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Capitalism Under The Sea
***Generic 1NC***
The 1AC’s call for development creates the ocean as a new space for neoliberal capitalism
Steinberg (Department of Geography, Royal Holloway University of London) 10
(Philip E., Sekula, Allan and Noël Burch 2010 The Forgotten Space, reviewed by Philip E. Steinberg
http://societyandspace.com/reviews/film-reviews/sekula/)
In other words, in
the capitalist imagination, the sea is idealized as a flat surface in which space is
abstracted from geophysical reality. As the sea’s space is reduced to an abstract quantity of distance, or
time, it is constructed as amenable to annihilation by technologies that enable the compression (or, better yet,
the transcendence) of space-time, like the containership. While this construction of the ocean provides rich material for
geographers of capitalism and modernity (e.g. Steinberg 2001), it provides precious little material for filmmakers. Under
capitalism, the ocean is valued only in its (idealized) absence, and absence is notoriously difficult to film. Thus, as Brett
Story, the other geographer who has commented on the film, has noted, ‘he film spends surprisingly little time
on actual water’ (Story 2012, page 1576, emphasis added). By my count, only about ten minutes of the 110-minute film are
spent at sea (all on the Hanjin Budapest) and even in this footage the material ocean is not a force that needs to be reckoned
with, except as a source of rust.
For viewers who are familiar with Sekula’s book Fish Story, as well as with his other film The Lottery of the Sea, the
relative absence of the ocean in The Forgotten Space is, as Story suggests, surprising. In contrast with The Forgotten
Space, Fish Story begins with a meditation on the ‘crude materiality’ of the sea (Sekula 1995, page 12) and he reminds the
reader throughout the book that the ocean’s materiality persists despite the best intentions of capital to
wash it away. Thus, for instance, we learn in Fish Story that ‘large-scale material flows remain intractable.
Acceleration is not absolute: the hydrodynamics of large-capacity hulls and the power output of
diesel engines set a limit to the speed of cargo ships not far beyond that of the first quarter of [the twentieth]
century’ (Sekula 1995, page 50). In Fish Story, the ocean is a space of contradictions and a non-human actor in its own
right. However, no such references to the sea’s geophysical materiality and the barriers that this might pose to its
idealization as a friction-free surface of movement appear in The Forgotten Space.
Human frictions on the sea likewise feature in Fish Story: militant seafarers, longshoremen, and mutineers all make
appearances in the text. In contrast, these individuals receive scant attention in The Forgotten Space (a point noted by Story
as well), and much of the attention that they do receive is about their failings. A relatively hopeful account of union
organizing in Los Angeles is paired with a story of labour’s defeat in the face of automation in Rotterdam and that of a
faded movement in Hong Kong where the union hall has become a social club for retirees and their widows.
For Sekula, the heterotopia of the ship celebrated by Foucault has become a neoliberal dystopia. The
world of containerization is Foucault’s dreaded ‘civilization without boats, in which dreams have dried up,
espionage has taken the place of adventure, and the police have taken the place of pirates’ (adapted from Foucault 1986,
page 27). Echoing Foucault, Sekula asks near the beginning of the film, ‘Does the anonymity of the box turn the sea of
exploit and adventure into a lake of invisible drudgery?’ Although Sekula never answers this question directly, his response
would seem to be in the affirmative: the sea is no longer a romantic space of resistance; it has been tamed.
Sekula and Burch’s failure to depict the ocean as a space of dialectical encounters (whether between humans or
among human and non-human elements) reproduces a dematerialization of the sea that is frequently
found in narratives of globalization, including critical narratives (Steinberg 2013). This leads the
filmmakers to inadvertently reaffirm the capitalist construction of the ocean as an external space
beyond politics. By turning away from the frictions encountered at sea, Sekula and Birch end up tacitly
endorsing the very ‘forgetting’ of the sea promoted by capital, as it subscribes to an ideology of
limitless mobility.
And neoliberal capitalism makes economic collapse, inequality and extinction inevitable
Wise et al. (Director of Doctoral Program in Migration Studies & Prof of Development Studies; Universidad Autónoma de
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Zacatecas, Mexico) 10
(Raúl Delgado Wise, Humberto Márquez Covarrubias, Rubén Puentes, Reframing the debate on migration, development and human
rights: fundamental elements, October, 2010, www.migracionydesarrollo.org)
At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, a general crisis centered in the United States affected the global capitalist
system on several levels (Márquez, 2009 and 2010). The consequences have been varied:
Financial. The overflowing of financial capital leads to speculative bubbles that affect the socioeconomic
framework and result in global economic depressions. Speculative bubbles involve the bidding up of
market prices of such commodities as real estate or electronic innovations far beyond their real value,
leading inevitable to a subsequent slump (Foster and Magdof, 2009; Bello, 2006). Overproduction. Overproduction
crises emerge when the surplus capital in the global economy is not channeled into production processes due to a fall in
profit margins and a slump in effective demand, the latter mainly a consequence of wage containment across all sectors of
the population (Bello, 2006). Environmental. Environmental degradation, climate change and a predatory
approach to natural resources contribute to the destruction of the latter, along with a fundamental
undermining of the material bases for production and human reproduction (Fola- dori and Pierri, 2005; Hinkelammert and
Mora, 2008). Social. Growing social inequalities, the dismantling of the welfare state and dwindling means of
subsistence accentuate problems such as poverty, unemployment, violence, insecurity and labor precariousness,
increasing the pressure to emigrate (Harvey, 2007; Schierup, Hansen and Castles, 2006).
The crisis raises questions about the prevailing model of globalization and, in a deeper sense, the systemic
global order, which currently undermines our main sources of wealth—labor and nature—and overexploits
them to the extent that civilization itself is at risk. The responses to the crisis by the governments of developed
countries and international agencies promoting globalization have been short-sighted and exclusivist. Instead of
addressing the root causes of the crisis, they have implemented limited strategies that seek to rescue
financial and manufacturing corporations facing bankruptcy. In addition, government policies of labor
flexibilization and fiscal adjustment have affected the living and working conditions of most of the population. These
measures are desperate attempts to prolong the privileges of ruling elites at the risk of imminent
and increasingly severe crises. In these conditions, migrants have been made into scapegoats, leading to
repressive anti- immigrant legislation and policies (Massey and Sánchez, 2006). A significant number of jobs
have been lost while the conditions of remaining jobs deteriorate and deportations increase. Migrants’ living standards have
drastically deteriorated but, contrary to expectations, there have been neither massive return flows nor a collapse in
remittances, though there is evidence that migrant worker flows have indeed diminished.
Our alternative is to reject the Aff’s endorsement of market based development.
Rejecting market competition is an act of economic imagination that can create real alternatives within
the existing economy
White and Williams (senior lecturer of economic geography at Sheffield Hallam University; professor of public policy in the
Management School at the University of Sheffield) 12
(Richard J. and Cohn C., Escaping Capitalist Hegemony: Rereading Western Economies in The Accumulation of Freedom, pg. 13132)
The American anarchist Howard Ehrlich argued, " We must act as if the future is today." What we have hoped to
demonstrate here is that non-capitalist spaces are present and evident in contemporary societies. We do not need to
imagine and create from scratch new economic alternatives that will successfully confront the capitalist
hegemony thesis, or more properly the capitalist hegemony myth. Rather than capitalism being the all powerful, all
conquering, economic juggernaut, the greater truth is that the "other" non-capitalist spaces have grown in proportion
relative in size to the capitalism realm.
This should give many of us great comfort and hope in moving forward purposefully for, as Chomsky observed:
"[a]lternatives have to be constructed within the existing economy, and within the minds of working
people and communities."' In this regard, the roots of the heterodox economic futures that we desire do exist in the
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present. Far from shutting down future economic possibilities, a more accurate reading of "the
economic" (which decenters capitalism), coupled with the global crisis that capitalism finds itself in, should give us
additional courage and resolve to unleash our economic imaginations, embrace the challenge of
creating "fully engaged" economies. These must also take greater account of the disastrous social and environmental
costs of capitalism and its inherent ethic of competition. As Kropotkin wrote:
Don't compete!-competition is always injurious to the species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid it!
Therefore combine-practice mutual aid! That is the surest means for giving to each and all to the greatest safety, the
best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectual, and moral .... That is what Nature teaches us;
and that is what all those animals which have attained the highest position in the respective classes have done. That is also
what man [ski-the most primitive man-has been doing; and that is why man has reached the position upon which we stand
now."
A more detailed and considered discussion of the futures of work, however, is beyond the scope of this chapter. What we
have hoped to demonstrate is that in reimagining the economic, and recognizing and valuing the non-capitalist economic
practices that are already here, we might spark renewed enthusiasm, optimism, insight, and critical discussion within and
among anarchist communities. The ambition here is similar to that of Gibson-Graham, in arguing that:
The objective is not to produce a finished and coherent template that maps the economy "as it really is"
and presents... a ready made "alternative economy." Rather, our hope is to disarm and dislocate the naturalized
dominance of the capitalist economy and make a space for new economic beeomings-ones that we will
need to work to produce. If we can recognize a diverse economy, we can begin to imagine and create
diverse organizations and practices as powerful constituents of an enlivened noncapitalist policies of
place.
***Wind 1NC***
The 1AC’s profit based green revolution simply shifts to domination and exploitation into other spheres
White (post-doctoral research fellow in the School of Cultural and Innovation Studies, University of East London) 2
(Damian, A Green Industrial Revolution? Sustainable Technological Innovation in a Global Age, Environmental Politics, Vo1.II.
No.2, Summer 2002. pp.I-26)
The first point is essentially negative. Notably, it draws attention to the fact that even if all the obstacles to a green
industrial revolution posed by the structuring of the current political economy are addressed - ifthere are notforces to
make things differently - the type of eco-technological and ecoindustrial reorganisation that triumphs could simply
serve and reinforce the patterns of interest of dominant groups. A neo-liberal version of the 'green
industrial revolution' could simply give rise to eco-technologies and forms of industrial reorganisation
that arc perfectly compatible with extending social control, military power, worker surveillance
and the broader repressive capacities of dominant groups and institutions. It might even be that a
corporate dominated green industrial revolution would simply ensure that employers have 'smart' buildings which not only
give energy back to the national grid but allow for new 'solar powered' employee surveillance technologies. What of a
sustainable military-industrial complex that uses green warfare technologies that kill human beings
without destroying ecosystems? To what extent might a 'nonhero' dominated green industrial revolution
simply ensure that the South receives ecotechnologies that primarily express Northern interests (for
example, embedding relations of dependency rather than of self management and autonomy?). In short then, a green
industrial revolution could simply give rise to new forms of 'green governmentality' [Dorier et aI., 1999].
Green capitalism makes economic collapse, inequality and extinction inevitable
Wise et al. (Director of Doctoral Program in Migration Studies & Prof of Development Studies; Universidad Autónoma de
Zacatecas, Mexico) 10
(Raúl Delgado Wise, Humberto Márquez Covarrubias, Rubén Puentes, Reframing the debate on migration, development and human
rights: fundamental elements, October, 2010, www.migracionydesarrollo.org)
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At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, a general crisis centered in the United States affected the global capitalist
system on several levels (Márquez, 2009 and 2010). The consequences have been varied:
Financial. The overflowing of financial capital leads to speculative bubbles that affect the socioeconomic
framework and result in global economic depressions. Speculative bubbles involve the bidding up of
market prices of such commodities as real estate or electronic innovations far beyond their real value,
leading inevitable to a subsequent slump (Foster and Magdof, 2009; Bello, 2006). Overproduction. Overproduction
crises emerge when the surplus capital in the global economy is not channeled into production processes due to a fall in
profit margins and a slump in effective demand, the latter mainly a consequence of wage containment across all sectors of
the population (Bello, 2006). Environmental. Environmental degradation, climate change and a predatory
approach to natural resources contribute to the destruction of the latter, along with a fundamental
undermining of the material bases for production and human reproduction (Fola- dori and Pierri, 2005; Hinkelammert and
Mora, 2008). Social. Growing social inequalities, the dismantling of the welfare state and dwindling means of
subsistence accentuate problems such as poverty, unemployment, violence, insecurity and labor precariousness,
increasing the pressure to emigrate (Harvey, 2007; Schierup, Hansen and Castles, 2006).
The crisis raises questions about the prevailing model of globalization and, in a deeper sense, the systemic
global order, which currently undermines our main sources of wealth—labor and nature—and overexploits
them to the extent that civilization itself is at risk. The responses to the crisis by the governments of developed
countries and international agencies promoting globalization have been short-sighted and exclusivist. Instead of
addressing the root causes of the crisis, they have implemented limited strategies that seek to rescue
financial and manufacturing corporations facing bankruptcy. In addition, government policies of labor
flexibilization and fiscal adjustment have affected the living and working conditions of most of the population. These
measures are desperate attempts to prolong the privileges of ruling elites at the risk of imminent
and increasingly severe crises. In these conditions, migrants have been made into scapegoats, leading to
repressive anti- immigrant legislation and policies (Massey and Sánchez, 2006). A significant number of jobs
have been lost while the conditions of remaining jobs deteriorate and deportations increase. Migrants’ living standards have
drastically deteriorated but, contrary to expectations, there have been neither massive return flows nor a collapse in
remittances, though there is evidence that migrant worker flows have indeed diminished.
Our alternative is to reject green capitalism. Only broad social movements have the possibility of solving
climate change
Dawson (Associate Professor English Department @ CUNY) 10
(Ashley, Climate Justice: The Emerging Movement Against Green Capitalism, South Atlantic Quarterly 2010 Volume 109, Number
2)
A specter is haunting the planet – the specter of ecocide. The United States, and with it the rest of the world, is experiencing
an unprecedented emergency brought on by three intertwined factors: a credit-fueled financial crisis, wildly gyrating energy
prices linked to the peaking of oil supplies, and an accelerating climate crisis. Although the news has been filled over the
last two years with reports of the sub-prime mortgage crisis, food riots, and the melting of the polar ice caps, these alarming
phenomena are seldom linked to one another. Moreover, these grave epiphenomena are not often tied to their underlying
cause: the planet-consuming rapacity of a capitalist system that must grow incessantly or expire.1 Yet
the more desperately we try to exorcise this specter of ecocide through saccharine exercises in
greenwashing and politically palatable half measures, the louder the death rattle of the planet
becomes.
The current triple crisis signals the collapse of the neoliberal paradigm that has held sway since the last major crisis of
accumulation during the 1970s.2 While there will inevitably be significant continuities between the neoliberal era and what
is to come, the triple crisis nevertheless signals the onset of a new phase of capitalism. This new phase, which I believe is
most aptly characterized as Green Capitalism, will see the emergence of new spaces of accumulation and novel types of
regulation.3 Green Capitalism does not seek to and will not solve the underlying ecological contradictions of
capital’s insatiable appetite for ceaselessly expanding accumulation on a finite environmental base.
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Instead, Green Capitalism seeks to profit from the current crisis. In doing so, it remorselessly intensifies the
contradictions, the natural destruction and human suffering, associated
with ecocide.
The lineaments of Green Capitalism have been emerging for some time, dating perhaps most clearly back to the creation of
the World Bank’s Global Environmental Facility during the Rio Earth Summit in 1992.4 Nevertheless, with the longdelayed conclusion over the debate about whether climate change is actually taking place over the last several years and the
coeval crisis of neoliberalism, a truly Green Capitalist new order is emerging far more clearly. Take the landmark climate
change legislation that, at the time of writing, has barely scraped through the House of Representatives and is set to come
up for negotiation in the Senate. Fred Krupp of the Environmental Defense Fund, one of the biggest green groups in the US,
called the global warming bill “the most important environmental and energy legislation in the history of our country.”5
Yet the bill, seen as a triumph after more than twenty years of Congressional inaction on the climate crisis, not only fails to
mandate necessary reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, but in addition establishes a market-based cap-and-trade policy
that essentially commodifies the atmosphere. In recent years, a scientific consensus has emerged that emissions cuts of the
order of 85-95% will be required in order to prevent the planet entering into cycles of cataclysmic, runaway climate
change.6 Yet the new bill, known as the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACESA), measures emissions relative
to 2005 rather than the Kyoto- mandated date of 1990.7 It promises a meager seventeen percent reduction by 2020, which
translates into only four to five percent less emissions than the US produced in 1990. The heavily promoted cap- and-trade
provision of ACESA promises an even more derisory one percent reduction by 2020. In addition, like the European
Union’s highly flawed Emissions Trading Scheme (EU-ETS), the plan is filled with loopholes: at least eighty five percent
of the allowances for continuing to pollute will be given away for free rather than auctioned, as Obama had pledged during
his presidential campaign. While the promised reductions in greenhouse gas emissions may be risible under cap-and-trade,
the profits that polluting corporations stand to gain are not. Advocates of the carbon market are looking forward to the
emergence of a global trading system ultimately valued at over ten trillion dollars per year.8 With an emerging cadre of
brokers set to begin trading in carbon futures using precisely the same financial sleights of hand that led to the current
economic crisis, the foundations for Green Capitalism are clearly now in place.
As the climate crisis intensifies, the contradictions of Green Capitalism will produce more and more of what
Zygmunt Bauman calls “human waste” - the population of human beings rendered surplus by the remorseless advance of
modernity.9 On one level, these wasted lives will be the result of worsening environmental instability alone, as climate
change leads to dessication, water shortages, crop failure, and extreme weather events on an unparalleled scale. On another
level, however, the practices of carbon offsetting that are an integral part of Green Capitalism will play a crucial role in
mass displacement. Offsets such as those implicit in the cap-and-trade mechanism and in already-established programs such
as the World Bank’s Clean Development Mechanism allow polluters to continue their unsustainable behavior by paying
others – typically in the global South – to absorb such pollution. But, by, for example, establishing vast plantations of
quick-growing eucalyptus trees in countries like Brazil, these offsets displace huge numbers of subsistence farmers and
pollute the groundwater through intensive use of the pesticides necessary to sustain such monocultural developments.10 In
many cases, deforestation simply moves elsewhere, meaning that there is no net diminution of carbon. Offsets and the
Green Capitalist system of which they are an integral part will thus dramatically augment the production of surplus people
and mega-slums that has characterized the neoliberal era.11 In scenarios based on current predictions by the International
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for example, twenty percent of the world’s population could be rendered homeless by the
end of this century.
Green Capitalism will necessarily hinge on new forms of authoritarian control over the wasted lives
that it ineluctably produces. Global elites are already preparing for this eventuality. According to a report recently
presented to European Union heads of state by two senior foreign policy officials, for example, climate change threatens to
significantly intensify global political instability.12 The US military, for its part, recently commissioned a report, National
Security and the Threat of Climate Change, that frames global warming as a threat-multiplier that the security establishment
must prepare to confront on multiple fronts.13 As environmental and political instability grow, the turn to popular
authoritarian ideologies and increasingly draconian forms of rule over those marginalized by the prevailing socioeconomic-ecological order will necessarily be ratched up.14 This trend towards heightened authoritarianism is the dark but
integral side of Green Capitalism, which will nevertheless always blame the instability and suffering that are structurally
inherent in this mode of accumulation on the “human waste” it produces.
Genuine solutions to the climate crisis cannot emerge from climate negotiations, whether on a domestic or
international level, unless significant pressure – pressure that outweighs that of powerful corporate interests – is
brought to bear by a globally linked, locally grounded group of social movements mobilizing around
the theme of climate justice. This will take genuine organizing – a task that the Left in general and cultural studies in
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particular has been prone to shy away from.15 Such organizing is a particularly urgent task on both a practical and a
theoretical level given the predominantly anarchist, anti-statist character of the global justice movement in the North.
Rather than abdicating engagement with the organs of state power, the crisis of our times requires
transformation of these organs through practices of radical democracy. In addition, however, a movement for
climate justice needs a theoretical grasp of the economic, political, and ecological stakes at play in the new Green
Capitalist order. As I have already indicated in brief, this new order is characterized by significant greenwashing,
ideological flim-flam around issues such as offsets and carbon trading, that needs to be laid bare so that those
affected by the inequalities of Green Capitalism can mobilize in solidarity with rather than scapegoating the
new order’s victims.
In what follows I sketch the recent birth of a climate justice movement. In the US, this movement builds on the deep
and powerful roots of the environmental justice movement, which in turn draws on the organizing tactics, cultural forms,
and ideological stance of the Civil Rights movement. This emergent climate justice movement will, I argue, play a pivotal
role in challenging Green Capitalism, both in the US and internationally. We cannot expect such a challenge to come from
the mainstream environmental movement. As the comments of the Environmental Defense Fund official quoted above
suggest, many prominent conservation organizations have bought into the new Green Capitalist order. In addition, although
some of them have made significant strides of late, many of these mainstream organizations have failed to incorporate the
perspectives of communities worst affected by the toxic byproducts of unregulated industrial growth. This failure stems
not simply from their closeness to pro-corporate interests, but also from a reifying epistemological
stance towards nature embodied in the wilderness ethic, one which sees the environment and human beings and their
social struggles in antithetical terms. Building on several decades of activism within the environmental justice movement,
the emerging movement for climate justice challenges the wilderness ethic, and in so doing strives to center
discussion and militancy around the climate crisis in an engagement with issues of inequality and injustice. The stance of
the climate justice movement is, as a result, far more attuned to the issues that drive environmental activism throughout the
global South.16 The movement for climate justice thus promises to be a vehicle for mobilizing the kind of
transnational, grassroots alliances that will be decisive in the unfolding fight against ecocide.
***Links***
Climate Link
Massive change is needed to solve climate change – only an end to capitalism can solve
Foster et al (professor of sociology at the University of Oregon; assistant professor of sociology at North Carolina State University;
associate professor of sociology at the University of Oregon) 9
(Foster, J. B., Clark, B. and York, R. (2009), The Midas Effect: A Critique of Climate Change Economics. Development and Change,
40: 1085–1097)
Some argue today that the speed and intensity of the ecological threat leaves us with no choice but to
stick with the existing system and embrace its limited and myopic solutions to environmental problems: such
strategies as ‘cap and trade’ carbon markets and market-driven technological silver bullets. The fantastic nature of these
strategies reflects the fact that they conform to the Midas Effect of mainstream economics: environmental change must
conform to the ‘bottom line’ of capital accumulation.
In fact, where adopted, carbon markets have accomplished little to reduce carbon emissions. This has to do with numerous
factors, not least of all provisions for nations to buy out of the actual reductions in various ways. The idea that
technology can solve the global environmental problem, as a kind of deus ex machine without changes in social
relations, belongs to the area of fantasy and science fiction. Thomas Friedman (2008: 186–7) provides a vision
of green industrial revolution in hisHot, Flat, and Crowded in which he repeatedly tells his readers that if given ‘abundant,
clean, reliable, and cheap electrons’, we could move the world and end all ecological problems. Gregg Easterbrook (1995:
687–8), in what he calls environmental ‘realism’, argues that even if we destroy this biosphere we can ‘terraform’ Mars —
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so humanity's existence is not necessarily impaired by environmental destruction.
The very desperation of such establishment arguments, which seek to address the present-day environmental problem
without confronting the reality of capitalism, highlights the need for more radical measures in relation to climate change
and the ecological crisis as a whole. Especially noteworthy in this respect is Hansen's carbon tax proposal, and global
contraction-conversion strategies. In place of carbon markets, which invariably include various ways to buy out of
emissions reductions (registering reductions while actually increasing emissions), Hansen (2008a) proposes a carbon tax for
the United States to be imposed at well-head and point of entry, aimed at bringing carbon dioxide emissions down to near
zero, with 100 per cent of the revenue from the tax being deposited as monthly dividends directly into the bank accounts of
the public on a per person basis (with children receiving half shares). Not all carbon taxes of course are radical measures.
But Hansen's emergency strategy, with its monthly dividends, is designed to keep carbon in the ground and at the same time
to appeal to the general public. It explicitly circumvents both the market and state power, in order to block those who desire
to subvert the process. In this, the hope is to establish a mass popular constituency for combating climate change by
promoting social redistribution of wealth toward those with smaller carbon footprints (the larger part of the population).
Hansen insists that any serious attempt to protect the climate means going against Big Coal. An important step would be to
declare a moratorium on new coal-fired power stations, which he describes as ‘death factories’ since the carbon emissions
they produce contribute to escalating extinction rates (as well as polluting regional environments and directly impairing
human health) (Hansen, 2009). He argues that we need to leave as much coal as possible in the ground and to close existing
coal-fired power stations if we are to prevent catastrophic environmental change.
From a global standpoint, ecological degradation is influenced by the structure and dynamics of a world system
hierarchically divided into numerous nation states, competing with each other both directly and via their corporations. In an
attempt to counter carbon imperialism, Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain (1991) propose that carbon emissions of nations
should be determined on an equal per capita basis, rooted in what is allowable within the shared atmosphere. The global
North, with its relatively smaller population in contrast to the South, has used a disproportionate
amount of the atmospheric commons, given its immense carbon emissions. Thus Tom Athanasiou and Paul
Baer (2002) and other climate justice activists propose a process of contraction and convergence. The rich nations of the
North would be required to reduce (contract) their emissions of greenhouse gases to appropriate levels as determined by the
atmospheric carbon target. Given global inequalities, the nations of the South would be allowed to increase their emissions
gradually to a limited extent — but only if a nation had a per capita carbon emission rate below the acceptable level
established by the target. This would create a world converging toward ‘equal and low, per capita allotments’ (Athanasiou
and Baer, 2002: 84). Today contraction and convergence would necessarily aim at stabilizing atmospheric carbon dioxide at
350 ppm, in conformity with scientific indications.
Such a proposal would mean that the rich nations would have to reduce their carbon emissions very rapidly
by levels approaching 100 per cent, while a massive global effort would be needed to help countries in
the global South move toward emissions stabilization as well, while not jeopardizing sustainable human
development. Such a process of contraction and convergence would require that the global North pay the ecological debt
that it has accrued through using up the bulk of the atmospheric commons, by carrying the main cost of mitigation globally
and aiding nations of the South in adapting to negative climate effects.
In reality, the radical proposals discussed above, although ostensibly transition strategies, present the issue of
revolutionary change. Their implementation would require a popular revolt against the system itself. A
movement (or movements) powerful enough to implement such changes on the necessary scale might
well be powerful enough to implement a full-scale social-ecological revolution. In fact, humanity
cannot expect to reach 350 ppm and avoid planetary climatic disaster except through a major
global social transformation, in line with the greatest social revolutions in human history. This
would require not simply a change in productive forces but also in productive relations, necessitating
a green cultural revolution. The answer to today's social and environmental crisis, as Lewis Mumford argued inThe
Condition of Man (1973: 419–23), lies in the creation of the ‘organic person’, or a system of sustainable human
development. This means the creation of cultural forms that present the opportunity for balance in the human personality.
Rather than promoting the asocial traits of humanity, the emphasis would be on nurturing the social and collective
characteristics. Each human being would be ‘in dynamic interaction with every part of his environment’.
Climate Conflict Link
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The environmental conflict thesis is wrong, racist and locks in systemic poverty and inequality
Hartmann (Director, Population and Development Program, Associate Professor, Development Studies, Hampshire College) 10
(Betsy, POLICY ARENA RETHINKING CLIMATE REFUGEES AND CLIMATE CONFLICT: RHETORIC, REALITY AND THE
POLITICS OF POLICY DISCOURSE, Journal of International Development, J. Int. Dev. 22, 233–246)
The construction of Darfur as a climate conflict should serve as canary in the coal mine that something is amiss when
environmental determinism overrides serious analysis of power relations. This is not to deny that environmental changes
due to global warming could in some instances exacerbate already existing economic and political divisions. However,
whether or not violent conflict and mass migrations result depends on so many other factors that it is
far too simplistic to see climate change as a major cause or trigger. Moreover, such threat scenarios
ignore the way many poorly resourced communities manage their affairs without recourse to violence.
Brown et al. (2007) cite the case of the semi-arid regions of Northern Nigeria where conflicts between pastoralists and
agricultural communities occur over water and fodder, but seldom spread because of the existence of traditional conflict
resolution institutions. They argue that helping these communities adapt to climate change should involve strengthening
such institutions. Research in the drylands of Marsabit District in Northern Kenya found that, in times of drought and
water scarcity, there was actually less violence, not more (Witsenburg and Roba, 2007). Poor herdsmen were not inclined
to start fights during droughts, and despite poverty and population growth in the region, strong but flexible common
property regimes governing water helped people adjust to its scarcity. ‘If at any time a conflict over a scarce natural
resource like water exists,’ the authors write, ‘it can be a sign that local resource users themselves have been made
powerless and that their negotiating system has been paralysed, either by external agencies or local elites’ (Witsenburg and
Roba, 2007, p. 235). A study done in northern Senegal from 1998–2002 concluded that drought-related migration led
pastoralists to develop better strategies to manage herds and also had positive repercussions on the communities where
they settled due to expansion of agriculture and trade (Juul, 2005). In fact, there is a rich body of empirical case
studies of African agriculture, pastoralism and forestry that challenges conventional neo-Malthusian
narratives about population, scarcity and conflict (e.g. Leach and Mearns, 1996; Gausset et al., 2005; Derman et
al., 2007). Yet it is hardly ever cited in the environmental conflict or climate conflict literature. A certain exceptionalism is
at work —while it is commonly assumed that scarcity can lead to institutional and technological innovation in
more affluent countries, just the opposite is assumed for poor people in less affluent countries. Scarcity
renders them into victims/villains, incapable of innovation or livelihood diversification and naturally prone
to violence. Also neglected in the climate conflict literature is scholarship that connects violent conflict in Africa more
closely to resource abundance (e.g. rich oil and mineral reserves, valuable timber and diamonds) than resource scarcity
(e.g. Fairhead, 2001). Today, critiques of ‘climate conflict’ are emerging. For example, regarding the implications of
climate change for armed conflict, Buhaug et al. (2008) note the difficulty of coming up with any generalisable model since
increased likelihood of organised violence ‘depends crucially on country-specific and contextual factors’ (p. 2). The report
concludes that alarm about climate conflict is not based on substantive evidence.
The term ‘climate refugees’ is also coming under increased scrutiny on a number of grounds. First, while climate change is
likely to cause displacement, the extent of that displacement will not only depend on how much the temperature rises and
affects sealevels, rainfall patterns and extreme weather, but also on the existence and effectiveness of adaptation measures
that help individuals and communities cope with environmental stresses. Whether or not such measures are in place in turn
depends on political economiesat the local, regional, national and international levels that are often conveniently left out of
the discussion of so-called ‘climate refugees.’ As one report points out, larger climaterelated humanitarian emergencies
may be in places ‘where people cannot afford to move, rather than the places to which they do move’ (GECHS, 2008, p.
24). Secondly, migration is too complex a process to label simply as environmental or climate-induced (Dun and
Gemenne, 2008; Morrissey, 2008, p. 28). For example, studying the impact of desertification on migration patterns in the
northeastern Ethiopian highlands, Morrissey (2008) found that people’s decisions on whether to migrate or not were
mediated by both structural and individual factors. These included the potential for livelihood diversification within rural
areas as well as whether or not one had real opportunities and connections in urban areas. In addition, the high degree to
which ethnicity has been politicised in the country limits migration options. His research shows the impossibility of
providing a grand narrative, or simplistic model, of environmentally induced migration in which farmers experiencing
adverse environmental change migrate out of those areas (and livelihoods) affected by environmental deterioration (p. 29).
Even on islands and atolls threatened by sea-level rise, decisions to migrate can entail many more factors than climate
change alone. A study of the small Pacific island nations of Kiribati and Tuvalu found that socio-economic pressures
resulting from lack of employment and development opportunities as well as other kinds of environmental changes are the
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main drivers of out-migration. The role of climate change needs to be viewed together with these processes (McAdam and
Loughry, 2009). A third area of concern is how the label ‘climate refugee,’ like ‘environmental refugee’ before it, could
further undermine the rights and protections of traditional refugees as defined by the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention
(UNHCR, 1951/1967). According to the Convention, a refugee is someone who ‘owing to a well-founded fear of being
persecuted for reasons of race, religion and nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is
outside his country of nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that
country. . .’ (UNHCR, 1951/1967). At the same time that it has become popular to apply the label refugee to any group of
forced migrants, immigration enforcement agencies, especially in Europe, have fractioned the traditional refugee category
by creating a bureaucratic hierarchy of asylum seeker eligibility in order to restrict admission (Zetter, 2007). It is against
this politicised background that one must view the evolution of the term ‘climate refugee.’ Both the U.N. High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) caution against using either
the term environmental refugee or climate refugee since they have no basis in international refugee law and could
undermine the international legal regime for the protection of refugees (UNHCR, 2008; IOM, 2009). UNHCR further
emphasises that much displacement due to climate-related factors is likely to be internal in nature, without the crossing of
international borders. A more appropriate legal regime for climate-related migration may be human rights law (McAdam
and Saul, 2008).
Given their analytical flaws and lack of supporting evidence, why have these narratives gained so
much momentum? Part of the reason lies in the ways they draw on deep-seated fears and
stereotypes of the dark-skinned, over-breeding, dangerous poor (Hartmann, 2009). For example, a June
2009 ABC prime time television documentary on climate change, Earth 2100, scared the viewers with scenes of future
apocalypse in which starving Africans take to arms against the West, desperate Mexicans storm the American border, and
half the world population dies of a new plague so that humans can get back into balance with nature again. In policy
circles, the persistence of these narratives is tied to their usefulness to a variety of interests. Critical literature
on policy narratives illustrates the importance of population ‘crisis narratives’ in justifying certain kinds of Western
development interventions — particularly the spread of commercial agriculture and forestry at the
expense of peasant livelihoods —in Africa and elsewhere (Roe, 1995). A similar phenomenon is witnessed for
climate narratives. For example, a 2008 report titled A Climate of Conflict argued that climate change would likely
compound the propensity for violent conflict in 46 poor countries and political instability in another 56 (Smith and
Vivekananda, 2008). Much of the authors’ analysis is based on old assumptions about the relationship between
environmental scarcity and violence. They propose a solution in which international agencies invest in sustainable
development, climate change adaptation measures and peace-building activities. There is also a role for multinational
corporations. In this win- win world, the rich help the poor, and are largely absolved of responsibility for
resource degradation and extraction, as well as political violence. It is as if the scramble for oil, minerals and land
in Africa is of little consequence.
However, it is also important to note that climate refugee and conflict narratives are sometimes deployed strategically by
actors demanding that Western states take seriously their obligations to curb carbon emissions and provide adaptation
assistance to affected communities. For example, in May 2009, twelve Pacific Island states brought a resolution to the UN
General Assembly linking climate change to political instability in an attempt to get the Security Council to address their
plight (MacFarquar, 2009). But even the best of intentions cannot obscure that we do not live in a win-win world, and that
spinning climate change as a security threat is likely to undermine, rather than strengthen, serious efforts to
link climate change mitigation and adaptation to development efforts that reduce poverty and promote
equity. Playing with fear is like playing with fire. You cannot be sure exactly where it will spread. In the current moment,
crisis narratives about climate refugees and conflict serve the interests of national security actors. The
next section looks at the United States as a case study of how these narratives threaten to blur the line between
development and military assistance, especially in Africa
Clean Energy Link
Only abandoning capitalism can solve the environment – Even a total and immediate switch to clean
energy would only accelerate numerous trends towards ecological collapse and extinction.
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Smith (an economic historian. He wrote his UCLA history Ph.D. thesis on the transition to capitalism in China and held post-docs at
the East-West Center in Honolulu and Rutgers University) 14
(Richard, Green Capitalism: The God That Failed, Thursday, 09 January 2014, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21060)
Stern asserted that "the world does not have to choose between averting climate change and promoting growth and
development."(40) But if the science is right that we need to keep emissions below 400 ppm, or even get them back below
350 ppm, then more growth is out of the question. Indeed, we would have to make radically deeper cuts in GDP than even
the 7 percent reduction per year that Stern calculates would be necessary just to get us down to 450 ppm. Because, under
capitalism, a contraction of economic output on anything like that scale would mean economic collapse and depression, it
is difficult to see how we can make the reductions in greenhouse gases we have to make to avoid
climate catastrophe unless we abandon capitalism. This is the dilemma. So far most scientists have tended to
avoid getting into the contentious economic side of the question. But with respect to the issue of growth, the science is
unequivocal: Never-ending growth means the end of civilization, if not humanity itself - and in the not-so-distant future.
For a summary of the peer-reviewed science on this subject, read a few chapters of Mark Lynas' harrowing Six
Degrees.(41)
Global warming is surely the most urgent threat we face, but it is far from the only driver of global ecological
collapse. For even if we switched to clean renewable electric power tomorrow, this would not stop the
overconsumption of forests, fish, minerals, fresh water. It would not stop pollution or solve the garbage
crisis or stop the changes in ocean chemistry. Indeed, the advent of cheap, clean energy could even
accelerate these trends.(42) Numerous credible scientific and environmental researchers back up what the climate
scientists have been telling us, to demonstrate why perpetual growth is the road to collective social suicide. For example:
In 2005 the United Nations Millennium Ecosystem Assessment team of 1,300 scientists from 95 countries issued a
landmark report on humanity's overconsumption of "nature's services." The scientists reported that 60 percent (15 of 24) of
the ecosystems examined that are critical for human survival are being "degraded or used unsustainably,"
including fresh water, capture fisheries, coral reefs, wetlands, drylands and forests. Around the world, many of these are
deteriorating or on the verge of collapse. Thus nature's ability to provide the resources for growing future populations
is very much in doubt unless radical steps are taken soon.
Competitiveness Link – 1NC
The ideology of economic competitiveness makes environmental and economic collapse inevitable
Bristow (School of City & Regional Planning, Cardiff University) 10
(Gillian, Resilient regions: re-‘place’ing regional competitiveness, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 2010, 3,
153–167)
In recent years, regional development strategies have been subjugated to the hegemonic discourse of competitiveness, such
that the ultimate objective for all regional development policy-makers and practitioners has become the creation of
economic advantage through superior productivity performance, or the attraction of new firms and labour (Bristow, 2005).
A major consequence is the developing ‘ubiquitification’ of regional development strategies (Bristow, 2005; Maskell and
Malmberg, 1999). This reflects the status of competitiveness as a key discursive construct (Jessop, 2008) that has acquired
hugely significant rhetorical power for certain interests intent on reinforcing capitalist relations (Bristow, 2005; Fougner,
2006). Indeed, the competitiveness hegemony is such that many policies previously considered only
indirectly relevant to unfettered economic growth tend to be hijacked in support of competitiveness
agendas (for example Raco, 2008; also Dannestam, 2008). This paper will argue, however, that a particularly narrow
discourse of ‘competitiveness’ has been constructed that has a number of negative connotations for the
‘resilience’ of regions. Resilience is defined as the region’s ability to experience positive economic success that
is socially inclusive, works within environmental limits and which can ride global economic punches
(Ashby et al., 2009). As such, resilience clearly resonates with literatures on sustainability, localisation and diversification,
and the developing understanding of regions as intrinsically diverse entities with evolutionary and context-specific
development trajectories (Hayter, 2004). In contrast, the dominant discourse of competitiveness is ‘placeless’
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and increasingly associated with globalised, growth-first and environmentally malign agendas (Hudson,
2005). However, this paper will argue that the relationships between competitiveness and resilience are more complex than
might at first appear. Using insights from the Cultural Political Economy (CPE) approach, which focuses on understanding
the construction, development and spread of hegemonic policy discourses, the paper will argue that the dominant discourse
of competitiveness used in regional development policy is narrowly constructed and is thus insensitive to contingencies of
place and the more nuanced role of competition within economies. This leads to problems of resilience that can be partly
overcome with the development of a more contextualised approach to competitiveness. The paper is now structured as
follows. It begins by examining the developing understanding of resilience in the theorising and policy discourse around
regional development. It then describes the CPE approach and utilises its framework to explain both how a narrow
conception of competitiveness has come to dominate regional development policy and how resilience inter-plays in subtle
and complex ways with competitiveness and its emerging critique. The paper then proceeds to illustrate what resilience
means for regional development firstly, with reference to the Transition Towns concept, and then by developing a typology
of regional strategies to show the different characteristics of policy approaches based on competitiveness and resilience.
Regional resilience Resilience is rapidly emerging as an idea whose time has come in policy discourses around localities
and regions, where it is developing widespread appeal owing to the peculiarly powerful combination of transformative
pressures from below, and various catalytic, crisis-induced imperatives for change from above. It features strongly in policy
discourses around environmental management and sustainable development (see Hudson, 2008a), but has also more
recently emerged in relation to emergency and disaster planning with, for example ‘Regional Resilience Teams’ established
in the English regions to support and co-ordinate civil protection activities around various emergency situations such as the
threat of a swine flu pandemic. The discourse of resilience is also taking hold in discussions around desirable local and
regional development activities and strategies. The recent global ‘credit crunch’ and the accompanying in-crease in
livelihood insecurity has highlighted the advantages of those local and regional economies that have greater ‘resilience’ by
virtue of being less dependent upon globally footloose activities, hav-ing greater economic diversity, and/or having a determination to prioritise and effect more significant structural change (Ashby et al, 2009; Larkin and Cooper, 2009). Indeed,
resilience features particular strongly in the ‘grey’ literature spawned by thinktanks, consul-tancies and
environmental interest groups around the consequences of the global recession, catastrophic climate change
and the arrival of the era of peak oil for localities and regions with all its implications for the longevity
of carbon-fuelled economies, cheap, long-distance transport and global trade. This popularly labelled ‘triple
crunch’ (New Economics Foundation, 2008) has power-fully illuminated the potentially disastrous material
consequences of the voracious growth imperative at the heart of neoliberalism and competitiveness, both
in the form of resource constraints (especially food security) and in the inability of the current system
to manage global financial and ecological sustainability. In so doing, it appears to be galvinising previously
disparate, fractured debates about the merits of the current system, and challenging public and political opinion to develop a
new, global concern with frugality, egalitarianism and localism (see, for example Jackson, 2009; New Economics
Foundation, 2008).
And the quest for economic competitiveness makes fascism and war inevitable
Kienle (Lecturer in Middle East Politics at University of London and Chair of its Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies) 10
(Eberhard, Global competitiveness, the erosion of checks and balances, and the demise of liberal democracy, 10 May,
http://www.opendemocracy.net/global-competitiveness-erosion-of-checks-and-balances-and-demise-of-liberal-democracy)
Ultimately, therefore, the
search for competitiveness challenges liberal democracy in two analytically separate ways that in
practice of course may reinforce each other. First, as a totalitarian principle that subjugates all other values and by
definition erodes a variety of liberties and the checks and balances that are co-terminus with liberal
democracy; second, as a principle that, whilst it holds the promise for a better life, simultaneously threatens the
prosperity and survival of the weaker competitors; it fuels ideologies and practices that are authoritarian
and even totalitarian in the classical sense. As a matter of course, these practices and ideologies are no less hostile to checks and balances.
Numerous authoritarian regimes around the world, today and in the past, have been the result of attempts
to catch up and compete with economically more successful states. Nineteenth century Prussia, the
bureaucratic authoritarian regimes in mid Twentieth century Latin America and more recently Iraq under
Saddam Hussein are telling examples, even though they differ widely as far as restrictions to liberties are concerned. The European fascisms
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of the 1920s, 30s and 40s were partly moved by the same perception of comparative weakness, though combined with and transformed into extreme projects of
domination, subjugation and annihilation.
Our alternative is to reject the Aff’s endorcement of economic competition
Rejecting competition is an act of economic imagination that can create real alternatives within the
existing economy
White and Williams (senior lecturer of economic geography at Sheffield Hallam University; professor of public policy in the
Management School at the University of Sheffield) 12
(Richard J. and Cohn C., Escaping Capitalist Hegemony: Rereading Western Economies in The Accumulation of Freedom, pg. 13132)
The American anarchist Howard Ehrlich argued, " We must act as if the future is today." What we have hoped to
demonstrate here is that non-capitalist spaces are present and evident in contemporary societies. We do not need to
imagine and create from scratch new economic alternatives that will successfully confront the capitalist
hegemony thesis, or more properly the capitalist hegemony myth. Rather than capitalism being the all powerful, all
conquering, economic juggernaut, the greater truth is that the "other" non-capitalist spaces have grown in proportion
relative in size to the capitalism realm.
This should give many of us great comfort and hope in moving forward purposefully for, as Chomsky observed:
"[a]lternatives have to be constructed within the existing economy, and within the minds of working
people and communities."' In this regard, the roots of the heterodox economic futures that we desire do exist in the
present. Far from shutting down future economic possibilities, a more accurate reading of "the
economic" (which decenters capitalism), coupled with the global crisis that capitalism finds itself in, should give us
additional courage and resolve to unleash our economic imaginations, embrace the challenge of
creating "fully engaged" economies. These must also take greater account of the disastrous social and environmental
costs of capitalism and its inherent ethic of competition. As Kropotkin wrote:
Don't compete!-competition is always injurious to the species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid it!
Therefore combine-practice mutual aid! That is the surest means for giving to each and all to the greatest safety, the
best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectual, and moral .... That is what Nature teaches us;
and that is what all those animals which have attained the highest position in the respective classes have done. That is also
what man [ski-the most primitive man-has been doing; and that is why man has reached the position upon which we stand
now."
A more detailed and considered discussion of the futures of work, however, is beyond the scope of this chapter. What we
have hoped to demonstrate is that in reimagining the economic, and recognizing and valuing the non-capitalist economic
practices that are already here, we might spark renewed enthusiasm, optimism, insight, and critical discussion within and
among anarchist communities. The ambition here is similar to that of Gibson-Graham, in arguing that:
The objective is not to produce a finished and coherent template that maps the economy "as it really is"
and presents... a ready made "alternative economy." Rather, our hope is to disarm and dislocate the naturalized
dominance of the capitalist economy and make a space for new economic beeomings-ones that we will
need to work to produce. If we can recognize a diverse economy, we can begin to imagine and create
diverse organizations and practices as powerful constituents of an enlivened noncapitalist policies of
place.
Competitiveness Link – Economy 2NC
Competitiveness discourse makes the economy unsustainable – ignores local markets and income
inequality
Bristow (School of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University) 5
(Gillian, Everyone’s a ‘winner’: problematising the discourse of regional competitiveness, Journal of Economic Geography 5 (2005)
pp. 285–304)
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Taking a broader perspective on regional development processes again highlights the limits of policy approaches predicated
upon the dominant regional competitiveness discourse. Adopting the relational perspective would imply that the problems
of less prosperous or weaker regions may be explained by their relationships with prosperous, core regions rather than
simply reflecting deficiencies in the performance of their firms or the environments within which they operate. However,
the competitiveness discourse eschews consideration of the relations between regions, focusing only
on the imperative of building capacity within regions. The responsibility for developing competitive firms and
prosperous regions is thus placed firmly with institutional actors and communities within regions, who are therefore also
seen as culpable where competitive performance is seen to have slipped. Competitiveness league tables are
inevitably seductive for regional development agencies and the media keen to absorb ‘quick and dirty’
comparative measures of regional economic performance. However, they clearly carry the inherent danger of
stigmatising lagging regions as failing because of their own deficiencies, when the problems may lie in part in broader
structures. The policy consequences are also clear. The result is an overarching focus on building institutional structures
such as RDAs, to the neglect of a more active interregional policy that might aim to both redistribute resources between
regions and control growth in the core with equal if not greater impact (see Cumbers et al., 2003). The dominant
discourse also leads to an emphasis upon a relatively narrow route to regional prosperity, ignoring the
potential for growth and development to be achieved through more diverse avenues. The regional
competitiveness discourse ignores the possibility that regional prosperity might be achieved by, for
example, the development of firms serving local and national markets and not just international ones, or
by the development of community or social enterprises which meet broader social and environ- mental
as well as economic objectives. As a consequence, policies tend to prioritise rather narrow, private-sector orientated
agendas at the expense of broader regeneration initiatives, a criticism recently levelled at the English RDAs (Niven, 2004).
Indeed, the discourse on regional competitiveness fails to address the question of sustainability or the
possibility that the outcomes of relying on a strategy based upon internationally competitive firms may not necessarily be
desirable. The modern socioeconomic system has to achieve not only a sustainable balance of payments
or absolute level of income performance, but also a number of other basic social objectives, notably
some degree of income redistribution and at least a basic level of health care (Llewellyn, 1996). If these
are not met, then over the longer term the situation would almost certainly not be sustainable. If the aim
is to increase average earnings in the long- term, for example, it is only logical that improving competitiveness should
involve alleviating poverty—persistent poverty will ‘hold back’ efforts to enhance competitiveness (Hirmis, 2002). The
current discourse of regional competitiveness does not, however, exhibit any concern with the
structure, beneficiaries and durability of improved firm competitiveness.
Competition state framework makes the global economy unsustainable – debt for growth. Solving
inequality is key to any economic recovery
Palan (Professor of International Political Economy at the University of Birmingham) ‘98
(Ronen, Luring Buffaloes and the Game of Industrial Subsidies: A Critique of National Competitive Policies in the Era of the
Competition State, Global Society: Journal of Interdisciplinary International Relations, Sep98, Vol. 12, Issue 3)
It appears to me that there are strong grounds to believe that the growing gap between the rich and
poor within each and every country is linked directly to the structure of the global economy in the era
of the "competition state". However, since growing polarisation comes into conflict with some of the
central aims of the competition state by negatively affecting social and political stability which is so
essential in the current beauty contests between states, it adds an additional component to the rising
costs of the competition state, exacerbating further its internal contradictions. Competition State and Debt
Regressive taxation and growing polarisation affects negatively the vast majority of the population's income. This raises a
serious question: where is the demand for goods and services supposed to come from? Or, to be more exact,
where is the demand for wage goods going to come from?[84] And if there is indeed a crisis or at least fundamental change
in the nature of demand in the OECD core, then what role does the "competition state" have to play in it? The changing
nature of consumer demand in OECD countries, particularly in light of the slow rate of recovery in consumer confidence in
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the 1990s, is beginning to be discussed in earnest.[85] The argument is familiar that Keynesian fine-tuning policies were
about the synchronisation of wage and productivity rises so that global demand kept up with increasing production.[86]
Lipietz argues that neoliberalism has failed to provide a new mode of regulation and synchronisation of global demand and
supply. Without risking an inquiry into the complex and intricate question of the nature of demand in a globalised
economy, I would simply like to take note of a well-known argument among financial experts, namely that the last three
decades were a period characterised by the progressive loosening of credit controls, on the one hand, complemented (not
surprisingly) by rising debt, individual, corporate and global, on the other. Although one should continue treating debt on a
case-by-case basis, the overall problem of indebtedness cannot be dissociated from the broader tendencies
of the competition state era. Growing individual, national and corporate debt has kept consumption higher than it
would have been otherwise. The "debt for growth" syndrome, experienced during the 1980s in the USA, the
UK and later on in Japan contributed to the rising perception of risk and volatility in the financial
markets which is believed to be the principal cause of the 1989-1994 world recession. Conclusion This
paper does not purport to be a policy proposal and should not be read as an argument for or against national industrial
policies and/or state intervention. The central message of this paper is that there is a marked difference between the
dynamics of economic growth in an integrated global market and the dynamics of economic growth of a market politically
divided among nationstates. This may appear self-evident. Unfortunately, current debates are caught up between two
equally unhelpful and extreme positions. On the one hand, the pro-globalisation literature on the whole tends to ignore the
central significance of the state. On the other hand, there is a resurgence of state-centric literature which maintains that
globalisation is, by and large, a myth. As a consequence, the study of the dynamics of globalisation within the framework
of a politically divided world, which is a more realistic assumption, is, by and large, neglected. At the same time, the debate
over national industrial policy and the role of the state in the field of economic development shows little inclination to
include the competitive inter-state dynamics into its models. Consequently, it is often assumed that competitive industrial
policy can simply be replicated from one state to another without much difficulty. The underlying problem is that there is a
contradiction between two capacities of the state: from the early 1930s onward, the state has taken upon itself the
role of providing a stable juridical, political, social and increasingly economic environment for
accumulation. To do so it had turned, in effect, into a gigantic redistributive mechanism. But as the state grew it also
turned into a powerful economic actor in its own right. The problem is that the state as an economic actor
competes over resources with the businesses which, in its other capacity as provider of stable economic
and social environment, it is supposed to support. In shouldering the social costs of production with an ageing
population inevitably puts greater demand on the state which translate, in one form or another, into higher taxation and
hence lower corporate profit. But if the state seeks to limit its direct economic impact and "roll back the
frontiers of the state", then the environment of accumulation is eventually damaged. There is no
obvious route out of this quandary except one: increase the level of exports so that government
revenues draw on a larger pie and hence tax does not have to rise to such a proportion. This is the solution
that Japan and other export-led economies were able to pursue until very recently. Whether this option is still open is a
matter of debate which cannot be discussed here. Another radical solution which is seriously debated suggests
an abandonment of the universal commitment for health and education. For all intents and purposes, between
10 and 20% of the population of many of the OECD countries are now being neglected and may even be abandoned to their
fate. But this strategy renders the "quality of life" of the other 80% hideous and raises the problem of social exclusion
which the EU and the USA in different ways are, not surprisingly, concerned with. The second and related contradiction
stems from the inability of the state, in practice, to withdraw gently from the economy. The enormous centralising powers
of the state inevitably draw interest groups' attentions. Coupled with the need of politicians to get elected, and to be seen to
be doing something for their constituencies, a powerful cocktail of social interests ensures that the redistributive mechanism
of the state will remain engaged in the pursuit of better economic performances. Whatever theory or ideology may
prescribe, on the ground, so to speak, governments ceaselessly seek a role and inevitably employ their fiscal and economic
powers. They emulate each other, they adopt each others "models" and they innovate. The state remains, however, fully
engaged in the economy. The error of the national industrial policy debate is that this aspect of competition between states
is not taken into account. In more recent policy studies the lessons are beginning to be learned, and the calls on resources
are far more modest. However, as the escalating levels of sweeteners and so on demonstrate, even prudent
policy proposals are likely in practice to escalate into an unhelpful competitive game. This paper has
pointed out these central contradictions, but also sought to demonstrate that these are already with us ; that there is a
complex line of causality linking the contradictory policy of the "competition states" with the "debt for
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growth" syndrome experienced in the 1980s, which in itself is not unrelated to the growing income
polarity experienced within the competitive states. The implication of this argument is that income
distribution must be placed at the heart of any attempt at economic recovery. The problem, however, is that
redistribution might erode the competitive position and surely stimulate capital flight. The only alternative open to OECD
states is to adopt the tenets of financial orthodoxy, which contributed to the crisis in the first place. Ultimately, the
underlying problem is that the very vision of a transnational world economy sustained by a responsible "system of states" is
untenable. This vision of so-called "embedded liberalism"[87] enshrined in the Bretton Woods
institutions and other multilateral agreements was to begin with an unsatisfactory compromise, on the
one hand, asserting the primacy of domestic economic policy and, at the same time, demanding
responsibility of each nation to the community of nations. Such a vision was inherently contradictory.
Competitiveness Link – Warming
Competitiveness is a bad frame for global warming - locks in economic nationalism, structural violence
and prevents cooperative solutions to problems
Roos (Fellow (Climate & Energy Policy) at The Breakthrough Institute; M.A. International Affairs from Sciences Po Paris and an
MSc International Political Economy from the London School of Economics) 10
(Jerome, The Specter of Economic Nationalism, June 10,
http://breakthroughgen.org/blog/2010/06/the_specter_of_economic_nation.shtml)
Many self-proclaimed experts in the U.S., ranging from Fareed Zakaria to Thomas Friedman, have taken to couching their
advocacy for a clean-energy economy in terms of innovation, growth and competitiveness. Playing into the self-deprecating
sense of doom that has pervaded American society in the face of Asia's recent challenge to U.S. economic hegemony, such
a narrative is likely to register much more powerfully with an increasingly cynical electorate than the environmentalist
'politics of limits'. What most commentators fail to appreciate, however, is that this renewed focus on growth and
competitiveness is not only misleading the American public, it also poses a profound threat to the world
economy and the billions of people who are still struggling to make their way out of poverty. The specter
of economic nationalism looms large behind the desperate attempt to reframe the climate crisis in terms
of innovation and competiveness. Late last year, Fareed Zakaria compared America's global reputation to "a star that
still looks bright in the farthest reaches of the universe but has burned out at the core." Businessweek reported an American
CEO as saying that "the rest of the world is chewing us alive," in conclusion to which it argued that the 'might' of the U.S.
manufacturing sector has eroded to that of a developing country. Thomas Friedman, in the meantime, is wondering who is
asleep now, and has begun publicly fantasizing what the U.S. might look like if it could be China for a day. Across the
board, the obsession with the Asian rise to power, and in particular the Chinese challenge to U.S. hegemony (which at times
borders on sinophobic tendencies), has gone hand-in-hand with loss of self-esteem and a pervasive sense that everything in
the U.S. is going downhill. The conclusion of most Americans is straightforward: "we're not good enough." The solution of
most self-proclaimed experts is just as simple: "we need to become better at stuff." This view is not only very selfdeprecating - it is utterly misleading as well. America today finds itself in the middle of possibly the most significant
economic transformation in its young history: the transition to a clean-energy, post-industrial economy. To judge the
solidity of that economy on the basis of outdated concepts like manufacturing productivity entirely
misses the point. With the advent of the knowledge economy and the network society, the very nature of wealth creation
was radically altered. The future well-being of U.S. citizens no longer hinges on technological advances alone. Human and
social capital, rather than the physical capital that underpinned the Fordist assembly lines, have become the crucial
determinants of post-industrial wealth creation. Hence, the key investments of the future will be in education, not in
manufacturing. Surely we need an unfathomable amount of solar panels, wind mills and electric vehicles to
bridge the transition to a sustainable economy and avert the worst effects of climate change. There is a very powerful
argument to be made for epic government investment in these sectors, particularly on the level of infrastructure (think smart
super grids and plug-in recharge depots, for example). But why does the U.S. necessarily have to engage in a
fierce competitive struggle to gain dominance over these sectors, if it might as well let others develop
those technologies at cheaper cost? Although the U.S. may have fallen behind in terms of producing the physical
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solar panels, windmills and hybrid vehicles, it is still light years ahead of China in terms of personal freedoms and human
well-being, as well as ecological concern. Since the ultimate end of our political and economic system should be to
improve human well-being, and growth is only a means towards achieving this end, what does it matter
if we grow a bit less rapidly relative to developing countries and our own growth record of the past six decades,
as long as our levels of well-being remain relatively stable over time? In other words, what does it matter if China produces
the solar panels? For the climate, it only matters that we actually start buying them. For the U.S. economy, it matters that
the government invest in human and social capital through education, as well as in the infrastructure necessary to spearhead
the green economy. Would it not be a much more logical division of labor if we found a balance between Asia doing most
of the manufacturing, and the West continuing to expand on its knowledge economy? There are two groups of people who
would strongly disagree here. First of all, the wealthy industrialists who failed to adapt to changing markets - most notably
the American car industry - will find their factories either outsourced to foreign countries or taken over by foreign firms, so
they have a great stake in a public project to revamp America's flailing manufacturing sector. Secondly, the workers in
those factories who are laid off over time and find themselves unable to find a new job in a different sector also have a
strong interest in promoting the idea of 'green collar jobs'. Now what pundits like Zakaria and Friedman are doing, is
forging an unholy alliance with these failed industrialists and laid-off workers, in order to come to a
corporatist, neo-mercantilist compromise that would see the creation of a heavily government-subsidized
U.S. manufacturing sector stealing jobs back from China and other countries in the developing world. This has
nothing to do with progressive climate politics. It is economic nationalism. Unlike the doomsday theories of
those who like to equate China's rise with America's inevitable downfall, the truth is that there is still more than enough
money to go round in the United States, and this is unlikely to change anytime soon. American annual GDP per capita sits
at $46,400, compared to China's $6,600 (adjusted for purchasing power parity). Yet we somehow have the conceit to
challenge this poor country's rise to modernity as a fundamental threat to our 'innovative edge'? Worldwide, billions of
people are knockin' on modernity's door, and all we can think of is how to use massive public investments in green-tech to
slam the door shut just when they are about to come in? Rather than staging a new global competition with
Chinese workers for long-lost manufacturing jobs, Americans would do well to stage a competition
with their own elites in demanding a healthier sense of redistributive justice and more investment in
public education. This way, workers who lose their jobs due to outsourcing fall into a social safety net rather than into
abject poverty, and they can be directly retrained to take up positions in more economically relevant sectors. A more
expansive social system that shifts money from the American aristocracy to the American people seems a lot fairer
than a form of economic nationalism that shifts jobs from poor Asians to relatively rich Americans. It also seems to be
the only way to create the much needed economic breathing space for our brothers and sisters in the developing world to
catch up, while simultaneously allowing us to solve the climate crisis in the most cost effective way.
Competitiveness Link – Environment
Competitiveness ensures environmental collapse- renders costs environmental externalities to growth and
economic gain
Bristow ‘10
(School of City & Regional Planning, Cardiff University)
(Gillian, Resilient regions: re-‘place’ing regional competitiveness, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 2010, 3, 153–167)
The placelessness of the competitiveness discourse also has other significant implications—implications which directly
threaten the resilience of regions. The discourse of de-contextualised competitiveness fails to address the
question of sustainability or the environmental costs of globally mobile firms and resources (Bristow and
Wells, 2005; Hudson, 2008a). In fact, the pursuit of this notion of competitiveness works to constrain the
possibility of developing more positive policies in relation to the environment. As Purcell (2009, 145)
observes, ‘‘a polity that values the environment, for example, might feel it cannot make a strong
environmental policy (e.g. signing on to Kyoto) because it would make the area less competitive. The neoliberal claim is that competition is a question of life and death’’. Regions feel they must be competitive or die. Strategies
based on more sustainable development approaches then look very optional in the face of the competitive and global
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struggle for survival. This reflects the economically reductionist conception of development that lies at the
heart of the competitiveness discourse. The discourse focuses on the narrowly microeconomic and emphasises the
efficiency of individual firms. It also views the production process in a linear fashion whereby ‘end of pipe’
wastes are ultimately to be disposed of as ‘externalities’ (Hudson, 2005). Similarly, the discourse defines the
‘environment’ in terms of the microeconomic business environment, thus ignoring the broader
ecological and material limits and capacities of a region. This creates short-termist, growth-first approaches
to development creating scenarios whereby a region becomes competitive today by depleting and
denuding its physical environment, thereby limiting its competitiveness for tomorrow (Bristow and Wells,
2005).
Econ Crisis Link
Attempting to resolve short term economic crisis papers over massive ongoing structural violence of
capitalism
Shannon and Volcano (editor of the Routledge journal Contemporary Anarchist Studies; member of the Workers Solidarity
Alliance and Queers without Borders) 12
(Deric and Abby, Capitalism in the 2000s in The Accumulation of Freedom, pg. 87-88)
As Asimakopoulos explains in this collection, capitalism is prone to periodic "crises." This isn't necessarily a new
insight-a. system based on capital investments creates "bubbles" in expanding industries (i.e., housing, the "dot corn boom,"
etc.) that cannot last, but that investors want to make a quick buck off (or a few million, for that matter). When these
bubbles "burst" (when they are no longer profitable), investors stop raking in profits and this can lead to economic
downturns-to recessions or, in the case of the current crisis, depressions.
But what do we mean with this discourse of"crisis?" A quick look at the ultra-rich doesn't show a drastic reduction in
comfort and lifestyle. And while unemployment, poverty; precarity, and privation are affecting larger sections of the
world's population, those problems are business as usual for a significant portion of the world. And yet we declare
capitalism in "crisis" now, For children working in sweatshops, for entire countries struggling with
food insecurity and hunger, for continents grappling with an AIDS crisis that disproportionately affects
our most marginalized populations, for trafficked women and children, for queer youth struggling to
obtain basic resources and kicked out of their homes by fundamentalist parents, for those people living
with the legacy of colonization and slavery-for the majority of the world's inhabitants capitalism IS
the crisis. But the discourse of "crisis" isn't employed until it starts hurting the collective bottom line of the wealthy.
'This, in and of itself, can be used as an opportunity to discuss the need for socialist alternatives. And the truth is that
capitalism requires these "crises" to function. People talk about events like the 1987 stock market crash, the
Asian financial crisis of 1997, and the dot-corn and housing bubbles and bursts as though they are anomalies. These things
are regular features of capitalism. And those not at the top tiers of our global class system (about 95 percent of the world)
are experiencing crisis every single day-a constant crisis of sorts. So the discourse surrounding crises themselves
seem to uphold that capitalism is more or less functioning the rest of the time. More and more people are
coming to the realization that this is not the case-and we need to be pressing this point as we battle against austerity. If we
want to avoid "austerity," we need to smash capitalism to pieces. No amount of good-hearted reform or
Keynesian policy is going to substantively address the social crisis that is capitalism.
Environmental Refugees Link
The “environmental refugee” thesis is wrong, racist, obscures the causes to environmental destruction
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and is seized by the right for xenophobic crackdowns
Hartmann (Director, Population and Development Program, Associate Professor, Development Studies, Hampshire College) 10
(Betsy, POLICY ARENA RETHINKING CLIMATE REFUGEES AND CLIMATE CONFLICT: RHETORIC, REALITY AND THE
POLITICS OF POLICY DISCOURSE, Journal of International Development, J. Int. Dev. 22, 233–246)
For those familiar with the environmental security field, particularly neo-Malthusian models of environmental conflict
developed in the 1980s and 1990s, climate refugee and conflict narratives seem very much like old wine in a new bottle.
The vintage goes back even further, however, to a powerful policy narrative that I call the ‘degradation narrative’
(Hartmann and Hendrixson, 2005; Hartmann, 2006). Drawing on old colonial stereotypes of destructive Third
World peasants and herders, degradation narratives go something like this: population-pressure
induced poverty makes Third World peasants degrade their environments by over-farming or overgrazing marginal lands. The ensuing soil depletion and desertification then lead them to migrate
elsewhere as ‘environmental refugees’, either to other ecologically vulnerable rural areas where the vicious cycle is
once again set in motion or to cities where they strain scarce resources and become a primary source of political
instability. Despite salient critiques by international development scholars and practitioners (for example, Boserup, 1965;
Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987; Williams, 1995; Leach and Mearns, 1996; Thompson, 2000), the degradation narrative
has proved particularly popular in Western policy circles because it kills a number of birds with one stone: it blames
poverty on population pressure, and not, for example, on lack of land reform or off-farm employment opportunities; it
blames peasants for land degradation, obscuring the role of commercial agriculture and extractive
industries and it targets migration both as an environmental and security threat. With the waning of the Cold War, growing
interest in sustainable development and alternative visions of security increased the authority of the degradation narrative.
In particular, concern began to mount about the dangers posed by so-called ‘environmental refugees’. Central to the
concept is the assumption that population pressure is one of the main precipitating causes of environmental degradation
and resulting migration (Saunders, 2000). Myers (1995) further popularised and legitimised the concept of environmental
refugees offering a working definition: Environmental refugees are persons who can no longer gain a secure livelihood in
their traditional homelands because of environmental factors of unusual scope, notably drought, desertification,
deforestation, soil erosion, water shortages and climate change [my emphasis], also natural disaster such as cyclones, storm
surges and floods. In face of these environmental threats, people feel they have no alternative but to seek sustenance
elsewhere, whether within their own countries or beyond and whether on a semi-permanent or permanent basis. (Myers,
1995, pp. 18–19) In many cases, Myers wrote, environmental refugees are actually ‘population pressure’ refugees (p. 63).
The report made the statistical claim that there were at least 25 million environmental refugees in the world, compared with
22 million refugees of ‘traditional kind’ (p. 1). Despite the fact that the 25 million figure was arrived at more by conjecture
than scientific method,1 it began to circulate widely in the international policy arena (Saunders, 2000; Nordas and
Gleditsch, 2007). Now Myers claims there will be 200 million climate migrants by 2050, a figure which is similarly
making the rounds in policy documents even though Myers himself acknowledges that the estimate is based on ‘heroic
extrapolations’ (Brown, 2008, p. 8). In addition to unreliable statistics, the ‘environmental refugee’ concept has a
number of shortcomings. It naturalises the economic and political causes of environmental
degradation and masks the role of institutional responses to it. Should people forced to leave their
homelands because of the development of a large dam, mine tailings, petroleum pollution or flooding caused by illegal
logging all be categorised together as ‘enviro- nmental refugees’? In the case of extreme natural events such as droughts,
storms and floods, whether or not people are forced to migrate permanently from their homes usually depends on preexisting social relations (who is most vulnerable) and post-disaster responses (what kind of aid/relief is provided and who
receives it). (Wisner et al., 2004). Rooted as it is in neo-Malthusian thinking, the concept of ‘environmental refugee’
overemphasises the role of demographic pressures in migration. The causes of migration are extremely complex and
context-specific, and moreover, there is little evidence to support the view that demographic pressure is at the root of many
population movements (Suhrke, 1997). In addition, negative neo-Malthusian narratives of migration obscure the
positive roles migration can play in improving people’s livelihoods and diminishing vulnerability to
environmental change. Often, migration from rural areas is not a linear phenomenon or a rejection of rural livelihoods,
but is instead a vital part of sustaining them (Black, 1998). Despite such shortcomings, the environmental refugee concept
was deployed by a variety of political actors. Sustainable development advocates found it useful to focus policy attention
on environmental degradation issues (Black, 1998) and it also appealed to Western interests in favour of more
rigid immigration controls, including limiting the grounds for political asylum. Kibreab argues that the
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term was invented in part to ‘depoliticise the causes of displacement’ so that states would not have the
obligation to provide asylum (Kibreab, 1997, p. 21, cited in Saunders, 2000, p. 240). As the concept gained favour,
environmental refugees were increasingly portrayed as a security threat, even though there was little
serious research to substantiate the claim (Black, 1998).
Green Economy Link
The green economy guarantees environmental destruction
Via Campesinos 12
(Nyeleni Newsletter, Number 10, June 2012, nyeleni.org)
This June in Rio de Janeiro the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Develop- ment Rio+20 will be held, marking two decades since the Earth
Summit. The “green”
economy will be the main theme of discussion and debates at the Rio+20 summit, this concept represents a way
of transforming the environmental crisis into a tool for capital accumulation – considering that in current times the
capitalist system regards markets as the primary medium for responding to the global environmental crisis, and the green economy marks an
attempt to make this system appear “sustainable”. The current edi- tion of the Nyéléni Newsletter opens and invites discussion on
the green economy, add- ing various elements to the debate and providing alternatives. What is certainly clear is that international capital is organizing to
appropriate territories, to transform nature into another form of merchandise, all the while increasing exploitation and privatization. The “green”
economy elevates the principles of commerce and profit above any form of social consideration, above even the reproduction of life itself. Our challenge
is to continue building on our mobilization capacities in our territories, based on solidarity, internationalism and the integration of peoples to convert
our struggles in realities. In response to the worrying evidence of an ecological crisis, in 1983 the United Nations established the World Commission on
Environment and Development to investigate the connection between the depletion of the environment and development. In 1987 the Commission
published a report called Our Common Future1, better known as the Brundtland Report. The new concept of Sustainable Development was launched (Box
3) and became the basis of the negotiations at the Earth Summit in 19922. Governments at the Earth Summit agreed to establish a number of multilateral
struc- tures- including the UNFCCC (Global Climate negotiations), the CBD (the Convention on Biological Diversity) and others.
All of these
instruments have failed in the last twenty years to address the Earth’s ecological crises. Even worse, the
world now faces unprecedented inancial, food, energy and environmental threats caused by the
development model of a capitalist system based on in infinite growth which Rio in 1992 failed to question. Despite this,
the agenda for Rio +20 is quite clear – govern- ments and transnational corporations (TNCs) are promoting a new framework to take advantage of the
crisis and promote new ways of making pro it. They are calling it the “green” economy. It may have an appealing name but in reality the green economy
is an attack to the commons, on peoples’ rights and on nature itself. The Green Economy includes a wide range of proposals3 that can be summarized in
two trends. On one hand, it pro- motes the development of a ‘post-fossil fuel’ bio-economy based on the exploitation of biomass (forests, soils, plants and
microbes – de inition box 1). The biomass will be used both as fuel and as raw material from which to manufacture a wide range of prod- ucts, including
plastics, chemicals and pharmaceuticals – through the employment of hazardous new technologies. This
means a more intense use of
natural resources (the biomass), that will cause – as already occurred with agrofuels production4 - more land- grabbing,
monoculture, water depletion, soil and biodiversity degradation. On the other hand, the Green Economy
embraces the “protection” of ecosystems and biodiversity through the commodification and
privatization of nature and the use of new financial mechanisms. At irst the two trends seem contradictory, but both
illustrate the clever attempt of corporations to ind new business opportunities and to secure access to land and natural resources5. The Green Economy
is an assortment of different proposals that will succeed only if supported by an international framework of policies that endorse it and subsidize the
private agents involved. The Earth Summit is the perfect place to get the necessary international commitment and legitimization. This is why it is also the
key time to stop them.
Green Investment/Entrepreneurship Link
Attempting to initiate change via a reliance on the entrepreneurship cements green capitalism
Prudham (Department of Geography and Centre for Environment, University of Toronto) 9
(Scott, Pimping climate change: Richard Branson, global warming, and the performance of green capitalism, Environment and
Planning A 2009, volume 41, pages 1594 ^ 1613)
The paper features two interrelated arguments. First, Branson’s announcements (particularly the first one) point to a central
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contradiction in the
green capitalist agenda. This agenda pivots in large measure on the problematic suggestion
that more sustainable futures can be secured via capitalist investment and entrepreneurial innovation.
Whatever truth there may be in particular cases, this obscures the relentless, restless, and growth-dependent
character of capitalism’s distinct metabolism, an argument most closely associated with the work of Bellamy
Foster (Clark and York, 2005; Foster, 2000), but which draws in turn on Karl Marx. The metabolism critique right- fully
identifies a tendency in capitalist political economies for aggregate throughput of material and energy to
grow, outstripping any efficiency gains (ie the so- called ‘Jevons paradox’). But accumulation for accumulation’s
sake also entails dynamic confrontation, transformation, and redefinition of material, social, and cultural conditions in
ways that confound coherent articulation of any notion of fixed ‘limits’ (including ecological ones) to continued expansion.
This essentially qualitative problem originates in the microeconomics of the entrepreneurial subject
who is compelled to accumulate on an expanded scale if only to reproduce himself or herself. What
results is a systemic logic of the production of new natures ö integrally connected to the production of space and uneven
development more generally (Smith, 2008 [1984]) ö by the anarchic, restless drive to accumulate capital as an end in and
of itself. Thus, I argue that, when thinking of capitalism’s so- cal led ‘biospheric rift’ (Clark and York, 2005), it is crucial
to attend not only to quantiti es of aggregate material and energy throughput, but also to issues of quality. Secondly, focus
on the elite entrepreneurial or bourgeois subject points to the need for a politico-cultural perspective on
green capitalism as a sort of ‘drama’ which must be performed. That is, the viability of green capitalism is not
only an ‘objective’ question of whether or not entrepreneurial energy, unleashed by neoliberalized green markets, can give
rise to sustainable technoeconomic trajectories. Rather, it is also a political agenda whose viability turns on whether or not
capitalism and environmen- talism are seen ö subjectively ö to be compatible. Seen in this way, green capitalism has
interwoven material ^ semiotic dimensions (Haraway, 1997), one central facet of which is the
‘performance’ of the entrepreneurial subject as environmental crusader. Perform- ances such as Branson’s
not only stage the political and cultural fusion of capitalism and environmentalism as green capitalism; they also act to
augment the economic foundations of bourgeois power by making the entrepreneur a central figure in
climate policy, and, by extension, environmentalism.
Green Tech Link
A neoliberal green revolution simply shifts to domination and exploitation into other spheres
White (post-doctoral research fellow in the School of Cultural and Innovation Studies, University of East London) 2
(Damian, A Green Industrial Revolution? Sustainable Technological Innovation in a Global Age, Environmental Politics, Vo1.II.
No.2, Summer 2002. pp.I-26)
The first point is essentially negative. Notably, it draws attention to the fact that even if all the obstacles to a green
industrial revolution posed by the structuring of the current political economy are addressed - ifthere are notforces to
make things differently - the type of eco-technological and ecoindustrial reorganisation that triumphs could simply
serve and reinforce the patterns of interest of dominant groups. A neo-liberal version of the 'green
industrial revolution' could simply give rise to eco-technologies and forms of industrial reorganisation
that arc perfectly compatible with extending social control, military power, worker surveillance
and the broader repressive capacities of dominant groups and institutions. It might even be that a
corporate dominated green industrial revolution would simply ensure that employers have 'smart' buildings which not only
give energy back to the national grid but allow for new 'solar powered' employee surveillance technologies. What of a
sustainable military-industrial complex that uses green warfare technologies that kill human beings
without destroying ecosystems? To what extent might a 'nonhero' dominated green industrial revolution
simply ensure that the South receives ecotechnologies that primarily express Northern interests (for
example, embedding relations of dependency rather than of self management and autonomy?). In short then, a green
industrial revolution could simply give rise to new forms of 'green governmentality' [Dorier et aI., 1999].
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Incentives Link – General 1NC (Long)
Relying on incentives structures makes environmental destruction and market competition inevitable
Adaman and Madra (Bogazici University, Department of Economics) 12
(Fikret & Yahya M., Understanding Neoliberalism as Economization: The Case of the Ecology,
http://www.econ.boun.edu.tr/public_html/RePEc/pdf/201204.pdf)
In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, governments and international finance organizations began to call for and take
regulatory measures in order to prevent similar breakdowns in the future, causing some commentators to quickly
pronounce neoliberalism dead. Consider, for instance, a most recent example: while writing this chapter, a special report
in the January 21-27, 2012, issue of The Economist—embellished with a red and black portrait of Lenin on the cover,
triumphantly holding a cigar with a dollar sign on it—lamented the “emerging world’s new model” would be “the rise of
state capitalism.” Yet, this line of argument is based on a rather simplified and narrow reading of neoliberalism, as a purer
laissezfaire regime where spontaneous markets reign free with minimal role for governments. A closer look at the brief
history of neoliberalism challenges this reading of neoliberalism as a project/process of marketization on both the practical
and the ideational levels. Practically speaking, governments have always played an active role in designing, instituting and
facilitating the operation of markets, not only before but also under neoliberalism. In other words, the historical track
record of three decades of neoliberal hegemony at a global scale demonstrates that the much invoked dichotomy between
state and private capitalism fails to do justice to the intensity and the depth of dirigiste and technocratic bureaucratic state
involvement in implementing neoliberalism (Harvey, 2005; Peck, 2010). In fact, if we were to follow the directions
proposed back in the end of the 1970s by Michel Foucault (2008) in his prescient genealogy of neoliberal reason, at the
ideational level, neoliberal “turn” in economic thinking, quite distinct from the earlier, late 18 th -century classical
liberalism which aimed at protecting the markets from the arbitrary interventions of the state, represents a particular
epistemic shift in the way the governments relate to and regulate the entire ensemble of social relations
through a governmental matrix which is organized around the assumption that all social agents (be they
individuals, groups, enterprises, or states) are calculatively rational and calculably responsive towards
(pecuniary or otherwise) incentives. In other words, if neoliberalism is not (only) a drive towards
marketization, but rather more broadly a drive towards the economization of the ensemble of social
relations (viz. the economic, the cultural, the political, and the ecological) through governmental dispositifs, then it
would be misleading to deduce the death of neoliberalism from the increasing visibility of state involvement in the
economy and society at large without asking how that involvement is epistemically organized and whether or not it
successfully transforms social ontology in the direction of economization (Madra and Adaman, 2010).
If one were to subscribe to this reading of neoliberalism as a drive towards economization of the economic, political,
social, and ecological spheres, one could plausibly argue in our current conjuncture that, despite the fact that the economic
recession is still going strong in North America and Europe, leading to political crises in Southern Europe (Greece, Spain,
and Italy) and potentially to the dissolution of the Euro-zone, neoliberalism remains hegemonic. In response to this
persistent crisis, governments are electing not to return to a Keynesian-style demand-management policy through deficitor, better yet, progressive taxation-based spending policy (as advocated by the likes of Joseph Stiglitz [2010]), and
continue to advocate and actually implement austerity programs despite widespread popular unrest and opposition. But
more importantly, while only a small fraction within the neoliberal field still defend the market panacea paradigm
unequivocally, there is very little questioning of the economizing and calculative ideologies of the neoliberal social
ontological project. In this chapter, our aim is to shed some light on how the neoliberal project reproduces itself
theoretically and practically in the context of the government of the ecology. Given the everdeepening dual crises
of environmental pollution and the over-use of natural resources (including the exhaustion of non-renewable energy and
material sources), unveiling the relationship between neoliberalism and ecological degradation—at both
theoretical and policy levels—is crucial. Currently, the privatization of natural resources (viz. natural parks, forests) is
being promoted; financial markets are finding their way into environmental policy and conservation (viz. payments for
ecosystem services, biodiversity derivatives, species banking and carbon trade); and incentive schemes are being
designed to provide the right signal to agents in their relationship with ecology (viz. the price-per-bag
policy for household waste). Critically engaging with these numerous policies and their ideological sources will be
possible only if one subscribes to the understanding of neoliberalism as a project of economization as outlined above.
This constitutes the essence of this chapter.
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More specifically, the chapter argues that the global spread of neoliberalism as a set of ideas, interpretative grids,
governmental interfaces, and institutional dispositifs in relation to ecology is premised on the conceptualization of human
behavior from a certain perspective, according to which the capacity of agents in understanding and responding to
economic incentives is taken as a postulate, and every human decision is assumed reducible to a mere cost-benefit
analysis. The chapter reads the widespread and resilient hold of the neoliberal epistemic grid within theory and policymaking by situating it, or “embedding” it, within the historical context of intellectual continuities between neoliberal
policies towards the use of ecology and the general postwar intellectual legacy of neoliberalism within the mainstream of
the discipline of economics. For this purpose, it traces the historical genealogy of neoliberal reasoning back to the
establishment of the Mont-Pèlerin Society in order to defend the idea of free market against the post-Great Depression
hegemony of the Keynesian welfare state capitalism (the Beveridge Plan in the UK, New Deal in the USA,
developmentalism in the Third World), by discussing the links, affinities, and differences among not only the usuallyrecognized Austrian, Chicago, and Virginia Schools, but also, and perhaps more controversially, the left-leaning and
egalitarian post-Walrasian, or better-known as “mechanism-design,” approach. Indeed, the latter set of approaches,
because they highlight the limits and failures of markets (arising mainly due to informational asymmetries) and advocate
for the regulation of markets and the design and institution of “incentive-compatible” mechanisms that would
substitute for markets, tend to be read as alternatives to the neoliberal creed. Nevertheless, what appears
as an alternative from the neoliberalism-qua-marketization perspective, can be considered only as a
variant from the perspective of our understanding of neoliberalism as a project/process of
economization. The common thread that has held these diverse groups of intellectual networks together, the chapter
argues, is the ultimate belief that relying on economic incentives would indeed produce a prosperous and harmonious
society. In sum, this chapter invites the reader to understand neoliberalism as a governmental epistemic grid
that aims to performatively bring to existence a particular calculative and calculable organization of
the entire social field, including the ecology—as a governmental logic, while undoubtedly including
marketization and privatization among its policy options, exhaustively entailing the economization of the political, the
cultural and the natural, and performatively promoting calculative (and therefore calculable) behavior
across all fields.
Incentives Link – General 1NC (Short)
Incentives structures reenforce biopolitical neoliberalism
Adaman and Madra (Bogazici University, Department of Economics) 12
(Fikret & Yahya M., Understanding Neoliberalism as Economization: The Case of the Ecology,
http://www.econ.boun.edu.tr/public_html/RePEc/pdf/201204.pdf)
Michel Foucault’s close reading of some of the key texts of neoliberal thought at his 1979 lectures at the Collège de
France (Foucault, 2008; see also Tribe, 2009) moves beyond the popular representations of neoliberalism that reduce it to
a set of marketization policies. According to Foucault, neoliberalism is a response to the historical unfolding of a
constitutive tension of liberal governmental reason: how might one extend the realm of freedom without inadvertently
delimiting it with governmental interventions that are necessary for the extension of the realm of freedom? In contrast to
classical liberalism that tried to limit government control over markets, neoliberalism answers this question by aiming at
nothing less than modeling “the overall exercise of political power” on the competitive logic of markets (Foucault, 2008:
131). The emergence of neoliberalism, according to Foucault, heralds the birth of a new art of government, a
“biopolitical mode of governmentality,” where the state ceases to relate to its subjects as citizensubjects with social rights, and begins to conduct its functions under the presumption that subjects will
respond (predictably) to economic incentives in all aspects of their lives. In short, neoliberalism, as a
combination of an ideological discourse and practices, entails a push towards a de-politicization of the social
through its economization—viz. imposing a logic of cost-benefit analysis to all aspects of life under
the assumption that everything is commodifiable (see also Fine and Milonakis, 2009).
This is the MO of neoliberalism
Adaman and Madra (Bogazici University, Department of Economics) 12
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(Fikret & Yahya M., Understanding Neoliberalism as Economization: The Case of the Ecology,
http://www.econ.boun.edu.tr/public_html/RePEc/pdf/201204.pdf)
Neoliberal reason is therefore not simply about market expansion and the withdrawal of the welfare state, but more
broadly about reconfiguring the state and its functions so that the state governs its subjects through a filter
of economic incentives rather than direct coercion. In other words, supposed subjects of the neoliberal
state are not citizen-subjects with political and social rights, but rather economic subjects who are
supposed to comprehend (hence, calculative) and respond predictably (hence, calculable) to economic
incentives (and disincentives). There are mainly two ways in which states under the sway of neoliberal reason aim to
manipulate the conduct of their subjects. The first is through markets, or market-like incentive-compatible institutional
mechanisms that economic experts design based on the behaviorist assumption that economic agents respond predictably
to economic (but not necessarily pecuniary) incentives, to achieve certain discrete objectives. The second involves a
revision of the way the bureaucracy functions. Here, the neoliberal reason functions as an internal critique of the way
bureaucratic dispositifs organize themselves: The typical modus operandi of this critique is to submit the bureaucracy
to efficiency audits and subsequently advocate the subcontracting of various functions of the state to the
private sector either by fullblown privatization or by public-private partnerships.
Incentives Link – General 2NC
Incentive structures force individuals into a neoliberal subjectivity
Read (University of Southern Maine) 9
(Jason, The University of Southern Maine, A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity,
Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 25-36, February 2009)
In order to frame Foucault’s analysis it is useful to begin with how he sees the distinction between liberalism and
neoliberalism. For Foucault, this difference has to do with the different ways in which they each focus on economic
activity. Classical liberalism focused on exchange, on what Adam Smith called mankind’s tendency to “barter,
truck, and exchange.” It naturalized the market as a system with its own rationality, its own interest, and its
own specific efficiency, arguing ultimately for its superior efficiency as a distributor of goods and services. The market
became a space of autonomy that had to be carved out of the state through the unconditional right of private property.
What Foucault stresses in his understanding, is the way in which the market becomes more than just a specific institution
or practice to the point where it has become the basis for a reinterpretation and thus a critique of state power. Classical
liberalism makes exchange the general matrix of society. It establishes a homology: just as relations in the marketplace can
be understood as an exchange of certain freedoms for a set of rights and liberties.4 Neoliberalism, according to
Foucault, extends the process of making economic activity a general matrix of social and political
relations, but it takes as its focus not exchange but competition.5 What the two forms of liberalism, the “classical”
and “neo” share, according to Foucault, is a general idea of “homo economicus,” that is, the way in which they place a
particular “anthropology” of man as an economic subject at the basis of politics. What changes is the
emphasis from an anthropology of exchange to one of competition. The shift from exchange to competition has
profound effects: while exchange was considered to be natural, competition is understood by the neo-liberals of
the twentieth century to be an artificial relation that must be protected against the tendency for markets to
form monopolies and interventions by the state. Competition necessitates a constant intervention on the part
of the state, not on the market, but on the conditions of the market.6 What is more important for us is the way in
which this shift in “anthropology” from “homo economicus” as an exchanging creature to a competitive creature, or rather
as a creature whose tendency to compete must be fostered, entails a general shift in the way in which human beings make
themselves and are made subjects.
First, neoliberalism entails a massive expansion of the field and scope of economics. Foucault cites Gary
Becker on this point: “Economics is the science which studies human behavior as relationship between ends and scarce
means which have alternate uses.” 7 Everything for which human beings attempt to realize their ends, from
marriage, to crime, to expenditures on children, can be understood “economically” according to a particular
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calculation of cost for benefit. Secondly, this entails a massive redefinition of “labor” and the “worker.”
The worker has become “human capital”. Salary or wages become the revenue that is earned on an
initial investment, an investment in one’s skills or abilities. Any activity that increases the capacity to earn income, to
achieve satisfaction, even migration, the crossing of borders from one country to another, is an investment in human
capital. Of course a large portion of “human capital,” one’s body, brains, and genetic material, not to mention race
or class, is simply given and cannot be improved. Foucault argues that this natural limit is something that exists
to be overcome through technologies; from plastic surgery to possible genetic engineering that make it
possible to transform one’s initial investment. As Foucault writes summarizing this point of view: “Homo economicus
is an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself.”8 Foucault’s object in his analysis is not to bemoan this as
a victory for capitalist ideology, the point at which the “ruling ideas” have truly become the ideas of the “ruling
class,” so much so that everyone from a minimum wage employee to a C.E.O. considers themselves to be entrepreneurs.
Nor is his task to critique the fundamental increase of the scope of economic rationality in neo-liberal economics: the
assertion that economics is coextensive with all of society, all of rationality, and that it is economics “all the way down.”
Rather, Foucault takes the neo-liberal ideal to be a new regime of truth, and a new way in which people are
made subjects: homo economicus is fundamentally different subject, structured by different motivations and governed by
different principles, than homo juridicus, or the legal subject of the state. Neoliberalism constitutes a new mode of
“governmentality,” a manner, or a mentality, in which people are governed and govern themselves. The operative terms
of this governmentality are no longer rights and laws but interest, investment and competition. Whereas rights exist to be
exchanged, and are some sense constituted through the original exchange of the social contract, interest is irreducible and
inalienable, it cannot be exchanged. The state channels flows of interest and desire by making desirable
activities inexpensive and undesirable activities costly, counting on the fact that subjects calculate
their interests. As a form of governmentality, neoliberalism would seem paradoxically to govern without
governing; that is, in order to function its subjects must have a great deal of freedom to act—to choose
between competing strategies. The new governmental reason needs freedom; therefore, the new art of government
consumes freedom. It must produce it, it must organize it. The new art of government therefore appears as
the management of freedom, not in the sense of the imperative: “be free,” with the immediate contradiction that this
imperative may contain...[T]he liberalism we can describe as the art of government formed in the eighteenth century
entails at its heart a productive/destructive relationship with freedom. Liberalism must produce freedom, but this very act
entails the establishment of limitations, controls, forms of coercion, and obligations relying on threats, etcetera.9 These
freedoms, the freedoms of the market, are not the outside of politics, of governmentality, as its limit, but rather are an
integral element of its strategy. As a mode of governmentality, neoliberalism operates on interests, desires, and
aspirations rather than through rights and obligations; it does not directly mark the body, as sovereign
power, or even curtail actions, as disciplinary power; rather, it acts on the conditions of actions. Thus, neoliberal
governmentality follows a general trajectory of intensification. This trajectory follows a fundamental
paradox; as power becomes less restrictive, less corporeal, it also becomes more intense, saturating the
field of actions, and possible actions. 10 Foucault limits his discussion of neoliberalism to its major theoretical texts and paradigms, following
its initial formulation in post-war Germany through to its most comprehensive version in the Chicago School. Whereas Foucault’s early analyses are often
remembered for their analysis of practical documents, the description of the panopticon or the practice of the confessional, the lectures on “neoliberalism”
predominantly follow the major theoretical discussions. This is in some sense a limitation of the lecture course format, or at least a reflection that this
material was never developed into a full study. Any analysis that is faithful to the spirit and not just the letter of Foucault’s text would focus on its
existence as a practice and not just a theory diffused throughout the economy, state, and society. As Thomas Lemke argues, neoliberalism is a political
project that attempts to create a social reality that it suggests already exists, stating that competition is the basis of social relations while fostering those
same relations.11 The
contemporary trend away from long term labor contracts, towards temporary and
part-time labor, is not only an effective economic strategy, freeing corporations from contracts and the
expensive commitments of health care and other benefits, it is an effective strategy of subjectification
as well. It encourages workers to see themselves not as “workers” in a political sense, who have
something to gain through solidarity and collective organization, but as “companies of one.” They
become individuals for whom every action, from taking courses on a new computer software application to having
their teeth whitened, can be considered an investment in human capital. As Eric Alliez and Michel Feher write:
“Corporations’ massive recourse to subcontracting plays a fundamental role in this to the extent that it turns the workers’
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desire for independence...into a ‘business spirit’ that meets capital’s growing need for satellites.”12 Neoliberalism is
not simply an ideology in the pejorative sense of the term, or a belief that one could elect to have or not have, but
is
itself produced by strategies, tactics, and policies that create subjects of interest, locked in
competition. Because Foucault brackets what could be considered the “ideological” dimension of neoliberalism, its connection with the global
hegemony of not only capitalism, but specifically a new regime of capitalist accumulation, his lectures have little to say about its historical conditions.
Foucault links the original articulation of neoliberalism to a particular reaction to Nazi Germany. As Foucault argues, the original neo-liberals, the “Ordoliberals,” considered Nazi Germany not to be an effect of capitalism. But the most extreme version of what is opposed to capitalism and the market—
planning. While Foucault’s analysis captures the particular “fear of the state” that underlies neoliberalism, its belief that any planning, any intervention
against competition, is tantamount to totalitarianism. It however does not account for the dominance of neoliberalism in the present, specifically its
dominance as a particular “technology of the self,” a particular mode of subjection. At the same time, Foucault offers the possibility of a different
understanding of the history of neoliberalism when he argues that neoliberalism, or the neo-liberal subject as homo economicus, or homo entrepreneur,
emerges to address a particular lacunae in liberal economic thought, and that is labor. In this sense neoliberalism rushes to fill the same void, the same
gap, that Marx attempted to fill, without reference to Marx, and with very different results.13 Marx and neo-liberals agree that although classical economic
theory examined the sphere of exchange, the market, it failed to enter the “hidden abode of production” examining how capital is produced. Of course the
for
the neo-liberals, as we have seen, labor is no sooner introduced as a problem than the difference between
labor and capital is effaced through the theory of “human capital.”14 Neoliberalism scrambles and exchanges
agreement ends there, because what Marx and neo-liberals find in labor is fundamentally different: for Marx labor is the sphere of exploitation while
the terms of opposition between “worker” and “capitalist.” To quote Etienne Balibar, “The capitalist is defined as worker,
as an ‘entrepreneur’; the worker, as the bearer of a capacity, of a human capital.”15 Labor is no longer limited to the
specific sites of the factory or the workplace, but is any activity that works towards desired ends. The terms “labor” and
“human capital” intersect, overcoming in terminology their longstanding opposition; the former becomes the activity and
the latter becomes the effects of the activity, its history. From this intersection the discourse of the economy
becomes an entire way of life, a common sense in which every action--crime, marriage, higher
education and so on--can be charted according to a calculus of maximum output for minimum
expenditure; it can be seen as an investment. Thus situating Marx and neoliberalism with respect to a similar problem
makes it possible to grasp something of the politics of neoliberalism, which through a generalization of the idea of the
“entrepreneur,” “investment” and “risk” beyond the realm of finance capital to every quotidian relation, effaces the very
fact of exploitation. Neoliberalism can be considered a particular version of “capitalism without capitalism,” a way
of maintaining not only private property but the existing distribution of wealth in capitalism while
simultaneously doing away with the antagonism and social insecurity of capitalism, in this case
paradoxically by extending capitalism, at least its symbols, terms, and logic, to all of society. The opposition
between capitalist and worker has been effaced not by a transformation of the mode of production, a new organization of
the production and distribution of wealth, but by the mode of subjection, a new production of subjectivity. Thus,
neoliberalism entails a very specific extension of the economy across all of society; it is not, as Marx argued, because
everything rests on an economic base (at least in the last instance) that the effects of the economy are extended
across of all of society, rather it is an economic perspective, that of the market, that becomes coextensive
with all of society. As Christian Laval argues, all actions are seen to conform to the fundamental economic ideas of
self-interest, of greatest benefit for least possible cost. It is not the structure of the economy that is extended
across society but the subject of economic thinking, its implicit anthropology.16
Incentives Link – Energy 1NC
Relying on market mechanisms to facilitate the energy transition make warming, international
competition, structural violence and war inevitable
Abramsky (visiting fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Science, Technology and Society; fmr. coordinator of the
Danish-based World Wind Energy Institute) 10
(Koyla, Racing to "Save" the Economy and the Planet: Capitalist or Post capitalist Transition to a Post-petrol World?, in Sparking A
Worldwide Energy Revolution, ed. Koyla Abramsky, pg. 26-7)
The fact that coal and oil are finite resources means that there is a long-term tendency in the direction of their phase-out,
regardless of what intentional short-term interventions are carried out or not. Many proponents of renewable energy simply
advocate leaving this phase-6ut process to the market. It is hoped that rising oil and coal prices will make these fuels
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increasingly less attractive. Efforts
are focused on developing a renewable energy sector that is able to
compete, rather than directly confronting, suppressing, and ultimately dismantling the coal and
oil industries. However, leaving the phase-out of oil and coal to the market has at least three crucial implications.
First, such a phase-out is likely to actually prolong the use of fossil fuels. As long as these energy sources are profitable to
extract and to use, they will be. Down to the last remaining drops of oil or lumps of coal. Although resources are finite, they
are still relatively abundant Even those analysts who give the most pessimistic (though realistic) perspectives on resource
availability, such as those included in this book, do not predict a complete exhaustion of resources in the very near future.
And, from the perspective of climate change, a prolongation of fossil fuel use is the exact opposite of what needs to happen,
phase-out must be sped up, not prolonged.
Linked to this, the second consequence of a market-based phase-out of oil and coal will mean that the
remaining oil and coal resources are frittered away for immediate profit rather than to build the
infrastructure for a transition process. Given that building a new energy system will require massive
amounts of energy inputs in a very concentrated period of time, this is a recipe for disaster.
The third important consequence is that leaving the transition process to the market is likely to be
increasingly coercive and conductive if competition is left to determine who controls the last of these
resources and for what purposes they are used. This means competition between workers globally,
competition between firnis, and competition between states. This translates to massive inequalities, hierarchies,
and austerity measures being imposed on labor (both in and outside the energy sectan); massive bankruptcies
of smaller firms and concentration and centralization of capital; and last, but not least, military conflicts
between states.
Accepting a market-based phase out of oil and coal is accepting in advance that the rising price of
energy and a transition away from coal and oil is paid by labor and not capital, when in actual fact the
question of who pays still remains to be determined. The answer will only come through a process of collective global
struggle, which occurs along class lines within the world-economy. It is important to correctly identify these lines of
struggle at the outset, otherwise it will be a struggle lost before the fight even begins. Collectively planning energy
use and fossil fuel phase-out is proving to be an enormously difficult social process, but it is likely to
be far less socially regressive if based on cooperation, solidarity, and collectively-defined social needs,
rather than if it is based around competition and profit.
Oil Dependence Link
Capitalism makes wars for oil inevitable even if we didn’t import one drop of oil
Caffentzis (a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern Maine, a founder member of the co-ordinator of the Committee
for Academic Freedom in Africa) 10
(George, EVERYTHING MUST CHANGE SO THAT EVERYTHING CAN REMAIN THE SAME, in Sparking A Worldwide
Energy Revolution, ed. Koyla Abramsky, pg. 565-6)
Obama's paradigm is problematic since it poses the key question of oil policy as a matter of
"dependency" and not as th consequence of the present system of commodity production. It does not recognize that
oil is a basic commodity, that the oil industry is devoted to making money profits; that the US government is
essentially involved in guaranteeing the functioning of the world-market and the profitability of the oil
industry (not access to the hydrocarbon stuff itself); and that energy politics involves classes in conflict (and not only
competing corporations and conflicting nation states). In brief, it leaves out the centri players of contemporary life:
workers, their demands and struggles. Somehow, when it comes to writing the history of petroleum, capitalism, working
class, and class conflict are frequently forgotten in a way that never-happens with oil's earthy hydrocarbon cousin, coal
Once we put profitability and the working lass conflict into the oil story, the plausibility of the
National Security paradigm lessens, since the US military will be called upon to defend the
profitability of international oil companies against the demands of workers around the world, even if
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the US did not import one drop of oil.
There will be wars fought by US troops aplenty in the years to come, if the US government tries to
continue to play for the oil industry in particular and for capitalism in general, the twenty-first century equivalent of
the nineteenth century British Empire. For what started out in the nineteenth century as a tragedy, will be
repeated in the twenty-first, not as farce, but as catastrophe. At the same time, it is not possible 'for the US
government to "retreat" from its role without jeopardizing the capitalist project itself. Obama and his Administration show
no interest in leading an effort to abandon this imperialist, market-policing role as his efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and
Pakistan, as well as his carte blanche to Israel in its bombing of Gaza, initially indicate.
Thus supporters of the National Security paradigm for oil policy, like Obama, are offering up a questionable connection
between energy import-substitution and the path of imperialism. As logicians would say, energy dependence might be
a sufficient condition of imperialist oil politics, but it is not a necessary one. This is Obama’s dilemma
then: he cannot reject the central role of the US in the control of the world-market's basic commodity, at the same time, the
interand intra-class conflict in the oil-producing countries is making the US' hegemonic role impossible to sustain.
Therefore, Obama's oil policy will be quite. similar to Bash's..
A HESITANT "YES"
Up until now my argument has been purely negative, i.e., though Obama's oil policy and Bush's are radically different
rhetorically, they will have much in common in practice. Obama's goal of "energy independence' will not affect
the military interventions generated by the efforts to control oil production and accumulate oil profits
throughout the world. These interventions will intensify as the capitalist crisis matures and as the short-term,
spot market price fluctuates wildly from the long-term price, and geological, political, and economic factors
create, an almost apocalyptic social tension.
Regulation/Privatization Link
State legal infrastructure is crucial to neoliberalism
Mansfield (Professor of Geography @ OSU) 4
(Becky, Geoforum, Neoliberalism in the oceans: “rationalization,” property rights, and the commons question, Volume 35, Issue 3,
May 2004, Pages 313–326)
A third argument, running implicitly throughout the paper, is the importance of the state in neoliberal regulation. Whereas
proponents offer neoliberalism as an alternative to state governance, the discussion in this paper shows that states and
markets do not act independently. This is especially the case with privatization, which relies on states to
create and maintain property rights. Whether it is in the form of enclosing the oceans as state property,
deciding how to further devolve property rights to individuals and collectives, or enforcing those property
rights, states have been central to the neoliberal shift in ocean governance: markets are not natural and
spontaneous (Polanyi, [1944] 1957). That states have a key role does not in itself negate the neoliberal aspects of fisheries
policy; rather it highlights that the exclusive focus on markets within neoliberalism is itself misleading.
Resource Wars Link – 1NC
It’s racist and leads to interventionism – injects a neorealism that turns the liberalism adv
Barnett (Senior Lecturer, School of Anthropology, Geography, and Environmental Studies, University of Melbourne; Ph.D., Centre
for Resource and Environmental Studies) 2k
(Jon, “Destabilizing the Environment-Conflict Thesis,” Review of International Studies 26(2): 271–288)
The argument that environmental degradation will induce violent conflict over scarce resources recasts ecological
problems in mainstream international relations terms; it scripts the 'South' as primeval Other, and as a
consequence suggests the imposition of the North to maintain order. The water wars thesis is no less
ethnocentric in outlook, and it is here that we see most clearly the deployment of environment in the
rewriting of security to justify longstanding interventions in regions of strategic importance,
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particularly the Middle East. That it is uncon vincing in its assertion that there will be large scale violent conflict
over water further highlights this article's claim that the environment-conflict thesis is a poor theoretical justification for
security business-as-usual. The selective interpretation continues in the argument that when population growth exceeds
ecological limits, conflict will ensue. Here, the most immediate development and human security issues are peripheral to
strategic concerns about civil conflicts and refugees. Again, the interpretation is of the South, by the North. As a body of
theory, the environment-conflict literature reflects the intermingling of neorealist and liberal theories in
North American security discourse, a confluence which excludes alternative critical perspectives and which,
ironically in the case of environmental security, serves to marginalize the insights of a Green theory. At this point some
further critical observations about environment-conflict theory are warranted.
Resource Wars Link – 2NC
And its obscures role of western business interests and the root cause and allows 25,000 deaths a day
from systemic violence
Barnett (Senior Lecturer, School of Anthropology, Geography, and Environmental Studies, University of Melbourne; Ph.D., Centre
for Resource and Environmental Studies) 2k
(Jon, “Destabilizing the Environment-Conflict Thesis,” Review of International Studies 26(2): 271–288)
The theory that environmental degradation will induce violent conflict may affect a change in social
'reality' consistent with its image. Elliott suggests that predictions which 'posit more conflict as environmental
decline increases will become self fulfilling prophecies'.65 In short, in describing a world of 'coming anarchy', the
environment-conflict literature prepares for the reification of this possible world. In this respect the environment-conflict
thesis is notable both for the way it justifies the defence of Northern interests, and for the way it obscures
Northern complicity in the generation of the very environmental problems scripted as threats. An
examination of US environmental security policy reveals that the US interprets environmental security largely in terms of
environmentally induced conflicts. This includes an awareness of the potential need to deploy forces in con flicts of a
(supposed) environmental nature, and the need to?in some ambiguous way?defend the United States against externally
originated environmental 'threats' likened to drug trafficking, weapons of mass destruction and terrorism.66 Thus the
1997 National Security strategy states that: Natural resource scarcities often trigger and exacerbate conflict.
Environmental threats such as climate change, ozone depletion and the transnational movement of dangerous chemicals
directly threaten the health of US citizens ... our national security planning is incorporating environmental analyses as
never before.67 This occurs in the context of a strategy to 'retain our superior diplomatic, technological, industrial and
military capabilities'.68 This discourse evades the most salient point about security and environmental degradation, which
is that as the world's largest economy with the world's largest military and more greenhouse gas emissions than any other
country, the country most complicit in 'global' environ mental degradation is the United States itself. Thus the
scripting of environmental problems as externally originated security threats to the state is a discursive
tactic that excludes from consideration the role of Northern businesses, consumers and governments
in generating environmental problems. Further, a familiar construction of Us and Other is evident. So conceived,
environmental security as environment-conflict displays the usual suite of geopolitical disjunctures
necessary to preserve the security of the select few at the expense of the insecurity of the many. In
environmental security terms, the most environmentally insecure are not the states of the North, but
the people of the underdeveloped South whose lives are jeopardized by a suite of environmental
changes including exacerbated climatic uncertainties causing more storm surges, floods and droughts,
and 25,000 daily deaths from water-borne diseases.69
Water Wars Link – 1NC
War wars discourse locks in Northern security interests and trades off with addressing root causes of
environmental degradation
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Barnett (Senior Lecturer, School of Anthropology, Geography, and Environmental Studies, University of Melbourne; Ph.D., Centre
for Resource and Environmental Studies) 2k
(Jon, “Destabilizing the Environment-Conflict Thesis,” Review of International Studies 26(2): 271–288)
In the final analysis, the more telling question about the linkages between environ ment and conflict is not?is
environmental degradation likely to lead to violence?? nor even how might environmental degradation lead to
violence??b ut rather why are we interested in the linkages between environmental degradation and violence? In short,
why this literature! This article has argued that the thesis that environmental degradation will lead to violence
is generally unconvincing and is more a reflection of Northern theoretical and strategic interests than the
reality of environmental degradation. This is to say, then, that the first two questions are by and large irrelevant.
The answer given to the latter question is that the environment-conflict literature is the discursive primer to legitimate
defence of the status quo. Thus the obsession with only one of the possible effects of environmental
degradation (conflict) at the expense of other effects and at the expense of taking seriously the root
causes of the degradation. The net effect of the environment-conflict thesis, then, is the justification of
a state response that maintains the legitimacy of the security and military elite, and the justification for
impending military and economic defence of Northern lifestyles.
Water Wars Link – 2NC
Water war discourse is false and trades off with structural violence that needs to be prioritized
Asmal (South Africa, Minister of Education) 1
(Prof. Kader, International Journal of Water, “Water is a catalyst”)
With all due respect to my friends, have battles been fought over water? Is water scarcity a casus belli? Does it in
fact divide nations? My own answer is no, no and no. I recognise the obvious value to sensational Water War rhetoric.
Alarmists awaken people to the underlying reality of water scarcity, and rally troops to become more progressive and
interdependent. By contrast, to challenge or dispute that rhetoric is to risk making us passive or smug about the status quo,
or delay badly needed innovations or co-operation against stress. And yet I do challenge 'Water War' rhetoric. For
there is no hard evidence to back it up. If the 'water's-for-fighting' chorus is off key, then its disharmony affects
lives as well. It shifts energy and resources from local priorities to foreign affairs. It scares off investment
where it is most in need. It inverts priorities, delays implementation of policy. And it forgets that water
management is, ultimately, about real people. Mahatma Gandhi said, "When you are unsure of a course of action,
remember the face of the poorest, weakest person in society and ask yourself what impact the action you are about to take
will have on that person." More recently Nelson Mandela reiterated that democratic systems lose their validity if they fail to
combat and eradicate poverty. We thus would be well advised to remember that, for the poorest and weakest, water's
for drinking, not fighting over. The poor are most affected by rhetoric, just as they are by war. It is easier to
ignore their thirst than to divert attention to potential foreign threats, real or imagined. Easier, not better.
To help the poor and weak, let us reform our unstable, consumptive, ultra-nationalistic habits to share our resource.
And comprehensive studies of all historical evidence disproves the impact
Turton (African Water Issues Research Unit, Political Scientist; Gibb-SERA Chairman, Integrated Water Resource Management,
South Africa) 2k
(Green Cross International and AWIRU, African Dialogue Monograph Series No. 2, Water Wars: Enduring Myth or Impending
Reality, “Water Wars in Southern Africa: Challenging Conventional Wisdom,” Google Scholar.)
Water Wars are nothing more than a myth. There is not a shred of evidence to support their existence
in any of the chapters in this book. True, there is a lot of conflict, or potential conflict, over water resources. This is
particularly true where these water resources are found in shared river basins or aquifers. However, this does not mean
a war over water. In this sense, we need concep- tual clarity (Turton 2000a). Water scarcity, as both a necessary
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and sufficient condition for going to war, is an almost non-existent phenomenon. In this regard, it is
illuminating to read the revealing findings of a comprehensive research project which used the Transboundary
Freshwater Dispute Database. One of the main conclusions was that, ‘the actual history of armed water conflict
is somewhat less dramatic than the water wars literature would lead one to believe: a total of seven incidents, in three of
which no shots were fired. As near as we can find, there has never been a single war fought over water’
(emphasis in the original text), (Wolf 1998:255) This has been the case since at least 2,5000 BC, when the Sumerian citystates of Lagash and Umma went to war over the right to exploit boundary channels along the Tigris River (Cooper 1983
as cited in Wolf 1998:255). However, that was not even a true water war (Turton 2000), falling neatly, instead, into the
definition of a quasi water war. These seven incidents are briefly as follows (Wolf 1998:256): • The 1948 partition
between India and Pakistan saw the Indus Basin being divided in a convoluted fashion. No less than 12 years of
negotiations, led by the World Bank, resulted in the Indus Waters Agreement.
Their authors conclusions are flawed – they apply the abstract concept of water wars based on militarism
and Eurocentrism
Barnett (Senior Lecturer, School of Anthropology, Geography, and Environmental Studies, University of Melbourne; Ph.D., Centre
for Resource and Environmental Studies) 2k
(Jon, “Destabilizing the Environment-Conflict Thesis,” Review of International Studies 26(2): 271–288)
In sum, the selection of cases to prove the water wars thesis is suspect. What is truly notable is the failure to
examine successful and peaceful water management regimes, such as those in Western Europe and North America.31 This
omission might be explained by an absence of scarcity, or the relative balance of military powers (although this is not the
case with US–Mexico cooperation over the waters of the Colorado River), but the failure to examine positive cases
might also be a function of the way in which warfare appeals to our sensationalist and militaristic culture.
The water wars thesis can be read as a case of ‘civilized’ Europeans constructing a barbaric Other.
It suggests that there is really a pervasive disinterest in peace, and that warfare is more interesting. The focus on
conflict rather than peace creates the justification for strategic interventions in key regions, in this
respect ‘environment’ is part of the discursive repackaging of the Northern security agenda.
***Impact***
Laundry List Impact
Makes social inequality and exn inevitable
Wise et al. (Director of Doctoral Program in Migration Studies & Prof of Development Studies; Universidad Autónoma de
Zacatecas, Mexico) 10
(Raúl Delgado Wise, Humberto Márquez Covarrubias, Rubén Puentes, Reframing the debate on migration, development and human
rights: fundamental elements, October, 2010, www.migracionydesarrollo.org)
At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, a general crisis centered in the United States affected the
global capitalist system on several levels (Márquez, 2009 and 2010). The consequences have been varied:
Financial. The overflowing of financial capital leads to speculative bubbles that affect the socioeconomic
framework and result in global economic depressions. Speculative bubbles involve the bidding up of
market prices of such commodities as real estate or electronic innovations far beyond their real value,
leading inevitable to a subsequent slump (Foster and Magdof, 2009; Bello, 2006). Overproduction. Overproduction
crises emerge when the surplus capital in the global economy is not channeled into production processes due to a fall in
profit margins and a slump in effective demand, the latter mainly a consequence of wage containment across all sectors of
the population (Bello, 2006). Environmental. Environmental degradation, climate change and a predatory
approach to natural resources contribute to the destruction of the latter, along with a fundamental
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undermining of the material bases for production and human reproduction (Fola- dori and Pierri, 2005; Hinkelammert and
Mora, 2008). Social. Growing social inequalities, the dismantling of the welfare state and dwindling means of
subsistence accentuate problems such as poverty, unemployment, violence, insecurity and labor precariousness,
increasing the pressure to emigrate (Harvey, 2007; Schierup, Hansen and Castles, 2006).
The crisis raises questions about the prevailing model of globalization and, in a deeper sense, the systemic
global order, which currently undermines our main sources of wealth—labor and nature—and overexploits
them to the extent that civilization itself is at risk. The responses to the crisis by the governments of developed
countries and international agencies promoting globalization have been short-sighted and exclusivist. Instead of
addressing the root causes of the crisis, they have implemented limited strategies that seek to rescue
financial and manufacturing corporations facing bankruptcy. In addition, government policies of labor
flexibilization and fiscal adjustment have affected the living and working conditions of most of the population. These
measures are desperate attempts to prolong the privileges of ruling elites at the risk of imminent
and increasingly severe crises. In these conditions, migrants have been made into scapegoats, leading to
repressive anti- immigrant legislation and policies (Massey and Sánchez, 2006). A significant number of jobs
have been lost while the conditions of remaining jobs deteriorate and deportations increase. Migrants’ living standards have
drastically deteriorated but, contrary to expectations, there have been neither massive return flows nor a collapse in
remittances, though there is evidence that migrant worker flows have indeed diminished.
Oceans/Exn Impact
Capitalism makes oceanic and human extinction inevitable
Clark and Clausen (teaches sociology at North Carolina State University in Raleigh; teaches sociology at Fort Lewis College) 8
(Brett and Rebecca, The Oceanic Crisis: Capitalism and the Degradation of Marine Ecosystem, 2008, Volume 60, Issue 03 (JulyAugust)
The world is at a crossroads in regard to the ecological crisis. Ecological degradation under global capitalism
extends to the entire biosphere. Oceans that were teeming with abundance are being decimated by the
continual intrusion of exploitive economic operations. At the same time that scientists are documenting the complexity
and interdependency of marine species, we are witnessing an oceanic crisis as natural conditions, ecological
processes, and nutrient cycles are being undermined through overfishing and transformed due to global
warming.
The expansion of the accumulation system, along with technological advances in fishing, have intensified the
exploitation of the world ocean; facilitated the enormous capture of fishes (both target and bycatch); extended the
spatial reach of fishing operations; broadened the species deemed valuable on the market; and disrupted
metabolic and reproductive processes of the ocean. The quick-fix solution of aquaculture enhances capital’s
control over production without resolving ecological contradictions.
It is wise to recognize, as Paul Burkett has stated, that “short of human extinction, there is no sense in which
capitalism can be relied upon to permanently ‘break down’ under the weight of its depletion and degradation of
natural wealth.”44 Capital is driven by the competition for the accumulation of wealth, and short-term profits provide the
immediate pulse of capitalism. It cannot operate under conditions that require reinvestment in the reproduction of nature,
which may entail time scales of a hundred or more years. Such requirements stand opposed to the immediate interests of
profit.
The qualitative relation between humans and nature is subsumed under the drive to accumulate capital on an ever-larger
scale. Marx lamented that to capital, “Time is everything, man is nothing; he is at the most, time’s carcase. Quality no
longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything.”45 Productive relations are concerned with production time, labor costs,
and the circulation of capital—not the diminishing conditions of existence. Capital subjects natural cycles and processes
(via controlled feeding and the use of growth hormones) to its economic cycle. The maintenance of natural conditions is not
a concern. The bounty of nature is taken for granted and appropriated as a free gift.
As a result, the system is inherently caught in a fundamental crisis arising from the transformation and
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destruction of nature. István Mészáros elaborates this point, stating:
For today it is impossible to think of anything at all concerning the elementary conditions of social metabolic reproduction
which is not lethally threatened by the way in which capital relates to them—the only way in which it can. This is true
not only of humanity’s energy requirements, or of the management of the planet’s mineral resources
and chemical potentials, but of every facet of the global agriculture, including the devastation caused by
large scale de-forestation, and even the most irresponsible way of dealing with the element without which no human
being can survive: water itself….In the absence of miraculous solutions, capital’s arbitrarily self-asserting attitude to the
objective determinations of causality and time in the end inevitably brings a bitter harvest, at the expense of
humanity [and nature itself].46
An analysis of the oceanic crisis confirms the destructive qualities of private for-profit operations. Dire conditions are being
generated as the resiliency of marine ecosystems in general is being undermined.
To make matters worse, sewage from feedlots and fertilizer runoff from farms are transported by rivers to
gulfs and bays, overloading marine ecosystems with excess nutrients, which contribute to an expansion of algal
production. This leads to oxygen-poor water and the formation of hypoxic zones—otherwise known as “dead zones”
because crabs and fishes suffocate within these areas. It also compromises natural processes that remove nutrients from the
waterways. Around 150 dead zones have been identified around the world. A dead zone is the end result of
unsustainable practices of food production on land. At the same time, it contributes to the loss of marine life in
the seas, furthering the ecological crisis of the world ocean.
Coupled with industrialized capitalist fisheries and aquaculture, the oceans are experiencing ecological degradation and
constant pressures of extraction that are severely depleting the populations of fishes and other marine life. The severity of
the situation is that if current practices and rates of fish capture continue marine ecosystems and fisheries around the world
could collapse by the year 2050.47 To advert turning the seas into a watery grave, what is needed is nothing
less than a worldwide revolution in our relation to nature, and thus of global society itself.
Environment Impact
Attempting to understand the perceived non-human environment through economics inevitably fails and
culminates in the destruction of all life
Weiskel (Harvard Seminar on Environmental Values) 97
(Timothy C., 6 July 1997, Selling Pigeons in the Temple: The Danger of Market Metaphors in an Ecosystem,
http://ecojustice.net/coffin/ops-008.htm)
The natural order of the world and our role within it is affirmed by market enthusiasts and politicians
alike to be an inevitable manifestation of the ongoing logic of an economy of unending, capitalist
accumulation. In recent electoral history, politicians took pride in mouthing the simple syllogism, "it's the economy,
stupid!" -- as if the only significant role of political leadership was to "grow the economy." Whether we like it or not -whether we fully know it or not -- this entire worldview is subconsciously enlisted whenever we surrender to
the use of market metaphors in devising public policy. It is no wonder that in this framework it is
impossible to formulate effective environmental policy to protect biodiversity. Such a worldview arbitrarily
restricts the notion of what is possible to what is profitable. Market metaphors truncate the range of policy
options open to environmental leaders, and the vocabulary and images these metaphors generate
completely fail to capture what we humans value most about our rich and complex world of everyday
human experience. The insidious thought control exercised by market metaphors in the public discourse needs to be
squarely confronted and firmly rejected . Only by stepping outside the make-believe world of these market
metaphors is it possible to see why they mystify rather than clarify our environmental circumstance.
Essentially, market metaphors are based on a logical fallacy that projects a fundamental falsification of
reality. Despite frequent appeals to the "real world," market advocates live in a self-contained world of
abstract modeling, statistical fantasies and paper currency that serves as a proxy measure of wealth. In
fact, the real world is quite a different place, consisting of the physical parameters of all life forms that can be measured in
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terms of meters from sea-level, metric tons of gas emissions and degrees of temperature variation. The human economy
needs to be understood as a subset of this physical ecosystem and not the other way around. Environmental policy based on
an inverted representation of reality cannot help but fail in the long run. It is for this reason that economism -- the
belief that principles of market economics can and should always be used to resolve environmental public policy dilemmas
-- represents such a palpable failure of political leadership. Further, the attempt to substitute economism for
meaningful public policy constitutes a blatant abdication of the public trust. This tragic abdication of the public
trust through the relentless pursuit of economism has fueled the current righteous indignation of global
citizens sensitive to the environment and concerned about the prospect of human survival. Politicians
under the spell of economism fail to grasp what growing numbers of decent citizens sense and seek to affirm from a very
deep level of conviction, and that is simply this: biodiversity must be saved for its intrinsic, expressive, and
relational value -- not simply for the momentary advantage it may yield in some economist's costbenefit calculations. If global policy makers do not free themselves from the trap of market mantras, their claim to
leadership will be seen to be vacuous and illegitimate in the long run. This will be so because misplaced market metaphors
cannot help but prove fatal in mediating human relationships with the environment. Taken together they have the
power to drive industrial civilization into the sad syndrome of "overshoot-and-collapse" so often
characteristic of failed economies of accumulation throughout human history. Unless radically
different forms of valuation can be rediscovered, unless public leaders can learn to embrace and
articulate them, and unless these leaders can then proceed to formulate effective public policy based on
these new values to change collective human behavior, we will witness the demise of industrial society
as the unavoidable outcome of "business as usual." In short, public leadership needs now to define, declare and defend the public good in terms that
transcend private self-interest. There are no doubt connections between the public good and private gain, but to justify the former exclusively in terms of the latter is a fundamental mistake of moral
reasoning. Without political leadership that can understand this fundamental difference and learn to defend the public good in its own right, industrial civilization will become irretrievably consumed in a
scramble for private profit and personal advantage in a dismal world of diminishing resources. The Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, expressed this fear with a rivetting sense of urgency
in his opening remarks at the Earth Summit Plus Five conference in New York.(6) Failure to act now could damage our planet irreversibly, unleashing a spiral of increased hunger, deprivation, disease and
squalor. Ultimately, we could face the destabilising effects of conflict over vital natural resources....We must not fail.
In past epochs individual religious and spiritual figures emerged to warn society of this kind of impending doom. Prophets of old inveighed against gluttonous consumption based on inequity and iniquity,
and they warned societies of the physical consequences of failing to mend their ways. Perhaps more importantly, they served to remind societies of the natural order of the created world and the proper place
for humankind within it. Amos, Jesus of Nazareth and Mohammed of Medina all arose in the ancient near east with strikingly parallel messages in this regard. Jews, Christians and Muslims to this day retain
scriptural traditions which remind them that the earth does not ultimately belong to humans, nor will their mistreatment of the earth or their fellow creatures go unpunished. In these religious traditions
arrogant, self-centered behavior with regard to the created order is thought to be morally wrong, however expedient or profitable it may prove to be for individuals in the short run. We are not fully informed
by the preserved text, but one suspects that selling pigeons in the temple prompted a sense of moral indignation on the part of Jesus of Nazareth, not because the prices were a bit too high. Rather such
activity inspired moral outrage because selling pigeons in the temple involved a fundamental confusion of the market place with sacred space. It is -- perhaps not surprisingly -- the scientists who speak with
the prophetic voice of conviction in our day. Physicists like Nobel Laureate Henry Kendall, the late astronomer Carl Sagan, the evolutionary biologist Edward Wilson and renowned "public" scientists like
the late oceanographer Jacques Cousteau now provide us with the clarion call to awareness and action that parallels the prophetic message of old. In a document entitled World Scientists' Warning to
Humanity the Union of Concerned Scientists representing more than one hundred Nobel laureates put the message quite plainly:(7) Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human
activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society
and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our
present course will bring about. It is hard to image a more thorough embodiment of the ancient prophetic tradition. Nevertheless, economists and politicians -- the scribes and Pharisees of our day -- do not
yet seem to have understood the point. It is not that their prices are inaccurate -- goodness knows we have some of the world's most clever economists and accountants devoted to the task of assigning nature
its cash value. We cannot expect much better on this score. But the issue before us is more fundamental than this. The essential problem is that to approach the issue of biodiversity as if it were an exercise in
It is wrong because it mistakes price for value, proffering market valuations as a proxy
surrogate for a meaningful discussion of values. In such a constricted framework there can never be a purposeful debate -only a mindless, mechanical and endless set of calculations. Given the two-year time frame of the electoral cycle
global bean-counting is fundamentally wrongheaded.
and the pressures to craft policy to please rich and influential interest groups, there are powerful and
evident reasons why politicians may well wish to avoid meaningful discussions about values and the
environment. In this sense, the alliance between economists and politicians is a marriage of considerable convenience for
both partners, but it must be made clear to each of them that this is not acceptable as a mode of public leadership. On this
point, scientists and spiritual leaders agree, and it is for this reason that they have joined forces in such impressive numbers
to express themselves in terms of the moral obligations facing the human community. The Union of Concerned Scientists
has joined with the National Religious Partnership for the Environment to reiterate the prophetic message in churches,
temples and mosques across the country and around the world. In a similar vein, research scientists at Harvard have
provided strong support for the activities of the Harvard Seminar on Environmental Values convened by the University's
Committee on Environment and the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life in order specifically to explore the full
range of valuation -- not just economic costs -- which can be drawn upon in developing public policy to protect the
environment and biodiversity. The message from spiritual leaders and research scientists alike is as clear as it is forceful:
we did not create the world; we cannot control it; we must not destroy it. More precisely: we must not commodify and
merchandise biodiversity merely because in the short run it may appear profitable for us to do so.
Convinced that we know the price of everything we will soon have lost the ability to value anything
that is priceless. The capacity to value some things and human experiences beyond all measure of
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worldly worth and to esteem them without any thought of their exchange value or sale is surely one of
the most cherished attributes that makes us human. To forget this or deny it is to disavow our humanity, and
down that road lies our swift and certain extinction. The capacity to appreciate intrinsic value is not a
quality of humanity that it would be wise to denigrate, dismiss or eliminate in formulating
environmental public policy. On the contrary, it may well constitute our last, best hope for survival as a
species.
Environment/Economy Impact
This neoliberal spread makes environmental and economic collapse inevitable
Wise et al. (Director of Doctoral Program in Migration Studies & Prof of Development Studies; Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas,
Mexico) 10
(Raúl Delgado Wise, Humberto Márquez Covarrubias, Rubén Puentes, Reframing the debate on migration, development and human
rights: fundamental elements, October, 2010, www.migracionydesarrollo.org)
The internationalization of capital. The expansion
strategy of the global economy in- volves a profound
economic restructuring based on the establishment of subcontracting chains dominated by large
multinational corporations, which have a global reach. This form of expansion seeks to economically reinsert
peripheral countries that are rich in natural resources and ensure an abundant and cheap workforce. The new export
platforms, in fact, operate as enclaves, that is production, commercial and services zones dominated by multinational
corporations and often exempted from national taxation and regulation of working and environmental conditions. These
types of plants cur- rently employ between 55 million (Robinson, 2008) and 66 million Southern workers (Singa Boyenge,
2006) and the strategy is widely implemented by large manufacturing, financial, agricultural, commercial, and servicesector multinationals (Robinson, 2008). Financialization. Financial capital generates speculative strategies that
foster the chan- neling of investment funds, sovereign funds, pension funds and social savings toward
new financial instruments that offer short-term high profit margins but can entail re- current crises and
massive fraud. These speculative strategies obstruct and affect the functioning of the so-called real
economy (Foster and Magdof, 2009; Bello, 2006). Environmental degradation. Biodiversity, natural resources, and
communal and national wealth are privatized for the benefit of large corporations that favor profits while
ignoring social and environmental costs. This leads to increased environmental degradation, pollution,
famine, and disease, as well as climate changes (global warming and increasingly frequent extreme climatic
events) that threaten the symbiotic relationship between humans and the environment (Foladori and Pierri,
2005).
Innovation Impact
Green Capitalism short circuits innovation
Prudham (Department of Geography and Centre for Environment, University of Toronto) 9
(Scott, Pimping climate change: Richard Branson, global warming, and the performance of green capitalism, Environment and
Planning A 2009, volume 41, pages 1594 ^ 1613)
If correct, this portrait of the bourgeois entrepreneurial subject presents a sobering problem for green capitalism. If
capitalism produces all manner of potentially progressive and liberating technologies and conditions of
production (as seems to be the case), it also produces these according to a logic driven not by meeting those
needs per se, but by the anarchic dynamics of accumulation for accumulation’s sake, in turn driven by
a nihilistic bourgeois subject whose claim to fame is accumulation in and of itself, and, moreover, whose ability to
merely reproduce himself or herself is predicated on accumulation on an ever expanding scale. While a market-centered
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discourse of environmentalism
fixates on the most efficient ways to meet given environmental targets, it ignores the
systemic production of new environmental problems (new natures) for which there may be no social regulation
and no targets, and which leaves unchallenged a political economy whose mantra is growth as an end in itself.
If growth may be required to lift millions if not billions out of grinding poverty, growth in a capitalist economy is
fuelled not by meeting human needs per se, but by accumulation for accumulation’s sake, and, with it, not just
expansion, but anarchic transformation, of social relations, of technology, and of biophysical nature. This systematically
violates any robust version of the precautionary principle, interpreted generally as ‘do no harm’, since it places society in a
position of reacting ex ante to the changing character of produced nature. To be clear, this is not to say that all forms of
socionatural change produced through accumulation for accumulation’s sake are necessarily destructive or undesirable.
Rather, it is to say that the production of socio-nature, under green capitalism, is subordinated to the will of the
entrepreneur whose ethos is accumulation as an end in itself. Historical examples of the phenomenon may
include numerous beneficial technologies, but they also include the development of a range of new chemicals for
applications in agriculture, industrial processes, and consumer goods, not least in the form of synthetic organics and hybrid
organic/inorganic chemicals such as polychlorinated and polybromi- nated biphenyls (Colbor n et al, 1996). Rachel Carson
(1994) made these the focus of her life’s work. Polychlorinated biphenyls, first manufactured commercially by one of the
parent companies of what became Monsanto, are perhaps the poster child of the phenomenon, a boon across a range of
industrial and commercial applications, but also at the heart of an almost unparalleled toxic legacy whose implicati ons
continue to unfold. Moreover, and this is the main point I am trying to emphasize here, these and other chemicals are the
direct products of innovative capital striving to make use of its formerly wasted by-products in the absence of knowledge
about or regulation of the effects of introducing new substances into commodity circulation, food chains, and the
environment more generally. If this is a seldom celebrated form of ‘industrial ecology’, it is also quintessentially green
capitalism. I am generally in agreement with and informed by O’Connor (1998) on capitalism’s second, ecological,
contradiction here except that I am emphasizing not only the underproduction of the (ecological) conditions of
reproduction, but also the systemic production of new ecological conditions that may be (and, indeed, have
been) highly destructive to human and nonhuman life. To advocate the desirability of such outcomes or a faith in
the social foundations of their genesis, as green capitalism requires, seems rather perverse indeed.
Inequality/Exn Impact
Neoliberalism creates multiple structural trends towards extinction
Szentes (a Professor Emeritus at the Corvinus University of Budapest) 8
(Tamás, “Globalisation and prospects of the world society”, 4/22 http://www.eadi.org/fileadmin/Documents/Events/exco/Glob.___prospects_-_jav..pdf)
It’ s a common place that human society can survive and develop only in a lasting real peace. Without peace countries
cannot develop. Although since 1945 there has been no world war, but --numerous local wars took place, --terrorism has
spread all over the world, undermining security even in the most developed and powerful countries, --arms race and
militarisation have not ended with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, but escalated and continued, extending also to
weapons of mass destruction and misusing enormous resources badly needed for development, --many “invisible wars”
are suffered by the poor and oppressed people, manifested in mass misery, poverty, unemployment,
homelessness, starvation and malnutrition, epidemics and poor health conditions, exploitation and oppression,
racial and other discrimination, physical terror, organised injustice, disguised forms of violence, the denial or regular
infringement of the democratic rights of citizens, women, youth, ethnic or religious minorities, etc., and last but not least,
in the degradation of human environment, which means that --the “war against Nature”, i.e. the disturbance of
ecological balance, wasteful management of natural resources, and large-scale pollution of our environment, is still going
on, causing also losses and fatal dangers for human life. Behind global terrorism and “invisible wars” we find
striking international and intrasociety inequities and distorted development patterns , which tend to
generate social as well as international tensions, thus paving the way for unrest and “visible” wars. It is a
commonplace now that peace is not merely the absence of war. The prerequisites of a lasting peace between and within
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societies involve not only - though, of course, necessarily - demilitarisation, but also a systematic and gradual elimination
of the roots of violence, of the causes of “invisible wars”, of the structural and institutional bases of large-scale international
and intra-society inequalities, exploitation and oppression. Peace requires a process of social and national emancipation, a
progressive, democratic transformation of societies and the world bringing about equal rights and opportunities for all
people, sovereign participation and mutually advantageous co-operation among nations. It further requires a pluralistic
democracy on global level with an appropriate system of proportional representation of the world society, articulation of
diverse interests and their peaceful reconciliation, by non-violent conflict management, and thus also a global governance
with a really global institutional system. Under the contemporary conditions of accelerating globalisation and deepening
global interdependencies in our world, peace is indivisible in both time and space. It cannot exist if reduced to a period
only after or before war, and cannot be safeguarded in one part of the world when some others suffer visible
or invisible wars. Thus, peace requires, indeed, a new, demilitarised and democratic world order, which can provide
equal opportunities for sustainable development. “Sustainability of development” (both on national and world level) is
often interpreted as an issue of environmental protection only and reduced to the need for preserving the ecological balance
and delivering the next generations not a destroyed Nature with overexhausted resources and polluted environment.
However, no ecological balance can be ensured, unless the deep international development gap and
intra-society inequalities are substantially reduced. Owing to global interdependencies there may exist hardly any
“zero-sum-games”, in which one can gain at the expense of others, but, instead, the “negative-sum-games” tend to
predominate, in which everybody must suffer, later or sooner, directly or indirectly, losses. Therefore, the actual question is
not about “sustainability of development” but rather about the “sustainability of human life”, i.e. survival of mankind –
because of ecological imbalance and globalised terrorism. When Professor Louk de la Rive Box was the president of EADI,
one day we had an exchange of views on the state and future of development studies. We agreed that development studies
are not any more restricted to the case of underdeveloped countries, as the developed ones (as well as the former “socialist”
countries) are also facing development problems, such as those of structural and institutional (and even system-)
transformation, requirements of changes in development patterns, and concerns about natural environment. While all these
are true, today I would dare say that besides (or even instead of) “development studies” we must speak about and make
“survival studies”. While the monetary, financial, and debt crises are cyclical, we live in an almost permanent crisis of the
world society, which is multidimensional in nature, involving not only economic but also socio-psychological, behavioural,
cultural and political aspects. The narrow-minded, election-oriented, selfish behaviour motivated by thirst for
power and wealth, which still characterise the political leadership almost all over the world, paves the way for the
final, last catastrophe. One cannot doubt, of course, that great many positive historical changes have also taken place in
the world in the last century. Such as decolonisation, transformation of socio-economic systems, democratisation of
political life in some former fascist or authoritarian states, institutionalisation of welfare policies in several countries, rise of
international organisations and new forums for negotiations, conflict management and cooperation, institutionalisation of
international assistance programmes by multilateral agencies, codification of human rights, and rights of sovereignty and
democracy also on international level, collapse of the militarised Soviet bloc and system-change3 in the countries
concerned, the end of cold war, etc., to mention only a few. Nevertheless, the crisis of the world society has extended and
deepened, approaching to a point of bifurcation that necessarily puts an end to the present tendencies, either by the final
catastrophe or a common solution. Under the circumstances provided by rapidly progressing science and technological
revolutions, human society cannot survive unless such profound intra-society and international
inequalities prevailing today are soon eliminated. Like a single spacecraft, the Earth can no longer afford to have
a 'crew' divided into two parts: the rich, privileged, wellfed, well-educated, on the one hand, and the poor, deprived,
starving, sick and uneducated, on the other. Dangerous 'zero-sum-games' (which mostly prove to be “negative-sum-games”)
can hardly be played any more by visible or invisible wars in the world society. Because of global interdependencies, the
apparent winner becomes also a loser. The real choice for the world society is between negative- and positive-sum-games:
i.e. between, on the one hand, continuation of visible and “invisible wars”, as long as this is possible at all, and, on the
other, transformation of the world order by demilitarisation and democratization. No ideological or terminological
camouflage can conceal this real dilemma any more, which is to be faced not in the distant future, by the next generations,
but in the coming years, because of global terrorism soon having nuclear and other mass destructive weapons, and also due
to irreversible changes in natural environment.
Democracy/Public Sphere Impact
Leads to facism and collapses
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Giroux 6
[Henry A. Giroux, Symploke, 14.1/2 (2006) 98-151]
But there is even more at stake here than the obliteration of public concerns, the death of the social, the
emergence of a market-based fundamentalism that undercuts the ability of people to understand how to
translate privately experienced misery into collective action, and the elimination of the gains of the welfare
state. There is also the growing threat of displacing "political sovereignty with the sovereignty of the
market, as if the latter has a mind and morality of its own" (332). As democracy becomes a burden
under the reign of neoliberalism, civic discourse disappears, and the reign of unfettered social
Darwinism with its survival-of-the-slickest philosophy emerges as the template for a new form of protofascism. However, none of this will proceed further in the face of sufficient resistance. The increasing move toward
proto-fascism is not inevitable. It is rather the case that the conditions have been put into place for
democracy potentially to lose all semblance of meaning in the United States. [End Page 143]
Wars Impact
Neoliberal economic model makes global wars inevitable
Castles 3
(Stephen, Towards a Sociology of Forced Migration and Social Transformation, Sociology, Vol. 77, no. 1, pp. 13-34, 2003)
The context of this trend was the inability to achieve economic and social development and the failure
to build legitimate and stable states in large areas of the South. What Mary Caldor calls ‘the new wars’ are
usually internal wars connected with identity struggles, ethnic divisions, problems of state formation
and competition for economic assets. But they are simultaneously transnational as they involve diaspora
populations, foreign volunteers and mercenaries, and international intervention forces. They also draw in international
journalists, UN aid organizations, NGOs, and regional organizations. The means of warfare have also changed. The
protagonists are not large standing armies but irregular forces. The aim is not control of territory, but political control of the
population. Mass population expulsion is often a strategic goal, which is why the new wars have led to such an upsurge in
forced migration (Kaldor 2001). Ninety per cent of those killed are civilians. Both government forces and insurgents use
exemplary violence including torture and sexual assault as means of control. Many politicians and media commentators
saw the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Former Yugoslavia, Rwanda etc. as the resurgence of ‘age-old hatreds’. It
is more accurate to see such practices as systemic elements of a thoroughly modern new form of warfare
(Summerfield 1999). Northern economic interests (such as the trade in oil, diamonds, coltan or small arms) play an
important part in starting or prolonging local wars. At a broader level, trade, investment and intellectual property
regimes that favour the industrialised countries maintain underdevelopment in the South. Conflict and forced
migration are thus ultimately an integral part of the North-South division. This reveals the ambiguity of
efforts by the ‘international community’ (which essentially means the powerful Northern states and the intergovernmental
agencies) to prevent forced migration. They seek to do this through both entry restrictions in the North and ‘containment’
measures in the South. Containment includes humanitarian aid, peace-keeping missions and even military
intervention. At the same time, the North does more to cause forced migration than to stop it, through enforcing an
international economic and political order that causes underdevelopment and conflict. However, violence and forced
migration also causes social transformation. They destroy economic resources, undermine traditional ways of life and break
up communities. Forced migration is thus a factor which deepens underdevelopment, weakens social bonds, and reduces
the capacity of communities and societies to achieve positive change. Post-conflict reconstruction rarely leads to restoration
of the pre-conflict situation, but rather to new and often problematic social relationships. The study of forced migration
therefore should be a central part of the sociology of development. Forced migration is a factor in social transformation in
an additional sense, as Mark Duffield has recently argued (Duffield 2001). Persistent underdevelopment in large parts of the
South is not an economic problem for the North, because these countries are largely disconnected from the global economy.
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However, underdevelopment
is increasingly seen as a threat to security in the North. This is because the
South connects with the North in unexpected and unwanted ways: through the proliferation of
transnational informal networks, such as international crime, the drug trade, people smuggling and
trafficking, as well as migrant networks which facilitate irregular mobility. Such phenomena are partly a result of
trends towards economic deregulation and privatisation in the North, which open up the space for informal
economies. The Al Qaida network can be seen as the very epitome of an undesirable transnational network, whose goals
and mode of operation would have been unthinkable in any earlier epoch. Duffield argues that the result is a fundamental
change in the objectives of both development policy and humanitarianism. Containment of forced migration through neutral
humanitarianism has failed. Similarly, the Washington Consensus – the neo-liberal credo of the World Bank and the IMF
that underdevelopment could be countered by economic growth based on foreign investments and export-led growth – has
proved mistaken. Humanitarianism and development policy have a new joint task: the transformation of whole societies in
order to prevent conflict and to achieve social and economic change. The principle of transforming whole societies was
contained in a remarkable lecture by the then Senior Vice-President of the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz, in 1998. He argued
that development required fundamental shifts in cultural values and social relationships, and that it was the task of
international agencies to help bring these about (Stiglitz 1998). In the meantime, Stiglitz has left the World Bank and been
awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize for Economics. Development is now seen by Northern governments and international
agencies as impossible without security and peace. This means that humanitarian action and military
intervention can no longer attempt to be neutral. Rather, such interventions seek to restore peace at the
local level through imposing certain political and economic structures as part of a system of
‘networked global liberal governance’. This system has ‘a radical mission to transform societies as a whole,
including the attitudes and beliefs of the people within them’ (Duffield 2001). The price of being connected to
global economic and political networks is thus the adoption of Northern economic structures, political
institutions and value systems.
The quest to spread liberal forms of governance is implicated in a radically violent war machine.
Dillon and Reid 2000
(Michael and Julian, ”Global Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex Emergency.” Alternatives. Vol. 25, Issue 1)
Complex emergencies are intimately related to the liberal peace of global governance.[ 1] They are said
to occur at the boundaries of liberal peace, where that regime of power encounters institutions, norms,
and practices that violently differ from its own. Global liberal governance does not, however, simply
encounter other so-called rogue states--such as Iraq, Libya, Serbia, or Iran--at the frontiers of the peace that it
celebrates. There has been a widely acknowledged weakening and dissolution of the state form in those regions of Africa
and Eurasia where complex emergencies are said to arise. That is among the reasons why liberal peace encounters what it
calls "complex emergencies" there. Here, liberal peace finds itself deeply implicated in a terrain of disorder in
which some states are powerful, some states are in radical dissolution, traditional societies are
collapsing and civil conflict is endemic, where international corporations and criminal cartels are also
deeply involved, and where international organizations and nongovernmental organizations are inextricably
committed as well. The authors of this article prefer to call these circumstances "emerging political complexes," because they are comprised of
dynamic power relations that have long, often convoluted, and poorly understood histories that are social and cultural as well as political and economic
and that are simultaneously undergoing significant reformulation and change. The term complex emergency tends to elide these dynamics, often
simplifying the vexed political character of them. It does so typically by masking the complex implication of global liberal governance in them. The
violent conflicts associated with such emerging political complexes are not simply the persistent recurrence, as so many contemporary analysts are
inclined to argue, of fixed and irresolvable historical hatreds. They are very much a function of the ways in which societies in dissolution, since they are at
the turbulent confluence of local and global dynamics excited by the diverse military, political, and economic practices of global liberal governance itself,
are in consequence thereby subject to violent disorder and change. It is that change that engenders emerging political complexes. While radically
reformulating old identity myths and inventing new ones is a typical feature of such complexes, so giving the appearance of unchanging historical form,
these are devices by which political and economic forces are mobilized everywhere in the face of change. That is why they are also an active part of the
political processes by which emerging political complexes coalesce. It is however quite simplistic to think of them as peculiar to those regions where
complex emergencies are said to occur or the mere recurrence of unchanging historical truths there. These practices are part of the common currency of
political mobilization in the domain of liberal peace as well. It therefore seems obvious that the radical and continuous transformation of societies that
global liberal governance so assiduously seeks must constitute a significant contribution to the very violence that it equally also deplores. The disorder of
emerging political complexes is of course fueled by local factors. In a world that has always been more or less interdependent, however, it would be
grossly naive to think that local factors were ever permanently or totally isolated historically from global developments.[ 2] Much less so now, then, in an
age of virulent globalization. Global liberal governance is not, of course, a neutral phenomenon, indifferent to local cultures, traditions, and practices.
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Neither is it benignly disposed toward them. Rather, it has always been virulently disruptive of them and aggressively related to them as much in moral as
in economic and military terms. Much of the disorder that borders the domain of liberal peace is clearly also a function, therefore--albeit a fiercely
contested function--of its very own normative, political, economic, and military agendas, dynamics, and practices, and of the reverberations these excite
throughout the world. It seems increasingly to be a function, specifically, of the way in which development is now ideologically embraced by all of the
diverse institutions of liberal peace as an unrelenting project of modernization.[ 3] The chief economist of the World Bank (Joseph Stiglitz) attacks the
Washington Consensus on liberalization, stabilization, and privatization in the world economy, for example, as too technical and too narrowly framed a
development strategy. He espouses instead a new intensive as well as extensive policy committed to the unqualified and comprehensive modernization and
"transformation of traditional societies."[ 4] "Honesty, however requires me to add one more word. In calling for a transformation of societies, I have
elided a central issue," Stiglitz had the candor to conclude, "transformation to what kind of society and for what ends?" The impact of modernization on
modern as well as traditional societies is, of course, as violent as the impact on global resources and global ecology. The values, practices, and investments
that propel such development nonetheless, however, are precisely what protect it from pursuing the key question, locally as well as globally, that Stiglitz
posed in terms other than those that underwrite his very problematization of it. Pursued as a deliberate policy of comprehensive social transformation, and
of power projection, development becomes allied in novel ways via global liberal governance with geopolitical military and economic institutions and
interests. The transformation is therefore to be effected according to the current efficiency and performance criteria of good governance--economically and
politically--set by the varied institutions of global liberal peace. In the process, sovereignty, as the traditional principle of political formation whose
science is law, is being supplemented by a network-based account of social organization whose principle of formation is "emergence" and whose science
increasingly is that of complex adaptive systems.[ 5] These ensure that the political issue posed by Stiglitz rarely progresses beyond an afterthought. This
incendiary brew is currently also fueled by a resurgent liberal moralism. That moralism generates its own peculiar forms of liberal hypocrisy. These
include: the calling for intervention by the international community against Indonesian actions in East Timor while liberal states furnished Indonesian
armed forces with the very means of carrying out those actions; and seeking to proscribe child soldiers while failing to address the global arms economy
that furnishes the children with their weapons. The vexed relation between liberalism and capitalism is also at issue once more since clearly, too, the
globalization of markets and of capitalism is intimately involved in the "complex emergencies" that global liberal governance seeks to police. …dilon and
reid continue… As much attention is paid to civil-military communication and coordination and practices of political negotiation in the development of the
novel operational concepts and doctrines that such complex interventions require--quite literally, their very discursive formation at an operational level--as
it is to traditional military requirements. Moreover, liberalization has applied to military security in some areas and in some respects as much as it has
applied to economics and social welfare. The complexification of conflict has also opened new commercial possibilities for the provision of "security,"
and new security discourses, practices, and agencies have flourished as a consequence. Private armies have emerged and transnational security
corporations now offer their services. States have contracted alliances with commercial security organizations that offer assistance where formal state
intervention, for whatever reason, is eschewed. Even international organizations avail themselves of the security advice and services that commercial
security companies offer, for example with respect to protecting food warehouses so that "spontaneous distribution" of food supplies does not occur.[ 8]
Emerging political complexes in Africa and Eurasia have therefore become the "strange attractors" around which novel security-development alliances of
states, international organizations, international nongovernmental organizations, and local nongovernmental organizations have formed within the domain
Global liberal governance thus responds to the
turbulence of emerging political complexes by forming its own emerging strategic complexes as a
means of dealing with the instances of violence that the densely mediated polities of the West
periodically find unacceptable there, or in response to the security threats that they are generally said to pose. The
of liberal peace and at the interface of its turbulent border terrain.[ 9]
resultant assemblages are often coalitions of the willing, the accidental, and the ready to hand. Their formation and
intervention are selective, influenced by media attention, and by economic and geostrategic interests at least as much as by
the calculation or anticipation of need. Such diverse multiple international/interagency networks pose novel strategic and
political questions not only for their own contingent formations but also to the order of liberal peace as such. Their accounts
of the sources of disorder are varied and conflicting, yet they also offer new rationales for Western armed forces and their
allied arms economies. The outcome can be quite contradictory: military attaches can be committed both to selling
arms and to selling "security reform" measures designed to introduce Western-style policing, the rule of
law, and demilitarization. Through the advent of such emerging strategic complexes, development analysts have become
as interested in conflict, war, and security as security specialists have become interested in development economics, civil
society, and conflict resolution.[ 10] In the process, the liberal peace of global governance exposes its allied face of
humanitarian war. An additional feature of these strategic complexes is, however, also a deep and profound confusion about
military purpose and military strategy. That in turn promotes a new liberal bull market for strategic ideas in the aftermath of
the dissolution of Cold War discourse.[ 11] Already, then, discourses concerned to elucidate the practices and dynamics of
interagency cooperation have emerged, operational concepts and doctrines are formulated and disseminated, and manuals
of good practice are officially adopted . Accounts of the bureaucratic politics that characterize the intense
interagency competition and rivalry that accompany the formation and operation of such strategic complexes are also
emerging. These relish the failure and confusion that abounds in such circumstances, but simultaneously also appeal
to it in order to fuel demands for yet better governance, early warning of incipient conflicts, and more adaptive
military might to deal with them. No political formulation is therefore innocent. None refers to a truth about
the world that preexists that truth's entry into the world through discourse. Every formula is instead a clue to
a truth. Each is crafted in the context of a wider discursive economy of meaning. Tug at the formula, the pull in the fabric
begins to disclose the way in which it has been woven. The artefactual design of the truth it proclaims then emerges. We are
therefore dealing with something much more than a mere matter of geo- political fact when encountering the vocabulary of
complex emer- gency in the discourse of global governance and liberal peace. We are not talking about a discrete class of
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unproblematic actions. Neither are we discussing certain forms of intractable conflicts. The formula complex emergency
does of course address certain kinds of violent disorder. That disorder is not our direct concern. Recall with Foucault and
many other thinkers that an economy of mean- ing is no mere idealist speculation. It is a material political pro- duction
integral to a specific political economy of power.
Global War/Genocide Impact
Neoliberalism will cause genocides globally
Pramon (Prof @ School of Social Science, The Australian National University) 3
(Siswo, The Genocidal Global Politics and Neoliberalism, Journal of Economic and Social Research 4 (2), 115-138)
The neoliberal global politics can also incite to the desire to protect the psychological self such as identity and self-esteem
(Staub, 1989). Protection against who? A protection against the perceived hegemon, for one, can give rise to the desire for
harm doing as suggested in the previous point. But, worse, often "it employs such 'internal', psychological means as
scape-goating or devaluation of others, which eventually provides a basis for violence against them" (Staub, 1989: 39).
Those who attempt to protect the psychological self can arbitrarily determine the "others", which might include minority
and unwanted groups, which have nothing to do with the provoking hegemon. Thus, for instance, facing the mounting US
military threat at the end of 2001, the anti-American sentiment within the Taliban regime was directed against the nonPhustun Afganis such as Hazaris, Tajiks and Uzbeks. And in the 1991 Gulf War, the anti-American sentiment within the
Iraqi regime was directed against the Kurd minority. The next instigating factor to observe is the question of (in)justice.
A sense of injustice can incite resentment, anger, and violence (Staub, 1989). For instance, following the political reform
in 1998, Indonesia is becoming more democratic but poor. Yet, it is the democratisation —more than the
simplistically alleged radicalism— which gives rise to the anti-American sentiment. More and more Indonesians
dare to challenge, although with little success, the practice of US neoliberal global politics. Why should Indonesians who
work for an American leading sportswear company in Indonesia be paid less than US$ 2.00 per day for a product worth
US$ 45 - US 80 in American market? (McKinley, 2001). Aside from the question of (in)justice, the rising anti-American
sentiment in Indonesia, and in the third world in general, which has sometimes led to violence, should be viewed as a
result of frustration, acute deprivation, and sense of powerlessness. Such psychological conditions will motivate peoples
to regain a sense of personal efficacy and personal power. If people feel vulnerable to diseases, poverty, the
constant threat of military pre-emptive strikes and weapons of mass-destruction, and, ultimately, death,
then killing (eg, homicide, genocide) "may give the killer a feeling of invulnerability and power over [the]
death" itself (Staub, 1989: 41). Such killings elusively help improve a sense of personal power. And this personal power
is a psychological tool to help survive the increasing uncertainty, anarchy or chaos. "Chaos, disorder and sudden
profound changes, especially when accompanied by frustration, threat, and attack," for Staub (1989: 41), "invalidate the
conceptions of self and world that serve as guides by which new experience acquires meaning and life gains coherence."
As such, chaotic changes from a society based on the value of work to a workless society, as discussed in the previous
section, would trigger moral panic until the arrival (or the acceptance) of a 'new' ideology that is perceived as able to
provide a renewed comprehension. If you were deprived from material gain, why would you not embrace something
against (or destroy) all kinds of material gain? (eg, the case of Taliban anti-modernisation policy in Afghanistan) If you
were deprived of a better life (and in no way can attain this) why would not you embrace a sub-culture that destroys all
kinds of lives (eg, the case of terrorist ideology). In either case, albeit suicidal- genocidal, you were no longer a loser.
Thus, the neoliberal global politics help the appeal of such destructive (and murderous) ideology in the
decaying society. The point is that not only is the neoliberal theory-as-practice genocidal, as depicted in
the previous sections, but also it inflicts difficult life conditions that increase the severity of the existing
global genocide. Most big cases of genocide happened in the backdrop of difficult life conditions.
Turkey committed genocide against the Armenians after years of humiliation —losses of territory, power, and global
political status— before and during the World War I. Difficult life condition following the defeat of Germany in World
War I helped Hitler's rise to power. And the Holocaust was committed in the years when Germany was losing World War
II. In Cambodia, the Polpot regime committed genocide in 1970s after years of civil war, starvation, and misery. In
Argentina, severe economic problems preceded genocide (Staub, 1989). In Rwanda, the collapse of the coffee
industry, the country's main national earning, preceded genocide. And in Indonesia, symptoms of genocidal society have
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been apparent since the collapse of the national economy following the Asian economic meltdown in 1997.
With the
neoliberal theory-as-practice, genocidal global politics is materialised and intensified.
Racism/Biopower Impact
Neoliberalism creates a racist biopolitics
Bourassa (University of Utah Salt Lake City) 11
(GREGORY N. , Rethinking the Curricular Imagination: Curriculum and Biopolitics in the Age of Neoliberalism, 25 JAN 2011,
Curriculum Inquiry, Volume 41, Issue 1, pages 5–16, January 2011)
Youth in a Suspect Society marks a continuation of Giroux's recent interests in the resurgence of authoritarianism, marketbased logics of disposability, and a biopolitics of neoliberalism. The convergence of these concepts, for Giroux, is
accompanied by a fundamental shift from an imperfect social state to a ruthless market state. This shift, from “state
sovereignty” to “market sovereignty” is characterized by a disinvestment in the public sphere. In this configuration,
anything pertaining to the public is not only neglected but also met with great disdain. As an economic logic, neoliberalism
invades the public sphere, invalidating and enclosing that which cannot be filtered through a market rationality. Here,
neoliberalism meets biopolitics in that politics distances itself from social governance—withdrawing from a commitment to
protect its citizens—and increasingly resorts to governing populations through the economic reign of the market. In this
cruel landscape that Giroux calls the biopolitics of neoliberalism, the social state ceases to exist only to be
replaced by a corporate state that is intent on warding off democratic sensibilities and enclosing the few
spheres of the public that remain. Giroux's conceptual mapping of a biopolitics of neoliberalism contains yet another
important element. Excluded from social and political life, those populations marginalized by class and race are
reduced from the status of citizens to waste, or in Agamben's (1998) terms, from bios (social and political life) to
zoē (life without quality). Rendered disposable under a biopolitics of neoliberalism, marginalized populations are
vulnerable to Agamben's formulation of biopolitics as thanatopolitics. Giroux, rightfully taking Agamben's biopolitics
seriously in this instance, draws here from Achille Mbembe (2003), who argues that “vast populations are subject to
conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead” (p. 40). In short, a neoliberal biopolitics
of disposability ushers in forms of social death, rendering populations expendable, without support,
protection, or compassion. In Giroux's account, such a biopolitical order abandons populations under the guise that they
represent the refuse of a neoliberal economic regime. This epitomizes, for Giroux, a complete violation of ethical
responsibility and obligation to youth and the democratic future to come.
***Alts***
Reject Neolib Subjectivity Alt
Our alternative is to reject neoliberal subjectivity
Dilts (Collegiate Assistant Professor, University of Chicago) 10
(Andrew, From ‘entrepreneur of the self’ to ‘care of the self’: Neoliberal Governmentality and Foucault’s Ethics,
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1580709, Western Political Science Association 2010 Annual Meeting Paper)
In this same interview, Foucault was asked directly about the relationship between the lectures on liberalism and neoliberalism and its connection to the work on sexuality.5 He was asked if “liberalism seemed to be a detour taken to discover
the individual beyond the mechanisms of power,” noting that it was at this point that, “one began to speak of a subject of
practices, and the rereading of liberalism took place somewhat in that context.” This is not at all a surprising question, as
the idea of homo œconomicus seems to be precisely a rejection of the idea of the sovereign, psychological, anthropological,
or phenomenological subject. Foucault’s response is fascinating: I don’t think there is actually a sovereign, founding
subject, a universal form of subject that one could find everywhere. I am very skeptical and very hostile toward this
conception of the subject. I think, on the contrary that the subject is constituted through practices of subjection, or, in a
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more anonymous way, through practices of liberation, of freedom, as in Antiquity, starting of course from a number of
rules, styles and conventions that are found in the culture (Foucault 1996, 452). Foucault makes no mention of homo
œconomicus here, and yet the figure seems to be implied and rejected in the same move. The neo-liberal homo
œconomicus is surely a universal form of the subject, as it is driven by a theory of human capital that
extends to any and all persons who make decisions about their activities within a scope of temporal
and material conditions. As a universalizing figure, Foucault can easily be read as “hostile” to such a sweeping move.
Yet it is precisely the attention to the human capital theory that reminds us that this neo-liberal homo œconomicus is
a subject that is constituted primarily through practices. The key term, of course, is if the practices of neo-liberal
rationality are rightly called practices of “subjection.” Certainly, Becker and Schultz understood all practices as being
fundamentally expressions of freedom, that is, as choices. For the neo-liberals (and in fact, many classical liberals before
them), freedom is expressed precisely through choice (and in fact, might be radically coincident with choice). The
antitheses of freedom, as Schultz repeatedly reminds his readers, is slavery and servitude, instances in which the theory of
human capital takes on its more nefarious tones. A slave or an indentured servant is unfree precisely because they are
unable to choose their daily activities. What Foucault seems to be expressly attending to in the account of a subject formed
through practices is the way in which freedom is only achieved through practices of the self that proceed from the “rules,
styles, and conventions” of a particular culture. To identify what practices constitute free practices requires (as
he sets out to do in The Care of the Self in particular) an account of how some practices can be understood as
ones that allow access to a self that is not sovereign, but which “takes care of oneself” as a way of
“knowing oneself.” That is, the truth of a practice as a “free” practice requires precisely an account of the specific rules
and practices of a specific milieu, of the truth games or regimes of veridiction that are in play. That is, as a subject that
forms him or herself, but precisely by never appearing to be “beyond the mechanism of power.” If our
current milieu, at least in terms of its dominant mode of governmental reason, is one in which we are, from the point of
view of the exercise of power, individuals whose conducts are to be determined in relation to the rules of the games, then it
requires us to think not just about how to resist the use of power, but how to conduct ourselves under those rules. That is,
if we must accept some degree of the neo-liberal understanding of the subject, then we must think very
seriously about the care of the self, about the kinds of individuals that we form ourselves into - never
forgetting, however, that we are constrained, that we are already governable, or that we can succumb to
something that forms and reforms us. We must take part in that work ethically rather than
satisfactorily. That is, as an ethical activity rather than a purely consumptive activity.
Movements Alt
Massive networks of oppressed people are coalescing throughout the world now – what they lack is a
clear vision to counter neoliberal development.
Wise (Director of Doctoral Program in Migration Studies & Prof of Development Studies; Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas,
Mexico) 9
(Raúl Delgado, Forced Migration and US Imperialism: The Dialectic of Migration and Development, Crit Sociol, 35: 767, ProQuest)
The profound need for change in the structural dynamics and strategic practices at work in the current schemes of regional
integration and neoliberal national development have given way to two types of social agents, which can be
separated into two groups: those ‘from above’ and those ‘from below’. The current economic project has clearly been
implemented ‘from above’ by the agents of US imperialism in tandem with Mexican allies. They work within a political
coalition that seeks to maintain the privileges of neoliberal integration and push them to its very limits. In short, this is an
actual class project that promotes economic asymmetries, social inequalities and phenomena such as poverty,
unemployment, labor precarization and migration. In contrast, those ‘below’ – particularly in Mexico – are mostly
unhappy and disenchanted, although they sometimes engage in open acts of opposition, resistance, and
rebellion. It is true that there is currently no collective agent that can articulate a project that counters the one
being implemented by neoliberal elites. However, we should point out that a number of dispersed social
alternative movements have willingly, even optimistically, sprung up. The Mexican agricultural sector,
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one of the quarters that has been hardest hit by the implementation of NAFTA and is suffering in the productive,
commercial, population and environmental areas, has given rise to movements like El Barzón (The ‘Plow’), El
Campo No Aguanta Más (The Countryside Can’t Take Anymore; see Bartra, 2003) and the campaign Sin Maíz no
hay País (No Corn, no Country). Other denouncers of the neoliberal system include the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación
Nacional (Zapatista Army of National Liberation, EZLN) and its Otra Campaña (Other Campaign), as well as some sectors
of the social and electoral left who have converged into the Coalición por el Bien de Todos (Coalition for the Good of All)
and the Convención Nacional Democrática (National Democratic Convention). There are also other more or less important
national sociopolitical movements, but what is worth noticing is that the widespread popular discontent (which could
even extend to the majority of Mexicans) is not expressed in an organized manner and has not produced yet
an alternative development project. On a binational level, the actions of opposition forces have been even more
scattered. Initially, the Red Mexicana de Acción frente al Libre Comercio (Mexican Action Network in Opposition of Free
Trade) communicated with likeminded organizations in the USA and Canada that opposed the signing of NAFTA, but since
then its actions (which involve agreements between unions and social organizations on both sides of the border) have been
few and far between (Brooks and Fox, 2004). The idea that migrants are agents of development has been promoted for over
a decade. This proposal, which is in no way sustainable when applied to large-scale social processes, suggests that migrants
should be held responsible for promoting development in their countries of origin. And yet, as Fox (2005) has pointed out,
migrant society has produced social actors who operate on three levels: integration into US society (e.g. unions, the media,
and religious organizations); networki ng and promoti on of devel opment i n pl aces of ori gi n (i . e. nati ve organizations),
and binational relationships that combine the previous two (i.e. pan-ethnic organizations). For example, Mexican migrant
organizations fund public works and social projects in their communities of origin with the aid of the program Tres por
Uno. And during the spring of 2006 USA-residing immigrants participated in massive marches in favor of their working,
political, social, and civil rights. As for the latter, Petras (2006) points out that ‘between March 25 and May 1, 2006 close
to five million migrant workers and their supporters marched through nearly 100 cities of the US’.
This, he notes, is the biggest and most sustained workers’ demonstration in the history of the USA. In
its 50-year history, the US trade union confederation, the AFL-CIO, has never been capable of mobilizing even a fraction of
the workers convoked by the migrant workers movement. The rise and growth of the movement is rooted in the
historical experience of the migrant workers (overwhelmingly from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean),
the exploitative and racist experience they confront today in the USA and the future in which they face
imprisonment, expulsion and dispossession. Generally speaking, migrants and their organizations affect the political,
social, economic, and cultural aspects of sending and receiving countries to varying degrees. However, it would be a
theoretical mistake to present migrants themselves as a collective agent of transformation. If we intend to portray them as
agents of development, then we had better examine the strategic projects and structural dynamics present on the differ- ent
planes and levels, as well as the interests that prompt participation ‘from above’ and ‘from below’. This will allow us to
understand the role played by migrants. Stating that they cannot be considered agents of development does
not entail a pessimistic message advocating immobility. Quite the opposite: this can help us
disentangle possible forms of articulation between migrant organizations and social sectors that seek a
new type of development agenda, one that can be applied on the global, regional, national, and local
levels. Only then will we be able to discuss the configuration of an agent of social trans- formation that
includes migrant participation. In any case, as Petras (2006) has pointed out, ‘[t]he emergence of the mass
migrant workers’ movement opens a new chapter in the working class struggle both in North America,
and Central America’. First and foremost it represents the first major upsurge of independent working class struggle in
the USA after over 50 years of decline, stagna- tion and retreat by the established trade union confederation.
Movements Alt – Knowledge Communities Solvency
New knowledge communities are developing now proves that the alternative is possible
Wise et al. (Director of Doctoral Program in Migration Studies & Prof of Development Studies; Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas,
Mexico) 10
(Raúl Delgado Wise, Humberto Márquez Covarrubias, Rubén Puentes, Reframing the debate on migration, development and human
rights: fundamental elements, October, 2010, www.migracionydesarrollo.org)
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During the later part of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, the relationship between migration and development
has become a major academic and political is- sue encompassing the national, regional and global contexts. So far, the
discussion agenda has been dictated by the governments of the major migrant-receiving north- ern
countries—primarily the United States and the European Union—and implemented by some key international
organizations like the World Bank (WB). These bodies define the topics that determine the course of
international and regional forums, policy design, and research financing. The governments of sending and
transit countries, mostly located in the southern hemi- sphere as well as parts of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, tend to
take a passive stance in the de- bate. Most merely validate the political position taken by receiving countries
or discursively protest the treatment received by their emigrants, in order to justify the failure of their
own development policies. Some progressive governments, however, are now taking an alternative approach in order
to reassess the role played by their nations in the fields of development and migration . Academic research is also
under the sway of the dominant agenda, but new voices have begun to question this perspective,
highlighting the need to reframe the debate while introduc- ing new theoretical and empirical tools with which to
approach these complex problems and find alternative solutions. Some of these new think-tanks include the
International Network on Migra- tion and Development (RIMD), the Institutet för Forskning om Migration,
Etnicitet och Samhälle (REMESO) in Sweden, Oxford’s International Migration Institute (IMI), Princeton’s
Center for Migration and Development (CMD), and the Scalabrini International Migration Network (SIMN).
While civil society has not remained passive, its participation in policy making processes has so far
been essentially marginal. Organizations, movements and networks that create alternative spaces for
discussion and resistance have begun to emerge. Among them is the World Social Forum on Migration, which
brings together thousands of delegates each year, including academics. The Global Forum on Migration and Development
(GFMD), a governmental forum derived from the 2006 United Nations (UN) High-Level Dialogue, provides some room
for participation and includes spaces where civil society representatives can discuss governmental agendas and make
suggestions. Discussions between civil society and governments and northern and southern nations have, how- ever, been
unfruitful during the past three GFMD meetings in Brussels, Manila, and Athens. The People’s Global Action on
Migration, Development and Human Rights (PGA) has come into being alongside the aforementioned
assemblies. It convenes civil society organizations and networks that follow an alternative agenda,
seeking to change the terms of the debate and influence public policies. It is worth mentioning that civil
society and migrant organizations and networks in particular have driven a wide range of local, regional and transnational
development initiatives, in addition to being key participants in regional forums across the globe and weighing in on a
wealth of issues. Despite all of this, receiving countries still maintain a reductionist and exclusivist
approach to migration and development, obscuring the root causes of the first and ignoring the
contribu- tions made by migrants to receiving societies. This discourse also masks the costs migration has for
migrants themselves and for their societies of origin, despite the alleged benefits of remittanc- es. Instead of a
comprehensive approach, we have a distorted view of reality that encourages the perception of migrants as public enemies.
Furthermore, agendas that emphasize national security promote xenophobic, anti-immigration policies. In these
circumstances, actual development in countries of origin and respect for migrants’ human rights remain unfulfilled goals.
***Answers To***
A2: Perm
Perm’s inclusion guarantee’s that inequalities are whitewashed and Western interests always win out
Martell (University of Sussex, Brighton, UK) 9
(Luke, Global Inequality, Human Rights and Power: A Critique of Ulrich Beck’s Cosmopolitanism, Critical Sociology 35(2) 253–272,
SAGE)
Where Beck does try to put into action his cosmopolitan postcolonialism it runs into trouble (e.g. Beck and Sznaider, 2006).
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He advocates a ‘both/and’ perspective taking over from an ‘either/or’ perspective. This is good for bringing in previously
excluded inputs to views that have stressed Westernization without understanding a mixture of influences including from
non-Western sources (e.g. Abu-Lughod, 1989). However a ‘both/and’ view runs the risk of replacing
Westernization perspectives with one in which power and inequality is glossed over by an attempt to
resurrect understandings of the inputs of non- Western societies. When different global societies meet
there are often some that have greater economic, political and ideological power. To highlight this fact is
not to endorse it. And it is not to say there are not real sources of opposition and alternatives to
Westernization both academically and politically (in the latter case from Iran to Venezuela for example). But
positing a ‘both/and’ mix appears to give an equality to a mix of perspectives when there are great
inequalities and power differences in that mix. In trying to give more of a role to inputs from beyond the West it
runs the risk of playing down the Western power that such inputs are subjected to. Beck’s own use of a ‘both/and’
hybridizing postcolonialism (2000b: 89) underesti- mates these power relations and inequalities. In a discussion of
deregulation and flexibi- lization which promote an informal economy, diluted trade union representation and weak states
Beck suggests these are non-Western standards being adopted by Western societies. But the direction of power is the other
way around. These are structures and effects of neoliberalism being exported by Western-dominated governments and
institu- tions to other Western and non-Western societies with the deleterious effects that Beck rightly suggests. Western
power is underestimated here when neoliberalism is seen as an effect of the importation of poor
regulation from the non-West to West rather than an expression of the corporate and state power of
Western interests. So the novelty and uniqueness of Beck’s cosmopolitanism for establishing a postcolo- nial
perspective is justified by an understatement of the extent to which postcolonialism is already in existence and an
overstatement of the role of cosmopolitanism in having a new role in establishing this itself. At the same time, his more
hybrid postcolonial view, rather than restoring a greater emphasis on poorer countries’ contribution to globaliza- tion, may
underestimate the power they are subjected to. Beck’s postcolonialism fits into a more general pattern in his work, of
underestimating previous cosmopolitanism in social science, overestimating the novelty of his cosmopolitan vision, and
leading down a road which rather than overcoming power and inequality seems as much to play down
how significant it is.
A2: No Alt
Rejecting the Aff’s research model makes alternative to neoliberal development possible
Wise et al. (Director of Doctoral Program in Migration Studies & Prof of Development Studies; Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas,
Mexico) 10
(Raúl Delgado Wise, Humberto Márquez Covarrubias, Rubén Puentes, Reframing the debate on migration, development and human
rights: fundamental elements, October, 2010, www.migracionydesarrollo.org)
neoliberal
globalization posits itself as inevitable. It is therefore crucial that we theoretically and practically endorse the
feasibility of alter- native development strategies. Rejecting the assymetrical power relationships between
sending and receiving countries is of paramount importance. This will allow us to identify and counter practices
that have plunged vast regions of the world into quagmires of inequality, marginalization, poverty, social exclusion
and forced migration. A project of genuine social transformation must focus on the root causes of forced
migration and fight them by creating decent, secure, and well-paid employment opportunities. This will make
The promotion of alternative development as social transformation can prevent forced migration. Ideologically speaking,
migration an option rather than a necessity.
A2: Tragedy of the Commons
Commons is the solution not the cause of problems
Mansfield (Professor of Geography @ OSU) 4
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(Becky, Geoforum, Neoliberalism in the oceans: “rationalization,” property rights, and the commons question, Volume 35, Issue 3,
May 2004, Pages 313–326)
By the 1980s, scholars
in anthropology, institutional economics, and geography, among others, were
challenging the idea that “the commons” is the ultimate cause of environmental and economic
problems associated with resource use. Witnessing the rising popularity of the commons model, not only in fisheries but
much more widely after the publication of Hardin's “tragedy of the commons” formulation of the model, scholars began to
piece together empirical evidence that countered the argument that resources in the commons are inevitably degraded.
Researchers found numerous case studies from around the world, of fisheries and otherwise, in which
local people successfully managed common property resources using combinations of explicit and
implicit rules and cultural norms to protect resources, control access to those resources, and distribute the
benefits of resource use (Berkes, 1989; Bromley, 1992; Burger et al., 2001;Durrenberger and King, 2000; Dyer and
McGoodwin, 1994; Hanna and Munasinghe, 1995b; McCay and Acheson, 1987). From this empirical starting point,
scholars have offered the commons not as the underlying cause of resource problems, but instead as a
potential solution. Community and cooperative management are alternatives in which people's ability
to design institutions for resource use and allocation is harnessed to the specific goals of contemporary
resource management.6
A2: Neolib Not Monolithic
Neolib is overdetermined
Cerny (Department of Political Science and the Division of Global Affairs, Rutgers University) 9
(Phillip, Neoliberalisation and Place: Deconstructing and Reconstructing Borders, B. Arts et al. (eds.), The Disoriented State: Shifts in
Governmentality, Territoriality and Governance, 13–39, SpringerLink)
Finally, neoliberalisation, I would argue, is
overdetermined. The actors and institutions that make up the
galaxy of multi-level governance and multi-nodal politics in the 21st century can all be seen as pushing
more or less in the same direction, towards more transnationally interconnected political processes as
well as market structures. In one sense this means that there is a holistic, ‘fusion’ aspect of the neoliberalisation
process that transcends national borders. But it also means that the constellation of variables all play distinct, if
complementary, roles in neoliberalisation. In the first place, as argued earlier in this chapter, political actors –
politicians and bureaucrats, policy and institutional entrepreneurs, interest groups and even ordinary voters – have in
various ways been key actors in this process. For example, state actors today, in pursuing traditional goals of economic
growth and development, tend to prioritise using public policy to promote and enhance the international competitiveness of
firms and sectors that also play significant roles in the domestic economy – the ‘competition state’ (Cerny 1997, 2000a). In
this role they increasingly to construct broad yet neoliberal coalitions such as New Labour in the United Kingdom (Cerny
and Evans 2004), the current Christian Democrat-Social Democrat coalition in Germany under Angela Merkel, or even,
despite nationalist electoral rhetoric, the quasi-neoliberal majority of Sarkozy in France.
A2: Things Getting Better
Both real and relative poverty are massively increasing – neoliberal growth is unsustainable
Li (Prof of political economy at the Department of Political Science of York University, fmr. Chinese political prisoner) 4
(Minqi, After Neoliberalism: Empire, Social Democracy, or Socialism?, http://monthlyreview.org/2004/01/01/after-neoliberalismempire-social-democracy-or-socialism)
According to United Nations’ Human Development Report, the world’s richest 1 percent receive as much income as the
poorest 57 percent. The income gap between the richest 20 percent and the poorest 20 percent in the world rose
from 30:1 in 1960, to 60:1 in 1990, and to 74:1 in 1999, and is projected to reach 100:1 in 2015. In 1999–2000, 2.8
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billion people lived on less than $2 a day, 840 million were undernourished, 2.4 billion did not have access
to any form of improved sanitation services, and one in every six children in the world of primary school age were not in
school. About 50 percent of the global nonagricultural labor force is estimated to be either unemployed or underemployed.1
In many countries, working people have suffered an absolute decline in living standards. In the United States,
the real weekly earnings of production and nonsupervisory workers (in 1992 dollars) fell from $315 in 1973 to
$264 in 1989. After a decade of economic expansion, it reached $271 in 1999, which remained lower than the average real
wage in 1962. In Latin America, a continent that has suffered from neoliberal restructuring since the 1970s, about 200
million people, or 46 percent of the population, live in poverty. Between 1980 and the early 1990s (1991–1994),
real wages fell by 14 percent in Argentina, 21 percent in Uruguay, 53 percent in Venezuela, 68 percent in Ecuador, and
73 percent in Bolivia.2 The advocates of neoliberalism promised that the neoliberal “reforms” or “structural adjustments”
would usher in an era of unprecedented economic growth, technological progress, rising living standards, and material
prosperity. In fact, the world economy has slowed towards stagnation in the neoliberal era. The average
annual growth rate of world GDP declined from 4.9 percent between 1950 and 1973, to 3.0 percent between 1973 and
1992, and to 2.7 percent between 1990 and 2001. Between 1980 and 1998, half of all the “developing countries”
(including the so-called “transition economies”) suffered from falling real per capita GDP.3 The global
economy has been kept afloat by the debt-financed U.S. economy. Between 1995 and 2002, the U.S. economy
accounted for 96 percent of the cumulative growth in world GDP.4 The U.S. expansion has been financed by reducing
domestic savings, raising the private sector debts to historically unprecedented levels, and running large and ever-rising
current account deficits. The process is unsustainable. The enormous imbalances have to be corrected one way or the
other. If the United States cannot continue to generate ever-rising current account deficits and none of the other large
economies are capable of functioning effectively as the autonomous driving force, the neoliberal global economy
will be under powerful downward pressures and exposed to the threat of increasingly frequent and
violent financial crises.
A2: Framework
Beggs the question of the K – We have to adopt a pedagogy that allows revolutionary thought or
neoliberal biopower is inevitable
Bourassa (University of Utah Salt Lake City) 11
(GREGORY N. , Rethinking the Curricular Imagination: Curriculum and Biopolitics in the Age of Neoliberalism, 25 JAN 2011,
Curriculum Inquiry, Volume 41, Issue 1, pages 5–16, January 2011)
Second, employing the theory of a neoliberal biopolitics of disposability, Giroux highlights the broken promises of public
schooling in terms that refocus what is at stake for curriculum inquiry. Beyond the myopic rhetoric of accountability and
standards, it is absolute democracy (Dewey, 1927; Hardt & Negri, 2004) and its unfolding futurity that is in jeopardy. Put
differently, a biopolitical reading of curriculum insists that the production and reproduction of certain
forms of life are at the very center of the educational experience. Thus, no longer can prevailing conceptions of
curriculum fail to locate the ideological underpinnings of school practices, allowing the relationship between schooling and
economic, political, and cultural imperatives to remain veiled. In other words, curriculum inquiry must strive to locate and
disrupt the commensurability between these prevailing imperatives, their broader political projects and the mandates they
impose on curriculum. With the aid of Giroux's biopolitical framework, the curricular imagination must conceive
of the educational experience not as a formula to be consumed or constructed for calculable
instrumentality, but rather as a vital resource for galvanizing a robust social imagination capable of
collectively negotiating and perpetually reconstructing democratic life (Dewey, 1927). The writings of Tyson
Lewis, which I will now turn to, are especially crucial for this task.
Their education is worthless – becomes more neoliberal route learning without a self-reflexive
examination of their own assumptions and the possibility of a radical imagining like the alt
Bourassa (University of Utah Salt Lake City) 11
(GREGORY N. , Rethinking the Curricular Imagination: Curriculum and Biopolitics in the Age of Neoliberalism, 25 JAN 2011,
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Curriculum Inquiry, Volume 41, Issue 1, pages 5–16, January 2011)
One of the more difficult and pressing challenges confronting curriculum inquiry today relates to the increasing enclosure
and privatization of the public sphere. Public schools, often exalted and thought to be among the most resilient spaces of the
common, are now incredibly fragile, on the brink of being fully besieged by the onslaught of neoliberalism (De Lissovoy,
2008; Saltman, 2007). While this practice of enclosure is not necessarily new, as market forces have long been encroaching
the spaces of public schooling (Du Bois, 1918; Dewey, 1930), the emergence of neoliberalism in the last thirty years marks
a particularly insidious turn. The novelty of neoliberalism resides not only in that it has become normalized and even
celebrated, but also in that the far-reaching tentacles of neoliberalism assume pedagogical dimensions.1 At
the same time, the unapologetic posturing of neoliberalism (Giroux, 2009) offers curriculum theorists the
contours of a common target that has not always been so easily recognizable in attempts to chart the
flows and logics of capital. From this, we might gather that the current configuration of neoliberalism, like that of
public schooling, precariously occupies a liminal status between that of inordinate durability and immanent vulnerability.
Given the hubris and arrogance of neoliberalism, we are now better armored with the vocabularies and conceptual
understandings needed to both defend and rethink the institution of public schooling in our current juncture. For curriculum
inquiry, this means reclaiming, and more accurately, reinventing, the educational experience. As William Pinar (2004)
notes: In its interest in and commitment to the study of educational experience, curriculum theory is critical of
contemporary school “reform.” Indeed, “educational experience” seems precisely what politicians do not
want, as they insist we focus on test scores, the “bottom line.” By linking the curriculum to student performance
on standardized examinations, politicians have, in effect, taken control of what is to be taught: the curriculum.
Examination-driven curricula demote teachers from scholars and intellectuals to technicians in service to the state. The
cultivation of self-reflexive, interdisciplinary erudition and intellectuality disappears. Rationalized as
“accountability,” political socialization replaces education. (pp. 2–3) Although Pinar is highlighting some of the most
saliently corrosive school practices, his stress on the enclosure of the educational experience does not translate into
acquiescence to market forces. In fact, it could be argued that the circumstances for absolute democracy have never been
more possible (Hardt & Negri, 2004).2 In the face of perpetual reform, high-stakes testing, mechanical pedagogy, scripted
curricula, and punitive disciplinary practices, curriculum inquiry is immediately thrust into a limit-situation in which a new
horizon of possibilities is unveiled (Freire, 2000). In other words, these realities are not “the impassable boundaries where
possibilities end, but the real boundaries where all possibilities begin” (Alvaro Vieira Pinto, quoted in Freire, 2000, p. 99).
With this, the task of curriculum inquiry is to collectively imagine fields of possibility (Appadurai, 1996), working from the
occupied, yet generative, confines of a “cramped space” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986, p. 17). At the same time, such calls for
an unleashed curricular imagination must be tempered with the humility of a diligent yet playful social imagination that
recognizes that problems are always beginning anew and altering in both form and appearance (de Certeau, 1984). Thus in
curriculum inquiry's quest to reinvent public schooling as a beacon of possibility and promise for a
new democratic future, the only way to proceed is to nourish a radically collective imagination and
embrace the inextinguishable spirit of struggle (Dewey, 1927; Giroux, Penna, & Pinar, 1981; Pinar, 2004).
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