Off #1 - Cap
Their focus on subjective flashpoints of violence creates a stop-gap in thought which
distracts us from attempts to solve the root cause of all violence - Capital
Zizek, ’08 (Slavoj, senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia and a professor at the
European Graduate School, Violence, p. 1-4)
If there is a unifying thesis that runs through the bric-a-brac of reflections on violence that follow, it is that a similar paradox holds true for
violence. At the forefront of our minds, the obvious signals of violence are acts of crime and
terror, civil
unrest, international conflict . But we should learn to step back , to disentangle ourselves from the
fascinating lure of this directly visible “subjective” violence, violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent. We
need to perceive the contours of the background which generates such outbursts. A step back enables
us to identify a violence that sustains our very efforts to fight violence and to promote tolerance. This is the
starting point, perhaps even the axiom, of the present book: subjective violence is just the most visible portion of a
triumvirate that also includes two objective kinds of violence. First, there is a “symbolic” violence
embodied in language and its forms, what Heidegger would call “our house of being.” As we shall see later, this violence is not
only at work in the obvious—and extensively studied—cases of incitement and of the relations of social domination reproduced in our habitual
speech forms: there is a more fundamental form of violence still that pertains to language as such, to its imposition of a certain universe of
Second, there is what I call “systemic” violence, or the often catastrophic consequences of the
smooth functioning of our economic and political systems . The catch is that subjective and objective
meaning.
violence cannot be perceived from the same standpoint : subjective violence is experienced as such
against the background of a non-violent zero level. It is seen as a perturbation of the “normal,” peaceful
state of things. However, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent to this “normal” state of
things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we
perceive something as subjectively violent. Systemic violence is thus something like the notorious “dark
matter” of physics, the counterpart to an all-too- visible subjective violence. It may be invisible, but it has to be taken
into account if one is to make sense of what otherwise seem to be “irrational” explosions of subjective
violence. When the media bombard us with those “humanitarian crises” which seem constantly to pop up all over the world, one should
always bear in mind that a particular crisis only explodes into media visibility as the result of a complex struggle. Properly humanitarian
considerations as a rule play a less important role here than cultural, ideologico-political, and economic considerations. The cover story of Time
magazine on 5 June 2006, for example, was “The Deadliest War in the World.” This offered detailed documentation on how around 4 million
people died in the Democratic Republic of Congo as the result of political violence over the last decade. None of the usual humanitarian uproar
followed, just a couple of readers’ letters—as if some kind of filtering mechanism blocked this news from achieving its full impact in our
symbolic space. To put it cynically, Time picked the wrong victim in the struggle for hegemony in suffering. It should have stuck to the list of
usual suspects: Muslim women and their plight, or the families of 9/11 victims and how they have coped with their losses. The Congo today has
effectively re-emerged as a Conradean “heart of darkness.” No one dares to confront it head on. The death of a West Bank Palestinian child, not
to mention an Israeli or an American, is mediatically worth thousands of times more than the death of a nameless Congolese. Do we need
further proof that the
humanitarian sense of urgency is mediated, indeed overdetermined, by clear political
considerations? And what are these considerations? To answer this, we need to step back and take a look
from a different position. When the U.S. media reproached the public in foreign countries for not displaying enough sympathy for the
victims of the 9/11 attacks, one was tempted to answer them in the words Robespierre addressed to those who complained about the innocent
victims of revolutionary terror: “Stop shaking the tyrant’s bloody robe in my face, or I will believe that you wish to put Rome in chains.”1
There are reasons for looking at the
problem of violence awry. My underlying premise is that there is something inherently mystifying in a direct
confrontation with it: the overpowering horror of violent acts and empathy with the victims inexorably
function as a lure which prevents us from thinking . A dispassionate conceptual development of the typology of violence
Instead of confronting violence directly, the present book casts six sideways glances.
must by definition ignore its traumatic impact. Yet there is a sense in which a cold analysis of violence somehow reproduces and participates in
its horror. A distinction needs to be made, as well, between (factual) truth and truthfulness: what renders a report of a raped woman (or any
other narrative of a trauma) truthful is its very factual unreliability, its confusion, its inconsistency. If the victim were able to report on her
painful and humiliating experience in a clear manner, with all the data arranged in a consistent order, this very quality would make us
suspicious of its truth. The problem here is part of the solution: the very factual deficiencies of the traumatised subject’s report on her
experience bear witness to the truthfulness of her report, since they signal that the reported content “contaminated” the manner of reporting
it. The same holds, of course, for the so-called unreliability of the verbal reports of Holocaust survivors: the witness able to offer a clear
narrative of his camp experience would disqualify himself by virtue of that clarity.2 The only appropriate approach to my subject thus seems to
be one which permits variations on violence kept at a distance out of respect towards its victims.
It is not possible to solve any situation without solving them all - only a
criticism which attacks the universality of capitalism can solve inevitable
extinction
Zizek, ’89
(Slavoj, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies, The Sublime Object of Ideology, page 3-4)
It is upon the unity of these two features that the Marxist notion of the revolution, of the revolutionary situation, is founded: a
situation of metaphorical condensation in which it finally becomes clear to the everyday
consciousness that it is not possible to solve any particular question without solving them all - that is,
without solving the fundamental question which embodies the antagonistic character of the social
totality. In a 'normal', pre-revolutionary state of things, everybody is fighting his own particular
battles (workers are striking for better wages, feminists are fighting for the rights of women, democrats for political and social
freedoms, ecologists against the exploitation of nature, participants in the peace movements against the danger of war, and so
on). Marxists are using all their skill and adroimess of argument to convince the participants in these particular struggles that
as long as social relations are
dominated by Capital, there will always be sexism in relations between the sexes, there will always be
a threat of global war, there will always be a danger that political and social freedoms will be
suspended, nature itself will always remain an object of ruthless exploitation. . . . The global
revolution will then abolish the basic social antagonism, enabling the formation of a transparent,
rationally governed society.
the only real solution to their problem is to be found in the global revolution:
Our alternative is to completely withdraw from the ideology of capital - this
opens up the space for authentic politics
Johnston ’04 (Adrian, interdisciplinary research fellow in psychoanalysis at Emory, The Cynic’s Fetish: Slavoj Zizek and the Dynamics of
Belief, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society)
Perhaps the absence of a detailed political roadmap in Žižek’s recent writings isn’t a major shortcoming.
Maybe, at least for the time being, the most important task is simply the negativity of the critical struggle, the
effort to cure an intellectual constipation resulting from capitalist ideology and thereby to truly open up
the space for imagining authentic alternatives to the prevailing state of the situation. Another definition of
materialism offered by Žižek is that it amounts to accepting the internal inherence of what fantasmatically appears as an external deadlock or
hindrance ( Žižek, 2001d, pp 22–23) (with fantasy itself being defined as the false externalization of something within the subject, namely, the
illusory projection of an inner obstacle, Žižek, 2000a, p 16). From
this perspective, seeing through ideological fantasies
by learning how to think again outside the confines of current restrictions has, in and of itself, the
potential to operate as a form of real revolutionary practice (rather than remaining merely an instance of
negative/critical intellectual reflection). Why is this the case? Recalling the analysis of commodity fetishism, the social
efficacy of money as the universal medium of exchange (and the entire political economy grounded upon it) ultimately
relies upon nothing more than a kind of ‘‘magic,’’ that is, the belief in money’s social efficacy by those
using it in the processes of exchange. Since the value of currency is, at bottom, reducible to the belief
that it has the value attributed to it (and that everyone believes that everyone else believes this as well), derailing
capitalism by destroying its essential financial substance is, in a certain respect, as easy as dissolving the
mere belief in this substance’s powers. The ‘‘external’’ obstacle of the capitalist system exists exclusively
on the condition that subjects, whether consciously or unconsciously, ‘‘internally’’ believe in it –
capitalism’s life-blood, money, is simply a fetishistic crystallization of a belief in others’ belief in the
socio-performative force emanating from this same material. And yet, this point of capitalism’s frail vulnerability is
simultaneously the source of its enormous strength: its vampiric symbiosis with individual human desire, and the fact that the late-capitalist
cynic’s fetishism enables the disavowal of his/her de facto belief in capitalism, makes it highly unlikely that people can simply be persuaded to
stop believing and start thinking (especially since, as Žižek claims, many of these people are convinced that they already have ceased believing).
Or, the more disquieting possibility to entertain is that some people today, even if one succeeds in
exposing them to the underlying logic of their position, might respond in a manner resembling that of
the Judas-like character Cypher in the film The Matrix (Cypher opts to embrace enslavement by illusion rather than cope
with the discomfort of dwelling in the ‘‘desert of the real’’): faced with the choice between living the capitalist lie or
wrestling with certain unpleasant truths, many individuals might very well deliberately decide to accept
what they know full well to be a false pseudo-reality, a deceptively comforting fiction (‘‘Capitalist commodity
fetishism or the truth? I choose fetishism’’).
Off #2 - CP
CP Text: The United States should place prohibitions of state-run marihuana stores
under erasure and cease enforcement.
Keep it on the books – erasure pardons and whitewashes our collective colonial
history – the impact is modern colonialism.
Baudrillard ‘3 /Jean, Fragments, 106-111/
On the necessity of Evil and Hell There is no longer any irrevocable damnation today. There is no longer any hell. We may concede that we are
still within the mongrel concept of Purgatory, but virtually everything falls within the scope of redemption. It is clearly from such an evangelism
that all the manifest, promotional signs of well-being and fulfilment derive that are offered us by a paradisaical society subject to the Eleventh
Commandment ('Be happy and give all the signs of contentment!') - the one that cancels out all others. But we can also read this
demand
for salvation and universal atonement in the way that not only all current violence and injustices, but
also, retrospectively, all the crimes and contradictory events of the past are now coming in for
condemnation. The French Revolution is put in the dock and slavery is condemned, along with original sin and battered
wives, the ozone layer and sexual harassment. In short, the pre-trial investigation for the Last Judgement is
well under way. We are condemning, then pardoning and whitewashing, our entire history,
exterminating the Evil from even the tiniest crevices in order to present the image of a radiant
universe, ready to pass into the next world. A gigantic undertaking. One that is inhuman, superhuman, too human? As Stanislaw Lee says,
'We no doubt have too anthropomorphic a view of man.' And why feed this eternal repentance factory, this chain reaction of
bad conscience? Because everything has to be saved. This is what we have come to today: everything will
be redeemed, the entire past will be rehabilitated, polished to the point of transparency. As for the future,
there's even better in store, and even worse: everything will be genetically modified to achieve biological perfection and the democratic
perfection of the species. Salvation, which was defined by the equivalence of merit and grace, will, once the abscess of evil and hell has been
drained, be defined by the equivalence between genes and performance. Actually, once happiness becomes purely and simply the general
equivalent of salvation, there is no further reason for heaven. No heaven without hell, no light without darkness. No one can be saved if no one
is damned (by definition, but we also know this intuitively: where would the elect find pleasure, except in the contemplation of God, were it not
for the spectacle of the damned and their torment?). And once everyone is virtually saved, no one is. Salvation no longer has any meaning. This
is the fate in store for our democratic enterprise: it is vitiated from the outset by the neglect of necessary discrimination, by the omission of
evil. We therefore need an irrevocable presence of Evil, an Evil with no possible redemption, a definitive discrimination, a perpetual duality of
Heaven and Hell, and even in a way a predestination to Evil, for no destiny can be without some predestination. There is nothing immoral in
this. By the rules of the game there is nothing immoral in some losing and others winning, nor even in everyone losing. What would be immoral
would be for everyone to win. Now, this is the contemporary ideal of our democracy: that everyone be saved. And this is possible only at the
cost of a perpetual upping of the stakes, of endless inflation and speculation, since ultimately happiness is not so much an ideal relationship to
the world as a rivalry with, and a victorious relation to, others. And this is good: it means that the hegemony of Good, of the individual state of
grace, will always be thwarted by some challenge or passion, and that any kind of happiness, any kind of ecstatic state, can be sacrificed to
something more vital, which may be of the order of the will, as Schopenhauer has it, or of power, or of the will to power in Nietzsche's
conception, but something which, in any event, is of the order of Evil, of which there is no definition, but which may be summed up as follows:
that which, against any happy intended purpose [destination heureuse}, is predestined to come to pass. Beneath its euphoric exaltation, this
imperative of optimum performance, of ideal achievement, certainly bears evil and misfortune within it, then, in the form of a profound
disavowal of such fine prospects, in the form of a secret, anticipated disillusion ment. Perhaps even
this is again just a collective
form of sacrifice - a human sacrifice, but a disembodied one, distilled into homeopathic doses. Wherever
humans are condemned to total freedom or to ideal fulfilment, this subversion seeps in - this automatic
abreaction to their own good and their own happiness. When they are ordered to get the maximum efficiency and pleasure out of themselves,
they remain out of sorts and live a split existence. In this strange world, where everything is potentially available (the body, sex, space, money,
pleasure) to be taken or rejected en bloc, everything is there; nothing has disappeared physically, but everything has disappeared
metaphysically. 'As if by magic or enchantment', you might say. Only the fact is, it is more by disenchantment. Individuals, such as they are, are
becoming exactly what they are. With no transcendence and no image, they pursue their lives like a function that is useless in respect of
another world, irrelevant even in their own eyes. And they do what they do all the better for the fact that there is no other possibility. No
instance, no essence, no personal substance worthy of singular expression. They
have sacrificed their lives to their
functional existences. They coincide with the exact numerical calculation of their lives and their performances. An
existence fulfilled, then, but one at the same time denied, thwarted, disavowed. The culmination of a whole
negative counter-transference. This imperative of optimum performance at the same time comes into internal contradiction with the
democratic moral law which ordains that everyone be perpetually re-set to equality and everything re-set to zero, on the pretext of democracy
and an equal sharing of opportunity and advantage. Given the prospect of salvation for all and universal redemption, no one has the right to
distinguish himself, no one has the right to captivate [siduire}.
For justice to be done, all privilege must disappear; it is
for all to rid themselves voluntarily of any specific qualities, to become once again an elementary particle2 - collective
happiness, based on levelling down and repentance, leading to the coming of the lowest common
denominator and basic banalities. This is like a reverse potlatch, with everyone outdoing each other in
minimalism and victimhood, while fiercely cultivating their tiniest differences and cobbling together their multiple identities.
Repentance and recrimination are all part of the same movement: recrimination means going back over the crime to
correct its course and effects. This is what we are doing in going back over the whole of our history, over the
criminal history of the human race, to do penance here and now as we await the Last Judgement. For
God is dead, but his judgement remains. Which explains the immense syndrome of resipiscence and (historical) rewriting (with
the future genetic and biological rewriting of the species still to come) that has seized the twentieth century's end; with an eye, as ever, to
deserving salvation and - with the prospect of the final accounting before us - to presenting the image of an ideal victim. Naturally, we are not
speaking of a real trial or of genuine repentance. It
is a matter of fully enjoying the spectacle of one's own
misfortune: 'Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation
has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order' (Walter Benjamin).3 This is but
the latest episode in a heart-rending process of revisionism - running down not just the history of the twentieth century, but all the violent
events of past centuries, to subject them to the new jurisdiction of human rights and crimes against humanity (just as every action today is
subjected to the jurisdiction of sexual, moral or political harassment). As part of the same trend by which all works of art (including the human
genome) are listed as world heritage sites, everything
is put on the list of crimes against humanity. The latest episode,
then, of this revisionist madness has been the proposal to condemn slavery and the slave trade as crimes against humanity. An absurd
proposal to rectify the past in terms of our Western humanitarian consciousness or, in other words, in
terms of our own criteria, in the purest traditions of colonialism. This imperialism of repentance really
is the limit! The idea is, in fact, to enable the 'peoples concerned' to put this tragedy behind them thanks to this official condemnation and,
once their rights have been restored and they have been recognized and celebrated as victims, to
complete their work of mourning and draw a line under this page of their history in order to become
full participants in the course of modernity. It might be seen, then, as a kind of successful psychoanalysis. Perhaps the
Africans will even be able to translate this moral acknowledgement into damage claims, using the same
monstrous measure of equivalence from which the survivors of the Shoah have been able to benefit. So we shall go on
compensating, atoning and rehabilitating ad infinitum, and we shall merely have added to raw
exploitation the hypocritical absolution of mourning; we shall merely, by compassion, have
transformed evil into misfortune. From the standpoint of our recycled humanism, the whole of history is pure
crime - and, indeed, without all these crimes there quite simply would be no history: 'If we eliminated the evil in man,' wrote
Montaigne, 'we would destroy the fundamental conditions of life.' But, on this basis, Cain killing Abel is already a crime
against humanity - and almost a genocide (there were only two of them!), and isn't original sin already a crime against humanity? All this is
absurd, all this humanitarian, retrospective fakery is absurd. And it all stems from the confusion between evil and
misfortune. Evil is the world as it is and as it has been, and one may look upon this with lucidity. Misfortune is the world as it never
should have been - but in the name of what? - in the name of what should be, in the name of God or a transcendent ideal, of a Good
it would be difficult indeed to define. We may take a criminal view of crime - that is the tragic view - or we may take a recriminatory
view - and that is the humanitarian view, the pathos-laden, sentimental view, the view which
constantly calls for reparation. We have here all the ressentiment dredged up from the depths of a
genealogy of morals, and requiring in us reparation for our own lives. This retrospective compassion,
this conversion of evil into misfortune is the twentieth century's most flourishing industry. First as a
mental blackmailing operation, to which we all fall victim, even in our actions, from which we can now hope only for the
lesser evil (keep a low profile, do everything in such a way as anyone else could have done it - decriminalize your existence!). Then
as a
profitable operation with gigantic yields, since misfortune (in all its forms: from suffering to insecurity, oppression to
depression) represents a symbolic capital, the exploitation of which - even more than the exploitation of happiness - is
endlessly profitable from the economic standpoint. It's a gold-mine, as they say, and there is an inexhaustible source of
ore, because the seam lies within each of us. Misfortune commands the highest prices, whereas evil cannot be traded. It is impossible to
exchange. To
transcribe evil into misfortune and then to transcribe misfortune into commercial, or
spectacular, value - most often with the collusion or assent of the victim himself. But the victim's
collusion with his own misfortune is part of the ironic essence of Evil. It is what brings it about that no
one wants his own good, and nothing is for the best in the best of all worlds
Modernity is essentially biopolitical – it can only construct security through ongoing
war through inclusion and exclusion – this politics is actually anti-political violence
that designates the very chains of life and death it made in the first place –
extermination becomes inevitable as modernity chases its own tail.
Balibar 2004 (Professor of Philosophy, Etienne, We, The People of Europe? p.125-30)
In such conditions, we can incline toward divergent conclusions. Either we can think that the multifaceted phenomenon of mass violence and
extreme violence has generally replaced politics, including internal and external relationships of forces among states, or we fully take into
account the fact that the fields of politics
and violence—a violence that seems to lack rational organization, not excepting selfdestruction—are no longer separated . They have progressively permeated one another. It is precisely in such conditions that
something called “humanitarian action” or “intervention,” both “private” and “public,” has become the necessary supplement of politics. I
cannot discuss all the aspects of this mutation, but I would like briefly to address three questions that seem to me to have an importance for
the concept of politics itself. Are We Facing an “Unprecedented” Spread of Extreme Violence (or Violence of the Extremes)? I should like to be
very careful on this point, which raises a number of discussions ranging from the issue of “old and new wars” to the highly sensitive moral
questions of why and how to “compare genocides” in history. Perhaps what is unprecedented is basically the
new visibility of extreme
violence, particularly in the sense that modern techniques of media coverage and broadcasting and the transformation of images—in
the end, as we could see for the first time on a grand scale during the Gulf War, of the production of “virtual reality”—
transform extreme violence into a show , and display this show simultaneously before a world audience. We also know that the
effect of such techniques is, at the same time, to uncover some violent processes, or scenes of horror (truly horrifying, such as hundreds of
mutilated children in Angola or Sierra Leone), and to cover up others (equally horrifying, such as babies starving in Baghdad). We suspect that
powerful ideological biases are at work when the coverage of extreme violence gives credit to such simplistic
ideas as the political transition from the “equilibrium of terror” during the Cold War to the “competition among victims,” by
way of the undifferentiated uses of the legal and moral but hardly political notion of “crimes against humanity.” In the end, we become aware
of the fact that talking about and showing the images of everyday horror produces, particularly in the relatively wealthy and protected regions
reinforcing the idea that humankind as such is really
divided into qualitatively different cultures or civilization, which, according to one political scientist, could only
produce a “clash” among them. I am aware of all these difficulties, but I would maintain that a reality lies behind the notion of
of humanity, a very ambivalent effect: raising compassion but also disgust,
something “unprecedented.” Perhaps it is simply the
fact that a number of heterogeneous methods or processes of extermination
(by which I mean eliminating masses of individuals inasmuch as they belong to objective or subjective groups) have themselves become
“globalized ,” that is, operate in a similar manner everywhere in the world at the same time, and so progressively form a “chain ,”
giving full reality to what E.P. Thompson anticipated twenty years ago with the name “exterminism.” In this series of connected processes, we
must include, precisely because they are heterogeneous—they do not have one and the same “cause,” but they produce cumulative effects:1.
Wars (both “civil” and “foreign,” a distinction that is not easy to draw in many cases, such as Yugoslavia or Chechnya).2. Communal rioting,
with ethnic and/or religious ideologies of “cleansing.”3. Famines and other kinds of “absolute” poverty produced by the ruin
of traditional or nontraditional economies.4. Seemingly “natural” catastrophes, which in fact are killing on a mass scale because they
are overdetermined by social, economic, and political structures, such as pandemics (for example, the difference in the distribution of AIDS and
the possibilities of treatment between Europe and North America on the one side, Africa and some parts of Asia on the other), drought, floods,
or earthquakes in the absence of developed civil protection. In the end it would be my suggestion that the
“globalization” of various
kinds of extreme violence has produced a growing division of the “globalized world” into life zones and death
zones . Between these zones (which indeed are intricate and frequently reproduced within the boundaries of a single country or city) there exists a decisive and fragile superborder,
which raises fears and concerns about the unity and division of mankind—something like a global and local “enmity line,” like the “amity line” that existed in the beginning of the modern
European seizure of the world. It is this superborder, this enmity line, that becomes at the same time an object of permanent show and a hot place for intervention but also for
nonintervention. We might discuss whether the most worrying aspect of present international politics is “humanitarian intervention” or “generalized nonintervention,” or one coming after
the other. Should We Consider Extreme Violence to be “Rational” or “Functional” from the Point of View of Market Capitalism (the “Liberal Economy”)? This is a very difficult question—in fact,
I think it is the most difficult question—but it cannot be avoided; hence it is also the most intellectually challenging. Again, we should warn against the paralogism that is only too obvious but
nonetheless frequent: that of mistaking consequences for goals or purposes. (But is it really possible to discuss social systems in terms of purposes? On the other hand, can we avoid reflecting
on the immanent ends, or “logic,” or a structure such as capitalism?) It seems to me, very schematically, that the difficulty arises from the two opposite “global effects” that derive from the
emergence of a chain of mass violence—as compared, for example, with what Marx called primitive accumulation when he described the creation of the preconditions for capitalist
accumulation in terms of the violent suppression of the poor. One kind of effect is simply to generalize material and moral insecurity for millions of potential workers, that is, to induce a
massive proletarianization or reproletarianization (a new phase of proletarianization that crucially involves a return of many to the proletarian condition from which they had more or less
escaped, given that insecurity is precisely the heart of the “proletarian condition”).
This process is contemporary with an increased mobility of
capital and also humans , and so it takes place across borders. But, seen historically, it can also be distributed among
several political varieties:1. In the “North,” it involves a partial or deep dismantling of the social policies and the institutions of social citizenship
created by the welfare state, what I called the “national social citizenship,” and therefore also a violent transition from welfare to workfare,
from the social state to the penal state (the United States showing the way in this respect, as was convincingly argued in a recent essay by
LoicWacquant).2. In the “South,” it involves destroying and inverting the “developmental” programs and policies, which admittedly did not
suffice to produce the desired “takeoff” but indicated a way to resist impoverishment.3. In the “semiperiphery,” to borrow Immanuel
Wallerstein’s category, it was connected with the collapse of dictatorial structure called “real existing socialism,” which was based on scarcity
and corruption, but again kept the polarization of riches and poverty within certain limits. Let me suggest that a common formal feature of all
these processes resulting in the reproletarianization of the labor force is the fact that they
suppress or minimize the forms and
possibilities of representation of the subaltern within the state apparatus itself , or, if you prefer, the
possibilities of more or less effective counterpower. With this remark I want to emphasize the political aspect of processes that, in the first
instance, seem to be mainly “economic.” This political aspect, I think, is even more decisive when we turn to the other scene, the other kind of
result produced by massive violence, although the mechanism here is extremely mysterious. Mysterious but real, unquestionably. I am
thinking of a much more destructive tendency, destructive not of welfare or traditional ways of life, but of the social bond itself and, in the end,
of “bare life.” Let us think of Michel Foucault, who used to oppose two kinds of politics: “Let live” and “let die.” In the face of the cumulative
effects of different forms of extreme violence or cruelty that are displayed in what I called the “death zones” of humanity, we are led to admit
that the
current mode of production and reproduction has become a mode of production for elimination, a
reproduction of populations that are not likely to be productively used or exploited but are always already superfluous, and
therefore can be only eliminated either through “political” or “natural” means—what Latin American sociologists provocatively call
poblacionchatarra,
“garbage humans,” to be “thrown”
way
out of the global city .
If this is the case, the question arises
once again: what is the rationality of that? Or do we face an absolute triumph of irrationality. My suggestion would be: it is economically
irrational (because it amounts to a limitation of the scale of accumulation), but it is politically rational—or, better said, it can be interpreted in
political terms. The fact is that history does not move simply in a circle, the circular pattern of successive phases of accumulation. Economic
and political class struggles have already taken place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the result of limiting the possibilities of
exploitation, creating a balance of forces, and this event remains, so to speak, in the “memory” of the system. The system (and probably also
some of its theoreticians and politicians) “knows” that there is no exploitation without class struggles, no class struggles without organization
and representation of the exploited, no representation and organization without a tendency toward political and social citizenship. This is
precisely what current capitalism cannot afford: there is no possibility of a “global social state” corresponding to the “national social states” in
some parts of the world during the last century. I mean, there is no political possibility. Therefore there is political resistance, very violent
indeed, to every move in that direction. Technological revolutions provide a positive but insufficient condition for the deproletarianization of
the actual or potential labor force. This time, direct political repression may also be insufficient. Elimination or extermination has to take place,
“passive” if possible, “active” if necessary; mutual elimination is “best,” but it has to be encouraged from outside. This is what allows me to
suggest (and it already takes me to my third question) that if the “economy of global violence” is not functional (because its immanent goals are
indeed contradictory), it remains in a sense teleological: the same populations are massively targeted (or the reverse: those populations
that are targeted become progressively assimilated, they look “the same”). They are qualitatively “deterritorialized,” as Gilles Deleuze would
say, in an intensive rather than extensive sense: they “live”
on the edge of the city under the permanent threat of
elimination; but also, conversely, they live and are perceived as “nomads,” even when they are fixed in their homelands, that is,
their mere existence, their quantity, their movements, their virtual claims of rights and citizenship are perceived as
a threat for “civilization.” In the End, Does “Extreme Violence” Form a Global System”? Violence can be highly “unpolitical”—this is
what I wanted to suggest—but still form a system or be considered “systematic” if its various forms reinforce each other, if they contribute to
creating the conditions for their succession and encroachment, if in the end they build a chain of “human(itarian) catastrophies” where actions
to prevent the spread of cruelty and extermination, or simply limit their effects, are systematically obstructed. This teleology without an end is
exactly what I suggested calling, in the most objective manner, “preventative counterrevolution” or, better perhaps, “preventative
counterinsurrection.” It is only seemingly “Hobbesian,” since the
weapon used against a “war of all against all” is
another kind of war (Le Monde recently spoke about Colombia in terms of “a war against society” waged by the state and the Mafiosi
together). It is politics as antipolitics , but it appears as a system because of the many connections
between the heterogeneous forms of violence
(arms trade indispensable to state budgets with corruption; corruption with
criminality; drugs, organ, and modern slave trade with dictatorships; dictatorships with civil wars and terror); and perhaps also, last but not
least, because there is a politics of extreme violence that confuses all the forms to erect the figure of “evil” (humanitarian intervention
sometimes participates in that) and because there is an economics of extreme violence, which makes both coverage and intervention sources
of profitable business. I spoke of
demarcation .
a division between zones of life and zones of death, with a fragile line of
It was tantamount to speaking of the “totalitarian” aspects of globalization. But globalization is clearly not only that. At
the moment at which humankind becomes economically and, to some extent, culturally “united,” it is
violently divided “biopolitically .” A politics of civility (or a politics of human rights) can be either the imaginary substitute of the
destroyed unity, or the set of initiatives that reintroduce everywhere, and particularly on the borderlines themselves, the issue of equality, the
horizon of political action.
Off #3 – University K
Academic debate and civic life are social death – plugging meaning into the university
factory just increases the management of our social death and neutralizes all
resistance – instead, we should try to rupture academic debate
Occupied UC Berkeley ‘9 (“The Necrosocial – Civic Life, Social Death, and the University of California,”
November 2009, Craccum Magazine – University of Auckland Student Magazine. Iss. 4, 2012.
http://craccum.ausa.auckland.ac.nz/?p=286) [m leap]
Yes, very much a cemetery. Only here
there are no dirges, no prayers, only the repeated testing of our
threshold for anxiety, humiliation, and debt. The classroom just like the workplace just like the
university just like the state just like the economy manages our social death , translating what we
once knew from high school, from work, from our family life into academic parlance, into acceptable
forms of social conflict. Who knew that behind so much civic life (electoral campaigns, student body
representatives, bureaucratic administrators, public relations officials, Peace and Conflict Studies, ad
nauseam) was so much social death? What postures we maintain to claim representation, what limits we assume, what
desires we dismiss? And in this moment of crisis they ask us to twist ourselves in a way that they can hear. Petitions to Sacramento, phone
calls to Congressmen—even the
chancellor patronizingly congratulates our September 24th student strike,
shaping the meaning and the force of the movement as a movement against the policies of
Sacramento. He expands his institutional authority to encompass the movement. When students begin to hold
libraries over night, beginning to take our first baby step as an autonomous movement he reins us in by serendipitously announcing library
money. He
manages movement, he kills movement by funneling it into the electoral process. He
manages our social death. He looks forward to these battles on his terrain, to eulogize a proposition,
to win this or that—he and his look forward to exhausting us. He and his look forward to a
reproduction of the logic of representative governance, the release valve of the university plunges us
into an abyss where ideas are wisps of ether—that is, meaning is ripped from action . Let’s talk about
the fight endlessly, but always only in their managed form: to perpetually deliberate , the endless
fleshing-out-of—when we push the boundaries of this form they are quick to reconfigure themselves
to contain us: the chancellor’s congratulations, the reopening of the libraries, the managed general assembly—there is no fight against the
administration here, only its own extension. Each day passes in this way, the administration on the look out to shape
student discourse—it happens without pause, we don’t notice nor do we care to. It becomes banal,
thoughtless . So much so that we see we are accumulating days: one semester, two, how close to being this or that, how far? This
accumulation is our shared history. This accumulation—every once in a while interrupted, violated by a riot, a wild protest, unforgettable
fucking, the overwhelming joy of love, life shattering heartbreak—is a muted, but desirous life. A dead but restless and desirous life. The
university steals and homogenizes our time yes, our bank accounts also, but it also steals and
homogenizes meaning . As much as capital is invested in building a killing apparatus abroad, an
incarceration apparatus in California, it is equally invested here in an apparatus for managing social
death. Social death is , of course, simply the power source, the generator, of civic life with its talk of
reform, responsibility, unity. A ‘life,’ then, which serves merely as the public relations mechanism for
death: its garrulous slogans of freedom and democracy designed to obscure the shit and decay in which our feet are planted. Yes, the
university is a graveyard , but it is also a factory: a factory of meaning which produces civic life and at
the same time produces social death. A factory which produces the illusion that meaning and reality
can be separated; which everywhere reproduces the empty reactionary behavior of students based on
the values of life (identity), liberty (electoral politics), and happiness (private property). Everywhere the
same whimsical ideas of the future. Everywhere democracy. Everywhere discourse to shape our desires and
distress in a way acceptable to the electoral state, discourse designed to make our very moments
here together into a set of legible and fruitless demands . Totally managed death. A machine for
administering death, for the proliferation of technologies of death. As elsewhere, things rule. Dead objects rule. In
this sense, it matters little what face one puts on the university —whether Yudof or some other lackey. These are
merely the personifications of the rule of the dead, the pools of investments, the buildings, the flows of materials into and out of the physical
space of the university—each
one the product of some exploitation—which seek to absorb more of our work,
more tuition, more energy. The university is a machine which wants to grow, to accumulate, to expand, to absorb more and more of
the living into its peculiar and perverse machinery: high-tech research centers, new stadiums and office complexes. And at this critical juncture
the only way it can continue to grow is by more intense exploitation, higher tuition, austerity measures for the departments that fail to pass the
With their ‘pure’ motives of knowledge for its
own sake, they perpetuate the blind inertia of meaning ostensibly detached from its social context .
As the university cultivates its cozy relationship with capital, war and power, these discourses and
research programs play their own role, co-opting and containing radical potential . And so we attend lecture
test of ‘relevancy.’ But the ‘irrelevant’ departments also have their place.
after lecture about how ‘discourse’ produces ‘subjects,’ ignoring the most obvious fact that we ourselves are produced by this discourse about
discourse which leaves us believing that it is only words which matter, words about words which matter. The
university gladly
permits the precautionary lectures on biopower; on the production of race and gender; on the
reification and the fetishization of commodities. A taste of the poison serves well to inoculate us
against any confrontational radicalism. And all the while power weaves the invisible nets which contain and neutralize all
thought and action, that bind revolution inside books, lecture halls. There is no need to speak truth to power when power already speaks the
truth. The university is a graveyard– así es. The graveyard of liberal good intentions, of meritocracy, opportunity, equality, democracy. Here
the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. We graft our
flesh, our labor, our debt to the skeletons of this or that social cliché. In seminars and lectures and
essays, we pay tribute to the university’s ghosts , the ghosts of all those it has excluded—the
immiserated, the incarcerated, the just-plain-fucked. They are summoned forth and banished by a
few well-meaning phrases and research programs , given their book titles, their citations . This is our
gothic —we are so morbidly aware, we are so practiced at stomaching horror that the horror is
thoughtless. In this graveyard our actions will never touch, will never become the conduits of a
movement, if we remain permanently barricaded within prescribed identity categories—our force will
be dependent on the limited spaces of recognition built between us. Here we are at odds with one another socially,
each of us: students, faculty, staff, homebums, activists, police, chancellors, administrators, bureaucrats, investors, politicians, faculty/ staff/
homebums/ activists/ police/ chancellors/ administrators/ bureaucrats/ investors/ politicians-to-be. That is, we are students, or students of
color, or queer students of color, or faculty, or Philosophy Faculty, or Gender and Women Studies faculty, or we are custodians, or we are shift
leaders—each with our own office, place, time, and given meaning. We
form teams, clubs, fraternities, majors, departments, schools,
unions, ideologies, identities, and subcultures—and thankfully each group gets its own designated burial plot .
Who doesn’t participate in this graveyard? In the university we prostrate ourselves before a value of
separation, which in reality translates to a value of domination. We spend money and energy trying to convince
ourselves we’re brighter than everyone else. Somehow, we think, we possess some trait that means we deserve more than everyone else. We
It should never feel terrible ordering others around, right? It
should never feel terrible to diagnose people as an expert, manage them as a bureaucrat, test them
have measured ourselves and we have measured others.
as a professor, extract value from their capital as a businessman. It should feel good, gratifying,
completing. It is our private wet dream for the future; everywhere, in everyone this same dream of
domination. After all, we are intelligent, studious, young. We worked hard to be here, we deserve
this. We are convinced, owned, broken. We know their values better than they do: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. This
triumvirate of sacred values are ours of course, and in this moment of practiced theater—the fight between the university and its own
students—we have used their words on their stages: Save public education! When those values are violated by the very institutions which are
created to protect them, the veneer fades, the tired set collapses: and we call it injustice, we get indignant. We demand justice from them, for
them to adhere to their values. What many have learned again and again is that these institutions don’t care for those values, not at all, not for
all. And we are only beginning to understand that those values are not even our own. The
values create popular images and
ideals (healthcare, democracy, equality, happiness, individuality, pulling yourself up by your
bootstraps, public education) while they mean in practice the selling of commodified identities, the
state’s monopoly on violence, the expansion of markets and capital accumulation, the rule of
property, the rule of exclusions based on race, gender, class, and domination and humiliation in
general. They sell the practice through the image . We’re taught we’ll live the images once we accept
the practice. In this crisis the Chancellors and Presidents, the Regents and the British Petroleums, the politicians and the managers, they all
intend to be true to their values and capitalize on the university economically and socially—which is to say, nothing has changed, it is only an
escalation, a provocation. Their
most recent attempt to reorganize wealth and capital is called a crisis so that
we are more willing to accept their new terms as well as what was always dead in the university, to
see just how dead we are willing to play , how non-existent, how compliant, how desirous. Every
institution has of course our best interest in mind, so much so that we’re willing to pay, to enter debt contracts, to strike a submissive pose in
Each
bulging institutional value longing to become more than its sentiment through us, each of our empty
gestures of feigned-anxiety to appear under pressure, or of cool-ambivalence to appear accustomed
to horror, every moment of student life, is the management of our consent to social death. Social
the classroom, in the lab, in the seminar, in the dorm, and eventually or simultaneously in the workplace to pay back those debts.
death is our banal acceptance of an institution’s meaning for our own lack of meaning. It’s the
positions we thoughtlessly enact . It’s the particular nature of being owned. Social rupture is the
initial divorce between the owners and the owned. A social movement is a function of war . War
contains the ability to create a new frame , to build a new tension for the agents at play, new
dynamics in the battles both for the meaning and the material. When we move without a return to
their tired meaning, to their tired configurations of the material, we are engaging in war. It is November
2009. For an end to the values of social death we need ruptures and self-propelled, unmanaged movements of wild
bodies. We need, we desire occupations. We are an antagonistic dead.
Only voting negative to trigger a symbolic collapse of meaning can reverse the
metastasis of debate and blast open the gates of hell, i.e. the cemetery-university
Anonymous UC Berkeley Graduate Student ‘10 (“The University, Social Death, and the Inside Joke,”
http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20100220181610620) [m leap]
Universities may serve as progressive sites of inquiry in some cases, yet this does not detract from
the great deal of military and corporate research, economic planning and, perhaps most importantly,
social conditioning occurring within their walls . Furthermore, they serve as intense machines for the
concentration of privilege ; each university is increasingly staffed by overworked professors and
adjuncts, poorly treated maintenance and service staff. This remains only the top of the pyramid, since a hyper
educated, stable society along Western lines can only exist by the intense exploitation of labor and
resources in the third world. Students are taught to be oblivious to this fact; liberal seminars only
serve to obfuscate the fact that they are themselves complicit in the death and destruction waged on
a daily basis . They sing the college fight song and wear hooded sweatshirts (in the case of hip liberal arts colleges, flannel serves the same
purpose). As the Berkeley rebels observe, “Social
death is our banal acceptance of an institution’s meaning for
our own lack of meaning .”[43] Our conception of the social is as the death of everything sociality
entails; it is the failure of communication, the refusal of empathy, the abandonment of autonomy.
Baudrillard writes that “The cemetery no longer exists because modern cities have entirely taken over their
function: they are ghost towns, cities of death. If the great operational metropolis is the final form of
an entire culture, then, quite simply, ours is a culture of death.”[44] By attempting to excel in a
university setting, we are resigning ourselves to enrolling in what Mark Yudoff so proudly calls a cemetery, a
necropolis to rival no other . Yet herein lies the punch line. We are studying in the cemeteries of a
nation which has a cultural fetish for things that refuse to stay dead; an absolute fixation with
zombies . So perhaps the goal should not be to go “Beyond Zombie Politics” at all. Writes Baudrillard: “The
event itself is counter-offensive and comes from a strange source: in every system at its apex, at its
point of perfection, it reintroduces negativity and death .”[45] The University, by totalizing itself and
perfecting its critiques, has spontaneously generated its own antithesis . Some element of sociality
refuses to stay within the discourse of the social, the dead; it becomes undead , radically potent .
According to Steven Shaviro’s The Cinematic Body, “zombies mark the dead end or zero degree of capitalism’s logic
of endless consumption and ever expanding accumulation, precisely because they embody this logic
so literally and to such excess.”[46] In that sense, they are almost identical to the mass, the silent majorities that Baudrillard
describe as the ideal form of resistance to the social: “they know that there is no liberation , and that a system is
abolished only by pushing it into hyperlogic, by forcing it into excessive practice which is equivalent
to a brutal amortization.”[47] Zombies do not constitute a threat at first, they shamble about their
environments in an almost comic manner and are easily dispatched by a shotgun blast to the face.
Similarly, students emerge from the university in which they have been buried , engaging in random acts
of symbolic hyperconsumption and overproduction ; perhaps an overly enthusiastic usage of a
classroom or cafeteria here and there, or a particularly moving piece of theatrical composition that is
easily suppressed. “Disaster is consumed as cheesy spectacle, complete with incompetent reporting, useless information bulletins, and
inane attempts at commentary:”[48] Shaviro is talking about Night of the Living Dead, but he might as well be referring to the press coverage of
the first California occupations. Other
students respond with horror to the encroachment of dissidents: “the
living characters are concerned less about the prospect of being killed than they are about being
swept away by mimesis – of returning to existence, after death, transformed into zombies
themselves.”[49] Liberal student activists fear the incursions the most, as they are in many ways the most invested in the fate of the
contemporary university; in many ways their role is similar to that of the survivalists in Night of the Living Dead, or the military officers in Day.
Beyond Zombie Politics claims that defenders of the UC system are promoting a “Zombie Politics”; yet
this is difficult to fathom. For they are insistent on saving the University , on staying ‘alive’ , even
when their version of life has been stripped of all that makes life worth living , when it is as good as
social death . Shaviro notes that in many scenes in zombie films, our conceptions of protagonist and antagonist are reversed; in many
scenes, human survivors act so repugnantly that we celebrate their infection or demise.[50] In reality, “Zombie Politics are
something to be championed, because they are the politics of a multitude, an inclusive mass of
political subjects, seeking to consume brains. Yet brains must be seen as a metaphor for what Marx calls
“the General Intellect”; in his Fragment on Machines, he describes it as “the power of knowledge, objectified.”[51]
Students and faculty have been alienated from their labor, and, angry and zombie-like, they seek to destroy the means of their alienation. Yet,
for Shaviro, “the
hardest thing to acknowledge is that the living dead are not radically Other so much as
they serve to awaken a passion for otherness and for vertiginous disidentification that is already
latent within our own selves.”[52] In other words, we have a widespread problem with aspiring to be this
other, this powerless mass . We seek a clear protagonist , we cannot avoid associating with those we
perceive as ‘still alive’ . Yet for Baudrillard, this constitutes a fundamental flaw: "at the very core of the 'rationality' of
our culture, however, is an exclusion that precedes every other , more radical than the exclusion of
madmen, children or inferior races, an exclusion preceding all these and serving as their model: the
exclusion of the dead and of death. "[53] In Forget Foucault, we learn the sad reality about biopower: that
power itself is fundamentally based on the separation and alienation of death from the reality of our
existence. If we are to continue to use this conception, we risk failing to see that our very lives have
been turned into a mechanism for perpetuation of social death : the banal simulation of existence .
Whereas socialized death is a starting point for Foucault, in Baudrillard and in recent actions from California, we see a return to a
reevaluation of society and of death; a possible return to zombie politics. Baudrillard distinguishes
himself as a connoisseur of graffiti; in Forget Foucault, he quotes a piece that said “When Jesus arose from
the dead, he became a zombie.”[54] Perhaps the reevaluation of zombie politics will serve as the
messianic shift that blasts open the gates of hell , the cemetery-university . According to the Berkeley kids,
“when we move without return to their tired meaning, to their tired configurations of the material, we are engaging in war.”[55]
Baudrillard’s words about semiotic insurrectionaries might suffice: "They blasted their way out however, so as
to burst into reality like a scream , an interjection, an anti-discourse , as the waste of all syntatic,
poetic and political development, as the smallest radical element that cannot be caught by any
organized discourse. Invincible due to their own poverty, they resist every interpretation and every
connotation , no longer denoting anyone or anything."[56]
Therefore vote negative to steal and sacrifice the 1AC.
The technology of the affirmative ballot is not neutral, but reflects a crucial technique
of global semiotic capitalism: abstracting language and meaning (1) to exchange value
such that they become indeterminate and lose their relationship to the real and (2) to
the currency demarcation of the ballot i.e. traditional notions of affirmative or
negative — we explode this metastasis, rip it out, by stealing the 1AC and sacrificing it
as our hostage – this causes the system to commit its own suicide
Bifo ‘11 (Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Professor of Social History of Communication at the Accademia di Belle Arti of
Milan, After the Future, pg. 104-108)
Time is in the mind. The essential limit to growth is the mental impossibility to enhance time
(Cybertime) beyond a certain level. I think that we are here touching upon a crucial point. The process of recomposition, of conscious and collective subjectivation, finds here a new – paradoxical – way. Modern radical thought has always
seen the process of subjectivation as an energetic process : mobilization , social desire and political
activism , expression, participation have been the modes of conscious collective subjectivation in the
age of the revolutions. But in our age energy is running out , and desire which has given soul to
modern social dynamics is absorbed in the black hole of virtualization and financial games , as Jean
Baudrillard (1993a) argues in his book Symbolic Exchange and Death, first published in 1976. In this book Baudrillard analyzes the hyper-realistic
stage of capitalism, and the instauration of the logic of simulation. Reality itself founders in hyperrealism, the meticulous reduplication of the
real, preferably through another, reproductive medium, such as photography. From medium to medium, the real
is volatilized,
becoming an allegory of death. But it is also, in a sense, reinforced through its own destruction. It
becomes reality for its own sake, the fetishism of the lost object : no longer the object of representation, but the
ecstasy of denial and of its own ritual extermination: the hyperreal. [...] The reality principle corresponds to a certain stage of the law of value.
Today the whole system is swamped by indeterminacy , and every reality is absorbed by the
hyperreality of the code and simulation . The principle of simulation governs us now, rather that the outdated reality principle.
We feed on those forms whose finalities have disappeared. No more ideology, only simulacra. We
must therefore reconstruct
the entire genealogy of the law of value and its simulacra in order to grasp the hegemony and the
enchantment of the current system. A structural revolution of value. This genealogy must cover political economy, where it will
appear as a second-order simulacrum, just like all those that stake everything on the real: the real of production, the real of signification,
whether conscious or unconscious. Capital no longer belongs to the order of political economy: it operates with political economy as its
simulated model. The
entire apparatus of the commodity law of value is absorbed and recycled in the
larger apparatus of the structural law of value, this becoming part of the third order of simulacra.
Political economy is thus assured a second life, an eternity, within the confines of an apparatus in which it has lost all its strict determinacy, but
maintains an effective presence as a system of reference for simulation. (Baudrillard 1993a: 2) Simulation
is the new plane of
consistency of capitalist growth: financial speculation, for instance, has displaced the process of exploitation
from the sphere of material production to the sphere of expectations, desire, and immaterial labor. The simulation process
(Cyberspace) is proliferating without limits, irradiating signs that go everywhere in the attention market. The brain is the
market , in semiocapitalist hyper-reality. And the brain is not limitless, the brain cannot expand and
accelerate indefinitely.
The process of collective subjectivation (i.e. social recomposition) implies the development of a common
language-affection which is essentially happening in the temporal dimension. The semiocapitalist acceleration of time has destroyed the social
possibility of sensitive elaboration of the semio-flow. The
proliferation of simulacra in the info-sphere has saturated
the space of attention and imagination . Advertising and stimulated hyper-expression (“just do it”),
have submitted the energies of the social psyche to permanent mobilization . Exhaustion follows, and
exhaustion is the only way of escape : Nothing, not even the system, can avoid the symbolic
obligation , and it is in this trap that the only chance of a catastrophe for capital remains . The system turns
on itself, as a scorpion does when encircled by the challenge of death. For it is summoned to answer, if it is not to lose face, to what can only be
death. The
system must itself commit suicide in response to the multiplied challenge of death and
suicide . So hostages are taken . On the symbolic or sacrificial plane, from which every moral
consideration of the innocence of the victims is ruled out the hostage is the substitute , the alter-ego
of the terrorist, the hostage’s death for the terrorist . Hostage and terrorist may thereafter become
confused in the same sacrificial act . (Baudrillard 1993a: 37) In these impressive pages Baudrillard outlines the end of the
modern dialectics of revolution against power, of the labor movement against capitalist domination, and predicts the advent of a new form of
action which will be marked by the sacrificial gift of death (and self-annihilation). After the destruction of the World Trade Center in the most
important terrorist act ever, Baudrillard wrote a short text titled The Spirit of Terrorism where he goes back to his own predictions and
recognizes the emergence of a catastrophic age. When the code becomes the enemy the only strategy can be catastrophic: all the
counterphobic ravings about exorcizing evil: it is because it is there, everywhere, like an obscure object of desire. Without
this deepseated complicity, the event would not have had the resonance it has, and in their symbolic strategy
the terrorists doubtless know that they can count on this unavowable complicity. (Baudrillard 2003: 6) This
goes much further than hatred for the dominant global power by the disinherited and the exploited, those who fell on the wrong side of global
order. This malignant desire is in the very heart of those who share this order’s benefits. An allergy to all definitive order, to all definitive power
is happily universal, and the two towers of the World Trade Center embodied perfectly, in their very double-ness (literally twin-ness), this
definitive order: No
need, then, for a death drive or a destructive instinct, or even for perverse, unintended
effects. Very logically – inexorably – the increase in the power heightens the will to destroy it. And it was party
to its own destruction. When the two towers collapsed, you had the impression that they were responding to the suicide of the
suicide-planes with their own suicides. It has been said that “Even God cannot declare war on Himself.” Well, He can. The West, in position
of God (divine omnipotence and absolute moral legitimacy), has become suicidal , and declared war on itself. (Baudrillard
2003: 6-7) In Baudrillard’s catastrophic vision I see a new way of thinking subjectivity: a reversal of the energetic subjectivation that animates
the revolutionary theories of the 20th century, and the opening of an implosive theory of subversion, based on depression and exhaustion. In
the activist view exhaustion is seen as the inability of the social body to escape the vicious destiny
that capitalism has prepared: deactivation of the social energies that once upon a time animated
democracy and political struggle. But exhaustion could also become the beginning of a slow
movement towards a “wu wei” civilization, based on the withdrawal , and frugal expectations of life
and consumption. Radicalism could abandon the mode of activism, and adopt the mode of passivity . A
radical passivity would definitely threaten the ethos of relentless productivity that neoliberal politics
has imposed. The mother of all the bubbles, the work bubble, would finally deflate. We have been
working too much during the last three or four centuries, and outrageously too much during the last
thirty years. The current depression could be the beginning of a massive abandonment of competition, consumerist drive, and of
dependence on work. Actually, if we think of the geopolitical struggle of the first decade – the struggle between Western domination and
jihadist Islam – we recognize that the
most powerful weapon has been suicide. 9/11 is the most impressive act
of this suicidal war, but thousands of people have killed themselves in order to destroy American
military hegemony. And they won, forcing the western world into the bunker of paranoid security, and
defeating the hyper-technological armies of the West both in Iraq, and in Afghanistan. The suicidal implosion
has not been confined to the Islamists. Suicide has became a form of political action everywhere. Against neoliberal
politics, Indian farmers have killed themselves. Against exploitation hundreds of workers and employees have killed themselves in the French
factories of Peugeot, and in the offices of France Telecom. In Italy, when the 2009 recession destroyed one million jobs, many workers, haunted
by the fear of unemployment, climbed on the roofs of the factories, threatening to kill themselves. Is it possible to divert this implosive trend
from the direction of death, murder, and suicide, towards a new kind of autonomy, social creativity and of life?
I think that it
is possible
only if we start from exhaustion, if we emphasize the creative side of withdrawal. The exchange
between life and money could be deserted , and exhaustion could give way to a huge wave of
withdrawal from the sphere of economic exchange. A new refrain could emerge in that moment , and
wipe out the law of economic growth. The self-organization of the general intellect could abandon
the law of accumulation and growth , and start a new concatenation, where collective intelligence is
only subjected to the common good.
Cartels ADV
Terrorist rhetoric reinforces a binary that pits the good in an endless war against the
other
Kellner, ’07 (Douglas, Chair of Philosophy @ UCLA, Presidential Studies Quarterly. Vol. 37
(4), 2007, pg. 622+)
On the day of the strikes on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the U.S. corporate television networks brought out an array of national
security state intellectuals, usually ranging from the right to the far right, to explain the horrific events of September 11. Fox News presented
former UN Ambassador and Reagan administration apologist Jeane Kirkpatrick, who rolled
out a simplified version of Samuel
Huntington's clash of civilizations (1996), arguing that we were at war with Islam and should defend the
West. (4) Kirkpatrick was the most discredited intellectual of her generation, legitimating Reagan administration alliances with unsavory
fascists and terrorists as necessary to beat Soviet totalitarianism. Her propaganda line was premised on a distinction
between fascism and Communist totalitarianism which argued that alliances with authoritarian or right-wing terrorist
organizations or states were defensible because these regimes were open to reform efforts or historically undermined themselves and disappeared.
(5) Soviet totalitarianism, by contrast, should be resolutely opposed, as a Communist regime had never collapsed or been overthrown and
communism was an intractable and dangerous foe, which must be fought to the death with any means necessary. Of course, the Soviet Union
collapsed in the early 1990s, along with its empire, and although Kirkpatrick was totally discredited she was awarded a professorship at
Georgetown and continued to circulate her extremist views through Fox TV and other right-wing venues. On the afternoon of September 11,
Ariel Sharon, leader of Israel, himself implicated in war crimes in Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon in 1982, came on global television to convey his
regret, condolences, and assurance of Israel's support in the war on terrorism. Sharon
called for a coalition against terrorist
networks, which would mobilize the civilized world against terrorism, posing the Good versus Evil,
"humanity" versus "the blood-thirsty," "the free world" against "the forces of darkness," which are
trying to destroy "freedom" and our "way of life." (6) The Bush-Cheney administration would take up
precisely the same tropes, with President Bush constantly evoking the "evil" of the terrorists, using the
word five times in his first statement on the September 11 terror assaults. Bush also declared that the attacks were an "act of war" against the
United States, presaging the era of war that was to come. (7) The Fox News network had its anchor Brit Hume ask former Reagan Secretary of
State George Schultz whether military action by the United States was justified, and Schultz answered: "Absolutely.... We need to put people on
notice that if they harbor terrorists, they are going to get it from us. No place to hide." He then recounted a story from boot camp when a sergeant
handed him his rifle and said: "Here. This is your best friend.... And remember, never point this rifle at anybody unless you're willing to pull the
trigger." (8) Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House, noted that President Bush just described the attack as an act of war and urged Congress
to move immediately toward declaring war against militant Islam. (9) Commenting later in the day, pundit Bill O'Reilly exclaimed, "I think we
have to let the chains fall down and let the dogs of war," and his guest Colonel David Hunt enthused: "Bill, you've got to unleash the dogs of
Such all-out war hysteria, militarism, and extremist rhetoric was the order of the day, and
throughout September 11 and its aftermath, ideological warhorses such as William Bennett came out and urged
that the United States declare war on "militant Islam," asserting: "We have a moment of moral clarity
right now in America.... There is good and evil in the world.... We issued a statement today at Empower America, Jack
war." (10)
Kemp and Jeane Kirkpatrick and I, saying that Congress should declare war against militant Islam and that the United States should proceed as if
in war, because it is war." (11) While Bennett and his group urged war on Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, and other alleged sites of militant Islam, on the
Canadian Broadcasting Network, former Reagan administration Deputy Secretary of Defense and military commentator Frank Gaffney suggested
that the United States needed to go after the sponsors of these states as well, such as China and Russia, to the astonishment and derision of
Canadian commentators. (12) And right-wing talk radio and the Internet buzzed with talk of dropping nuclear bombs on Afghanistan,
exterminating all Moslems, and whatever other fantasy popped into their overheated rhetoric. Hence, corporate
television and radio
in the United States allowed right-wing militarist zealots to vent and circulate the most aggressive,
fanatic, and extremist views, creating a consensus around the need for immediate military action and
all-out war. The television networks themselves featured logos such as "War on America," "Attack on America," "America under
Attack," and circulated discourses that assumed that the United States was at war and that only a military
response was appropriate. Few cooler heads appeared on any of the major television networks that repeatedly
beat the war drums day after day, without even the relief of commercials for three days straight, driving the country into
hysteria and making it certain that there would be a military response and war.
Terrorist rhetoric shuts off solutions to terrorism, necessitates eradication of those
who it’s applied to, and incites racist violence
Kapitan and Schulte, ’02 (Tomis and Erich, Thomas – Prof of Philosophy @ N Illionois U, and Erich – ,
Journal of Political and Military Sociology Vol. 30 Iss. 1, 2002, pp. 172+, Questia)
Given that a population has deeply rooted grievances it is determined to rectify, and given that, continually, its members have been willing to
resort to terrorist actions in pursuing its goals, then what is the intelligent response? One might try to beat them into submission, but short
of outright genocide, retaliation against a population from whose ranks terrorists emerge will not
solve anything so long as that population feels it has a legitimate grievance worth dying for and decides that terrorism is the only viable
response. Such "counter-terrorist" retaliation, combined with a failure to address their grievances, only intensifies their
hatred and resolve, their willingness to engage in more terrorism, and soon the parties will find themselves wrapped
in an ever-increasing spiral of violence. Whether individual terrorists are driven by strategy, psychology, or a combination of
both, the rational approach to persistent terrorism stemming from a given group requires examining the situation wherein terrorism is seen as
the only route of resistance or outlet for outrage. Only then can intelligent moral responses be crafted. This brings us closer to our main
contentions. The
prevalent rhetoric of 'terrorism' has not provided an intelligent response to the
problem of terrorism. To the contrary, it has shut off any meaningful examination of causes or debate
on policies and has left only the path of violence to solve differences. Rather than promoting a free and open examination of the
grievances of the group from which terrorists emerge, the 'terrorist' label nips all questioning and debate in the
bud. Terrorists are "evil"-as the U.S. Administration has repeated on numerous occasions since September 11, 2001-and are
therefore to be eradicated. This sort of response to terrorist violence is nothing new; the 'terrorist' rhetoric has been steadily
escalating since the early 1970s, and under the Reagan Administration it became a principal foil for foreign policy. None of this has
been lost upon those who employ the rhetoric of 'terrorism' as a propaganda device, to obfuscate
and to deflect attention away from controversial policies. A prime example in the 1980s was a book edited by
Benjamin Netanyahu entitled, Terrorism: How the West Can Win. While it offers a standard definition of 'terrorism,' both the editor and
the contributors applied it selectively and argued that the only way to combat terrorism is to respond with
force, "to weaken and destroy the terrorist's ability to consistently launch attacks," even though it
might involve the "risk of civilian casualties" (pp. 202-205). Throughout this book, very little is said about the possible
causes of terrorist violence beyond vague assertions about Islam's confrontation with modernity (p. 82), or passages of this calibre: The
root cause of terrorism lies not in grievances but in a disposition toward unbridled violence. This can be traced
to a worldview that asserts that certain ideological and religious goals justify, indeed demand, the shedding of all moral inhibitions. In this
context, the observation that the root cause of terrorism is terrorists is more than a tautology. (p. 204) One is tempted to pass off comments
like this as pure rant, save for the fact that this book reached a large audience, especially since its contributors included not only academics
and journalists but also important policy makers. Netanyahu himself went on to become the Israeli Prime Minister, and among the American
contributors were U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz, U.N. Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and Senators Daniel Moynihan and Alan
a terrorist is portrayed as a
carrier of "oppression and enslavement," lacking moral sense, and "a perfect nihilist" (pp. 29-30). Given
that the overwhelming number of examples of terrorism are identified as coming from the Arab and
Islamic worlds, and that "retaliation" against terrorists is repeatedly urged even at the expense of
civilian casualties, then one begins to see the point of Edward Said's assessment of the book as nothing short of "an
incitement to anti-Arab and anti-Moslem violence" (Said 1988:157).17
Cranston, all of who voiced sentiments similar to those of Netanyahu. This upshot of the book is that
Latin America war unlikely—newest ev
ATUL SINGH, 1/28/14, Fair Observer, Make Sense of the World: Weekly Report,
http://www.fairobserver.com/article/make-sense-world-weekly-report-jan-28-2014, jj
The International Court of Justice (ICJ), the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, delineated the
maritime boundary between Peru and Chile. Peru had appealed to the ICJ to settle the matter in 2008. The ICJ gave Peru
around 20,000 square kilometers outright and control over a further 28,000 square kilometers. Both countries have pledged to
abide by the ICJ ruling. Clearly, Peru gains from the ruling but the key fact to note is that both countries appealed to the
ICJ instead of resorting to saber rattling . China and Japan could draw lessons from their Latin American counterparts. The ICJ
ruling has three important implications. First, Peru has gained while Chile has lost maritime territory. Peru’s fishermen will benefit at the
expense of their Chilean counterparts whom their government has promised to help. Second, it sets a precedent for Bolivia to reclaim some of
its mineral-rich land from Chile that it lost in the 1879-1883 war between the two countries. Finally,
one of the key boundary
disputes in Latin America is over . This makes any inter-state conflict in the region unlikely and paves
the way for greater economic integration that is more likely than most people imagine.
Cartels are diversified- losses from marijuana are negligible and they can just shift to
other illegal activities
Longmire 11 (Sylvia, former officer and investigative special agent in USAF, author of “Cartel: The
Coming Invasion of Mexico’s Drug Wars”, “Legalization Won’t Kill the Cartels,” New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/opinion/19longmire.html?_r=2&smid=twnytimesopinion&seid=auto& 6/18/11)
Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. Marijuana legalization has many merits, but it would
do little to hinder the long-term
economics of the cartels — and the violent toll they take on Mexican society. For one thing, if marijuana makes
up 60 percent of the cartels’ profits, that still leaves another 40 percent, which includes the sale of methamphetamine, cocaine, and brown-
marijuana were legalized, the cartels would still make huge profits from the
sale of these other drugs. Plus, there’s no reason the cartels couldn’t enter the legal market for the
sale of marijuana, as organized crime groups did in the United States after the repeal of Prohibition.
powder and black-tar heroin. If
Still, legalization would deliver a significant short-term hit to the cartels — if drug trafficking were the only activity they were engaged in. But
cartels derive a growing slice of their income from other illegal activities. Some experts on organized
crime in Latin America, like Edgardo Buscaglia, say that cartels earn just half their income from drugs. Indeed, in
recent years cartels have used an extensive portfolio of rackets and scams to diversify their income.
For example, they used to kidnap rivals, informants and incompetent subordinates to punish, exact
revenge or send a message. Now that they have seen that people are willing to pay heavy ransoms,
kidnapping has become their second-most-lucrative venture, with the targets ranging from
businessmen to migrants. Another new source of cartel revenue is oil theft, long a problem for the Mexican
government. The national oil company, Pemex, loses hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of petroleum every year to bandits and criminal
gangs who tap into pipelines and siphon it off. Now the cartels are getting involved in this business, working with associates north of the border
to sell the oil to American companies at huge markups. In 2009 a federal court convicted an American businessman of helping to funnel $2
million in petroleum products stolen from Pemex by a Mexican cartel, eventually selling it to a Texas chemical plant owned by the German
chemical company BASF. The chemical company claims never to have known where the products came from. Cartels
are also moving
into the market in pirated goods in Latin America. The market used to be dominated by terrorist
groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, who operated in the triborder area of Argentina, Brazil and
Paraguay. Now the field is being overtaken by Mexican cartels, which already have so much control
over the sale of pirated CDs, DVDs and software that many legitimate companies no longer even
bother to distribute their full-price products in parts of Mexico. Taking another page from traditional
organized crime, cartels are also moving into extortion. A cartel representative will approach the owner of a business —
whether a pharmacy or a taco stand — demanding a monthly stipend for “protection.” If those payments aren’t made on time, the business is
often burned to the ground, or the owner is threatened, kidnapped or killed. A popular cartel racket involves branded products. For
example, a cartel member — most often from Los Zetas and La Familia Michoacana, two of the largest
and most diversified cartels — will tell a music-store owner that he has to sell CDs with the Zetas logo
stamped on them, with the cartel taking a 25 percent cut of the profits. Noncompliance isn’t an
option. With so many lines of business, it’s unlikely that Mexican cartels would close up shop in the
event of legalization, even if it meant a serious drop in profits from their most successful product.
Cartels are economic entities, and like any legitimate company the best are able to adapt in the face
of a changing market. This is not to say that drug legalization shouldn’t be considered for other reasons. We need to stop viewing
casual users as criminals, and we need to treat addicts as people with health and emotional problems. Doing so would free up a significant
amount of jail space, court time and law enforcement resources. What it won’t do, though, is stop the violence in Mexico.
Legalization won’t hurt cartel revenue and won’t alter Mexican state stability- too
many institutional malfunctions
Hope 14 (Alejandro, security policy analyst at IMCO, a Mexico City research organization and former
intelligence officer, “Legal U.S. Pot Won’t Bring Peace to Mexico,” Bloomberg,
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-01-21/legal-u-s-pot-won-t-bring-peace-to-mexico
1/21/14)
Since Jan. 1, Colorado has had a legal marijuana market. The same will soon be true in Washington State, once retail licenses are issued. Other
states, such as California and Oregon, will likely follow suit over the next three years. So does
this creeping legalization of
marijuana in the U.S. spell doom for the Mexican drug cartels? Not quite. The illegal marijuana trade provides
Mexican organized crime with about $1.5 billion to $2 billion a year. That’s not chump change, but according to a number of
estimates, it represents no more than a third of gross drug export revenue. Cocaine is still the cartels’
biggest money-maker and the revenue accruing from heroin and methamphetamine aren’t trivial.
Moreover, Mexican gangs also obtain income from extortion, kidnapping, theft and various other types
of illegal trafficking. Losing the marijuana trade would be a blow to their finances, but it certainly
wouldn’t put them out of business. But surely Mexico would experience less violence if marijuana was legal? Yes, to some extent,
but the decline wouldn’t be sufficient to radically alter the country’s security outlook. In all likelihood,
marijuana production and marijuana-related violence are highly correlated geographically. Marijuana
output is concentrated in five states (Chihuahua, Durango, Sinaloa, Michoacan and Guerrero) that accounted for approximately
a third of all homicides committed in Mexico in 2012. Assuming improbably that half of all murders in those areas were marijuana-related, we
can estimate that the
full elimination of the illegal marijuana trade would reduce Mexico’s homicide rate to
18 per 100,000 inhabitants from 22 -- still about four times the U.S. rate. Well, but couldn’t the Mexican
government gain a peace dividend by redirecting some resources from marijuana prohibition to other law enforcement objectives? Yes, but the
effect would probably be modest. Only 4 percent of all Mexican prison inmates are serving time exclusively for marijuana-related crimes. In
2012, drug offenses represented less than 2 percent of all crime reports in the country. When it comes to only federal crimes (7 percent of the
total), the share of drug offenses rises to 20 percent, but that percentage has been declining since 2007. So
the legalization of
marijuana won’t free up a huge trove of resources to be redeployed against predatory crime.
Whatever the legal status of marijuana, Mexico needs to tackle its many institutional malfunctions. Its
police forces are underpaid, undertrained, under motivated and deeply vulnerable to corruption and
intimidation. Its criminal justice system is painfully slow, notoriously inefficient and deeply unfair.
Even with almost universal impunity, prisons are overflowing and mostly ruled by the inmates
themselves. Changing that reality will take many years. Some reforms are under way, some are barely
off the ground. As a result of a 2008 constitutional reform, criminal courts are being transformed, but progress across states has been
uneven. With a couple of local exceptions, police reform has yet to find political traction. The federal Attorney General’s Office is set to become
an independent body, but not before 2018. The reformist zeal that President Enrique Pena Nieto has shown in other policy areas (education,
energy, telecommunications) is absent in security and justice. Security policy remains reactive, driven more by political considerations than by
strategic design. And results have been mixed at best: Homicides declined moderately in 2013, but both kidnapping and extortion reached
record levels. Marijuana legalization won’t alter that dynamic. In the final analysis, Mexico
doesn’t have a drug problem, much
less a marijuana problem: It has a state capacity problem. That is, its institutions are too weak to
protect the life, liberty and property of its citizens. Even if drug trafficking might very well decline in
the future, in the absence of stronger institutions, something equally nefarious will replace it.
Legalization of marijuana increases demand- DTOs will still supply
Stimson 2010 (Charles "Cully,"Manager, National Security Law Program and Senior Legal Fellow,
“Legalizing Marijuana: Why Citizens Should Just Say No” Legal Memorandum #56 on Legal Issues
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2010/09/legalizing-marijuana-why-citizens-should-just-sayno September 13, 2010 8/2/14)
According to the Department of Justice’s National Drug Threat Assessment for 2010, Mexican drug
trafficking organizations (DTOs) “have expanded their cultivation operations in the United States, an
ongoing trend for the past decade…. Well-organized criminal groups and DTOs that produce domestic
marijuana do so because of the high profitability of and demand for marijuana in the United
States.”[53] Legalize marijuana, and the demand for marijuana goes up substantially as the
deterrence effect of law enforcement disappears. Yet not many suppliers will operate legally, refusing
to subject themselves to the established state regulatory scheme— not to mention taxation—while
still risking federal prosecution, conviction, and prison time. So who will fill the void?
Mexico won’t collapse- economy is growing and corruption is decreasing
Barone 13 (Michael, political analyst, coauthor of annual Almanac of American Politics and senior
policy analyst for the Washingon Examiner, “Mexico becomes a stable, politically diverse neighbor,”
American Enterprise Institute, http://www.aei.org/article/politics-and-public-opinion/mexico-becomesa-stable-politically-diverse-neighbor/ 4/6/14
We Americans are lucky, though we seldom reflect on it, that we have good neighbors. In East Asia, Japan, South Korea,
Taiwan and the Philippines face challenges from China over islands they have long claimed in the East China Sea. In Europe, Germany and other
prosperous nations face demands for subsidies from debt-ridden nations to avoid the collapse of the euro. When Southern Europeans look
across the Mediterranean, they see Muslim nations facing post-Arab Spring upheaval and disorder. The United States has land borders with just
two nations, Canada (more on that another day) and Mexico, where Barack Obama is headed next month. They're both good neighbors. I
realize that most of the recent news on Mexico has been about violent drug wars. You
get 500,000 hits when you Google
"Mexico failed state." But that's a misleading picture. The war on drug lords waged by President
Felipe Calderon from 2006 to 2012 has had considerable success and has been de-emphasized by his successor,
Enrique Pena Nieto. The focus on the drug war ignores Mexico's progress over the last 25 years as an
electoral democracy. For 71 years, it had one-party rule of the PRI, or Party of the Institutional Revolution. Under PRI rule, a president
selected by his predecessor selected his successor. But under PRI Presidents Carlos Salinas (1988-94) and Ernesto Zedillo (1994-2000),
Mexico established a clean election system under which the opposition conservative PAN and leftist
PRD parties won state and legislative offices. This was capped when PAN candidate Vicente Fox was elected president in July
2000. When Zedillo came on television and said, "I recognize that Vicente Fox is the next president of Mexico," thousands of Fox supporters
gathered around Mexico City's Angel of Independence and stomped so strongly in unison that the Earth shook. Fox and his PAN successor,
Calderon, had some significant policy successes. But they were frustrated in getting changes in the energy sector, in which the state-owned
monopoly Pemex has lagged behind, and in education, where teacher jobs are handed down from parent to child. The reason
is that
since 2000, none of Mexico's three parties has had a majority in Congress. That's one result of genuine
political competition, in which voters have imposed rotation in office in governorships and legislative
seats. But it also meant that the PAN presidents could not get reforms through Congress if they were opposed by the PRI and the PRD. Things
have been different since the 2012 presidential election. PRI candidate Enrique Pena Nieto seemed a depressingly conventional politician, who
as governor of the state of Mexico (which surrounds central Mexico City) won publicity for dating a telenovela star. Pena won the July election
handily and on taking office in December called for major reforms. He issued a 34-page Pact for Mexico, which proposed greater competition
for Pemex in the energy sector, plus education and judicial reforms. Remarkably, it was endorsed by PAN and PRD as well as the PRI. Pemex has
been a sacred cow in Mexico since the 1930s when President Lazaro Cardenas seized foreign oil operations and created the state-owned
monopoly. The Pemex union was a pillar of the PRI establishment. Now a PRI president was proposing to reform it, and his move was endorsed
by a PRI party convention in March. Pena also acted on education. In February, Congress passed a law establishing a transparent system for
teacher hiring and evaluation. The next day, the government arrested the head of the teachers union and charged her with spending $156
million of union funds on luxury goods. And Pena has moved to deregulate telecommunications, which threatens the position of telecom
billionaire Carlos Slim. There
is other heartening news from south of our border. Mexico's economy is
moving ahead with 5 percent growth. Since the NAFTA treaty went into effect in the 1990s, it seemed
that Mexico's economy was tethered to ours, leaving it unable to close the gap with the United States.
Now as our economy slogs along slowly, Mexico is moving toward catching up. It is, as former Foreign
Minister Jorge Castaneda has proclaimed, a majority middle-class country now. It is also a country
from which, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, there has been no net migration to the United
States since 2007. All this vindicates our previous four presidents, who pressed for closer ties with
Mexico. But most of the credit belongs to the leaders and people of Mexico. Good neighbors.
Farms ADV
Alt causes in their first card – processed foods and cotton subsidies
No ev farms are modelled – just legalization
Co2 enhances efficiency of existing farmland --- means we can meet growing global
food demand without a massive increase in the amount of land used for agriculture --Co2 reductions force cropland expansion
Idso ’05 – Sherwood, Keith and Craig Idso, CO2 Science, Will Farming Destroy Wild Nature? Volume 8, Number 15: 13 April 2005,
http://www.co2science.org//articles/V8/N15/EDIT.php, jj
In an article in Science entitled "Farming and the Fate of Wild Nature," Green
et al. (2005) address a looming problem of
incredible proportions and significance: how to meet the two- to three-fold increase in food demand
that will exist by 2050 (Tilman et al., 2002; Bongaarts, 1996) without usurping for agriculture all the land that is
currently available to what they call "wild nature."¶ The four scientists demonstrate the immediacy of the problem by
discussing the relationship between farming and birds. They begin by noting that "farming (including conversion to farmland and its intensifying
use) is the single biggest source of threat to bird species listed as Threatened (accounting for 37% of threats) and is already substantially more
important for species in developing countries than those in developed countries (40% and 24% of threats, respectively)," and by reporting that
"for developing and developed countries alike, the scale of the threat posed by agriculture is even greater for Near-Threatened species (57%
and 33% of threats, respectively)."¶ Clearly, a
little more taking of land by agriculture will likely be devastating to
several species of birds; and a lot more usurpation (using words employed by climate alarmists the world over) will
likely be catastrophically deadly to many of them, and numerous other animals as well. So how does
one solve the problem and keep from driving innumerable species to extinction (using more words that climate
alarmists relish) and still feed the masses of humanity that will inhabit the planet a mere 45 years hence?¶
The answer is simple: one has to raise more food without appreciably increasing the amounts of land
and water used to do it . The problem is that it is getting more and more difficult to do so. Already, in fact, Green et al. report that
annual growth in yield is now higher in the developing world than it is in the developed world, which suggests we may be approaching
the upper limits of the benefits to be derived from the types of technology that served us so well over
the last four decades of the 20th century, when global food production outstripped population growth and kept us largely
ahead of the hunger curve, at least where political unrest did not keep food from reaching the tables of those who needed it.¶ This is also the
conclusion of Green et al., who report that "evidence from a range of taxa in developing countries suggests that high-yield farming may allow
more species to persist." But will the high-yield farming we are capable of developing in the coming years be high enough to keep the loss of
wild nature's land at an acceptable minimum?¶ This question was addressed by Idso and Idso (2000), who developed a supply-and-demand
scenario for food in the year 2050. Specifically, they identified the plants that currently supply 95% of the world's food needs and projected
historical trends in the productivities of these crops 50 years into the future. They also evaluated the growth-enhancing effects of atmospheric
CO2 enrichment on these plants and made similar yield projections based on the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration likely to occur by
that future date. This
work indicated that world population would be 51% greater in the year 2050 than it
was in 1998, but that world food production would be only 37% greater, if its enhanced productivity
were solely a consequence of anticipated improvements in agricultural technology and expertise.
However, they determined that the consequent shortfall in farm production could be overcome - but
just barely - by the additional benefits anticipated to accrue from the aerial fertilization effect of the
expected rise in the air's CO2 content, assuming no Kyoto-style cutbacks in anthropogenic CO2
emissions.¶ Clearly, there are two sides to the story of what anthropogenic CO2 emissions may do to and/or for wild nature. Climate
alarmists speak only of the former of these alternatives, decrying the possibility of CO2-induced global warming and its claimed potential to
drive numerous species of plants and animals to extinction (see our Major Report The Specter of Species Extinction: Will Global Warming
Decimate Earth's Biosphere?). We at CO2 Science, on the other hand, address both of these issues, recognizing the fact that the precautionary
principle is a two-edged sword that cuts both ways. We
cannot create informed energy policy by closing our eyes to
the devastating war that will be waged by humanity upon wild nature if we deny ourselves (and
nature) the biological benefits that come from atmospheric CO2 enrichment.
Expanding cropland leads to increased methane emissions --- turns warming
Ranjana & Kumar ’11 – DR. RANJANA*, SURESH KUMAR**¶ *SAVEN-Govind Ballabh Pant University of Agriculture and
Technology,¶ **S.S Agrobiotech¶ GREEN HOUSE EFFECT DUE TO METHANE FROM PADDY FIELDS¶ 2011-09-17,
http://agropedia.iitk.ac.in/openaccess/?q=content/green-house-effect-due-methane-paddy-fields, jj
The occasions gave global concern, one
fifths of the over all annual methane emissions which cause greenhouse
effect from around the world are from the biogenetic origin. A considerable part of this is attributed
to wet land agriculture such as from paddy fields. World population projections indicate that the
demand of rice would increase by 50 per cent and for that additional 700 mt of rice will have to be
produced, which would increase as much as 20 % methane in atmosphere in next 10 years.¶ Rice, one
of the most important staple crops of the world, is realizing the increased pressure on the growing
resources. Area expansion is one of the strategies to meet the growing demand of the population
with the increase in crop area, the hazardous effects that rice cultivation brings, are also increasing.
Probably, Asia would be most rigorously affected part of the world in the years to come, where 90 percent of rice is grown and consumed. The
crop has significant effects on global warming through the emission of greenhouse gas, methane from
flooded rice field. This occasion increases atmospheric temperature, resulting in alteration of climate
of region. The new environment may replace many of the indigenous species from the area, which
may affect the biodiversity of region badly.¶ Methane is one of the greenhouse gases which induce
climatic change, and this phenomenon of modifying climate where atmospheric gases act like glass panes in greenhouses they allow the
small wave solar radiation to pass through them but trap the long wave radiation which comes after the reflection from natural bodies. The
phenomenon leads to the warming of atmosphere popularly known as “global warming”. It is really a
matter of concern that wet land rice agriculture accounts for as much as 265 per cent of anthropogenic methane budget around 70-80 percent
of total annual global emission of methane is of biogenic origin and it has been confirmed on the basis of extrapolation of measurements done
in Europe and USA, US.EPA. Methane is increasing in atmosphere by around one percent every year. This gas is relatively active trace gas with
about 25-30 times more infra red absorption capacity per molecule than carbon di oxide through its atmospheric concentration is about 200
times lesser.
Outweighs co2
VIN 1-29-13, Validated Independent News, Media Freedom International, Positive Feedback Accelerates- Rice Agriculture Can Worsen
Global Warming, http://www.mediafreedominternational.org/2013/01/29/positive-feedback-accelerates-rice-agriculture-can-worsen-globalwarming/, jj
Moreover, although rice is not the most popular staple in U.S., it is
indispensable for people in Asia, Africa and South
America. Since those areas are heavily populated, rice becomes the second-most consumed food in the world. In addition, although people
always connect methane emission with livestock, in fact, rice paddies are the number one manmade source of
methane. Moreover, compared to carbon dioxide, methane is a much stronger GHG. Therefore, the extra
methane produced by rice may bring significant negative effects on climate change. Thus, Kees Jan van
Groenigen, the co-author of the study, referred to rice agriculture as less “climate-friendly.” However, this
less “climate-friendly” staple may still need to play an important role to “ensure a secure global food supply” in this population explosion era
for a long time, according to Professor Bruce Hungate from Northern Arizona University.
Methane outweighs and has none of Co2’s upsides
Pearce ’12 – Fred Pearce, English author and journalist based in London. He is a science writer and has reported on the environment,
popular science and development issues from 64 countries over the past 20 years. New Scientist, 28 March 2012, Methane cuts could delay
climate change by 15 years, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328583.800-methane-cuts-could-delay-climate-change-by-15years.html, jj
THE world could buy itself 15 years of breathing space for fighting climate change, one of the world's top climate modellers argued on
Monday.¶ Peter Cox at the University of Exeter, UK, was speaking at the Planet Under Pressure meeting in London, where more than 2800
scientists gathered to discuss fears that Earth's life-support systems are under intense stress from human activity.¶ The
trick, he says, is to
widen our attack on greenhouse gases from carbon dioxide to include the second most significant
greenhouse gas - methane. "Methane is a more important control on global temperature than
previously realised. The gas's influence is much greater than its direct effect on the atmosphere," says
Cox. Curbing methane, he adds, may now be the only way to prevent dangerous warming.¶ We release
methane in many ways - leaks from gas pipelines and coal mines, from landfills, the guts of livestock and rice paddies. Curbing
these emissions would bring a manifold benefit for climate, says Cox.¶ He has studied the way CO2 and methane
influence plant growth, and says that these feedback mechanisms mean action on methane could have twice the expected
punch.¶ An atmosphere containing less methane but more CO2 would encourage forests and other
vegetation on land to absorb more carbon . This would happen in two ways. First, the extra CO2 would itself act
as a fertiliser for vegetation, so it would grow faster and absorb more CO2. Second, less methane would
minimise the formation of tropospheric ozone, which damages plant growth.