Capitalism K GHS + F Unit– CNDI
2020
Neg
1NCs
1NC – Generic
Criminal justice and capitalism are intrinsically linked – the only way
to solve our criminal justice system is to address the underlying
capitalist issues behind crime.
Nayak ’20 (Bhabani Shankar Nayak, Coventry University UK, “Crime, Justice and
Capitalism”, Countercurrents, July 12 2020, https://countercurrents.org/2020/07/crimejustice-and-capitalism/)-EL
*spellings in the card are British English not American English
The right-wing henchmen and their liberal brethren provide moral justifications for extra judicial deaths during colonial
plunders and imperialist wars. From Iraq wars to the killing of Osama Bin Laden, and from honour killings to domestic
violence, police encounters, and custodial deaths around the world are part of the same genealogy, that justifies violence
on moral grounds. Colonialism as civilising mission, imperialist wars for democracy and human rights are products of
unfounded moral discourses shaped by the ruling class propaganda. The moral arguments continue to provide
justifications to institutionalise violence and patronise it in the name of nationalism, religion, community and caste honour.
The masses fall into such false intellectual narrative and celebrate such extra judicial, structural and institutionalised
violence as justice. It has shaped the Orwellian proverbial expression. “Those who live by the sword die by the sword.
Those who do not die by the sword die of smelly diseases”. Such a violent social formulation derives its cultural legitimacy
from Christian theology. The Gospel of Matthew echoes it by saying “sword shall perish with the sword”. The patronage of
violence is an integral part of most of the world religions. The idea of god and religions will perish without cherishing the
ideals of violence and fear in the name of justice. In this way, normalisation and naturalisation of violence as justice
derives its legitimacy from religious and moral discourses, which is antithetical to ideals of justice. The moral foundation of
extra judicial killing as justice is not new in the world. The modified version of the Hammurabian code and Anglo-Saxon
culture of crime, evidence, punishment and justice continues to resonate in the 21st century judicial praxis. The origin
and growth of crime and its moral foundation is intrinsically linked with ascendancy of
private property from feudalism to finance capital. The economic construction of society
and transformation of individual as a mere producer and consumer in support of
capitalism both in its old and new forms led to the rise of crime. The culture of consumerism has
promoted a culture of competition, where realisation of one’s own self-interest is supreme goal. The capitalist
transformation of need-based culture to a desire-based culture with the help of advertisement industry, which has
destroyed collective foundations of society. The
ascendancy of capitalism has increased wealth
without diminishing miseries. It has led to the concentration of wealth in the hands of
few, and growth of huge social and economic in inequalities in the society. The rotten
capitalist system continues to produce miseries for many and prosperity for the few.
Laws are made by the capitalist classes to protect their own interests. The Corn Laws were
made to uphold the interests of landed aristocracies, mercantile classes and industrial bourgeoisie in early 19th century
England. The legacies of such laws continue to exist today in different parts of the world. The special economic
zones, industrial zones, agricultural zones, export and import zones are classic
examples of policies, working conditions and labour laws, which disempower the
working-class masses and empowers capitalist classes. The strong-security state and conformist
bourgeois judiciary is important to provide protection to the private properties of capitalist classes. The capitalist
system not only produces crime, it also uses organised criminal gangs to promote its
regimes of capitalist profit accumulation. Historically, alienating capitalist system is an
organic incubator for crime and criminals. There is nothing new in the criminogenic
character of capitalism. The law is used and interpreted differently to different classes of
people. As a result of which American prisons are over flowing with black, ethnic minority
and working-class population whereas Indian prisons packed with lower caste, tribal and
poor population. The criminals have their classes. The punishments and prison cells are
different according to their class location of the criminals. If criminals are rich and
powerful; the law takes a different course whereas law takes its own course with poor
and vulnerable. The unequal availability and accessibility to police, law and judiciary did
not help society to grow in an egalitarian way. The police, law firms, solicitors, judiciary
and prisons did not deliver justice. These judicial institutions of law and order did not help to eradicate social
and economic problems of our times. It has rather helped to consolidate the power of the capitalist
elites while the masses continue to suffer in different forms of miseries. The
contemporary capitalism is organised around ideals of illiberal and undemocratic
governance of the society in which citizens are free consumers and wage labours. The
ideals of individual liberty, freedom and rights are cosmetic covers to criminogenic face
of capitalism. The capitalist societies do not overcome the problem of crime but it opens
up in frontiers of crime every day in different stages of its development. The culture of
crime and punishment is an integral part of the proportional retributive judicial system
with bourgeois spirit in which ‘popular/elite consciousness and an element of desire for
revenge’ plays key role shaping laws to regulate crime and criminals. The capitalist judicial
system is based on the perceived notion of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Such a system disciplines
the citizens and does not destroy the crime and criminals. It does not reform the
criminals or did not provide the environment for the criminals to develop their abilities to
reform themselves. It normalises and naturalises the culture of crime within retributive
judicial system that complements capitalism. The moral foundations of retributive justice derive its
legitimacy from major religions of the world. There is nothing modern about it. It is feudal, medieval and barbaric in letter
and spirit. The social, economic, religious and cultural conditions that produce crime and promotes
criminals continue to thrive under capitalist patronage. Such a system moves the society
into unending darkness of injustice. It is time to understand and unravel the innate goodness and human
values in human beings, which are destroyed by capitalist cultures. Crimes and capitalisms are unnatural whereas love
and peace is natural to all human beings in all societies. The cosmetic vicissitudes of capitalism and its actuarial justice
cannot solve the problems of crime. The world needs new language of penology by addressing the alienating capitalist
conditions that produces and patronises crime and criminals. The establishment of a crime free society is possible and
inevitable. It depends on our abilities to struggle for an egalitarian economy, democratic society and non-discriminatory
governance based on progressive politics of peace and prosperity. Such decriminalised transformations depend on
unwavering commitment of people’s struggles to ideals of liberty, equality, fraternity and justice for all. These ideals are
indivisible to establish a crime free, punishment free and prison free society based on harmony and love for each other.
Understandings of criminal justice that focus exclusively on
economic backgrounds or racial backgrounds fail to understand the
full political economy in the criminal justice system. Despite
intentions reforms that stem from misunderstandings will always fail
Jackie Wang, February 2019, " CARCERAL CAPITALISM " No Publication, Jackie Wang is a student of the dream
state, black studies scholar, prison abolitionist, poet, performer, library rat, trauma monster, and Ph.D. candidate at
Harvard University in African and African American Studies. She is the author of a number of punk zines including On
Being Hard Femme, as well as a collection of dream poems titled Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womh (Capricious). She
tweets @loneberrywang and blogs at loneberry.tumblr.com. https://worldsapart.noblogs.org/files/2019/02/WANGCarceral-Capitalism-IWE-PRINT.pdf, accessed 7-16-2020 MS
(financialization, automation, and looting) represent exclusionary
processes that proceed by way of inclusion (subjectivation as citizen debtors,
incorporation through the extension of credit), confinement and gratuitous violence are
examples of exclusionary processes that result in civic and actual death. In other words, in the
first three instances the parasitic state and predatory credit system must keep people alive in
order to extract from them; in the latter two instances it must confine and kill to maintain the
current racial order. As we move to the fourth and fifth techniques of parasitic governance—confinement and
gratuitous violence—we reach the point at which political economy fails as a lens
through which to analyze racial dynamics in the United States. Although the concept of the
prison-industrial complex draws attention to the industries that benefit from the prison
boom of the last several decades—including the construction companies contracted to build the prisons, the
While the first three categories
companies contracted to supply food and commissary items, the predatory phone and video companies contracted to
provide communication services, and private prison companies such as GEO Group and the Corrections Corporation of
America (which has recently rebranded itself as CoreCivic)—the profit motive itself is not sufficient in
explaining the phenomenon of racialized mass incarceration. Nonetheless, an economic
analysis of prisons should not be wholly abandoned. In addition to drawing attention to the
private companies that benefit from the existence of prisons, there is much that political
economy can tell us about prisons in the U.S.: it can elucidate how the economies of rural white
America were revived through the construction of prisons and the employment of
displaced white workers as prison guards; it can explain how deindustrialization and the
migration of jobs to the suburbs and abroad created zones of concentrated black urban
poverty; and it can show how the expansion of prisons “solved” the surplus population crisis
caused by the wave of unemployment that followed the restructuring of the U.S.
economy. Political economy also gives us a way to understand the growth of private prisons in the last several
decades (particularly in the arena of juvenile detention) and the use of prison labor to produce goods at an average cost
of 93 cents per hour. The
lens of political economy can even shed light on why there has been
a marginal decrease in the prison population in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, which
led to revenue shortfalls that left many states desperate to slash public spending. Yet to reduce mass
incarceration to the proft motive would be misleading, considering that most inmates are
held in publicly operated state and federal facilities as well as public local jails. Though as
many as 700,000 prisoners are employed in a variety of jobs (ranging from facility maintenance to manufacturing jobs in
industries such as furniture production), the majority of those in prisons and jails don’t work. At the end of the day, the cost
of housing prisoners is high, and the public bears the burden of the cost. A question that a purely economistic
view fails to address is why, when the welfare state was being dismantled and there was
an ideological pivot away from “big government,” was the public induced to believe that a prison binge
was legitimate while spending on social services, education, and job creation was not? Is it possible that, as the
government withdrew from the arena of social welfare and the revolt among those in the
capitalist class reorganized politics such that the government was no longer allowed to
regulate the economy, the only remaining social entitlement—the entitlement that has come to give
the state as an entity its coherence—is the entitlement of security? Understanding the foundation of capitalism requires a
consideration of “the hidden abode of race”: the ontological distinction between superior and inferior humans—codified
as race—that was necessary for slavery, colonialism, the theft of lands in the Americas,
and genocide. This racial separation is manifested in the division between full humans who possess the right to sell
their labor and compete within markets, and those that are disposable, discriminated against, and ultimately either
eliminated or superexploited.15 Black
racialization, then, is the mark that renders subjects as
suitable for—on the one hand—hyperexploitation and expropriation, and, on the other
hand, annihilation. Before the neoliberal era, the racial order was propped up by the state, and racial distinctions
were enforced through legal codification, Jim Crow segregation, and other formal arrangements. In a contemporary
context, though the legal regime undergirding the racial order has been dismantled, race has maintained its dual
character, which consists of “not only a probabilistic assignment of relative economic value but also an index of differential
vulnerability to hyperexploitation and expropriation in
the economic domain and vulnerability to premature death in the political and social
domains. My essay on the Ferguson Police Department and the city’s program of municipal plunder is an attempt to
make visible the hidden backdrop of Mike Browns execution: the widespread racialized expropriation of
black residents carried out by the criminal justice arm of the state. It is not just that Mike Browns
vulnerability to state violence.”16 In other words,
murder happened alongside the looting of residents at the behest of the police and the city’s financial manager, but that
racial legacies that have marked black residents as lootable are intimately tied to police officers’ treatment of black people
as killable. The two logics reinforce and are bound up with each other. In her response to Dawson’s analysis of
racialization as expropriation, Fraser develops Dawson’s claims by looking at the interplay between economic
accumulation in a capitalist
society occur along the two axes of exploitation and expropriation, but one makes the
other possible in that the “racialized subjection of those whom capital expropriates other
expropriation and “politically enforced status distinctions.”17 Not only does
things, bilks women of their futures. The aged woman who has toiled by caring for others is left with little by the end of her
life. Though gender distinctions are maintained through expropriative processes, they also have consequences beyond
the economic and material realm. While it could be said that disposability is the logic that corresponds to racialized
expropriation, gendered subjectivation has as its corollary rapeability. It also goes without saying that these expropriative
logics are not mutually exclusive, as nonwhite women and gender-non- conforming people may be subject to a different
set of expropriative logics than white women.
Capitalism is a failed and broken system that has produced a laundry
list of impacts such as socioeconomic inequality, rampant disease,
abject poverty, global warming, etc.
Foster ’19 (John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon,
Capitalism Has Failed – What Next?, Monthly Review, 01 February 2019,
https://monthlyreview.org/2019/02/01/capitalism-has-failed-what-next/)-NR
capitalism has failed as a social system. The
world is mired in economic stagnation, financialization, and the most extreme
inequality in human history, accompanied by mass unemployment and
underemployment, precariousness, poverty, hunger, wasted output and lives, and
what at this point can only be called a planetary ecological “death spiral.”1 The
digital revolution , the greatest technological advance of our time, has rapidly mutated from a promise of free communication
and liberated production into new means of surveillance, control, and displacement of the
working population. The institutions of liberal democracy are at the point of
collapse , while fascism, the rear guard of the capitalist system, is again on the march, along with patriarchy, racism, imperialism, and war. To say that
capitalism is a failed system is not, of course, to suggest that its breakdown and disintegration is imminent.2 It does, however, mean that it has
passed from being a historically necessary and creative system at its inception to being
a historically unnecessary and destructive one in the present century. Today , more than ever, the world
is faced with the epochal choice between “the revolutionary reconstitution of
society at large and the common ruin of the contending classes.” 3 Indications of this failure of
capitalism are everywhere. Stagnation of investment punctuated by bubbles of financial
expansion, which then inevitably burst, now characterizes the so-called free
market.4 Soaring inequality in income and wealth has its counterpart in the
declining material circumstances of a majority of the population. Real wages for
most workers in the United States have barely budged in forty years despite steadily rising
productivity.5 Work intensity has increased, while work and safety protections on the job
have been systematically jettisoned. Unemployment data has become more and
more meaningless due to a new institutionalized underemployment in the form of
contract labor in the gig economy.6 Unions have been reduced to mere shadows of their former glory as capitalism has
asserted totalitarian control over workplaces. With the demise of Soviet-type societies, social
democracy in Europe has perished in the new atmosphere of “liberated capitalism. ”7
The capture of the surplus value produced by overexploited populations in the poorest
regions of the world, via the global labor arbitrage instituted by multinational corporations,
is leading to an unprecedented amassing of financial wealth at the center of the
world economy and relative poverty in the periphery .8 Around $21 trillion of offshore funds are currently lodged
Less than two decades into the twenty-first century, it is evident that
in tax havens on islands mostly in the Caribbean, constituting “the fortified refuge of Big Finance.”9 Technologically driven monopolies resulting from the globalcommunications revolution, together with the rise to dominance of Wall Street-based financial capital geared to speculative asset creation, have further contributed
Forty-two billionaires now enjoy as much wealth as half the
world’s population, while the three richest men in the United States —Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and
Warren Buffett— have more wealth than half the U.S. population. 10 In every region of the world,
inequality has increased sharply in recent decades.11 The gap in per capita
income and wealth between the richest and poorest nations , which has been the dominant trend for
centuries, is rapidly widening once again .12 More than 60 percent of the world’s
employed population , some two billion people, now work in the impoverished informal sector ,
to the riches of today’s “1 percent.”
forming a massive global proletariat. The global reserve army of labor is some 70 percent larger than the active labor army of formally employed workers.13
Adequate health care, housing, education, and clean water and air are
increasingly out of reach for large sections of the population, even in wealthy
countries in North America and Europe, while transportation is becoming more
difficult in the United States and many other countries due to irrationally high levels of dependency on
the automobile and disinvestment in public transportation. Urban structures are
more and more characterized by gentrification and segregation, with cities
becoming the playthings of the well-to-do while marginalized populations are
shunted aside. About half a million people, most of them children, are homeless on any given night in the United States.14 New York City is
experiencing a major rat infestation, attributed to warming temperatures, mirroring trends around the world.15 In the United States and other high-income
life expectancy is in decline, with a remarkable resurgence of Victorian
illnesses related to poverty and exploitation. In Britain, gout, scarlet fever,
whooping cough, and even scurvy are now resurgent, along with tuberculosis . With
inadequate enforcement of work health and safety regulations, black lung disease has returned with a vengeance
in U.S. coal country.16 Overuse of antibiotics, particularly by capitalist
agribusiness, is leading to an antibiotic-resistance crisis , with the dangerous growth of superbugs
countries,
generating increasing numbers of deaths, which by mid–century could surpass annual cancer deaths, prompting the World Health Organization to declare a
These dire conditions, arising from the workings of the system,
are consistent with what Frederick Engels, in the Condition of the Working Class in England, called “social murder.” 18 At
the instigation of giant corporations , philanthrocapitalist foundations, and neoliberal governments,
public education has been restructured around corporate-designed testing based on the
implementation of robotic common-core standards. This is generating massive databases on the student
population, much of which are now being surreptitiously marketed and sold.19
The corporatization and privatization of education is feeding the progressive
subordination of children’s needs to the cash nexus of the commodity market . We are thus seeing a
“global health emergency.”17
dramatic return of Thomas Gradgrind’s and Mr. M’Choakumchild’s crass utilitarian philosophy dramatized in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times: “Facts are alone
wanted in life” and “You are never to fancy.”20 Having been reduced to intellectual dungeons, many of the poorest, most racially segregated schools in the United
More than two million people in the United States are
behind bars, a higher rate of incarceration than any other country in the world ,
constituting a new Jim Crow. The total population in prison is nearly equal to the number of people in Houston, Texas, the fourth largest U.S. city. African
Americans and Latinos make up 56 percent of those incarcerated, while
constituting only about 32 percent of the U.S. population. Nearly 50 percent of American adults, and a
States are mere pipelines for prisons or the military.21
much higher percentage among African Americans and Native Americans, have an immediate family member who has spent or is currently spending time behind
bars. Both black men and Native American men in the United States are nearly three times, Hispanic men nearly two times, more likely to die of police shootings
Racial divides are now widening across the entire planet. Violence
against women and the expropriation of their unpaid labor, as well as the higher level of exploitation of their paid
labor, are integral to the way in which power is organized in capitalist society—
and how it seeks to divide rather than unify the population. More than a third of women worldwide have
experienced physical/sexual violence. Women’s bodies , in particular, are objectified, reified, and
commodified as part of the normal workings of monopoly-capitalist marketing. 23
The mass media-propaganda system , part of the larger corporate matrix, is now merging into a
social media-based propaganda system that is more porous and seemingly
anarchic, but more universal and more than ever favoring money and power . Utilizing
than white men.22
modern marketing and surveillance techniques, which now dominate all digital interactions, vested interests are able to tailor their messages, largely unchecked, to
individuals and their social networks, creating concerns about “fake news” on all sides.24 Numerous business entities promising technological manipulation of
The elimination of net
neutrality in the United States means further concentration, centralization, and
control over the entire Internet by monopolistic service providers. Elections are
increasingly prey to unregulated “dark money” emanating from the coffers of corporations and
voters in countries across the world have now surfaced, auctioning off their services to the highest bidders.25
the billionaire class . Although presenting itself as the world’s leading democracy, the United States , as Paul Baran and Paul
Sweezy stated in Monopoly Capital in 1966, “ is democratic in form and plutocratic in content .”26 In the Trump
administration, following a long-established tradition, 72 percent of those appointed to the cabinet have
come from the higher corporate echelons , while others have been drawn from the military.27 War , engineered by the
United States and other major powers at the apex of the system, has become perpetual in strategic oil regions such
as the Middle East, and threatens to escalate into a global thermonuclear exchange. During the
Obama administration, the United States was engaged in wars/bombings in seven different
countries —Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan.28 Torture and assassinations have been reinstituted by Washington as
acceptable instruments of war against those now innumerable individuals, group networks, and whole societies that are branded as terrorist. A new
Cold War and nuclear arms race is in the making between the United States and
Russia , while Washington is seeking to place road blocks to the continued rise of China. The Trump administration has created a new space force as a
separate branch of the military in an attempt to ensure U.S. dominance in the militarization of space. Sounding the alarm on the
increasing dangers of a nuclear war and of climate destabilization, the distinguished
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved its doomsday clock in 2018 to two minutes to
midnight , the closest since 1953, when it marked the advent of thermonuclear weapons.29 Increasingly severe economic
sanctions are being imposed by the United States on countries like Venezuela and
Nicaragua , despite their democratic elections—or because of them. Trade and currency wars are being actively
promoted by core states, while racist barriers against immigration continue to be erected in
Europe and the United States as some 60 million refugees and internally displaced peoples
flee devastated environments. Migrant populations worldwide have risen to 250
million , with those residing in high-income countries constituting more than 14 percent of the populations of those
countries, up from less than 10 percent in 2000. Meanwhile, ruling circles and wealthy countries seek to wall off islands of
More than three-quarters
of a billion people , over 10 percent of the world population, are chronically malnourished .31
Food stress in the United States keeps climbing , leading to the rapid growth of cheap dollar stores
selling poor quality and toxic food. Around forty million Americans, representing one out of
eight households , including nearly thirteen million children, are food insecure .32 Subsistence farmers
power and privilege from the mass of humanity, who are to be left to their fate.30
are being pushed off their lands by agribusiness, private capital, and sovereign wealth funds in a global depeasantization
Urban overcrowding and poverty
across much of the globe is so severe that one can now reasonably refer to a
“planet of slums.”34 Meanwhile, the world housing market is estimated to be worth up to $163 trillion (as
compared to the value of gold mined over all recorded history, estimated at $7.5 trillion).35 The Anthropocene
epoch , first ushered in by the Great Acceleration of the world economy immediately after the Second World War ,
has generated enormous rifts in planetary boundaries, extending from climate
change to ocean acidification, to the sixth extinction, to disruption of the global
nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, to the loss of freshwater, to the disappearance
of forests, to widespread toxic-chemical and radioactive pollution .36 It is now estimated
process that constitutes the greatest movement of people in history.33
that 60 percent of the world’s wildlife vertebrate population (including mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and fish) have
been wiped out since 1970, while the worldwide abundance of invertebrates has declined by 45 percent in recent
exterminations” resulting from
accelerating climate change and rapidly shifting climate zones are only
compounding this general process of biodiversity loss. Biologists expect that half
of all species will be facing extinction by the end of the century. 38 If present
climate-change trends continue, the “global carbon budget” associated with a 2°C
increase in average global temperature will be broken in sixteen years (while a 1.5°C
decades.37 What climatologist James Hansen calls the “ species
increase in global average temperature—staying beneath which is the key to long-term stabilization of the climate—will be
the world is now perilously close to a
Hothouse Earth, in which catastrophic climate change will be locked in and
irreversible. 39 The ecological, social, and economic costs to humanity of continuing to increase carbon emissions
reached in a decade). Earth System scientists warn that
by 2.0 percent a year as in recent decades (rising in 2018 by 2.7 percent—3.4 percent in the United States), and failing to
meet the minimal 3.0 percent annual reductions in emissions currently needed to avoid a catastrophic destabilization of
major energy corporations
continue to lie about climate change, promoting and bankrolling climate
denialism —while admitting the truth in their internal documents. These corporations are working to
accelerate the extraction and production of fossil fuels, including the dirtiest,
most greenhouse gas-generating varieties, reaping enormous profits in the
process . The melting of the Arctic ice from global warming is seen by capital as a new El Dorado, opening up
the earth’s energy balance, are simply incalculable.40 Nevertheless,
massive additional oil and gas reserves to be exploited without regard to the consequences for the earth’s climate. In
response to scientific reports on climate change, Exxon Mobil declared that it intends to extract and sell all of the fossil-
Energy corporations continue to intervene in climate
negotiations to ensure that any agreements to limit carbon emissions are defanged. Capitalist countries
across the board are putting the accumulation of wealth for a few above
combatting climate destabilization, threatening the very future of humanity.
Capitalism is best understood as a competitive class-based mode of production and
exchange geared to the accumulation of capital through the exploitation of
workers’ labor power and the private appropriation of surplus value (value generated
fuel reserves at its disposal.41
beyond the costs of the workers’ own reproduction). The mode of economic accounting intrinsic to capitalism designates
as a value-generating good or service anything that passes through the market and therefore produces income. It follows
the greater part of the social and environmental costs of production outside
the market are excluded in this form of valuation and are treated as mere negative
“externalities ,” unrelated to the capitalist economy itself— whether in terms of the shortening
and degradation of human life or the destruction of the natural environment . As
environmental economist K. William Kapp stated, “capitalism must be regarded as an economy of
unpaid costs.” 42 We have now reached a point in the twenty-first century in which
the externalities of this irrational system, such as the costs of war, the depletion
of natural resources, the waste of human lives, and the disruption of the planetary
environment, now far exceed any future economic ben efits that capitalism offers to society as a
whole. The accumulation of capital and the amassing of wealth are increasingly
occurring at the expense of an irrevocable rift in the social and environmental
conditions governing human life on earth.43
that
<ALT >
Links
L – Political Economy
Understandings of criminal justice that focus exclusively on
economic backgrounds or racial backgrounds fail to understand the
full political economy in the criminal justice system. Despite
intentions reforms that stem from misunderstandings will always fail
Jackie Wang, February 2019, " CARCERAL CAPITALISM " No Publication, Jackie Wang is a student of the dream
state, black studies scholar, prison abolitionist, poet, performer, library rat, trauma monster, and Ph.D. candidate at
Harvard University in African and African American Studies. She is the author of a number of punk zines including On
Being Hard Femme, as well as a collection of dream poems titled Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womh (Capricious). She
tweets @loneberrywang and blogs at loneberry.tumblr.com. https://worldsapart.noblogs.org/files/2019/02/WANGCarceral-Capitalism-IWE-PRINT.pdf, accessed 7-16-2020 MS
(financialization, automation, and looting) represent exclusionary
processes that proceed by way of inclusion (subjectivation as citizen debtors,
incorporation through the extension of credit), confinement and gratuitous violence are
examples of exclusionary processes that result in civic and actual death. In other words, in the
first three instances the parasitic state and predatory credit system must keep people alive in
order to extract from them; in the latter two instances it must confine and kill to maintain the
current racial order. As we move to the fourth and fifth techniques of parasitic governance—confinement and
gratuitous violence—we reach the point at which political economy fails as a lens
through which to analyze racial dynamics in the United States. Although the concept of the
prison-industrial complex draws attention to the industries that benefit from the prison
boom of the last several decades—including the construction companies contracted to build the prisons, the
While the first three categories
companies contracted to supply food and commissary items, the predatory phone and video companies contracted to
provide communication services, and private prison companies such as GEO Group and the Corrections Corporation of
America (which has recently rebranded itself as CoreCivic)—the
profit motive itself is not sufficient in
explaining the phenomenon of racialized mass incarceration. Nonetheless, an economic
analysis of prisons should not be wholly abandoned. In addition to drawing attention to the
private companies that benefit from the existence of prisons, there is much that political
economy can tell us about prisons in the U.S.: it can elucidate how the economies of rural white
America were revived through the construction of prisons and the employment of
displaced white workers as prison guards; it can explain how deindustrialization and the
migration of jobs to the suburbs and abroad created zones of concentrated black urban
poverty; and it can show how the expansion of prisons “solved” the surplus population crisis
caused by the wave of unemployment that followed the restructuring of the U.S.
economy. Political economy also gives us a way to understand the growth of private prisons in the last several
decades (particularly in the arena of juvenile detention) and the use of prison labor to produce goods at an average cost
of 93 cents per hour. The
lens of political economy can even shed light on why there has been
a marginal decrease in the prison population in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, which
led to revenue shortfalls that left many states desperate to slash public spending. Yet to reduce mass
incarceration to the proft motive would be misleading, considering that most inmates are
held in publicly operated state and federal facilities as well as public local jails. Though as
many as 700,000 prisoners are employed in a variety of jobs (ranging from facility maintenance to manufacturing jobs in
industries such as furniture production), the majority of those in prisons and jails don’t work. At the end of the day, the cost
purely economistic
view fails to address is why, when the welfare state was being dismantled and there was
an ideological pivot away from “big government,” was the public induced to believe that a prison binge
was legitimate while spending on social services, education, and job creation was not? Is it possible that, as the
government withdrew from the arena of social welfare and the revolt among those in the
capitalist class reorganized politics such that the government was no longer allowed to
regulate the economy, the only remaining social entitlement—the entitlement that has come to give
of housing prisoners is high, and the public bears the burden of the cost. A question that a
the state as an entity its coherence—is the entitlement of security? Understanding the foundation of capitalism requires a
consideration of “the hidden abode of race”: the ontological distinction between superior and inferior humans—codified
as race—that was necessary for slavery, colonialism, the theft of lands in the Americas,
and genocide. This racial separation is manifested in the division between full humans who possess the right to sell
their labor and compete within markets, and those that are disposable, discriminated against, and ultimately either
eliminated or superexploited.15 Black racialization, then, is the mark that renders subjects as
suitable for—on the one hand—hyperexploitation and expropriation, and, on the other
hand, annihilation. Before the neoliberal era, the racial order was propped up by the state, and racial distinctions
were enforced through legal codification, Jim Crow segregation, and other formal arrangements. In a contemporary
context, though the legal regime undergirding the racial order has been dismantled, race has maintained its dual
character, which consists of “not only a probabilistic assignment of relative economic value but also an index of differential
vulnerability to hyperexploitation and expropriation in
the economic domain and vulnerability to premature death in the political and social
domains. My essay on the Ferguson Police Department and the city’s program of municipal plunder is an attempt to
make visible the hidden backdrop of Mike Browns execution: the widespread racialized expropriation of
black residents carried out by the criminal justice arm of the state. It is not just that Mike Browns
vulnerability to state violence.”16 In other words,
murder happened alongside the looting of residents at the behest of the police and the city’s financial manager, but that
racial legacies that have marked black residents as lootable are intimately tied to police officers’ treatment of black people
as killable. The two logics reinforce and are bound up with each other. In her response to Dawson’s analysis of
racialization as expropriation, Fraser develops Dawson’s claims by looking at the interplay between economic
expropriation and “politically enforced status distinctions.”17 Not only does accumulation in a capitalist
society occur along the two axes of exploitation and expropriation, but one makes the
other possible in that the “racialized subjection of those whom capital expropriates other
things, bilks women of their futures. The aged woman who has toiled by caring for others is left with little by the end of her
life. Though gender distinctions are maintained through expropriative processes, they also have consequences beyond
the economic and material realm. While it could be said that disposability is the logic that corresponds to racialized
expropriation, gendered subjectivation has as its corollary rapeability. It also goes without saying that these expropriative
logics are not mutually exclusive, as nonwhite women and gender-non- conforming people may be subject to a different
set of expropriative logics than white women.
L – Reform: Generic
The aff commodifies the prison industrial complex by failing to
address the larger system of neoliberalism—super-structural reform
justifies the continued objectification of POC in the squo
(Mariah Balestracci, Evan Fritz, and Matt Talley 2017 “Capitalist Logics of the
U.S. Prison System" No Publication, https://anthropology.uconn.edu/wpcontent/uploads/sites/944/2018/02/Capitalist-Logics-of-the-U.S.-Prison-System-.pdf)-SH
Intro: The history of the United States of America is a history of class struggle. As it developed, battle-lines
have been drawn which put people of different races and genders on different sides,
almost always against their own interests. These conflicts have been made apparent in the
institutional setting, as typically rich, white males have orchestrated the system itself to
maintain power and wealth. Through the vehicles of federal and local governmental policy,
these elites have vehemently made law their racist, sexist, and classist ideals . These
derogatory values have been perpetuated and reinforced despite changing political
climates . The prison system in the United States is a perfect example of this kind of systemic and
institutionalized racism , sexism, and classism in effect . The system maintains itself in large
part through extremely one-sided laws that substantiate the continuing success in operation of
not only prisons, as they are written by private corporate interests (rich, white males), but also every other aspect of
society. The government legalizes and essentially justifies the profit gained via a
racialized and 3 gendered system of incarceration. All of this results in the removal of a large quantity of
people from society, stowed away to work without pay for the same corporate interests that ensure their captivity. The
prison sector acts dialectically both as a Band-Aid for the economic crises that capitalism
naturally generates, as well as a means of reproducing racialized subjectivities in the
working class. The dynamic of its development is characterized as fits and spurts of growing recognition of its utility
to discipline and contain surplus populations, making profit hand over fist along the way. This paper provides an in-depth
Marxist analysis of the prison system in America by providing a theoretical structure of the role and function of prisons in
the United States, a historical analysis of the California prison system, and an outline of the formation of a Gramscian
‘historical bloc’1 intimately connected with the bid for hegemony of neoliberal ideology in the country. Theoretical Basis:
Marxism: We take as our starting point, as an assumption, that Marxism is correct. In the first analysis, human
society is organized to collectively produce social means of subsistence (food, shelter, cultural
products, etcetera). From this basic fact, the division of labor develops as well as its technical means,
organizational (class) and objective (tools). The development of the organizational and technical means of
production are conditioned by and condition the functioning of society in general, but in no case can society
exist without material production . People need to eat so they can socialize, but
they also must socialize in order to eat . Tools, productive and reproductive organizations are then
directly products of their historical “epoch,” of the real human events, the continuity of human production over time, which
lead to their use/implementation (Marx 1932). Tools are then, literally, an objectification of productive 1 Widely understood
as the notion of “common sense” 4 relationships and, going one step further, class struggle. Class struggle, very
briefly,
is the persistent struggle over surplus-product, that amount of production above what is
necessary for the direct producers to reproduce their ability to labor from day to day.
Class struggle too is a product of historical developments and inseparable from technical
(objective and subjective) means of production2 . The form of class struggle, i.e. fight over control of
surplus product and the process of production, is the main distinguishing principle between different historical periods and
geographic relationships: the mode of production. In the modern day, we live under (late?) capitalism, exemplified by the
bifurcation of social production into owners of means of production and owners of “labor-power,” the ability to labor.
Bourgeois and proletarians; the capitalists and the workers. Between the two warring classes, stands the
state, mediating the terms of class struggle, always to the benefit of the capitalists as
a whole (some individual capitalists may be martyred for the class’ benefit). Prison/Social Reproduction: Lenin (1918)
described the modern state as the bureaucratic/administrative and repressive/armed apparatus of class rule. From this
analysis, we may say the prison system in capitalist countries is an institution which straddles the line of both functions.
The United States’ prison exists within the context of a historically specific interplay of processes of
racialization and gender construction utilized by the American bourgeois to maintain
social ordering within a severe and dominating national system of production. As such, the “prison system,”
which we will use to refer to the entire apparatus of incarceration, confinement, and control insofar as it is explicitly
connected to the state (i.e. the self-discipline of a corporation would not be included), in theory and in practice,
has a
multifaceted and highly dynamic role within American capitalism. I also tend to use “prison” and
“jail” interchangeably. 2 Everything Marx and Engels ever wrote. 5 Notably, prison functions as a “warehousing” of labor
creating what Marx called a “reserve
army of labor.” In the United States, this reserve army of labor, unemployed or especially
precariously employed workers, has been a motive force in larger processes of
racialization . Similarly, domestic and emotional work, the work of “social reproduction” (see Lewis 2016,
Bhattacharya 2015) more generally, has been placed as the nearly exclusive domain of women,
non-binary, and queer individuals, much of which occurs outside of the sphere of
production proper. In either case, the labor, or lack thereof, is often “unproductive” in the
sense that social reproduction does not always, although increasingly now does, lend itself to
profitability. At the same time, being unemployed, while benefitting the capitalist by driving wages down, is
par excellence. Capitalism perpetually displaces and dislocates workers,
subjectively (ethically) “bad” in the sense that, again, no surplus-value is being produced. Both of these designations,
racialization of (un)employment and the gendering/individualization of social
reproduction place people of color and women in subordinate positions within
capitalism . Such subordination allows the capitalists to not only pay less for their labor,
but cheapens the value of labor-power as a whole. Prison , then, becomes a means for
the capitalists to house these people with “non-productive” (i.e. not immediately
profitable) social positions 3 . Prison’s aspect of “housing,” however, is only of secondary importance; the
prison itself takes over the role of social reproduction for its inhabitants (Lewis 2016).
With this said, it must be recognized that the prison is not an independent institution separate from society. How
incarcerated people's’ labor-power is reproduced is decided, in a cynical fashion, by the capitalists and their state. In this
way, prisons become the “Ideal Workhouse/House of Terror ” which Marx shows bourgeois
ideologues describing as early as 1770 (Marx 1990, 388)4 . Incarcerated workers are made to 3 There is an obvious
contradiction here, because by taking away the people who are responsible for reproducing the working class, the
working class becomes more pathologized in the eyes of capitalism, spiralling (socially)
with an expansion of the prison system. 4 The fact that prison was being formulated for bringing wageworkers’ conditions of labor 6 labor for free, without any legal rights as citizens, under supreme surveillance, and subject
to physical punishment. The
state (re)enforces these conditions
, and by their very existence the working conditions of all workers in
the state are made more precarious and the value of all labor is reduced. Noticeably absent from this discussion, is an account of “illegal” behaviors, the juridical basis for criminality. From our
Marxist standpoint, the law develops out of the objective conditions which create the populations which will be put behind bars5 . Of course, prison is a longstanding institution, so the subjective
justifications for it at a particular point will have historical roots and continuity with earlier periods in capitalism. Still, it is a mistake to view discourse around prison separate from capitalist
hegemony in general. Surplus: We use the categories of Ruth Gillmore’s6 (1999; 2007) disaggregation of “surplus”7 into surplus land, labor, capital, and state capacity to explain the objective
conditions which gave rise to prison expansion in California. Surplus is generated by the shifting needs and capacities of life under capitalism. As new forms of industry and domesticity replace
previous ones, the former physical structures, i.e. land taken out of use, productive capacity, and formerly employed workers, fall into disuse. They become unused surplus productive formations,
“waiting” for investment which may never come. Gillmore (2007) traces how shifts in California's economy, driven by movements within capitalism such as “globalization” (imperialism), agricultural
consolidation, and automation, left California with large expanses of unusable land, restless surplus populations in need (in the eyes of capital) of discipline, and a severely falling rate of profit.
Taken together, and utilizing existent racial imagery, private capital and the state 5 These conditions include: a falling rate of profit necessitating the utilization of a virtually free labor pool, high
unemployment, etc. All of these, incidentally, are related to, if not caused by, a higher organic composition of capital. 6 Heavily influenced by Neil Smith 7 It is unclear to me (Evan) how closely this
concept relates to Sweezy and Baran’s original idea of surplus, I think the concept can be a little tendentious, in any case, although of course still analytically useful. 7 converged to begin a period
of “carceral Keynesianism” to put these various surpluses to work for capital, that is, for valorization. The actual historical workings of this process will be put in much greater detail in the section
“Historical Lead-Up” Historical Lead-Up: The global trend that is the modern prison-industrial complex can be analyzed on a smaller, state-sized scale, where its general characteristics are thrown
into sharp relief. The state of California is a prime example of the mode of development of a modern prison sector and how it wreaks havoc on workers’ livelihoods and rights. From the year 1982
to 2000, California’s prison population increased by about 500 percent despite falling crime rates. Those who were imprisoned consisted mostly of people of color (African Americans and Latinos),
women, and undocumented immigrants. Altogether, the state had nearly 160,000 prisoners at the end of the 18-year period. Additionally, around 80% of those incarcerated were represented by
state-appointed lawyers, as they could not afford to pay for one themselves. Finally, a vast majority of prisoners lived in very urban cities in California prior to being arrested. It is obvious through
Those who were being targeted as
the ‘ideal’ population to imprison were people of color, women, and noncitizens from
low socioeconomic situations that lived in large cities. These are the general lines of a process of
viewing these statistics that this particular case in California touches upon the core aspects of the prison system.
racialized class structure being reproduced by policies that create new spaces of confinement for these marginalized
groups of people (Gilmore 2007, 7-9). In the 1800s, California went through a dramatic change in demographics and the
structure of land ownership. After the United States claimed victory in the Mexican War, white Americans gained
the ability to use their newfound economic power to construct and develop the state to their liking (Gilmore 2007, 31).
They utilized
this power to their advantage, and created labor and property classes that instilled
and made systemic the racist and classist social 8 and economic hierarchy through the
use of legislation (Gilmore 2007, 32). The goal of this was to depict themselves as the ruling
category of people in society, and give everyone else a spot underneath them, thus
subjecting people who were not rich and White males to the rule of the elite (Gilmore 2007,
32). Race and labor were “counter-posed” against each other in a ruling class gambit to reify
and reconstruct race divisions in the wake of slavery (DuBois 1940). These new laws continued the
process of a racialized process proletarianization in California (Gilmore 2007, 32). Labor was affected heavily as a result
of this, and exploitation of workers began to be apparent, as
opting for cheap labor became the norm
(Gilmore 2007, 33). Additionally, substantial power blocs emerged as a result of increased and urbanized industry in transportation, which began to develop more tools and legislature in order to
restrict economic movement and accumulation by anyone other than the bourgeois White men (Gilmore 2007, 34). The Great Depression temporarily limited the state’s white supremacist agenda
due to major economic and political strife (Gilmore 2007, 34). The post-World War II era of “creative destruction” allowed California industrial leaders to resurrect itself from this temporary moment
of class struggle. The military industry boomed, and millions of dollars were invested in California’s construction of war machines. Millions (mostly African American) of people accompanied these
dollars, migrating from all over the United States to take part in this new period of abundance. As a result, the racial composition of California changed drastically (Gilmore 2007, 35). White
supremacy carried on during and following this period, as a sort of defense mechanism for White Californians after the landmark decision of desegregation in 1946. For example, a law was
passed, created by the realtor’s association, making it lawful for homeowners to refuse to sell their house to another person for any reason whatsoever (Gilmore 2007, 36). This
the continuation of the White supremacist agenda, and the ability for
this agenda to be institutionalized even after federal laws that attempted to diffuse
it . In order for California to maintain their economic profusion in the midst of the war 9 coming to an end, elites sought Department of Defense contracts in order to bolster federal investment
demonstrates
into the state (Gilmore 2007, 36). They did this by pairing development of aerospace and electronics research, which ended up concentrating in an area we known today as “Silicon Valley”. In
order to come up with a sudden and qualified workforce to foster these new industries, the state decided to finance higher education opportunities. (Gilmore 2007, 37) As a result of these new
innovations, funding, and still flourishing economy, the population of California increased and doubled to about 20 million people from 1950 to 1970 (Gilmore 2007, 38). White people continued to
dominate this population politically, and African Americans faced profound economic struggle. Having moved to California to join the war manufacturing industry, African Americans were forced
out of their jobs in droves at the end of the war. They found new work often in the lowest paying positions in other industries. This essentially catalyzed the concentration of Black, impoverished
populations in cities such as Los Angeles and in Alameda Country, where they settled after migration to the state (Gilmore 2007, 39). At the outbreak of the 1969-70 recession, California was
unequivocally affected as a result of major blows to the military industry. Thousands of people lost their jobs, and the state economy fell into crisis. A massive amount of people, mostly people of
color, were now excluded from the labor market, and the new narrative of utilizing “law and order” in order to crackdown on these populations (an obviously racist method) began federally (then
President Richard Nixon) and at the state level (California Governor Ronald Reagan). (Gilmore 2007, 39- 40) The next blow to state came in the form of a recession from 1973-75. California
experienced intensification in urban unemployment and in rural communities still reliant on agriculture. Thus, uneven development becomes extremely evident. Following this period, immigration
swelled immensely, and most of the immigrants were people of color. This caused a major demographic shift in California’s overall population, and made White people no longer the 10 majority
(Gilmore 2007, 41-42). Proposition 13 and the insertion of regressive taxes into society reinstated and perpetuated White dominance, as it ensured that poor people received less services and
more costs than the rich (White) people. (Gilmore 2007, 43) California continued on as a manufacturing state, and the polarity of rich Whites and everyone else being poor ensued as well.
This extremely high amount of unemployed and impoverished people (of color) became
the economic crisis that capitalism created, a surplus population without work and in
need of money (Gilmore 2007, 54). The state, in this case, and in many cases globally, failed to reinstate
this population back into the workforce, and thus the prison-industrial complex was born.
This ensured that the surplus population (who happened to be mostly African American) would be removed from the state
general population, and thus the
issue of implementing Black people into the workforce was
‘solved’. (Gilmore 2007, 70) The investment of millions of dollars into this industry created (White) legislators eager to
get involved, and to make money off of imprisoning people of color in low socioeconomic situations. So, laws were made
to conserve this behavior, and this behavior conserved the prison population. This cyclical and systemic industry has
grown exceedingly, and produced what we have today, where millions of people of color are locked up for a large portion
of their lives for crimes equivalent to what White people commit yet aren’t sentenced for nearly as harshly if at all.
California is a great example to really see into the inner mechanisms and origins of this
prison-industrial complex, and this information can be extrapolated as a representation
for the rest of the world’s very similar structures.
L – Reform: Police
Police reform is pointless absent confrontation of capitalism—history
and empirics
Zeese and Flowers 6-22 (Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers. Kevin Zeese is an American political
activist who has been a leader in the drug policy reform and peace movements and in efforts to ensure a voter verified
paper audit trail. Margaret Flowers, M.D., is a Maryland pediatrician seeking the Green Party nomination for the US
Senate. She is co-director of PopularResistance.org and a board adviser to Physicians for a National Health Program and
is on the Leadership Council of the Maryland Health Care Is a Human Right campaign. Police Violence Have Always
Been Tools of Capitalism. June 22, 2020. https://www.nationofchange.org/2020/06/22/police-violence-and-racism-havealways-been-tools-of-capitalism/)-MR
The system-wide challenges the United States faces with policing are entrenched and deeply rooted.
police have been designed to
uphold the status quo including racial injustice and class inequality. Whenever political movements
When the historical and current practices of police are examined, it is evident
develop to respond to racial and class unfairness, the police have undermined their politically-protected constitutional
rights.
Police have used infiltration, surveillance, and violence against political movements seeking to end injustices throughout
the history of the nation. It is the deeply embedded nature of these injustices and the structural problems in policing that
are leading more people to conclude police must be completely transformed, if not abolished.
We advocate for democratic community control of the police as a starting point in addition to defunding the police and
funding alternatives such as programs that provide mental health, public health, social work and conflict resolution
services, and other nonviolent interventions. Funding is needed for the basic human needs of housing, education,
employment, healthcare, and food especially in communities that have been neglected for years and whose low-wage
labor has enriched the wealthy in this unequal society.
The roots of policing are rotten
The needs of the wealthy have been the driving force for the creation of police. Policing developed to control workers,
many who were Irish, Italian and other immigrants seeking fair wages in the North and African people who were enslaved
in the South. Victor E. Kappeler, Ph.D writes in “A Brief History of Slavery and the Origins of American Policing” that
“Slave patrols and Night Watches, which later became modern police departments, were both designed to control the
behaviors of minorities.”
A. Southern police created to protect slavery
In the south, the driving force of the economy was slavery where people kidnapped in Africa were brought to the Americas
as chattel slaves, workers who created wealth for their owners. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database lists 12.5 million
Africans who were shipped to the Americas, 10.7 million of which survived the dreaded Middle Passage. Of that, 388,000
were brought to North America. African slaves were forced to reproduce for their owners and to sell.
From the start, African people revolted against slavery and fought to escape it. This 400 years legacy of racist injustice
that helped form the United States is the history we must confront. The roots of policing in what became the Confederacy
and later the sheriffs who enforced Jim Crow grew out of the containment of slaves, the most valuable ‘property’ in the
nation.
Olivia Waxman describes this history writing that in the South, “the economics that drove the creation of police forces
were centered . . . on the preservation of the slavery system.” She describes “slave patrols tasked with chasing down
runaways and preventing slave revolts” as one of the primary police institutions.
Gary Potter writes in “The History of Policing in the United States,” that “Slave patrols had three primary functions: (1) to
chase down, apprehend, and return to their owners, runaway slaves; (2) to provide a form of organized terror to deter
slave revolts; and, (3) to maintain a form of discipline for slave-workers who were subject to summary justice, outside of
the law, if they violated any plantation rules.” The purpose of slave patrols was to protect the wealth of the white people
who owned slaves.
Potter writes, “the first formal slave patrol had been created in the Carolina colonies in 1704. During the Civil War, the
military became the primary form of law enforcement in the South, but during Reconstruction, many local sheriffs
functioned in a way analogous to the earlier slave patrols, enforcing segregation and the disenfranchisement of freed
slaves.”
Hundreds of laws were passed in the South around slavery and its enforcement but laws were also passed in northern
colonies including Connecticut, New York, and others to control slaves. The U.S. Congress passed fugitive Slave Laws
allowing the detention and return of escaped slaves, in 1793 and 1850. Racist police made up the “kidnap gang” in New
York City in 1830 who would capture Africans and bring them to a rubber stamp court that would send them to the South
as captured slaves – often before their families knew they were arrested. Throughout this history, there were people who
fought police violence and abuse as is discussed in The Black New Yorker Who Led The Charge Against Police Violence
In The 1830s.
The history of racist policing did not end with the abolition of slavery. Police forces were involved in enforcing the racist
Black Code, the Convict-Lease System, and JimCrow segregation. The terrorism of white supremacist groups like the
KKK, the burning of black schools and churches and lynching became the common realities of the south. White police
often did not stop, or seriously investigate these crimes; some even participated. In the era of Civil Rights, southern police
used violence against nonviolent protesters—beatings, fire hoses and dogs.
This also occurred in the north. For example, Minnesota was infamous for arresting indigenous people on charges like
vagrancy and forcing them to work for no pay. This spurred the formation of the American Indian Movement. Dennis
Banks describes, “The cops concentrated on the Indian bars. They would bring their paddy wagons around behind a bar
and open the back doors. Then they would go around to the front and chase everybody toward the rear. ” They would be
taken to stadiums and convention centers and forced to work for no pay. The police did not do this at white bars, only bars
where Native Americans gathered.
The War on Drugs became the new disguise for police violence against black people. “We could arrest their leaders, raid
their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news,” said President Nixon’s
domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman to Harper’s Magazine. Mass incarceration of the 1980s, begun under President
Reagan and continued under President Clinton with Joe Biden leading efforts in the Senate, disproportionately impacted
black and brown people. Now slavery legally continues as prison labor.
B. Northern police protect commercial interests, hold down wages
The history of policing in the northern colonies was also driven by economics. Commercial interests protected
their property through an informal, private for-profit form of hiring people part-time. Towns relied on a “night-watch” to
enforce laws. Boston started a night-watch in 1636, New York followed in 1658 and Philadelphia created one in 1700.
As cities become more populated, the night-watch system was ineffective. Commercial interests needed more regular
policing and so they hired people to protect their property and goods as they were transported from ports to other areas.
Boston, a large shipping commercial center, became the first city to form a police force when merchants convinced the
government that police were needed for the “collective good” thereby transferring the cost of maintaining a police force to
the citizens.
A driving force for police expansion was workers, who were often immigrants, seeking better pay and working conditions.
Abolishing The Police: A Radical Idea That’s Been Around For Over A Century, describes how the first
state police
force was formed in 1905 in Pennsylvania to combat workers forming unions. According to a study in
1969 by the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, the United States has the
bloodiest and most violent labor history of any industrial nation in the world.
Sam Mitrani, author of The Rise of the Chicago Police Department: Class and Conflict, 1850-1894, writes in In These
Times that “as Northern cities grew and filled with mostly immigrant wage workers who were physically and socially
separated from the ruling class, the wealthy elite who ran the various municipal governments hired hundreds and then
thousands of armed men to impose order on the new working-class neighborhoods. Class conflict roiled late-19th century
American cities like Chicago, which experienced major strikes and riots in 1867, 1877, 1886, and 1894. In each of these
upheavals, the police attacked strikers with extreme violence, even if in 1877 and 1894 the U.S. Army played a bigger role
in ultimately repressing the working class.”
Martha Grevatt points out that “Throughout labor history, one finds innumerable accounts of cops engaging in anti-union
violence. Police viciously attacked unarmed pickets during the 1994 Staley strike in Decatur, Ill., as well as the 1995
Detroit newspaper strike, to name a few examples. They arrested and harassed UAW members during last year’s strike
against GM.”
This is not only a time of growing protest against police violence but also against the mistreatment of workers. Over the
last two years, there has been a record number of strikers not seen in 35 years. PayDay Report counts more than 500
strikes in the last three weeks with a peak number on Juneteenth at “29 ports across the West Coast” and the UAW
stopping production on all assembly lines “for 8 minutes and 46 seconds to honor George Floyd.” They have tracked
more than 800 strikes since March.
Historic time of uprising and unrest rattles the police and power structure
The rebellion by workers and anti-racism activists is unprecedented in the lives of most people alive today. There is a
nationwide uprising in every state and in thousands of cities and towns. Repression by the power structure with
militarized police and the National Guard has failed to stop the protests. Democrats have failed to divert the movement of
the energy into the elections, as Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi have offered inadequate reforms such as more police
training. Fundamental changes are needed.
Police will continue to make efforts to shut down the unrest. The FBI and local police have a long history of combating
movements. In addition to the violent response that has been well documented against the current rebellion, we should
expect infiltration, surveillance, creation of internal divisions, and other tactics, even murder.
All of these acts against labor, civil rights, peace, environmental, and other movements have happened before and we
should expect them again. Documents show a nationwide effort of police and the FBI to defeat the Occupy Movement that
included entrapment of activists in crimes. There has also been aggressive police violence against people protesting
pipelines and seeking climate justice.
Black activists continue to be a major focus of the FBI and law enforcement. Media Justice and the ACLU reported last
week that one million pages of materials on FBI surveillance were discovered in a FOIA request showing widespread
surveillance of black activists.
The small victories that have been won by the movement are already causing repercussions. Police are threatening to
quit because they are being held accountable for violence, even though they remain protected by immunity from
prosecution. A survey last week found 3 out of 4 Washington, DC police were ready to leave the force. CNN reported
police in Minneapolis, Atlanta, South Florida, and Buffalo quitting. In Atlanta, police got the “flu” after felony murder
charges were brought against the officer who killed Rayshard Brooks.
New York City police are planning a strike on the Fourth of July to show people what life would be like without police.
However, this may backfire as during a 1997 slowdown and also during a 2014–2015 slowdown, crime did not spike, and
may even have declined a bit. The nation’s top law enforcement official, Attorney General Bob Barr threatened in
December 2019 that if some communities don’t begin showing more respect to law enforcement, then they could
potentially not be protected by police officers.
To transform the police, the economy must be transformed
The U.S. Constitution, written by slaveholders and businessmen who profited from slave products, puts property rights
ahead of individual rights. The Bill of Rights was an afterthought. The result of treating
people as property, Jim
Crow laws, redlining, and other racially unfair economic practices has left Black
Americans with a $13 trillion dollar wealth gap.
Max Rameau told us in a recent podcast, To Deal With Police, We Must Understand Why They Even Exist, that when we
understand the purpose of police is to protect property, it becomes more evident why they cannot be
reformed. Unless we confront neoliberal capitalism that creates inequality and a hyperclass-based society, the wealthy will always find someone to pay to protect them.
In fact, the call to defund the police can be easily thrown off course by getting activists fighting for small gains of cuts to
police budgets, while the police are increasing their funding from private corporations. Already, as reported by Eyes on the
Ties, “Police
foundations across the country are partnering with corporations to raise
money to supplement police budgets by funding programs and purchasing tech and
weaponry for law enforcement with little public oversight.” Their report documents support to
police from Wall Street and finance, retail and food industries, Big Tech, fossil fuel
corporations, sports, and universities.
It is fantasy to believe police exist for public safety. As Justin Podur writes, “Society doesn’t need a large group with a
license to kill.” Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report advocates for community control over police but he doesn’t stop there,
writing “communities should control, not just the police, but much of the rest of their neighborhoods’ vital services and
resources.”
As Richard Rubinstein writes in ThePolice May Pull the Trigger but it is the System That Kills, “Racism, police brutality,
and economic injustice can be thought of as separate boxes, but they are part of one self-reinforcing system. And that
system’s defining characteristic—the feature most resistant to change—is that it is based on the production of goods and
services for profit, not to satisfy basic human needs.”
Like many conflicts in the United States, the problems of police violence comes down to corporate-capitalists vs. the
people. Racial
separation and inequality are ways the ownership class keeps people
divided so the people can be controlled. This is the reality of the U.S. political system
and the reality of policing in the United States, but we can change that reality by continuing to organize,
staying in the streets and building our power.
Reforming Capitalism is an oxymoron—a nation built on corporate
dominance cannot create an impartial legal system
D’Amato 10 (Paul D’Amato. Paul D'Amato is managing editor of the International
Socialist Review and author of The Meaning of Marxism, a lively and accessible
introduction to the ideas of Karl Marx and the tradition he founded. Crime and
Punishment Under Capitalism. August 5, 2010.
https://socialistworker.org/2010/08/05/capital-crime-and-punishment)-MR
WHAT CONSTITUTES a crime? We are encouraged to see crime as something quite simple:
Laws are made so that society can function smoothly. Steal or kill, and you are
punished; disobey these laws, and you pay a price.
This superficial view fails to explain some glaring contradictions in the law and its
application, or the social context in which crime is defined. As Rosa Luxemburg once wrote, bourgeois justice
is "like a net, which allowed the voracious sharks to escape, while the little sardines were
caught."
Laws and the violation of those laws (crime) reflect the interests of the dominant class--both what is
defined as crime, and how the law, which gives the appearance of fairness, is applied in practice.
We know that murder
is a crime, punishable in some states by death (state murder). But to
murder large numbers of people in the service of one's country can get you a medal and
a promotion. Bill Clinton imposed sanctions on Iraq that were responsible for the deaths of half a million Iraqi
children. To date, no one has arrested him for this crime.
Kidnapping is a serious crime for which you can spend years in prison. But when the United States kidnaps people and
sends them to foreign countries to be imprisoned and tortured--extraordinary rendition, as it is called--this is merely a
useful "tool" in the "war on terror."
It is a crime to trespass on another's land, and a worse one to steal it. Yet the formation
of the U.S. was based on the outright theft, by force and fraud, of the land of Native
Americans and of Mexico.
We know that it is a crime punishable by death or life in prison to walk into a grocery store and gun down the owner.
Killing someone while driving drunk is severely punished. But it is apparently not murder--and certainly not a crime
punishable by death, let alone long prison sentences--when companies engage in practices that boost profitability at the
expense of human life.
Last April, 29 workers died in an explosion at the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia. The mine owner, Massey
Energy, showed, according to a federal mine inspector, a reckless disregard for mine safety. Surviving workers at the
nonunion mine described it as a ticking time bomb, where corners were cut and safety sacrificed for profit. Prior to the
explosion, Massey was hit with over 1,300 safety violations at the Upper Big Branch Mine.
Yet it is highly unlikely that Massey CEO Don Blankenship will be prosecuted for reckless homicide or even manslaughter.
The last time a corporation was put on trial for homicide was in 1980, when three teenagers burned to death after their
Ford Pinto exploded following a mild rear-end collision. Though it was conclusively established that the
Pinto had a rear gas tank that had the potential to explode in such circumstances, Ford hired a
top-notch attorney who was a personal friend of the judge, and won an acquittal.
In financial terms, corporate theft dwarfs what we call "street crime." Russell Mokhiber, editor of Corporate Crime
Reporter, notes that burglary and robbery cost about $3.8 billion a year, according to the FBI, whereas health care
fraud alone costs somewhere between $100 and $400 billion per year. Yet you will find
many "street" burglars in prison, but very few of the wealthier, more respectable sort-even though they are by far the bigger criminals.
IN 1994, California voters approved a ballot proposition mandating a 25-year-to-life-in-prison sentences for being
convicted of a third felony. Twenty-two other states followed suit. There are now thousands of people
serving life sentences for things like stealing videos or food. In one notorious case, a homeless exconvict was given a life sentence for attempting to break into a church kitchen, where he had been fed in the past, to get
food.
Imagine if a three-strikes law was passed for corporate offenders who engage in criminal negligence regarding the safety
of the environment and their employees?
For example, the British-based oil company BP has paid out $484 million in fines since 2005. In 2009, it paid almost $90
million to OSHA for negligence at a Texas oil refinery it owns, which led to the deaths of 15 workers in a refinery
explosion. At the time of the explosion, the workers had been working 12-hour shifts for more than a month. Additionally,
BP recently paid $3 million for 42 violations of workplace safety at a refinery in Ohio.
Surely, the death of 11 workers at Deepwater Horizon and the worst oil spill in history--caused, we now know, by BP's
efforts to work quickly, cut corners and skimp on safety measures--counts as a third strike that should lead to life
imprisonment for BP top executives.
Regulatory agencies such as the M inerals M anagement S ervices, which is supposed to oversee oil
companies like BP, are complicit in the whole affair . According to James Baker, former head of
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and a former Commerce
Department undersecretary for oceans and atmosphere, "MMS is in bed with industry."
Quite literally. The American Prospect reports that "the MMS was a cesspool of drug use,
sexual harassment, and personal, financial and sexual intermingling between the
regulators and the regulated."
The process whereby government regulatory agencies become pawns of the industries
they are set up to regulate now has a name--"regulatory capture." "Regulatory capture"
should really be called "government capture." The last two presidential administrations
and Congresses have enthusiastically supported offshore drilling to the neglect of welldocumented safety concerns.
Oil companies have taken advantage of a friendly business climate that permits them to evade taxes while reaping
large subsidies. For example, according to the New York Times, BP "used a tax break for the oil industry to
write off 70 percent of the rent for Deepwater Horizon--a deduction of more than
$225,000 a day since the lease began." Oil companies save $4 billion a year in tax breaks. They have also
evaded paying billions in taxes by creating foreign tax havens.
Meanwhile, the moral panic whipped up by politicians and the
media is reserved for low-level "street"
crime, even though the 56,000 people who die every year from occupational diseases
dwarfs the number of murders--16,000--each year. In cities across the country, police are found
to be involved in systematic corruption, drug dealing, brutality and murder. But rarely do
police officers find their way into a prison cell.
THE CRIME and drug hysteria not only disproportionately targets the poor and oppressed. It
serves an important ideological function --of creating a sense of social solidarity,
using racially charged stereotypes about Black men, immigrants and so on, that
diverts attention away from the crimes of the powerful and acts as a brake on class
solidarity.
The last three decades have witnessed a massive increase in incarceration, backed by a host of increasingly draconian
laws, particularly related to drugs. Writes Phil Gasper, "As the 1960s progressed, 'law and order' became the rallying cry
of right-wingers opposed to the civil rights, antiwar and student movements, as well as a convenient way to make coded
appeals to racists, particularly in the South."
Richard Nixon--who later lost the presidency for authorizing an illegal break-in to spy on his Democratic rivals--ran his
1968 presidential campaign linking crime with the social movements sweeping the country. He wrote in an in Readers'
Digest that America was "the most lawless and violent [nation] in the history of free peoples," blaming this on the "growing
tolerance of lawlessness" by civil rights organizations and "the increasing public acceptance of civil disobedience."
This "tough on crime" (but not on corporate crime) environment has had disastrous effects on the most oppressed people
in our society. Take the question of drugs.
Though Blacks and whites commit drug offenses at comparable rates, a 2009 Human Rights Watch report found that "in
every year from 1980 to 2007, Blacks were arrested nationwide on drug charges at rates relative to population that were
2.8 to 5.5 times higher than white arrest rates." One in three drug arrestees in this period were Black, though they make
up only 13 percent of the population in the United States.
Human Rights Watch concluded from its analysis of data from 2003 that "Blacks are 10.1 times more likely than whites to
be sent to prison for drug offenses."
Today, politicians are creating a "moral panic" around immigration by linking crime, drugs and terrorism with the southern
U.S. border. Amid claims that the border has an out-of-control and rising crime rate, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer recently
claimed, "Our law enforcement agencies have found bodies in the desert either buried or just lying out there that have
been beheaded." There is not a grain of truth to her claim. Moreover, FBI statistics show that crime has been flat on the
border for a decade.
Why don't companies that kill thousands get the same punishment as a man who kills
one? What constitutes a crime in our society cannot contradict the nature of that society.
A nation built on continental conquest, foreign expansion and
corporate dominance cannot create a legal system that
punishes murder impartially. If it did, every major president would have been in jail before he
finished his first term.
The relative ease with which organized crime operates is also explained by the nature of
capitalism. Organized crime is merely the production and sale of illegal goods and
services for which there is a strong demand--by and large, it follows the same logic of
accumulation as "legitimate" capitalist enterprises.
Then there's the record of the CIA and U.S. Army utilizing criminal gangs to further U.S. foreign policy interests in Europe,
Vietnam, South and Central America, and elsewhere--a subject I have no time to develop here. So the economic and
political system creates a fairly wide berth for illegal profiteering, even as it declares "wars" on drugs and crime.
Our political system, to quote one sociologist, is "little more than an arena for squabbles over the distribution of spoils
between rival factions of the ruling class." So it isn't really surprising that the minnows are caught and most of the whales
go free.
Companies may get a slap on the wrist--some executives may even get some prison time--to show
that our justice system is "fair," without jeopardizing the essential functioning of
capitalism, which by its nature involves playing with the lives of workers in the pursuit of
financial gain. Seriously pursuing corporate crime would beg the question: Where does "legitimate business practice"
end and "crime" begin?
L – Immigration
Criminalization of immigration operates to sustain the immigrantmilitary-prison-industrial-detention-complex and dichotomies of
citizen/non-citizen turn the immigrant workforce into superexploitable labor
Robinson 13 (William I. Robinson, William I. Robinson is professor of sociology,
global studies and Latin American studies at the University of California at Santa
Barbara. His most recent book is Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity. 9-132013, "The New Global Capitalism and the War on Immigrants," Truthout,
https://truthout.org/articles/the-new-global-capitalism-and-the-war-on-immigrants/)-NA
To understand the immigration reform debate, we
need to go beyond the headlines and see the big picture of
the role that immigrants play in the new global capitalism system. There is more here than meets
the eye. The battle over reform legislation reflects the changing patterns of domination over the “wretched of the earth,” a
world increasingly under the dictatorship of corporate and military power, and the challenges and pitfalls that popular
movements face in their struggles for social justice.
Global Capitalism and Immigrant Labor
The larger story behind immigration reform is capitalist globalization and the
worldwide reorganization of the system for supplying labor to the global
economy. Over the past few decades, there has been an upsurge in transnational migration as
every country and region has become integrated, often violently, into global capitalism
through foreign invasions and occupations, free-trade agreements, neoliberal social and
economic policies, and financial crises. Hundreds of millions have been displaced from the
countryside in the Global South and turned into internal and transnational migrants, providing a vast new pool
of exploitable labor for the global economy as national labor markets have increasingly merged into a
global labor market.
The creation of immigrant labor pools is a worldwide phenomenon in which growth
poles in the global
economy attract immigrant labor from their peripheries. Thus, to name a few of the major 21st
century transnational labor flows, Turkish and Eastern European workers supply labor to
Western Europe, Central Africans to South Africa, Nicaraguans to Costa Rica, Sri
Lankas and other South Asians to the Middle East oil producing countries, Asians to
Australia, Thais to Japan, Indonesians to Malaysia, and so on.
These transnational immigrant labor flows are a mechanism that has replaced
colonialism in the mobilization around the world of labor pools, often drawn from
ethnically and racially oppressed groups. States assume a gatekeeper function to
regulate the flow of labor for the capitalist economy. For example, US immigration
enforcement agencies, as do their counterparts around the world, undertake “revolving-door”
practices – opening and shutting the flow of immigration in accordance with needs of
capital accumulation during distinct periods. Immigrants are sucked up when their labor is
needed and then spit out when they become superfluous or potentially destabilizing to
the system.
During the 1980s, 8 million Latin American emigrants arrived in the United States as
globalization induced a wave of outmigration. This was nearly equal to the total figure of European
immigrants who arrived on US shores during the first decades of the 20th century and made Latin America the principal
origin of migration into the United States. Some 36 million immigrant workers were in the United States in 2010, at least
20 million of them from Latin America, some 11 million of which are undocumented.
The US economy has become increasingly dependent on immigrant labor . Although
immigrant labor sustains US and Canadian agriculture, by the 1990s the majority of Latino/a immigrants
were absorbed by industry, construction and services as part of a general “Latinization”
of the economy. Latino immigrants have massively swelled the lower rungs of the US
workforce. They provide almost all of the farm labor and much of the labor for hotels, restaurants, construction,
janitorial and house cleaning, child care, domestic service, gardening and landscaping, hairdressing, delivery, meat and
poultry packing, food processing, light manufacturing, retail and so on.
This dependence of the United States and the global economy on
immigrant labor, presents a
contradictory situation. From the viewpoint of the dominant groups, the dilemma is how
to super-exploit an immigrant labor force, such as Latinos in the United States, yet how to
simultaneously assure it is super controllable and super-controlled. The state must play
a balancing act by finding a formula for a stable supply of cheap labor to employers, and
at the same time, a viable system of state control over immigrants. The push in the United States
and elsewhere has been toward heightened criminalization of immigrant communities ,
the militarized control of these communities, and the establishment of an
immigrant detention and deportation complex.
New Axis of Inequality Worldwide
As borders have come down for capital and goods, they have been reinforced for
human beings . While global capitalism creates immigrant workers, these workers do not enjoy
citizenship rights in their host countries. Stripped either de facto or de jure of the political,
civic and labor rights afforded to citizens, immigrant workers are forced into the
underground, made vulnerable to employers, whether large private or state employers or
affluent families, and subject to hostile cultural and ideological environments.
The super-exploitation of an immigrant workforce would not be possible if that workforce had the
same rights as citizens, if it did not face the insecurities and vulnerabilities of being
undocumented or “illegal.” Granting full citizenship rights to the tens of millions of immigrants in the
United States would undermine the division of the United States – and by extension, the global –
working class into immigrants and citizens. That division is a central component of the
new class relations of global capitalism, predicated on a “flexible” mass of workers
who can be hired and fired at will, are de-unionized, and face precarious work
conditions, job instability, a rollback of benefits and downward pressure on
wages .
Immigrant workers are not only flexible, but are disposable through deportation, and therefore,
controllable. The condition of deportable must be created and then reproduced – periodically
refreshed with new waves of “illegal” immigrants – since that condition assures the ability to
super-exploit with impunity and to dispose of without consequence, should this labor become unruly or
unnecessary.
Driving immigrant labor underground and absolving the state and employers of any
commitment to the social reproduction of this labor allows for its maximum exploitation, together with its
disposal, when necessary. The punitive features of immigration policy in the United States in recent
decades have been combined with reforms to federal welfare law that denied immigrants –
documented or not – access to such social wages as unemployment insurance, food stamps
and certain welfare benefits. In this way, the immigrant labor force becomes responsible
for its own maintenance and reproduction and also – through remittances – for family
members abroad. This makes immigrant labor low cost and flexible for capital and also
costless for the state compared to native-born labor. Immigrant workers become the archetype of
these new global class relations; the quintessential workforce of global capitalism.
Hence, sustaining a reserve army of immigrant labor involves reproducing the division of workers into
immigrants and citizens, which requires contradictory practices on the part of states. The state must lift
national borders for capital but must reinforce these same national boundaries in its
immigrant policies, and in its ideological activities, it must generate a nationalist hysteria by
propagating such images as “out-of-control borders” and “invasions of illegal
immigrants.”
In sum, the division of the global working class into citizen and immigrant is a major new
axis of inequality worldwide. Borders and nationality are used by transnational capital, the
powerful and the privileged, to sustain new methods of control and domination over the global working
class.
The Immigrant Military-Prison-Industrial-Detention Complex
There is a broad social and political base, therefore, for the maintenance of a flexible,
super-controlled and super-exploited Latino immigrant workforce. The system cannot
function without it. But immigrant labor is extremely profitable for the corporate economy in double
sense. First, it is labor that is highly vulnerable, forced to exist semi-underground, and
deportable, and therefore super-exploitable. Second, the criminalization of undocumented
immigrants and the militarization of their control not only reproduce these conditions of
vulnerability, but also in themselves, generate vast new opportunities for profit-making.
The immigrant military-prison-industrial-detention complex is one of the fastest
growing sectors of the US economy. There has been a boom in new private prison
construction to house immigrants detained during deportation proceedings. In 2007, nearly
one million undocumented immigrants were apprehended and 311,000 deported. The Obama administration presents
itself as a friend of Latinos (and immigrants more generally), yet Obama has deported more immigrants than any other
president in the past half a century – some 400,000 per year since he took office in 2009.
Undocumented immigrants constitute the
fastest growing sector of the US prison population and are detained in private detention
centers and deported by private companies contracted out by the United States. As of 2010,
there were 270 immigration detention centers that caged on any given day over 30,000 immigrants. Since
detainment facilities and deportation logistics are subcontracted to private companies,
capital has a vested interest in the criminalization of immigrants and in the
militarization of control over immigrants – and more broadly, therefore, a vested interest in
contributing to the neofascist, anti-immigrant movement.
The private immigrant detention complex is a boom industry.
L – Death Penalty
Critiques of the death penalty place blame in the wrong placecapitalism produces crime and villainizing the state for deficits in
human dignity detracts from anti-capitalist movements
Robert M. Bohm, 9-25-2008, "Karl Marx and the Death Penalty," Critical Criminology, Department of Criminal
Justice and Legal Studies, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, 32816, USA
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10612-008-9062-8, accessed 7-16-2020 MS
Second, Marx criticized both Kant and Hegel’s German idealism regarding their beliefs about free will and self-
individuals
certainly make one another, physically and mentally, but do not make themselves’’ (Marx
determination. Marx’s ontology was different. In The German Ideology, Marx wrote, ‘‘It is clear … that
and Engels 1976, pp. 55–56, emphasis in original). In the article, Marx also cited favorably the work of the positivist and
‘‘moral statistician’’ Adolphe Quetelet, who showed the regularity of both the amount and type of
crime in a ‘‘modern bourgeois society’’ (referring to France and the United States in the early nineteenth
century). It was Quetelet, incidentally, that observed early on that a key factor in violent crime was
‘‘relative poverty,’’ where there is great inequality between poverty and wealth in the
same area. According to Quetelet, relative poverty incited people through jealousy to commit violent crimes. This was
especially true, surmised Quetelet, where changing economic conditions caused the
impoverishment of some people while others retained their wealth (Taylor et al. 1974, pp. 37–38;
Vold and Bernard 1986, pp. 131–132). Quetelet’s formulation is consistent with Marxist analysis; furthermore, the
idea that ‘‘relative poverty’’ or ‘‘relative deprivation’’ is a cause of crime has been
adopted by current critical or Marxist criminologists (see, for example, Young 1997, p. 30). Third,
Marx argued that ‘‘punishment is nothing but a means of society to defend itself against
the infraction of its vital conditions, whatever may be their character.’’ He then quipped, taking a
poke at capitalism, ‘‘is there not a necessity for deeply reflecting upon an alteration of the
system that breeds these crimes, instead of glorifying the hangman who executes a lot
of criminals to make room only for the supply of new ones?’’ Marx maintained that one would be
hard pressed to find a use for capital punishment in a society ‘‘glorying in its civilization.’’ In that
respect, he shared the viewpoint, attributed to both Fyodor Dostoevsky and Winston Churchill, that: ‘‘The mood and
temper of the public with regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilization
of any country.’’ Marx believed that capitalism produces an amount and type of crime that it
punishes. One of the roles of the state is to determine guilt and administer punishment.
Capital punishment is the state’s ultimate sanction and means of coercion and is
generally reserved for the most heinous crimes, as defined by the state, but not
necessarily the most serious harms. Marx apparently expected heinous crime in capitalist societies and the
death penalty as a means by which the capitalist state would deal with it.
L – Marijuana
Decriminalization of marijuana only strengthens the race/class divide
within the capitalist system.
Weiner ’19 (Katie Weiner, writer for Harvard Political Review, “Overpoliced,
Underrepresented: Racial Inequality and Cannabis Capitalism”, Harvard Political
Review, May 19 2019, https://harvardpolitics.com/culture/racial-inequality-cannabis/)-EL
Marijuana legalization in states like California, Colorado, and Washington represented
more than a shift in American drug culture: For the black and brown communities that
have been targeted and stigmatized, and particularly for the millions of people of color
who have gone to jail on marijuana charges, it heralded the beginning of the end of
America’s disastrous, racist War on Drugs. But an emerging cannabis market is
abandoning the values of racial justice that in large part motivated those initial calls for
legalization. White entrepreneurs are crowding out black and brown ones, with
legislation in many parts of the country failing to provide for an inclusive, representative
legal cannabis industry. With more than 80 percent of legal cannabis companies under
white ownership, black and brown Americans are struggling to break in. And while the
exclusion and underrepresentation of people of color are certainly characteristic of the
American economy more broadly, marijuana’s historical significance makes this
inequality particularly troublesome. How Weed Became White For Steve Hawkins, executive director of the
Marijuana Policy Project, fighting for representation in the cannabis industry is about both recognizing the injustices of the
past and investing in a better future. Policies aimed at encouraging black participation in cannabis companies “should be
seen as a form of restitution, and a recognition that poor communities of color bore the terrible brunt of this war that cut
people’s lives short, limited their opportunities, limited their educational and career advancement, all of that,” he explained
in an interview with the HPR. And even small gains in representation, he believes, can trigger a sort of “multiplier effect,
where when a business is run by people of color, they tend to hire other people of color, and they tend to bank or do
business with other people of color.” The opposite, however, is also true — and that is what is happening now. White
entrepreneurs in this industry typically work with white venture capitalists and cater to
white audiences, creating few entry points for people of color. Federal restrictions compound this
dynamic: “Because of the federal illegality, there are no bank loans in this area, there’s no small business administration
coming in, there’s no commercial banking, and so its left to venture capitalists and private asset managers, very few of
whom are people of color,” Hawkins said. Federal restrictions and local regulations also make cannabis a relatively
complicated industry to navigate, raising barriers to entry for anyone without significant training or legal expertise. This
problem both reflects and perpetuates a fundamental dissonance in how black and white drug use are perceived in
American society. “When people of color use cannabis, we’re seen as using it as an intoxicant, whereas when white
people use it it’s perceived as a wellness tool, which is such a hypocrisy,” explained Amber Senter, an advocate for a
more racially inclusive cannabis industry, in an interview with the HPR. This hypocrisy is what allows white
cannabis users like the “marijuana moms” to go viral for the very behavior that is
stigmatized and even criminalized for their black counterparts. In large part, Hawkins
blames the police for this incongruity: “The Madison police know just as many drugs are
being dealt on the campus of the University of Wisconsin as in the downtown area, but
are they going to go throw the kid whose dad is a local banker in jail, or are you just
gonna round up the black kids downtown?” Unequal application of the law creates a
culture that vilifies black drug use while embracing white drug use, which means white
cannabis entrepreneurs may face less stigmatization and mistrust when starting legal
businesses. One legacy of this unequal policing, Hawkins said, is that the black Americans who have accumulated
the independent wealth that would be needed to finance a cannabis startup are reluctant to do so. “Anybody who
understands how the disparity has worked with respect to how the War on Drugs was waged is gonna be a little bit gunshy about exposing the assets that they’ve spent their lives accumulating in an area where there could be discretion as to
who gets targeted — and that’s not an irrational way to see it.” The Policy Piece Perhaps the most obvious priority here is
designing racially inclusive cannabis policy. Cities like Oakland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles have developed locally
tailored equity programs aimed at carving out space for black and brown participation in the industry, while places like Los
Angeles and Massachusetts prioritize license requests from marginalized applicants. In Oakland, equity applicants are
eligible for special trainings, workshops, and consultations aimed at supporting entrepreneurs during the difficult early
phases of creating a startup. A popular proposal in Connecticut would give minority applicants a three-month head start
on their cannabis company license applications. For Senter, what matters most in designing these programs is flexibility
— the cities “are moving in uncharted territory, and the most important thing is that they’re pivoting along the way and
they’re making changes to the programs when they see something’s not working.” But supporting entrepreneurs of color,
while crucial, is only one small piece in a much larger toolkit of policies available to cities and states interested in using the
cannabis industry to begin repairing racial inequalities. While the conversation has so far typically focused on ownership
of these new companies, policies aimed at improving representation in rank-and-file cannabis jobs have the potential to
impact millions more people than those that focus only on the executives. The high taxes imposed on cannabis products,
furthermore, provide states with large sums of money that they can then commit to reinvesting in communities
disproportionately impacted by the War on Drugs. This money can fund programs specifically targeted at increasing black
and brown participation in the cannabis industry, particularly in the areas of workforce development and mentorship. But it
can also ensure that even the members of these communities who do not use or work with cannabis receive a form of
restitution for a history of over-policing and discrimination. By using tax revenue to fund grants for community service
organizations or more traditional workforce trainings, legislators can ensure that the benefits of legalization go to
entrepreneurs of color as well as their broader communities. A Joint Endeavor Private investors, too, have both the
opportunity and the responsibility to make a difference here. White entrepreneurs can and should listen to these
frustrations and commit themselves to fostering greater diversity and inclusion within their own companies. Particularly in
places where government responses to the overwhelming whiteness of the cannabis industry have been insufficient, the
burden falls on those already working in this field to lead it in a new direction. “How do we challenge every company to
have a chief diversity officer, and just make this part and parcel of their movement forward?” Hawkins asked. “Because
even if it’s a majority-owned company, that majority-owned company should not be operating in Chicago with 200 people
on staff and have only one percent who are people of color — that’s ridiculous.” By demanding better policies from the
legislature and better results from the industry, advocates can increase their impact and remind white entrepreneurs of the
responsibility that accompanies working in this space. For Hawkins, private philanthropists have thus far ignored
opportunities to get involved in reshaping the cannabis industry: “This is an excellent area for foundations that are willing
to step up to say, ‘We’re going to create a social impact investing fund in this space’ … That’s one thing I’d like to see that
is just not happening and that would hugely consequential.” Socially conscious investing firms and philanthropies can
supplement well-intentioned policies to maximize impact and support the entrepreneurs trying to diversify this market. But
while these wealthy philanthropists have unique resources and access, they are not the only people with the power to
make a difference. In 2015, Senter, along with Sunshine Lencho and Nina Parks, watched these inequities emerging in
Oakland and decided to found Supernova, an organization focused on providing skills and networks, as well as a sense of
community, to women of color entering the cannabis industry. Their organization’s mission goes beyond policy advocacy;
through panels, workshops, and social events, Supernova hopes to offer women of color in cannabis a space to “discuss
the pain points, triumphs, pitfalls, and experiences of operating in the regulated cannabis industry,” Senter explained. A
Rigged System Unfortunately, in places without advocates like Senter and Hawkins ,
the whiteness of this
emerging market has often gone unchallenged. Racial justice “has not been a major
topic at the national level, or in most of the states that have legalized cannabis,” according
to Rob MacCoun, a professor at Stanford Law School whose work focuses on social psychology and drug policy. “An
issue like this needs ‘issue entrepreneurs’” — people like Senter, Lencho, and Parks — “to frame the problem and call
HPR.
Indeed, policies aimed at creating a legitimate and well-regulated market are often
counterproductive. Every state but California currently prohibits companies from offering
cannabis delivery, the lowest-barrier service in the industry. More disturbing are statutes
in place across the country which bar formerly incarcerated individuals from owning or
even working at legal cannabis companies. Only Massachusetts has flipped the script,
giving advantages to those who were incarcerated during the War on Drugs instead of
locking them out. These exclusionary policies are both morally troubling and
pragmatically counterproductive. Given pervasive racial discrepancies in the
enforcement of drug laws, those affected by these restrictions are mostly people of color.
The injustice of allowing white entrepreneurs to profit off of cannabis while former
convicts of color are left out is particularly galling given that the plant is still criminalized at the federal
attention to it, and that’s what activists did during the California rollout,” he explained in an interview with the
level. White entrepreneurs are still breaking laws by working in this industry, but their entrepreneurship is embraced while
their black counterparts are labeled as criminals and excluded from the market. The ongoing
as the legacies of racist drug laws, ensure that any legislation
that moralizes past convictions simply produces more racial inequality. And these
policies are not only unjust; according to Hawkins, “If you deny [formerly convicted
people of color] an opportunity, then it becomes harder to kill off the illicit market,
because people will continue to do what they’ve been doing if they’re locked out and
they’re still trying to make a living.” As more states begin to decriminalize and legalize cannabis, and the
legal ambiguity of cannabis, as well
proposal gains traction at the federal level, states that have already taken the leap can provide invaluable lessons about
cannabis capitalism and racial equality. Places like California and Massachusetts offer a model, albeit an imperfect one,
for centering racial justice in the creation of a legal cannabis market. And even those places that have legalized marijuana
must continue taking steps to counteract the uneven application of existing regulations. According to MacCoun, “while
cannabis legalization has reduced the number of people arrested and incarcerated for cannabis offenses, among those
who still get arrested, most states are still finding that people of color are overrepresented. So legalization is only partially
effective at solving problems of racial injustice.” For Hawkins, legalization is the first step in a longer process of criminal
justice reform: “Police are still going to harass brown and black people on the streets, but [legalization] will hopefully force
American policing to change in some ways and remove this arsenal within the police’s discretion.” But while that criminal
justice reform is happening,
politicians and activists cannot turn a blind eye to inequalities within
the legal market. While this regulated market is still young, America has the chance to
acknowledge historical injustices and create a vibrant, inclusive cannabis industry before
these private-sector racial inequalities become intractably entrenched.
L – Generic
Criminal justice and capitalism are intrinsically linked – the only way
to solve our criminal justice system is to address the underlying
capitalist issues behind crime.
Nayak ’20 (Bhabani Shankar Nayak, Coventry University UK, “Crime, Justice and
Capitalism”, Countercurrents, July 12 2020, https://countercurrents.org/2020/07/crimejustice-and-capitalism/)-EL
*spellings in the card are British English not American English
The right-wing henchmen and their liberal brethren provide moral justifications for extra judicial deaths during colonial
plunders and imperialist wars. From Iraq wars to the killing of Osama Bin Laden, and from honour killings to domestic
violence, police encounters, and custodial deaths around the world are part of the same genealogy, that justifies violence
on moral grounds. Colonialism as civilising mission, imperialist wars for democracy and human rights are products of
unfounded moral discourses shaped by the ruling class propaganda. The moral arguments continue to provide
justifications to institutionalise violence and patronise it in the name of nationalism, religion, community and caste honour.
The masses fall into such false intellectual narrative and celebrate such extra judicial, structural and institutionalised
violence as justice. It has shaped the Orwellian proverbial expression. “Those who live by the sword die by the sword.
Those who do not die by the sword die of smelly diseases”. Such a violent social formulation derives its cultural legitimacy
from Christian theology. The Gospel of Matthew echoes it by saying “sword shall perish with the sword”. The patronage of
violence is an integral part of most of the world religions. The idea of god and religions will perish without cherishing the
ideals of violence and fear in the name of justice. In this way, normalisation and naturalisation of violence as justice
derives its legitimacy from religious and moral discourses, which is antithetical to ideals of justice. The moral foundation of
extra judicial killing as justice is not new in the world. The modified version of the Hammurabian code and Anglo-Saxon
culture of crime, evidence, punishment and justice continues to resonate in the 21st century judicial praxis. The origin
and growth of crime and its moral foundation is intrinsically linked with ascendancy of
private property from feudalism to finance capital. The economic construction of society
and transformation of individual as a mere producer and consumer in support of
capitalism both in its old and new forms led to the rise of crime. The culture of consumerism has
promoted a culture of competition, where realisation of one’s own self-interest is supreme goal. The capitalist
transformation of need-based culture to a desire-based culture with the help of advertisement industry, which has
destroyed collective foundations of society. The
ascendancy of capitalism has increased wealth
without diminishing miseries. It has led to the concentration of wealth in the hands of
few, and growth of huge social and economic in inequalities in the society. The rotten
capitalist system continues to produce miseries for many and prosperity for the few.
Laws are made by the capitalist classes to protect their own interests. The Corn Laws were
made to uphold the interests of landed aristocracies, mercantile classes and industrial bourgeoisie in early 19th century
England. The legacies of such laws continue to exist today in different parts of the world. The special economic
zones, industrial zones, agricultural zones, export and import zones are classic
examples of policies, working conditions and labour laws, which disempower the
working-class masses and empowers capitalist classes. The strong-security state and conformist
bourgeois judiciary is important to provide protection to the private properties of capitalist classes. The capitalist
system not only produces crime, it also uses organised criminal gangs to promote its
regimes of capitalist profit accumulation. Historically, alienating capitalist system is an
organic incubator for crime and criminals. There is nothing new in the criminogenic
character of capitalism. The law is used and interpreted differently to different classes of
people. As a result of which American prisons are over flowing with black, ethnic minority
and working-class population whereas Indian prisons packed with lower caste, tribal and
poor population. The criminals have their classes. The punishments and prison cells are
different according to their class location of the criminals. If criminals are rich and
powerful; the law takes a different course whereas law takes its own course with poor
and vulnerable. The unequal availability and accessibility to police, law and judiciary did
not help society to grow in an egalitarian way. The police, law firms, solicitors, judiciary
and prisons did not deliver justice. These judicial institutions of law and order did not help to eradicate social
and economic problems of our times. It has rather helped to consolidate the power of the capitalist
elites while the masses continue to suffer in different forms of miseries. The
contemporary capitalism is organised around ideals of illiberal and undemocratic
governance of the society in which citizens are free consumers and wage labours. The
ideals of individual liberty, freedom and rights are cosmetic covers to criminogenic face
of capitalism. The capitalist societies do not overcome the problem of crime but it opens
up in frontiers of crime every day in different stages of its development. The culture of
crime and punishment is an integral part of the proportional retributive judicial system
with bourgeois spirit in which ‘popular/elite consciousness and an element of desire for
revenge’ plays key role shaping laws to regulate crime and criminals. The capitalist judicial
system is based on the perceived notion of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Such a system disciplines
the citizens and does not destroy the crime and criminals. It does not reform the
criminals or did not provide the environment for the criminals to develop their abilities to
reform themselves. It normalises and naturalises the culture of crime within retributive
judicial system that complements capitalism. The moral foundations of retributive justice derive its
legitimacy from major religions of the world. There is nothing modern about it. It is feudal, medieval and barbaric in letter
and spirit. The social, economic, religious and cultural conditions that produce crime and promotes
criminals continue to thrive under capitalist patronage. Such a system moves the society
into unending darkness of injustice. It is time to understand and unravel the innate goodness and human
values in human beings, which are destroyed by capitalist cultures. Crimes and capitalisms are unnatural whereas love
and peace is natural to all human beings in all societies. The cosmetic vicissitudes of capitalism and its actuarial justice
cannot solve the problems of crime. The world needs new language of penology by addressing the alienating capitalist
conditions that produces and patronises crime and criminals. The establishment of a crime free society is possible and
inevitable. It depends on our abilities to struggle for an egalitarian economy, democratic society and non-discriminatory
governance based on progressive politics of peace and prosperity. Such decriminalised transformations depend on
unwavering commitment of people’s struggles to ideals of liberty, equality, fraternity and justice for all. These ideals are
indivisible to establish a crime free, punishment free and prison free society based on harmony and love for each other.
L – Mass Incarceration
Race alone cannot explain mass incarceration-must account for the
underlying class dynamics or reform is doomed to fail
Mark Jay in 2019 Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara;
Cages and Crises: A Marxist Analysis of Mass Incarceration; Historical Materialism 27.1
(2019) 182–223
In 1965, the correctional population in the United States, including all those in jail or prison, or on
probation or parole, was less than 800,000.1 At present, the number is around seven million, accounting for 3% of
the US population. This historically unprecedented rise is what is commonly referred to as mass incarceration.
The correctional population is made up of the poorest, most marginalised and most
economically expendable people in the US. As the prison population peaked in the 2000s, more than
half of inmates did not hold a fulltime job at the time of their arrest; two-thirds came from
households whose annual income amounted to less than half of the poverty line; and
more than half were Latinos or blacks, though these groups account for only one-fourth of the country’s
general population.2 In the growing scholarly literature on the US prison system, and in ‘social justice’ circles more
broadly, it
has become something of a doxa that a class-based analysis cannot adequately
explain mass incarceration. The most influential text on mass incarceration remains Michelle Alexander’s 2010
work, The New Jim Crow, a New York Times best-seller for over a year. In this work, which Cornel West has called ‘the
secular bible for a new social movement’, Alexander
implicitly rejects a Marxist approach by arguing
that mass incarceration has less to do with political economy than with racial domination.
Mass incarceration – the centrepiece of which, Alexander argues, is a War on Drugs that disproportionately locks up
people of colour for petty offences – is a mechanism by which ‘proponents of racial hierarchy found they could install a
new racial caste system’.3 White elites used the legal system to criminalise and disenfranchise people of colour and
reverse the gains of the civil-rights movement. As numerous commentators have pointed out, Alexander’s
work
fails to account for many aspects of mass incarceration.4 For one, while she rightly points
out that blacks and Latinos have been disproportionately incarcerated, Alexander
underplays the extent to which whites have been targeted. Even if people of colour were
incarcerated at the same rate as whites, the US’s incarceration rate would still far
exceed nearly every other industrialised country. Indeed, as Marie Gottschalk writes, some of
the whitest states in the US have the highest rates of incarceration.5 A recent study by the
People’s Policy Project found that ‘while class has a large and statistically significant effect’ in
determining whether young US males are incarcerated, ‘race – once one controls for
class – does not’.6 This report’s findings line up with scholarship by James Forman, Jr. ‘Mass incarceration’s
impact’, Forman, Jr. writes, ‘has been almost exclusively concentrated among the most disadvantaged African
Americans.’7 In fact, ‘while the lifetime risk of incarceration skyrocketed for African American male high school
dropouts with the advent of mass incarceration, it actually decreased slightly for black men with some college education.’8
Overall, ‘blacks are
overrepresented in the prison population by a factor of three, high school
dropouts are overrepresented by a factor of five, and the unemployed are over-represented by a factor of
six.’9 Another problem with Alexander’s account is that her near-exclusive focus on the
War on Drugs obscures other drivers of imprisonment. This point is especially pertinent as
Alexander’s narrative has become increasingly influential in policy circles. ‘Over the last few decades’, said President
Obama in 2015, ‘we’ve locked up more and more nonviolent drug offenders than ever before, for longer than ever before.
even if every prison
inmate whose most serious charge is a drug crime were released, the prison
population would decline by 14%, and the US would still have the world’s largest
carceral system .10 The fact is, mass incarceration began at a time when crime rates were
increasing dramatically. Alexander attempts to underplay the importance of actually-existing crime by noting the
And this is the real reason our prison population is so high.’ This claim is misleading:
‘significant controversy over the accuracy of these statistics’ – but bureaucratic machinations obviously fail to fully account
for the rise in crime.11 Between 1963 and 1974, the homicide rate doubled and the robbery
rate tripled; and from 1959 to 1971 reported street crime quadrupled.12 The FBI’s violent-crime
index rose from the 1960s through the ’80s, and reached an all-time high in the early ’90s. And while violent-crime rates
have decreased since, the
US is still the world’s most violent industrial society, in no small part
because its imperial tactics and arsenal have consistently boomeranged onto domestic
turf.13 Alexander rightly points out that the government’s war on crime was motivated by social-control aims beyond
mere crime-fighting; but that does not mean that really-existing crime can be dismissed as a Trojan Horse used by white
elites to control blacks. The
insufficiency of the Jim Crow metaphor becomes clearer when one
considers that it is not only whites who have supported aggressive anti-crime measures.
As John Clegg and Adaner Usmani point out, ‘an absolute majority of African-American
representatives voted in favor of each of the major federal crime bills of the punitive turn: the
Omnibus Crime Control Act of 1968; the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984; and the Violent Crime Control and
Law Enforcement Act of 1994.’ These
votes, the authors insist, mostly responded to black
constituents’ demands that anti-crime measures be taken.14 In the end, Alexander’s account
fails because she glosses over important political-economic shifts and presents racial
domination as a trans-historical scourge, as an essence that undergirds myriad historical
forms. ‘Jim Crow’, she writes, ‘eventually replaced slavery, but now it too had died, and it was unclear what might take
its place…. Those committed to racial hierarchy were forced to search for new means of achieving their goals.’15 In
contrast to Alexander’s approach, I
argue that mass incarceration (or any form of social control)
cannot be analysed in abstraction from the concrete political-economic system of which
it is a part.
L – Mass Incarceration/Race Focus
The aff’s description of mass incarceration as a project to uphold
racism is a partial telling that ignores the material and ideological
conditions that structure the carceral system. This turns the case
through corporate cooptation
Mark Jay in 2019 Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara;
Cages and Crises: A Marxist Analysis of Mass Incarceration; Historical Materialism 27.1
(2019) 182–223
Loïc Wacquant, the author of several seminal works on the US carceral system, has also dismissed Marxist criminological
approaches. Marxist analyses – which Wacquant depicts as ‘stressing the instrumental role of penality as a vector of
[class] power’ – cannot account for mass incarceration’s symbolic effects: for example, its ability to meet America’s
supposed ‘need to shore up an eroding caste cleavage’.16 There are two problems here. The first is that, like Alexander,
Wacquant reifies and mischaracterises America’s racial dynamics, causing him to simplify the causes of mass
incarceration to the point of distortion. Wacquant
ignores black support for anti-crime measures,
and dismisses the importance of rising crime rates in the 1960s and ’70s, choosing to
present mass incarceration as yet another in a line of ‘peculiar institutions [which] have
successively operated to define, confine, and control African Americans in the history of the United
States’.17 The second problem lies in Wacquant’s conflation of Marxism with such an
‘instrumentalist’ approach. In reality, the latter approach has been widely criticised by
Marxist criminologists. Drew Humphries and David F. Greenberg, for example, have criticised the
‘assumption … that the capitalist class is unified, all-powerful, and invariably capable of
ensuring that legislation reflects its interests alone.’18 Rather than reducing mass
incarceration to the economic interests of an omnipotent capitalist class, a
Marxist approach entails a concrete historical analysis of the political-economic
system of which the criminal justice system is a part . This historical analysis, which I
provide in the second section of this article, will focus predominantly on f our intertwined aspects
of the carceral system, as they dialectically relate to the capitalist system at large.
Firstly, mass incarceration must be seen within the larger framework of the state’s
repression of radical movements. This is important for two reasons. For one, imprisonment
and criminalisation have been important tactics in the government’s attempts to repress
radical working-class movements, particularly in the 1960s and ’70s. Indeed, hallmarks of
contemporary policing, such as SWAT raids and stop-and-frisk, emerged as attempts to
combat political militancy.19 Secondly, this repression provides important context for
subsequent working-class acceptance of ‘law-and-order’ politics. In his analysis of so-called
primitive accumulation, Marx writes that peasants were ‘first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes,
turned into vagabonds, then whipped, branded and tortured by grotesquely terroristic laws into accepting the discipline
after this spectacular violence occurs can ‘the silent
compulsion of economic relations [set] the seal on the domination of the capitalist over
the worker.’20 Analogously, it is only alongside the systematic foreclosure of
emancipatory alternatives that we can understand why working-class Americans
of all races came to support law-and-order policies as the only practical solutions
for dealing with problems of social dissolution . In Punishing the Poor, Wacquant intentionally
necessary for the system of wage labor.’ Only
ignores this history of repression, claiming that radical movements have been ‘remarkably ineffectual’ and that the people
This aloof approach
erases the violent history of class struggle in the US, thus reifying capitalism and
its coercive forms of social control as pseudo-natural. Secondly, mass incarceration
is one of many mechanisms for disciplining the working class and containing surplus
workers. Aggressive policing and punitive policies help keep wages down by harshly punishing
targeted by mass incarceration ‘have little capacity or care to contest corporate rule’.21
this increases
corporate profitability and makes the working class as a whole more docile in the face of
jobs featuring harsh working conditions and low wages. Moreover, in Capital, Marx shows how the
accumulation of capital logically necessitates the perpetual production of a
‘relative surplus population’ redundant to current economic requirements .22 For
centuries now, the criminalisation of this surplus population has been one way in
which the working class has been divided , creating a ‘moral distinction’ between the
employed and the criminalised factions of the working class.23 To understand how
millions of the US’s poorest workers became economically superfluous, and subsequently vulnerable
to authoritarian forms of social control, requires a concrete analysis of class-struggle in
the US, and of broader shifts in the global political economy. In the US, a society
founded on slavery, genocide and imperial expansion, this analysis must also
account for how these processes have been inflected by race and ethnicity . Thirdly,
‘crime’ and ‘law-and-order’ have been essential frameworks for naturalising and ‘working
through’ the social antagonisms of post-Fordism. As Marx demonstrated, capitalism is a
structurally opaque system wherein acts of production are separated in space and time
from those of distribution and consumption. This leads people to have a ‘distorted’
understanding of the ‘actual, intrinsic’ conditions of their existence.24 Therefore, as Humphries and
Greenberg argue, ‘crime control strategies cannot be a simple reflection of the “objective”
needs of a class. One must at times examine the ways in which the relations of
production give rise to misconceptions that shape crime control.’25 To understand the ‘symbolic’
those recalcitrant poor workers who may seek to reproduce themselves outside of the wage relation;
effects of mass incarceration, then, one does not need to ‘break out of the materialist register’ as Wacquant insists.26
main point’, as Žižek writes, is to see how class society ‘cannot reproduce itself
without this so-called ideological mystification .’27 To understand mass
incarceration, one must understand why, in the past half-century, ‘crime’ has
become an important signifier for broader social and economic dislocations, and
how this (often racist) ideological coding has helped secure the ‘bourgeois order’
required for the ongoing accumulation of capital .28 Finally, the criminal-justice system
has become a site of large-scale private investment in the past several decades. William
Robinson has coined the term ‘accumulation by repression’ to signal the ‘increasing
convergence around global capitalism’s need for social control and repression and its
economic need to perpetuate accumulation in the face of overaccumulation and
stagnation.’29 Although Wacquant dismisses the prison-industrial complex as a ‘bogeyman’ and ‘myth’, it is clear
that private interests are increasingly vested in mass incarceration .30 Private
imprisonment has become a multi-billion dollar industry, as has prison labour, and the
‘The
prisoner strikes that occurred in the summer of 2018 on the anniversary of George Jackson’s death were largely a
response to harsh working conditions and miniscule wages.31 In recent years, due both to the fiscal crisis that followed
the financial crisis of 2007–8 and to activist efforts to combat the ‘injustices’ of the criminal-justice system, there
has
been mounting political and economic pressure for states to downsize their inmate
populations and transition to ‘alternatives to incarceration’. In the conclusion, I show how
large corporations are attempting to influence this transition and to dominate the ‘huge
“untapped market for privatization”’ that ‘alternatives’ represent.32
Impacts
Cap Unsustainable
Capitalism is a failed and broken system that has produced a laundry
list of impacts such as socioeconomic inequality, rampant disease,
abject poverty, global warming, etc.
Foster ’19 (John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon,
Capitalism Has Failed – What Next?, Monthly Review, 01 February 2019,
https://monthlyreview.org/2019/02/01/capitalism-has-failed-what-next/)-NR
capitalism has failed as a social system. The
world is mired in economic stagnation, financialization, and the most extreme
inequality in human history, accompanied by mass unemployment and
underemployment, precariousness, poverty, hunger, wasted output and lives, and
what at this point can only be called a planetary ecological “death spiral.”1 The
digital revolution , the greatest technological advance of our time, has rapidly mutated from a promise of free communication
and liberated production into new means of surveillance, control, and displacement of the
working population. The institutions of liberal democracy are at the point of
collapse , while fascism, the rear guard of the capitalist system, is again on the march, along with patriarchy, racism, imperialism, and war. To say that
capitalism is a failed system is not, of course, to suggest that its breakdown and disintegration is imminent.2 It does, however, mean that it has
passed from being a historically necessary and creative system at its inception to being
a historically unnecessary and destructive one in the present century. Today , more than ever, the world
is faced with the epochal choice between “the revolutionary reconstitution of
society at large and the common ruin of the contending classes.” 3 Indications of this failure of
capitalism are everywhere. Stagnation of investment punctuated by bubbles of financial
expansion, which then inevitably burst, now characterizes the so-called free
market.4 Soaring inequality in income and wealth has its counterpart in the
declining material circumstances of a majority of the population. Real wages for
most workers in the United States have barely budged in forty years despite steadily rising
productivity.5 Work intensity has increased, while work and safety protections on the job
have been systematically jettisoned. Unemployment data has become more and
more meaningless due to a new institutionalized underemployment in the form of
contract labor in the gig economy.6 Unions have been reduced to mere shadows of their former glory as capitalism has
asserted totalitarian control over workplaces. With the demise of Soviet-type societies, social
democracy in Europe has perished in the new atmosphere of “liberated capitalism. ”7
The capture of the surplus value produced by overexploited populations in the poorest
regions of the world, via the global labor arbitrage instituted by multinational corporations,
is leading to an unprecedented amassing of financial wealth at the center of the
world economy and relative poverty in the periphery .8 Around $21 trillion of offshore funds are currently lodged
Less than two decades into the twenty-first century, it is evident that
in tax havens on islands mostly in the Caribbean, constituting “the fortified refuge of Big Finance.”9 Technologically driven monopolies resulting from the globalcommunications revolution, together with the rise to dominance of Wall Street-based financial capital geared to speculative asset creation, have further contributed
Forty-two billionaires now enjoy as much wealth as half the
world’s population, while the three richest men in the United States —Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and
Warren Buffett— have more wealth than half the U.S. population. 10 In every region of the world,
inequality has increased sharply in recent decades.11 The gap in per capita
income and wealth between the richest and poorest nations , which has been the dominant trend for
to the riches of today’s “1 percent.”
is rapidly widening once again .12 More than 60 percent of the world’s
employed population , some two billion people, now work in the impoverished informal sector ,
centuries,
forming a massive global proletariat. The global reserve army of labor is some 70 percent larger than the active labor army of formally employed workers.13
Adequate health care, housing, education, and clean water and air are
increasingly out of reach for large sections of the population, even in wealthy
countries in North America and Europe, while transportation is becoming more
difficult in the United States and many other countries due to irrationally high levels of dependency on
the automobile and disinvestment in public transportation. Urban structures are
more and more characterized by gentrification and segregation, with cities
becoming the playthings of the well-to-do while marginalized populations are
shunted aside. About half a million people, most of them children, are homeless on any given night in the United States.14 New York City is
experiencing a major rat infestation, attributed to warming temperatures, mirroring trends around the world.15 In the United States and other high-income
life expectancy is in decline, with a remarkable resurgence of Victorian
illnesses related to poverty and exploitation. In Britain, gout, scarlet fever,
whooping cough, and even scurvy are now resurgent, along with tuberculosis . With
inadequate enforcement of work health and safety regulations, black lung disease has returned with a vengeance
in U.S. coal country.16 Overuse of antibiotics, particularly by capitalist
agribusiness, is leading to an antibiotic-resistance crisis , with the dangerous growth of superbugs
countries,
generating increasing numbers of deaths, which by mid–century could surpass annual cancer deaths, prompting the World Health Organization to declare a
These dire conditions, arising from the workings of the system,
are consistent with what Frederick Engels, in the Condition of the Working Class in England, called “social murder.” 18 At
the instigation of giant corporations , philanthrocapitalist foundations, and neoliberal governments,
public education has been restructured around corporate-designed testing based on the
implementation of robotic common-core standards. This is generating massive databases on the student
population, much of which are now being surreptitiously marketed and sold.19
The corporatization and privatization of education is feeding the progressive
subordination of children’s needs to the cash nexus of the commodity market . We are thus seeing a
“global health emergency.”17
dramatic return of Thomas Gradgrind’s and Mr. M’Choakumchild’s crass utilitarian philosophy dramatized in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times: “Facts are alone
wanted in life” and “You are never to fancy.”20 Having been reduced to intellectual dungeons, many of the poorest, most racially segregated schools in the United
More than two million people in the United States are
behind bars, a higher rate of incarceration than any other country in the world ,
constituting a new Jim Crow. The total population in prison is nearly equal to the number of people in Houston, Texas, the fourth largest U.S. city. African
Americans and Latinos make up 56 percent of those incarcerated, while
constituting only about 32 percent of the U.S. population. Nearly 50 percent of American adults, and a
States are mere pipelines for prisons or the military.21
much higher percentage among African Americans and Native Americans, have an immediate family member who has spent or is currently spending time behind
bars. Both black men and Native American men in the United States are nearly three times, Hispanic men nearly two times, more likely to die of police shootings
Racial divides are now widening across the entire planet. Violence
against women and the expropriation of their unpaid labor, as well as the higher level of exploitation of their paid
labor, are integral to the way in which power is organized in capitalist society—
and how it seeks to divide rather than unify the population. More than a third of women worldwide have
experienced physical/sexual violence. Women’s bodies , in particular, are objectified, reified, and
commodified as part of the normal workings of monopoly-capitalist marketing. 23
The mass media-propaganda system , part of the larger corporate matrix, is now merging into a
social media-based propaganda system that is more porous and seemingly
anarchic, but more universal and more than ever favoring money and power . Utilizing
than white men.22
modern marketing and surveillance techniques, which now dominate all digital interactions, vested interests are able to tailor their messages, largely unchecked, to
individuals and their social networks, creating concerns about “fake news” on all sides.24 Numerous business entities promising technological manipulation of
voters in countries across the world have now surfaced, auctioning off their services to the highest bidders.25
The elimination of net
neutrality in the United States means further concentration, centralization, and
control over the entire Internet by monopolistic service providers. Elections are
increasingly prey to unregulated “dark money” emanating from the coffers of corporations and
the billionaire class . Although presenting itself as the world’s leading democracy, the United States , as Paul Baran and Paul
Sweezy stated in Monopoly Capital in 1966, “ is democratic in form and plutocratic in content .”26 In the Trump
administration, following a long-established tradition, 72 percent of those appointed to the cabinet have
come from the higher corporate echelons , while others have been drawn from the military.27 War , engineered by the
United States and other major powers at the apex of the system, has become perpetual in strategic oil regions such
as the Middle East, and threatens to escalate into a global thermonuclear exchange. During the
Obama administration, the United States was engaged in wars/bombings in seven different
countries —Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan.28 Torture and assassinations have been reinstituted by Washington as
acceptable instruments of war against those now innumerable individuals, group networks, and whole societies that are branded as terrorist. A new
Cold War and nuclear arms race is in the making between the United States and
Russia , while Washington is seeking to place road blocks to the continued rise of China. The Trump administration has created a new space force as a
separate branch of the military in an attempt to ensure U.S. dominance in the militarization of space. Sounding the alarm on the
increasing dangers of a nuclear war and of climate destabilization, the distinguished
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved its doomsday clock in 2018 to two minutes to
midnight , the closest since 1953, when it marked the advent of thermonuclear weapons.29 Increasingly severe economic
sanctions are being imposed by the United States on countries like Venezuela and
Nicaragua , despite their democratic elections—or because of them. Trade and currency wars are being actively
promoted by core states, while racist barriers against immigration continue to be erected in
Europe and the United States as some 60 million refugees and internally displaced peoples
flee devastated environments. Migrant populations worldwide have risen to 250
million , with those residing in high-income countries constituting more than 14 percent of the populations of those
countries, up from less than 10 percent in 2000. Meanwhile, ruling circles and wealthy countries seek to wall off islands of
More than three-quarters
of a billion people , over 10 percent of the world population, are chronically malnourished .31
Food stress in the United States keeps climbing , leading to the rapid growth of cheap dollar stores
selling poor quality and toxic food. Around forty million Americans, representing one out of
eight households , including nearly thirteen million children, are food insecure .32 Subsistence farmers
power and privilege from the mass of humanity, who are to be left to their fate.30
are being pushed off their lands by agribusiness, private capital, and sovereign wealth funds in a global depeasantization
Urban overcrowding and poverty
across much of the globe is so severe that one can now reasonably refer to a
“planet of slums.”34 Meanwhile, the world housing market is estimated to be worth up to $163 trillion (as
compared to the value of gold mined over all recorded history, estimated at $7.5 trillion).35 The Anthropocene
epoch , first ushered in by the Great Acceleration of the world economy immediately after the Second World War ,
has generated enormous rifts in planetary boundaries, extending from climate
change to ocean acidification, to the sixth extinction, to disruption of the global
nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, to the loss of freshwater, to the disappearance
of forests, to widespread toxic-chemical and radioactive pollution .36 It is now estimated
process that constitutes the greatest movement of people in history.33
that 60 percent of the world’s wildlife vertebrate population (including mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and fish) have
been wiped out since 1970, while the worldwide abundance of invertebrates has declined by 45 percent in recent
decades.37 What climatologist James Hansen calls the “ species
exterminations” resulting from
accelerating climate change and rapidly shifting climate zones are only
compounding this general process of biodiversity loss. Biologists expect that half
of all species will be facing extinction by the end of the century. 38 If present
climate-change trends continue, the “global carbon budget” associated with a 2°C
increase in average global temperature will be broken in sixteen years (while a 1.5°C
increase in global average temperature—staying beneath which is the key to long-term stabilization of the climate—will be
the world is now perilously close to a
Hothouse Earth, in which catastrophic climate change will be locked in and
irreversible. 39 The ecological, social, and economic costs to humanity of continuing to increase carbon emissions
reached in a decade). Earth System scientists warn that
by 2.0 percent a year as in recent decades (rising in 2018 by 2.7 percent—3.4 percent in the United States), and failing to
meet the minimal 3.0 percent annual reductions in emissions currently needed to avoid a catastrophic destabilization of
major energy corporations
continue to lie about climate change, promoting and bankrolling climate
denialism —while admitting the truth in their internal documents. These corporations are working to
accelerate the extraction and production of fossil fuels, including the dirtiest,
most greenhouse gas-generating varieties, reaping enormous profits in the
process . The melting of the Arctic ice from global warming is seen by capital as a new El Dorado, opening up
the earth’s energy balance, are simply incalculable.40 Nevertheless,
massive additional oil and gas reserves to be exploited without regard to the consequences for the earth’s climate. In
response to scientific reports on climate change, Exxon Mobil declared that it intends to extract and sell all of the fossil-
Energy corporations continue to intervene in climate
negotiations to ensure that any agreements to limit carbon emissions are defanged. Capitalist countries
across the board are putting the accumulation of wealth for a few above
combatting climate destabilization, threatening the very future of humanity.
Capitalism is best understood as a competitive class-based mode of production and
exchange geared to the accumulation of capital through the exploitation of
workers’ labor power and the private appropriation of surplus value (value generated
fuel reserves at its disposal.41
beyond the costs of the workers’ own reproduction). The mode of economic accounting intrinsic to capitalism designates
as a value-generating good or service anything that passes through the market and therefore produces income. It follows
the greater part of the social and environmental costs of production outside
the market are excluded in this form of valuation and are treated as mere negative
“externalities ,” unrelated to the capitalist economy itself— whether in terms of the shortening
and degradation of human life or the destruction of the natural environment . As
environmental economist K. William Kapp stated, “capitalism must be regarded as an economy of
unpaid costs.” 42 We have now reached a point in the twenty-first century in which
the externalities of this irrational system, such as the costs of war, the depletion
of natural resources, the waste of human lives, and the disruption of the planetary
environment, now far exceed any future economic ben efits that capitalism offers to society as a
whole. The accumulation of capital and the amassing of wealth are increasingly
occurring at the expense of an irrevocable rift in the social and environmental
conditions governing human life on earth.43
that
Capitalism is likely to fail- its an unsustainable model
Hutton 18 (Will Hutton, September 09, 2018 Observer, Big Innovation Centre, Hertford
College, Oxford. “Ten years on, capitalism might not survive the shock of another
Lehman” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/09/ten-years-after2008-crisis-another-financial-crash)-- RD
Ten years ago this weekend, frantic efforts were being made to save one of the biggest banks in the world. When
chancellor Alistair Darling overruled Barclays’ supreme stupidity in considering the takeover of the stricken Lehman
Brothers investment bank – the extent and complexity of its debts would have brought down both it and probably the
British banking system – the die was cast. Lehman collapsed and the shockwaves are still felt to this day. Suddenly, the
proud buccaneers of high finance were exposed as “sapient nincompoops”, as the great economic commentator Walter
Bagehot described the senior executives of Overend, Gurney & Co in the wake of its collapse 150 years earlier. All the
assumptions made by a generation of free-market economists, conservative politicians and the financial establishment
were shown to be ideological tosh propagated by today’s nincompoops. Yes, markets could
and did make
vast, earth-shaking mistakes. Yes, shareholders were so disengaged from the companies in which they
invested they, in effect, allowed ownerless banks to be run to create gargantuan, dynastic fortunes for their managers,
assuming risks on a scale they did not themselves understand. Yes, the
financial system had become a
complex interrelated network no stronger than its weakest link – which was very
weak. The bill for all these mistakes would be picked up by wider society, with
perpetrators suffering nothing – nationalising losses and privatising gain. The
whole effect was to transmute capitalism into a system of value extraction
rather than value creation, with knock-on effects that depressed wages and
contractualised work into short-term and zero-hour contracts. The financial
system, based in London and New York, had become damnable – the nightmare of our times. The
cumulative costs of this have become so large they can scarcely be comprehended. The total cost across the west of
recapitalising bust banks, offering guarantees and making good disappeared liquidity is estimated at $14tn. The recession
conservative
politicians – most successfully in Britain – succeeded in pinning the blame not on the architects and
operators of modern finance but on the excesses of the state, the rationale for “austerity”.
that followed was the deepest since the 1930s, with the slowest subsequent recovery. Worse,
High government spending, alleged chancellor George Osborne and prime minister David Cameron, had caused the
government budget deficit to balloon. Wrong. Rather, the deficit was caused by collapsing tax revenues during a
monumental recession. The same nincompoopery that had created modern finance now proclaimed that the stock of
public debt – despite it being proportionally higher for most of the previous three centuries and at times of higher interest
rates – represented an existential threat. In the UK, public spending per head on services will have fallen by a quarter by
2020 as a result of the consequent spending cuts – tax increases could not be countenanced – with what remains of
Britain’s social contract ripped apart. The distress and disaffection helped to fuel the margin that won the referendum for
Leave. As profound was the rupturing of the Faustian bargain between finance and society that had defined the 30 years
up to 2008. The bankers made their fortunes, but wider society was offered boundless credit and booming property prices.
Companies did not have to create value through innovation, investment and
export; instead, they could ride the credit boom. The result: an overblown,
featherbedded service sector delivering ungrounded productivity growth. Post
2008, the wounded system has been unable to deliver at the same pace,
although it tries. The illusory productivity has stagnated; and trust in valueextracting business and capitalism, which continues to displace risk on to the
shoulders of ordinary people, has fallen to new lows. Small wonder that Jeremy Corbyn did so
well in the 2017 general election. Too little has been learned; too little has changed . Even the
limited reforms set in train since 2010 have not been fully implemented. Worse, the essential amoral bargain remains in
place. Finance can do more or less what it likes, with pay beyond the dreams of avarice for what Lord Adair Turner,
former chair of the Financial Services Authority, calls activity that is no better than a system of wealth transference. It is
zero-sum: nothing worthwhile is taking place. Yet, if it collapses, be sure that governments will be asked to step in again.
Finance can do more or less as it likes, but if it collapses, be sure that
governments will be asked to step in again The risks are downplayed. Surely it could
not happen again when regulators are more alert and bankers have been required to provide more of their own capital as
a cushion against mistakes? Yet just a cursory glance at the markets shows how febrile they are, how exposed to violent
movements, how illusory is their much-vaunted liquidity – and how rich the pickings remain for those prepared to take the
risks. Note, also, how shaky are the foundations of the new wave of financial products offering “risk diversification”,
notably exchange trading funds (ETF). We live in a world in which the price of US Treasury bonds – a market of multitrillion dollars – can move 10% in 10 minutes. What was bewildering in 2008 was how, as a result of computerised
algorithmic buy and sell instructions, everybody had diversified in the same way – so everybody became simultaneous
buyers and sellers. That is even more acute today. All that is required is for, say, Turkey or Italy to default on their debts,
the impact would
radiate across the network as it did in 2008. Banks carry far too little capital to insulate themselves from
an ETF to become distressed, or a sequence of Chinese banks to fail (all too imaginable) and
the shocks – and governments, again, would have to step in. Capitalism as it is could not survive. Trump’s America would
not collaborate in underwriting a global bailout as the US did in 2008. The
trend towards
deglobalisation and trade protection would accelerate. Brexit Britain, outside the EU and
with a huge financial sector, would be devastated. We must urgently minimise risk and reshape our economy. If not,
today’s debates and preoccupations will, in the future, be viewed as incredible.
Impact – Coopts CJR
Capitalism coopts the reform movement- corporate interest privatize
“alternative solutions” for profit while continuing to siphon money
away from public programs- guarantees failure
Mark Jay in 2019 Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara;
Cages and Crises: A Marxist Analysis of Mass Incarceration; Historical Materialism 27.1
(2019) 182–223
Having peaked in 2008, the incarceration rate has slightly declined in the decade since. One reason for
this decline is that the fiscal crisis which followed the Great Recession of 2007–8 put pressure on state governments to
cut costs by reducing their inmate populations (states like California, New York, and New Jersey have made particularly
significant cuts). Another is that progressive movements have brought into national focus the ‘injustices’ of the criminaljustice system. Although President Obama tried to dismiss as ‘criminals’ the black activists who have increasingly taken to
increased activism has
pressured politicians to reform the authoritarian criminal-justice system. During the
Obama era, there emerged a nascent political consensus around the prudence of ‘smart
on crime’ measures, such as decreasing the sentences for nonviolent drug offenders. Indeed, in 2013, David
the streets in recent years to protest police killings of unarmed black people,
Dagan and Steven M. Teles wrote that ‘Retrenching the carceral state is becoming as orthodox on the Right as building it
was just a few short years ago.’144 For years now, the Right on Crime movement (led by conservatives like Newt
Gingrich and the Koch Brothers) has advocated for ‘cost-effective’ criminal-justice reforms, and in late 2018, Trump
signed into law the First Step Act (supported and significantly shaped by Right on Crimers) which reduces sentences for
low-level drug offenders in the federal prison system, and expands ‘alternatives to incarceration’.145 Before considering
it is important to keep in mind how small prison downsizing
has been . At the present rate of decline, it would take more than eight decades for
the prison population to return to its 1980 level .146 A main reason for this scant
decline is that efforts to reduce inmate populations have centred on reductions in
sentencing for nonviolent offenders, especially drug offenders (the central focus of Alexander’s
The New Jim Crow). Even as many states have bolstered punitive measures as a
response to the opioid epidemic , which ‘claimed more American lives in 2017
than were lost in the entire Vietnam War’ , sentencing lengths for drug possession have generally
decreased in recent years. At the same time, however, ‘sentence lengths have grown for all major
offense categories’.147 With this in mind, it is important to analyse prison reforms, especially
because, as Rusche and Kirchheimer showed in Punishment and Social Structure, when the modern
prison emerged centuries ago, it too was initially presented as a ‘reform’ – to the
spectacular violence of corporal punishment .148 As groups across the political spectrum call for
‘reform’, we must understand how private interests are attempting to influence this
process . In an interview available in the online counterpart of this journal, Ruth Wilson Gilmore recently described
private prisons as ‘an infinitesimal part of mass incarceration’; but this downplays the situation.149 Private prison
companies, which hold 19% of federal prisoners and nearly 75% of immigrant detainees,
have a huge stake in prison reform.150 This is especially true for two companies: ‘CoreCivic, Inc. and
GEO Group, Inc. – which collectively manage more than half of private prison contracts in the
country (including immigration and nonimmigration detention) – earned combined revenue exceeding $4
billion in FY 2017.’151 During the Obama presidency, these corporations responded to mounting
moral outrage against private imprisonment by investing in ‘alternatives’ . Among a
‘alternatives to incarceration’,
slew of other acquisitions, in 2010 GEO Group announced a $685 million merger with Cornell Companies, ‘a provider of
they acquired Behavioral Interventions, ‘ the
world’s largest producer of monitoring equipment’ for criminal offenders .152 As part
corrections, treatment and educational services’; and in 2011,
of its own ‘rebranding strategy’ Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) recently renamed itself CoreCivic. The
executive director of CIVIC – an organisation committed to ending immigrant detention – has said: ‘It is shocking that CCA
would steal our name in what can only be construed as an effort to create undue confusion for immigrants in detention
and exploit the goodwill associated with our name.’153 Aside from changing its name, CoreCivic has ‘diversified’ its
investments. For example, in
addition to buying up halfway houses across the country, the
company acquired Correctional Alternatives in 2013, and Avalon Correctional Services (a
‘community corrections’ company) in 2015.154 As a recent report from the American Friends Service Committee has
shown, there are four pillars of the community corrections ‘alternatives’ that local
governments are increasingly turning to: day-reporting centres, intermediatesanctions facilities,
residential-reentry centres (halfway houses), and electronic monitoring. The GEO Group and CoreCivic –
which have a combined $3.4 billion debt, held largely by Wall Street banks with whom each company has an agreement
for a ‘revolving credit facility’ – have the capital to outcompete smaller service providers for government contracts in each
Many Right on Crimers have rejected Medicaid funding, forfeiting
large amounts of federal aid that could have supported alternatives to
incarceration by funding public initiatives for supportive housing, substanceabuse programmes and mental-health centres. But Right on Crimers do support
private ‘alternatives’ . One Right on Crime statement reads: For those instances when prisons are
necessary, explore private prison options … private prisons offer cost savings of 10 to 15
percent compared to state-operated facilities. By including an incentive in private corrections contracts for
of these four areas.155
lowering recidivism and the flexibility to innovate, private facilities could potentially not just save money but also compete
to develop the most cost-effective recidivism reduction programming.156
Decarceration is a futile alternative without struggling against the
entirety of the system- it only increases the displacement of millions
of people as the economy fails to provide opportunity
Mark Jay in 2019 Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara;
Cages and Crises: A Marxist Analysis of Mass Incarceration; Historical Materialism 27.1
(2019) 182–223
In 2011, GEO Group acquired BI Inc. for $415 million. BI is one of the largest electronic-monitoring
contractors in the US, and at the time of this acquisition, BI was the only provider of
monitoring and supervision services for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as part of the
Department of Homeland Security’s ‘Alternative to Detention’ programme.160 The ongoing crisis of
social reproduction in Latin America has led to an increased flow of workers entering the
US from this region, and these incoming workers have been scapegoated for social
problems and aggressively criminalised. Hispanics now constitute more than a third of federal prisoners,
and more than threequarters of immigrant detainees are held in private facilities.161 As sociologist David Feldman has
written, escalating efforts to profit from immigrant detention creates a contradiction: Since
the ‘immigrant industrial complex’ treats immigrant bodies as raw materials in the
production process, it actually poses a threat to other capitalists who seek to extract
surplus value from them. Quite simply, the detention of immigrants removes their labor power from the
(nonprison) labor market.162 By helping to create a super-exploitable workforce, while at the
same time allowing correctional corporations to profit, ‘free-floating’ forms of control like
electronic control may herald one minor way in which the capitalist class can attempt to
navigate this contradiction. Since GEO Group’s acquisition of BI, federal contracts for ‘alternatives to detention’
have been awarded to the same company that operates the detention centres. The size of the ‘alternatives’ market is all
the larger because, according to ICE reports, more than half of all immigrants under supervision have not been convicted
of a crime.163 Contemporary
rates of incarceration match rates of institutionalisation for
‘mentally ill’ patients in the period from the 1930s to the 1950s. ‘ There is a significant
risk’, Bernard Harcourt writes, ‘ that any decarceration will simply produce new
populations for other institutions, whether homeless shelters, inpatient treatment
facilities, or other locked-down facilities . This is certainly what happened last
time .’ Indeed, more than 1.2 million people with mental illness sit behind bars today.164 The ominous example of
deinstitutionalisation, as well as widespread corporate attempts to influence prison reform, demonstrate how difficult a
if the carceral system is downsized,
then the millions of people currently targeted and employed by that system will have to
be otherwise absorbed into the capitalist system. Given that mass incarceration has
mainly targeted the most precarious members of the working class, the situation is
especially urgent when one considers ongoing dislocations caused by automation and
globalisation (US manufacturing jobs have decreased 37% since 1979) as well as monopolisation (1,318 firms
control at least 80% of the world’s wealth).165 These and other processes have led to a dramatic
increase in the global surplus population: in 2011, the number of global workers between the ages of 25
challenge is presented to contemporary prison activists. Simply put,
and 54 that are unemployed, vulnerably employed, or economically inactive was 2.4 billion.166 Ruth Wilson Gilmore has
recently claimed that there
are about 70 million adults who have some kind of criminal
conviction – whether or not they were ever locked up – that keeps them from holding certain kinds of jobs…. So it
seems that anti-criminalization and the extensive and intensive forces and effects of
criminalization and perpetual punishment has to be central to any kind of political,
economic change that benefits working people and their communities, or benefits poor
people, whether or not they’re working, and their communities.167 Today as ever, the
struggle against the punitive state goes hand in hand with the struggle for a
‘refashioning of our political economy’ that Bayard Rustin called for a halfcentury ago.
Impact – Laundry List
Capitalism causes every impact—poverty, inequality, democratic
decline, disease, climate change, women and worker exploitation,
and nuclear war
Foster 19 (John, PhD from York University, Professor at the University of Oregon
Department of Sociology, “Capitalism Has Failed—What Next?,” Monthly Review,
2/1/19, https://monthlyreview.org/2019/02/01/capitalism-has-failed-what-next/, JLin)
Less than two decades into the twenty-first century, it is evident that capitalism has failed as a social
system. The world is mired in economic stagnation, financialization, and the most
extreme inequality in human history, accompanied by mass unemployment and
underemployment, precariousness, poverty, hunger, wasted output and lives, and what at
this point can only be called a planetary ecological “death spiral.”1 The digital revolution, the greatest
technological advance of our time, has rapidly mutated from a promise of free communication and
liberated production into new means of surveillance, control, and displacement of
the working population. The institutions of liberal democracy are at the point of collapse,
while fascism , the rear guard of the capitalist system, is again on the march , along with patriarchy,
racism, imperialism, and war. To say that capitalism is a failed system is not, of course, to suggest that its breakdown
and disintegration is imminent.2 It does, however, mean that it has passed from being a historically
necessary and creative system at its inception to being a historically unnecessary and
destructive one in the present century. Today, more than ever, the world is faced with the
epochal choice between “the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large and the
common ruin of the contending classes.”3 Indications of this failure of capitalism are everywhere.
Stagnation of investment punctuated by bubbles of financial expansion, which then
inevitably burst, now characterizes the so-called free market.4 Soaring inequality in income
and wealth has its counterpart in the declining material circumstances of a majority of
the population. Real wages for most workers in the United States have barely budged in forty
years despite steadily rising productivity.5 Work intensity has increased, while work and
safety protections on the job have been systematically jettisoned. Unemployment data has become
more and more meaningless due to a new institutionalized underemployment in the form of contract
labor in the gig economy.6 Unions have been reduced to mere shadows of their former glory as
capitalism has asserted totalitarian control over workplaces . With the demise of Soviet-type
societies, social democracy in Europe has perished in the new atmosphere of “liberated capitalism.”7 The capture of
the surplus value produced by overexploited populations in the poorest regions of
the world, via the global labor arbitrage instituted by multinational corporations, is
leading to an unprecedented amassing of financial wealth at the center of the world economy and relative
poverty in the periphery.8 Around $21 trillion of offshore funds are currently lodged in tax havens on islands
mostly in the Caribbean, constituting “the fortified refuge of Big Finance.”9 Technologically driven monopolies resulting
from the global-communications revolution, together with the rise to dominance of Wall Street-based financial capital
Forty-two
billionaires now enjoy as much wealth as half the world’s population, while the three richest men
in the United States—Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett—have more wealth than half the U.S. population.10 In
every region of the world, inequality has increased sharply in recent decades.11
geared to speculative asset creation, have further contributed to the riches of today’s “1 percent.”
The gap in per capita income and wealth between the richest and poorest nations, which has been the dominant trend for
centuries, is rapidly widening once again.12 More than 60 percent of the world’s employed population, some two billion
people, now work in the impoverished informal sector, forming a massive global proletariat. The global reserve army of
Adequate health care,
housing, education, and clean water and air are increasingly out of reach for large
sections of the population, even in wealthy countries in North America and Europe, while transportation is
labor is some 70 percent larger than the active labor army of formally employed workers.13
becoming more difficult in the United States and many other countries due to irrationally high levels of
dependency on the automobile and disinvestment in public transportation. Urban structures are more and
more characterized by gentrification and segregation, with cities becoming the playthings of the wellto-do while marginalized populations are shunted aside. About half a million people, most of them children, are homeless
on any given night in the United States.14 New York City is experiencing a major rat infestation, attributed to warming
life
expectancy is in decline, with a remarkable resurgence of Victorian illnesses related to
poverty and exploitation. In Britain, gout, scarlet fever, whooping cough, and even scurvy are now resurgent,
along with tuberculosis. With inadequate enforcement of work health and safety regulations,
black lung disease has returned with a vengeance in U.S. coal country.16 Overuse of antibiotics,
particularly by capitalist agribusiness, is leading to an antibiotic-resistance crisis,
with the dangerous growth of superbugs generating increasing numbers of deaths, which by mid–
temperatures, mirroring trends around the world.15 In the United States and other high-income countries,
century could surpass annual cancer deaths, prompting the World Health Organization to declare a “global health
emergency.”17 These dire conditions, arising from the workings of the system, are consistent with what Frederick Engels,
At the instigation of giant
corporations, philanthrocapitalist foundations, and neoliberal governments, public education has
been restructured around corporate-designed testing based on the implementation of robotic
common-core standards. This is generating massive databases on the student population, much
of which are now being surreptitiously marketed and sold.19 The corporatization and
privatization of education is feeding the progressive subordination of children’s needs to the
in the Condition of the Working Class in England, called “social murder.”18
cash nexus of the commodity market. We are thus seeing a dramatic return of Thomas Gradgrind’s and Mr.
M’Choakumchild’s crass utilitarian philosophy dramatized in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times: “Facts are alone wanted in
life” and “You are never to fancy.”20 Having been reduced to intellectual dungeons, many of the poorest, most racially
segregated schools in the United States are mere pipelines for prisons or the military.21 More than two million people in
the United States are behind bars, a higher rate of incarceration than any other country in the world, constituting a new
Jim Crow. The total population in prison is nearly equal to the number of people in Houston, Texas, the fourth largest U.S.
city. African Americans and Latinos make up 56 percent of those incarcerated, while constituting only about 32 percent of
the U.S. population. Nearly 50 percent of American adults, and a much higher percentage among African Americans and
Native Americans, have an immediate family member who has spent or is currently spending time behind bars. Both black
men and Native American men in the United States are nearly three times, Hispanic men nearly two times, more likely to
die of police shootings than white men.22 Racial
divides are now widening across the entire planet.
Violence against women and the expropriation of their unpaid labor, as well as the
higher level of exploitation of their paid labor, are integral to the way in which power is organized
in capitalist society —and how it seeks to divide rather than unify the population. More than a third of women
worldwide have experienced physical/sexual violence. Women’s bodies, in particular, are objectified,
reified, and commodified as part of the normal workings of monopoly-capitalist
marketing. 23 The mass media-propaganda system, part of the larger corporate matrix, is now
merging into a social media-based propaganda system that is more porous and seemingly anarchic,
but more universal and more than ever favoring money and power. Utilizing modern marketing
and surveillance techniques, which now dominate all digital interactions, vested interests are able to tailor their messages,
largely unchecked, to individuals and their social networks, creating concerns about “fake news” on all sides.24 Numerous
business entities promising technological manipulation of voters in countries across the world have now surfaced,
auctioning off their services to the highest bidders.25 The elimination of net neutrality in the United States means further
Elections are
increasingly prey to unregulated “dark money” emanating from the coffers of
corporations and the billionaire class. Although presenting itself as the world’s leading democracy, the
concentration, centralization, and control over the entire Internet by monopolistic service providers.
United States, as Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy stated in Monopoly Capital in 1966, “is democratic in form and plutocratic
in content.”26 In the Trump administration, following a long-established tradition, 72 percent of
those appointed to the cabinet have come from the higher corporate echelons, while others
have been drawn from the military.27 War, engineered by the United States and other major
powers at the apex of the system, has become perpetual in strategic oil regions such as
the Middle East, and threatens to escalate into a global thermonuclear exchange.
During the Obama administration, the United States was engaged in wars/bombings in seven different countries—
Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan.28 Torture
and assassinations have been
reinstituted by Washington as acceptable instruments of war against those now innumerable
individuals, group networks, and whole societies that are branded as terrorist. A new Cold War and nuclear arms race is
in the making between the United States and Russia, while Washington is seeking to place road blocks to the continued
rise of China. The Trump
administration has created a new space force as a separate branch
of the military in an attempt to ensure U.S. dominance in the militarization of space.
Sounding the alarm on the increasing dangers of a nuclear war and of climate destabilization, the distinguished Bulletin of
Atomic Scientists moved its doomsday clock in 2018 to two minutes to midnight, the closest since 1953, when it marked
the advent of thermonuclear weapons.29 Increasingly severe economic sanctions are being imposed by the United States
on countries like Venezuela and Nicaragua, despite their democratic elections—or because of them. Trade and currency
wars are being actively promoted by core states, while racist barriers against immigration continue to be erected in
Europe and the United States as some 60 million refugees and internally displaced peoples flee devastated environments.
Migrant populations worldwide have risen to 250 million, with those residing in high-income countries constituting more
than 14 percent of the populations of those countries, up from less than 10 percent in 2000. Meanwhile, ruling circles and
wealthy countries seek to wall off islands of power and privilege from the mass of humanity, who are to be left to their
fate.30 More than three-quarters of a billion people, over 10 percent of the world population, are
chronically malnourished.31 Food stress in the United States keeps climbing, leading to the rapid growth of
cheap dollar stores selling poor quality and toxic food. Around forty million Americans, representing one out of eight
households, including nearly thirteen million children, are food insecure.32 Subsistence farmers are being pushed off their
lands by agribusiness, private capital, and sovereign wealth funds in a global depeasantization process that constitutes
the greatest movement of people in history.33 Urban overcrowding and poverty across much of the
globe is so severe that one can now reasonably refer to a “planet of slums.”34 Meanwhile, the
world housing market is estimated to be worth up to $163 trillion (as compared to the value of gold mined over all
recorded history, estimated at $7.5 trillion).35 The Anthropocene epoch, first ushered in by the Great
Acceleration of the world economy immediately after the Second World War, has generated enormous rifts in planetary
extending from climate change to ocean acidification, to the sixth
extinction, to disruption of the global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, to the loss of
freshwater, to the disappearance of forests, to widespread toxic-chemical and
radioactive pollution .36 It is now estimated that 60 percent of the world’s wildlife vertebrate population
boundaries,
(including mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and fish) have been wiped out since 1970, while the worldwide
abundance of invertebrates has declined by 45 percent in recent decades.37 What climatologist James Hansen calls the
“species exterminations” resulting from accelerating climate change and rapidly shifting climate zones are only
compounding this general process of biodiversity loss. Biologists expect that half of all species will be facing extinction by
present climate-change trends continue, the “global carbon budget”
associated with a 2°C increase in average global temperature will be broken in sixteen
years (while a 1.5°C increase in global average temperature—staying beneath which is the key to long-term
the end of the century.38 If
stabilization of the climate—will be reached in a decade). Earth System scientists warn that the world is now perilously
close to a Hothouse Earth, in which catastrophic climate change will be locked in and irreversible.39 The ecological,
social, and economic costs to humanity of continuing to increase carbon emissions by 2.0 percent a year as in recent
decades (rising in 2018 by 2.7 percent—3.4 percent in the United States), and failing to meet the minimal 3.0 percent
annual reductions in emissions currently needed to avoid a catastrophic destabilization of the earth’s energy balance, are
energy corporations continue to lie about climate
change, promoting and bankrolling climate denialism —while admitting the truth in their internal
documents. These corporations are working to accelerate the extraction and production of
fossil fuels, including the dirtiest, most greenhouse gas-generating varieties, reaping
enormous profits in the process. The melting of the Arctic ice from global warming is seen by capital as a new El
simply incalculable.40 Nevertheless, major
Dorado, opening up massive additional oil and gas reserves to be exploited without regard to the consequences for the
earth’s climate. In response to scientific reports on climate change, Exxon Mobil declared that it intends to extract and sell
all of the fossil-fuel reserves at its disposal.41 Energy corporations continue to intervene in climate negotiations to ensure
that any agreements to limit carbon emissions are defanged. Capitalist countries across the board are putting the
accumulation of wealth for a few above combatting climate destabilization, threatening the very future of humanity.
Capitalism is best understood as a competitive class-based mode of production and exchange geared to the accumulation
of capital through the exploitation of workers’ labor power and the private appropriation of surplus value (value generated
beyond the costs of the workers’ own reproduction). The mode of economic accounting intrinsic to capitalism designates
as a value-generating good or service anything that passes through the market and therefore produces income. It follows
that the greater part of the social
and environmental costs of production outside the market are
excluded in this form of valuation and are treated as mere negative “externalities,”
unrelated to the capitalist economy itself—whether in terms of the shortening and degradation of human life
or the destruction of the natural environment. As environmental economist K. William Kapp stated, “capitalism must be
regarded as an economy of unpaid costs.”42 We have now reached a point in the twenty-first century
in which the externalities of this irrational system, such as the costs of war, the depletion
of natural resources, the waste of human lives, and the disruption of the planetary
environment, now far exceed any future economic benefits that capitalism offers
to society as a whole. The accumulation of capital and the amassing of wealth are increasingly occurring at the
expense of an irrevocable rift in the social and environmental conditions governing human life on earth.43 Some would
argue that China stands as an exception to much of the above, characterized as it is by a seemingly unstoppable rate of
economic advance (though carrying with it deep social and ecological contradictions). Yet Chinese development has its
roots in the 1949 Chinese Revolution, carried out by the Chinese Communist Party headed by Mao Zedong, whereby it
liberated itself from the imperialist system. This allowed it to develop for decades under a planned economy largely free of
constraints from outside forces, establishing a strong agricultural and industrial economic base. This was followed by a
shift in the post-Maoist reform period to a hybrid system of more limited state planning along with a much greater reliance
on market relations (and a vast expansion of debt and speculation) under conditions—the globalization of the world
market—that were particularly fortuitous to its “catching up.” Through trade wars and other pressures aimed at
destabilizing China’s position in the world market, the United States is already seeking to challenge the bases of China’s
growth in world trade. China, therefore, stands not so much for the successes of late capitalism but rather for its inherent
limitations. The current Chinese model, moreover, carries within it many of the destructive tendencies of the system of
capital accumulation. Ultimately, China’s future too depends on a return to the process of revolutionary transition, spurred
An
understanding of the failure of capitalism, beginning in the twentieth century, requires a
historical examination of the rise of neoliberalism, and how this has only served to
increase the destructiveness of the system. Only then can we address the future of humanity in the
by its own population.44 How did these disastrous conditions characterizing capitalism worldwide develop?
twenty-first century.
Capitalism is the root cause of every impact – climate change, war,
structural inequality, and psychological violence
Robinson PhD ’18 (William, American professor of sociology at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, “Accumulation Crisis and Global Police State”)/ly
Each major episode of crisis in the world capitalist system has presented the potential for systemic change. Each has
involved the breakdown of state legitimacy, escalating class and social struggles, and military conflicts, leading to a
restructuring of the system, including new institutional arrangements, class relations, and accumulation activities that
eventually result in a restabilization of the system and renewed capitalist expansion. The current crisis shares aspects of
earlier system-wide structural crises, such as of the 1880s, the 1930s or the 1970s. But there are six interrelated
dimensions to the current crisis that I believe sets it apart from these earlier ones and suggests that a simple restructuring
of the system will not lead to its restabilization – that is, our
against global capitalism
very survival now requires a revolution
(Robinson, 2014). These six dimensions, in broad strokes, present a “big picture”
context in which a global police state is emerging. First, the
system is fast reaching the ecological
limits of its reproduction. We have already passed tipping points in climate change, the
nitrogen cycle, and diversity loss. For the first time ever, human conduct is intersecting with and fundamentally
altering the earth system in such a way that threatens to bring about a sixth mass extinction (see,
e.g., Foster et al., 2011; Moore, 2015). These ecological dimensions of global crisis have been brought to the forefront of
the global agenda by the worldwide environmental justice movement. Communities around the world have come under
escalating repression as they face off against transnational corporate plunder of their environment. While capitalism
it is difficult to imagine that the
environmental catastrophe can be resolved within the capitalist system given capital’s
implacable impulse to accumulate and its accelerated commodification of nature .
Second, the level of global social polarization and inequality is unprecedented. The richest
cannot be held solely responsible for the ecological crisis,
one percent of humanity in 2016 controlled over half of the world’s wealth and 20 percent controlled 95 percent of that
escalating
inequalities fuel capitalism’s chronic problem of overaccumulation: the TCC cannot find productive outlets to
unload the enormous amounts of surplus it has accumulated, leading to chronic stagnation in the world
economy (see next section). Such extreme levels of social polarization present a challenge of social control to
wealth, while the remaining 80 percent had to make do with just five percent (Oxfam, 2017). These
dominant groups. As Trumpism in the United States as well as the rise of far-right and neo-fascist movements in Europe
so well illustrate, cooptation also involves the manipulation of fear and insecurity among the
downwardly mobile so that social anxiety is channeled towards scapegoated
communities. This psychosocial mechanism of displacing mass anxieties is not new, but
it appears to be increasing around the world in the face of the structural destabilization of
capitalist globalization. Extreme inequality requires extreme violence and repression that
lend themselves to projects of 21st century fascism. Third, the sheer magnitude of the means of violence
and social control is unprecedented, as well as the magnitude and concentrated control over the means of
global communication and the production and circulation of symbols, images, and knowledge. Computerized wars,
drone warfare, robot soldiers, bunker-buster bombs, a new generation of nuclear
weapons, satellite surveillance, cyberwar, spatial control technology, and so forth, have
changed the face of warfare , and more generally, of systems of social control and repression. We have
arrived at the panoptical surveillance society, a point brought home by Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013, and the
age of thought control by those who control global flows of communication and symbolic production. If
global
capitalist crisis leads to a new world war the destruction would simply be unprecedented.
Fourth, we are reaching limits to the extensive expansion of capitalism, in the sense that there are no
longer any new territories of significance to integrate into world capitalism and new spaces to
commodify are drying up. The capitalist system is by its nature expansionary. In each
earlier structural crisis, the system went through a new round of extensive expansion – from waves of colonial conquest in
earlier centuries, to the integration in the late 20th and early 21st centuries of the former socialist countries, China, India
and other areas that had been marginally outside the system. There are no longer any new territories to integrate into
world capitalism. At the same time, the privatization of education, health, utilities, basic services, and public lands is
turning those spaces in global society that were outside of capital’s control into “spaces of capital,” so that intensive
expansion is reaching depths never before seen. What is there left to commodify? Where can the system now expand?
New spaces have to be violently cracked open and the peoples in these spaces must be
repressed by the global police state. Fifth, there is the rise of a vast surplus population inhabiting a “planet
of slums” (Davis, 2007) pushed out of the productive economy, thrown into the margins,
and subject to sophisticated systems of social control and to destruction, into a mortal cycle of
dispossession-exploitation exclusion. Crises provide capital with the opportunity to accelerate the
process of forcing greater productivity out of fewer workers. The processes by which surplus labor is generated have
accelerated under globalization. Spatial reorganization has helped transnational capital to break the territorial-bound
power of organized labor and impose new capital–labor relations based on fragmentation, flexibilization, and the
cheapening of labor. These developments, combined with a massive new round of primitive accumulation and
displacement of hundreds of millions, have given rise to a new global army of superfluous labor that goes well beyond the
traditional reserve army of labor that Marx discussed. Global
capitalism has no direct use for surplus humanity. But
wages down everywhere and makes new systems of 21st century slavery possible.1
Dominant groups face the challenge of how to contain both the real and potential rebellion
of surplus humanity. In addition, surplus humanity cannot consume and so as their ranks expand
the problem of overaccumulation becomes exacerbated. Sixth, there is an acute political contradiction in
indirectly, it holds
global capitalism: economic globalization takes places within a nation-state system of political authority. Transnational
state apparatuses are incipient and have not been able to substitute for a leading nation-state with enough power and
authority to organize and stabilize the system, much less to impose regulations on transnational capital. In the age
of
capitalist globalization governments must attract to the national territory transnational corporate
investment, which requires providing capital with all the incentives associated with neoliberalism – downward
pressure on wages, deregulation, austerity, and so on – that aggravate inequality,
impoverishment, and insecurity for working classes. Nation-states face a contradiction between the need
to promote transnational capital accumulation in their territories and their need to achieve political legitimacy. As a
result, states around the world have been experiencing spiraling crises of legitimacy . This
situation generates bewildering and seemingly contradictory politics and also helps explain the resurgence of far-right and
neo-fascist forces that espouse rhetoric of nationalism and protectionism even as they promote neo-liberalism.
Impact – Environment
Capitalism is inherently unsustainable – the continual growth
necessary to perpetuate it guarantee existential environmental
impacts. Monbiot ’19 (George Monbiot, Dare to declare capitalism dead – before it
takes us all down with it, The Guardian, 25 April 2019,
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/25/capitalism-economic-systemsurvival-earth)-NR
For most of my adult life I’ve railed against “corporate capitalism”, “consumer capitalism” and “crony capitalism”. It took me
a long time to see that the problem is not the adjective but the noun. While some people have rejected capitalism gladly
and swiftly, I’ve done so slowly and reluctantly. Part of the reason was that I could see no clear alternative: unlike some
anti-capitalists, I have never been an enthusiast for state communism. I was also inhibited by its religious status. To say
“capitalism is failing” in the 21st century is like saying “God is dead” in the 19th: it is secular blasphemy. It requires a
degree of self-confidence I did not possess. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to recognise two things. First, that
it is
the system, rather than any variant of the system, that drives us inexorably
towards disaster . Second, that you do not have to produce a definitive alternative to
say that capitalism is failing. The statement stands in its own right. But it also demands another, and
different, effort to develop a new system. Perpetual growth on a finite planet leads inexorably to environmental calamity
Capitalism’s failures arise from two of its defining elements. The first is perpetual
growth. Economic growth is the aggregate effect of the quest to accumulate
capital and extract profit. Capitalism collapses without growth, yet perpetual
growth on a finite planet leads inexorably to environmental calamity. Those who defend
capitalism argue that, as consumption switches from goods to services, economic growth can be decoupled from the use
of material resources. Last week a paper in the journal New Political Economy, by Jason Hickel and Giorgos Kallis,
examined this premise. They found that while some relative decoupling took place in the 20th century (material resource
in the 21st century there has been a recoupling :
rising resource consumption has so far matched or exceeded the rate of
economic growth. The absolute decoupling needed to avert environmental
catastrophe (a reduction in material resource use) has never been achieved, and appears
impossible while economic growth continues. Green growth is an illusion. A system based on
perpetual growth cannot function without peripheries and externalities. There
must always be an extraction zone – from which materials are taken without full payment – and a
disposal zone , where costs are dumped in the form of waste and pollution. As the scale of economic
activity increases until capitalism affects everything , from the atmosphere to the deep ocean
floor, the entire planet becomes a sacrifice zone: we all inhabit the periphery of the
profit-making machine. This drives us towards cataclysm on such a scale that
most people have no means of imagining it. The threatened collapse of our lifesupport systems is bigger by far than war, famine, pestilence or economic crisis ,
consumption grew, but not as quickly as economic growth),
though it is likely to incorporate all four. Societies can recover from these apocalyptic events, but not from the loss of soil,
an abundant biosphere and a habitable climate. The second defining element is the bizarre assumption that a person is
seizure of common
goods causes three further dislocations. First, the scramble for exclusive control
of non-reproducible assets, which implies either violence or legislative
truncations of other people’s rights. Second, the immiseration of other people by
an economy based on looting across both space and time. Third, the translation
of economic power into political power, as control over essential resources leads
to control over the social relations that surround them. In the New York Times on Sunday, the
entitled to as great a share of the world’s natural wealth as their money can buy. This
Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz sought to distinguish between good capitalism, which he called “wealth creation”, and
But from the
environmental point of view, wealth creation is wealth grabbing. Economic
growth, intrinsically linked to the increasing use of material resources, means
seizing natural wealth from both living systems and future generations. To point to
bad capitalism, which he called “wealth grabbing” (extracting rent). I understand his distinction.
such problems is to invite a barrage of accusations, many of which are based on this premise: capitalism has rescued
capitalism,
and the economic growth it drives, has radically improved the prosperity of vast
numbers of people, while simultaneously destroying the prosperity of many
others: those whose land, labour and resources were seized to fuel growth
elsewhere. Much of the wealth of the rich nations was – and is – built on slavery and
colonial expropriation. Like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes
more harm than good . Just as we have found means of generating useful energy that are better and less
hundreds of millions of people from poverty – now you want to impoverish them again. It is true that
damaging than coal, so we need to find means of generating human wellbeing that are better and less damaging than
capitalism. There is no going back: the alternative to capitalism is neither feudalism nor state communism. Soviet
communism had more in common with capitalism than the advocates of either system would care to admit. Both systems
are (or were) obsessed with generating economic growth. Both are willing to inflict astonishing levels of harm in pursuit of
this and other ends. Both promised a future in which we would need to work for only a few hours a week, but instead
demand endless, brutal labour. Both are dehumanising. Both are absolutist, insisting that theirs and theirs alone is the one
true God. So what does a better system look like? I don’t have a complete answer, and I don’t believe any one person
does. But I think I see a rough framework emerging. Part of it is provided by the ecological civilisation proposed by Jeremy
Lent, one of the greatest thinkers of our age. Other elements come from Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics and the
environmental thinking of Naomi Klein, Amitav Ghosh, Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq, Raj Patel and Bill McKibben. Part of
the answer lies in the notion of “private sufficiency, public luxury”. Another part arises from the creation of a new
conception of justice based on this simple principle: every generation, everywhere, shall have an equal right to the
enjoyment of natural wealth. I believe our task is to identify the best proposals from many different thinkers and shape
them into a coherent alternative. Because no economic system is only an economic system but intrudes into every aspect
of our lives, we need many minds from various disciplines – economic, environmental, political, cultural, social and
logistical – working collaboratively to create a better way of organising ourselves that meets our needs without destroying
Do we stop life to allow capitalism to continue, or
stop capitalism to allow life to continue?
our home. Our choice comes down to this.
Impact – Fem
Capitalism has been historically complicit in state sanctioned
violence against women specifically in the context of incarceration
Stern ’18 (Scott Stern, How Capitalism Helped to Fuel the Mass Incarceration of
Women, Teen Vogue, 25 June 2018, https://www.teenvogue.com/story/how-capitalismhelped-to-fuel-the-mass-incarceration-of-women) - NR
I spent the past seven years researching the mass incarceration of women in the 20th century. I traveled around the country, visiting
archives in Kansas, in Oregon, in upstate New York, seeing documents from Wyoming, from Virginia, from Arizona, to better understand a
Under the American Plan , which lasted from the 1910s
through the 1950s, and in some places into the 1970s, law enforcement officials walked the streets, detaining women whom they
“reasonably suspected” of being prostitutes or of having sexually transmitted infections. These women
were forcibly examined , usually by male physicians , and then those with STIs would be quarantined without
due process in detention facilities , which were often brutal. Women were held behind bars for weeks
or for months while they were “treated ” for STIs, usually with injections of mercury. As a result of this program,
the American Plan, tens of thousands — if not hundreds of thousands — of women were
unfairly incarcerated . It did not take long for me to discover that the American Plan almost exclusively
affected working-class women , or that it disproportionately affected nonwhite women . What did take me
somewhat longer to realize was that the American Plan — one of the largest and longest-lasting mass quarantines in
American history — was inextricably linked to capitalism , as government officials and their
allies in business imprisoned thousands upon thousands of women , in part t o make
money. As far back as the mid-19th century, many of the most ardent supporters of rounding up and
locking up women suspected of being prostitutes were small- business men, fearing
that nearby brothels would hurt their businesses . Conversely, businessmen located far from a “red-light
largely forgotten government program called the “American Plan.”
district”— a section of a city known for prostitution — sometimes opposed closing brothels, since this might cause the prostitutes to relocate
nearer to them. These businessmen lobbied vigorously for or against the incarceration of suspected women prostitutes, depending on
in the 20th century, private
anti-vice groups in New York and Chicago strong-armed hotels, saloons, and cabarets into
banning women they suspected of prostitution from their premises by threatening
to protest these establishments or have them prosecuted, and thus hurt their profits. Members of local
chambers of commerce had helped to found many of these private groups. In the early
whether they thought the cessation of prostitution might affect their bottom line. Then, early
1910s, San Francisco shut down one of its red-light districts and targeted prostitutes because local businessmen had invested heavily in
the upcoming world’s fair in that city and needed the city to look “clean.” The next year, Bascom Johnson, a famous anti-vice activist,
arrived in town and convinced property owners that it would be “to their financial advantage” to launch another “cleanup” in San Francisco.
A similar dynamic played out in Buffalo, Omaha, and some 80 cities across the country. By the time the United States entered World War I
the federal government’s most effective tactics for
getting local officials to enforce the American Plan was to threaten to remove the
local military-training camp (where young men trained to become soldiers), along with all the money
these tens of thousands of troops brought to local businesses. When , late in 1917, officials in
Seattle refused to lock up infected women with sufficient vigor , the military placed the city
“off-limits” for the soldiers from Camp Lewis — presenting what one historian called a “grave threat to the
local economy.” Businessmen and others rebelled, very nearly impeaching the mayor
in 1917, this strategy was well established. Among
and forcing him to launch a crackdown on suspected women prostitutes. When the War Department expressed doubts about the suitability
of El Paso, Texas, as a site for a potentially lucrative training camp (one newspaper estimated it would bring in half a million dollars every
week), local authorities swore they would close the city’s red-light district and the chamber of commerce hastily assembled a special
delegation to go to Washington and persuade officials that the city would eliminate prostitution and STIs. As the El Paso Herald put it in
June 1917, “[T]he end of El Paso’s ‘wide open’ period of tolerated debauchery may come suddenly and unanimously, now that the
pocketbook is touched.” Soon after, El Paso police began launching nightly raids and arresting suspected sex workers — but not their
clients — in an effort to earn a coveted camp. Other cities, wanting to receive or retain their own training camp — Waco, San Antonio,
Federal and state authorities frequently
emphasized the “sound business sense” of “aggressive tactics to eradicate
Galveston, and Houston (as well as San Francisco) — all followed suit.
venereal disease.” In Michigan, while trying to promote “venereal disease suppression,” health officials in 1918 planned “a
series of talks to businessmen and manufacturers, appealing to them from an economic standpoint.” Bay City received $15
per week from the state for each infected woman it held in its “detention
hospital,” then a tidy sum — and a motivation to lock up as many women as
possible. As the Bay City Times Tribune noted, “This pays all the expense connected therewith and leaves a nice profit for the city
besides.” In part because of such promotional efforts, in many cities, members of the chamber of commerce
were among the Plan’s most enthusiastic supporters. Local chambers gave the
money to build detention houses in Montgomery, Alabama, and Houston, Texas, and pressured the government of
Lawton, Oklahoma, to fork over the money to build its own . Members of the chamber of commerce in El Paso
helped to create that city’s “ purity squads” — what one historian called “vigilante groups that
roamed the streets of south El Paso searching for ‘undesirables.’” This pattern continued for decades.
During World War II, the American Plan remained tightly connected to local
businessmen’s desires to make money. When attempting to persuade cities to
open detention facilities for women with STIs, one federal official emphasized in a
letter the profits these facilities might bring . In May 1942, after the federal government threatened to place
Nashville, Tennessee, “off-limits” to soldiers, thus threatening to starve businesses of the soldiers’ wages, the city immediately cracked
down on suspected women prostitutes. This pattern was repeated across the country. One particularly arresting example is the city of
After the federal government placed Phoenix “out of bounds,” the
city’s merchants rebelled. In a stunningly audacious move, t he Phoenix Chamber of Commerce
assembled a slate of new individuals who they felt would run the city in a way that
adequately address ed Phoenix’s “vice conditions.” The Chamber of Commerce directors then held a six-hour
Phoenix, Arizona.
meeting with the city’s chief of police, clerk magistrate, and city manager, and, as the Associated Press put it, “bluntly demanded action.”
They insisted that the city officials resign, which, remarkably, they did, and the Chamber of Commerce’s selections for the new positions
Hundreds of
arrests, examinations, and incarcerations of women followed . This pattern
continues to the present day. An increasing share of our incarcerated population
lives and labors in private prisons — desperate institutions created by
businessmen who , like the businessmen of decades past, are looking to make a quick buck off of
the suffering of those ensnared by the criminal justice system . Private prisons for
women are often squalid, unhealthy places where inmates are subjected to sexual
abuse. Municipal governments make money by locking up more people, women as well
assumed control. Three days after the government was replaced, the military placed Phoenix back “in bounds.”
as men. As Ryan Grim wrote in 2016, the state of Mississippi “pays $29.74 per day per prisoner to the regional facilities, a deal that worked
for everybody as long as the buildings were stuffed full with bodies….As the wave of mass incarceration begins to recede, the Mississippi
controversy has local and state officials talking openly about how harmful locking up fewer people will be for the economy.” While more
the rate of growth for female imprisonment
has been twice as high as that of men since 1980. This sick dynamic has its origins in the American Plan,
and other early-20th century carceral regimes. Indeed, the American Plan literally laid the groundwork
for the expansion of mass incarceration of women: Several institutions created in
1917, 1918, or 1919 to imprison women with STIs transformed in the decades that
followed into general women’s prisons. Some of these, such as the York Correctional Institution in
men are in prison than women, the Sentencing Project notes that
Connecticut, still lock up women to this day. There’s an old saying about those who forget their history being doomed to repeat it. I think it is
Women locked up under the
American Plan constantly resisted their incarceration: Dozens sued for their
freedom; hundreds escaped. Many others physically assaulted their captors,
rioted, and burned their sites of detention to the ground. Women continue to
resist such oppression to this day . In 2015, for instance, dozens of women imprisoned by ICE in an immigration
vital that we not forget this history. Yet this history stays with us in other ways as well.
detention facility launched a hunger strike. This reminds me of Genevieve DeMille, who, in 1920, launched a three-day hunger strike to win
her freedom from incarceration under the American Plan. For more than a century, marginalized women have resisted oppression. I hope
that by learning their history, we can be better equipped to aid them in their fight for justice.
Capitalism is a patriarchal economic system that advances the
deception of equality but only offers liberation to the top 1% of white
women while exploiting poor women of color globally
Aschoff 19 (Nicole Aschoff, Nicole Aschoff is on the editorial board at Jacobin. She is
the author of The Smartphone Society: Technology, Power, and Resistance in the New
Gilded Age and The New Prophets of Capital. 9-24-2019, "Why Capitalism and
Feminism Can’t Coexist," Jacobin, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/09/capitalismsocialist-feminism-inequality-sexism)-NA
Has the spread of capitalism been a net positive or a net negative for women?
This is a difficult question to answer, not least because I find it odd to formulate an equation of human costs that spans
centuries of capitalism. Do
more recent improvements in life expectancy, literacy, and women’s
autonomy outweigh the mass slaughter of indigenous women and children, the desperate
lives of women trapped and tortured in chattel slavery, and the disfigurement and early
deaths of women who spent their life toiling in sweatshops, their bodies destroyed by
factory work?
A difficult calculation to be sure. But if we were to attempt it, we would certainly have to temper the sunny
claims of global capitalism’s recent successes with the stark reality that more than two
billion people suffer from malnutrition, that the bottom 60 percent of people worldwide
miss out on 95 percent of new income from global growth, and the absolute number of
people living in poverty has risen by a billion people over the past few decades.
I’m willing to say, in agreement with Marx, that capitalism is better than feudalism. We can also point to data that suggests
aggregate progress, for example, toward the fulfillment of the Millennium Development Goals on life expectancy, mortality,
and education. Middle- and upper-class women in much of the world enjoy access and rights
that would have been the envy of their sisters a century and a half ago.
But in celebrating these gains, and we should celebrate them, we must be cautious about the causal
arrows we draw . While some of these gains can be attributed to development and
rationalization — which are correlated with capitalism — many of these gains are the result of
dogged political struggle, not capitalism itself.
Laws and norms against discrimination, the right to not be our husbands’ property, the right to vote, the
right to be able to protect ourselves and our children from domestic violence — these and so many other rights weren’t
handed down from on high by the Chamber of Commerce. They were won by social
movements, many of which were led by socialists and feminists, who fought tooth and nail and
suffered many defeats on the way to getting them.
Even if we were to concede that capitalism
has been a net gain for women — which I don’t — it is much more important to ask
whether capitalism will lead to gains in the future.
Feminism is not just about eliminating gender-based discrimination. It’s about fighting for
and creating equality and a good life for everyone, regardless of their sex, gender, race,
ethnicity, education, income, religion, or where they live. This is what’s great about feminism — it’s
In this moment, however, I think it is important to look forward.
why I’m a feminist.
Simply put, we can’t achieve these goals in capitalism .
This week is the climate strike, so let’s consider the example of climate change. Nothing demonstrates the failure of the
so-called free market better than the looming climate catastrophe. While capitalism may be rational for individuals, on a
systemic level it is highly irrational. The reckless pursuit of profits by individual capitalists, who have been empowered by
elites and governments, has created the massive collective problem of global warming, not to mention resource depletion
and habitat destruction.
But instead of addressing this problem head on — a problem we roughly understood decades ago — for the past forty
years elites and business owners have insisted on the healing power of free markets. They have argued that markets are
natural and part of a spontaneous order, that rational individuals operating with perfect information create optimal
outcomes, that externalities are trivial.
We know what needs to be done, yet the imperatives of profit-making and the entrenched prerogatives of elites have
prevented countries from adopting projects and programs to free ourselves from our destructive fossil-fuel based
economies, from developing and instituting sustainable solutions to meeting our needs.
Only a collective project, rooted in solidarity and cooperation, and organized around the principle of taking back our planet
from rapacious corporations, will offer us a fighting chance of altering our current trajectory.
2
Is capitalism an inherently exploitative, oppressive, and patriarchal economic
system entwined with the subjugation of women?
Let’s parse this out a bit. Is capitalism exploitative? In political economy exploitation describes a relationship
whereby someone sells her labor power to someone else who owns the means of production and makes a profit by
yes , most people, including women, are
exploited in the sense that they work for a wage, and that they wouldn’t be able to buy
food or pay their rent without working for a wage.
Is this exploitation oppressive, meaning does it constitute cruel or unjust treatment? Well,
paying her, the worker, less than the value of what she produces. So
that depends. In the United States, for example, not all women are oppressed. There are feminists and socialists who
highly paid white women who have respect,
security, and autonomy in organizing their work lives are oppressed — or at least not
oppressed enough to get me into the street to fight for them.
The problem is that this happy scenario does not describe the situation for the vast
majority of women , either in the United States or globally. A woman working full time for
minimum wage who can’t afford to go to the doctor, or buy vegetables, or pay her
rent is oppressed . A college graduate drowning in student loan debt, working a sixtyplus-hour contract gig for a tech start-up that tops up a lousy paycheck with free beer and a
foosball table in the break room is oppressed.
A good chunk of this oppression is linked to patriarchy , or more precisely sexism, since we
would balk at this assessment. Nonetheless, I don’t think
don’t live in a formally patriarchal society. The jury is out on whether capitalism is inherently sexist, and sexism certainly
exists outside capitalism. Once could imagine a model of capitalism that wasn’t sexist or racist. But capitalism is a
real-life way of organizing the norms, priorities, structures, and activities of society that
evolves over time and space.
As a historical system sexism and racism have been a core part of strategies of
accumulation in capitalism . Sexism makes women’s unpaid labor in the home, which
is essential to society, appear natural, a labor of love. Sexism and racism also continue to
be extremely handy tools in the business owners’ tool kit to divide and oppress
workers, to discourage demands for better pay and benefits, or to block efforts to
form a union .
3
Or has capitalism helped to empower women, enhancing their material well-being and fostering gender parity?
Rather than posing our questions and answers as either/or, we should opt for a more nuanced both/and discussion. As I
said earlier, women have been empowered in capitalism. While we should be cautious not to confuse correlation with
causation — keeping in mind those lurking variables such as the women’s movement, the civil rights movement, the labor
movement, and the environmental movement — it is still the case that markets can empower women.
Money equals power. If American women today are lucky enough to have rich
parents, or be born with fantastic abilities or intelligence that land them in a wellpaid, fulfilling job, they will be empowered. More than that, they will be able to empower others in
their social networks, such as their own children.
But observing
that some women are quite empowered in capitalism does not imply that
the path has been laid and that if we just follow it the goals of feminism will be reached.
The fabulous wealth of the relative few at the top is not an accident, or a harmless peak over a
healthy floor of people living a good life. The market-friendly reforms of the past few decades have
made a handful of people (mostly men) unimaginably wealthy while the vast majority of
people have seen their livelihoods stagnate and their opportunities narrow.
The incredible technological
and scientific advances of the past forty years could have been
channeled toward dramatically reducing poverty, improving health care outcomes and
the ecological sustainability of our production processes, and ensuring security in the
supply and distribution of clean water, nutritious food, and adequate housing. These are
things that all people value. These are also things that would greatly empower women who
suffer disproportionately from the lack of these things.
We have the tools to vastly improve the lives of the world’s women, and all people for
that matter. Yet we haven’t directed our resources, knowledge, and energy toward achieving this goal.
Why? Because the goal of capitalism is not to better the world — it’s to make a profit.
Impact – Racial Inequality
Capitalism and anti-blackness go hand in hand- we have to get rid of
capitalism to solve for racism
Urie 14’ (Rob Urie, I a political economist, has B.S. degree in Economics and
Philosophy from Albright College and an M.S. degree in Economics from The University
of North Carolina, “Slavery, Mass Incarceration and Capitalism”, IBW21, April 5, 2014,
https://ibw21.org/editors-choice/slavery-mass-incarceration-and-capitalism/)-AL
This same premise of capitalist democracy that frames all acts as ‘freely’ undertaken has
Central and South American peasants whose indigenous economies were destroyed
through engineered displacement / replacement by American industrial agriculture
‘freely’ migrating to the U.S. to labor as a ‘special’ class of labor that subsidizes
American food prices and industrial farm ‘profits.’ Chinese laborers who manufacture
products for export to the West for Foxconn live fifteen to a room, share one bathroom to
three rooms (45 persons) and routinely work fifteen hour days for subsistence wages.
Unicor employs fifteen percent of the Federal prison population in the U.S. to
manufacture goods for the Federal government for pennies an hour. And in the
much larger state prison system prisoners manufacture goods for multi-national
corporations like Wal-Mart, IBM and Microsoft for the same pennies an hour. While this
is hardly news to those paying attention, the implication is that most of the good citizens
of Philadelphia, Detroit, Oakland, East St. Louis etc, have political and economic
interests more closely aligned with the poor citizens of Venezuela, Bangladesh,
Nicaragua, El Salvador, Vietnam, etc, than with the Western capitalists—bankers,
industrialists and for-profit militarists, who are their nominal fellow ‘citizens.’
Philadelphia, reportedly the poorest large city in the U.S., was a dumping ground for
slaves when they became too old to work and it was a major stop on the underground
railroad that moved fleeing slaves from the South. Today it resembles post-War Iraq in
the sense that the strategies imposed by empire— privatization of public functions,
expropriation of city resources by connected insiders and race-based laws and
policing that feed a conspicuously racist system of mass incarceration, are used
against a population of nominal ‘citizens.’ The incarcerated can have their children
taken from them through forced adoptions and are forced to pay for part of their
incarceration with money their incarceration assures they don’t have. When tied to the
‘external’ relations of capitalist imperialism what is illustrated is that exploitation and
expropriation are by degree, not type.
Framed differently, the distribution of income and wealth, and with it social power,
ties to strategies of social legitimation and repression reconstituted in the
institutions of global capitalism. The incarcerated ‘deserve’ to be exploited because
of their ‘criminal’ behavior. ‘Illegal’ immigrants ‘deserve’ to be exploited because they
‘are in this country illegally.’ And the rich deserve their wealth because ‘equals’ freely
undertake all acts in capitalist democracy and wealth is therefore ‘proof’ of economic
contribution.
The historical relation of actual outcomes to imperial ‘place’ finds wholly unrelated
‘explanation’ through backward induction, through taking factual distribution and running
it through the precepts of capitalist democracy to develop theoretical explanations
against all knowledge and history. Theories of social, cultural and genetic ‘difference’ are
developed to relate the Western concept / precept of ‘freedom’ to factual outcomes that
otherwise tie miraculously, inexplicably, with correlation = 1, to imperial history.
Conspicuously racist blather like difference in quantum of ‘intelligence’ put forward by
Murray and Herrnstein in ‘The Bell Curve’ tie to ‘legitimate’ capitalist (Western)
economics and progressive ‘scientific’ analyses / explanations of ‘criminal’ behavior as
imperialist apologetics put into service to legitimate capitalist social relations.
Progressive ‘science’ is reconstituted in judicial and police practice through tight
circumscription of the types (and targets) of crimes the police concern themselves with.
No crimes were committed in the last decade by Wall Street because within the frame
of capitalist democracy concentrated wealth is self-legitimating and in
institutional practice because the definitions of ‘crimes’ function as tools of social
repression. George W. Bush launched an illegal war as defined by international
treaties to which the U.S. is signatory and caused the deaths of a million or more Iraqis
but will never serve a day in prison while black or brown youth caught with a bag
of weed might spend years in prison. So, does America want to ‘have a conversation’
about crime?
To be clear, and to pre-empt undue liberal-progressive hand wringing on the matter, this
isn’t an issue of ‘fairness,’ the quasi-theocratic Western conceit of ‘balance’ in social
outcomes, because such never has been and never will be the case. Conversely, with
slavery and genocide being the preponderance of U.S. history and current circumstance
the continued exploitation and repression of the descendants of those on the wrong side
of this history, when precisely will ‘fairness’ come into being? And more specifically, how
would it be retroactively applied to those who lived and died on the wrong side of the
imperial divide?
Mass incarceration is social struggle for the living in the present. Its ties to
slavery and Western imperialism past and present requires a base state and
ongoing political economy of social justice before discussion of ‘solutions’ to
socially destructive behavior are more than neo-imperialist blather. Sure
communities of color deserve to be protected from violence.
But racist policing and mass incarceration are tools of violence, not protection
from it. Where is discussion of protection from the violence of economic exploitation,
immiseration, political and economic exclusion and from external strategies of social
legitimation that pose these outcomes as ‘self-inflicted?’ When tied to the contrived
conceit of ‘equal opportunity’ the revival of mechanisms of social repression has
communities blaming their own members for outcomes directly related to imperial
history. Slaves weren’t responsible for the conditions of their enslavement. The
conditions were externally imposed.
Impact – War/Intervention
Hegemony and liberal institutions use military force and economic
coercion to force capitalism on the entire globe- the result is endless
war and violence
Tarik Kochi in 2017
Sussex Law School, School of Law, Politics and Sociology, University of Sussex,
Dreams and Nightmares of Liberal International Law:
Capitalist Accumulation, Natural Rights and State Hegemony, Law Critique, March 2017,
Volume 28, Issue 1, pp 23–41
One liberal ‘solution’ to the tension between commerce and interstate war was put in place
institutionally from 1945 onwards through the dual mechanism of a cosmopolitan federation of
states, and the hegemonic role of a dominant liberal, capitalist state. The pacification of
commerce, the global coordination of capitalist accumulation, the financing of post-war economic development, the
shaping of much of the institutional framework of the United Nations, and the backing of international law
and global security through military force, has been held in place since 1945 through the
expansion of the military, bureaucratic, political and economic power of the United
States of America (Mann 2013). The liberal theorist G. John Ikenberry describes the link between the current liberal
world order and American hegemony: The pivotal moment in liberal order building occurred in the years after World War
II. It was then that America’s desire for a congenial world order – open, stable, friendly – turned into an agenda for the
construction of a liberal hegemonic order. But this shift was not entirely deliberate. The United States took charge of the
liberal project and then found itself creating and running an international order. America and liberal order became fused. It
was a distinctive type of order – organised around American hegemonic authority, open markets, cooperative security,
multilateral solutions, social bargains, and democratic community. It was also built on core hegemonic bargains. These
bargains determined how power and authority would be apportioned. So although the United States ran the liberal order
and projected power, it did so within a system of rules and institutions – of commitments and restraints. It underwrote
order in various regions of the world. It provided public goods related to stability and openness, and it engaged in
bargaining and reciprocity with its allies and partners. The centre of gravity of this order was the West – and as it moved
outward to Asia, Latin America, and the developing world, the liberal logic gave way to more traditional imperial and greatpower domination. Globally, the order was hierarchical – dominated by the United States – but infused with liberal
the idea of
the benevolent role of the USA as a liberal hegemon which managed to reconcile the unsocial aspects of
global capitalism and global peace has been viewed far more problematically.7 For Thomas McCormick
the post-1945 global economic and political order underwritten by US hegemonic power
combined the aim of pacifying global commercial relations with the goal of placing US
industrial and financial capital at the centre of a system of global capital accumulation
characteristics (Ikenberry 2012, p. 334). For critical theory, and in particular for ‘world systems theory’,
which the US state attempted to control and direct. For McCormick the explicit aim developed by US policy makers in the
1940s and 1950s was to create a stable and secure global system of capitalist accumulation in which US industry and
finance would have access to global markets unencumbered by old European imperial preferences, socialist planned
economies or postcolonial national development. Over the middle decades of the twentieth century
this would be achieved through the ‘carrot’ of development aid and credit tied to
economic and political structural reforms, and the ‘stick’ of open and covert wars aimed
at disciplining predominantly developing states into accepting a US-directed global
capitalist development model (McCormick 1995). In many cases in the developing world, such
as Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, and in Iraq from the 1990s to the present, the ‘stick’ of war has involved a
brutal scorched earth policy in which American and US-funded proxy armies decimated
urban and peasant populations and attempted to maintain ‘international peace and
security’ through the terror of aerial bombardment, land invasion, and endless ‘dirty wars’ (Mann 2013;
Chomsky 1991; Westad 2007). Such aggressive wars, often drawing upon the natural law language of the ‘just
war’ (Douzinas 2007, pp. 236–66; Kochi 2009, pp. 23–47), can be interpreted as a modern
continuation of the violence of ‘primitive accumulation’ in which natural
resources are secured and national economies dismantled and brought firmly
into the orbit of privatisation and capitalist markets (Neocleous 2014). This violence
operates also as a form of ‘class war’ in which economic and state resources are
brought under the control of local elites supported by American capital (Robinson
1996). Such wars have also extended a degree of ‘biopolitical’ control over populations in both the developing world and
in the West. Justified
via a discourse of ‘security’, ‘emergency’ and ‘state of exception’ the
portrayal of internal and foreign threats (‘communism’, ‘terrorism’) have been used to discipline
and control populations and globally extend economic and social policies of capitalist
accumulation (Agamben 1998; Hardt and Negri 2001; Douzinas 2007; Neocleous 2008; Butler 2010).
Neolib fuels social instability and political instability – turns heg by
undermining American legitimacy and power projection
Regilme 19 [Salvador Santino F. Regilme Jr. History and International Studies,
Institute for History, Leiden University, Netherlands. “The Decline of American Power
and Donald Trump: Reflections on Human Rights, Neoliberalism, and the World Order,”
Geoforum, June 2019, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.04.010]//AT
Considering that debate, my core argument maintains that American decline pertains not only to the decreasing
economic vitality underscored by the concrete detrimental effects generated through
neoliberalism vis-à-vis the sharpening material inequality within the US. Rather, decline also
constitutes America’s decreasing appeal and legitimacy as a dominant actor in the
international system. The latter element becomes much more visible especially in the case of the Trump presidency when
racist, sexist, and blatantly nationalist discourses that have become so normalized in global and national mainstream public spheres.
Various structural deficiencies and injustices that are entrenched in the US neoliberal
political economy — a governance model that many countries worldwide have adopted in varying scales and extent of
localization— have facilitated this decline of American power. Specifically, the Trump administration has
accelerated neoliberal policies coupled with authoritarian discourses and practices in ways
that have meaningfully undermined the legitimating foundations of American power. Therefore, the puzzle on American decline is not only a
problem of discursive legitimation as punctuated by the horrendous rhetoric of Trump. Rather, the
logic of wealth
accumulation through neoliberalism has engendered severe distributive injustice within
the US and in the world economy, and Trump unabashedly championed that logic without instrumentally invoking discourses on human
rights, democracy, and rule of law. This paper engages with the aforementioned opposing stances on American decline in three exploratory
ways. First, I offer a more holistic conception of American power, particularly by highlighting both its materialist and ideational foundations
that co-constitute each other during its periods of ascent, consolidation, and decline2. Many scholars in those two opposing stances
underscore only the materialist elements of American power, as demonstrated by military prowess and economic indicators, and
unfortunately, sidelining the importance of moral appeal and claims for legitimacy of American power. Amid the increasing material strength
of rival powers such as China, the Trump presidency reinforces the decline of American power as it has blatantly eschewed its justificatory
and normative underpinnings that his predecessors had quite consistently invoked, as the case maybe with the discourses on democracy,
human rights, rule of law, and the purported shared benefits accrued from increasing economic globalization. Second, I underscore the
mutually reinforcing interdependence of domestic and transnational dimensions of US power. Scholars in the decline debate usually
highlight the transnational dimensions of the American power compared to other states in the international system. Yet, that analytic
emphasis fails to recognize the two faces of American power, particularly its domestic and transnational elements. Indeed, the
contradictions of neoliberalism as the core element of the domestic and transnational foundations of American power have facilitated its
the sharpening material inequality within the US generates
pervasive internal social conflicts, and as research shows in the field of democratization studies, could
lead to democratic backsliding or other forms of political instability (Rapley 2004; Regilme
2014; Boix 2003). At the transnational level, neoliberalism, as a constitutive paradigm of American power, shows that unregulated
financial markets, the pervasive commodification of human life, and the weakening of
public goods provision undermine the legitimacy of American power — an outcome that
becomes more pronounced especially when other rising powers discursively provide alternatives to the current world order3. As the US
promotes neoliberal principles and unfettered wealth accumulation within and beyond its
formal borders, its long-term domestic political and social stability are at risk, which in
turn, undermines America’s material capacities and legitimacy to project its power
abroad . This means that self-regulating market and socio-political stability are inherently
incompatible (Polanyi 2001). Referring to the ‘trilemma paradox’, Dani Rodrik (2012) underscores the fundamental contradictions
in the contemporary international system: that the simultaneous pursuit of democracy, economic
globalization, and national self-determination is a recipe for disaster . This broader argument is
further decline. Domestically,
further supported by quantitative research on the political effects of neoliberal globalization among advanced industrialized democracies
since the 1960s. Particularly, “more trade and FDI [foreign direct investments] are associated with a turn to anti-internationalism and antiglobalization”, while “social welfare spending also seems less and less able to mitigate this relationship” (Milner 2018, 40). This backlash
against increasing economic interdependence through neoliberalism has generated deep-seated feelings of exclusion and profound
material suffering for many people, who are unable to reap the benefits of globalization.
Capitalist cycles of accumulation present in the US necessitate a
phase of hegemonic transition – this turns any heg impacts
Mendes ’18 (Marcos Vinicus Isaias Mendes, PhD candidate in International Relations,
Universidade de Brasilia, Is it the end of North-American hegemony? A structuralist
perspective on Arrighi’s systemic cycles of accumulation and the theory of hegemonic
stability, Brazilial Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 38 No. 3, 2018) - NR
In his book The long twentieth century (Arrighi, 1994), Italian sociologist Giovanni Arrighi studied the evolution of Capitalism throughout
history. Using Marx’s concept of circulation of value through the money-commodity-money formula (MCM’), and based on Braudel’s division
Arrighi developed the concept of
systemic cycles of accumulation. According to the Marxist perspective, on these cycles there is a
pattern of productive expansion followed by a financial expansion. Marx’s general
formula of capital (MCM’) can therefore be interpreted as depicting not just the
logic of individual capitalist investments, but also a recurrent pattern of historical
capitalism as world system. The central aspect of this pattern is the alternation of
epochs of material expansion (MC phases of capital accumulation) with phases of financial
rebirth and expansion (CM’ phases). In phases of material expansion money capital “sets in motion” an increasing mass of
of Society in three layers (material life, market economy and anti-market),
commodities (including commoditized labor-power and gifts of nature); and in phases of financial expansion an increasing mass of money
capital “sets itself free” from its commodity form, and accumulation proceeds through financial deals (as in Marx’s abridged formula MM’).
In the course
of the systemic cycle, two momentums must be distinguished: the transition from
the material expansion to the financial expansion within each cycle, and the
transition from one systemic cycle to another, or hegemonic transition . In the first kind of
Together, the two epochs or phases constitute a full systemic cycle of accumulation (MCM’) (Arrighi, 1994, p. 6).
transition, Arrighi (1994) adopts the hypothesis of a downward trend in the long-term profit rate of productive/commercial activities. Such
trend leads to a drastic reduction of profit margins, leading to a scenario in which “decreasing returns set in, competitive pressures intensify,
and the stage is set for the change of phase from material to financial expansion” (Arrighi and Silver, 2001, p.262). Furthermore, Giovanni
the characteristics of the second
kind of transition: Chaos and governance in the modern world system (Arrighi and Silver,
Arrighi and Beverly Silver published a work with the central purpose of explaining
1999). Exemplified by the transitions from Dutch to British hegemony in the eighteenth century and from British to the US hegemony in the
the authors developed a model that illustrates the process of
hegemonic transition. Figure 1 illustrates this model. According to it, while the hegemonic state
exercises its leadership in the international arena, two simultaneous processes
occur: establishment of policies of general interest deepening the division of
labor and specialization of functions, and escalation of other states in the path of
development, emulating the hegemon’s strategies firstly via cooperation, and
then via competition (Fig.1, column 1). This scenario eventually leads to a hegemonic
crisis , characterized by three processes: intensification of interstate and inter-enterprise
competition, escalation of social conflicts and new configurations of power (Figure 1,
column 2). Further evolutions in this situation eventually cause hegemonic
“breakdown” and systemic chaos, typical of the advanced stages of financial
expansion; this course entangles the emergence of new hegemonies (Figure 1, column 3).
late-nineteenth century,
Finally, with the emergence of a new stabilizing state, the system is led to a new phase of co-operation among states and, again, emulation
of the hegemon’s development strategy; it is the start of a new hegemonic cycle (Arrighi and Silver, 2001). Hence, as stated in Arrighi
a primary factor for the rise of the North-American empire was the modern
capitalist company, which emerged in the US , with some existing features from the Dutch cycle. For him,
(1994),
the novel feature of capitalist companies in the North-American cycle was the internalization of transaction costs. This feature helped to
It
was this pattern of companies, which later began to internationalize, becoming
known as transnational corporations, that provided enough economic and
financial basis for the North-American global supremacy. Even though the systemic
cycles of accumulation provide a useful framework of analysis for the NorthAmerican case , other theories were developed presenting additional perspectives on this topic, as it is the case of the theory
raise capitalist enterprises to a standard of performance, profitability, scale of operations and range of territories never seen before.
presented in the next section. In the 1970s, based on the works of Stephen Krasner, Robert Gilpin and Charles Kindleberger, especially in
his book The world in depression, 1929-1939 (Kindleberger, 1986), it was developed the so called theory of hegemonic stability. It emerged
from Kindleberger’s studies of the causes of the 1929 crisis, mainly by his thesis that the depth, resilience and extension of the crisis were
due to the lack of a clear international leadership, capable of stabilize and coordinate the world system (Mariutti, 2013). Hence, this theory
supports the necessity of a global leader, responsible for regulating the market, keeping liberal values, providing credit and a strong
currency, coordinating macroeconomic policies and maintaining a stable world environment, from a political-economic point of view
(Kindleberger, 1996). In this sense, Great Britain in the second half of XIX century and the US since the post WW II are examples of global
hegemonies. There are two main approaches for the theory of hegemonic stability. The first is assigned to Kindleberger. According to it, the
hegemon has a benevolent will, with the intension to keep liberal rules in the system, providing public goods (free trade and a monetary
international system), being able to provide acyclic long-term loans and short-term financing in cases of crises. The second approach has a
realistic nature, encompassing perspectives from Marxism and world-system, and is attributed to Gilpin and Krasner (Mariutti, 2013). It
the hegemon would lead the international system
mainly with the intention of self-benefit (Gilpin, 1987). This theory emerged in the 1970s, when the US was
facing political and economic instabilities. Evidences of such situation were: decrease in relative
participation on international trade, collapse of Bretton Woods system, end of the
convertibility of the dollar in gold, instabilities in financial markets and in the
balance of payments , ‘free creation of currency’ undermining confidence in the dollar and economic empowerment of Japan
and Western Europe. The evidence for hegemonic decline seemed obvious. In 1950, the
United States accounted for a remarkable one-third of all world output of goods
and services. Twenty-five years later, its share was less than one-quarter . In
manufacturing the decline was even steeper, from nearly half the global total at midcentury to less than one-third by the 1970s .
Overall, U.S. economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s was significantly below that
of continental Europe and Japan. America’s share of world trade dropped from
some 33 percent in 1948 to less than 24 percent by the mid-1970s . In 1971, persistent balance
considers the egoistic nature of states, so that
of payments deficits forced Washington to terminate the convertibility of the dollar into gold, precipitating the collapse of the Bretton Woods
By the 1970s it was clear that the country, once the world’s greatest creditor,
was rapidly becoming a net debtor. And where as recently as the 1950s the United States had been a net
system.
exporter of oil, it now appeared that the economy’s continued access to energy resources had been placed in the unreliable hands of the
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) (COHEN, 2008, p. 75).
2NC – Impact: Racism
Capitalism is intertwined with racial inequality—reforming the justice
system without addressing the capitalist thought that undergirds the
political economy fails
Urie 14 (Rob Urie. artist and political economist. His book Zen Economics is published
by CounterPunch Books. Mass Incarceration and Capitalism. April 4, 2014.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2014/04/04/mass-incarceration-and-capitalism/)-MR
With no public acknowledgement of the irony the U.S., the ‘land of the free,’ has both the highest incarceration
rate in the world and the largest overall prison population. The dominant public perception appears
to rest at the local level: the state has the right to prohibit socially destructive acts; people commit socially destructive acts
and they are put in prison. Left largely unconsidered is the nature of the democratic capitalist state that claims this right to
incarcerate. American history places it squarely in the service of economic interests. The country
was founded on genocide and slavery. Western political theory frames these as ‘political’ acts. Genocide against the
indigenous population was / is framed as military conflict. Slavery in theory ‘ended’ with the Civil War. But both of these
also had profound economic impacts. Much as the enclosure ‘movement’ in Britain produced a ‘criminal’ class of peasants
‘freed’ from formerly collective lands, the American genocide against the indigenous population resulted in imposition of
European ‘property’ relations where ‘property’ had never before been conceived. As far back as the philosopher Aristotle
slavery was framed as the right of conquerors over the conquered whereas the labor expropriated from slaves in America
supported a self-perpetuating plutocracy that today finds the descendents of slaves overwhelmingly populating U.S.
prisons and the descendents of slave ‘owners’ as a class immune from prosecution for its own socially destructive acts
and in position to profit from the system of mass incarceration.
Likewise, the history of race ‘relations’ in the U.S. doesn’t reduce to singular explanations. But it does tie broadly to
Western imperial history, to British, European and American strategies of colonization, subjugation and economic
expropriation begun in the seventeenth century that by degree continue today. The kidnapped Africans forced
into slavery in the U.S. were used to feed a global system of capitalist trade and they
served as human ‘currency’ as chattel property. The self-serving storyline that capitalism ‘replaced’
slavery with ‘free’ economic participation ignores the role expropriated slave labor played in capitalist trade and capital
accumulation and it requires an anti-historical notion of ‘free’ economic participation that ignores the strategies of
economic coercion that followed the nominal end of slavery. Designated three-fifths a person in the U.S. Constitution to
accrue political power to slave ‘owners,’ slaves accrued political power to the institution of slavery as system of labor
expropriation as well. A century or more of theoretical argumentation on both left and right notwithstanding, slavery
was a capitalist institution that fed nascent global capitalist trade. And its residual in post Civil
War strategies of racial repression, suppression and economic exploitation relate by
degree to current capitalist imperialism in other former colonies. The racist, classist
prison system in the U.S. is fact and reified metaphor for this ‘internal’ history and for the
breadth and reach of the capitalist imperial relations behind the concentrated fortunes
today so in evidence in the West.
Readers here likely know some or all of this history but most Westerners appear to have little to no knowledge of it. To
most the question back is: how can a system of public safety, ‘crime’ suppression, be a strategy of social repression? Part
of the disconnect lies within the very idea of crime as it is socially circumscribed through the anti-historical precepts of
capitalist democracy. If ‘the West’ is capitalist and democratic then all social acts are ‘freely’ undertaken. Social history
and material need are irrelevant because ‘we’ all have the same opportunity to react to existing circumstance in the
present. Readers may see the outline of the ‘opportunity society’ of right-wing fantasy here. Within this frame the fact that
per capita rates of incarceration in U.S. states are between five and ten times higher for
the descendents of slaves than for the descendents of slave ‘owners’ must indicate innate
qualitative differences, as must the relations of income and wealth distribution to this
same residual of history. But if ‘crime’ were defined as the willful causing of social harm to others how could
these overlaps of history: slavery, social repression, economic expropriation, and incarceration, not be crimes? As Angela
Davis, Michelle Alexander, Kahlil Gibran Muhammad and other great historians of social tragedy before them have noted,
the Western narrative of ‘crime’ ties closely in history to strategies of economic
expropriation and social repression against nominally ‘freed’ slaves and their
descendents following the end of the Civil War. And it ties as well to British social
theories of ‘crime’ used to explain the sudden appearance of a large peasant class
dispossessed by the enclosure of formerly collective lands.
But this history of race in America is particular as well. It can’t be reduced to Marxian notions of class alone because the
social persistence / insistence of race is more than just economic. And to reduce the history of race ‘relations’ to
economics within the circular precepts of capitalist democracy is to misrepresent systematic repression as missed
‘opportunities,’ as the otherwise included who only coincidentally share relation with ‘external’ imperial subjects in social
outcomes but who nevertheless join the ‘us’ when it comes to paying taxes and fighting and dying in imperial wars. While
specific social technologies like race-based drug laws enforced using race-based policing are the mechanism that
‘explains’ the current massively disproportionate incarceration rate for blacks, browns and indigenous peoples, drug laws
were used for a century prior in strategies of targeted social repression. The near instantaneous conversion of the U.S.
penal population from white to black following the Civil War restored the economic relations of coerced expropriation
outside of explicit chattel title. ‘Convict leasing’ was the conversion mechanism that tied ‘the law’ as tool of social
Capital ‘formation’ in the West
included the aggregation of the expropriated labor of slaves, the exploited ‘resources’
that accrued from genocide against the indigenous population and from the place of
these in the global system of capitalist trade. Race doesn’t reduce to class but it does
find broad analog in Western imperial relations.
The prior history of drug laws used as tools of targeted social repression ties the wholesale
revival of the practice around 1980 to a fundamental shift in political economy begun in
the 1970s and brought to full fruition with the election of Ronald Reagan. Mr. Reagan used
racial division as a political tactic with his ‘Southern strategy.’ But as was made evident in the ascendance of
high capitalist political economy following his election, revival of the social mechanisms
of economic expropriation was the ultimate goal of ‘winning’ politically. The bi-partisan looting of
repression to the economic expropriation that fed post-war capitalist relations.
the Savings and Loans and epic of pirate capitalism through ‘investment’ banking in the 1980s were the most visible
the ‘tough on
crime’ public stance was clearly intended to use ‘the law’ for social repression— it is
hardly a coincidence that the massive increase in incarceration rates for blacks, Latinos,
indigenous populations and poor whites occurred as the ‘culture’ of absolute impunity for
the connected wealthy assumed its place in the social order. For looting the S&Ls
(Savings & Loans) a thousand ‘white collar’ criminals went to prison. For misrepresentations
and fraudulent accounting in the ‘dot-com’ boom and bust a few analysts were driven
from the industry. And for the industrial-scale looting of the housing boom and bust and
related economic and financial catastrophes the culpable malefactors on Wall Street were given
trillions of dollars of public money and saw their ‘businesses’ fully restored—by a liberal,
black Democrat President. Meanwhile, from 1980 forward, the incarceration rate in the U.S.
increased seven-fold and was overwhelmingly populated by the descendants of slaves,
the remaining indigenous population and Latino refugees from American imperial
‘adventures.’
strategies of this renewed ‘internal’ economic expropriation. As it was reconstituted in penal practice
The ‘commonsense’ character of fighting ‘crime’ seeks its legitimacy in the everyday facts of socially destructive behavior.
Rape, murder and pillage are socially destructive acts. Their ‘legitimate’ use as state tactics in the expression of state
power requires overlooking the imperial-economic context in which they are used. The U.S. murdered three-and-one half
million Vietnamese (Robert McNamara’s count) in the Vietnam War, almost entirely in the years after the war was known
to be a lost ‘cause’ by American political ‘leadership.’ Over a million Iraqis were killed to ‘liberate’ Iraq’s oil for Western oil
companies. The military culture of rape ties to both military and imperial history across millennia. The apparent inability to
successfully prosecute rape in the U.S. military illustrates both the role of the military in social repression and the use of
targeted violence as a tactic of empire. And ‘theft’ simply restates the imperial role imposed property relations have on
current economic distribution. The ‘free’ land that was ‘America’ required genocide against the indigenous population to
make it ‘free.’ Economic taking through the use of social asymmetries is the basis for the
preponderance of capitalist ‘wealth.’ The careful circumscription of ‘crime’ as the socially
destructive behavior of poor, black, brown and indigenous people finds its reciprocal in
the absolute impunity and immunity from prosecution the rich and connected have for
their socially destructive behavior. Without public expression of irony the investment bank Goldman Sachs is
today partnering with non-profit agencies to reduce ‘crime’ committed by poor youth of color when it could to better effect
open its own books to prosecutors and have some fair portion of its employees arrested and prosecuted for their own
socially destructive behavior.
This same premise of capitalist democracy that frames all acts as ‘freely’ undertaken has
Central and South American peasants whose indigenous economies were destroyed
through engineered displacement / replacement by American industrial agriculture
‘freely’ migrating to the U.S. to labor as a ‘special’ class of labor that subsidizes
American food prices and industrial farm ‘profits.’ Chinese laborers who manufacture products for
export to the West for Foxconn live fifteen to a room, share one bathroom to three rooms (45 persons) and routinely work
fifteen hour days for subsistence wages. Unicor employs fifteen percent of the Federal prison population in the U.S. to
manufacture goods for the Federal government for pennies an hour. And in the much larger state prison system prisoners
manufacture goods for multi-national corporations like Wal-Mart, IBM and Microsoft for the same pennies an hour. While
this is hardly news to those paying attention, the implication is that most of the good citizens of Philadelphia, Detroit,
Oakland, East St. Louis etc, have political and economic interests more closely aligned with the poor citizens of
Venezuela, Bangladesh, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Vietnam, etc, than with the Western capitalists—bankers, industrialists
and for-profit militarists, who are their nominal fellow ‘citizens.’ Philadelphia, reportedly the poorest large city in the U.S.,
was a dumping ground for slaves when they became too old to work and it was a major stop on the underground railroad
that moved fleeing slaves from the South. Today it resembles post-War Iraq in the sense that the strategies imposed by
empire— privatization of public functions, expropriation of city resources by connected insiders and race-based laws and
policing that feed a conspicuously racist system of mass incarceration, are used against a population of nominal ‘citizens.’
The incarcerated can have their children taken from them through forced adoptions and
are forced to pay for part of their incarceration with money their incarceration assures
they don’t have. When tied to the ‘external’ relations of capitalist imperialism what is
illustrated is that exploitation and expropriation are by degree, not type.
Framed differently, the distribution of income and wealth, and with it social power, ties to strategies of social
legitimation and repression reconstituted in the institutions of global capitalism. The
incarcerated ‘deserve’ to be exploited because of their ‘criminal’ behavior. ‘Illegal’ immigrants ‘deserve’ to be exploited
because they ‘are in this country illegally.’ And the rich deserve their wealth because ‘equals’ freely undertake all acts in
capitalist democracy and wealth is therefore ‘proof’ of economic contribution. The historical relation of actual outcomes to
imperial ‘place’ finds wholly unrelated ‘explanation’ through backward induction, through taking factual distribution and
running it through the precepts of capitalist democracy to develop theoretical explanations against all knowledge and
history. Theories of social, cultural and genetic ‘difference’ are developed to relate the Western concept / precept of
‘freedom’ to factual outcomes that otherwise tie miraculously, inexplicably, with correlation = 1, to imperial history.
Conspicuously racist blather like difference in quantum of ‘intelligence’ put forward by Murray and Herrnstein in ‘The Bell
Curve’ tie to ‘legitimate’ capitalist (Western) economics and progressive ‘scientific’ analyses / explanations of ‘criminal’
behavior as imperialist apologetics put into service to legitimate capitalist social relations. Progressive ‘science’ is
reconstituted in judicial and police practice through tight circumscription of the types (and targets) of crimes the police
concern themselves with. No crimes were committed in the last decade by Wall Street because within the frame of
capitalist democracy concentrated wealth is self-legitimating and in institutional practice because the definitions of ‘crimes’
George W. Bush launched an illegal war as defined by
international treaties to which the U.S. is signatory and caused the deaths of a million or
more Iraqis but will never serve a day in prison while black or brown youth caught with a
bag of weed might spend years in prison. So, does America want to ‘have a conversation’ about crime?
To be clear, and to pre-empt undue liberal-progressive hand wringing on the matter, this isn’t an issue of
‘fairness,’ the quasi-theocratic Western conceit of ‘balance’ in social outcomes, because
such never has been and never will be the case. Conversely, with slavery and genocide
being the preponderance of U.S. history and current circumstance the continued
exploitation and repression of the descendants of those on the wrong side of this history,
when precisely will ‘fairness’ come into being? And more specifically, how would it be retroactively
function as tools of social repression.
applied to those who lived and died on the wrong side of the imperial divide? Mass incarceration is social struggle for the
living in the present. Its ties to slavery and Western imperialism past and present requires a base state and ongoing
political economy of social justice before discussion of ‘solutions’ to socially destructive behavior are more than neoimperialist blather. Sure communities of color deserve to be protected from violence. But racist
policing and mass
incarceration are tools of violence, not protection from it. Where is discussion of
protection from the violence of economic exploitation, immiseration, political and
economic exclusion and from external strategies of social legitimation that pose these
outcomes as ‘self-inflicted?’ When tied to the contrived conceit of ‘equal opportunity’ the revival of mechanisms
of social repression has communities blaming their own members for outcomes directly related to imperial history.
Slaves weren’t responsible for the conditions of their enslavement. The conditions were
externally imposed. The big lie in the U.S. is that ‘freedom’ from economic exploitation and social repression was
ever granted to slaves and their descendants. Is it an accident that mass incarceration began just as
the Civil Rights movement was bearing fruit for its participants? Race in America is a special
class. But it shares history and social outcomes with several centuries of capitalist imperialism in South and Central
America, Asia, the Middle East, India and China, etc.
With over two million people in federal, state and local prisons and another five million whose lives are tied to the U.S.
penal system a social emergency has been created. The preponderance of those affected share relation through Western
imperial history and its residual embedded in current social relations.
Slavery was at its core an economic
institution, a system for forcing people to labor for others. The near instantaneous creation of a system of ‘freely’
coerced labor through convict leasing places the law, the social mechanisms of its enforcement and incarceration as ways
by
claiming an end to slavery while maintaining the mechanisms of social repression and
economic expropriation the onus for claims of social legitimacy was shifted to the
repressed and exploited. This finds its contemporary expression in long immiserated
communities being blamed for their own immiseration, in long excluded communities being blamed for
of continuing the economic expropriation of slavery outside of explicit chattel relations. To add insult to injury,
their exclusion and in long repressed communities being blamed for their own repression. The question of whether or not
prison labor is a reconstitution of slavery leaves aside the global strategies of economic coercion and expropriation that
are related by degree. The claim of capitalist democracy that all labor is freely undertaken (and compensated according to
its economic contribution) is a fundamental premise of capitalism. Explicit
and implicit strategies of
coercion put a lie to this base conceit. The effect, again, is that working class and poor Americans have
political and economic interests more clearly aligned with the people of Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bangladesh and Vietnam
than they do with the American political establishment. The late President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, understood these
broader relations as did the Black Panther Party when it formed international coalitions. If there is any hope for ending
mass incarceration it is likely to be found in these broader coalitions.
2NC – Impact: Fem
Capitalism places economic markers of productivity that reinforces
gendered dichotomies of public/private and conceal women’s
domestic work while utilizing patriarchal ideas to naturalize gender
hierarchies and abdicate responsibility for social welfare
Commane 10 (Denise Comanne, 5-27-2010, "How Patriarchy and Capitalism
Combine to Aggravate the Oppression of Women," No Publication,
https://www.cadtm.org/How-Patriarchy-and-Capitalism-Combine-to-Aggravate-theOppression-of-Women)-NA
Where Capitalism Comes in
In the past, when
children were asked on school questionnaires what their parents did for a
living, they were told to leave a blank for their mothers if they were housewives. There
could be no better emblem than that “blank” for the invisibility of women’s work in the
domestic sphere in capitalist societies before the revival of feminism in the late
’Sixties. Feminists were the ones who drew attention to the importance and diversity of women’s unpaid activities in the
home.
It would be hard to put a figure to women’s invisible contribution, not usually considered
in terms of monetary value since neither buying nor selling comes into it; however the UNDP in
its 1995 report evaluated it at an estimated 11 000 billion dollars. This figure must be seen in
relation to that of world productivity, estimated at the time to be around 23 000 billion
dollars, in order to get an idea of how much women contribute to humanity as a whole. (UNDP, 1995, p. 6).
To these 11 000 billion dollars should be added women’s contribution to the economy in monetary terms (for example in
in general women are paid less than men
for the same or equivalent work.
Housework involves the tasks that reproduce the workforce - tasks that are carried out
within the family home. 80% of such domestic tasks are carried out by women, and by far
the greatest proportion of this work by women is UNPAID. Somehow the capitalist system
has never envisaged transforming domestic tasks into professional employment
remunerated with a salary and/or by marketable products. To bring off such a tour
de force has required that, through the patriarchal values underpinning our society, men
and women accept and develop the idea that women are naturally predisposed to
accomplishing domestic chores.
The issue of women’s domestic work in the private sphere is thus central to any
analysis of their situation.
The capitalist system’s propensity to reorganise the economy on a global scale to
its own profit has direct repercussions on gender relations . Analysis of its methods shows
that, on the one hand, the capitalist system feeds on a pre-existing system of oppression – patriarchy –
and on the other, it compounds many of its defining characteristics. The oppression of
women is a tool which enables capitalists to manage the entire workforce to their own
profit. It also enables them to justify their policies when they find it more profitable
to shift the responsibility for social welfare from the State and collective
institutions to the “privacy” of the family . In other words, when the capitalists need extra labour, they
the form of paid employment). Lastly, it should be recalled that
call upon women whom they pay less than men, which has the side-effect of dragging down wages generally. This means
that the State is forced to provide services to facilitate women’s jobs or allow them to offload some of their responsibilities.
Then when
they no longer require women’s labour, they send them home, back to their
“proper place” in patriarchal terms.
There is not yet a country in the world, even among the most advanced in this area,
where women’s pay is equal to men’s. Indeed some industrialized countries are seriously losing ground in
comparative terms of human development, regarding this criterion: Canada has slipped back from the 1st to the 9th place
in world ranking, Luxemburg has fallen back twelve places, the Netherlands sixteen and Spain twenty-six (UNDP, 1995).
Careers where women are in the majority in fields such as health care and
education are devalued.
When capitalism is in crisis, austerity measures are introduced whereby women are the
first to be excluded from social benefits such as unemployment benefits, for example, where
they exist. Elsewhere, they are pushed into very poorly-paid jobs such as work in the free
zones. In Mexico in this sector women’s salaries have collapsed from 80% to a mere 57% of men’s. They may
also be won over by the idea of doing a good job for a pittance among the multitude of
jobs in the informal sector, beyond the pale of “paralysing ” State regulations.
Women’s rights in the workplace are undermined by a thousand government tricks.
There is of course the “choice” of working part-time which extends from half-time to the “zero” contract
where the female worker remains at the boss’s disposal to work from zero to any number of hours as required; this
despite the fact that practically all surveys show that the majority of working women would like a full-time job. The
increasing reduction in services such as crèches and day-nurseries, or the privatisation
of others such as rest-homes for the elderly, have led to a multiplicity of pitfalls for
working women. “Equality at work” has had the negative effect of introducing more nightwork for women. Of course it was right to establish equal working conditions for women in the security and health
services, and so forth; but what was also at stake with these so-called egalitarian measures was
to allow women to work on the line in night-shifts, for example. There is absolutely no vital imperative to
build cars at night. The new measures establishing male-female equality should then have been – in clear-thinking
feminist terms – to eliminate night-work for men. Moreover, for
most women this night-work on the line,
unacceptable on principle, makes life intolerably hard most of the time, in view of the
work women still have to do in the domestic sphere.
To manage this issue, capitalism uses patriarchy as a lever to attain its objectives, while
at the same time reinforcing it
The issue of women’s work in production, or the public sphere, is therefore just as central.
The fact that women are relegated – by patriarchy – to domestic tasks allows capitalists to
justify their over-exploitation and under-payment of women with the argument that their
work is less productive than men’s. They invoke weakness, menstruation, absenteeism
for pregnancy and maternity leave, breastfeeding, and caring for sick children and older
relatives. This is where the woman’s salary is denigrated as being “for extras”. Even today, with equal qualifications
and for equal hours, women are paid about 20% less than men. This holds a double interest for
capitalists. On the one hand, they have a cheaper, more flexible labour pool that can be used or laid off
according to market fluctuations; on the other hand, this enables them to bring down rates of pay
generally.
The general issue of women’s work in the private and public spheres thus reflects either their
oppression, as for example when policies of the far right or religious fundamentalism force
them to remain in the home; or their liberation, as in the case of progressive policies of
equal pay, job creation and free public services.
2NC – AT: Cap Good
Capitalism is empirically proven to have no correlation with conflict
reduction – this takes out any war turn
Anderson & Souva ’10 (Sally Anderson and Mark Souva, The Accountability
Effects of Political Institutions and Capitalism on Interstate Conflict, The Journal of
Conflict Resolution , August 2010, Vol. 54, No. 4 (August 2010), pp. 543-565) - NR
We argue that extant research testing the relationship between political account ability
and interstate conflict initiation and targeting is flawed. First, the primary
accountability argument in international politics is selectorate theory, yet some
tests of selectorate theory do not use selectorate theory's measure of winning
coalition size, opting instead for a measure of democracy. Using a measure of a
different concept may lead to faulty inferences regarding the original theory's
expectations. Second, some research on selectorate theory's hypotheses on conflict
initiation do not analyze the relevant domain of cases ; for example, instead of examining all
directed dyads, some research examines the country-year and selects on militarized disputes. Third, and most
importantly ,
that
the essence of selectorate theory's accountability argument of conflict is
as accountability increases, leaders are more selective about entering into international militarized disputes and
selectorate theory expects a conditional
relationship between accountability and the balance of power : as accountability increases,
states become more selective about initiating conflict when they are relatively weaker than a potential target. The
appropriate way, then, to test political accountability arguments of interstate
conflict initiation is by interacting the hypothesized accountability mechanism
with the balance of power, but existing research does not do this . We address these
that once in they try harder to win. In other words,
research design problems and conduct new tests on the relationship between political institu tions, capitalism, and
we present the first tests of (a) the effect of winning
coalition size on dispute initiation conditional on the balance ofpower for all dyads, (b) the effect of capitalism
on dis pute initiation conditional on power , (c) the effect of winning coalition size on dispute initiation
militarized dispute initiation and targeting. Specifically,
conditional on both power and the target's winning coalition size, and (d) the effect of winning coalition size on dispute
we find limited support for
the claim that capitalism influences foreign policy decision making by increasing
political account ability but robust support for the influence of political
institutions. That is, the original expectations of selectorate theory are supported but extensions of
selectorate theory to include capitalism are not supported .2The article proceeds as follows.
initiation conditional on both capitalism and power. To preview the conclusion,
In the next section, we develop the selectorate theory explanation of interstate conflict and situate capitalism within it.
Next, we present a research design to test the central hypotheses that come out of this theory. We, then, present the
results of the base model and extensive sensitivity analyses. In the final section, we discuss the implications of this
research.
2NC – AT: Cap Inev
Rejecting the notion of inevitable neoliberalism is critical to
resistance – surrender is a self-fulfilling prophecy
Hursh and Henderson, associate professor of education at the University of Rochester and PhD at the
Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development 11 (David and Joseph, “ Contesting global
neoliberalism and creating alternative futures”, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 32:2, May 2011,
Routledge)
Contesting neoliberalism necessitates that we situate neoliberal policies within the larger
neoliberal discourse promoting markets, competition, individualism, and privatization.
Analysing education policies in the USA, whether the push for mayoral control in Rochester, New York (see Duffy, 2010;
Hedeen, 2010; Ramos, 2010), school reform policies under Renaissance 2010 in Chicago, or Race to the Top under the
Obama administration, requires that we understand how reforms such as using standardized testing are presented as
efficient, neutral responses to the problem of raising student achievement, rather than examining the root causes of
student failure, including lack of decent paying jobs and health care, and under-funded schools. Current
policies
reinforce neoliberalism and leave the status quo intact. Similarly, if we look at education in SubSaharan Africa, we must situate schools within the hollowing out of the state, and the lack of adequate funding for
education and other social services such as health care. For example, in Uganda, as in several other Sub-Saharan
countries, the global recession has contributed to drug shortages, making it impossible to treat the growing number of
AIDS patients (McNeil, 2010). Yet, under more social democratic policies the state would play a larger role in providing
health care. Furthermore, education is increasingly contested, as the plutocracy promotes education as a means of
producing productive, rather than critical, employees. Schools are more often places where teachers and students learn
what will be on the test rather than seeking answers to questions that cry out for answers, such as how to develop a
healthy, sustainable environment or communities where people are actually valued for who they are rather than what they
contribute to the economy. Instead, we must ask what kinds of relations do we want to nurture,
what kinds of social relations, what kind of work do we want to do, and what kinds of
culture and technologies do we want to create. These questions require that we rethink schools so that
teachers and students can engage in real questions for which the answer will make a difference in the quality of our lives.
These questions also require that we rethink our relationship to a specific kind of ‘free’
marketplace that is not, in fact, inevitable. By problematizing the idea of neoliberal
marketization, we can begin to construct new markets that actually value commonly held
resources and local communities.
the aff’s justification of capitalism is founded in pointing to the evil of
the alternative as a reason for the status quo which normalizes crisis
and precludes imagining any world outside capitalism
Fisher 9 (Mark, cultural theorist and professor at Department of Visual Cultures at
Goldsmiths, University of London, Capitalist Realism, chapter 1)
What is unique about the dystopia in Children of Men is that it is specific to late capitalism. This isn't the familiar
totalitarian scenario routinely trotted out in cinematic dystopias (see, for example, James McTeigue's 2005 Vfor Vendetta).
In the P.D. James novel on which the film is based, democracy is suspended and the country is ruled over by a selfappointed Warden, but, wisely, the film downplays all this. For all that we know, the authoritarian measures that are
The
War on Terror has prepared us for such a development: the normalization of
crisis produces a situation in which the repealing of measures brought in to deal
with an emergency becomes unimaginable (when will the war be over?) Watching
Children of Men, we are inevitably reminded of the phrase attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, that it is
easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism .
That slogan captures precisely what I mean by 'capitalist realism': the widespread sense
that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is
now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it. Once, dystopian films and novels were
everywhere in place could have been implemented within a political structure that remains, notionally, democratic.
exercises in such acts of imagination - the disasters they depicted acting as narrative pretext for the emergence of
different ways of living. Not so in Children of Men. The world that it projects seems more like an extrapolation or
exacerbation of ours than an alternative to it. In its world, as in ours, ultra-authoritarianism and Capital are by no means
incompatible: internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist. In Children of Men, public space is abandoned, given
over to uncollected garbage and stalking animals (one especially resonant scene takes place inside a derelict school,
through which a deer runs). Neoliberals, the capitalist realists par excellence, have celebrated the destruction of public
space but, contrary to their official hopes, there is no withering away of the state in Children of Men, only a stripping back
of the state to its core military and police functions (I say 'official hopes since neoliberalism surreptitiously relied on the
state even while it has ideologically excoriated it. This was made spectacularly clear during the banking crisis of 2008,
when, at the invitation of neoliberal ideologues, the state rushed in to shore up the banking system.)
The catastrophe in Children of Men is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already
happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster;
the world doesn't end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart.
What caused the catastrophe to occur, who knows; its cause lies long in the past, so
absolutely detached from the present as to seem like the caprice of a malign being: a
negative miracle, a malediction which no penitence can ameliorate. Such a blight can
only be eased by an intervention that can no more be anticipated than was the
onset of the curse in the first place . Action is pointless; only senseless hope makes sense. Superstition
and religion, the first resorts of the helpless, proliferate.
But what of the catastrophe itself? It is evident that the theme of sterility must be read metaphorically, as the displacement
of another kind of anxiety. I want to argue this anxiety cries out to be read in cultural terms, and the question the film
poses is: how long can a culture persist without the new? What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing
surprises?
Children of Men connects with the suspicion that the end has already come, the thought that it could well be the case that
the future harbors only reiteration and re-permutation. Could it be that there are no breaks, no 'shocks of the new' to
come? Such anxieties tend to result in a bi-polar oscillation: the 'weak messianic' hope that there must be something new
on the way lapses into the morose conviction that nothing new can ever happen. The focus shifts from the Next Big Thing
to the last big thing - how long ago did it happen and just how big was it?
T.S. Eliot looms in the background of Children of Men, which, after all, inherits the theme of sterility from The Waste Land.
The film's closing epigraph 'shantih shantih shantih' has more to do with Eliot's fragmentary pieces than the Upanishads'
peace. Perhaps it is possible to see the concerns of another Eliot - the Eliot of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' ciphered in Children of Men. It was in this essay that Eliot, in anticipation of Harold Bloom, described the reciprocal
relationship between the canonical and the new. The new defines itself in response to what is already established; at the
same time, the established has to reconfigure itself in response to the new. Eliot's claim was that the exhaustion of the
future does not even leave us with the past. Tradition counts for nothing when it is no longer contested and modified. A
culture that is merely preserved is no culture at all. The fate of Picasso's Guernica in the film - once a howl of anguish and
outrage against Fascist atrocities, now a wall-hanging - is exemplary. Like its Battersea hanging space in the film, the
painting is accorded 'iconic' status only when it is deprived of any possible function or context. No cultural object can
retain its power when there are no longer new eyes to see it.
We do not need to wait for Children of Men's near-future to arrive to see this transformation of culture into museum
pieces. The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism
subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one effect of its 'system of equivalence'
which can assign all cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography,
pornography, or Das Kapital, a monetary value. Walk around the British Museum, where you see objects
torn from their lifeworlds and assembled as if on the deck of some Predator spacecraft, and you have a powerful image of
this process at work. In
the conversion of practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects,
the beliefs of previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into artifacts.
Capitalist realism is therefore not a particular type of realism; it is more like realism in
itself. As Marx and Engels themselves observed in The Communist Manifesto,
[Capital] has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine
sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place
of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one
word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal
exploitation.
Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic
elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and
the relics. Yet this turn from belief to aesthetics, from engagement to spectatorship, is
held to be one of the virtues of capitalist realism. In claiming, as Badiou puts it, to have 'delivered us
from the "fatal abstractions" inspired by the "ideologies of the past'", capitalist realism presents itself as a
shield protecting us from the perils posed by belief itself. The attitude of ironic distance proper to
postmodern capitalism is supposed to immunize us against the seductions of fanaticism. Lowering our
expectations, we are told, is a small price to pay for being protected from terror and
totalitarianism. 'We live in a contradiction,' Badiou has observed:
a brutal state of affairs, profoundly inegalitarian - where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone - is presented
to us as ideal. To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot
really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they have decided to say that all the rest is
horrible. Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect Goodness. But we're
lucky that we don't live in a condition of Evil. Our democracy is not perfect. But it's better
than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But it's not criminal like Stalinism. We
let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don't make racist nationalist declarations like
Milosevic. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don't cut their throats with machetes
like they do in Rwanda, etc.
The 'realism' here is analogous to the deflationary perspective of a depressive who
believes that any positive state, any hope, is a dangerous illusion.
Alternatives
Alt – Abandon Institutions
Seems great—policy sucks, movement below key
Bond 15. Patrick, University of the Witwatersrand School of Governance
(Johannesburg) and University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society (Durban). “Can
Climate Activists’ ‘Movement Below’ Transcend Negotiators’ ‘Paralysis Above’?”
JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH. ISSN: 1076-156X | Vol. # 21 No. 2
Paris will be no different. Further ‘neoliberalized nature’ dangers emerge in this
context. Remarked Ariel Salleh (2010: 215), “ The current financial and climate
crises are consciousness-raising opportunities all round, but green new deals
designed to revive the faltering international system will delay fundamental
change.” In the same spirit, Samir Amin (2010), Africa’s leading political economist,
offers this argument about economic theory applied to ecology: Capture of ecology by
vulgar ideology operates on two levels: on the one hand by reducing
measurement of use value to an ‘improved’ measurement of exchange value, and
on the other by integrating the ecological challenge with the ideology of
‘consensus.’ Both these manoeuvres undermine the clear realization that ecology
and capitalism are, by their nature, in opposition. But the complications implicit in
correlating crisis-ridden capitalism to commodifying climate crisis are profound.
As Harvey (2006: 96) warns: [T]he spatio-temporality required to represent energy flows
through ecological systems accurately, for example, may not be compatible with that of
financial flows through global markets. Understanding the spatio-temporal rhythms of
capital accumulation requires a quite different framework to that required to understand
global climate change. The increased commodification of nature runs under such
constraints of uncertainty into various limits, Harvey (2010) is quick to point out, in part
because spatio-temporal rhythms of crazed financial markets now drive globalscale public policy, even when it comes to addressing the crucial problem of
global climate change. For this reason, as Klein (2014) puts it, This Changes
Everything. However, of the two main branches within global and local climate activism –
CAN and Avaaz on the one hand and climate justice on the other – only the latter
addresses the matter with the sufficiently critical politics required to break through
regarding both the world’s main concerns: climate change and global economic
vulnerability. In contrast, instead of legitimizing the Paris negotiators, the climate
justice movement had worked hard to develop a broad-based ‘Coalition Climat21’
network premised on vigorous, diverse forms of critique. At the main strategy
meeting at the Tunis World Social Forum in March 2015, the climate activists present
seemed ready for progressive ideology, analysis, strategy, tactics and alliances. Up to
400 people jammed a university auditorium over the course of the two days, mixing
French, English and Arabic. The initial signs were upbeat. Christophe Aguiton, one of
Attac’s founders, opened the event: ‘In the room are Climate Justice Now!, Climate
Action Network, international unions, the faith community, and the newer actors in the
global movement, especially 350.org and Avaaz. We have had a massive New York City
march and some other inspiring recent experiences in the Basque country and with the
Belgium Climate Express.’ Still, he explained, ‘We won’t talk content because in the
same room, there are some who are moderate, some who are radical – so we will
stress mobilization, because we all agree, without mobilization we won’t save the
climate.’ This unity-seeking-minus-politics was reminiscent of a process four years in
Durban, South Africa (Bond 2012). But the French movements have been mobilizing
much more impressively, with plans for decentralized November 28-29 protests aimed at
municipalities; a Brussels-Paris activist train; a ‘run for life’ with 1000 people running
4km each from northern Sweden to Paris; a long march from Italy to Journal of WorldSystem Research | Vol. #21 No. 2 | Climate Activists’ ‘Movement Below’ jwsr.org |
http://dx.doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2015.577 264 France starting in September; and the
‘Alternatiba’ alternatives project with 200 participating villages from the Basque country
up to Brussels which will culminate on September 26-27. Yet the local context sounds as
difficult in 2015 as it was in South Africa in 2011. As Malika Peyraut from Friends of the
Earth-France pointed out, national climate policy is ‘inconsistent and unambitious’
and the country’s politics are increasingly chaotic, what with the rise of the far
right to 25% support in municipal elections. Worse, French society will be distracted
by regional elections from December 6-12, and with national elections in 2017, ‘there is
a high risk of co-optation,’ she warned. No politicians should have their faces near
these mobilizations, suggested Mariana Paoli of Christian Aid (reporting from a
working group), as COP21 protesters needed to avoid the celebrity-chasing
character of the big New York march. Behind that excellent principle lies a practical
reality: there are no reliable state allies of climate justice at present and indeed
there really are no high-profile progressives working within the COPs. This is a
huge problem for UN reformers because it leaves them without a policy jammaker inside
to accompany activist tree-shaking outside. The UN head of the COP process is an oftcompromised carbon trader: Christiana Figueres. Although once there were heroic
delegates badgering the COP process, they are all gone: • Lumumba Di-Aping led the
G77 countries at the Copenhagen COP15 – where in a dramatic accusation aimed at the
Global North, he named climate a coming holocaust requiring millions of coffins for
Africa – and so was lauded outside and despised inside, but then was redeployed to
constructing the new state of South Sudan; • President Mohamed Nasheed from the
Maldives – also a high-profile critic at Copenhagen – was first a victim of U.S. State
Department’s cables (revealed by Wikileaks) which documented how his government
agreed to a February 2010 $50 million bribe to support the Copenhagen Accord (just as
Washington and the EU agreed that the ‘Alliance of Small Island States countries
‘could be our best allies’ given their need for financing’) and was then couped by
right-wingers in 2012 and, earlier this month, was illegitimately jailed for a dozen years;
• Bolivia’s UN Ambassador Pablo Solon was booted from his country’s delegation after
the 2010 Cancun COP16, where, solo, he had bravely tried to block the awful deal there,
and not even the Latin American governments most hated by Washington – Bolivia,
Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua – supported him thanks to Northern bullying; • In any
case a jungle road-building controversy (TIPNIS) soon divided Evo Morales’ supporters,
and in 2013 the COP’s progressive leadership void grew wide after the death of Hugo
Chavez and the battle by Rafael Correa against green-indigenous-feminist critics for his
decision that year to drill for oil in the Yasuni Amazon (after having once proposed an
innovative climate debt downpayment to avoid its extraction); and • Filippino Climate
Commissioner Yeb Saño had a dramatic 2013 role in Warsaw condemning COP19
inaction after his hometown was demolished by Super Typhoon Haiyan, but he was
evicted by a more conservative environment ministry (apparently under Washington’s
thumb) just before the Lima COP in 2014. The message from these COP experiences
is unmistakable: if you support climate justice, going inside is suicide. It is for this
reason that the original protest narrative suggestions that CAN’s Mark Raven proposed
here were generally seen as too reformist. Acknowledging the obvious – “People losing
faith in the broken system, corporations sabotaging change” and “We need a just
transition” – his network then offered these as favored headline memes: “Showdown in
2015 leads to a vision of just transition to fossil-free world” and “Paris is where the world
decides to end fossil fuel age.” Yet with no real prospects of reform, the more
militant activists were dissatisfied. Nnimmo Bassey from Oilwatch International was
adamant, “We need not merely a just transition, but an immediate transition: keep
the oil in the soil, the coal in the hole, the tar sands in the land and the fracking
shale gas under the grass.” That, after all, is what grassroots activists are
mobilising for. Added long-time climate justice strategist Nicola Bullard: “This narrative
is too optimistic especially in terms of what will surely be seen as a failed COP21.”
Bullard was a Focus on the Global South leader at the 2007 Bali COP13 when Climate
Justice Now! was formed based on five principles: • reduced consumption; • huge
financial transfers from North to South based on historical responsibility and ecological
debt for adaptation and mitigation costs paid for by redirecting military budgets,
innovative taxes and debt cancellation; • leaving fossil fuels in the ground and investing
in appropriate energy-efficiency and safe, clean and community-led renewable energy; •
rights-based resource conservation that enforces indigenous land rights and promotes
peoples’ sovereignty over energy, forests, land and water; and • sustainable family
farming, fishing and peoples’ food sovereignty. Just as valid today, these principles were
further fleshed out at the April 2010 World People’s Conference on Climate Change and
the Rights of Mother Earth in Bolivia, to include emissions cut targets—45% below 1990
levels in the advanced capitalist economies by 2020—plus a climate tribunal and the
decommissioning of destructive carbon markets which have proven incapable of
fair, rational and non-corrupt trading. Dating to well before the CJN! split from CAN in
Bali, that latter fantasy—letting bankers determine the fate of the planet by
privatizing the air—remains one of the main dividing lines between the two
ideologies: climate justice or climate action. In sum, while the elites are paralyzed,
there is movement below . But it is bifurcated. The narrative divergence between
climate action and climate justice does not boil down to merely the choice of a Paris
march date and the signal sent in the process. Back in Tunis, ActionAid’s Teresa
Anderson had reported back from a Narrative Working Group on lessons from
Copenhagen: “Don’t tell a lie that Paris will fix the climate. People were arrested in
Copenhagen for this lie. No unrealistic expectations – but we need to give people
hope that there is a purpose to the mobilization.” Most important, she reminded,
“There is Global North historical responsibility, and those who are most vulnerable have
done the least to cause the problem.” This is vital because in Durban, UN delegates
began the process of ending the ‘common but differentiated responsibility’ clause. As a
result, finding ways to ensure climate ‘loss & damage’ invoices are both issued and paid
is more difficult. The UN’s Green Climate Fund is a decisive write-off in that respect, with
nowhere near the $100 billion annually promised for 2020 and beyond by then U.S.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Also, continued Anderson, given the tendency of Third
World nationalists to posture on this point, ‘Elites in both North and South are to blame,
so it’s not a matter of pure geographical injustice. It’s the economic system that is driving
climate change.’ Looking at more optimistic messaging, she concluded the report-back:
‘Powerful positive actions are in play. We are life— fossil fuels are death. Paris is a
moment to build movements, to show we are powerful and will fight into 2016 and
beyond to solve the climate crisis. It takes roots to weather the storm ahead.’
Responding, said former Bolivian negotiator Solon, “I think we need a clearer narrative:
let’s stop an agreement that’s going to burn the climate. We already know that
agreement exists. If China peaks emissions only by 2030 or if we accept Obama’s
offer to China, we all burn. The Paris agreement will be worse than the draft we’ve
seen. The point is not to put pressure for something better. It’s to stop a bad deal.
We are against carbon markets, geoengineering and the emissions targets.”
These are the fault lines. One of the lead scholars of global climate justice, John Foran
(2015), predicts the Paris COP21 outcome: “we are on course to lock in a
genocidally inadequate, woefully underfunded, non-binding set of pledges whose
deadlines are laughably too late already.” But instead of paralysis above, he
argues for movement below: We will need to be very creative to defeat our enemies:
the largest corporations in the world, the global political elite, and the systems whose
levers they believe they control: capitalism and a make-belief brand of democracy.
Alt – Revolutionary
The alternative is a revolutionary movement against global capitalism
centered on socialist understandings of equality and sustainable
human development
Foster ’19 (John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon,
Capitalism Has Failed – What Next?, Monthly Review, 01 February 2019,
https://monthlyreview.org/2019/02/01/capitalism-has-failed-what-next/) – NR
Indeed, history has been unkind to all such attempts to provide detailed forecasts of the future, particularly if they simply extend current
trends and leave the bulk of humanity and their struggles out of the picture. It is for this reason that a
dialectical view is so
important. The actual course of history can never be predicted. The only thing certain about historical change is the existence of the
struggles that drive it forward and that guarantee its discontinuous character. Both implosions and explosions inevitably materialize,
rendering the world for new generations different than that of the old. His
tory points to numerous social systems
that have reached the limits of their ability to adapt their social relations to allow for the
rational and sustainable use of developing productive forces. Hence, the human past is
dotted by periods of regression, followed by revolutionary accelerations that sweep all
before them. As the conservative historian Jacob Burckhardt declared in the nineteenth century, “a historical crisis”
occurs when “a crisis in the whole state of things is produced , involving whole epochs and all
or many peoples of the same civilization.… The historical process is suddenly accelerated in terrifying
fashion. Developments which otherwise take centuries seem to flit by like phantoms in months or weeks, and are fulfilled.” He called this
the “acceleration of historical processes.”91 Burckhardt principally had in mind social revolutions, like the
French Revolution
of 1789. This was an acceleration of history that, as the modern French historian Georges Lefebvre explained,
commenced as a series of widening revolutions, mutating with terrifying speed, from an
aristocratic revolution to a bourgeois revolution to a popular revolution and then a peasant revolution—finally taking on the character of a
historic “bloc, a single thing,” seemingly unconquerable, which reshaped much of world history. 92
Could such a revolutionary acceleration of history, though on an incomparably greater scale, happen in the twenty-first century? Most
establishment commentators in the hegemonic countries of the world imperialist system would say no, based on their own narrow
revolutions continue to break out in the periphery
of the world system and are , even now, only put down by imperialist economic, political, and military
interventions . Moreover, the failure of capitalism on a planetary scale today threatens
all of civilization and life on the planet as we know it. If drastic changes are not made, global temperature this century will
experience and limited view of history. Nevertheless,
increase by 4° or even 6°C from preindustrial times, leading to conditions that will imperil humankind as a whole. Meanwhile, the
extreme capitalism of today seeks to expropriate and enclose all the bases of
material existence, siphoning off almost the entire net social surplus and robbing the
natural environment for the direct benefit of a miniscule few. As a direct result of capitalist social relations, the material
challenges now facing humanity are greater than anything ever seen before, pointing to an
accumulation of catastrophe along with the accumulation of capital.93 Hundreds of millions of people under these
circumstances are already being drawn into struggles with the system, creating the
basis of a new worldwide movement toward socialism. In his book Can the Working Class
Change the World ? Yates answers yes, it can. But it can only do so through a unifying struggle by
workers and peoples aimed at genuine socialism .94 It may be objected that socialism has been tried and
has failed and hence no longer exists as an alternative. However, like the earliest attempts at capitalism in the Italian city-states of the late
the failure of the
first experiments at socialism presage nothing but its eventual rebirth in a new, more
revolutionary, more universal form , which examines and learns from the failures.95 Even in failure, socialism has
this advantage over capitalism: it is motivated by the demand for “freedom in general,” rooted
in substantive equality and sustainable human development—reflecting precisely
those collective social relations, borne of historical necessity and the unending
Middle Ages, which were not strong enough to survive amongst the feudal societies that surrounded them,
struggle for human freedom , crucial to human survival in our time.96 It is capitalism’s undermining of
the very basis of human existence that will eventually compel the world’s workers and peoples to
seek new roads forward. An inclusive, class-based movement toward socialism in
this century will open up the possibility of qualitative new developments that the
anarchy of the capitalist-market society with its monopolistic competition, extreme inequality, and
institutionalized greed cannot possibly offer .99 This includes the development of a socialist technology, in which both
the forms of technology utilized and the purposes to which they are put are
channeled in social directions, as opposed to individual and class gain .100 It introduces
the prospect of long-term democratic planning at all levels of society, allowing decisions to be made and distributions to occur outside the
logic of the cash nexus.101 Socialism, in its most radical form, is about substantive equality, community solidarity, and ecological
Once sustainable human development ,
rooted not in exchange values, but in use values and genuine human needs, comes to define
historical advance, the future , which now seems closed, will open up in a myriad ways,
allowing for entirely new , more qualitative, and collective forms of development .102 This can
sustainability; it is aimed at the unification—not simply division—of labor.
be seen in the kinds of needed practical measures that could be taken up, but which are completely excluded under the present mode of
production. It is not physical impossibility, or lack of economic surplus, most of which is currently squandered, that stands in the way of the
democratic control of investment, or the satisfaction of basic needs—clean air and water, food, clothing, housing, education, health care,
transportation, and useful work—for all. It is not the shortage of technological know-how or of material means that prevents the necessary
ecological conversion to more sustainable forms of energy.103 It is not some inherent division of humanity that obstructs the construction of
a New International of workers and peoples directed against capitalism, imperialism, and war.104 All of this is within our reach, but requires
pursuing a logic that runs counter to that of capitalism. Humanity, Karl Marx wrote, “inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to
solve, since
closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when
the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of
formation.”105 The very waste and excess of today’s monopoly-finance capitalism ,
together with the development of new means of communication that allow for greater human coordination, planning, and democratic action
suggest that there are countless paths forward to a world of
substantive equality and ecological sustainability once the world is freed from the fetters of capital.106
than ever before,
The answers to the crises before us are both social and ecological. They require the rational regulation of the metabolism between human
beings and nature under the control of associated humanity—regenerating and maintaining the flows, cycles, and other vital processes of
healthy, local, regional, and global ecosystems (and species habitats)—in accord with the needs of the entire chain of human generations.
the drive for human freedom and the struggle to master our
relation to the world. The first of these ultimately demands equality and community ; the second, human
development and sustainability. It is on these struggles for collective advancement that we must
ultimately rely if humanity is to have a future at all.
The mainsprings of human action throughout history lie in
The alternative is an economic and political rejection of capitalism in
favor of a revolutionary communist dictatorship led by the proletariat
Owen 18 [MK Owen, PhD in philosophy from the University of Birmingham, Capitalism:
What it is and How to Abolish It, 8-11-18, Accessible Online at
https://cosmonaut.blog/2018/11/08/capitalism-what-it-is-and-how-to-abolish-it/] DL 7-142020
Let us first examine efforts to abolish capitalism economically rather than politically, for it is
here that we first meet that which bedevils our effort: the collective capitalist. Note that the first
iteration of the collective capitalist was invented by the capitalists themselves: the corporation. Workers employed by a
corporation work not for an individual capitalist, but for the corporation, charged with securing the interests of its
shareholders. Already, the
form of ownership is social—or rather, a social way to appropriate the surplus-value
if, however, the workers own the corporation and manage it
democratically? This—the cooperative—was very prevalent in Marx and Engels’ day, and
has as its modern flagship the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation of the Basque
Country. On the one hand, Marx offered this in Vol. III of Capital: The co-operative factories run by workers
themselves are, within the old form, the first examples of the emergence of a new form, even though
they naturally reproduce in all cases, in their present organization, all the defects of the
existing system, and must reproduce them. But the opposition between capital and labour
the workers produce. What
is abolished there, even if at first only in the form that the workers in association become their own capitalists, i.e.,
they use the means of production to valorise their labour.3 This illuminates why the Mondragon
Cooperative Corporation wasn’t able to abolish capitalism, even within itself: in order to survive
in a capitalist economy, the cooperative itself is forced to become a collective capitalist! It
is the markets, not the workers, which determine what to produce, how to produce it, and what must
be done with the proceeds from the sale of products. This is why workers at Mondragon found it necessary
early on to elect a second body—the “social council”—to check and balance the board of directors. Although the board
Fagor, the
flagship cooperative which produced household appliances, suddenly found itself without its largest
customers: home-builders. After strenuous efforts to adjust the operations of Fagor to the situation without selling out
its workers, it was finally forced, by forces beyond its control, to shut its doors. What if, however, workers
do seize the means of production on a massive scale? What if the problem is solved
politically rather than economically? What is to be done next? This was how Marx looked at the problem as
faced by the Paris Commune: “If cooperative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to
supersede the capitalist system; if the united co-operative societies are to regulate
national production upon a common plan, thus taking it under their control, and putting an end to the
was elected, they were forced to act like any other such board. The problem became particularly acute when
constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of Capitalist production—what else, gentlemen, would
it be but Communism, “possible” Communism?” 4 After the fall of the Paris Commune, Marx dealt with this question
in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, juxtaposing to the various socialist notions floating around at the time a very
specific formulation: “the
revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat” exemplified by the Paris
Commune. While this was the minimum required to break with capitalism, Marx acknowledged that
it would inevitably inherit much of capitalism’s defects, and these would have to be overcome in a process of postrevolutionary communist development. It also reveals a major problem: if a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is
the only possible transition between capitalism and communism, what happens if the preceding class struggle—that of the
world’s peasants to avoid being reduced to proletarians—is still going on in much of the world? This question which
the path to
communism would have to include advanced capitalist countries: otherwise, peasant
revolutions would result not in communism, but in state-capitalism: the final form post-crisis
capitalism takes in order to stave off revolution. Lenin, in particular, was quite up-front about this when
he characterized the New Economic Policy as a conscious and deliberate retreat into statecapitalism, pending the spread of socialist revolution into advanced capitalist countries—which came very close to
dogged the Paris Commune and the Soviets is why Marx, Engels, and subsequent Marxists insisted that
happening in Germany, particularly during the hyperinflation of 1923. Such forthrightness has been unmatched since.
State-capitalism is a political economy in which a bureaucracy rather than the market
determine what to produce, how to produce it, and what to do with the products. Since a
bureaucracy is based on the same employer-employee relationship specific to
capitalism, it is premised on the existence of a labor-power market, and hence is
inherently capitalist. This formed the basis of Marx’ critique of Ferdinand Lasalle’s state socialism as statecapitalism and has been the basis of the Marxist understanding of state capitalism ever since. If we look at the
revolutions Marx, Engels, and Lenin took as their examples, we see that they were the products of extreme
crisis: war, defeat, military occupation, etc. Those extreme crises could only be ended by
an even more extreme revolution. But they happened in cities surrounded by a peasant
countryside—where the previous struggle over the means of production (land) was still being fought—so that a
revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat as a realization of democracy was impossible.
What if such an extreme crisis were to occur in an advanced capitalist country? In many
countries, the proletarianization of the peasantry has resulted in societies where
revolutions to end extreme crises have the potential to develop into revolutionary
dictatorships of the proletariat. These have greater potential to spread to neighboring
countries: from Venezuela to Colombia, Catalunya to Spain and France, etc. It is this
potential which drives the gendarmes of international capital to defeat any such revolutionary potential, and to back any
So daunting is the political project of abolishing
capitalism that the economic development of communism may seem at first blush a utopian project. Yet
if we lose sight of that goal, we mistake the present for the future, and any political victories the
working class wins risk being hollowed out. How would a free association of producers
regime—including fascists—to crush such potentials.
increase its own freedom? Marx provided this insight in Vol. III of Capital: they accomplish this task
with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most adequate to their human nature and most
worthy of it. But it always remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human power, which is its
own end, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can flourish only upon that realm of necessity as its basis. The
shortening of the working day is its fundamental premise. Hence we see illuminated the distinctive
goal of communist development: the shortening of the working day and week. How might communist economic planners
go about engineering that? One
would have to have a way to scientifically determine the mix of
means of production which would most rapidly reduce the time needed in production; if in
the sector that produces means of production inputs and outputs were proportional to one another, one could theoretically
reinvest all such production into that sector.5 One would never do this, of course, given that this sector was responsible
not only for its own production but for all production; but if inputs were not proportional, one could not even theoretically
reinvest means of production into its sector! Reinvestment would be constrained by a bottleneck industry, holding the
entire economy back like a single-track block constipating a railway. It follows that, in order to shorten the working day and
week as quickly as possible, socialist economic planners would have to be able to find the bottleneck industry in order to
direct investment into it.6 A
serious effort was made by the government of Salvador Allende in
Chile to undertake such an effort, which produced an early version of the internet called Project Cybersyn.
While Allende’s government was overthrown in a right-wing coup before the potential fruits of this project could be fully
explored, the legacy of Project Cybersyn can help give us a vision of what a democratic form of planning may look like.
Operations room of Cybersyn Cybersyn
aimed to construct a distributed decision support
system—a system that could help process complex levels of information for decision
making. Given the difficulties faced by Soviet planners, the use of a distributed support system seemed to point a way
beyond their bureaucratic system of the USSR for a more democratic form of planning that directly engaged the needs of
Cybersyn aimed to put the most advanced scientific
knowledge in the field of cybernetics to work in making an effective and democratic
planned economy. Project Cybersyn consisted of a national network of telex machines in nationalized enterprises
workers. Based on the theories of Stafford Beer,
and an operations room to which they were all linked. Information from each enterprise would come in through the
Cybernet and fed into statistical modeling software, allowing a bird’s-eye view of production indicators for the Operations
Room in Santiago. This meant that workers had a way to directly communicate their needs to the planners, and planners
had the ability to adjust accordingly. The
government also used economic simulation software to
forecast the outcomes of economic decisions. Cybersyn was basically reactive: it took in
data from the various enterprises and transmitted it to workers in the system in order that
demands would consistently be met.7 In order to facilitate communist development, a Cybersyn-type
planning mechanism would need: a macro (similar to the one I wrote) to identify and facilitate
investment in the bottleneck industry holding back the development of the basic industrial sector, and
therefore of the entire economy; a mechanism to set the working day and week at a level to
eliminate unemployment, hence maximizing labor productivity by replacing the least
productive hours of previously employed workers with hours for previously unemployed
or underemployed workers. Unlike under capitalism, communist development has as its
object the shortening of the socially necessary working day and week, growing the realm
of freedom at the expense of the realm of necessity. Once the political transition from
capitalism to communism is underway—because the domain of workers’ control would
be confronted from the outset, even while still under capitalist rule—the process of
communist development must be immediately begun. A scientific understanding of
communist development is indispensable to that process.
Movements are gaining momentum and Trump’s policies fuel the
need—abolition of carceral capitalism is the only viable solution
Berger 18(Dan Berger. Dan Berger is an associate professor of comparative ethnic
studies at the University of Washington Bothell and the author or editor of six books,
including Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era (University of
North Carolina Press, 2014) and, with Toussaint Losier, Rethinking the American Prison
Movement (Routledge, 2018). How Prisons Serve Capitalism. August, 17, 2018.
https://www.publicbooks.org/how-prisons-serve-capitalism/)-MR
I once asked a class at a prison in Washington State how they would describe the relationship between capitalism and
incarceration. “They get you coming and going,” someone quickly offered. Perhaps he had in mind the legal financial
obligations that are levied against many people upon their conviction.1 He also could have been referring to the exorbitant
costs of commissary supplies. In January, Florida prisoners announced a strike to protest their conditions. Among their
grievances, the high cost of commissary, including $17 for a case of soup and $18 for tampons.2 Or maybe he was
thinking about the lengths his loved ones went to communicate with him. Since being asked to write this review, I’ve paid
$53 to the telecommunications company Securus so that a friend incarcerated in New York could call me—a $3 activation
fee in addition to a $50 deposit in his account for future collect calls—and $50 to JPay, a subsidiary of Securus that bills
itself as “the most trusted name in corrections,” so that I could email with people incarcerated here in the Northwest. This
money is on top of my regular acquisition of stamps and envelopes to maintain traditional forms of correspondence with
incarcerated friends who do not have email access.
imprisonment keeps
people—and communities—poor. Although overwhelmingly government-run, the US penal system
extracts wealth from people least able to pay and, by making them pay, it keeps them in
its grip.
That prisons incarcerate almost exclusively poor people is a truism. Less discussed is that
People often misread the role of economics in giving the United States the world’s largest prison system. Surely, many
commentators insist, the whole enterprise must be driven by profit; why else would the country lock up so many people for
so long in conditions so cruel? Capitalism
is a central character in the story of American
punishment—but not because the criminal justice system is an elaborate pyramid scheme. A summary review of the
half-century expansion of police and prison power shows that debt, violence, and prison
have served primarily political purposes in the context of deepening economic inequality.
More than profit, capitalism generates misery from its poorest subjects.
While it has a long history, the braiding of debt and punishment has become a core feature of how criminal justice has
“carceral
capitalism”: a draconian model of economic governance that approaches Black urban
communities with a mixture of debt and police violence. Carceral capitalism turns police,
prosecutors, and courts into creditors, lessors, and debt collectors. Capitalism, Wang shows,
integrates the punitive state through debt. For many people, debt itself is a form of punishment.
anchored the American state since the early 1970s. In her new book, Jackie Wang dubs this development
Examining how police power grows through the imposition of debt and the deployment of new technologies, Wang wants
readers to understand the role of incarceration in “the dynamics of late capitalism.” As city and state governments
themselves are squeezed for funds, they pick the pockets of the poor to pay their bills. From the debtors’ prisons of 17thcentury America to the high-interest legal financial obligations of today that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, to be in
debt is to be exposed to the government’s power to punish. One means for city and state governments to keep the funds
flowing is to prey on those who already occupy the economic margins, and novel technologies have elaborated ever-more
sophisticated ways of tracking their quarry.
Still, focusing too closely on the technological innovations of finance and debt obscure a more profound transformation.
The story of debt that Wang traces says more about broader trends in contemporary American capitalism, including its
urban political economy, than about carceral injustice.
The idea of “carceral capitalism” suggests a different way of naming the convergence of finance capitalism and the
punitive state that has seen so many people sacrificed to cops and cages. Scholars and activists have offered terms such
as “mass incarceration,” which emphasizes the rapid growth of imprisonment since the 1970s; the “prison industrial
complex,” which is often misread as an economistic focus on prison labor or the small number of private prisons; or the
“carceral state,” a clunky phrase that focuses on the state form but makes no mention of the economic transformations
precipitating or propelling industrialized punishment.
No single phrase can capture the complex integration of the state, private actors, and impoverishment that is made
manifest through the 10 million people that annually pass through America’s jails, the more than 1.5 million held in prisons
and detention centers on any given day, the 4.5 million on parole or probation, and the uncounted masses daily stopped,
frisked, harassed, and surveilled. But the concept of “carceral capitalism” offers a way to synthesize the parts that have
made the United States the world’s biggest jailer.
Today, elites gain political and financial rewards for imprisoning groups of people. The roots of this system can be traced
to a political-economic project aimed at preserving capitalism’s racial inequalities: the quelling of the rebellions of workingclass Black communities in the 1960s. A deeper look into this history places the repression and disappearance of
racialized labor at the center of the story. To full understand carceral capitalism, then, it is necessary to look at the history
of labor and joblessness in Black urban neighborhoods.
Throughout the 1960s, Black working-class people rose up against racial capitalism. Their uprisings also catalyzed similar
rebellions in Puerto Rican and Chicano communities. Police brutality was invariably the spark. Yet the tender had been
provided by decades of housing and employment segregation that saw Black (and Latinx) communities overwhelmingly
housed in squalid conditions and chronically under- or unemployed. In Watts, Detroit, and Newark; in Plainfield, NJ,
Cambridge, MD, and Waukegan, IL; and in so many other locales, the fires were lit by the same arsonist: patterned
segregation upheld by routine if spontaneous police violence. The National Guard helped local and state police arrest 10s
of thousands of people in these long, hot summers. In response, metropolitan police forces increasingly began to
resemble the National Guard in weaponry and authority.
The crisis of worklessness led many people to protest in the streets or join organizations
ranging from the Black Panther Party to the Urban League, the Communist Party to the
NAACP. The government, however, responded to these groups and the crisis by expanding the
legal rationale and physical capacity for incarceration. It was not debt, as Wang highlights with
regard to the contemporary period, but war that explained the imprisonment of the period: wars on
communism, crime, drugs, gangs, and guns.
Debt has become a form of repression for those rendered obsolete by globalizing capital. A number of analysts within the
1960s-era Black freedom struggle recognized the looming challenge. Jack O’Dell opined in a 1967 issue of Freedom
ways that the response to urban rebellions of the 1960s augured a dangerous trend: “Despite certain concessions to civil
rights and a number of important court decisions favorable to the defense of civil liberties, militarism and the military
presence are rapidly becoming the main features of governmental power in American life.”5 Three years later, in his book
Who Needs the Negro?, sociologist Sidney Willhelm warned that automation caused increasing worklessness for Black
communities that would have to be addressed—either through public works programs or increasing authoritarianism,
social democracy, or state violence.
Soon after, the US incarceration rate began its inexorable climb.
THE STORY OF DEBT THAT WANG TRACES SAYS MORE ABOUT BROADER TRENDS IN CONTEMPORARY
AMERICAN CAPITALISM, INCLUDING ITS URBAN POLITICAL ECONOMY, THAN ABOUT CARCERAL INJUSTICE.
Punishment came to preoccupy the state in response to Black working-class protests against the racism of 1960s
capitalism. Once local and federal government entities redirected public coffers toward punishment, it was only a matter of
time before private companies tried monetizing racist and political repression—much as they have done with housing and
employment segregation. Their literal and ideological investments in punishment are fundamentally parasitic: punishingly
extractive themselves, they are yet still dependent on the motivation of external entities. State policy, and state funding,
drives their actions.
As elites responded to labor crises in communities of color with mass incarceration, prisons accelerated worklessness
itself. The idea of rehabilitation had always existed uneasily with the punitive mission of incarceration. As prisons became
filled with more Black and Brown people, antiracist rebellions erupted within prison with an urgency that matched their
urban counterparts. Talk of rehabilitation all but disappeared. Longtime wardens lamented the “new breed of inmate”
entering their custody and lobbied for greater severity in punishment.7 Removing work was part of increasing the prison’s
severity. “Prison provided inmates with few opportunities to constructively pass the time they were sentenced to serve,”
journalist John McCoy wrote in a 1981 photo-essay on Washington’s Walla Walla prison. “Jobs were few.” Those that did
exist tended to be make-work activities that offered neither gratification nor meaningful training.
The expansion of punishment under neoliberalism has exacerbated the warehouse
prison. Less than half of the 2.3 million people currently incarcerated do any work in prison, and the vast majority of
those who do work inside work for the prison itself: sweeping the halls of the cell block, cleaning the kitchen, assisting one
of the scant programs available to prisoners. Idleness is a feature, not a bug, of American punishment. Conservative
criminologists and reactionary politicians soon replaced even the idea of rehabilitation with incapacitation. “Incapacitation
doesn’t pretend to change anything about people except where they are,” writes geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore in her
trenchant study of California prisons.
Much of the current scholarship on the carceral state has added more data points to the insights Black radicals offered in
the 1960s and 1970s, investigating its metastasization as a reflection of disciplining an unruly, politically militant Black
working class. Although there are significant differences in the literature, including how to weigh economic transformations
in relation to explicit political repression, there is an emerging consensus that the rise of mass incarceration needs to be
understood as the elite response to politically rebellious Black and Brown communities at the advent of neoliberalism.
The phrase “carceral capitalism” raises a question: how do capitalism and carceral power not just coexist but come to
constitute each other? Debt is a necessary but insufficient explanatory variable in understanding how carceral capitalism
celebrates the utopian, “prophetic dream” of
abolition, to which we must add concrete organizing efforts to reduce the scale and
scope of the punishment system. Recognizing that carceral power is a measure of
American inequality, abolitionists have pursued full employment, universal health care,
educational equity, and restorative justice alongside an end to prisons, jails, and
immigrant detention and deportation.
comes to exist—and what it would mean to abolish it. Wang
Carceral power exceeds the framework of finance capital and technological innovation around which Wang builds her
argument. Rather,
carceral expansion is a form of political as well as economic repression
aimed at managing worklessness among the Black and Brown (and increasingly white)
working class for whom global capitalism has limited need.11 The generative theorizing of Carceral
Capitalism needs to be put in further conversation with the empirical work on the political
economy of prisons.
Police and prisons have expanded in both quantity and meanness over the last half century to enable the brutal management of
(potentially) rebellious
workers made obsolete by the increasing globalization of American
capitalism. But perhaps, in the depths of the Trump era, buoyed by the hunger and labor
strikes that increasingly dot the American carceral landscape, the demands for full
employment and universal health care, the civil disobedience actions aiming to halt the
detention and deportation of immigrant workers, we can start to see the abolitionist
horizon come into focus.
Alt – Class Key
Capitalism causes inevitable crises, inequality, and
dehumanization—the alternative is a class-based critique of the
system—pedagogical spaces are the crucial staging ground for
keeping socialism on the horizon
McLaren, Distinguished Fellow – Critical Studies @ Chapman U and UCLA urban
schooling prof, and Scatamburlo-D’Annibale, associate professor of Communication – U
Windsor, ‘4
(Peter and Valerie, “Class Dismissed? Historical materialism and the politics of
‘difference’,” Educational Philosophy and Theory Vol. 36, Issue 2, p. 183-199)
For well over two decades we have witnessed the jubilant liberal and conservative pronouncements of the demise of
socialism. Concomitantly, history's
presumed failure to defang existing capitalist relations has
been read by many self-identified ‘radicals’ as an advertisement for capitalism's inevitability. As a
result, the chorus refrain ‘There Is No Alternative’, sung by liberals and conservatives, has been
buttressed by the symphony of post-Marxist voices recommending that we give
socialism a decent burial and move on. Within this context, to speak of the promise of Marx and socialism may
appear anachronistic, even naïve, especially since the post-al intellectual vanguard has presumably demonstrated the
folly of doing so. Yet we stubbornly believe that the chants of T.I.N.A. must be combated for they offer as a fait accompli,
something which progressive Leftists
should refuse to accept —namely the triumph of
capitalism and its political bedfellow neo-liberalism, which have worked together to naturalize
suffering, undermine collective struggle, and obliterate hope. We concur with Amin (1998), who
claims that such chants must be defied and revealed as absurd and criminal, and who puts the
challenge we face in no uncertain terms: humanity may let itself be led by capitalism's logic to a
fate of collective suicide or it may pave the way for an alternative humanist project of
global socialism. The grosteque conditions that inspired Marx to pen his original critique of capitalism
are present and flourishing. The inequalities of wealth and the gross imbalances of power that exist today are
leading to abuses that exceed those encountered in Marx's day (Greider, 1998, p. 39). Global
capitalism has paved the way for the obscene concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands and
created a world increasingly divided between those who enjoy opulent affluence and those who
languish in dehumanizing conditions and economic misery. In every corner of the globe, we are
witnessing social disintegration as revealed by a rise in abject poverty and inequality. At the current
historical juncture, the combined assets of the 225 richest people is roughly equal to the annual income of the poorest 47
percent of the world's population, while the combined assets of the three richest people exceed the combined GDP of the
48 poorest nations (CCPA, 2002, p. 3). Approximately 2.8
billion people—almost half of the world's population—
struggle in desperation to live on less than two dollars a day (McQuaig, 2001, p. 27). As many as
250 million children are wage slaves and there are over a billion workers who are either un- or
under-employed. These are the concrete realities of our time—realities that require a vigorous
class analysis , an unrelenting critique of capitalism and an oppositional politics
capable of confronting what Ahmad (1998, p. 2) refers to as ‘capitalist universality.’ They are realities that
require something more than that which is offered by the prophets of ‘difference’ and post-Marxists who would have us
relegate socialism to the scrapheap of history and mummify Marxism along with Lenin's corpse. Never before has
a Marxian analysis of capitalism and class rule been so desperately needed. That is not to say that
everything Marx said or anticipated has come true, for that is clearly not the case. Many critiques of Marx focus
on his strategy for moving toward socialism, and with ample justification; nonetheless
Marx did provide us with fundamental insights into class society that have held true to
this day. Marx's enduring relevance lies in his indictment of capitalism which continues to wreak havoc in the lives of most.
While capitalism's cheerleaders have attempted to hide its sordid underbelly, Marx's description of capitalism as the
sorcerer's dark power is even more apt in light of contemporary historical and economic conditions. Rather than
jettisoning Marx, decentering the role of capitalism, and discrediting class analysis,
radical educators must continue to engage Marx's oeuvre and extrapolate from it that
which is useful pedagogically, theoretically, and , most importantly, politically in light of the
challenges that confront us. The urgency which animates Amin's call for a collective socialist vision
necessitates, as we have argued, moving beyond the particularism and liberal pluralism that informs
the ‘politics of difference.’ It also requires challenging the questionable assumptions
that have come to constitute the core of contemporary ‘radical’ theory, pedagogy and politics.
In terms of effecting change, what is needed is a cogent understanding of the systemic
nature of exploitation and oppression based on the precepts of a radical political economy
approach (outlined above) and one that incorporates Marx's notion of ‘unity in difference’ in which people share widely
common material interests. Such an understanding extends far beyond the realm of theory, for the
manner in which we choose to interpret and explore the social world, the concepts and frameworks we
use to express our sociopolitical understandings, are more than just abstract categories.
They imply intentions, organizational practices, and political agendas. Identifying class
analysis as the basis for our understandings and class struggle as the basis for political transformation
implies something quite different than constructing a sense of political agency around
issues of race, ethnicity, gender, etc. Contrary to ‘Shakespeare's assertion that a rose by any other name
would smell as sweet,’ it should be clear that this is not the case in political matters. Rather, in politics ‘the
essence of the flower lies in the name by which it is called’ (Bannerji, 2000, p. 41). The task for
progressives today is to seize the moment and plant the seeds for a political agenda that
is grounded in historical possibilities and informed by a vision committed to overcoming exploitative
conditions. These seeds, we would argue, must be derived from the tree of radical political
economy. For the vast majority of people today—people of all ‘racial classifications or identities, all
genders and sexual orientations’—the common frame of reference arcing across ‘difference’, the
‘concerns and aspirations that are most widely shared are those that are rooted in the common experience
of everyday life shaped and constrained by political economy’ (Reed, 2000, p. xxvii). While postMarxist advocates of the politics of ‘difference’ suggest that such a stance is outdated, we
would argue that the categories which they have employed to analyze ‘the social’ are now losing
their usefulness, particularly in light of actual contemporary ‘social movements.’ All over the globe, there
are large anti-capitalist movements afoot. In February 2002, chants of ‘Another World Is Possible’ became
the theme of protests in Porto Allegre. It seems that those people struggling in the streets haven’t read
about T.I.N.A., the end of grand narratives of emancipation, or the decentering of
capitalism. It seems as though the struggle for basic survival and some semblance of human dignity in the mean
streets of the dystopian metropoles doesn’t permit much time or opportunity to read the heady proclamations emanating
from seminar rooms. As E. P. Thompson (1978, p. 11) once remarked, sometimes ‘experience walks in without knocking
at the door, and announces deaths, crises of subsistence, trench warfare, unemployment, inflation, genocide.’ This, of
course, does
not mean that socialism will inevitably come about, yet a sense of its nascent
promise animates current social movements. Indeed, noted historian Howard Zinn (2000, p. 20) recently
pointed out that after years of single-issue organizing (i.e. the politics of difference), the WTO and
other anti-corporate capitalist protests signaled a turning point in the ‘history of
movements of recent decades,’ for it was the issue of ‘class’ that more than anything ‘bound
everyone together.’ History, to paraphrase Thompson (1978, p. 25) doesn’t seem to be following Theory's script.
Our vision is informed by Marx's historical materialism and his revolutionary socialist humanism, which must not be
a socialist humanist vision remains
crucial, whose fundamental features include the creative potential of people to challenge
collectively the circumstances that they inherit. This variant of humanism seeks to give expression to the
conflated with liberal humanism. For left politics and pedagogy,
pain, sorrow and degradation of the oppressed, those who labor under the ominous and ghastly cloak of ‘globalized’
capital. It calls for the transformation of those conditions that have prevented the bulk of humankind from fulfilling its
potential. It vests its hope for change in the development of critical consciousness and social
agents who make history, although not always in conditions of their choosing. The political goal of socialist
humanism is, however, ‘not a resting in difference’ but rather ‘the emancipation of difference at the level of human
mutuality and reciprocity.’ This would be a step forward for the ‘discovery or creation of our real differences which can only
in the end be explored in reciprocal ways’ (Eagleton, 1996, p. 120). Above all else,
the enduring relevance of a
radical socialist pedagogy and politics is the centrality it accords to the interrogation of
capitalism. We can no longer afford to remain indifferent to the horror and savagery committed by capitalist's barbaric
machinations. We need to recognize that capitalist democracy is unrescuably contradictory
in its own self-constitution. Capitalism and democracy cannot be translated into one another without profound
efforts at manufacturing empty idealism. Committed Leftists must unrelentingly cultivate a
democratic socialist vision that refuses to forget the ‘wretched of the earth,’ the children of the damned and the
victims of the culture of silence—a task which requires more than abstruse convolutions and striking ironic poses in the
agnostic arena of signifying practices. Leftists
must illuminate the little shops of horror that lurk beneath
challenge the true ‘evils’ that are manifest in the tentacles of global
capitalism's reach. And, more than this, Leftists must search for the cracks in the edifice of
globalized capitalism and shine light on those fissures that give birth to alternatives.
Socialism today, undoubtedly, runs against the grain of received wisdom, but its vision of a
vastly improved and freer arrangement of social relations beckons on the horizon. Its
unwritten text is nascent in the present even as it exists among the fragments of history and the shards of
‘globalization’s’ shiny façade; they must
distant memories. Its potential remains untapped and its promise needs to be redeemed.
Class is a key starting point—not to obscure intersecting inequalities,
but to historicize them and address the engines of mass oppression
Taylor 11 [Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, on the editorial board of the International Socialist Review and a doctoral
student in African American Studies at Northwestern University; “Race, class and Marxism,” SocialistWorker.org,
http://socialistworker.org/2011/01/04/race-class-and-marxism]
Marxists believe that the potential for that kind of unity is dependant on battles and struggles against racism today. Without a commitment
by revolutionary organizations in the here and now to the fight against racism, working-class unity will never be achieved and the
revolutionary potential of the working class will never be realized. Yet despite all the evidence of this commitment to fighting racism over
many decades, Marxism
has been maligned as, at best, "blind" to combating racism and, at worst,
"incapable" of it. For example, in an article published last summer, popular commentator and self-described "antiracist" Tim Wise summarized the critique of "left activists" that he later defines as
Marxists. He writes: [L]eft activists often marginalize people of color by operating from a framework of extreme class reductionism,
which holds that the "real" issue is class, not race, that "the only color that matters is green," and that issues like racism are mere "identity
politics," which should take a backseat to promoting class-based universalism and programs to help working people. This reductionism, by
ignoring the way that even middle class and affluent people of color face racism and color-based discrimination (and by presuming that lowincome folks of color and low-income whites are equally oppressed, despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary) reinforces white denial,
privileges white perspectivism and dismisses the lived reality of people of color. Even more, as we'll see, it ignores perhaps the most
important political lesson regarding the interplay of race and class: namely, that the biggest reason why there is so little working-class
consciousness and unity in the Untied States (and thus, why class-based programs to uplift all in need are so much weaker here than in the
rest of the industrialized world), is precisely because of racism and the way that white racism has been deliberately inculcated among white
working folks. Only by confronting that directly (rather than sidestepping it as class reductionists seek to do) can we ever hope to build
cross-racial, class based coalitions. In other words, for the policies favored by the class reductionist to work--be they social democrats or
Marxists--or even to come into being, racism and white supremacy must be challenged directly. Here, Wise
accuses Marxism
of: "extreme class reductionism," meaning that Marxists allegedly think that class is more
important than race; reducing struggles against racism to "mere identity politics"; and
requiring that struggles against racism should "take a back seat" to struggles over
economic issues. Wise also accuses so-called "left activists" of reinforcing "white denial" and
"dismiss[ing] the lived reality of people of color"--which, of course, presumes Left activists
and Marxists to all be white. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - What do Marxists actually say? Marxists argue
that capitalism is a system that is based on the exploitation of the many by the few.
Because it is a system based on gross inequality, it requires various tools to divide the
majority--racism and all oppressions under capitalism serve this purpose. Moreover, oppression is
used to justify and "explain" unequal relationships in society that enrich the minority that live off the majority's labor. Thus, racism
developed initially to explain and justify the enslavement of Africans--because they were less than
human and undeserving of liberty and freedom. Everyone accepts the idea that the oppression of slaves was rooted
in the class relations of exploitation under that system. Fewer recognize that under capitalism,
wage slavery is the pivot around which all other inequalities and oppressions turn.
Capitalism used racism to justify plunder, conquest and slavery, but as Karl Marx pointed out, it also used racism to divide and rule--to pit
one section of the working class against another and thereby blunt class consciousness.
To claim, as Marxists do, that racism
is a product of capitalism is not to deny or diminish its importance or impact in American society. It
is simply to explain its origins and the reasons for its perpetuation. Many on the left today talk about
class as if it is one of many oppressions, often describing it as "classism." What people are really referring to as "classism" is elitism or
snobbery, and not the fundamental organization of society under capitalism. Moreover, it
is popular today to talk about
various oppressions, including class, as intersecting. While it is true that oppressions
can reinforce and compound each other, they are born out of the material relations
shaped by capitalism and the economic exploitation that is at the heart of capitalist
society. In other words, it is the material and economic structure of society that gave rise to a range of ideas and ideologies to justify,
explain and help perpetuate that order. In the United States, racism is the most important of those ideologies. Despite the widespread
Marx himself was well aware of the centrality of race under
capitalism. While Marx did not write extensively on the question of slavery and its racial impact in societies specifically, he did
write about the way in which European capitalism emerged because of its pilfering, rape and destruction, famously writing: The
discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the
aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa
into a warren for the commercial hunting of Black skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of
capitalist production. He also recognized the extent to which slavery was central to the world economy. He wrote: Direct slavery
beliefs to the contrary of his critics, Karl
is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no
modern industry. It is slavery that has given the colonies their value; it is the colonies that have created world trade, and it is world trade
that is the pre-condition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance. Without slavery North
America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe out North America from the map of the
world, and you will have anarchy--the complete decay of modern commerce and civilization. Cause slavery to disappear and you will have
wiped America off the map of nations. Thus slavery, because it is an economic category, has always existed among the institutions of the
peoples. Modern nations have been able only to disguise slavery in their own countries, but they have imposed it without disguise upon the
New World. Thus, there is a fundamental understanding of the centrality of slave labor in the national and international economy. But what
about race? Despite the dearth of Marx's own writing on race in particular, one might look at Marx's correspondence and deliberations on
the American Civil War to draw conclusions as to whether Marx was as dogmatically focused on purely economic issues as his critics make
him out be. One must raise the question: If Marx was reductionist, how is his unabashed support and involvement in abolitionist struggles in
England explained? If
Marx was truly an economic reductionist, he might have surmised that
slavery and capitalism were incompatible, and simply waited for slavery to whither away.
W.E.B. Du Bois in his Marxist tome Black Reconstruction, quotes at length a letter penned by Marx as the head of the International
Workingmen's Association, written to Abraham Lincoln in 1864 in the midst of the Civil War: The contest for the territories which opened the
epoch, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the immigrant or be prostituted by the
tramp of the slaver driver? When an oligarchy of 300,000 slave holders dared to inscribe for the first time in the annals of the world
"Slavery" on the banner of armed revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had
first sprung up, whence the first declaration of the rights of man was issued...when on the very spots counter-revolution...maintained
"slavery to be a beneficial institution"...and cynically proclaimed property in man 'the cornerstone of the new edifice'...then the working
classes of Europe understood at once...that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy war of property against
labor... They consider it an earnest sign of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working
class, to lead his country through the matchless struggles for the rescue of the enchained race and the Reconstruction of a social order.
Not only was Marx personally opposed to slavery and actively organized against it, but
he theorized that slavery and the resultant race discrimination that flowed from it were not just
problems for the slaves themselves, but for white workers who were constantly under the threat of losing work to slave labor.
This did not mean white workers were necessarily sympathetic to the cause of the slaves--most of them were not. But Marx was not
addressing the issue of consciousness, but objective factors when he wrote in Capital, "In the United States of America, every independent
movement of the workers was paralyzed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white
skin where in the Black it is branded." Moreover, Marx understood the dynamics of racism in a modern sense as well--as a means by which
workers who had common, objective interests with each other could also become mortal enemies because of subjective, but nevertheless
real, racist and nationalist ideas. Looking at the tensions between Irish and English workers, with a nod toward the American situation
between Black and white workers, Marx wrote: Every industrial and commercial center in England possesses a working class divided into
two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who
lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he feels himself a member of the ruling nation and so turns himself into a tool of the
aristocrats and capitalists of his country against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social and
national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude is much the same as that of the "poor whites" to the "niggers" in the former slave
states of the USA. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker at once the accomplice and
stupid tool of the English rule in Ireland. This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in
short by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class,
despite its organization. It is the secret by which the capitalist maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it. Out of this quote, one
can see a Marxist theory of how racism operated in contemporary society, after slavery was ended. Marx was highlighting three things: first,
that capitalism
promotes economic competition between workers; second, that the ruling class
uses racist ideology to divide workers against each other; and finally, that when one group of
workers suffer oppression, it negatively impacts the entire class.
Class focus is absolutely necessary to combat exclusion—the
affirmatives politics aims towards reconciliation and cultural
inclusion—class antagonism strives for annihilation. Examining
isolated aspects of identity at the expense of class obscures the way
class structures other antagonisms into chains of meaning.
Zizek 12, senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia,
international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities and a professor of philosophy and psychoanalysis at the
European Graduate School
(Slavoj, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, p.32-4)
The first thing to note here is that it takes two to fight a culture war: culture is also the dominant
ideological topic of the “enlightened” liberals whose politics is focused on the fight
against sexism, racism, and fundamentalism, and for multicultural tolerance. The key question is thus:
why has “culture” emerged as our central life-world category? With regard to religion, we no longer
“really believe,” we simply follow (some of the) religious rituals and mores as part of our respect for the “lifestyle” of the
community to which we belong (non-believing Jews obeying kosher rules “out of respect for tradition,” etcetera). “I dont
really believe in it, it s just part of my culture” seems to be the predominant mode of the disavowed or displaced belief
characteristic of our times. Perhaps, then, the “non-fundamentalist” notion of “culture” as distinguished from “real” religion,
art, and so on, is in its very core the name for the field of disowned or impersonal beliefs—“culture” as the name for all
those things we practice without really believing in them, without “taking them seriously.” The second thing to note is how,
while professing their solidarity with the poor, liberals encode their culture war with an
opposed class message. More often than not, their fight for multicultural tolerance and
womens rights marks the counter-position to the alleged intolerance, fundamentalism,
and patriarchal sexism of the “lower classes” One way to unravel this confusion is to
focus on the mediating terms whose function is to obfuscate the true lines of
division. The way the term “modernization” has been used in the recent ideological offensive is exemplary here: first,
an abstract opposition is constructed between “modernizers” (those who endorse global capitalism
in all its aspects, from the economic to the cultural) and “traditionalists” (those who resist globalization). Into this
category of those-who-resist is then thrown everyone from traditional conservatives and populists to the “Old Left” (those
who continue to advocate the welfare state, trade unions, and so on). This categorization obviously does capture
an aspect of social reality. Recall the coalition between the Church and trade unions in Germany in early 2003,
which prevented the legalization of Sunday opening for shops. However, it is not enough to say that this
“cultural difference” traverses the entire social field, cutting across different strata and classes; it is also
inadequate to say that it can be combined in different ways with other oppositions (so that we get conservative “traditional
values” resisting global capitalist “modernization,” or moral conservatives who fully endorse capitalist globalization). In
short, it is useless to claim that this “cultural difference” is one in a series of antagonisms
operative in contemporary social processes. The failure of this opposition to function as
the key to the social totality means not only that it should be articulated with other
differences. It means that it is “abstract,” and the wager of Marxism is that there is one
antagonism (class struggle) which overdetermines all the others and which is as such the
“concrete universal” of the entire field. The term “overdetermination” is here used in its
precise Althusserian sense: it does not mean that class struggle is the ultimate referent and
horizon of meaning of all other struggles; it means that class struggle is the
structuring principle that allows us to account for the very “inconsistent” plurality
of ways in which other antagonisms can be articulated into “chains of
equivalences” For example, the feminist struggle can be articulated into a chain with the
progressive struggle for emancipation, or it can (as it certainly often does) function as an
ideological tool with which the upper-middle classes assert their superiority over the
“patriarchal and intolerant” lower classes. The point is not only that the feminist struggle
can be articulated in different ways with the class antagonism, but that the class
antagonism is, as it were, doubly inscribed here: it is the specific constellation of the class
struggle itself that explains why the feminist struggle was appropriated by the upper
classes. ( The same goes for racism: it is the dynamics of class struggle itself that
explain why open racism is more prevalent among the lowest strata of white
workers.) Class struggle is here “concrete universality” in the strict Hegelian sense: in
relating to its otherness (other antagonisms), it relates to itself, it (over)determines the way it
relates to other struggles. The third thing to underline is the fundamental difference
between feminist, anti-racist, anti-sexist and other such struggles and the class struggle. In
the first case, the goal is to translate antagonism into difference (the peaceful coexistence of
sexes, religions, ethnic groups), while the goal of the class struggle is precisely the opposite, to
turn class differences into class antagonisms. The point of subtraction is to reduce the
overall complex structure to its antagonistic minimal difference . What the series racegender-class obfuscates is the different logic of the political space in the case of class:
while anti-racist and anti-sexist struggles are guided by a striving for the full recognition
of the other, the class struggle aims at overcoming and subduing, annihilating even,
the other—even if not a direct physical annihilation, it aims at wiping out the others socio-political
role and function. In other words, while it is logical to say that antiracism wants all races to be
allowed to freely assert and to realize their cultural, political, and economic strivings, it is
obviously meaningless to say that the aim of the proletarian class struggle is to
allow the bourgeoisie to fully assert its identity and realize its goals . In the one case,
we have a horizontal logic of the recognition of different identities, while in the other we
have the logic of the struggle with an antagonist. The paradox here is that it is populist
fundamentalism that retains this logic of antagonism, while the liberal left follows the
logic of recognition of difference, of defusing antagonisms into coexisting
differences. In their very form, conservative-populist grassroots campaigns took over the old leftist-radical stance of
popular mobilization and struggle against upper-class exploitation. Insofar as, in the US two-party system, red designates
Republicans and blue Democrats, and insofar as populist fundamentalists (of course) vote Republican, the old antiCommunist slogan “Better dead than red!” now acquires a new and ironic meaning—the irony residing in the unexpected
continuity between the “red” attitude of the old-style leftist grassroots mobilization and the new Christian fundamentalist
populism.
Alt – HM/Education Key
The alternative is historical materialism - it provides an effective
starting point for global revolution – our use of the academic sphere
as an organizing space for anti-capitalist knowledge is able to
produce global change – you should reject any permutation as it
forfeits totality in favor of diluted knowledge incapable of achieving
revolution
(Katz 2003) ADAM KATZ, adjunct English instructor at Onondaga Community College
in Syracuse, NY. He received his Ph.D. in English literature from Syracuse. “The
University and Revolutionary Practice: A Letter toward a Leninist Pedagogy” 2003, pg
237-239
Can we do otherwise? Other, that is, than reproducing the student as a passive consumer of knowledge? (This passivity is not
as related to how much the student speaks and/or participates in class as it is to his/her access to the means of production. Traditionally
the student is set in advance along a trajectory leading inexorably toward the "job" and "success," that is, toward subject positions "out
there" waiting for her.) I think we can, but only
if we foreground the subjectivities that construct the
"student" and "teacher" as effects of the system of social relations (which, in Althusser's phrase, is
"present in its effects"), as positions within the relations of production and reproduction, and as
"bearers" of the antagonistic and contradictory interests within which we are inscribed.
The radical instructor's function is to effect a continuous demystification of the
positions taken up in the classroom, by teacher and students alike, in terms of their materiality, their
historicity, and their socially constructed nature. The teacher, then, is not simply to validate
and strengthen the students positions (which is to validate and strengthen their subordmatIon), but to
pressure and critique those positions in relation to what they presuppose and conceal,
and those interests they support and/or contest. The teacher is to take up a position
similar to that of the revolutionary vanguard as proposed by Lenin, to engage With the
positions and "opinions" of the students not on the level of "agree"/"disagree/'
"correct"/"incorrect," but as material forces With historically determinate effects. Since the
classroom, like any cultural space, is one of contradiction and antagonism, the teacher is not to
downplay and conceal these antagonisms, but to make them concrete in material
practices, as reproductions" of those positions held in the relations of production and in
the struggles over their reproduction. Lenin understood that a single "theoretical" difference on
an apparently minor point could in fact be a site of antagonistic interests, of irreconcilable
differences that would become concrete in times of crisis. As teachers , we should strive
for that precision in drawing and clarifying distinctions, and in relating them to the
unevenness and contradictoriness of global capitalist-imperialist relations. At the same time, the
teacher IS to stand at the" extreme" end of students' statements and positions that bear some emancipatory potential, and, by taking them
to their "logical" conclusions, to pressure and enable these students to move beyond the structural limitations of such positions and
the teacher is taking
up a position of political leadership in the class struggle taking place in the classroom,
critiquing reactionary and reformist discourses and strengthening revolutionary
ones . This, in addition, "invites" the student to critique the Instructor in this role, to push the "leader" along
the path she had originally pointed out, and sometimes even to "lead" the "leaders." Such a teacher
must acknowledge the rather large and special claims his/her students have on him/her. It is rather commonplace, in liberal
and even socialist discourses to "criticize" the "authoritarianism" of Lenin's conception of the
party, In fact, nothing could be less authoritarian, because such a position attempts to
represent Itself as an effect of the system of social relations-that is, as material and
contradictory, subject to change and revision. It is a position not to be Judged in terms of
its "inherent" or "exchange" value, but in terms of Its effects, effects not limited to the
statements towards even more emancipatory, radical, and revolutionary subjectivities. This means that
classroom itself, but potentially interpreted and calculated more broadly-for instance, in terms
of what can or cannot be said, what reading practices are legitimated, what hiring
practices employed, what discourses and subjectivities are being produced and might be
taken up, even if not within the space of a semester. The aim, finally, is not to enable
students simply to "talk," or to have more "confidence," but to be ready and able to
engage in struggles over the production of knowledge. This includes challenging teachers' authority
(and their use of it), breaking with established decorum if necessary, "disrupting" "normal" classroom discussions and practices with their
"own" concerns and questions, and much more. This
involves a democratization of knowledge in the
deepest possible sense. It is not, as in liberal classrooms, a question of "everyone" having his/her
"say," but of directing attention to those power relations embodied in discourses in such
a way as to enable students to take responsibility for their education in terms of its social
ends. Real democracy must presuppose not only equal access to the means of
production in the conventional sense, but also to the means of knowledge production.
The student can then be drawn consciously into the process of (the struggles over) the
construction of social relations and social purposes. The teacher, meanwhile, earns her
authority in direct proportion to her effectively in representing herself as the bearer of
these interests, which includes both her capacity to include students within the process
of their construction and her ability to foreground and thereby transform into an enabling
condition the contradiction between her institutionalized authority (as university professor) and the
ideological and theoretical authoritativeness she tries to represent (in which case the university is
read as a site of struggle and contradiction in its own right, and not merely as "connected" to other, implicitly more "real" sites). A
revolution in or of knowledge can take place only in conjunction with revolutionary
uprisings at other sites . In the university , we can do no more than engage in struggle,
take up positions, and make some gains. We can also try to relate our practices with
those of others who are struggling elsewhere, sometimes leading, sometimes following; finally, we can try
to look beyond the present to other possible modes of knowledge production.
Contradictions constitute, reproduce, and subvert the academy, though. It is not only one of
the heaviest sites of social "investment" (in terms of its "moral" and "ideological" "value," as well as its economic
significance) but also one of the few spaces in our society where opposition and critique (in the
forms of marxism and feminism, in particular) can take on articulate form and be given a force that
commands "respect," and even "fear." Such contradictions must be theorized as the
grounds on which we mark out the possibility of such work. Rather than producing some
transhistorical valorization or denigration of the "intellectual" or of "theory," our focus
should be here, on the possibilities of leadership in the site of the university, on the
relation, between class struggle in "theory" (in Althusser's - following Lenin’s - sense) and social
revolution. We should examine the question of pedagogy as a site for the articulation of
these questions in their relations, and in their relation to the conditions of possibility for
a heightening and waging of class struggle on a global scale .
Alt – Decarceration
The alternative is decarceration – it resolves instances of gendered
violence throughout the capitalist prison industrial complex and
encourages women’s societal inclusion while combating capitalism
Reynolds ’08 (Marylee Reynolds, The War on Drugs, Prison Building, and
Globalization: Catalysts for the Global Incarceration of Women, NWSA Journal, Vol. 20,
No. 2, Women, the Criminal Justice System, and Incarceration: Processes of Power,
Silence and Resistance (Summer, 2008), pp. 72-95,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40071275) - NR
The penal policy of mass incarceration needs to end. Mass incarcera- tion is not only a civil and
human rights issue, but it is also a women's issue. Women's incarceration rates continue to climb ,
but of the over two million people behind bars in the United States, the majority of these people are males. Left behind to
care for themselves and their families are the wives, mothers, daughters, partners, and sisters of incarcerated men.
Abuse, violence, racism, isolation, overcrowding, and neglect are common to
prisons worldwide. Prisons are costly to build and maintain, fail to rehabilitate, and have
wide-ranging consequences for imprisoned women, their families, and
communities (see Mauer and Chesney-Lind 2002; Richie 2002). A policy of decarceration would
allow nonviolent female drug offend- ers to serve their sentences in the
community , utilizing community- corrections options. As a first step to decarceration, states
could be petitioned to pass a resolution not to build any more prisons , in effect
establishing a moratorium on prisons (Sudbury 2004b). Decarceration is a policy of inclusion; it
allows women to be active citizens, to have their needs addressed in a community
setting, and to be with their chil- dren and families. It is well-documented in the literature that a
mother's incarceration affects their children and families (see Bush-Baskette 2000; Enos 2001). Also, allowing foreignborn drug couriers to be deported to their home country for community sentences would be cost-effective and humane.
The United States could assist other nations in developing their community-based correctional services (Joseph 2006).
Alt – Radical Imagination
The alternative is a conceptualization of a real utopia – a radical
imagination of an anti-capitalist social order which accounts for its
material an unintended consequences
Wright ’12 (Erik Olin Wright, Transforming Capitalism through Real Utopias, American
Sociological Review, 26 December 2012) - NR
In what follows I propose a power- centered framework for addressing these issues
anchored in the idea of “real utopias.” At its core, this proposal revolves around
transforming power relations within the econ- omy in ways that deepen and
broaden the possibility of meaningful democracy. I will begin by briefly discussing two
foundational propositions shared by all varieties of critical and emancipatory social science. The idea of real
utopias is one response to the intellectual challenge posed by these propositions .
FOUNDATIONS All varieties of social science that have critical and emancipatory aspirations, whether
they are anchored in values and beliefs of the left or the right, share two foundational positions:
Foundational Proposition of Critical Social Science: Many forms of human suffering and many
deficits in human flourishing are the result of existing institutions and social
structures. Foundational Proposition of Emancipatory Social Science: Transforming existing institutions and social structures in the right way has the potential to substantially
reduce human suffering and expand the possibili- ties for human flourishing. The
first proposition affirms the very general idea that significant aspects of human
suffering and deficits in human flourishing are not simply the result of human nature, acts of God,
or vari- ations in people’s attributes, but are the result of social causes. Stated in this abstract way, this
proposition is accepted by nearly all sociolo- gists, whether or not they explicitly identify with any of the traditions of critical
sociology, and is thus not controversial. The proposition becomes very controversial, of course, when concrete claims are
made about the specific mechanisms that generate these harms .
Writers have proposed many social
sources of harms: the core structures of the capitalist economy ; unintended effects of the
welfare state ; enduring social and cultural structures of racism and sex- ism ; educational
institutions; changes in family structures; and particular kinds of technology. A great deal of sociological research attempts
to identify these sources of harm and adjudicate among rival arguments. The second proposition should not be considered a simple corollary of the first .
It could be the case that various causal processes connected to capitalism explain much human suf- fering, and yet any deliberate
attempt at transforming the fundamental structures of capitalism would only
make things worse. The cure could be worse than the disease due to unintended and uncontrollable effects of
attempts at deliberate social transformation. This is essentially Hayek’s (1988) argument in his attack on radical
reformers. Following a long tradition of classical conservative thought, Hayek makes two central claims (although not
the negative unintended consequences of deliberate
social change are generally greater than the positive unintended consequences;
second, the larger the attempted social trans- formation, the bigger the negative
unintended consequences are likely to be .1 Taken together, these arguments suggest that even if
stated in precisely these terms): first,
one accepts the first proposition, in general the second proposition should be rejected. The emancipatory proposition
constitutes the “fatal conceit” of intellectuals, in Hayek’s (1988:27) words, that “man is able to shape the world around him
according to his wishes.” While I disagree with Hayek’s pessimism and embrace the foundational proposition of
The folk aphorism
“the road to hell is paved with good intentions,” has too many historical examples
to be ignored, many of them ani- mated by emancipatory aspirations. The idea of
emancipatory social science, I do not think such arguments can be dismissed out of hand.
real utopias is a way of thinking about alternatives and transformations that
responds to these concerns. The expression “real utopia” is meant to be a
provocation, for “utopia” and “real” do not comfortably go together. Thomas Moore
coined the word utopia in the early-sixteenth century as a kind of pun, combining the Greek for place—topos—with two
Utopia is thus both a
nowhere place and a good place. It is the fan- tasy of a perfect world that fully
embodies our moral ideals . When politicians want to sum- marily discredit a policy proposal without having
to provide serious arguments, they call it utopian . Realists reject such fantasies as a distraction
from the serious business of mak- ing practical improvements in existing institutions. The idea of real utopias embraces this tension between dreams and
practice: utopia implies developing visions of alternatives to dominant
institutions that embody our deepest aspirations for a world in which all people
have access to the conditions to live flourish- ing lives; real means proposing
alternatives attentive to problems of unintended conse- quences, self-destructive
dynamics, and diffi- cult dilemmas of normative trade-offs.2 A real utopian holds
on to emancipatory ideals with- out embarrassment or cynicism but remains fully
cognizant of the deep complexities and contradictions of realizing those ideals .
prefixes that sound the same in English—ou meaning “not” and eu meaning “good.”
The exploration of real utopias is an inte- gral part of a broad agenda of an emancipatory social science that includes four
basic tasks: 1. Specifying the moral principles for judging social institutions. 2. Using these moral principles as the
standards for diagnosis and critique of existing institutions. 3. Developing an account of viable alternatives in response to
the critique. 4. Proposing a theory of transformation for real- izing those alternatives . First ,
how one thinks
about alternatives depends in part on one’s conceptualization of the idea of
“social system.” One metaphor for thinking about social systems depicts them as analogous to an organism
whose parts are tightly integrated into a functioning whole. There is some degree of freedom and varia- bility in how the
parts function, but basically they constitute a totality of functional interde- pendency. If you remove critical parts of the
whole or try to dramatically transform them, the whole disintegrates. An alternative metaphor is that a social system is
more like an ecosystem. Think of society like a pond. A pond contains many species of fish, insects, and plants.
Sometimes an alien species is introduced to an ecosystem and it thrives; sometimes it does not. Some ecosystems are
quite fragile and easily dis- rupted; others can tolerate quite significant intrusions of invasive species without being
If you think of society as an ecosystem, it still is the case that everything is interdependent, but interactions do not constitute a tightly functionalized
totality. This opens up a different way of imagining alternatives. One way to
transform an ecosys- tem is to introduce an alien species that ini- tially finds a
niche and then gradually displaces certain other species. The idea of real utopias
as a way of transforming a soci- ety is more in line with the ecosystem view of
society than with the organismic view. The second general comment about alternatives concerns two contrasting ways of thinking about how to make the world a
better place—ameliorative reforms and real utopian transformations. Ameliorative
reforms look at existing institutions, identify their flaws, and propose
improvements that can be enacted. These improvements matter—they reduce harms and
enhance flourishing—but they are limited to proposals that directly act on exist- ing
structures and move one step beyond. Real utopias, in contrast, envision the
contours of an alternative social world that embodies emancipatory ideals and
then look for social innovation s we can create in the world as it is that move us toward that
destination. Some- times, this turns out to be the same as an ame- liorative reform, but often ameliorative
reforms do not constitute building blocks of an emancipatory alternative . Consider, for
seriously affected.
example, affirmative action policies around race. Affirmative action is one of the critical policies for combating the
pernicious effects of ongoing racism, not merely the legacies of racism in the past. But affirmative action is not, I would
argue, a building block of a world of racial justice and emancipation. It is a nec- essary means to move toward such a
To embrace real utopias in
this way is not to reject ameliorative reforms. In the practical world of struggling
to create the social condi- tions for human flourishing it is important to be a
pragmatic idealist. Often this means muddling through with patchwork programs
that do not prefigure emancipatory alterna- tives. Sometimes this is the best one can do. But
world, but it is not itself a constituent element of the alternative that we seek.
sometimes it is possible to move strug- gles for equality, democracy, and sustainabil- ity beyond such narrow constraints
and create institutions that are constitutive of a more profound alternative.
Alt – Psychoanalytic Penology
The alternative is an epistemological reorientation of penology
through materialistic psychoanalysis which exposes the
sociocultural underpinnings of punitive policy – the alt is uniquely
necessary in the current recession as dire economic conditions make
a shift from capitalist ideologies key now
Cheliotis ’13 (Leonidas K Cheliotis, University of Edinburgh, Neoliberal capitalism
and middle-class punitiveness: Bringing Erich Fromm’s ‘materialistic psychoanalysis’ to
penology, Punishment & Society, Volume 15 issue 3, 17 June 2013)-NR
With the global ramifications of the ‘credit crunch’ of 2008 ongoing, Frommian scholarship is especially germane. Times of economic recession are precisely the
instances when capitalist elites in office may be most tempted to symbolically manipulate dangers such as violent street crime, and to deploy state coercion as
through the exercise of penal violence, in order to distract and relieve mounting public anger and insecurity, not least because socio-economic policies driving such
the political urgency that the myth of crime and the
reality of state punitiveness assume against the back- ground of financial crises is itself
reflective of the degree to which different courses, penal as well as socio-economic, have already become
possible. That is to say, to the extent that political exploitation of crime and punitiveness
heightens during periods of recession, it is because these are the times when the
people are most likely to reconsider and even seek to alter the conditions of their relationship
with governing capitalist elites, from their support for state punitiveness as it stands,
to their toleration of unjust socio-economic policies.9 This being the case, a penology which
aspires to put a halt to the excesses of the penal system and to promote
progressive grassroots reforms in society as a whole needs to intervene promptly
in the field of symbolic politics and engage directly in public debate. The starting
point of such intervention is to reveal the hidden func- tions of state punitiveness,
and this in turn may reorient public attention hitherto unduly paid to issues of crime and punishment towards
politico-economic change . To the extent that the primary duty of the penologist becomes
to expose, explain and thereby help correct the fallacies underpinning punitive
attitudes and policies, Frommian scholarship can offer guidance and inspiration in at least six ways. First, it sheds
light on the psychological roots and functions of illegitimate forms of social
arrangements, without knowledge of which any account must be incomplete. It does so, second,
anger and insecurity may nonetheless be maintained. Yet
by refraining from fatalistically blaming human nature, at the same time as avoiding the alienating castigation of individuals or groups for their complicity in
. Attention is drawn, instead, to the social, cultural, political and
economic factors under the influence of which all humans may come to hold attitudes
and engage in actions they would otherwise reject. Third, in seeking to account for the
ways in which illegitimate states of affairs come to assume appearances of legitimacy,
Frommian scholarship does not shy away from including intellectuals and the knowledge
they produce and disseminate in the array of fields to be scrutinized (see, for example, Fromm, 1970). Fourth, both in the sense of a yardstick by
irrational and immoral phenomena
means of which to assess the legitimacy of current states of affairs and as a socio-political ideal type to be actively pursued, Frommian scholarship encourages a
firm commitment to the moral philosophy of humanism, which can bind individuals in harmony without stifling individuality and difference (see further Cheliotis,
it sets an example of how to combine scientific and philosophical endeavours
with civic activism, not just by way of debunking social reality through one’s writings, but
also by directly immer- sing oneself in social movements. Sixth, and finally, commitment to the pursuit of
2010a, 2011b). Fifth,
humanism is fortified with hard-headed realism, whereby illusions are dropped and practical difficulties appreciated. In Fromm’s own words, ‘to hope means to be
ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime’ (Fromm, 1968: 9).
2NC – AT: Alt Fails on Race
Race is a necessary but insufficient point of analysis for
understanding the explosion of law and order policies- even black
politicians and black rights activists centered around law and ordermass unemployment, leverage from corporations, and devastated
budgets made punishment the “economic option”
Mark Jay in 2019 Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara;
Cages and Crises: A Marxist Analysis of Mass Incarceration; Historical Materialism 27.1
(2019) 182–223
If this ‘refashioning’ did not occur, the racial demands of the civil-rights and Black Power
movements would only result in ‘a new black establishment’ .108 Making sense of this
claim requires examining the political-economic context in which black politicians
rose to power . It was then that large industrial firms began to shift their production
operations to the Global South: between 1970 and 1993, the number of transnational corporations (with
headquarters in three or more countries) increased from 7,000 to 37,000, and they controlled the majority of world
trade.109 Capital
flight to, and the creation of export processing zones in, Latin America
and Asia created the conditions for many workers from these countries to come to the
US: the number of foreign-born Americans increased from 9.6 million in 1970 to 14.1 million in 1980, and many of these
workers replaced recalcitrant black labourers.110 Meanwhile, ‘the recessions of 1969–1970 and 1973–75
forced at least 550,000 black workers permanently out of the job market … By 1978,
only 10.8 million out of 18.1 million black persons over 14 years of age could find
employment.’111 Furthermore, as David Harvey has shown, the 1970s fiscal crisis in New York
City served as a lesson to urban politicians that financial elites were willing to
push cities into bankruptcy rather than extend debt so that municipalities could
fund social programmes. 112 To be sure, many of the main proponents and architects of
the war on crime in the 1960s and ’70s were racist, but this fact should not allow us
to forget the broader situation . In the late ’60s and throughout the ’70s, Keynesian policies failed
to restore corporate profitability and eliminate stagflation, leading political elites to favour
policies that replaced social programmes with cheaper and more effective
punitive programmes (from the standpoint of capital, i.e., creating conditions for restored profitability).
Moreover, crime remained a real problem in the day-to-day lives of working-class people.113
In the early ’70s, a devastating crime wave led New York-based black activists to organise in
support of the draconian Rockefeller drug laws; the local NAACP Citizens’ Mobilization Against
Crime actively called on the government to ‘increase prison terms for muggers, pushers and first
degree murderers’.114 Contemporaneously, in Detroit, where rates of black youth unemployment
soon exceeded 50%, the punitive turn was implemented by Coleman Young, who
became the city’s first black mayor in 1974, having run a campaign centred on the claim
that his Republican opponent, a former police commissioner, was too soft on crime.115 In Young’s
inaugural address he issued ‘forward a warning now to all dope pushers, to all rip-off
artists, to all muggers: It’s time to leave Detroit.’ As Michael Stauch, Jr. has shown, as rates of
crime accelerated in the ’70s, black leaders enthusiastically supported Young’s
self-described ‘all-out war’ on crime . The president of Detroit’s branch of the NAACP insisted
that the group would ‘do everything in its power to support an all-out drive against the
lawlessness that is prevailing.’ For his part, black UAW leader Robert Battle signalled the union’s intention to
aid in the ‘fight against street gangs’. In 1976, local civil-rights groups organised a ‘March Against
Crime’. Thereafter, these organisations formed the ‘Coalition to Resist Crime’ which
‘mobilize[d] civil rights tactics against the perceived crime wave gripping the city.’
Evincing the growing moral and class division within black America, the article
announcing the Coalition read: ‘Coalition is taking aim at crime; Blacks see rights
gains lost to thugs.’116 As this war on crime was waged by the city’s black leaders and an integrated police
department, Pulitzer-Prize winning author Studs Terkel declared that, in Detroit, as around urban America, ‘there’s a
new attitude…. The police are no longer looked upon as a foreign army of
occupation…. It reflects a new respect between the people and the police.’117 As
this post-riot era of racial and civil harmony was being hailed, between 1971 and
1981, the national unemployment rate doubled and the prison population
increased by 45%. 118
2NC – AT: Not Global / No Spillover
Movements are crossing social contexts to articulate shared goals
based on precarity of neoliberal globalization
Glasius 13 – professor of IR @ University of Amsterdamn
(Marlies, “The Global Moment of 2011: Democracy, Social Justice and Dignity,”
Development and Change, online pub)
In this contribution, we argue that post-2010 activisms, ranging from the Arab revolts to the
Occupy movement, the Indignados and anti-austerity protests in Europe, and the
pro-democracy protests in Russia and Mexico, exhibit three kinds of commonalities .
These are a common infrastructure of networks and meetings that facilitate rapid
diffusion ; a generational background shaped both by the precarity of paid work and by
exposure to and participation in global information streams ; and, most fundamentally, a shared
articula- tion of demands and practices. We argue that three interconnected concepts have been at the
core of both demands and the identity of these movements: democracy, social justice and dignity. Flowing from these
three shared val- ues and practices, post-2010
activisms also share a mistrust of institutional
politics and a determination not to become corrupted by power, which run deeper
than in previous generations of activists and which pose an ongoing challenge to their
involvement with formal politics. The diffusion of slogans, repertoires of action and meanings from Sidi Bouzid
(Tunisia) and Cairo to Athens, Madrid, New York and Moscow has been a major feature of the
global wave of movements that started in 2011. Most journalist and academic accounts to date have focused
on diffusion within the Arab world on the one hand, and between the Occupy and Indignant movements on the other hand.
We will focus in this article on the evolution of networks and meeting places, shared context
and, most importantly, the development of a shared articulation of claims across
North– South or East–West divides. An obvious example of the rapid and unintended diffusion of a
symbol is the Guy Fawkes mask, worn by the main character ‘V’ in the comic book series and film of the same name
about a revolutionary bringing down a totalitarian regime, which has been adopted globally by recent social movements. It
was first seen at protests against the Scientology church in various British and North American cities in February 2008,
organized by the global cyber-activist group Anonymous, and inspired cartoons and short video clips on ‘We Are All
Khaled Said’ and other Egyptian activist sites on Facebook (Herrera, 2011). It has since been worn at demonstrations and
Occupy camps in New York, Mexico City and Moscow. Nevertheless, we might question how meaningful this adoption
really is: V is an overtly violent activist and a loner, whereas the vast majority of 2011 activists emphasize non-violent
collective action. The resonance of such a symbol triggers questions about the common- alities of these movements
across contexts as different as Cairo, Madrid, Manhattan and Moscow. If this symbol resonates in different contexts, is it
just because the same movies are watched across the globe, or is it because the movements share some
elements of their ‘diagnostic’ framing, as well as some of their subjective and symbolic reference points?
This is not to say that they constitute a unified and homogeneous actor across a diversity of local and national contexts, but that to some extent, their claims, actions,
subjectivities and values resonate with each other . Understanding these movements requires
attention to affective, cultural and expressive di- mensions of activism and citizenship (McDonald, 2006; Melucci, 1996).
Current movements are ‘better understood in terms of cultural pragmatics and personal
experience than organization building and collective identity’ (McDonald, 2006: 4). In this contribution, we
focus on the central question posed by Biekart and Fowler in their Introduction to this Debate: ‘What is the nature of the
post-2010 activism and who are its key actors?’. The actor question
will be answered not through a list
of groups and networks, or even a discussion of organizational forms, but by focusing on who the
participants understand themselves to be, in terms of what they want and what they practise . The
contribution also tries to give a partial answer to the ‘why now?’ question posed by Biekart and Fowler, discussing both
the prior networks that facilitated diffusion to some extent (although we are emphatically not making a causal claim), and
commonalities in the circumstances in which different activists now find themselves. We argue that post-2010 activisms
common
‘infrastructural resources’ of networks, meetings and exchanges built up over the last decade.
This has facilitated a recognition, celebration and imitation of mobilizations in 2011 across
exhibit three kinds of commonalities, which will be explored in the sections that follow. The first is
superficially very different social, cultural and political contexts. It is this common element,
and their highly visible and often sustained presence in public outdoor spaces — streets, squares and
camps — in 2011 which causes us to refer to ‘the moment of 2011’ as the point at which
these previously more submerged movements gained global visibility. The second
commonality shared by the current generation of activists relates to the impact that processes of
globalization have had on them. This impact is not uniform; it affects each region, each country and each locality in a
particular way. Yet this impact appears to be increasing, as the globalization of economics
(and its crisis), policies, consumption and aspirations deepens. This gives rise to a ‘global
generation’ which is shaped by precarious working conditions on the one hand, and
constant exposure to and participation in global information streams on the other hand. However, the most
fundamental and least noticed commonality, and the one to which we will devote most attention in this
article, lies in the sub- stance of what moves these movements, in their meanings, demands
and attributes. We argue that three interconnected concepts have been at the core of the demands and identity of
these movements: democracy, social justice and dignity. While each has a much longer history, in combination the three
concepts resonate within the upheaval across the world and may constitute an emancipatory horizon. We further argue
that this
set of values, shared by some of the participants in street protests on both sides of the
Mediterranean and from Mexico to Moscow , transcends older understandings of
Western social movements as ‘post-materialist’ (i.e. concerned with values like free- dom, selfexpression and quality of life) and non-Western ones as solely materialist (i.e. concerned with economic
and physical security).1
2NC – AT: Perm
Our only option is to make America ungovernable. There is no time to
waste in broken systems.
Hedges 2/5
[02/05/17, Chris Hedges is a professor at Princeton University in the department of
African American Studies. Hedges is currently a senior fellow at the Nation Institute, and
has taught at Columbia University, New York University, and Princeton University. He
received his B.A. in English Literature from Colgate University and a Master of Divinity
degree from Harvard University. Hedges was also awarded an honorary doctorate from
Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, California. , "Make America
Ungovernable"., ww.truthdig.com/report/print/make_america_ungovernable_20170205]
Donald Trump’s
regime is rapidly reconfiguring the U nited S tates into an authoritarian state. All
forms of dissent will soon be criminalized . Civil liberties will no longer exist. Corporate
exploitation, through the abolition of regulations and laws, will be unimpeded. Global
warming will accelerate. A repugnant nationalism, amplified by government propaganda,
will promote bigotry and racism . Hate crimes will explode. New wars will be launched
or expanded. And, as this happens, those Americans who remain passive will be complicit.
“We don’t have much time,” Kali Akuno, the co-director of Cooperation Jackson and an organizer with the Malcolm X
Grassroots Movement, told me when I reached him by phone in Jackson, Miss. “We are talking two to three months
before this whole [reactionary] initiative is firmly consolidated. And that’s with massive
resistance.” Flurries of executive orders and memorandums are being issued to demolish
the anemic remnants of our bankrupt democracy. Those being placed in power—such as
Betsy DeVos, who if confirmed as secretary of education will defund our system of public
education and expand schools run by the Christian right, and Scott Pruitt, who if confirmed as head of the
Environmental Protection Agency will dismantle it— are agents of destruction . In the
eyes of the Christian fascists, generals, billionaires and conspiracy theorists around
Trump, the laws, the courts and legislative bodies exist only to silence opponents
and swell corporate profits . It is impossible to know how long this transformation will take—it may be longer than the two
or three months Akuno fears—but unless we mobilize quickly to stop the Trump regime the end
result is certain . “The forces around Trump have a plan to roll this [attack on democracy] out,” said Akuno, who was the
coordinator of special projects and external funding for the late Mayor Chokwe Lumumba in Jackson. “They have a strategy.
They have a timeline. They know whom they need to divide and whom they need to
recruit. They are consolidating their base. Those who try and chalk this up to Trump’s pathology
miss the intentionality, the strategic aims and the objectives. We will do ourselves a
great disservice if we underestimate this regime and where it is going.” Stephen Bannon,
the president’s chief counselor, was behind the ban on Muslims entering the United States from seven Muslim-majority
countries—a ban you can expect to see extended if the Trump administration is successful in removing a stay issued by a district court.
He was behind the order to the Department of Homeland Security to draw up lists of Muslim
organizations and individuals in the United States that, in the language of the executive action, have been “radicalized” and
have “provided material support to terrorism-related organizations in countries that pose a threat to the United States.” Such lists will be
used to criminalize Muslim leaders and the institutions and organizations they built. Then,
once the Muslims are dealt with domestically, there will be new Homeland Security lists that will allow the
government to target the press, activists, labor leaders, dissident intellectuals and the
left. It is the beginning of a fascist version of Leon Trotsky’s “permanent
revolution. ” “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too,” Bannon told writer Ronald Radosh in 2013. “I want to bring
everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” The Trump regime’s demented project of
social engineering, which will come wrapped in a Christianized fascism, can be implemented only if it quickly
seizes control of the bureaucratic mechanisms, an action that Max Weber pointed out is the prerequisite
for exercising power in industrial and technocratic societies. Once what the historian Guglielmo Ferrero
calls the “silken threads” of habit, tradition and legality are gone, the “iron chains” of dictatorship will impose social cohesion. “This
problem is not going to be solved in the 2018 elections,” warned Akuno, the author of the organizing
handbook “Let Your Motto Be Resistance” and the former executive director of the New Orleans-based People’s Hurricane Relief Fund.
The democratic apparatus will be completely gutted by then. We
have to look beyond Trump. We have to look at the consolidation on the state level of
these reactionary forces. They are near the threshold of being able to call for a constitutional convention because of the
“That hope is an illusion.
number of governorships and state legislatures where they hold both chambers. They can totally reorder the Constitution, if they even
continue to abide by it, which they may not. We
are facing a serious crisis. I don’t think people grasp the
depth of this because they are focused on the president and not the broader strategy of
these reactionary forces.” “ We have to encourage a broad noncompliance strategy of
ungovernablity ,” Akuno said. “Not complying. Not consenting. We have to struggle on
every front . We have to expect that the courts will not protect us . We are going to
get less and less protection from the police . The slightest act of civil disobedience
will mean jail. We have to mentally prepare for that. We have to build serious organizations, drawing
upon the examples of forces that fought authoritarian regimes in Latin America and Europe.
Either we submit to not having any protection as workers, women, queers, blacks,
Latinos or indigenous or we fight back. These forces [arrayed against us] are not willing to compromise. I hope it
does not come to violence, but we know the proclivities of the society and the forces that run it.” If nonviolent protest is met with violence,
we must never respond with violence. The use of violence, including property destruction, and taunting the police are gifts to the security
and surveillance state. It allows the state to demonize and isolate a mass movement. It drives away the bulk of the population. Violence
against the state is used by the authorities to justify greater forms of control and repression. The corporate state understands and
welcomes the language of force. This is a game the government will always win and we will always lose. If we are perceived as a flagburning, rock-throwing, angry mob that embraces violence, we will be easily crushed. We
can succeed only if we win
the hearts and minds of the wider public and ultimately many of those within the
structures of power, including the police. When violence is used against nonviolent protesters demanding basic forms of justice
it exposes the weakness of the state. It delegitimizes those in power. It prompts a passive population to respond with active support for the
protesters. It creates internal divisions within the structures of power that, as I witnessed during the revolutions in Eastern Europe, paralyze
and defeat those in authority. Martin Luther King Jr. held marches in Birmingham, Ala., rather than Albany, Ga., because he knew
The Trump
regime is populated with blind fanatics. They believe in one truth, which is whatever they proclaim at the moment
(any such declaration may contradict what they said a few hours before). They are possessed with one idea—
conflict. They venerate a demented hypermasculinity that includes a sacralization of
violence, misogyny, a disdain for empathy, and the self-appointed right to engage in
bouts of frenzied rage. These characteristics, they believe, are a sign of masculinity. The highest aesthetic is
militarism, violence and war. Without conflict, without enemies real or imagined, their ideological structures and racism
Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner “Bull” Connor would overreact and discredit the city’s racist structures.
collapse into a heap of contradictions and absurdities. They will attempt to thwart nonviolent, nationwide resistance with force. And they will
attempt to stoke counterviolence, including through the use of agents provocateurs, as a response. If we speak back to them in the
Bannon and his followers on
the “alt-right,” self-declared intellectuals, ferret out facts and formulas that buttress their
peculiar worldview and discard truths that contradict their messianic delusions. They
mouth a few clichés and quote a few philosophers to justify bigotry, chauvinism and
governmental repression. It is propaganda masquerading as ideology. These pseudo-intellectuals are singularly incurious.
language of violence, we will fail. We will be transformed into the monsters we seek to defeat.
They are linguistically, culturally and historically illiterate about the Muslim world, and about most other foreign cultures, yet blithely write off
one-fifth of the world’s population—Muslims—as irredeemable. The
inability of white supremacists like Trump and
recognize the humanity of others springs from their spiritual impoverishment.
They mistake bigotry for honesty and ignorance for innocence. They cannot
separate fantasy from reality. Such people are , as author James Baldwin said, “ moral
monsters.” Evil, for them, is embodied in the dehumanized other . Once the human personification of
evil is eradicated, evil itself is supposed to disappear. Except, of course, that as soon as one group of human
beings is annihilated, another human embodiment of evil rises to take its place.
The Nazis began with Jews. Our fanatics are beginning with Muslims. History has
Bannon to
shown where they will go from here. “The nationalist is by definition an ignoramus,” the Yugoslav writer Danilo Kis said.
“Nationalism is the line of least resistance, the easy way. The nationalist is untroubled, he knows or thinks he knows what his values are,
his, that’s to say national, that’s to say the values of the nation he belongs to, ethical and political; he is not interested in others, they are no
concern of his, hell—it’s other people (other nations, another tribe). They don’t even need investigating. The nationalist sees other people in
his own images—as nationalists.” Like all utopian dreamers they believe their authoritarianism is being implemented for our benefit.
They are like Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, who oversaw the burning of Giordano Bruno at
the stake and who argued that eradicating heretics does them a favor because it saves
them from their own damnation. It is impossible to have a rational dialogue with
people who view reality through the binary lens of black and white—us and them .
They do not recognize the right of dissent. Dissent is at best obstruction and probably treason. Fanatics, in
power, always become inquisitors . The acts of resistance—including the massive street
protests the day after the inauguration and later the demonstrations that grew out of the
ban on Muslims, the Department of Energy’s refusal to give the Trump administration a
list of employees that worked on climate change, acting Attorney General Sally Yates’
refusal to enforce the travel ban and hundreds of State Department staff members’
signing of a memo opposing the immigration restrictions—terrify those around Trump.
These reactionaries do not trust the old elites and their bureaucrats and courtiers, including the press, which Bannon has called “the
opposition party.” Akuno, who supports the appeal for nationwide general strikes, cautioned that such a call might be premature “because
unions don’t know if a general strike is called how many members would comply, given how many voted for Trump.” He also noted that
because the Trump regime is carrying out assaults on so many fronts, resistance will tax
the resources of the left. “This shotgun assault effectively divides the left,” he said. “Do I defend Chicago if, as Trump says, he
puts tanks in the streets or do I go to Standing Rock if I am black? These are the kinds of choices we will be forced to make.” “We are
going to have to bring this society to a standstill,” he said. “We are going to have to disrupt
the flow of commerce. We are going to have to disrupt the nodal points of distribution. We will not only have to
figure out how to get on the highways, but disrupt Amazon.com and UPS. We have to
get workers there, even though they are not unionized, to see these acts as in their longterm interests. And we have to build strong, fortified bases locally and link them together.” Trump loyalists are
counting on enough support from the police, the military, private contractors and the
organs of internal security such as Homeland Security and the FBI, along with newly
empowered white vigilante groups, to physically crush those who defy them. They will
attempt to use fear and even terror to paralyze the population into acquiescence. “It is
not accidental that the Trump regime immediately went after the water protectors
at Standing Rock ,” Akuno said. “Standing Rock forced the wider society to look at itself, its
history and its origins. It raised serious questions. Do we want human civilization to survive? Are we willing to destroy ourselves
for short-term profit? Standing Rock exposed the U.S. colonial project and challenged capitalist
logic. It showed us that we have to make a choice between oil and water. It asked us
which will take priority for human beings .” We have the power to make the country
ungovernable . But we do not have much time. The regime will make it harder and harder to
organize, get into the streets and carry out the nationwide strikes, including within the
federal bureaucracy. Resistance alone, however, is not enough. It must be
accompanied by an alternative vision of a socialist and anti-capitalist society . It
must reject the Democratic Party’s attempt to ride anti-Trump sentiment back into power.
The enemy is, in the end, not Trump or Bannon, but the corporate state. If we do not dismantle corporate power
we will never stop fascism’s seduction of the white working class and
unemployed. “ The evil which you fear becomes a certainty by what you do ,” Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe wrote in his play “Egmont.” Now is the time not to cooperate. Now is the time to
shut down the systems of power. Now is the time to resist. It is our last chance.
The fanatics are moving with lightning speed. So should we.
2NC – AT: No Mindset Shift
People are down for the alt and hate the squo
Jackson 9 – professor of sustainable development at University of
Surrey
(Tim, Prosperity Without Growth, pp. 148-51)
Change is essential. And some mandate for this change already exists . There is crossparty concern over the social recession. And alarm at evidence like the Sheffield study. Politicians struggle
for solutions. Small-scale initiatives aimed at addressing the pernicious impacts of social
recession are springing up at grass roots level, led by community groups or local
authorities .11 The philosopher Kate Soper points to a growing appetite for ‘alternative hedonism’,
sources of satisfaction that lie outside the conventional market. She describes a
widespread disenchantment with modern life – what she refers to as a ‘structure of feeling’ – that
consumer society has passed some kind of critical point, where materialism is now
actively detracting from human well- being .12 Anxious to escape the work and spend
cycle, we are suffering from a ‘fatigue with the clutter and waste of modern life’ and
yearn for certain forms of human interaction that have been eroded . We would
welcome interventions to correct the balance, according to Soper. A shift towards alternative
hedonism would lead to a more ecologically sustainable life that is also more satisfying and
would leave us happier.13 Some statistical evidence supports this view . Psychologist Tim
Kasser has highlighted what he calls the high price of materialism. Materialistic values such as popularity,
image and financial success are psychologically opposed to ‘intrinsic’ values like selfacceptance, affiliation, a sense of belonging in the community . Yet these latter are the
things that contribute to our well-being. They are the constituents of prosperity.14 Kasser’s
evidence is striking here. People with higher intrinsic values are both happier and have
higher levels of environmental responsibility than those with materialistic values. This
finding is extraordinary because it suggests there really is a kind of double or triple dividend in a less
materialistic life: people are both happier and live more sustainably when they favour
intrinsic goals that embed them in family and community. Flourishing within limits is a real
possibility, according to this evidence. It’s a possibility that has already been
explored to some extent from within modern society. Against the surge of consumerism, there are already
those who have resisted the exhortation to ‘go out shopping’, preferring instead to
devote time to less materialistic pursuits (gardening, walking, enjoying music or reading, for exam- ple) or
to the care of others. Some people (up to a quarter of the sample in a recent study)
have even accepted a lower income so that they could achieve these goals.15 Beyond
this ‘quiet revolution’, there have also been a series of more radical initiatives aimed at
living a simpler and more sustain- able life.16 ‘Voluntary simplicity’ is at one level an entire
philosophy for life. It draws extensively on the teachings of the Indian cultural leader Mahatma Gandhi who
encouraged people to ‘live simply, that others might simply live’ . In 1936, a student of
Gandhi’s described voluntary simplicity in terms of an ‘avoidance of exterior clutter’ and the ‘deliberate organisation of life
for a purpose’.17 Former Stanford scientist Duane Elgin
picked up this theme of a way of life that is
‘outwardly simple, yet inwardly rich’ as the basis for revisioning human progress .18
More recently, psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi has offered a scientific basis for the hypothesis that our lives can be
more satisfying when engaged in activities which are both purposive and materially light. These conditions are more likely,
says Csikszentmihalyi, to provide a good balance between skill and the challenge associated with the task and lead to a
state of ‘flow’.19 Individual
efforts to live more simply are more likely to succeed in a
supportive community . This realization has led to the emer- gence of so-called ‘intentional
communities’ where people come together under the declared aim of living simpler,
more sustainable lives. Some of these initiatives began, interestingly, as spiritual communities, attempting to
create a space where people could reclaim the contemplative dimension of their lives that used to be captured by religious
institutions. The
Findhorn community in northern Scotland is an example of this. Findhorn’s roots lie
character as an eco-village developed more recently,
building on principles of justice and respect for nature.20 Another modern example is
Plum Village, the ‘mindfulness’ community established by the exiled Vietnamese monk Thich
Nhat Hahn in the Dordogne area of France, which now provides a retreat for over 2000 people.21 These
initiatives are modern equivalents of more traditional reli- gious communities like those of the
Amish in North America; or the network of Buddhist monasteries in Thailand where every young male is
in the desire for spiritual transforma- tion. Its
expected to spend some time before going out into professional life. Not all networks have this explicit spiritual character.
The Simplicity Forum, for example, launched in North America in 2001, is a loose secular network of
‘simplicity leaders’ who are committed to ‘achieving and honoring simple, just and sustainable ways of life’.
Downshifting Downunder is an even more recent initiative, launched off the back of an international conference on
downshifting held in Sydney during 2005; its aim is to ‘catalyze and co-ordinate a downshifting movement in Australia that
will significantly impact sustainability and social capital’.22 The
downshifting movement now has a
surprising allegiance across a number of developed economies. A recent survey on
down- shifting in Australia found that 23 per cent of respondents had engaged in some form of
downshifting in the five years prior to the study. A staggering 83 per cent felt that Australians are too
materi- alistic . An earlier study in the US found that 28 per cent had taken some steps
to simplify and 62 per cent expressed a willingness to do so . Very similar results
have been found in Europe.23 Research on the success of these initiatives is quite
limited. But the findings from studies that do exist are interesting. In the first place, the evidence confirms
that ‘simplifiers’ appear to be happier. Consuming less, voluntarily, can improve
subjective well-being – completely contrary to the conventional model.24
2NC – AT: No Spillover
Growth fetishism primarily represents an ideological frame that can
be systematically denaturalized through small cascading acts in
order to create an ethical society.
Kallis 11
[2011, Giorgos Kallis is an environmental scientist working on ecological economics and
political ecology. He is a Leverhulme visiting professor at SOAS and an ICREA
professor at ICTA, Autonomous University of Barcelona. Before that he was a Marie
Curie International Fellow at the Energy and Resources Group of the University of
California at Berkeley. He holds a PhD in Environmental Policy and Planning from the
University of the Aegean in Greece, a Masters in Economics from Universitat Pompeu
Fabra, and a Masters in Environmental Engineering and a Bachelors in Chemistry from
Imperial College, London, "In defence of degrowth." Ecological Economics 70.5 (2011):
873-880.]
degrowth is not a
“policy”; it is framed as a political alternative that seeks a popular mandate for
radical changes (including caps and environmental taxes). The question then is whether such
an alternative could ever become popular. To this question I now turn. 7. Social and Political Change Sustainable
degrowth is a multi-faceted political project that aspires to mobilise support for a
change of direction, at the macrolevel of economic and political institutions and
at the micro level of personal values and aspirations . Income and material comfort is
to be reduced for many along the way, but the goal is that this is not experienced as
welfare loss . van den Bergh is sceptical about the political feasibility of this
proposal. Beyond arguments and opinions, both of us, an economist and an environmental scientist, have to read
and learn from historians and social scientists that have studied big social and political changes. But let me discern
our differences on how we see social change happening, and hence clarify the debate
over the feasibility of the degrowth proposal. In van den Bergh's implicit mental model of
political change there are scientists, politicians, and the people. The role of scientists is
to convince politicians and people about what needs to be done. Ideas such as degrowth
that are unlikely to be accepted by “mainstream” scientists and hence politicians should
be avoided, since they are likely to remain a marginal rearguard. There are two problems with
this. First, van den Bergh sees scientists and their proposals (“policies”) in isolation from the
political-economic system of politicians and vested interests within which such proposals
come to operate, and of which scientists themselves are part of. Economists are not
unbiased observers or developers of metrics; they are key players in the
perpetuation of the growth economy and imaginary . Second, in van den Bergh's
implicit model, it is to powerful politicians we should all, scientists and civil society,
appeal to. From such a perspective, which takes the current distribution of power as granted, there is little hope for a
degrowth proposal. However, there is an alternative viewpoint, according to which big social
change never appeals to the “kings” and “priests” of the time. Revolutionary
changes, in society or science, are often punctuations after big periods of stasis or
development locked in a paradigm (Kuhn, 1962). Crises and quick reversals of what was
perceived as the normal direction of things (Davies, 1962) open windows of opportunity
for change . As Wallerstein (2010, 141) puts it: “when the system is far from equilibrium … small
social mobilizations can have very great repercussions”. According to Korten (2008)
A degrowth agenda would face even more resistance from the same quarters. But
mobilisations start with a “new cultural story” initially a conversation among a few, that
gradually comes to challenge an established paradigm that seemed previously
unmovable . In the gap and loss of meaning created by a crisis, such new stories may
be seen to offer more convincing explanations and directions for action. Small, but
accumulating, actions stemming from the initial conversations create gradually a
new reality and give a concrete expression to the benefits of a different way of
doing things. The new cultural story and the alternative, liberated social spaces and
practices that embody it connect disparate people across interests and generate a
social movement of thought and practice . As liberated spaces expand people lead
and leaders (old and new ones coming in power) follow and respond (Korten, 2008). The movement for
degrowth is much more in accordance with Korten's model of revolutionary social
change (Fournier, 2008; Baykan, 2007), than the more technocratic model underlying van
den Bergh's view . Scientists working on degrowth counter a false cultural story (growth
as progress) and work to construct a new even if imperfect one (sustainable
degrowth). Scientists are in conversation with practitioners and activists “escaping the economy” – (Cattaneo and
Gavalda, 2010) – who embody degrowth ideas in new material spaces. Scientists and practitioners network
to experiment, creating new spaces, intellectually and physically.7 A movement may
grow which will extend this new alternative cultural story, build alliances with other
similar cultural stories and movements, and in the void opened by the current crisis,
create a convincing and popular alternative. In my view, climate change and the creation
of a low-carbon society require such a revolutionary social change (not in the
sense of violent, but in the sense of fast and dramatically different), rather than
the marginal one – politically speaking – implied in van den Bergh's model. van den Bergh proposes an
ambitious policy agenda, but offers no associated ambitious political proposal on
how could this become possible (or an explanation why the same proposals have
been on the table for so many years without being effectively implemented). 8.
Feasibility and Acceptance A State that institutes salary caps, sets strict emission caps, increases taxes to the rich or
bans advertising will need somemuscle. But there are currently strong and intensifying interdependencies between
politicians and private interests, not least through the funding of political parties, which themselves depend on a growing
economy. For some the control of governments by vested private interests marks the end of democracy and the dawn of
an era of oligarchy (Kempf, 2010). The
degrowth proposal is at odds with such tendencies, as it
insists in the possibility to bring radical – ecological and redistributive – change through
parliamentary democracy (see Latouche, 2009). We cannot surrender a priori the
possibility of a non-totalitarian, popularly elected government with a mandate to
redistribute and plan in the direction of sustainable degrowth. In the past we have
had reasonable democratic planned economies that boldly redistributed surpluses from
private consumption to public goods. Mike Davis (2007) documents how the U. S. economy was
refashioned in a stroke to fight fascism: as investments were shifted from private
consumption to the public war machine, cars were shared, hitchhiking became a popular
way of transport, bicycles made a comeback, urban food gardens multiplied and
recycling and thrift reached unprecedented levels. As a voluntary communal spirit
reigned, conspicuous consumption became socially ostracised (exhibiting publicly that you are rich
remained unpopular well into the 1970s). It is a manifestation of the colonization of our
imaginary that we now consider infeasible any bold collective attempt to plan our
way out of the ecological catastrophe . As philosopher Slavoj Zizek puts it, it is much easier
for us to imagine the end of the world than serious social change. van den Bergh is
sceptical also of the prospect of individuals opting voluntarily for living a simpler and
more frugal life (much less to fight politically to demand it). In his view, the image of the hunter–gatherer cannot
appeal to a society of locked-in shopping mall consumers, more so given the biological – evolutionary – roots of selfish,
conspicuous consumption. First, since this is a common – and easy – criticism, let me make clear that the hunter–
gatherer or the caveman are not the ideal human subjects of degrowth. In my view, it is the convivial yet simple and
content, enlightened human (my own preference goes for Kazantzakis' fictional hero “Alexis Zorbas”). Degrowth
does not imagine turning back the clock to an idealized past that may have never
existed, but using the capacities we have developed to create a mature future of being
content with little material, but abundant relational, goods (Latouche, 2009). The desire for a
simpler, secure and more communal life resonates with a large part of the
population, well beyond radical environmentalists. Whereas social positioning and
the desire for differentiation might as well be programmed in our genes, this does not
need to take necessarily the shape of an endless rivalry for material accumulation.
Ceremonial sport competitions are a much nobler and cleaner way to channel rivalry and status differentiation for
testosterone-filled males. Anthropologists document the multiple forms rivalry has taken in human societies from giftgiving to self-sacrifice as the ultimate honour. Conditioned by genes, cultures still decide. Our capitalist culture does select
for material possession, but the driving force is the structural imperative of the system to grow or die, not the genes of the
people. The positional quest for wealth in our “affluent society” is linked to state policies that have shifted investments
Precisely
because there are “complex factors of lock-in” (van den Bergh, 2011), we need to plan
systemic change. People were alright without shopping malls and televisions a few
decades back, and rest sure they will so be if they have to live without them in the future.
9. A Common Ground In this article I argued that in these times of crisis we need a new story-line
and vision; a new political project, not individual environmental policies,
increasingly rejected because of their “cost on the economy”. Sustainable
degrowth does away with economism and growth and offers such a promising vision
which is cohesive enough for the purpose. The vision is one of a society with a
stable and leaner metabolism, where well-being stems from equality, relation and
simplicity, and not material wealth. The hypothesis is that this vision, and the transition to it, is doable. And
from public to private goods (Galbraith, 1998), in order to maintain at all costs private accumulation.
the research challenge is to study the conditions under which this hypothesis may turn out true. A central difference with
van den Bergh originates in our assessment of the relationship between throughput, growth and welfare. A key question is
whether the past correlation between throughput and GDP, and the failure of absolute decoupling suggest a more
structural correlation between the two. This is a fertile area for theoretical and empirical research. Even if we disagree in
much with van den Bergh, we share a defiant optimism in the face of generalized pessimism, if not despair. And we share
some common remedies (e.g. international climate change agreement, reduced working hours, and controls on
advertising). Although in my view such
policies require radical political change of the sort
explained above if they are ever to be seriously implemented, I do not suggest
waiting for this before we start researching or promoting them. Numerous
interesting questions emerge including for example, the effectiveness of reduced working hours
schemes and their implications for social security; the feasibility of reduced working hours in a context of peak-oil; the
effects of possible income and resource tax reforms; policy packages to account for the distributive consequences of
environmental taxes or resource caps; modelling of the conditions under which international cooperation might emerge
and the attributes of workable governance schemes; effective tools for regulating advertising, while allowing free
communication, etc. Our exchange raises also the need for an ecological macro-economics linking environmental and
sustainability issues to the “big” themes of the economy: inflation, debt, finance, banks and currencies. What sort of
financial or monetary institutions do we need for a de- or non-growing economy? Such fundamental questions about the
Even
if degrowth wanes as a scientific or political project and the truths and desires it
represents find expression in a new keyword, its long-lasting legacy will be that it
brought important questions back on the table.
core institutions of capitalist economies were not addressed under the framework of “sustainable development”.
Root Cause
2NC – Root Cause: Crime
They misdiagnose the problem- crime is underpinned by neoliberal
desires and narcissistic tendencies. Both crime and punishment
comes from the same place which is only addressed by the alt
Cheliotis ’13 (Leonidas K Cheliotis, University of Edinburgh, Neoliberal capitalism
and middle-class punitiveness: Bringing Erich Fromm’s ‘materialistic psychoanalysis’ to
penology, Punishment &amp; Society, Volume 15 issue 3, 17 June 2013) accessed 717-20 MS
The psychopolitics of law and order History, according to Fromm, teaches us that state governments lacking
either the resources or the will to provide adequately for the majority or large segments
of the populace, first turn to the formation of social characters that may provide mass
legitimation for the unjust order of things as they stand. Once this ideological effect wears off as a
result of persistent basic insecurities among the public, Fromm goes on to explain, state governments resort to the
cultivation of the ‘authoritarian character’. In the case of the authoritarian character, real public insecurities –
and
thereby also public anger towards incumbent rulers – are displaced onto concocted
substitutes and are acted out aggressively against them. ‘Sadism’, Fromm writes, ‘is the great
instinctual reservoir to which one appeals when one has no other...satisfactions to offer the masses’, or when other
‘instinctual satisfactions of a more positive nature are ruled out on socio-economic
grounds’ (Fromm, 1970: 113). But the authoritarian character may only be complete so long as ‘sadism’ is
accompanied by ‘masochism’, in the sense of willingly subordinating oneself to powerful and unjust or otherwise failing
authorities. Indeed, sadistic acting out functions as a lure to masochistic submission, which is why failing rulers take it
upon themselves to perform sadistic violence on behalf of their constituents. The means by which displacement,
masochistic submission and sadistic acting out are set and kept in motion, consists in well-crafted political myths. In the
first instance, political
myths must work to designate particular objects or situations as
posing dangers in urgent need of decisive state intervention, and particular rulers as
being prepared to undertake such intervention in response (Fromm, 1964: 19). But the symbolic and
material outcomes of the process of designation – from the construction of dangerousness and the appropriate method
and authority to deal with it, to citizens’ submission to decisive rulers and the decisive action of rulers in itself – also have
to appear valid and moral, in accordance with the ‘second-order’ narcissistic need for a ‘popular sense of justice’ (Fromm,
2000 [1930]: 126). Ironically, some of the basic ingredients of
successful authoritarian mythologems may
be found in the very quandaries the state has generated and is thereby trying to
manage. In other words, rather than the state merely surviving its contradictions, it has
the capacity to live and thrive through them. At least in part, Fromm explains, the popular appeal of
political myths is to be explained by reference to the particular conditions of the moment and the ways in which these
impact upon the psyche. Humans, he argues, exhibit greater susceptibility to mythical narratives that promulgate danger
and call for harsh reaction by a superior power, when feeling tangled in situations of intense insecurity as to their actual
life prospects; when there are objective reasons to fear powerlessness and insignificance (Fromm, 1964: 78–79). To this
extent, the allure of alarmist political myths lies outside their discursive realm, and is rather
deeply rooted in the narcissistic negative compulsion we all have to evade or escape
factually unbearable situations (Fromm, 1994 [1941]). Whereas an ideological construct may be timely in
striking sensitized chords in the realm of basic drives, however, timeliness alone cannot account for the
construct’s appeal where it lacks grounding in empirical reality. The construct needs somehow to
attend to the ‘second-order’ narcissistic need for a lasting sense of self-legitimacy. This is all the more so when ideological
those accompanying the acceptance of
authoritarianism, from bestowing the mandate to rule on powerful authorities to
consenting to the violent exclusion of others. The weightier the concessions implied by an ideological
constructs imply the need for weighty concessions, such as
construct, the more frequent and attentive its subjection to assessment against prevalent standards of rationality and
morality, and the more likely its demystification in turn (Cheliotis, 2011b). Anticipating this challenge, Fromm also draws
attention to the
rhetorical form of political myths as these may provide authoritarianism with
an aura of rationality and morality. Before all else, he observes, successful myth-making rests on extant
cultural frames of reference; on familiar descriptive idioms and dominant ideas about causation and methods of evaluating
not
merely that justifications must fit certain conventions in order to be grasped. The very fact that
the world, the acceptability of which helps further justify what would on closer scrutiny turn out to be irrational. It is
justifications are thereby grasped enhances their apparent credibility, and especially
when they are used to overcome a sense of personal or in-group failure (Fromm, 2006 [1962]:
87–100; see also Herzfeld, 1992). But again, although language is typically rich enough to allow for a host of dangers to
enter public awareness and be viewed as credible – indeed, suitable idioms and ideas may be furnished by the very
language of the system at risk – not
all mythologizable dangers lend themselves to the political
functions of distracting public attention away from the real sources of insecurity and
legitimating the discharge of aggressive urges against given others through
subordinating oneself to the acting state. Thus, alongside addressing the context and language of effective
political myths about danger – when and how they are uttered – Fromm also returns to clarify their specific content – what
they utter, or the substantive attributes characterizing the danger which they name. Fromm’s views on the matter can be
fruitfully brought to bear upon the substantive theme of this article: the symbolic means by which incumbent elites in the
USA and Britain manage the psychic repercussions of their neoliberal socioeconomic policies for the middle classes.
Below I engage in just that exercise, making the case that well-established conventions of neoliberal
rhetoric are employed to rebrand the nature and sources of middle-class insecurity in the
narrow sense of violent street crime (e.g. robbery and physical assault). In addition to its
capacity to authorize the expansion of imprisonment by way of protection and retribution,
the specific choice of violent street crime is further explained in conjunction with three
criteria. Violent street crime may qualify as urgent in ways identifiable with the insecurities triggered by
neoliberal capitalism, it may be linked to the very minorities neoliberal capitalism has
rendered or kept weak and may be attributed to their supposed inclination to cheat in the
race for consumerist pleasure, and it can take on the appearance of a persistently intractable problem. As a
260 result, it is argued, middle-class insecurities are protractedly displaced and discharged from the actual onto suitable
substitute objects and subjects, without obviously opposing commonly cherished principles of rationality and morality.
Capitalist prioritization of self-interest and inequality is the root cause
of crime
Thompson 16 (Karl Thompson, Revise Sociology, “The Marxist Perspective on
crime” https://revisesociology.com/2016/06/04/marxist-theory-crime/)-RD
Marxist Sociologist David Gordon says that Capitalist societies are ‘dog eat dog societies’ in which each individual
company and each individual is encouraged to look out for their own
interests before the interests of others, before the interests of the
community, and before the protection of the environment. If we look at the Capitalist
system, what we find is that not only does it recommend that we engage in the self-interested pursuit of profit is good, we learn that it is
acceptable to harm others and the environment in the process. Please see KT’s blog post –
‘On The incredible immorality of corporate greed’ for referenced examples of Corporations acting immorally in the pursuit of
Marxists point out that in a Capitalist society, there is immense competitive
pressure to make more money, to be more successful, and to make more profit,
because in a competitive system, this is the only way to ensure survival. In such a
context, breaking the law can seem insignificant compared to the pressure to
succeed and pressures to break the law affect all people: from the investment banker to the unemployed gang member.Marxists
theorise that the values of the Capitalist system filter down to the rest of our culture . Think
again about the motives of economic criminals: The burglars, the robbers, and the thieves. What they are doing is
seeking personal gain without caring for the individual victims.Companies such as Coca
profit.
Cola and McDonald’s spend billions of dollars every year on advertising, morphing their products into fantastical images that in no way
resemble the grim reality of the products or the even grimmer reality of the productive processes that lie behind making their products.
Advertising is a long way beyond merely providing us with information about a product; it has arguably become
the art of disinformation.It is doubtless that corporations benefit through advertising, and modern Capitalism could
not exist without the culture of consumerism that the advertising industry perpetuates, and activities have pointed to many downsides. One
of the most obvious is that the world of advertising presents as normal a lifestyle that may be unattainable for many people in British
Society. For those millions who lack the legitimate means to achieve the materialist norm through working, this can breed feelings of failure,
creates the
conditions that can lead to status frustration, which in turn can lead to crime. The Capitalist system
is one of radical inequality. At the very top we have what David Rothkopf calls the ‘Superclass’ , mainly the
inadequacy, frustration and anger at the fact that they are working-but-not–succeeding. In short, Advertising
people who run global corporations, and at the very bottom we have the underclass (in the developed world) and the slum
dwellers, the street children and the refugees in the developing world. The Sociologists Zygmunt Bauman points out that
the super wealthy effectively segregate themselves from the wealthy, through living in exclusive gated communities and
travelling in private jets and armoured vehicles with security entourages. If people can afford it, they move to a better
area, and send their children to private schools. However, this doesn’t prevent the poor and the rich from living side by
side. Marxists
argue that this visible evidence of massive inequalities give
people at the bottom a sense of injustice, a sense of anger and a sense of
frustration that they are not sharing in the wealth being flaunted in front of them
(the flaunting is the point is it not?) As a result, Capitalism leads to a flourishing
of economic crime as well as violent street crime. William Chambliss even
goes so far as to say that economic crime ‘’represents rational responses to the
competitiveness and inequality of life in capitalist societies”. As we have seen
from previous studies. Drug dealers see themselves as innovative entrepreneurs.
So internalised is the desire to be successful that breaking the law is seen as a
minor risk.
2NC – Root Cause: Immigrant Exploitation
Capitalist governments necessitate exploitation of immigrant labor
and control over immigrant bodies – interrogating capitalism is a
prior question
Selfa and Scott 06 (Lance Selfa and Helen Scott, April 21, 2006, “READING
BETWEEN THE LINES How capitalism uses immigrants,” Socialist Worker page 7,
http://socialistworker.org/2006-1/585/585_07_Capitalism.php)-RD
immigrants played a key role in
building the U.S. Yet right-wing politicians tell us today that immigrants are
responsible for crime, economic decline and other problems in the U.S. This lovehate view of immigration and immigrants stems from the role that immigration
plays in the capitalist economic system under which we live. mmThe capitalist system is
international, with products manufactured and sold worldwide. Capitalists--the tiny minority that owns and
controls the international banks and multinational corporations--rely on a global
pool of labor. To enable the capitalists to fill their demands for labor, this labor pool has to be somewhat mobile. The central mechanism of control
over the movement of labor is the nation-state. National border controls ensure that capitalism , through its
state, maintains control over labor, rather than allowing people to move at will. The
IN HISTORY books, we're reminded that the United States is a "nation of immigrants," and that
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the U.S., Canada and Mexico aimed to promote easy transport of goods and services across the three
countries' borders. But NAFTA explicitly bars free immigration. When economic growth produces a demand for workers that can't be satisfied by the existing
labor shortage" results. During the Second World War, women filled the labor shortage in military industries created because millions
When the domestic workforce can't fill
demands for labor that capitalists need, governments often promote
immigration. Immigration is not an accident. Nor do rich countries accept the
world's poor out of generosity. Labor migration is essential to the capitalist system. The purpose of immigration
policy, then, is to regulate the flow of labor--to control the borders so as to
control the workers themselves. Immigration laws serve capitalism in two ways. First, they ensure
cheap foreign labor when the domestic economy needs it. Second, they allow for greater control of the whole workforce. Most of the advanced
workforce, a "
of men entered the armed forces. It is likewise with immigration.
economies of the capitalist world were built on migrant labor. They have actively sought foreign-born workers in some historical periods. The same countries have
The U.S. government's previous bracero program shows clearly how
immigration policy is shaped to the needs of capital. The bracero program was initially implemented as a
also clamped down on immigration at other times.
wartime emergency program in 1942 to fill a labor shortage in agriculture by importing farm workers from Mexico. The program became the largest foreign-worker
the government
maintained control over the movements of these workers, and at any time could (and did) restrict the
numbers of Mexicans crossing the border and clamp down on Mexicans in the U.S. The passage of workers from
Mexico was crucial to the economy, but the workers themselves, at any given moment, could be treated like
unwanted criminals, refused entry or deported. Reducing labor costs, a key aim of capitalists at all times,
program in the history of the U.S., contracting over 5 million braceros to growers and ranchers over the next 22 years. Yet
can be achieved by paying lower wages. To this end, companies can either move production to sites with cheaper labor supplies, or they can bring cheap labor
supplies to production sites. A perfect illustration of moving production to the labor supply is the maquila zone along the U.S.-Mexico border, created after the
country multinationals gain immigrant workers' skills without
having to pay to develop them. The social costs of child benefits and education have been provided by another state (in this case,
bracero program ended. Here, advanced
Mexico). But if the workers come across the border to work as undocumented labor in the U.S., employers gain the same advantages. What are the specific
Immigrant workers are less likely to be
unionized, and an immigrant workforce is often more controllable. Employers use the threat of
deportation and criminalization to exploit immigrants ruthlessly and quell
immigrants' efforts to fight for their rights. Legal immigrants waiting for confirmation of citizenship are subject to
this pressure, as well as undocumented workers. The presence of a criminalized section of the workforce
is crucial for the employers to maintain their control. New immigrants often don't speak English and are
conditions that make immigrant labor especially attractive to business?
desperate for work. Employers exploit this vulnerability to the fullest--paying below-average wages, violating safety standards and workers' rights.
Meatpacking companies in the Midwest, for example, send personnel managers on tours of the U.S. to recruit Asian and Latino immigrants from California and
One company representative for Dupaco,
a meatpacking firm in Nebraska, was typically up-front about the aims of recruitment: "We need to
get us a minority group in here." The Dupaco executive's statement illustrates another important benefit employers gain from hiring
New York, according to sociologists Louise Lamphere, Alex Stepick, and Guillermo Grenier.
immigrants: keeping the workforce divided. Employers use every possible difference between workers--sex, race, sexual orientation, skill and citizenship status--to
sow division in the workforce. Employers know that a divided workforce is less likely to unite to demand union representation and higher wages and benefits. It's
clear that when it comes to making profits, U.S. business sees no borders.
2NC – Root Cause: Mass Incarceration
Capitalism is the root cause of mass incarceration – it requires a
lower caste to exploit which results in the criminal justice system.
Bunker 19 [Allison Bunker, CJPC intern, Are Corporations the Cause for
Incarceration? No, but Capitalism Might Be., Carolina Justice Policy Center, 1-10-2019,
Accessible Online at https://www.cjpcenter.org/are-corporations-the-cause-forincarceration-no-but-capitalism-might-be/] DL 7-13-2020
When we examine the current state of justice in America there seems to be no rationality for why we incarcerate
2.3 million people. Yet if we peel away the layers of the prison system a possible answer comes to
light: corporate interests. The practice of corporations within the prison system are questionable at best. In
prisons, emboldened by the thirteenth amendment, companies pay inmates essentially nothing for
their labor (average pay falls between 14 cents and $1.41 per hour), and slap a “Made in America” label on the
finished product. Additionally, millions have been invested in private prisons, creating a market
that now brings in 3.9 billion a year. Private prisons and prison labor are stark examples
of injustice; putting people behind bars should not be economically beneficial to anyone.
However, it is not clear that they are the drivers of mass incarceration. The practices of private prisons and prison labor
are detestable, but they are not very widespread. In 2015, only 8% of people incarcerated in state and federal prisons
were in privately owned facilities. Since 2012 the private prison population had also declined by 8%, in comparison to a
5% drop in total prison population since 2009. If private prisons were the sole reason for incarcerating people, why would
we lock up the other 92% of inmates? Furthermore, when you follow the money being dumped into the justice system; it
does not predominantly land in the hands of private interests. Each year 182 billion dollars is spent incarcerating people
both by the government and families of those incarcerated. Only 2% of that is spent on private prisons, and only .37 billion
is collected by those prisons as profit. The amount paid to people employed in government owned facilities is more than
one hundred times the profits of private prisons. Similarly, prison labor isn’t very predominant. Two of the largest groups
that incarcerated people are employed via are Federal Prison Industries (FPI), also known as UNICOR and Prison
Industries Enhancement Certification Program (PIECP). FPI is a government owned manufacturing company that as of
2016 employed a little over 12,000 people in 83 prison factories. From PIECP’s second quarter report in 2018, they
currently employ 4,977 people. While we can’t know if these numbers encompass all people incarcerated, they would
suggest that less than one percent of the 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States are working for a prison
labor corporation. Furthermore, the FPI mostly contracts for the government, not corporations, and has not been
financially successful. Meanwhile PIECP’s largest project only employs 220 people, and they do not have any other
projects exceeding 150 people employed for a company. In the scheme of corporations these projects are small and likely
not meaningful for their bottom line. The justice system was not built as broken as it is to benefit a few
corporations, it was
built to maintain a lower racial caste of people, both while incarcerated
and long after they are released. Even after they leave prison, formerly incarcerated people are
labeled “criminals”, stripped of their voting rights, and under the increased scrutiny of parole that threatens to
reincarcerate them for minor mistakes. Under these conditions the prison system succeeds in creating, and
maintain, a lower racial caste which enables our neoliberal, capitalist system. Capitalism
thrives when there exists a lower caste of people to exploit, in order to have “winners”,
there also must be “losers”. For example, the wealthiest 100 households in the nation own almost the same
amount of money as the entire African- American population within the United States. The existence of a lower racial
caste enables their exploitation, creating the inequality that is built into the design of capitalism. We must acknowledge the
real damages caused by corporations wanting to benefit from private prisons, and guard against the risk of increasing
privatization in the criminal justice system. Yet in order to address the creation of a lower caste, it is not beneficial to focus
only on corporations. When it comes to dismantling the system, it is vitally important to combat the creation of a lower
status based on “criminality”. We must acknowledge that the
indifference of many Americans to the
creation of a new racial caste system is why one is able to exist. As much as we may want the
responsibility for the creation of our justice system, built to oppress, to be fully on corporations it is also just as much, if not
more, a product of the American people and the capitalistic racial caste system that has flowed through every phase of
our history continually retaining the power structures of the past, and present, while enabling massive inequality.
Mass incarceration is another form of slavery and it economically
exploits black people- we can only solve by turning to broader
coalitions
Urie 14’ (Rob Urie, I a political economist, has B.S. degree in Economics and
Philosophy from Albright College and an M.S. degree in Economics from The University
of North Carolina, “Slavery, Mass Incarceration and Capitalism”, IBW21, April 5, 2014,
https://ibw21.org/editors-choice/slavery-mass-incarceration-and-capitalism/)-AL
The big lie in the U.S. is that ‘freedom’ from economic exploitation and social
repression was ever granted to slaves and their descendants. Is it an accident that
mass incarceration began just as the Civil Rights movement was bearing fruit for
its participants? Race in America is a special class. But it shares history and social
outcomes with several centuries of capitalist imperialism in South and Central America,
Asia, the Middle East, India and China, etc.
With over two million people in federal, state and local prisons and another five
million whose lives are tied to the U.S. penal system a social emergency has been
created. The preponderance of those affected share relation through Western imperial
history and its residual embedded in current social relations. Slavery was at its core an
economic institution, a system for forcing people to labor for others. The near
instantaneous creation of a system of ‘freely’ coerced labor through convict
leasing places the law, the social mechanisms of its enforcement and incarceration as
ways of continuing the economic expropriation of slavery outside of explicit
chattel relations.
To add insult to injury, by claiming an end to slavery while maintaining the
mechanisms of social repression and economic expropriation the onus for claims
of social legitimacy was shifted to the repressed and exploited. This finds its
contemporary expression in long immiserated communities being blamed for their own
immiseration, in long excluded communities being blamed for their exclusion and in long
repressed communities being blamed for their own repression. The question of whether
or not prison labor is a reconstitution of slavery leaves aside the global strategies of
economic coercion and expropriation that are related by degree.
The claim of capitalist democracy that all labor is freely undertaken (and compensated
according to its economic contribution) is a fundamental premise of capitalism. Explicit
and implicit strategies of coercion put a lie to this base conceit. The effect, again, is that
working class and poor Americans have political and economic interests more
clearly aligned with the people of Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bangladesh and Vietnam
than they do with the American political establishment. The late President of
Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, understood these broader relations as did the Black Panther
Party when it formed international coalitions. If there is any hope for ending mass
incarceration it is likely to be found in these broader coalitions.
2NC – Root Cause: Slavery
Slavery was a capitalist institution designed to accumulate wealth
and the effects of it are still seen in our prison systems.
Urie 14’ (Rob Urie, I a political economist, has B.S. degree in Economics and
Philosophy from Albright College and an M.S. degree in Economics from The University
of North Carolina, “Slavery, Mass Incarceration and Capitalism”, IBW21, April 5, 2014,
https://ibw21.org/editors-choice/slavery-mass-incarceration-and-capitalism/)-AL
With no public acknowledgement of the irony the U.S., the ‘land of the free,’ has both the
highest incarceration rate in the world and the largest overall prison population. The
dominant public perception appears to rest at the local level: the state has the right to
prohibit socially destructive acts; people commit socially destructive acts and they are
put in prison. Left largely unconsidered is the nature of the democratic capitalist state
that claims this right to incarcerate.
American history places it squarely in the service of economic interests. The country was
founded on genocide and slavery. Western political theory frames these as ‘political’
acts. Genocide against the indigenous population was / is framed as military conflict.
Slavery in theory ‘ended’ with the Civil War. But both of these also had profound
economic impacts. Much as the enclosure ‘movement’ in Britain produced a ‘criminal’
class of peasants ‘freed’ from formerly collective lands, the American genocide against
the indigenous population resulted in imposition of European ‘property’ relations where
‘property’ had never before been conceived.
As far back as the philosopher Aristotle slavery was framed as the right of conquerors
over the conquered whereas the labor expropriated from slaves in America
supported a self-perpetuating plutocracy that today finds the descendents of
slaves overwhelmingly populating U.S. prisons and the descendents of slave
‘owners’ as a class immune from prosecution for its own socially destructive acts and
in position to profit from the system of mass incarceration.
Likewise, the history of race ‘relations’ in the U.S. doesn’t reduce to singular
explanations. But it does tie broadly to Western imperial history, to British, European and
American strategies of colonization, subjugation and economic expropriation begun in
the seventeenth century that by degree continue today. The kidnapped Africans forced
into slavery in the U.S. were used to feed a global system of capitalist trade and they
served as human ‘currency’ as chattel property.
The self-serving storyline that capitalism ‘replaced’ slavery with ‘free’ economic
participation ignores the role expropriated slave labor played in capitalist trade
and capital accumulation and it requires an anti-historical notion of ‘free’ economic
participation that ignores the strategies of economic coercion that followed the nominal
end of slavery. Designated three-fifths a person in the U.S. Constitution to accrue
political power to slave ‘owners,’ slaves accrued political power to the institution of
slavery as system of labor expropriation as well.
A century or more of theoretical argumentation on both left and right notwithstanding,
slavery was a capitalist institution that fed nascent global capitalist trade. And its
residual in post Civil War strategies of racial repression, suppression and economic
exploitation relate by degree to current capitalist imperialism in other former colonies.
The racist, classist prison system in the U.S. is fact and reified metaphor for this
‘internal’ history and for the breadth and reach of the capitalist imperial relations
behind the concentrated fortunes today so in evidence in the West.
2NC – Root Cause: War on Drugs – WOC
Global capitalism incentivizes the marginalization of minority women
through the war on drugs and drives them into the system of mass
incarceration.
Reynolds ’08 (Marylee Reynolds, The War on Drugs, Prison Building, and
Globalization: Catalysts for the Global Incarceration of Women, NWSA Journal, Vol. 20,
No. 2, Women, the Criminal Justice System, and Incarceration: Processes of Power,
Silence and Resistance (Summer, 2008), pp. 72-95,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40071275)-NR
Although women still comprise a small percentage of the total prison population
in countries in North America, Western Europe, and Latin America, their numbers have
been rising in the past two decades. This article is a literature review of a new and
dynamic field of scholarship that maintains that this increase is a byproduct of three
interrelated fac- tors: the war on drugs, globalization, and prison building. First,
using international pressure, the United States has imposed its federalized and
militarized drug war on the governments of other nations. Second, the transfer of
U.S. -led neoliberal economic policies, fueled by globalization, has marginalized
poor women of color in modern and developing nations. As a result, many of
these women have become involved in criminalized behaviors, including drug
trafficking, as a means of economic survival. In this post-September 1 1
environment, transborder crossings are closely monitored, increasing the likelihood of
arrest. Third, in an effort to con- tain surplus populations created by economic
restructuring the United States has promoted a social policy of mass
incarceration. The union of these three factors results in the greater likelihood of
the arrest, detain- ment, prosecution, and imprisonment of poor women of color.
The article concludes with a brief discussion of the experiences of women in global
prisons and recommends strategies to curtail women's imprisonment The United
States incarcerates more women than any other nation in the world (Hartney
2006). A primary catalyst behind America's imprison- ment binge is the war on
drugs, the government's initiative to stop drug production and use. This domestic war
has expanded across the globe and its primary victims have been poor women of
color.1 U.S. -led neoliberal economic policies fueled by globalization have pushed
many of these women into criminalized behaviors, such as drug trafficking , as a
means of survival. At the same time, the United States has played the leading
inter- national role in pressuring other countries to criminalize drugs, strengthen
drug enforcement efforts, and to build prisons to warehouse convicted drug offenders.
The result has been dramatic growth in the female population in the United
States, Canada, Latin America, countries in Western Europe, and other locations
where the United States is able to exert its influence (da Cunha 2005; Diaz-Cotto
2005; Joseph 200 Sudbury 2
An anti-capitalist feminist perspective is necessary to challenge the
fundamental nature of the prison industrial complex.
Reynolds ’08 (Marylee Reynolds, The War on Drugs, Prison Building, and
Globalization: Catalysts for the Global Incarceration of Women, NWSA Journal, Vol. 20,
No. 2, Women, the Criminal Justice System, and Incarceration: Processes of Power,
Silence and Resistance (Summer, 2008), pp. 72-95,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40071275)-NR
Several writers have commented on the social consequences of the war on drugs on the lives of women of color, their
children, and their communi- ties in the United States (Allard 2002; Bush-Baskette 1998, 2000; Hagen and Coleman 2001;
Hirsch 1999, 2001, 2002; Jensen, Gerber, and Mosher 2004; Mauer 2007; Richie 2002; Rubinstein and Mumakal 2002).
a body of literature has appeared that links the global increase in
women's imprisonment to the global expansion of the war on drugs, the prisonindustrial complex, and neo-liberal globalization (da Cunha 2005; Diaz-Cotto 2005; Joseph 2006;
More recently,
Kampfner 2005; Sudbury 2000, 2004a, 2004b, 2005a, 2005b, 2005c). This article is a literature review of this vital and
the article conveys the empirical findings of
scholars who have examined the relationship between the global increase in
women's imprisonment and the transfer of U.S. -led neoliberal economic and
crime control policies across national borders. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the
emerging field of scholarship. More specifically,
experiences of women in global prisons and recommends strategies to curtail women's imprisonment.
Transnational feminism has emerged as a practical theoretical frame- work for
studying women in global prisons . Julia Sudbury, activist and prison abolitionist, has been a leading
voice in promoting transnational feminist prison studies. Sudbury (2005a) notes that: Transnational feminist practices
theorizing the intersections of gender with race, class, and
sexuality . However, they differ from many feminisms of color because of a central concern with how
these pro- cesses articulate with cross-border flows of goods, people, capital,and
cultures associated with globalization. . . . Transnational feminist practices assist
us in unpacking the global prison by drawing our attention to the ways in which
punishment regimes are shaped by global capitalism, dominant and subordinate
patriarchies, and neocolonial racialized ideologies, (xiii) A transnational feminist
analysis, then, connects the multiple and intersecting identities of individual
women - race, class, gender, culture, and nation - with the processes of
globalization, militarism, patriarchy, and neocolonialism, and places the
experiences of women of color at the center of the analysis . Essentially, a transnational
feminist analysis of women's imprisonment requires a macro-level examination of the social,
political, and economic forces operating in the current global environment that
intersect with the individual life histories and experiences of women in specific
sociocultural contexts . Globalization is an important feature of late modern society and refers to the
parallel antiracist feminism in
"worldwide economic, social, cultural and political expansion and integration which have enabled capital, production,
finance, trade, ideas, images, people and organizations to flow transnationally across the boundaries of regions, nation-
The United States has embraced globalization as a
mechanism to transfer its neoliberal economic, political, and penal policies
across national borders . Neoliberalism is a revival of the economic liberalism of the nineteenth century,
founded on free-market capitalism (Cavadino and Dignan 2006). Socioeconomic and penal
characteristics that exemplify neoliberal politi- cal economies include a belief in freestates and cultures" (Chow 2003, 444).
market capitalism; an emphasis on individualism; social relationships that are formally egalitarian, yet extreme income
the social exclusion of
economically marginalized and "deviant" members of society,- a high receptivity
to prison privatization; a high imprisonment rate; and a central penal ide- ology of
differentials exist; a welfare state that is minimalist; a right-wing political orientation,-
"law and order" (Cavadino and Dignan 2006). Nations with neoliberal political economies, like the United States,
tend to have high incarceration rates (Cavadino and Dignan 2006). Chow (2003) notes that in discussions of
"neoliberal and universalistic globalization" little attention is paid to gender,
underrepresenting "the experiences of diverse women in specific societal
contexts , especially those in the developing world" (444). Chow (2003) further comments that: Much of the theorizing
about globalization is either gender-neutral or gender- blind, ignoring how globalization shapes gender relationships and
people's lives materially, politically, socially, and culturally at all levels and treating its dif- ferential effects on women and
How the gender dimension shapes the globalization process is
ignored as either unimportant or irrelevant. How gender relations are products of
various global-local systems of patriarchy and hegemonic masculinities seldom
enters debate and discussion. (443-44) Essentially, women's voices and experiences are left out of much
men as similar. . . .
of the theoretical discussion on globalization. As a result, women become invisible when policies and practices of
if the gendered consequences of globalization remain
hidden, then effective social change to reduce inequalities and injustices
resulting from globalization will not occur (Chow 2003). While globalization provides
legitimate economic opportunities for a small sector of the women's population,
these opportunities are generally not available to poor women of color. For such
women, globalization opens up greater opportunities for transnational criminal
activities, steering women into drug-related crimes, sex work, or low-paid work .
The schol- arship discussed in this article champions poor women of color who have become
invisible victims of structural marginalization due to the gendered effects of
neoliberal globalization. These women often resort to economic survival
strategies that bring them into contact with social control agents of the state.
globalization are initiated. More- over,
Subsequently, as a result of "penal globalization" (Cavadino and Dignan 2006) - an expression that refers to the transfer
of penal ideas and crime control policies across national borders -
many of these women are arrested,
detained, prosecuted, and imprisoned.
The impact is the global disproportionate incarceration of minority
women under the pretext of drug offenses.
Reynolds ’08 (Marylee Reynolds, The War on Drugs, Prison Building, and
Globalization: Catalysts for the Global Incarceration of Women, NWSA Journal, Vol. 20,
No. 2, Women, the Criminal Justice System, and Incarceration: Processes of Power,
Silence and Resistance (Summer, 2008), pp. 72-95,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40071275)-NR
The substantial growth in female imprisonment in the United States is evident by
examining the percentage of women prisoners in 1980, prior to the current war on drugs, and in 2006, approximately
twenty years after the current war on drugs was launched in the mid-1980s. In
1980, women accounted for
4.1 percent of all prisoners nationwide,- in 2006, this number climbed to 7.2 percent
(Gilliard and Beck 1998; Sabol, Couture, and Paige 2007). Mauer (2003, 7) notes that the past two decades
witnessed the most significant change in the composition of the U.S. prison
population, with a more than tenfold increase in the number of persons
incarcerated for drug offenses . Forty thousand inmates were incarcerated for drug offenses in 1980, and
by 2003 that number reached 450,000 (Mauer 2003). Aggregate numbers mask that women of color are
disproportionately overrepresented as persons incarcerated for drug offense s
(Allard 2002; Bush-Baskette 1998; Mauer, Potler, and Wolf 1999). Allard (2002, 26) notes that in 1997 black and
Hispanic women were "disproportionately incarcerated for drug offenses compared to
their white, and male, counterparts." Among women in state prisons in 1997, forty- four
percent of Hispanic women, thirty-nine percent of black women, and twenty-three
percent of white women were there for drug convictions. In contrast, twenty-four percent
of black males and twenty-six percent of Hispanic men were being held for drug offenses
(Allard 2002). According to Bush-Baskette (1998), in 1994 in the state of Florida, thirty-four percent of incarcerated black
females had a drug offense as their primary charge, in contrast to about twenty-seven percent of the white females.
Mauer, Potler, and Wolf (1999), in their analysis of the racial and ethnic impact of drug policies in sentencing patterns of
women drug offenders in
the states of New York, California, and Minnesota, found that women of
color represented a disproportionate share of the women sentenced to prison for a drug
offense. Mauer, Potler, and Wolf (1999) state "Minority women are nearly one and a half times
as likely to be sentenced as their share of the population in California, three times
as likely in New York, and more than five times as likely in Minnesota" (22). In the state
of New York, in 1995, eighty-two percent of Hispanic women, sixty-five per- cent of black women, and forty percent of
white women were sentenced to prison for a drug offense (Mauer, Potler, and Wolf 1999). Like the United States, several
countries in Western Europe and Latin America have seen dramatic increases in the number of women prison- ers,
Perceived threats of transnational drug trafficking,
international terrorism, and illegal immigration have enhanced border security in
many of these countries. Poor women of color, who are forced to smuggle drugs for
economic survival, to finance their drug habits, or who are illegally crossing
borders to secure employment are being arrested, detained, and convicted at
alarming rates. As a result, the populations of women's prisons are increasing. In
largely because of the war on drugs.
New South Wales, women comprise approximately seven percent of the total prison population; this represents a thirteen
percent increase since 2001 and an eighty-eight percent increase since 1998 (Armstrong, Chartrand, and Baldry 2005).
Aboriginal women comprise two percent of the female population and yet comprise thirty-two percent of the total women's
prison population (Armstrong, Chartrand, and Baldry 2005). According to the Home Office (2003), in England and Wales
during the period between 1992 and 2002, the average population of women in cus- tody rose by one hundred seventythree percent; during this same period the average population of males in custody rose fifty percent. Twenty per- cent of
female prisoners in 2002 were foreign nationals,- out of this group eighty-four percent were held for drug offenses.
Seventy-five percent of sentenced black females in prison were held for drug offenses compared to forty-one percent of
all sentenced women in prison for drug offenses. These numbers reflect the punitive drug policies of the United Kingdom
and their crackdown on female drug couriers and smugglers, many of whom are foreign nationals (primarily Nigerians and
Jamaicans) or British blacks (Joseph 2006; Sudbury 2005b). An international study of 653 women prisoners representing
nine European countries (Denmark, Germany, Spain, Greece, Croatia, Slove- nia, Poland, Lithuania, and Russia) found
that almost one-third of the women were incarcerated for drug offenses (Dunkel, Kestermann, and Zolondek 2005).
Studies of women incarcerated for drug offenses in Por- tugal (da Cunah 2005), Bolivia (Diaz-Cotto 2005), Mexico (DiazCotto 2005; Kampfner 2005), Canada (Lawrence and Williams 2006) and Britain (Sudbury 2005b) reveal similar trends
The war on drugs directed by the United States, at both the national and
international levels, has led to increased arrest and incarceration rates for women
in the United States, Canada, Latin America, and Western Europe. The women
disproportionately affected by this "war" are poor, marginalized, women of color
arrested in their home countries or as foreign nationals
and patterns.
2NC – Root Cause- War on Crime
Law and order gained material and symbolic significance because of
the inability of the social welfare state to absorb the inequalities of
capitalism. Control turned to repressive policing tactics as a more
cost effective option
Mark Jay in 2019 Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara;
Cages and Crises: A Marxist Analysis of Mass Incarceration; Historical Materialism 27.1
(2019) 182–223
These uprisings occurred as the global dominance of US-based monopoly
firms was waning: in 1953, 30% of global exports came from US firms; by 1966,
the year when profit rates began to decline, that figure was 16%.79 At the same
time, elites were under serious threat from students’ and workers’ movements
across Europe, Africa and Asia.80 In the US, the anti-imperialist movement
was also growing. Martin Luther King denounced the war in his 1967 ‘Beyond
Vietnam’ speech, in which he linked ‘poverty, racism and militarism’.81 In the
immediate aftermath of his assassination a year later, there were uprisings in
over 100 US cities, leading to 46 deaths, almost all at the hands of state authorities. At
the same time, students occupied buildings in universities across the
US, resulting in widespread arrests and nine student deaths.82
It was in this context that the law-and-order presidential election of 1968
took place. Republicans claimed the liberal War on Poverty was catalysing
‘lawlessness’. As Morton Wenger and Thomas Bonomo observe
The loss of confidence in the ability of a particular form of the capitalist
state to handle its own social contradictions can as easily lead to a shift of
allegiance by the socially insecure masses to a more proactive and brutal
capitalist regime …83
This is precisely what occurred. Nixon won the 1968 election with an appeal
that included the claim that the ‘crime problem’ would be solved ‘not [by] quadrupling the
funds for “any governmental war on poverty”, but convicting more
criminals.’ The ‘counterrevolution’ that James Boggs had predicted just a few
years earlier was taking shape. Also in ’68, the Omnibus Crime Control and
Safe Street Act was passed, facilitating the transfer of military equipment to
police, and providing $100 million in funding for initiatives like ‘riot control’.84
Many scholars have written about how penal spending crowded out social
spending at this time, but this misses the larger point that liberal social programmes
were failing to secure ‘bourgeois order’, and the punitive turn proved
to be a much more cost-effective option.85 When considering the economic
costs of mass incarceration, it is essential to keep in mind the benefits to capital
provided by punitive policies that reduce social protest and coerce workers
into accepting lower wages. In 1968, crime-control spending totalled $6 billion,
or 0.7% of national GDP; social-welfare spending, by contrast, totalled $114 billion, or
13% of national GDP. At the time, A. Philip Randolph’s Freedom Budget
called for $185 billion in new social programmes over the next decade. In short,
the War on Poverty, which proved unable to secure bourgeois order, had lost
legitimacy, leaving political elites with a choice: either dramatically expand
social spending, or shift to a more repressive approach.86
From the outset, the punitive turn proved to be not only cost-effective, but
ideologically effective as well: ‘crime’ operated as a signifier that demonised
political resistance and collapsed the social causes of the racial/urban crisis
into an individualised, moral problem. Law-and-order, rather than progressive
social change, could then ‘resolve’ the crisis.
2NC – Root Cause: Death Penalty
Death Penalty a product of capitalism
Bohm 08 (Bohm, R. M. (2008). Karl Marx and the Death Penalty. Critical Criminology,
16(4), 285–291. doi:10.1007/s10612-008-9062-8)
Marx believed that capitalism produces an amount and type of crime that it
punishes. One of the roles of the state is to determine guilt and administer punishment.
Capital punishment is the state’s ultimate sanction and means of coercion and is
generally reserved for the most heinous crimes , as defined by the state, but not necessarily
the most serious harm s. Marx apparently expected heinous crime in capitalist societies
and the death penalty as a means by which the capitalist state would deal with it.
Following Friedrich Engels’ description of the causes of crime in The Condition of the
Working Class in England (1968, pp. 145–146), Marxist criminologists have argued
that ‘‘senseless’’ and heinous violent crime—the type of crime most likely to be
deatheligible—is a product of the demoralizing and brutalizing conditions under
which many people are forced to live in a capitalist society. As criminologists
Taylor, Walton, and Young explain, ‘‘It is not that man behaves as an animal because of
his ‘nature’ [under capitalism]: it is that he is not fundamentally allowed by virtue of the
social arrangements of production to do otherwise’’ (1975, p. 23). Recent estimates
provide support for this contention. Nationwide, about 40% of all capital indictments
are for felony murder, i.e., a murder committed during the commission of another
felony such as armed robbery (Walker 2006), and many other death-eligible murders are
the result of ‘‘collateral damage’’ in the illicit drug trade. Not long ago, criminologist
Elliott Currie specified seven elements of ‘‘market societies’’ or ‘‘capitalist
societies’’ that he believed, in combination, are likely to breed serious violent
crime. They are: (1) ‘‘the progressive destruction of livelihood’’ (the absence of
steady well-paying work); (2) ‘‘the growth of extremes of economic inequality and
material deprivation’’; ‘‘the withdrawal of public services and supports, especially
for families and children’’; ‘‘the erosion of informal and communal networks of
mutual support, supervision, and care’’; ‘the spread of a materialistic, neglectful,
and ‘hard’ culture’’ (the exaltation of ‘‘often brutal individual competition and
consumption over the values of community, contribution, and productive work’’); ‘‘the
unregulated marketing of the technology of violence’’ (the absence of public
regulation of firearms); and, not least ‘‘the weakening of social and political
alternatives’’ (which inhibits people most ‘‘at risk’’ from defining their problems in
collective terms and envisioning a collective response) (Currie 1997a; also see Currie
1997b). Although one may agree with the Marxist analysis that capitalist societies
breed serious violent crime, it does not necessarily follow that capitalist societies must
respond to serious violent crime with capital punishment, as history clearly
demonstrates. Nor is it to suggest that state-socialist societies should be free of serious
violent crime, as history also attests. Rather, for Marxist criminologists, compared to
capitalist societies, state-socialist societies should have a different amount and type of
serious violent crime because of the less intense class struggle in state-socialist
societies (see Chambliss 1976, p. 9). State-socialist societies, especially in their early
transitional years, are likely to experience some residual ‘‘bourgeois crime’’ and capital
punishment. History also demonstrates the use of capital punishment by new leaders of
state-socialist societies to rid themselves of their political enemies. However, once
state-socialist societies are more entrenched, they often abolish capital
punishment, at least for short periods of time. For example, the Second Congress of
Soviets abolished the death penalty in November 1917, only to reinstate it by 1922; even
Stalin repealed the death penalty in 1947, but reinstated it in 1950 for political crimes
(Caffentzis 2000).
2NC – Root Cause: Policing
Any reform of the police fails – capitalism’s reliance on policing to
control and exploit means that only the abolition of capitalism solves.
Maffea 20 [Carmin Maffea, revolutionary socialist from New York, The Fight to Abolish
the Police Is the Fight to Abolish Capitalism, Left Voice, 6-10-2020, Accessible Online at
https://www.leftvoice.org/the-fight-to-abolish-the-police-is-the-fight-to-abolish-capitalism]
DL 7-14-2020
After the gruesome murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police over a counterfeit
$20 bill, the United States erupted in an unprecedented nationwide revolt. This uprising
has seen harsh clashes between protesters and police and put many new proposals on
the table about what to do with the police as an institution.
There are demands circulating that the police be defunded, removed from certain
spaces such as schools, or completely abolished. This last demand is clearly the most
far-reaching, but the question is how to actually end the police as an institution — a
question that has been asked more and more especially since the City Council of
Minneapolis has endorsed dismantling the city’s PD.
The calls for the defunding of the police seek to address the fact that police budgets are
obscenely bloated while other government programs such as education scramble for
resources. In many cases, police departments, jails, and prisons can take up to 60
percent of a city’s annual budget. However, we must ask: why are police budgets so
big? Is it because cities have bad priorities and invest in police instead of social
services?
The gigantic police budgets are not accidental: they are central to the American
capitalist system founded on slavery. They are essential to maintaining a society
where Jeff Bezos is about to be a trillionaire while Amazon workers, many of them
people of color, live in poverty. The police are an intrinsic component of the capitalist
system; they are one of the repressive forces that maintains this order and the stark
inequalities that it inevitably gives rise to. Therefore, if we are serious about abolishing
the police to save the lives of Black, Brown, and working-class people, we need to be
clear that our fight is against the capitalist system and the state that enforces its rule.
There can be no abolition of police under capitalism.
A History Lesson
The police as an institution has always been intrinsically racist and sexist. In the
American North, before formal full-time police forces were established, there were night
watches. These night watches hired volunteers for a day to surveil communities for sex
work and gambling. The night watchmen were severely disliked by the public and
scorned for cracking down on working people’s leisure activities and vulnerable women’s
means of survival.
The first formalized police department in the North originated in Boston in 1838. As a
port city, Boston was a major place of commerce, and it developed the full-time police
force to protect the shipments of the affluent bourgeoisie. To cut down on the cost of
hiring people to safeguard their property, these wealthy owners convinced the public that
a police force was necessary for the common good.
In the South, before the police were formalized into departments, there were slave
patrols. Their sole purpose was to repress Black people. They did this by chasing,
apprehending, and re-enslaving Black people who had escaped, by terrorizing enslaved
people in order to prevent revolts, and by brutalizing them through extrajudicial
punishment for breaking plantation rules. It is thus entirely unsurprising that many
members or admirers of the KKK today are police officers. In fact, there has historically
been an important overlap between the KKK and the police, and the two organizations
have worked hand in hand in strengthening white supremacy.
After the Civil War, these slave patrols became Southern police departments. They
enforced the Black Codes through imprisonment or fines for unemployment,
houselessness, and interracial marriage. They put freedmen and women into impossible
debt or hard labor camps akin to slavery. Similarly today, Black people are
disproportionately arrested, face unaffordable bails, and are super exploited as prison
labor.
Capitalism Needs Cops
Police exist because capitalism needs them. Just as Southern slave owners used slave
patrols to maintain their “private property,” the Northern bourgeoisie needed the police to
repress strikers and send them back to work, to quash any challenge to the capitalist
order, and to defend the private property of the means of production. As industrialization
increased capitalist profit, police also became necessary to repress the immigrant and
native-born working class.
In the twentieth century, there came a series of social upheavals in which workers
organized to win greater rights on the job, more control of the workplace, and proper
compensation for their work. In response, nearly every city developed a PD, and the
bourgeoisie began to sic their repressive dogs on the working class. Unionizing attempts
were often quashed by police. Ideas spread about the “troublemaker” who would likely
incite a workplace strike. For example, during the 1934 waterfront strike in San
Francisco, police fired their shotguns into crowds of supporters and strikers and entered
the union hall to further their attack. The police killed two people and were not arrested.
Similar brutal actions occurred throughout the 20th century all over the country.
The current role of police is no different. Around the world, the police terrorize
working-class neighborhoods in the same way. Never was the inception or the practice
of policing rooted in protecting people’s safety. Because the police were always intended
to preserve capitalist private property, the solution to police terror is not better oversight
or greater accountability. Rather, the solution is the abolition of the racist system in
which wealthy white men, many of whom inherited their property directly from the slave
trade, aim to keep people in conditions of starvation, precarious shelter, fatigue, and
alienation. And the harsher the oppression, the more brutal the violence used to keep
the working class “in their place.”
Body Cams and New Training
After the first wave of the Black Lives Matter movement and even today, there have
been calls for body cameras to be worn by police and better training for officers. The
argument for these reforms is that they would provide greater transparency and
accountability for officers.
The problem is that measures like this have already been instituted in many states
around the country but have done little or nothing to curb police brutality. For example,
Eric Garner was choked to death in 2014 in broad daylight, in front of a crowd, while
being recorded using an illegal NYPD chokehold. Tamir Rice was killed in a public park
that had cameras. Philando Castile had his murder captured by police dash cameras
and a recording by his girlfriend. Derek Chauvin looked and smiled at the people who
recorded him killing George Floyd. The (in)justice system in this country is such that
even recorded murders of Black people don’t mean that killer cops will be locked up.
Furthermore, police often turn off their body cameras when committing heinous acts of
violence. Just recently, a Kentucky barbecue shop owner was shot and killed by an
officer who had their body camera shut off.
The number of people shot and killed by police has remained nearly consistent since
2015 even after a greater use of cameras. We don’t need more images of Black people
being brutalized and killed by police. We need this repressive racist apparatus to
disappear.
The Trouble with Community Policing
One of these reformist ideas that is often proposed by the mainstream media and
bourgeois intellectuals is community policing. The notion is that when cops are stationed
in a particular neighborhood, preferably where they themselves live, and only police that
area, the officers will have stronger relationships with the community. According to this
argument, such a move would decrease incidents of crime, brutality, and lethal
interactions.
This rosy picture doesn’t acknowledge the function of police as an institution in charge of
enforcing the rule of law. The Community Oriented Policing Services program, or COPS,
established by the 1994 crime bill invested billions into enhancing the practice of
community policing for the very purpose of fostering relationships between police and
people. The program, however, was an absolute nightmare for working-class Black
people. Not only did it do almost nothing to reduce “crime,” but it also contributed to
mass incarceration, throwing countless Black youth in prison and leaving them in
circumstances of job disenfranchisement and housing precarity.
The fact is, as long as nothing is done to address the underlying structural conditions
that communities of color face — housing segregation, economic insecurity,
unemployment, and scarcity of resources — policing can lead only to criminalization and
brutality, regardless of whether it’s community based or not.
Furthermore, community policing doesn’t change the fact that police budgets drain funds
for much-needed resources away from communities. During the height of the Covid-19
pandemic, cities scrambled to get essential supplies like ventilators. When the ventilator
manufacturers raised their prices, New York City still had $5.6 billion allocated to the
NYPD and $8 billion for building new jails. The cops received a massive budget for their
riot gear, tear gas, and military-grade weapons, which were then used to repress the
protesters. Nurses, meanwhile, were forced to reuse masks and wear garbage bags
instead of proper PPE.
Community policing doesn’t mean the cops no longer serve the racist capitalist system.
A cop who knows a community, the families of that community, and the culture of that
community will still brutalize that community because that is their job and their function.
Defund the Police?
Another discussion that is circulating today is the idea of defunding the police as a
solution to police terror. It is true that police budgets have increased over the last few
decades, especially after the 1994 crime bill was passed, while healthcare and
education have been defunded; however, the current efforts to reverse this trend would
only make a miniscule difference. In New York, Mayor De Blasio has vowed to cut the
budget of the NYPD and reallocate those funds to youth services. In LA, Mayor Eric
Garcetti has said he will cut the LAPD’s $1.8 billion budget by $150 million to reallocate
to marginalized communities. These promises are no more than minor concessions that
will not change anything. What will change something is the total defunding of the
police to a budget of zero and ultimately its permanent abolition.
It is worth noting that anti-police organizations such as the Black Panther Party emerged
in the 1960s when police budgets were far smaller. These organizations correctly
identified the police as a repressive force within working-class Black communities. As
one of the founding members of the Black Panther Party, Huey P Newton, put it, “The
police in our neighborhoods occupy our community just as a foreign troop occupies a
territory and the police are not there to promote our welfare, they are there to contain us.
To brutalize us and murder us because they have their orders to do so.”
The swelling size of police budgets and further militarization of the police were a
response to increasing social tensions. In fact, the first SWAT units were developed at
the time of the Watts riots and the rise of the Black Panther Party.
Partially defunding the police is no solution. If we use the momentum of today’s protests
to merely decrease police budgets today, how can we stop city, state, and federal
governments from increasing these same budgets tomorrow ? More importantly,
what will partial defunding do to end the systemic violence against Black and workingclass people?
Our goal shouldn’t be to lessen the number of Black people killed and brutalized by
police. Our goal is not a little less oppression. Our goal needs to be to protect Black lives
and to eradicate all forces that threaten them. Aspiring to anything less as an ultimate
goal only reserves a spot in the future for more grief and anger over the next Black
person killed by state violence.
Abolish the Police, End Capitalism
Police cannot be reformed to be on the side of the working class and oppressed.
Therefore, the only viable solution to police terror is complete abolition. But, for there to
be abolition of police, there must also be an abolition of prisons, the military, the state,
and capitalism, because these forces are all intertwined.
Since police exist to protect private property and repress the working class, there needs
to be a revolutionary force composed of the working class that opposes capitalism and
its violent guard dogs. In the current struggle, though spontaneous and scattered, there
is a massive worldwide revolt against police that is forcing major concessions from the
state. With this unprecedented solidarity, there is a potential to organize this force into
one that directly opposes the police, other state agents, and capitalism itself.
There needs to be an independent political working-class party that fights for socialism.
Only such a party can organize a society in which resources are distributed by need and
not profit and in which the prisons, the police, and the military can be done away with
permanently.
Repression is an integral component in maintaining a system of exploitation. Therefore,
police will always exist within a capitalist system. If we are to destroy the forces of
repression that kill children, lock people in cells, spread misery, and stifle efforts to
improve the material conditions for society as a whole, our fight needs to be directed
toward the system that relies on and maintains that repression.
2NC – Root Cause: Racism
The maintenance of capitalism requires a divided working class- it
uses racism used to displace its own disintegration
Mark Jay in 2019 Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara;
Cages and Crises: A Marxist Analysis of Mass Incarceration; Historical Materialism 27.1
(2019) 182–223
At the time, there was an ideological struggle being waged: were poverty and social flux
to be blamed on the system of capitalism or on the influx of black migrants? Striking
workers who chose the former narrative faced intense repression. In 1945 and 1946,
President Truman ordered the military to seize railroads, mines, oil refineries and
factories occupied by striking workers. As Truman later wrote, ‘we used the weapons we
had at hand to fight a rebellion against the government.’48 Workers who chose the latter
racist narrative faced no such resistance. After black socialist leader A. Philip Randolph
organised the 1941 March on Washington in protest at economic discrimination, white
workers across the country launched ‘hate strikes’ protesting workplace integration: this
time, authorities did not break up the strikes. Even the CPUSA supported the wartime
strike-ban as part of the fight against fascism, and labelled Randolph a ‘proto-fascist’, a
position that alienated many black workers.49 At the same time, ‘race riots’ broke out
across the country: in nearly all cases, the police either participated in, or turned a blind
eye toward, white vigilante violence against blacks. This type of state violence helps
explain why black leaders like Ida B. Wells and Malcolm X opposed attempts to disarm
black Americans.50 Capital’s predominant response to urban militancy was to flee to the
suburbs.51 The state’s subsidisation of this entire process – from highways and schools,
to home loans for white families – provides a material basis for many whites’ view that
their interests aligned with capital, not with urban workers.52 Capital’s counterrevolution
was sanctified into law with the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which allowed states to pass
right-to-work laws (facilitating capital flight to ‘business friendly’ areas), made wildcat
strikes and boycotts illegal, and forced union officials to sign affidavits guaranteeing that
they had no contact with the CPUSA. This facilitated a sharp decline in CPUSA
membership, and led to a mass expulsion of the most militant CIO unions with the best
anti-racist record. The number of unionised workers in the US decreased from 5.2 million
in 1945 to 3.7 million in 1950. Such union-busting was part of a broader antiCommunist
witch hunt: as former FBI director William Sullivan stated, Cold War tactics ‘were brought
home against any organization against which we targeted. We did not differentiate.’53
2NC – Root Cause: Colonial Patriarchy/Racism
Capitalism is the root cause of patriarchal, racist, and colonial
violence.
Dawson, 16 [author, activist and professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center,
and at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, Extinction A Radical
History, Chapter 3 ‘Capitalism and Extinction,’ 2016] -TB
Capitalism’s Degradation of the Environment The tendency for capitalism to degrade the conditions
of its own production is shockingly evident in the fur trade, one of the main forces that drove
European expansion after 1500. Aside from keeping wearers warm, fur clothes were status symbols in early modern
Europe. The right to wear fur was tightly controlled by so-called sumptuary laws, which dictated that only people of certain
social rank were allowed to don luxurious clothes. Nevertheless, as the mercantile bourgeoisie grew, the demand for furs
spiraled. Western Europe quickly destroyed most of its fur-bearing mammals, and Russia began its long expansion
eastward into Siberia, where it collected furs as tribute from conquered peoples such as the Tatars. By the sixteenth
century, furs were the Russian state’s largest source of income. Siberian beavers, sables, and martens were driven to the
The insatiable demand for fur consequently became
one of the primary catalysts for European colonization of the Americas. Indeed, the
edge of extinction within two centuries.58
French, Dutch, and English development companies established to facilitate European colonization of North America
quickly realized that furs offered one of the most convenient means for the colonists to remit value back to Europe. Furs
made fortunes for many European traders, who exchanged common and relatively cheap manufactured items such as
Over time, the Native
American tribes caught up in the fur trade gradually abandoned their subsistent
ways of life, becoming integrated into the emerging capitalist world system as
specialized laborers working to harvest furs for European traders. 59 European traders
iron axe heads with Native Americans for valuable beaver, deer, ermine, and other pelts.
barter with Native American hunters for furs. In addition to transforming indigenous subsistence culture, the fur trade
catalyzed bloody conflicts between Native American tribes, including the so-called Beaver Wars of the mid-17th century,
in which the Dutch- and Englishbacked Iroquois Confederation battled the predominantly Algonquin-speaking tribes of the
Great Lakes region, whom the French supported. As beaver populations declined in places such as the Hudson Valley
due to over-hunting, tribes like the Mohawks clashed with their neighbors to the north and west, where fur-bearing animals
had not yet been hunted to the brink of extinction. The
full human impact of these wars is still largely
unknown since they took place beyond the frontier of European colonization, but they
undoubtedly weakened the Native American tribes of the Northeast, making them
more vulnerable to subsequent settler colonial campaigns of expropriation and
extermination. In addition, such inter-imperial competition between the French and English led to higher prices for
pelts, which increased the incentive for unsustainable over-harvesting of furs by European trappers and Native
Americans. The fur trade continued until after the American Revolution, helping to make John Jacob Astor, owner of the
monopolistic American Fur Company, into the US’s first multi-millionaire. But Astor, having played a prominent role in
decimating the continent’s fur-bearing animals, abandoned the trade for speculation in real estate early in the nineteenth
century. Although the beaver did not become extinct, its numbers were so reduced that it was no longer viable to hunt
commercially. Scarcely two hundred years had passed since King Henry IV of France had granted the first charter to a
European fur trading company in North America. As Europe subjugated other parts of the planet, it dramatically
transformed, and in most cases radically diminished, biodiversity of all kinds. In some cases, this was unconscious. The
expansion of Europe into the Americas took the form of a great wave of novel biota, from smallpox and influenza viruses
to pigs and horses.60 Traveling alongside the European conquerors, these invasive species often wreaked havoc in the
New World, killing many millions of Native Americans who had not been exposed to the new germs and transforming the
landscape wholesale. In many cases, however, the Europeans also consciously obliterated biodiversity for their own
selfish economic ends. For example, consider the plantation system. The immense diversity of the tropical and semitropical lands settled by the Portuguese and Spanish, early implementers of the plantation economy, was dramatically
As territories were subjugated and
incorporated into European empires and the nascent capitalist system,
indigenous agricultural practices that were adapted to the local climate (and
remade as land was turned over to grow a single crop such as sugar.
consequently highly diverse and resilient) were extirpated. Such well-adapted agricultural practices were replaced by cash
crops grown for export to the imperial metropole. Indigenous
peoples were displaced and slaves were
imported to work the land, generating a brutal system of hitherto unequalled exploitation
based on invented notions of racial difference. In addition to displacing and killing
many millions of people, the monocultures of the plantation economy quickly
exhausted the land in the colonies, destroying soil fertility, and increasing
vulnerability to pests. By the late eighteenth century, plantation owners in the Caribbean islands had begun to
worry about environmental degradation and climate change, which at the time was known as desiccation.61 As a result of
the deforestation linked to plantations, rain had ceased to fall on some of these islands. Mounting concern over the
deteriorating environment led to the passage of the first conservation legislation, which set aside forest land in a
forerunner of national park systems.62 As
plantation owners depleted the land, inter-imperial rivalry
surged, with European colonial powers vying to capture islands whose fertility had not
yet been depleted. The British abolition of slavery in 1833 can, in fact, be seen as a
reaction to the declining productivity of its Caribbean plantations, rather than as
an act of selfless humanitarianism. 63 Despite mounting awareness of the destructive social and
environmental impact of the plantation system, however, the European powers continued to establish plantations around
the world, as extensive tea, rice, and rubber industries were opened in Asia and Africa well into the twentieth century. The
Green Revolution of the second half of the twentieth century continued this trend towards displacement of small peasant
agriculture by large landholdings devoted to export agriculture, with fossil fuel based fertilizers and pesticides used to
As Europeans colonized other parts of
the world, they took cultural beliefs with them that legitimated their conquests. These
ideologies of domination, intended to justify European expropriation of
indigenous people and their land, also established an exploitative attitude
towards flora and fauna in the colonies. The English philosopher John Locke, for example,
argued that God intended the land to belong to those who were “industrious and
rational.” These attributes were manifested in Europeans’ “improvement” of the land through their labor,
cope with the resulting environmental stresses and contradictions.64
development work that, he argued, removed the land from its original communal state and made it the property of the
Europeans. As Locke remarked, “He that in obedience to this command of God, subdued, tilled and sowed any part of
In other
words, since indigenous people weren’t using the land properly, it didn’t really
belong to them and they could be dispossessed with no problem. Not coincidentally,
[the land], thereby annexed to it something that was his property, which another had no title to…”65
Locke owned plantations in English colonies in Ireland and Virginia.66 While part of the “improvement” that Locke
envisaged was to come through the form of privatization known as enclosure, such development was also to take place
through the application of modern science. As
it was conceptualized by Francis Bacon and his
followers in the seventeenth century, the scientific method involved interventions in a
natural world represented as a female body, a body that had to be “twisted on the rack”
and “tortured by fire” before it would reveal its secrets. But Bacon’s representation of the
forceful subjugation of a feminized nature also reflects a process of subjugation
unfolding at the time he wrote: the violent acts of enclosure through which women,
accused of being witches and often burnt at the stake, were deprived of control of their
reproductive power in the early modern period. 67 In many ways, Bacon and his acolytes were simply
expanding on the Judeo-Christian tradition; after all, it is Adam whom God allows to name not just the animals in Genesis,
Women being burned at the
stake in Europe, part of the campaign to enclose the commons that helped
inaugurate capitalism. This subjugation mirrored the equally savage measures through which the European
thereby establishing his dominion over the natural world, but also Eve. 68
peasantry was expelled from the land they once held communally, as well as the bottomless depravity of colonialism and
racial slavery, processes of expropriation, as Marx put it, “written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.” As
Bacon’s account of scientific inquisition suggests, the scientific method took this reign of terror as one of its core
metaphors, generating a model of patriarchal mastery over a passive feminized nature that set the terms for subsequent
Doctrines of the objectivity and
disinterestedness of the scientific method helped to obscure the potentially
ecocidal, patriarchal, and racist character of techno-science, until the social
movements of the late twentieth century arose to challenge science’s role in
legitimating colonialism, in depriving women of control of their bodies, and in
creating deadly chemicals such as DDT .69
notions of progress through domination of the natural world.
2NC – Root Cause: Stop and Frisk
Stop and frisk and over policing are rooted in racial capitalism- the
intensity of black struggle was stoked by economic exploitationpolicing tactics developed to prevent and punish future uprisings
Mark Jay in 2019 Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara;
Cages and Crises: A Marxist Analysis of Mass Incarceration; Historical Materialism 27.1
(2019) 182–223
The combination of the War on Poverty, with its focus on ‘helping individuals
to reform themselves’, and ‘Black Bourgeois reformism’, with its goal of integration, did
little to ameliorate daily living conditions for black workers.61 In the
context of high unemployment, brutal working conditions, and intensifying
police operations the civil-rights movement entered its most radical phase.
Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, local authorities used mass arrest as a tactic
to intimidate and repress black activists. Indeed, the notion of ‘law-and-order’
was introduced by Southern politicians attempting to delegitimise civil-rights
activists. In response to the government crackdown, groups like the Student
Non-Violent Coordinating Committee launched a ‘fill the jails’ campaign to
remove the stigma of imprisonment.62 In the mid-1960s, the ‘legal repression’
of black-led movements took on a new order of magnitude. Between 1964
and 1972, there were black-led uprisings in 300 US cities (where 75% of black
Americans lived) involving around half a million people and resulting in tens
of thousands of arrests and 250 deaths.63
The combination of the War on Poverty, with its focus on ‘helping individuals
to reform themselves’, and ‘Black Bourgeois reformism’, with its goal of integration, did
little to ameliorate daily living conditions for black workers.61 In the
context of high unemployment, brutal working conditions, and intensifying
police operations the civil-rights movement entered its most radical phase.
Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, local authorities used mass arrest as a tactic
to intimidate and repress black activists. Indeed, the notion of ‘law-and-order’
was introduced by Southern politicians attempting to delegitimise civil-rights
activists. In response to the government crackdown, groups like the Student
Non-Violent Coordinating Committee launched a ‘fill the jails’ campaign to
remove the stigma of imprisonment.62 In the mid-1960s, the ‘legal repression’
of black-led movements took on a new order of magnitude. Between 1964
and 1972, there were black-led uprisings in 300 US cities (where 75% of black
Americans lived) involving around half a million people and resulting in tens
of thousands of arrests and 250 deaths.63
In the 1965 Watts rebellion, at the time the largest post-Civil War uprising in US history,
LAPD chief Parker likened the situation to ‘fighting the Viet
Cong’. Days of armed struggle resulted in 3,952 arrests and 34 deaths, nearly
all brought about by state forces. The material conditions of the uprising
are telling: between 1963 and 1965, the LAPD had killed 60 black people, and
28 factories had shifted operations away from the local area, leaving more than
one-third of Watts’ residents unemployed. When Martin Luther King, Jr. tried
to organise the rebels into a nonviolent movement, his speech was shouted
down. King’s friend Dick Gregory attempted to intervene, grabbing a police
bullhorn and telling rebels to ‘go home!’ A protester subsequently shot Gregory
in the leg.64
After the rebellion, the LAPD instituted ‘stop and frisk’ tactics in the black
neighbourhoods that had launched the uprising. These tactics were subsequently
adopted in cities throughout the US, such as Detroit, where, in 1967, an
even larger rebellion occurred.65 Even if we heed Adolph Reed’s advice not to
‘impute instrumental rationality’ to all urban rebels, it is clear that Detroit’s
uprising cannot be described in Wacquant’s terms, as a ‘race riot’ protesting ‘caste
exclusion’.66 While the uprising was black-led, thousands of white workers
participated, and local factory operations came to a near standstill. A survey from
a local prison showed that 40% of arrestees during the uprising worked for
the big three auto firms. Meanwhile, the Michigan Chronicle, Detroit’s leading
black newspaper, chastised the police’s ‘permissiveness’ in handling the ‘looters’
who were overrunning the city. When black congressman John Conyers
failed to persuade Detroiters to leave the streets, he referenced the growing
class divide within black America: ‘they’re alienated from us. We don’t speak
their language. We throw $100 dinners and some of these people don’t see $100
in a month.’67
Days into the uprising, the Malcolm X Society ‘contacted the mayor of
Detroit and the governor of Michigan, claiming they would bring a cessation
of “all hostilities” if the officials would meet a number of key demands’ such
as educational reform and jobs programmes.68 As was the case in Watts, rather
than countenance political demands, ‘a “dragnet” process was evoked in which
the ordinary canons of evidence necessary to arrest and the normal constraints
of limited police manpower were largely ignored in an all-out effort to clear the
streets.’69 Police targeted activists for arrest, and the courts refused bail to 98%
of arrestees until the uprising ended.70
Largely as a result of the government’s use of incarceration as a response
to urban militancy, the rate at which new inmates entered the prison system
increased at a faster rate in the late 1960s and early ’70s than at any time since
the Great Depression.71 As Dan Berger writes:
Although these arrests resulted only in brief incarcerations, they were
dry runs at dedicating massive state resources to widespread imprisonment. As
the economy began its postindustrial turn, elites changed these
urban uprisings into experiments in detaining large numbers of people.72
2NC – Root Cause- Supermax Prisons
Supermax prisons arose as a response to resistance from withinprisoner riots and struggles cut across ideological lines to fight the
economic conditions that generate crime and punishment- this threat
was quashed through over securitization and stripping of prisoner’s
rights
Mark Jay in 2019 Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara;
Cages and Crises: A Marxist Analysis of Mass Incarceration; Historical Materialism 27.1
(2019) 182–223
As underemployed and politically militant blacks were thrown in prison en
masse, people like George Jackson organised prisoners as part of the Panther’s
strategy of turning the ‘lumpenproletariat’ (a group that Marxists had long ignored,
even scorned) into the ‘vanguard of the revolution’.97 As Jackson wrote
at the time, ‘Only the prison movement has shown any promise of cutting
across the ideological, racial and cultural barricades that have blocked the
natural coalition of left-wing forces at all times in the past.’98 Indeed, although
the majority of rebelling prisoners were black, Jackson insisted on the uprisings’
socialist character: ‘If a man wants to relate to my blackness, fine, but
I would prefer he relate to me on the basis of my status as a soldier in the
WORLD revolution.’ As more prisoners became politicised, the number of uprisings
rose from five in 1968 to 48 in 1971. The state’s response to these uprisings turned
prisons into sites of ‘low-intensity warfare’.99
The most famous uprising was in 1971 in Attica, a maximum-security facility housing
the country’s most recalcitrant prisoners. Several weeks after
state forces killed George Jackson, 1,300 Attica prisoners took control of the
prison and, on national TV, issued a list of demands that included ‘amnesty’,
‘adequate food, water, and shelter’, ‘effective drug treatment’, and an ‘inmate
education system’. In response, New York Governor Rockefeller ordered police
and National Guardsmen to quash the uprising, which they did, but only after
killing 29 prisoners and ten of the guards who had been taken hostage. The
national media blamed the deaths on the inmates. The New York Times wrote
that prisoners’ actions ‘reflect a barbarism wholly alien to civilized society.
Prisoners slashed the throats of utterly helpless unarmed guards.’ Days later,
however, an autopsy revealed that state forces had killed all 39 men.100
As Dan Berger has shown, Supermax prisons were launched as a response
to prisoner militancy. These are facilities where prisoners are kept in solitary
confinement for up to 23 hours per day, with their reading materials and
communication closely monitored. As the prison warden of Marion, the nation’s
first Supermax, explained in 1973: ‘The purpose of the Marion control unit is
to control revolutionary attitudes in the prison system and in society at large.’101
In the mid-1960s, Marion was the only Supermax in the US; by 1997 there were
more than 55.102 The Marion model of ‘indefinite lockdown and limited access
to the outside, brutal segregation and random attacks … has become the dominant
model of prison in America.’103
Due to such securitisation efforts, and the collapse of groups like the
Panthers who supported prisoners from the outside, prison activism waned in
the late 1970s, just as the prison population was booming. Subsequent cuts to
prison educational and rehabilitation programmes ensured that prisons would be l
ittle more than highly securitised warehouses for inmates.104 It would be
increasingly difficult for inmates to have George Jackson’s self-described experience:
‘I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels and Mao when I entered prison
and they redeemed me.’105 Had he served his prison sentence in a Supermax,
Malcolm X would surely not have been a member of a prison debate team that
defeated MIT’s debate team.106
Framework
2NC – Framework: Academy
Limiting debate to a choice between policies enforces neoliberal
conception of politics and history which makes impossible any
alternative way of being – the task of the university is to generate an
ontological disruption which injects deep anxiety into this worldview
Curtis 13 [Neal, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Film, Television and Media
Studies at the University of Auckland, “Thought Bubble: Neoliberalism and the Politics of
Knowledge,” new formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics, Volume 80-81, 2013,
Project MUSE]
Thought Bubble
The Ernst & Young report quotes one anonymous university Vice-Chancellor declaring: ‘Our major competitor in ten years
time will be Google … if we’re still alive!’ This quote supposedly encapsulates changes to our relation to knowledge
indicative of the two drivers of change which the report calls ‘digital technologies’ and ‘democratization’. The reason why
these two are related is because the report understands democratisation simply in terms of ‘access’ and then assumes
the flawed syllogism whereby because digital technologies make knowledge accessible and democracy is about access,
therefore all digital technologies are democratic. It would be foolish to suggest that a report citing ‘the Darwinian force of
the market’33 could countenance the idea that democracy ought to be measured by something other than consumer-style
access, but access in and of itself is not inherently democratic. Much like ‘excellence’ it requires secondary criteria to
become a meaningful concept. Admittedly the report does avoid the positivist trap that users of Google can easily fall into,
of assuming that knowledge is simply ‘out there’, such that its acquisition is merely a matter of data retrieval. The author of
the report does link knowledge to analysis and interpretation, but given that we are asked to bend our
knee to ‘the Darwinian force of the market’, one suspects that analysis and interpretation
is of a kind with that found in the pages of the Financial Times and will be limited to
debates over best policy within a given system, rather than any ontological
engagement with the character and shape of the world itself .
The Google model is, however, exemplary of the problem faced by the post-historical university and the nature of its
democratic role. Leaving aside the rather obvious point that in the pursuit of profit Google have quite happily aided the
Chinese government in their restriction of the democracy movement in that country, the Google model is significant
because its success is based on successfully attending to and facilitating the personalisation that has come to define both
democracy and knowledge in neoliberal consumer cultures. Google’s success has primarily come from its ability to
provide a highly individualised service, partly due to the capacity of its search engine to learn what the user likes and to
display results that are closely aligned to preferences indicated through earlier ‘click signals’; but this has also been a path
to monetisation as the company is able to claim that it can deliver customers to companies with impressive precision. In
an economy increasingly based on information, attention becomes a very rare commodity,34 so the ability to deliver
attention to advertisers becomes a highly profitable capability. The capacity for Google to archive click signals affords
increasingly successful searches without additional work from the user and provides a profile that companies can attach
themselves to in their search for consumers. [End Page 84]
While this mode of information retrieval sits well with all the neoliberal markers of value -
individuality, preference, choice, competition, immediacy - it gives rise to significant
concerns for both knowledge and democracy that must not be ignored. In a fascinating book
entitled The Filter Bubble, Eli Pariser sets out the implications of the Google algorithm. Initially, while the idea that what is
best for one person may not be best for someone else is hardly revolutionary, the idea that a search engine is ‘biased to
share our own views’35 has far-reaching consequences. In short, ‘your computer monitor is a kind of one-way mirror,
reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click’ (Filter Bubble, p3). Here, access is instant
and individualised, but Pariser is concerned that where ‘democracy requires a reliance on shared facts […] we’re being
offered parallel but separate universes’ (Filter Bubble, p5). While it is important to argue that “facts” are not enough,
shared or not, the problem is accentuated because the search engine, which is now a ‘prediction engine’ (Filter Bubble,
p9), has a tendency to search out ‘facts’ you have already indicated a preference for through click signals. Ultimately the
cookies and bots that aid personalised web-browsing begin to produce a filter bubble: ‘a unique universe of information for
each of us’, but more importantly one that ‘fundamentally alters the way we encounter ideas and information’ (Filter
Bubble, p9). In other words, the Google model is one in which we continually receive more of what we already know and
have indicated a preference for. Ultimately, the filter bubble is ‘a cozy place, populated by our favourite people and things
and ideas’ (Filter Bubble, p12).
Pariser notes that while this personalisation flatters users who believe they are in a position of control because the
prediction engine appears to be giving them what they want, it increasingly subjects users ‘to a kind of informational
determinism in which what you clicked on in the past determines what you see next’ (Filter Bubble, p16). This mode of
personalised access means that Google does have great significance for the post-historical university, but that
significance does not lie in the claim that Google University is the future as Ernst & Young would have us believe. Rather,
the posthistorical university will increasingly take on the character of a filter bubble . As
research is increasingly directed towards what are described to be the needs of the
current system, and teaching is tailored to satisfying the existing desires and
preferences of students refigured as customers, the university’s role in the global knowledge economy
will be to offer more of the same. The university has always had a major role to play in
maintaining the cultural status quo and policing knowledge, but it has also historically
been a major site for the social production of dissensus which is irreducible to the
promotional language of ‘innovation’ and ‘entrepreneurialism’ (or any historical equivalent thereof).
the Google model is significant because the two forces of impact and customer service suggest that
Ultimately the sole purpose of the Ernst & Young report is to ensure that the university of the future plays an integral part
in the production of an ‘identity loop’ (Filter Bubble, p127), or what we might call a thought bubble that reproduces the
truth of market logic.
In the face of this doctrinal onslaught the future of the university as a social institution
looks bleak, but despite the heavy-handed ideological work that the Ernst & Young report epitomises, the future
cannot be closed off in the way they hope. As was noted in the introduction, the rationality of markets was
shown to be a pseudo-science by the persistence and the effects of what Besley and Hennessey called the ‘psychology of
herding’. First of all this produced the hysterical delusion that the business cycle had been overcome, which was then
counteracted by the global loss of confidence that brought about the greatest economic crisis in living memory. [End Page
85] The evident role played by these ‘animal spirits’ testifies to the importance of a non-theoretical, non-rational relation to
the world, but also to a more profound ontological state of mind that Heidegger refers to as ‘attunement’ or ‘mood’.36
Ordinarily that attunement is an unremarkable and comfortable familiarity, but one that might become a concerted defence
in times of crisis. Fluctuations in mood are usually accompanied by stories that tell us something about the world we live
in. With regards to the world of economics these are stories that precipitate trust, confidence, euphoria, frenzy, fear, and
anxiety.37 These spirits and the stories that shape them are evidence of the continuing hermeneutic condition set out
above. Stories
make a world of sense, but they are only ever interpretations and remain
subject to the vagaries of mood.
The narrative of neoliberal post-history can claim to be the rightful representation of
human relations only because it is underwritten by gigantic economic, political and social
power that supports and distributes its stories, not because it has discovered the truth. In
such an environment, academics regularly articulate concern about the utilitarian if not
instrumental mood, of managers and students alike . While the discourses of impact and
customer service further support such instrumentality and suggest that the university of the future will increasingly help
lock down the narrative of post-history, there is still hope . In keeping with Heidegger’s (in)famous use of
Hölderlin’s words: ‘But where danger is, grows/The saving power also’,38 the pressures on students to achieve a certain
GPA or class of degree and the demands on them to be socially compliant, still does not eradicate their sense that
the
world is contestable . In many cases the mood of students remains one of scepticism and doubt towards the
remain interested in the big questions
and readily support courses that make great theoretical demands on them. Students tend to
supposed common sense, coupled with a desire for change. They
be of an age when the sedimented world they have inherited has not yet ossified and all kinds of malformations and
reformations remain possible. This means that an important role can still be played by the university;
not one that is reduced to increasing access to what is already given, but one that
opens up spaces for this contestation and challenging of the world, for offering
up radically alternative ways of living and being-with-others .
As was noted in the introduction, the humanities have an especially important role to play in this
regard. While traditional humanities disciplines such as philosophy, English, and history have all
supported social and political conservatism through, amongst other things, the defence of a
canon, these disciplines have also been traditionally concerned with that gap between
the meaningful and meaninglessness that defines the human condition . Whether a
philosophical treatise, a work of literature, or the recovery of a counter-history, work in the humanities has
always occupied that space where the meaningful totality we call our world suffers a
variety of disruptions and is revealed to be inadequate . The humanities are never
more alive than when faced with the loss of an established truth and the slipping
away of the world . Some of the greatest works in the humanities are riddled with
anxiety. It therefore falls on the humanities in a time of crisis to enable anxiety to work in
the name of alternative visions, which is precisely why the humanities are under such
strident attack within the marketised model. This is also a role that ought to be taken
beyond the campus to form the beginnings of a new contract with a public that has just
bailed out private speculators at the expense of public welfare. Turning away from the anxiety
generated by the crisis will only encourage more of the same. The public role of the university should
be to ensure this anxiety, understood as the re-emergence of the questioning that
neoliberal post-history continually seeks to suppress, is turned to creative use .
2NC – Framework: Cap Focus Good
Conversations of crime must take into account capitalism’s
constructions of blame onto ‘criminals’ and the social underpinnings
behind that. Anything that moves away from the current cjs or
capitalism must center social discursive problems and solutions
Cheliotis ’13 (Leonidas K Cheliotis, University of Edinburgh, Neoliberal capitalism
and middle-class punitiveness: Bringing Erich Fromm’s ‘materialistic psychoanalysis’ to
penology, Punishment &amp; Society, Volume 15 issue 3, 17 June 2013) accessed 717-20 MS
‘Suitable threats’ and ‘suitable enemies’ Two confusions must be avoided at this juncture. First, although Fromm himself
does not raise this point, to speak of displacement is not to claim that public consciousness is wholly diverted away from
the original sources of insecurity. This, in the case under consideration, would not be possible, given
that
socioeconomic adversities always impinge directly and heavily on the human psyche. Nor
would it even be politically desirable, as socio-economic concerns work to increase (if not, as we
have seen, fully and permanently ensure) personal susceptibility to exploitation as both a
worker and a consumer in the neoliberal marketplace. Displacement is to be understood, instead, as a
matter of prioritizing or at least rebalancing different concerns according to their perceived levels of importance and
socio-economic insecurities
may be kept constant or even increase but either take a back seat to, or not far exceed,
insecurities related to the likelihood of criminal victimization on the street. The second
urgency, be such perceptions justified or not by objective factors. In this sense,
confusion to be avoided also concerns the process of displacement. To suggest that the source of middle-class worries is
displaced from neoliberal socio-economic policies onto violent street crime is not to subscribe to the behaviourist concept
of ‘stimulus generalization’, whereby a given response may extend to objects or situations outwardly resembling the
original stimulus. As well as referring to the rise of new but not substitutive stimuli, the concept of generalization fails to
explain why superficially similar objects or situations are not equally effective in triggering the same response. Here one
needs to recall, this time with Fromm, that stimulation requires that the stimulus be commonly thought of as bearing a
causal link to the response. For example, although fear is a biological instinct found in all sentient organisms, a man will
feel threatened with danger to his life only to the extent that the source of danger has previously been nominated as such.
Displacement, it follows, requires that there be unconscious associative connections between new objects or situations
and their original counterparts; that there be sufficient identity in the responses each of them may be said to elicit,
regardless of any similarities they may or may not share in terms of outward form (Fromm, 1984 [1973]: 321–325). Thus,
albeit due to the unequal distribution of resources under neoliberal capitalism, corporeal insecurity
among the middle classes is attributed to the supposed spread of violent street crime
and the threats it poses directly to the human body. Similarly, inasmuch as middle-class ontological
insecurity springs from reduced geographical mobility, it is blamed not on financial constraints but rather on the sociospatial implications of violent crime on the streets, for example the avoidance of public places denoted as ‘danger zones’
neoliberal capitalism can have
actual, if indirect, criminogenic effects, in that it brings about the economic ills and wider
existential gaps that may push a minority of people to take up violent street crime. (This,
or ‘no-go areas’ (see further Garland, Cheliotis 261 Arguably, however,
incidentally, is an observation which Fromm (2000 [1931]) elaborates in the context of earlier forms of capitalism.) By
implication, and at least in this limited sense, the
process of displacement becomes one where the
original danger and its resembling substitute are not only associated causally, but also
share a certain grounding in lived reality. Indeed, governing elites may manipulate the
criminogenic side-effects of neoliberal capitalism to their own political advantage. By
arbitrarily extrapolating from the relatively few concrete instances of violent victimization on the street – by putting together
‘[l]ittle straws of truth’, as Fromm (1964: 85) would phrase the point – elites
may accord semblances of
reality to the fictional image of violent street crime as a danger similar in its spread to the
insecurities directly borne of neoliberal socioeconomic policies. At the same time, the apparent
root causes of the substitute danger that is violent street crime, whether fictional or real, must be disassociated from the
governing party and its socio-economic policies as such. If not, displacement risks defeating its political purpose, both in
terms of incumbent interests and the broader neoliberal project to which these are subtly and tightly tied. It is important
here to elaborate on the neoliberal framework of blame and accountability within which
violent street crime is depicted and explained in political and public discourses. Blame and
accountability in general, and the identity of those held responsible for the problem of violent street crime in particular, are
key to further deepening our understanding of the process of displacement at issue. For resolution,
if such it can
be termed, cannot be reached by governing elites if they merely deny responsibility for
the problem they have chosen to foreground. The outlet where responsibility is transferred has crucial
functions to perform besides, over and above assuming the burden of blame, hence it needs to satisfy a battery of very
particular criteria. In fact, the political utility and selectability of a given danger are largely commensurate with its capacity
to be attributed to sources that can meet these criteria. As Fromm (1964: 85–87) notes, a danger cannot be sufficiently
attractive as a substitute for the real source of one’s insecurities unless it leads to the identification of specific others, and
unless it helps to mobilize disdain for them as opposed to praise for one’s own group. This is because a central
function of substitutive dangers is to drain off the narcissistic needs for a sense of
mastery over destiny (although, as we shall see, mastery must by no means be absolute to be politically effective)
and for achieving or reaffirming significations of social superiority. What thus allows violent street
crime to appear liable to regulation and provoke targeted disdain is first and foremost that it can be given a familiar face,
as when mugging is linked to young Black males (Hall et al., 1978; Simon, 2001; Wacquant, 2009; Tonry, 2011). Not all
categories of persons are equally suitable for the purposes in hand. Fromm (1964: 86) points out that scapegoats need to
issue from ‘a minority that 262 is sufficiently helpless to lend itself as an object for narcissistic satisfaction’ (see also
the helplessness of scapegoats is
generally to be conceived in socio-economic terms, then governing elites in the case at
issue manage to twist yet another complication of neoliberalism to their own advantage,
here laying responsibility squarely on the backs of people whom neoliberal socioeconomic policies have kept or pushed into the most disadvantaged positions in society
Christie, 1986; Hollway and Jefferson, 1997). If, as Fromm elaborates,
(Reiner, 2002; Wacquant, 2009). Once personified, Fromm goes on to argue, selected dangers may be framed in the
language of extant self-serving effigies that divide societies into pairs of extremes along moralistic lines. Crucially, besides
furnishing idioms for describing the general qualities of human conduct, such effigies also offer precise ideas about how
human conduct is to be explained and how it should be weighed morally (Fromm, 2006 [1962]: 87–100; see also Herzfeld,
the violent street criminal’s demerits are constructed in a
classificatory language that feeds on the symbolic order of neoliberal capitalism.
More specifically, the perpetrators of violent street crime are said and thought to be enjoying
instant access to material and ontological gains, from the goods they seize to
unrestricted spatial mobility through taking over streets. Thereby induced among the middle classes
1992). In all these senses,
is the sense of unfairness one consciously feels when others ‘short circuit the whole marketplace of effort and reward,
when they are perceived as getting exactly what they want without any effort at all – or, more precisely, exactly what you
want and can only achieve with great effort’ (Young, 2007: 45, emphasis in original). Purporting to be causally associated
with failing performance in the marketplace, violent street crime soon comes to be viewed as the means by which ‘flawed
consumers’ manage to offset the effects of personal ‘irresponsibility’ and ‘laziness’ (see further Bauman and May, 2001;
also Garland, 2001; Wacquant, 2009). It is not hard to see how governing elites once more manage to draw symbolic
benefits from deeply problematic features of their neoliberal socio-economic policies. Not only do they deploy the scathing
rhetoric of the market to theorize and castigate the violent street criminal. In so doing, they also conflate the
disadvantages their very policies have done so much to produce with a constructed
succession of taints, from irresponsibility and laziness, to criminal propensity, to reduced
morality. This argument may be advanced further: rather than assuming that the politico-symbolic benefit at issue is
restricted to relativizing the significance and urgency of middle-class socio-economic insecurities vis-a`-vis violent street
crime, the discourse of violent street crime may be viewed as allowing the reconstruction of middle-class socio-economic
insecurities as such, treating them as a signifier of responsible citizenship and thereby unconsciously enhancing their
public acceptability. In this case, while the disadvantaged are berated for allegedly rejecting ‘responsible’ alternatives in
favour of crime as the easy route out of their predicament, praise is extended to the middle classes, who equally allegedly
make the hard ‘responsible’ choice of abstaining from crime despite the persistence of their own socio-economic
insecurities. Among the middle classes, stubborn socio-economic Cheliotis 263 Downloaded from pun.sagepub.com at
Karolinska Institutets Universitetsbibliotek on May 25, 2015 insecurities may thus come to be regarded as indicators of
righteousness and responsibility, both in terms of entrepreneurship and approach to the rule of law. To this extent, crime
allows for expanding the meaning of success in life under neoliberalism to include reference to the legal merits of the
means by which one struggles for corporeal and ontological security, opening up opportunities for finding a modicum of
narcissistic satisfaction in the process of struggling even where, ironically, the ultimate desired goals remain pending. But
the irony goes further still, insofar
as the dichotomous discourse of responsibilization as applied
to the public reflects, and ultimately serves, the interests of neoliberal rulers who thereby
try to evade nothing less than responsibility for their own civic failings and misdeeds
2NC – FW: Challenge Structures
A framework of understanding the PIC as necessitated by capitalism
is the only route to an effective challenge of structures of domination
Smith & Hattery ’08 (Earl Smith and Angela J. Hattery, Incarceration: A Tool for
Racial Segregation and Labor Exploitation, Race, Gender & Class Journal, Vol. 15 No
½) - NR
Our argument is framed primarily by the race, class and gender paradigm which was largely developed by African
American and multiracial feminists (Anderson, 2001 ; Davis, 1983; Hill-Collins, 1994, 2004; King, 1988; Zinn, 2005).
This theoretical paradigm rests on the assumption that systems of oppression
and domination (i.e. patriarchy, capitalism, and racial superiority) exist independently and are
woven together in what Baca Zinn and Thornton Dill (2005) refer to as a matrix of domination.
Furthermore, the race, class, and gender paradigm requires that the data be analyzed
not only with attention to individual social locations but more importantly with
attention to the inequality regimes (Acker, 2006) that are based in the systems of
patriarchy, capitalism, and racial domination . As powerful an analytical tool as this framework is,
one of the shortcomings of the use of the race, class and gender paradigm by other scholars is the tendency to focus on
the individual level rather than the structural level. In other words, often the analysis focuses on the race, class, and
focus our analysis on the
structural level and the ways in which different systems of domination are
mutually reinforcing: patriarchy is woven with racism (or race supremacy) both of which
are woven with capitalism . For example, we are not focused on the social class or race of individual
inmates, but instead examine the ways in which capitalism and the system of racial
domination collude to exploit the labor of male and female inmates thus increasing
profits for shareholders while simultaneously reducing competition for scarce
jobs in an increasingly tenuous domestic labor market. Of particular importance to the argument here is a focused
examination on capitalism as a core organizing structure of the raced and
gendered PIC. Wright's work on exploitation (1997), though not developed with the express purpose of explicating
gender of individual actors and how these status locations shape experiences. We
the processes in prisons offers an important framework for understanding the role of capitalism in the PIC. Pointing out, as
prisons are nothing more than catchments for the undesirables in our
society (Chang & Thompkins, 2002; Chasin, 2004:234-239), Wright (1997:153).extends the argument and links it
directly to the "needs" of capitalist economic system : In the case of labor power, a person can
others do, that
cease to have economic value in capitalism if it cannot be deployed productively. This is the essential condition of
people in the 'underclass' ... above all [they lack] the necessary means to acquire the
skills needed to make their labor power saleable. As a result they are not consistently
exploited. . .the underclass consists of human beings who are largely expendable from the point of
view of the logic of capitalism. Like Native Americans who became a landless underclass in the nineteenth
century, repression rather than incorporation is the central mode of social control
directed toward them. Capitalism does not need the labor power of unemployed
inner city youth. The material interests of the wealthy and privileged segments of
American society would be better served if these people simply disappeared .
However, unlike in the nineteenth century, the moral and political forces are such that direct genocide is no longer a viable
The alternative, then, is to build prisons and cordon off the zones of cities in which the
prisons can be seen as a modern day substitution for genocide, a
strategy for removing unwanted, unnecessary , un-useful members of a capitalist
society. Incarceration provides a mechanism whereby the privileged can
segregate or cordon-off these unwanted members of society, thus increasing the
strategy.
underclass lives. According to Wright,
efficiency of the capitalist economy and its insatiable desire for expansion, without
the moral burden of genocide. It is easy to see how prisons accomplish this goal : they remove individuals
from society and they permanently (in many states) disenfranchise them from the
political realm (Uggen & Manza, 2002 ). Prisoners and ex-convicts become virtual non-citizens,
unable to challenge the economic, social or political power structures. And, the very
fact of cordoning off some individuals means that the goods and riches of society are accessible only to those citizens
who are not cordoned-off. As Baca Zinn and Thornton Dill (2005) note,
every system of oppression has
as its reflection a system of privilege. That which cordons some off, cordons others in. Put another
way, along with any accumulation of disadvantage comes an accumulated advantage for someone else (Zinn & Dill,
2005). For example, Whites, especially White men, implicitly or explicitly, benefit from the sending of hundreds of
high levels of incarceration effectively
remove African American men from the competitive labor force and upon release
they are disenfranchised in the political system (Uggen & Manza, 2002) and permanently
thousands of African American men to prisons; specifically,
unemployable (Pager, 2003).
2NC – FW: Superstructure
The superstructure of capitalism is intricately designed to conceal—
reject arguments that divert from capitalism’s role in perpetuating
racism—they perpetuate racism too in effect
Wolff 16 (Richard D. Wolff. emeritus professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is currently
a visiting professor at the New School University in New York City. How Capitalism and Racism Support Each Other. April
17, 2016. https://truthout.org/articles/how-capitalism-and-racism-support-each-other/)-MR
“Racism” is so often applied to US prison statistics and policing; to data on differences in employment, housing, wealth
and income distributions, college enrollments, film awards, and so much more; and to hardening hostilities toward
immigration. At the same time, racism is so often condemned — at least in mainstream media, dominant political circles
and most intellectual and academic institutions. Racism’s persistence where the capitalist economic
system prevails raises the question of the connection between capitalism and racism.
Many societies are structured and operate to subordinate one or more portions of their population — politically, culturally,
economically or in combinations of these ways — while privileging others. Among the successive generations born into
societies with such subordinations, some will challenge and seek to change their condition. Force can try to maintain
subordination, but it is costly, dangerous and often unsuccessful. The
preferred method has rather been
(a) to develop an idea that justifies the subordination and (b) to install that idea as deeply
as possible into the thinking of both the subordinated and the privileged.
One such idea is “race,” the notion that sets of inherent (often deemed “natural”) qualities differentiate groups of people
from one another in fundamental ways. This idea of race can then be used to explain the subordination of some and the
privileges of others as effects of their racial differences. The concept of race thus accomplishes a reversal: Instead of
being a produced idea, an ex-post justification of structures of social subordination, race morphs instead into
some pre-existing “reality” that caused or enabled the subordination.
We know how and why racism worked often to support slavery around the world and especially in the early United States.
Masters endorsed and promoted ideas that justified slaves as subordinated because they were an inferior race. Racist
ideology also sometimes supported feudalism by dividing lords and serfs into different races. Indeed, some early
capitalist systems likewise racially distinguished employers from employees.
Racism persists in no small part because its benefits to capitalism outweigh its costs.
However, capitalism presents a more complex case, because it often made “individual freedom” central to its supportive
ideologies. Opponents of slavery could use that ideology to fight for slavery’s abolition. Yet capitalism’s history
nonetheless keeps exhibiting both the idea of race and racism. And the evidence marshaled by, among others, Manning
Marable in How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (1983) certainly documents capitalism’s subordination of
many African Americans. Do racism and capitalism then support one another as
per Malcolm X’s famous
statement, “You can’t have capitalism without racism”? Should we follow Adolph Reed Jr.’s
perspective (in his 2013 New Labor Forum article “Marx, Race and Neoliberalism”) that sees racism as a
“historically specific ideology that emerged, took shape, and has evolved as a
constituent element within” capitalism?
Answers to these questions emerge from patterns exhibited by capitalism’s inequality and instability. Capitalists
never could end their system’s tendency to generate gross inequality (in wealth and
income distributions) nor its instability (in cycles of depression and recession). Both those
features of capitalism have contributed to ongoing social injustice and oppositional social
movements. Had the heavy burdens of recurring business cycles (periodic unemployment and its multiple consequences)
been distributed roughly equally or randomly across societies where capitalism prevailed — threatening and frightening
everyone — those oppositional movements might well have gathered the broad support needed to consign capitalism to
an early demise.
However, those burdens were never distributed equally or randomly. Some suffered them disproportionally and
repeatedly, resulting in social subordination. Others were relatively privileged, exempted from those burdens partially or
totally. Yet, in their struggles to displace slavery and feudalism as societies’ prevalent pre-capitalist economic systems,
supporters of capitalism had often promised that it would differ from those systems by
guaranteeing everyone liberty, equality and brotherhood or solidarity. What capitalism
achieved contradicted that promise.
The burdens of capitalism’s instability fell much harder on employees than employers,
and much harder upon some employees than others. Capitalism thus always faced a basic
legitimation problem. How could it justify its unequal distributions of income, wealth and the burdens of its systemic
instability among the people whose condition of being “free and equal” capitalism was supposed to guarantee?
One of the major means of managing this legitimation problem has been an ideology of race (alongside other ideologies
centered around concepts such as “productivity” and “meritocracy”). Capitalism repurposed race and racism. By dividing
human beings, conceptually and practically, into intrinsically different subgroups, capitalism’s defenders could explain and
justify why its economic benefits (e.g. the status of employer rather than employee) and burdens (unemployment, poverty
etc.) were so unequally distributed (both within countries and globally). Employers, politicians, academics
and journalists reinforced the notion that the cause, fault or blame for that unequal distribution
lay with racially differentiated characteristics, not with the capitalist system.
Certain population groups — conceived as races — were deemed underdeveloped, incapable,
irrational and/or psychologically disqualified in relation to capitalism’s productive rigors.
Such presumed inferiority was then offered as an explanation for why people of some
races were rarely employers and, among employees, were those last hired and first
fired, poorly paid, ghettoized etc.
Such races — often non-whites — were, in effect, assigned to play the role of shock absorbers in and for capitalist
business cycles. They still are: A 2016 report from the University of Illinois, using the racialized differentiations, documents
how young people of color in the United States continue to face significantly higher rates of unemployment and lower
employment per population ratios than young white people do.
In the United States, most white employees have been spared constantly fearing and periodically suffering unemployment
and its consequences. A minority of white employees shares the fate of a huge portion of the “shock absorber” races.
That fate comprises job insecurity, recurring unemployment and its consequences: loss of skills, job connections and
promotions; descent into hopelessness and desperation; turning toward illegal revenue-generating activities; policed into
disproportionate incarceration; etc. By concentrating both poverty and the business cycle shock absorber role in certain
subgroups of their populations and by using racism to explain that concentration, capitalist societies “manage” the risks
attending their tendencies to gross inequality and instability.
Same conservatives and right-wingers further legitimate capitalism by reframing their racism. For them “the problem” is
that capitalism has not been allowed to work its healing magic — market discipline — upon those inferior groups.
Misguided social protections, minimum wages, safety nets, welfare etc. have kept them inside a “culture of poverty”
defined as recurring unemployment, poverty, social isolation, family instability, incarceration etc. By correcting (i.e.
removing) those misguided and counterproductive social protections, capitalism’s disciplines would integrate them into
prosperity and growth. That this has not happened for most subordinate groups is blamed on the depth of their racialized
inferiority and/or the legacy of liberals’ imposition of a culture of poverty.
In contrast, liberals and social democrats who accept the concept of race have mostly sought to ameliorate the sufferings
of the unemployed and poor by policies such as education, welfare and training. Such policies likewise rarely succeeded
either generally or enduringly. They could not overcome the system’s reproduction of poverty and unemployment and the
imposition of them disproportionally on the shock absorber “races.” Both conservatives and liberals have enforced a
shared denial of the mechanisms of mutual support between capitalism and racism.
Of course, capitalism
is not the only cause or source of racism, but ignoring or minimizing its role
only perpetuates racism. By designating some members of society to be shock absorbers of recurring business
cycles, the capitalist system creates legacies of trauma and inequality that can accumulate
into dysfunctional qualities for its victims. There is neither need nor warrant to take those qualities as
givens, nor to transform them into racialized attributes. The solution is rather to treat those legacies as among the
profoundly unacceptable consequences and costs of capitalism’s profoundly divisive inequality and instability.
A capitalism that perpetuates itself via racism incurs huge self-protection costs: to police
and imprison or to provide some safety nets for its shock absorber “races” or varying
combinations of both. When capitalists shift some or all of those costs onto the tax obligations of workers, more
social tensions emerge. Workers are then told their tax payments must compensate for the “deficiencies” attributed to the
shock absorber “races” rather than to the structural irrationalities of capitalism. Racial conflicts then preclude or tear apart
working-class political unity. Racism persists in no small part because its benefits to capitalism outweigh its costs, or at
least those costs capitalists have to bear.
When capitalists and their ideological supporters disavow racism, they carefully
ignore capitalism as a
key part of the problem. They point instead to the intolerance of “some people who lack
compassion for the less fortunate.” Thereby they further divide the working class, in effect,
into one race that cannot or will not work hard (and is therefore unemployed and poor) and another race that lacks
compassion. In comparison, capitalists and their supporters congratulate themselves for their superior morality.
Capitalism thus comes full circle. Its supporters use and benefit from a racism whose
practice and consequences they blame exclusively on others but never on capitalism
itself.
2NC – FW: Debate Key
We must push anti-neoliberal pedagogy into the debate space – it is
the only way to produce new ideas and escape the military-industrialacademic-cultural complex
Giroux 14—(Henry A. Giroux, Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest, The Paulo
Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy, April 15, 2014, "Neoliberalism and the
machinery of disposability," Philosophers for Change,
https://philosophersforchange.org/2014/04/15/neoliberalism-and-the-machinery-ofdisposability/, 6-28-2019)//don
Such movements are not simply about reclaiming space but also about producing new
ideas, generating new conversations, and introducing a new political language.
While there has been considerable coverage in the progressive media since 2001 given to
the violence being waged against the movement protesters in Brazil, the United States,
Greece and elsewhere, it is important to situate such violence within a broader set of categories
that enables a critical understanding of not only the underlying social, economic and political
forces at work in such assaults, but also makes it possible to reflect critically on the distinctiveness of the current
historical period in which they are taking place. For example, it is difficult to address such state-sponsored violence against young people
without analyzing the devolution of the social state, emergence of a politics of disposability, and the corresponding rise of the warfare and
punishing state. The
merging of the military-industrial-academic-cultural complex and unbridled
corporate power points to the need for strategies that address what is specific about the
current warfare state and the neoliberal project and how different interests, modes of
power, social relations, public pedagogies , and economic configurations come together to shape
its politics of domestic terrorism, cruelty, and zones of disposability. Such a conjuncture is invaluable politically in
that it provides a theoretical opening for making the practices of the neoliberal revolution visible to organize
resistance to its ideologies, policies and modes of governance. It also points to the
conceptual power of making clear that history remains an open horizon that cannot be
dismissed through appeals to the end of history or end of ideology.[20] It is precisely through the
indeterminate nature of history that resistance becomes possible and politics refuses any guarantees and remains open. A number of
the United States, have become addicted to violence . War
provides jobs, profits, political payoffs, research funds, and forms of political and
economic power that reach into every aspect of society. As war becomes a mode of
sovereignty and rule, it erodes the distinction between war and peace. Increasingly fed
by a moral and political frenzy, warlike values produce and endorse shared fears as the
primary register of social relations. Shared fears and the media-induced panics that feed them produce more than a
culture of fear. Such hysteria also feeds the growing militarization of the police , who increasingly use
neoliberal societies, including
their high-tech scanners, surveillance cameras and toxic chemicals on anyone who engages in peaceful protests against the warfare and
Images abound in the mainstream media of such abuses. As a mode of public
pedagogy, a state of permanent war needs willing subjects to abide by its values , ideology and
narratives of fear and violence. Such legitimation is largely provided through a marketdriven culture addicted to production of consumerism, militarism, and organized
violence, largely circulated through various registers of popular culture that extend from high fashion and Hollywood movies to the
creation of violent video games and music concerts sponsored by the Pentagon. The market-driven spectacle of war
demands a culture of conformity, quiet intellectuals and a largely passive republic of consumers. But it also needs
subjects who find intense pleasure in the spectacle of violence.
corporate state.
We must recognize that we have a choice in order to dismantle
neoliberalism—public debate is a critical arena
Hay, Professor of Political Analysis at the University of Sheffield04 (Colin, “The normalizing role of rationalist
assumptions in the institutional embedding of neoliberalism”, Economy and Society 33:4, 2004, Taylor and Francis)
Accordingly, however
depoliticized and normalized neoliberalism has become, it remains a
political and economic choice, not a simple necessity. This brings us naturally to the question of
alternatives. A number of points might here be made which follow fairly directly from the above analysis. First, our
ability to offer alternatives to neoliberalism rests now on our ability to identify that there is
a choice in such matters and, in so doing, to demystify and deconstruct the rationalist premises
upon which its public legitimation has been predicated. This, it would seem, is a condition of
the return of a more normative and engaging form of politics in which more is at stake than the
personnel to administer a largely agreed and ostensibly technical neoliberal reform agenda. Second, the present
custodians of neoliberalism are, in many cases, reluctant converts, whose accommodation to neoliberalism is essentially
borne of perceived pragmatism and necessity rather than out of any deep 522 Economy and Society Downloaded by
[Emory University] at 12:12 28 June 2013 normative commitment to the sanctity of the market. Thus, rather than defend
neoliberalism publicly and in its own terms, they have sought instead to appeal to the absence of a choice which might be
political discourse is technocratic rather than political.
neoliberalism is itself a deeply depoliticizing
paradigm (2001), whose effect is to subordinate social and political priorities, such as might arise
from a more dialogic, responsive and democratic politics, to perceived economic imperatives and to the
ruthless efficiency of the market. As I have sought to demonstrate, this antipathy to ‘politics’ is a direct
defended in such terms. Consequently,
Furthermore, as Peter Burnham has recently noted,
correlate of public choice theory’s projection of its most cherished assumption of instrumental rationality onto public
officials. This is an important point, for it
suggests the crucial role played by stylized rationalist
assumptions, particularly (as in the overload thesis, public choice theory more generally and even the timeinconsistency thesis) those which relate to the rational conduct of public officials, in contributing to the depoliticizing
dynamics now reflected in political disaffection and disengagement. As this perhaps serves to indicate, seemingly
innocent assumptions may have alarmingly cumulative consequences. Indeed, the
internalization of a neoliberalism predicated on rationalist assumptions may well serve to
render the so-called ‘rational voter paradox’ something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.12 The
rational voter paradox _/ that in a democratic polity in which parties behave in a ‘rational’ manner it is irrational for citizens
to vote (since the chances of the vote they cast proving decisive are negligible) _/ has always been seen as the central
weakness of rational choice theory as a set of analytical techniques for exploring electoral competition. Yet, as the above
analysis suggests, in a world constructed in the image of rationalist assumptions, it may become depressingly accurate.
Political parties behaving in a narrowly ‘rational’ manner, assuming others (electors and market participants) to behave in
a similarly ‘rational’ fashion will contribute to a dynamic which sees real electors (rational or otherwise) disengage in
increasing numbers from the facade of electoral competition. That this is so is only reinforced by a final factor. The
institutionalization and normalization of neoliberalism in many advanced liberal
democracies in recent years have been defended in largely technical and rationalist
terms and in a manner almost entirely inaccessible to public political scrutiny,
contestation and debate. The electorate, in recent years, has not been invited to choose
between competing programmatic mandates to be delivered in office, but to pass a judgement on the
credibility and competence of the respective candidates for high office to behave in the appropriate (technical) manner in
response to contingent external stimuli. Is it any wonder that they have chosen, in increa increasing numbers, not to
exercise any such judgement at all at the ballot box?
Aff
Aff
2AC – Cap Good
2AC – Top
Growth solves the environment and every other impact through tech
innovation and higher incomes. Even if each tech by itself can’t stop
warming, they act synergistically which overcomes their defense.
Also, warming doesn’t cause extinction
Bailey 18 [Ronald Bailey, shortlisted by the editors of Nature Biotechnology as one of
the personalities who have made the "most significant contributions" to biotechnology.
From 1987 to 1990, Bailey was a staff writer for Forbes magazine, covering economic,
scientific and business topics. His articles and reviews have appeared in The New York
Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Commentary, The Public
Interest, Smithsonian, and many other publications. Prior to joining Reason in 1997,
Bailey produced several weekly national public television series including Think Tank
and TechnoPolitics, as well as several documentaries for PBS television and ABC News.
In 1993, he was the Warren T. Brookes Fellow in Environmental Journalism at the
Competitive Enterprise Institute. Climate Change Problems Will Be Solved Through
Economic Growth. March 12, 2018. https://reason.com/blog/2018/03/12/climate-changeproblems-will-be-solved-t]
In an essay for The Breakthrough Journal, Pinker notes that such optimism "is commonly dismissed
as the 'faith that technology will save us.' In fact, it is a skepticism that the status quo
will doom us—that knowledge and behavior will remain frozen in their current state for
perpetuity. Indeed, a naive faith in stasis has repeatedly led to prophecies of
environmental doomsdays that never happened." In his new book, Enlightenment Now, Pinker points out
that "as the world gets richer and more tech-savvy, it dematerializes, decarbonizes,
and densifies, sparing land and species." Economic growth and technological
progress are the solutions not only to climate change but to most of the problems
that bedevil humanity .
Boisvert, meanwhile, tackles and rebuts the apocalyptic prophecies made by eco-pessimists like Wallace-Wells, specifically with regard to
food production and availabilty, water supplies, heat waves, and rising seas.
"No, this isn't a denialist screed," Boisvert writes. "Human
greenhouse emissions will warm the planet,
raise the seas and derange the weather, and the resulting heat, flood and drought will be
cataclysmic. Cataclysmic—but not apocalyptic . While the climate upheaval will be
large, the consequences for human well-being will be small . Looked at in the broader
context of economic development, climate change will barely slow our progress in
the effort to raise living standards."
Boisvert proceeds to show how a series of technologies— drought-resistant crops , cheap
desalination , widespread adoption of air-conditioning, modern construction techniques—will ameliorate
and overcome the problems caused by rising temperatures . He is entirely correct when he notes,
"The most inexorable feature of climate-change modeling isn't the advance of the sea
but the steady economic growth that will make life better despite global warming ."
Horgan, Pinker, and Boisvert are all essentially endorsing what I have called "the progress solution" to climate change. As I wrote in 2009,
if one wants to help future generations deal with climate
change, the best policies would be those that encourage rapid economic growth . This
would endow future generations with the wealth and superior technologies that could
be used to handle whatever comes at them including climate change." Six years later I added that
that "richer is more climate-friendly, especially for developing countries. Why? Because faster growth means higher
incomes, which correlate with lower population growth. Greater wealth also means
"It is surely not unreasonable to argue that
higher agricultural productivity, freeing up land for forests to grow as well as speedier
progress toward developing and deploying cheaper non–fossil fuel energy
technologies. These trends can act synergistically to ameliorate man-made climate
change ."
The transition is inevitable and gradual but growth now is key to
prevent a crash. Also, their cards lack robust studies
Weiss 17 [Martin Weiss, European Commission – Joint Research Centre, Directorate
C – Energy, Transport and Climate, Sustainable Transport Unit. Also Written by Claudio
Cattaneo, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona Institute of Regional and
Metropolitan Studies. Degrowth – Taking Stock and Reviewing an Emerging Academic
Paradigm. March 15, 2017.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800916305900]
With the methodological limitations sketched in Section 2, the outcome of our review suggests that the history, concept, and
rationale for degrowth are well explained. Yet, the largely descriptive academic
discourse lacks rigid hypotheses testing through modelling and empirical
assessments . By addressing the research questions and hypotheses identified in Section 5, the academic degrowth discourse
could make an important contribution to the debate around a sustainable post-growth development (see also Escobar, 2015).
We expect that degrowth may only receive broader public support if the marginal
benefits of the status quo become smaller than those of the next best degrowth
scenario for large parts of the population. The degrowth discourse has qualitatively discussed the deficiencies of the
status quo but spent little effort to quantify the costs of continued economic growth as well as the well-being benefits of degrowth.
growth policies may not necessarily be abandoned on a finite planet earth.
Instead, such policies may allow making maximum use of available resources (be it
through expanded resource extraction, technological innovation, or increased
commodification of society) in the short term, while in parallel enabling the
development of means to cope with environmental limits in the long term . Drought in
Moreover,
California arguably forced residential water consumption to decrease in 2014 by some 30% (Reese, 2015) without causing major social
disruptions. Such a decrease may not have been achievable by appealing to voluntary frugality nor may have water-saving policies
obtained sufficient public support by pointing out unsustainable water consumption. The observed water savings might be temporary but
show the capacity of humans to adapt in face of acute resource shortage. The case also points to the importance of technology as a
catalyst for factor substitution in production and consumption in response to environmental constraints.
To be successful, degrowth has to identify a concrete and inclusive development perspective (see Schwartzman, 2012) for the affluent and
powerful elites and the marginalized poor. Direct benefits of degrowth might be experienced by consumers in areas where further growth
has obviously become undesirable, such as in the health care industry as illustrated by Missoni (2015), in the food, nutrition and the
agricultural sector, or in urban transportation. Degrowth could address psychological stress related to over consumption, long working
hours, and the commodification of social relations and highlight the benefits of a simplified life style away from positional competition and
towards more collaborative community development. Addressing life quality around resonant human interactions (Rosa, 2015) in face of
increasing competition and individuation may be a viable angle to highlight the benefits of degrowth. Decreasing working time can mitigate
environmental degradation (Knight et al., 2013; Fitzgerald et al., 2015) and provide a leverage point for virtually all other degrowth
proposals. In fact, we would regard a decrease in working time as the single silver bullet through which degrowth can yield personal welfare
gains, increase environmental sustainability, enhance democracy, and thus obtain the support of larger parts of the population. Yet, to be a
fulfilling choice, reduced working time, and degrowth in more general, may hinge on a wider cultural recognition (see, e.g., Skidelsky and
Skidelsky, 2012) that still appears to be hampered under the present societal conditions.
Kallis (2013) argues that societies
have the capacity to steer social processes towards
degrowth, thereby opposing the view of Sorman and Giampietro (2013) who consider that societies are
destined to grow, crash, and adapt . We see a larger and more differentiated space of development to which the
degrowth discourse contributes visions for both social and economic adaptation and the mitigation of environmental impacts. In a
resource-constraint world, degrowth may occur as a gradual and locally-specific
transition (Buch-Hansen, 2014). We argue with Ott (2012) in favor of political prudence through
addressing specific problems with specific policies and against the pursuit of
grand new utopias that often come with unintended consequences .
2AC – Generic
Capitalism provides a myriad of social and economic benefits – net
good for society
Skarbek ’10 (Emily Skarbek, research fellow at Independent Institute, Capitalism and
Economic Growth, 15 April 2010,
https://www.independent.org/issues/article.asp?id=2769) - NR
Recent events and the words of our politicians have popularized the idea that while markets can be important to economic
growth and prosperity, they can also undermine it. It is fashionable to give a nod to the forces of entrepreneurship but in
the same breath assert that the power of markets must be tamed by regulation. It is complacently accepted that
somehow, these regulators—the men and women in Washington—know what’s best for American consumers. When the
current administration talks of entrepreneurship, they speak of politically favored businesses and privileged recipients of
the taxpayers’ dollars. To be clear, that is not entrepreneurship. It has become conventional to say that those who openly
embrace capitalism, free markets and free trade are dogmatic, ideologues, idealistic, or market fundamentalists. And if
you look to the media and our leaders, you get the impression that being in favor of free markets is somehow an
Unless one is ashamed of unprecedented increases in income,
rising life expectancy, greater education, and more political freedom, there is no
reason to be a fair-weather fan of capitalism. Sprawling free markets in countries
that became more capitalist over the last 25 years have meant many more people
enjoy improvements in well being and opportunities to advance human
capabilities. There is no evidence that countries that eschewed freer markets and
embraced substantially greater state control performed better on any of these
major indicators. On the contrary, those countries that adopt increased taxation,
increased regulation, fiscal mismanagement and enormous public debt have
performed demonstrably worse . From a global perspective, we have witnessed remarkable progress of
mankind through the increased acceptance of free market policies in both rich and poor countries. Before the
industrial revolution, 80% of the world’s population lived in abject poverty. By
1980, that number has fallen to 34.8% and by 2000, less than 20% of the
population lives on less than $1 a day. In five years, the number is expected to fall
to 10% if free trade is allowed to flourish. In just the past 25 years increased private
ownership, increased free trade, and lower taxes all came at the hands of
politicians like Deng Xiaoping in China, Margaret Thatcher in England, and Ronald
Reagan in United States. In the years following the adoption of these policies by
these global leaders, per capita income nearly doubled from 1980 to 2005; Tariffs fell
and trade increased; Schooling and life expectancy grew rapidly, while infant mortality and poverty fell just as fast. In
the average country that became more capitalist over the last 25 years, the
average citizen gained a 43% increase in income, nearly half a decade in life
expectancy, and a 2-year increase in the average years of schooling . In my lifetime
unreasonable position.
alone, freer markets have improved the lives of billions of people from all walks of life. When we look back at our own
history, the tremendous economic growth that Americans experienced from the time of the original Tea Party up to 1914
was the result of economic freedom from government regulation, open boarders for free immigration, and very few trade
restrictions on the global flow of goods, services, and capital. Anyone could get on a boat, land on Ellis Island and
become an immigrant and this benefited both domestic Americans and the immigrant alike. Business and labor were free
to be entrepreneurial—and entrepreneurship created wealth. But we don’t want wealth for wealth’s sake. Wealth allows
for the improvement of the human condition .
For example, in 1905, our average life expectancy
in the U.S. was 47. Today it is 78. A hundred years ago only 14% of homes had a bathtub; 8% had a
phone; 95% of all births took place at home; most women washed their hair once a month; and the average worker made
about $300 per year .
As recent as 1984, it took the average American wage earner 456
hours of labor to earn enough to purchase a cellphone. Today, it takes the
average American 4 hours. A computer has fallen from costing 435 hours of labor
to less than 20. None of this accounts for the tremendous improvements in
technological capacity . There are several reasons that the costs of goods have dropped so drastically, but
perhaps the biggest is increased international trade. Simply put, the free market means the poor are
less poor. Globalization extends and deepens a capitalist system that has for
generations been lifting American living standards —for high-income households, of course, but
for low-income ones as well. When the world embraces free market reforms, the world economy expanded greatly, the
quality of life improves sharply for billions of people, and dire poverty was substantially scaled back. This is not a
when people are free to buy from, sell to, and invest
with one another as they choose, they can achieve far more than when
governments attempt to control economic decisions. Widening the circle of
people with whom we transact —including across political borders— brings benefits to
consumers in the form of lower prices, greater variety, and better quality, and it
allows companies to reap the benefits of innovation, specialization, and
economies of scale that larger markets bring. Free markets are essential to
prosperity, and expanding free markets as much as possible enhances that
prosperity . Voluntary economic exchange is inherently fair and does not justify government intervention. When two
free people come together on terms they have agreed upon to exchange peacefully, both benefit. Government
intervention in voluntary economic exchange on behalf of some citizens at the
expense of others is inherently unfair. One person is coerced in order to privilege
another . It really is that simple. When goods, services, labor and capital flow freely across U.S. borders, Americans
coincidence. It is a well-established fact that
can take full advantage of the opportunities of the international marketplace. They can buy the best or least expensive
goods and services the world has to offer; they can sell to the most promising markets; they can choose among the best
Study after study has shown
that countries that are more open to the global economy grow faster and achieve
higher incomes than those that are relatively closed. This is capitalism. Growth is not
investment opportunities; and they can tap into the worldwide pool of capital.
guaranteed. It seems obvious that the central challenges facing America have to do with the with predatory regulatory and
tax policies conducted by governments domestic and abroad. From an economic perspective, then, the case for unilateral
trade liberalization—that is reducing our own trade barriers and subsidies without preconditions or reciprocal
commitments from other countries—is the best policy to promote peace and prosperity globally. Politically, however, the
concentrated and organized beneficiaries of protectionism are powerful relative to the much larger, disorganized,
beneficiaries of free trade. Politicians tend to be most responsive to the loudest interest groups and are therefore inclined
to view free trade unfavorably. But we as Americans must be clear— capitalism is not evil. It
has done more
good for more people than any acts of state, any stimulus spending, any health
program or welfare initiati ve. Americans can no longer afford to fear freedom. Finally, acknowledging the
relationship between free markets and economic prosperity does not make someone “dogmatic”. It is unreasonable to
continue to ignore these facts .
Capitalism’s superiority for economic growth and
development deserves the unqualified support of everyone who believe that
wealth is better than poverty, life is better than death, and liberty is better than
oppression .
2AC – Inequality
Capitalism is redeemable and can be used to reduce inequality
Hodgson 16 (Geoffrey M. Hodgson. Geoffrey M. Hodgson is research professor at
Hertfordshire Business School, University of Hertfordshire, England. He is the author of
Conceptualizing Capitalism and author or co-author of over a dozen other books.
Twitter: @g_m_hodgson. How Capitalism Actually Generates More Inequality.
Evonomics. August 11, 2016. https://evonomics.com/how-capitalism-actually-generatesmore-inequality/)-MR
At least nominally, capitalism embodies and sustains an Enlightenment agenda of freedom and equality. Typically there is
freedom to trade and equality under the law, meaning that most adults – rich or poor – are formally subject to the same
legal rules. But with its inequalities of power and wealth, capitalism nurtures economic inequality alongside equality under
the law.
Today, in the USA, the richest 1 per cent own 34 per cent of the wealth and the richest 10 per cent own 74 per cent of the
wealth. In the UK, the richest 1 per cent own 12 per cent of the wealth and the richest 10 per cent own 44 per cent of the
wealth. In France the figures are 24 cent and 62 per cent respectively. The richest 1 percent own 35 percent of the wealth
in Switzerland, 24 per cent in Sweden and 15 percent in Canada. Although there are important variations, other
developed countries show similar patterns of inequality within this range. In their book The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson
and Kate Pickett showed multiple deleterious effects of inequalities of income and wealth. Using data from twenty-three
developed countries and from the separate states of the United States, they observed negative correlations between
inequality, on the one hand, and physical health, mental health, education, child well-being, social mobility, trust and
community life, on the other hand. They also found positive correlations between inequality and drug abuse,
imprisonment, obesity, violence, and teenage pregnancies. They suggested that inequality creates adverse outcomes
through psycho-social stresses generated through interactions in an unequal society.
Although economic inequality is endemic to capitalism, data gathered by Thomas Piketty in his Capital in the Twentieth
Century, and in my book entitled Conceptualizing Capitalism, show that there are large variations in measures of
inequality in different major capitalist countries, and through time. The existence of such variety within capitalism suggests
that it possible to alleviate inequality, to a significant degree, within capitalism itself.
But first we must be clear about the drivers of inequality within the system. What are the mechanisms within capitalism
that exacerbate inequalities of income or wealth?
Some inequality results from individual differences in talent or skill. But this cannot explain the huge gaps between rich
and poor in many capitalist countries. Much of the inequality of wealth found within capitalist societies results from
inequalities of inheritance. The process is cumulative: inequalities of wealth often lead to differences in education,
economic power, and further inequalities in income.[2]
Do markets create inequality?
To what extent can inequalities of income or wealth be attributed to the fundamental institutions of capitalism, rather than
a residual landed aristocracy, or other surviving elites from the pre-capitalist past? A familiar mantra is that markets are
the source of inequality under capitalism. Can markets be blamed for inequality?
In real-world markets different sellers or buyers vary hugely in their capacities to influence prices and other outcomes.
When a seller has sufficient saleable assets to affect market prices, then strategic market behaviour is possible to drive
out competitors.
Would more competition, with greater numbers of market participants, fix this problem? If markets per se are to be blamed
for inequality, then it has to be shown that competitive markets also have this outcome. Unless we can demonstrate their
culpability, blaming competitive markets for inequalities of success or failure might be like blaming the water for drowning
a weak swimmer.
To demonstrate that competitive markets are a source of inequality we would have to start from an imagined world where
there was initial equality in the distribution of income and wealth, and then show how markets led to inequality. I know of
no such theoretical explanation.
Markets involve voluntary exchange, where both parties to an exchange expect benefits. One party to the exchange may
benefit more than the other; but there is no reason to assume that individuals who benefit more, or benefit less (in one
exchange) will generally do so. And if some traders become more powerful in the market than others, then its
competitiveness is reduced.
There is another reason why it is a mistake to focus on markets. In the sense of organized arenas of exchange, markets
have existed for thousands of years. We need to look at new institutional drivers of inequality that became prominent in
the last 400 years or so. These new institutional changes were additional to markets.
The sources of inequality within capitalism
So if markets per se are not the root cause of inequality under capitalism, then what is? A clear answer to this question is
vital if effective policies to counter inequality are to be developed. Capitalism builds on historically-inherited inequalities of
class, ethnicity, and gender. By affording more opportunities for the generation of profits, it may also exaggerate
differences due to location or ability. Partly through the operation of markets, it can also enhance positive feedbacks that
further magnify these differences. But its core sources of inequality lie elsewhere.
Because waged employees are not slaves, they cannot use their lifetime capacity for work as collateral to obtain money
loans. The very commercial freedom of workers denies them the possibility to use their labour assets or skills as
collateral. By contrast, capitalists may use their property to make profits, and as collateral to borrow money, invest and
make still more money. Differences become cumulative, between those with and without collateralizable assets, and
between different amounts of collateralizable wealth. Even when workers become home-owners with mortgages, the
wealthier can still race ahead.
Unlike owned capital, free labour power cannot be used as collateral to obtain loans for investment. At least in this
respect, capital and labour do not meet on a level playing field, this asymmetry is a major driver of inequality.
The foremost generator of inequality under capitalism is not markets but capital. This may sound Marxist, but it is not. In
my Conceptualizing Capitalism I define capital differently from Marx and from most other economists and sociologists. My
definition of capital corresponds to its enduring and commonplace business meaning. (Piketty’s definition is also similar to
mine.) Capital is money, or the realizable money-value of collateralizable property. Unlike labour, capital can be used as
collateral and the loan obtained can help generate further wealth.
Because workers are free to change jobs, employers have diminished incentives to invest in the skills of their workforce.
Especially as capitalism becomes more knowledge-intensive, this can create an unskilled and low-paid underclass and
further exacerbate inequality, unless compensatory measures are put in place. A socially-excluded underclass is
observable in several developed capitalist countries.
Another source of inequality results from the inseparability of the worker from the work itself. By contrast, the owners of
other factors of production are free to trade and seek other opportunities while their property makes money or yields other
rewards. This puts workers at a disadvantage. Through positive feedbacks, even slight disadvantages can have
cumulative effects.
None of these core drivers of inequality can be diminished by extending markets or increasing competition. These drivers
are congenital to capitalism and its system of wage labour. If capitalism is to be retained, then the compensatory
arrangements that are needed to counter inequality cannot simply be extensions of markets or private property rights.
These ineradicable asymmetries between labour and capital mean that ultra-individualist arguments against trade unions
are misconceived. In a system that is biased against them, workers have a right to organize and defend their rights, even
if it reduces competition in labour markets.
Reducing inequality – within capitalism
The twentieth-century socialist experiments in Russia and China undermined
human rights in their efforts to reduce inequality. This is not a road that we should
attempt to follow .
Instead, we have to look at ways of reducing inequality within capitalism, and which do
not undermine capitalism’s unparalleled capacity to increase productivity and
generate wealth.
Long ago, Thomas Paine (1737-1809) argued for an inheritance tax, but balanced this by a grant to each adult at reaching
the age of maturity. In this way, wealth would be recycled from the dead to the young, providing greater equality of
opportunity across the board. Paine also advocated welfare provision and a guaranteed pension for those over 50. Bruce
Ackerman and Anne Alstott took up Paine’s agenda in their proposal for a ‘stakeholder society.’ They argued that
‘property is so important to the free development of individual personality that everybody ought to have some’. They
echoed Francis Bacon: ‘Wealth is like muck. It is not good but if it be spread.’
Ackerman and Alstott stressed progressive taxes on wealth rather than on income. Echoing Paine, they proposed a large
cash grant to all citizens when they reach the age of majority, around the benchmark cost of taking a bachelor’s degree at
private university in the United States. This grant would be repaid into the national treasury at death. To further advance
redistribution, they argued for the gradual implementation of an annual wealth tax of two percent on a person’s net worth
above a threshold of $80,000. Like Paine, they argued that every citizen has the right to share in the wealth accumulated
redistribution of wealth, they proposed, would bolster the sense of
community and common citizenship.
by preceding generations. A
Increased wealth or inheritance taxes are likely to be unpopular because they are perceived as an attack on the wealth
that we have built up and wish to pass on to our children or others of our choice. But the brilliance of Paine’s 1797
proposal for a cash grant at the age of majority is that it offers a quid-pro-quo for wealth or inheritance taxes at later life.
People will be more ready to accept wealth taxation if they have earlier benefitted from a large cash grant in their youth.
Wealth would by recycled to younger generations rather than syphoned away. The more fortunate or successful can be
persuaded to give up some of their advantages if they see the benefits for society as a whole.
In the economy, there are many ways of spreading power and influence more broadly. The idea of extending employee
shareholding is growing in popularity. This is a flexible strategy for extending ownership of revenue-producing assets in
society. In the USA alone, over ten thousand enterprises, employing over ten million workers, are part of employeeownership, stock bonus, or profit-sharing schemes. Employee ownership can increase incentives, personal identification
with the enterprise, and job satisfaction for workers.
As modern capitalist economies become more knowledge-intensive, access to education to develop skills becomes all the
more important. Those deprived of such education suffer a degree of social exclusion, and, unless it is addressed, this
problem is likely to get worse. Widespread skill-development policies are needed, alongside
integrated measures to deal with job displacement and unemployment.
A key challenge for modern capitalist societies, alongside the needs to protect the
natural environment and enhance the quality of life, is to retain the dynamic of
innovation and investment while ensuring that the rewards of the global system
are not returned largely to the richer owners of capital. As Paine put it in 1797:
All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man’s own hands produce, is derived to him by living in
society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation from whence
the whole came.
We need to update Paine’s approach to dealing with inequality, to suit modern times.
Capitalism provides the most feasible solutions to income inequality
– this turns their socioeconomic impacts
Siebold ’15 (Steve Siebold, Capitalism Can Defeat Economic Inequality, HuffPost, 11
September 2015, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/capitalism-can-defeat-eco_b_8123186)
- NR
The answer to fixing the deficit and fixing income inequality is innovation driven
through capitalism. Many of the best ideas that work in anything are the non-linear strategies, or the nonobvious ways of getting things done. When the obvious doesn’t work, which it isn’t right now, it’s time to look at the
If you want to help balance the budget and reduce the
federal deficit, instead of putting a gun to the head of the wealthy and forcing them to pay more in taxes , play
to the vanity of large corporations and sell them the naming writes to streets,
parks and other publicly held properties . Instead of I-95 it could be Johnson & Johnson Highway (or
whatever company). Imagine that: billions of dollars come trickling into the government
and it’s some of the best advertising a large corporation could buy. It’s no
different than legalized pot in Colorado and other states bringing in millions of
dollars to help support the economy. We also need to educate the poor and the middle class on how to
earn more money. Through capitalism, we can get the ultra-wealthy to sponsor the
middle class for education purposes in exchange for a write off. It’s value for
value. Capitalism built this country and it’s capitalism that will solve our
problems. The sustained rise in inequality is years in the making, but the truth is making money has never been
problem in a non-linear fashion.
easier because there are so many problems waiting to be solved. We just need to teach people how to do it. The reality is
while higher education and even continuing education courses are certainly
great accomplishments, they don’t teach the financial basics of how to get ahead
and succeed in a free market economy . After studying the wealthy for more than 30 years, most
that
millionaires will tell you the way they look at money compared to how the rest of the world looks at it is not even in the
same ballpark. It’s like the two groups are operating on totally different planets. If you’re one of those people whose
financial situation isn’t quite where you want it to be, start focusing your mental energy where it belongs: on the big
the only way to close the
income inequality gap is through non-linear ideas and strategies driven through
capitalism .
money! Making money is easy once you know how to do it. In the meantime,
2AC – Mass Incarceration
Capitalism’s incentives can solve mass incarceration.
Stevenson 17 [Bryan Stevenson, human rights lawyer, Can Capitalism Reduce Mass
Incarceration?, 6-25-17, Accessible Online at https://www.ttbook.org/interview/cancapitalism-reduce-mass-incarceration] DL 7-14-2020
My name is Bryan Stevenson. I'm a human rights lawyer in Montgomery, Alabama. I direct a project called the Equal
Justice Initiative. And my dangerous idea is about how to overcome mass imprisonment and excessive punishment in
America. Our
prison population has gone from 300,000 in 1972 to 2.3 million [in 2017]. We've got
we could
radicalize our commitment to helping people recover from the mistakes they make — if we began
to incentivize our vast infrastructure of jails and prisons to actually pick up the challenge
of rehabilitation, of restoration, of recovery. What I would I'd like to do is to create financial
prizes for the prisons that release people who have the lowest recidivism rate. I'd like to
reward correctional employees who find ways to inspire and educate and empower the
people who are in prison and incarcerated under their supervision to leave prison and never come back. I think you'd
see a very different prison system emerge. You wouldn't have the indifference to what happens.
You wouldn't tolerate the abuse and misjudgments and mistreatment. You'd actually have people
pulling together to find ways to help people stay free from drugs and alcohol dependency,
stay free from the violence and the environments that create despair and suffering. I think it would
radicalize our criminal justice system. But more than that, I think it would revolutionize our
society. There are too many people living hopelessly and I think we ought to be creating the incentives — and I don't
have a problem making them financial incentives — to turn the prison industrial complex into
something that's more like the redemption industrial complex, where we actually invest in changing
six million people on probation and parole, 68 million Americans with criminal arrests. I think that
lives rather than throwing lives away. I think we've just abandoned rehabilitation in ways that have left us really vulnerable.
And we now see this revolving door where lots of communities are just being fractured by the way in which there is no
stability or security or public safety. And so, yes, I think we need to reorient ourselves to a new concept of justice that
really is rooted in helping people recover.
2AC – Solves War
Capitalist development solves war – globalizes economic interests,
de-incentivizes resource competition, and increases political and
economic security
Gartzke ’07 (Eric Gartzke, Columbia University, The Capitalist Peace, American
Journal of Political Science, Vol. 51 No. 1, January 2007) - NR
What else but democracy could account for liberal peace? One answer might be capitalism. The association between
economic freedom and interstate peace has deep intellectual roots , though the liberal
political economy tradition has received little attention in recent decades.22 Enlightenment figures like Montesquieu and Smith ar- gued
that market interests abominate war. Paine wrote that “ commerce diminishes the spirit,
both of patriotism and military defense ” (cited in Walker 2000, 59). Cob- den called trade “the grand panacea”
([1867] 1903, 36). Mill saw market forces as “rapidly render ing war obsolete ” (1902, 390). Angell argued that
it had become “impossi- ble for one nation to seize by force the wealth or trade of
another . . . war, even when victorious, can no longer achieve those aims for
which peoples strive” (1933, 60). Angell (1933) serves as a useful point of departure in attempting to identify how
capitalism contributes to interstate peace. Angell highlights two processes thought to diminish the appeal of conquest among countries with
changes in the na- ture of production make it difficult to
cheaply subdue and to profitably manage modern economies through force.
Industrial economies are increasingly dependent on in- puts that are more easily
and cheaply obtained through commerce than through coercion . Relating tales of Viking raids
modern industrial economies. First,
on the English countryside, Angell asks why, now that the tables have turned, he did not see “our navy loading up a goodly part of our
mercantile marine with the agricultural and industrial wealth of the Scandina- vian peninsular” (1933, 103 ).
Governments, like
individ- uals, choose between trade and theft in obtaining needed goods and services. Modernity
made it easier to profit from production and trade , and harder to draw wealth from conquered lands or
confiscated loot.23 The second process Angell outlines involves eco- nomic globalization. The integration of world
markets not only facilitates commerce, but also creates new inter- ests inimical to war. Financial
interdependence ensures that damage inflicted on one economy travels through
the global system, afflicting even aggressors . Angell imag- ines a Teutonic army descending on London:
“the German General, while trying to sack the Bank of England, might find his own balance in the Bank of Germany had van- ished, and the
As wealth becomes less tangible, more
mobile, distributed, and more dependent on the good will of investors, it also
becomes more difficult to coerce (Brooks 1999; Rosecrance 1985). The chief challenge to the
arguments of Angell and other political economists is that they turned out to be wrong (Carr 1939; Morgenthau
value of even the best of his investments reduced” (1933, 106–7).
1948). Two world wars and associated economic upheaval reversed the trend to- ward globalization and dissolved optimism about a capitalist peace.24 Cold war tensions ensured that scholarship was preoccupied with balancing and deterrence (Jervis 1978; Richardson 1960;
Snyder 1961; Waltz 1959, 1979), and that subsequent generations of researchers remained skeptical about the prospects for liberal peace
However, when
interest in liberal peace returned, attention centered on democracy. Kantian theory was
given a thorough rewrite in an attempt to conform to the evolving evidence, while the capitalist peace received little
attention. Of the factors emphasized by liberal political economists, trade has been by far the most closely evalu- ated in
(Waltz 1970, 1999, 2000). These same events led to the long hiatus in democratic peace research.
contemporary scholarship (Bliss and Russett 1998; Keohane and Nye 1989; Oneal and Ray 1997; Oneal et al. 1996; Oneal and Russett
of the elements of global
capitalism, trade is arguably the least impor- tant in terms of mitigating warfare .
1997, 1999a; Polachek 1980, 1997; Polachek, Robst, and Chang 1999).25 Yet,
Classical political economists had yet to consider the strategic nature of con- flict (Schelling 1966). If trade makes one partner more pli- ant,
it should allow other states to become more aggressive (Morrow 1999; Wagner 1988), so that the overall decline in warfare is small or
Economic devel- opment, financial
markets, and monetary policy coordi- nation all arguably play a more critical role
nonexistent (Beck, Katz, and Tucker 1998; Gartzke, Li, and Boehmer 2001).
in promoting peace (Gartzke and Li 2003). Much of the impact of free markets on peace will be missed if much of what comprises capitalism is omitted or ignored. What are the “aims for which peoples strive,” which Angell mentions? Much like realists, classical
political economists assumed that warfare results from resource competition. If there are other reasons why nations fight, then some wars
will occur, despite the basic validity of capi- talist peace arguments. It is then necessary to revise, rather than reject out of hand, economic
explanations for lib- eral peace. This article next offers the outlines of a revised theory of capitalist peace. The security dilemma implies that
insecurity is a durable facet of international affairs.
War can result as each coun- try fears for its own
security , even when neither state in- tends aggression (Glaser 1997; Jervis 1978). Yet, insecurity is predicated on the expectation
that at least some coun- tries are revisionist powers. Even “pessimistic” concep- tions of world affairs appear more sanguine as we relax
The task before peace theorists, then, is to
identify when and how nations are liberated from the security dilemma. The argument
here is that capitalism resolves insecurity by creating “powerful pacifists” (Lake 1992 ),
countries possessing military strength ensuring that they are largely free from
foreign influence or domination, but equally that they lack incentives to act
aggressively abroad , at least under certain circumstances.26 At least three mechanisms associated
with capital- ism are capable of addressing the security dilemma and mitigating
the causes of war. States with similar policy goals have no need to fight to
establish policy since little can be gained from victory, or lost in defeat. States al- ways have dissimilar interests when it comes
to resource or territorial issues, but changes in modern economies often make these differences
trivial, as resources can be had more easily through commerce . There can be no basis for
the assumption that insecurity is ubiquitous and immutable.
agreement between two passersby about who should collect a quarter lying on the sidewalk, but fighting over 25 cents makes little sense.
If, however, a sack of $100 bills falls from the sky, landing on the quarter, then it is en- tirely possible that a fight will ensue over who can
collect their bag of riches. Yet, even the sack of money need not lead to violence if the passersby can agree on how to di- vide up the wind
fall. States willing and able to fight can still avoid a contest if competitors are able to foresee the likely consequences of fighting and identify
Conflict is inherent in the allocation of resources among two or more
parties, but need not result in violence if the stakes are literally “not worth fighting over” or when bar- gains
appropriate bargains.
preempt fighting. Imagine two countries attempt- ing to divide up a bundle of goods (resources, territory). Comparison of available
allocations is zero-sum; any shift from one allocation to another benefits one country only at the expense of the other country. In this
a mutual preference for peace requires that the value of winning be small
relative to the cost of fighting (Morrow 1989; Powell 1999). Peace advocates have long championed factors thought to make
war prohibitively expensive. Cobden, for example, claimed optimistically that “ Should war break out between two
great nations I have no doubt that the im- mense consumption of material and the rapid
destruction of property would have the effect of very soon bringing the
combatants to reason or exhausting their resources ” ([1867] 1903, 355). Yet, if war is a process where
framework,
com- petitors inflict costs on one another, making war more expensive will affect who wins, or how long fighting lasts, but not whether a
If , on the other hand, the value of resources in dis- pute is small
or varies with ownership, then states can be disinclined to fight . Nations have historically used
contest occurs (Levy and Morgan 1984).
force to acquire land and resources, and subdue foreign pop- ulations. War or treaties that shifted control of territory changed the balance
Development
can alter these incen- tives if modern production processes de-emphasize land,
minerals, and rooted labor in favor of intellectual and financial capital (Brooks 1999, 2005;
Rosecrance 1996). If the rents from conquest decline, even as occupation costs increase, then states can prefer to buy
goods rather than steal them .31 As the U.S. invasion of Iraq illustrates, occupying a reluctant foreign power is
of resources, and power. Sovereigns, and to a lesser extent citizens, prospered as the state ex- tended its domain.
extremely labor intensive. If soldiers are expensive, then nations can be better off “outsourcing occupation” to local leaders and obtaining
developed countries
also retain pop- ulations with common identities, cultural affinities, and political,
social, and economic ties. These states may be reluctant to conquer their neighbors, but they are equally opposed to
needed goods through trade.32 At the same time that development leads states to prefer trade to theft,
arbitrary contractions of their borders. Resi- dents of Gibraltar, for example, prefer British rule, even while Spain, which has fought over this
The com- bination of a lack of motive for
territorial expansion and continued interest in serving and protecting a given population ensures a decline in conflict among states with developed economies ,
lump of rock for centuries, is today unwilling to provoke a war.33
especially where developed coun- tries are geographically clustered (Gleditsch 2003). Since most territorial disputes are between
contiguous states (Vasquez 1993), I hypothesize that developed, contigu- ous dyads are more powerful than either developing or
Development leads contiguous dyads to be less likely to
experience conflict . While development decreases incentives for territo- rial aggrandizement, it greatly
enhances the technological ability of states to project power . Nations with ships and aircraft can
engage in distant disputes inconceivable for poor countries. Development may also lead to increased
willingness to pursue policy conflicts. If development is clustered and neighbors no longer covet territory,
noncontiguous dyads.34 H1:
capabil- ities can be devoted to pursuing the nation’s secondary or tertiary interests. Distributed production networks and greater economic,
social, or political integration natu- rally also create incentives to seek to influence the for- eign policies of other countries, sometimes
through force. In contrast to the blanket assertion of classical politi- cal economists, I expect that development actually leads countries to be
more likely to engage in conflicts far from home.35 Iraq invaded and occupied Kuwait in August 1990, intent on securing its “nineteenth
province” and wresting Kuwaiti oil wealth from local leaders. The United States and its Coalition allies also invaded Kuwait, not to conquer
and keep, but to return the Emirate to its previous lead- ers. While Coalition objectives were couched in moralistic rhetoric, the United
States was clearly concerned about who governed Kuwait, while preferring not to govern the country itself. Similarly, European colonial
powers have repeatedly intervened in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere to prop up or dethrone regimes, impose settlements, or oth- erwise
meddle in the affairs of developing countries.
Market orientated nations are bringing the world to permanent peace
– Interest in self-determination and the global order means that they
won’t go to war.
Mousseau 19 [Michael Mousseau, Ph.D. Binghamton University and studies
international politics with a focus on the link between economic conditions, institutions,
and conflict, The End of War: How a Robust Marketplace and Liberal Hegemony Are
Leading to Perpetual World Peace, MIT Press Journals, 7-29-2019, Accessible Online at
https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.1162/isec_a_00352?mobileUi=0&] DL 7-172020
Is war becoming obsolete? There is wide agreement among scholars that war has been
in sharp decline since the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945, even as there is little agreement as to its cause.1
Realists reject the idea that this trend will continue, citing states’ concerns with the “security dilemma”: that is, in anarchy
states must assume that any state that can attack will; therefore, power equals threat, and changes in relative power
result in conºict and war.2 Discussing the rise of China, Graham Allison calls this condition “Thucydides’s Trap,” a
reference to the ancient Greek’s claim that Sparta’s fear of Athens’ growing power led to the Peloponnesian War.3 This
article argues that there
is no Thucydides Trap in international politics. Rather, the world is moving
rapidly toward permanent peace, possibly in our lifetime. Drawing on economic norms
theory,4 I show that what sometimes appears to be a Thucydides Trap may instead be a function of
factors strictly internal to states and that these factors vary among them. In brief, leaders of states with
advanced market-oriented economies have foremost interests in the principle of self-determination
for all states, large and small, as the foundation for a robust global marketplace. War among these states,
even making preparations for war, is not possible, because they are in a natural
alliance to preserve and protect the global order. In contrast, leaders of states with weak internal
markets have little interest in the global marketplace; they pursue wealth not through
commerce, but through wars of expansion and demands for tribute. For these states, power equals threat, and
therefore they tend to balance against the power of all states. Fearing stronger states, however, minor
powers with weak internal markets tend to constrain their expansionist inclinations and, for
security reasons, bandwagon with the relatively benign market-oriented powers. I argue that this liberal
global hierarchy is unwittingly but systematically buttressing states’ embrace of market norms and values that,
if left uninterrupted, is likely to culminate in permanent world peace, perhaps even something close to
harmony. My argument challenges the realist assertion that great powers are engaged in a timeless competition over
global leadership, because hegemony cannot exist among great powers with weak markets;
these inherently expansionist states live in constant fear and therefore normally balance against the
strongest state and its allies.5 Hegemony can exist only among market-oriented powers,
because only they care about global order. Yet, there can be no competition for leadership
among market powers, because they always agree with the goal of their strongest
member (currently the United States) to preserve and protect the global order based on the principle
of selfdetermination. If another commercial power, such as a rising China, were to
overtake the United States, the world would take little notice, because the new leading
power would largely agree with the global rules promoted and enforced by its predecessor. Vladimir Putin’s
Russia, on the other hand, seeks to create chaos around the world. Most other powers, having market-oriented
economies, continue to abide by the hegemony of the United States despite its relative economic decline since the end of
World War II.6 To
support my theory that domestic factors determine states’ alignment decisions, I analyze
the voting preferences of members of the United Nations General Assembly from 1946 to
2010. I find that states with weak internal markets tend to disagree with the foreign policy
preferences of the largest market power (i.e., the United States), but more so if they are major
powers or have stronger rather than weaker military and economic capabilities. The
power of states with robust internal markets, in contrast, appears to have no effect on their
foreign policy preferences, as market-oriented states align with the market leader regardless of
their power status or capabilities. I corroborate that this pattern may be a consequence of states’ interest in the
global market order by finding that states with higher levels of exports per capita are more likely
than other states to have preferences aligned with those of the United States; those with
lower levels of exports are more likely to have interests that do not align with the United
States, but again more so if they are stronger rather than weaker. Liberal scholars of international
politics have long offered explanations for why the incidence of war may decline, generally beginning with the assumption
that although the security dilemma exists, it can be overcome with the help of factors external to states.7 Neoliberal
institutionalists treat states as like units and international organization as an external condition.8 Trade interdependence is
dyadic and thus an external condition.9 Democracy is an internal factor, but theories of democratic peace have an
external dimension: peace is the result of the expectations of states’ behavior informed by the images that leaders create
security dilemma may not exist at all and
can emerge in anarchy with states pursuing their interests determined entirely
by internal factors.11 I begin by explaining how a robust internal market can affect a society’s
values and institutions. Next, I discuss how a state’s internal values and institutions can
influence its foreign policy interests. After identifying the marketoriented states, I describe the hegemony of
of each other’s regime types.10 In contrast, I show that the
how peace
market states and argue that its power may be reaching the point where it cannot be seriously challenged. After reporting
the results of my tests of the theory, I explain why hegemonic war cannot happen and how market
hegemony, by
bolstering states’ internal markets, is causing the decline of war. I follow this with discussions of
the security implications of China’s rise for the global market order and why predictions of the
demise of the liberal order are greatly exaggerated. I conclude with a few thoughts on some of the
implications of my argument, including how the world is on a centuries-long trajectory of profound
change toward permanent peace.
War is becoming obsolete due to a rise in contractualist states who
want universal stability and self-determination.
Status societies don’t have a robust market. Contractualist societies do.
Status vs contractualist societies as explained by Mousseau
In status societies, individuals normally acquire securities not in the marketplace in the
form of mortgages or life insurance, but through various networks, including families,
tribes, clans, unions, parties, and criminal gangs. In status societies, prices are
inequitable, determined by the status of the parties involved in the exchange.
In contractualist societies, individuals normally obtain securities, including incomes and
financial securities, through contracts with strangers in a market. in contractualist
societies, prices are equitable, determined by the forces of supply and demand in the
marketplace.
Mousseau 19 [Michael Mousseau, Ph.D. Binghamton University and studies
international politics with a focus on the link between economic conditions, institutions,
and conflict, The End of War: How a Robust Marketplace and Liberal Hegemony Are
Leading to Perpetual World Peace, MIT Press Journals, 7-29-2019, Accessible Online at
https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.1162/isec_a_00352?mobileUi=0&] DL 7-172020
This article has introduced a new liberal theory of global politics and argues that global
alignments are rooted in factors internal to states: status states want expansion and
disorder wherever they lack control; contractualist states want universal stability and
order based on the principle of self-determination for all states. As such, global patterns of war,
peace, and cooperation can be explained without recourse to such external factors as
trade interdependence, international institutions, interstate images, or intersubjective
structure; economic norms theory can explain these patterns from states’ internal
conditions alone. If this argument is correct, then the relative power of states does determine the
perception of threat, as realists have long maintained, but with an essential qualification: only
among status states. In this way, internal conditions can explain why 2,400 years ago Sparta feared
the rising power of Athens, and why today the distribution of power seems to be playing an ever
reduced role in global politics. My analyses of most states from 1946 to 2010 corroborate the
prediction of a liberal global hierarchy managed by a natural alliance of states with
contractualist economies. States with contractualist and export-oriented economies tend
to agree on issues voted on in the United Nations General Assembly, regardless of their
power status or capability, because they have common interests in a global order based
on self-determination. Among states with status and insular economies, in contrast, major
powers and those with greater capability are more likely to balance the contractualist
hegemony, which they fear. Meanwhile, minor powers and those with less capability are more likely
to bandwagon with it, which they fear less than they do the status major powers.
Additionally, the theory provides an explanation for a large number of observed facts in
international politics. It can explain the decline of war. It can explain the United States’
enduring soft power, and why its leadership continues utterly unchallenged by other market
powers, despite its relative economic decline since the mid-twentieth century. It offers an
account for why developing states with weak institutions tend to bandwagon with the Western
powers;87 and why land powers tend to provoke counterbalancing coalitions, and
International Security 44:1 194 87. Jack S. Levy and Michael N. Barnett, “Alliance Formation, Domestic Political Economy,
and sea
powers, which tend to be trading powers, do not.88 It can account for the democratic peace;
why democracies tend to win theirwars; and why the probability of war among market democracies is
practically zero. It can explain how states become prosperous; how democracy consolidates; the tenacity of
corruption in developing countries; why Western powers reproach their clients for their corruption;89 and why states fail. It
can explain global terrorism and anti-Americanism.90 If the theory is right, war
is becoming obsolete, and not
for reasons supposed in most international relations theorizing. There is no security
dilemma in international politics, as realists contend there is: relative power reliably matters
only to leaders of status states, which always consider all other states enemies. Yet, the
trajectory of peace is not at all caused by democracy, trade, or international institutions,
as liberals maintain. As argued here, democracy, trade, and institutions are
epiphenomenal. Contractualist economies are not the only explanation for these factors,
but they are a cause of democratic consolidation, foreign policy preferences for equitable
trade, and international organization. Leaders of contractualist states assess threats
based not on their images of other states’ regime types, economic types, or their
capabilities, but on their behavior. What economic norms theory cannot explain is the triggering
environmental and political origins of economic change. Although the theory predicts systemic effects (contractualist
hegemony) on unit-level change (national transitions toward contractualist economies), it cannot predict when and where
leaders of status and axial states might seek to support the market; when and where contractualist economies will
emerge; or when and where systemic effects will result in changes in the units. The theory treats economic change largely
exogenously.91 Thus, the theory cannot predict what China will do in the future, because it is impossible to know whether
it will become a contractualist power. The the The End of War 195 Third World Security,” Jerusalem Journal of
International Relations, Vol. 14, No. 4 (December 1992), pp. 19–40. 88. Jack S. Levy and William R. Thompson,
“Hegemonic Threats and Great-Power Balancing in Europe, 1495–1999,” Security Studies, Vol. 14, No. 1 (January–March
2005), pp. 1–33, doi.org/ 10.1080/09636410591001465. 89. Alexander Cooley, Great Games, Local Rules: The New
Power Contest in Central Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 134–148. 90. Krieger and Meierrieks, “The
Rise of Market-Capitalism and the Roots of Anti-American Terrorism.” 91. One exogenous factor that may promote a
contractualist economy is the resolution of territorial conºict. On the territorial peace, see John A. Vasquez, “Why Do
Neighbors Fight? Proximity, Interaction, or Territoriality,” Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 32, No. 3 (August 1995), pp.
conflict with China is not
inevitable, and that it can be avoided if the contractualist powers do not confuse China’s
mercantilist pursuits with incipient revisionism, and if they grasp that China’s leadership
increasingly has interests in the global market order. If China transitions to a
contractualist economy—and such a prospect is likely if current trends continue—the
proportion of people in the contractualist mind-set worldwide will more than double, from 16
percent to 35 percent. This would greatly increase the speed of the trajectory toward peace, as
277–293, doi.org/10.1177/0022343395032003003. ory can predict, however, that
long as the planet can ecologically sustain the contractualist economies’ high levels of productivity. Russia, in contrast, is
the natural enemy of the contractualist hegemony: its status economy encourages the sowing of chaos anywhere Russia
lacks control, putting it in direct opposition to the contractualists’ interest in order. Russia has a substantial nuclear
arsenal, but this does not diminish the overwhelming might of the contractualist hegemony, because nuclear weapons can
be used rationally only to deter attacks. Contractualist states do not attack states to make them
contractualist, so Russia’s deterrent capability has no effect on the power of this hegemony
and the trajectory of peace. Since the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945, an alliance of contractualist
states has sought to impose a global order based on the principle of selfdetermination—
a principle that applies to all states, large and small. This global order is increasing the
odds of states transitioning from status to contractualist economies and reducing the
odds of reverse transitions. In this way, economic norms theory supports the proposition that
the world may be nearing half a millennium of change that began with the rise of axial
markets in northwestern Europe around 1450. If the theory is correct, the beginning of the end
of this change may have been the emergence of the contractualist hegemony in the midtwentieth century. This article has argued that no status power could ever overtake the
combined might of this hegemony. Thus, barring some dark force that brings about a
collapse of the global economy, the world is now in the endgame of a have-centurylong trajectory toward permanent peace and prosperity
2AC – Warming
Capitalism is key to resolving impacts of global warming – this turns
their impacts
Bailey ’19 (Ronald Bailey, Capitalism Is the Key to Fixing Climate Change, Reason,
22 September 2019, https://reason.com/2019/09/20/capitalism-is-the-key-to-fixingclimate-change/) - NR
Today's Climate Strike protests are supposed to bring attention to the science showing that human-made global warming
is becoming a problem. Fair enough. But some participants see climate change as pretext for destroying a market system
that they have always hated. Naomi Klein made this point crystal clear in her 2014 book, This Changes Everything:
Capitalism vs. the Climate. Speaking with New York magazine this week, Klein claimed that "taking climate change
seriously decimates the entire neoliberal project because you can't have a laissez-faire attitude, where it's having your
emissions in 11 years; you actually need to regulate your way out of it. And yeah, you can have a few market mechanisms
in place, but the market is not going to do it for you." The science, insists Klein, "says our future is radical. The present is
pretty radical too. The idea that there is some sort of gradual, incremental, let's-split-the-difference pathway to respond to
this crisis is silly at this point." A headline in The Guardian put it even more forthrightly: "Ending climate change requires
Global warming is a classic example of what happens in an openaccess commons. The atmosphere is unowned, so no one has an incentive to protect and
conserve it. Instead, people overexploit and pollute it. Historically this happened with sulfur dioxide,
carbon monoxide, and smoke. In the United States, cities initially implemented regulations to cut
back on noxious air pollutants . (For example, the first smoke abatement regulations were enacted by
Chicago and Cincinnati in 1881.) Eventually federal regulations and market mechanisms
were adopted. As a result, since 1980 air pollutants have collectively declined by
68 percent while the economy grew by 175 percent. Scientists call this the environmental
Kuznets curve. Environmental commons tend to deteriorate as countries begin to
develop economically—but once per-capita income reaches a certain level, the
public starts to demand a cleanup . It's a U-shaped pattern: Economic growth initially
hurts the environment, but after a point it makes things cleaner. By then, slowing
or stopping economic growth will delay environmental improvement, including
efforts to mitigate the problem of man-made global warmin g. The MIT economist Andrew
ending capitalism."
McAfee explains the process in a forthcoming book, More from Less: We have finally learned how to tread more lightly on
our planet…. In
America—a large rich country that accounts for about 25 percent of
the global economy—we're now generally using less for most resources year
after year, even as our economy and population continue to grow . What's more, we're
also polluting the air and water less, emitting fewer greenhouse gases, and seeing population increases in many animals
that had almost vanished. America , in short , is post-peak in its exploitation of the earth . The
situation is similar in many other rich countries, and even developing countries such as China are now taking better care
of the planet in important ways. How did this happen? Through more capitalism, not less : The
strangest aspect of the story is that we didn't make any radical course changes to eliminate the trade-off between human
prosperity and planetary health. Instead, we just got a lot better at doing things we'd already been doing. In particular,
we got better at combining technological progress with capitalism to satisfy
human wants and needs. McAfee's book documents how technological progress spurred by market
competition is dematerializing the economy. McAfee makes a strong case that climate change is an openaccess commons problem that markets can dematerialize once a price is put on
greenhouse gas emissions. The upshot is that Klein, The Guardian, and many of the climate strikers have it
exactly backwards . Properly incentivized capitalism is the key to solving the problems
caused by climate change.
A new study from Harvard Business School shows that economic inequality and
stagnant middle-class incomes are big concerns for America’s business elite. And
while it shows that the rich believe they will get richer and the gap will continue to grow,
the study also shows that even the super wealthy prefer there was more equality.
The numbers show that the top one-percent predict the distribution of future
income gains to be 41 percent, while their preferred distribution of future income
gains is 16 percent.
Capitalism solves warming – better tech due to competition and
government funding is vital – the alt fails because transition wars and
improving quality of life quickens warming.
Smith 19 [Noah Smith, assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University,
Dumping Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet, Bloomberg, 4-5-2019, Accessible Online at
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-05/capitalism-is-more-likely-to-limitclimate-change-than-socialism] DL 7-14-2020
It has become fashionable on social media and in certain publications to argue that capitalism is killing the planet. Even
The basic idea is that the
profit motive drives the private sector to spew carbon into the air with reckless abandon. Though many
renowned investor Jeremy Grantham, hardly a radical, made that assertion last year.
economists and some climate activists believe that the problem is best addressed by modifying market incentives with a
carbon tax, many activists believe that the problem can’t be addressed without rebuilding the economy along centrally
planned lines. The climate threat is certainly dire, and carbon taxes are unlikely to be enough to solve the problem. But
eco-socialism is probably not going to be an effective method of addressing that threat. Dismantling
an entire economic system is never easy, and probably would touch off armed conflict
and major political upheaval. In the scramble to win those battles, even the socialists would
almost certainly abandon their limitation on fossil-fuel use — either to support military efforts, or to keep
the population from turning against them. The precedent here is the Soviet Union, whose multidecade
effort to reshape its economy by force amid confrontation with the West led to profound environmental
degradation. The world's climate does not have several decades to spare. Even without international conflict,
there’s little guarantee that moving away from capitalism would mitigate our impact on the
environment. Since socialist leader Evo Morales took power in Bolivia, living standards have improved
substantially for the average Bolivian, which is great. But this has come at the cost of higher emissions.
Meanwhile, the capitalist U.S managed to decrease its per capita emissions a bit during this
same period (though since the U.S. is a rich country, its absolute level of emissions is much higher). Doubting the
Carbon-Capitalism Equation CO2 emissions per capita in metric tons Source: Knoema In other words, in terms of
economic growth and carbon emissions, Bolivia looks similar to more capitalist
developing countries. That suggests that faced with a choice of enriching their people or
helping to save the climate, even socialist leaders will often choose the former. And that same
political calculus will probably hold in China and the U.S., the world’s top carbon emitters — leaders who demand
The best hope
for the climate therefore lies in reducing the tradeoff between material prosperity and carbon emissions. That requires
technology — solar, wind and nuclear power, energy storage, electric cars and other
vehicles, carbon-free cement production and so on. The best climate policy plans all
involve technological improvement as a key feature. Recent developments show that the
technology-centered approach can work. A recent report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance
analyzed about 7000 projects in 46 countries, and found that large drops in the cost of
solar power from photovoltaic systems, wind power and lithium-ion batteries have made utility-scale
renewable electricity competitive with fossil fuels. A 76 percent decline in the cost of
energy for short-term battery storage since 2012 is especially important. In a blog post, futurist and energy
draconian cuts in living standards in pursuit of environmental goals will have trouble staying in power.
writer Ramez Naam underscores the significance of these developments. Naam notes the important difference between
renewables being cheap enough to outprice new fossil-fuel plants, and being inexpensive enough to undercut existing
plants. The former is already the case across much of the world, which is among the reasons for an 84 percent decrease
in the number of new coal-fired plants worldwide since 2015. But when it becomes cheaper to scrap
existing fossil-fuel plants and build renewables in their place, it will allow renewables to start
replacing coal and gas much more quickly. Naam cites examples from Florida and Indiana where this
is already being done. He cites industry predictions that replacing existing fossil-fuel plants
with renewables will be economically efficient almost everywhere at some point in the next
decade. Electricity is far from the only source of carbon emissions — there’s also transportation, manufacturing
(especially of steel and cement), home and office heating, and agriculture to worry about. But the rapid advance of
solar technology is a huge victory in the struggle against climate change, because it will allow
people all over the world to have electricity without cooking the planet. And how was this victory achieved? A
combination of smart government policy and private industry. Massachusetts Institute of
Technology researchers Goksin Kavlak, James McNerney and Jessika Trancik in a recent paper evaluated the
factors behind the solar-price decline from 1980 to 2012. They concluded that from 1980 to 2001,
government-funded research and development was the main factor in bringing down costs, but from
2001 to 2012, the biggest factor was economies of scale. These economies of scale
were driven by private industry increasing output, but with government subsidies helping
to increase the incentive to ramp up production. It’s apparent, therefore, that both government and profitseeking enterprises have their roles to play. Government funds the development of earlystage technology and then helps push the private sector toward adopting those technologies, while private
companies compete to find ever-cheaper methods of implementation. Instead of ecosocialism, it’s eco-industrialism. If there’s any system that can beat climate change, this
looks like it.
Cap solves warming – new tech solves and stats prove.
Bailey 19 [Ronald Bailey, B.A. in philosophy and economics and Warren T. Brookes
Fellow in Environmental Journalism, Capitalism Is the Key to Fixing Climate Change,
Reason, 9-20-2019, Accessible Online at https://reason.com/2019/09/20/capitalism-isthe-key-to-fixing-climate-change/] DL 7-14-2020
Global warming is a classic example of what happens in an open-access commons. The atmosphere is unowned, so no
one has an incentive to protect and conserve it. Instead, people overexploit and pollute it. Historically this happened with
sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and smoke. In the United States, cities initially implemented regulations to cut back on
noxious air pollutants. (For example, the first smoke abatement regulations were enacted by Chicago and Cincinnati in
1881.) Eventually federal regulations and market mechanisms were adopted. As a result,
since 1980 air pollutants have collectively declined by 68 percent while the economy
grew by 175 percent. Scientists call this the environmental Kuznets curve. Environmental
commons tend to deteriorate as countries begin to develop economically—but once per-capita
income reaches a certain level, the public starts to demand a cleanup. It's a U-shaped
pattern: Economic growth initially hurts the environment, but after a point it makes things
cleaner. By then, slowing or stopping economic growth will delay environmental improvement,
including efforts to mitigate the problem of man-made global warming. The MIT economist Andrew McAfee
explains the process in a forthcoming book, More from Less: We have finally learned how to tread more
lightly on our planet….In America—a large rich country that accounts for about 25 percent of the global economy—
we're now generally using less for most resources year after year, even as our economy and
population continue to grow. What's more, we're also polluting the air and water less,
emitting fewer greenhouse gases, and seeing population increases in many animals that
had almost vanished. America, in short, is post-peak in its exploitation of the earth. The situation is
similar in many other rich countries, and even developing countries such as China are now
taking better care of the planet in important ways. How did this happen? Through more capitalism,
not less : The strangest aspect of the story is that we didn't make any radical course changes to
eliminate the trade-off between human prosperity and planetary health. Instead, we just got a lot better at
doing things we'd already been doing. In particular, we got better at combining technological
progress with capitalism to satisfy human wants and needs. McAfee's book documents how
technological progress spurred by market competition is dematerializing the economy. McAfee makes a strong case that
climate change is an open-access commons problem that markets can dematerialize once a price is put on greenhouse
climate strikers have it exactly
backwards. Properly incentivized capitalism is the key to solving the problems caused by
climate change .
gas emissions. The upshot is that Klein, The Guardian, and many of the
2AC – Link
2AC – Link Turn: Death Penalty
The death penalty is a tool of capitalist control.
This card also answers backlash – it refers to growing support to ban the death penalty
which makes today distinct from the 1970s.
Cornish 11 [Megan Cornish, BA from Cornell University, Capitalism and the death
penalty, Freedom Socialist Party, 9-21-2011, Accessible Online at
https://socialism.com/fs-article/capitalism-and-the-death-penalty/] DL 7-14-2020
By the time they murdered him, the whole world knew who Troy Davis was — a Black man framed for the killing of a cop
20 years ago. Despite an international campaign that exposed powerful evidence of his innocence, Davis was executed
by the state of Georgia on Sept. 21, 2011 with explicit approval of the U.S. Supreme Court. His callous killing has added
tremendous momentum to the fight against the death penalty in the U.S.A. Most countries have abolished
capital punishment. Why does the U.S., still the center of world capitalism, cling to this
barbaric practice? Because the handful of super-rich who rule this country need state terror to
keep their grip on power. Racist history. The origin of the death penalty in the United States is rooted
in slavery. Life-and-death control over slaves was fundamental to Black bondage. After the brief
post-Civil War period of Reconstruction, when federal troops enforced the civil rights of freed slaves, lynching
became rampant throughout the former Confederacy. Only when decades of civil rights militancy finally weakened
the power of the Ku Klux Klan and lynching became widely condemned did capital punishment increase dramatically.
Says David Jacobs, lead author of a study at Ohio State University, the
death penalty is “a sort of legal
replacement” for lynching . Since 1976, 88 percent of state executions have been in the
South — the same states with a history of lynching. Further facts speak volumes. Today, there are
nearly 3,500 death-row prisoners. Of them 42 percent are Black, even though African
Americans are just 13 percent of the total population. Death sentences against people of
color are far more likely if the alleged victim is white. The death penalty and state repression.
Nothing shows the repulsive core of capitalism so well as its use of capital punishment
and the whole prison system, both indispensable to the rule of wealth. Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels defined the state as “a body of armed men.” Its job under capitalism is to disarm
the have-nots and tyrannize those most likely to revolt. As journalist and innocent death-row inmate
Mumia Abu-Jamal puts it, prisons serve to inculcate “terror in the minds of the working
class, as a tool of class and racial discipline.” Historically, especially in times of political ferment, the
death penalty has been used against labor militants, anarchists and socialists. Among the
most famous executions were Joe Hill, Industrial Workers of the World organizer and troubadour; the Haymarket
Square martyrs who led the Chicago movement for the eight-hour day; anarchist agitators Sacco and
Vanzetti; and Communist Party members Julius and Ethel Rosenburg. All were flagrant,
politically motivated executions . Countless frame-ups and death sentences of Black
Panthers and American Indian Movement members in the ’70s and ’80s are still being fought, in the
streets and in the courtroom. But under pressure from the civil rights struggle of the ’60s, the Supreme Court
ruled in 1972 that two death penalty cases constituted cruel and unusual punishment
because of racist and arbitrary application. But a conservative backlash was unleashed against the
gains of the tumultuous ’60s and early ’70s. A relentless corporate media campaign for “law and order” led to the “war on
drugs,” “three-strikes” life sentences, and to the revival of capital punishment. The Supreme Court reversed its moratorium
in 1976. Polls in the ’80s and ’90s showed support for executions around 75 percent. President Clinton gave the death
penalty a big boost with his 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which bars federal courts from
reconsidering legal and factual issues ruled on by state courts. In effect, “Innocence is no defense.” Not coincidentally, the
A growing movement. Today
the tide is turning against capital punishment, partly due to publicized, flagrant cases of
injustice. In Missouri, the case of Reggie Clemons, like Troy Davis’, contains no physical evidence linking
Act passed soon after exonerations based on DNA evidence began to mount.
him to the crime, police coercion of witnesses, two highly questionable witnesses who were themselves suspects, and
racist dismissals of Blacks from the jury. Texas had scheduled the execution of Hank Skinner on Nov. 9, 2011, refusing to
conduct DNA tests on all of the evidence from his trial, despite a decade of legal requests. At the last minute an appeals
court temporarily stayed the Nov. 9 killing. The Obama administration is seeking the death penalty at one of its infamous
Guantánamo military tribunals. The defendant, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri — under prolonged and severe torture —
confessed to a role in the bombing of the USS Cole in 2002. The number of those sentenced to death and later proven
innocent has had a powerful impact on public opinion. Since 1973, 138 prisoners have been exonerated,
mainly with DNA evidence unavailable at the time of their convictions. The Innocence Project is a national organization
Sixteen states and the
District of Columbia have at last ended capital punishment. Overall, dogged organizing by the Left
and other long-time opponents of the death penalty is connecting with a rising mass awareness of the
inequality of our economic system — one that relies on the power of life and death over
human beings to maintain its rule. As Mumia recently wrote, “The Troy Davis movement amassed almost a
dedicated to clearing the wrongfully convicted and reforming the criminal law system.
million signatures on petitions. Remarkable. But signatures … aren’t people in the streets. If a million people were on the
march, maybe, maybe — he would be alive.” The task ahead is to mobilize those millions.
Abolishing the death penalty removes capitalism’s ability to control
the public – it’s a step toward socialism because it recognizes the
dignity of all life.
Sculos 17 [Bryant William Sculos, PhD and visiting assistant professor of global
politics and theory at Worcester State University, Left of Death: The Socialist Case
Against the Death Penalty, New Politics, 1-10-2017, Accessible Online at
https://newpol.org/left-death-socialist-case-against-death-penalty/ ] DL 7-14-2020
On January 10, 2017, white supremacist and mass murderer Dylann Roof was sentenced to
death by a jury of his peers in federal court. He was deemed competent to stand trial multiple times,
despite serious questions regarding his mental stability. He was afforded what, by all means, appeared to be a competent
legal team to defend him against the charges stemming from the shooting of ten (killing nine) Black church-goers at
Mother Emmanuel African Methodist Church in South Carolina on June 17, 2015, though Roof decided to abandon legal
counsel at several points in the legal process. Roof was 21 years old at the time of the attack—barely old enough to
legally consume alcohol and not old enough to even rent a car. He has expressed nothing resembling regret for his
crimes, and in fact has remained steadfast in his justification for them. Assuming the psychological experts are right and
Roof lacks any kind of relevant mental illness, I have no sympathy for Roof nor should anyone else. I even understand the
visceral desire to want to see Roof suffer the ultimate penalty for his crimes. If anyone deserves the death penalty, it is
Dylann Roof. What is most often missing from such pronouncements like this “If anyone deserves it, it is…” is this: No
one deserves the death penalty. If anyone deserves the death penalty it is Dylann Roof, and despite his
crimes, complete lack of remorse, and that he was afforded all the legal opportunities to
defend himself in court, no one deserves the death penalty—not even Dylann Roof. While there are
good liberal and conservative reasons to oppose the death penalty, this essay will expound an explicitly socialist
case against this most horrific legal institution. If socialism means the replacement of the private
ownership of the means of production and marketized access to basic goods and resources with democratic control over
the same, there seems to be no reason to think that so long as our laws are genuinely democratically decided upon that
the death penalty would be inherently inconsistent with socialism. If the people come together and
decide that for certain crimes where there are confessions and evidence that proves the crime beyond a shadow of a
doubt, why should this practice be disallowed? We could start with the perhaps more well-known response rooted in how
the death penalty is actually carried out in the countries where it is still practiced like the US, Iran, China, North Korea,
Saudi Arabia, and Sudan. The argument here is that the death penalty is unjust because people are executed for political
reasons, through racially-biased processes, and in absence of the kind of evidence that we imagine should be necessary
to carry out such a final, unalterable punishment. The consequence of this argument is that if the process were to be
made more just and fair, the penalty would then be acceptable for the most heinous of crimes. I reject this argument, and I
think all socialists should as well. Before proceeding to the socialist case against the death penalty, I want to state firmly,
that despite the fact that I reject the “process” argument overall, this rejection should not be taken as a rejection of the
important fact that the critique of the process is accurate. The process involved in carrying out the death penalty, even in
the US where there are far more legal protections for the accused than in the other countries that allow capital
punishment, is unjust—most egregiously due to racism. I support those working to abolish the death penalty for these
reasons, though my reasons—the same reasons I consider myself a socialist—differ. Put simply, I
support the
dignity of life. Dylann Roof is a human being, and should not be killed. He was arrested,
charged, tried, and convicted for killing people—people he believed deserved to die. He
is wrong, and so are the jurors who unanimously voted to execute him. Some people
think that the poor deserve to be poor because they lack a strong enough work ethic to
improve their circumstances. As socialists, we know they are wrong. I—we—oppose capitalism because it
harms and kills people. The discourse of personal responsibility pervades all kinds of
justifications for capitalism, the prison-industrial complex, war, and the death penalty. I
support life and I want to live in a society that values all life, even life that we hate—even
life that we disagree with. Capitalism is based on and perpetuates a culture of suffering
and death, shrouded in the most superficial narratives of freedom, equality, and justice
for all. While socialists should still value personal responsibility, all good socialists
understand that even personal responsibility is a social project. As socialists, we want
CEOs and business owners to take personal responsibility for their exploitative,
oppressive, self-aggrandizing practices, whether they are entirely within the law or not.
We need to understand that personal responsibility and social responsibility are
inseparable. Dylann Roof did not invent murder. He did not invent nor build the gun he used to kill those
parishioners. He did not invent white supremacy. He was conditioned by a society that justifies all kinds
of killing: in “self-defense,” by police, by soldiers in war, by pharmaceutical companies who profit of off limiting access
to life-saving drugs, and by courts that sentence people to death—often incorrectly as we’ve
found out many times after executions have been carried out. Dylann Roof was conditioned into a
society with a thirst for guns and violence. He was conditioned into a society that is pervaded by white
supremacy—a white supremacy whose standard-bearers have once again found their way into the White House.
Opposing the mentality that justifies and naturalizes capitalism and all systems that reproduce unjust, preventable
suffering means opposing the death penalty, even for someone like Dylann Roof, who commits
heinous acts against life. Being genuinely pro-life should have nothing to do with policing women’s
bodies and choices; instead, it means supporting all life: human, animal, ecological, and even the accused or
convicted criminal’s life. Even if I or you want Dylann Roof to die, it is my—it is our—personal and social
responsibility to oppose the death penalty (and inhumane prison sentences and prison conditions more
broadly, by the way). The death penalty—like capitalism—is sustained by people
systematically giving-in to their basest fears and desires and codifying them into law. We
should oppose all laws, whether democratically determined or not, that violate life in any of its forms.
This is the strongest case—the socialist case—against the death penalty.
The practice of the death penalty is rooted in capitalist ideas. Only
ridding of capitalism can solve for the deeply integrated problems
with the death penalty.
Cornish ’11 (Megan Cornish, Cornell graduate, member of Radical Women and the
Freedom Socialist Party, “Capitalism and the death penalty”, Freedom Socialist Party,
December 2011, https://socialism.com/fs-article/capitalism-and-the-death-penalty/)-EL
By the time they murdered him, the whole world knew who Troy Davis was — a Black
man framed for the killing of a cop 20 years ago. Despite an international campaign that
exposed powerful evidence of his innocence, Davis was executed by the state of
Georgia on Sept. 21, 2011 with explicit approval of the U.S. Supreme Court. His callous
killing has added tremendous momentum to the fight against the death penalty in the
U.S.A. Most countries have abolished capital punishment. Why does the U.S., still the
center of world capitalism, cling[s] to this barbaric practice? Because the handful of
super-rich who rule this country need state terror to keep their grip on power. Racist
history. The origin of the death penalty in the United States is rooted in slavery. Life-anddeath control over slaves was fundamental to Black bondage. After the brief post-Civil War period
of Reconstruction, when federal troops enforced the civil rights of freed slaves, lynching became rampant throughout the
former Confederacy. Only when decades of civil rights militancy finally weakened the power of the Ku Klux Klan and
lynching became widely condemned did capital punishment increase dramatically. Says David Jacobs, lead author of a
study at Ohio State University, the death penalty is “a sort of legal replacement” for lynching. Since 1976, 88 percent of
state executions have been in the South — the same states with a history of lynching. Further facts speak volumes.
Today, there are nearly 3,500 death-row prisoners. Of them 42 percent are Black, even though African Americans are just
13 percent of the total population. Death sentences against people of color are far more likely if the alleged victim is white.
Nothing shows the repulsive core of capitalism so well as
its use of capital punishment and the whole prison system, both indispensable to the rule
The death penalty and state repression.
of wealth. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels defined the state as “a body of armed men.”
Its job under capitalism is to disarm the have-nots and tyrannize those most likely to
revolt. As journalist and innocent death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal puts it, prisons serve to inculcate “terror in the
minds of the working class, as a tool of class and racial discipline.” Historically, especially in times of political ferment, the
death penalty has been used against labor militants, anarchists and socialists. Among the most famous executions were
Joe Hill, Industrial Workers of the World organizer and troubadour; the Haymarket Square martyrs who led the Chicago
movement for the eight-hour day; anarchist agitators Sacco and Vanzetti; and Communist Party members Julius and
Ethel Rosenburg. All were flagrant, politically motivated executions. Countless frame-ups and death sentences of Black
Panthers and American Indian Movement members in the ’70s and ’80s are still being fought, in the streets and in the
courtroom. But under pressure from the civil rights struggle of the ’60s, the Supreme Court ruled in 1972 that two death
penalty cases constituted cruel and unusual punishment because of racist and arbitrary application. But a conservative
backlash was unleashed against the gains of the tumultuous ’60s and early ’70s. A relentless corporate media campaign
for “law and order” led to the “war on drugs,” “three-strikes” life sentences, and to the revival of capital punishment. The
Supreme Court reversed its moratorium in 1976. Polls in the ’80s and ’90s showed support for executions around 75
percent. President Clinton gave the death penalty a big boost with his 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty
Act, which bars federal courts from reconsidering legal and factual issues ruled on by state courts. In effect, “Innocence is
no defense.” Not coincidentally, the Act passed soon after exonerations based on DNA evidence began to mount. A
growing movement. Today the tide is turning against capital punishment, partly due to publicized, flagrant cases of
injustice. In Missouri, the case of Reggie Clemons, like Troy Davis’, contains no physical evidence linking him to the
crime, police coercion of witnesses, two highly questionable witnesses who were themselves suspects, and racist
dismissals of Blacks from the jury. Texas had scheduled the execution of Hank Skinner on Nov. 9, 2011, refusing to
conduct DNA tests on all of the evidence from his trial, despite a decade of legal requests. At the last minute an appeals
court temporarily stayed the Nov. 9 killing. The Obama administration is seeking the death penalty at one of its infamous
Guantánamo military tribunals. The defendant, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri — under prolonged and severe torture —
confessed to a role in the bombing of the USS Cole in 2002. The number of those sentenced to death and later proven
innocent has had a powerful impact on public opinion. Since 1973, 138 prisoners have been exonerated, mainly with DNA
evidence unavailable at the time of their convictions. The Innocence Project is a national organization dedicated to
clearing the wrongfully convicted and reforming the criminal law system. Sixteen states and the District of Columbia have
at last ended capital punishment. Overall, dogged organizing by the Left and other long-time opponents of the death
penalty is connecting with a rising mass awareness of the inequality of our economic system —[is] one
that relies on the power of life and death over human beings to maintain its rule. As
Mumia recently wrote, “The Troy Davis movement amassed almost a million signatures
on petitions. Remarkable. But signatures … aren’t people in the streets. If a million
people were on the march, maybe, maybe — he would be alive.” The task ahead is to
mobilize those millions.
2AC – Link Turn: Reform
Concrete reforms that reduce the carceral state is a perquisite to the
end of capitalism – absent the perm the alt fails because the carceral
state enables capitalism to prevent rebellion and social change.
Berger 18 [Dan Berger, How Prisons Serve Capitalism, Public Books, 8-17-2018,
Accessible Online at https://www.publicbooks.org/how-prisons-serve-capitalism/] DL 713-2020
I once asked a class at a prison in Washington State how they would describe the
relationship between capitalism and incarceration. “They get you coming and going,”
someone quickly offered. Perhaps he had in mind the legal financial obligations that are
levied against many people upon their conviction.1 He also could have been referring to
the exorbitant costs of commissary supplies. In January, Florida prisoners announced a
strike to protest their conditions. Among their grievances, the high cost of commissary,
including $17 for a case of soup and $18 for tampons.2 Or maybe he was thinking about
the lengths his loved ones went to communicate with him. Since being asked to write
this review, I’ve paid $53 to the telecommunications company Securus so that a friend
incarcerated in New York could call me—a $3 activation fee in addition to a $50 deposit
in his account for future collect calls—and $50 to JPay, a subsidiary of Securus that bills
itself as “the most trusted name in corrections,” so that I could email with people
incarcerated here in the Northwest. This money is on top of my regular acquisition of
stamps and envelopes to maintain traditional forms of correspondence with incarcerated
friends who do not have email access.
That prisons incarcerate almost exclusively poor people is a truism. Less discussed
is that imprisonment keeps people—and communities—poor. Although overwhelmingly
government-run, the US penal system extracts wealth from people least able to pay and,
by making them pay, it keeps them in its grip.3
People often misread the role of economics in giving the United States the world’s
largest prison system. Surely, many commentators insist, the whole enterprise must be
driven by profit; why else would the country lock up so many people for so long in
conditions so cruel? Capitalism is a central character in the story of American
punishment—but not because the criminal justice system is an elaborate pyramid
scheme. A summary review of the half-century expansion of police and prison power
shows that debt, violence, and prison have served primarily political purposes in the
context of deepening economic inequality. More than profit, capitalism generates misery
from its poorest subjects.
While it has a long history, the braiding of debt and punishment has become a core
feature of how criminal justice has anchored the American state since the early 1970s. In
her new book, Jackie Wang dubs this development “carceral capitalism”: a draconian
model of economic governance that approaches Black urban communities with a mixture
of debt and police violence. Carceral capitalism turns police, prosecutors, and courts into
creditors, lessors, and debt collectors. Capitalism, Wang shows, integrates the punitive
state through debt. For many people, debt itself is a form of punishment.
THAT PRISONS INCARCERATE ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY POOR PEOPLE IS A
TRUISM. LESS DISCUSSED IS THAT IMPRISONMENT KEEPS PEOPLE—AND
COMMUNITIES—POOR.
Examining how police power grows through the imposition of debt and the deployment of
new technologies, Wang wants readers to understand the role of incarceration in “the
dynamics of late capitalism.” As city and state governments themselves are squeezed
for funds, they pick the pockets of the poor to pay their bills. From the debtors’ prisons of
17th-century America to the high-interest legal financial obligations of today that cannot
be discharged in bankruptcy, to be in debt is to be exposed to the government’s
power to punish. One means for city and state governments to keep the funds flowing
is to prey on those who already occupy the economic margins, and novel technologies
have elaborated ever-more sophisticated ways of tracking their quarry.
Still, focusing too closely on the technological innovations of finance and debt obscure a
more profound transformation. The story of debt that Wang traces says more about
broader trends in contemporary American capitalism, including its urban political
economy, than about carceral injustice.
The idea of “carceral capitalism” suggests a different way of naming the convergence of
finance capitalism and the punitive state that has seen so many people sacrificed to
cops and cages. Scholars and activists have offered terms such as “mass incarceration,”
which emphasizes the rapid growth of imprisonment since the 1970s; the “prison
industrial complex,” which is often misread as an economistic focus on prison labor or
the small number of private prisons; or the “carceral state,” a clunky phrase that focuses
on the state form but makes no mention of the economic transformations precipitating or
propelling industrialized punishment.
No single phrase can capture the complex integration of the state, private actors,
and impoverishment that is made manifest through the 10 million people that annually
pass through America’s jails, the more than 1.5 million held in prisons and detention
centers on any given day, the 4.5 million on parole or probation, and the uncounted
masses daily stopped, frisked, harassed, and surveilled. But the concept of “carceral
capitalism” offers a way to synthesize the parts that have made the United States the
world’s biggest jailer.
Today, elites gain political and financial rewards for imprisoning groups of people. The
roots of this system can be traced to a political-economic project aimed at preserving
capitalism’s racial inequalities: the quelling of the rebellions of working-class Black
communities in the 1960s. A deeper look into this history places the repression and
disappearance of racialized labor at the center of the story. To full understand carceral
capitalism, then, it is necessary to look at the history of labor and joblessness in Black
urban neighborhoods.
BROWSE
“THE COLLEGE THAT ENTERS THE PRISON IS TRANSFORMED”
BY SONYA POSMENTIER
Throughout the 1960s, Black working-class people rose up against racial capitalism.
Their uprisings also catalyzed similar rebellions in Puerto Rican and Chicano
communities. Police brutality was invariably the spark. Yet the tender had been provided
by decades of housing and employment segregation that saw Black (and Latinx)
communities overwhelmingly housed in squalid conditions and chronically under- or
unemployed. In Watts, Detroit, and Newark; in Plainfield, NJ, Cambridge, MD, and
Waukegan, IL; and in so many other locales, the fires were lit by the same arsonist:
patterned segregation upheld by routine if spontaneous police violence. The National
Guard helped local and state police arrest 10s of thousands of people in these long, hot
summers. In response, metropolitan police forces increasingly began to resemble the
National Guard in weaponry and authority.
The crisis of worklessness led many people to protest in the streets or join organizations
ranging from the Black Panther Party to the Urban League, the Communist Party to the
NAACP. The government, however, responded to these groups and the crisis by
expanding the legal rationale and physical capacity for incarceration. It was not debt, as
Wang highlights with regard to the contemporary period, but war that explained the
imprisonment of the period: wars on communism, crime, drugs, gangs, and guns.4
Debt has become a form of repression for those rendered obsolete by globalizing
capital. A number of analysts within the 1960s-era Black freedom struggle recognized
the looming challenge. Jack O’Dell opined in a 1967 issue of Freedomways that the
response to urban rebellions of the 1960s augured a dangerous trend: “Despite certain
concessions to civil rights and a number of important court decisions favorable to the
defense of civil liberties, militarism and the military presence are rapidly becoming the
main features of governmental power in American life.”5 Three years later, in his book
Who Needs the Negro?, sociologist Sidney Willhelm warned that automation caused
increasing worklessness for Black communities that would have to be addressed—either
through public works programs or increasing authoritarianism, social democracy, or state
violence.6
Soon after, the US incarceration rate began its inexorable climb.
THE STORY OF DEBT THAT WANG TRACES SAYS MORE ABOUT BROADER
TRENDS IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CAPITALISM, INCLUDING ITS URBAN
POLITICAL ECONOMY, THAN ABOUT CARCERAL INJUSTICE.
Punishment came to preoccupy the state in response to Black working-class protests
against the racism of 1960s capitalism. Once local and federal government entities
redirected public coffers toward punishment, it was only a matter of time before private
companies tried monetizing racist and political repression—much as they have done
with housing and employment segregation. Their literal and ideological investments in
punishment are fundamentally parasitic: punishingly extractive themselves, they are yet
still dependent on the motivation of external entities. State policy, and state funding,
drives their actions.
As elites responded to labor crises in communities of color with mass incarceration,
prisons accelerated worklessness itself. The idea of rehabilitation had always existed
uneasily with the punitive mission of incarceration. As prisons became filled with more
Black and Brown people, antiracist rebellions erupted within prison with an urgency that
matched their urban counterparts. Talk of rehabilitation all but disappeared. Longtime
wardens lamented the “new breed of inmate” entering their custody and lobbied for
greater severity in punishment.7 Removing work was part of increasing the prison’s
severity. “Prison provided inmates with few opportunities to constructively pass the time
they were sentenced to serve,” journalist John McCoy wrote in a 1981 photo-essay on
Washington’s Walla Walla prison. “Jobs were few.” Those that did exist tended to be
make-work activities that offered neither gratification nor meaningful training.8
The expansion of punishment under neoliberalism has exacerbated the warehouse
prison. Less than half of the 2.3 million people currently incarcerated do any work in
prison, and the vast majority of those who do work inside work for the prison itself:
sweeping the halls of the cell block, cleaning the kitchen, assisting one of the scant
programs available to prisoners. Idleness is a feature, not a bug, of American
punishment. Conservative criminologists and reactionary politicians soon replaced even
the idea of rehabilitation with incapacitation. “Incapacitation doesn’t pretend to change
anything about people except where they are,” writes geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore
in her trenchant study of California prisons.9
Much of the current scholarship on the carceral state has added more data points to the
insights Black radicals offered in the 1960s and 1970s, investigating its metastasization
as a reflection of disciplining an unruly, politically militant Black working class. Although
there are significant differences in the literature, including how to weigh economic
transformations in relation to explicit political repression, there is an emerging consensus
that the rise of mass incarceration needs to be understood as the elite response to
politically rebellious Black and Brown communities at the advent of neoliberalism.10
BROWSE
FROM THE WAR ON POVERTY TO THE WAR...
BY GARRETT FELBER
The phrase “carceral capitalism” raises a question: how do capitalism and carceral
power not just coexist but come to constitute each other? Debt is a necessary but
insufficient explanatory variable in understanding how carceral capitalism comes to
exist—and what it would mean to abolish it. Wang celebrates the utopian, “prophetic
dream” of abolition, to which we must add concrete organizing efforts to reduce the scale
and scope of the punishment system. Recognizing that carceral power is a measure of
American inequality, abolitionists have pursued full employment, universal health care,
educational equity, and restorative justice alongside an end to prisons, jails, and
immigrant detention and deportation.
Carceral power exceeds the framework of finance capital and technological innovation
around which Wang builds her argument. Rather, carceral expansion is a form of
political as well as economic repression aimed at managing worklessness among the
Black and Brown (and increasingly white) working class for whom global capitalism has
limited need.11 The generative theorizing of Carceral Capitalism needs to be put in
further conversation with the empirical work on the political economy of prisons.
Police and prisons have expanded in both quantity and meanness over the last half
century to enable the brutal management of (potentially) rebellious workers made
obsolete by the increasing globalization of American capitalism. But perhaps, in the
depths of the Trump era, buoyed by the hunger and labor strikes that increasingly dot
the American carceral landscape, the demands for full employment and universal health
care, the civil disobedience actions aiming to halt the detention and deportation of
immigrant workers, we can start to see the abolitionist horizon come into focus.
2AC – Link Turn: Inequality
Enforcing laws that prevent corporations and the wealthy from illegal
economic activity solves the inequality produce by capitalism.
Price 12 [Tim Price, Roosevelt Institute's Editorial Director, For Capitalism to Survive,
Crime Must Not Pay, Roosevelt Institute, 4-12-12, Accessible Online at
https://rooseveltinstitute.org/capitalism-survive-crime-must-not-pay/] DL 7-13-2020
Unequal enforcement of the law will distort and destroy any capitalist society, and we
may be witnessing just such a downward spiral in the financial sector.
Capitalism is not an abstract idea. It is an economic system with a distinct set of
underlying principles that must exist in order for the system to work. One of these
principles is equal justice. In its absence, parties will stop entering into transactions that
create overall wealth for our society. Justice must be blind so that both parties —
whether weak or powerful — can assume that an agreement between them will be
equally enforced by the courts.
There is a second, perhaps even more fundamental, reason that equal justice is
essential for capitalism to work. When unequal justice prevails, the party that does not
need to follow the law has a distinct competitive advantage. A corporation that knowingly
breaks the law will find ways to profit through illegal means that are not available to
competitors. As a consequence, the competitive playing field is biased toward the
company that does not need to follow the rules.
The net result of unequal justice is likely to be the destruction of the overall wealth of our
society. I don’t mean the wealth of individuals; I mean the total wealth of goods and
services that are the benefits of healthy competition. To the extent that unequal justice
prevails, entities that are exempt from the laws will, in all likelihood, be more profitable
than law abiding competitors. Then they use their profits to further weaken competitors
by using their illegal profits to further build their businesses at the expense of
competitors. All of this business building activity is based on a foundation of sand, and
ultimately the entire industry — or even the larger economy — becomes distorted. The
“rogue” company gains power, changes markets, and destroys direct and indirect
competitors because it is playing by different rules.
The above scenario is not simply a hypothetical example. It is exactly what happened at
Worldcom. As the company succeeded because of its then-unknown illegal activities, it
grew, managed to take over MCI (one of the true innovators in the industry), and
weakened competitors who could not match its profitability. Ultimately the whole edifice
collapsed, causing massive wealth destruction in the telecommunications industry and
the economy as a whole.
In the WorldCom example, appropriate legal enforcement and prosecution did not occur
until the accounting fraud and other crimes were detected. Thus, while it is more an
example of undetected accounting fraud than unequal justice, the results are illustrative.
In a society with unequal justice, the appropriate laws are never enforced, so entities
acting outside the law continue to grow more profitable and powerful (as compared to
everyone operating according to the rules). Moreover, the profits from illegal activities
can be used to subsidize competition across the spectrum of business activities of
companies acting outside the law — which further enforces the competitive advantage,
and possible hegemony, of entities operating on a different playing field.
Now, here’s why the above discussion is so important if we hope to return our economy
to the dynamo of wealth creation for the entire society that is, in part, what made
America a great nation. As economic inequality increases, two sets of laws implicitly
develop: one set for powerful members of society and another set for the weaker. These
two sets of laws are often defined by a single question: who is prosecuted for crimes
and who is not. When powerful members of society can break the law without fear of
prosecution, they will inevitably exploit this competitive advantage by engaging in
profitable (but illegal) activity. At the same time, the weaker members of society can’t
compete; they are shackled by the need to follow the laws of the land. Meanwhile,
everyone loses as the profits of companies violating the law distort the competitive
playing field and the activities of everyone in it and divert societal activity from the
creation of real wealth.
Join the conversation about the Roosevelt Institute’s new initiative, Rediscovering
Government, led by Senior Fellow Jeff Madrick.
In effect, equal enforcement of the law is not simply important for democracy or to
ensure that economic activity takes place, it is fundamental to ensuring that capitalism
works. Without equal enforcement of the law, the economy operates with participants
who are competitively advantaged and disadvantaged. The rogue firms are in effect
receiving a giant government subsidy: the freedom to engage in profitable activities that
are prohibited to lesser entities. This becomes a self-reinforcing cycle (like the growth of
WorldCom from a regional phone carrier to a national giant that included MCI), so that
inequality becomes ever greater. Ultimately, we all lose as our entire economy is
distorted, valuable entities are crushed or never get off the ground because they can’t
compete on a playing field that is not level, and most likely wealth is destroyed.
The central question for the nation right now is whether we are, in fact, in the middle of
the dire and dangerous cycle described above. Washington insiders have reportedthat
the Justice Department is explicitly choosing not to prosecute seemingly illegal bank
activities. Indeed, in my previous column I noted that the audits released by the Office of
the Inspector General of the Department of Housing and Urban Development detailed
activities by senior banking officials associated with the robo-mortgage scandal that
seem to constitute clear evidence of multiple federal felonies, and most likely violated
state laws as well. Yet no one has been indicted.
In an entirely different sector of financial services, the venerable American Banker just
completed a three-part series on past credit card debt collection practices. Many of
these activities are now under investigation by the Office of the Comptroller of the
Currency. But if the past is prologue, it’s unlikely that any criminal indictments will result,
no matter what these investigations uncover.
Indeed, as has been repeatedly documented, when illegal activity is detected, the SEC
settles with the banks in civil lawsuits for sums that, while appearing to be large, are a
pittance compared to the profits of the institutions involved. While these same activities
would in many cases constitute criminal violations, no prosecutions have occurred. The
bankers who operate our largest financial institutions can rightfully assume that they are
above the laws that constrain everyone else.
The evidence that crime does, in fact, pay is perfectly clear. Before the 1990s, the total
profits of the financial services sector rarely accounted for more than 20 percentof the
total corporate profits of the nation’s economy. By 2005, they averaged about one-third
of all corporate profits. After sinking as a result of the crash, they rebounded
dramatically. By early 2011, the sector once again accounted for about 30 percent of
total corporate profits. As The Wall Street Journal noted, “That’s an amazing share given
that the sector accounts for less than 10 percent of the value added in the economy.”
Finance serves a valuable function. Its principal role is to ensure that capital is most
efficiently allocated in a society. However, financial services are also an intermediate
good. They grease the wheels, through capital allocation, so that real goods and
services that people consume or experience can be created. Yet, as the Journal noted,
the sector’s profits are far in excess of the value the sector adds to the overall economy.
At the same time, recent academic research has suggested that the financial sector has
become less efficient over time, with the gains from information technology cancelled out
by increases in trading activity (whose social value is certainly open to question).
This will ultimately lead us in a downward spiral: A few large powerful entities and people
operate above the law, inequality is extreme, citizens have lost faith in their political
systems, real societal wealth is not created, and political instability becomes a potential
reality. John Adams held that “We are a nation of laws, not men” for a valid reason. Now,
we need those charged with enforcing our laws to do their job.
2AC – AT: Chocolate Laxative
Chocolate laxatives K totally stupid
Dan T. Olson 9 - MA in theology from Fuller Theological Seminary and am in the
process of completing another MA in philosophy at LMU, 8/1/9, HAUERWAS, ZIZEK,
PATAGONIA AND ROB BELL: CAPITALISM’S CHOCOLATE LAXATIVES AND THE
CHURCH
http://dtomolson.wordpress.com/2009/08/01/hauerwas-zizek-patagonia-and-rob-bellcapitalisms-chocolate-laxatives-and-the-church/
To get back to the point, Zizek suggests that the reason these liberal-communists and their chocolate laxatives
must be rejected is that they are the quick fixes that allow the system to continue to grind on,
grinding up the masses as it does. The chocolate laxative may momentarily loosen your stool, but it will not fix the main cause of the
problem. In order to do that one must stop living off of chocolate and eat some roughage, which doesn’t taste all that good to a palate used
to sugar, cocoa and butter.¶ One possible danger in Zizek’s answer, for me,
is that it is in danger of making the
same mistake that every other purely human revolution, insurrection, or rescue mission
has made . That is, in view of what must be achieved some sacrifices must be made—some
heads of the aristocracy, some infidels, a couple of thousand Iraqi or Afghani civilians lives or the massive suffering and
starvation of many of the wretched of the earth who depend on the charity of the liberal
communists. For the Christian this is always unacceptable. People are not goods to be used no matter how lofty the purpose but
persons to be loved. (Of course how this love works itself out is what is in question here.)¶ Many theologians have told us, rightly, that the
poor are the sight of the in breaking and redeeming work of Christ. This is different than being the subjective location of, or potential for, the
revolution. One
must be careful that in order to achieve one’s end, the end of capitalist
hegemony, an end that I believe is completely in line with the Gospel, one does not sacrifice those who
cannot choose otherwise .¶ This does not mean that on the other hand we shut our eyes
and continue to rejoice in liberal communists and chocolate laxatives . We cannot be
content to wear our Tom’s Shoes and Gap Red T-shirts while drinking our fair trade coffee and going about our day
pleased with the current social order. There has to be a third or middle way, a
political option better than Elizabeth’s ecclesial via media.
2AC – Alternatives
2AC – Cap Inevitable
Neoliberalism is institutionally embedded – means it’s inevitable
Cahill 14—(Damien Cahill, Senior Lecturer in Political Economy, University of Sydney,
Australia, 2014, “The End of Laissez-Faire?: On the Durability of Embedded
Neoliberalism” p119-121)//don
Writing of the constraints imposed upon the ability of member states to conduct autonomous fiscal and monetary policies by the European
Union (EU), van Appledorn (2009: 26) observes that ‘ policy
making is structurally biased towards
policies of neoliberal restructuring’ . This prompts recognition that the roll-out of neoliberalism has
entailed more than just the construction of new institutions to regulate markets in which
corporations have been granted greater freedoms or in which newly privatised entities now operate. Rather, it has also entailed the
enactment of new regulations that commit states to neoliberal forms of
governance. These are ‘ structurally biased’ towards neoliberalism because they
provide a framework of rules and obligations that privilege and commit states to neoliberal forms of
regulation and response. While the fiscal and monetary policy constraints of the European Union provide a clear example of this, the
structural bias extends beyond the sphere of European macroeconomic management. It is embodied in various forms of
competition policy, in the EU and beyond, and in the articles of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) as well as
numerous free trade agreements, all of which commit states to neoliberal forms of
governance . Not only does this highlight that actually existing neoliberalism is underpinned by much
more than fundamentalist neoliberal ideas, it also suggests that a shift in the
ideological adherence of policy makers away from neoliberal norms is far from a
sufficient condition to bring about a shift away from neoliberal forms of state
regulation. Indeed, as several authors have observed, the structural bias towards neoliberal policies gives them a constitutional
element (Gill 2001; Nicol 2010). The neoliberal bias is institutionally embedded in such a way as to make
neoliberal policy norms part of the rules, principles and precedents by which nation-states are
governed, thus effectively constitutionalising neoliberalism . Nicol (2010: 46) therefore calls such measures
a ‘constitutional law protection of neoliberal capitalism’, which draws attention to the ways in which such regulations limit the policy freedom
of states to move in non-neoliberal directions, irrespective of the ideology or policy preferences of state elites. The following section will
detail key examples of institutionally embedded neoliberalism which underpin the structural bias towards, and constitutional nature of,
neoliberal policy norms, before turning to a consideration of the de-democratising tendencies inherent within such structures and the ways
in which they reinforce the class embedded nature of neoliberalism, privileging not just neoliberal forms of policy, but the interests of the
owners and controllers of capital as well. The
constitutionalisation of neoliberalism occurs at both the
national and supranational levels. At the supranational level neoliberalism has been institutionally
embedded and constitutionalised via states joining or making legally binding commitments to
supranational economic institutions including the IMF, World Bank, WTO, European Union, EU and
various multilateral trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement ( NAFTA ). The
mechanism by which neoliberalism becomes embedded through these institutions varies, with the former two institutions – the IMF and
World Bank – providing a less durable form of institutionally embedded neoliberalism than the latter agreements, treaties and supranational
governance bodies. The contrast between the IMF and the WTO provides a good example of this differential durability. Both have their
origins in the post-World War Two era, as key institutions for regulating the international political economy during this period. Moreover,
both were later transformed into institutions which facilitated the expanded reproduction of neoliberalism. However, differences in the
membership, applicability and enforcement of the rules of each organisation are at the heart of differences in the ways in which each
contributes to the expanded reproduction of neoliberalism. The
IMF facilitates the institutional embedding of
neoliberalism through the conditions attached to the loans it brokers for nation-states. That
this supranational organisation requires states to implement a range of neoliberal
institutional transformations as a condition of access to finance means that, in such states, neoliberalism
becomes state policy irrespective of the ideological disposition of state elites. Thus, neoliberal
policy norms are institutionally embedded within the conditional lending rules of the IMF.
Capitalism is the inevitable interaction between parties, it can not be
escaped as it rooted in human nature – the neg fundamentally
misunderstands this words definition
Stromberg, 4 (Joseph R. Stromberg, 7-9-2004, accessed on 7-17-2020, Mises
Institute, "Why Capitalism is Inevitable | Joseph R. Stromberg",
https://mises.org/library/why-capitalism-inevitable)
The result is that interventions are cheered from all sides. For example, the movement for the (government-imposed)
family wage spans left and right, when the state intervenes to curb mass retailing, free trade, sound money, freedom of
association, private property, and all the other institutional marks of commercial society, it can count on wide intellectual
agreement. Capitalism, it seems, despite its triumphs, remains an irresistible target of the
opponents of liberty and property. How striking to discover, then, how few writers and thinkers are willing to
spell out precisely what they mean when they refer to the economics of capitalism. For many, the term
capitalism is nothing but a vessel into which they pour all the people,
institutions, and ideas that they hate. And so capitalism emerges as a synonym for
greed, dirty rivers and streams, pollution, corrupt businessmen, entrenched social
privilege, the Republican Party, criminal syndicates, world Jewry, war for oil, or what have
you. In fact, the advocates of capitalism themselves haven't always been entirely clear on the meaning and implications of
capitalist theory. And this is why Murray Rothbard went to such lengths to spell out precisely what he was endorsing when
he championed the economics of capitalism. This was especially necessary when he was writing in 1973, a time which was
arguably the low point for capitalist theory. Mises died that year, all economists were said to be Keynesians, Nixon closed
the gold window, wage and price controls were fastened on industry as an inflation fix, and the US was locked in a titanic
Cold War struggle that emphasized government weaponry over private enterprise. Murray Rothbard, meanwhile, was hard
at work on his book For A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto , an effort to breath new life into a
traditionally liberal program by infusing it with a heavy dose of political radicalism. It must have seemed like a hopeless
task. The same year, he was asked to contribute an essay in a series of readings called
Modern Political
Economy (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1973). He was to address "The Future of Capitalism" (pp. 419-430), the
conclusion of which might have seemed self-evidently bleak. But not to Rothbard. His contribution to the volume was
lively, optimistic, enormously clarifying, and prescient to the extreme. Above all, he used the opportunity to explain with
great clarity what precisely he means when he refers to capitalism: no more and no less than the sum of voluntary activity
in society, particularly that characterized by exchange. Does that seem like a stretch? Rothbard explains that the term
capitalism itself was coined by its greatest enemy Karl Marx, and ever since
the term has conflated two very different ideas: free-market capitalism, on the
one hand, and state capitalism, on the other. "The difference between them, Rothbard notes,
"is precisely the difference between, on the one hand, peaceful, voluntary exchange, and
on the other, violent expropriation." This may seem like a small point, but the confusion
accounts for why whole swaths of American historiography are incorrect, for example, in
distinguishing Alexander Hamilton's supposed sympathy for capitalism from Thomas
Jefferson's sympathy for "agrarianism." Rothbard points out that Jefferson was in fact an advocate
of laissez-faire who had read and understood the classical economists; as an "agrarian" he was merely applying the
doctrine of free markets to the American regional context, even as Hamilton's mercantilist and inflationist sympathies are
best described as a preference for state capitalism. As Rothbard explains, capitalism is nothing but the
system that emerges in the framework of free exchange of property and the absence of
government efforts to stop it. Whether you are talking about buying a newspaper from a vendor or a group of
stockholders hiring a CEO, the essence of the exchange is the same: two parties finding ways to benefit by
the trade goods and services. From the exchange, both parties expect to benefit else the trade would not have
occurred. The global marketplace at all levels is nothing but the extension of the idea of mutual betterment through
peaceful exchange. In contrast to market exchange, we have its opposite in government intervention. It can be classified
in two ways: either as prohibiting or partially prohibiting an exchange between two people or forcing someone to make
an "exchange" that would otherwise not take place in the market. All government activity—regulation, taxation,
protectionism, inflation, spending, social insurance, ad infinitum—can be classified as one of those two types of
interventions. Taxation is nothing more than robbery (Rothbard challenges anyone to define taxation in a way that would
not also describe high-minded theft), and the state itself is nothing but a much-vaunted robber on a mass scale—and it
matters not whether the state is conducting domestic or foreign policy; the essence of statecraft is always coercion whereas
the essence of markets is always voluntarism. In Rothbard's conception, it is not quite correct to characterize support for
free markets
as either right or left. In 1973, he heard as many complaints about the supposed greed unleashed by
markets from the followers of Russell Kirk as he did from the new left socialists. The right, in fact, was afflicted with a
serious intellectual attachment to pre-capitalistic institutional forms of monopoly privilege, militarism, and the
unrelenting drive to war. This was what Rothbard saw the political establishment of 1973 bringing to the US: the march of
the partnership between government and business that is nothing but the reinvention of political forms that pre-dated the
capitalist revolution that began in the Italian city states of the 16th century. The US conservatives were entirely complicit in
this attempt to reverse the classical liberal revolution in favor of free markets in order to fasten an old-world monopolist
system on society. In this, the conservatives resembled their supposed enemies, the socialists. After all, socialism was, as
Rothbard put it, "essentially a confused, middle-of-the-road movement." Its supposed goal of liberty, peace, and
prosperity was to be achieved through the imposition of new forms of regimentation, mercantilism, and feudalism.
Socialism seeks, in Rothbard's words, "liberal
ends by the use of conservative means ." ("Left and Right: The
Prospects for Liberty," Left and Right , I, 1, Spring 1965). Conservatives could be counted on to support the means
but not the ends, and the result is something that approaches the current status quo in the US: a mixed political system
that combines the worst features of egalitarian ideology with corporate militarism—a system that leaves enough of the
private sector unhampered to permit impressive growth and innovation. It was precisely the productive power of market,
as versus the dead-end of statist methods favored by both left and right, that led Rothbard to see that the gains of
capitalism could not finally be reversed. In addition, he may have been the first to anticipate the way in which the terms
left and right would eventually come to mean their precise opposite in the reforming economies of Eastern Europe. He was
fascinated but not entirely surprised by the events in old Yugoslavia, where a Stalinist system had been forced to reform
into a more market oriented economy. In fact, he noted that the trend had begun in the 1960s, and extended all over
Eastern Europe. What was essentially happening, Rothbard wrote, was that socialism had been tried and failed and now
these countries were turning to market models. Keep in mind that this was 1973, when hardly anyone else believed these
countries capable of reform: "In Eastern Europe, then, I think that the prospects for the free market are excellent--I think
we’re getting free-market capitalism and that its triumph there is almost inevitable." Ten years later, it was still
fashionable to speak of authoritarian regimes that could reform, as contrasted with socialist totalitarianism that could not
be reform and presumably had to be obliterated. Rothbard did not believe this, based on both theory and evidence.
Rothbard saw that all sectors in all countries moving either toward capitalism or toward socialism, which is to say, toward
freedom or toward control. In the US, the trends looked very bleak indeed but he found trends to cheer in the antiwar
movement, which he saw as a positive development against military central planning. "Both in Vietnam and in domestic
government intervention, each escalating step only creates more problems which confront the public with tile choice:
either, press on further with more interventions, or repeal them--in Vietnam, withdraw from the country." His conclusion
must have sounded impossibly naïve in 1973 but today we can see that he saw further than any other "futurists" of his
time: "the advent of industrialism and the Industrial Revolution has irreversibly changed the prognosis for freedom and
statism. In the pre-industrial era, statism and despotism could peg along indefinitely, content to keep the peasantry at
subsistence levels and to live off their surplus. But industrialism has broken the old tables; for it has become evident that
socialism cannot run an industrial system, and it is gradually becoming evident that neomercantilism, interventionism, in
Free-market capitalism, the
victory of social power and the economic means, is not only
the only moral and by far the most productive system; it has
become the only viable system for mankind in the industrial
era. Its eventual triumph is therefore virtually inevitable."
the long run cannot run an industrial system either.
Rothbard's optimism about the prospects for liberty is legendary but less well understood is the basis for it: markets work
and government do not. Left and right can define terms however much they want, and they can rant and rave from the
point of view of their own ideological convictions, but what must achieve victory in the end is the remarkable influence of
millions and billions of mutually beneficial exchanges putting relentless pressure on the designs of central planners to
thwart their will. To be optimistic about the prospects for capitalism requires only that we understand Mises's argument
concerning the inability of socialist means to produce rational outcomes, and to be hopeful about the triumph of choice
over coercion.
2AC – Alt Fails: Socialism
Socialism is destined for failure – a lack of economic calculation
ensures instability and insecurity
Richard M. 20 [Richard M., Why Socialism Is Impossible, No Publication, 10-1-2004,
Accessible Online at https://fee.org/articles/why-socialism-is-impossible/] DL 7-14-2020
In the Nineteenth century, critics of socialism generally made two arguments against the establishment of a collectivist
society. First, they warned that under a regime of comprehensive socialism the ordinary citizen
would be confronted with the worst of all imaginable tyrannies. In a world in which all
the means of production were concentrated in the hands of the government, the
individual would be totally and inescapably dependent on the political authority
for his very existence. The socialist state would be the single monopoly provider of
employment and all the essentials of life. Dissent from or disobedience to such an
all-powerful state could mean material destitution for the critic of those in political
authority. Furthermore, that same centralized control would mean the end to all
independent intellectual and cultural pursuits. What would be printed and published,
what forms of art and scientific research permitted, would be completely at the discretion
of those with the power to determine the allocation of society’s resources. Man’s mind and
material well-being would be enslaved to the control and caprice of the central planners of the socialist state.
Personal freedom and virtually all traditional civil liberties were crushed under the
centralized power of the Total State . Second, these Nineteenth-century anti-socialists argued that the
socialization of the means of production would undermine and fundamentally
weaken the close connection between work and reward that necessarily exists under a system
of private property. What incentive does a man have to clear the field, plant the seed, and
tend the ground until harvest time if he knows or fears that the product to which he
devotes his mental and physical labor may be stolen from him at any time? Similarly,
under socialism man would no longer see any direct benefit from greater effort,
since what would be apportioned to him as his “fair share” by the state would not
be related to his exertion, unlike the rewards in a market economy . Laziness and lack of
interest would envelop the “new man” in the socialist society to come. Productivity, innovation, and
creativity would be dramatically reduced in the future collectivist utopia. The
Twentieth-century experiences with socialism, beginning with the communist revolution in Russia in 1917, proved these
critics right. Personal freedom and virtually all traditional civil liberties were crushed under the centralized power of the
Total State. Furthermore, the
work ethic of man under socialism was captured in a phrase that
became notoriously common throughout the Soviet Union: “They pretend to pay us, and
we pretend to work.” The defenders of socialism responded by arguing that Lenin’s and
Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s National Socialist Germany, and Mao’s China were not “true”
socialism. A true socialist society would mean more freedom, not less, so it was unfair to
judge socialism by these supposedly twisted experiments in creating a workers’ paradise.
Furthermore, under a true socialism, human nature would change, and men would no longer be motivated by self-interest
but by a desire to selflessly advance the common good. Without such a competitively generated system of market prices,
there would be no method for rational economic calculation. In the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, the Austrian economists,
most notably Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich A. Hayek, advanced a uniquely different argument against a socialist
society. They, Mises, in particular, accepted for the sake of argument that the socialist society would be led by men who
had no wish to abuse their power and crush or abrogate freedom, and further, that the same motives for work would
Even with these assumptions,
Mises and Hayek devastatingly demonstrated that comprehensive socialist central planning would
create economic chaos . Well into the Twentieth century, socialism had always meant the
abolition of private property in the means of production, the end of market
prevail under socialism as under private property in the market economy.
competition by private entrepreneurs for land, capital, and labor, and, therefore, the
elimination of market-generated prices for finished goods and the factors of
production, including the wages of labor. Yet, without such a competitively generated
system of market prices , Mises argued, there would be no method for rational
economic calculation to determine the least-cost methods of production or the
relative profitability of producing alternative goods and services to best satisfy the wants of the
consuming public. It may be possible to determine the technologically most efficient way to
produce some good, but this does not tell us whether that particular method of
production is the most economically efficient way to do it. Mises explained this in many different
ways, but we can imagine a plan to construct a railway through a mountain. Should the lining of the railway tunnel be
constructed with platinum (a highly durable material) or with reinforced concrete? The answer to that question depends on
the value of the two materials in their alternative uses. And this
can be determined only through knowing
what people would be willing to pay for these resources on the market, given competing
demand and uses. Prices Encapsulate People’s Valuations On the free market, private entrepreneurs express their
demand through the prices they are willing to pay for land, capital, resources, and labor. The entrepreneurs’ bidding is
guided by their anticipation of the demand and prices consumers may be willing to pay for the goods and services that
can be produced with those factors of production. The resulting market prices encapsulate the estimates of millions of
consumers and producers concerning the value and opportunity costs of finished goods and the scarce resources, capital,
A socialist planned economy would be left without the rudder of
economic calculation. But under comprehensive socialist central planning, there
would be no institutional mechanism to discover these values and opportunity
costs. With the abolition of private ownership in the means of production, no resources could be purchased or hired.
and labor of the society.
There would be no bids and offers expressing what the members of society thought the resources were worth in their
alternative employments. And without bids and offers, there would be no exchanges, out of which emerges the market
structure of relative prices.
Thus socialist planning meant the end of all economic
rationality , Mises said — if by rationality we mean an economically efficient use of the means of production to
produce the goods and services desired by the members of society. Given that nothing ever stands still — that consumer
demand, the supply of resources and labor, and technological knowledge are continually changing — a socialist planned
economy would be left without the rudder of economic calculation to determine whether what was being produced and
how was most cost-effective and profitable. Neither Mises nor Hayek ever denied that a socialist society could exist or
even survive for an extended period of time. Indeed, Mises emphasized that in a world that was only partly socialist, the
central planners would have a price system to rely on by proxy, that is, by copying the
market prices in countries where competitive capitalism still prevailed. But even this would only
be of approximate value since the supply-and-demand conditions in a socialist society would not be a one-to-one replica
of the market conditions in a neighboring capitalist society. Socialist and even some pro-market critics of Mises have
sometimes ridiculed his supposed extreme language that socialism is “impossible.” But by “impossible,” Mises simply
meant to refute the socialist claim in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries that a comprehensive centrally-planned
economy would not merely generate the same quantity and quality of goods and services as a competitive market
Socialism could not create the material paradise on earth
the socialists had promised. The institutional means (central planning) that they
proposed to achieve their stated ends (a greater material prosperity than under capitalism) would
instead lead to an outcome radically opposite to what they said they wanted to
achieve. Without market prices, there can be neither economic calculation nor the
social coordination of multitudes of individual consumers and producers. Mises emphasized
that a socialist society also would lack the consumer-oriented activities of private
entrepreneurs. In the market economy, profits can be earned only if the means of production are used to serve
consumers. Thus in their own self-interest, private entrepreneurs are driven to apply their
knowledge, ability, and “reading” of the market’s direction in the most effective way, in
economy, but would far exceed it.
comparison to their rivals who are also trying to capture the business of the buying public. Certainly, incentives motivate
the private entrepreneur. If he fails to do better than his rivals, his income will diminish and he may eventually go out of
business. But the private entrepreneur, as much as the central planner, would be “flying blind” if he could not function
economic
calculation is the benchmark by which to judge whether socialist central planning
within a market order with its network of competitive prices. Thus, for Austrian economists like Mises,
is a viable alternative to the free-market economy . Without market prices, there can be neither
economic calculation nor the social coordination of multitudes of individual consumers and producers with their diverse
demands, localized knowledge, and appraisements of their individual circumstances. Central Planning versus Rational
The pricing system is what gives rationality — an efficient use of resources — and
direction to society’s activities in the division of labor, so that the means at
people’s disposal may be successfully applied to their various ends . Central planning
Planning
means the end to rational planning by both the central planners and the members of society since the abolition of a
market price system leaves them without the compass of economic calculation to guide them along their way .
The
chaos of the Soviet economy was centered on the lack of a real price system and,
therefore, a method of economic calculation. In the Soviet Union, for example, the older criticisms of
collectivism were verified. The Total State did create a cruel, brutal, and murderous tyranny.
And the abolition of private property resulted in weakened and often perverse incentives,
in which individual access to wealth, position, and power came through membership in
the Communist Party and status within the bureaucratic hierarchy. In reality, the rulers of the
communist countries had other ends than that of the material and cultural improvement of those over whom they ruled.
They pursued personal power and privilege, as well as various ideologically motivated goals. They artificially set prices for
both consumer goods and resources at levels that had no relationship to their actual demand or scarcity. As a
consequence, the
degree of misuse of resources was such that virtually all manufacturing or
industrial projects in the Soviet Union used up far more raw materials and labor hours
per unit of output than anything comparable in the more market-oriented Western
economies. The chaos of the Soviet economy was centered on the lack of a real price system and, therefore, a
method of economic calculation. There could not be a real price system in the Soviet Union
because it would have required the reversal of the very rationale for the socialist system
on which the Soviet rulers’ power was based — government control and central planning of production.
And they could not set their network of artificial prices at levels comparable to those in some Western countries because it
along
with the inherent irrationality of the central planning system due to the lack of real
prices were the weakened incentives for the ordinary Soviet citizen to be
industrious and creative in the official economy, as well as the perverse
incentives of the political system in which personal gain was achieved through a
near-total disregard for the interests of the wider society . That the Soviet planners had
would have made clear just how misguided their entire planning and distribution process actually was. Thus,
agendas other than serving consumers only further distorted the system. Just how misdirected and inefficient the use of
resources were under socialism only became clear after the Soviet Union collapsed and a limited market economy
emerged in Russia. The End of Civilization In his arguments against socialist central planning, Mises often couched his
reasoning in rhetoric that warned of the end of civilization as we know it if the collectivist road were followed. In the 1930s
and 1940s, when Mises most forcefully raised these fears, he was far from being alone in this dire warning, given the
brutality and violent tyranny then being experienced in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. If nothing else, the
“priorities” of the “workers’ state” would be different from those under decentralized, profit-oriented decision-making. But
the very nature of a socialist system threatened the
economic and cultural standard of well-being that Western man had come to take
for granted over the preceding hundred years. With every passing day, a socialist system would be
less like the market society that preceded it. The allocation of resources, the utilization of capital, and
the employment of labor would have to be modified and shifted from previous uses to
new ones. If nothing else, the “priorities” of the “workers’ state” would be different from
those under decentralized, profit-oriented decision-making. Should a new public hospital be
Mises’s more fundamental point was that
constructed in a particular location, or should the limited resources be assigned to building additional public-housing
complexes in a different part of the country? Should a piece of land in a particular area be used for a new “people’s
recreational facility” or should it become the site of a new industrial factory? If a new housing complex is chosen for
construction, should it be made mostly of brick and mortar, or of steel and glass? Should the efforts of some scientists be
employed for additional cancer research or for possible development of a tastier and longer-lasting chewing gum? What
represents the more highly valued use for various resources that can be employed making different types of machines,
which could then be used either to produce more books on religion and faith or to increase the productivity of workers in
agriculture? Would a new technological idea be worth the investment in time, resources, and labor, even though its payoff
may be years away (assuming it worked as initially conceived)?
Without prices for finished goods and
the factors of production to provide the information and signals to guide the
decision-making, each passing day would mean more such decisions were made
in the dark. It would be analogous to sea travelers in the ancient world before the invention of the sextant or the
compass. Every movement out of sight of land — the known and the familiar — would be into uncharted waters with no
way of knowing the direction or the consequences of the course chosen. Better to stay close to the shore than to explore
unknown seas. And if the journey on the open sea under cloud-covered skies is undertaken, it is uncertain where it will
The establishment of a
comprehensive system of socialist central planning would be equivalent to going
back in time. It is for reasons such as this that Mises referred to economic calculation as “the guiding star of action
under a social system of division of labor. It is the compass of the man embarking upon production.” Thus, even if
the rulers of a socialist state were completely benevolent and concerned only
with the well-being of their fellow men, without economic calculation a collectivist
society potentially faced what Mises titled one of his books, planned chaos. Thus, the establishment
lead or whether the shortest and best course has been selected.
of a comprehensive system of socialist central planning would be equivalent to going back in time, before the institutions
of private property and market competition had enabled the utilization of prices for rational decision-making. Luckily, the
attempt to create socialism in the Twentieth century made enough of an impression that it seems unlikely that such a
dramatic abolition of the fundamental institutions of the market economy will be tried again anytime soon. The dilemma of
our own time is that governments, through regulation, intervention, redistribution, and numerous controls, prevent the
market and the price system from functioning as they should and could in a free society.
2AC – Alt Fails: Racism + Inequality
The alt cannot solve for white supremacist values or antiblack
violence in the squo- capitalism is a different issue than black
poverty and inequality
Coates 16 (Ta- Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic,
February 8, 2016, Politics, “The Enduring Solidarity of Whiteness, The Atlantic,
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/02/why-we-write/459909/) – RD
There have been a number of useful entries in the weeks since Senator Bernie Sanders declared himself against reparations. Perhaps the most clarifying comes
from Cedric Johnson in a piece entitled, “An Open Letter To Ta-Nehisi Coates And The Liberals Who Love Him.” Johnson’s essay offers those of us interested in
the problem of white supremacy and the question of economic class the chance to tease out how, and where, these two problems intersect. In Johnson’s rendition,
racism, in and of itself, holds limited explanatory power when looking at the socio-economic problems which beset African Americans. “We continue to reach for
blackness is still derogated but antiblack racism is not the principal determinant of material conditions and economic
mobility for many African Americans.” Johnson goes on to classify racism among
other varieties of -isms whose primary purpose is “to advance exploitation on
terms that are most favorable to investor class interests.” From this perspective, the absence of specific
anti-racist solutions from Bernie Sanders, as well as his rejection of reparations, make sense. By Johnson’s lights, racism is a
secondary concern, and to the extent that it is a concern at all, it is weapon deployed to advance the
interest of a plutocratic minority. At various points in my life, I have subscribed to some version of Johnson’s argument. I did not
old modes of analysis in the face of a changed world,” writes Johnson. “One where
always believe in reparations. In the past, I generally thought that the problem of white supremacy could be dealt through the sort of broad economic policy favored
by Johnson and his candidate of choice. But eventually, I came to believe that white supremacy was a force in and of itself, a vector often intersecting with class,
a world
with equal access to safe, quality, and affordable education; with the right
to health care; with strong restrictions on massive wealth accumulation;
with guaranteed childcare; and with access to the full gamut of birthcontrol, including abortion, is a better world. But I do not believe that if this world were
realized, the problem of white supremacy would dissipate, anymore than I believe that if reparations were realized, the
problems of economic inequality would dissipate. In either case, the notion that one solution is the answer to the
other problem is not serious policy. It is a palliative. Unfortunately, palliatives are common these days among
many of us on the left. In a recent piece, I asserted that western Europe demonstrated that democratic-socialist policy, alone,
could not sufficiently address the problem of white supremacy. Johnson strongly disagreed with this:
but also operating independent of it. Nevertheless, my basic feelings about the kind of America in which I want to live have not changed. I think
Coates’s sweeping mischaracterization diminishes the actual impact that social-democratic and socialist governments have historically had in improving the labor
conditions and daily lives of working people, in Europe, the United States, and for a time, across parts of the Third World. There is not a single word in this
response relating to race and racism in Western Europe or anything remotely closely to it. Instead, Johnson proposes to bait with race, and then switch to class.
He swaps “labor conditions and daily lives of working people” in for “victims of white supremacy” and prays that the reader does not notice. Indeed, one might just
as easily note that the advance of indoor plumbing, germ theory, and electricity have improved “the labor conditions and daily lives of working people,” and this
would be no closer to actual engagement. This pattern—strident rhetoric divorced from knowable fact—marks Johnson’s argument. Reparations, he tells us, do
not emerge from the “felt needs of the majority of blacks,” a claim that is hard to square with the fact that a majority of blacks support reparations. Instead, he
argues, the claim for reparations emerges from a cabal of “anti-racist liberals” and “black elites” seeking to make a “territorial-identitarian claim for power.” In fact,
the reparations movement runs the gamut from the victims of Jon Burge, to those targeted by North Carolina’s eugenics campaign, to those targeted by the same
campaign in Virginia, to those targeted by “Massive Resistance” in the same state, to the descendants of those devastated by the Tulsa pogrom. Are the black
people of Tulsa who suffered aerial bombing at the hands of their own government“black elites” in pursuit of “territorial-identitarian claim?” Or are they something
far simpler—people who were robbed and believe they deserve to be compensated? Johnson denigrates recompense by asserting that the demands for
reparations have not “yielded one tangible improvement in the lives of the majority of African Americans.” This is also true of single-payer health care, calls to
break up big banks, free public universities, and any other leftist policy that has yet to come to pass. For a program to have effect, it has to actually be put in effect.
Why would reparations be any different? But ultimately, Johnson doesn’t reject reparations because he doesn’t think they would work, but because
he
doesn’t believe specific black injury through racism actually exists. He favors a “more Marxist
class-oriented analysis” over the notion of treating “black poverty as fundamentally distinct from white
poverty.” Johnson declines to actually investigate this position and furnish evidence—even though such evidence is not really hard to find. Courtesy of
Emily Badger, this is a chart of concentrated poverty in America—that is to say families which are both individually poor and live in poor neighborhoods. Whereas
concentrated poverty extends out from the
wallet out to the surrounding institutions—the schools, the street, the community
center, the policing. If individual poverty in America is hunger, neighborhood
poverty is a famine. As the chart demonstrates, the black poor are considerably more
individual poverty deprives one of the ability to furnish basic needs,
subject to famine than the white poor. Indeed, so broad is this particular famine that its reach extends out to environs
that most would consider well-nourished. As the chart above demonstrates, neighborhood poverty threatens both black
poor and nonpoor families to such an extent that poor white families are less
likely to live in poor neighborhoods than nonpoor black families. This is not an original finding. The
sociologist Robert Sampson finds that: This chart by sociologist Patrick Sharkey quantifies the degree to which neighborhood poverty afflicts black and white
The majority of
black people in this country (66 percent) live in high-poverty neighborhoods. The vast majority of whites (94
percent) do not. The effects of this should concern anyone who believes in a universalist solution to a particular affliction. According to Sharkey:
families. Sociologists like Sharkey typically define a neighborhood with a poverty rate greater than 20 percent as “high poverty.”
Neighborhood poverty alone, accounts for a greater portion of the black-white downward mobility gap than the effects of parental education, occupation, labor
force participation, and a range of other family characteristics combined. No student of the history of American housing policy will be shocked by this.
Concentrated poverty is the clear, and to some extent intentional, result of the segregationist housing policy that dominated America through much of the 20th
century. But the “fundamental differences” between black communities and white communities do not end with poverty or social mobility. In the chart above,
incarceration
rate in the most afflicted black neighborhood is 40 times worse than the
incarceration rate in the most afflicted white neighborhood. But more tellingly for our purposes,
Sampson plotted the the incarceration rate in Chicago from the onset imprisonment boom to its height. As Sampson notes, the
incarceration rates for white neighborhoods bunch at the lower end, while incarceration rates for black neighborhoods bunch at the higher end. There is no
black and white people—regardless
inhabit two “fundamentally distinct”worlds.
gradation, nor overlap between the two. It is almost as if, from the perspective of mass incarceration,
of neighborhood—
The pervasive and distinctive effects of racism
are viewable at every level of education from high school drop-outs (see pages 13-14 of this Pew report, especially) to Ivy league graduates. I strongly suspect that
if one were to investigate public-health outcomes, exposure to pollution, quality of public education or any other vector relating to socio-economic health, a similar
pattern would emerge.
Such investigations are of little use to Johnson, who prefers ideas over people, and jargon divorced of meaningful investigation. The
“black managerial elite” are invoked without any attempt to quantify their numbers and power. “Institutional racism” is presented as a figment, without actually
defining what it is, and why, in Johnson’s mind, it is insignificant. “Black plunder” is invoked in Chicago, with no effort to examine its effects or compare it to “white
plunder.” Johnson tells us that “universal social policies” and an expanded “public sector” built the black middle class. He seems unaware that the same is true of
the “white middle class.” A useful question might arise from such awareness: Has the impact of “universalist social policies” been equal across racial lines?
Johnson can not be bothered with such questions as he is preoccupied with —in his own words—“solidarity.” I am not opposed to solidarity, in and of itself, but I
would have its basis made clear. When an argument is divorced of this clarity, then deflection, subject-changing, abstraction, and head-fakes—as when Johnson
exchanges“laborers” for the victims of white supremacy—all become inevitable. Bombast, too. In Johnson’s rendition, black writers who trouble his particular
“solidarity” are not sincerely disagreeing with his ideas, they are assuaging “white guilt” and doing the dirty work of interpreting black people for “white publics.”
Johnson lobs this charge as though he is not himself interpreting for white publics, as though he were holding forth from the offices of The Amsterdam News
. And
then he lobs a good deal more: Coates’s latest attack on Sanders, and willingness to join the chorus of red-baiters, has convinced me that his particular brand of
antiracism does more political harm than good, further mystifying the actual forces at play and the real battle lines that divide our world. This not the language of
debate. It is the vocabulary of compliance. In this way, a strong and important disagreement on the left becomes something darker. Critiquing the policies of a
presidential candidate constitutes an “attack.” A call for intersectional radicalism is “red-baiting.” And the argument for reparations does “more political harm than
good.” The feeling is not mutual. I think Johnson’s ideas originate not in some diabolical plot, but in an honest and deeply held concern for the plundered peoples
of the world. Whatever their origin, there is much in Johnson’s response worthy of study, and much more which all who hope for struggle across the manufactured
line of race might learn from. Johnson’s distillation of the Readjuster movement, his emphasis on the value of the postal service and public-sector jobs, and his
insistence on telling a broader story of housing and segregation add considerable value to the present conversation. His insistence that airing arguments to the
contrary is harmful does not. It is not even that a solidarity premised on the suppression of debate—a solidarity of ignorance—is wrong in and of itself, though it is.
Social exclusion and labor exploitation are
different problems, but they are never disconnected under capitalism. And both
It is that a solidarity of ignorance blinds one to complicating factors:
processes work to the advantage of capital. Segmented labor markets, ethnic rivalry, racism, sexism, xenophobia, and informalization all work against solidarity.
Whether we are talking about antebellum slaves, immigrant strikebreakers, or undocumented migrant workers, it is clear that exclusion is often deployed to
advance exploitation on terms that are most favorable to investor class interests. No. Social exclusion works for solidarity, as often as it works against it. Sexism is
not merely, or even primarily, a means of conferring benefits to the investor class. It is also a means of forging solidarity among “men,” much as xenophobia forges
solidarity among “citizens,” and homophobia makes for solidarity among “heterosexuals.” What one
is is often as important as what one is not, and so strong is
the negative act of defining community that one wonders if all of these definitions—man, heterosexual, white—would evaporate in absence of negative definition.
2AC – Alt Fails – Mindset Shift
The alt fails – No mindset shift and doesn’t solve developing
countries
Harangozo et. al. 18 – *Hungarian politician and Member of the European
Parliament for the Hungarian Socialist Party, part of the Party of European Socialists,
**Associate professor at the Corvinus University of Budapest teaching environmental
management and environmental economics, ***Corvinus University of Budapest,
Department of Environmental Economics and Technology
(Gabor, Maria, and Tamas, “How big is big enough? Toward a sustainable future by
examining alternatives to the conventional economic growth paradigm”, published by
ERP Environment and John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 4-25-2018, Wiley Online Library, acc. 625-2018)//kb
4.4 Shortcomings of the alternatives Alternatives to the conventional growth economy have much
to offer, but they also face legitimate criticism, especially regarding their preconditions
and the feasibility of the transition they propose. The first major, pragmatic critique of
negative and zero growth is that transition is not very popular in times of crisis, and
fear of unemployment and a decline in living standards may be major obstacles to
change (Kallis et al., 2012). van den Bergh (2011) argues that alternative lifestyles have always existed, but—by
definition—are not accepted by the majority. (However, many now mainstream ideas were once also considered
insignificant, and a period of crisis can be seen as a window of opportunity for pushing changes through.) Second,
a transition can only be forced upon societies, but—
for unspecified reasons—never achieved voluntarily or through collective choice.
This approach suggests that it is highly unlikely that a negative or zero growth economy will ever
arise voluntarily within cultures that are generally composed of individuals seeking ever‐
higher levels of income and consumption (Buch‐Hansen, 2018; Hamilton & Denniss, 2005). Third, a lack
of precise knowledge and successful narratives concerning alternatives is also an
obstacle. Trainer (2010) claims that transitioning to a negative or zero growth economy
voluntarily is very unlikely if practical experience is insufficient. Alexander (2013) also considers
Sorman and Giampietro (2013) warn that
the lack of experience and infrastructure to be important obstacles to the creation of simpler lifestyles (e.g., it is difficult to
Another major critique (based on
Maslow's, 1954 thesis) is that voluntary reductions in consumption may be lucrative and
attractive only in wealthy countries where basic needs are already satisfied, and thus the
approach does not properly address sustainability problems in low‐income
countries . Thus, the question of whether “developing” low‐income countries should develop according to the
exit car culture without the existence of safe and accessible cycle paths).
conventional (or positive) growth paradigm remains open. For countries which are in a state of overshoot, it can be argued
that negative growth should continue until a “steady‐state” is reached—that is, when ecological limits are fully observed
(e.g., Goodland and Daly, 1996)—but from a policy perspective, it is still difficult to know when this point has been
achieved.
2AC – Alt Fails – Transition Wars
Capitalism disintegration causes transition wars --- three distinct
scenarios
Ahmed 19, Nafeez Ahmed, Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is a bestselling author, investigative
journalist, international security scholar, policy expert, film-maker, strategy &
communications consultant, and change activist., 2-22-2019, "The “Disintegration” of
Global Capitalism Could Unleash World War 3, Warns Top EU Economist," Resilience,
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-02-22/the-disintegration-of-global-capitalismcould-unleash-world-war-3-warns-top-eu-economist/ /AH
A senior European Commission economist has warned that a Third World War is an
extremely “high probability” in coming years due to the disintegration of global
capitalism. In a working paper published last month, Professor Gerhard Hanappi argued
that since the 2008 financial crash, the global economy has moved away from
“integrated” capitalism into a “disintegrating” shift marked by the same sorts of trends
which preceded previous world wars. Professor Hanappi is Jean Monnet Chair for Political Economy of
European Integration — an European Commission appointment — at the Institute for Mathematical Models in Economics at
the Vienna University of Technology. He also sits on the management committee of the Systemic Risks expert group in
the EU-funded European Cooperation in Science and Technology research network. In his new paper, Hanappi concludes
that global conditions bear unnerving parallels with trends before the outbreak of the first and second world wars. Key red
flags that the world is on a slippery slope to a global war, he finds, include: the inexorable growth of military spending;
democracies transitioning into increasingly authoritarian police states; heightening geopolitical tensions between great
powers; the resurgence of populism across the left and right; the breakdown and weakening of established global
These trends,
some of which were visible before the previous world wars, are reappearing in new
forms. Hanappi argues that the defining feature of the current period is a transition from
an older form of “integrating capitalism” to a new form of “disintegrating capitalism”,
whose features most clearly emerged after the 2008 financial crisis. For most of the twentieth
institutions that govern transnational capitalism; and the relentless widening of global inequalities.
century, he says, global capitalism was on an “integrating” pathway toward higher concentrations of transnational wealth.
This was interrupted by the outbreaks of violent nationalism involving the two world wars. After that, a new form of
“integrated capitalism” emerged based on an institutional framework that has allowed industrialised countries to avoid a
world war for 70 years. This
system is now entering a period of disintegration. Previously,
fractures within the system between rich and poor were overcome “by distributing a bit of
the gains of the tremendous increase of the fruits of the global division of labour to the
richer working classes in these nations.” Similarly, international tensions were diffused
through transnational governance frameworks and agreements for the regulation of
capitalism. But since the 2008 financial crisis, wealth distribution has worsened, with
purchasing power for the middle and working classes declining as wealth becomes even
more greatly concentrated. Growth in the Western centres of transnational capital has slowed, while formerly
sacrosanct international trade agreements are being torn to shreds. This has fuelled a reversion to nationalism in which
global and transnational structures have been rejected, and ‘foreigners’ have been demonised. As global capital thus
continues to disintegrate, these pressures escalate, particularly as its internal justification depends increasingly on
intensifying competition with external rivals. While
integrated capitalism depended on a transnational
institutional framework that permitted “stable exploitation on a national level”, Hanappi
argues that “disintegrating capitalism” sees this framework become disaggregated
between the USA, Europe, Russia and China, each of which pursues new forms of
hierarchical subordination of workers. Disintegrating capitalism, he explains, will resort increasingly to
“direct coercive powers supplemented by new information technologies” to suppress internal tensions, as well as a greater
propensity for international hostilities: “The new authoritarian empires need confrontation with each other to justify their
own internal, inflexible command structure.” Great
power conflict Hanappi explores three potential
scenarios for how a new global conflict could unfold. In his first scenario, he explores the
prospect of a war between the three most prominent military powers: the US, Russia and
China. All three have experienced large increases in military spending since the collapse
of the Soviet Union. Despite a dip for the US since 2011, President Trump has ushered
in a new spike, while Russian spending has plateaued and Chinese expenditures are
rapidly increasing. All three countries have also experienced an authoritarian turn. Drawing
on game theory, Hanappi argues that the calculus that none of these countries would be capable of ‘winning’ a world war
may be changing in the perceptions of the leaderships of these countries. By one estimate, China has the highest
probability of survival at 52 per cent, followed by the US at 30 per cent, and Russia at 18 per cent. This calculus suggests
that of all the three powers, China might be the most inclined to escalate direct hostile military activities that challenge its
rivals if it perceives a direct threat to what it sees as its legitimate interests. The US and Russia in contrast might transfer
the focus of their military activities on more covert, indirect and proxy mechanisms. In the US case, Hanappi points out:
“… the military strategy of Trump seems to include the possibility to delegate part of local operational responsibility to
close vassals, which receive massive weapon support from the US, e.g. Saudi Arabia and Israel in the Middle East.
Turkey, one of the strongest NATO branches in the area is a special case. It seems to have been allowed to destroy an
emergent state of the Kurdish population, which would have been closer to the European style of governance.” There are
growing signs of heightened great power tensions which could erupt entirely by accident or unanticipated provocation into
a global conflict that nobody wants. The US-China trade war is escalating, while both powers tussle over technology
secrets and argue over China’s growing military footprint in the South China Sea. Meanwhile Trump’s massive expansion
of the US Navy and Air Force point to preparations for a major potential conflict with either China or Russsia. Both the US
and Russia have jettisoned a critical nuclear treaty established since the Cold War opening the way to a nuclear arms
race. North Korea remains unrepentant about its ongoing nuclear weapons programme while Trump’s tearing up of the
nuclear agreement with Iran disincentivises that country from complying with disarmament and reporting terms. Early last
year, a statistical study of the frequency of major wars in human history found that the so-called 70 years of ‘long peace’ is
simply not an unusual phenomenon indicating an unprecedented period of peace. The study concluded that there was no
reason to believe that the 70 year period so far would not give way to another major war. Small wars, global
contagion Hanappi’s second scenario explores the prospect of a series of “small civil
wars in many countries”. The ingredients for such a scenario are rooted in the
resurgence of both right-wing and left-wing populism. “Both variants — sometimes
implicitly, sometimes explicitly — refer to a past historical national state form that they
propose to return to,” explains Hanappi. While right-wing populism harks back to the
authoritarian, racist regimes established in Germany and Italy in the 1930s, left-wing
populism yearns to return to the model of “integrated capitalism” that was in place during
the first three decades after the Second World War, and which reacted to the
unequalising effects of capitalism through the ‘social net’ of the so-called ‘welfare state’
as well as various forms of state intervention in the economy alongside private industry.
But the challenge is that “integrated capitalism” is already engulfed with its own internal
contradictions, propelling the shift toward disintegration. This puts left-wing populism in a
systematically weaker position, as right-wing populism can point to the multiple failures of “integrated capitalism”: the
failure to “overcome class antagonisms”, and the failure to “fulfil the promise of a substantially better life for the majority of
people.” According to Hanappi: “The representatives of Integrated Capitalism are discredited and cannot act as leaders,
the movement therefore is forced to experiment with new forms of national organization. More participatory forms of
democratic organization take more time, and with multiple social groups involved this weakens this movements strength
vis-à-vis right-wing populism. Furthermore, its vision of an improved national Integrated Capitalism is handicapped by the
fact that many people still remember its failures, while the song of national glory that right-wing populism sings refers to an
imagined far-away past that no one ever had seen.” In this context, he argues, the potential exists for outbreaks of
national civil war between emerging paramilitary branches of right-wing and left-wing populist movements, in the context
Hanappi warns of the
possibility of a regional or global “contagion” effect, if these breakdowns occur within a
similar time-scale. In that scenario: “The fluid mobility of national ideological political entrepreneurs, the
of either movement adopting state power and coming into conflict with the opposition.
creators of populist movements, meets the rigidity of dire global economic constraints. This is the crash that provokes
local wars.” This scenario is also backed by statistical data. In 2016, a study by Lloyds Insurers found that since 1960
there has been an increasing frequency in “pandemics” of “political violence contagion” involving regional and
transnational outbreaks of civil unrest within and among states. The report said that social protest and dissent against
government policies of militarism abroad and neoliberal austerity at home could act as potential precursors to “contagions”
of violence, along with other risk factors, including “an increase in the share of internet users”, greater urban
Global insurgency of the poor
Hanappi’s third scenario parallels the Lloyds study’s finding that in coming years, the
world is likely to face a series of “super strain pandemics” in the form of “anti-imperialist”
and “independence movements”, “mass pro-reform protests against national
government”, and “armed insurrection” or “insurgency” associated with two particular
ideologies, “Marxism” and “Islamism.” According to Hanappi, the plausibility of this scenario can be found in
concentration, increases in infant mortality, and a growing young population.
the “profoundly divergent trajectories of welfare of poor parts and rich parts of the world economy.” While GDP has
continued to grow overall, in the last three decades income and wealth inequalities within almost every country have
widened, and look set to sharpen further. If this cycle continues, a coalescence of grievances among the poorest three
Hanappi argues
that in reality, global conditions make a combination of these three scenarios more likely
than just one of them. “Disintegrating capitalism is not a prediction. It already has arrived
and shapes everyday life. The vanishing of integrated capitalism is not a forecast either.
Disintegrating capitalism dissolves capitalism but to do so it first has to destroy
integrated capitalism, its immediate predecessor.” The distinguishing feature of disintegrating
billion, spurred on by the interconnectivity of communications in the smartphone era, is plausible.
capitalism is its tendency to establish “nationalist and racist restrictions” designed to exclude “what its leaders define as
an inferior minority” in order to protect capital accumulation for a parochially-defined narrow national identity. Old
integrated capitalist institutions are abandoned, and new more coercive governance structures are introduced. In this
context, Hanappi concludes that a third world war will “not necessarily” take place, but carries “a frightening high
probability.” To avert it, he suggests, requires the adoption of effective counter-strategies, such as a global peace
movement. Beyond disintegration: what comes next? Hanappi’s diagnosis is insightful, but is ultimately limited due to his
narrow focus on economics. Missing from his analysis is any acknowledgement of the biophysical crises driving the
disintegration of global capitalism: the ecological and energy flows by which capitalist economies function — and thus the
natural limits (or planetary boundaries) they are breaching. However, his concept of “disintegrating capitalism” — bringing
with it a heightened propensity for violent conflict — coheres well with a broader ecological concept of civilisational decline
explored in a recent paper by American geographer Dr Stephanie Wakefield published in the peer-reviewed journal,
Resilience. Wakefield draws on the pioneering work of systems ecologist CS Holling, who argued that natural ecosystems
tend to follow an “adaptive cycle” consisting of two phases, “a front loop of growth and stability and a back loop of release
and reorganisation.” She points out that while Holling’s work focused on the study of local and regional ecosystems, there
remained the question of whether the idea of the “back loop” could be applied on a planetary scale to understand the
dynamics of civilisational transition: “Are we in a ‘deep back loop’ that presents the same opportunities and crises as the
regional back-loop studies that we have described?” he asked in 2004. Wakefield explores the idea of the “back loop” of
the Anthropocene, signalling a phase shift in which a particular order, structure and value system encompassing
humanity’s relationship with the earth is experiencing a deep rupture and decline: “The claims to human mastery over the
world are being literally washed away by rising seas and unprecedentedly powerful storms, while terminal diagnoses of
western civilisation proliferate as quickly as fantasies of the end.” In this new phase, there is a parallel between the
escalation of environmental crises and intensifying political disruption. “The list of anthropogenic-induced tipping points
crossed or neared grows: fisheries collapse; biodiversity loss; the melting of the ice caps and rising seas; 350 ppm and
now 400 ppm CO2; anthropogenic nitrogen inputs; ocean acidification and coral reef bleaching; deforestation… But
equally and together with these processes, since 2011 we are also in an era of riots, revolutions, local experiments and
social movements from left to right that, to the front loop mind, may look insane, but that are very real.” But the parallel
between environmental and political disruption is no accident. Rather, it is a fundamental feature of what Wakefield calls
the “Anthropocene back loop”, a phase of systemic decline which sees the old order unravelling — but which
simultaneously opens up new possibilities for the emergence of a new system. “In short one thing would seem clear: we
are not in the front loop anymore,” writes Wakefield. “If the front loop was the ‘safe operating space’ of the
Anthropocene… this complex, nonlinear ‘post-truth’ world of fragmentation, fracture, dissolution, and transfiguration is
what I propose we call the Anthropocene back loop.” The front loop, then, is equivalent to the apex of Hanapper’s
“integrated capitalism” that emerged after the Second World War and continued to evolve through a ‘golden age’ of
neoliberal growth from the 1980s to the early 2000s. Since then, we have increasingly witnessed the eruption of internal
contradictions with this ‘front loop’ of integrated capitalism, in the form of a trajectory of disintegration which manifests the
“back loop” of systemic-civilisational decline: “The back loop is our present, the moment of the naming of the
Anthropocene (as a failure), in which the past (front loop) has not disappeared, like points trailing behind on a line, but is
erupting in unpredictable ways in the present.” The phase of disintegrating capitalism, then, is part of a wider “adaptive
cycle” of global capital which now finds itself on the cusp of protracted collapse. And yet, adopting this systems lens
beyond econometric thinking in a deeper ecological framework allows us to see more than just the destruction of the old
order at play, but within that very process, the real emergence of unprecedented possibilities for the emergence of a new
‘front loop’: “Viewing the Anthropocene through the adaptive cycle lens, and in particular our threshold ‘now’ of scrambled
grounds, discombobulated modes of knowing and being as a back loop, has a number of benefits,” suggests Wakefield.
“Chief amongst these is the ability to see the Anthropocene not as a tragic End or world of ruins, but a scrambling where
possibility is present and the future more open than typically imagined.” Wakefield’s repositioning of the human condition
within the framework of the ‘back loop’ opens up space to envisage this as part of a longer historical series of civilisational
cycles of decline and renewal, in which the task before us is to embrace our role in activating and enhancing the
possibilities for renewal. This means moving far beyond conventional ‘front loop’ models of resilience — adapting stale,
broken, extant political and economic structures to a world of intensifying crisis; into models of resilience aiming to
reinvent and redesign ourselves and our structures from the ground up: “Instead of accepting the end of human agency
except that of managing crisis — and rather than imagining ourselves as victims or managers of the back loop — I argue
that another possibility exists: deciding for ourselves, locally and in diverse ways, where and how to inhabit the back loop.”
Inhabiting requires more than “fighting against or living in fear” of the back loop. It requires a degree of acceptance of it,
finding one’s own place in it: “to be familiar, comfortable, and involved with it… A habitual, everyday act of free creation
and building.” And that requires recognising that we are moving into fundamentally and literally unknown terrain, which
can only be done by dispensing with the old “modes of thinking and acting from the fore loop.” In the back loop, everything
is up for grabs — not just old infrastructures, but also political ideologies and assumed philosophical realities. And so, to
respond to the phase of disintegrating capitalism and the threat of a global war, more is required of us than old models
like the idea of a ‘global peace movement’ — we need an entirely new ethos and practice committed to the ushering in of a
new world: “What the back loop suggests to us is that the Anthropocene is now a time to explore, to let go — of
foundations for thinking and acting — and open ourselves to the possibilities offered to us here and now. This is an
‘unsafe’ operating space because we have passed thresholds already, but also because there are no blueprints, no
transcendents, no guarantees, and no assurances: the only thing to do is become creators of new values and new
answers.” Wakefield’s work reminds us that while the dangers of a third world war are escalating in the Anthropocene
back loop of disintegrating capitalism, the opportunities for renewal, reorganisation and revival are rapidly emerging.
These need to be grasped and activated whether or not war breaks out. Further, we need to work to sound the alarm,
relentlessly, at all levels to raise awareness of the true nature of the phase shift we now find ourselves in as a species.
Whatever ultimately emerges, the end is not nigh – rather, we stand at the unknown dawn of a new beginning.
2AC – AT: Localism
Localism magnifies ecological damage -- fragmented economies
can’t specialize which supercharges inefficiency
Karlsson 17 [Dr Rasmus Karlsson is an Associate Professor in political science. He
has published widely on climate mitigation policy, development ethics, and global affairs
from an ecomodernist perspective. The Environmental Risks of Incomplete
Globalisation. Globalizations, Vol 14, No 4 -- 2017.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14747731.2016.1216820?needAccess=tru
e]
One long-running theme in the literature on sustainability has been the virtues of
localism and decentralisation (Dobson, 2007, p. 95; Goodin, 1992, p. 147). Local economies are thought
to be (a) intrinsically more sustainable, (b) better equipped to cope with resources
scarcities, and (c) less vulnerable to environmental catastrophes. As a consequence, the ‘Transition
Town’ movement and others have come to see intentional localisation as an appropriate response to climate change and other
Anthropocene risks (Barry & Quilley, 2009; North, 2010). While such arguments obviously form part of a much broader discussion on
political economy and the future of capitalism, there
are many reasons to be sceptical of this localist
discourse .
different geographical
locations have different endowments of everything from soil types to moisture
variability . This naturally invites specialisation and intensification of production. If
each locale were to produce the full range of goods necessary even for meeting
basic human needs, then efficiency would be much lower and land use much
higher than today. Inefficient modes of production would thus not only require
higher inputs of labour, energy, and raw materials but also leave less room for
nature (Desrochers & Shimizu, 2012). As agricultural production would be pushed into landscapes
of increasingly lower productivity (e.g. poorer soils, less favourable climatic conditions, and
steeper slopes), the result would be lower yields yet again. In a field such as metallurgy, even the most
rudimentary processes require inputs that are geographically dispersed. To unthink trade is therefore essentially to
unthink modern civilisation . While this may in fact be the explicit goal of some of the most radical voices (Zerzan, 2008),
there is very little recognition in localist literature for how much of human welfare that
actually depends on economies of scale, specialisation, and exchange . Yet, it simply
Starting with the first claim and assuming a basic natural resource point of view, it is clear that
suffices to consider how little most individuals in advanced economies know of farming, forestry or mining to realise what an enormous loss
in productivity and knowledge that would follow if these tasks were to be more broadly shared within local communities. Similarly, the
ecological toll that would follow if billions of people would go out in nature in
search for food and fuel is clearly unfathomable . It is thus not surprising that most advocates of localism
fall short of endorsing autarky or complete self-reliance. However, by romanticising the local and discriminating in favour of it (Woodin &
Lucas, 2004, p. 30), these
scholars show little appreciation for the enormous gains in welfare,
not to mention the formidable progress in science and technology, which have been
made possible over the last centuries precisely, thanks to specialisation and the
integration of markets .
2AC – AT: Mindset Shift
No mindset shift---cap’s internalized and regrowth movements
overwhelm---empirics.
Milanovic ’17. (Branko; 11/21/2017; Visiting Presidential Professor, Graduate Center - CUNY, leading scholar
on income inequality, joined the Graduate Center as Visiting Presidential Professor and LIS Senior Scholar, former Lead
Economist in the World Bank's research department; “The illusion of degrowth: Part II,”
http://glineq.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/the-illusion-of-degrowth-part-ii.html)
I do not think that this program is illogical. It is just so enormous, outside of anything that we normally can
expect to implement, that it verges, I am afraid, on absurdity. It is simply impossible to put
in practice, not only in democracies, but probably in North Korea either. I do not want to be impolite or insulting, but I
think that only Kampuchea came up with anything similar. Many countries have lost large fractions of
their overall income through wars or civil strife, but none has impoverished itself
voluntarily . If put to test in real life, rather than at conferences and blogs, Jason’s program would receive
support from almost no one.
Capitalist societies, after several centuries of exposure to market ideology and way of life,
are structured in such a way that populations have fully accepted, and reaffirm in their daily
lives, the objectives that make capitalism thrive . We want more and newer “stuff” every year. The
ideology of commodification and commercialization has never been stronger: it is as present in the UK and the United
States as in China, Nigeria, Congo, Russia or Brazil. We are not only working for a wage, we are cheerfully renting our
homes and cars for money, networking at our children’s birthdays, and having kids who beat each other to grab a new
we have global capitalism with a population that has
internalized the objectives needed for capitalism to reproduce itself and to expand, by
requiring an ever greater amount of saving, investment and output.
model of smart phone or shoes. In other words,
It is irrelevant whether I like or dislike this situation (as Jason seems to believe). It is just that I observe how the world
functions while Jason appears to me to live in an unreal world. If he looked at the real world he would have seen that up to
50 immigrants from Sudan are often found squeezed in the tiny electric compartments of French trains while crossing the
border in order to live better lives and buy more “stuff”; he would have noticed that people, as they will doubtlessly do on
this Thanksgiving too, get up at 4 in the morning to line up in front of Walmart’s and engage in fistfights so that they can
buy the new model of “stuff”; he would have noticed that professors at many, and probably his own, universities fight
endless battles over 1 or 2 percent salary increases; he would have noticed that families go into debt just to show off with
a new model of a car etc. etc.
So his program may in words be accepted by those who would have travelled 10,000
miles to attend the conference where the program is presented; who would use AC while sitting in the
conference hall and eat meat during the conferences meals, but they too would not vote for it .
For if the proponents of such a program really believed in it, they should start (or should
have already started) a political movement that would promise to implement it and save
the planet. They should explicitly promise continuous annual income declines of several percentage points, lower wages,
pensions and social transfers, a work week of 20 hours or fewer, closure of most gas stations and many airports, home
production of key food items, picketing of factories that work longer hours or supermarkets that sell meat. They should put
this program on their flag and see how many people will vote for it.
2AC – AT: Transition
Collapse makes all their impacts worse
Igor Guardiancich 17, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and
Public Management of the University of Southern Denmark, 3/3/2017, “Absorb, Coopt
and Recast: Global Neoliberalism’s Resilience through Local Translation”,
http://www.euvisions.eu/neoliberalisms-resilience-translation/
One powerful message permeating the book, and which gives a forceful explanation to Colin Crouch’s punchy title is that:
“ rather
than a mass-produced, slightly shrunk, and off-the-rack ideological suit,
neoliberalism is a bespoke outfit made from a dynamic fabric that absorbs local
color ” (5). Even under a full-out attack against some of its basic assumptions ,
such as the one unleashed in the immediate wake of the global financial crisis ,
neoliberalism proved resilient beyond its many architects’ wildest dreams. Its
capacity to absorb, coopt and recast selected ideas of oppositional social forces
has been the most valuable asset guaranteeing its survival . Again, the comparison of the
responses to the crisis in Spain and Romania show such adaptability in full.¶ The socialist government of
José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero tried to salvage the social-democratic legacies of
the Spanish economy by engineering a Keynesian rescue package. Only later,
when the disaster of the cajas became apparent and the emergency intensified,
did conservative PM Mariano Rajoy embrace more deregulation in the labour market
(inspired by the Hartz IV reform) and extensive cuts in the public sector under the strong external pressure of the
In Romania, local policymakers further
radicalized in the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers’ crisis, thereby outbidding the
IMF on austerity and structural reforms. Instead of shielding lower-income
groups, the opposite strategy of upward redistribution was chosen . By heroically
European Central Bank and of international financial markets.¶
withstanding the external attempts at moderation, the Romanian economy retained an unenviable mix of libertarian
achievements (flat-tax rates), experimental neoliberalism (privatized pensions) and mainstream neoliberal orthodoxy
(sound finance, labour market deregulation, social policy targeting, privatization of all public companies). Pure laissezfaire ideas such as the replacement of the welfare state by a voluntary, private, Christian charity system were not unheard
of.¶ Hence, through an insightful analysis of the ideational underpinnings of its local interpretations, this book shows us
that ,
despite the challenges, neoliberalism is alive and kicking . Ban guides us through half
a century of policymaking in Spain and Romania, and embeds his analysis within the related nuances of contemporary
liberal economic thought. The research is a valuable addition to a growing literature on the origin of current ideational
frames and comfortably sits alongside contemporary classics, such as Mark Blyth’s Austerity: The History of a Dangerous
Idea.
No transition – individuals can’t unlearn growth practices and
political elites will block – only economic innovation solves.
Karlsson, Associate Professor in political science at Umeå University, 2016
Rasmus, “The Environmental Risks of Incomplete Globalisation” 8/11
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rasmus_Karlsson2/publication/306068168_The_E
nvironmental_Risks_of_Incomplete_Globalisation/links/57bc062e08aefea8f0f575ac.pdf
Similarly, large groups in the OECD-economies either have retired already or will do so in the coming decades with considerable expectations in terms of retirement income. Failure to deliver on
these pension expectations would probably create a state of political crisis in which the “immigrants” but also the “environment” would be easy targets. For these, and many other reasons, it is not
political elites remain deeply wedded to the idea of economic growth . Yet,
insufficient demand due to rising inequality and a lack of social investments have made it
difficult to deliver that growth. In the best of worlds, the need for growth could hypothetically make
policy-makers more willing to challenge the prevailing supply-side paradigm but also
consider the benefits of accelerating globalisation (or at least keeping them away from enacting protectionist measures).
surprising that
While it is obvious that economic growth does not benefit everyone equally, and that it
can be source of environmental destruction, the same can be said about the lack of
growth. A secular stagnation or even degrowth is certainly no guarantee for environmental protection or
greater equality. If anything, the rich are likely to try to isolate themselves even
more from the rest of society in case they feel threatened, in particular by moving overseas. It is also not
surprising that the literature on degrowth has had almost nothing to say about how such
strategies would play out at the international level (including what mechanisms that
would be needed to prevent other states from taking military advantage of countries
pursuing degrowth) or how exactly economic growth is to be “unlearned” at the
micro level . Recognising the difficulties associated with imagining degrowth as an
effective way of saving the global environment is not the same as defending “status
quo” or embracing neoliberalism . As discussed above, it is the rather the failure of laissez-faire
thinking that has made government intervention necessary to ensure both climate
stability and a world with more equal opportunities. One common objection against climate innovation is that the real problem is not
about limitations of renewable energy sources but about overcoming the entrenched interests of fossil industries. Yet, the fact that large multinational
corporations such as ExxonMobil have vast political influence can also be seen as one
of the reasons why technological change must be disruptive and go beyond, for instance,the
scenariosin the IPCC database. Only by shocking markets through breakthrough innovation does it
seem possible to break with the path dependence of existing energy systems in a
way that would rapidly displace fossil fuels 14 globally. In terms of strategy, it is also likely that fossil
industries will be far more successful in thwarting the deployment of existing inferior
technologies than in preventing a more general acceleration of science and technology,
which would span multiple fields reaching from nanotechnology to basic physics (Victor, 2011:144) that are not immediately related to energy R&D and as such not subject to the same political
economic constraints.
2AC – Permutation
2AC – Permutation: Specificity
Neoliberal policies don’t prop up neoliberal systems---no impact
absent specificity
Kirsten Bell & Judith Green 16. Department of Anthropology, University of British
Columbia AND Faculty of Public Health & Policy, Department of Health Services
Research & Policy, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. 05/26/2016. “On the
Perils of Invoking Neoliberalism in Public Health Critique.” Critical Public Health, vol. 26,
no. 3, pp. 239–243.
Introduction Read any issue of Critical Public Health and you’re more likely than not to see the
concept of ‘neoliberalism’ invoked at some point. Inputting it as a keyword in the journal brings up 93
papers, and it features prominently in the title of three articles on our ‘most cited’ list: ‘Understanding health promotion in a
neoliberal climate and the making of health conscious citizens’ (Ayo, 2012), ‘Neoliberalism, public health, and the moral
perils of fatness’ (LeBesco, 2011) and ‘Aboriginal mothering, FAS prevention and the contestations of neoliberal
citizenship’ (Salmon, 2011). The growing frequency with which the concept is invoked amongst authors publishing in CPH
perhaps we should modify our name to Critical
Public Health: the Negative Impacts of Neoliberalism. In light of the growing
prominence accorded to the concept of neoliberalism in (and of course beyond) the journal, it
therefore seems like a good time to take stock of our conceptual equipment to ensure
that it does what we think it does and want it do. Reminded of Latour’s (2004) injunction to think
critically about critique, in this editorial we simply want to do ‘what every good military officer, at regular periods, would
do: retest the linkages between the new threats he or she has to face and the
equipment and training he or she should have in order to meet them’ (p. 231). Indeed, we
can’t help but notice that much like the concept of ‘society’ before it, when the term
neoliberalism is invoked it is often used to jump straight ahead to connect vast arrays
of life and history , to mobilize gigantic forces, to detect dramatic patterns emerging
out of confusing interactions, to see everywhere in the cases at hand yet more
examples of well-known types, to reveal behind the scenes some dark powers pulling
the strings. (Latour, 2005, p. 22) What is ‘neoliberalism’? Broadly speaking, neoliberalism refers to the capitalist
has led us to joke, on more than one occasion, that
restructuring that has occurred around the globe since the 1970s in the name of a ‘post-Cold War, post-welfare state
model of social order that celebrates unhindered markets as the most effective means of achieving economic growth and
public welfare’ (Maskovsky & Kingfisher, 2001, p. 105). Thatcherism in the UK and Reaganism in the USA are often
highlighted as prototypical manifestations of neoliberalism; however, policies informed by a similar market-centric logic
were introduced in a more moderate form in a variety of social democracies (e.g. Canada, New Zealand, Australia,
Sweden) (Brenner & Theodore, 2002; Maskovsky & Kingfisher, 2001; Ward & England, 2007). They were also exported to
the Global South through the structural adjustment and fiscal austerity pro- grammes enforced by institutions such as the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (Brenner & Theodore, 2002). In its strictest sense,
neoliberalism refers to a macro-economic doctrine, but there is huge variation in the ways the term is
employed in contemporary scholarship (Ferguson, 2010). Although its conceptual intelligibility is often taken for granted
(Garland & Harper, 2012), neoliberalism is variously used as: a sloppy synonym for capitalism itself, or as a kind of
shorthand for the world economy and its inequalities … a kind of abstract causal force that comes in from outside to
decimate local livelihoods … [or] a broad, global cultural formation characteristic of a new era of ‘millennial capitalism’ – a
kind of global meta-culture, characteristic of our newly deregulated, insecure, and speculative times. And finally,
‘neoliberalism’ can be indexed to a sort of ‘rationality’ in the Foucauldian sense, linked
less to economic dogmas or class projects than to specific mechanisms of government,
and recognizable modes of creating subjects . (Ferguson, 2010, p. 171) Indeed, Ward and
England (2007) have identified four distinct understandings of neoliberalism in the social
sciences: (1) neoliberalism as an ideological hegemonic project; (2) neoliberalism as policy
and programme (e.g. policies enacted under the banner of privatization, deregulation, liberalization, etc.); (3)
neoliberalism as state form – i.e. the ‘rolling back’ and ‘rolling out’ of state formations in the name of reform;
and (4) neoliberalism as governmentality – the ways in which the relations among and between peoples and
things are reimagined, reinterpreted and reassembled to effect governing at a distance. In light of this eclectic
usage , scholars are now examining the relationships between neoliberalism and
everything from ‘cities to citizenship, sexuality to subjectivity, and development to
discourse to name but a few’ (Springer, 2012, p. 135). Although these versions of neoliberalism
often intersect with each other, they can also lead to very different readings of the same
phenomena. For example, taking a political economy perspective, Otero, Pechlaner, Liberman, and Gürcan (2015,
p. 48) use the term ‘neoliberal diet’ to characterize the high levels of consumption of energy-dense, low-nutrition ‘pseudo
foods’ amongst the working class; however, Foucauldian governmentality perspectives are more likely to characterize a
neoliberal diet as precisely the opposite of this – as one that encourages the individual to take responsibility for his or her
health by consuming more fruits and vegetables (e.g. Ayo, 2012). When
a concept can be used to
describe such an extraordinary – and even downright contradictory – array of
phenomena , questions can clearly be asked about how useful it actually is. Perhaps
a larger issue is the reductive ways neoliberalism often tends to be used . As Phelan
(2007) observes, in a number of accounts its effects are so totalizing and monolithic that it starts
to assume causal properties in its own right; ‘that is, it becomes the “it” which
does the explaining , rather than the political phenomenon that needs to be
explained’ (Phelan, 2007, p. 328). Consider, for example, neoliberalism as governmentality – one of the more
common ways the term is employed by CPH authors. As Kipnis (2008) observes, the key defining features of this variant
of neoliberalism: governing from a distance; the emphasis on calculability; and the promotion of self-activating, disciplined,
individuated subjects, can be found in a variety of contexts that are historically and culturally distant from Western
neoliberal or liberal governing philosophies. In his words, ‘These three categories correspond to broad human
potentialities that have been imagined in a wide variety of ways in a broad range of settings and that have become more
characterizing
such features exclusively in terms of neoliberalism runs the risk of exaggerating its
scope by reifying it into a globally dominant force or stage of history (Kipnis, 2008). It
also runs the risk of eliding other processes that deserve analytic attention in their own
right. For such reasons, there have been growing calls to explore neoliberalism in terms
of ‘concrete projects that account for specific people, institutions and places’
(Kingfisher & Maskovsky, 2008, p. 118) – what Brenner and Theodore (2002) refer to as ‘actually
existing neoliberalism’. Some suggestions for the way forward Theoretical concepts such as
neoliberalism clearly have their uses: they signal to readers the kind of argument a writer is
making, and act as a shorthand to summarize complex configurations of economic, political and cultural change
that do, arguably, have some commonalities across different contexts. It is the role of theory to provide
abstracted explanations that hold across time and place, and the concept of neoliberalism has
been a fruitful one for thinking about some general implications of contemporary social change. However,
over-extension has its risks , and there are now diminishing returns in simply
documenting how technologies, policies or products ‘illustrate’ neoliberalism . To
advance our understanding of how, specifically, public health is imbricated in the
various manifestations of neoliberalism requires a more critical, nuanced and
reflexive approach. First, we need far more clarity on how the term is being used, rather
than taking its meaning for granted. With the over-extension of ‘neoliberal’ to describe
everything from welfare cuts to wearable health monitors, scholars need to unpack more carefully the
particular processes to which they are referring . Rather than assume a deterministic role
for those processes, the nature of the links between, say, welfare change and the impact
on subjectivities needs to be explicated . As Meershoek and Hortsman (2016) note in this issue,
merely reporting how health promotion reflects or contributes to neoliberalism does
little to untangle the ‘material, technical and practical dimensions’ of how what
kinds of health, and whose, are prioritized . Taking the commodification of workplace health
prevalent in all state-governed and industrial societies’ (p. 284, 240 Editorial emphasis added). Thus,
promotion technologies as their case, they unpack how policies emphasizing employee health become legitimated within
networks that include knowledge institutes and private companies, but not the workers themselves. Importantly, this
focus on the process itself enables their analysis to point to not only the potential
negative effects for public health of such commodification, but also ways forward, in
political mobilization through workers’ organizations to incorporate different frameworks of well-being.
Second, we need more nuance and specificity in accounts. The question is not so much
‘what forms do public health outputs or technologies take in neoliberal times?’ but ‘ how,
where and in what forms do the various processes of neoliberalism impact public
health?’ Two papers in this issue illustrate the value of more specificity. Hervik and Thurston (2016), in their account of
how Norwegian men discuss their responsibilities for health, note that the specificities of the welfare state in Norway
configure assumptions embedded in talk about ‘responsibility’. Rather than simply reading off the espousal of ‘personal
responsibility for health’ as another reflection of neoliberal hegemony, Hervik and Thurston note that in this context,
responsibility for health is rooted in a participatory model of the welfare state, in which principles of egalitarianism and
social democracy may have very different implications for public health than in welfare states where the focus is on
individual choice and self-sufficiency. Similarly, Nourpanah Editorial 241 and Martin (2016) delineate both parallels and
divergences between the discursive framings of health promotion described in Western states and those they document in
Iran, where there is an absence of focus on consumption, despite similar orientations towards individual choice. In
general, rather
than reifying neoliberalism as a monolithic entity, it may be more
productive to speak of ‘neoliberalization’ as an always partial and incomplete
process (Ward & England, 2007). This raises potentially fruitful questions around when, where,
and in what ways the economic, political and cultural intersect with health. We need also
to be reflexive about claims to neoliberalism , in that of course our critique is
inevitably embroiled in the very processes it seeks to analyze . Indeed, it may be
productive to think of neoliberalism as a discourse as much as a reality (Springer, 2012). In
sum, we are not calling for the abandonment of the concept – paraphrasing Clifford (1988) on yet
another troubled notion (‘culture’), neoliberalism seems to be a deeply compromised idea we cannot yet do without. Thus,
being more careful and mindful of how we use it seems a good place to start.
2AC – Permutation: Death Penalty
A rhetorical rejection and abolition of the death penalty is a key step
to curtail global capitalism
McCann 07 (Bryan J. McCann, 26 Oct 2007,Therapeutic and Material hood: Ideology
and the Struggle for Meaning in the Illinois Death Penalty Controversy. Communication
and Critical/Cultural Studies
https://scihub.wikicn.top/https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420701632931)-AO
This incident, however, should not prompt a complete abandonment of the victim
ideograph or emotional rhetoric in general. Such rhetorical strategies are provocative by
virtue of their location within a liberal ideological context. Barbara Koziak argues that,
rather than completely dismissing the value of emotion in public deliberation, rhetors
should create new spaces in which the traumatic implications of oppression can
be affectively articulated.88 Abolitionists must work to link the emotional appeal of the
victim ideograph to its broader structural realities. This may include the continued
enlistment of individuals who have had direct experience with the death penalty, whether
it is exonerated inmates or the families of those presently on Death Row or already
executed.89 Because these individuals are disproportionately members of
disadvantaged communities, such strategies can have mainstream appeal while
being referential to larger struggles. The violence of capital punishment not only has
heartbreaking implications, but also articulates, in a particularly macabre fashion, the
myriad forms of oppression that maintain capitalism’s structures of exploitation.
Most importantly, however, anti-death penalty activists must construct a rhetoric of
material victimhood grounded in solidarity among oppressed populations, identifying
capital punishment as the most violent expression of a criminal justice system that
consistently reproduces the stratifications that advance capitalist interests.
Therapeutic victimhood is compelling and enduring because it fosters solidarity among
what Dana Cloud has described as an ‘‘affected public,’’ one ‘‘constructed in terms of
shared affect rather than shared interests or shared reasoning.’’90 Current
manifestations of material victimhood can offer solidarity by grounding any Therapeutic
and Material Victimhood affective discourse in lived material relations that encourage
identification and outrage on the basis of shared interest in the face of an unjust system.
It is not a coincidence that the Furman v. Georgia decision of 1972, which abolished
capital punishment in the United States for four years, occurred in the midst of massive
moves toward racial, gender, and economic equality, an anti-war movement, as well as
a determined public interest in prison reform.91 This social context encouraged citizens
to recognize the connections between various expressions of institutional power, as the
disproportionate execution of black inmates became an example of a victimhood of
broader inequalities.92 An abolitionist movement that recognizes the ways in which the
death penalty works against the shared material interests of ordinary people is a
movement powerful in its capacity to address the origins of criminality in a
capitalist society. The death penalty, while one of many expressions of capitalism,
carries with it a brutality and urgency that demands nothing less than a normative
framework capable of taking sides and drawing connections between what takes place
in the death chamber and the broader interests it serves.
K Totalizes Cap- Plan Key
Using neoliberalism as an umbrella produces reductive totalization –
plan focus is key
Phelan 7 – quals (Sean, “Messy Grand Narrative or Analytical Blind Spot? When
Speaking of Neoliberalism”, Comparative European Politics, vol. 5, issue 3, pg 328-338,
8-23-2007, SpringerLink, acc. 7-1-2019)//kb
As shorthand for giving conceptual definition to the global ascent of a balder, marketcentric political logic, ‘neoliberalism’ will perhaps inevitably be invoked in ways that
suggest an all too neat doctrinal coherence.1 The use of the term risks two distinct
pitfalls. The first is the overly reductive use of a necessarily reductive term, where its
expanse becomes so broad, its implications and effects so monolithic and totalizing,
that the fact of its different articulations is occluded; or sidelined as ‘merely’ a matter of
rhetoric. The principal risk here is that this inculcates a mode of reified analysis where, to
paraphrase Smith's (2005) analogous observations of the commonplace uses of the
term ‘globalization’, the ‘thing’ we call neoliberalism starts assuming causal properties in
its own right — that is, it becomes the ‘it’ which does the explaining, rather than the
political phenomenon that needs to be explained. This can, in turn, spawn a kind of
grand theorizing that can easily suggest an outright colonization of the identity deemed
neoliberal, such as a ‘state’ or ‘political party’, when such institutions are much more
usefully understood as composites of multiple identities, aspects of which are likely to be
the site of hegemonic tensions with the neoliberalized elements.
The second potential pitfall involves a more empirically exacting use of the term — the
approach essentially followed by Smith — where neoliberalism is more rigidly defined in
terms of more transparently neoliberal political identities (Thatcher, Reagan, Joseph,
Hayek, Friedman, etc.). Endeavouring to map and identify a specific, theoretically literate
neoliberal genealogy is certainly a useful exercise. But the danger here is that it
orientates the analyst towards a circumscribed mode of investigation, which deflects
attention from other, putatively non-neoliberal political agents and structures. The point
may seem trite, but one does not have to exhibit the overt pro-market ideological
posturing of a Thatcher or Friedman to act ‘neoliberal’. The fact that neoliberalism is an
identity marker more routinely ascribed by critics and analysts, rather than self-asserted
by ‘neoliberals’ themselves, suggests that what takes place at a surface level of political
self-identification is not a very useful barometer for indicating ‘who’ or ‘what’ might be
constituted as neoliberal.