Cap K – Starter Pack

Cap K – Starter Pack ..................................................................................................................................... 1

1NCs ......................................................................................................................................................... 2
1NC – Cuba Terrorism Aff ................................................................................................................... 3
1NC – Policy Affs ............................................................................................................................... 11
Links ....................................................................................................................................................... 19
Link Ext. – Cuba ................................................................................................................................. 20
Link Ext. – Anti-Imperialism .............................................................................................................. 22
Link – Mexico ..................................................................................................................................... 23
Link – Venezuela ................................................................................................................................ 24
Link – Latin American Economy........................................................................................................ 25
Link – Single Issue Focus ................................................................................................................... 26
Impacts .................................................................................................................................................... 28
Impact – Ethics ................................................................................................................................... 29
Impact – Nuclear War ......................................................................................................................... 31
Impact – War on Terror ...................................................................................................................... 32
Impact – AT: Growth .......................................................................................................................... 35
Alt ........................................................................................................................................................... 37
Alt Solves – Neolib UQ – Latin America ........................................................................................... 38
Alt Solves – Terrorism Aff ................................................................................................................. 40
Answers to Answers ............................................................................................................................... 42
AT: Perm............................................................................................................................................. 43
AT: Pragmatism/Need Blueprint ........................................................................................................ 46
AT: Totalizing..................................................................................................................................... 48
AT: Transition Wars ........................................................................................................................... 49
Aff Answers ............................................................................................................................................ 50
Perm – Terrorism Aff .......................................................................................................................... 51
Link – AT: Cuba ................................................................................................................................. 52
Link – AT: Reformism Bad ................................................................................................................ 53
Impact – AT: Root Cause – Terror Aff ............................................................................................... 54
Impact – AT: Root Cause – General ................................................................................................... 56
Cap Good – Ethics .............................................................................................................................. 58
Cap Good – Growth/Economy ............................................................................................................ 59
Cap Good – War ................................................................................................................................. 61
Cap Good – Status Quo Improving ..................................................................................................... 63
Alt Fails – Cede the Political – Terrorism Aff .................................................................................... 64
Alt Fails – Pragmatism Key ................................................................................................................ 65
Alt Fails – Rejection Not Enough ....................................................................................................... 66
Alt Fails – Totalitarianism .................................................................................................................. 67
Alt Fails – Totalizing .......................................................................................................................... 68
Alt Fails – Transition Wars ................................................................................................................. 69
Alt – AT: Neolib UQ .......................................................................................................................... 70
1NCs
 1NC – Cuba Terrorism Aff
Thesis: Capitalism is the hidden systemic backdrop to the 1AC’s politics. Despite their
proclamations of radical resistance, the affirmative is trading in the politics of
interpassivity, where all their frenetic energy serves as an ideological screen to permit the
logic of capital to march on.
Zizek 02—Professor of Philosophy @ Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana [Slavoj, “Revolution at the
Gates”, pg 167-172]
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
all this occurs against the background of a fundamental
fight new forms of ethnic, religious or sexist violence. The problem is that
Denkverbot: a prohibition on thinking. Today’s 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 Wittgenstein’s
“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 don’t 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 today’s 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 liberal-democratic 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” people’s 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 it’s him, tomorrow it’ll be us” (an excellent
example is Noam Chomsky’s 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 woman’s 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 ruling ideology with ideology which seems to dominate. More than ever, we should bear in mind
Walter Benjamin’s 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 non-fiction books: “Capitalism,
This Unknown Ideal”, or in “top managers, America’s last endangered species”. Indeed, since
the “normal” functioning of capitalism
involves some kind of disavowal of the basic principle of its functioning (today’s model capitalist is
someone who, after ruthlessly generating profit, then generously shares parts of it, giving large donations
to churches, victims of ethnic or sexual abuse, etc., posing as a humanitarian), the ultimate act of
transgression is to assert this principle directly, depriving it of its humanitarian mask. I am therefore tempted to
reverse Marx’s Thesis 11: the first task today is precisely not to succumb to the temptation to act, to intervene
directly and change things (which then inevitably ends in a cul-de-sac of debilitating impossibility: “What can we do against global capital?”), but
to question the hegemonic ideological 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 don’t know.” I can only try to analyse rigorously what there is. Here people reproach me: When
you practise criticism, you are also obliged to say how one should make it better. To my mind, this is
incontrovertibly a bourgeois 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: of doing things not in order to
achieve something, but to prevent something from really happening, really changing. All this frenetic humanitarian,
Politically Correct, etc., activity fits the formula of “Let’s go on changing something all the time so that, globally, things will remain the same!”. If standard Cultural
Studies criticize capitalism, they do so in the coded way that exemplifies Hollywood liberal paranoia: the
enemy is “the system”, the hidden
“organization”, the anti-democratic “conspiracy”, not simply capitalism and state apparatuses. The
problem with this critical stance is not only that it replaces concrete social analysis with a struggle against
abstract paranoiac fantasies, but that — in a typical paranoiac gesture — it unnecessarily redoubles social
reality, as if there were a secret Organization behind the “visible” capitalist and state organs. What we should
accept is that there is no need for a secret “organization-within-an-organization”. the “conspiracy” is already in the “visible” organization as such, in the capitalist
system, in the way the political space and state apparatuses work.8 Let us take one of the hottest topics in today’s “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 today’s “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: “Let’s 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 half-confidentially indicate that it is, of course, that
October — in this way, you can indulge in jargonistic analyses of modern art, 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.

That’s particularly true for Cuba. Small tactical shifts in posture will be used by capitalist
imperialists to strong-arm Cuba into accepting neoliberal globalization.
Nahem, coordinator of Cuba Solidarity New York, ’10 [Ike, “Obama and Cuba: End of an Illusion”, March 16th,
http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/03/obama-and-cuba-end-of-an-illusion/]
Under the new Obama Administration there was a tactical diplomatic shift — a necessary retreat in form, more
of a regrouping. The bellicose rhetoric and in-your-face confrontationism of the Bush years were
ratcheted down somewhat. Ambassadors were again exchanged with Venezuela and Bolivia. At the OAS Summit in Trinidad, Obama was
photographed shaking hands with Hugo Chavez. Nevertheless, the aims of US policy were unchanged. (And, in recent months, alongside the shift
to direct contention again with Cuba, there has been a ramping up of political hostility, demonization, and destabilization against the Hugo
Chavez government in Venezuela. Corporate media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post and the increasingly bellicose
and conservative editorial page of the Washington Post have echoed, albeit more harshly, the US State Department government line painting a
picture of Venezuela in utter economic and social chaos with a repressive government lashing out at dissent and “dropping the mask of
democracy.”) On Cuba Obama quickly adjusted US policy on some secondary questions – in the face of the
mounting Hemispheric and near-unanimous international opposition to the US economic, financial, and commercial embargo –
in order to more credibly defend and promote the core policy aim which remains the overturning of
the revolutionary government, the destruction of the social relations and conquests of the
Revolution, and the restoration of capitalism and US domination. Obama fulfilled his campaign promise
to end existing travel restrictions for Cuban-Americans; has eased somewhat the ability of some Cuban academics, musicians, artists,
and scientists to visit the US and some similar US categories and individuals to legally travel to Cuba at the invitation of Cuban society. Also,
there has been a slight US liberalization in granting so-called “people to people” licenses. Nevertheless, so far, the
Obama moves still are far from taking us to where the policy on exchanges and licenses was under
Clinton and the first several years of the George W. Bush Administration. These anorexic measures, doled out with an
eyedropper, are presented by Obama and Clinton as bold moves begging for a Cuban response. They are
saying in essence: “We’ve done our bit, now you must basically commit suicide and end the Revolution
in exchange.”

And, their weak criticism of the War on Terror strengthens capitalists by obscuring class
division. Framing imperialism as simply a matter of changing bad policies leads to
bankrupt coalitions that co-opt true revolutionary change.
International Communist League 2006 [The "War on Terror" and the Imperialist World Order, Workers Vanguard No.
881, 24 November 2006, http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/881/terrorism.html]

Marxists oppose individual terrorism as a political strategy, even that terrorism which is derived from real, if
misguided, anti-racist or anti-imperialist impulses and takes as its target genuine institutions or agents of state repression (manifestly not the case in the attack on

the World Trade Center). Such individual acts, however heroic in particular circumstances, are counterposed to the proletarian class

struggle and the consciousness the working class needs if it is to stand at the head of the oppressed in the
revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist imperialist system. As Trotsky wrote in his 1911 article, in regard to the left-wing populist terrorists in
late tsarist Russia: “In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their powerlessness, and turns
their eyes and hopes toward a great avenger and liberator who some day will come and accomplish his mission” (emphasis in original). Despite our political opposition to the strategy of
terrorism, the International Communist League has consistently defended individuals and organizations targeted for bourgeois state repression for carrying out attacks against the class enemy.
The SL/U.S., for example, has defended the Ohio 7, leftist activists who were convicted for their role in a radical group that took credit for “bank expropriations” and bombings in the late 1970s
and ’80s against symbols of U.S. imperialism, such as military and corporate offices. Two of the Ohio 7 remain in prison (see article, page 2). Likewise, our comrades of the Trotskyist Group of
Greece call on the workers movement to defend the November 17 group against the Greek bourgeois state. Ward Churchill, a radical professor at the University of Colorado, argued in his
September 2001 essay, “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” that the September 11 attacks were a response in kind to the crimes of U.S. imperialism against the
peoples of the Third World. As a consequence, he has been the target of a right-wing campaign to drive him and other critics of government policy off campus. As we have stated, Churchill must
be vigorously defended against the McCarthyite witchhunt (see “Hands Off Ward Churchill!” WV No. 873, 7 July). Churchill denies any meaningful distinction between the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon in what he sees as a counterstrike by oppressed and therefore good Third World peoples against the bad peoples of the First World. According to Churchill, all Americans
,
collectively partake of guilt for U.S. imperialism’s crimes insofar as they have not fought to stop them. But far from being a “terrorist sympathizer,” as rightists outrageously contend

Churchill aims to shame American imperialism into cleaning up its act. And, as is typical of New Left-style
radicals and nationalists the world over, Churchill’s outlook divides the world into good peoples and bad peoples
rather than into opposing classes. Churchill does not pretend to be a Marxist and thus is at least consistent in disregarding
the explosive class contradictions at the base of American society. Not so the reformist leftists who cover with empty
socialist phrases what are in reality nothing but liberal bourgeois politics. “Gov’t Policy Puts People in Harm’s Way,” declared
Workers World (27 September 2001) following September 11. “The military response to terrorism just perpetuates the cycle of

terrorism and counterterrorism,” wrote radical-liberal professor Howard Zinn, uncritically quoted in the International Socialist Organization’s Socialist
Worker (14 September 2001). These groups promote the illusion that imperialist militarism is a bad policy that

can be eliminated from the capitalist system if sufficient pressure is applied. To this end, they seek to
form a “coalition” with the liberal wing of the capitalist class, represented by a section of the Democratic
Party. Contrary to the preachings of the reformist fake socialists, the capitalist state cannot be wielded by
the exploited and the oppressed to serve their interests. In order to defend itself, the working class must mobilize
independently of all the agencies and parties of its class enemy. In order to sweep away this ruling class and open the road to a world free of
class exploitation, war and all forms of oppression, the working class must take control of society in its own hands through a socialist revolution that breaks up and destroys the capitalist state and
establishes in its place a workers state based on a planned, collectivized economy.

Capitalism causes endless war and the creation of death zones globally, and especially in
Latin America. The world of peace promised by the affirmative is a mask for capitalism’s
continual production of death, dispossession, and violence as a condition of its existence.
Banerjee, professor at the international graduate school of business at the University of South
Australia, 2008 [Subhabrata, Necrocapitalism, Organization Studies 2008 29: 1541]

Violence,
Locating imperialism and the legacies of colonialism in contemporary forms of capitalism is central to the theoretical development of necrocapitalism.

dispossession, and death that result from practices of accumulation occur in spaces that seem to be immune from
legal, juridical, and political intervention, resulting in a suspension of sovereignty. In the modern era the democratization of sovereignty is still fundamentally determined by and
grounded in mechanisms of disciplinary coercion (Foucault 1980) – coercion that was more apparent and visible during colonial times but is more sophisticated in its operation in the postcolonial
era. Drawing on Carl Schmitt’s (1985) definition of sovereignty as one ‘who decides on the state of exception’, Agamben (1998: 17) argues that through the state of exception, the sovereign
‘creates and guarantees the situation that the law needs for its own validity’. Agamben describes the Nazi state, the current status of Palestine, and ‘legal civil wars’ as examples of states of
exception in the modern era. The US Naval Station at Guantánamo Bay is perhaps one of the latest examples of a state of exception where ‘enemy combatants’ that are incarcerated there are not
legal subjects or prisoners of war but have become ‘legally unnameable and unclassifiable beings entirely removed from the law and from judicial oversight’ (Agamben 2005: 4). Violence,
torture, and death can occur in this space of exception without political or juridical intervention. The state of exception thus creates a zone where the application of law is suspended but the law
.
remains in force Agamben (1998: 27) develops the ancient Roman legal notion of homo sacer or sacred man – ‘one who may be killed but not sacrificed’. In ancient Roman law, homo sacer
referred to people whose deaths were of no value to the gods and thus could not be sacrificed but could be killed with impunity because their lives were deemed be of no value to society. Homo
sacer occupied a space both outside (and hence inside) divine law and juridical law; they were objects of sovereign power but excluded from being its subjects; ‘mute bearers of bare life deprived
of language and the political life that language makes possible’ (Gregory 2004: 63). A sovereign decision to apply a state of exception invokes a power to decide the value of life, which would
allow a life to be taken without the charge of homicide. The killings of mentally and physically handicapped people during the Nazi regime was justified as ending a ‘life devoid of value’, a life
‘unworthy to be lived’. Sovereignty becomes a decision on the value of life
thus , ‘a power to decide the point at which life ceases to be politically
relevant’ (Agamben 1998: 142). Sovereignty has always been a moving target and despite Westphalian notions of the independence and ‘supreme authority’ of nation states, the jurisdiction of
borders have been routinely transgressed as ‘sovereignty has become progressively unbundled from territoriality’ (Raustiala 2005). Far from being a fixed political and legal category, sovereignty
was always a ‘sociological praxis full of exceptions, fissures and fractures’ (Shenhav and Berda 2008). Benton’s (2002: 10) analysis of legal politics during the colonial era reveals what she calls
the ‘jurisdictional politics’ of conflicts arising from multiple legal procedures and authorities. ‘Jurisdictional fluidity’ and ‘legal jockeying’ enabled the creation of a space to govern the colonies
in India and Africa while expanding European claims to sovereignty. In the historical praxis of colonialism the state of exception in the colonies was more the rule, resulting in multiple and
interrupted sovereignties that were used to govern the natives. However, in both Foucault’s formulation of sovereignty and the production of the biopolitical body and Agamben’s deployment of
homo sacer and states of exception, the omission of the colony is notable. The colony, as Mbembe (2003: 14) points out, represented a permanent state of
exception where sovereignty became an exercise of power outside the law, where ‘peace was more likely to take on the face of a war
without end and where violence could operate in the name of civilization’. In fact, as Anghie (2005) points out, colonialism and imperialism (Anghie uses these terms interchangeably)
were constitutive of European notions of sovereignty, international law, and development. Discourses of ‘civilization’ and ‘development’, for example, created and

sustained the binary categories of civilized–barbaric and developed–underdeveloped, where sovereignty

always remained on the side of the ‘civilized’ and ‘developed’. Once sovereignty was established along the dimensions of civilization and development,
the key ‘universal’ problem was how to create order among sovereign states by developing techniques to ‘normalize the aberrant society’ (Anghie 2005: 4). As Hussain (2003) argues, the
historical formation of colonialism reveals the self-generative epistemic space of the West in its ability to create the rule and the exception. Thus, the European notion of sovereignty that became
the basis of international law has its roots in colonialism and tends to reproduce and reinforce colonial modes of control even in the present era. While transgressions of sovereignty were common
in the colonial era where the colony marked a permanent state of exception, there are different levels of sovereignties in today’s neoliberal political economy. In contemporary political economy,
states of exception, uneven sovereignties, and gradations of rights are produced and maintained by what Stoler (2006: 128) calls ‘imperial formations’ which she describes as ‘states of becoming,
rather than being’. Imperial formations in today’s political economy do not reflect a ‘steady state’ enclosed by national sovereign boundaries but have
more to do with how the economy and polity are organized. A ‘politics of dislocation’ characterizes imperial formations involving ‘systematic recruits and transfers of colonial agents, native
military, redistribution of peoples and resources, relocations and dispersions, contiguous and overseas territories’ (Stoler 2006: 138). States of exception created by imperial formations are
not restricted to the former colonies ‘out there’ but include ‘the West’. The ‘West’ operates not so much as a particular set of
geographical locations, or indeed a specific collection of locationally defined peoples, but is a discursive space formed by a network of economic and power relations (Banerjee and Linstead
2001). Spaces of imperial exception also occur in metropolitan contexts – for example, the migrant bodies, the ‘illegal’ or ‘undocumented bodies’ that labor in the ‘ethnic enclaves’ that contain
American brand of neoliberalism that seems to be embraced by the supranational institutions that govern the
the sweatshops of New York, London, and Paris (Ong 2006). The

is increasingly tied to
global economy and adopted by several countries in the developing world represents a type of ‘radicalized capitalist imperialism’ (Ong 2006: 1) that

military action, often in the name of maintaining ‘security’. The imperial formations that create states of exception and multiple sovereignties in
the postcolonial era are enabled and sustained by the formation of economic states of exception created by neoliberal policies. Thus, ‘neoliberalism as exception’ produces specific arrangements
of sovereignty and citizenship that are enabled by the ‘infiltration of market logic into politics’ while constructing subjectivities that reflect market citizenship and a ‘reconfiguration of
relationships between governing and the governed, power and knowledge and sovereignty and territoriality’ (Ong 2006: 6). If the sword of co mmerce was most visibly active in the days of
empire, its activity in the postcolonial era continued the violence in a more covert manner, often with the complicity of the political elites in the former colonies. Ong (2006) develops the notion
of ‘graduated sovereignty’ to describe how some countries in South East Asia, notably the so-called ‘Asian tigers’, embraced the global market with a combination of governmental political
strategies and military repression. Her research on globalization in Indonesia and Malaysia showed that the interaction between states and transnational capital resulted in a differential state
treatment of the population already fragmented by race, ethnicity, gender, class, and religion as well as a reconfiguration of power and authority in the hands of transnational corporations
operating in special export processing zones. The neoliberal turn in these regions follows a different trajectory where the interplay of market versus state results in differing levels of sovereignty:
global markets and
some areas of the economy have a very strong state presence and in other areas, markets and foreign capital rule. State sovereignty is dispersed because

capital, with the collusion of governments, create states of exception where coercion, violence, and killings occur. State
repression against rebel populations and separatist movements is often influenced by market forces: as Ong (2006) argues, territories
are cleared of rebels (‘outlawed citizens’) to make way for logging concessions, petroleum pipelines, mines, and dams. Thus, necrocapitalism creates states of exceptions where ‘democratic
rights are confined to a political sphere’ while continuing forms of domination, exploitation, and violence in other domains (Wood 2003: 80). Accumulation by Death and Dispossession
Violence, death, and dispossession and their relationship with capitalism is not new: in Volume I ofCapital, Marx (1867: 926) wrote: ‘If money comes into the world with a congenital blood stain
on one cheek, then capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt .’ Early capitalist
practices of recruiting labor involved violence, often sanctioned by law. The legislation against ‘vagabondage’, for example, transformed peasants who were driven off the land into vagabonds to
be ‘whipped, branded, tortured by laws grotesquely terrible, into the discipline necessary for the wage system’ (Marx 1867: 899). Colonialism added a racial
dimension to the exploitation of labor – for example, Marx describes the colonial capitalist practices in Africa as ‘extirpation, enslavement and entombment in
mines of the aboriginal population … and the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins’ (Marx 1867: 915). In his analysis of death metaphors in Marx’s work,
Neocleous (2003) draws parallels between capital and death, arguing that Marx’s critique of political economy is ultimately a ‘political economy of the dead’. At various points in Capital, Marx
refers to capital as ‘dead labor’ in opposition to ‘living labor’ where capitalist rule is the ‘independent conditions of labor over the worker … the rule of things over man, of dead labor over
it is necessary to understand
living’ (Marx 1867: 989). However, rather than reduce death to distinctions between labor whether in a colonial or a metropolitan context,

necrocapitalism as a practice that operates through the establishment of colonial sovereignty, and the manner in
which this sovereignty is established in the current political economy where the business of death can take place through states of exception. In the postcolonial era the imperial prerogative, as
Chatterjee (2005: 495) argues, is the ‘power to declare the colonial exception’. Thus, while the ‘international community’ agrees that nuclear proliferation should be stopped, it becomes an
The entities in this
imperial right for some to decide that while India and Israel may be allowed to have nuclear weapons, it is unacceptable for North Korea or Iran to do so.

colonial space of exception must either be disciplined by violence or ‘civilized by culture’ to become
normalized. The colonial state of exception is also the space where more profits accrue whether it is
through the extraction of resources, the use of privatized militias or through contracts for reconstruction. In this sense, it is necessary to read the manner in which
colonial sovereignty operates to create states of exception conducive to the operation of necrocapitalist practices. Mbembe (2003) extends Foucault’s notion of sovereignty as power that produces
and regulates a biopolitical body, or the power to ‘make live or let die’ (Foucault, 1978) to develop his concept of necropolitical power that involves the subjugation of life to the power of death.
These forms of necropolitical power literally create ‘death worlds, new and unique forms of social
existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of
the living dead’ (Mbembe 2003: 40). Situating necropolitics in the context of economy, Montag (2005: 11) argues that if necropolitics is interested in the production of death or
subjugating life to the power of death then it is possible to speak of a necroeconomics – a space of ‘letting die or exposing to death’. Montag explores the relation of the market to life and death in
his reading of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments(Smith 1986). In Montag’s reading of Smith, it is ‘the dread of death, the great poison to the happiness ... which
while it afflicts and mortifies the individual, guards and protects the society’ (cited in Montag 2005: 12). If social life was driven solely by unrestrained self-interest, then the fear of punishment
the
or death through juridical systems kept the pursuit of excessive self-interest in check, otherwise people would simply rob, injure, and kill for material wealth. Thus, for Smith

universality of life is contingent on the particularity of death, the production of life on the production of
death where the intersection of the political and the economic makes it necessary to exercise the right to
kill. The market then, as a ‘concrete form of the universal’ becomes the ‘very form of universality as life’
and requires at certain moments to ‘let die’. Or as Montag theorizes it, ‘Death establishes the conditions of life; death as by an invisible hand restores the
market to what it must be to support life. The allowing of death of the particular is necessary to the production of life of the universal. The market reduces and rations

life; it not only allows death, it demands death be allowed by the sovereign power, as well as by those
who suffer it. In other words, it demands and requires the latter allow themselves to die. Thus alongside the figure of homo sacer, the one who may be killed with impunity, is another
figure, one whose death is no doubt less spectacular than the first and is the object of no memorial or commemoration: he who with impunity may be allowed to die, slowly or quickly, in the
.
name of the rationality and equilibrium of the market’ (Montag 2005: 15) Montag, therefore, theorizes a necroeconomics where the state becomes the legitimate purveyor of violence: in this
scenario, the state can compel by force ‘those who refuse to allow themselves to die’ (Montag 2005: 15). However, Montag’s concept of necroeconomics appears to universalize conditions of
poverty through the logic of the market. My concern, however, is the creation of death worlds in colonial contexts through the collusion between states and corporations. If states and corporations
work in tandem with each other in colonial contexts, creating states of exception and exercising necropower to profit from the death worlds that they establish, then necroeconomics fails to
consider the specificities of colonial capitalist practices. I argue that necrocapitalism emerges from the intersection of necropolitics and necroeconomics, as practices of accumulation in
(post)colonial contexts by specific economic actors – transnational corporations, for example – that involve dispossession, death, torture, suicide, slavery, destruction of livelihoods, and the
The fundamental feature of
general management of violence. It is a new form of imperialism, an imperialism that has learned to ‘manage things better’.

necrocapitalism is accumulation by dispossession and the creation of death worlds in colonial contexts.
Land privatization and the subsequent forceful expulsion of peasants, conversion of public property into
private property, restrictions on public use of common property resources, neocolonial practices of asset
appropriation, control over natural resources in the former colonies, and the suppression of alternate,
indigenous forms of consumption and production are some forms of dispossession in contemporary
political economy (Harvey 2005: 145). In contemporary forms of accumulation, the corporation is a powerful actor and in conjunction with nation states, supranational bodies, and
international agencies contributes to a necrocapitalist privatization of sovereignty. The transformation of European colonialism to a new ‘imperialism without colonies’ also required coercive
power and brute force often with the collusion of postcolonial political elites in the former colonies where local states emerged as sites of power for capitalist accumulation. Thus, rather than
the globalization of markets is dependent on a system of multiple states which required ‘a new
marking the ‘death of the nation state’,

extra-economic, especially military, coercion. An endless invisible empire, which has no

doctrine of

boundaries, even no territory, requires war without end, an infinite war, and a new doctrine of war
to justify it’ (Wood 2003: 161). And to further clarify the relationship between markets and war, President George W. Bush, in an attempt to address concerns about the dramatic
decline in tourism and air travel in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, told airline employees that ‘one of the great goals of this war is to tell the traveling public: Get on board’ (cited in
Gregory 2004). Thus, for the American tourist to ‘get on board’ to enjoy a holiday, stimulate the tourism market, and save airline jobs it becomes necessary for some people to die, as homo sacer,
in a state of exception outside national and international law. The creation of new spaces of exceptions is a weapon for the ideological arsenal of empire where the imposition of
an economic relationship becomes paramount, using force if required. Thus, the right to rule is justified ‘by the right, indeed the
obligation, to produce exchange value’ (Wood 2003: 157). Economic domination where markets manage much of the imperial work

extends the powers and reach of colonial states. New economic doctrines require new military doctrines as well. War without end does not necessarily
mean endless fighting: the coercive mechanisms of capital require an endless possibility of war. ‘War without end’ has an impressive
genealogy in the West. Woodrow Wilson wrote in 1907: ‘Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow
him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of
unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked … The seed of war in the modern world is
industrial and commercial rivalry.’ (cited in Katz 2006) The nexus between economic interests and military power, which characterized the colonial project, continues to operate in the new
imperial formations that constitute the contemporary neoliberal project and is another enabling condition of necrocapitalism. Political sovereignty becomes subservient to corporate sovereignty
and economics rather than politics determines war zones. In imperial formations, power is deployed to repress ‘symptoms of despair’, and to establish behavioral and economic norms in ‘a
The involvement of US multinationals along with the CIA in fomenting military and political
system for regulating disorder’ (Joxe 2002: 14).

coups in Latin America (notably United Fruit Inc. in Guatemala and Colombia and ITT in Chile and Brazil) is well documented (Dosal 1993; Grandin 2006).
Millions of dollars were spent by the US government to destabilize Chile in the 1970s – on learning that Chile had elected a Marxist president in 1970, Nixon instructed the CIA to ‘make their
Corporate strategies to ensure ‘safe havens’ for their investment
economy scream’ in an effort to ‘smash Allende’ (Grandin 2006).

included obtaining US government support for dictatorial regimes, violent reprisals using state military
and police to suppress dissent, and bribes and kickbacks to political elites. Because violence was deployed in these states of
exception, both governments and corporations were able to kill with impunity: Colombia in 1929, when the military gunned down striking
United Fruit workers killing at least 400 (Kepner and Soothill 1935), and the US-backed military coup in Guatemala in 1954, where more than 200 union leaders were killed, are two of the more
Privatization of the commons through corporate
widely publicized cases involving violence and multinational capital (Chomsky and Herman 1979).

control of natural resources is another ‘sword of commerce’ that subjugates lives and destroys
livelihoods by creating states of exception in many developing regions. In Latin America, for example, it is estimated that more than 2000
government industries were sold off between 1985 and 1992, many of them below their market value to private buyers ‘with connections’ to the military and US corporate and government
interests (Grandin 2006). The collusion of local states is instrumental in the battle over natural resources: a 1975 Philippine government advertisement placed in Fortune magazine declared: ‘To
attract companies like yours ... we have felled mountains, razed jungles, filled swamps, moved rivers, relocated towns … all to make it easier for you and your business to do business here’ (cited
The effects of creating a ‘business friendly climate’ are often violent, leading to loss of life and
in Korten 1995).

the creation of death worlds. For instance, a combination of trade liberalization in agriculture (agriculture is ‘liberalized’ in the Third World and protected in the First) and
the failure of genetically modified seeds has been linked to a 260% increase in suicide rates of farmers in India (Milmo 2005). More than 4000 farmers have committed suicide in the southern
state of Andhra Pradesh since the imposition of agricultural reforms. The suicide rate among farmers is the highest in cash crop growing regions. In 2005 there were 520 suicides by farmers in
Vidarbha, the largest cotton growing region in India. Six journalists covered the ‘farmer suicides story’ in February 2006. That same week 512 journalists were jostling for space in Mumbai for
the Lakme Fashion Week where models were exhibiting the new chic cotton dresses made from cotton grown by farmers who were killing themselves less than 500km away. Roy (2001: 46)
claims that ‘India’s rural economy which supports 700 million people, is being garroted. Farmers who produce too much are in distress, farmers who produce too little are in distress, and landless
agricultural laborers are out of work as big estates and farms lay off their workers. They’re all flocking to already overcrowded cities in search of employment.’ Roy (2001) has also documented
the displacement of villagers in large-scale dam projects in India. She estimates that between 30 and 50 million people have lost their traditional lands as a result of dam projects. A single project,
the Sardar Sarovar dam project will displace 400,000 tribal peoples once it is completed. is the case in all developing countries, the dispossessed do not participate in any of the benefits: the
Necrocapitalist practices deny people
electricity generated by the dams is for use by city dwellers and the water for irrigating large industrial agriculture farms.

access to resources that are essential to their health and life, destroy livelihoods, and dispossess
communities. The privatization of water in Africa and South America is a case in point: in almost every case where water was
privatized the poorer segments of society ended up paying not only higher prices for water but paid with their lives as well. In South
Africa during 2002–2003 more than 100,000 people were infected with cholera, leading to the deaths of 200 people after the South African government (following World Bank
‘recommendations’) denied water and sanitation services to thousands of citizens in KwaZulu-Natal province who were too poor to pay their water bills (Barlow and Clarke 2002). World Bank
Race
water policies encourage ‘cost recovery’: however, the problem is that corporate costs are recovered at the expense of people who are denied access to clean water and sanitation.

and class also determine who suffers, who lives and who dies: in South Africa 600,000 white farmers consume 60% of the country’s water
supplies for irrigation while 15 million black people have no access to clean water (Barlow and Clarke 2002). A similar situation exists in the maquiladoras of Mexico

where clean water is scarce because it is mainly reserved for use by foreign-owned industries in the region. And

when Bolivia’s economy was ‘structurally adjusted’ by the World Bank, one of the conditions was to sell off the national water
company, which the Bolivian government did to Bechtel. Not long after the purchase, water bills rose by 200% for an already impoverished citizenry, with the government even attempting to
charge citizens for collecting rainwater for personal use. Extended protests by the people forced the Bolivian government to take over the water supply again, leading Bechtel to exit Bolivia,
Other contemporary cases of accumulation by dispossession that can be seen
albeit with a $25 million payout (Grandin 2006).

as necrocapitalist practices are the privatization of war resulting from the increasing use of privatized
military forces and conflicts over natural resources between transnational corporations and indigenous
communities in the Third World, which I will discuss in the next section.

The alternative is solidarity with revolutionary struggle against capitalism. Voting

negative is a refusal of the tepid half-measures of the 1AC in favor of clearing the space for
a truly just and equitable society.
Marcuse, German Philosopher and Professor at Columbia and Harvard, 1969 (Herbert, member of the Frankfurt School, An Essay on
Liberation, p. 85-91) *GENDER MODIFIED

In a sense, this is indeed the community of interests of the "haves" against the "have nots," of the Old against the New. The "collaborationist" policy of the Soviet
Union necessitates the pursuance of power politics which increasingly reduces the prospect that Soviet society, by virtue of its basic institutions alone (abolition of
private ownership and control of the means of production: planned economy) is still capable of making the transition to a free society. And yet, the very dynamic of
imperialist expansion places the Soviet Union in the other camp: would the effective resistance in Vietnam, and the protection of Cuba be possible without Soviet aid?
However, while we reject the unqualified convergence thesis, according to which -at least at present -the assimilation of interests prevails UPOIl the conflict between
capitalism and Soviet Socialism, we
cannot minimize the essential difference between the latter and the new historical
efforts to construct socialism by developing and creating a genuine solidarity between the leadership and
the liberated victims of exploitation. The actual may considerably deviate rom the ideal, the fact remains
that, for a whole generation, "freedom," "socialism," and "liberation" are inseparable from Fidel and Che
and the guerrillas -not because their revolutionary struggle could furnish the model for the struggle in the
metropoles, but because they have recaptured the truth of these ideas, in the day-to-day fight of men and
women for a life as human beings: for a new life. What kind of life? We are still confronted with the
demand to state the "concrete alternative." The demand is meaningless if it asks for a blueprint of the
specific institutions and relationships which would be those of the new society: they cannot be determined
a priori; they will develop, in trial and error, as the new society develops. If we could form a concrete
concept of the alternative today, it would not be that of an alternative; the possibilities of the new society
are sufficiently "abstract," i.e., removed from and incongruous with the established universe to defy any
attempt to identify them in terms of this universe. However, the question cannot be brushed aside by
saying that what matters today is the destruction of the old, of the powers that be, making way for the
emergence of the new. Such an answer neglects the essential fact that the old is not simply bad, that it
delivers the goods, and that people have a real stake in it. There can be societies which are much worse –
there are such societies today. The system of corporate capitalism has the right to insist that those who
work for its replacement justify their action. But the demand to state the concrete alternatives is justified
for yet another reason. Negative thinking draws whatever force it may have from its empirical basis: the
actual human condition in the given society, and the "given" possibilities to transcend this condition, to
enlarge the realm of freedom. In this sense, negative thinking is by virtue of its own internal concepts
"positive": oriented toward, and comprehending a future which is "contained" in the present. And in this
containment (which is an important aspect of the general containment policy pursued by the established societies), the future appears as
possible liberation. It is not the only alternative: the advent of a long period of "civilized" barbarism, with
or without the nuclear destruction, is equally contained in the present. Negative thinking, and the praxis
guided by it, is the positive and positing effort to prevent this utter negativity. The concept of the primary, initial
institutions of liberation is familiar enough and concrete enough: collective ownership, collective control and planning of the
means of production and distribution. This is the foundation, a necessary but not sufficient condition for
the alternative: it would make possible the usage of all available resources for the abolition of poverty,
which is the prerequisite for the turn from quantity into quality: the creation of a reality in accordance
with the new sensitivity and the new consciousness. This goal implies rejection of those policies of
reconstruction, no matter how revolutionary, which are bound to perpetuate (or to introduce) the pattern of the
unfree societies and their needs. Such false policy is perhaps best summed up in the formula "to catch up with,
and to overtake the productivity level of the advanced capitalist countries." What is wrong with this
formula is not the emphasis on the rapid improvement of the material conditions but on the model guiding
their improvement. The model denies the alternative, the qualitative difference. The latter is not, and cannot be, the result
of the fastest possible attainment of capitalist productivity, but rather the development of new modes and ends of production "new" not only (and perhaps not
at all) with respect to technical innovations and production relations, but with respect to the different human
needs and the different human relationships in working for the satisfaction of these needs. These new relationships
would be the result of a "biological" solidarity in work and purpose, expressive of a true harmony between social and
individual needs and goals, between recognized necessity and free development -the exact opposite of the
administered and enforced harmony organized in the advanced capitalist (and socialist?) countries. It is the
image of this solidarity as elemental, instinctual, creative force which the young radicals see in Cuba, in the
guerrillas, in the Chinese cultural revolution. Solidarity and cooperation: not all their forms are liberating. Fascism and militarism have developed a deadly efficient
solidarity. Socialist solidarity is autonomy: selfdetermination begins at home -and that is with every I, and the We whom the I chooses. And this end must indeed
appear in the means to attain it, that is to say, in the strategy of those who, within the existing society, work for the new one. If
the socialist
relationships of production are to be a new way of life, a new Form of life, then their existential quality
must show forth, anticipated and demonstrated, in the fight for their realization. Exploitation in all its
forms must have disappeared from this fight: from the work relationships among the fighters as well as from their individual relationships.
Understanding, tenderness toward each other, the instinctual consciousness of that which is evil, false, the
heritage of oppression, would then testify to the authenticity of the rebellion. In short, the economic, political, and cultural
features of a classless society must have become the basic needs of those who fight for it. This ingression of the future into the present,
this depth dimension of the rebellion accounts, in the last analysis, for the incompatibility with the traditional forms of the political struggle.
The new radicalism militates against the centralized bureaucratic communist as well as against the semi-
democratic liberal organization. There is a strong element of spontaneity, even anarchism, in this
rebellion, expression of the new sensibility, sensitivity against domination: the feeling, the awareness, that
the joy of freedom and the need to be free must precede liberation. Therefore the aversion against preestablished Leaders,
apparatchiks of all sorts, politicians no matter how leftist. The initiative shifts to small groups, widely diffused, with a high
degree of autonomy, mobility, flexibility. To be sure, within the repressive society, and against its ubiquitous apparatus, spontaneity by itself
cannot possibly be a radical and revolutionary force. It can become such a force only as the result of enlightenment, education, political practice -in this sense indeed,
as a result of organization. The anarchic element is an essential factor in the struggle against domination: preserved but disciplined in the preparatory political action,
it will be freed and aufgehoben in the goals of the struggle. Released for the construction of the initial revolutionary institutions, the antirepressive sensibility, allergic
to domination, would militate against the prolongation of the "First Phase," that is, the authoritarian bureaucratic development of the productive forces. The new
society could then reach relatively fast the level at which poverty could be abolished (this level could be considerably lower than that of advanced capitalist
productivity, which is geared to obscene aflluence and waste). Then the development could tend toward a sensuous culture, tangibly contrasting with the gray-on-gray
culture of the socialist societies of Eastern Europe. Production would be redirected in defiance of all the rationality of the Performance Principle; socially necessary
labor would be diverted to the construction of an aesthetic rather than repressive environment, to parks and gardens rather than highways and parking lots, to the
creation of areas of withdrawal rather than massive fun and relaxation. Such redistribution of socially necessary labor (time), incompatible with any society governed
by the Profit and Performance Principle, would gradually alter society in all its dimensions -it would mean the ascent of the Aesthetic Principle as Form of the Reality
Principle: a culture of receptivity based on the achievements of industrial civilization and initiating the end of its self-propelling productiVity. Not
regression
to a previous stage of civilization, but return to an imaginary temps perdu in the real life of [hu]mankind:
progress to a stage of civilization where [hu]man[s] has learned to ask for the sake of whom or of what
[s/]he organizes his[/her] society; the stage where he checks and perhaps even halts his incessant struggle for existence on an enlarged scale,
surveys what has been achieved through centuries of misery and hecatombs of victims, and decides that it is enough, and that it is time to enjoy what he has and what
can be reproduced and refined with a minimum of alienated labor: not
the arrest or reduction of technical progress, but the
elimination of those of its features which perpetuate [hu]man[ity]'s subjection to the apparatus and the
intensification of the struggle for existence -to work harder in order to get more of the merchandise that has to be sold. In other words,
electrification indeed, and all technical devices which alleviate and protect life, all the mechanization which frees
human energy and time, all the standardization which does away with spurious and parasitarian
"personalized" services rather than multiplying them and the gadgets and tokens of exploitative affiuence.
In terms of the latter (and only in terms of the latter), this would certainly be a regression -but freedom from the rule of merchandise over man is a precondition of
freedom. Theconstruction of a free society would create new incentives for work. In the exploitative societies, the so-called
work instinct is mainly the (more or less effectively) introjected necessity to perform productively in order to earn a
living. But the life instincts themselves strive for the unification and enhancement of life; in nonrepressive
sublimation they would provide the libidinal energy for work on the development of a reality which no
longer demands the exploitative repression of the Pleasure Principle. The "incentives" would then be built
into the instinctual structure of men. Their sensibility would register, as biological reactions, the difference between the ugly and the beautiful,
between calm and noise, tenderness and brutality, intelligence and stupidity, joy and fun, and it would correlate this distinction with that between freedom and
servitude. Freud's last theoretical conception recognizes the erotic instincts as work instincts -work for the creation of a sensuous environment. The
social
expression of the liberated work instinct is cooperation, which, grounded in solidarity, directs the
organization of the realm of necessity and the development of the realm of freedom. And there is an
answer to the question which troubles the minds of so many men of good will: what are the people in a
free society going to do? The answer which, I believe, strikes at the heart of the matter was given by a
young black girl. She said: for the first time in our life, we shall be free to think about what we are going
to do.
 1NC – Policy Affs
Economic engagement with Latin America is a neoliberal ruse, designed to draw countries
into the United States’ sphere of economic influence in the name of imperialism.
Jacobs, Political Science Professor at West Virginia University, 2004 [Jamie, "Neoliberalism and
Neopanamericanism: The View from Latin America," Latin American Politics & Society 46.4 (2004)
149-152]
The advance of neoliberalism suffers no shortage of critics, both from its supporters who seek a greater balance in the interests of North and South, and from its
opponents who see it as lacking any real choice for developing states. The
spread of neoliberalism is viewed by its strongest critics as part of the
continuing expression of Western power through the mechanisms of globalization, often directly linked to the
hegemonic power of the United States. Gary Prevost and Carlos Oliva Campos have assembled a collection of articles that pushes this debate in
a somewhat new direction. This compilation addresses the question from a different perspective, focusing not on the neoliberal process as globalization but on
neoliberalism as the new guise of panamericanism, which emphasizes a distinctly political overtone in the discussion. The edited volume argues that
neoliberalism reanimates a system of relations in the hemisphere that reinforces the most negative aspects of the last century's U.S.-
dominated panamericanism. The assembled authors offer a critical view that places neoliberalism squarely in the realm of
U.S. hegemonic exploitation of interamerican relations. This volume, furthermore, articulates a detailed vision of the potential failures
of this approach in terms of culture, politics, security, and economics for both North and South. Oliva and Prevost present a view from Latin America that differs from
that of other works that emphasize globalization as a general or global process. This volume focuses on the implementation of free market capitalism in the Americas
as a continuation of the U.S. history of hegemonic control of the hemisphere. While Oliva and Prevost and the other authors featured in this volume point to the
changes that have altered global relations since the end of the Cold War—among them an altered balance of power, shifting U.S. strategy, and evolving interamerican
relations—they all view the U.S. foreign policy of neoliberalism and economic integration essentially as old wine
in new bottles. As such, old enemies (communism) are replaced by new (drugs and terrorism), but the fear of Northern
domination of and intervention in Latin America remains. Specifically, Oliva and Prevost identify the process through which
"economics had taken center stage in interamerican affairs." They [End Page 149] suggest that the Washington Consensus—diminishing the state's role
in the economy, privatizing to reduce public deficits, and shifting more fully to external markets—was instead a recipe for weakened
governments susceptible to hemispheric domination by the United States (xi). The book is divided into two main sections
that emphasize hemispheric and regional issues, respectively. The first section links more effectively to the overall theme of the volume in its chapters on
interamerican relations, culture, governance, trade, and security. In the first of these chapters, Oliva traces the evolution of U.S. influence in Latin America and
concludes that, like
the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny in the past, the prospect of hemispheric economic
integration will be marked by a dominant view privileging U.S. security, conceptualized in transnational, hemispheric terms,
that is both asymmetrical and not truly integrated among all members. In this context, Oliva identifies the free trade area of the Americas (FTAA) as "an
economic project suited to a hemispheric context that is politically favorable to the United States" (20). The chapters in this section are strongest when they focus on
the political aspects of neoliberalism and the possible unintended negative consequences that could arise from the neoliberal program. Carlos Alzugaray Treto draws
on the history of political philosophy, traced to Polanyi, identifying ways that social
inequality has the potential to undermine the
stable governance that is so crucial a part of the neoliberal plan. He goes on to point out how this potential for instability
could also generate a new period of U.S. interventionism in Latin America. Treto also analyzes how the "liberal peace" could be
undermined by the "right of humanitarian intervention" in the Americas if the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia served as a model for U.S. involvement in the
hemisphere. Hector Luis Saint-Pierre raises the issue of "democratic neoauthoritarianism," responsible for "restricting citizenship to the exercise of voting, limiting its
voice to electoral polls of public opinion, restraining human rights to consumer's rights, [and] shutting down spaces to the citizens' participation" (116). While these
critiques are leveled from a structuralist viewpoint, they often highlight concerns expressed from other theoretical perspectives and subfields (such as the literature on
citizenship and participation in the context of economic integration). These chapters also emphasize the way inattention to economic, social, and political
crisis could damage attempts at integration and the overall success of the neoliberal paradigm in the Americas. In
general, the section on hemispheric issues offers a suspicious view of the U.S. role in promoting integration, arguing that in reality, integration offers a
deepening of historical asymmetries of power, the potential to create new justifications for hegemonic
intervention, and the further weakening of state sovereignty in the South. [End Page 150]

Oil extraction in Latin America is a particularly violent aspect of the neoliberal obsession
with control. Those deemed extraneous to the market will be disposed of in the name of the
affirmative’s oil economy.
Banerjee, professor at the international graduate school of business at the University of South
Australia, 2008 [Subhabrata, Necrocapitalism, Organization Studies 2008 29: 1541]

no other commodity has such a long and bloody history involving dispossession, colonial conquest,
Perhaps

military coups, wars, corruption, global politics, and power as oil. Since the end of the 19th century, oil has consistently
been one of the biggest businesses in the world and oil companies were some of the first truly multinational corporations of the modern era. In 2007, six of
the 15 largest corporations in the Fortune 500 Global list were oil companies. Corporate strategies of oil companies are inextricably linked with national strategies of governments as well as
global politics and power.Watts (1999: 1) has documented numerous cases of ‘petro-violence’ – violence that often accompanies
the extraction of oil arising from the ‘intersection of environment and violence: both biological violence perpetrated upon the biophysical world, and the social violence,
criminality and degeneracy associated with the genesis of petrowealth and with its ecological destructiveness’. Oil has been the cause of civil conflict and

war in so many regions of the world, with ongoing conflicts in Nigeria, Ecuador, Colombia, Myanmar, and the Caspian basin where petroleum has
become central to what the Azerbaijani president calls ‘armed conflict, aggressive separatism and nationalism’ (Watts 1999: 1).
Transnational oil companies, governments, and private security forces are all key actors in these zones of violence and the communities most affected by this violence are forced to give up their
sovereignty, autonomy, and traditions in exchange for modernity and economic development which continues to elude them. Oil has played a key role in the tragedy unfolding in the Middle East
today, from the carving up of the region into nation states to satisfy the needs of colonial and imperial powers in the 1930s to the so-called war on terror in Iraq and elsewhere that is increasingly
resembling a permanent state of exception. The state of exception also blurs the distinction between public and private providers of security. For example, in Nigeria, private security firms, in the
words of one oil company director, act as a ‘buffer between the state security forces and the oil companies’ (Abrahamsen and Williams 2005). There are also significant differences in labor
conditions between guards, soldiers, and police employed by the state and private contractors – while workers in both sectors risk injury and death, those employed by the latter tend to be better
armed and trained as well as better paid. In many countries in Africa, private military forces have both material and symbolic significance – from protection of foreign assets and security of
employees to the perceived collusion between local governments and multinational corporations. The ‘integration’ of public forces such as the police by private security firms for the protection
of foreign capital results in the creation of new states of exception where violence can be used with impunity. The case of Shell in Nigeria is well documented: a single company that generates
75% of the Nigerian government’s revenues and nearly 35% of the country’s GNP. Despite millions of dollars in royalties, local communities most affected by Shell’s operations continue to
suffer dire levels of poverty and have seen their traditional sources of livelihood disappear (Hertz 2001). And while government corruption is a major cause of the problem, several environmental
and human rights activists have questioned Shell’s role and relationship with the government. The corporation has contributed to building roads, schools, hospitals, and power utilities in the
Niger Delta where its main operations are based. As a Shell manager put it: ‘Things are back to front here. The government’s in the oil business and we are in local government’ (Hertz 2001:
173). However, despite the rhetoric of corporate social responsibility, oil companies operating in the region find that the money they contribute to the local economy does not benefit local
communities. The notion of ‘responsibility’is also contested: when a local village leader complaining about the clinic’s inability to deliver health care in the village was told that Shell’s
indigenous
executives were not ‘responsible’ for his government’s corruption, he asked, ‘but is it Shell’s responsibility to take our resources?’ (Maas 2005). Many

communities all over the world are fighting against economic, social, and cultural marginalization at
different levels and their struggles are against their own governments, multinational and domestic
corporations, international agencies, and supranational organizations. The primary victims of the
structural violence of necrocapitalist practices are the poor of the world. As Farmer (2005: 50) points out, not only are the
poor ‘more likely to suffer, they are also less likely to have their suffering noted’. The Zapatista uprising in the Chiapas
district of southern Mexico is one case where the suffering of the poor received worldwide media attention. Indigenous communities in Chiapas rose up against the Mexican government in an
armed insurrection and temporarily took over the regional capital of San Cristobal. The Mexican government responded with military action and after several conflicts offered conditional pardon
to the rebels. On 18 January 1994 Zapatista leaders responded to the Mexican government’s offer of conditional pardon with the following letter, entitled ‘Who must ask for pardon and who can
grant it?’ suggesting that the Mexican government ask the Chiapans for a pardon instead, which they would consider: ‘Why do we have to be pardoned? What are we going to be pardoned for?
Of not dying of hunger? Of not being silent in our misery? Of not humbly accepting our historic role of being the despised and the outcast? Of having demonstrated to the rest of the country and
In Chiapas,
to the entire world that human dignity still lives, even among some of the world’s poorest peoples?’ (Marcos & the Zapatista Army of National Liberation 1995)

14,500 people die every year. 71.6% of the indigenous population in the region suffer from malnutrition
(CIEPAC 2001). The region has the highest infant mortality rate in the country, the third highest maternal mortality rate, and the highest death rate in the country. Most of these deaths are caused
by curable diseases: respiratory infections, gastroenteritis, parasites, malaria, breakbone fever, tuberculosis, conjunctivitis, typhus, cholera, and measles. While there are 7 hotel rooms for every
A region that produces 54% of the country’s hydroelectric
1000 tourists, there are 0.3 hospital beds for every 1000 Chiapans (Farmer 2005).

energy, 21% of its oil, and 47% of its natural gas also contains the country’s most impoverished people
where 36.2% of the population do not have running water and 35.2% do not have electricity (CIEPAC 2001). Transnational corporations
extract wealth from Chiapas by mining their land, felling their forests, and selling a tourist experience at
the expense of local communities who have the misfortune of ‘inhabiting’ the region. One of the leaders of the movement,
Subcomandente Marcos, described their struggle: ‘When we rose up against a national government, we found that it did not exist. In reality we were up against financial capital, against
speculation, which is what makes decisions in Mexico as well as in Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, North America, South
America – everywhere.’ (Zapatista 1998) ‘Financial capital’ here refers tothe World Bank’s structural adjustment program where a World Bank loan to
meant that agricultural land used by indigenous
Mexico was conditional upon the country undertaking ‘land reforms’. Basically these reforms

communities in Chiapas was to be redistributed to the private sector to raise cattle for fast food markets in the US while locking out local
communities from participating in the benefits (there is no McDonald’s in Chiapas). The corporate response to the Zapatista rebellion typifies

necrocapitalist practice: in an internal memo the Chase Manhattan Bank, one of the major financiers of the Mexican government stated ‘the
government will need to eliminate the Zapatistas to demonstrate their effective control of the national territory and security policy’ (Mexico, Political
Update, Chase Manhattan Bank, Zapatista 1998). If communities have to be ‘eliminated’ for economic development to occur,

one can only wonder what corporate social responsibility means in this context. Violence used by
authoritarian regimes to suppress dissent may well involve creating a state of exception for that violence
to be deployed and is easily identifiable. The violence, dispossession, and death that often follow the imposition of ‘open markets’, ‘land reform’, and ‘free
trade’ in the poorer regions of the world, however, marks another state of exception that escapes political scrutiny. To quote Karl Marx: ‘between two rights, force decides’. Often, the
multinational corporation escapes liability when it partners with repressive regimes: the gray area of corporate complicity in violence marks a state of exception where, despite the continuing
extraction of economic benefits through human rights violation, corporate culpability is difficult to prove in an international court of law. Transnational corporations appear to operate with
impunity in states of exception as far as the realm of international law is concerned. For example, Ramasastry (2002) has documented several legal cases against multinational corporations,
ranging from a legal claim filed by the Hererro community in Namibia against German industry seeking reparations for ‘the enslavement and destruction of their tribes’ and Holocaust-related
cases of slave labor to the more recent case against Unocal’s use of slave labor in constructing an oil pipeline in Myanmar and its complicity with the brutally repressive practices of the Myanmar
military government. Every legal case was dismissed either on ‘grounds of nonjusticiability’ or because the statute of limitations had expired; or, as in the case of Unocal, ‘mere knowledge’ that
Cases where incursion
the corporation’s business partner (Myanmar’s military government) used slave labor was insufficient to penalize the corporation (Ramasastry 2002).

of capital has led to ‘elimination’ of people including dispossession, violence, death, and destruction are
numerous: corporate profits generated through slavery by 19th-century American banks who traded in slaves as collateral for
loans (New York Times 2005); the use of slave labor by multinational corporations during World War II (Ramasastry 2002); the
biotechnological redefinition of bare life through the Human Genome Project and the use of genetic information by governments and corporations (Cunningham
and Sharper 1996); intellectual property rights regimes on biodiversity conservation (Banerjee 2003); increase in suicide

rates by farmers in India as a result of ‘liberalization’ in agriculture (Milmo 2005); displacement and dispossession of
tribal people because of mega dam projects in the Third World (Roy 2001); the rise of ‘disaster capitalism’ where
corporations make profits, control resources, and reshape economies of regions devastated by natural and human-made disasters as was the case
during reconstruction efforts after the Boxing Day tsunami, Hurricane Mitch, Hurricane Katrina, and the Gujarat earthquake of 2001 (Klein 2007; Sharma 2003); the struggles

fought by indigenous groups against mining and resource corporations (Banerjee 2000); and the ‘clinical trials’ conducted
by transnational pharmaceutical corporations on the bodies of the world’s poorest patients causing disfigurement and
death (Shah, 2006). Along with the destruction of economies comes the inevitable reconstruction involving the usual coterie of

corporations, construction companies, government aid agencies, UN agencies, and international financial institutions. Wars and natural disasters have left
several countries with little power to govern their economies, and these regions end up being de facto subjects of World Bank and private construction companies’ sovereignty. All loans

to impoverished countries come with neoliberal strings attached: privatize or die seems to be the directive
(or in some cases privatize and die). Natural disasters such as hurricanes, tsunamis, and earthquakes become enabling conditions of disaster capitalism: for example, reconstruction efforts after
Hurricane Mitch hit Central America were contingent on the selling off of public enterprises and facilities like airports, seaports, highways, telephone companies, utilities, and water sectors.
Thousands of small fishing communities devastated by the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami have permanently lost their livelihood and relief efforts are not aimed at reconstructing their lives but rather
expanding the tourist sector and industrial fisheries. Post-tsunami reconstruction and rebuilding involved building corporate hotels, beaches, tourist resorts and casinos services by newly
privatized airports and highways, over the bodies and lost livelihoods of displaced peoples (Klein 2007). India’s worst recorded earthquake which shook Gujarat in 2001 killed 20,000 people,
injured hundreds of thousands, left more than 600,000 people homeless, and destroyed or severely damaged more than 1 million houses. Amidst the rubble, one of the first to arrive with a ‘relief
package’ was a large partly state-owned mining company which had been trying for years to obtain access to lignite mining on traditional indigenous land, and because of the earthquake was
successful in ‘relocating’ the villagers and getting access to their land. The displaced people were left without their traditional sources of income and minimum wage, as casual and
environmentally dangerous employment in the mines or prostitution became their only means of income (Sharma 2003).

Capitalism causes endless war and the creation of death zones globally, and especially in
Latin America. The world of peace promised by the affirmative is a mask for capitalism’s
continual production of death, dispossession, and violence as a condition of its existence.
Banerjee, professor at the international graduate school of business at the University of South
Australia, 2008 [Subhabrata, Necrocapitalism, Organization Studies 2008 29: 1541]

Violence,
Locating imperialism and the legacies of colonialism in contemporary forms of capitalism is central to the theoretical development of necrocapitalism.

dispossession, and death that result from practices of accumulation occur in spaces that seem to be immune from
legal, juridical, and political intervention, resulting in a suspension of sovereignty. In the modern era the democratization of sovereignty is still fundamentally determined by and
grounded in mechanisms of disciplinary coercion (Foucault 1980) – coercion that was more apparent and visible during colonial times but is more sophisticated in its operation in the postcolonial
era. Drawing on Carl Schmitt’s (1985) definition of sovereignty as one ‘who decides on the state of exception’, Agamben (1998: 17) argues that through the state of exception, the sovereign
‘creates and guarantees the situation that the law needs for its own validity’. Agamben describes the Nazi state, the current status of Palestine, and ‘legal civil wars’ as examples of states of
exception in the modern era. The US Naval Station at Guantánamo Bay is perhaps one of the latest examples of a state of exception where ‘enemy combatants’ that are incarcerated there are not
legal subjects or prisoners of war but have become ‘legally unnameable and unclassifiable beings entirely removed from the law and from judicial oversight’ (Agamben 2005: 4). Violence,
torture, and death can occur in this space of exception without political or juridical intervention. The state of exception thus creates a zone where the application of law is suspended but the law
.
remains in force Agamben (1998: 27) develops the ancient Roman legal notion of homo sacer or sacred man – ‘one who may be killed but not sacrificed’. In ancient Roman law, homo sacer
referred to people whose deaths were of no value to the gods and thus could not be sacrificed but could be killed with impunity because their lives were deemed be of no value to society. Homo
sacer occupied a space both outside (and hence inside) divine law and juridical law; they were objects of sovereign power but excluded from being its subjects; ‘mute bearers of bare life deprived
of language and the political life that language makes possible’ (Gregory 2004: 63). A sovereign decision to apply a state of exception invokes a power to decide the value of life, which would
allow a life to be taken without the charge of homicide. The killings of mentally and physically handicapped people during the Nazi regime was justified as ending a ‘life devoid of value’, a life
‘unworthy to be lived’. Sovereignty becomes a decision on the value of life
thus , ‘a power to decide the point at which life ceases to be politically
relevant’ (Agamben 1998: 142). Sovereignty has always been a moving target and despite Westphalian notions of the independence and ‘supreme authority’ of nation states, the jurisdiction of
borders have been routinely transgressed as ‘sovereignty has become progressively unbundled from territoriality’ (Raustiala 2005). Far from being a fixed political and legal category, sovereignty
was always a ‘sociological praxis full of exceptions, fissures and fractures’ (Shenhav and Berda 2008). Benton’s (2002: 10) analysis of legal politics during the colonial era reveals what she calls
the ‘jurisdictional politics’ of conflicts arising from multiple legal procedures and authorities. ‘Jurisdictional fluidity’ and ‘legal jockeying’ enabled the creation of a space to govern the colonies
in India and Africa while expanding European claims to sovereignty. In the historical praxis of colonialism the state of exception in the colonies was more the rule, resulting in multiple and
interrupted sovereignties that were used to govern the natives. However, in both Foucault’s formulation of sovereignty and the production of the biopolitical body and Agamben’s deployment of
homo sacer and states of exception, the omission of the colony is notable. The colony, as Mbembe (2003: 14) points out, represented a permanent state of
exception where sovereignty became an exercise of power outside the law, where ‘peace was more likely to take on the face of a war
without end and where violence could operate in the name of civilization’. In fact, as Anghie (2005) points out, colonialism and imperialism (Anghie uses these terms interchangeably)
were constitutive of European notions of sovereignty, international law, and development. Discourses of ‘civilization’ and ‘development’, for example, created and

sustained the binary categories of civilized–barbaric and developed–underdeveloped, where sovereignty

always remained on the side of the ‘civilized’ and ‘developed’. Once sovereignty was established along the dimensions of civilization and development,
the key ‘universal’ problem was how to create order among sovereign states by developing techniques to ‘normalize the aberrant society’ (Anghie 2005: 4). As Hussain (2003) argues, the
historical formation of colonialism reveals the self-generative epistemic space of the West in its ability to create the rule and the exception. Thus, the European notion of sovereignty that became
the basis of international law has its roots in colonialism and tends to reproduce and reinforce colonial modes of control even in the present era. While transgressions of sovereignty were common
in the colonial era where the colony marked a permanent state of exception, there are different levels of sovereignties in today’s neoliberal political economy. In contemporary political economy,
states of exception, uneven sovereignties, and gradations of rights are produced and maintained by what Stoler (2006: 128) calls ‘imperial formations’ which she describes as ‘states of becoming,
rather than being’. Imperial formations in today’s political economy do not reflect a ‘steady state’ enclosed by national sovereign boundaries but have
more to do with how the economy and polity are organized. A ‘politics of dislocation’ characterizes imperial formations involving ‘systematic recruits and transfers of colonial agents, native
military, redistribution of peoples and resources, relocations and dispersions, contiguous and overseas territories’ (Stoler 2006: 138). States of exception created by imperial formations are
not restricted to the former colonies ‘out there’ but include ‘the West’. The ‘West’ operates not so much as a particular set of
geographical locations, or indeed a specific collection of locationally defined peoples, but is a discursive space formed by a network of economic and power relations (Banerjee and Linstead
2001). Spaces of imperial exception also occur in metropolitan contexts – for example, the migrant bodies, the ‘illegal’ or ‘undocumented bodies’ that labor in the ‘ethnic enclaves’ that contain
American brand of neoliberalism that seems to be embraced by the supranational institutions that govern the
the sweatshops of New York, London, and Paris (Ong 2006). The

is increasingly tied to
global economy and adopted by several countries in the developing world represents a type of ‘radicalized capitalist imperialism’ (Ong 2006: 1) that

military action, often in the name of maintaining ‘security’. The imperial formations that create states of exception and multiple sovereignties in
the postcolonial era are enabled and sustained by the formation of economic states of exception created by neoliberal policies. Thus, ‘neoliberalism as exception’ produces specific arrangements
of sovereignty and citizenship that are enabled by the ‘infiltration of market logic into politics’ while constructing subjectivities that reflect market citizenship and a ‘reconfiguration of
relationships between governing and the governed, power and knowledge and sovereignty and territoriality’ (Ong 2006: 6). If the sword of commerce was most visibly active in the days of
empire, its activity in the postcolonial era continued the violence in a more covert manner, often with the complicity of the political elites in the former colonies. Ong (2006) develops the notion
of ‘graduated sovereignty’ to describe how some countries in South East Asia, notably the so-called ‘Asian tigers’, embraced the global market with a combination of governmental political
strategies and military repression. Her research on globalization in Indonesia and Malaysia showed that the interaction between states and transnational capital resulted in a differential state
treatment of the population already fragmented by race, ethnicity, gender, class, and religion as well as a reconfiguration of power and authority in the hands of transnational corporations
operating in special export processing zones. The neoliberal turn in these regions follows a different trajectory where the interplay of market versus state results in differing levels of sovereignty:
global markets and
some areas of the economy have a very strong state presence and in other areas, markets and foreign capital rule. State sovereignty is dispersed because

capital, with the collusion of governments, create states of exception where coercion, violence, and killings occur. State
repression against rebel populations and separatist movements is often influenced by market forces: as Ong (2006) argues, territories
are cleared of rebels (‘outlawed citizens’) to make way for logging concessions, petroleum pipelines, mines, and dams. Thus, necrocapitalism creates states of exceptions where ‘democratic
rights are confined to a political sphere’ while continuing forms of domination, exploitation, and violence in other domains (Wood 2003: 80). Accumulation by Death and Dispossession
Violence, death, and dispossession and their relationship with capitalism is not new: in Volume I ofCapital, Marx (1867: 926) wrote: ‘If money comes into the world with a congenital blood stain
on one cheek, then capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt .’ Early capitalist
practices of recruiting labor involved violence, often sanctioned by law. The legislation against ‘vagabondage’, for example, transformed peasants who were driven off the land into vagabonds to
Colonialism added a racial
be ‘whipped, branded, tortured by laws grotesquely terrible, into the discipline necessary for the wage system’ (Marx 1867: 899).

dimension to the exploitation of labor – for example, Marx describes the colonial capitalist practices in Africa as ‘extirpation, enslavement and entombment in
mines of the aboriginal population … and the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins’ (Marx 1867: 915). In his analysis of death metaphors in Marx’s work,
Neocleous (2003) draws parallels between capital and death, arguing that Marx’s critique of political economy is ultimately a ‘political economy of the dead’. At various points in Capital, Marx
refers to capital as ‘dead labor’ in opposition to ‘living labor’ where capitalist rule is the ‘independent conditions of labor over the worker … the rule of things over man, of dead labor over
it is necessary to understand
living’ (Marx 1867: 989). However, rather than reduce death to distinctions between labor whether in a colonial or a metropolitan context,

necrocapitalism as a practice that operates through the establishment of colonial sovereignty, and the manner in
which this sovereignty is established in the current political economy where the business of death can take place through states of exception. In the postcolonial era the imperial prerogative, as
Chatterjee (2005: 495) argues, is the ‘power to declare the colonial exception’. Thus, while the ‘international community’ agrees that nuclear proliferation should be stopped, it becomes an
The entities in this
imperial right for some to decide that while India and Israel may be allowed to have nuclear weapons, it is unacceptable for North Korea or Iran to do so.

colonial space of exception must either be disciplined by violence or ‘civilized by culture’ to become
normalized. The colonial state of exception is also the space where more profits accrue whether it is
through the extraction of resources, the use of privatized militias or through contracts for reconstruction. In this sense, it is necessary to read the manner in which
colonial sovereignty operates to create states of exception conducive to the operation of necrocapitalist practices. Mbembe (2003) extends Foucault’s notion of sovereignty as power that produces
and regulates a biopolitical body, or the power to ‘make live or let die’ (Foucault, 1978) to develop his concept of necropolitical power that involves the subjugation of life to the power of death.
These forms of necropolitical power literally create ‘death worlds, new and unique forms of social
existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of
the living dead’ (Mbembe 2003: 40). Situating necropolitics in the context of economy, Montag (2005: 11) argues that if necropolitics is interested in the production of death or
subjugating life to the power of death then it is possible to speak of a necroeconomics – a space of ‘letting die or exposing to death’. Montag explores the relation of the market to life and death in
his reading of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments(Smith 1986). In Montag’s reading of Smith, it is ‘the dread of death, the great poison to the happiness ... which
while it afflicts and mortifies the individual, guards and protects the society’ (cited in Montag 2005: 12). If social life was driven solely by unrestrained self-interest, then the fear of punishment
the
or death through juridical systems kept the pursuit of excessive self-interest in check, otherwise people would simply rob, injure, and kill for material wealth. Thus, for Smith

universality of life is contingent on the particularity of death, the production of life on the production of
death where the intersection of the political and the economic makes it necessary to exercise the right to
kill. The market then, as a ‘concrete form of the universal’ becomes the ‘very form of universality as life’
and requires at certain moments to ‘let die’. Or as Montag theorizes it, ‘Death establishes the conditions of life; death as by an invisible hand restores the
market to what it must be to support life. The allowing of death of the particular is necessary to the production of life of the universal. The market reduces and rations

life; it not only allows death, it demands death be allowed by the sovereign power, as well as by those
who suffer it. In other words, it demands and requires the latter allow themselves to die. Thus alongside the figure of homo sacer, the one who may be killed with impunity, is another
figure, one whose death is no doubt less spectacular than the first and is the object of no memorial or commemoration: he who with impunity may be allowed to die, slowly or quickly, in the
.
name of the rationality and equilibrium of the market’ (Montag 2005: 15) Montag, therefore, theorizes a necroeconomics where the state becomes the legitimate purveyor of violence: in this
scenario, the state can compel by force ‘those who refuse to allow themselves to die’ (Montag 2005: 15). However, Montag’s concept of necroeconomics appears to universalize conditions of
poverty through the logic of the market. My concern, however, is the creation of death worlds in colonial contexts through the collusion between states and corporations. If states and corporations
work in tandem with each other in colonial contexts, creating states of exception and exercising necropower to profit from the death worlds that they establish, then necroeconomics fails to
consider the specificities of colonial capitalist practices. I argue that necrocapitalism emerges from the intersection of necropolitics and necroeconomics, as practices of accumulation in
(post)colonial contexts by specific economic actors – transnational corporations, for example – that involve dispossession, death, torture, suicide, slavery, destruction of livelihoods, and the
The fundamental feature of
general management of violence. It is a new form of imperialism, an imperialism that has learned to ‘manage things better’.

necrocapitalism is accumulation by dispossession and the creation of death worlds in colonial contexts.
Land privatization and the subsequent forceful expulsion of peasants, conversion of public property into
private property, restrictions on public use of common property resources, neocolonial practices of asset
appropriation, control over natural resources in the former colonies, and the suppression of alternate,
indigenous forms of consumption and production are some forms of dispossession in contemporary
political economy (Harvey 2005: 145). In contemporary forms of accumulation, the corporation is a powerful actor and in conjunction with nation states, supranational bodies, and
international agencies contributes to a necrocapitalist privatization of sovereignty. The transformation of European colonialism to a new ‘imperialism without colonies’ also required coercive
power and brute force often with the collusion of postcolonial political elites in the former colonies where local states emerged as sites of power for capitalist accumulation. Thus, rather than
 the globalization of markets is dependent on a system of multiple states which required ‘a new
marking the ‘death of the nation state’,

extra-economic, especially military, coercion. An endless invisible empire, which has no

doctrine of

boundaries, even no territory, requires war without end, an infinite war, and a new doctrine of war
to justify it’ (Wood 2003: 161). And to further clarify the relationship between markets and war, President George W. Bush, in an attempt to address concerns about the dramatic
decline in tourism and air travel in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, told airline employees that ‘one of the great goals of this war is to tell the traveling public: Get on board’ (cited in
Gregory 2004). Thus, for the American tourist to ‘get on board’ to enjoy a holiday, stimulate the tourism market, and save airline jobs it becomes necessary for some people to die, as homo sacer,
the imposition of
in a state of exception outside national and international law. The creation of new spaces of exceptions is a weapon for the ideological arsenal of empire where

an economic relationship becomes paramount, using force if required. Thus, the right to rule is justified ‘by the right, indeed the
obligation, to produce exchange value’ (Wood 2003: 157). Economic domination where markets manage much of the imperial work

extends the powers and reach of colonial states. New economic doctrines require new military doctrines as well. War without end does not necessarily
mean endless fighting: the coercive mechanisms of capital require an endless possibility of war. ‘War without end’ has an impressive
genealogy in the West. Woodrow Wilson wrote in 1907: ‘Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow
him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of
unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked … The seed of war in the modern world is
industrial and commercial rivalry.’ (cited in Katz 2006) The nexus between economic interests and military power, which characterized the colonial project, continues to operate in the new
imperial formations that constitute the contemporary neoliberal project and is another enabling condition of necrocapitalism. Political sovereignty becomes subservient to corporate sovereignty
and economics rather than politics determines war zones. In imperial formations, power is deployed to repress ‘symptoms of despair’, and to establish behavioral and economic norms in ‘a
The involvement of US multinationals along with the CIA in fomenting military and political
system for regulating disorder’ (Joxe 2002: 14).

coups in Latin America (notably United Fruit Inc. in Guatemala and Colombia and ITT in Chile and Brazil) is well documented (Dosal 1993; Grandin 2006).
Millions of dollars were spent by the US government to destabilize Chile in the 1970s – on learning that Chile had elected a Marxist president in 1970, Nixon instructed the CIA to ‘make their
Corporate strategies to ensure ‘safe havens’ for their investment
economy scream’ in an effort to ‘smash Allende’ (Grandin 2006).

included obtaining US government support for dictatorial regimes, violent reprisals using state military
and police to suppress dissent, and bribes and kickbacks to political elites. Because violence was deployed in these states of
exception, both governments and corporations were able to kill with impunity: Colombia in 1929, when the military gunned down striking
United Fruit workers killing at least 400 (Kepner and Soothill 1935), and the US-backed military coup in Guatemala in 1954, where more than 200 union leaders were killed, are two of the more
Privatization of the commons through corporate
widely publicized cases involving violence and multinational capital (Chomsky and Herman 1979).

control of natural resources is another ‘sword of commerce’ that subjugates lives and destroys
livelihoods by creating states of exception in many developing regions. In Latin America, for example, it is estimated that more than 2000
government industries were sold off between 1985 and 1992, many of them below their market value to private buyers ‘with connections’ to the military and US corporate and government
interests (Grandin 2006). The collusion of local states is instrumental in the battle over natural resources: a 1975 Philippine government advertisement placed in Fortune magazine declared: ‘To
attract companies like yours ... we have felled mountains, razed jungles, filled swamps, moved rivers, relocated towns … all to make it easier for you and your business to do business here’ (cited
The effects of creating a ‘business friendly climate’ are often violent, leading to loss of life and
in Korten 1995).

the creation of death worlds. For instance, a combination of trade liberalization in agriculture (agriculture is ‘liberalized’ in the Third World and protected in the First) and
the failure of genetically modified seeds has been linked to a 260% increase in suicide rates of farmers in India (Milmo 2005). More than 4000 farmers have committed suicide in the southern
state of Andhra Pradesh since the imposition of agricultural reforms. The suicide rate among farmers is the highest in cash crop growing regions. In 2005 there were 520 suicides by farmers in
Vidarbha, the largest cotton growing region in India. Six journalists covered the ‘farmer suicides story’ in February 2006. That same week 512 journalists were jostling for space in Mumbai for
the Lakme Fashion Week where models were exhibiting the new chic cotton dresses made from cotton grown by farmers who were killing themselves less than 500km away. Roy (2001: 46)
claims that ‘India’s rural economy which supports 700 million people, is being garroted. Farmers who produce too much are in distress, farmers who produce too little are in distress, and landless
agricultural laborers are out of work as big estates and farms lay off their workers. They’re all flocking to already overcrowded cities in search of employment.’ Roy (2001) has also documented
the displacement of villagers in large-scale dam projects in India. She estimates that between 30 and 50 million people have lost their traditional lands as a result of dam projects. A single project,
the Sardar Sarovar dam project will displace 400,000 tribal peoples once it is completed. is the case in all developing countries, the dispossessed do not participate in any of the benefits: the
Necrocapitalist practices deny people
electricity generated by the dams is for use by city dwellers and the water for irrigating large industrial agriculture farms.

access to resources that are essential to their health and life, destroy livelihoods, and dispossess
communities. The privatization of water in Africa and South America is a case in point: in almost every case where water was
privatized the poorer segments of society ended up paying not only higher prices for water but paid with their lives as well. In South
Africa during 2002–2003 more than 100,000 people were infected with cholera, leading to the deaths of 200 people after the South African government (following World Bank
‘recommendations’) denied water and sanitation services to thousands of citizens in KwaZulu-Natal province who were too poor to pay their water bills (Barlow and Clarke 2002). World Bank
Race
water policies encourage ‘cost recovery’: however, the problem is that corporate costs are recovered at the expense of people who are denied access to clean water and sanitation.

and class also determine who suffers, who lives and who dies: in South Africa 600,000 white farmers consume 60% of the country’s water
supplies for irrigation while 15 million black people have no access to clean water (Barlow and Clarke 2002). A similar situation exists in the maquiladoras of Mexico

where clean water is scarce because it is mainly reserved for use by foreign-owned industries in the region. And

when Bolivia’s economy was ‘structurally adjusted’ by the World Bank, one of the conditions was to sell off the national water
company, which the Bolivian government did to Bechtel. Not long after the purchase, water bills rose by 200% for an already impoverished citizenry, with the government even attempting to
charge citizens for collecting rainwater for personal use. Extended protests by the people forced the Bolivian government to take over the water supply again, leading Bechtel to exit Bolivia,
Other contemporary cases of accumulation by dispossession that can be seen
albeit with a $25 million payout (Grandin 2006).

as necrocapitalist practices are the privatization of war resulting from the increasing use of privatized
military forces and conflicts over natural resources between transnational corporations and indigenous
communities in the Third World, which I will discuss in the next section. Outsourcing the ‘War on Terror’: Corporate Warriors and the Privatized Military Industry
Imperial power, military might, economic interests, and capital all converge in the so-called war on terror: while it may be true that the oil may not have been the sole reason for the invasion of
Iraq, it is no accident that in the mayhem and looting in Baghdad that followed the first few days of the invasion, the only two buildings guarded by American troops were the Ministry of the
Interior and the Ministry of Oil. Flows of capital in and out of Iraq leave a trail of death and destruction followed by reconstruction: one of several key post-war decisions had to do with the
establishment of ‘Operation Adam Smith’ involving the privatization of Iraq’s state industries and the allocation of reconstruction contracts to mainly American and British corporations (Grandin
2006; Gregory 2004). While the entire country is declared a state of exception, colonial cartographies have redrawn Baghdad into zones. The ‘Green Zone’ where the Coalition Provisional
Authority is based is a state of exception within a state of exception – ‘America’s Baghdad’ as an interpreter worker in the Green Zone described it an interview with the Washington Post: ‘It’s
like I never left America. They serve peanut butter, lobster and ice cream. The cell phones have a 914 area code (White Plains, New York). The television sets show Monday Night Football. The
people speak English’ (cited in Gregory 2004: 247). Life and death for people unfortunate enough to live outside the Green Zone yet governed by its operations is very different. Colonial
cartographies in rezoning Baghdad based on levels of security have differential effects on the human bodies that occupy these zones. The ‘war on terror’ operating in a neoliberal economy has
created a type of sovereignty that has profound implications for those whose livelihoods depend on the war on terror as well as those whose lives become constituted as ‘bare life’ in the economy
of the war on terror. Outsourcing is a key strategy used in the so-called war on terror. There are currently over 160,000 American troops in Iraq. The next highest group of soldiers is hired by
privatized military firms (PMFs) and number 21,250 compared to 8500 British troops which is the second largest national contingent (Singer 2004). Private contractors operate prisons in
Guantanamo Bay and Iraq. Haliburton, Bechtel, and other major US-hired contractors have received milliondollar contracts to provide security services and work on reconstruction projects.
These contractors in turn bring in thousands of workers (often illegally) from the Philippines, Nepal, Pakistan, India, and Sri Lanka to do what one American supervisor calls ‘grunt jobs’,
meaning dirty and dangerous work that American employees are not willing to do (Phinney 2005). Hundreds of these ‘Third Country Nationals’ (TCNs) have been killed and while the Pentagon
keeps an exact body count of American soldiers killed, they do not keep records of TCN deaths or civilian deaths. Working conditions are also described as being abusive, with contractors doing
their best to minimize costs by providing minimal service: TCNs do not get overtime or other benefits like American employees, they eat their very basic meals outdoors in 140 degree
temperatures while their American counterparts enjoy culinary delights in air conditioned mess halls along with US soldiers. A racialized international division of labor is a profitable strategy for
corporations involved in outsourcing the war on terror and reconstruction efforts in Iraq. The practice of necrocapitalism is embodied in these bodies of the living and dead Third Country
Nationals by their invisibility in statistics of body counts or media coverage of soldiers in Iraq. Their labor profits imperial sovereignties yet their deaths are as disposable as the deaths of Iraqi
civilians who are also evidence of the costs of necrocapitalism (or ‘collateral damage’ in Pentagonspeak). A racialized system of counting the dead also operates in Iraq. At the time of writing
4388 coalition soldiers have died in Iraq since the invasion: comprising 4077 Americans, 2 Australians, 176 Britons, 13 Bulgarians, 1 Czech, 7 Danes, 2 Dutch, 2 Estonians, 1 Fijian, 2 Georgians,
1 Hungarian, 33 Italians, 1 Kazakh, 1 Korean, 3 Latvians, 22 Poles, 3 Romanians, 5 Salvadoran, 4 Slovaks, 11 Spaniards, 1 South Korean, 2 Thai, and 18 Ukrainians (www.cnn.com). Numbers
of Iraqi civilians killed as a result of the conflict are not as precise: various agencies put the total number of civilian dead between 83,521 and 91,094 (www.iraqbodycount.org). When General
Tommy Franks infamously said ‘We don’t do body counts’, he of course meant that they only do the bodies that count. Recent years have seen an increasing trend in the outsourcing of war and
the global rise of the privatized military industry (Singer 2004). Privatized military firms (PMFs) are business corporations that offer a variety of military related services including combat
operations, strategic planning, asset protection, support, and training. PMFs have been active in Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Sudan, Algeria, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Uganda,
Liberia, Cameroon, Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, Congo-Brazzaville, Senegal, Somalia, Namibia, Sierra Leone, Zambia, Croatia, Bosnia, Albania, Macedonia, Kosova, Russia, Azerbaijan,
Armenia, Kazakhstan, Chechnia, Georgia, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, several other Gulf states, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Indonesia, Haiti, Colombia, and several Latin American countries
(Singer 2004). While these regions, many of them former colonial outposts, mark the theater of operations for PMFs, their corporate head offices are, not surprisingly, based in metropolitan
centers of London, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, and New York. Modern nation states have drawn from the ‘private violence market’ to build their public power, resulting in a privatization of
sovereignty in territories where PMFs operate today (Singer 2004: 20). PMFs owned and operated by transnational corporations have the right to take life or let live, ‘protect’ assets, and even
claim mineral rights, as is the case in several African states. Given the nature of their business, there is a lack of transparency about the actual operations of PMFs. Singer (2004) estimates that
the industry has an annual revenue of $100 billion, which is expected to double by 2010. PMFs sell their services to the highest bidder: nation states, other multinational corporations,
international organizations, and even non-governmental organizations. This can have some ironic consequences: a PMF can be hired for military combat operations in a particular region to kill
the ‘enemy’ and can subsequently be hired by another bidder at another time in the same region to ‘protect’ the people they were engaged in killing earlier. This has happened in Angola (Singer,
2004). Some industry lobbyists are even attempting to privatize UN peacekeeping systems invoking the neoliberal mantra of delivering services, faster, cheaper, and more efficiently than the
public sector. The privatization of war and the privatization of peace are now business decisions: governments and corporations will choose either strategy based on profitability and efficiency.
Joseph Heller must have been prescient when he wrote Catch 22, where Major Milo Minderbinder remarked: ‘Frankly, I’d like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the
whole feud to private industry.’ Private contractors have also been implicated in the torture of prisoners that took place at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq (McKelvey 2005). If the state can torture and
kill because of its sovereign ability to create a state of exception status, what implications arise from the sanctioned violence used by private corporations? I argue that a state of exception created
by the war on terror results in a privatization of sovereignty, which is another enabling condition of necrocapitalism. The global organization and management of violence blurs the distinction
between public and private providers of security. The state, of course, is a key funder of and protector of necrocapitalist practices. But the war on terror has been used strategically by several US
multinational corporations to obtain generous tax breaks from their government as part of a ‘stimulus package’ which in turn is attempting to restrict the legal avenues for foreign citizens to sue
multinational corporations for human rights abuses in US courts. The ‘integration’ of public forces such as the police by private security firms for the protection of foreign capital results in the
creation of new states of exception where violence can be used with impunity. Corporations and violence have a long and troubled history, especially in the Third World. Colonial modes of
development, where resource rich but cash poor countries export their natural resources to industrialized countries, often lead to armed conflicts between government soldiers, mercenaries,
warlords, separatist groups, and private interests. Civil wars and military coups in Africa, Asia, and South America have been financed by revenues from resource extraction – in Angola, for
example, factions fighting government forces used revenues from illicit diamond trafficking to buy weapons while the government used their legal oil revenues for the same purpose (Klare
2001). A recent World Bank study of internal conflicts between 1960 and 1995 found that the greatest risk factor for civil war was not ethnic tensions but ‘natural resource predation’ or the
availability of easily ‘lootable resources’ (Collier 2000). In all these bloody power struggles involving the deaths of thousands of civilians, transnational corporations profited from access to
resources, cheap sources of labor, sales of weapons, protection of assets, and use of privatized military forces. Accumulation by Death and Dispossession in the Energy and Resources Industry

The alternative is solidarity with revolutionary struggle against capitalism. Voting

negative is a refusal of the tepid half-measures of the 1AC in favor of clearing the space for
a truly just and equitable society.
Marcuse, German Philosopher and Professor at Columbia and Harvard, 1969 (Herbert, member of the Frankfurt School, An Essay on
Liberation, p. 85-91) *GENDER MODIFIED

In a sense, this is indeed the community of interests of the "haves" against the "have nots," of the Old against the New. The "collaborationist" policy of the Soviet
Union necessitates the pursuance of power politics which increasingly reduces the prospect that Soviet society, by virtue of its basic institutions alone (abolition of
private ownership and control of the means of production: planned economy) is still capable of making the transition to a free society. And yet, the very dynamic of
imperialist expansion places the Soviet Union in the other camp: would the effective resistance in Vietnam, and the protection of Cuba be possible without Soviet aid?
However, while we reject the unqualified convergence thesis, according to which -at least at present -the assimilation of interests prevails UPOIl the conflict between
capitalism and Soviet Socialism, we
cannot minimize the essential difference between the latter and the new historical
efforts to construct socialism by developing and creating a genuine solidarity between the leadership and
the liberated victims of exploitation. The actual may considerably deviate rom the ideal, the fact remains
that, for a whole generation, "freedom," "socialism," and "liberation" are inseparable from Fidel and Che
and the guerrillas -not because their revolutionary struggle could furnish the model for the struggle in the
metropoles, but because they have recaptured the truth of these ideas, in the day-to-day fight of men and
women for a life as human beings: for a new life. What kind of life? We are still confronted with the
demand to state the "concrete alternative." The demand is meaningless if it asks for a blueprint of the
specific institutions and relationships which would be those of the new society: they cannot be determined
a priori; they will develop, in trial and error, as the new society develops. If we could form a concrete
concept of the alternative today, it would not be that of an alternative; the possibilities of the new society
are sufficiently "abstract," i.e., removed from and incongruous with the established universe to defy any
attempt to identify them in terms of this universe. However, the question cannot be brushed aside by
saying that what matters today is the destruction of the old, of the powers that be, making way for the
emergence of the new. Such an answer neglects the essential fact that the old is not simply bad, that it
delivers the goods, and that people have a real stake in it. There can be societies which are much worse –
there are such societies today. The system of corporate capitalism has the right to insist that those who
work for its replacement justify their action. But the demand to state the concrete alternatives is justified
for yet another reason. Negative thinking draws whatever force it may have from its empirical basis: the
actual human condition in the given society, and the "given" possibilities to transcend this condition, to
enlarge the realm of freedom. In this sense, negative thinking is by virtue of its own internal concepts
"positive": oriented toward, and comprehending a future which is "contained" in the present. And in this
containment (which is an important aspect of the general containment policy pursued by the established societies), the future appears as
possible liberation. It is not the only alternative: the advent of a long period of "civilized" barbarism, with
or without the nuclear destruction, is equally contained in the present. Negative thinking, and the praxis
guided by it, is the positive and positing effort to prevent this utter negativity. The concept of the primary, initial
institutions of liberation is familiar enough and concrete enough: collective ownership, collective control and planning of the
means of production and distribution. This is the foundation, a necessary but not sufficient condition for
the alternative: it would make possible the usage of all available resources for the abolition of poverty,
which is the prerequisite for the turn from quantity into quality: the creation of a reality in accordance
with the new sensitivity and the new consciousness. This goal implies rejection of those policies of
reconstruction, no matter how revolutionary, which are bound to perpetuate (or to introduce) the pattern of the
unfree societies and their needs. Such false policy is perhaps best summed up in the formula "to catch up with,
and to overtake the productivity level of the advanced capitalist countries." What is wrong with this
formula is not the emphasis on the rapid improvement of the material conditions but on the model guiding
their improvement. The model denies the alternative, the qualitative difference. The latter is not, and cannot be, the result
of the fastest possible attainment of capitalist productivity, but rather the development of new modes and ends of production "new" not only (and perhaps not
at all) with respect to technical innovations and production relations, but with respect to the different human
needs and the different human relationships in working for the satisfaction of these needs. These new relationships
would be the result of a "biological" solidarity in work and purpose, expressive of a true harmony between social and
individual needs and goals, between recognized necessity and free development -the exact opposite of the
administered and enforced harmony organized in the advanced capitalist (and socialist?) countries. It is the
image of this solidarity as elemental, instinctual, creative force which the young radicals see in Cuba, in the
guerrillas, in the Chinese cultural revolution. Solidarity and cooperation: not all their forms are liberating. Fascism and militarism have developed a deadly efficient
solidarity. Socialist solidarity is autonomy: selfdetermination begins at home -and that is with every I, and the We whom the I chooses. And this end must indeed
appear in the means to attain it, that is to say, in the strategy of those who, within the existing society, work for the new one. If
the socialist
relationships of production are to be a new way of life, a new Form of life, then their existential quality
must show forth, anticipated and demonstrated, in the fight for their realization. Exploitation in all its
forms must have disappeared from this fight: from the work relationships among the fighters as well as from their individual relationships.
Understanding, tenderness toward each other, the instinctual consciousness of that which is evil, false, the
heritage of oppression, would then testify to the authenticity of the rebellion. In short, the economic, political, and cultural
features of a classless society must have become the basic needs of those who fight for it. This ingression of the future into the present,
this depth dimension of the rebellion accounts, in the last analysis, for the incompatibility with the traditional forms of the political struggle.
The new radicalism militates against the centralized bureaucratic communist as well as against the semi-
democratic liberal organization. There is a strong element of spontaneity, even anarchism, in this
rebellion, expression of the new sensibility, sensitivity against domination: the feeling, the awareness, that
the joy of freedom and the need to be free must precede liberation. Therefore the aversion against preestablished Leaders,
apparatchiks of all sorts, politicians no matter how leftist. The initiative shifts to small groups, widely diffused, with a high
degree of autonomy, mobility, flexibility. To be sure, within the repressive society, and against its ubiquitous apparatus, spontaneity by itself
cannot possibly be a radical and revolutionary force. It can become such a force only as the result of enlightenment, education, political practice -in this sense indeed,
as a result of organization. The anarchic element is an essential factor in the struggle against domination: preserved but disciplined in the preparatory political action,
it will be freed and aufgehoben in the goals of the struggle. Released for the construction of the initial revolutionary institutions, the antirepressive sensibility, allergic
to domination, would militate against the prolongation of the "First Phase," that is, the authoritarian bureaucratic development of the productive forces. The new
society could then reach relatively fast the level at which poverty could be abolished (this level could be considerably lower than that of advanced capitalist
productivity, which is geared to obscene aflluence and waste). Then the development could tend toward a sensuous culture, tangibly contrasting with the gray-on-gray
culture of the socialist societies of Eastern Europe. Production would be redirected in defiance of all the rationality of the Performance Principle; socially necessary
labor would be diverted to the construction of an aesthetic rather than repressive environment, to parks and gardens rather than highways and parking lots, to the
creation of areas of withdrawal rather than massive fun and relaxation. Such redistribution of socially necessary labor (time), incompatible with any society governed
by the Profit and Performance Principle, would gradually alter society in all its dimensions -it would mean the ascent of the Aesthetic Principle as Form of the Reality
Principle: a culture of receptivity based on the achievements of industrial civilization and initiating the end of its self-propelling productiVity. Not
regression
to a previous stage of civilization, but return to an imaginary temps perdu in the real life of [hu]mankind:
progress to a stage of civilization where [hu]man[s] has learned to ask for the sake of whom or of what
[s/]he organizes his[/her] society; the stage where he checks and perhaps even halts his incessant struggle for existence on an enlarged scale,
surveys what has been achieved through centuries of misery and hecatombs of victims, and decides that it is enough, and that it is time to enjoy what he has and what
can be reproduced and refined with a minimum of alienated labor: not
the arrest or reduction of technical progress, but the
elimination of those of its features which perpetuate [hu]man[ity]'s subjection to the apparatus and the
intensification of the struggle for existence -to work harder in order to get more of the merchandise that has to be sold. In other words,
electrification indeed, and all technical devices which alleviate and protect life, all the mechanization which frees
human energy and time, all the standardization which does away with spurious and parasitarian
"personalized" services rather than multiplying them and the gadgets and tokens of exploitative affiuence.
In terms of the latter (and only in terms of the latter), this would certainly be a regression -but freedom from the rule of merchandise over man is a precondition of
freedom. Theconstruction of a free society would create new incentives for work. In the exploitative societies, the so-called
work instinct is mainly the (more or less effectively) introjected necessity to perform productively in order to earn a
living. But the life instincts themselves strive for the unification and enhancement of life; in nonrepressive
sublimation they would provide the libidinal energy for work on the development of a reality which no
longer demands the exploitative repression of the Pleasure Principle. The "incentives" would then be built
into the instinctual structure of men. Their sensibility would register, as biological reactions, the difference between the ugly and the beautiful,
between calm and noise, tenderness and brutality, intelligence and stupidity, joy and fun, and it would correlate this distinction with that between freedom and
servitude. Freud's last theoretical conception recognizes the erotic instincts as work instincts -work for the creation of a sensuous environment. The
social
expression of the liberated work instinct is cooperation, which, grounded in solidarity, directs the
organization of the realm of necessity and the development of the realm of freedom. And there is an
answer to the question which troubles the minds of so many men of good will: what are the people in a
free society going to do? The answer which, I believe, strikes at the heart of the matter was given by a
young black girl. She said: for the first time in our life, we shall be free to think about what we are going
to do.
Links
 Link Ext. – Cuba
The aff’s minor change in Cuban policy simply greases the wheels of capitalism. Half-
measures that stop short of lifting the embargo empower capitalist industries.
Chase, history doctoral candidate at NYU, 2009 [Michelle, doctoral candidate in the history department
of New York University, “The Bigger Picture of the Cuban Embargo and Travel Ban”, April 28th,
http://nacla.org/news/bigger-picture-cuban-embargo-and-travel-ban]

Last week, on the eve of the Summit of the Americas held in Trinidad and Tobago, President Barack Obama announced new
measures to permit unlimited Cuban-American travel and remittances to the island. These relaxations immediately set off
predictions that the entire travel ban would soon be lifted. And in fact, there are bills in both the House and Senate that aim to do just that. The
excitement over these new possibilities, however, should be tempered with a note of caution. Although there have always
been important voices raised in the United States over the injustice of the embargo, much of the progressive mobilization effort of recent years
has focused on a complete end to the travel ban, demanding the right to travel “for all, not for some.” The campaign has generated support partly
by casting the embargo as a violation of U.S. citizens’ freedom to travel. But as full liberalization of travel now looms, it is clearer than
ever that a progressive opposition to U.S. Cuba policy needs to focus on ending the entire embargo, and
for the right, big-picture reasons: The embargo violates Cuban sovereignty and is patently imperialist. Otherwise,
the momentum for U.S. Cuba policy reform will be co-opted by representatives of the tourism,
agricultural and telecommunication industries. The new relaxations announced by Obama are, of course, mostly positive
and welcome; any measures that diminish the daily hardships endured by Cubans would be. But these changes will also ensure that money
and goods sent to Cuba will go through private hands and family networks, rather than allowing the
Cuban state to guide the distribution of those resources. While the socialist government has a decidedly mixed record on
overturning historic inequalities based on race and class, we nevertheless know, based on what happened during the Special Period, that resources
funneled through private channels greatly exacerbate existing class and especially race tensions. Obama's reforms will play out differently among
Miami's increasingly diverse Cuban community. Recently emigrated, less educated, darker-skinned migrants will likely use the reforms to help
improve their families' situation back on the island, primarily at the level of everyday purchases like food, clothes, and home repairs. However,
assistance sent by Miami's more established and affluent Cuban-Americans could help their relatives on
the island acquire centrally-located property on the black market or proffer the substantial bribes that have increasingly become
necessary to secure small business licenses and sometimes even to obtain plum jobs in the tourist sector. Thus, the new measures will
not benefit all Cubans equally. They will raise the consumption levels of those with family abroad and, less directly, of
those employed in the service sector in Havana and other tourist destinations. But the embargo, which remains firmly in place through the 1992
Cuban Democracy Act and the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, will still block things like the importation of badly needed modern farming equipment
and key infrastructural improvements. Fully ending the travel ban is necessary and desirable, but doing so while leaving the embargo in place is
one way that Washington is trying to scuttle Havana's ability to guide its own internal affairs. The capital’s youth population is already
particularly frustrated with the inaccessibility of certain consumer goods and the difficulties of receiving permission to travel abroad. An
avalanche of iPod-toting U.S. spring-breakers will only exacerbate this frustration. A U.S.-induced tourist boom also stands to increase the steady
stream of migration from places like the impoverished easternmost province of Oriente toward Havana. These migrants already face difficulty
legalizing their residency in Havana and are often forcibly deported back to their place of origin. In either case, tensions with their Havana
neighbors and police could grow. Anyone who has spent time in Miami knows that Bush’s draconian restrictions, imposed during his campaign
for reelection in 2004, never managed to fully contain visits and remittances. Countless small outfits sent money through unofficial channels and
paid “mules” to carry goods to the island. Cuban-Americans flew through third countries to visit their relatives and friends. Such endeavors were
costly and complicated, but they were rarely if ever prosecuted. The embargo has never been about fully blocking all
movement of people and goods. Instead, it has sought to define which channels are legitimate. Goods
distributed through individuals, family, church, and the rare humanitarian assistance effort were deemed acceptable. Exchanges promoted
by political solidarity movements or formal bilateral trade relations were off limits. In other words, give Cubans
charity, not solidarity; give them sporadic aid, not trade. It has been clear to U.S. authorities ever since the early 1960s that economic pressure
alone would not topple the Cuban government. The embargo has been more about making a lesson out of Cuba,
showing the rest of Latin America the kinds of consequences that would accompany a socialist revolution.
Despite Washington's rhetoric about using sanctions as leverage to promote democracy, the embargo has always harbored a cruel subtext of
punishing Cubans for supporting Fidel Castro.
Specifically, lifting the terrorism designation would open the floodgates of US consumerism
and business interests
Patrick Ryan, The Hill, April 30, 2013, “Former U.S. diplomat Patrick Ryan: Time to drop Cuba from
terror list,” http://thehill.com/blogs/global-affairs/guest-commentary/296867-former-us-diplomat-patrick-
ryan- (Ryan is a 12-year veteran of the U.S. Foreign Service who previously worked on Capitol Hill.
Recently having returned after 14 years away, he has a degree in International Studies from Johns
Hopkins and is currently consulting in D.C. on issues that have nothing to do with Cuba, the embargo, or
potential business interests there)
Ironically, these members of Congress support Cubans’ ability freedom to travel to the United States but not Americans’ freedom to travel to Cuba, and use the
terrorist justification for this. If
we truly want to undermine the Castro regime, the best way would be to end the
listing, including the embargo and travel ban, and flood Cuba with American visitors, as well as our products and
democratic ideas. Ending the restrictions would also demonstrably help the Cuban people — a stated aim of these same politicians. In comparison, most
Vietnamese-Americans — who also lost a civil war to communists, 16 years after the Cubans — long ago accepted reality and supported the 1994 normalization of
relations with Vietnam. The U.S. buried the hatchet and engaged a country whose human rights record, like Cuba’s — and China’s — has been disappointing, and
with whom we were actually involved in a war that took the lives of more than 58,000 Americans. So why not Cuba? The fact that members of the Basque separatist
group ETA have retired to the island with the blessing of the Spanish government, that FARC members are residing in Cuba during peace talks hosted by Havana and
supported by the Colombian government and that various fugitives from American justice — none of whom have been accused of terrorism, by the way — have lived
in exile there since the 1970s, are simply not credible arguments for maintaining the designation. Frankly, it’s well past time that U.S. policymakers had the courage to
tell the most vocal Miami exiles to acknowledge reality and move on, as many of them already have. Fortunately, the younger generation of Cubans in Miami isn’t as
President Obama
obsessed with the island as their forebears — and Cubans are no longer a majority of the Latin American population in South Florida.
won Florida twice, and is in a unique position to remove Cuba from the list of State Sponsors of
Terrorism and push Congress to end the embargo in his second term. As Cuba continues its sporadic offshore oil exploration
with foreign partners, including U.S. allies, it would seem advantageous for it to be a part of the process,
in order to help ensure there will not be another disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, not to mention
the economic benefits it would receive from increased exports to the island. The only way to do so is to
take Cuba off the terrorism list.

Cuba would be pressured to join financial institutions like the World Bank
McKenna, Professor of Political Science at the University of Prince Edward Island, 4-17-13 [Peter,
“Cuba languishes on terrorism list for no good reason”, http://thechronicleherald.ca/opinion/1123835-
cuba-languishes-on-terror-list-for-no-good-reason]

By keeping Cuba on that list, it prevents dual-use military technology — which could include advanced medical equipment — from
reaching the island. It also
compels Washington to oppose vigorously any loans to Cuba from international
financial institutions like the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank.

The threshold for a link is low – even small attempts at normalizing relations would
drastically strain Cuba’s ability to provide crucial social services
Garrett, Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations, 2010 [Laurie,
“Castrocare in Crisis”, Foreign Affairs July/August 2010,
http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~kmcm/Articles/Castrocare%20in%20Crisis.pdf]

The Castro government, meanwhile, is in a seemingly untenable position. The two greatest
achievements of the Cuban
Revolution -- 100 percent literacy and quality universal health care -- depend on huge streams of
government spending. If Washington does eventually start to normalize relations, plugging just a few holes
in the embargo wall would require vast additional spending by the Cuban government. The government
would have to pay higher salaries to teachers, doctors, nurses, and technicians; strengthen the country's
deteriorating infrastructure; and improve working conditions for common workers. To bolster its health-care
infrastructure and create incentives for Cuban doctors to stay in the system, Cuba will have to find external support from donors, such as the
United Nations and the U.S. Agency for International Development. But few sources will support Havana with funding as long as the regime
restricts the travel of its citizens.
 Link Ext. – Anti-Imperialism
Their anti-imperialist veneer provides ideological support for capitalists. The history of US
policy in Latin America and elsewhere demonstrates that we should be skeptical when
imperialist powers suddenly profess anti-imperialist stances.
Petras, professor of sociology at Binghamton University, 2011 [James, Imperialism and the “Anti-
Imperialism of the Fools”, Dec 30, http://petras.lahaine.org/?p=1886]

The imperial “grass roots” strategy combines humanitarian, democratic and anti-imperialist rhetoric and paid and
trained local NGO’s, with mass media blitzes to mobilize Western public opinion and especially “prestigious leftist moral critics”
behind their power grabs. The Consequence of Imperial Promoted “Anti-Imperialist” Movements: Who Wins and Who Loses? The
historic record of imperialist promoted “anti-imperialist” and “pro-democracy” “grass roots movements”
is uniformly negative. Let us briefly summarize the results. In Chile ‘grass roots’ truck owners strike led to the brutal
military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and nearly two decades of torture, murder, jailing and forced exile of hundreds of thousands, the
imposition of brutal “free market policies” and subordination to US imperial policies. In summary the US multi-national copper
corporations and the Chilean oligarchy were the big winners and the mass of the working class and urban and rural poor the biggest losers. The
US backed “grass roots uprisings” in Eastern Europe against Soviet domination, exchanged Russian for
US domination; subordination to NATO instead of the Warsaw Pact; the massive transfer of national public enterprises, banks and media to
Western multi-nationals. Privatization of national enterprises led to unprecedented levels of double-digit unemployment, skyrocketing rents and
the growth of pensioner poverty.The crises induced the flight of millions of the most educated and skilled workers and the elimination of free
public health, higher education and worker vacation resorts. Throughout the now capitalist Eastern Europe and USSR highly organized criminal
gangs developed large scale prostitution and drug rings; foreign and local gangster ‘entrepeneurs’ seized lucrative public enterprises and formed a
new class of super-rich oligarchs Electoral party politicians, local business people and professionals linked to Western ‘partners’ were the socio-
economic winners. Pensioners, workers, collective farmers, the unemployed youth were the big losers along with the formerly subsidized cultural
artists. Military bases in Eastern Europe became the empire’s first line of military attack of Russia and the target of any counter-attack. If we
measure the consequences of the shift in imperial power, it is clear that the Eastern Europe countries have
become even more subservient under the US and the EU than under Russia. Western induced financial crises have
devastated their economies; Eastern European troops have served in more imperial wars under NATO than under Soviet rule; the cultural media
are under Western commercial control.Most of all, the degree of imperial control over all economic sectors far exceeds anything that existed
under the Soviets. The Eastern European ‘grass roots’ movement succeeded in deepening and extending the US Empire; the advocates of peace,
social justice, national independence, a cultural renaissance and social welfare with democracy were the big losers. Western liberals,
progressives and leftists who fell in love with imperialist promoted “anti-imperialism” are also big losers.
Their support for the NATO attack on Yugoslavia led to the break-up of a multi-national state and the
creation of huge NATO military bases and a white slavers paradise in Kosova. Their blind support for the
imperial promoted “liberation” of Eastern Europe devastated the welfare state, eliminating the pressure on Western
regimes’ need to compete in providing welfare provisions. The main beneficiaries of Western imperial advances via ‘grass roots’ uprisings were
the multi-national corporations, the Pentagon and the rightwing free market neo-liberals.As the entire political spectrum moved to the right a
sector of the left and progressives eventually jumped on the bandwagon. The Left moralists lost credibility and support, their peace movements
dwindled, their “moral critiques” lost resonance. The left and progressives who tail-ended the imperial backed “grass roots movements”, whether
in the name of “anti-stalinism”, “pro-democracy” or “anti-imperialism” have never engaged in any critical reflection; no effort to analyze the
long-term negative consequences of their positions in terms of the losses in social welfare, national independence or personal dignity. The
long history of imperialist manipulation of “anti-imperialist” narratives has found virulent expression in
the present day. The New Cold War launched by Obama against China and Russia, the hot war brewing in
the Gulf over Iran’s alleged military threat, the interventionist threat against Venezuela’s “drug-
networks”,and Syria’s “bloodbath” are part and parcel of the use and abuse of “anti-imperialism” to prop
up a declining empire. Hopefully, the progressive and leftist writers and scribes will learn from the
ideological pitfalls of the past and resist the temptation to access the mass media by providing a
‘progressive cover’ to imperial dubbed “rebels”. It is time to distinguish between genuine anti-imperialism and pro-democracy
movements and those promoted by Washington, NATO and the mass media.
 Link – Mexico
Increased economic engagement with Mexico empirically wreaks neoliberal devastation
and inequality. The Mexican elite have and will sell out the vast majority of the country in
the name of US interest.
Regil, Executive Director of The Jus Semper Global Alliance, 2004 [Álvaro J. de Regil, “The Neo-
Capitalist Assault in Mexico: Democracy vis-à-vis the logic of the market” Sustainable Economic
Development February 2004 http://www.jussemper.org/Resources/Economic%20Data/Resources/Neo-
capAssaultMexico.pdf ]

Structural Change Starting with Miguel de la Madrid, the PRI governments cease to be merely oligarchic, and they transform more properly into
agents of the Consensus to impose and consolidate U.S. neoliberalism. Thus, with the direct connivance of the domestic power
elite, the neo-capitalist assault is forged. The bet of the political elite and its twin, the business oligarchy,
continues to be the same: to make themselves suitable to Washington’s new geopolitical interests, banking to
benefit its very private interests on maintaining a centre-periphery partnership where they can continue to milk the country. Nevertheless, they are
not just partners jointly exploiting with the North the natural and human resources of the country. They are now more properly
agents in charge of imposing the economic structures dictated by the metropolis’ institutional investors
for benefit of their multinationals (MNCs). This is a new North-South system, absolutely imperialist, that makes use
of resources under a globally-integrated system that cuts across borders and includes and marginalises
resources and inhabitants in the entire system, according to the national economic environments generating the maximum
efficiencies, which in turn translates into the greatest possible shareholder values. In this system, the North-South borders become blurred, and
the agents of the neo-capitalist assault are both the leaders of the G7 and those in the periphery. However, the agents in the South, due to their
congenital weakness, are left only with the option of participating in the profits, depending on their capacity to generate the best efficiencies in
infrastructure, in costs of commodities and of course in high-yield labour, for its extremely low cost and its operative dexterity at the industrial
units of the MNCs. Those offering the best natural resources for exploitation, the best infrastructure and fiscal
incentives and the best workers and most flexible labour legislation, will be the best bidders to attract
foreign capital. Those who build the most sublime Darwinian ethos will be the winners. The aspirations of true development,
of eliminating poverty, of social justice, of sovereignty, are absolutely frivolous and strictly remain as
rhetoric for domestic consumption. The real thing is the savage competition of the business/political oligarchies of the countries of
the South to attract capital and participate in the global system of exploitation. Kissinger said at the start of the government of Vicente Fox that
globalization has its risks, perhaps 20% of the Mexican economy will be able to participate in the international
system of multinationals. But the rest will continue to be marginalised and with no access to income,
employment and the opportunities of globalisation.9 In this way, the new role of foreign agent of the Mexican
elite becomes evident. Fiscally, the role is strictly as monetary regulator with high interest to contain
inflation, depress demand and service the foreign debt by deepening the oil dependency of the economy.
The role of balancing supply and demand is eliminated, and there is exclusive support for export supply;
preponderantly the export of labour at misery prices through in-bond plants, which only export labour, for its local content is barely 2%. At the
same time, the dismantling of the Welfare State and of programs against poverty is initiated. Between 1983 and
1988, the minimum wage falls 49%. Moderate and extreme poverty increase 33% and 23% respectively. Thus, the poor become the majority for
the first time in many decades. The general subsidies on food are replaced by focalised aid, another of the
commandments of neoliberalism, and the programs on extreme rural poverty are either reduced or
completely eliminated. Clear regressive signs emerge, such as the increase in the incidence of infant mortality due to avitaminosis. The
proportion of death cases due to fetal underdevelopment and malnutrition boom in absolute terms. Schooling indices drop for the first time in
decades. The GINI inequality index increases from 47 to 53. 10
 Link – Venezuela
The affirmative is nothing but a nostalgic longing for the glory days of US domination of
Venezuela and Latin America, a neoliberal fantasy that would devastate Venezuelan
popular classes.
Petras, professor of sociology at Binghamton University, 2010 [James, “U.S. Venezuelan Relations:
Imperialism and Revolution”, http://lahaine.org/petras/b2-img/petras_usven.pdf]

Under US hegemony Venezuela was a major player in the US effort to isolate and undermine the Cuban revolutionary government. Venezuelan client regimes played a major
role in support of the successful US led effort to expel Cuba from the OAS; in 1961 and brokering a deal in the early 1990’s to disarm the guerillas in El Salvador and Guatemala without regime
or structural changes in exchange for legal status of the excombatants. In short,Venezuelan regimes played a strategic role in policing the Central
American-Caribbean region, a supplier of oil and as an important regional market for US exports. For Venezuela
the benefits of its relations with the US were highly skewed to the upper and the affluent middle classes.
They were able to import luxury goods with low tariffs and invest in real estate, especially in south Florida. The business and banking elite were able to

“associate” in joint ventures with US MNC especially in the lucrative oil, gas, aluminum and refinery sectors. US
military training missions and joint military exercises provided a seemingly reliable force to defend ruling class interests and repress popular protests and revolts. The benefits for the popular
Even more
classes, mainly US consumer imports, were far outweighed by the losses incurred through the outflow of income in the form of royalties, interest, profits and rents.

prejudicial were the US promoted neo-liberal policies which undermined the social safety net, increased
economic vulnerability to market volatility and led to a two decade long crises culminating in a double
digit decline in living standards (1979 – 1999). Toward Conceptualizing US-Venezuelan Relations Several key concepts are central to the understanding of US-
Venezuelan relations in the past and present Chavez era. These include the notion of ‘hegemony’ in which the ideas and interests of Washington are accepted and internalized by the Venezuelan
ruling and governing class. Hegemony was never effective throughout Venezuelan class and civil society. “Counterhegemonic” ideologies and definitions of socio-economic interests existed
with varying degree of intensity and organization throughout the post 1958 revolutionary period. In the 1960’s mass movements, guerilla organizations and sectors of the trade unions formed part
of a nationalist and socialist counter-hegemonic bloc. Venezuelan-US relations were not uniform despite substantial continuities over time. Despite close relations and economic dependence
especially during the 1960’s counter-insurgency period, Venezuela was one of the original promoters of OPEC, nationalized the oil industry (1976), opposed the US backed Somoza regime and
The regression from nationalist capitalism to US sponsored neo-
White House plans to intervene to block a Sandinista victory (in 1979).

liberalism in the late 1980’s and 1990’s reflected a period of maximum US hegemony, a phenomena that took place
throughout Latin America in the 1990’s. The election and re-election of President Chavez beginning in 1998 through the first decade of the new century marked a

decline of US hegemony in the governing and popular classes but not among the business elite, trade union officials (CTV)
and sectors of the military and public sector elite especially in the state oil company (PDVSA). The decline in US hegemony was influenced by the change in the power configuration governing
Venezuela, the severe economic crises in 2000 – 2002, the demise and overthrow of client regimes in key Latin American countries and the rise of radical social movements and left center
regimes. Accelerating the ‘loss of presence of the US’ and ‘policing’ of Latin America, were the wars in the Middle East, Iraq, South Asia (Afghanistan, Pakistan) and the expanding economic
role and trading relations between Latin America and Asia (mainly China). The commodity boom between 2003 – 2008 further eroded US leverage via the IMF and WB and enhanced the
counterhegemonic policies of the center-left regimes especially inVenezuela. A key concept toward understanding the decline of US hegemony over Venezuela are “pivotal events”. This concept
refers to major political conflicts which trigger a realignment of inter-state relations and changes the correlation of domestic socio-political forces. In our study President’s Bush’s launch of the
“War on Terror” following 9/11/01 involving the invasion of Afghanistan and claims to extra territorial rights to pursue and assassinate adversaries dubbed “terrorists” was rejected by President
Chavez (“you can’t fight terror with terror”). These events triggered far reaching consequences in USVenezuelan relations. Related to the above, our conceptualization of US-Venezuelan
relations emphasizes the high degree of inter-action between global policies and regional conflicts. In operational terms the attempt by Washington to impose universal/global conformity to its
war on terrorism led to a US backed coup, which in turn fueled Chavez’ policy of extra hemispheric alignments with adversaries of the White House. Historical shifts in global economic power
and profound changes in the internal make-up of the US economy have necessitated a reconceptualization of the principal levers of the US empire. In the past dollar diplomacy, meaning the
dominant role of US industry and banks, played a major role in imposing US hegemony in Latin America, supplemented via military interventions and military coups especially in the Caribbean
and Central America. In recent years financial capital “services” have displaced US manufacturing as the driving force and military wars and intervention have overshadowed economic
We reconceptualize US-Venezuelan relations in light of a
instruments, especially with the surge of Asian trade agreements with Latin America.

declining US economic and rising military empire, as a compensatory mechanism for sustaining
hegemony especially as a tool for restoring client domestic elites to power. The relation between past imperial successes in securing
harmonious hegemonic collaborating rulers in the 1990’s and the profound political changes resulting from the crises of and breakdown of neo-liberalism, led Washington to totally misread the
policy failures (for example Latin America’s rejection of the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas) and isolation and defeat of US policy toward
new realities. The resulting

reflects what we conceptualize as “romantic reaction”, a failure of political realism: nostalgia for the imperial “golden age”
Venezuela, Cuba and Honduras

of hegemony and pillage of the1990’s. The repeated failure by both the Bush and Obama regime to recognize regime changes, ideological shifts and the new
development models and trade patterns has lead to mindless threats and diplomatic incapacity to develop any new bridges to the centrist regimes in the key countries of South America, especially
toward Mercosur (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay).
 Link – Latin American Economy
Their promise of economic growth is an abstraction that leaves the Latin American poor
behind. History demonstrates that neoliberal growth has been uniformly disastrous.
Lewis, Professor of Spanish at the University of Iowa, 2005 [Tom, also a member of the editorial board
of the International Socialist Review, “Latin America on fire”, International Socialist Review Issue 44,
November–December 2005, http://www.isreview.org/issues/44/latinamericafire.shtml]

In fact, no correlation exists under neoliberalism between economic growth and social improvement. The
opposite is true: neoliberalism widens the gap between rich and poor. Latin America’s economies grew by 5.8 percent in
2004, but the region remains the one with the most unequal distribution of wealth on the planet.2 Forty-four percent of Latin Americans live in
poverty, subsisting on less than $2 per day.3 Fifty-eight million people live in extreme poverty on less than $1 per
day. Chronic malnutrition plagues 19.4 percent of Latin American children under the age of five.4 Every day
2,500 children die in Latin America as a result of curable diseases—an increase of 500 per day in recent years. Urban unemployment across the
continent grew from 6 to 9 percent between 1996 and 1999, while underemployment went from 50 percent to 56 percent. By 2003,
unemployment affected 13.6 million people. At the same time, more than seven million children aged ten to fourteen were exploited in industrial
and agricultural labor. Thirty million youth under the age of eighteen dropped out of school in order to work to help their families. Even the U.S.
State Department calculated in 2004 that Latin American unemployment averaged 10.7 percent, “with underemployment significantly higher.”5
According to the International Labor Organization’s Panorama Laboral 2004, 19.5 million workers lack employment in the great urban centers of
the region.6 Neoliberalism throws millions of people out of work (downsizing) and condemns millions more to
the hellish world of insecure jobs and sweatshop conditions (flexibilization and informalization).7 Outsourcing and
two-tier wage systems lead to the shrinking of large factories as well as to a weakening of class consciousness
and habits of solidarity. In many Latin American countries, the working class as a whole has suffered an experience of fragmentation.8 The
prices paid by workers for such basic necessities such as water, gas, and electricity have soared with
neoliberal privatization, thus exacerbating the impoverishing effects of lower wages, job insecurity, and unemployment.9 Privatization
also hurts workers by causing rampant decay in health, education, and transportation services, since privatization reduces state
revenue. A huge net outflow of debt payment from Latin American nations to foreign creditors results as
governments borrow in order to try to keep state services minimally intact. Between 1996 and 2002, debt transfers
from Latin America and the Caribbean to foreign capitalists equaled an astonishing $206 billion.10 Neoliberalism perpetuates and
deepens a vicious circle of imperialist oppression. IMF and World Bank “structural adjustment programs” (SAPs)
are based today on the theory of “comparative advantage,” a doctrine which states that “the best way to increase overall welfare is for each to
stick to the activity at which it is best, and to trade with others working on the same principle. [The theory] is frequently cited as a reason why
Latin American countries should stick to exports based on natural resources and cheap labor.”11 SAPs thus have the effect of
compelling Latin American countries to rely primarily on the export of raw materials or basic commodities
(agricultural goods, natural gas, oil, and minerals) as the preferred way to create economic growth. This means that Latin American
capitalists generally sell their products on the international market without having added much, if any, value (e.g., they sell unrefined oil and gas
as opposed to refined oil and gas). Neoliberal theory tells them that profits from exporting such basic goods are
sufficient to help Latin America to continue to modernize.
 Link – Single Issue Focus
The affirmative is only attacking the symptom of capital dispossession. We must refuse the
call for easy reform and dedicate ourselves to the real task of anti-capitalist movement
building.
Patrick Reinsborough 2003 (has been involved in campaigns for peace, the environment, and social justice for over twenty years. He
co-founded the smartMeme strategy & training project in 2002 and with his colleague has trained over 3,000 organizers and partnered with over
100 high impact organizations to frame issues, strengthen alliances and win critical campaigns. Patrick was previously the Organizing Director
of the Rainforest Action Network where he mobilized thousands of people to confront corporations who destroy the environment and violate
human rights. Patrick's work has incorporated a range of creative tactics including brand busting, cross-cultural alliance building, markets
campaigning and nonviolent direct action. DE-COLONIZING THE REVOLUTIONARY IMAGINATION Journal of aesthetics and politics
August 2003 volume 1, issue 2 http://www.joaap.org/1/de_colonizing/index.html)

Our planet is heading into an unprecedented global crisis. The blatancy of the corporate power grab and the accelerating ecological
meltdown is evidence that we do not live in an era where we can afford the luxury of fighting the symptoms . As is often
noted, crisis provides both danger and opportunity. The extent that these two opposing qualities define our era will be largely based on the appeal and breadth of the
social movements which arise to address the crisis. This essay is part of my own struggle to explore a politics that is commensurate with the scale of the global crisis.
In part it was inspired by a profound strategy insight I received while watching a circling bird of prey. The raptor seemed to spend hours calmly drifting on the
breezes, waiting and watching, then suddenly made a lightning quick dive to seize its prey. Had I only witnessed the raptor’s final plunge, I might not have realizing
that it took hours of patient surveillance for the raptor to be in the right place to make a seemingly effortless kill. I was struck by what a clear metaphor the raptor’s
circling time is for what our movements need to do in order to be successful. Social change is not just the bird of prey’s sudden plunge—the flurry of direct
confrontation - but rather the whole process of circling, watching, and preparing. Analysis
is the most import tool in the social change
toolbox. It is this process of analysis— the work to find the points of intervention and leverage in the
system we are working to transform— that suggests why, where and how to use the other tools. Many of
us are impatient in our desire for change and particularly, those of us from privileged backgrounds, are
often times unschooled in the realities of long-term struggle. I often recall the Buddhist saying “The task before us is very urgent so
we must slow down.” This essay is my effort as an organizer who has been deeply involved in a number of recent global justice mass actions, to “slow down” a bit
and explore some new analytical tools. My hope is that this essay will incite deeper conversations about strategies for building movements with the inclusiveness,
creativity and depth of vision necessary to move towards a more just and sane world. To do so, let’s begin by asking why aren’t more global north movements coming
forward with systemic critiques? Why despite the increasingly obvious nature of the crisis, isn’t there more visible resistance to the corporate take over of the global
political system, economy and culture? The answer to this question lies in our exploration of how pathological values have shaped not only the global system but also
our ability to imagine true change. The system we are fighting is not merely structural it’s also inside us, through the
internalization of oppressive cultural norms which define our worldview. Our minds have been colonized
to normalize deeply pathological assumptions. Thus often times our own sense of self-defeatism becomes complicit with the anesthetic
qualities of a cynical mass media to make fundamental social change unimaginable. As a consequence activists frequently ghettoize themselves
by self-identifying through protest and failing to conceive of themselves as building movements that can
actually change power relations. All too often we project our own sense of powerlessness by mistaking
militancy for radicalism and mobilization for movement building. It seems highly unlikely to me that
capitalism will be smashed one widow at a time. Likewise getting tens of thousands of people to take joint action is not an end in itself,
rather only the first step in catalyzing deeper shifts in Western culture. Our revolution(s) will really start rolling when the logic of our actions and the appeal of our
disobedience is so clear that it can easily replicate and spread far beyond the limiting definition of “protester” or “activist”. To do so, our movements for justice,
ecology and democracy must deepen their message by more effectively articulating the values crisis underlying the corporate system. We must lay claim to life-
affirming, common sense values and expose one of the most blatant revolutionary truths of the modern era: the corporate rule system rooted in sacrificing human
This is the domain of post-issue
dignity and planetary health for elite profit is out of alignment with an increasing number of people’s basic values.
activism— the recognition that the roots of the emerging crisis lie in the fundamental flaws of the modern
order and that our movements for change need to talk about re-designing the whole global system— now.
Post-issue activism is a dramatic divergence from the slow progression of single-issue politics, narrow
constituencies and band-aid solutions. Traditional single-issue politics, despite noble and pragmatic goals, is not just a strategic and gradualist
path to the same goal of global transformation. Rather the framework of issue-based struggle needs to affirm the existing
system in order to win concessions and thus inhibits the evolution of more systemic movements. Too
often we spend our time campaigning against the smoke rather than clearly alerting people to the fact that
their house is on fire. Post-issue activism is the struggle to address the holistic nature of the crisis and it
demands new frameworks, new alliances and new strategies. We must find ways to articulate the connections between all the
“issues” by revealing the pathological nature of the corporate take over. To do so we must rise to the challenge of going beyond (rather than abandoning) single-issue
politics. We have to learn to talk about values, deepen our analysis without sacrificing accessibility and direct more social change resources into creating political
space for a truly transformative arena of social change. To explore de-colonizing the revolutionary imagination, we must reference the history of colonization. The
word colonialism comes from “colonia” a Latin word for rural farmstead. When the armies of the Roman empire conquered the peoples of Europe they seized the land
and created colonias to control the territory. A thousand years later Europe came to be controlled by leaders who went on to mimic this cruelty, and force Western
civilization ("a disease historically spread by sharp swords"1 ) upon the rest of the world. Colonialism is not just a process of establishing physical control over
territory, it is the process of establishing the ideologies and the identities - colonies in the mind - that perpetuate control. Central to this process has been the
manufacture of attitudes of racism, nationalism, patriarchal manhood, and the division of society into economic classes. If we are to take seriously de-colonizing the
revolutionary imagination then we must examine how these attitudes, shape the way we conceive of social change. Likewise we must remember that analysis is
shaped by experience and that those who suffer directly as targets of these manufactured attitudes of oppression often live the experiences which create clear analysis.
Effective revolutions listen. In facing the global crisis, the most powerful weapon that we have is our imaginations. But first we
must liberate ourselves
from the conceptual limitations we place on social change. As we expand the realm of the possible we
shape the direction of the probable. This means directly confronting the myths and assumptions that make
a better world seem unattainable. To that end this essay endeavors to explore some tools to help us unshackle our imaginations and deepen the
momentum of the global justice movements into a political space to fundamentally re-design the global system.
Impacts
 Impact – Ethics
You have an ethical obligation to reject neoliberalism. Utilitarian rationality cannot
account for the degraded life chances of billions because capital makes its victims
anonymous
Daly 2004 Glyn. Lecturer in International Studies at the University College Northampton. Conversations with Žižek. 14-19
it is imperative that we cut through this Gordian knot of postmodern protocol and recognize that our ethico-
For Žižek

political responsibility is to confront the constitutive violence of today's global capitalism and its obscene
naturalization/anonymization of the millions who are subjugated by it throughout the world. Against the standardized
positions of postmodern culture - with all its pieties concerning 'multiculturalist' etiquette - Žižek 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, Žižek 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. Žižek'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 Žižek'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 Žižek 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 Žižek's universalism is that it would not attempt to conceal this fact or to
The response of the left to global capitalism cannot be one
reduce the status of the abject Other to that of a 'glitch' in an otherwise sound matrix.

of retreat into the nation-state or into organicist forms of community’ and popular identities that currently abound in
Europe and elsewhere. For Žižek it is, rather, a question of working with the very excesses that, in a Lacanian sense, are in capitalism more than capitalism. It is a question,
therefore, of transcending the provincial ‘universalism’ of capitalism. To illustrate the point, Žižek draws attention to the category of ‘intellectual property’ and the increasingly absurd
attempts to establish restrictive dominion over technological advance – genetic codes, DNA structures, digital communications, pharmaceutical breakthroughs, computer programs and so on –
that either affect us all and/or to which there is a sense of common human entitlement. Indeed, the modern conjuncture of capitalism is more and more characterized by a
prohibitive culture: the widespread repression of those forms of research and development that have real emancipatory potential beyond exclusive profiteering; the
restriction of information that has direct consequences for the future of humanity; the fundamental denial that social equality could be sustained by the abundance
generated by capitalism. Capitalism typically endeavours to constrain the very dimensions of the universal that are enabled by it and simultaneously to resist all those developments that
disclose its specificity-artificially as merely one possible mode of being. The left, therefore, must seek to subvert these ungovernable excesses in the direction of a political and politicizing
universalism; or what Balibar would call égaliberté. This means that the left should demand more globalization not less. Where neo-liberals speak the language of freedom – either in terms of
individual liberty or the free movement of goods and capital – the left should use this language to combat today’s racist obsessions with ‘economic refugees’, ‘immigrants’ and so on, and insist
that freedoms are meaningless without the social resources to participate in those freedoms. Where there is talk of universal rights, the left must affirm a responsibility to the universal, one that
emphasizes real human solidarity and does not lose sight of the abject within differential discourses. Reversing the well-known environmentalists’ slogan, we must say that the left has to
involve itself in thinking locally and acting globally. That is to say, it should attend to the specificity of today’s political identities within the context of their global
(capitalist) conditions of possibility precisely in order to challenge those conditions . Yet here I would venture that, despite clearly stated differences (Butler et al., 2000), the
political perspective of Žižek is not necessarily opposed to that of Laclau and Mouffe and that a combined approach is fully possible. While Žižek is right to stress the susceptibility of today’s
‘alternative’ forms of hegemonic engagement to deradicalization within a postmodern-p.c. imaginary – a kind of hegemonization of the very terrain (the politico-cultural conditions of possibility)
that produces and predisposes the contemporary logics of hegemony – it is equally true to say that the type of political challenge that Žižek has in mind is one that can only advance through the
type of hegemonic subversion that Laclau and Mouffe have consistently stressed in their work. The very possibility of a political universalism is one that depends on a certain hegemonic
breaking out of the existing conventions/grammar of hegemonic engagement. It is along these lines that Žižek affirms the need for a more radical intervention in the political imagination. The
modern (Machiavellian) view of politics is presented in terms of a basic tension between (potentially) unlimited demands/appetites and limited resources; a view which is implicit in the
predominant ‘risk society’ perspective where the central (almost Habermasian) concern is with more and better scientific information. The political truth of today’s world, however, is the
the demands of the official left (especially the various incarnations of the Third Way left) tend to articulate
opposite of this view. That is to say,

extremely modest demands in the face of a virtually unlimited capitalism that is more than capable of
providing every person on this planet with a civilized standard of living. For Žižek, a confrontation with the
obscenities of abundance capitalism also requires a transformation of the ethico-political imagination. It is
no longer a question of developing ethical guidelines within the existing political framework (the various institutional
and corporate ‘ethical committees’) but of developing a politicization of ethics; an ethics of the Real.8 The starting point here is an insistence on the unconditional autonomy of the subject; of
accepting that as human beings we are ultimately responsible for our actions and being-in-the-world up to and including the constructions of the capitalist system itself. Far from simple norm-
breaking or refining/reinforcing existing social protocol, an ethics of the Real tends to emerge through norm-breaking and in finding new
directions that, by definition, involve traumatic changes: i.e. the Real in genuine ethical challenge. An ethics of the Real does not simply defer to
the impossible (or infinite Otherness) as an unsurpassable horizon that already marks every act as a failure, incomplete and so on. Rather, such an ethics is one that fully accepts contingency

but which is nonetheless prepared to risk the impossible in the sense of breaking out of standardized positions. We might say that it is an ethics which is not only
politically motivated but which also draws its strength from the political itself. For Žižek an ethics of the Real (or Real ethics) means that we cannot rely on any form of symbolic Other that
would endorse our (in)decisions and (in)actions: for example, the ‘neutral’ financial data of the stockmarkets; the expert knowledge of Beck’s ‘new modernity’ scientists, the economic and
military councils of the New World Order; the various (formal and informal) tribunals of political correctness; or any of the mysterious laws of God, nature or the market. What Žižek affirms is a
forms of militancy must first of all be militant with themselves.
radical culture of ethical identification for the left in which the alternative

they must be militant in the fundamental ethical sense of not relying on any external/higher
That is to say,

authority and in the de velopment of a political imagination that, like Žižek’s own thought, exhorts us to risk the
impossible.
 Impact – Nuclear War
Capitalism results in a never-ending war on the poor and inter-state competition—impact
is nuclear annihilation.
Callinicos 2004 Alex, Director of the Centre for European Studies at King’s College, The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx, 2004 pg.
196-197

Capitalism has not changed its spots. It is still based on the exploitation of the working class, and liable to constant crises. The conclusion that
Marx drew from this analysis, that the working class must overthrow the system and replace it with a classless
society, is even more urgent now than in his day. For the military rivalries which are the form increasingly assumed by
competition between capitals now threaten the very survival of the planet. As Marx’s centenary approached, the fires of
war flickered across the globe—in Lebanon, Iran and Iraq, Kampuchea, southern Africa, the Horn of
Africa, Afghanistan and the South Atlantic. The accumulation of vast armouries of nuclear destruction by
the superpowers, missilerattling in the Kremlin, talk of ‘limited’ and ‘protracted’ nuclear war in Washington—these cast a shadow
over the whole of humanity. Socialist revolution is an imperative if we are to change a world in the grip of
economic depression and war fever, a world where 30 million rot on Western dole queues and 800 million
go hungry in the Third World. To that extent, Marx’s ideas are more relevant today than they were 100 years ago. Capitalism has
tightened its grip of iron on every portion of the planet since 1883, and is rotten-ripe for destruction, whether at its own hands
through nuclear war, or at the hands of the working class. The choice is between workers’ power or the ‘common ruination
of the contending classes’—between socialism or barbarism. Many people who genuinely wish to do something to remedy the present state of the
world believe that this stress on the working class is much too narrow. The existence of nuclear weapons threatens everyone, whether workers or
capitalists or whatever. Should not all classes be involved in remedying a problem which affects them all? What this ignores is that what Edward
Thompson has called ‘exterminism’— the vast and competing military apparatuses which control the arms race—is
an essential part of the working of capitalism today. No sane capitalist desires a nuclear war (although some
insane ones who believe that such a war would be the prelude to the Second Coming now hold positions of influence in Washington). But
sane or insane, every capitalist is part of an economic system which is bound up with military competition
between nation-states. Only a class with the interest and power to do away with capitalism can halt the march to Armageddon. Marx
always conceived of the working class as the class whose own self-emancipation would also be the liberation of the rest of humanity. The
socialist revolution to whose cause he devoted his life can only be, at one and the same time, the emancipation of the working class and the
liberation of all the oppressed and exploited sections of society. Those who accept the truth of Marx’s views cannot rest content with a mere
intellectual commitment. There are all too many of this sort around, Marxists content to live off the intellectual credit of Capital, as Trotsky
described them. We cannot simply observe the world but must throw ourselves, as Marx did, into the practical task of building a revolutionary
party amid the life and struggles of the working class. ‘The philosophers have interpreted the world,’ wrote Marx, ‘the point, however, is to
change it.’ If Marxism is correct, then we must act on it.
 Impact – War on Terror
The War on Terror is only the latest item on the neoliberal agenda to quash labor
solidarity
Lafer ‘4 [George, political economist and is an Associate Professor at the University of Oregon's Labor Education and Research Center,
“Neoliberalism by other means: the “war on terror” at home and abroad”, New Political Science Volume 26, Issue 3, 2004]

If the war in Iraq is really about something other than weapons, what is the domestic “ war on terror” about? At first glance, the war at home appears to be more straightforward: a
genuine if heavy‐handed effort to prevent a repeat of anything like the attacks of September 11, 2001. But here too, the administration's actions point to motives that are mixed at best. On the one
hand, genuine security measures are often treated with a surprising degree of laxity. Whistleblowers within the federal intelligence community complain that problems identified two years ago
have remained unresolved. The multicolored national security alerts have produced great public drama but, as far as the public has been told, have never had any relationship to major terrorist
attacks either committed or deterred. Critical needs such as preparing the public health system to cope with potential bioterrorist attacks, or supporting the anti‐terrorism work of state and local
police, have gone unfunded as the monies were diverted to tax cuts.34 At the same time, a wide range of initiatives apparently unrelated to anything to do with terrorism—including the tax cuts,
“fast track” authority, and deunionization of federal jobs, have all been advanced as critical components of the war on terror.35 I assume that the government is genuinely interested in preventing
terrorism. Nevertheless, these facts suggest that the administration's agenda is more complex, and much more ambitious than simply that of protecting the population from future attacks. And
while any one of these items may be viewed as an individual case of cronyism or opportunism, the broader pattern points to the need for a deeper theory of what is driving the regime's domestic
agenda. I believe that the domestic agenda, too, can only be understood in the context of neoliberal globalization . One of the axioms of
globalization is that capital accumulation has become disconnected from the nation‐state. Before “global city” became the mantra of Chamber of Commerce boosters everywhere, it was
geographer Saskia Sassen's term for the locales that are home to the administrative headquarters of far‐flung corporate empires.36 As corporate production, distribution and services have grown
into complex, worldwide networks, those at the top need ever greater capacity at central headquarters in order to coordinate these global empires. A handful of cities have come to serve as the
central hubs of financial, legal, accounting, marketing and telecommunications functions for global capital. These cities are “global” because their dominant industries participate in an economy
that is increasingly disconnected from the fortunes of any particular nation. The functional colleagues of New York lawyers and stockbrokers are London lawyers and brokers. By contrast, both
have increasingly little economic connection to normal manufacturing and service workers. The latter are stuck in a parallel economy that, while sharing the same physical and political space, has
no means of participating in the growing fortunes of corporate empires. It may never have been true that what was good for GM was good for America, but over the past 20 years the connection
This denationalized economy has produced
between the success of “American” companies and the prosperity of Americans has grown threadbare.

increased inequality both within the United States and around the world. But it has also rearranged the geography of inequality. When
capital accumulation was nationally based, the corporate titans of one country battled those of another for market domination, and developed nations exploited the undeveloped for raw materials
and captive customers. In this world order, it made sense to think in terms of “rich countries” and “poor countries.” Because we inhabit a world that is still largely a product of this previous
The corollary to “global cities”
system, there is still plenty of truth to these categories. But the logic of neoliberal globalization is clearly pulling in a different direction.

must be something like “global wastelands.” In the future, the distribution of wealth and poverty will not map onto the borders of nation‐states. What does all
this mean for the United States? Simply put, if we continue to follow the logic of capitalist globalization, the fate of most Americans is to become much

poorer, until we balance out at the level of typical of middle‐ and working‐class people in the rest of the world, i.e. in the third world. Because this is a slow process, this conclusion may
seem counterintuitive. But all the signs are there. Over the past 30 years, real wages have fallen in 80% of American jobs.37 During the same period, our hours of work have increased while
health and pension coverage and public services of all manner have shrunk.38 While the years from 1946 to 1973 saw the country growing slightly more equal, the past 30 years have brought
dramatic increases in inequality, culminating in the recent series of “jobless recoveries,” in which the financial markets improve while employment and wages stagnate.39 We are witnessing
For the Bush
what may be the first generation of Americans characterized by downward mobility.40 And economists cannot point to any industry that promises to reverse this decline.

administration and its corporate backers, the question of the day is how to continue advancing the neoliberal agenda while managing the

politics of decline for the majority. The administration clearly has multiple goals for the “war on terror” at home.

But among the central ones is the repression of labor and the prevention of potential political alliances
that might challenge the prerogatives of American capital. In the period immediately preceding the Bush presidency, the
American labor movement had enjoyed a period of success unprecedented in at least 25 years. After decades of decline under the guidance of
a moribund leadership, the ascendance of John Sweeney to presidency of the AFL‐CIO brought renewed vigor to organized labor. In the second half of the 1990s, the AFL‐CIO arrested the long‐
term decline in national union density; in 1998 the number of union members grew for the first time in five years, and in 1999 union density held steady, rather than declining, for the first time in
decades.41 Moreover, union campaigns began to capture the imagination and support of millions of Americans who were not union members but who experienced the same economic distress
that drove others to organize. The campus anti‐sweatshop movement; living wage movements in hundreds of cities across the country; and the 1997 UPS strike highlighting the problem of part‐
time jobs all galvanized broad public backing in support of workers and in opposition to big business and economic “rationalization.” Likewise, the new labor movement
succeeded in dramatically increasing the political clout of organized workers. Throughout the course of the 1990s, the AFL‐CIO
mobilized growing numbers of union workers to participate in electoral politics. By the 2002 elections, while organized workers represented only 13% of the labor force, union households
accounted for over 25% of all voters.42 As in workplace organizing, the labor movement's political program succeeded in reaching beyond its own members to form critical coalitions with allied
groups, most importantly including immigrant communities. Under the Sweeney leadership, the AFL‐CIO reversed its long‐term stance opposing immigrant labor as stealing American jobs, and
became the most powerful proponent of blanket amnesty for undocumented workers. Simultaneously, as service‐sector unions organized more immigrant workers and launched more campaigns
in concert with these workers' churches and community organizations, the union movement started to be seen as a natural and integral part of immigrant workers' drive to make it in America.
Emblematic of this emerging alliance is the coalition of labor unions and Latino community organizations that, in a relatively short timespan, flipped Los Angeles from a bedrock Republican to
bedrock Democratic constituency. When ultraconservative Representative Bob Dornan lost his Orange County Congressional seat to a Latina woman backed by progressive unions, the changing
of the guard was undeniable. The nation's largest state, so recently under Republican control, had become so solidly Democrat that it is no longer considered in contention for Republican
presidential candidates. Beyond the impact of California itself, the prospect of a Labor–Latino coalition spreading to other states with large Hispanic communities posed a grave danger for
the “global justice” movement that came together in the Seattle 1999 protests against the WTO
Republican and corporate strategists. Finally,

marked the potential birth of a massive and powerful new movement challenging corporate prerogatives. It is easy to overestimate the
importance of the Seattle protests. The few days of unity did not undo the many differences between the various protest groups. And the months following Seattle were filled with “where do we
go from here?” discussions that never achieved a satisfactory answer. It is not clear that the coalition that assembled in Seattle deserves to be called a “movement.” However, even as a first step
with an uncertain future, the import of these protests was potentially earth‐shaking. Essentially,the anti‐WTO protests undid fissures that had
fractured progressive organizations for at least four decades. At least since the Vietnam war, the history of whatever might be called
the American “left” has been primarily characterized by fragmentation. In place of the Old Left's unity around class, the New
Left led to multiple and often conflicting agendas organized around various forms of identity politics. While
feminist, civil rights and labor organizations might come together around specific political issues , the alliances were generally short ‐lived and

superficial. Most important from an economic point of view, the labor movement throughout the 1970s and 1980s was largely alienated from the most energetic social change
movements. The incredible accomplishment of Seattle was to forge a coalition that overcame these differences in
opposition to a common enemy. For union members, Seattle was possible because 20 years of jobs going overseas and management invoking the threat to relocate as a strategy for slashing wages
had made “globalization” a gut‐level rank and file issue. Thus the process of neoliberalism finally created its own antithesis in a labor movement
that was ready to join with youth, environmentalists and immigrant organizations in fighting the power. From a corporate viewpoint, the divisions that for 30 years had so effectively kept the
The “war on terror” aims, in large part, at undoing all of these
various parts of the “left” from coming together were threatening to dissolve.

challenges to corporate authority: undoing workers' power in the workplace; pushing back against labor's growing
political clout; and breaking apart the labor–community coalitions that threatened to exercise too much democratic control over capital. The
“war on terror” is not something the Bush administration could have instituted on its own were it not for the September 2001 attacks. But the administration's choice to respond as it has is based
on an agenda that predated the attacks. It is not a mistake that the terror of McCarthyism followed immediately after the labor movement had achieved its peak of militance in the 1930s and
The economic agenda being enacted
1940s. Nor is it a mistake that Bush's war at home came in response to a decade of renewed promise for American workers.

under the rubric of the “war on terror” is far more profound than merely a collection of isolated
opportunities for expanding the return to capital at the expense of workers. In the eyes of the Bush administration and its corporate
sponsors, the post‐9/11 period presents a historic opportunity to permanently restructure both workers' leverage in the labor market and the public's expectations of government. Unsurprisingly,
the first target of the president's post‐9/11 labor agenda was the public sector. This is partly because public sector workers are
easier to attack—the government has direct control over their contracts, and in hard times it is easy to rally others against images of greedy civil servants living high off our hard‐earned tax
dollars. But public sector workers are not only an easy target; they are also a strategic target. Beginning in the 1970s, public employees organized at a pace far above that of the private sector.
Because private sector labor law is so weak, allowing employers to intimidate or fire union supporters with more or less impunity, it is much more difficult for workers in the private sector to win
recognition for their unions. Over the years, this imbalance became increasingly pronounced. Thus by the year 2003, nearly 40% of public employees had unions, compared with less than 10% in
For the Bush administration, an attack against public sector unions hit at a key source of
the private sector.43

strength for the national labor movement. Destroying these unions would significantly shrink the
movement as a whole, and deny significant dues money to national efforts at both workplace and political organizing. Bush's attack on public employees was threefold. Within
the federal government itself, the president declared hundreds of thousands of employees ineligible for union representation due to “national security” concerns. One of the president's first labor
initiatives after 9/11 was to deny unionization rights to baggage screeners at the nation's airports. According to representatives of the newly formed Transportation Security Administration,
“collective bargaining would be incompatible with the nation's safety” because “fighting terrorism
demands a flexible workforce that [is] … not compatible with the duty to bargain with labor unions.”44
Similarly, in creating the new Department of Homeland Security, the president insisted on giving incoming

Secretary Ridge the authority to unilaterally waive civil service, anti‐discrimination, whistleblower and
union protections to these 170,000 workers who had previously enjoyed all these rights while performing the same jobs under previous management.45 The administration has
never identified a single instance where union protections have restricted national security effectiveness. On the contrary, police and fire unions around the country routinely include contract
clauses that waive work rules in emergency situations, and federal union leaders publicly stated their commitment to honoring similar standards.46 Moreover, many of the lessons we have
learned about what went wrong in the leadup to 9/11, and what has to be improved in future intelligence operations, was made possible only because intelligence employees had exactly the type
of whistleblower protections that the Bush administration declared incompatible with national security. So too, in January 2002, the president issued an executive order unilaterally revoking
union representation for workers in five divisions of the Justice Department.

The alt solves case but not vice versa – The War on Terror is only a secondary
contradiction of capitalist economic interest – it co-opts their integrationist strategy
Güney & Gökcan ’10 (Aylin, Dept. of PoliSci @ Bilkent U., Ankara, and Fulya, “The ‘Greater Middle East’ as a ‘Modern’
Geopolitical Imagination in American Foreign Policy” Geopolitics, Vol. 15, pp. 26-28)

Another influential pretext was the new US strategic vision that can be termed ‘integration’ into a Western
and American set of values and modus operandi. Falah and Flint refer to this integrative power of ‘prime modernity’. 45 According to
this view, state and inter-state political institutions that can support the hegemonic power's global project of an open
economic space are repackaged as the necessary foundations for a way of life that has been defined as modern and
therefore should be wanted by most states. 46 They further argue that prime modernity is used to construct a prime morality.
47 Thus “faltering states” are identified as those whose economic practices, political institutions, and civil society do
not meet the preferred definition imposed by the USA. Next, such states are equated with terrorism, with
terrorism against the USA being portrayed as a crime against the ‘basic’ moral values of humanity. 48 This
integration strategy in turn creates its own set of exclusions, with forms of violence awaiting those who
are either unwilling or unable to be incorporated. 49 Although geopolitical actions under the guise of world leadership provide
material benefits for the United States, this self-interest becomes equated instead with benefits for the whole world. Such benefits are presented
and defined through values. 50 Flint further argues that if the calculations of war are traceable back to material interests,
such as access to oil, then governments must usually emphasise values and ideas in justifying their
foreign policy, especially when it involves invading another country. The world leader must therefore convince its international as well as
domestic audience, that the actions are for the benefit of all rather than its own interests. In this respect, the GMEI represents a US search for
allies. Flint also argues that the power of the world leader rests not on its military strength alone, but rather on a package of innovations that it
claims will benefit the whole world. The central ingredients of this package are national self-determination and democracy, or the rule of law.
Together, these “innovations” combine to form the integrative power of the world leader: the collection of ideas, values, and institutions designed
to bring order and stability to the world. Regarding GMEI, this theory of integrative power of prime modernity
contextualised the positions, objectives and problems of the region. It also facilitated the opportunity to
establish alliances guaranteeing US world leadership and regional interests. That is why this theory constituted a
solid ground for justification for the US extra-territorial activities.
 Impact – AT: Growth
Turn – Capitalist policies create inequalities that jeopardize long-term stable growth
Arrighi ‘4 [Giovanni, Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, “Capitalism, socialism and uneven development”, October 22]
As previously noted, the
leading institutions of the capitalistic interpretation of the world have championed the view of a
significant worldwide reduction of both absolute and relative deprivation. In addition, they have also championed the
view that this reduction has been due to the adoption of the capitalist-friendly policies they have been advocating for the former Third and Second
Worlds. This view flies in the face of the basic fact that, comparatively speaking, the three world regions that have
experienced the greatest increase in both absolute and relative deprivation are also the regions that willy-
nilly have been subjected more extensively or intensively to the structural adjustment or shock therapy
advocated by the institutions in question. In light of this, asks James Galbraith, Is this the golden age of capitalism,
really? Or is it something closer to a golden age of reformed socialism in two places (China and India)-alongside
an age of disasters for those who followed the prescriptions favored by The Economist? In truth, countries that followed the IMF-World
Bank prescriptions to the letter-Argentina, say, or Russia in the early 1990s-have seen catastrophe worse in every way than the Great Depression
of the 1930s was for us. (Galbraith 2004) Ironically, socialists (especially radical socialists in the global North) have unwittingly facilitated the
capitalistic appropriation of the Chinese success in reducing absolute and relative deprivation, by writing off economic reforms in the PRC as a
straightforward transition to capitalism essentially indistinguishable from that occurring in the former USSR. The spread of capitalistic
practices in the PRC has undoubtedly been rampant, and one of its main effects has been a rapid growth
of income inequality within China-an inequality that is estimated to have become among the largest in the world (Riskin, Zhao and Li
2001). Closely related to this tendency, only a limited number of (predominantly coastal) provinces have contributed (and benefitted from) the
reduction in global absolute and relative deprivation. By restraining the growth of the domestic market, increasing inequality within
China reproduces the dependence of the Chinese economic expansion on the willingness and capacity of the United States and other
wealthy countries to absorb ever increasing labor-intensive imports. More important, it is likely to engender social and political
tensions that may jeopardize further growth and even wipe out whatever is left of China's socialist past (cf Perry and Selden
2000).

Capitalism’s economic growth is a ruse – the financial crisis proves its fundamentally
unstable and speculative
IWAI ‘8 [Katsuhito , Professor of Economics, University of Tokyo, “Global Financial Crisis Shows Inherent Instability of Capitalism”, The
Tokyo Foundation, October 17th, http://www.tokyofoundation.org/en/articles/global-financial-crisis-shows-inherent-instability]

Why is capitalism unstable? Because it is fundamentally based on speculation. Consider carmakers, for example. They
build automobiles not for themselves but in the expectation that others will buy them to ride in. There is an element of speculation in this process.
Milton Friedman and his followers in mainstream economics, however, claim that speculation leads to stability. Those investors who buy high
and sell low, they argue, are irrational and will promptly fall by the wayside. Only the rational investors who buy low and sell high will survive;
this will cause markets to be stable.What they assert may apply to an idyllic market where investors mediate between producers and consumers.
But, the activity in financial markets, including markets for stocks, bonds, foreign currency and their derivatives, is of entirely different nature. It
is professional investors and investment funds that dominate the markets and compete with each other. They buy
and sell based not on their forecasts of long-term demand/supply conditions but on their observations of each other's
movements and readings of each other's intentions. When a price is expected to rise or fall, it is not irrational to buy or sell more and
move the price further up or down, leading to speculative bubbles and panics. The more fundamental reason I believe that capitalism
as a whole is speculative and inherently unstable is that the money on which it is based is itself speculative.
Money has made the economy much more efficient by making it possible to conduct transactions without the trouble of
exchanging on a barter basis. But money has no intrinsic value. People are willing to hold it only because they expect other people to
accept it in exchange for something else, with the people who accept it expecting that yet other people will accept it in turn. To hold money is, in
other words, the purest form of speculation, and trust in it is based on circular, bootstrap logic: Everybody uses money as money merely because
everybody believes everybody else uses it as money. In this light, we can see that money has two faces: It brings greater efficiency, but at the
same time it has the potential of causing great instability. In a capitalist economy supported by money, it is impossible
for efficiency and stability to coexist as claimed by the neoclassical economists. This bootstrap logic of money also underlies
the present financial crisis. The subprime loans that set off the crisis are extremely risky loans to people
with low creditworthiness. Because the risk of default on such loans is so high, a single subprime loan by itself is unattractive as a
financial product. But bundling many such loans together and securitizing them made the risks seem diluted, and as a result of further bundling
with numerous other financial instruments into big packages that were then dispersed around the globe, the risks became invisible
from the surface. As the financial products created in this way were traded more and more steadily among numerous parties, they began to
be considered readily convertible to cash and other safe assets. They came to be seen as being like the money in which people place supreme
trust. Here again we see the workings of bootstrap logic: Everybody trusted the products as safe merely because
everybody believed everybody else trusted them as safe. But when the subprime loans whose risks were concealed therein
went bad, trust in all financial products toppled like a row of dominoes. This is the essence of the current financial crisis.
Alt
 Alt Solves – Neolib UQ – Latin America
The Latin American tide is turning against neoliberalism – the only question is whether or
not we align ourselves with anti-capitalist struggle.
Dello Buono, Sociology professor at Manhattan College, 2011 [Richard, “Latin America and the
Collapsing Ideological Supports of Neoliberalism”, Critical Sociology 37(1) 9–25]

Fast forwarding to 21st century sociological terminology, this involves doing ‘public sociology’ and in Latin America it specifically means work
dedicated
to unmasking neoliberal forms of social organization before various publics. When successful, these efforts serve to identify and
render visible the underlying power relations of neoliberal capitalist practices and the larger architecture of imperial
power. Its cumulative effect is to attack the legitimacy of neoliberal capitalism and to undermine its ideological supports. In so doing, the sense that the neoliberal
order is somehow ‘natural’ or ‘inevitable’ begins to collapse. This
ideological struggle does not take place in a historical
vacuum but instead emerges in the throes of popular resistance. Intellectual upsurges like the Frankfurt
School and the more recent calls for ‘public sociology’ arise in particular historical moments to confront
idealogical domination. As anti-systemic momentum builds in 21st century Latin America, the emphasis
of critical discourse tends to shift, at some risk, towards theorizing around the bases for building larger
social unities of resistance. As social movement resistance in Latin America has demonstrated, this can take place at various levels of the ‘local-global’
continuum. Recalling how the Zapatista rebellion inaugurated a resurgence of progressive mass movements
throughout the region, this amounted to linking local resistance to a global struggle against neoliberalism. In Bolivia, similar indigenous
demands reached a fever pitch in 2000 with the ‘Water War’ that opposed ceding control over water distribution to a transnational
corporation. There, the government was forced to back down and cancel the contract in order to put an end to a virtual siege of La Paz organized by activist blockades.
This successful experience helped pave the way to renewed protests over the privatization of gas shortly
afterwards. This time, the showdown led to a mass ouster of President Sanchez de Lozada in 2003 that further galvanized the Bolivian people’s struggle against
neoliberalism. In just a few short years, three presidents in Bolivia and three presidents in Ecuador were ousted
by powerful political movements in which indigenous organizations played the leading role, eventually resulting in governments openly opposed to
neoliberalism. The linkage between specific sectoral or conjunctural struggles amid a wider rejection of neoliberal rule in Latin America has been amply treated
elsewhere (De la Barra and Dello Buono, 2009; Harnecker, 2000). The pattern certainly proved not to be exclusively the product of indigenous movements. In
Latin America, a total of 13 presidents in nine countries in the period 1985– 2004 were forced out of
office as a result of inter-sectoral oppositional mass movements. These forward steps of unity building, be it focused
around pan-indigenous unification, ethnic solidarity building, or other contexts of national unity and/or regional federalism, all carried with them an
ideological platform both for recovering progressive currents of resistance from the preneoliberal era and
establishing important synergies in popular resistance and concerted anti-neoliberal discourse. In this sense,
social movements were the critical bearers of an ideological struggle that both empowered the region and
propelled the popular struggle towards regaining national and regional sovereignty. The political successes of mass
movements in countries such as Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Brazil and others who have openly challenged neoliberal dogma have produced a cumulative
ideological effect that bring unity building at a national level to a more regional level, even as global capital tries to suffocate the challenge. The Free Trade Area of
the Americas (FTAA) initiative proposed by Washington illustrates how it sought to re-expropriate certain key decision making powers of national states so as to
remove the possibility of future direct challenges to neoliberal rule on the part of rebellious national states. But a concerted campaign of social mobilization across the
hemisphere succeeded in beating back the FTAA initiative while radicalized states led the charge to produce new counter-initiatives such as the Bolivarian Alternative
for the Americas (ALBA). In my estimation, this
outcome illustrates a general ideological shift of focus in anti-neoliberal
sentiments towards regional-integrative strategies of resistance, something that took place during the 1990s and the first decade of
the 21st century. It is a decisively significant development . Regional-integrative thinking tends to promote consolidated resistances at various
levels, enhance the capacity for social mobilization, and provide a basis for reconstituting social bonds that were effectively suppressed by neoliberal fragmentation.
The strategic element of this ideological shift rests in creating ‘schools of thought’ dedicated to regional resistance building. This can involve practical consideration
of how to deepen the popular character of existing national and regional institutions and theorizing about the creation of new forms of popular social organization.
Practical problems such as reconstructing the links between social movements and political parties are now being productively tackled in this venue. Visionary work
on the role of regional civil societies and/or global civil society is exemplary of this ideological moment. The celebration of the First World Social Forum (WSF) in
Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2001 placed in evidence a qualitative expansion of networking among progressive social movements and NGOs in Latin America that has
since grown in leaps and bounds. The participants began to link up with peers around the world in waging a common struggle against neoliberalism. Portuguese
critical theorist Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2008) argues that the
movement for an alternative to neoliberal globalization was
born within the struggle against neoliberalism’s implementation. The new slogan of ‘another world is
possible’ presided over the ongoing social movement efforts dedicated to visualizing alternatives to
neoliberal globalization and its hegemonic ideology, thereby taking up the challenge of building a
counter-hegemonic alternative from the base (De Sousa Santos, 2008). A concerted examination of the popular content embedded in existing,
‘official’ institutions of sub-regional/regional integration can help popular forces stake out their own independent positions and pave the way to the formulation of
popular alternatives for more genuine institutions of regional integration. Where does all of this end up? The
regional ideological trajectory has
the potential to gain further traction and move further towards directly engaging the construction of new,
post-capitalist imaginaries, analyses, propositions and practical structures. Ideological work in this vein is no longer utopian
in nature since it has found vast territories where it now informs practice, including in countries such as Venezuela and Bolivia where anti-neoliberal regimes are in
power. Ongoing work in identifying the role that regional integration schemes can play in social transformation point towards a new vision for the consolidation of
anti-capitalist forms of regional cooperation. There is no question that the initial beacon points for this ideological
moment became decisively positioned in Latin America with the 1959 Cuban Revolution and have been
reinforced by additional revolutionary upheavals since that time, such as in Chile during the early 1970s, Nicaragua in the 1980s,
and by Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador in the early years of the 21st century. What remains to be seen is whether popular forces can
make further breakthroughs in nations of intense counterinsurgency such as Colombia and Peru as well as in those countries
where neoliberal institutions have been heavily reinforced through hegemonic ‘free-trade’ regimes such as Chile and Mexico
 Alt Solves – Terrorism Aff
The alternative’s materialist method is superior to their emphasis on discourse and
representation in the context of terrorism.
Joseph, Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent, 2011 [Jonathan,
“Terrorism as a social relation within capitalism: theoretical and emancipatory implications”, Critical
Studies on Terrorism, 4:1, 23-37]
We can start this discussion by taking another argument from Hülsse and Spencer. They argue that if CTS is serious about terrorism being a social construction, then the terrorist cannot be
regarded as the primary source and that terrorists are a consequence of discourse, rather than vice versa. The study of terrorism should therefore concern itself with the discourse in which the
social construction of terrorism takes place and which constitutes particular people as ‘terrorists’ (Hülsse and Spencer 2008, p. 576). Although this critique makes some good points, it is
discursive reductionism, reflected in such one-sided statements as ‘terrorism is a social construction,
ultimately

hence a social fact produced in discourse’ and ‘[t]errorism can only be known through the terrorism
discourse’ (Hülsse and Spencer 2008, p. 572). This is reductionist because it suggests that the idea of terrorism is exhausted by
discourse, rather than seeing discourse as one crucial component in the construction of terrorism. But for the discourse to ‘construct’ terrorism,
there must be something that allows for this construction to be worthwhile and meaningful. It would be ridiculous, for
example, to suggest that something like the war on terror or the Northern Ireland peace process is all about discursive construction and nothing to do with material interests or socio-economic
relations. What is important, therefore, in the study of terrorism – and, it should be emphasised, the study of the way ‘terrorism’ is constructed – is that we take into account a range of social
relations including (but not exclusively) discursive ones. Although Hülsse and Spencer claim that they are following the work of Foucauldians in IR, the IR Foucauldians are, in the main,
discursive idealists who ignore Foucault’s own argument that ‘[a]rchaeology also reveals relations between discursive relations and non-discursive domains (institutions, political events,
economic practices and processes)’ (1989, p. 162). Hence, an adequate account of terrorism has to see it in relation to a whole series of social processes, not just discursive ones. Jackson’s
argument is similarly askew when he decides to dip into IR constructivism to make a point that closely resembles Wendt’s argument that structure should be seen in social rather than material
terms, where the basis of sociality is shared knowledge and culture (Wendt 1999, p. 20). Jackson’s argument is that terrorism is a social rather
than a brute fact. He says it is something constructed through speech acts and constituted through a set of discursive practices (Jackson 2009, p. 75). What both Jackson and Wendt
are doing is defining the social in opposition to a very crude, physicalist notion of the material. Wendt’s argument in effect argues that the material cannot also be social and ignores the work of
Marxists who argue that things like economic relations of production, for example, are bound up with complex social practices and discourses. By saying that terrorism is not a brute fact,
Jackson wants to suggest that terrorism is not something that just happens ‘out there’. Of course, the violent act might be
considered ‘out there’, but this is only rendered meaningful when discursively articulated as ‘terrorism’. Such a view is very similar to that articulated by Laclau and Mouffe when they claim that
they do not deny that objects exist, but they reject the idea that objects can meaningfully constitute themselves outside of discourse (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, p. 108; for a critique, see Joseph
This then justifies the predominantly discourse-based study of terrorism found in CTS. But, as our
2002, pp. 111–113).

terrorism is in part ‘out there’ and that ‘out there’ must be at least partly constitutive or
conclusion will go on to argue,

else there would be nothing for the speech acts and discursive practices to construct or constitute. But saying that
terrorism is somehow ‘out there’ is not the same as saying that it is a ‘brute fact’ or a physical ‘thing’. Terrorism is ‘out there’ as a social relation just as much as it is socially ‘in discourse’.
Conclusion: terrorism as a social relation Marx wrote that capital is not a thing but a social relation between people (1976, p. 932). My suggestion is that terrorism is also impossible to
understand unless we see it in these terms – both as a social relation and as embedded within a wider set of social relations. Unfortunately the nature of terrorism – often represented through
spectacular events – gives it this thing-like quality. Likewise, the study of terrorism is usually event-driven and policy-driven . In arguing that terrorism is more
like a social relation, we make terrorism more difficult to pin down. Because terrorism is not a clearly identifiable ‘thing’, we immediately
find ourselves involved in disputes when we try to identify it. Unfortunately, this has led CTS scholars to move too far in a constructivist or

post-structuralist direction and say instead that terrorism is a discursive ‘construction’. Terrorism, therefore, is not a brute
fact. Nor is it a social fact if fact means thing. It is not merely a discursive construction. Nor is it a social construction if social is defined in the manner used by some constructivists.
Terrorism is a social relation that is overdetermined by both material and discursive practices. And its
existence, as Wight points out, should be separated from the beliefs of agents because although ‘the
concepts and beliefs of actors . . . are integral to any understanding of that practice, they do not exhaust it..
. . Everyday understandings of terrorism are essential to any social scientific account of terrorism, but they cannot set the limits of that understanding’ (2009, p. 100). This argument applies as
much to those on the counterterrorism side as it does to those deemed to be the terrorists. Thus, terrorism can only be understood by a thorough understanding of a complex set of social relations,
the investigation of which requires a lot more than just looking at beliefs and motivations, even if this is linked to a more complex idea of discursive articulation. On rare occasions, the CTS
scholars recognise the need for an approach that is better able to examine these social relations: there is also a need to explore in much more detail the political-economic contexts of both the
applying historical materialist
terrorism studies field as a politically-embedded domain of knowledge, and the theory and practice of counterterrorism. In other words,

approaches and taking materiality seriously, there is a need for further exploration of how
counterterrorism functions as a form of ideology – how it works to promote certain kinds of material and
class interests, maintain political hegemony, and sustain dominant economic relationships. This means rooting critical
analyses of the theory and practice of counterterrorism within theories of class, capitalism, hegemony, and imperialism (see Herring, 2008). (Jackson et al. 2009b, p. 229) However, the article by
Eric Herring (2008, p. 199), which is mentioned at the end of this quote, is one of the contributions concerned with exactly the issue that CTS makes very little mention of Marx, Marxism or
historical materialism. Herring (2008, p. 198– 199) rightly calls for a more engaged analysis of social relations, noting how the use of discourse analysis and constructivism cannot themselves
perform this task given that they are methods of analysis rather than theories of world politics. More specifically, he says that although CTS rightly focuses on bringing the state back into the
study of terrorism, more is required, in particular, ‘a class analysis of the state and terrorism, one that is historically specific to the changing dynamics of capitalist globalization’ (Herring 2008, p.
200). Ruth Blakeley’s book certainly does this by linking state terrorism to the control of labour and markets in the South (2009, p. 19). However, this is one of the few exceptions. In terms of
real world social changes, we might point to such things as the effects of the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union on the nature of political movements, their organising
ideals or the way in opposition to imperialism gets expressed. We might look at the changing nature of the state and the rise of new forms of governance that place greater emphasis on
responsible action. The emphasis on individual responsibility is particularly prevalent in forms of risk management and insurance. The process of underwriting terrorism has been examined by
Aradau and van Munster, who talk of how this ‘fosters the imaginary of the indefinite continuity of the present as capitalist social and economic processes’, protecting the propertied subject, and
defining terrorism in such a way that it ‘instantiates forms of continuity between all actions deemed destabilizing for social and economic processes’ (2008, p. 207). Meanwhile, the ‘hollowing
out of the state’ through new forms of governance might be examined alongside the strengthening of the state in its powers of observation, classification and calculation, the removal of civil
liberties in the name of anti-terrorism and justification of states of exception. These topics should not be the preserve of those with an interest in Agamben; it was after all Poulantzas (1980) who
had the foresight to note the re-emergence of the strong state. These issues are not just the result of the way elites use the terrorism
narrative to justify surveillance, social control, the normalisation of security procedures or altered legal
practices (Jackson 2009). They are more deep-rooted than this and are part of the reconfiguration of the
institutional framework of capitalist societies. This leads to the issue of neo-liberalism. It works as a strategy for
governing from a distance precisely through dividing up populations, classifying them, assessing their
labour and skills and condemning large sections to live ‘bare life’ in the ghettos and slums although state
terror helps guarantee that nothing will hinder the extraction of surplus value and accumulation of capital.
This works as a dual process of coercion and legitimation (Blakeley 2009, pp. 7–8), and where necessary, force and terror will be used to gain access to markets and resources. In this reified and
With its preference for discourse over non-discursive social
alienated world, terrorism itself emerges as a reified form of opposition.

relations, CTS is keen to emphasise on how studies of terrorism often reify social relations, but nowhere
does it consider this idea of terrorism itself as a reified form of social relations. This idea is neatly expressed in Trotsky’s small
pamphlet Why Marxists Oppose Individual Terrorism in which he writes: In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own
consciousness, reconciles them to their own powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes toward a great avenger and liberator who someday will come and accomplish his mission. (Trotsky
1911) Despite the age of this quote, it fits well with a historical account of the acceptance of terrorism in the consciousness of groups of alienated people following the collapse of the Soviet
Union and the discrediting of the socialist project, as well as the alienating experience of living through the new neoliberal onslaught.This also shifts attention away
from CTS’ fixation with the discursive construction of terrorism. For Marxist accounts of terrorism not only
examine the way such acts are described – ‘the discourse naturalises a particular understanding of what terrorism is, namely, a form of illegitimate non-state
violence’ (Jackson et al. 2009b, p. 386) – but also try to explain what the acts themselves are. What Trotsky is describing are acts that, regardless of the

ways they are described by terrorism discourse, are already, if not illegitimate, then reified expressions of complex social situations. We do not need to deconstruct

terrorist discourse to make this point.

Answers to Answers
 AT: Perm
The permutation’s coalitional strategy fails – the goal of class struggle is conflict and
antagonism, not cooperation or assimilation
ZIZEK 2004, PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY AT THE INSTITUTE FOR SOCIOLOGY AT
LJUBLJANA UNIVERSITY, [SLAVOJ, “ETHICAL SOCIALISM? NO, THANKS!”
HTTP://JOURNAL.TELOSPRESS.COM/CGI/REPRINT/2004/129/ 173]
As to the “rainbow coalition” motif, the first thing to take not of is the fundamental difference between
feminist/anti-racist/anti-sexist etc. struggle and class struggle: in the first case, the goal is to translate
antagonism into difference (“peaceful” coexistence of sexes, religions, ethnic groups), while the goal of the class struggle is
precisely the opposite, i.e., to “aggravate” class difference into class antagonism. So what the series race-gender-class
obfuscates is the different logic of the political space in the case of class: while the anti-racist and anti-sexist struggle are guided by
the striving for the full recognition of the other, the class struggle aims at overcoming and subduing,
annihilating even, the other – even if not a direct physical annihilation, class struggle aims at the
annihilation of the other’s sociopolitical role and function. In other words, while it is logical to say that anti-racism wants all races to
be allowed to freely assert and deploy their cultural, political and economic strivings, it is obviously meaningless to say that the aim of
the proletarian class struggle is to allow the bourgeoisie to fully assert its identity and strivings. . . . In one case,
we have a “horizontal” logic of the recognition of different identities, while, in the other case, we have the logic of the struggle with an antagonist. The paradox
here is that it is the populist fundamentalism which retains this logic of antagonism, while the liberal Left
follows the logic of recognition of differences, of “defusing” antagonisms into co-existing differences: in
their very form, the conservative-populist grass-roots campaigns took over the old Leftist-radical stance
of the popular mobilization and struggle against upper-class exploitation. Insofar as, in the present US two-parties system,
red designates Republicans and blue Democrats, and insofar as populist fundamentalists, of course, vote Republican, the old anti-Communist slogan “Better dead than
red!” now acquires a new ironic meaning – the irony residing in the unexpected continuity of the “red” attitude from the old Leftist grass-root mobilization to the new
Christian fundamentalist grass-root-mobilization....

We must break from state structures—the permutation recreates the failed socialist
experiments of the 20th century.
Hardt and Negri 2009 [Michael and Antonio, Commonwealth 91-5]
It is no coincidence that in the last decades of the twentieth century, when the "great hope" of really existing socialism falls into disenchantment, the three great
In the case of the Soviet Union, what was its model of development
socialist experiments are all enveloped in a common crisis.
if not a mirage of liberation translated into the language of capitalist development? It envisioned an exit
from economic dependency through stages of development, through the awkward absorption and
transfiguration of capitalist modernity into the rhetoric of socialism. Marxism was simplified into an evolutionary theory of
progress from which all elements of antimodernity are excluded as backward, underdeveloped. The Soviet crisis involved all aspects of
social development, along with the democratic status of the political structures, the ruling mechanisms of
the bureaucratic elite, and the geopolitical situation of Soviet quasicolonial expansion. In China the crisis led not to collapse but
to an evolution of the system that refined the strongly centralized political management of development
along the lines of the capitalist organization of labor. This can be directed through socialist, bureaucratic,
and centralized means or in a more socially decentralized way, giving space and support to market forces
in the framework of a unified global market that offers profits and competitive advantage from wage in
equalities and poor labor conditions. The Chinese road to neoliberalism is different from that of the capitalist countries—with limited
privatization, continuing state control, the creation of new class divisions with new hierarchies between urban and rural areas, and so forth—but no less effective. In
retrospect, the current neoliberal regime in China helps us identify more clearly how powerful the developmentalist ideology was all along within the socialist regime.
Cuba, finally, has managed so far to hold at bay the ultimate consequences of the crisis but only by freezing itself in time, becoming a kind of preserve of socialist
ideology that has lost its original components. The enormous pressure of the crisis, though, continues to have profound effects. And Cuba constantly has to ward off
the two threatening alternatives that seem to prefigure its future: the catastrophic end of the Soviet experience or the neoliberal evolution of the Chinese. This same
socialist ideology also traveled for several decades through the so-called underdeveloped or developing countries, from India and East Asia to Africa and Latin
America. Here too there was a strong continuity between the capitalist theories of development and the socialist theories of dependency.49 The project of modernity
and modernization became key to the control and repression of the forces of antimodernity that emerged in the revolutionary struggles. The
notions of
"national development" and the "state of the entire people," which constantly held out an illusory promise
for the future but merely served to legitimate the existing global hierarchies, was one of the most
damaging regurgitations of socialist ideology. In the name of the "unity of the entire people ," in fact, were
organized political operations that pretended to overcome class conflict (while merely suppressing it) and thus
confused the political meanings of Right and Left, along with fascist and communist. This reactionary project of
modernity (behind the mask of socialism) emerges most strongly in moments of economic crisis: it was part of the horrible experience of the Soviet 1930s, and in
certain respects it is repeated again today, not in the name of the "unity of the entire people" but rather in
the mad rush of Left and Right
elected political forces toward parliamentary and populist "centrism," to create what Etienne Balibar calls "extremism of the center."50
The "mistaken standpoint" of the three great socialist experiences, to take up ironically an old term of Soviet bureaucrats, is due not so much to the fact that the
progressivist norms of capitalist development were internalized in the consciousness of the ruling classes of "really existing socialism," but rather to the fact that,
paradoxically, these norms were too weakly internalized. Although these experiments in socialism failed, capitalist development in Russia and China did not. After
relatively brief crises those countries returned to capitalism much richer and more powerful than they
were when they supposedly broke with capitalist development. "Really existing socialism" proved to be a powerful machine of
primitive accumulation and economic development. Among other innovations, in conditions of underdevelopment it invented instruments (like those of Keynesianism,
for instance) that capitalist states adopted only in phases o f cyclical crisis; and it anticipated and normalized the tools of governance to rule over the exception that (as
we will see in Part 4) continue to be used in the current global order. Considering the exhaustion of global capitalist development today, the crises of "really existing
socialism" take on an acute contemporary relevance. De te fabula narratur: the story is really about you. It would be wrong to forget or minimize, however, how much
the victorious socialist revolutions in Russia, China, and Cuba aided and inspired anticapitalist and anti-imperialist liberation movements around the world. We should
be careful that our critique of them does not simply reinforce the vulgar attempts of the dominant ideology to cancel them from memory. Each of these revolutions
initiated cycles of struggles that spread throughout the world in a kind of viral contamination, communicating their hopes and dreams to other movements. It would be
useful, in fact, at this point in history, to be able to measure realistically the extent to which the definitive crisis of the socialist states hindered or actually aided the
course of liberation movements. If we say, in other words, that the "brief twentieth century," which began in 1917, came to an end between Beijing and Berlin in 1989,
that does not mean in any way that the hope and movement for communism ended then but only that another century has begun. We will explore some of the ways
that the forces of antimodernity today act within and against the processes of capitalist globalization and discover an escape route from the cage of developmentalist
ideology in which the socialist states were trapped. In any case, one fact that emerges clearly from this history is that liberation struggles can no longer be cast in terms
of modernization and stages of development. The power of antimodernity, which was unrealized in the socialist revolutions and the struggles for national
independence, comes to the fore again, intact, in our times. Che Guevara seems to intuit this fact during the final years of his life when he tries to break away from the
structural determinism and the historical linearity of socialist doctrine, which, he recognizes, merely reproduces the basic features of capitalist modernity.
"Pursuing the chimera of realizing socialism with the help of the blunt weapons left to us by capitalism," he
writes, leads
to a dead end. "To construct communism it is necessary to make, simultaneous with the new
material foundation, a new humanity [el hombre nuevo]."51 Che certainly knows firsthand the constraints of socialist developmentalism. He
serves as president of the national bank and minister of industries in the years after the revolution. But in 1965 he mysteriously disappears from public view and leaves
to join revolutionary struggles first in the Congo and then in Bolivia, where he is killed. Some see this decision to leave Cuba and his government posts as a sign of a
romantic's restlessness for adventure or an unwillingness to roll up his sleeves and face the hard work of building a national economy. We
interpret it
instead as a refusal of the bureaucratic and economic straitjacket of the socialist state, a refusal to obey the dictates of
development ideology. The new humanity he seeks to build communism will never be found there. His flight to the jungle
is really a desperate attempt to rediscover the forces of antimodernity he knew in the liberation struggle. Today it is even more clear than in Che's time
that only movements from below, only subjectivities at the base of the productive and political processes
have the capacity to construct a consciousness of renewal and transformation. This consciousness no
longer descends from the intellectual sectors that are organic to what was once called socialist science but
rather emerges from the working classes and multitudes that autonomously and creatively propose
antimodern and anticapitalist hopes and dreams.

Negativity is key – the perm doesn’t solve because pure negation of current political
coordinates is necessary to open new forms of resistance
Bruce-Novoa, Lecturer in Mexican and Latino Literature and Culture @ UC Irvine, 2005
[“Eroticism, Counterculture, and Juan García Ponce.”CR: The New Centennial Review 5.3, 1-33]

In One-Dimensional Man, a less optimistic Marcuse analyzed the manipulation by advanced industrial societies of communication media and
concepts of modernity to stifle cultural revolution, voiding any possibility of the erotic liberation of the masses. Instead of facilitating
expression of creative instincts, society created an array of imaginary needs and desires, the acquisition of
which—through participation in the rites of consumption—constituted a sinister, complex, and highly developed form of sublimating human
sexual energy. By making individuals feel part of an illusory integration of national life, the potentially great
variety of modes of social expression were funneled into a one-dimensional system in which the capacity
to think and act freely in manners other than those sanctioned by the system eventually
disappeared. By monopolizing the means of consumption as well alternative or oppositional forms of
expression, advanced societies blocked development of an eroticized society. Marcuse warned that control
mechanisms even provided outlets for eroticism that channeled its energy into merely distracting and addictive consumption. All expression
of rebellion, including literature and the arts, would be turned into chips in the game of competition and
economic gain. The efforts to recapture the Great Refusal in the language of literature suffer the fate of being
absorbed by what they refute. As modern classics, the avant-garde and the beatniks share the function of entertaining without
endangering the good conscience of the men of good will. This absorption is justified by technical progress; the refusal is refuted by the
alleviation of misery in the advanced industrial society. The liquidation of high culture is a by-product of the conquest of nature, and of the
progressing conquest of scarcity. (Marcuse 1991, 70) Marcuse's answer: a Great Refusal beyond what the scandalous but
ineffectual vanguards had achieved, a break he called a "rupture"—especially and significantly in the chapter "The New
Sensibility" in An Essay on Liberation (1969a, 33–34, 36). This rupture signaled the withdrawal from the system of organized
social conduct, or in 1960s parlance, the "establishment." Borrowing elements of his analysis from Eros and Civilization, Marcuse
postulated that a society that had won the basic struggle for survival and eliminated excessive domination and
repression should open itself to the development of a new being, an orphic-narcissist who would reject
utilitarian goals or social standing in favor of love, pleasure, play, and contemplation. This eroticized being would
be a product of an essentially new human reality, able to achieve the ultimate "break, the turn of quantity into quality" (1991, 231) and establish
"the realm of the irrational [that] becomes the home of the really rational—of the ideas which may 'promote the art of life'" (247). This
rupture must not fall into the trap of oppositional collaboration; rather it must counter the system's
capacity for appropriating everything in its path with "the politically impotent form of the 'absolute
negation'" (Marcuse 1991, 255). To support his claim while simultaneously offering an example of such an act of refusal in the guise of
surrendering to appropriation, Marcuse cites Maurice Blanchot, a writer whose work would also become key reading for counterculture
intellectuals in their passage to postmodernity, particularly for García Ponce. [End Page 7] What
we refuse is not without value
or importance. Precisely because of that, the refusal is necessary. There is a reason which we no
longer accept, there is an appearance of wisdom which horrifies us, there is a plea for agreement
and conciliation which we will no longer heed. A break has occurred. We have been reduced to that
frankness which no longer tolerates complicity. (Blanchot, quoted in Marcuse 1991, 256)
 AT: Pragmatism/Need Blueprint
The absence of a practical roadmap is irrelevant – the real revolutionary act lies in the
enactment of negativity to clear intellectual space for authentic alternatives
Johnston, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHER, 2007 [ADRIAN, INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ZIZEK STUDIES, 1.0,
PGS. 23 - 24] http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/8/24

Perhaps the
absence of a detailed practical roadmap in Zizek's political writings isn't 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 truly to open
up the space for imagining authentic alternatives to the prevailing state of the situation. Another definition of
materialism offered by Zizek is that it amounts to accepting the internal inherence of what fantasmatically appears as an external deadlock or hindrance127 (with
fantasy itself being defined as the false externalization of something within the subject, namely, the illusory projection of an inner obstacle128). 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 just an instance of negative/critical intellectual reflection). Why is this the case? Recalling the earlier 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 money's 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
substance's powers. The "external" obstacle of the capitalist system exists exclusively on the condition
that subjects, whether consciously or unconsciously, "internally" believe in it—capitalism's 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 capitalism's frail vulnerability is simultaneously the source of its enormous strength: Its
vampiric symbiosis with individual human desire, and the fact that the late-capitalist cynic's fetishism enables the disavowal of his/her de facto belief in capitalism,
makes it highly unlikely that people can be persuaded to stop believing and start thinking (especially since, as Zizek 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 ofthe real"):
Faced with the choice between living the
capitalist lie or grappling 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.").

The alternative’s refusal is not a passive withdrawal but the most positive act possible – the
refusal to articulate an alternative vision is the strongest possible condemnation of the
current order
Wark 2011 McKenzie, Assoc Prof of Media and Cultural Studies at The New School, “McKenzie Wark on Occupy Wall Street: 'How to
Occupy an Abstraction'” Verso Blog http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/728

The abstraction that is Wall Street also stands for something else, for an inhuman kind of power, which one can
imagine running beneath one's feet throughout the financial district. Let's call this power the vectoral. It's the combination of fiber optic cables
and massive amounts of computer power. Some vast proportion of the money in circulation around the planet is being automatically traded even
as you read this. Engineers are now seriously thinking about trading at the speed of light. Wall Street in this abstract sense means our new robot
overlords, only they didn't come from outer space. How can you occupy an abstraction? Perhaps only with another abstraction. Occupy Wall
Street took over a more or less public park nestled in the downtown landscape of tower blocks, not too far from the old World Trade Center
site, and set up camp. It is an occupation which, almost uniquely, does not have demands. It has at its core a
suggestion: what if people came together and found a way to structure a conversation which might come
up with a better way to run the world? Could they do any worse than the way it is run by the combined efforts of Wall Street as
rentier class and Wall Street as computerized vectors trading intangible assets? Some commentators have seen the modesty of this request as a
weakness of Occupy Wall Street. They want a list of demands, and they are not shy about proposing some. But perhaps
the best thing about Occupy Wall Street is its reluctance to make demands. What's left of pseudo-
politics in the United States is full of demands. To reduce the debt, to cut taxes, to abolish regulations.
Nobody even bothers with much justification for these any more. It is just sort of assumed that only what
matters to the rentier class matters at all. Its not that the rentier class buys politicians in America. Why
bother when you can rent them by the hour? In this context, the most interesting thing about Occupy Wall Street is its suggestion
that the main thing that's lacking is not demands, but process. What is lacking is politics itself . It may
sound counter-intuitive, but there really is no politics in the United States. There is exploitation, oppression,
inequality, violence, there are rumors that there might still be a state. But there is no politics. There is
only the semblance of politics. Its mostly just professionals renting influence to favor their interests. The
state is no longer even capable of negotiating the common interests of its ruling class. Politics from below
is also simulated. The Tea Party is really just a great marketing campaign. It's a way of making the old
rentier class demands seem at least temporarily appealing. Like fast food, it will seem delicious until the indigestion starts.
It's the Contract on America, its Compassionate Conservatism, but with new ingredients! The Tea Party was quite successful. But
you can't fool all of the people all of the time, and no doubt there's a new marketing campaign waiting in
the wings for when it runs out of steam. But none of this is anything but the semblance of a politics. So the
genius of the occupation is simply to suggest that there could be a politics, one in which people meet and
propose and negotiate. This suggestion points to the great absence at the center of American life: a whole
nation, even an empire, with no politics.
 AT: Totalizing
This is Interpassivity – fixation on anti-dogmatism conceals an individualistic politics that
fetishizes difference and remains content with endless minor reforms
Dean ’11 [Jodi, Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, “What is to be done? (4)”,
http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2011/02/what-is-to-be-done.html]

1. Lenin: "The worst sin we commit is that we degrade our political and organizational tasks to the level of the immediate,
'palpable,' 'concrete' interests of the everyday economic struggle; yet they singing to us the same refrain: Lend the economic struggle itself a political character!"
Sometime I
find it so strange, so puzzling, that the spontaneity, immediacy, concreteness, amateurism, and emphasis on the
everyday that Lenin condemns as primitivism and economism is taken so widely for granted among so many left activists and intellectuals. Is
this uncritical acceptance a reaction to what many see as the mistakes of the Soviet period? Is it a more recent
response to the failures and compromises of communist parties in other countries (I'm thinking mostly of Italy here)? Is it a reaction to the rigidity of some
communists in the US and the UK, a reaction by those who associate themselves with a new left? Or
are other explanations equally or even
more compelling--absorption of a 100 years of anti-communism, cooptation by the pleasures of
capitalism, relief through forfeiture of responsibility for the terribly hard work of organizing? So many
strands of intellectual ideology converge: don't speak for another, appreciate differences, celebrate locality.
It's no wonder that a politics can't emerge. Dogmatism, demands, and organization are discounted
in advance. I should put this differently. There is a politics here: an individualist politics whose sole principle is that of
individual freedom, where this freedom is reduced to particular choice and decision, even as it blocks
access to organized contestation and rebuilding of the conditions of choice and decision. Did I choose to
live in a society where security is privatized, where required home and car insurance is subject to a market and a set of corporations whose
interest is in profit and not my well-being? Did I choose to live in a society where wealth is held in more esteem than fairness, creativity,
or scientific curiosity? Did I have a choice to live in a society where a collective good like space exploration is subordinated to tax breaks for
the top one percent? 2. For Lenin, mass movement and "professional revolutionaries" are not alternative organizational forms. Each is necessary: Such
workers, average people of the masses, are capable of displaying enormous energy and self-sacrifice in strikes and in street battles with the police and the troops, and
are capable (in fact are alone capable) of determining the outcome of our entire movement--but the struggle against the political police requires special qualities; it
requires professional revolutionaries. Lenin gives one reason for the need of professional revolutionaries--the police make every strike and every demonstration a
secret. They prevent news of the strikes from spreading. Do we have the same problem? Cutting of Internet services in Egypt suggests a contemporary version of this
kind of policing role, as do the attacks on journalists and the disruptions of Al Jazeera's signals. Yet news from Cairo was getting out and it was circulating in the
country, even more, news of the struggles in multiple cities reinforced the struggles' as dimensions of one struggle. No one will deny that Egypt has been under
authoritarian rule for decades. It's not surprising, then, that there are resonances with Russian at the beginning of the 20th century. The
situation of the
US, UK, and Europe under communicative capitalism suggests a different problem. The effect of the police--non knowledge of strikes
and resistance--is achieved differently, now via over-kill, deluge, distraction, and obfuscation. Too much
information becomes too little. Too much analysis and commentary deflects and displaces. The culture of
media circulates and redirects energies away from direct confrontation. No wonder turning off the internet
in Egypt had energizing effects--people had to get information from each other on the streets.

Their excessive anti-essentialism prevents actual opposition to capitalism

Barbara Epstein, Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz, 1998 [“Interpreting the World (Without Necessarily Changing It)” in New Politics
http://www.wpunj.edu/~newpol/issue24/epstei24.htm as]

"The question becomes," she writes, "what to do with the monster? Should we refine it, cut it down to size, render it once more acceptable,
unremarkable, invisibly visible?" No, she writes; for in doing so, we might lose sight of its grotesqueness. Capitalism -- refined and redefined --
would still be capable of "relegating noncapitalism to a space of necessary weakness and defeat." Gibson-Graham calls for an anti-
essentialist project of "supplanting the discourse of capitalist hegemony with a plurality and heterogeneity
of economic forms." (ibid. pp. 8-10) Capitalist production, then, should be seen as only one set of
economic practices among many -- not as an integral system encompassing and subordinating "non-capitalist" forms such as self-
employment and household economy, but as something on a par with these and other alternative forms. By this account, the U.S.
economy is no longer capitalist. Instead, it is a site of diverse economic practices -- none with more power
to shape society than any others. Capitalism has been brought under control; discursively, at least, it is
largely de-fanged. We can challenge capitalism, it seems, by refusing to believe that it holds sway over
our society. Gibson-Graham argues her political economy on grounds that her commitment to an anti-
essentialist perspective requires it -- not that it makes reality more intelligible.
 AT: Transition Wars
Transition wars are limited and peaceful and can’t resolve capital’s internal antagonisms.
Mészáros 2008 István, Prof Emeritus in Philosophy and Political Theory @ U of Sussex The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time,
310-311

The second blocked avenue is even more important. It concerns the removal of the possibility of solving the system’s aggravating problems
through an all-out war, as it was twice attempted in the world wars of the twentieth century. I wrote at the time of the onset of capital’s structural
crisis, toward the end of the Vietnam war that: …the system has been decapitated through the removal of its ultimate
sanction: an all-out war on its real or potential adversaries…Exporting violence is no longer possible on
the required massive scale. Attempts at doing so on a limited scale—like the Vietnam War37—not only are
no substitutes for the old mechanism but even accelerate the inevitable internal explosions of the system.
Nor is it possible to get away indefinitely with the ideological mystification which represented the
internal challenge of socialism: the only possible solution to the present crisis, as an external confrontation: a ‘subversion’ directed
from abroad by a ‘monolithic’ enemy. For the first time in history capitalism is globally confronted with its own
problems which cannot be ‘postponed’ much longer, nor can they be indeed transferred to the military
plane in order to be exported in the form of an all-out war.38 I added in a note to the last sentence that “Of course
such a war can happen, but its actual planning and active preparation in the open cannot function as a vital
internal stabilizer.”39 This is so even if the neoconservative “vision guys” of the Pentagon—whose “theories” border on insanity40—are
more than willing “to think the unthinkable.” But even such extreme forms of irrationality cannot undo the far-reaching
implications of this blocked avenue. For the underlying issue is an insoluble contradiction within the
reproductive framework of the capital system. A contradiction manifest, on the one hand, through the
ongoing relentless concentration and centralization of capital on a global scale, and on the other, through
the structurally imposed inability of the capital system to produce the required political stabilization on a
global scale. Even the most aggressive military interventions of global hegemonic imperialism—at present
those of the United States—in different parts of the planet are bound to fail in this respect. The destructiveness of
limited wars, no matter how many, is very far from being enough for imposing everywhere on a lasting
basis the unchallengeable rule of a single imperialist hegemon and its “global government”—the only thing that would befit
the logic of capital. Only the socialist hegemonic alternative can show a way out of this destructive contradiction. That is, an organizationally
viable alternative that fully respects the dialectical complementarity of the national and international in our time.
Aff Answers
 Perm – Terrorism Aff
The perm solves best – class analysis on its own is too reductionist. Combining both
methods is best able to address the complexities of the war on terror.
Herring, Professor of International Politics at the University of Bristol, 2008 [Eric, “Critical terrorism studies: an
activist scholar perspective”, Critical Studies on Terrorism,1:2, 197 — 211]

Those who ‘do’ historical materialist analysis generally do not ‘do’ security studies. This is mainly for political reasons, in
that they see it overwhelmingly as a field which serves primarily as an instrument of class domination, and for intellectual reasons, in that the concept of security is seen as a relatively
The problem with this approach is that students new to security studies will
unsatisfying one for theorising about world politics.

effectively, even if unintentionally and despite Booth’s assertion to the contrary, be guided to the conclusion that they have little to learn
from historical materialism and do not need to think about class and capitalism. Path dependency – roads more and less travelled
– will operate in a powerful way. For example, the ‘Approaches to Security’ section of the first edition of the Collins Contemporary Security Studies (2007) textbook effectively sets out security
studies as involving choices between a traditional state-centric realist-liberal framing, a discursive-constructivist critical framing, or one focused thematically on peace studies, gender,
securitisation, or human security. Marxism is discussed briefly in the traditional approaches chapter which is structured around realism and liberalism. The lessons for the emergent field of
critical terrorism studies are clear. Bringing the state back into terrorism studies is valuable, but not enough – what is required is a class analysis of the state and terrorism, one
that is historically specific to the changing dynamics of capitalist globalisation, and one which considers the ways that terrorism can be a tactic of all sides in class conflict, rather than just a tactic
would also provide it with a way of describing,
of a subordinate class. Such a perspective would distinguish it sharply from mainstream terrorism studies up to now. It

explaining, and challenging Northern state terrorism, because it would frame it in terms of the extent to which it is functional for shoring up or challenging
exploitative relations which favour capital over labour. The good news is that the work of scholars such as
Stokes (2005, 2006) and Blakeley (2007, forthcoming) is leading the way, building on the work of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, and ensuring that

critical terrorism studies has a major strand which puts the discursive and ideological into the context of
US-led capitalist globalisation and associated class relations. Bringing class back in begs the question of what one means by class, of course. This is a huge question far
beyond the scope of this article. What can be said here is that while class has an important economic dimension, it is not reducible to

economics with the non-economic separate and secondary. As Overbeek (2004, p. 3) puts it: Class is a broad and inclusive concept that refers to
the situation of human beings in the social relations through which they produce and reproduce their existence, and by which they are in turn constituted as social beings. These social relations of
(re-)production are hierarchical and exploitative. They are furthermore guaranteed by the state: in the era of the dominance of capitalist social relations, they are guaranteed by the capitalist state.
A whole host of related issues must be addressed, such as how many classes there are, how distinct they are, how movement occurs between
them, the extent to which and the ways in which classes are antagonistic, how particular social formations are stabilised through means such as class

compromises compared with the threat or use of coercive means such as terrorism, the relationships between classes and elites (i.e. social and
agentic concentrations of power of whatever kind), how classes are organised within and across states, how they can be united on some things and divided on others, and how those divisions may
The class role that terrorism plays may be functional or dysfunctional and driven by
be objective or perceptual.

complex interaction of fractions of classes and elites (subnational, national, transnational), and progressive or reactionary
opposition. States may tolerate or promote progressive developments such as a move from dictatorship to liberal democracy. A class analysis would expect in general terms that this will
occur only when ruling class power is not threatened or where it simply lacks sufficient power to prevent those developments. Consideration will also need to be given to understanding when and
A guard must also be maintained
how forces such as nationalism, ethnicity, religion, or sect can be the primary dynamic shaping resort or non-resort to terrorism.

against a tendency often associated with historical materialist perspectives of undervaluing liberal
democracy and other often progressive aspects of liberalism. Bringing class back in does not mean class
reductionism: terrorism is not all about class. The point being made here is the rejection of the implicit assumption that class has nothing to do with terrorism,
including Northern state terrorism, or only plays a role in class rebellion from below. By Northern states, I mean industrial and post-industrial capitalist ones. They may be liberal democratic or
authoritarian, although they are overwhelmingly in the former group. Hence, it is not a geographical category, as such states can be located in the southern hemisphere (such as Australia). By
Southern states, I mean those with low levels of industrial and post-industrial capitalist development. The North is more or less a post-Cold War synonym for ‘Western’, though with the obvious
qualification that there is no non-capitalist East with which it is struggling for the political, military, and economic allegiance of a Third World. Instead, the United States is trying to balance its
own interests, with keeping the other Northern democratic states on board while engaging with the structural shift associated with China’s increasingly global version of authoritarian Northern
capitalism. The ‘North’ and the ‘Global North’ are frequently used as synonyms (the latter being the trendy version): the problem with this approach is that the phrase ‘Global North’ is useful to
encapsulate the fact that within Northern states substantial elements of society are part of the Global South, defined as those which are marginal to advanced capitalism, impoverished and
policed, or just ignored. Their poverty, hunger, ill health, and shortened life spans can be witnessed across the world. Equally, within Southern states there are substantial elements of society
which are part of the Global North, defined as those which are deeply integrated into advanced capitalism, wealthy, and on behalf of which the Global South is policed, securitised, and if
necessary repressed. The people of the Global North and Global South correspond roughly to Duffield’s (2007) categories of insured and uninsured or surplus life (for an application to post-
invasion Iraq, see Herring, forthcoming). As such, it is above all a class rather than a geographical distinction, or a distinction between types of state. Within this system, terrorism can be a means
the world is structured and
of capital accumulation by violent and intimidatory dispossession, opposition to it, or part of a bid to take part in it. Nevertheless,

stratified around multiple inequalities and critical terrorism studies needs to be attentive to what they are
and how they relate to the use and non-use of terrorism. A particularly important inequality which critical
terrorism studies ought to challenge is the operation of the categories of worthy and unworthy victims.
 Link – AT: Cuba
Their link is incorrect – Cuba can be subject to globalization without succumbing to
neoliberalism. Even if industry investment increased, anti-neoliberal resistance would not
be doomed.
Shreve, Executive Articles Editor at the Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, 2012 [Heather, .D. Candidate, 2012, Indiana University
Maurer School of Law, “Harmonization, But Not Homogenization:
The Case for Cuban Autonomy in Globalizing Economic Reforms”, Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, Volume 19, Issue 1, Winter 2012]

Globalization in today's world no longer requires homogenization; Cuba does not need to either adopt a
neoliberal or Maoist version of economics to globalize. Instead, it can remain Marxist-Leninist while
entering into the global economy. Just as neoliberal policies are not the [End Page 386] only concept of globalization, as seen in
China, so too Chinese Maoism is not the only alternative form of globalization. The fundamental differences between China and Cuba are vast—
for example, the focus of the Cuban reform differs from that of the Chinese,131 the decision by Cuban officials to shun Chinese "market
socialism"132 in favor of limited Communist reforms,133 and the histories and cultures of the two countries differ.134 Cuba presents a
different story of globalization—one of a nation, rather than making an ideological change without regard
to outside circumstances, instead shifting policies out of necessity and the need to survive in a changed
world. Moreover, Cuba's story of globalization is one of a nation attempting to limit negative effects of globalization. Cuba, while
symbolically isolated for the last sixty years, was not immune from globalization—the country's resistance wreaked
havoc upon the economic and social growth of the nation. Instead, Cuba, as a global actor, reconfigures itself to retain
power in its new model of global engagement. And yet, Cuba's decision to gradually reform economic
policies is not made in isolation; while Raúl Castro certainly makes the decisions, many of these decisions have already been made
for Cuba by a globalized world. Upon review, Cuba will retain its ideological goals without completely compromising
or adhering to the other forms of governance—this is what globalization means, the permeation of even the most historically
uncompromising country and the harmonization of certain key ideas and practices embraced by the rest of the world. Moreover, it shows that
globalization does not stop with market-based or neoliberal governance; instead, as Deng Xiaoping stated, "[The] [m]arket can also serve
socialism."135 Although Cuba certainly will stop [End Page 387] short of embracing market socialism, it is engaging economic globalization
as a global actor.136 The state can carve out niches for globalization; however, the question remains how Cuba and other states can limit the
undesirable aspects of globalization—here, the neoliberal parts—while benefitting from the harmonization of globalization.

And, removing Cuba from the list would not open it up to enough trade to trigger the link
Burns, Adjunct Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, ’13 [Clif, U.S. May Be
Considering Dropping Cuba from Terrorist Country List, Export Law Blog, Feb 21,
http://www.exportlawblog.com/archives/4732]

If you think that the removal of Cuba from the list will permit unlicensed exports of food, medicine and agricultural
goods to Cuba, think again. Although section 7205 of the Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act of 2000
(“TSRA”) does indeed impose a license requirement on shipments of these goods to state sponsors of terrorism, it
also directly imposes that restriction on TSRA exports to Cuba. So a license will still be required even if
Cuba is removed from the list. Section 40 of the Arms Export Control Act prohibits granting licenses for
the export of items on the United States Munitions List to state supporters of terrorism. So there is a
theoretical possibility, I suppose, that if Cuba is removed from the list, the arms embargo against Cuba might
also be lifted. Right. When pigs fly. Then we have Section 6(j) of the now-defunct Export Administration Act as allegedly
extended in force by various executive orders. That provision requires that certain licenses for exports of goods on the
Commerce Control List to state sponsors of terrorism be notified to Congress. Since licenses for CCL
items are rarely granted in any event for Cuba, and seem unlikely to be granted even if Cuba is removed
from the list, this doesn’t seem to an area in which Cuba’s removal would have much impact. In sum,
removal of Cuba from the list seems largely symbolic and with little practical effect. At most, it could presage a
liberalization of the embargo down the road, particularly if the current Cuban government gnaws on this bone a little rather than simply regarding
it with disdain.
 Link – AT: Reformism Bad
Their links are a fantasy. Actual movements against neoliberalism require pragmatic issues
to organize around, not abstract revolutions.
David Harvey, Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York,
2010 (The Enigma of Capital, and the crises of capitalism 224-228)

The co-revolutionary theory laid out earlier would suggest that

there is no way that an anti -capitalist social order can be
constructed without seizing state power, radically transforming it and reworking the constitutional and
institutional framework that currently supports private property, the market system and endless capital
accumulation. Inter-state competition and geoeconomic and geopolitical struggles over everything from trade and money to questions of
hegemony are also either far too significant to be left to local social movements or cast aside as too big to contemplate. How the architecture of
the state-finance nexus is to be reworked, along with the pressing question of the common measure of value given by money, cannot be ignored
in the quest to construct alternatives to capitalist political economy. To ignore the state and the dynamics of the inter-state system is therefore a
ridiculous idea for any anti-capitalist revolutionary movement to accept. The fourth broad trend is constituted by all the social
movements that are not so much guided by any particular political philosophy or leanings but by the
pragmatic need to resist displacement and dispossession (through gentrification, industrial development,
dam construction, water privatisation, the dismantling of social services and public educational
opportunities, or whatever). In this instance the focus on daily life in the city, town, village or wherever
provides a material base for political organising against the threats that state policies and capitalist
interests invariably pose to vulnerable populations. Again, there is a vast array of social movements of this sort, some of
which can become radicalised over time as they come to realise more and more that the problems are systemic rather than particular and local.
The bringing-together of such social movements into alliances on the land (like the landless movement in Brazil or peasants mobilising against
land and resource grabs by capitalist corporations in India) or in urban contexts (the right to the city movements in Brazil and now the United
States) suggest the way may be open to create broader alliances to discuss and confront the systemic forces that underpin the particularities of
gentrification, dam construction, privatisation or whatever. Driven by pragmatism rather than by ideological
preconceptions, these movements nevertheless can arrive at systemic understandings out of their own
experience. To the degree that many of them exist in the same space, such as within the metropolis, they
can (as supposedly happened with the factory workers in the early stages of the industrial revolution)
make common cause and begin to forge, on the basis of their own experience, a consciousness of how
capitalism works and what it is that might be done collectively. This is the terrain where the figure of the 'organic intellectual'
leader, made so much of in the early twentieth -century Marxist writer Antonio Gramsd's work, the autodidact who comes to understand the world first hand through
bitter experiences, but shapes his or her understanding of capitalism more generally, has a great deal to say. To listen to the peasant leaders of the MST in Brazil or the
In this instance the task of the educated discontented
leaders of the anticorporate land grab movement in India is a privileged education.
is to magnify the subaltern voice so that attention can be paid to the circumstances of exploitation and
repression and the answers that can be shaped into an anti-capitalist programme.
 Impact – AT: Root Cause – Terror Aff
Challenging the politics and ontology of security outweighs anti-capitalism. The hostile
relationship to Otherness at the heart of the War on Terror cannot be fully explained by
capitalism.
Burke, Professor of Politics and International Relations in the University of New South Wales, 2006
[Anthony, Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence, pp. 129-134]

True, neo-liberal globalisation ‘tends to deconstruct the boundaries of the nation-state’, but not its
ontology. Consider the genesis of Empire after the Second World War. Rigid, fear-soaked ontologies of Cold War anticommunism,
combined with massive military expenditures, levels of strategic confrontation and internal repression, were central to the vast movement of US, European and Asian accumulation from 1950 to
A rigid and coercive division between ‘democracy’ and ‘communism’, between Self and Other, was
1989.

then fed into a Hegelian discourse of development and progress where the Other ideally dissolved into the Same.34 Such ontologies
continued in Southeast Asia beyond that, through to the Cambodian settlement and the fall of Suharto, when they were partially dismantled through the (very limited) liberalisation of Indonesian
politics and the normalisation of relations with Vietnam (which did admittedly occur in tandem with new ‘imperial’ movements of foreign capital into the socialist markets of Vietnam and
the Persian Gulf
China). For a period, which we can date from the early 1990s until 11 September 2001, a global binary confrontation fractured into more local and regional confrontations:

War, the Balkans, Chechnya, the first Intifada, civil war in Cambodia and Burma, repression of the Kurds and Tibetans, East Timor and Aceh, the 1998
riots in Indonesia. Surely these conflicts were proof that modern sovereignty and its vicious, security-obsessed

ontology was not passing. Nor was modern sovereignty unrelated to the continuing reliance of capital on strong states for ‘stability’, the control of labour, and the security of
mines and oil fields. Now, the great binary confrontation has returned – between ‘freedom’ and ‘terror’, ‘civilisation’ and
‘evil’ – which draws in wider and wider sections of the global polity and reinforces modern sovereignty in the worst way. Hardt and Negri’s analysis here rests, I suspect, on having swallowed
the ‘democratic peace’ theory whole, refracted via Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’: ‘sovereign power’, they assert, ‘will no longer confront its Other and no longer face its outside, but rather will
progressively expand its boundaries to envelop the entire globe as its domain’.35 Where Fukuyama divided the world between the developed ‘post-historical’ world (where democratic peace
would reign) and the ‘historical’ world (where war and conflict continue), Hardt and Negri describe a world of ‘minor and internal conflicts’. The ‘history of imperialist, inter-imperialist and anti-
imperialist wars is over’ they say; there are only civil wars, police actions, a ‘proliferation of minor and indefinite crises . . . an omni-crisis’.36 This tends to diminish the destructive power of the
‘minor and indefinite crises’ they cite, both in terms of scale, loss of life and political importance, and with them the theoretical trajectories that are most able to challenge them. While they do
briefly acknowledge the import of ‘postmodern’ theorising in the discipline of IR, they still (mistakenly) regard it as trapped in a death-struggle with modern sovereignty, despite their earlier
admission that such scholarship ‘strive[s] to challenge the sovereignty of states by deconstructing the boundaries of the ruling powers, highlighting irregular and uncontrolled international
movements and flows, and thus fracturing stable unities and oppositions’.37 National Deconstruction, David Campbell’s study of the interpenetration of sovereignty and conflict in Bosnia-
Herzegovina, for example, starkly illustrates the dangers of assuming sovereignty’s passage or irrelevance. There he shows how purist discourses of sovereignty and territorial identity both drove
ethnic cleansing and crippled international responses. In turn, his attempts to critically rethink sovereignty and democracy, via Derridean deconstruction and Levinasian ethics, provide invaluable
tools for preventing such a disaster from ever reoccurring. Two-hundred thousand dead, UN humiliation, instability in Yugoslavia and the Kosovo war were the legacies of the very violent, and
thoroughly contemporary, perseverance of sovereignty in a crisis that was far from ‘minor’.38 The theoretical double-movement that asserts the disappearance of modern sovereignty from
reality, and the obsolescence of anti-modernist thought as a political guidepost, has two effects that must be interrogated. First, it imagines a new kind of polit ical subject, the ‘multitude’, which
can hopefully mimic and subvert the same deterritorialising movement of capital without succumbing to it; and, second, it enforces the new description of rule, ‘Empire’, as the most pressing
political task. Yet we can reasonably ask whether this subject is so ripe for fruition, or whether the continued operation of modern technologies of sovereignty and identity might not be in danger
we can ask whether in order to liberate the multitude we need to continue to critique
of crippling its emergence; likewise

and fight modern sovereignty, to fight its hold on subjectivity, its violence, and its complex enabling relationship with global capital. Only then can we begin to grapple
with the irony William Connolly identifies: ‘the more global capital becomes, the more aggressive the state is with respect to

citizen allegiances and actions’.39 In short, the teleological metaphor is the wrong one. We need instead to
think in terms of a strategic coexistence of imperial and modern ontology whose objectives are somatic and spatial: the control and
production of bodies, land and space as a necessary (but not always umbilical) adjunct to the flow and exploitation of capital. Tactical sovereignty: post-Suharto Indonesia Contemporary
Indonesia certainly provides one of the most stark examples of the work of Empire, but it is also an example of the contemporary perseverance of sovereignty. Pressed to open its capital markets
during the 1990s, and long influenced by the liberal development advice of the World Bank (which chaired the aid consortium the Consultative Group on Indonesia), tens of billions of short-term
capital flooded in during the 1990s, much of which was channelled into property and sharemarket speculation and the corrupt business practices of the Suharto family and other cronies. Such
capital account liberalisation, with its complex interrelationship with currency speculation, corruption and political crisis, was a major factor in the terrible financial crash of 1997–8.40 In the
wake of this ‘Asian’ crisis, the IMF grossly infringed the sovereignty of the Indonesian state with detailed programmes that amount to indirect control of its entire economic policy. We could be
forgiven, in the face of this, for thinking sovereignty was passing. The IMF simultaneously demanded and utilised that same sovereignty as it forced the Indonesian state to bail out insolvent
private banks – assuming liability for their bad loans, the often worthless piles of assets and the crippling responsibilities of debt service. Such debts – incurred through IMF ‘bail-out’ packages
and the issue of bonds to insolvent banks – now reached US$154 billion, and required 51 per cent of the national budget in servicing amid forced reductions in subsidies and spending on health
and education.41 The bailout also helped Indonesia’s corrupt elite by socialising their burden of debt, and quarantining assets in the Indonesian Bank Restructuring Authority (IBRA) which has
since been the subject of an unseemly struggle to prevent assets being sold in the hope that they can be shifted – minus the debt they originally secured – back to their former owners.42 Needless
to say, this has caused enormous hardship and misery, and further disenfranchised an already marginalised population. We may wonder whether sovereignty in such contexts is less a secure
ontological container, or a stable site of political agency and authority, than a strategic handhold for power – abrogated here, incited there, deployed, evaded and reinvented within a struggle over
who can seize and shape its myriad administrative, economic, cultural, spatial and political potentials. Here is a symptom of the loss of economic autonomy and authority that was assumed to
attach to sovereignty, but also of its continuity as an enabling juridical structure for both domestic and transnational capital; sovereignty as a site of tactical contest not only between classes and
social groups, but between corporations and sectors of capital itself. The imperial ‘sovereignty’ exercised by the IMF on behalf of Western banks and investors depends on the modern
sovereignty of states, which continues to perform a significant channelling, policing and legalising function both of capital and labour. This has been recognised by scholars of ‘international
political economy’, who emphasise the enabling role of the state in the creation of that most profound symptom of Empire, the liberalisation of global finance. Susan Strange argues that ‘markets
exist under the authority and permission of the state’, while Jeffrey Frieden tellingly reminds us that ‘political consent made the global financial integration of the past thirty years possible’.43
Indonesia is also an example of a central paradox of the contemporary crisis of sovereignty: the way in which the (often wilful) loss of economic autonomy is matched by an insistence on
repressive, territorial images of national integrity, security and identity. As Connolly argues, ‘while political movements, economic transactions, environmental dangers, security risks, cultural
communications, tourist travel, and disease transmission increasingly acquire global dimensions, the state retains a tight grip over public definitions of danger, security, collective identification
and democratic accountability’.44 Even through its ‘democratic’ transition, Indonesia still plays out a politics of security directed against a variety of threatening Others who in the past have
taken myriad forms: the Chinese victims of the 1998 riots, the ‘ungrateful’ Catholics of East Timor, the Christians of Maluku, the West Papuans or the Acehnese. While there have been,
admittedly, laudable efforts to promote greater autonomy for some regions, the harsh ‘security approach’ of the Indonesian military (TNI) still perseveres. The TNI’s sponsorship of militia
violence in East Timor led to massive destruction and international intervention; nearly 1,000 civilians have died in Aceh since 1999, and the military has even been implicated in the religious
violence in Maluku.45 This ironic situation was starkly demonstrated by two events in late 2001: within two weeks the Indonesian parliament passed a new autonomy law for West Papua and the
indigenous leader Theys Eluay was killed by the Indonesian special forces command, Kopassus. In August 2002, repeating the political double-take of the year before, the Indonesian military
issued an ultimatum for the Acehnese resistance movement to accept an autonomy package and abandon independence or risk ‘firmer’ military action. Their deadline? The 7 December
anniversary of the invasion of East Timor.46 Indonesia, the state that haemorrhages its sovereignty to the global market, simultaneously asserts its ‘national integrity’ with increasing harshness.
As it does so it performs, more and more abjectly, its failure to imagine a different form of politics, a different form of coexistence, a different model of identity than that which must always
‘appropriate and grasp the otherness of the unknown’. As Levinas asks: ‘My being-in-theworld or my ‘place in the sun’ . . . have these not also been the usurpation of spaces belonging to the
other man who I have already oppressed or starved . . . are they not acts of repulsing, excluding, exiling, stripping, killing?’47 This, for me, raises an issue of political priority. What is more
dangerous, the fluid grasp of capital or the violent ontology of modernity? Could they not form a common and intertwined danger? Neoliberal sovereignty: security and the refugee The coercive
reassertion of sovereignty amid its imperial corrosion is not confined to Third World national security states recently emerging from dictatorship; it is visible, in not unconnected ways, in
developed states as well. At the beginning of the twenty-first century this has most clearly emerged in the travail of the asylum seeker. Attitudes and policies towards asylum seekers have been
hardening for over a decade, in Britain, continental Europe and the United States. Anxieties over the integrity of physical borders (when borders to capital have been all but removed) are
increasing, and policy is moving to match such anxieties in the face of a long-standing body of international law and new regional institutions like the European Convention on Human Rights.48
This has been most pronounced in Australia, where a neo-liberal government has been championing economic globalisation while instituting ever more repressive policies of mandatory
detention, restrictions to legal process, and military operations to repel boats. Australia’s policy became world news in August 2001 with the crisis over the Norwegian ship the Tampa, which
CNN compared with the Voyage of the Damned; however, controversy over beatings, protests, self-mutilation, suicide and psychological trauma in many detention centres had been developing
for some time.49 At the general election in November 2001, the Howard government also drew on historical and racial anxieties about fears of invasion and Anglo-Celtic cultural integrity to
retain office. Its policies drew on and developed those previously deployed by the United States against Cuban and Haitian refugees. Flows of asylum seekers became militarised and securitised,
demonisation of the Other, the Stranger, and their
‘transformed into a threat not only to the state but to the security and identity of the host society’.50 The

incarceration and punishment for simply being non-citizens, is part of the general apparatus of governmentality and biopower
intrinsic to modern sovereignty; but one deployed now as a way of managing resentful publics and controlling global flows. If, as McKenzie Wark argues, ‘migration is globalisation from
The repressive reassertion of sovereignty against the refugee
below’, its repressive securitisation aims to preserve the privileges of globalisation from above.51

is utterly bound up with the dissolution of sovereignty in neo-liberal economic restructuring, and its insistence on permanent
mass unemployment; a perfect way for neo-liberal governments to evade responsibility for the palpable hardship and insecurity experienced by the losers of globalisation at home and abroad.
This is a wilful displacement of the ‘permanent and irreducible’ postmodern uncertainty analysed by Zygmunt Bauman, for which neo-liberalism bears so much responsibility: the troubled
context for John Howard’s promises to provide Australians with a sense of security and ‘home’, a repressive and futile panacea for the globalisation-induced upheaval he deems so necessary.52
This, to me, contradicts Hardt and Negri’s insistence that ‘the transcendence of modern sovereignty . . . conflicts with the immanence of capital’, and questions their traditionally
Marxian insistence on capitalist power as the major focus for resistance and political action. (Their insistence on the
primacy of the ‘terrain of production’ and the development of ‘posthuman’ forms of labour power is a kind of postmodern echo of the statement in the Communist Manifesto that ‘the history of
Rather I would insist on the historical interrelationship of modernity, bio-
all society up to now is the history of class struggles’.)53

power, sovereignty and capital (as Foucault suggested more than once); on their interrelationship as problems, and on modernity’s important status as a unique focus for
critical politics. Modernity not as a ‘time’ but as a political formation which brings not just the repression and alienation of labour but detention
centres, prisons, death camps, ethnic cleansing, counter-insurgency, nuclear weapons and killing at a distance.54 I write here from a ‘disciplinary’ situation. For the critical international theorist,
sovereignty as a political problem occurs not merely through its abrogation or its passage towards Empire, but through the persistence of its central normative status in international relations. This
in strategy and statecraft sovereignty remains associated with inherently violent images of
is not merely nostalgia –

security and identity that draw constant sustenance from the poisonous soil of modern ontology. Such facts
underlie, for example, Jim George’s appeal ‘for serious critical reflection upon the fundamental philosophical premises of western modernity’.55 Just as neoliberal states collude in the
construction of Empire, they continue to insist on the ontological primacy of the state and its monopoly on the legitimate use of force, a ‘monopoly’ which variously imprisons and expels
refugees, incarcerates African-Americans, dispossesses indigenous people and runs ‘counter-insurgency’ operations against that most sinister threat to the nation – the movement for secession. A
malign contemporary force to Hobbes’s founding conditions for the survival of the State: ‘Concord, Health; Sedition, Sickness; and Civill war, Death’.56 As I have argued throughout this book,
Warfare, killing and conflict are often driven
in such a context, security ironically rests on the necessity of the insecurity and suffering of the Other.

less by the imperatives of capitalism (present though they often are) than by the logic of an ontology that refuses to
coexist with otherness and seeks an absolute solution to the threat of its existence . This is as true of the Howard
government’s ‘deterrence’ of asylum seekers through detention and military expulsion, as it is of the more openly violent strategy of the Israeli state when faced with Palestinian violence and
Such images of security weld together ontological necessity, positivist epistemology, ‘realist’
demands for justice.

morality and an instrumental image of technology in the hope of realising the modern dream of what Levinas
called the absolute ‘correlation between knowledge and being’.57 This time has not passed, it is not in

twilight; it enables and coexists with Empire, thwarts its temporal pull, and generates its own political
urgency that is both a part of and additional to the necessary work against capital’s global sovereignty.
 Impact – AT: Root Cause – General
Capitalism is not the root cause of war
Dandeker, Professor of Military Sociology in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London,
in ‘92 [Christopher , “The Causes of War and the History of Modern Sociological Theory,” Effects of War on Society, Edited by Giorgio
Ausenda, Published by the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Social Stress by Boydell & Brewer Ltd, p. 44-46]

All these arguments presuppose two specious sociological contentions: first that capitalism, as the most historically developed
and dynamic form of class exploitation, is the source of modern militarism, and second, that socialism, preferably on a
world scale would involve the abolition of war. The deficiencies in these views, and indeed of those associated with the industrial society
thesis discussed earlier, can be revealed by drawing on Machiavellian themes which can then be set out more explicitly in the next section. Despite the fact
that industrial capitalism has produced two world wars, as Aron (1954) and more recently Michael Mann (1984) have argued, there
is no ’special relationship’ between capitalism and militarism—or the tendency to war—only one of
historical indifference. All the pre-dispositions of ‘capitalist states’ to use warfare calculatively as a
means of resolving their disputes with other states predate the formation of capitalism as an economic
system. Of course, it could be argued that capitalism merely changes the form of militarism. That is to say, pre-capitalist patterns of militarism were still
expressions of class relations and modern capitalism has just increased the destructive power of the industrialised means of war available to the state. But this
argument will not do. Socialist societies in their use of industrialised power show that the technological potential
for war is transferable and can be reproduced under non-capitalist conditions. Furthermore, the military
activities of socialist states cannot be explained in terms of a [end page 44] defensive war against capitalism or
even an aggressive one, as national and geopolitical power motives are arguably just as significant in the
determination of state behaviour. Furthermore, imperial expansion not only predates capitalism but it is also difficult to reduce the causes of wars
then and now to the interests of dominant economic classes (Mann 1984:25-46). Meanwhile, modern attempts to explain patterns of
military expenditure in terms of the imperatives of capital accumulation face major difficulties. The association
between economic boom and military spending has been revealed as an empirical association not an inherent connection; indeed the evidence from Germany and
Japan indicates that low levels of military spending might well be associated with economic performances superior to those of societies which commit more of their
GNP to defence expenditure. Furthermore, the idea that war and the threat of war are weapons of national mythology
used by dominant classes to confuse the working class and weaken their natural affinity with international
socialism faces the problem that, as in the case of Europe in 1914, national enthusiasms were such that truly
remarkable powers would have to be attributed to ruling classes in order to make sense of them while in
any case alternative explanations are at hand (Howard 1976:108-15). The problems of economic determinism in Marxist social theory are
compounded by two further difficulties. The first of these concerns is its emphasis on endogenous, unfolding models of social change. The tendency is to
view state behaviour in terms of the imperatives of internal class relations with warfare being regarded as
the externalisation of the contradictory nature of those relations. Marxism finds it difficult to view inter-
state relations as characterised by structural interdependencies of a politico-strategic nature. The drift of Marxism
is to regard the state as a class actor not as a geopolitical one. This failing derives not just from the internalist bias of Marxist social theory but also from its failure to
provide a satisfactory account of the conditions under which the human species has become differentiated into separate societies and, more specifically, why it is that
the modern capitalist economic system has developed in the context of a system of competing nation-states—a political system extending from the core of Europe to
there is nothing in capitalism as an
the rest of the globe during the course of the twentieth century. As Michael Mann has suggested
economic system which presupposes or requires such a political system although there is a strong [end page
45] case in favour of the view that the development and triumph of modern capitalism benefited from the
constant power struggle amongst the emergent nation-states of European civilisation (Hall 1986; Mann 1988). In
Marxist theory, the rise of nation-states has been interpreted as an early stage in the political expression of the universality of the capitalist market, an expression
which will change with the demands of capital accumulation (Semmel 1981: 166-73). A contemporary case in point would be the current shift to European integration
in the context of global competition amongst the major capitalist blocs. However, nationalism is not a bourgeois phenomenon created to provide ideological and legal
conditions favourable for capitalist economic relations. Nor are modern nationalisms, when suitably ‘decoded,’ enthusiastic proletarian movements ready to take the
stage vacated by their less distinguished Western comrades. Nationalism is a far more significant motor of human history than class—a fact which was recognised by
some Marxists in the early twentieth century: Mussolini was one of them (Ashworth and Dandeker 1986:82-7; Dandeker 1985:349-67; Gregor 1974:145-7; Smith
1983:47-50). The inability of Marxism to provide a satisfactory account of nationalism is part of a broader failure to explain why ’societies’ exist at all. That is to say,
in relation to the four clusters of modernity distinguished earlier, it is through the conjoining of industrialism, capitalism, bureaucratic surveillance and the state
monopolisation of the means of violence that modern societies have emerged. As Anthony Giddens has suggested, societies are actually products of modernity (and
not one dimension of modernity, i.e., class relations within capitalism). If by society one means a clearly demarcated and internally well articulated social entity it is
only relatively recently that large human populations have lived under such arrangements and these have been the achievements of modern nation-states (Dandeker
1990:51; Giddens 1985:172).
Capitalism is not the root cause of violence
Aberdeen, Author & Philanthropist, ‘3 (Richard, Uncommon Sense, Ch. 80, p. google)

that capitalism, free enterprise, multi-national corporations and globalization are the primary
A view shared by many modern activists is

cause of the current global Human Rights problem and that by striving to change or eliminate these, the root problem of
what ills the modern world is being addressed. This is a rather unfortunate and historically myopic view, reminiscent of early “class struggle” Marxists
who soon resorted to violence as a means to achieve rather questionable ends. And like these often brutal early Marxists, modern anarchists who resort to violence to solve the problem are
walking upside down and backwards, adding to rather than correcting, both the immediate and long-term Human Rights problem. Violent revolution, including our own American revolution,
Large, publicly traded corporations are created by individuals
becomes a breeding ground for poverty, disease, starvation and often mass oppression leading to future violence.

or groups of individuals, operated by individuals and made up of individual and/or group investors . These business enterprises are deliberately structured to be empowered by
individual (or group) investor greed. For example, a theorized ‘need’ for offering salaries much higher than is necessary to secure competent leadership (often resulting in corrupt and entirely
incompetent leadership), lowering wages more than is fair and equitable and scaling back of often hard fought for benefits, is sold to stockholders as being in the best interest of the bottom-line
market value and thus, in the best economic interests of individual investors. Likewise, major political and corporate exploitation of third-world nations is rooted in the
individual and jointgreed of corporate investors and others who stand to profit from such exploitation. More than just investor greed, corporations are driven by the greed of all
those involved, including individuals outside the enterprise itself who profit indirectly from it. If one examines “the course of human events” closely, it can correctly be surmised that the

“root” cause of humanity’s problems comes from individual human greed and similar negative individual motivation. The
Marx/Engles view of history being a “class” struggle ¹ does not address the root problem and is thus fundamentally flawed from a true historical perspective (see for more details). So-called
“classes” of people,unions, corporations and political groups are made up of individuals who support the particular group or organizational position based on their own individual needs, greed
nations engage in wars of aggression, not
and desires and thus, an apparent “class struggle” in reality, is an extension of individual motivation. Likewise,

because capitalism or classes of society are at root cause, but because individual members of a society are individually
convinced that it is in their own economic survival best interest. War, poverty, starvation and lack of Human and Civil Rights have
existed on our planet since long before the rise of modern capitalism, free enterprise and multi-national corporation avarice, thus the root problem obviously goes deeper
than this. Junior Bush and the neo-conservative genocidal maniacs of modern-day America could not have recently effectively gone to war against Iraq without the individual support of
individual troops and a certain percentage of individual citizens within the U.S. population, each lending support for their own personal motives, whatever they individually may have been.
While it is true that corrupt leaders often provoke war, using all manner of religious, social and political means to justify, often as not, entirely ludicrous ends, very rare indeed is a battle only
engaged in by these same unscrupulous miscreants of power. And though a few iniquitous elitist powerbrokers may initiate nefarious policies of global genocidal oppression, it takes a very great
many individuals operating from individual personal motivations of survival, desire and greed to develop these policies into a multi-national exploitive reality. No economic or political
organization and no political or social cause exists unto itself but rather, individual members power a collective agenda. A workers’ strike has no hope of succeeding if individual workers do not
perceive a personal benefit. And similarly, a corporation will not exploit workers if doing so is not believed to be in the economic best interest of those who run the corporation and who in turn,
must answer (at least theoretically) to individuals who collectively through purchase or other allotment of shares, own the corporation. Companies have often been known to appear benevolent,
offering both higher wages and improved benefits, if doing so is perceived to be in the overall economic best interest of the immediate company and/or larger corporate entity. Non-unionized
business enterprises frequently offer ‘carrots’ of appeasement to workers in order to discourage them from organizing and historically in the United States, concessions such as the forty-hour
workweek, minimum wage, workers compensation and proscribed holidays have been grudgingly capitulated to by greedy capitalist masters as necessary concessions to avoid profit-crippling
strikes and outright revolution. It is important to understand that so-called workers ‘rights’ and benefits were not volunteered by American capitalists or their political stooges (including several
U.S. presidents) without extreme and often violent worker coercive persuasion over a great many years of prolonged strikes and similar worker revolts. Modern supply-side Adam Smith inspired
economic pipe dreams of unencumbered markets freely moving toward the common good are clearly and fundamentally, based on outright lies and not very well-masked, deliberate capitalist
deception (again, see Gallo Brothers for more information. Those who proclaim the twisted gospel of modern supply-side economic theory are generally those who have a lot to gain from its
acceptance, both economically and politically. Large political and other problems are historically created gradually stemming from negative individual leading to negative group motivation, in
turn leading to negative individual and group action. The correct root solution to humanity’s problems becomes, by historical default, changing individual negative motivation towards positive
motivation. This is not at all a new theory, as it was first stated over two thousand years ago by Jesus, historically the founder of Human and Civil Rights and not at all, the founder of Christianity
or of any other religious movement; virtually everything Jesus said and did goes directly to human motivation, is community oriented, has little to do with modern conceptions of religion and is
the antithesis of modern Christianity (see Revolution for more information). Contrary to many current views painted of him, Jesus was extremely political, the correct political (and other)
solution from true perspective being to center on and change individual motivation. That is, if we wish to constructively change the extensive political and social problem plaguing our planet
today, the root cause of negative individual human motivation leading to negative action must be addressed at the fundamental individual level. This correct political theory is seen as successfully
initiated by early followers of Jesus, who practiced extreme communism, having no law “but to love one another”, sharing all things in common, allotting to each according to their need and
giving the excess to the poor (which since they were mostly very poor, was a true sacrifice). ² This was a way of life foreign to their culture, was viewed as a severe threat to the established
religious and political order and thus, they were thrown to the lions accordingly. The arising extended movement, called “The Way” by those who joined (it was not called “Christianity” by them,
nor did these early followers view themselves as founders of a religion ), ³ represents extreme far-left radicalism even by modern liberal activist cooperative standards. It has thus been historically
demonstrated that if people practice the Human Rights foundation axiom set down by Jesus to treat other people as we ourselves wish to be treated, established ways of living will change,
including non-violent elimination of the entire idea of capitalist oppression based on individual gain and private property ownership. In practicing The Way, economic oppression is dealt with
from the root cause up and thus, is overcome with love and peaceful unselfish collective co-existence. It is important to note that claiming to be a follower of Jesus and actually practicing “The
Way” are today usually two entirely different realities; the modern 21st Century world has plenty of examples of the former and virtually no examples of the latter. Lenin and the Communist
party overthrew a very oppressive capitalist Czarist system. It did not take long for one corrupt system to be replaced by
another, where even without capitalism and free enterprise to aggravate the Human Rights problem, people of power within the Communist political
structure began, similar to their counterparts of capitalistic excess in Europe and America, exploiting the mass population for their own individual

benefit, comfort and excess. Thus the root problem is exposed as going deeper than simply changing an oppressive capitalist or
other system. Quite obviously, changing a corrupt system does not by itself, change the corrupt people who invented and supported

it, neither does it change negative individual motivation leading to group oppression based on irrational disparagement of others regarding sex, color, intelligence or other perceived difference
and neither does it prevent waste, laziness, murder, theft and rape by individuals within a perceived economic “class”.
 Cap Good – Ethics
Capitalism is ethical—provides means to better lives
Saunders 7 – fellow, Center for Independent Studies (Peter, Why Capitalism is Good for the Soul,
http://www.cis.org.au/POLICY/summer%2007-08/saunders_summer07.html)

What Clive Hamilton airily dismisses as a ‘growth fetish’ has resultedin one hour of work today delivering twenty-five
times more value than it did in 1850. This has freed huge chunks of our time for leisure, art, sport, learning, and other
‘soul-enriching’ pursuits. Despite all the exaggerated talk of an ‘imbalance’ between work and family life, the average Australian today
spends a much greater proportion of his or her lifetime free of work than they would had they belonged to any previous generation in
history. There is another sense, too, in which capitalism has freed individuals so they can pursue worthwhile lives , and
that lies in its record of undermining tyrannies and dictatorships. As examples like Pinochet’s Chile and Putin’s Russia vividly demonstrate, a
free economy does not guarantee a democratic polity or a society governed by the rule of law. But as Milton Friedman once pointed out, these
latter conditions are never found in the absence of a free economy.(12) Historically, it was capitalism that delivered humanity from the ‘soul-
destroying’ weight of feudalism. Later, it freed millions from the dead hand of totalitarian socialism. While capitalism may not be a sufficient
condition of human freedom, it is almost certainly a necessary one. [continues] Wherever populations have a chance to move,
the flow is always towards capitalism, not away from it. The authorities never had a problem keeping West
Germans out of East Germany, South Koreans out of North Korea, or Taiwanese out of Communist China. The attraction of living in
a capitalist society is not just that the economy works. It is also that if your version of the good life leads you to turn your
back on capitalism, you don’t have to pick up sticks and move away. If you don’t like capitalism, there is no need to bribe people-
smugglers to get you out of the country. You simply buy a plot of land, build your mud-brick house, and drop out (or, like
Clive, you set up your own think tank and sell books urging others to drop out).
 Cap Good – Growth/Economy
Cap key to growth
Locke 2 (Edwin A., Dean's Professor Emeritus of Leadership and Motivation – University of Maryland,
“Anti-Globalization: The Left's Violent Assault on Global Prosperity”, Capitalism Magazine, 5-1,
http://www.capmag.com/articlePrint.asp?ID=1559)

The advantage of a global economy based on free trade and capitalism is so obvious and so enormous that it is
difficult to conceive of anyone opposing it. The benefit is based on the law of comparative advantage: every
country becomes more prosperous the more it invests in producing and exporting what it does best (in terms of quality, cost, uniqueness, etc.),
and importing goods and services that other countries can produce more efficiently. For example, let us say that Nigerian companies can produce
T-shirts for $1 a piece whereas U.S. companies can only produce them for $5 a piece. Under free trade, Americans will buy their T-shirts from
Nigeria. This division of labor benefits people in both countries. Nigerians will have more money to buy food, clothing and housing. Americans
will spend less on T-shirts and have more money to buy cell phones and SUVs, and the investment capital formerly spent on T-shirts will be put
to more productive uses, say in the area of technology or drug research. Multiply this by millions of products and hundreds of countries and over
time the benefits run into the trillions of dollars. How, then, do we reconcile the incredible benefits of global capitalism with the anti-
globalization movement? The protestors make three claims repeatedly. First, they argue that m ulti n ational c orporation s are
becoming too powerful and threaten the sovereignty of smaller nations. This is absurd on the face of it. Governments have the
power of physical coercion (the gun); corporations do not; they have only the dollar--they function through voluntary trade.
Second, anti-globalists claim that m ulti n ational c ompanie s exploit workers in poor countries by paying lower wages than
they would pay in their home countries. Well, what is the alternative? It is: no wages! The comparative advantage of poorer countries
is precisely that their wages are low, thus reducing the costs of production. If multinational corporations had to pay the same wages as in their
home countries, they would not bother to invest in poorer countries at all and millions of people would lose their livelihoods. Third, it is claimed
that multinational corporations destroy the environments of smaller, poorer countries. Note that if 19th-century America had been subjected to the
environmental legislation that now pervades most Western countries, we ourselves would still be a third-world country. Most of the industries
that made the United States a world economic power--the steel, automobile, chemicals and electrical industries--would never have been able to
develop. By what right do we deprive poor, destitute people in other countries from trying to create prosperity in the same way that we did, which
is the only way possible? All of these objections to global capitalism are just rationalizations. The giveaway, and the clue to
the real motive of today's left and their hangers-on, is that all their protests are against--they are anti-capitalism, anti-free trade, anti-using the
environment for man's benefit--but they are not for anything. In the first third of the 20th century, most leftists were idealists--they stood for and
fought for an imagined, industrialized utopia--Communism (or Socialism). The left's vision was man as a selfless slave of the state, and the state
as the omniscient manager of the economy. However, instead of prosperity, happiness and freedom, Communism and Socialism
produced nothing but poverty, misery and terror (witness Soviet Russia, North Korea and Cuba, among others). Their system
had to fail, because it was based on a lie. You cannot create freedom and happiness by destroying individual rights; and you cannot create
prosperity by negating the mind and evading the laws of economics. Furious over the fact that their envisioned utopia
has collapsed in ruins, the leftists now seek only destruction. They want to annihilate the system that has produced the very prosperity, happiness
and freedom that their system could not produce. That system is capitalism, the system of true social justice where people are free to produce and
keep what they earn. The fact that free trade is now becoming truly global is one of the most important
achievements in the history of mankind. If, in the end, it wins out over statism, global capitalism will bring about the
greatest degree of prosperity and the greatest period of peaceful cooperation in world history. We
should scornfully ignore the nihilist protestors--they have nothing positive to offer. The proper answer to their acts of violence is police power as
a means of protecting our law-abiding citizens from their depredations. We should not only allow global capitalism; we should welcome it and
foster it in every way possible. It is time to rephrase Karl Marx: Workers of the world unite for global capitalism; you
have nothing to lose but your poverty.

Impact is extinction
Zey 98 (Michael, Executive Director – Expansionary Institute, Professor of Management – Montclair
State University, Seizing the Future, p. 34, 39-40)

However, no outside force guarantees the continued progress of the human species, nor does anything
mandate that the human species must even continue to exist. In fact, history is littered with races and
civilizations that have disappeared without a trace. So, too, could the human species. There is no
guarantee that the human species will survive even if we posit, as many have, a special purpose to the species’ existence.
Therefore, the species innately comprehends that it must engage in purposive actions in order to maintain its level
of growth and progress. Humanity’s future is conditioned by what I call the Imperative of Growth, a
principle I will herewith describe along with its several corollaries. The Imperative of Growth states that in order to survive, any
nation, indeed, the human race, must grow, both materially and intellectually. The Macroindustrial Era
represents growth in the areas of both technology and human development, a natural stage in the
evolution of the species’ continued extension of its control over itself and its environment. Although 5 billion strong, our
continued existence depends on our ability to continue the progress we have been making at higher
and higher levels. Systems, whether organizations, societies, or cells, have three basic directions in which to move.
They can grow, decline, or temporarily reside in a state of equilibrium. These are the choices. Choosing any
alternative to growth, for instance, stabilization of production/consumption through zero-growth policies, could have
alarmingly pernicious side effects, including extinction.
[Continues…]
The fifth corollary of the Imperative of Growth claims that a society can remain in a state of equilibrium only
temporarily. In reality, a society seemingly in a phase where it neither improves nor regresses is actually
in a transition to either growth or decline. Such periods easily seduce their contemporaries into a false
sense of security, that their institutions will last forever, they have all the science they need, and there are no more
challenges. In fact, during such periods some imagine that they have reached their “golden age,” perhaps even the “end of history.” During
such periods of supposed equilibrium, the population ceases to prepare itself for new challenges and
becomes risk averse. Importantly, they reject the idea that growth and progress are necessary for their
survival. The sixth corollary evolves from the fifth. If the system chooses not to grow, it will decline and
eventually disappear, either because other organisms or systems overtake it or because it is impossible
to maintain itself even at static levels without in some way deteriorating. This is the Law of Spiraling Regression.
It is indeed a curiosity of the late-twentieth-century culture that this truism has been ignored. In the morass of claims about the risks of
technological growth and its impact on the ecosystem, the mainstream media and orthodox academics have decided not to
consider what harm the full pursuance of zero growth or non growth might inflict on the sociotechnical
system, which includes our technological infrastructure, culture, and standard of living.
 Cap Good – War
Capitalism solves war
Gartzke 7 (Eric, associate professor of political science and a member of the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia
University, “The Capitalist Peace”, American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 51, No. 1, January 2007, Pp. 166–191)

If waris a product of incompatible interests and failed or abortive bargaining, peace ensues when states lack
differences worthy of costly conflict, or when circumstances favor successful diplomacy. Realists and others argue that state
interests are inherently incompatible, but this need be so only if state interests are narrowly defined or when conquest promises tangible benefits.
Peace can result from at least three attributes of mature capitalist economies. First, the historic impetus to
territorial expansion is tempered by the rising importance of intellectual and financial capital, factors that are
more expediently enticed than conquered. Land does little to increase the worth of the advanced economies while resource
competition is more cheaply pursued through markets than by means of military occupation. At the same time,
development actually increases the ability of states to project power when incompatible policy objectives exist.
Development affects who states fight (and what they fight over) more than the overall frequency of warfare. Second, substantial overlap
in the foreign policy goals of developed nations in the post–World War II period further limits the scope and scale of
conflict. Lacking territorial tensions, consensus about how to order the international system has allowed liberal states
to cooperate and to accommodate minor differences. Whether this affinity among liberal states will persist in the next century is a question
open to debate. Finally, the rise of global capital markets creates a new mechanism for competition and
communication for states that might otherwise be forced to fight. Separately, these processes influence patterns of warfare in
the modern world. Together, they explain the absence of war among states in the developed world and account
for the dyadic observation of the democratic peace.

Data proves cap stops war

Hegre et al 2009 (H’vard Hegre, Professor of Political Science @University of Oslo, , John R. Oneal, Professor of Political Science @
The University of Alabama, Bruce Russett, Professor of Political Science @ Yale University) August 25, 2009 “Trade Does Promote Peace: New
Simultaneous Estimates of the Reciprocal Effects of Trade and Conflict” http://www.yale-university.com/leitner/resources/docs/HORJune09.pdf

Liberals expect economically important trade to reduce conflict because interstate violence adversely affects commerce, prospectively or contemporaneously. Keshk,
Reuveny, & Pollins (2004) and Kim & Rousseau (2005) report on the basis of simultaneous analyses of these reciprocal relations that conflict impedes trade but trade
does not deter conflict. Using refined measures of geographic proximity and size—the key elements in the gravity model of
international interactions—reestablishes support for the liberal peace, however. Without careful specification,trade becomes a proxy for these
fundamental exogenous factors, which are also important influences on dyadic conflict. KPR‘s and KR‘s results are
spurious. Large, proximate states fight more and trade more. Our re-analyses show that, as liberals would expect, commerce reduces the
risk of interstate conflict when proximity and size are properly modeled in both the conflict and trade equations. We
provided new simultaneous estimates of liberal theory using Oneal & Russett‘s (2005) data and conflict equation and a trade
model derived from Long (2008). These tests confirm the pacific benefit of trade. Trade reduces the likelihood of a
fatal militarized dispute, 1950–2000 in our most comprehensive analysis, as it does in the years 1984-97
when additional measures of traders‘ expectations of domestic and interstate conflict are incorporated (Long, 2008) and in the period 1885-2000. This strong
support for liberal theory is consistent with Kim‘s (1998) early simultaneous estimates, Oneal, Russett & Berbaum‘s (2003) Granger-style causality tests, and recent
when
research by Robst, Polachek & Chang (2007). Reuveny & Kang (1998) and Reuveny (2001) report mixed results. It is particularly encouraging that,
simultaneously estimated, the coefficient of trade in the conflict equation is larger in absolute value than
the corresponding value in a simple probit analysis. Thus, the dozens of published articles that have addressed the
endogeneity of trade by controlling for the years of peace—as virtually all have done since 1999—have not
overstated the benefit of interdependence. Admittedly, our instrumental variables are not optimal. In some cases, for example, in violation of
the identification rule, the creation or end of a PTA may be a casus belli. More importantly, neither of our instruments explains a large amount of variance. Thus,
future research should be directed to identifying better instruments. Our confidence in the commercial peace does not depend entirely on the empirical evidence,
however; it also rests on the logic of liberal theory. Our new simultaneous estimates—as well as our re-analyses of KPR and KR—indicate that fatal disputes reduce
trade. Even with extensive controls for on-going domestic conflict, militarized disputes with third parties, and expert estimates of the risks of such violence, interstate
conflict has an adverse contemporaneous effect on bilateral trade. This is hardly surprising (Anderton & Carter, 2001; Reuveny, 2001; Li & Sacko, 2002; Oneal,
Russett & Berbaum, 2003; Glick & Taylor, 2005; Kastner, 2007; Long, 2008; Findlay & O‘Rourke, 2007; cf. Barbieri & Levy, 1999; Blomberg & Hess, 2006; and
Ward & Hoff, 2007). If conflict did not impede trade, economic agents would be indifferent to risk and the maximization of profit. Because
conflict is
costly, trade should reduce interstate violence. Otherwise, national leaders would be insensitive to
economic loss and the preferences of powerful domestic actors. Whether paid prospectively or contemporaneously, the
economic cost of conflict should reduce the likelihood of military conflict, ceteris paribus, if national leaders are
rational.
 Cap Good – Status Quo Improving
The status quo is structurally improving
Indur Goklany 10, policy analyst for the Department of the Interior – phd from MSU, “Population, Consumption, Carbon Emissions, and
Human Well-Being in the Age of Industrialization (Part III — Have Higher US Population, Consumption, and Newer Technologies Reduced
Well-Being?)”, April 24, http://www.masterresource.org/2010/04/population-consumption-carbon-emissions-and-human-well-being-in-the-age-
of-industrialization-part-iii-have-higher-us-population-consumption-and-newer-technologies-reduced-well-being/#more-9194

In my previous post I showed that, notwithstanding

the Neo-Malthusian worldview, human well-being has
advanced globally since the start of industrialization more than two centuries ago, despite massive increases in
population, consumption, affluence, and carbon dioxide emissions. In this post, I will focus on long-term trends in the
U.S. for these and other indicators. Figure 1 shows that despite several-fold increases in the use of metals and synthetic organic chemicals, and
emissions of CO2 stoked by increasing populations and affluence, life expectancy, the single best measure of human well-
being, increased from 1900 to 2006 for the US. Figure 1 reiterates this point with respect to materials use. These figures indicate
that since 1900, U.S. population has quadrupled, affluence has septupled, their product (GDP) has increased 30-
fold, synthetic organic chemical use has increased 85-fold, metals use 14-fold, material use 25-fold, and
CO2 emissions 8-fold. Yet life expectancy advanced from 47 to 78 years. Figure 2 shows that during the same
period, 1900–2006, emissions of air pollution, represented by sulfur dioxide, waxed and waned. Food and water got
safer, as indicated by the virtual elimination of deaths from gastrointestinal (GI) diseases between 1900 and 1970. Cropland, a measure of
habitat converted to human uses — the single most important pressure on species, ecosystems, and biodiversity — was more or less
unchanged from 1910 onward despite the increase in food demand. For the most part, life expectancy grew more or less
steadily for the U.S., except for a brief plunge at the end of the First World War accentuated by the 1918-20 Spanish flu epidemic. As in the
rest of the world, today’s U.S. population not only lives longer, it is also healthier. The disability rate for seniors
declined 28 percent between 1982 and 2004/2005 and, despite quantum improvements in diagnostic tools, major diseases (e.g., cancer, and
heart and respiratory diseases) now occur 8–11 years later than a century ago. Consistent with this, data for New York City
indicate that — despite a population increase from 80,000 in 1800 to 3.4 million in 1900 and 8.0 million in 2000 and any associated increases in
economic product, and chemical, fossil fuel and material use that, no doubt, occurred —crude mortality rates have declined more or less steadily
since the 1860s (again except for the flu epidemic). Figures 3 and 4 show, once again, that whatever health-related problems accompanied
economic development, technological change, material, chemical and fossil fuel consumption, and population growth, they were overwhelmed by
the health-related benefits associated with industrialization and modern economic growth. This does not mean that fossil fuel, chemical and
material consumption have zero impact, but it means that overall benefits have markedly outweighed costs. The
reductions in rates of deaths and diseases since at least 1900 in the US, despite increased population,
energy, and material and chemical use, belie the Neo-Malthusian worldview. The improvements in the
human condition can be ascribed to broad dissemination (through education, public health systems, trade and commerce) of
numerous new and improved technologies in agriculture, health and medicine supplemented through
various ingenious advances in communications, information technology and other energy powered
technologies (see here for additional details). The continual increase in life expectancy accompanied by the decline in disease during this
period (as shown by Figure 2) indicates that the new technologies reduced risks by a greater amount than any risks that
they may have created or exacerbated due to pollutants associated with greater consumption of materials,
chemicals and energy, And this is one reason why the Neo-Malthusian vision comes up short. It dwells on
the increases in risk that new technologies may create or aggravate but overlooks the larger — and
usually more certain — risks that they would also eliminate or reduce. In other words, it focuses on the
pixels, but misses the larger picture, despite pretensions to a holistic worldview.
 Alt Fails – Cede the Political – Terrorism Aff
No alternative solvency – challenging the construction of terrorism requires the creative
use of policy-relevant mechanisms. Blanket condemnations fail.
Jackson et al., professors of International Politics at Aberystwyth University, 2007 [Richard, “The
Case for a Critical Terrorism Studies”, paper delivered for 2007 Annual Meeting of the American
Political Science Association, August 30 – September 2,
http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/handle/2160/1945/APSA-2007-Paper-final2.pdf?sequence=1]

If emancipation is central to the critical project, we would argue that CTS cannot remain policy-irrelevant without belying its
emancipatory commitment. It has to move beyond critique and deconstruction to reconstruction and
policy-relevance.53 The challenge of CTS is to engage policy-makers – as well as „terrorists‟ and their communities –
and work towards the realization of new paradigms, new practices and the transformation of political structures. That, after
all, is the original meaning of the notion of „immanent critique‟. Striving to be policy-relevant does not
mean that one has to accept the validity of the term „terrorism‟ or stop investigating the political interests
behind it. Nor does it mean that all research must have policy-relevance or that one has to limit one‟s research to what
is relevant for the state, since the critical turn implies a move beyond state-centric perspectives. End-users could, and should,
include both state and non-state actors, as long as the goal is to combat both the use of political terror by
actors and the political structures that encourage its use. However, engaging policy-makers raises the thorny issue of co-option. One of the fears
of critical scholars is that by engaging with policy-makers, either they or their research become co-opted, whether through governments (ab)using
independent research findings for their own ends, allowing one‟s research to be overly shaped by the agendas of major grant-awarding bodies, or
by gradually coming to uncritically adopt the perspectives and values of policy-makers. A more intractable problem is the one highlighted by
Rengger that „the demand that theory must have a praxial dimension itself runs the risk of collapsing critical theory back into traditional theory
by making it dependent on instrumental conceptions of rationality‟.54 A related problem is that by becoming embedded in existing power
structures, one risks reproducing existing knowledge structures or inadvertently contributing to counter-terrorism policy that uncritically reifies
the status quo. Such dilemmas have to be confronted and debated; non-engagement is not an option. Engagement is facilitated by the fact that as
counterterrorism projects flounder, advisors to policy-makers are increasingly eager for advice, even when it is „critical‟. For obvious reasons,
„embedded‟ terrorism scholars and traditional think-tanks have enjoyed a much closer relationship with policy-makers, allowing them both more
institutionalized and more direct access. This is partly structural, since critical studies have been seen as inherently adversarial towards existing
power structures. Critical scholars have also at times unnecessarily burned bridges by issuing blanket
condemnations of all things associated with the state, whilst failing to engage with the public safety
obligations of the authorities, and the challenges terrorism poses to such safety. Critical scholars cannot
indulge in the unilateral demonizing of all state actors, at the same time as arguing against the
comprehensive demonizing of all „terrorists‟. Simply because a piece of research originates within RAND does not
automatically invalidate it; conversely, a study emanating from a critical scholar is not inherently superior. Just as Fred Halliday
critiqued those who privileged voices from „the South‟ as somehow more authentic, critical scholars must
guard against either privileging „terrorist‟ voices or uncritically dismissing state or state-related actors.55
 Alt Fails – Pragmatism Key
The alternative’s demand for political purity only helps capitalism. Even if they win some
risk of a link, we have to begin with the world we have, not the one we wish we had.
Bryant 12—professor of philosophy at Collin College (Levi, We’ll Never Do Better Than a Politician: Climate Change and Purity, 5/11/12,
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/05/11/well-never-do-better-than-a-politician-climate-change-and-purity/)

However, pointing this out and deriding market based solutions doesn’t get us very far. In fact, such a response to
proposed market-based solutions is downright dangerous and irresponsible. The fact of the matter is that
1) we currently live in a market based world, 2) there is not, in the foreseeable future an alternative system on the
horizon, and 3), above all, we need to do something now. We can’t afford to reject interventions simply
because they don’t meet our ideal conceptions of how things should be. We have to work with the
world that is here, not the one that we would like to be here. And here it’s crucial to note that pointing this out does
not entail that we shouldn’t work for producing that other world. It just means that we have to grapple
with the world that is actually there before us.¶ It pains me to write this post because I remember, with great bitterness, the
diatribes hardcore Obama supporters leveled against legitimate leftist criticisms on the grounds that these critics were completely unrealistic
idealists who, in their demand for “purity”, were asking for “ponies and unicorns”. This rejoinder always seemed to ignore that words have power
and that Obama, through his profound power of rhetoric, had, at least the power to shift public debates and
frames, opening a path to making new forms of policy and new priorities possible. The tragedy was that
he didn’t use that power, though he has gotten better.¶ I do not wish to denounce others and dismiss their claims on these sorts of
grounds. As a Marxist anarchists, I do believe that we should fight for the creation of an alternative hominid ecology or
social world. I think that the call to commit and fight, to put alternatives on the table, has been one of the most powerful contributions of
thinkers like Zizek and Badiou. If we don’t commit and fight for alternatives those alternatives will never appear in the world. Nonetheless,
we still have to grapple with the world we find ourselves in. And it is here, in my encounters with some
Militant Marxists, that I sometimes find it difficult to avoid the conclusion that they are unintentionally aiding
and abetting the very things they claim to be fighting. In their refusal to become impure, to work with
situations or assemblages as we find them, to sully their hands, they end up reproducing the very system
they wish to topple and change. Narcissistically they get to sit there, smug in their superiority and purity,
while everything continues as it did before because they’ve refused to become politicians or engage in the
difficult concrete work of assembling human and nonhuman actors to render another world possible. As a
consequence, they occupy the position of Hegel’s beautiful soul that denounces the horrors of the world, celebrate the
beauty of their soul, while depending on those horrors of the world to sustain their own position. ¶ To
engage in politics is to engage in networks or ecologies of relations between humans and nonhumans. To engage in ecologies is to descend into
networks of causal relations and feedback loops that you cannot completely master and that will modify your own commitments and actions. But
there’s no other way, there’s no way around this, and we do need to act now.
 Alt Fails – Rejection Not Enough
Lack of specific action means the alt will fail
Jones 11—Owen, Masters at Oxford, named one of the Daily Telegraph's 'Top 100 Most Influential
People on the Left' for 2011, author of "Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class", The
Independent, UK, "Owen Jones: Protest without politics will change nothing", 2011,
www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/owen-jones-protest-without-politics-will-change-
nothing-2373612.html
Today, as protesters in nearly a thousand cities across the world follow the example set by the Occupy
Wall Street protests, it's worth pondering what happened to the anti-globalisation movement. Its activists did not

lack passion or determination. But they did lack a coherent alternative to the neo-liberal project.
With no clear political direction, the movement was easily swept away by the jingoism and turmoil
that followed 9/11, just two months after Genoa. Don't get me wrong: the Occupy movement is a glimmer of sanity amid today's economic madness. By descending on the
West's financial epicentres, it reminds us of how a crisis caused by the banks (a sentence that needs to be repeated until it becomes a cliché) has been cynically transformed into a crisis of
public spending. The founding statement of Occupy London puts it succinctly: "We refuse to pay for the banks' crisis." The Occupiers direct their fire at the top 1 per cent, and rightly so –
as US billionaire Warren Buffett confessed: "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." The Occupy movement has provoked
fury from senior US Republicans such as Presidential contender Herman Cain who – predictably – labelled it "anti-American". They're right to be worried: those camping outside banks
But a coherent alternative to the tottering global
threaten to refocus attention on the real villains, and to act as a catalyst for wider dissent.

economic order remains, it seems, as distant as ever. Neo-liberalism crashes around, half-dead, with
no-one to administer the killer blow. There's always a presumption that a crisis of capitalism is good news for the left. Yet in the Great Depression, fascism
consumed much of Europe. The economic crisis of the 1970s did lead to a resurgence of radicalism on both left and right. But, spearheaded by Thatcherism and Reaganism, the New Right
This time round, there doesn't even seem to be an alternative for the right
definitively crushed its opposition in the 1980s.

to defeat . That's not the fault of the protesters. In truth, the left has never recovered from being virtually smothered out of
existence. It was the victim of a perfect storm: the rise of the New Right; neo-liberal globalisation; and
the repeated defeats suffered by the trade union movement. But, above all, it was the aftermath of the collapse of Communism that did for the left .
As US neo-conservative Midge Decter triumphantly put it: "It's time to say: We've won. Goodbye." From the
British Labour Party to the African National Congress, left-wing movements across the world hurtled to the right in an almost synchronised fashion. It was as though the

left wing of the global political spectrum had been sliced off. That's why, although we live in an age of
revolt, there remains no left to give it direction and purpose.
 Alt Fails – Totalitarianism
Marxism has historically led to genocide
Jeffrey T. Kuhner, assistant national editor, The Washington Times November 30, 2003

The 20th century will be remembered as the bloodiest century in history. A major reason was the 1917 establishment by Vladimir Lenin and his
Bolsheviks of a Marxist regime in Russia. The Soviet Union was the epicenter of a communist empire that, until its disintegration in 1991, spread
doctrines of economic collectivism and class struggle to almost every part of the globe. From Eastern Europe to Africa to Latin America to Asia,
hundreds of millions suffered the brutality of Marxist-Leninist dictatorships. Now, if some in Washington have their way, the memories of the
countless victims of communism will be remembered. Led by its courageous president, Jay Katzen, the Victims of Communism Memorial
Foundation [www.victimsofcommunism.org] is seeking to erect a monument in D.C. dedicated to those who perished under Marxism's
murderous reign. Their goal is to have the Memorial Monument built by October of next year. A monument is desperately needed because, sadly,
communism's crimes risk being forgotten. Lenin's project resulted not only in unprecedented economic and
ecological destruction, but more importantly the greatest system of mass murder ever invented: More than
100 million individuals were killed at the hands of communist regimes. Yet many Western academics
continue to deny or downplay the full extent of communist atrocities. It is common on many campuses in the United
States to hear that Marxism-Leninism, unlike its totalitarian twin, fascism, was a benevolent ideology that sought to impose universal peace and
social justice - that it was a good idea gone bad. Nothing could be further from the truth. From its inception, communism sought
to forge a new order based on genocide and mass murder. Lenin set the precedent, followed by subsequent
Marxist regimes, that to establish a revolutionary proletarian state, entire categories of humans needed to be
systematically wiped out: the bourgeoisie, kulaks, counterrevolutionaries and intellectuals who refused to follow
the Bolshevik line. The totalitarian essence of Lenin's vision was that it sought to erect the perfect society by imposing one-party rule and
smashing all dissent and opposition. Recent history has been littered with Lenin's evil offspring - Josef Stalin, Mao Tse-
tung, Josip Broz Tito, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Nicolae Ceausescu, Fidel Castro. The atrocities committed by these dictators
need to be remembered not only to honor the dead but because they reveal the seminal lesson of the past century:
Utopianism leads to totalitarianism; the road to Utopia goes through Golgotha. The millions slaughtered by
communist regimes were not accidental byproducts of misguided policies, but central to the Marxist project.
 Alt Fails – Totalizing
Total rejection of capitalism fragments resistance – the perm solves best
J.K. Gibson-Graham, feminist economist, 96, End of Capitalism

One of our goals as Marxists has been to produce a knowledge of capitalism. Yet as “that which is known,” Capitalism has become the
intimate enemy. We have uncloaked the ideologically-clothed, obscure monster, but we have installed a
naked and visible monster in its place. In return for our labors of creation, the monster has robbed us of
all force. We hear – and find it easy to believe – that the left is in disarray. Part of what produces the disarray of the left is the vision of what
the left is arrayed against. When capitalism is represented as a unified system coextensive with the nation or
even the world, when it is portrayed as crowding out all other economic forms, when it is allowed to
define entire societies, it becomes something that can only be defeated and replaced by a mass collective
movement (or by a process of systemic dissolution that such a movement might assist). The revolutionary task of replacing
capitalism now seems outmoded and unrealistic, yet we do not seem to have an alternative conception of
class transformation to take its place. The old political economic “systems” and “structures” that call forth a vision of revolution as
systemic replacement still seem to be dominant in the Marxist political imagination. The New World Order is often represented as political
fragmentation founded upon economic unification. In this vision the economy appears as the last stronghold of unity and singularity in a world of
diversity and plurality. But why can’t the economy be fragmented too? If we theorized it as fragmented in the United States, we could being to
see a huge state sector (incorporating a variety of forms of appropriation of surplus labor), a very large sector of self-employed and family-based
producers (most noncapitalist), a huge household sector (again, quite various in terms of forms of exploitation, with some households moving
towards communal or collective appropriation and others operating in a traditional mode in which one adult appropriates surplus labor from
another). None of these things is easy to see. If capitalism takes up the available social space, there’s no room for
anything else. If capitalism cannot coexist, there’s no possibility of anything else. If capitalism functions
as a unity, it cannot be partially or locally replaced. My intent is to help create the discursive conception
under which socialist or other noncapitalist construction becomes “realistic” present activity rather than a
ludicrous or utopian goal. To achieve this I must smash Capitalism and see it in a thousand pieces. I must
make its unity a fantasy, visible as a denial of diversity and change.
 Alt Fails – Transition Wars
And, capitalist elites will resist, causing global war
Harris, Atlanta Writer, in ‘2 [Lee, Policy Review, December, p3(13) The intellectual origins of
America-Bashing]

This is the immiserization thesis of Marx. And it is central to revolutionary Marxism, since if
capitalism produces no widespread
misery, then it also produces no fatal internal contradiction: If everyone is getting better off through
capitalism, who will dream of struggling to overthrow it? Only genuine misery on the part of the workers
would be sufficient to overturn the whole apparatus of the capitalist state, simply because, as Marx
insisted, the capitalist class could not be realistically expected to relinquish control of the state apparatus
and, with it, the monopoly of force. In this, Marx was absolutely correct. No capitalist society has ever
willingly liquidated itself, and it is utopian to think that any ever will. Therefore, in order to achieve the
goal of socialism, nothing short of a complete revolution would do; and this means, in point of fact, a full-
fledged civil war not just within one society, but across the globe.
 Alt – AT: Neolib UQ
Neoliberalism is not declining in Latin America – It’s flourishing.
Petras, professor of sociology at Binghamton University, 2010 [James, Latin America: Roads to 21st
Century Capitalist Development, http://www.lahaine.org/petras/b2-img/petras_roads.pdf]

Over the better part of the present decade, Latin American stock markets have boomed. Overseas investors have reaped and repatriated
billions in dividends, profits and interest payments. Multi-national corporations have piled into mining, agro-business
and related sectors, unimpeded and with virtually no demands by local regions for ‘technological
transfers’ and environmental constraints. Latin American regimes, have accumulated unprecedented foreign currency reserves to
ensure that foreign investors have unlimited access to hard currencies to remit profits. The decade has witnessed unprecedented
political and social demobilization of radical social movements. Regimes have provided political and
social protection for foreign and national investors as well as long term guarantees of private property
rights. Nary a single regime in the region, with the unique exception of Venezuela, has reverted the large scale privatizations of strategic
economic sectors implemented by previous neo-liberal regimes in the 1990’s. In fact the concentration and centralization of
fertile lands has continued with no pretense of land or income redistribution on the policy agenda. While
bankers, and investors, overseas and nationals, celebrate the economic boom and more importantly express their positive appreciation by
investing billions in the region, leftist pundits claim to find a “resurgent left” and write of one or another version of 21st century socialism. In
particular many prominent and widely published Euro-American progressives and leftists intellectuals and pundits have badly served their
followers and readers. Commentaries based on jet flyovers provide glowing reports of Latin America’s march to
the left and national independence. Such accounts lack any empirical, historical, analytical or statistical
foundation. Writers as diverse as Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Wallerstein, who have never conducted any field research below the Rio Grande at
any time or for that matter consulted major investors reaping billions in today’s Latin America have become instant experts on the social and
political nature of the regimes, the state of the social movements and current economic policies. It seems as if Latin America is fair game for any
and all Western leftist writers who can echo the political rhetoric of the incumbent regimes. No doubt this secures an occasional official invite but
it hardly serves to clarify the most striking socio-economic features of the current crop of regimes in Latin America and their sharply defined
development strategies. A wealth of data based on extensive field interviews, statistical studies published by international development agencies,
reports by economic consultancies and business and investment houses, as well as discussions with independent social movement leaders
provides ample documentation to argue that Latin America has taken multiple roads to 21st century capitalism, not socialism or anything akin to
it. In fact one of the great success stories celebrated by the business press, is the marginalization of socialist politics, the general acceptance of
“globalization” by the leaders of the political class (from the center-left rightward) and the de-radicalization of the intellectual/academic elite who
wage battle against neo-liberal phantoms while providing populist legitimization for the politicians of 21st century … capitalism. Twenty-First
Century Capitalism: Continuities and Changes Investors, speculators, multinational corporations and trading companies from Asia, Europe, North
America and the Middle East have, in recent years found virtue and value in the economic development policies pursued by recent Latin
American leaders. In particular, they applaud the new found political stability and economic opportunities for long term, high rates of profits. In
fact Latin America is looked at as an outlet for profitable investments surpassing those found in the unstable and volatile markets of the US and
EU. Twenty-first century capitalism (21C) as we know its operations in Latin America overlaps in some of its major features
with the multiple variants of 20th century capitalism. 21C has embraced the “open market” policies of the late 20th
century neoliberal model; it has, promoted agro-mineral exports and importation of finished goods similar
to the early 20th century colonial division of labor. It has borrowed from the nationalist developmental
strategy, policies of state intervention to ameliorate poverty, bailout banks, promote exporters and foreign
investors. As in most ‘late and ‘later’ developing capitalist countries, the state plays an important role in mediating
between agro-mineral exporters and industrial capitalists (national and foreign) in some of the larger countries like Brazil
and Argentina. Unlike earlier versions of liberal and neo-liberal capitalists which, in the first instance dissolved pre-capitalist constraints on
capital flows and later labor and welfare demands constraining capitalist exploitation, current heterodox liberal (or “post-neoliberal”) regimes
attempt to harness and co-opt labor and the poor to the new export strategy. In part, 21st capitalism, can pursue “free market” and welfare/poverty
policiesbecause of the favorable world market conjuncture of high commodity prices and expanding markets in Asia. Increased activity
by the state in regulating capital flows and “picking winners and losers”, promoting agro business over
small farmers, exporters and large retail importers over small and medium producers and retailers –
highlights the compatibility, indeed the importance, of state interventionism in sustaining the “free market”
agromineral export model. While some sectors of capital complained about potential deficits and rising public debts resulting from
increased state spending on poverty programs and in raising the minimum wage, in general most capitalist view the current version of “statism”
as complementary and not in conflict with the larger goals of expanding investment opportunities and capital accumulation.