NEOLIBERALISM K
Neoliberalism K ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 1
Neoliberalism K 1NC .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 1
Cuba Link – Embargo................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 6
Cuba Link – Embargo................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 8
Cuba Link – Democracy Promotion ..................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 9
Cuba Link – Economic Development ................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 10
Link – Disaster Reps ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 10
Link – History of Neoliberalism........................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 12
Link – Elite Decision Making/FIAT* .................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 13
Link – Subjectivity ..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 15
Impact – Extinction .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 16
Impact – Environment............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 17
Impact – Zones of Exclusion ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 18
Impact – Disaster Capitalism ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 20
Alternative – Local Movements........................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 24
Alternative – Counter-Memory ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 25
Framework – Subjectivity 1st................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 29
Framework – Representations Matter .............................................................................................................................................................................................................. 30
NEOLIBERALISM K 1NC
THE AFF’S ECONOMIC ENGAGEMENT WITH CUBA IS AN EXTENSION OF NEOLIBERAL GOVERNMENTALITY,
INTEGRATING
CUBA INTO GLOBAL NETWORKS OF CAPITAL, PRODUCING THE POPULATION AS A NEW FIELD OF
ECONOMIC SUBJECTS
READ ‘9 (Jason, The University of Southern Maine, A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity,
Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 25-36, February 2009)
In order to frame Foucault’s analysis it is useful to begin with how he sees the distinction between liberalism and neoliberalism. For Foucault,
this difference has to do with the different ways in which they each focus on economic activity. Classical liberalism focused on exchange, on
what Adam Smith called mankind’s tendency to “barter, truck, and exchange.” It naturalized the market as a system with its own rationality, its
own interest, and its own specific efficiency, arguing ultimately for its superior efficiency as a distributor of goods and services. The market
became a space of autonomy that had to be carved out of the state through the unconditional right of private property. What Foucault
stresses in his understanding, is the way in which the market becomes more than just a specific institution or practice to the point where it
has become the basis for a reinterpretation and thus a critique of state power. Classical liberalism makes exchange the general matrix of
society. It establishes a homology: just as relations in the marketplace can be understood as an exchange of certain freedoms for a set of
rights and liberties.4 Neoliberalism, according to Foucault, extends the process of making economic activity a general matrix of social and
political relations, but it takes as its focus not exchange but competition.5 What the two forms of liberalism, the “classical” and “neo” share,
according to Foucault, is a general idea of “homo economicus,” that is, the way in which they place a particular “anthropology” of man as an
economic subject at the basis of politics. What changes is the emphasis from an anthropology of exchange to one of competition. The shift
from exchange to competition has profound effects: while exchange was considered to be natural, competition is understood by the neoliberals of the twentieth century to be an artificial relation that must be protected against the tendency for markets to form monopolies and
interventions by the state. Competition necessitates a constant intervention on the part of the state, not on the market, but on the conditions
of the market.6 What is more important for us is the way in which this shift in “anthropology” from “homo economicus” as an exchanging
creature to a competitive creature, or rather as a creature whose tendency to compete must be fostered, entails a general shift in the way in
which human beings make themselves and are made subjects. First,
neoliberalism entails a massive expansion of the field and
scope of economics. Foucault cites Gary Becker on this point: “Economics is the science which studies human behavior as relationship
between ends and scarce means which have alternate uses.” 7
marriage, to crime, to expenditures on children,
Everything for which human beings attempt to realize their ends, from
can be understood “economically” according to a particular calculation of
cost for benefit. Secondly, this entails a massive redefinition of “labor” and the “worker.” The worker has become
“human capital”. Salary or wages become the revenue that is earned on an initial investment, an investment in one’s skills or abilities. Any
activity that increases the capacity to earn income, to achieve satisfaction, even migration, the crossing of borders from one country to
another, is an investment in human capital. Of course a large portion of “human capital,” one’s body, brains, and genetic material, not to
mention race or class, is simply given and cannot be improved. Foucault argues that this natural limit is something that exists to be overcome
through technologies; from plastic surgery to possible genetic engineering that make it possible to transform one’s initial investment. As
Foucault writes summarizing this point of view: “Homo
economicus is an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself.”8 Foucault’s
object in his analysis is not to bemoan this as a victory for capitalist ideology, the point at which the “ruling ideas” have truly become the
ideas of the “ruling class,” so much so that everyone from a minimum wage employee to a C.E.O. considers themselves to be entrepreneurs.
Nor is his task to critique the fundamental increase of the scope of economic rationality in neo-liberal economics: the assertion that
economics is coextensive with all of society, all of rationality, and that it is economics “all the way down.” Rather,
Foucault takes the
neo-liberal ideal to be a new regime of truth, and a new way in which people are made subjects: homo economicus is
fundamentally different subject, structured by different motivations and governed by different principles, than homo juridicus, or the legal
subject of the state. Neoliberalism constitutes a new mode
of “governmentality,” a manner, or a mentality, in which people are governed and govern themselves.
The operative terms of this governmentality are no longer rights and laws but interest, investment and competition. Whereas rights exist to be exchanged, and are some sense constituted through the
original exchange of the social contract, interest is irreducible and inalienable, it cannot be exchanged.
The state channels flows of interest and desire by making
desirable activities inexpensive and undesirable activities costly, counting on the fact that subjects calculate their
interests. As a form of governmentality, neoliberalism would seem paradoxically to govern without governing; that is, in order to
function its subjects must have a great deal of freedom to act—to choose between competing strategies.
The new governmental reason
needs freedom; therefore, the new art of government consumes freedom. It must produce it, it must organize it. The new art of government
therefore appears as the management of freedom, not in the sense of the imperative: “be free,” with the immediate contradiction that this
imperative may contain...[T]he liberalism we can describe as the art of government formed in the eighteenth century entails at its heart a
productive/destructive relationship with freedom. Liberalism must produce freedom, but this very act entails the establishment of limitations,
controls, forms of coercion, and obligations relying on threats, etcetera.9 These freedoms, the freedoms of the market, are not the outside of
politics, of governmentality, as its limit, but rather are an integral element of its strategy. As a mode of governmentality, neoliberalism operates
on interests, desires, and aspirations rather than through rights and obligations; it does not directly mark the body, as sovereign power, or
even curtail actions, as disciplinary power; rather, it acts on the conditions of actions. Thus, neoliberal governmentality follows a general
trajectory of intensification. This trajectory follows a fundamental paradox;
as power becomes less restrictive, less corporeal, it also
becomes more intense, saturating the field of actions, and possible actions. 10
Foucault limits his discussion of neoliberalism to its major theoretical texts and paradigms,
following its initial formulation in post-war Germany through to its most comprehensive version in the Chicago School. Whereas Foucault’s early analyses are often remembered for their analysis of practical documents, the
description of the panopticon or the practice of the confessional, the lectures on “neoliberalism” predominantly follow the major theoretical discussions. This is in some sense a limitation of the lecture course format, or at least a
reflection that this material was never developed into a full study. Any analysis that is faithful to the spirit and not just the letter of Foucault’s text would focus on its existence as a practice and not just a theory diffused
throughout the economy, state, and society. As Thomas Lemke argues, neoliberalism is a political project that attempts to create a social reality that it suggests already exists, stating that competition is the basis of social
relations while fostering those same relations.11
time
The contemporary trend away from long term labor contracts, towards temporary and part-
labor, is not only an effective economic strategy, freeing corporations from contracts and the expensive
commitments of health care and other benefits, it is an effective strategy of subjectification as well. It encourages workers
to see themselves not as “workers” in a political sense, who have something to gain through solidarity and collective
organization,
but as “companies of one.” They become individuals for whom every action, from taking courses on a new
computer software application to having their teeth whitened,
can be considered an investment in human capital. As Eric Alliez
and Michel Feher write: “Corporations’ massive recourse to subcontracting plays a fundamental role in this to the extent that it turns the
workers’ desire for independence...into a ‘business spirit’ that meets capital’s growing need for satellites.”12 Neoliberalism is not simply an
ideology in the pejorative sense of the term, or a belief that one could elect to have or not have, but is itself produced by strategies, tactics,
and policies that create subjects of interest, locked in competition. Because Foucault brackets what could be considered the “ideological”
dimension of neoliberalism, its connection with the global hegemony of not only capitalism, but specifically a new regime of capitalist
accumulation, his lectures have little to say about its historical conditions. Foucault links the original articulation of neoliberalism to a
particular reaction to Nazi Germany. As Foucault argues, the original neo-liberals, the “Ordo-liberals,” considered Nazi Germany not to be an
effect of capitalism. But the most extreme version of what is opposed to capitalism and the market—planning. While Foucault’s analysis
captures the particular “fear of the state” that underlies neoliberalism, its belief that any planning, any intervention against competition, is
tantamount to totalitarianism. It however does not account for the dominance of neoliberalism in the present, specifically its dominance as a
particular “technology of the self,” a particular mode of subjection. At the same time, Foucault offers the possibility of a different
understanding of the history of neoliberalism when he argues that neoliberalism, or the neo-liberal subject as homo economicus, or homo
entrepreneur, emerges to address a particular lacunae in liberal economic thought, and that is labor. In this sense neoliberalism rushes to fill
the same void, the same gap, that Marx attempted to fill, without reference to Marx, and with very different results.13 Marx and neo-liberals
agree that although classical economic theory examined the sphere of exchange, the market, it failed to enter the “hidden abode of
production” examining how capital is produced. Of course the agreement ends there, because what Marx and neo-liberals find in labor is
fundamentally different: for Marx labor is the sphere of exploitation while for the neo-liberals, as we have seen, labor is no sooner introduced
as a problem than the difference between labor and capital is effaced through the theory of “human capital.”14 Neoliberalism scrambles and
exchanges the terms of opposition between “worker” and “capitalist.” To quote Etienne Balibar, “The capitalist is defined as worker, as an
‘entrepreneur’; the worker, as the bearer of a capacity, of a human capital.”15
Labor is no longer limited to the specific sites of the factory
or the workplace, but is any activity that works towards desired ends. The terms “labor” and “human capital” intersect, overcoming in
terminology their longstanding opposition; the former becomes the activity and the latter becomes the effects of the activity, its history. From
this intersection the discourse of the economy becomes an entire way of life, a common sense in which every action--crime, marriage, higher
education and so on--can be charted according to a calculus of maximum output for minimum expenditure; it can be seen as an investment.
Thus situating Marx and neoliberalism with respect to a similar problem makes it possible to grasp something of the politics of neoliberalism,
which through a generalization of the idea of the “entrepreneur,” “investment” and “risk” beyond the realm of finance capital to every
quotidian relation, effaces the very fact of exploitation. Neoliberalism can be considered a particular version of “capitalism without capitalism,”
a way of maintaining not only private property but the existing distribution of wealth in capitalism while simultaneously doing away with the
antagonism and social insecurity of capitalism, in this case paradoxically by extending capitalism, at least its symbols, terms, and logic, to all
of society. The opposition between capitalist and worker has been effaced not by a transformation of the mode of production, a new
organization of the production and distribution of wealth, but by the mode of subjection, a new production of subjectivity. Thus, neoliberalism
entails a very specific extension of the economy across all of society; it is not, as Marx argued, because everything rests on an economic base
(at least in the last instance) that the effects of the economy are extended across of all of society, rather it is an economic perspective, that
of the market, that becomes coextensive with all of society. As Christian Laval argues, all actions are seen to conform to the fundamental
economic ideas of self-interest, of greatest benefit for least possible cost. It is not the structure of the economy that is extended across
society but the subject of economic thinking, its implicit anthropology.16
NEOLIBERAL GOVERNMENTALITY ENSURES WAR, DISEASE, AND ENVIRONMENTAL COLLAPSE – ECONOMIC
DECISION-MAKING VIEWS PEOPLE AS A DISPOSABLE RESOURCE FOR PRODUCING CAPITAL, ONLY STEPPING
OUTSIDE THIS FRAME FOR POLITICS CAN AVERT EXTINCTION
GIROUX 6 (Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in Canada.
“Dirty Democracy
and State Terrorism: The Politics of the New Authoritarianism in the United States,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle
East 26.2 (2006) 163-177.)
While it would be ludicrous to suggest that the United States either represents a mirror image of fascist ideology or mimics the systemic
racialized terror of Nazi Germany, it is not unreasonable, as Hannah Arendt urged in The Origins of Totalitarianism, to learn to recognize how
different elements of fascism crystallize in different historical periods into new forms of authoritarianism. Such
antidemocratic elements combine in often unpredictable ways, and I believe they can be found currently in many of the political
practices, values, and policies that [End Page 164] characterize U.S. sovereignty under the Bush administration. Unchecked
power at the top of the political hierarchy is increasingly matched by an aggressive attack on dissent throughout the body politic and fuels
both a war abroad and a war at home. The
and political interests –
economic and militaristic powers of global capital – spearheaded by U.S. corporations
appear uncurbed by traditional forms of national and international sovereignty, the implications of which are
captured in David Harvey's serviceable phrase "accumulation by dispossession."
Entire populations are now seen as disposable,
marking a dangerous moment for the promise of a global democracy.8 The discourse of liberty, equality, and freedom that emerged with
modernity seems to have lost even its residual value as the central project of democracy.
State sovereignty is no longer organized
around the struggle for life but an insatiable quest for the accumulation of capital, leading to what Achille Mbembe calls
"necropolitics," or the
destruction of human bodies.9 War, violence, and death have become the principal elements
shaping the biopolitics of the new authoritarianism that is emerging in the United States and increasingly extending its reach into broader
global spheres, from Iraq to a vast array of military outposts and prisons around the world.
As the state of emergency, in Giorgio Agamben's
aptly chosen words, becomes the rule rather than the exception, a number of powerful antidemocratic tendencies threaten the prospects for
both American and global democracy.10 The first is a
market fundamentalism that not only trivializes democratic values and public
concerns but also enshrines a rabid individualism, an all-embracing quest for profits, and a social Darwinism in which misfortune is
seen as a weakness—the current sum total being the Hobbesian rule of a "war of all against all" that replaces any vestige of shared
responsibilities or compassion for others. The values of the market and the ruthless workings of finance capital become the template for
organizing the rest of society.
cost-effective
Everybody is now a customer or client, and every relationship is ultimately judged in bottom-line,
terms as the neoliberal mantra "privatize or perish" is repeated over and over again. Responsible citizens are
replaced by an assemblage of entrepreneurial subjects, each tempered in the virtue of self-reliance and forced to face the increasingly
difficult challenges of the social order alone. Freedom is no longer about securing equality, social justice, or the public welfare but about
unhampered trade in goods, financial capital, and commodities. As the logic of capital trumps democratic sovereignty, low-intensity warfare at
home chips away at democratic freedoms, and high-intensity warfare abroad delivers democracy with bombs, tanks, and chemical warfare.
The global cost of these neoliberal commitments is massive human suffering and death, delivered not only in the form of bombs and
the barbaric practices of occupying armies but also in structural adjustment policies in which the drive for land, resources, profits, and goods
are implemented by global financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Global lawlessness and
armed violence accompany the imperative of free trade, the virtues of a market without boundaries, and the promise of a
Western-style democracy imposed through military solutions, ushering in the age of rogue sovereignty on a global scale. Under such
conditions, human suffering and hardship reach unprecedented levels of intensity. In a rare moment of truth, Thomas Friedman, the columnist
for the New York Times, precisely argued for the use of U.S. power—including military force—to support this antidemocratic world order. He
claimed that "the hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist. . . . And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for
Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."11 As Mark Rupert points out, "In Friedman's
twisted world, if people are to realize their deepest aspirations—the longing for a better life which comes from their very souls—they must
stare down the barrel of [End Page 165] Uncle Sam's gun."12 As neoliberals in the Bush administration implement policies at home to reduce
taxation and regulation while spending billions on wars abroad, they slash funds that benefit the sick, the elderly, the poor, and young people.
But
public resources are diverted not only from crucial domestic problems ranging from poverty and unemployment to hunger;
they are also
diverted from addressing the fate of some 45 million children in "the world's poor countries [who] will die
needlessly over the next decade," as reported by the British-based group Oxfam.13 The U.S. commitment to market fundamentalism elevates
profits over human needs and consequently offers few displays of compassion, aid, or relief for millions of poor and abandoned children in the
world who do not have adequate shelter, who are severely hungry, who have no access to health care or safe water, and who succumb
needlessly to the ravages of AIDS and other diseases.14 For instance, as Jim Lobe points out, "U.S. foreign aid in 2003 ranked dead last among
all wealthy nations. In fact, its entire development aid spending in 2003 came to only ten percent of what it spent on the Iraq war that year.
U.S. development assistance comes to less than one-fortieth of its annual defense budget."15 Carol Bellamy, the executive director of UNICEF,
outlines the consequences of the broken promises to children by advanced capitalist countries such as the United States. She writes, Today
more than one billion children are suffering extreme deprivations from poverty, war, and HIV/AIDS. The specifics are
staggering: 640 million children without adequate shelter, 400 million children without access to safe water, and 270 million children without
access to basic health services. AIDS has orphaned 15 million children. During the 1990s alone, war forced 20 million children to leave their
homes.16
TEXT: THE JUDGE SHOULD VOTE NEGATIVE TO REJECT NEOLIBERAL KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION
NEOLIBERAL GOVERNMENTALITY HAS TAKEN CONTROL OF KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION, FORCING ITS
ECONOMIC UNDERSTANDING OF THE WORLD UPON THE POPULATION AND PRODUCING THEM AS HUMAN
SUBJECTS
– ONLY A PRIOR REJECTION OF THE AFF’S NEOLIBERAL APPROACH CAN SOLVE
MCMURTY ’96 (John, Prof. of Philosophy @ U of Guelph, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism, CCPA Monitor, July/August 1996,
http://www.islandnet.com/plethora/mai/cancer.html)
The essential problem of any life-threatening cancer is that the host body's immune system does not effectively recognize or respond to the
cancer's challenge and advance. This failure of our social immune system to recognize and respond to the cancerous form of capitalism is
understandable once we realize that the
function,
surveillance and communication organs of host social bodies across the world, as they now
are incapable of recognizing the nature and patterns of the disease. That is, capitalist-organized media and
information systems select for dissemination only messages that do not contradict the capitalist organization of social
bodies. Consequently, whatever exposes the systemic disorder of this social organization's structure (such as this essay) is normally refused
transmission through its communications media. In this way,
our social immune system has been gravely compromised by the
accelerating control of multinational capital conglomerates over most of the recorded information produced and exchanged
around the world--mass communications, the production of textbooks and educational resources for higher learning, and the biotechnology
for reproducing and adapting life-forms themselves.
Because of this subordination of social systems of research and communication
to transnational capital control, whatever does recognize the capitalist cancer is normally rejected. This social immune
suppression is
agencies.
now global, with over 90% of all foreign news output, for example, controlled by five U.S. and European multinational news
Cancerous takeovers of life-systems only prevail if they are not recognized by their hosts. This is our predicament today.
Life-bodies recover when the immune system recognizes and responds to the systemic disease that is attacking them. At
this stage of money capital's mutation and invasion,
signs of disease are increasingly evident. Even capitalist-organized mass media
display the life-danger in sporadic, partial recognitions of biospheric and social-structural breakdowns, and even the decoupling of moneycapital circuits from productive life functions. These eruptions, however, are not linked to the underlying disease pattern. As on any level of
complex life-organization,
the social immune system must recognize the disease agent before it can effectively respond to its
invasion. Only when this recognition is clear can an effective defense be mounted. On the macro-level of carcinogenic invasion, effective
response now minimally requires a global determination to resist, regulate and beat back the lethal, uncontrolled
growth and metastasis of cancerous capitalism. This could be a transformation of the world's now failing political and economic
systems which nothing short of a global cancer could effectively bring about.
WE CONTROL UNIQUENESS, LATIN AMERICA IS DEVELOPING ALTERNATIVES TO NEOLIBERALISM NOW –
FAILURE OF THAT STRUGGLES RISKS EXTINCTION
BARRA
(International Development Consultant and Public Policy Analyst; Former Public Policy Advisor at UNICEF)
10
(Ximena de la, Sacrificing Neoliberalism to Save Capitalism: Latin America Resists and Offers Answers to Crises, 2010 36: 635, Crit Sociol)
In this sense, crises are an opportunity to increase popular awareness that a better world is possible and that it is worth fighting for.
A
genuine hemispheric alliance will allow the development of a post-neoliberal and post-capitalist future in which an
expanded universal citizenship will flourish. The opposite is also valid.
A genuine hemispheric alliance and the survival of the
human species depend upon the development of that post-capitalist future.
Walden Bello warns that the world seems to be debating whether to refloat capitalism by way of a globalized social democracy or to opt for
fundamentalist, nationalist, protectionist populism. The fact that discredited neoliberalism gets rapidly abandoned in order to embrace
formerly vilified Keynesianism (though now in a globalized, deformed and meaner version) means that the real crisis feared by the powerful is
the crisis of capitalism, not of neoliberalism, and that they will find new ways to rescue the system (Bello 2009). The struggle for
emancipation therefore demands actions against capitalism in any of its forms as well as against imperialism.
The struggle requires a
socialist perspective going way beyond the mere regulation of the current system . As Wallerstein reminds us, what is
important is that we be prepared for when we start emerging from the crises. The key issue, he says, is to understand that reconstruction can
lead us into a better world, but it can also take us into a worse one (Wallerstein 2009).
Only a socialist perspective will enable the organization of an economy at the service of common needs. It should be a democratic and
participative socialism developed from the base, totally different from the failed experiences of bureaucratic state-socialism during the 20th
century. It should be a type of socialism that will place collective selfmanagement at the center of efforts to build an egalitarian society for
people in their emancipation process. Marx warned that capitalism will not fall by itself. Socialism will also not fall from the sky (Lebowitz
2006).
Social struggle and the search for viable alternatives are what are vitally needed, precisely what Latin
America is offering now. Current weaknesses at global centers of power, and structural contradictions embedded
in capitalism especially regarding the environment and peoples’ development, are increasingly fostering alliances
among social movements, peoples and nations to fight for an alternative post-capitalist, multicultural system in
harmony with nature. In Latin America the struggle for a better future has already started and the alternative is
gathering steam. We call it ‘socialism for the 21st century’ and we are inventing it and will perfect it as we progress in order to ‘live well’.
We also offer our experience to global movements seeking ‘another world’ so that we can converge together and fight our political battles
better equipped. We find ourselves, as Marta Harnecker expresses it, in the process of changing the correlation of forces in order to make
possible in the future what now seems impossible (Harnecker 1999).
CUBA LINK – EMBARGO
ENCOURAGING MORE FOREIGN INVESTMENT IN CUBA WILL ONLY INCREASE POVERTY AND MASSIVE SOCIAL
PROBLEMS BY INCREASED EXPOSURE TO THE NEOLIBERAL MARKET
REYES 2K (Hector, Cuba: The Crisis of State Capitalism, International Socialist Review Issue 11, Spring 2000,
http://www.isreview.org/issues/11/cuba_crisis.shtml)
The severe hardship imposed on most of the population by the combined effects of economic crisis and government policies,
and
the extensive pursuit of foreign investment, make a mockery of Castro’s 1986 speech in which he passionately stated
that “Cuba will never adopt capitalist methods.”54 In fact, even when the internal market was significantly curtailed during the
phase of USSR tutelage, the time-honored capitalist methods of increased productivity, tight labor discipline and enterprise profitability were
actively pursued by Cuba’s rulers through their eager participation in the international market. Now that the island has been thrust even
deeper into that market,
all of the ills that seemed to disappear with the revolution have reemerged with a vengeance:
malnutrition, theft, hoarding, prostitution tied to tourism and a rapidly increasing dependence on foreign capital ,
which doesn’t feel it has to disguise its profit motive. The truth is that when the guerrillas took power in 1959, they amounted to no more
than armed reformists. They managed to get rid of a hated despot, but they did not accomplish a revolutionary social transformation. They
introduced beneficial reforms in health and education. But these reforms were no different in character, and significantly less extensive due to
the severe economic underdevelopment, from those instituted by reformist social democratic governments in Sweden, Britain and other
countries of Western Europe in the 1950s and 1960s. A socialist revolution is much more than setting up social programs that can be taken
back at the whims of the rulers. It involves not only the working class taking direct control of state power, in order to redirect production for
human need, but also the reorganization of society to gradually rid it of all sorts of ills such as racism and sexism—what Marx called the muck
of ages. The worst aspects of racism were confronted in the early years of the revolution, but it has worsened during the current crisis. The
police regularly stop young Black men on the streets to demand their papers, Blacks are concentrated in the poorest neighborhoods and racist
sayings are spouted as a part of normal conversation. Women have also been affected more severely by the crisis. Often they are the first ones
to be laid off or demoted—which has surely contributed to the increase in prostitution—and sexist images of women in string bikinis have
become prominent in the promotion of tourism.55Although the persecution of gays has lessened during the past decade—there was an open
gay festival in La Habana in 199256—some aspects of gay sexuality remain a criminal offense.57 More importantly, one needs to ask, if
socialism is about the liberation of all humanity, why did it take the CCP until 1987—nearly 30 years after the revolution—to remove the law
penalizing public homosexual behavior, which had been in effect since 1938 when Batista ruled the country? The answer again is that the
Cuban regime has nothing to do with socialism. A nationalist armed uprising is not a socialist revolution. Castro had to take up arms in the
1950s because of a heavy, sovereignty-bending fact of contemporary capitalism: U.S. imperialism. In 1898, the U.S. snatched Cuba as booty of
the Spanish-American War. In 1902, due to popular resistance, it was forced to grant Cuba its independence. But it was a sham independence
because the U.S. inserted into the Cuban constitution the Platt Amendment—which guaranteed the U.S. the right to intervene militarily in
Cuba at anytime if its “national interests were threatened.”58 From that point and up to 1959, the U.S. supported every vicious and corrupt
dictator in Cuba. Peaceful methods of change were completely cut off even to liberal reformers. Since the revolution, the U.S. has continuously
attempted to undermine the Cuban state. The most recent act of economic sabotage, the 1995 Helms/Burton law—which penalizes countries
and companies that do business in Cuba—confers on the U.S. president the prerogative to define what constitutes democracy in Cuba.
Nothing could be more arrogant and hypocritical given the overt support the U.S. has provided to every kind of murderous dictator in Latin
America, from Nicaragua’s Somoza to Chile’s Pinochet. This is why we celebrate the Cuban Revolution, because it gave U.S. imperialism a black
eye—proving that it could be defeated in its own backyard. But
defending Cuba against American domination is not the same
as identifying with Castro’s regime. Cuba’s crisis is not separate from the severe economic recession that currently affects nearly 40
percent of the world. In country after country, the political parties traditionally associated with reforms—social democrats and liberals—have
proven unwilling and incapable of effecting significant reforms. On the contrary, they have presided over extensive attacks on their working
classes. Cuba’s population is facing a situation similar, but much sharper, to that of workers in Britain, Germany and the U.S., who are suffering
from drastic cuts in the welfare state. The strategy of the guerrillas-turned-bureaucrats has always been playing the international market—a
dead end for the Cuban working class. For
in order for the Cuban economy to compete favorably in that market,
continuous increases in productivity are demanded from its workers —in the form of longer working hours, speedups and
lower wages. Even in their own terms, the bureaucracy’s goals of national development and of overcoming the dependence on sugar have
failed wretchedly.
There is a different road. It involves not playing the market, but fighting to end the international
capitalist system that relies on that market. Cuba’s working class needs to fight its struggle on two fronts simultaneously. One is to
defend its living standards against the impositions of its ruling class organized in the CCP. The other is against U.S. imperialism. Cuba’s fate
has showed that there cannot be an island of “socialism” in a capitalist world. Even at its best, the conception of international revolution
espoused by some revolutionaries in Cuba—such as Che Guevara—amounted to no more than a collection of nationalist revolutions that
could come together to resist the policies of the advanced countries.59 That was in the 1960s. Such rhetoric has been abandoned by the
Cuban leadership for many years.
The liberation of the Cuban working class will come by means of a different strategy—
through its own self-activity, defending its own interests and joining the workers of the world in a common fight
to end the international system of capitalism, which causes misery in Cuba and imperialist siege and wars and
destruction everywhere.
CUBA LINK – EMBARGO
CUBA’S ECONOMIC ISOLATION BY THE US MAKES IT A CRUCIAL SITE TO RESIST GLOBAL CAPITALISM – THE
PLAN WOULD DESTROY THAT POTENTIAL
BACKER (Professor of Law and International Affairs at Penn State University) 2008
(Larry Cata, “CUBA AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF ODIOUS DEBT DOCTRINE,” August, Online: http://lcbackerblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/cubaand-development-of-odious-debt.html)
Before the collapse of the Soviet Union and its allies that goal had been difficult to achieve because of the steady support of the Soviet Union.
This produced a massive debt held first by the Soviet Union and then by the states that emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union.
(Mesa-Lago 2001). Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, it has been much easier for the United States to cut Cuba off from
international capital. Recently, however, the People’s Republic of China has been more active in cultivating Cuba. But is unclear, however, the
extent to which this friendship will serve as an effective counterweight to American plans for Cuba. (Backer 2004, 404–413; China to Discuss
Cuba Investments 2004).
Whatever the economic effects of the embargo, an important, if unintended consequence, has
been the incentive it provided for the development of a series of ideas that have proven influential outside the
developed world. While Castro’s effect on the global economy has been negligible, his importance on the development and
exportation of ideas about the shape and nature of the global economy have been far more significant—not
necessarily because he has spoken them but
because these ideas tend to be replicated, expanded and championed by a
host of global actors strategically placed throughout the developed and developing world. The inversion and
transformation of odious debt doctrine serves as a piece in a complex construction of a framework meant to
discredit the current global financial order (Backer 2006) and suggest an alternative. In the case of odious debt, the result
would produce irony. It might permit Cuba to avoid both current and prior debt.
CUBA LINK – DEMOCRACY PROMOTION
CHANGING THE CUBAN GOVERNMENTAL STRUCTURE WOULD LEAD TO NEOLIBERAL TAKEOVER AND THE
DESTRUCTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS
NICHOLS (National Executive of the Democratic Social Perspective) 5
(Dick, The Cuban Revolution in the Epoch of Neoliberal Globalisation, http://readingfromtheleft.com/PDF/CubaNeoLiberalEpoch.pdf)
As the anti-Cuba campaign spreads even to these distant shores we will need to make use of the powerful arguments in support of the Cuban
cause, explaining the simple truth that
there’s more human rights and democracy under Cuba’s single-party system than
under the two-party farce of western money politics. Here it’s always a case of plus ça change, plus la même chose — the more
things change, the more they stay the same — while
a multiparty system of the type being pushed for Cuba by the USA
would mean a catastrophic decline in human and democratic rights that capitalist restoration would bring.
Even on the grounds on which Amnesty International and the US Human
rights
Rights Watch operate — that of “universally recognised human
conventions” operating irrespective of the intensity of conflict conditions —
Cuba’s alleged crimes are puny compared to
those of its main accuser, the super-powerful, super-secure United States. To get an idea, compare the reports on the two
countries in the 2001 Amnesty International annual report: Political prisoners? Tell that to Leonard Peltier and the Puerto Rican patriots
have been in goal for decades. Death sentences? A few in Cuba last year, but take a look at the new
president’s record as the governing
ghoul of the Lone Star state. Prison population as a percentage of total population? No contest, with three
slave labour.
who
million in US goals operating as
CUBA LINK – ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
ECONOMIC GROWTH DRIVEN BY THE PRIVATE SECTOR LEADS TO CAPITALIST DOMINATION
NICHOLS (National Executive of the Democratic Social Perspective) 5
(Dick, The Cuban Revolution in the Epoch of Neoliberal Globalisation, http://readingfromtheleft.com/PDF/CubaNeoLiberalEpoch.pdf)
The stress in the theses comes down on the difficulty of this task, not because we’re being pessimists, but because
we have to have a
realistic assessment of the abiding constraints to growth, and awareness, too, that socialist development can’t just be
any old growth. Growth principally powered by the private sector and tourism which leaves the state and
cooperative sector lagging behind can only increase pressure for further concessions to the capitalist market, with
all the nefarious effects that can bring.
LINK – DISASTER REPS
THE AFFIRMATIVE’S DISASTERS ARE THE PLAYTHINGS OF THE NEW GLOBAL ECONOMY—FAR FROM BEING
SOMETHING TO AVOID, THE INVOCATION OF CRISIS FEEDS THE REGNANT IDEOLOGY OF DISASTER CAPITALISM
FEEDING OFF ENDLESS WAR.
THEIR IMPACTS ARE THE TUNNEL VISION OF THE PRIVILEGED LIVING INSIDE THE
LATEST ECONOMIC BUBBLE
KLEIN, former Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics, 2007 [Naomi, also recipient of James Aronson Award for Social Justice
Journalism, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, p. 11-15]
Shock Therapy Comes Home
Friedman's Chicago School movement has been conquering territory around the world since the seventies, but
until recently its vision had never been fully applied in its country of origin. Certainly Reagan had made headway, but
the U.S. retained a welfare system, social security and public schools, where parents clung, in Friedman's words, to their "irrational attachment
to a socialist system."24 When the Republicans gained control of Congress in 1995, David Frum, a transplanted Canadian and future
speechwriter for George W. Bush, was among the so-called neoconservatives calling for a shock therapy-style economic revolution in the U.S.
"Here's how I think we should do it. Instead of cutting incrementally—a little here, a little there—I would say that on a single day this summer
we eliminate three hundred programs, each one costing a billion dollars or less. Maybe these cuts won't make a big deal of difference, but,
boy, do they make a point. And you can do them right away."25 Frum didn't get his homegrown shock therapy at the time, largely because
there was no domestic crisis to prepare the ground. But in 2001 that changed.
When the September 11 attacks hit, the White
House was packed with Friedman's disciples, including his close friend Donald Rumsfeld. The Bush team seized the
moment of collective vertigo with chilling speed—not, as some have claimed, because the administration
deviously plotted the crisis but because the key figures of the administration, veterans of earlier disaster
capitalism experiments in Latin America and Eastern Europe, were part of a movement that prays for crisis the
way drought-struck farmers pray for rain, and the way Christian-Zionist end-timers pray for the Rapture.
When the long-awaited disaster strikes, they know instantly that their moment has come at last. For three
decades, Friedman and his followers had methodically exploited moments of shock in other countries—foreign
equivalents of 9/11, starting with Pinochet's coup on September 11, 1973. What happened on September 11, 2001, is that an
ideology hatched in American universities and fortified in Washington institutions finally had its chance to come home. The Bush
administration immediately seized upon the fear generated by the attacks not only to launch the "War on Terror"
but to ensure that it is an almost completely for-profit venture, a booming new industry that has breathed new life into the
faltering U.S. economy.
Best understood as a "disaster capitalism complex," it has much farther-reaching tentacles than
the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned against at the end of his presidency: this is global war fought on
every level by private companies whose involvement is paid for with public money, with the unending mandate of
protecting the United States homeland in perpetuity while eliminating all "evil" abroad. In only a few short years,
the complex has already expanded its market reach from fighting terrorism to international peacekeeping, to
municipal policing, to responding to increasingly frequent natural disasters. The ultimate goal for the corporations at the
center of the complex is to bring the model of for-profit government, which advances so rapidly in extraordinary circumstances, into the
ordinary and day-to-day functioning of the state—in effect, to privatize the government. To kick-start the disaster capitalism complex, the Bush
administration out-sourced, with no public debate, many of the most sensitive and core functions of government—from providing health care
to soldiers, to interrogating prisoners, to gathering and "data mining" information on all of us.
The role of the government in this
unending war is not that of an administrator managing a network of contractors but of a deep-pocketed venture
capitalist, both providing its seed money for the complex's creation and becoming the biggest customer for its new services. To cite just
three statistics that show the scope of the transformation,
in 2003, the U.S. government handed out 3,512 contracts to
companies to perform security functions; in the twenty-two-month period ending in August 2006, the Department
of Homeland Security had issued more than 115,000 such contracts.26 The global "homeland security industry"—economically
insignificant before 2001—is now a $200 billion sector.27 In 2006, U.S. government spending on homeland security averaged $545 per
household.28
And that's just the home front of the War on Terror; the real money is in fighting wars abroad.
Beyond the weapons contractors, who have seen their profits soar thanks to the war in Iraq, maintaining the U.S.
military is now one of the fastest-growing service economies in the world.29 "No two countries that both have a
McDonald's have ever fought a war against each other," boldly declared the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in December
1996.30 Not only was he proven wrong two years later, but thanks to the model of for-profit warfare, the U.S. Army goes to war with Burger
King and Pizza Hut in tow, contracting them to run franchises for the soldiers on military bases from Iraq to the "mini city" at Guantanamo
Bay.
Then there is humanitarian relief and reconstruction. Pioneered in Iraq, for-profit relief and reconstruction has
already become the new global paradigm, regardless of whether the original destruction occurred from a preemptive war, such as
Israel's 2006 attack on Lebanon, or a hurricane.
With resource scarcity and climate change providing a steadily increasing
flow of new disasters, responding to emergencies is simply too hot an emerging market to be left to the
nonprofits—why should UNICEF rebuild schools when it can be done by Bechtel, one of the largest engineering firms in
the U.S.? Why put displaced people from Mississippi in subsidized empty apartments when they can be housed on Carnival cruise ships? Why
deploy UN peacekeepers to Darfur when private security companies like Blackwater are looking for new clients?
And that is the post-
September 11 difference: before, wars and disasters provided opportunities for a narrow sector of the economy —
the makers of fighter jets, for instance, or the construction companies that rebuilt bombed-out bridges.
The primary economic role of
wars, however, was as a means to open new markets that had been sealed off and to generate postwar peacetime
booms. Now wars and disaster responses are so fully privatized that they are themselves the new market;
there is no need to wait until after the war for the boom—the medium is the message. One distinct
advantage of this postmodern approach is that in market terms, it cannot fail. As a market analyst remarked of a
particularly good quarter for the earnings of the energy services company Halliburton, "Iraq was better than expected."'1 That was in October
2006, then the most violent month of the war on record, with 3,709 Iraqi civilian casualties."2 Still, few shareholders could fail to be impressed
by a war that had generated $20 billion in revenues for this one company." Amid the weapons trade, the private soldiers, for-profit
reconstruction and the homeland security industry, what has emerged as a result of the Bush administration's particular brand of postSeptember 11 shock therapy is a fully articulated new economy.
It was built in the Bush era, but it now exists quite apart from
any one administration and will remain entrenched until the corporate supremacist ideology that underpins it is
identified, isolated and challenged. The complex is dominated by U.S. firms, but it is global, with British companies bringing their
experience in ubiquitous security cameras, Israeli firms their expertise in building high-tech fences and walls, the Canadian lumber industry
selling prefab houses that are several times more expensive than those produced locally, and so on. "I don't think anybody has looked at
disaster reconstruction as an actual housing market before," said Ken Baker, CEO of a Canadian forestry trade group. "It's a strategy to
diversify in the long run."34 In scale, the disaster capitalism complex is on a par with the "emerging market" and information technology
booms of the nineties. In fact,
insiders say that the deals are even better than during the dot-com days and that "the
security bubble" picked up the slack when those earlier bubbles popped. Combined with soaring insurance industry profits (projected to have
reached a record $60 billion in 2006 in the U.S. alone) as well as super profits for the oil industry (which grow with each new crisis),
the
disaster economy may well have saved the world market from the full-blown recession it was facing on the eve of
9/11. In the attempt to relate the history of the ideological crusade that has culminated in the radical privatization of war and disaster, one
problem recurs: the ideology is a shape-shifter, forever changing its name and switching identities. Friedman
called himself a "liberal," but his U.S. followers, who associated liberals with high taxes and hippies, tended to identify as
"conservatives," "classical economists," "free marketers," and, later, as believers in "Reaganomics" or "laissez-faire." In most of
the world, their orthodoxy is known as "neoliberalism," but it is often called "free trade" or simply "globalization."
Only since the mid-nineties has the intellectual movement, led by the right-wing think tanks with which Friedman
had long associations—Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute—called itself "neoconservative,"
a worldview that has harnessed the full force of the U.S. military machine in the service of a corporate agenda. All
these incarnations share a commitment to the policy trinity—the elimination of the public sphere, total
liberation for corporations and skeletal social spending—but none of the various names for the ideology seem quite
adequate.
Friedman framed his movement as an attempt to free the market from the state, but the real-world track
record of what happens when his purist vision is realized is rather different. In every country where Chicago
School policies have been applied over the past three decades, what has emerged is a powerful ruling alliance
between a few very large corporations and a class of mostly wealthy politicians —with hazy and ever-shifting lines between
the two groups. In Russia the billionaire private players in the alliance are called "the oligarchs"; in China, "the princelings"; in Chile, "the
piranhas"; in the U.S., the Bush-Cheney campaign "Pioneers."
Far from freeing the market from the state, these political and
corporate elites have simply merged, trading favors to secure the right to appropriate precious resources
previously held in the public domain—from Russia's oil fields, to China's collective lands, to the no-bid
reconstruction contracts for work in Iraq. A more accurate term for a system that erases the boundaries between Big
Government and Big Business
is not liberal, conservative or capitalist but corporatist. Its main characteristics are huge transfers of
public wealth to private hands, often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever-widening chasm between the
dazzling rich and the disposable poor and an aggressive nationalism that justifies bottomless spending on
security. For those inside the bubble of extreme wealth created by such an arrangement, there can be no more
profitable way to organize a society. But because of the obvious drawbacks for the vast majority of the
population left outside the bubble, other features of the corporatist state tend to include aggressive surveillance
(once again, with government and large corporations trading favors and contracts),
mass incarceration, shrinking civil liberties and
often, though not always, torture.
LINK – HISTORY OF NEOLIBERALISM
NEOLIBERALISM GUTS OUT THE STATE OF ALL POWER – HISTORICALLY ITS APPLICATION TO SOUTH AND LATIN
AMERICAN ECONOMIES HAS BEEN DISASTROUS
MONBIOT 12 (George, environmental and political activist, Forbidden Planet, December 3, 2012, monbiot.com)
Humankind’s greatest crisis coincides with the rise of an ideology that makes it impossible to address. By the late
1980s,
when it became clear that manmade climate change endangered the living planet and its people, the world
was in the grip of an extreme political doctrine, whose tenets forbid the kind of intervention required to arrest it.
Neoliberalism, also known as market fundamentalism or laissez-faire economics, purports to liberate the market from political
interference. The state, it asserts, should do little but defend the realm, protect private property and remove barriers to business.
In practice
it looks nothing like this. What neoliberal theorists call shrinking the state looks more like shrinking democracy:
reducing the means by which citizens can restrain the power of the elite. What they call “the market” looks
more like the interests of corporations and the ultra-rich(1). Neoliberalism appears to be little more than a
justification for plutocracy.
The doctrine was first applied in Chile in 1973, as former students of the University of Chicago, schooled in Milton Friedman’s
extreme prescriptions and funded by the CIA, worked alongside General Pinochet to impose a programme that would have been impossible in
a democratic state.
The result was an economic catastrophe, but one in which the rich – who took over Chile’s
privatised industries and unprotected natural resources – prospered exceedingly(2).
The creed was taken up by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
It was forced upon the poor world by the IMF and the
World Bank. By the time James Hansen presented the first detailed attempt to model future temperature rises to the US Senate in 1988(3),
the doctrine was being implanted everywhere.
As we saw in 2007 and 2008 (when neoliberal governments were forced to abandon their principles to bail out the banks), there
could scarcely be a worse set of circumstances for addressing a crisis of any kind. Until it has no choice, the selfhating state will not intervene, however acute the crisis or grave the consequences. Neoliberalism protects the
interests of the elite against all comers.
LINK – ELITE DECISION MAKING/FIAT*
THE RELEGATION OF THE
PLAN TO A COMPLETELY GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIR ENTRENCHES ELITE
DECISIONMAKIGN THAT ALLOWS FOR THE IMPOSITION OF NEOLIBERAL POLICIES
KLEIN, former Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics, 2007 [Naomi, also recipient of James Aronson Award for Social Justice
Journalism, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, p. 251-254]
By 1949, that meant tolerating from the West German government all kinds of policies that were positively uncapitalist: direct job creation by
the state, huge investment in the public sector, subsidies for German firms and strong labour unions.
In a move that would have been
unthinkable in Russia in the 1990s or Iraq under U.S. occupation, the U.S. government infuriated its own corporate
sector by imposing a moratorium on foreign investment so that war-battered German companies would not be forced to
compete before they had recovered. "The feeling was that letting foreign companies come in at that point would have been like piracy," I was
told by Carolyn Eisenberg, author of an acclaimed history of the Marshall Plan.'
"The main difference between now and then is
that the U.S. governmept did not see Germany as a cash cow. They didn't want to antagonize people. The belief was
that if you come in and start pillaging the place, you interfere with the recovery of Europe as a whole.” This approach, Eisenberg points out,
was not born of altruism. "The Soviet Union was like a loaded gun. The economy was in crisis, there was a substantial German left, and they
[the West] had to win the allegiance of the German people fast. They really saw themselves baffling for the soul of Germany." Eisenberg's
account of the battle of ideologies that created the Marshall Plan points to a persistent blind spot in Sachs's work, including his recent
laudable efforts to dramatically increase aid spending for Africa.
Rarely are mass popular movements even mentioned. For
Sachs, the making of history is a purely elite affair, a matter of getting the right technocrats settled on the
right policies. Just as shock therapy programs are drafted in secret bunkers in La Paz and Moscow, so, apparently,
should a $30 billion aid program for the Soviet republics have materialized based solely on the commonsense
arguments he was making in Washington. As Eisenberg notes, however, the original Marshall Plan came about not out of
benevolence, or even reasoned argument, but fear of popular revolt.
Sachs admires Keynes, but he seems uninterested in what
made Keynesianism finally possible in his own country: the messy, militant demands of trade unionists and
socialists whose growing strength turned a more radical solution into a credible threat, which in turn made the New Deal look like
an acceptable compromise. This unwillingness to recognize the role of mass movements in pressuring reluctant
governments to embrace the very ideas he advocates has had serious ramifications. For one, it meant that Sachs could
not see the most glaring political reality confronting him in Russia: there was never going to be a Marshall Plan for Russia because there was
only ever a Marshall Plan because of Russia. When Yeltsin abolished the Soviet Union, the "loaded gun" that had forced the development of
the original plan was disarmed. Without it, capitalism was suddenly free to lapse into its most savage form, not just in Russia but around the
world. With the Soviet collapse, the free market now had a global monopoly, which meant all the "distortions" that had been interfering with
its perfect equilibrium were no longer required. This was the real tragedy of the promise made to the Poles and Russians—that if they
followed shock therapy they would suddenly wake up in a "normal European country." Those normal European countries (with their strong
social safety nets, workers' protections, powerful trade unions and socialized health care) emerged as a compromise between Communism and
capitalism. Now that there was no need for compromise, all those moderating social policies were under siege in Western Europe, just as they
were under siege in Canada, Australia and the U.S. Such policies were not about to be introduced in Russia, certainly not subsidized with
Western funds.
This liberation from all constraints is, in essence, Chicago School economics (otherwise known as
neoliberalism or, in the U.S., neoconservatism): not some new invention but capitalism stripped of its Keynesian
appendages, capitalism in its monopoly phase, a system that has let itself go—that no longer has to work to keep us as
customers, that can be as antisocial, antidemocratic and boorish as it wants. As long as Communism was a threat,
the gentlemen's agreement that was Keynesianism would live on; once that system lost ground, all traces of
compromise could finally be eradicated, thereby fulfilling the purist goal Friedman had set out for his movement a
half century earlier. That was the real point of Fukuyama's dramatic "end of history" announcement at the University of Chicago lecture in
1989: he wasn't actually claiming that there were no other ideas in the world, but merely that, with Communism collapsing, there were no
other ideas sufficiently powerful to constitute a head-to-head competitor. So while Sachs saw the collapse of the Soviet Union as a liberation
from authoritarian rule and was ready to roll up his sleeves and start helping, his Chicago School colleagues saw it as a freedom of a different
sort—as the final liberation from Keynesianism and the do-gooder ideas of men like Jeffrey Sachs. Seen in that light, the do-nothing attitude
that so infuriated Sachs when it came to Russia was not "sheer laziness" but laissez-faire in action: let it go, do nothing. By not lifting a finger
to help, all the men charged with Russian policy—from Dick Cheney, as Bush Sr.'s defense secretary, to Lawrence Summers, Treasury
undersecretary, to Stanley Fischer at the IMF—were indeed doing something: they were practicing pure Chicago School ideology, letting the
market do its worst. Russia, even more than Chile, was what this ideology looked like in practice, a foreshadowing of the get-rich-or-die-trying
dystopia that many of these same players would create a decade later in Iraq.
The new rules of the game were on display in
Washington, D.C., on January 13, 1993. The occasion was a small but important conference, by invitation onl y, on
the tenth floor of the Carnegie Conference Center on Dupont Circle, a seven-minute drive from the White House and a stone's throw from the
headquarters of the IMF and the World Bank. John
and the fund,
Williamson, the powerful economist known for shaping the missions of both the,bank
had convened the event as a historic gathering of the neoliberal tribe. In attendance was an impressive
array of the star "technopols" who were at the forefront of the campaign to spread the Chicago doctrine
throughout the world. There were present and former finance ministers from Spain, Brazil and Poland, central bank heads from Turkey
and Peru, the chief of staff for the president of Mexico and a former president of Panama. There was Sachs's old friend and hero, Leszek
Balcerowicz, architect of Poland's shock therapy, as well as his Harvard colleague Dani Rodrik, the economist who had proven that every
country that had accepted neoliberal restructuring had been in deep crisis. Anne Krueger, future first deputy managing director of the IMF,
was there, and although Jose Pinera, Pinochet's most evangelical minister, couldn't make it because he was trailing in Chile's presidential
election, he sent a detailed paper in his place. Sachs, who was still advising Yeltsin at the time, was to deliver the keynote address.
All day
long, the conference participants had been indulging in that favorite economists' pastime of strategizing how
to get reluctant politicians to embrace policies that are unpopular with voters. How soon after elections
should shock therapy be launched? Are center-left parties more effective than right-wing ones because the attack is unexpected? Is it
better to warn the public or take people by surprise with "voodoo politics"? Though the conference was called "The Political Economy of Policy
Reform"—so willfully bland a title that it seemed designed to deflect media interest—one participant remarked slyly that what it was really
about was "Machiavellian economics."
LINK – SUBJECTIVITY
THE AFF LOCKS IN PLACE A FLAWED FORM OF FREEDOM WHICH IS PREDICATED BY A NEOLIBERAL LOGIC IN
WHICH FREEDOM IS CONFLATED WITH THE ABILITY TO COMPETE ECONOMICALLY—THIS PRODUCES A
FRACTURED SUBJECT THAT IS SIMULTANEOUSLY RESPONSIBLE FOR RECREATING BOTH CAPITALISM AND HIS OR
HER EXCLUSION FROM THE SYSTEM.
WITHIN NEOLIBERALISM, FREEDOM IS A RUSE.
LAZZARATO ‘7 (Maurizio, a Paris-based sociologist, a member of the editorial group of the journal Multitudes and the author of the
influential essay Immaterial labour, “The Misfortunes of the “Artistic Critique” and of Cultural Employment,” EIPC (European institute for
progressive cultural politics) Online, eipcp.net/transversal/0207/lazzarato/en)
As Foucault reminds us,
neo-liberalism needs to reconstruct a model of homo economicus but, as we shall see shortly, this
has very little to do with either the artist or artistic “creativity”. Neo-liberalism does not seek its model of subjectivation
in the artistic critique since it already has its own model: the entrepreneur, a figure that neo-liberalism wants to
extend across the board to everyone, artists included, as in the case of the French intermittent workers. In the “reform” of intermittent
employment, the new period of indemnification for intermittent workers is considered “a capital” derived from indemnified days, which the
individual has to manage as “capital”. What is this little word “capital” doing among wage earners? How does it work? It states that
unemployment benefits are part of the multiplicity of “investments” (in education and training, mobility, affectivity, etc.) that the individual (the
“human capital”) has to make in order to optimize his performance.
Foucault’s analysis can help us to see what the neo-liberal
logic is “positively” targeted at, what it encourages people to aim for through its model of “human capital”.
Capitalization is one of the techniques that must contribute to the worker’s transformation into “human capital”.
The latter is then personally responsible for the education and development, growth , accumulation, improvement and
valorization of the “self” in its capacity as “capital”. This is achieved by managing all its relationships, choices,
behaviours according to the logic of a costs/investment ratio and in line with the law of supply and demand.
Capitalization must help to turn the worker into “a kind of permanent, multipurpose business.” The worker is an
entrepreneur and entrepreneur of her/himself, “being
her/his own capital, being her/his own producer, being her/his own
source of revenue.” 2 Individuals are expected to deliver not the productivity of labour, but the profitability of a
capital investment (of their own capital, a capital that is inseparable from their own selves). The individual has to
regard her/himself as a fragment of capital, a molecular fraction of capital. The worker is no longer simply a factor
of production; the individual is not strictly speaking a “workforce” but rather a “capital-competence”, a “machine of competences”.
This idea of the individual as an entrepreneur of her/himself is the culmination of capital as a machine of
subjectivation. For Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, capital acts as a formidable “point of subjectivation that
constitutes all human beings as subjects; but some, the capitalists, are subjects of enunciation […], while others, the
proletarians, are subjects of the statement, subjected to the technical machines.” 3 We can talk about the fulfilment
of the process of subjectivation and exploitation since, in this case, it is the same individual who splits in two,
becoming both the subject of enunciation and the subject of the statement . On the one hand, s/he brings the
subjectivation process to its pinnacle, because in all these activities s/he involves the “immaterial” and “cognitive”
resources of her/his “self”, while on the other, s/he inclines towards identification, subjectivation and exploitation, given
that s/he is both her/his own master and slave, a capitalist and a proletarian, the subject of enunciation and the
subject of the statement.
If we continue to take Foucault as a point of departure, the claim that freedom was introduced into capitalism by the events of May 1968 and
by the students can be strongly criticized. According to Foucault,
liberalism is a mode of government that consumes freedom;
to be able to consume freedom, it is first of all necessary to produce and promote it . Freedom is not a universal
value, the enjoyment of which ought to be guaranteed by government; rather, it is the freedom (freedoms) that
liberalism needs in order to function. Freedom is quite simply “the correlative of devices of security” that Foucault
describes in Naissance de la Biopolitique.
The great difference from Keynesian liberalism is that this freedom, which must
be created and organized, is above all the freedom of business and of the entrepreneur, while the freedom of
“labour”, of the “consumer”, of
politics, elements which were at the heart of the Keynesian intervention, must be radically
subordinated to it. It is always about the freedom of the entrepreneurs.
IMPACT – EXTINCTION
WITHOUT CHALLENGING NEOLIEBRAL ECONOMIC IDEOLOGY, GLOBAL WARMING WILL COMBINE WITH
BROADER POLITICAL CHALLENGE TO CAUSE EXTINCTION
MONBIOT 12 (George, environmental and political activist, Forbidden Planet, December 3, 2012, monbiot.com)
The 1000-year legacy of current carbon emissions is long enough to smash anything resembling human
civilisation into splinters(13). Complex societies have sometimes survived the rise and fall of empires, plagues,
wars and famines. They won’t survive six degrees of climate change, sustained for a millennium(14). In return
for 150 years of explosive consumption, much of which does nothing to advance human welfare, we are atomising
the natural world and the human systems that depend on it.
The climate summit (or foothill) in Doha and the sound and fury of the British government’s new measures probe the current limits
of political action. Go further and you break your covenant with power, a covenant both disguised and
validated by the neoliberal creed.
Neoliberalism is not the root of the problem: it is the ideology used, often retrospectively, to justify a global grab
of power, public assets and natural resources by an unrestrained elite. But the problem cannot be addressed
until the doctrine is challenged by effective political alternatives .
In other words, the struggle against climate change – and all the crises which now beset both human beings and
the natural world – cannot be won without a wider political fight: a democratic mobilisation against plutocracy. I
believe this should start with an effort to reform campaign finance: the means by which corporations and the very rich buy policies and
politicians. Some of us will be launching a petition in the UK in the next few weeks, and I hope you will sign it.
But this is scarcely a beginning.
We must start to articulate a new politics: one that sees intervention as legitimate, that
contains a higher purpose than corporate emancipation disguised as market freedom, that puts the survival of
people and the living world above the survival of a few favoured industries. In other words, a politics that belongs
to us, not just the super-rich.
IMPACT – ENVIRONMENT
NEOLIBERAL GOVERNMENTALITY IS NOT SUSTAINABLE AND MAKES EXTINCTION INEVITABLE- IT PLACES PROFIT
MOTIVE ABOVE ALL OTHER CONCERNS AND RELIES UPON CONSTANT GROWTH- THIS ENSURES
ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION AND ECONOMIC COLLAPSE
MCMURTY ’96 (John, Prof. of Philosophy @ U of Guelph, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism, CCPA Monitor, July/August 1996,
http://www.islandnet.com/plethora/mai/cancer.html)
On a world scale, 20,000 pages of GATT or
World Trade Organization regulations and 1,400 articles within NAFTA specify exact rules
to protect the rights of capitalist corporations to own, produce, sell, and invest across boundaries. Yet absent from this
mountain of regulations
are any effective environmental protections against increasing pollution, destruction, wastes, exhaustion, or
extinction. The invasiveness of such "free trade" regimes may be discerned by the pathologies of its outcomes.
The air is increasingly
unbreathable; no one may stay in the sun without cancer danger; oceans and ecosystems are becoming lifeless in various parts of
the planet; tropical and temperate
varieties are becoming
rain forests are clear-cut at the rate of 100 acres a minute; plants and animals of countless
extinct every year; and the sounds of the world are ever more dominantly coming from the din of fossil-fuel motors--
but the profit-exploitation of the global life-environment only increases its assaults without self-control. The Cancer Stage of Capitalism Longterm, systematic and
irreversible destruction of global life -organization emerged for the first time during the current
advanced stage of capitalism. If we consider the defining principles of cancer and the eventual destruction of a life-host, it is difficult to
avoid seeing that
a cancer pattern is increasingly invading and spreading across the planet. In other words, there is-- 1. an
uncontrolled and unregulated reproduction and multiplication of an agent in the host body that: 2. is not committed to any
function of the host body; 3. increasingly appropriates nutriments from the host body in its growth and reproduction; 4. is not effectively
recognized by the immune system; 5.
possesses the ability to transfer or metastasize its assaultive growth to sites across the
host body; 6. progressively infiltrates and invades the host body until it obstructs, damages, or destroys successive organs of its
life-system;
and 7. eventually destroys the life-host in the absence of an effective immune-system recognition and response. Two
comparatively sudden and rapidly advancing
systemic changes across the social bodies and global environment are attacking the
evolved systems of life-protection just as the stress and assault on their carrying capacities by money-capital circuits have become more rapid,
intense, and pervasive. The most sudden attack is on society's protective systems, which were designed to ward off the internal starvation of
members' functions and growth by capitalist invasion and accumulation. Globally, protective systems are now being dismantled at every level.
The pattern is now so universal and aggressive that even the language of its agents no longer disguises its destructive intent--"drastic
cutbacks," "axing social programs," "slashing public services," and so on. And society's protective systems are openly being "cut,"
"slashed," and "axed"
to "reassure lenders and investors"--that circuit of money investment and profit that is no longer
linked to the production or circulation of useful goods and services. Money capital that seeks more money without producing any life
good or service goes back as far as usury, but never before has it been the dominant form of social life-organization. The mutation in this
macro-circuit of money investment and profit occurred when money capital became exclusively committed at every stage of its growth to the
direct multiplication of itself. The comparison with a carcinogen is starkly evident. A cancer pattern of disease and metastasis is confirmed
when money capital lacks any commitment to any life-organization on the planet, but is free to move with increasing volume and velocity in
and out of--but not to sustain--social and environmental life-hosts. On the contrary, ever more social resources and protections are being
diverted to assist the capitalist cancer to multiply.
and social infrastructures around the world
The spiralling debt and deficit circuits currently bankrupting governments
are a primary channel of money-capital's mutated form as it invades social hosts and
appropriates their life resources for its own growth and spread. For example, even after over $14 trillion had already been taken from poor,
less-developed countries by the money-extraction cycles of major banks, their total indebtedness to the banks doubled from approximately
$819 billion in 1982 to $1,712 billion in 1993.
Such processes cannot continue for long without destroying the host body.
Symptoms of this destructive pattern are visible across the nations of the world, but especially in Africa and Latin America. At a
certain stage of this invasive appropriation of life-resources, social bodies can no longer continue to convert their life-sustenance base to more
money for the money-lenders. "Restructuring" and "structural adjustment" programs are then imposed on them to ensure that the money
cancer keeps spreading without resistance from the host bodies. The disease agent advances against the weakened host social body and
spreads more widely and deeply into its vital organs. Society's ruling orders submit. Restructurings of social-life organization to feed the
invaders proceed faster and deeper.
More and more of society's resources are yielded up to the money lenders and investors.
Unemployment rises, organized labour declines, and jobs become more insecure. Poverty levels rise. Social programs
for health, education and housing are
cut back or dismantled. Social despair and panic spread beneath the mask of normality. Incremental
starvation of social bodies advances to sustain continuous money outflows to agents who lack a committed function to any life-host. The life
prospects of most of society's members rapidly deteriorate.
now clearly
Systemic deprivation and starvation of the social body's life sustenance are
evident, from the most undeveloped to the most advanced societies. In Canada, for example, infant mortality rates, the
quintessential indicator of social health, have just risen an astonishing
43%, the first recorded rise in over 30 years. At the bottom end of the
world's social bodies, 500,000 more children die each year from the enforced "restructuring" of their countries' economies. As this deprivation
grows, the capitalist cancer increasingly diverts effective demand for use-value production to its own growth and self-multiplication. Its modes
of mutating the metabolism of the social body to its own proliferation have many new and aberrant forms, such as turning bankrupt
governments into receiver states that enforce money lenders' insatiable demands on ever poorer public sectors;
demanding more tax
breaks for investment and debt instead of equity, and in non-productive speculation instead of job-creating enterprises; attacking
national currencies by speculative buying and selling in multi-billion-dollar profit accumulations that create no use value and cripple social
and economic orders overnight;
operating high-interest savings and loan banks so that their principals can expropriate up to $500
billion from taxpayers to pay for their money-into-more-money amassments;
shifting tax obligations from banking and financial
institutions to productive members of society who have less and less income to extract; and channelling vast pension and mutual funds into
stock speculation transactions. Everywhere the channels of money investment are systemically and progressively converted into the metabolism
of money for more money instead of into commitments to social life functions. At this stage of money capital's development,
we clearly
confront an unprecedented disease challenge to the survival of its social and planetary life-hosts. Indicative of the classic
pattern of cancer mutation and spread are the synergistic effect of money capital's cumulative destruction of the planet's basic conditions of
life (air, sunlight, water, soil, and biodiversity), its increasingly aggressive invasions and assaults on social infrastructures and self-protective
systems of life sustenance and circulation, its systemic intolerance of bearing the costs of maintaining social and environmental carrying and
defense capacities, and its rapidly escalating, autonomous self-multiplication that is no longer subordinated to any requirement of lifeorganization.
IMPACT – ZONES OF EXCLUSION
THESE NEOLIBERAL ECONOMIC REFORMS ESTABLISH APARTHEID ZONES ACROSS THE PLANET – EVIDENCED IN
DISASTROUS DECADES OF DEVELOPMENT IN THE GLOBAL
SOUTH. THEY ARE CENTRAL TO VIOLENCE AND
EXTERMINATION AND NECESSITATE UNENDING WAR
BALIBAR ‘1 (Etienne, Emeritus Prof. of Philosophy @ U. of Paris X Nanterre and U. of Cal., Irvine, “Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty:
Citizenship and Civility in the Era of Global Violence,” Constellations, Vol. 8.1)
With this pretentious title, I want to continue investigating a nexus of problems, both theoretical and philosophical, that I have already
touched upon several times. The term "cruelty'
is chosen by convention (but with some literary references in mind) to indicate those
forms of extreme violence, whether intentional or systemic, physical or moral—although such distinctions become questionable precisely
when we cross the lines of extremity—that
seem to be, as is said, worse than death. It is my hypothesis, generally speaking, that the
actual or virtual menace of cruelty represents for politics, and particularly for politics today in the context of globalization, a crucial experiment
in which the very possibility of politics is at stake. I use the term "civility" (which indeed has many other uses) to designate the speculative idea
of a politics of politics, or a politics in the second degree, which aims at creating, recreating, and conserving the set of conditions within which
politics as a collective participation in public affairs is possible, or at least is not made absolutely impossible. "Civility" is certainly an
ambiguous term, but I think that its connotations are preferable to others, such as civilization, socialization, police and policing, politeness, and
the like. In particular, "civility" does not necessarily involve the idea of a suppression of "conflicts" and "antagonisms" in society, as if they were
always the harbingers of violence and not the opposite.
Much, if not most, of the extreme violence we are led to discuss in fact
results from a blind political preference for "consensus" and "peace," not to speak of the implementation of law-and-order policies
on a global scale.
This, among other reasons, is what leads me to discuss these issues in terms of "topography," by which I understand
at the same time a concrete, spatial, geographical, or geopolitical perspective—for instance taking into account such
shifting distinctions
as "North and South," "core and periphery," "this side of the border or across the border," "global and local"—and an abstract,
speculative perspective,
which implies that the causes and effects of extreme violence are not produced on one and
the same stage, but on different "scenes" or "stages," which can be pictured as either "real," "virtual," or "imaginary" (but the
imaginary and the virtual are probably no less material, no less determining than the real). [CONTINUED 11 PAGES LATER] I am aware of all these
difficulties, but I would maintain that a reality lies behind the notion of something "unprecedented." Perhaps it is simply the fact
that a
number of heterogeneous methods or processes of extermination (by which I mean eliminating masses of individuals
inasmuch as they belong to objective or subjective groups) have themselves become "globalized,” that is, operate in a
similar manner everywhere in the world at the same time, and so progressively form a “chain ,” giving full reality to what
E. P. Thompson anticipated twenty years ago with the name “exterminism.” In this series of connected processes, we must include, precisely
because they are heterogeneous—they do not have one and the same "cause," but
they produce cumulative effects: 1. Wars (both
“civil” and “foreign,” a distinction that is not easy to draw in many cases, such as Yugoslavia or Chechnya). 2. Communal rioting, with
ethnic and/or religious ideologies of “cleansing.” 3. Famines and other kinds of “absolute” poverty produced by the
ruin of traditional and nontraditional economies. 4. Seemingly “natural”
catastrophes, which in fact are killing on a mass scale
because they are overdetermined by social, economic, and political structures , such as pandemics (for example, the
difference in the distribution of AIDS and the possibilities of treatment between Europe and North America on one side, Africa and some parts
of Asia on the other), droughts, floods, or earth-quakes in the absence of developed civil protection. In the end it would be my suggestion
that the "globalization"
of various kinds of extreme violence has produced a growing division of the "globalized"
world into life zones and death zones. Between these zones (which indeed are intricate and frequently reproduced within the
boundaries of a single country or city) there exists a decisive and fragile superborder, which raises fears and concerns about the unity and
division of [HU]mankind—something like a global and local “enmity line,” like the “amity line” that existed in the beginning of the modern
European seizure of the world. It is this superborder, this enmity line, that becomes at the same time an object of permanent show and a hot
place for intervention but also for nonintervention. We might discuss whether the most worrying aspect of present international politics is
"humanitarian intervention" or "generalized nonintervention," or one coming after the other. Should We Consider Extreme Violence to Be
"Rational" or "Functional" from the Point of View of Market Capitalism (the "Liberal Economy")? This is a very difficult question—in fact, I think
it is the most difficult question—but it cannot be avoided; hence it is also the most intellectually challenging. Again, we should warn against a
paralogism that is only too obvious but nonetheless frequent: that of mistaking consequences for goals or purposes. (But is it really possible to
discuss social systems in terms of purposes? On the other hand, can we avoid reflecting on the immanent ends, or "logic," of a structure such
as capitalism?) It seems to me, very schematically, that the
difficulty arises from the two opposite "global effects" that derive
from the emergence of a chain of mass violence—as compared, for example, with what Marx called primitive
accumulation when he described the creation of the preconditions for capitalist accumulation in terms of the
violent suppression of the poor. One kind of effect is simply to generalize material and moral insecurity for millions of potential
workers, that is, to induce a massive proletarianization or reproletarianization (a new phase of proletarianization that crucially involves a return
of many to the proletarian condition from which they had more or less escaped, given that insecurity is precisely the heart of the "proletarian
condition"). This process is contemporary with an increased mobility of capital and also humans, and so it takes place across borders. But,
seen historically, it can. also be distributed among several political varieties: 1. In the “North” it involves a partial or
deep dismantling of the social policies and the institutions of social citizenship created by the welfare state, what
I call the "national social state," and therefore also
a violent transition from welfare to workfare, from the social state to the penal
state (the United States showing the way in this respect, as was convincingly argued in a recent essay by Loïc Wacquant). 2 .
In the "South,"
it involves destroying and inverting the “developmental” programs and policies , which admittedly did not suffice to
produce the desired “takeoff” but indicated a way to resist impoverishment. 3. In the "semiperiphery," to borrow Immanuel Wallerstein's
category, it was connected with the collapse of the dictatorial structure called "real existing socialism," which was based on scarcity and
corruption, but again kept the polarization of riches and poverty within certain limits. Let me suggest that
a common formal feature
of all these processes resulting in the reproletarianization of the labor force is the fact that they suppress of
minimize the forms and possibilities of representation of the subaltern within the state apparatus itself, or, if you
prefer, the possibilities of more or less effective counterpower. With this remark I want to emphasize the political aspect of processes that, in
the first instance, seem to be mainly "economic." This political aspect, I think, is even more decisive when we turn to the other scene, the other
kind of result produced by massive violence, although the mechanism here is extremely mysterious. Mysterious but real, unquestionably. I am
thinking of a much more destructive tendency, destructive not of welfare or traditional was of life, but of the social bond itself and, in the end,
of “bare life.” Let us think of Michel Foucault, who used to oppose two kinds of politics: “Let live” and “let die.” In the face of the cumulative
effects of
different forms of extreme violence or cruelty that are displayed in what I called the “death zones” of
humanity, we are lead to admit that the current mode of production and reproduction has become a mode of production
for elimination, a reproduction of populations that are not likely to be productively used or exploited but are
always already superfluous, and therefore can be only eliminated either through “political” or “natural” mean s—
what some Latin American sociologists call problacion chatarra, “garbage humans,” to be “thrown” away, out of the global city. If this is the
case, the question arises once again, what is the rationality of that? Or do we face an absolute triumph of irrationality? My suggestion would
be: it is economically irrational (because it amounts to a limitation of the scale of accumulation), but it is politically rational—or, better said, it
can be interpreted in political terms. The fact is that history does not move simply in a circle, the circular pattern of successive phases of
accumulation. Economic and political class struggles have already taken place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the result of
limiting the possibilities of exploitation, creating a balance of forces, and this event remains, so to speak, in the "memory" of the system. The
system (and probably also some of its theoreticians and politicians) "knows" that there is no exploitation without class struggles, no class
struggles without organization and representation of the exploited, no representation and organization without a tendency toward political
and social citizenship. This is precisely what current capitalism cannot afford: there is no possibility of a "global social state" corresponding to
the "national social states" in some parts of the world during the last century. I mean, there is no political possibility. Therefore there is
political resistance, very violent indeed, to every move in that direction. Technological revolutions provide a positive but insufficient condition
for the deproletarianization of the actual or potential labor force.
This time, direct political repression may also be insufficient. Elimination
or extermination has to take place, "passive" if possible, "active" if necessary; mutual elimination is "best," but it
has to be encouraged from outside. This is what allows me to suggest (and it already takes me to my third question) that if the
"economy of global violence" is not functional (because its immanent goals are indeed contradictory), it remains in a sense
teleological: the "same" populations are massively targeted (or the reverse: those populations that are targeted
become progressively assimilated, they look "the same"). They are qualitatively "deterritorialized,” as Gilles Deleuze
would say, in an intensive rather than extensive sense:
they “live” on the edge of the city, under permanent threat of elimination,
but also, conversely, they live and are perceived as "nomads," even when they are fixed in their homelands, that is, their mere existence, their
quantity, their movements, their virtual claims of rights and citizenship are perceived as a threat for "civilization."
IMPACT – DISASTER CAPITALISM
THE PROGRESSIVE SELLING OFF OF THE PUBLIC COMMONS TO MULTINATIONAL COPRORATIONS
FUNCTIONALLY ABANDONS AN ENTIRE SECTOR OF
AMERICAN SOCIETY TO THE WHIMS OF THE MARKET—
DISASTER CAPITALISM TODAY THRIVES ON THE CONSTANT DIVISION OF THE WORLD INTO RED ZONES AND
GREEN ZONES—RURAL AMERICA IS THE AFFIRMATIVE’S RED ZONE
KLEIN, former Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics, 2007 [Naomi, also recipient of James Aronson Award for Social Justice
Journalism, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, p. 413-418]
Not so long ago, disasters were periods of social leveling, rare moments when atomized communities put divisions aside and pulled together.
Increasingly, however, disasters are the opposite: they provide windows into a cruel and ruthlessly divided future in which
money and race buy survival. Baghdad's Green Zone is the starkest expression of this world order. It has its own
electrical grid, its own phone and sewage systems, its own oil supply and its own state-of-the-art hospital with pristine
operating theaters—all
protected by five-meter-thick walls. It feels, oddly, like a giant fortified Carnival Cruise Ship
parked in the middle of a sea of violence and despair, the boiling Red Zone that is Iraq. If you can get on board,
there are poolside drinks, bad Hollywood movies and Nautilus machines. If you are not among the chosen, you
can get yourself shot just by standing too close to the wall. Everywhere in Iraq , the wildly divergent value
assigned to different categories of people is crudely evident. Westerners and their Iraqi colleagues have
checkpoints at the entrance to their streets, blast walls in front of their houses, body armor and private security guards on call at
all hours. They travel the country in menacing armored convoys, with mercenaries pointing guns out the windows as they follow their prime
directive to "protect the principal."
With every move they broadcast the same unapologetic message: we are the chosen;
our lives are infinitely more precious. Middle-class Iraqis, meanwhile, cling to the next rung down the ladder: they can afford to buy
protection from local militias, and they are able to pay off kidnappers to have a family member released. But the vast majority of Iraqis have
no protection at all. They walk the streets wide open to any possible violence, with nothing between them and the next car bomb but a thin
layer of fabric. In Iraq, the lucky get Kevlar, the rest get prayer beads. At first I thought the Green Zone phenomenon was unique to the war in
Iraq. Now, after years spent in other disaster zones, I realize that
the Green Zone emerges everywhere that the disaster
capitalism complex descends, with the same stark partitions between the included and the excluded, the
protected and the damned. It happened in New Orleans. After the flood, an already divided city turned into a
battleground between gated green zones and raging red zones—the result not of water damage but of the "freemarket solutions" embraced by the president. The Bush administration refused to allow emergency funds to pay
public sector salaries, and the City of New Orleans, which lost its tax base, had to fire three thousand workers in the months after Katrina.
Among them were sixteen of the city's planning staff—with
Orleans was in desperate need of planners.
shades of "de-Baathification," laid off at the precise moment when New
Instead, millions of public dollars went to outside consultants, many of whom
were powerful real estate developers.20 And of course thousands of teachers were also fired, paving the way for the conversion of
dozens of public schools into charter schools, just as Friedman had called for.
Almost two years after the storm, Charity Hospital
was still closed. The court system was barely functioning, and the privatized electricity company, Entergv, had failed to get the
whole city back online. After threatening to raise rates dramatically, the company managed to extract a controversial $200 million bailout
from the federal government. The
public transit system was gutted and lost almost half its workers. The vast majority of publicly owned
housing projects stood boarded up and empty, with five thousand units slotted for demolition by the federal housing authority.21
Much as the tourism lobby in Asia had longed to be rid of the beachfront fishing villages, New Orleans' powerful tourism lobby had been
eyeing the housing projects, several of them on prime land close to the French Quarter, the city's tourism magnet. Endesha Juakali helped set
up a protest camp outside one of the boarded-up projects, St. Bernard Public Housing, explaining that "they've had an agenda for St. Bernard
a long time, but as long as people lived here, they couldn't do it. So they
used the disaster as a way of cleansing the
neighborhood when the neighborhood is weakest. . . . This is a great location for bigger houses and condos. The only problem is
you got all these poor black people sitting on it!"22 Amid the schools, the homes, the hospitals, the transit system and the lack of clean water
in many parts of town,
New Orleans' public sphere was not being rebuilt, it was being erased, with the storm used as
the excuse. At an earlier stage of capitalist "creative destruction," large swaths of the United States lost their manufacturing bases and
degenerated into rust belts of shuttered factories and neglected neighborhoods. Post-Katrina New Orleans may be providing the first Westernworld image of a new kind of wasted urban landscape: the mold belt, destroyed by the deadly combination of weathered public infrastructure
and extreme weather. The American Society of Civil Engineers said in 2007 that the U.S. had fallen so far behind in maintaining its public
infrastructure—roads, bridges, schools, dams—that it would take more than a trillion and half dollars over five years to bring it back up to
standard. Instead, these types of expenditures are being cut back.23 At the same time, public infrastructure around the world is facing
unprecedented stress, with hurricanes, cyclones, floods and forest fires all increasing in frequency and intensity.
It's easy to imagine a
future in which growing numbers of cities have their frail and long-neglected infrastructures knocked out by
disasters and then are left to rot, their core services never repaired or rehabilitated. The well-off, meanwhile,
will withdraw into gated communities, their needs met by privatized providers.
Signs of that future were already in evidence by the time hurricane season
rolled around in 2006. In just one year, the disaster-response industry had exploded, with a slew of new corporations entering the market, promising safety and security should the next Big One hit. One of the more ambitious ventures was launched by an airline in West Palm Beach,
Florida. Help Jet bills itself as "the first hurricane escape plan that turns a hurricane evacuation into a jet-setter vacation." When a storm is coming, the airline books holidays for its members at five-star golf resorts, spas or Disneyland. With the reservations all made, the evacuees are
then whisked out of the hurricane zone on a luxury jet. "No standing in lines, no hassle with crowds, just a first class experience that turns a problem into a vacation. . . Enjoy the feeling of avoiding the usual hurricane evacuation nightmare."24 For the people left behind, there is a
different kind of privatized solution. In 2006, the Red Cross signed a new disaster-response partnership with Wal-Mart. "It's all going to be private enterprise before it's over," said Billy Wagner, chief of emergency management for the Florida Keys. "They've got the expertise. They've got
the resources." He was speaking at the National Hurricane Conference in Orlando, Florida, a fast-growing annual trade show for the companies selling everything that might come in handy during the next disaster. "Some folks here said, 'Man, this is huge business—this is my new
business. I'm not in the landscaping business anymore; I'm going to be a hurricane debris contractor,'" said Dave Blandford, an exhibitor at the conference, showing off his "self-heating meals."25
Much of the parallel disaster
economy has been built with taxpayers' money, thanks to the boom in privatized war-zone reconstruction. The giant
contractors that have served as "the primes" in Iraq and Afghanistan have come under frequent political fire for
spending large portions of their income from govemment contracts on their own corporate overhead—between 20 and 55
percent, according to a 2006 audit of Iraq contractors.26
Much of those funds have, quite legally, gone into huge investments
in corporate infrastructure — Bechtel's battalions of earth-moving equipment, Halliburton's planes and fleets of trucks, and the
surveillance architecture built by L-3, CACI and Booz Allen.
Most dramatic has been Blackwater's investment in its paramilitary
infrastructure. Founded in 1996, the company has used the steady stream of contracts during the Bush years to build up a private army of
twenty thousand mercenary soldiers on call and a massive military base in North Carolina worth between $40 million and $50 million.
According to one account, Blackwater's capacity now includes the following: "A burgeoning logistics operation that can deliver 100- or 200-ton
self-contained humanitarian relief response packages faster than the Red Cross. A Florida aviation division with 26 different platforms, from
helicopter gunships to a massive Boeing 767. The company even has a Zeppelin. The country's largest tactical driving track. . . A 20-acre manmade lake with shipping containers that have been mocked up with ship rails and portholes, floating on pontoons, used to teach how to
board a hostile ship. A K-9 training facility that currently has 80 dog teams deployed around the world. . . A 1,200-yard-long firing range for
sniper training."*27
analogy.
A right-wing journal in the U.S. pronounced Blackwater "al Qaeda for the good guys. "28 It's a striking
Wherever the disaster capitalism complex has landed, it has produced a proliferation of armed groupings
outside the state. That is hardly a surprise: when countries are rebuilt by people who don't believe in governments, the
states they build are invariably weak, creating a market for alternative security forces, whether Hezbollah, Blackwater, the Mandi Army or the gang down the street in New Orleans. The emergence of this parallel privatized
infrastructure reaches far beyond policing. When the contractor infrastructure built up during the Bush years is looked at as a whole,
what is seen is
a fully articulated state-within-a-state that is as muscular and capable as the actual state is frail and
feeble. This corporate shadow state has been built almost exclusively with public resources (90 percent of Blackwater's
revenues come from state contracts), including the training of its staff (overwhelmingly former civil servants, politicians and soldiers).29
Yet
the vast infrastructure is all privately owned and controlled. The citizens who have funded it have absolutely no
claim to this parallel economy or its resources. The actual state, meanwhile, has lost the ability to perform its core
functions without the help of contractors. Its own equipment is out of date, and the best experts have fled to the private sector. When
Katrina hit, FEMA had to hire a contractor to award contracts to contractors. Similarly, when it came time to update the Army Manual on the
rules for dealing with contractors, the army contracted out the job to one of its major contractors, MPRI— it no longer had the know-how inhouse. The CIA is losing so many staffers to the parallel privatized spy sector that it has had to bar contractors from recruiting in the agency
dining room. "One recently retired case officer said he had been approached twice while in line for coffee," reported the Los Angeles Times.
And when the Depaitment of Homeland Security decided it needed to build "virtual fences" on the U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada,
Michael P. Jackson, deputy secretary of the department, told contractors, "This is an unusual invitation. . . . We're asking you to come back and
tell us how to do our business." The department's inspector general explained that Homeland Security "does not have the capacity needed to
effectively plan, oversee and execute the [ Secure Border Initiative] program."
Under Bush, the state still has all the trappings of a
government—the impressive buildings, presidential press briefings, policy battles—but it no more does the actual work of
governing than the employees at Nike's Beaverton campus stitch running shoes. The implications of the decision
by the current crop of politicians to systematically outsource their elected responsibilities will reach far beyond a
single administration. Once a market has been created, it needs to be protected. The companies at the heart of
the disaster capitalism complex increasingly regard both the state and nonprofits as competitors—from the corporate
perspective, whenever governments or charities fulfill their traditional roles, they are denying contractors work that could be performed at a
profit. "Neglected Defense: Mobilizing the Private Sector to Support Homeland Security," a 2006 report whose advisory committee included
some of the largest corporations in the sector, warned that "the compassionate federal impulse to provide emergency assistance to the victims
of disasters affects the market's approach to managing its exposure to risk." 31
Published by the Council on Foreign Relations, the
report argued that if people know the government will come to the rescue, they have no incentive to pay for
privatized protection. In a similar vein, a year after Katrina, CEOs from thirty of the largest corporations in the United States joined
together under the umbrella of the Business Roundtable, which includes in its membership Fluor, Bechtel and Chevron. The group, calling itself
Partnership for Disaster Response, complained of "mission creep" by the nonprofit sector in the aftermath of disasters. Apparently
charities
and NGOs were infringing on their market by donating building supplies rather than having Home Depot supply them for a fee. The
mercenary firms, meanwhile, have been loudly claiming that they are better equipped to engage in peacekeeping in Darfur than the UN.32
Much of this new aggressiveness flows from the fact that the corporate world knows that the golden era of bottomless federal contracts
cannot last much longer. The U.S. government is barreling toward an economic crisis, in no small part thanks to the deficit spending that has
bankrolled the construction of the privatized disaster economy. That means that sooner rather than later, the contracts are going to dip
significantly. In late 2006, defense analysts began predicting that the Pentagon's acquisitions budget could shrink by as much as 25 percent in
the coming decade.33 When the disaster bubble bursts, firms such as Bechtel, Fluor and Black-water will lose much of their primary revenue
streams. They will still have all the high-tech gear and equipment bought at taxpayer expense, but they will need to find a new business
model, a new way to cover their high costs.
The next phase of the disaster capitalism complex is all too clear: with
emergencies on the rise, government no longer able to foot the bill, and citizens stranded by their can't-do state,
the parallel corporate state will rent back its disaster infrastructure to whoever can afford it, at whatever
price the market will bear. For sale will be everything from helicopter rides off rooftops to drinking water to
beds in shelters. Already wealth provides an escape hatch from most disasters —it buys early-warning systems for tsunamiprone regions and stockpiles of Tamiflu for the next outbreak. It buys bottled water, generators, satellite phones and rent-a-cops. During the
Israeli attack on Lebanon in 2006, the U.S. government initially tried to charge its citizens for the cost of their own evacuations, though it was
eventually forced to back down.'4
If we continue in this direction, the images of people stranded on New Orleans
rooftops will not only be a glimpse of America's unresolved past of racial inequality but will also foreshadow a
collective future of disaster apartheid in which survival is determined by who can afford to pay for escape.
Looking ahead to coming disasters, ecological and political, we often assume that we are all going to face them
together, that what's needed are leaders who recognize the destructive course we are on. But I'm not so sure. Perhaps part of the
reason why so many of our elites, both political and corporate, are so sanguine about climate change is that they are confident they will be
able to buy their way out of the worst of it. This may also partially explain why so many Bush supporters are Christian end-timers. It's not just
that they need to believe there is an escape hatch from the world they are creating. It's that the Rapture is a parable for what they are
building down here—a system that invites destruction and disaster, then swoops in with private helicopters and airlifts them and their friends
to divine safety.
As contractors rush to develop alternative stable sources of revenue, one avenue is disaster-proofing other corporations. This was Paul Bremer's line of business before he went to Iraq: turning multinationals into security bubbles, able to function
smoothly even if the states in which they are functioning are crumbling around them. The early results can be seen in the lobbies of many major office buildings in New York or London—airport-style check-ins complete with photo-ID requirements and X-ray machines—but the industry
has far greater ambitions, including privatized global communications networks, emergency health and electricity, and the ability to locate and provide transportation for a global workforce in the midst of a major disaster. Another potential growth area identified by the disaster
capitalism complex is municipal government: the contracting-out of police and fire departments to private security companies. "What they do for the military in downtown Falluja, they can do for the police in downtown Reno," a spokesperson for Lockheed Martin said in November
2004.35 The industry predicts that these new markets will expand dramatically over the next decade. A frank vision of where these trends are leading is provided by John Robb, a former covert-action mission commander with Delta Force turned successful management consultant. In a
widely circulated manifesto for Fast Company magazine, he describes the "end result" of the war on terror as "a new, more resilient approach to national security, one built not around the state but around private citizens and companies. . . . Security will become a function of where you
live and whom you work for, much as health care is allocated already.""
Robb writes,
"Wealthy individuals and multinational corporations will be the first to bail
out of our collective system, opting instead to hire private military companies, such as Blackwater and Triple Canopy, to protect their
homes and facilities and establish a protective perimeter around daily life. Parallel transportation networks—evolving out of the time-share
aircraft companies such as Warren Buffett's Neffets— will cater to this group, leapfrogging its members from one secure, well-appointed lily
pad to the next."
That elite world is already largely in place, but Robb predicts that the middle class will soon follow
suit, "forming suburban collectives to share the costs of security." These —armored suburbs' will deploy and
maintain backup generators and communications links" and be patrolled by private militias "that have received
corporate training and boast their own state-of-the-art emergency-response systems." In other words, a world of
suburban Green Zones. As for those outside the secured perimeter, "they will have to make do with the remains
of the national system. They will gravitate to America's cities, where they will be subject to ubiquitous surveillance
and marginal or nonexistent services. For the poor, there will be no other refuge." The future Robb described
sounds very much like the present in New Orleans, where two very different kinds of gated communities emerged from the
rubble.
On the one hand were the so-called FEMA-villes: desolate, out-of-the-way trailer camps for low-income evacuees, built by
Bechtel or Fluor subcontractors, administered by private security companies who patrolled the gravel lots, restricted visitors, kept journalists
out and treated survivors like criminals.
On the other hand were the gated communities built in the wealthy areas of the
city, such as Audubon and the Garden District, bubbles of functionality that seemed to have seceded from the state altogether. Within weeks
of the storm, residents there had water and powerful emergency generators. Their sick were treated in private hospitals, and their children
went to new charter schools. As usual, they had no need for public transit. In St. Bernard Parish, a New Orleans suburb, DynCorp had taken
over much of the policing; other neighborhoods hired security companies directly.
Between the two kinds of privatized sovereign
states was the New Orleans version of the Red Zone, where the murder rate soared and neighborhoods like the
storied Lower Ninth Ward descended into a post-apocalyptic no-man's-land. A hit song by the rapper Juvenile in
the summer after Katrina summed up the atmosphere: "We livin' like Haiti without no government"—failed
state U.S.A.' Bill Quigley, a local lawyer and activist, observed, "What is happening in New Orleans is just a more concentrated,
more graphic version of what is going on all over our country. Every city in our country has some serious similarities to New
Orleans. Every city has some abandoned neighborhoods. Every city in our country has abandoned some public education, public housing,
public healthcare, and criminal justice. Those who do not support public education, healthcare, and housing will continue to turn all of our
country into the Lower Ninth Ward unless we stop them."
The process is already well under way. Another glimpse of a disaster apartheid future can be found in a wealthy Republican suburb outside Atlanta. Its residents decided
that they were tired of watching their property taxes subsidize schools and police in the county's low-income African-American neighborhoods. They voted to incorporate as their own city, Sandy Springs, which could spend its taxes on services for its 100,000 citizens and not have the
revenues redistributed throughout the larger Fulton County. The only difficulty was that Sandy Springs had no government structures and needed to build them from scratch—everything from tax collection, to zoning, to parks and recreation. In September 2005, the same month that
New Orleans flooded, the residents of Sandy Springs were approached by the construction and consulting giant CH2M Hill with a unique pitch: let us do it for you. For the starting price of $27 million a year, the contractor pledged to build a complete city from the ground up.39 A few
months later, Sandy Springs became the first "contract city." Only four people worked directly for the new municipality—everyone else was a contractor. Rick Hirsekorn, heading up the project for CH2M Hill, described Sandy Springs as "a clean sheet of paper with no governmental
processes in place." He told another journalist that "no one in our industry has done a complete city of this size before."4° The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that "when Sandy Springs hired corporate workers to run the new city, it was considered a bold experiment." Within a
year, however, contract-city mania was tearing through Atlanta's wealthy suburbs, and it had become "standard procedure in north Fulton [County]." Neighboring communities took their cue from Sandy Springs and also voted to become stand-alone cities and contract out their
government. One new city, Milton, immediately hired CH2M Hill for the job—after all, it had the experience. Soon, a campaign began for the new corporate cities to join together to form their own county, which would mean that none of their tax dollars would go to the poor
neighborhoods nearby. The plan has encountered fierce opposition outside the proposed enclave, where politicians say that w ithout those tax dollars, they will no longer be able to afford their large public hospital and public transit system; that partitioning the county would create a
failed state on the one hand and a hyperserviced one on the other. What they were describing sounded a lot like New Orleans and a little like Baghdad.4'
In these wealthy Atlanta suburbs, the three-decade corporatist
crusade to strip-mine the state was complete: it wasn't just every government service that had been outsourced but also the very function of
government, which is to govern. It was particularly fitting that the new ground was broken by CH2M Hill. The corporation was a multimilliondollar contractor in Iraq, paid to perform the core government function of overseeing other contractors. In Sri Lanka after the tsunami, it had
not only built ports and bridges but was "responsible for the overall management of the infrastructure program."42 In post-Katrina New
Orleans, it was awarded $500 million to build FENLA-villes and put on standby to be ready to do the same for the next disaster. A master of
privatizing the state during extraordinary circumstances, it was now doing the same under ordinary ones.
If Iraq was a laboratory of
extreme privatization, the testing phase was clearly over.
ALTERNATIVE – LOCAL MOVEMENTS
THE ALTERNATIVE IS REJECT THE AFFIRMATIVE’S IMPERIALIST MODEL OF DEVELOPMENT.
GLOBAL SOCIAL MOVEMENTS ARE POSSIBLE ONLY IF THEY ARISE FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH FIRST
WISE (Director of Doctoral Program in Migration Studies & Prof of Development Studies; Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, Mexico) 9
(Raúl Delgado, Forced Migration and US Imperialism: The Dialectic of Migration and Development, Crit Sociol, 35: 767, ProQuest)
The promotion of development as social transformation could curtail forced migration. Globalization depicts migration as inevitable;
we
must endorse, both in theory and practice, the viability of alternative processes of development and do so on
different levels. We must first redefine the asymmetrical terms that developed countries, aided by principles that
have by now turned into fetishes (e.g. democracy, liberty, and free trade), used for imperialist domination. This
involves an exposé of imperialist practices, which have created oceans of inequality and condemned vast regions
of the world to marginalization, poverty, social exclusion, and unfettered migration . Foreign investment (FI) has been a
fundamental driving force in this regard.
A genuine process of social transformation involving the migrant and non-
migrant sectors of society would not only seek to contain the overwhelming flow of forced migration but also revert the
ongoing processes of social degradation that characterize underdevelopment and even pose a threat to human existence
(Bello, 2006; Harvey, 2007). As an alternative to the current phase of imperialist domination, Petras argues in favor of what he defines as a
Worker-Engineer Public Control model (WEPC) based on six main principles: tax revenues versus tax evasions; profit remittances and privileged
salaries versus social investment; high reinvestment ratios versus capital flight; long term investment in research and development versus
speculative investment; social welfare versus capitalist privileges; and fixed capital/mobile labor versus mobile capital/fixed labor (Petras, 2007:
234–5). This model provides an alternative approach that maximizes national and working- class interests: ‘it has potential drawbacks and
internal contradictions, which require constant reflection, deliberation, debate and reforms’ (2007: 237). Nonetheless, ‘the model provides the
surest and most direct road to development with democracy, social justice and national independence. The success of the WEPC model, its
introduction and sustainability, does not depend merely on its socioeconomic viability but also on appropriate and supporting national security
and cultural policies and institutions (2007: 237–8). Following the above considerations, an approach based on a Marxist critique of the World
Bank’s views regarding the migration-development nexus, would posit that
international migration is an element of the current
imperialist project led by the USA and that the migration phenomenon has to be examined in this context in
order to reveal its root causes and effects. In order to approach migration’s cause-and-effect relationships with development and
examine specific moments in the dialectic interaction between development and migration, the following two issues must be addressed:3
Strategic practices. These refer to the confrontation between different projects that espouse diverging class interests, which in turn underlie the
structures of contemporary capitalism and its inherent development problems.
There are currently two major projects. The
hegemonic one is promoted by the large MNCs, the governments of developed countries led by US imperialism, and allied
elites in underdeveloped nations, all under the umbrella of international organizations commanded by the US government, like the
IMF and the World Bank.
The project’s loss of legitimacy under the aegis of neoliberal globalization means that ,
nowadays, rather than writing of hegemony
we can use the term ‘domination’. The implementation of this imperialist project is not
the result of consensus but rather military force and the financial imposition of macroeconomic ‘structural reform’ along the lines of the
Washington or Post-Washington Consensus.
The second alternative project consists of the sociopolitical actions of a range
of social classes and movements as well as collective subjects and agents, including migrant associations that
endorse a political project designed to transform the structural dynamics and political and institutional
environments which bar the implementation of alternative development strategies on the global, regional, national
and local levels. Structural dynamics. These refer to the uneven development processes driven by the dynamics of US
imperialism on several planes and levels. This
includes the financial, commercial, productive, and labor market spheres, as
well as technological innovation (a strategic form of control) and the use and allotment of natural resources and environmental impacts. These factors condition the ways in which developed, developed and underdeveloped (including ‘people-importing’ and
‘people exporting’ nations), and underdeveloped, peripheral or postcolonial ountries relate to each other. They also determine the fields in
which interactions between sectors, groups, movements, and social classes take place, within and across national borders. All of this entails
different – albeit interrelated – dynamics at the global, regional, national and local levels.
ALTERNATIVE – COUNTER-MEMORY
CRITIQUE SOLVES—THE EXPOSURE OF THE SHOCK DOCTRINE ACTS AS A COUNTER-MEMORY WHICH SERVES
TO MAKE COMMUNITIES MORE RESILIENT TO FUTURE SHOCKS, AND SERVES AS A SPRINGBOARD FOR FUTURE
ALTERNATIVES.
THE CRITIQUE IS THE PRODUCTION OF A NARRATIVE COMMONS, FOLLOWED BY THE
PRODUCTION OF ACTUAL ONES
KLEIN, former Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics, 2007 [Naomi, also recipient of James Aronson Award for Social Justice
Journalism, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, p. 458-466]
Any strategy based on exploiting the window of opportunity opened by a traumatic shock relies heavily on the
element of surprise. A state of shock, by definition, is a moment when there is a gap between fast-moving events and the information
that exists to explain them. The late French theorist Jean Baudrillard described terrorist events as an "excess of reality"; in this sense, in North
America, the September 11 attacks were, at first, pure event, raw reality, unprocessed by story, narrative or anything that could bridge the gap
between reality and understanding."
Without a story, we are, as many of us were after September 11, intensely vulnerable
to those people who are ready to take advantage of the chaos for their own ends. As soon as we have a new
narrative that offers a perspective on the shocking events, we become reoriented and the world begins to make
sense once again. Prison interrogators intent on inducing shock and regression understand this process well. It is
the reason the CIA's manuals stress the importance of cutting detainees off from anything that will help them
establish a new narrative—their own sensory input, other prisoners, even communication with guards. "Prisoners should be segregated
immediately," the 1983 manual states. "Isolation, both physical and psychological, must be maintained from the moment of apprehension."35
The interrogators know that prisoners talk. They warn each other about what's to come; they pass notes
between the bars. Once that happens, the captors lose their edge. They still have the power to inflict bodily pain,
but they have lost their most effective psychological tools to manipulate and "break" their prisoners: confusion,
disorientation and surprise. Without those elements, there is no shock. The same is true for wider societies. Once
the mechanics of the shock doctrine are deeply and collectively understood, whole communities become
harder to take by surprise, more difficult to confuse—shock resistant. The intensely violent brand of disaster
capitalism that has dominated since September 11 emerged in part because lesser shocks—debt crises, currency
crashes, the threat of being left behind "in history"—were already losing much of their potency, largely because of
overuse. Yet today, even the cataclysmic shocks of wars and natural disasters do not always provoke the level of
disorientation required to impose unwanted economic -shock therapy. There are just too many people in the
world who have had direct experience with the shock doctrine: they know how it works, have talked to other
prisoners, passed notes between the bars; the crucial element of surprise is missing. A striking example is the
response of millions of Lebanese to attempts by international lenders to impose free-market "reforms" as a
condition of reconstruction aid after the Israeli attacks in 2006. By all rights, that scheme should have worked: the country
could not have been more desperate for funds. Even before the war, Lebanon had one of the heaviest debts in the world, while the new losses
from attacks on roads, bridges and airport runways were estimated at $9 billion. So when delegates from thirty wealthy nations got together
in Paris in January 2007 to pledge $7.6 billion in reconstruction loans and grants, they naturally assumed that Lebanon's government would
accept whatever strings they attached to the aid. The conditions were the usual ones: phone and electricity privatizations, price increases on
fuel, cuts to the public service and an increase to an already controversial tax on consumer purchases. Kamal Hamdan, a Lebanese economist,
estimated that, as a result, "household bills [would] increase by 15 percent because of increased taxes and adjusted prices"—a classic peace
penalty. As for the reconstruction itself, the jobs would of course go to the giants of disaster capitalism, with no requirement to hire or
subcontract locally.36 The U.S. secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, was questioned about whether such sweeping demands constituted
foreign interference in Lebanon's affairs. She replied, "Lebanon is a democracy. That said, Lebanon is also undertaking some important
economic reforms that are critical to making any of this work." Fouad Siniora, Lebanon's prime minister, backed by the West, easily agreed to
the terms, shrugging and saying that "Lebanon did not invent privatization." Further demonstrating his willingness to play ball, he hired the
Bush-connected surveillance giant Booz Allen Hamilton to broker Lebanon's telecom privatization.37
Many Lebanese citizens, however,
were distinctly less cooperative. Despite the fact that a lot of their homes still lay in ruins, thousands participated
in a general strike, organized by a coalition of unions and political parties, including the Islamist party Hezbollah .
The demonstrators insisted that if receiving reconstruction funds meant raising the cost of living for a war-ravaged people, it hardly deserved
to be called aid. So while Siniora was reassuring donors in Paris, strikes and road blockades brought the country to a halt—the first national
revolt specifically targeting postwar disaster capitalism. Demonstrators also staged a sit-in, which went on for two months, turning downtown
Beirut into a cross between a tent city and a street carnival. Most reporters characterized these events as shows of strength by Hezbollah, but
Mohamad Bazzi, the Middle East bureau chief for New York's Newsday, said that this interpretation missed their true significance: "The biggest
motivator driving many of those camped out in downtown isn't Iran or Syria, or Sunni versus Shiite. It's the economic inequality that has
haunted Lebanese Shiites for decades. It's a poor and working-class people's revolt."38 The location of the sit-in provided the most eloquent
explanation for why Lebanon was proving so shock resistant. The protest was in the part of downtown Beirut that residents refer to as
Solidere, after the private development company that built and owns almost everything in its confines. Solidere is the result of Lebanon's last
reconstruction effort. In the early nineties, after the fifteen-year civil war, the country was shattered and the state was in debt, with no money
to rebuild. The billionaire businessman (and later prime minister) Rafiq Hariri made a proposal: give him the land rights to the entire
downtown core and let him and his new real estate company, Solidere, turn it into the "Singapore of the Middle East." Hariri, who was killed in
a car bombing in February 2005, bulldozed almost all the standing structures, turning the city into a blank slate. Marinas, luxurious
condominiums (some with elevators for limousines) and lavish shopping malls replaced the ancient souks.39 Almost everything in the business
district—buildings, plazas, security forces—is owned by Solidere. To the outside world, Solidere was the shining symbol of Lebanon's postwar
rebirth, but for many Lebanese it had always been a kind of holograph. Outside the ultramodern downtown core, much of Beirut lacked basic
infrastructure, from electricity to public transit, and the bullet holes inflicted during the civil war were never repaired on the facades of many
buildings. It was in those neglected slums surrounding the gleaming center that Hezbollah built its loyal base, rigging up generators and
transmitters, organizing trash removal, providing security—becoming the much vilified "state within a state." When the residents of the rundown suburbs ventured into the Solidere enclave, they were often thrown out by Hariri's private security guards; their presence frightened the
tourists. Raida Hatoum, a social justice activist in Beirut, told me that when Solidere began its reconstruction, "people were so happy the war
was over and the streets were being rebuilt. By the time we became aware that the streets had been sold, that they were privately owned, it
was too late. We didn't know that the money was a loan and we'd have to pay it back later." That rude awakening of finding out that the least
advantaged people had been stuck with the bill for a makeover that benefited only a small elite has made the Lebanese experts in the
mechanics of disaster capitalism. It is this experience that helped keep the country oriented and organized after the 2006 war. By choosing to
hold their mass sit-in inside the Solidere bubble, with Palestinian refugees camped outside the Virgin megastore and high-end latte joints ("If I
ate a sandwich here, I'd be broke for a week," one protester remarked), the demonstrators were sending a clear message. They did not want
another reconstruction of Solidere-style bubbles and rotting suburbs—of fortressed green zones and raging red zones —but a reconstruction
for the entire country. "How can we still accept this government that steals?" one demonstrator asked. "This government that built this
downtown and accumulated this huge debt? Who's going to pay for it? I have to pay for it, and my son is going to pay for it after me." 40
Lebanon's shock resistance went beyond protest. It was also expressed through a far-reaching parallel reconstruction effort. Within days of the
cease-fire, Hezbollah's neighborhood committees had visited many of the homes hit by the air attacks, assessed the damage and were already
handing out $12,000 in cash to displaced families to cover a year's worth of rent and furnishings. As the independent journalists Ana Nogueira
and Saseen Kawzally observed from Beirut, "That is six times the dollar amount that survivors of Hurricane Katrina received from FEMA." And in
what would have been music to the ears of Katrina survivors, the Hezbollah leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, promised the country in a televised
address, "You won't need to ask a favor of anyone, queue up anywhere." Hezbollah's version of aid did not filter through the government or
foreign NGOs. It did not go to build five-star hotels, as in Kabul, or Olympic swimming pools for police trainers, as in Iraq. Instead, Hezbollah
did what Renuka, the Sri Lankan tsunami survivor, told me she wished someone would do for her family: put the help in their hands. Hezbollah
also included community members in the reconstruction—it hired local construction crews (working in exchange for the scrap metal they
collected), mobilized fifteen hundred engineers and organized teams of volunteers. All that help meant that a week after the bombing
stopped, the reconstruction was already well under way.4I In the U.S. press, these initiatives were almost universally derided as bribery or
clientelism —Hezbollah's attempt to purchase popular support after it had provoked the attack from which the country was reeling (David
Frum even suggested that the bills Hezbollah was handing out were counterfeit).42 There is no question that Hezbollah is engaged in politics
as well as charity, and that Iranian funds made Hezbollah's generosity possible. Equally important to its efficiency, however, was Hezbollah's
status as a local, indigenous organization, one that rose up from the neighborhoods being rebuilt. Unlike the alien corporate reconstruction
agencies imposing their designs from far-off bureaucracies via imported management, private security and translators, Hezbollah could act fast
because it knew every back alley and every jury-rigged transmitter, as well as who could be trusted to get the work clone. If the residents of
Lebanon were grateful for the results, it was also because they knew the alternative. The alternative was Solidere.
We do not always
respond to shocks with regression. Sometimes, in the face of crisis, we grow up—fast. This impulse was in powerful
evidence in Spain, on March 11, 2004, when ten bombs ripped through commuter trains and rail stations in Madrid, killing nearly two hundred
people.
President Jose Maria Aznar immediately went on television and told Spaniards to blame the Basque
separatists and to give him their support for the war in Iraq. "No negotiation is possible or desirable with these assassins who
so many times have sown death all around Spain. Only with firmness can we end the attacks," he said.43
Spaniards reacted badly to
that kind of talk. "We are still hearing the echoes of Franco," said Jose Antonio Martines Soler, a prominent Madrid newspaper
editor who had been persecuted under Francisco Franco's dicta torship. "In every act, in every gesture, in every sentence, Aznar told the
people he was right, that he was the owner of the truth and those who disagreed with him were his enemies."44 In other words, the very
same qualities that Americans identified as "strong leadership" in their president after September 11 were, in Spain, regarded as ominous signs
of a rising fascism. The country was
three days away from national elections, and, remembering a time when fear governed politics,
voters defeated Aznar and chose a party that would pull troops out of Iraq. As in Lebanon, it was the collective
memory of past shocks that made Spain resistant to the new ones. All shock therapists are intent on the
erasure of memory. Ewen Cameron was convinced that he needed to wipe out the minds of his patients before he could rebuild them.
The U.S. occupiers of Iraq felt no need to stop the looting of Iraq's museums and libraries, thinking it might make their jobs easier.
Cameron's former patient Gail Kastner, with her intricate architecture of papers, books and lists,
But like
recollections can be rebuilt, new
narratives can be created. Memory, both individual and collective, turns out to be the greatest shock
absorber of all. Despite all the successful attempts to exploit the 2004 tsunami, memory also proved to be an effective tool of
resistance in some areas where it struck, particularly in Thailand. Dozens of coastal villages were flattened by the wave, but
unlike in Sri Lanka, many Thai settlements were successfully rebuilt within months. The difference did not come from the government.
Thailand's politicians were just as eager as those elsewhere to use the storm as an excuse to evict fishing people and hand over land tenure to
large resorts. Yet what set Thailand apart was that villagers approached all government promises with intense skepticism and refused to wait
patiently in camps for an official reconstruction plan. Instead, within weeks, hundreds of villagers engaged in what they called land
"reinvasions." They marched past the armed guards on the payroll of developers, tools in hand, and began marking off the sites where their
old houses had been. In some cases, reconstruction began immediately. "I am willing to bet my life on this land, because it is ours," said
Ratree Kongwatmai, who lost most of her family in the tsunami.45 The most daring reinvasions were performed by Thailand's indigenous
fishing peoples called the Mokcn, or "sea gypsies." After centuries of disenfranchisement, the Moken had no illusions that a benevolent state
would give them a decent piece of land in exchange for the coastal properties that had been seized. So, in one dramatic case, the residents of
the Ban Tung Wah Village in the Phang Nga province "gathered themselves together and marched right back home, where they encircled their
wrecked village with rope, in a symbolic gesture to mark their land ownership," explained a report by a Thai NGO. "With the entire community
camping out there, it became difficult for the authorities to chase them away, especially given the intense media attention being focused on
tsunami rehabilitation." In the end, the villagers negotiated a deal with the government to give up part of their oceanfront property in
exchange for legal security on the rest of their ancestral land. Today, the rebuilt village is a showcase of Moken culture, complete with
museum, community center, school and market. "Now, officials from the sub-district come to Ban Tung Wah to learn about 'people-managed
tsunami rehabilitation' while researchers and university students turn up there by the bus-full to study 'indigenous people's wisdom.' All along
the Thai coast where the tsunami hit, this kind of direct-action reconstruction is the norm. The key to their success, community leaders say, is
that "people negotiate for their land rights from a position of being in occupation"; some have dubbed the practice "negotiating with your
hands."47 Thailand's survivors have also insisted on a different kind of aid—rather than settling for handouts, they have demanded the tools to
carry out their own reconstruction. Dozens of Thai architecture students and professors, for example, volunteered to help community members
design their new houses and draw their own rebuilding plans; master boat builders trained villagers to make their own, more sophisticated
fishing vessels. The results are communities stronger than they were before the wave. The houses on stilts built by Thai villagers in Ban Tung
Wah and Baan Nairai are beautiful and sturdy; they are also cheaper, larger and cooler than the sweltering prefab cubicles on offer there from
foreign contractors. A manifesto drafted by a coalition of Thai tsunami survivor communities explains the philosophy: "The rebuilding work
should be done by local communities themselves, as much as possible. Keep contractors out, let communities take responsibility for their own
housing.”
A year after Katrina hit, a remarkable exchange took place in Thailand between the leaders of that
country's grassroots reconstruction effort and a small delegation of hurricane survivors from New Orleans. The
visitors from the United States toured several rebuilt Thai villages and were taken aback by the speed with which rehabilitation had become a
reality. "In New Or leans, we're waiting around on the government to do things for us, but here you all are doing by yourselves," said Endesha
Juakali, founder of the "survivors' village" in New Orleans. "When we go back," he pledged, "your model is our new goal."49 After the
community leaders from New Orleans returned home, there was indeed a wave of direct action in the city. Juakali, whose own neighborhood
was still in ruins, organized teams of local contractors and volunteers to gut the flood-damaged interiors in every house on the block; then
they moved on to the next one. He said that his trip to the tsunami region gave him "a good perspective on ... how the people of New
Orleans are going to have to put FEMA aside and the city and state government aside and begin to say, 'What can we do right now to start to
bring our neighborhoods back in spite of the government, not because of it?'" Another veteran of the Asia trip, Viola Washington, also
returned to her New Orleans neighborhood, Gentilly, with an entirely new attitude. She "broke down a map of Gentilly into sections, organized
representative committees for each section and appointed leaders who meet to discuss rebuilding needs." She explained that "as we fight the
government to get our money we don't want to be doh ig nothing to try and get ourselves back."5(` There was still more direct action in New
Orleans. In February 2007, groups of residents who had lived in the public housing projects that the Bush administration was planning to
demolish began "reinvading" their old homes and taking up residence. Volunteers helped clean out apaitments and raised money to buy
generators and solar panels. "My home is my castle, and nu taking it back," announced Gloria Williams, a resident of the housing project C. J.
Peete. The reinvasion turned into a block party complete with a New Orleans brass band.'' There was much to celebrate: at least for now, this
one community had escaped the great cultural bulldozer that calls itself reconstruction.
Uniting all these examples of people
rebuilding for themselves is a common theme: participants say they are not just repairing buildings but healing
themselves. It makes perfect sense. The universal experience of living through a great shock is the feeling of being
completely powerless: in the face of awesome forces, parents lose the ability to save their children, spouses are
separated, homes—places of protection—become death traps. The best way to recover from helplessness turns
out to be helping—having the right to be part of a communal recovery. "Reopening our school says this is a very special
community, tied together by more than location but by spirituality, by bloodlines and by a desire to come home," said the assistant principal
of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans.
Such people's reconstruction efforts
represent the antithesis of the disaster capitalism complex's ethos, with its perpetual quest for clean sheets and
blank slates on which to build model states. Like Latin America's farm and factory co-ops, they are inherently
improvisational, making do with whoever is left behind and whatever rusty tools have not been swept away, broken or stolen. Unlike
the fantasy of the Rapture, the apocalyptic erasure that allows the ethereal escape of true believers, local
people's renewal movements begin from the premise that there is no escape from the substantial messes we have
created and that there has already been enough erasure—of history, of culture, of memory. These are movements
that do not seek to start from scratch but rather from scrap, from the rubble that is all around. As the corporatist
crusade continues its violent decline, turning up the shock dial to blast through the mounting resistance it
encounters, these projects point a way forward between fundamentalisms. Radical only in their intense practicality,
rooted in the communities where they live, these men and women see themselves as mere repair people, taking
what's there and fixing it, reinforcing it, making it better and more equal. Most of all, they are building in
resilience—for when the next shock hits.
FRAMEWORK – SUBJECTIVITY 1ST
OUR FRAMEWORK IS WE SHOULD UNDERSTAND THE DEBATE IN TERMS OF COMPETING FORMS OF
KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION
–
NEOLIBERALISM EXPANDS BY CONTROLLING OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE WORLD AND THE WAY WE DEFINE
OURSELVES WITHIN IT
NEOLIBERAL ORDER
– ONLY CONTESTING THE 1AC’S KNOWLEDGE CLAIMS CAN DESTROY THE EXISTING
READ ‘9 (Jason, The University of Southern Maine, A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity,
Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 25-36, February 2009)
In the Grundrisse, Marx does not use the term “human capital,” but fixed capital, a term generally used to refer to machinery, factories, and
other investments in the means of production to refer to the subjectivity, the subjective powers of the worker. In general Marx understood
the progression of capital to be a process by which the skills, knowledge, and know-how of workers were gradually incorporated into
machinery, into fixed capital, reducing the laborer to an unskilled and ultimately replaceable cog in a machine. This is “proletarianization” the
process by which capitalism produces its gravediggers in a class of impoverished workers who have nothing to lose but their chains. In the
Grundrisse, however,
Marx addresses a fundamentally different possibility, capital’s exploitation of not just the physical powers
of the body, but the general social knowledge spread throughout society and embodied in each individual. This is what Marx refers
to as
the “general intellect”—the diffused social knowledge of society. This knowledge, the capacity to use various languages, protocols,
and symbolic systems, is largely produced outside of work. As Marx writes: “The saving of labor time is equal to an increase of free time, i.e.
time for the full
development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon the productive power of labor as itself the greatest
productive power.
From the standpoint of the direct production process it can be regarded as the production of fixed
capital, this fixed capital being man [human] himself.”17 Marx’s deviation from the standard terminology of his own corpus,
terminology that designates the worker as labor power (or living labor), the machine or factory as fixed capital, and money as circulating
capital, is ultimately revealing. It
reveals something of a future that Marx could barely envision, a future that has become our
present: the real subsumption of society by capital. This subsumption involves not only the formation of what Marx referred to
as a specifically capitalist mode of production, but also the
incorporation of all subjective potential, the capacity to
communicate, to feel, to create, to think, into productive powers for capital. Capital no longer simply exploits labor,
understood as the physical capacity to transform objects,
but puts to work the capacities to create and communicate that
traverse social relations. It is possible to say that with real subsumption capital has no outside, there is no relationship that
cannot be transformed into a commodity, but at the same time capital is nothing but outside, production takes place
outside of the factory and the firm,
in various social relationships. Because of this fundamental displacement subjectivity becomes
paramount, subjectivity itself becomes productive and it is this same subjectivity that must be controlled.
FRAMEWORK – REPRESENTATIONS MATTER
ECONOMIC THEORY CAN’T COME TO TERMS WITH ONTOLOGICAL SHIFT IN SOCIETY FROM DISCIPLINE TO
CONTROL—SIGNS, IMAGES, AND WORDS THAT MODIFY BODIES AND BRAINS PRECONDITION PRODUCTION.
ANY ARGUMENT ABOUT IGNORING REPRESENTATIONS DEMONSTRATES THAT THEIR FAILURE TO UNDERSTAND
THE IMPORTANCE OF DISCOURSE LIES AT THE ROOT OF THEIR POLITICS
LAZZARATO ‘3 (Maurizio, a Paris-based sociologist, a member of the editorial group of the journal Multitudes and the author of the
influential essay Immaterial labour, “Struggle, Event, Media”, in Makeworlds. Google)
The paradigmatic body of Western control societies is no longer represented by the imprisoned body of the
worker, the lunatic, the ill person, but rather by the obese (full of the worlds of the enterprise) or anorectic (rejection of
this world) body, which see the bodies of humanity scourged by hunger, violence and thirst on television. The
paradigmatic body of our societies is no longer the mute body moulded by discipline, but rather it is the bodies and
souls marked by the signs, words and images (company logos) that are inscribed in us – similar to the procedure,
through which the machine in Kafka's “Penal Colony” inscribes its commands into the skin of the condemned.
In the 70s Pasolini very precisely described how television had changed the soul and the body of the Italians, how it was the main instrument
of an anthropological transformation that first and especially affected youth. He used practically the same concept as Tarde to describe the
modalities of an effect of television at a distance: the impact of television is due to example rather than discipline, to imitation rather than
coercion. It is the steering of behavior, the influence on possible activities. His film trilogy about bodies was rejected, because it did not take
up this transformation. It still spoke of the body before the modulation of brains and, with regard to certain aspects, even before disciplinary
societies.
These incorporeal transformations that come into our heads again and again like ritornelli, which are circulating all
over the world at the moment, penetrating into every household, and which represent the real weapon for the
conquest, the occupation, the seizure of brains and bodies – they are simply incomprehensible to Marxist theory and to
economic theories. We face a change of paradigms here, which we cannot grasp starting from labour, from
practice. On the contrary, it could well be that the latter supplies a false image of what production means today,
because the process we have just described is the precondition for every organization of labour (or non-labour).
Images, signs and statements are thus possibilities, possible worlds, which affect souls (brains) and must be
realized in bodies. Images, signs and statements intervene in both the incorporeal and the corporeal
transformations. Their effect is that of the creation and realization of what is possible, not of representation. They
contribute to the metamorphoses of subjectivity, not to their representation. “