Neoliberalism K – HSS13
Links
Economic Engagement – 1NC
The plan attempts to remake the target countries in the image of Northern development
through economic engagement. Challenging the limits of neoliberalism in public spaces is
key to politicize alternative strategies.
Sheppard et al., Minnesota geography professor, 2010
(Eric, “Quo vadis neoliberalism? The remaking of global capitalist governance after the Washington Consensus”,
Geoforum, 41.2, ScienceDirect)
We have shown that there have been marked periodic remakings of global capitalist governance from a Washington to a post-Washington consensus, and beyond, in
ways that have begun to question some key aspects of global neoliberal governance. Taken together, they hardly represent a consensus. Yet such shifts and
disagreements have been contained within a developmentalist socio-spatial imaginary that has, in effect, repeatedly legitimized
discourses of first world expertise even as the policies based in this expertise repeatedly fail. In this section, we
summarize the elements of this imaginary, and discuss how it has persisted even in the wake of crises that create space for alternative imaginaries. The
developmentalist socio-spatial imaginary has three components that are closely intertwined: A stageist, teleological thinking that
constitutes capitalism, Euro-North American style, as the highest form of development; a leveling metaphor, according to
which a flattening of the world equalizes opportunities for all individuals and places; and an imagining of socio-spatial difference as coexisting with this leveling
through its commodification. At
the center of mainstream policymaking discussed above is the conception of a single
trajectory of development, namely capitalist development, along which all places are imagined as sequenced. Rostow famously articulated such a trajectory
in his modernist “non-communist manifesto”, The Stages of Economic Growth (Rostow, 1960). As dependency, post-colonial and post-development theorists have
argued, this
has the effect of presenting places with no choices about what development means, and of ranking places,
and their inhabitants, on a scale of development—according to which the prosperous capitalist societies of western Europe and white settler
colonies (North America, Australia and New Zealand) occupy the apex, with respect to which other places are imagined as incomplete in their development. This
also implies the desirability of erasing or making over less adequate states of affairs, replacing them with
their more efficient and rational Northern exemplars. Notwithstanding very substantial shifts and disagreements
in how the apex is imagined (as liberal civilization during the colonial era, as Fordist industrialism after 1945, as neoliberal after 1980, and as good
governance and poverty reduction after 1997), the effect is to locate expertise at the apex. If all places are on a common path, then those who
have reached the end seem naturally pre-destined to teach others about how to achieve this —even when the paternalist advice is
‘don’t do as I do, but do as I say’ (cf. Chang, 2002 and Chang, 2008). The new development economics’ supplement of Keynesian strategies, while critical of and
presenting itself as a departure from the Washington Consensus, still endorses a stageist imaginary. Sachs is explicit about his debt to Rostow, framing the specific
diagnostic interventions in any nation in terms of the goal of achieving a healthy (first world capitalist) economic body. Sutured to stageist thinking is an imaginary of
flattening, of globalization and capitalist development as a process that is flattening out the world, creating a level playing field that equalizes opportunities
everywhere. It is this flattening that enables progress along the stages of development—what Blaut has termed a diffusionist conception of development (Blaut, 1993).
Some claim that the world is actually flattening out—that socio-spatial positionality matters less and less, with the implication that it is the conditions in a place, rather
than its connectivity to the rest of the world, that becomes the important differentiating factor (for critiques of such claims, in both the mainstream and political
economic literatures, see Sheppard, 2002 and Sheppard, 2006). The
Washington Consensus, in effect, sought to alter the conditions in
place; pressing nations to adopt ‘best practice’ neoliberal governance norms, structural adjustment, which would
then enable them to progress towards prosperity in a flat world . The ‘new’ development economists acknowledge that the world is not flat.
Thus Sachs and Stiglitz argue that certain differences between nations persist in the face of globalization, creating unequal conditions of possibility for development.
Sachs argues that certain biophysical differences can never be erased, making places ‘prisoners’ of their geography (Hausmann, 2001). This barrier can be overcome
by directing more investment toward and/or giving more policy latitude to, ‘backward’ cities, regions, and nations. Stiglitz stresses how institutions of global
governance reinforce power inequalities that disadvantage the global South, arguing for countervailing policies that favor the latter. Both advocate global
redistribution and affirmative action for poor nations in order to redress inequalities resulting from disadvantaged geographical or political positionalities, in the belief
that such interventions can level the playing field. Again, a flattened world, or leveled playing field, is seen as providing all places with the same opportunities to
advance toward prosperity. Yet a flattened world, within this socio-spatial imaginary, does not mean a homogeneous world .
Development economics has long recognized that places differ in their resource endowments, arguing that such differences need not be sources of inequality. Rather,
each place is enjoined to find its comparative advantage, and trade in global markets on this basis. In doing so, places develop very different economic specializations,
each of which is an equal basis for advancing along the developmental trajectory. More recently, both the World Bank and the new development economics have
increasingly come to recognize and value persistent differences in cultural norms and practices across the globe, explicitly distancing themselves from previous quasiorientalist rankings of cultures. Yet such
cultural differences are recognized and valorized in terms of how they can be utilized
in the market. As in the case of comparative advantage, the value of such socio-spatial differences is assessed in terms of their commodifiability. For example,
Bergeron (2003) analyzes how the World Bank incorporates difference into its attempts to create subjects for the market. Taking the case of microfinance, she notes
how the Bank, utilizing Putnam’s conception of social capital, takes the position that “developing social capital is best achieved by tapping into the communities’ own
‘premodern’ modes of collaboration and social life” (p. 403). Where such non-capitalist practices are seen as functional to incorporating subjects into microfinance,
they are valued. However, social and cultural differences and practices that are not regarded as commodifiable are dismissed as barriers to development, in need of
modernization. By the same token, Sachs’ concerns about geographical disadvantage can be regarded as identifying place-based characteristics that cannot be
commodified in terms of comparative advantage, e.g., tropical or inland locations, thus requiring intervention. A variety of forces has contributed to the persistence of
this imaginary, for at least the last century. First, its power geometry—its rootedness in hegemonic regions of the global system—has given the imaginary particular
power to shape not only thinking in the global North, whose self-image it reinforces, but also the global South, whose residents often have been convinced that their
own local knowledge and indigenous practices are inadequate. Second, the imaginary gains traction from its optimism and resonance with the notions of progress,
equality, and acknowledgement of difference. While each is defined in a particular, commodified way, their capacity to connect with deep human desires for a better
life is enticing. Notwithstanding the power and attractiveness of this imaginary, the failure of globalizing capitalism to bring about the prosperity that it promises,
combined with the persistence of contestation, has periodically created moments of both material and cognitive crisis. Capitalism’s ability to reinvent itself through
such moments of crisis, thereby reinvigorating this imaginary, can be understood through Derrida’s concept of the supplement. [T]he concept of the
supplement…harbors within itself two significations whose cohabitation is as strange as it is necessary. The supplement adds itself…, a plenitude enriching another
plenitude, the fullest measure of presence… But the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace…; if it fills, it is as one fills a void… As substitute, it is not
simply added to the positivity of a presence…, its place is assigned in the structure by the mark of an emptiness. (Derrida, 1976, pp. 144–5) Both Keynesian and
Hayekian governance discourses play this supplementary role for capitalism as, arguably, does any global governance discourse. Crises signal the incompleteness of
capitalism—marks of an emptiness that require a supplement. Supplements fill capitalism’s emptiness and enrich it, promising a fuller measure of presence.
Keynesianism provided exactly this supplement during the Great Depression, filling a gap in capitalism and reinvigorating the socio-spatial imaginary. Hayekian
neoliberalism worked similarly when first world Fordism entered its crisis in the later 1970s, only to run into its own difficulties, described above, for which a new
supplement is currently being sought. While there is no guarantee that a supplement must emerge to alleviate any crisis, to date this has been the case. 4. Conclusion
We have argued that the shifting global governance discourses directed toward the third world since the 1970s can
be conceptualized as capitalism’s supplements. As supplements, they have reaffirmed a persistent developmentalist socio-spatial imaginary.
Recent discussions of such shifts (e.g., Evans, 2008 and Wade, 2008) invoke Karl Polanyi’s double movement: struggles within nation-states of North Atlantic
capitalism, dating back to the 18th century, between those propagating free markets and those seeking to protect society through “powerful institutions designed to
check the action of the market relative to labor, land and money” (Polanyi, 2001 [1944], p. 79). The Washington Consensus entailed a shift from the latter to the
former pole, albeit at a global scale, generating some nostalgia for national Keynesianism among critical scholars (cf. Peck and Tickell, 2002, p. 38). Yet, while new
development economics discourses resonate with Keynesian imaginaries, it is doubtful that we are experiencing a return to Polanyi’s institutions, even at a supranational scale. The decommodification of land, labor and money is not evident, and emergent governance discourses in the US and the UK stress a paternalistic
‘nudging’ of individuals to make the right choices (Thaler and Sunstein, 2003). Nevertheless neoliberalism, as we know it, is in question. The current crisis has made
Hayekian nostrums unpopular, but faith in the market runs deep, and it will probably take a decade before it becomes clear what supplement emerges to manage this
crisis. There is no shortage of candidates for post-neoliberal governance regimes—both progressive and regressive (Brand and Sekler, 2009)—and in a moment of
crisis, when supplements are in question, contestations can play a vital role in shaping capitalism’s trajectories, and viability. Challenging
the
developmentalist socio-spatial imaginary, however, will require not just probing the limits of neoliberalism, but
exploring imaginaries that exceed capitalism. Within the academy, a plenitude of conceptual alternatives highlight capitalism’s complicity in
producing the inequalities and hierarchies that the developmentalist socio-spatial imaginary claims to overcome, including Marxist, world-systemic, feminist, postcolonial and post-developmental scholarship (cf. Sheppard et al., 2009). These alternatives imagine capitalism, development and governance otherwise – seeking more
just and sustainable alternatives that create space for variegated trajectories, uneven connectivities and ineluctable difference, instead of stageism, flattening and
commodification. Beyond
the academy, civil society is expanding the range of alternatives—and is arguably better
equipped to disrupt the current experimentations of global policymakers. Experiencing the disabling effects of
capitalism and its supplements, those living precariously actively contest neoliberalization, articulating alternative
imaginaries and practices through actions ranging from local initiatives to transnational activist networks. The World
Social Forum is just the most prominent of innumerable inter-related counter-neoliberal globalization movements (Fisher and Ponniah, 2003, Glassman, 2001, Evans,
2008, Sheppard and Nagar, 2004, Notes From Nowhere, 2003 and Reitan, 2007). Santos
(2008, p. 258) regards its gatherings as a
productive forum for “alternative thinking of alternatives”—where different kinds of knowledge about social
transformation and emancipation, exceeding the hegemonic epistemologies of the West, are valorized and
actively debated, and where the existence of alternatives is asserted without defining their content. It may seem
unlikely that such emerging alternatives constitute a serious near-term challenge to capitalist imaginaries, but they are provincializing Western understandings of
governance and social transformation, and re-politicizing capitalism. Politicization
is essential to make space for transformative
rather than affirmative remedies, changing the frameworks that generate unequal power relations, and
dismantling EuroAmerican centrism “so as to undo the vicious circle of economic and cultural subordination ”
(Fraser, 1997, p. 28).
Economic Engagement – 2NC
Movements against neoliberalism are strong in Latin America and check environmental
collapse and structural violence. US economic engagement is designed to re-entrench
transnational control of Latin America at the cost of local populations. Only de-linking
economies solve.
Harris, CSU global studies professor, 2008
(Richard, “Latin America’s Response to Neoliberalism and Globalization”,
http://www.nuso.org/upload/articulos/3506_2.pdf)
The economic, political and social development of the Latin American and Caribbean countries is obstructed by the
power relations and international structures that regulate the world capitalist system. The structures of this system
provide a hierarchical political and economic exoskeleton that constrains all national efforts to pursue any
significant degree of self-directed, inward-oriented, balanced and environmentally sustainable development.
Indeed, the geopolitical power structures that preserve and support the world capitalist system have made it almost
impossible for the governments of the core as well as the peripheral countries in this system to pursue a path of
inward-oriented, equitable, democratically controlled and environmentally sustainable development (Amin 2001b:20).
Since the 1980s, inter-American relations and the economic, political and social development of the Latin American and
Caribbean states have been shaped by these geo- political structures and the neoliberal strategic agenda put forward by
the government of the United States of America (USA), the major transnational corporations and the three major international financial institutions (IFIs)
that operate in the Latin American and Caribbean region (Harris and Nef, 2008). This later group of IFIs includes the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World
Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). The policies of these IFIs based in Washington generally follow the dictates of the government of the USA
Their agenda for the Latin American and Caribbean region gives
priority to promoting and protecting the interests of the major investors and transnational corporations that are
largely based in the USA and operate in the region. It also serves to maintain and strengthen the geopolitical hegemony of the USA over the
Western Hemisphere (Harris and Nef). But conditions are changing. Washington’s neoliberal agenda for controlling the capi­ talist
development of the Western Hemisphere and maintaining US hegemony over the region is increasingly threatened
by a progressive alternative agenda for the regio- nal integration of the Latin American and Caribbean countries that has
begun to gain widespread support in the region. This alternative agenda for the region calls for the autonomous
economic development of the region free of the hegemonic control and influence of the USA and the IFIs based in
Washington. Not only does this type of development pose a fundamental threat to the hegemony of the USA in the region, it threatens the dominance of
due to the controlling influence that it exercises over these institutions.
transnational capital throughout the Americas. Moreover, it also poses a significant threat to the global expansion and integration of the world capitalist system in
general and to the global hegemonic coalition led by the government and transnational corporations of the USA. Today, political and economic strategies are being
developed for moving from the prevailing export-oriented neoliberal model of economic development to new in- ward-oriented models of sustainable development,
tailored to the diverse conditions, economic capacities, political structures, natural endowments and cultural values of the societies involved. Moreover, a growing
number of international and regional civil society organizations have emerged in recent years to create such alternatives. What the forums, networks, programs, and
activities of these various types of organizations reveal is that there is a growing international network of organizations and social movements committed to promoting
new, more equitable forms of international cooperation and regulation that support inward-oriented and sustainable development as well as genuine democracy at the
regional and national levels. At the same time, these organizations argue that the present global trading regime that has been erected under the WTO should and can be
replaced by a new global trading system that replaces the present system of so-called free but in fact unfair trade, with a sys- tem that ensures «fair trade» and
promotes South-South economic exchange and coo- peration. Most of the progressive alternatives advocated by these organizations and the new left-leaning
governments that have been elected to office in the region give priority to aligning the external relations of the countries in the region to the internal needs of the
majority of the population. That is to say, decisions about what to export and what to import should be aligned with the needs of the population rather than the
interests of transnational capitalists and transnational corporations or the hegemonic interests of the USA. Some of these alternative strategies involve what Walden
Bello (2002) has referred to as «deglobalization.» That is to say, they
involve unlinking the economies of these peripheral capitalist
societies from the advanced capitalist centers of the world economy, particularly in the USA. They also involve throwing off
the constraints that have been imposed upon the economic policies and structures of the- se countries by the IFIs (IMF, World Bank, and IDB), the WTO and the other
agents and regulatory regimes that regulate the world capitalist system. In fact, there appears to be growing interest throughout Latin America in revivifying the PanAmerican ideal of unification, currently perhaps best expressed in Hugo Chávez’ Bolivarian dream of turning South America into a regional economic hegemon
(DeLong, 2005). The governments of Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Uruguay have indicated they want to join the government of Venezuela in creating a
regional union. It has been proposed that this coalescing continental confederation should shift the region’s extra-continental trade towards Europe, Asia and South
Africa and away from North America. The prospect of this happening appears to have alarmed Washington more than the increasing number of electoral triumphs of
leftist politicians in the region (Delong). There has also been considerable talk in the region about creating a single currency for the South American countries that
would be modeled on and perhaps tied to the Euro rather than the US Dollar. This discussion is symptomatic of what appears to be an emerging desire to create an
integrated economic and political community that is strikingly different from the type of hemispheric economic integration scheme being pursued by the Washington
and its allies in the region (DeLong). Moreover, there is an increasing tendency in the region to find alternatives to trading with the USA. In particular, several Latin
American nations (Brazil, Cuba, Venezuela and Chile) have been strengthening their economic relations with Asia, particularly with China. But the widespread
popular opposition to neoliberalism and so-called globalization, and the shift to the Left in the region’s politics, represent much more than a serious challenge to US
Central to Washington’s strategy for the
hemisphere has been the imposition of a neoliberal model of capitalist development on the region which involves the
increasing integration of the region’s economies into a hemispheric ‘free trade’ area or rather a trade bloc that
hegemony, they also represent a serious threat to the existing pattern of capitalist development in the region.
is dominated by the USA. This project is itself an essential part of the strategy of the USA for the domination of the global economy by its transnational
corporations. The restructuring of the economies of the region under the mantra of neoliberalism and the banner of
globalization has been aimed at giving the USA-based transnational corporations and investors free reign within the
region and a strong hemispheric base from which to dominate the world economy In opposition to the neoliberal, polyarchical
and globalizing model of development that has been imposed by the government of the USA and its allies in the region, the growing movement for an alternative form
of development that is both genuinely democratic, equitable and environmentally sustainable appears to be gaining ground in various parts of Latin America and the
Caribbean. This alternative model of development requires the reorganization and realignment of the existing economies in the region. It also requires the replacement
of the existing political regimes, which serve the interests of the transnational bloc of social forces that are behind the integration of the region into the new global
circuits of accumulation and production that the major trans- national corporations and the IFIs have been constructing since the 1970s. In addition to fundamental
economic changes, most of the existing pseudo-democratic political regimes in the region need to be thoroughly democratized so that they are responsive to and
capable of serving the needs and interests of the majority of the people rather than the ruling polyarchies and the transnational corporations operating in the region. An
essential requirement for realigning the region’s economies so that they produce people-centered and environmentally sustainable development is the integration of
these economies into a regional economic and political union that has the resources, structures and the power to operate independently of the government of the USA
and the transnational corporations based in the USA as well as in the European Union and Japan. If this type of regional integration takes place, it will enable the Latin
American and Caribbean states to break free of the hegemonic influence of the USA, and reverse the denationalization (‘globalization’) of the Latin American and
Caribbean economies. Instead
of the corporate-driven hemispheric integration of the region under the hegemony of the
USA, a new system of regional economic cooperation and both equitable as well as environmentally sustainable
development is desperately needed to improve the lives of the vast majority of the people living in Latin America and
the Caribbean. This type of regional, equitable and sustainable development can only be success- fully carried out by truly democratically elected political leaders with
broad-based popular support who are sincerely committed to achieving this alternative rather than the elitist neoliberal model. It probably will also require democratic
socialist political institutions and structures of production and distribution. Regionalism has been the dream of the democratic left for some time. The European Union
has its origins in the French socialist dream of ending Franco-German enmity through unifying Europe, and African regionalism was the vision of African socialists
such as Julius Nyerere of Tanzania who saw regional integration as the only means to progress beyond tribalism and colonialism and create a united and democratic
Africa (Faux, 2001:4). Viewed
from the perspective of those who want to create a people-cen- tered, democratic, equitable
and environmentally sustainable social order in the Ame- ricas, the corporate-dominated process of capitalist
pseudo-globalization taking place in the region and around the world urgently needs to be replaced by what Samir
Amin has referred to as a new system of «pluricentric regulated globalization» (Amin, 2001a). This alternative form of
globalization requires the development of regional economic and political unions in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East and elsewhere, which
collaboratively promote people-centered, democratic and envi- ronmentally sustainable forms of development on a regional basis. According to Amin, these regional
unions of states are needed to collaborate as partners in collecti- vely regulating the global restructuring of the world economy for the benefit of the vast majority of
humanity rather than the transnational corporations and the northern centers of the world capitalist system in the USA, Europe and Japan. This type of regional-based
regulative order is needed to regulate and redirect inter- national economic, social, and political relations so that these relations serve the inte- rests and needs of the
vast majority of the world’s population. The present power structures and regulatory regime of the world capitalist system support the transna- tional corporate-driven
The Latin American and Caribbean
countries need to ‘de-link’ step-by-step from this exploitative and inequitable system. They need to redirect and
restructure their eco- nomies so that they serve the needs of the majority of their people while also protec- ting their
natural resources and ecosystems. The alternative policies of economic, poli- tical and social development proposed
and in some cases adopted by the new leftist leaders, the progressive civil society organizations and their supporters,
combined with the project of regional integration associated with the new Unión de Naciones Suramericanas (UNASUR), are significant indications of
unprecedented and pro- found transformation unfolding in the Americas. A growing number of civil society organizations and social
restructuring and denationalization of the economies of both the societies at the core and in the periphery of this system.
movements throughout the Americas are pressuring the governments of the region to follow what the pro- gressive civil society networks such as the Alianza Social
Continental/ Hemispheric Social Alliance (ASC/HSA) describes as a regional model of integration that supports the environmentally sustainable and democratic
development of all the societies in the region (see ASC-HSA, 2006). The ASC/HSA also contends that the UNASUR pro- ject and the Bolivarian dream of unification
is threatened by the so-called free trade agreements that Washington has negotiated with Chile, Colombia, Peru, the Central American countries and the Dominican
Republic. As the ASC/HSA makes clear in its documents and public information campaigns, these
agreements compromise the national
sovereignty, obstruct the local production of medicines, threaten public health, facilitate the profit-driven
privatization of water and vital services such as health and sanitation, and threaten the survival of indigenous
cultures, biodiversity, food sovereignty, and local control over natural resources . The «Alternatives for the Americas»
proposal developed by this inter-American network of progressive civil society organizations and social movements calls on all governments in the region to
subordinate trade and investments to sustainability and environmental protection as well as social justice and local democratic control over economic and social
development (ASC/HSA 2002:5). The growing number and political influence of these kinds of networks, organizations and movements provide unquestionable
evidence of the emergence of the social for- ces and political conditions that Panitch (1996:89) and others (Harris, 1995:301-302; Jo- nas and McCaughan, 1994)
predicted in the 1990s would arise in opposition to neoli- beralism, corporate-dominated pseudo globalization and the extension and consolida- tion of the hegemony
of the USA. It now seems increasingly possible that these forces and the political mobilization that they have helped to create will transform the politi- cal regimes in
the region as well as the nature of inter-American relations, bring about the regional integration of the Latin American countries and free these countries from US
hegemony and the form of ‘turbo-capitalism’ to which they have been subjected. At this point, we can only speak in general terms about the new model(s) of development that will replace the neoliberal model of uneven and inequitable development that has pillaged most of the region.
Economic engagement entrenches neoliberalism through diffusion of capacity building and
expertise. This designates any hindrance to the market as a threat which requires
elimination.
Essex, Windsor political science professor, 2008
(Jamey, “The Neoliberalization of Development: Trade Capacity Building and Security at the US Agency for
International Development”, Antipode, 40.2, March, ScienceDirect)
The term TCB is relatively new, and is meant to move the international system beyond the impasse between discredited but institutionally entrenched projects of
development and aggressive efforts at global trade liberalization. Initially emphasized by developing states in the context of the WTO's 2001 Doha Round of
negotiations, TCB
has been operationalized in ways that reinforce and extend neoliberalization, focusing development
resources on building political and economic capacity to participate in liberalized trade and globalizing markets. In this
view, the ability to prosper through free trade drives economic growth and allows the greatest possible flowering of freedom and democracy. States and civil
society must be brought into line with market mechanisms—civil society through active cultivation and states
through limiting their functions to market facilitation and security provision. Phillips and Ilcan (2004) describe capacity
building as one of the primary political technologies through which neoliberal govermentality is constructed
and spatialized. They define neoliberal governance as the “ways of governing populations that make individuals responsible for changes that are occurring in
their communities”, with responsibility exercised and enforced through markets, which increasingly emphasize “skill acquisition, knowledge-generation, and training
programs” (Phillips and Ilcan 2004:397). This
perspective highlights the ways in which discourses and practices of capacity
building center on the creation and reproduction of social categories that mark off populations as either responsible
members of open, market-based communities moving toward development, or irresponsible and potentially dangerous
outliers (see Roberts, Secor and Sparke 2003). Moving from the latter group to the former depends on acquiring the skills and
knowledge that permit individuals to practice responsible behavior and allow for discipline via the marketplace .
Diffusion of skills, knowledge, and training—investments in “social capital” and “human capital”—are the
driving forces of neoliberalizing development (Rankin 2004). It is in this context, Jessop (2003) points out, that the networks praised by both
Castells (1996) and Hardt and Negri (2000, 2004) become a seductive but ultimately empty (and even celebratory) metaphor for understanding and challenging
neoliberalization and neoimperialism. A more critical and useful analysis goes beyond recognizing the re-categorization of populations and places along axes of
responsibility, and, as noted in the above discussion of the strategic-relational approach to the state, also considers the role of class-relevant social formations and
struggles in the expansion and maintenance of political and economic power. A closer examination of how USAID has instituted TCB, and what this means for state
institutions' strategic selectivity relative to development and securitization, is one way to analyze the process of neoliberalization and its significance for development
and security. For USAID, adopting TCB comprises one means to revise the agency's mission and align it with the unique combination of neoliberal and
neoconservative doctrines that dominate US trade and foreign policies. With development understood as a national security issue, USAID and its implementation of
TCB have become central to the US state's articulation of the relationship between development, trade, and security. In a 2003 report on TCB, USAID (2003b:3)
outlined a three-part framework for enacting successful development through TCB: participation in trade negotiations, implementation of trade agreements, and
economic responsiveness to new trade opportunities. USAID portrays this as the most effective way to incorporate developing states into processes of globalization.
This also poses new challenges for states, firms, and non-governmental organizations, however, as the “rewards for good policies and institutions—and the negative
consequences of weak policies and institutions—are greater than ever”, while economic globalization “has also created the need for better coordination and
harmonization” (USAID 2004b:7). USAID's three-part definition repositions development as a form of infrastructure, institution, and network building that can ensure
the success of trade liberalization efforts. Defining
development as the successful and total integration of a state and its economy
into the fabric of neoliberal globalization represents a significant change in the cartography of development through
which USAID works, and over which it has great strategic influence. Though national states remain at the heart of this new cartography,
USAID development programs now pivot on building state institutions capable (primarily) of enacting and reproducing neoliberal economic policies within the
context of capitalist internationalization. As the agency stated in its 2001 TCB report, US development policy “is committed to working in partnership with
developing and transition economies to remove obstacles to development, among which are barriers to trade” (USAID 2001:3). The 2003 report likewise singles out
trade negotiations as a powerful growth engine for developing countries, so long as they are supported by “sound institutions” that can “ensure transparency and
predictability in economic governance, reinforcing economic reforms that are critical for successful development” (USAID 2003b:7). This follows from and reinforces
the idea that state-managed foreign aid and assistance, the staple of past USAID programs, must be supportive of, and not a substitute for, trade and economic selfhelp by developing countries. This position echoes what USAID proclaimed at the development project's height, as discussed above, and relies on the idea that
“development progress is first and foremost a function of commitment and political will directed at ruling justly, promoting economic freedom, and investing in
people” (USAID 2004b:11). USAID defines “ruling justly” as “governance in its various dimensions: voice and accountability, political stability and absence of
violence; government effectiveness; regulatory quality; rule of law; and control of corruption”, while “investing in people” involves bolstering “basic education and
basic health” services (USAID 2004b:11, fn 8). This language draws from existing discourses of social capital and state effectiveness long favored by Washington
Consensus institutions such as the World Bank and IMF (Fine 2001; Peet and Hartwick 1999). How closely on-the-ground implementation of TCB hews to these
conceptualizations is rather more problematic. The
invocation of political will, just rule, and state efficiency are hallmarks of
neoliberal rhetoric, and suggests that TCB is the latest in a long line of strategies designed to further capital
internationalization and the reproduction of the US-dominated international state system. Yet the vague, catch-all character of
TCB in practice indicates that it is less a fully coherent strategic blueprint than the repackaging of existing development activities, meant to bring USAID in line with
state and hegemonic projects predicated on the neoliberal doctrine of free trade and the neoconservative obsession with security. A USAID official remarked that
initial attempts to institute TCB cast a very wide net: [In the field] you would get these surveys from Washington, and they would say, we're trying to conduct an
inventory of all our trade capacity building activities. And in the beginning—and I don't know how this has evolved—but in the beginning of those surveys, I mean, it
was sort of ludicrous because virtually anything that we were doing in the economic growth sphere could be described as trade capacity building (interview with the
author, December 2004). The broad practical definition of TCB, coupled with the increased emphasis on international markets as a means of alleviating poverty and
spurring economic development, belies the continuity between the current focus on trade liberalization and previous development programs. The same USAID official
continued: My understanding … was that [developed countries] would ask the developing countries, what do you need in terms of trade capacity building, to get you
ready to participate in the WTO and globalized trade regimes? And they would give these long laundry lists that would run into the hundreds of millions of dollars,
and the developed countries would go, “whoa, we can't do all this” … So we started developing these inventories of all our trade capacity building investments, and
one of the objectives of those inventories was so we could talk to the developing world and tell them, look, we're doing all this stuff in trade capacity building already
(interview with the author, December 2004). Despite this, there are two important changes that have occurred with the agency's adoption of TCB. The first relates to
the institutional relations through which USAID operates; the second centers on changing understandings and practices of security and state weakness. As
stated
above, the emphasis now placed on ensuring that development is ideologically and institutionally subordinate to
trade liberalization places the onus for successful development on “responsible” states that can adequately facilitate
capitalist accumulation via free trade. This shift has necessitated that USAID alter the character and intensity of the partnerships through which it
plans and implements capacity building and other development programs (see Lancaster and Van Dusen 2005, on USAID's subcontracting activities). This has meant
changes in how USAID serves as both site and strategy for class-relevant social forces institutionalized in and by the state. The most important partners with which
USAID has strengthened or pursued relations to advance capacity building programs have been the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR), USDA's tradefocused Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS), and internationalizing fractions of capital. TCB therefore must be analyzed not as technocratic jargon, but as a new
means of reproducing and re-institutionalizing class-relevant social struggles in and through the national state. The
danger USAID faces in so
tightly intertwining itself with market-oriented state institutions and capital arises from the continual
narrowing of the agency's strategic selectivity—neoliberal doctrine serves as the basis for agency work, and
further neoliberalization is the intended outcome. The benefit comes in the form of larger budgets and even the reproduction of USAID
itself, and the agency has received large appropriations to implement TCB (see Table 1). While these numbers still represent a small portion of its total budget, TCB
has moved quickly up the list of agency priorities, and has gained prominence as a guidepost for continued and intensified neoliberalization (USAID 2004a). It is
important to note, however, that even as USAID funding for TCB projects has steadily increased, the agency's proportional share of overall US government spending
on such activities has decreased, due to increases in TCB funding channeled into sector-specific trade facilitation activities or into WTO accession, areas where capital
and USTR command greater expertise. Geographically, USAID has concentrated TCB funding in states where acceptable neoliberalization is already underway, in
areas of geostrategic importance, particularly the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union (USAID 2001:6, 2003c:2), and in those countries eager to
engage in free trade agreements. Since 2001, the agency's “TCB funding to countries with which the US is pursuing Free Trade Agreements (Morocco, the Andean
Pact, CAFTA, and SACU) more than tripled”, with much of this funding targeted at building institutions compatible with the requirements of WTO accession or
specific features of bilateral and regional agreements with the US (USAID 2004a).1 This differs from the geopolitical criteria previously underlying USAID
development funding primarily in that trade policy has moved to the center of agency strategies, though this is complicated by emerging national security discourses
focused on counter-terrorism and failing or failed states. The second strategically and institutionally important change accompanying USAID's adoption of TCB rests
on the altered relationship between development and security, as outlined in the 2002 and 2006 NSS. Here, development bolsters “weak states” that might otherwise
become havens for terrorist and criminal networks, which could then pose a threat to American interests abroad and domestically. USAID, the State Department, and
the White House have therefore identified development, along with defense and diplomacy, as the three “pillars” of US security strategies (USAID 2004b:8; White
House 2002, 2006). The focus on strengthening “weak states” in new development schema demonstrates how the neoliberal understanding of states as rent-seeking
regulatory burdens on market relations becomes strategically intertwined with the security concerns and objectives of neoconservatism (USAID 2004b:12; on
neoconservatism, see Lind 2004). Two points stand out here. First, recalling that neoliberalization does not only or even primarily imply the rolling back of the state
apparatus, the emphasis on TCB demands that “weak” states be strengthened by removing trade barriers and making economic and social policy sensitive to
liberalized global market signals. Second,
weakness here stems directly from states' inability or unwillingness to properly
insinuate themselves into the networks, flows, and institutions of neoliberal capitalism. Distanciation and
disconnectedness from internationalizing capital is not only economically wrongheaded, but is the source of political
and social weakness, producing insecurity that threatens continued capitalist accumulation under the rubric of
neoliberalization. Roberts, Secor and Sparke (2003:889) thus identify an emphasis on “enforced reconnection” with the global capitalist system, “mediated
through a whole repertoire of neoliberal ideas and practices”. TCB offers a potential and enforceable technical fix for disconnectedness, as being outside
neoliberalization is to be against neoliberalization, and thus to pose a security risk. USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios made this clear in a May 2003 speech: For
countries that are marginalized, that are outside the international system, that are outside development, that are not developing, that are not growing economically, that
are not democratizing, look at the different factors that lead to high risk in terms of conflict. Income level is one of the highest correlations between marginalized
states and risks in terms of conflicts (USAID 2003a:np). The agency's 2004 White Paper expanded on this to provide a more detailed strategic framework for
development and aid programs, establishing a loose taxonomy of states according to the need for development assistance, the commitment to initiate neoliberalization,
and the degree to which states are capable and “fair” partners in the use of development resources (USAID 2004b). This geographic categorization was updated and
expanded further with the agency's 2006 Foreign Assistance Framework, which bases its categories on criteria developed from the Millennium Challenge Corporation,
a new (and thoroughly neoliberal) development institution established in 2004 (USAID 2006; see Table 2). In these frameworks, USAID identifies relatively weak
institutions, particularly those necessary to establish and maintain market openness and political stability, as the crux of underdevelopment. Running across such
taxonomies is a consideration of “strategic states”, a designation that depends less on USAID objectives than on the geostrategic and foreign policy goals of the US
executive and Congress. The agency recognizes that the determination of which developing states are considered strategic is a matter for other US state institutions,
but also notes: Increasingly, the primary foreign policy rationale for assistance may be matched by or indistinguishable from the developmental or recovery objectives.
Thus, the strategic allocation of ESF [Economic Support Fund] and like resources will begin to benefit from the same principles of delineation, selectivity and
accountability proposed in this White Paper (USAID 2004b:21).2 Incorporating
developing states into networks of neoliberal
globalization is, in this view, the essence of producing and maintaining security in line with US foreign policy
objectives. This understanding of the link between development, trade, security, and state weakness is echoed in the strategies of other US state institutions, most
notably the US Trade Representative (see US Trade Representative 2001). USAID articulates development progress and improved security in terms of the facilitation
of liberalized market relations by stable developing state institutions. While more candid interviews with USAID officials indicate that not everyone at the agency is
on board with this approach, it has nonetheless become official strategy, and presents a serious contradiction, as development comes to depend on internationalizing
and liberalized market forces, even as these remain dominated by predatory finance capital (Harvey 2005; McMichael 1999, 2000a). Internationalizing
market relations are fundamentally unstable and, as a means of achieving security outside the narrow
concerns of capitalist accumulation, completely insecure. A brief examination of how food security fits into USAID strategies regarding
trade, security, and state weakness demonstrates this.
Economic engagement with Latin America only serves transnational capital-leads to
inequality and racist constructions of the global south.
Nef et al., South Florida Latin American and Caribbean studies, 2010
(Jorge, Latin American Identities after 1980, pg 3-7)
Introduction In the last three decades, the Americas, with the exception of Cuba, have undergone a rapid and multifaceted process of globalization driven by
transboundary alliances of elites at both the global centre and its periphery. This order of things is being presently challenged by a reconfiguration of political
domestic and regional forces intent in redefining inter-American relations. In the 1980s, northern elites, in agreement with their southern counterparts, imposed
structural adjustment policies on Latin American and Caribbean nations in order to "solve" their debt crises. In so doing they created a transnational regime with a
legal infrastructure to solidify such structural changes. This
Pax Americana tied the hands of national governments in favour of
transnational capital and, thus, transformed the state into a mere collaborative regulator of the private sector. The
state was weakened with the promise of "low-intensity democratization," uneven and highly inequitable growth, and
widespread corruption. Moreover, the much-heralded democratic transition in Latin America has not been synonymous with the entrenchment of participatory
practices nor with responsible government, let alone with the enhancement of human dignity. The "safe,""limited;' and substantially meaningless democracy brokered
and supported by Washington and the famous unilateral Consensus impeded more than facilitated the emergence of a sustainable security community for the
Americas, as does the persistence of neoliberal economic dogmatism and the rebirth of national security doctrines designed to fight elusive and perpetual global
enemies from terrorism to criminality. De-democratization and authoritarianism throughout the hemisphere are the political corollary of these profoundly reactionary
socio-economic processes and alliances. The net result is a significant deterioration of the security of most people and the generation of democratic deficits, not only
south of the Rio Grande but also in North America. The New Pax Americana Following the explorations initiated in the 1980s by Robert Cox, Stephen Gill, Richard
Fagen, and Terry-Lynn Karl, we propose to examine Latin America and the Caribbean in the context of a new hegemonic framework. Going beyond traditional and
somewhat disembodied conceptions of realism, regime theory, and dependency, this proposed conceptualization examines complex interactions around military and
economic instruments that exhibit both coercion and consensus. This approach draws on Robert Cox's analysis of historical structures in order to re-examine the
changing mechanisms of hegemony developed by the region's transnational elites since the end of World War II. In his Approaches to world order (1996) Cox
identifies three categories offactors-ideas, material conditions, and institutions-that interact dialectically on three levels: social forces, states, and world orders. He
distinguishes two periods germane to our study of the Americas: the Pax Americana proper ( 1945-1964) and the period of"non-hegemonic condition" which starts in
1964. Retrospectively, the older version of Pax Americana at the continental scalewhat Cox called Pax Americana-originated with the 1947 Rio Treaty. This event
signaled the rise to the Cold War in the continent; the political side of the Keynesian World Order. This world order was expressed regionally over a decade later in
the Alliance for Progress, a project created as a response to the Cuban Revolution. It was a policy initiative based on development as the soft side of
counterinsurgency. Its intellectual foundation was modernization theory and area studies, which constructed "Latin America and the Caribbean" as a contested geoeconomic and strategic space. In light of the perceived and illusive communist threat in the hemisphere, hegemony was maintained through concessions and incentives
to local elites in the form of development projects and foreign aid. However, this approach always rested on military force and counterinsurgency as instruments of
last resort. By the mid-1960s this regional order gave way to a period that Cox called "non-hegemonic condition;' in which the elite was not hegemonic any more but
merely dominant. During this period, concessions were ignoredalthough not totally eliminated- and the mechanisms of control shifted towards support for military
dictatorships. This project involved the combination of the internationalization of production and finance with the implementation of Milton Friedman's monetarism,
leading to the 1982 debt crisis. The factors and levels that Cox identified in his examination ofworld orders are in a state of constant flux and thus, over time, new
concepts may be required to explain shifting realities. Re-thinking Cox's periodization from a non-US standpoint, we have identified a third period in inter-American
relations: the "new" Pax Americana. Beginning in the 1980s, this revised US strategy attempted to solve the debt problem that had emerged in Latin America and the
Caribbean through the imposition of structural adjustment conditionalities and a transnational legal framework that weakened local governments in favor of
transnational capital. "Old" social concessions were eliminated while politico-ideological adjustments such as democratization, the elimination of corruption, and
poverty reduction became the hegemonic instrumentalities and discourses of choice. During this period there was a geo-economic and strategic reconfiguration of
space: from "Latin America and the Caribbean" to "the Americas." This
reconfiguration of space included all the nations in the
hemisphere, with the conspicuous absence of Cuba, under US leadership. Free trade and foreign investment
accelerated the interconnectedness of the system. However, this also increased mutual vulnerability as "the weakness of the periphery increases
the exposure of the centre, making the entire configuration, including the centre, more unstable" (Nef 1999, 13). Examining 'the Americas' Mirroring the
abovementioned geo-economic and strategic reconfiguration of space, our study takes a critical approach to the elite's construction of the Americas. As Karl and
Fagen (1986) suggested decades ago, the paradigm developed by experts to analyze Eastern Europe can be applied to the Americas. This conceptual framework
posited that Eastern Europe was an integrated region where Soviet elites enjoyed relational control or metapower over its satellites. Thus, the study of individual
The relatively permeable borders
of the Western Hemisphere continuously experience formal and informal asymmetrical interpenetration. Northern
elites, in alliance with their Latin American and Caribbean counterparts, exert relational control or metapower over
other subordinate groups in the region. This process is framed within a dominant and messianic economic,
ideological, and cultural matrix, which is as dogmatic and compelling as its Soviet equivalent. In this complex
exchange system, capital, technology, and ideology flow south, while profits and migrants flow north. 1 Latin America
and the Caribbean are integrated in a hub-and-spokes relationship with the United States. There is a growing asymmetry in the limited free
trade arrangements known as NAFTA, CFTA-DR, and the presently paralyzed FTAA. Military integration under the Rio Treaty-and the letter's structural and
ideological mechanisms-has been a fact of life since World War II, much longer in Central America. For contemporary US elites, what lies south
of the Rio Grande continues to be simultaneously perceived as a resource-rich El Dorado and as a cultural and
political threat. In this sense, almost echoing Theodore Roosevelt's characterization, the South is constructed as a source of evil in the
form of narcotics, illegal aliens, and undesirable values. This American perceived threat has also emerged "indoors" in the form of a growing
countries and of the region as a whole began from the premise of penetrated political systems, not sovereign entities.
Hispanic population within the United States (Huntington 2004). Although the Americas are one of the richest continents on the globe, distributional inequity
throughout the region, deeply rooted in powerlessness and exclusion, has not only continued to exist, but has become increasingly more pronounced. The region
contains three geopolitical giants: the United States, Canada, and Brazil. Two of these are the most prosperous countries in the world: one of them is a global
superpower, and the other has persistently had one of the highest scores in the United Nations Human Development Index. Latin America, in contrast, (including
Brazil) continues to be "the region of the planet with the worst [distribution] indicators," according to a 2004 report by the United Nations Economic Commission on
Latin America and the Caribbean. The same report estimated that by 2002, forty-four per cent of the population was below the poverty line and over nineteen per cent
lived in extreme poverty (ECLAC 2004, 1, 5). This means that two
out of every five Latin Americans are poor and survive under
precarious circumstances. To understand this hemisphere as a whole, the notion of rich versus poor countries is
misleading: wealthy individuals reside in poor countries and poor people exist in richer countries. The abysmal gap
between the rich and poor within all of the countries in the Americas continues to expand. By most statistical accounts and with
very few exceptions (Haiti, Honduras, Bolivia, and Nicaragua), the nations south of the Rio Grande comprise the upper layer of the Third World.2 But poverty and
exclusion are not just Latin American or Third World traits. For all its wealth and power, the United States has nearly fourteen per cent of its population living in
permanent poverty and its income distribution has persistently worsened over the last decades. In 2000, the top one per cent of the US population earned on average
88.5 times as much as the lowest twenty per cent (Hogan 2005, 1). Poverty and income inequality have also risen in Canada where, in 2003, almost sixteen per cent of
the population was under the poverty line (CIA 2006). Above and beyond the differences that exist between the nations of the Americas, what
is patently clear
is a growing structural interconnectivity between the North and th e South of the Western Hemisphere . This
realization points towards the need to study the Americas as the elites' social construction of space. In fact, as Boas,
Marchand, and Shaw have pointed out, "regionalization can be seen as an integral part of globalization processes, i.e. the transformation of the global political
economy (GPE)" (1999, 900) .
Bilateralism – 1NC
Bilateralism is used to create asymmetrical power relations that lock in neoliberalism
Phillips, Sheffield political economy professor, 2005
(Nicola, “U.S. Power and the Politics of Economic Governance in the Americas”, Latin American Politics and
Society, 47.4, December, Wiley)
What explains this prioritization of bilateral negotiations? In the regional context, bilateralism represents, in essence, a political response by the US. government to the
political difficulties encountered in realizing its particular vision of the FTAA and the regional economic governance agenda. As it became clear that U.S. preferences
bilateralism became the strategy of choice for the
pursuit of US. trade and economic policy priorities. In other words, the logic propelling a more robust pursuit of bilateral than of hemispheric
arrangements rests on the apparently greater utility of bilateralism in serving key U.S. nego- tiating priorities; that is, of obtaining
access to services markets in the region in exchange for concessions on market access for a range of goods , but equally
regarding the shape of an FTAA were unlikely to prosper in hemispheric negotiations,
the exclusion of significant concessions on agricul- tural liberalization or modification of domestic legislation on trade reme- dies. Crucially also, bilateralism offered
a way of reviving the principle of WTO-plus in new trade agreements following the collapse of this aspiration as the foundation for an FTAA. Without exception, the
bilat- eral agreements that trade officials in Washington refer to as “state of the art” trade deals conform with a WTO-plus template. Notably, however, the terms of
WTO-plus are the same as those that prevailed in the FTAA negotiations; that is, WTO-plus does not universally apply to the vari- ous areas of negotiation and, as in
the
pursuit of bilateral agreements is also useful as a mechanism for increasing the incentives for other partners (notably
Brazil) to engage in similar negotiations, or else for increasing their interest in the success of the FTAA negotiations
and thus encouraging a softening of negotiating positions. The “incentive” has been invoked consistently by US. trade officials in the FTAA
the hemispheric negotiations, does not encompass agreements on trade remedies, agricultural subsidies, or various strategic and politically sensitive sectors. Yet
process. In an article published in 2002, Zoellick stated, “we want to negotiate with all the democracies of the Americas through the FTAA, but we are also prepared
to move step bystep toward free trade if others turn back or simply are not ready” (Zoel- lick 2002). Similar pressures in the multilateral arena were brought to bear
following the collapse of the WTO talks in Cancdn in late 2003, when Zoellick declared his determination not to entertain or wait for the “won’t do” countries in the
multilateral system and to undermine the emerging Brazil-led G-20+ coalition of developing countries (Zoellick 2003b). The echoes of U.S. tactics in dealing with
opposition among members of the U.N. Security Council to the invasion of Iraq around the same time are hard to miss, leading one observer pithily to cast Zoellick as
a “Donald Rumsfeld of trade policy” (Bhagwati 2004, 52). The early defection from this grouping of such countries as Colombia, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Peru
was directly a consequence of U.S. trade officials’ rebukes and warnings that trade agreements with the United States could be threatened by participation in the G20+
This form of “divide and rule” strategy in multilateral trade politics was also apparent earlier in the FTAA negotiations. In the process of presenting opening offers in
the various negotiating groups in early 2003, the USTR chose to differentiate between the various subregional groupings in the Americas in a manner that explicitly
disadvantaged Mercosur. It put forward four different sets of offers, in contrast with the single sets of offers put forward by all the other participants, ostensibly in
recognition of the particular needs of smaller and poorer economies in the FTAA process. Even if this were the case, the opportunity thereby presented to put further
pressure on the less-accommodating countries in the south of the region-particularly Brazil-would have gone neither unappreciated nor, indeed, lamented by U.S. trade
officials. It
is thus through the progressive prioritization of bilateral negotia- tions, mirrored in and reinforced by U.S.
strategies outside the Ameri- cas, that US. influence over the architecture of the region has been most easily
asserted. Indeed, the bilateralist emphasis facilitates the construc- tion of precisely the hub-and-spoke regional
arrangements and the extension of NAFTA that the United States initially envisaged and desired in the FTAA
context. Yet bilateralism has also come to be favored by a number of other governments in the region as the best
means of pursuing their strategic priorities in trade negotiations, given the height of the hurdles facing the successful
agreement of a comprehensive FTAA.
Cuba Embargo – 1NC
Cuba is insulated from neoliberal pressures now-eliminating the embargo reverses that
Barra, UNICEF international development consultant, 2010
Sacrificing Neoliberalism to Save Capitalism: Latin America Resists and Offers Answers to Crises”, Critical
Sociology, 36.5, SAGE)
We may start by highlighting the emblematic Cuban case for its resistance under an American embargo and for its
ability to retain its socialist principles. Cuba had extensive experience in crisis by contagion after the fall of the Soviet bloc. Because that crisis meant
the end of crucial outside support, Cuba was forced to enter a ‘special period’. It was not that Cuba opted to isolate itself. It was forcefully isolated by the outside
world. There
were several internal factors that allowed Cuba to react without losing revolutionary gains. First of all,
the Revolution democratized the power structure, creating a participative and solidarian culture . Rather that opting to
designate losers, everybody had to equally face up to the difficulties (except for the most vulnerable who were given additional protection). For more than three
This allowed for a post-capitalist process of social
accumulation which constituted its main reserve to face the Soviet crisis and defend its revolutionary process. It
constitutes an inspiring example for countries searching for alternative approaches to those predominating
globally. Given its particular situation of being a small island state with limited material resources, Cuba opted for an insertion of selective
connection-disconnection to the global economy depending on national interests. It therefore avoided a dependent
connection that would have reproduced capitalist underdevelopment relations within Cuban society (Bell
2004). This strategy has allowed Cuba to establish broad and diverse international relations in order to trade with dignity.
decades Cuba presented solo resistance to pressure to reconvert to neoliberalism.
Cuba Embargo – EXTN
Embargo triggered Cuba’s shift to sustainable development, lifting the embargo will crush
it
Gonzalez, Seattle University law professor, 2003
(Carmen, Seasons Of Resistance: Sustainable Agriculture And Food Security In Cuba, Summer,
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=987944)
Notwithstanding these problems, the
greatest challenge to the agricultural development strategy adopted by the Cuban
government in the aftermath of the Special Period is likely to be external – the renewal of trade relations with the United States.
From the colonial era through the beginning of the Special Period, economic development in Cuba has been constrained by Cuba’s
relationship with a series of primary trading partners. Cuba’s export-oriented sugar monoculture and its reliance on imports to satisfy domestic
food needs was imposed by the Spanish colonizers, reinforced by the United States, and maintained during the Soviet era. It was not until the collapse of
the socialist trading bloc and the strengthening of the U.S. embargo that Cuba was able to embark upon a radically
different development path. Cuba was able to transform its agricultural development model as a consequence of
the political and economic autonomy occasioned by its relative economic isolation, including its exclusion
from major international financial and trade institutions. Paradoxically, while the U.S. embargo subjected Cuba to immense
economic hardship, it also gave the Cuban government free rein to adopt agricultural policies that ran counter to the
prevailing neoliberal model and that protected Cuban farmers against ruinous competition from highly subsidized agricultural producers in the United
States and the European Union. Due to U.S. pressure, Cuba was excluded from regional and international financial institutions, including the International Monetary
Fund, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank.n413 Cuba also failed to reach full membership in any regional trade association and was barred
from the negotiations for the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). However, as U.S. agribusiness clamors to ease trade restrictions with Cuba, the lifting of the
embargo and the end of Cuba’s economic isolation may only be a matter of time. It is unclear how the Cuban government will respond to the immense political and
economic pressure from the United States to enter into bilateral or multilateral trade agreements that would curtail Cuban sovereignty and erode protection for Cuban
Cuba accedes to the dictates of agricultural trade liberalization, it appears likely that Cuba’s gains in
agricultural diversification and food self-sufficiency will be undercut by cheap, subsidized food imports from the
United States and other industrialized countries. Furthermore, Cuba’s experiment with organic and semi-organic
agriculture may be jeopardized if the Cuban government is either unwilling or unable to restrict the sale of
agrochemicals to Cuban farmers – as the Cuban government failed to restrict U.S. rice imports in the first half of the twentieth century. Cuba is once
agriculture.n416 If
again at a crossroads – as it was in 1963, when the government abandoned economic diversification, renewed its emphasis on sugar production, and replaced its trade
dependence on the United States with trade dependence on the socialist bloc. In the end, the future of Cuban agriculture will likely turn on a combination of external
factors (such as world market prices for Cuban exports and Cuba’s future economic integration with the United States) and internal factors (such as the level of
grassroots and governmental support for the alternative development model developed during the Special Period). While this Article has examined the major pieces of
legislation that transformed agricultural production in Cuba, and the government’s implementation of these laws, it is important to remember that these reforms had
their genesis in the economic crisis of the early 1990s and in the creative legal, and extra-legal, survival strategies developed by ordinary Cubans. The distribution of
land to thousands of small producers and the promotion of urban agriculture were in response to the self-help measures undertaken by Cuban citizens during the
Special Period. As the economic crisis intensified, Cuban citizens spontaneously seized and cultivated parcels of land in state farms, along the highways, and in vacant
lots, and started growing food in patios, balconies, front yards, and community gardens. Similarly, the opening of the agricultural markets was in direct response to the
booming black market and its deleterious effect on the state’s food distribution system. Finally, it was the small private farmer, the neglected stepchild of the
Revolution, who kept alive the traditional agroecological techniques that formed the basis of Cuba’s experiment with organic agriculture. The survival of Cuba’s
alternative agricultural model will therefore depend, at least in part, on whether this model is viewed by Cuban citizens and by the Cuban leadership as a necessary
adaptation to severe economic crisis or as a path-breaking achievement worthy of pride and emulation. The history of Cuban agriculture has been one of resistance
and accommodation to larger economic and political forces that shaped the destiny of the island nation. Likewise,
the transformation of Cuban
agriculture has occurred through resistance and accommodation by Cuban workers and farmers to the hardships of
the Special Period. The lifting of the U.S. economic embargo and the subjection of Cuba to the full force of
economic globalization will present an enormous challenge to the retention of an agricultural development model
borne of crisis and isolation. Whether Cuba will be able to resist the re-imposition of a capital-intensive, exportoriented, import-reliant agricultural model will depend on the ability of the Cuban leadership to appreciate the
benefits of sustainable agriculture and to protect Cuba’s alternative agricultural model in the face of overwhelming
political and economic pressure from the United States and from the global trading system.
Cuban Oil – 1NC
Cuban oil is inevitable and solves the case BUT extending US control shuts down
alternative social models
Sandels, former Quinnipiac University history professor, 2011
(Robert, “An Oil-Rich Cuba?”, September, http://monthlyreview.org/2011/09/01/an-oil-rich-cuba)
Cuba is about to begin drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico. If it finds what it is looking for, oil wealth could snatch Cuba out of the
century-old grasp of the United States before Obama leaves the White House. This possibility has brought out Miami’s congressional
assault team led by the fanatical Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), who essentially wants to criminalize drilling in Cuba’s section of the Gulf. In 2005, tests
by Canadian companies found high-quality oil in Cuba’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), a section of the Gulf of Mexico allotted to Cuba in the 1997 Maritime
Boundary Agreement with Mexico and the United States. The U.S. Geological Survey estimated the oil potential in the Cuban zone at 4.6 billion barrels and 9.8
trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Cuba’s state oil company Cubapetroleo (Cupet) says the reserves may be four or five times larger. Unable to purchase drilling
equipment in the United States because of the blockade, Cuba contracted with an Italian company (which in turn contracted with a Chinese company) to build
Scarabeo 9, a monster semi-submersible drilling platform. The rig is capable of drilling to 3,600 meters; it is expected to arrive sometime this summer, after which a
consortium led by the Spanish firm Repsol-YPF will begin operations in one the EEZ’s fifty-nine blocks. A dozen or so other firms, including Petronas (Malaysia),
Gazprom (Russia), CNPC (China), Petrobras (Brazil), Sonangol (Angola), Petrovietnam (Vietnam), and PDVSA (Venezuela) have contracts to explore in other
blocks. Industry
experts are not predicting a Cuban oil bonanza, but finding reserves even at the lower end of the
estimates would make Cuba energy independent, and eventually a net exporter. This would have an incalculable impact on
its economy, and would send the U.S. sanctions policy into the dustbin of imperial miscalculations . To prevent this
from happening, there have been legislative efforts like the 2007 bill offered by former Senator Mel Martinez (R-FL). This would have required the State Department
both to punish executives of foreign companies that cooperated with Cuba by withholding their visas, and also to fine foreign investors in Cuban oil.1 “Supporting the
Castro regime in the development of its petroleum is detrimental to U.S. policy and our national security,” said Martinez in 2007. Earlier this year, Representative
Vern Buchanan (R-FL) offered a similar bill, arguing that Cuba’s deepwater drilling would pose a threat to Florida’s tourism and environment. Spilled oil would reach
the Florida coast in three days, said Buchanan.2 He also wants to go after Repsol, first by compelling the Interior Department to deny the company licenses to drill in
U.S. waters, and then by urging Obama to force Repsol out of Cuba by pressuring the Spanish government. The Spanish gambit has gained more traction lately. The
current government is predicted to fall in November’s elections, which will put José María Aznar’s conservative (and anti-Cuba) party back in power. Senator Bill
Nelson (D-FL) has written to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton advising that by stalling until then, “Spain may have a government less inclined to tolerate investment
in Cuba. Until such time as the elections, I urge you to do your utmost to prevent these drilling operations.”3 Nelson has also suggested that the United States
unilaterally withdraw from the Maritime Boundary Agreement that set up the zones and then order Cuba to halt explorations. With Scarabeo 9 about to sail toward
Cuba, the Nelson scenario raises images of conflict in the Gulf; perhaps he imagines an Oil Rig Crisis and a U.S. naval blockade. Representative Ros-Lehtinen
recently introduced her third no-drill bill, the Caribbean Coral Reef Protection Act, which closely follows Buchanan’s bill. Despite the word “coral,” Ros-Lehtinen
admits the aim of the bill is to cripple Cuba’s oil industry. “The U.S. must apply stronger pressure to prevent other companies from engaging commercially, and any
other means, with this crooked and corrupt regime,” she said.4 Ros-Lehtinen has not been very active in fighting for tougher drilling regulations to save the reefs
following the explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon platform last year. Her main concern has been getting BP to pay compensation to tourism businesses and the
fishing industry in Florida, given that both have been hurt by the spill. Her advice to “file a claim” does not address the underlying risks of deepwater drilling.5 The
justification offered for these efforts is fear that Cuba lacks the necessary technology to prevent oil spills, though the
sponsors of these bills do not apply the argument against operations in U.S. waters. Repsol in Cuba waters is not safe; Repsol off
the Louisiana coast is safe. Then there is Mexico—not mentioned either—whose Gulf operations are carried out by state-owned Pemex, which has a long history of
leaks and blowouts on land, sea, and in the sewers of Guadalajara.6 In 1979, Pemex’s Ixtoc platform in the Bay of Campeche erupted for nine months, sending oil
onto the beaches of Texas and Florida in what is still the biggest of all oil spills. BP had to pay compensation for its failures; Mexico paid nothing. The issue facing
the United States is not just Cuba drilling close to the Florida Keys. Drilling operations are in place or planned all over the Gulf. Deepwater Horizon was just one of
scores of platforms operating in U.S. Gulf waters. Prior to the BP blowout, there were fifty-seven Gulf platforms, and that number is likely to be exceeded soon. Also
joining Cuba in the Gulf as early as next year is the Bahamas Petroleum Company (BPC), which plans to drill just north of Cuba’s eastern tip. The moratorium Obama
placed on deepwater drilling after the BP explosion was lifted last October. Since then, the Interior Department has issued thirty-seven permits for deepwater
exploration, some of which include the same foreign companies that are involved in the Cuba project. Then there is Pemex, which took delivery of a Korean-built
platform in May and plans to drill to 5,000 meters. Meanwhile, BP has a request pending with the Interior Department to resume operations on its ten existing Gulf
platforms and to install new ones. With
foreign companies swarming all over the Gulf, the Miami watchdogs have
unanimously settled on Repsol as the threat to coral formations and national security. They have sponsored no bill, however,
demanding that Obama threaten Angola, the Bahamas, Brazil, China, Mexico, Norway, India, Malaysia, Russia, Vietnam, or Venezuela. The U.S. dilemma starts with
the contradiction inherent in maintaining a blockade to destroy the same government which the United States now depends upon to help protect the Gulf and coastal
states from another platform disaster. In 2006, the Bush administration ordered a Mexico City hotel to kick out Cubans attending a meeting with U.S. oil executives on
environmental issues. But during the 2010 BP disaster, when it was a matter of U.S. interest, Cuban officials were invited to a conference in Florida on environmental
protection in the Gulf. The sanctions themselves work against protecting the Gulf. Repsol, for example, had to turn to China for the rig because, under U.S. law, no
one can sell anything to Cuba with more than 10 percent content that is made or patented in the United States. Ironically, the closest source for Scarabeo 9’s blowout
protector (the part that failed on the Deepwater Horizon well) is the United States, but it is apparently in the interests of the United States to deny a license for its sale
to Cuba. Signs of Cooperation and Indecision The White House response to all this is a kind of policy opacity where intentions are measured by degrees of inaction.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar would only say that the administration was monitoring the situation and that Cuba’s plans were “an issue of concern.”7 The
administration also signaled that it did not want to act on Nelson’s suggestion of tearing up the 1977 agreement. National Security Adviser James Jones wrote Nelson
that, “Although we share your concerns regarding the potential risks posed by the development of offshore oil drilling along the Cuban coast, withdrawal from the
Maritime Boundary Agreement would be detrimental to U.S. national interests.”8 As for Nelson’s other big idea of muscling the Spanish government into forcing
Repsol out, the administration has quietly let Secretary Salazar give Repsol his approval from Europe. Salazar met with Repsol representatives while attending an
energy conference in Madrid. They assured him that the company would observe strict U.S. environmental rules, and would allow U.S. inspectors to observe. The
U.S. Embassy said there was no pressure on the company and the United States had no objections to its Cuban operations.9 Stumbling on a Regional Energy Bloc The
administration is surely aware that Cuban oil is not just another thing to squelch through sanctions. Cuba is part of Petrocaribe, a region-wide program of exploration,
refining, and distribution backed by Venezuelan oil. PDVSA ships 200,000 barrels per day to Petrocaribe member states under a liberal payment plan with up to
twenty-five years to pay. Petrocaribe
benefits many Latin American and Caribbean countries that the United States has
always sought to influence, control, and sometimes occupy. Petrocaribe began in 2005 as an oil-sharing plan that,
instead of seeking absolute trade advantage over non-producing countries, sought to strengthen them, in order to create
the basis for political and economic independence from the United States . This is in contrast to capitalism’s dealings
with producing states in Africa and the Middle East that have historically been exploited and dependent. Whether or not
Cuba becomes an oil exporter, it plays a geographically and operationally central role as Petrocaribe’s refining, storage, and shipping center. In a joint venture,
PDVSA and Cupet have enlarged the Soviet-built refinery in Cienfuegos, while others are to be built in Santiago de Cuba and Matanzas. Matanzas will refine crude
from the EEZ operations and ship it from an upgraded super-tanker facility at the Port of Matanzas. The Port of Mariel will be developed with Brazilian capital to
serve as the base for EEZ drilling operations. This vertically integrated system is being planned to expand the energy bloc without U.S. participation.10 Petrocaribe
also acts as an infrastructure development machine with capital investments in member countries, including a generating plant in Haiti, a refinery in Nicaragua, the
expansion of a refinery in Jamaica, and various renewable energy projects. And where the oil goes, there also are projects in non-energy areas, such as tourism, health
services, housing, and education. Cables released by WikiLeaks have exposed failed attempts by U.S. oil companies and the embassy in Haiti to prevent Venezuelan
oil from getting to Haiti and saving it $100 million a year. The fact that in a powerless country like Haiti, then President René Préval could win the struggle against
Exxon, Chevron, and the State Department suggests the problems that trying to take away cheap oil might create in the fifteen other countries that benefit from
Petrocaribe.11 The Honduran coup of 2009 is another example of how regional
independence, fired by affordable oil, allows states to
choose between sticking with the United States and joining Latin America. With obvious U.S. support, right-wing elements
removed Honduran President Manuel Zelaya in 2009. One of his alleged offenses was that he enrolled Honduras in Petrocaribe, placing Honduras under the influence
of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. But Honduras’s exit from the energy alliance resulted in oil import costs skyrocketing. Now, prominent business leader and
coup-backer Adolfo Facussé is asking President Porfirio Lobo to rejoin Petrocaribe because of the high cost of oil. During the coup, Facussé had warned that along
with cheap oil from Venezuela came the importation of “neo-communism.”12
Deregulation – 1NC
Plan’s deregulation is the mantra of neoliberalism.
Wasserman, Nuclear Information Resource Service senior advisor, 2001
(Harvey, “Deregulation: The mantra of corporate globalization”,
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Economics/Deregulation_mantra.html, DOA: 6-23-12)
Deregulation is a disaster for the public. All deregulation really means is the removal of any semblance of public
participation in any of the decisions involving energy generation and distribution. It's a completely cynical, antidemocratic,
and ultimately catastrophic move to deregulate. WHY DOESN'T deregulation work? BECAUSE ELECTRIC power is a natural
monopoly. You will never have meaningful competition in the electric power business. It's like proposing that there be competition between streets. The only
real competition in the electric power business is between public-owned power and private-owned power. And public-owned power, without
exception, has provided electricity cleaner, safer, cheaper, and more reliably throughout the last century than
private-owned power. That's just the reality of the situation. And the idea of using deregulation to introduce the so-called magic of the marketplace to the
electric power business is utter nonsense. You are simply exchanging a regulated monopoly for a deregulated monopoly, and
there's nothing worse than a deregulated monopoly. DO YOU think that the forces of globalization are behind the drive to
deregulate? MOST DEFINITELY. Deregulation is the mantra of corporate globalization . They do not want interference from the
public. Basically, it's a new form of economic feudalism, where the big corporations sit on high, make their decisions in the
boardrooms, and have no interference whatsoever-from the public, from the government, or from grassroots
organizations. That's what globalization is all about. That's why deregulation-not only of electricity, but of the airlines, the trucking industry,
telecommunications, now even water-translates into a complete feudalization of economic life on this planet.
Drug AFFs – 1NC
Neoliberalism sets the parameters of criminal behavior by defining what threatens
economic order AND which crimes can be profitably exploited. Wholesale rejection of the
vulnerabilities created by neoliberalism is key to solve.
Corva, Washington geography professor, 2008
(Dominic, “Neoliberal globalization and the war on drugs: Transnationalizing illiberal governance in the Americas”,
Political Geography, 27.2, ScienceDirect)
Foucault (1984: 231) describes the illegalities that activate the penal apparatus as “delinquencies”: forms “of illegality that seem to sum up symbolically all the others,
but which make it possible to leave in the shade those that one wishes to – or must – tolerate”. Delinquencies
are juridical constructions, but they
are produced at the nexus of society–state relationships, and are associated primarily with forms of conduct which
threaten, or are seen to threaten, the normative social order. The enactment of criminal law is a key moment for the consolidation of
delinquencies as categories of behavior which must be regulated through state-sponsored coercion. This juridical moment emerges from historically and
geographically specific modes of political, economic, and cultural domination – antebellum Southern discourses of cocaine-induced miscegenation by newly freed
black labor, for example. The moment of criminalization mutes public discourse that might critically link the historical construction of a particular delinquency to
historical and contemporary modes of domination. But the construction of delinquency should not be reduced to the historical moment of criminalization: delinquent
populations must be located in shifting geo-historical social contexts. The
production of narco-delinquency, for example, is a dynamic
transnational process that targets specific populations, dispersed by local criminal justice practices that shape where, when, and against whom
to apply the force of the law (Skolnick & Fyfe, 1993). This process is fed by biopolitical practices which continuously script and
rescript illegal drugs as a dangerous threat to the individual and social bodies, rather than as embedded in relations
of domination and resistance. The state consolidates and disperses discourses of narco-danger that emanate from elite insecurity and hysteria about the
“scourge of drug addiction,”7 creating the category of narco-delinquency that justifies the application of the criminal justice function, especially against marginalized
populations. One of the ways this occurs domestically is through practices of policing “target rich” areas such as poor neighborhoods and public space (Herbert,
2006). This
accounts for much of the racial disparity in urban drug policing (see for example Beckett, 2004),
where “revanchist” gentrification policies seek to make cities attractive for global capital (Smith, 1996). The
criminalization of illicit drugs makes their economic viability dependent on a willingness to assume risk, especially as entry-level narco-labor. This willingness is a
condition clearly associated with the socioeconomically marginalized – those who have little to lose but their “freedom.” Neoliberalization
produces
social and economic vulnerability; criminalization produces ways to capitalize on that vulnerabilit y. The
combination produces, among many other things, a steady flow of pre-trial detainees, prisoners, parolees, and
families disrupted by harshly punitive sanctions. The expansion of the prison-industrial complex, and the competition for prisons as development
strategies (Bonds, 2005), are marketized ways to capitalize on, not causes of, drug war policies which produce “criminals” – populations that must be governed in
other ways. The
race to build new prisons and lower the cost of prison management for the government is a response to
drug war policies that have stressed the capacity of the criminal justice system. The biopolitical production of narco-delinquency
overdetermines the racial state (Omi & Winant, 1995), as well as its marketization via the prison-industrial complex.
Economic Rationality – 1NC
Permeation of economic rationality via the plan entrenches inequality
Brown, Maryland sociology professor, 2002
(Richard, “Global Capitalism, National Sovereignty, And The Decline Of Democratic Space”, Rhetoric & Public
Affairs; Summer2002, Vol. 5 Issue 2, p347-357, ebsco)
The intrusion of market rationality into formerly autonomous social spheres , like nonprofit hospitals, public education, or voluntary
blood drives, undermines the strength of civil society in relation to the corporate state . As the practices and institutions of civil
society become "permeated by market principles, they lose their capacity to offset market outcomes or to offer
alternative moralities. One recurrent market outcome is ever-increasing economic inequality."^ Similarly, when state
policy becomes infused with economic rationality, it exacerbates economic inequality rather than mitigating it. The
1981 U.S. tax law, passed in the name of increasing investment and national competitiveness, also contributed to a tremendous increase in
economic inequality. The tax law of 2001 also is likely to starve public services , threaten social security, and further increase economic
inequality between the top 20 percent and the rest of society. This trend is global. The United Nations reports that the incomes of the
world's richest 20 percent grew three times faster than the incomes of the poorest 20 percent from 1960 to 1990 . All
these factors narrow public space and the possibilities of informed, active citizenship
Enclosures – 1NC
The plan is a modern enclosure-it forces reliance on markets for livelihoods and organizes
society which make livelihoods zero sum
De Angelis, East London political economy professor, 2004
(Massimo, “Opposing fetishism by reclaiming our powers: The Social Forum movement, capitalist markets and the
politics of alternatives”, International Social Science Journal Volume 56, Issue 182, Wiley)
There is not the space here to discuss the processes of market creation. Suffice to say that it is possible to theorise them in terms of “enclosures” (Caffentzis 1995, De
refer to those strategies promoted by economic and political elites that “commodify”
things. In general commodification is to turn resources that are held in common among communities , or exchanged as gifts
among its members or across members of different communities, or administrated and distributed by central institutions (Polanyi 1944), into things that are
bought and sold on the market, commodities. The “things” turned into commodities often represent important resources
necessary for communities to reproduce their livelihoods, and their “enclosure” represents at the same time the destruction of
those communities and their increasing dependence on markets, which in today's context are increasingly linked to global commodity chains. The
consolidation, development and deepening of capitalism in our lives heavily depends on enclosures. Indeed, as
Angelis 2004b). To put it simply, enclosures
others and I have argued, enclosures are a continuous feature of the capitalist mode of production (Caffenzis 1995, De Angelis 2004b, Parelman, 2000) Today,
enclosures, the commodification of resources upon which people depend for their livelihoods, take many names. They may involve the dispossession of thousands of
farming communities from land and water resources following international bank funding of dam construction, as in the case of the dam project in the Narmada valley
in India or the Plan Puebla Panama in Latin America. Or they may take the form of cuts in social spending on hospitals, medicines, and schools, or, especially in
countries in the south, cuts in food subsidies so as to have money to pay interest on a mounting international debt. In all these cases, cuts, dispossessions and austerity,
namely “enclosures”,
are imposed for the sake of “efficiency”, and rationalisation and “global competitiveness ”.
Enclosures are therefore any strategy that push people to depend on markets for their livelihood. Enclosures only create a
context for market social interaction to occur. If enclosures push people into increasing the degree of their dependence on markets
for the reproduction of their livelihoods, then markets integrate their activities in a system that pits all against
all. The increasing intensification of planetary interdependence brought about by global markets implies that any “node” of social production, at
whatever scale – whether an individual on the labour market, a company in a particular industry, a city and country in competition to attract capital and investments
vis-à-vis other cities and countries – faces
an external force that forces it to adapt to certain standards of doing things , to adopt
order to beat the competitor on pain of threat to its livelihood. But “beating the competitor” is also, at
the same time, threatening the livelihoods of other communities we are competing with, to the extent that they also
depend on markets to reproduce their own livelihoods. The more we depend on money and markets to satisfy our
needs and follow our desires, the more we are exposed to a vicious circle of dependence that pits livelihoods against
each other. Some of us win, and some of us lose, but in either case we are both involved in perpetrating the system that keeps us reproducing scarcity when in
certain forms of social cooperation, in
fact we could celebrate abundance. It must be noted that the competition that runs through the global social body is not similar to the competitive games we play with
friends. When I play table football with my friends I aim at winning. But whether I win or lose, I end up sharing food and laughter with my friends, whether they lose
But competition in the
economy – whether “perfect” or “imperfect”, whether real or merely simul ated (the latter being increasingly the case in public services
where, in the absence of markets, government agencies simulate their dynamics by setting new benchmarks) – ultimately finds its very energy in its
threat to livelihoods. It is a mode of social relation that is based on pitting livelihoods against each other. In so doing it continuously
reproduces scarcity and community destruction. From the perspective of any “node”, this mode of articulation across the social
body is disciplinary because, borrowing from Foucault's (1975) analysis of Bentham's Panopticon, or model prison, the market is also a
mechanism in which norms are created through a social process that distributes rewards and punishments (see De Angelis 2002). By norms of
or win. Competition in this realm is innocuous; it is a practice that might strengthen communities' playfulness instead of destroying it.
production I am here referring to the variety of principles of allocation of resources and distribution associated with social human production, as well as ways of doing
Norms of production (that is, ways of relating to one another)
are answers to such fundamental questions as: what we shall produce, how we shall produce it, how much of it we shall produce, how long we should spend
working to produce it, and who shall produce it – all very concrete questions that define process and relational questions concerning
the reproduction of our social body and the ways in which we relate to each other and to nature. These questions are not
answered by people themselves taking charge of their lives and relations among themselves; thus, equally, the norms of social production and of their
relations to each other are not defined collectively. Instead they are defined by an abstract mechanism that we have
created (actually, that states have created at sword-and gun-point: see Polanyi, 1944, and Marx, 1867, as classical accounts) and that we take as “natural” in the daily
practices of our lives. It is the abstract process of disciplinary markets that articulates the social body in such a way as to
constitute social norms of production, rather than individual social actors negotiating among themselves the norms of their free cooperation. In this
market mechanism, individual actors must respond to existing heteronomous norms imposed by the blind
mechanism of the market by meeting or beating the market bench mark (or the simulated market benchmark imposed by neo-liberalism's
state bodies), an activity which in turn affects the market norm itself. In this continuous feedback mechanism, livelihoods are pitted
against each other. When rewards and punishments are repeated in a system, norms are created. This is a process that the paladin of market freedom,
things, rhythms and forms of cooperation, that in capitalist markets are synthesised in prices.
Friedrich von Hayek, well understood, although he ignored the question of power and enclosure processes in explaining the emergence of capitalist markets. For
Hayek, the abstract mechanism of the market is a spontaneously emerging system of freedom (De Angelis 2002).
Enclosures – 2NC
1. Plan thickens the market’s involvement in people’s lives-creates a cycle of dependence
where livelihoods tradeoff with one another due to an intense focus on competition and
profit-makes the system unsustainable-that’s De Angelis
2. Privatizing public space is the definition of enclosure.
Bollier, USC Annenberg School for Communication senior fellow, 2002
(David, “Reclaiming the Commons”, Summer, http://bostonreview.net/BR27.3/bollier.html, DOA: 6-29-12)
who shall control the commons? "The commons" refers to that
vast range of resources that the American people collectively own, but which are rapidly being enclosed: privatized,
traded in the market, and abused. The process of converting the American commons into market resources can accurately be described as enclosure
because, like the movement to enclose common lands in eighteenth-century England, it involves the private appropriation of collectively owned resources. Such
enclosures are troubling because they disproportionately benefit the corporate class and effectively deprive ordinary citizens of
access to resources that they legally or morally own. The result is a hypertrophic market that colonizes untouched natural resources
and public life while eroding our democratic commonwealth. The commons and enclosure are archaic, unfamiliar terms. But this strangeness is appropriate. We
currently lack a vocabulary for identifying a wide range of abuses that harm public assets and social ecology. When such abuses are acknowledged,
they tend to be viewed as isolated and episodic, rather than systematically related . A discussion of the commons and enclosure
One of the great questions of contemporary American political economy is,
helps bring into sharp focus a dramatic but largely unexamined phenomenon of contemporary American society: the forced privatization and marketization of large
swaths of shared wealth and social life. We already have a familiar and sophisticated language for talking about economic exchange, focused on market efficiency.
We need to develop a similarly rich body of knowledge about the commons, in order to appreciate the value of our civic patrimony and to develop strategies that will
help us fortify and extend it. Varieties of commons The
American commons comprises a wide range of shared assets and forms of
community governance. Some are tangible, while others are more abstract, political, and cultural. The tangible assets of the commons
include the vast quantities of oil, minerals, timber, grasslands, and other natural resources on public lands, as well as the
broadcast airwaves and such public facilities as parks, stadiums, and civic institutions. The government is the trustee and steward of such resources, but "the people"
are the real owners.
3. The plan only disembeds a market – enclosing energy within a neoliberal construct.
Bell, Iowa State sociology professor, 2000
(Michael, “Regulated freedoms: the market and the state, agriculture and the environment”, Journal of Rural Studies
Volume 16, Issue 3, July 2000, Pages 285–294, Science Direct)
But the notion of a “free” market without or prior to the state is an ideological abstraction. No market is possible without a
society to provide it with moral, legal, political, and administrative foundations. All markets are socially structured and socially patterned by legal
codes, policing, norms of interaction, and common mediums for exchanging goods and information. In a state society, this necessarily entails the
state. No form of modern market has validity apart from the state or states that gives it licence, scope, and regularity. It is the state that guarantees the
property rights, enforceable contracts, product standards, and sound money upon which the operation of any modern
market depends1. Unless by the term “free” we mean a brigand economy of six-shooters, pirates, and highwaymen, a market inherently involves the state.
David Marquand (1988: 101) put it well: “The truth is that it is as misleading to talk of the state `distorting’ the market as it would be to talk of the market `distorting’
the state. Without the state there would be no market: at the door of the auction room stands the policeman .” Moreover, no
market can exist apart from the cultural surround to which it adheres, and which adheres to it, giving it some normative regularity and some potential for change, both
of which — regularity and change — depend in part on the state's structuring powers.2 Indeed,
even policies which roll back or prevent
“interference” in a market require state action to put them into practice and to maintain them. Any new market freedoms that
we may contrive — through deregulation, privatization, and free trade agreements, for example — are inescapably the result of state power to structure and restructure
economic and social life. As
Karl Polanyi long ago observed, it is no accident that the expansion of the “free” market in the
early 19th century was accompanied by a great expansion of the state as well: Just as, contrary to expectation, the invention of laborsaving machinery had not diminished but actually increased the uses of human labor, the introduction of free markets, far from doing away with the need for control,
regulation, and intervention, enormously increased their range…. Thus
even those who wished most ardently to free the state from all
unnecessary duties, and whose whole philosophy demanded the restriction of state activities, could not but entrust
the self-same state with the new powers, organs, and instruments required for the establishment of laissez-faire (Polanyi,
1944: 140–141). Free-market ideology has long wrestled, and wrestles yet, with this basic contradiction: that “freeing” the market from the state depends upon the
state. But
like any economic arrangement, a “free” market is a social creation — not a force of “nature” and the
autonomous laws of efficient and adaptive production. Again in Polanyi's words (1944: 139), “There was nothing natural about
laissez-faire; free markets could never have come into being merely by allowing things to take their course….
Laissez-faire itself was enforced by state action.” Even capitalism is a social phenomenon.
Energy – 1NC
Notions if energy are informed by neoliberalism-assumes energy is an external input
necessary for human growth—this creates omnipresent scarcity and pre-determines
outcomes by not questions the ends to which energy is used.
Hildyard, Corner House director, 2012
(Nicholas, Corner House has aimed to support democratic and community movements for environmental and social
justice, former co-editor of the Ecologist, “Energy Security For What? For Whom?”, February,
http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/sites/thecornerhouse.org.uk/files/Energy%20Security%20For%20Whom%20For
%20What.pdf, DOA: 7-5-12)
Clearly, like “security”, “energy” is a term that leaves out a disturbing amount of critical detail. That fosters confusion
– confusion that can easily be exploited for political purposes. Politicians are prone to threatening that the “lights
will go out” unless new oilfields are developed
The abstract character of the concept of energy fosters other confusions as well. Consider the regular forecasts made
about energy consumption. For 150 years, the easy quantifiability of energy has tempted experts into making
predictions of energy use that almost always turn out to be wildly wrong
dams built or miners’ unions defeated, playing on the popular belief that any energy price rise or shortage must be a simple matter of insufficient supply. In the 1970s and 1980s, US leaders talked up an oil “crisis” triggered by “a
cartel of foreign sheikdoms” to push programmes of increased and diversified energy production at home and abroad in the name of “energy security”, despite the fact that the accident- and guerrilla-vulnerable centralised energy infrastructure that they supported (most of which was not dependent on oil but on coal) posed (and continues to pose) a much greater threat of supply failure. 12
because they do not take into account the diverse and shifting uses of energy, the specificity and materiality of particular sources, the
unpredictability of innovation and of political and economic change, and so forth. Emboldened by the power of computers and the eminently measurable nature of various variables (ranging from “share of air-conditioned areas in service establishments” to “average bus ridership” to “demolition rate of dwellings in New Zealand and South Africa” to national GDP), experts assemble
mathematical models of energy use that purport to be able to look ahead 5, 10, 20 or even 100 years. The results have been dismal. In 1970 most energy experts in the US expected electricity-generating capacity to reach around 2,100 gigawatts by the year 2000. The true figure turned out to be less than 40 per cent of that. 13 The next decade’s efforts to predict world energy use in 2000
. Despite engendering what energy
specialist Vaclav Smil calls “false feelings of insight,” such “counterproductive” forecasts continue to dominate
energy and climate change planning around the world. 15 To sum up, “energy” may at first appear to be an innocent concept. Bearing the
imprimateur of science and mathematics and holding few of the emotional (menacing or reassuring) connotations of “security”, it may seem to be a
harmless, matter-of-fact, timeless term of analysis denoting a “natural,” background constant or continuum. But its
haziness means that it is equally likely to promote confusions that lend themselves to counterproductive
policymaking and campaigning, and that can be seized upon to promote other objectives. But it is more than the vagueness of
by such prestigious institutions as the OECD, IIASA, the World Energy Council and the Hudson Institute were typically 30-50 per cent or more too high. 14 Short-term extrapolations and projections for particular countries such as China fare little better
the concept of “energy” that renders it less than an ideal tool for analysing what is at stake in social conflicts revolving around so many divergent issues ranging from
urban fuel poverty in Europe to the economics of shale gas, from the trade in oil derivatives to ill-health among those who cook with wood and other biomass in
enclosed spaces. The
abstractness that the term “energy” has acquired, like that of “security”, is an expression of a
hidden, often antidemocratic, political bias that makes the word’s appearance of neutrality all the more
dangerous Like minerals and water, energy is commonly seen as a Malthusian resource. In this sense, it is viewed as a substance
external to human societies, an input on which they are constantly exerting pressure, a (finite) good for which there
will be an ever-increasing need as human populations and aspirations for development increase. On this conception, energy, ineluctably
and continually encroached upon by a voracious humanity, is something of which new supplies have unceasingly to
be sought. Energy scarcity, or rather the threat of it – or more precisely the perception or feeling of such a
threat – is omnipresent. If this is what energy is, there can never be enough of it. This perspective is connected with a view of
history as a tale of the progressive unleashing of energy, or of humanity’s unending struggle to break through barriers in the quest for more of it. One historian writes,
in a common turn of phrase, of the industrial revolution as an “escape from the constraints of an organic economy” into a mineral-based era based on fossil energy.
16 Increased energy use signifies liberation, a breaking free from the “limitations” of land, soil, time and space.
Accordingly, all
societies, past and present, tend to be commensurated and then “rated” according to the amounts of energy they use. “Organic” societies of the past (and the millions today who cook with crop residues, wood or dung) are seen as backward, while contemporary societies are ranked according to per capita kilowatt usage of modern fuels, together with other markers of “development”. Even
distinguished energy experts tend to give short shrift to the possibility of a deliberate reduction in overall energy use. Vaclav Smil, for instance, assumes that the transition away from coal, oil and gas to avert catastrophic climate change must find a way to meet the world’s current annual use of 400 exajoules of energy as a minimum, 17 as do well-known scenarios for reducing carbon
Conflict over energy is
analysed applying a similar approach. As an addictive “thing,” energy is seen to possess a scarcity that causes
violence as people and countries fight each other for it, while the violence that (sometimes deliberately) creates its scarcity
tends to drop from view. 19 Unless the supply of energy can be increased indefinitely, it is assumed, or divided up (fairly or
unfairly) and husbanded more efficiently according to accounting principles, strife will result. 20 Energy politics becomes a matter of
reconciling supply and demand. Many geopolitical struggles are simplistically portrayed as grabs not only for oil but also for
an abstract “energy”, while at the same time, the unstoppable trajectory of energy use is seen as inevitably leading
to an environmentally-damaging appropriation of nature
dioxide (CO2) emissions. Inevitably, fairness or justice themselves become measured partly by how evenly energy is distributed between countries and within societies, despite the fact that energy-use figures correlate poorly with both standard measures and subjective evaluations of well-being.
(for example, of oil deposits or plant growth). The political influences over the concept of energy are no accident, but have had a particular historical development. The abstract concept
of “energy” that we use today – call it Energy with a capital “E” – was not always there, with all its elusiveness and biases. Creating it took a lot of hard work. Just as commons were not always conceptualised as resources, water not always seen as H2O, and forests not always viewed as stands of timber or quantities of industrial pulpwood, a charcoal fire or a bullock drawing a plough
through a field were not always regarded as an instance of characterless, quantifiable “energy consumption”. Nor, in many societies, are they necessarily seen this way today. Understanding today’s notion of upper-case Energy as a relatively new development requires trying to recapture what was there before, and what will always remain as one foundation of energy politics: namely, the
vernacular, varied, lower-case subsistence “energies” of commons regimes. Lower-case “energies” are multiple, incommensurable. Each is associated with a particular survival purpose. Indeed, it is part of their logic that in ordinary speech they seldom go by any single name – least of all “energy”. Heat from burning biomass is used for cooking, washing, keeping warm, preparing land
for seed. Light from the sun drives the growth of crops. Mechanical energy from animal muscle (or diesel engines) is used to get around the country. The amount of each “energy” used is fitted to the task at hand. What would be the point of using twice as much wood as you needed to bake a loaf of bread? In times of hardship, moreover, it is expected that specific “energies” will be
shared around so that even the poor have a crack at them. On remote mountain roads in the global South (and the North), it is a given, not a choice, that drivers of pickup trucks will give lifts to whomever they encounter on foot, even if there is hardly any room. Outside the ambit of fossil fuels, what we now call energy had a different relationship to time – and still has today. The
accumulation of plant growth required for food for muscle power depends on the annual rhythm of the seasons, and the growth of wood over several years if not decades of sunlight. Work has to be done mostly during the hours of daylight. Before the age of coal and oil, plant (and marine life) energy stored and concentrated over millions of years deep underground played little part in
either livelihood or commerce. Outside the fossil-fuelled world, energy has always also been tied to a multitude of disparate but particular activities that have no omnibus category or abstract quantity linking them all. There was seldom any reason, for example, to treat heat and mechanical energy as equivalent or exchangeable, physically or economically. As economic historian Joel
Mokyr notes: “the equivalence of the two forms was not suspected by people in the eighteenth century; the notion that a horse pulling a treadmill and a coal fire heating a lime kiln were in some sense doing the same thing would have appeared absurd to them.”s 22 Agriculture was driven by sunlight and muscles, long-range trade by wind and water currents. Cooking and heating
depended on wood and sometimes coal, which, together with charcoal and falling water, helped power industry. People did not think of themselves as “energy constrained” in the contemporary sense: an energy unbounded by seasons and the land still lay in the future. Capital “E” Energy as we know it today was in fact nowhere to be found. What we now recognise as Energy was also
embedded in particular places in a fairly non-flexible geographical pattern. In European countries, grain-milling was scattered across the countryside, depending on where rivers could provide sufficient mechanical energy. As late as 1838, water still powered one-quarter of Britain’s cotton factories (and even the coal-powered upstarts were nevertheless called “mills” in a mark of their
watery heritage). The size of towns depended on how much firewood was available within range of horse-powered transport. Global trade relied on understanding geographically specific wind patterns that had to be worked with, not against. Energy was not mobile, liquid, transferable in large quantities over long distances. The age of Btus, kilojoules and oil-equivalents lay in an
unimagined future. 23 As a result, there was no politics of energy of the kind that has become familiar in the fossil-fuel era. Controlling muscles meant controlling people and animals. Amassing power over production meant, above all, amassing human bodies – through slavery, for example. Exploitation of firewood and charcoal depended on access to land. How energy was used was
subject to different kinds of monitoring: for example, the practices of millers scattered along rivers were vulnerable, to a certain extent, to surveillance by the local peasants whose business they sought. One person could control only limited quantities of energy, both in absolute terms and relative to others. Fossil-fuelled industrial capitalism changed all that. In effect, it created the abstract
concept of Energy we use today. For one thing, fossil fuels allowed emerging industrial elites to abstract from time. With the tapping of millions of years of “fossilized sunshine”, 24 seasonal rhythms could be disregarded. The products of photosynthesis from past eras could be transported, in effect, to a single point in the present, commensurating biological activity of different ages and
allowing energy to be accumulated and deployed in unprecedented quantities. Today, 400 years’ worth of plant growth are burned every year in the form of coal, oil and gas. 25 The use of energy also became disconnected from the diurnal cycle: fossil fuels’ transportability and energy density allowed the construction of machines that could be run around the clock (indeed, they had to be
Fossil fuels also allowed energy to be disembedded from the particular
socio-ecological activities from which it had been inextricable in the past.
to repay investment in them and defeat competitors), together with the enhanced lighting systems that human beings needed to operate them.
Coal-fired steam engines, followed by internal combustion engines, helped make heat and mechanical energy equivalent on a practical, mass
scale. Electricity took the process one step further, visibly transforming the energy embedded in fossil fuels or uranium atoms into heat into mechanical energy into electromagnetic energy, which could be distributed widely only to be translated back into heat or mechanical energy. Under the reign of the machines of a mineral-based economy, it became possible to compare the efficiency
of different fuels along a single scale. Owners of industrial boilers did not necessarily have to tie themselves to a single, highly contextually-bound Energy source, while homeowners could switch from wood to coal to fuel oil to gas. For workplace managers whose labour productivity depended on electricity, different power plant fuel sources – biomass, coal, oil, gas (all of which were
themselves standardised into different grades), nuclear, solar and wind – became “equivalent”. An abstract Energy could be assessed merely according to price. Just as abstract labour became embodied in the mobile, partially expendable flesh of the first generations of industrial workers, so too abstract Energy took shape through the mechanisation of the fossil fuel era. Through this
process, the energy density of coal and oil became an implicit standard of measurement. 26 Today, agrofuels are assessed according to their ability to replace oil in transport. The giant Desertec solar array proposed for the North African desert is designed around renewables, but its “super grid” infrastructure of high voltage, direct current transmission lines throughout the Mediterranean
region bears a striking resemblance to the model of centralised fossil fuel power stations. Electric cars are intended to substitute for gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles. Upper-case Energy is an “abstraction which became true in practice.” 27 In addition, fossil fuels helped commensurate places, transforming them into equivalent spaces for accumulating capital. Bringing up coal and oil
from underground partially freed production from the land. By 1700 in England, coal had already replaced wood in making beer, bricks, glass, soap and lime, replacing around one million hectares of woodland. By 1800, so much coal was in use that one-third of England’s land area would have been needed to grow wood to replace it. 28 Today, coal, oil and gas supply the equivalent of
The capacity of fossil fuels
to delink energy use from specific locations (for example, rural watercourses) made it possible to concentrate
workers and production in large factories, while business’ new-found ability to increase energy flow at will
(assuming it could pay for it) made possible greater extraction of surplus,
phytomass from well over 1.25 billion hectares – even though the total land area taken up today by the global extraction, processing and transportation of fossil fuels, as well as the generation and transmission of thermal electricity, amounts to “only” 3 million hectares worldwide, 400 times less. 29
both through physically magnifying workers’ output and through routinising conditions in which they could be pushed to or beyond their
physical limits. As people were pushed off the land and energy-dense coal transported by boat, barge and railway to urban industry, cities became larger and less dependent on the land around them for energy and labour. One result was still more innovation and mechanisation and yet higher extraction rates. Railways and fossil-powered shipping (including, eventually, oil-powered
navies), meanwhile, annihilated distance, as did subsequent electricity grids. 32 The land itself was partly transformed into a manufactory of cheap food for labourers, its productivity in part underwritten by the same processes that were transferring fire from the open fields into the combustion chamber. 33 Eventually, the refined products of crude oil were put to work not only to plough
crops, but also to fertilise, harvest, transport, process, cool and store them (see Box: “Fossil food”, p.20). All of this, finally, was intertwined with a new politics partly defined by the new abstractions of capital “E” Energy. Hugely amplified levels of productivity hastened and expanded the generalisation and de-skilling of wage labour. In England, the steam engine led to a 100-fold
increase in labour productivity in textiles, for example, making it no surprise that investment in mineral-based energy jumped from 11 per cent in the 1790s to 50 per cent in 1850. The internal reorganisation of the labour process – assisted by the increasingly abstract Energy that fossil fuels heralded – shifted the focus of emerging elites from specific groups of “workers” (including those
that did not depend on a wage but lived partly off the land) to a more abstract paid-for “work,” and sharpened the divide between skilled and unskilled labour. 34 To put it another way, the commodification of the capacity for work – and the progressive “insecuritisation” of ordinary people’s lives – was accomplished largely through fossil-powered industry (see Box: “Upper-Case
‘Energy’ vs. the Right to Live”, p.18). As geographer Matthew Huber puts it, the “historical emergence of the social relation of wage labor” is “part and parcel of the ‘energy shift’ in the productive forces from biological to inanimate (fossil) sources of energy”. 35 In industrialised countries, in addition, mass production and the spread of wage labour engendered mass consumption –
which also ultimately became dependent on the provision of cheap Energy – in the form of, for example, private cars (particularly in the United States) and electrified family homes full of consumer goods. 36 Fossil capitalism’s invention of a plastic Energy that could be enlisted without customary types of regard for time, place or context helped mould the belief in infinite economic
growth. 37 As Energy became a fully-fledged resource defined by numbers, it also became a topic of forecasts and an object of security worries, rather than seen as a “contingent and historically situated socioecological relationship that is prone to contestation”. 38 Abstract Energy became as much of an obsession for business and the state as abstract labour. In time, it became equally a
concern of the suburbanised, individualised, automobilised homeowners of the US and some countries in Europe, the geography of whose daily lives and whose ideology of freedom and autonomy revolved around the unfettered use of fossil fuels, reinforcing obsessions with oil or gas, the machines they help drive 39 and the “hostile foreigners” impeding access to them (see Box:
“Automobility”, p.78). It became almost as easy to want Energy as to want warmth, comfort, cooked food, clothes, entertainment and so forth – and for such wants to morph into needs. At the same time, however, the new politics of Energy associated with the fossil fuel era has been dominated by battles among businesses over how much money can be made throughout a fossil-powered
system. 40 In sum, encouraging a rational debate about “energy security” necessitates understanding what is meant not only by the phrase, but also by its composite parts. The term “energy,” despite its apparent simplicity, presents particular challenges. During the past two centuries, the vernacular, varied, lower-case “energies” of commons regimes have been joined by a new, abstract,
Abstract, monolithic, seemingly limitless Energy is
something that only became possible with fossil-fuelled productivism and the machines, networks and institutions that came with it.
upper-case Energy evolved in industrialised societies. Exploring the difference between “energies” and Energy is crucial to understanding the international politics of “energy security”.
This Energy, like lowercase “energies”, can deliver the basic necessities of life, at least to some, lending a certain plausibility to politicians’ claims that their worries
Upper-case Energy is a transformation
and commensuration of specific energies into a general capacity to maximise the ability of human bodies to make
stuff. As the First Law of Thermodynamics (developed at the same time as industrial capitalism) recognises, any form of energy can be transformed into others and
about “energy security” centre on keeping the lights on and homes warm. But its underlying logic is different.
used to do work (but cannot be created or destroyed). Just as the invention of an absolute Time independent of daylight variations and traditional holidays helped
discipline early industrial workers into the regular rhythm of a long working day, so too the subsequent development of an abstract Energy was key to intensifying
For this upper-case Energy, survival is incidental except insofar
as it supports the production imperative. Whereas specific “energies” know their limits, of Energy there can never be
too much. Other things being equal, the more there is, the more can be produced, and the more money business can
make, without limit. Lower-case “energies” and Big-E Energy are not only different: they are also, in many senses, enemies to each other. In order that
fragmented “energies” do not become an obstacle to the mobilisation of economic value, they have to be folded into
abstract Energy under the care of dedicated disciplines and institutions (bureaucrats, engineers, statisticians, laboratories, economics
departments, inventors, investors, armies). Obsessed with quantitative growth for growth’s sake, Energy tends to treat the right of
all to a warm home (or a cool one in hotter climes), cooked food, electric light as a nuisance. It heralds a world that is not only
unequal, but also unable to respect the common right to subsistence. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of agrofuels, whose
their productivity further and harnessing them to the pace of the machine.
“interchangeability” with oil under the rubric of a unitary Energy makes routine the replacement of subsistence agriculture with industrial cropping aimed at fuelling
cars and airplanes. It is also plain in India’s development plans, which call for US$100 billion to be spent on a burgeoning number of large Energy projects – coal, oil,
hydropower and renewables – that will serve above all to boost the profits of industrialists but leave less than 2 per cent for the household use of the 700 million who
lack modern services. And it can be seen in South Africa’s policy of providing some of the cheapest electricity in the world to smelting companies while many
Well over a century into the era of
electrification, more than a billion people, about one-quarter of the world’s population, have no access to electricity
or other non-biotic forms of energy (and many will never have under fossil-fuelled capitalism). If fossil-fuelled
capitalism has defined what we mean by energy, then merely to use the word uncritically is to make a commitment
to certain assumptions about scarcity, foreclose certain alternatives and cover up some of the most important issues
that need to be discussed. Paradoxically, having a serious discussion about “energy security” requires taking a
therapeutic step back from the modern concept of Energy itself. For example, the seemingly innocent query “ How can we have energy security
in a post-fossil world?” is not so much a question as an ultimatum. The question implies that however we
organise our societies in future, it will have to be on the model that fossil capitalism built, with its threats to
the right to survive of both humans and nonhumans (and the associated threats to “security” itself, on a commons understanding). A more
township residents are forced to pirate electricity illegally because the price is out of their reach.
fruitful question would be: “Is the world that is defined (in part) by the modern concept of Energy the world that we want?” It is just such questions that policymakers
and social movements must ask when initiating any discussion of energy security
Energy Security – 1NC
Aff’s quest for energy security represents the final enclosure-this commodification of
nature culminates in extinction
Marzec, Purdue post colonial studies professor, 2011
(Robert, “Energy Security”, Radical History Review; Winter2011, Issue 109, p83-99, 17p, ebsco)
The emergence of counterhegemonic groups like the MST reveals the continuing (and growing) presence of the discourse of
enclosure and the monomaniacal drive to control production on a macroplanetary and a microbiological scale. One migbt
even characterize the present age as the age of the global war against inhabitancy and the fulfillment of the enclosure movement that
began almost a millennium ago. This war bypasses the needs of the environment, and the very presence of nature itself, in
favor of the technological "advancements" of speed, efficiency, and high production . As with the eighteenth-century enclosure
movement, the twenty-first century's enclosure movement related to energy security rewrites nature as a recalcitrant
force that must be ruled at all costs. The labor and peasant movements not associated with a privatized international
mechanism pose a threat to these feudalistic lords of the land. Struggles like those engaged in by organizations like the MST also reveal the power of the
resistant force of inhabitancy, a conception of the human subject fundamentally different from constitutions of subjectivity offered by globalization, nationality, and
even individuality. National
and international law, because of its foundation in discourses of enclosure, cannot provide a
resistant politics for the global poor. Moreover, the ideas of national sovereignty, as we have seen, will remain in the hands of the
primary global national actors, particularly nations in the Global North and the West. Individual sovereignty destroys chances for the
global poor to organize against large corporate and state landholders. What is needed, ultimately, is a new judicial conception and
deployment of food sovereignty and habitation sovereignty. Food sovereignty names immediately the pressing issue of planetary starvation. Habitation sovereignty
names the indissoluble connection between the land and its human and nonhuman inhabitants. And the idea of inhabitancy speaks to both of these. However, before
feudal enclosures and later
parliamentary enclosures have returned in the guise of a corporate and national war on the supposed security of the
planet, especially energy security, as both neoconservatives and neoliberals prepare to enclose the land on a planetary scale. In the political
push for energy security in the consumer world and in the struggle for basic existence in the developing world, we can observe the evolution
of two kinds of human subjects: those that seek to control the environment and those that are connected to (and
brutally disconnected from) their environments. If ideas of energy security continue down the path of history's
enclosures, environments and their inhabitants will be too compromised to save . The poorest communities on the planet
these transformations can occur, we will continue to encounter brutal forms of corporate and militarized feudalism. Early
already live with tenuous connections to their habitations. The transformation of corn and other edible crops into fuel for developed countries will inevitably cause
prices in staple foods to fluctuate at rates heretofore unknown. Even the World Bank acknowledges that large increases in food prizes will "raise overall poverty in
low income countries substantially.''^^ Human
subjects without a right to inhabitancy will quickly become citizens of the
shadow kingdom of the twentyfirst century. They will take on the mantle of history's dispossessed, the farmers, laborers,
villagers, and tenants who lost their rights to inhabitancy during the great waves of enclosure acts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The questions that global
players should be asking themselves, then, are: Should we be annexing half the planet's population to the status of a life without the means to live so that consumer
society's high yields can be maintained? Or should we be rethinking the status of all from the standpoint of the right to inhabitancy?
Energy Security – 2NC
1. Energy security discourse represents the final enclosure-one that seeks to divorce
humans from nature via speed, efficiency and technology. Pains nature as something that
must be ruled and dissenting movements as threats-this drive compromises human and
environmental security culminating in extinction-that’s Marzec.
2. Premeption-energy security forces it to defend against constructed scarcity and threats.
Labban, University of Miami assistant professor of Geography, 2011
(Mazen, “The geopolitics of energy security and the war on terror: the case for market expansion and the
militarization of global space.” Global Political Ecology, pg 340-1)
Energy security is a global question. We looked at it from the standpoint of the United States because the discourse of energy security, since its inception in the 1970s,
made energy security synonymous with US national security, and made the energy security of the US synonymous with the security of the global market. US
energy security is construed as necessary for global economic stability as much as global energy security is essential
for the US economy and national security. Any interruption in the flow of oil to the US - any threat to US national interests - will bring about global
economic disorder. This is the double blackmail of the globalism embodied in the energy security discourse emanating
from the US: everybody gains from increased energy security at the global scale; everybody suffers from threats to
US energy security and the vulnerability of the homeland to disruptions in energy supply. An expert expressed this danger on the eve of the Arab oil embargo
(1973) as the "the dangers to world harmony and peace - that lie in a situation of growing American dependence on external energy sources, especially Middle East
oil" (Wilson 1973). More recently, a former commander in chief of the US Pacific Command assured readers of the preeminent policy journal Foreign Affairs that
there is "far smaller" risk to the interruption of the international maritime flow of oil than generally assumed because of the preponderance of US naval power, adding
however that only the US has sufficient naval power to "seriously disrupt oil shipments": "Today, the U.S. Navy has no rivals in its capacity to impose and sustain . . .
blockades" over "a large area of water over a long period of time," and the US will employ naval blockades "when necessary." The world benefits from the naval
hegemony of the US as long as other countries "do not endanger Washington's vital interests" (Blair and Lieberthal 2007). According
to the hegemonic
discourse, military and economic threats to global energy security could be hedged by the simultaneous expansion of
an open market, managed by multilateral agreements that guarantee the uninterrupted circulation of material and
financial resources, and military forces through existing formal alliances such as NATO and informal arrangements such as the Global
Maritime Partnership initiative, in a manner that coincides with the national interest of the US. Terrorism is one threat that could be eliminated in the (very) long run
by the expansion of free market democracy and in the short run by military expansion and the arming and training of local police and military forces in vulnerable
regions. The
threat of intensified competition for hydrocarbon resources, especially from developing countries bent on
modernizing their militaries and developing blue water naval forces, and that could result potentially in armed
conflict, could be contained by integrating those countries in collective energy and collective security arrangements that align their energy policies with those of the
US; their state-owned companies would eventually behave according to market-based rules and participate in the international market to the benefit of the market as a
whole. Ultimately, the threat of resource nationalism, the source of current and potential oil scarcities, can be resolved by promoting "good governance" and creating
"hospitable investment climates" in oil producing countries, to channel national revenues and open the space to foreign capital for investment in the expansion of
reserves and production. It
is this threat, the threat from resource nationalism, which appears to magnify the effects of the
other two by creating resource scarcities and maintaining a tight energy market. Forecasts about imminent scarcities
and potential attacks on the network or resource wars bring imagined crises from the future into the present and
project them across global space in its entirety, making the expansion of a militarized global market necessary
and urgent. In the name of global energy security, military and market aggression becomes an act of defense , a
hedging strategy against threats in space and time, preempting presumed future threats before they become present, taking the
fight to the enemies "around the world so we do not have to face them here at home." Acts against aggressive expansion in
the name of security - from terrorism to resource nationalism - become the justification and legitimation of
the necessity of this act of preemptive aggression.
Normalization of preemption lets the state live and make die-creates absolute war
Goh, Harvard visiting fellow, 2006
(Irving, “Disagreeing Preemptive/Prophylaxis: From Philip K. Dick to Jacques Ranciere” Fast Capitalism, 2.1,
http://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/2_1/goh.html, DOA: 8-9-12)
To allow the normalization of the fatal preemptive would be to institute the legitimization of an absolute or extreme
biopolitics. According to Foucault, biopolitics is the control and management of individual bodies by the State through technics of knowledge (usually through
surveillance) of those same bodies. In
a biopolitical situation, the State holds the exceptional power to determine either the
right to let live or make die the individual belonging to the State. Should the preemptive become a force of reason of
contemporary life, one would terribly risk submitting the freedom of life and therefore an unconditional right to be
alive to a biopolitical capture, handing over the right to let die to the State police and military powers . It would be a
situation of abdicating the body as a totally exposed frontier of absolute war. For in the constant exposure of the
imminent preemptive, the body at any time—when decided upon by military or police powers to be a security threat—becomes the point
in which the space and time of conductibility of war collapse in a total manner. The preemptive reduces the body
to a total space of absolute war. Virilio has suggested that the absolute destruction of an enemy in war is procured when the enemy can no longer
hypothesize an alternate if not counter route or trajectory (of escape or counter-attack) from impending forces (1990: 17). In the sequence of executing
the preemptive to its resolute end, the escaping body faces that same threat of zero hypothesi s. There is no chance for that body
to think (itself) outside the vortical preemptive. Preemptive bullets into the head would take away that chance of hypothesis. A spectral figure begins to haunt the
scene now. And that is the figure of the homo sacer, who according to Agamben's analysis, is the one who in ancient times is killed without his or her death being a
This figure is also the sign par excellence of the absolute
biopolitical capture of life by the State, in which the decision to let live and make die is absolutely managed and
decided by the State, and thereby the right to be alive is no longer the fact of freedom of existence for the homo sac er
(Agamben 1998). For the right to be alive to be secured in any real sense from any political capture, for it to be
maintained and guaranteed as and for the future of the human, the body cannot be allowed to return to this
figure of the homo sacer. But victims of the preemptive irrepressibly recall the figure of the homo sacer. In the current legal proceedings of the London
religious sacrifice, and the one whose killers are nonindictable of homicide.
shooting, it has not been the fact that the police officers shot an innocent Brazilian that they will be charged. That charge remains absent. The charge of homicide
against the officers remains elliptical. Instead, the plan has been to charge them for altering the police log book to conceal the fact that they had mistakenly identified
the victim as a terror suspect.
3. Rejecting the discourse is key-energy security normalizes scarcity and growth mindsets
which are unsustainable
Hildyard, Corner House director, 2012
(Nicholas, Corner House has aimed to support democratic and community movements for environmental and social
justice, former co-editor of the Ecologist, “Energy Security For What? For Whom?”, February,
http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/sites/thecornerhouse.org.uk/files/Energy%20Security%20For%20Whom%20For
%20What.pdf, DOA: 7-5-12)
Such apparent pragmatism is understandable – but, in the end, unpragmatic. In today’s world, “energy” is about far
more than pipelines and power stations, transmission lines and oil contracts: it is a system of economic and political relationships that weaves and
reweaves the connections between corporations, governments, investors, human rights activists, environmentalists, the military, scientists, the media, trade unions and
consumers alike into constantly shifting networks of power that serve to reproduce “the world that Energy begat”. No decision related to upper-case or abstract Energy
(see pp.12ff) can escape the influences that such networks of power exert: Energy
with a capital “E” not only frames the decision; it
structures the solution, trapping the critical and the uncritical alike. To respond only to the daily froth of upper-case
Energy talk – which power station? where? fuelled by gas or coal? – is to remain hostage to a dynamic that simply
reinforces and reproduces the problems that Energy represents. Such “pragmatism” has helped shape an “energy
security” agenda that mischaracterises the many energy scarcities – and insecurities – experienced by poorer people;
promotes a response that has little to do with ensuring that everyone has the energy to meet their basic needs and
everything to do with creating new sources of accumulation; and that disrespects the limits posed by climate
change and resource depletion to endless economic growth. The result is a wave of new enclosures that, in
addition to creating new scarcities (not only of energy but also of food, water, land and other necessities of life) are making a transition
away from fossil fuels far harder to achieve. Fears of scarcity (demand outstripping supply) and promises of abundance (supply outstripping
demand) form the twin pillars of neo-classical economics and frame mainstream discussions of energy security: scarcity because it is taken as read
that energy needs, wants and desires are unlimited but the means to meet them are limited; abundance because
whatever scarcities arise it is assumed that markets, technological innovation and substitution processes will resolve
them. 6 That framework, though often unspoken, has important implications for how the multiple challenges of “energy security” are both analysed and
addressed. It also plays a central role in determining what current energy security policies aim to secure and for whom.
When scarcity is “naturalised” – by making it something that is part of the human condition – awkward questions as to how demand
for specific sources of energy has been (and still is) deliberately created are conveniently pushed aside. What needs to be
explained (scarcity) becomes the explanation (scarcity). Growing demand is simply assumed to be, and understood as, a
force that cannot, indeed must not, be tempered, a function both of rising numbers of people and of their innate desires, wants and needs. Yet demand for oilbased “energy” and its products results from policies deliberately aimed at creating demand for oil that have been
pursued for over a century, at the expense of non-oil based forms of livelihood or production.
7 In the case of agriculture, for instance, farmers North and South were
pressed into abandoning organic forms of farming, which rely on rotations and other techniques to maintain fertility, and adopting oil- and gas-based chemical agriculture through subsidies, land amalgamation schemes, taxation, and, in many cases, violence. In South Korea, for instance, officials uprooted varieties of rice that farmers had developed to meet their own needs over centuries
and pushed peasants into planting chemical-intensive modern varieties, whilst elsewhere farmers who refused to “modernise” were frequently dispossessed of their land. 8 Today, similar efforts are made to create demand for electricity and other market-based forms of energy through policies that curtail people from gathering fuelwood for free, on the spurious grounds that fuelwood
collectors are, in the words of the World Health Organisation, “stripping our forests, heating our planet” 9 (see Box: “Fuelwood Collectors”, p.24). In the transport sector, demand for cars has been carefully nurtured through suburbanisation, highway construction programmes, advertising (with cars being made an object of desire) and policies that have favoured the car over mass transport
systems. 10 Infamously, tram systems in a number of US cities were deliberately run down or replaced after they were bought by a consortium of manufacturers including Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, Phillips Petroleum Co., Mack Truck and General Motors. 11 The consequent manufactured scarcity of public transport means that cars are a necessity, not a luxury, for many US
urban dwellers
. The
framing of energy demand in terms of faceless unmet needs that spring from an inexorable but anonymous
expansion of desires also obscures who is responsible for demanding energy and who is not. A constant refrain in the
discourse of “energy security”, for example, is that rising numbers of people in the South are the “cause” of growing
energy scarcity. 12 China and India are usually top of the list of countries singled out; more than half the growth in global energy demand in the next 25 years is
predicted to come from these countries. 13 Impending future energy scarcity is framed not as a dynamic created by the political
and economic infrastructure that underpins the endless creation of consumer “desires” and their transformation into
“needs”, but as a problem born out of the inherent future aspirations of developing countries. Within 20 years, it is suggested,
the world’s energy needs will be more than 50 per cent higher than today, with developing countries accounting for 74 per cent – China and India alone for 45 per cent
– of the growth in demand. 14 But whilst growth in demand may be higher in the global South, actual consumption of energy in those countries will still trail far
behind that in the North. 15 China
might be importing and consuming more energy than ever before, but energy consumption
per head of population in the US and Canada is still roughly twice as high as in Europe or Japan, more than ten
times as high as in China, nearly 20 times as high as in India, and about 50 times as high as in the poorest countries
of sub-Saharan Africa. 18 Even these figures do not reveal who or what uses energy within a country and for what purposes. In China, for instance, heavy
industries consume more than 70 per cent of the country’s total energy use, 19 while in South Africa, more than 70 per cent of the country’s energy is consumed by
industrial, mining, agricultural and commercial interests – and just 16 per cent by the country’s residents. 20 Moreover, much of the growth in demand for energy in
China has not been to supply goods for Chinese customers but to manufacture consumer products for export to Europe and North America, 21 the direct result of
energy-intensive US and European manufacturing being “off-shored” to China (and to India and other Asian countries). 22 In
effect, higher imports of oil
into China are driven as much by US and European consumption as by growing affluence in the country itself . The
Chinese government has questioned whether all the carbon dioxide molecules emanating from smokestacks in China are really “Chinese”, or should in part be
Mainstream interpretations of “scarcity” also tend to render
invisible the way poorer sections of societies are denied access to energy, not because the means to meet their needs
are limited but because doing so is unprofitable,
attributed to the Western countries consuming the goods that China produces. 23
offers few opportunities for corrupt enrichment or empire-building, or is bureaucratically cumbersome to administer. Nepal is a case in point. With 6,000 or so rivers cascading down the Himalayas, the hydroelectric potential of
the country is one the richest in the world. 24 But hydroelectric development has, until recently, consisted of building large dams only, leading to short periods of excess capacity followed by several years of brownouts as shortages ensued from the increased demand for electrical goods stimulated by electricity producers – until the next mega project was constructed. The “choice” of large
dams over other hydroelectric technologies, however, results not from a rational assessment of what would best ensure access to energy for all, but from the entrenched power within government circles of what Dipak Gyawali, a former Minister for Water Resources in the country, and Ajaya Dixit of the Nepal Water Conservation Foundation term “hydrocracies” – government
departments and international financial institutions whose economic, bureaucratic and political interests are intimately bound up with the large dam industry or whose technocratic approach to development leans towards “larger, expertise-dependent technologies, such as one large power project implemented by their in-house expertise”. 25 The problem is compounded by the bureaucratic
“needs” of international development agencies, such as the World Bank, which find it more “cost-effective to make one large sovereign loan to a single large dam than to many smaller projects”. 26 In contrast, when popular opposition to one of the largest dams proposed for Nepal, Arun III, coupled with the restoration of multi-party democracy in 1990, led to the energy sector being
opened up to small producers, numerous villages introduced their own mini-hydro schemes, some run collectively, some privately. The outcome was to produce almost one-third more electricity at close to half the cost and half the time of the proposed Arun III project. Other reforms, such as the introduction of a “right to energy”, led to a major redistribution in access to the grid: local
electricity user groups, often run collectively, have flourished, with the electricity company required by law to connect them once they have been formally established. The demand is not necessarily for more electricity but for its equitable distribution: if the grid exists, its electricity should not belong “only to urban and connected Nepal [but] to the entire country”. 27 In effect, Nepal’s
. The treatment of “abundance” within
the framework of energy security is as problematic as that of “scarcity ”. The concept of Abundance dominant in industrialised societies
energy scarcity, rather than reflecting a lack of means to meet needs, has been socially constructed from a politics of exclusion – exclusion not only from access to the energy that is available, but also from decision-making power over how it should be produced
today (like Energy, it is an “uppercase” phenomenon, interpreted as supply outpacing demand) recognises no practical limits to economic growth. On the contrary,
such growth
is considered both necessary and inevitable: not only does it provide the means through which to
satisfy the (assumed) unlimited demand for energy, but also, critically, the (assumed) innovation through which all
scarcities can be overcome.
Instead, technical fixes are
proposed to “overcome” the scarcity imposed by the earth’s inability to absorb all the carbon dioxide. The most important
But climate scientists have stressed that the amount of carbon still remaining in fossil deposits underground is enormous compared to the amount that can be quickly absorbed by the above-ground carbon-cycling system of atmosphere, oceans, vegetation, soil, fresh water and surface geology. As an
illustration, the earth’s living vegetation (today containing perhaps 600-1,000 billion tons of carbon) is incapable of absorbing the 4,000-plus billion tons of extra carbon now lying beneath the planet’s surface in fossil stores built up over millions of years. 29 Because carbon brought to the surface cannot be got safely back underground in the form of coal, oil or gas over human timescales, it is imperative that fossil fuel extraction ends as soon as possible to avert runaway climate change. The framework of upper-case Abundance (more properly read as a framework for continuing accumulation) cannot easily countenance stopping the flow of fossil fuels out of the ground.
of these fixes is carbon markets (see pp.56ff), but others include the employment of unproven technologies such as carbon capture and storage. Instead of “energy
security” policies being directed towards the urgent task of organising for structural, long-term change capable of keeping the remaining fossil fuels in the ground, the
road is declared open for their further extraction, including the development of more destructive “unconventional” sources as shale gas, shale oil and tar sands. Within
the European Union, for example, it is envisaged that, regardless of energy conservation and efficiency measures, coal, oil and gas will continue to provide member
states with most of their energy for many decades to come. 30 The
same (over) optimistic faith in the ultimate ability of markets,
technological innovation, energy substitution and economic growth to overcome all scarcities is reflected in the
supposition that renewable energies will be able to power a continuously-expanding global economy. But to put in place the
necessary generating plant powered by solar collectors, wind turbines and tidal systems would require large areas of land and large quantities of aluminium,
their increased
supply is “problematic if not impossible”. 34 Water, too, is likely to prove a major constraint. Already, the energy
system is the largest consumer of water in the industrialised world (in the US half of all water withdrawals are for energy, to cool power
chromium, copper, zinc, manganese, nickel, lead and a host of additional metals, most of which are already being used for other purposes;
stations, for example). The development of alternative fuels, including non-renewable “alternatives” such as electricity derived from nuclear power, and shale oil and
gas, is likely to increase water use still further. 35 A 2006 Report from the US Department of Energy calculates that to meet US energy needs by the year 2030, total
US water consumption might have to increase by 10 to 15 per cent – and that such extra supply may not be available. 36 Unsurprisingly, US Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton announced in March 2010 that global freshwater scarcity was now a national security concern for US foreign policy makers. 37 This
is not even to
mention one of the biggest threats of a runaway “renewables”-based economy, which is to ordinary people’s access
to land, as it faces further enclosure for giant wind farms or solar parks . The problems do not end there. Whilst significant and
wholly welcome gains have been made in improving energy efficiencies, these gains are soon overtaken by
continued economic expansion (see Box: “Energy Efficiency”). Instead of providing a bridge to a society organised around
using less energy and phasing out fossil fuels, energy efficiency pursued within the framework of continued
economic growth simply becomes a means of what political sociologists Ian Walsh and Ingolfur Bluhdorn have termed “ sustaining the
unsustainable”, moving Western consumer democracies “beyond the politics of sustainability and into a realm where the management of the inability and
unwillingness to become sustainable has taken the center ground.” 38 “ Energy security” plays a key facilitating role in this . The belief that
consumer capitalism and ecological sustainability are compatible and interdependent has become hegemonic;
technological innovation, market instruments and managerial perfection are asserted to be the most appropriate
strategies to achieve sustainability, even though empirical experience suggests the opposite. The belief, however, is
obsessional: “This insistence on the capability of these strategies; the denial that the capitalist principles of infinite economic growth
and wealth accumulation are ecologically, socially, politically and culturally unsustainable and destructive; the
pathological refusal to acknowledge that western ‘needs’ in terms of animal protein, air travel, or electric energy, to name but three, simply cannot ie can not be
satisfied in ecologically and otherwise sustainable ways is itself a syndrome that deserves
closer sociological attention.” 39 Yet it is precisely this
debate – about what and whose needs, wishes and demands can not be satisfied – that the implicit framing of energy security in terms of “unlimited wants”, “limited
means” and capital-A Abundance prevents. Indeed,
by naturalising unlimited wants, it denies the reality of the continued
existence of numerous communities, user groups, co-operatives and other forms of social organisation whose lives are
governed not by the principles of neo-classical economics but by the rules of the commons (see Box, “Commons life”, p.13). Within such groupings, the
experience of scarcity is very different. This is not because forms of scarcity do not exist: periodic dearth is a recurring
phenomenon, for instance, when a crop fails (though the risks of wholesale scarcity can be guarded against by planting multiple varieties 46 ) or when a generator
breaks down. But
the needs that commons regimes satisfy are not infinitely expanding and the means by which they are
satisfied are framed by a politics (which has to be constantly sustained through social practice) in which no one individual or group has the ability to
survive at another’s expense. The survival of all is a key principle around which social relations are organised. Needs reflect less the requirements of
an “economy” for “effective demand” than the evolving give-and-take of the specific commons regime itself, whose
physical characteristics remain in everyone’s view. Without the race between growth and the scarcity that
accumulation creates, there can thus be a sense of “enoughness” . 48 It is no surprise that among, for example, many Andean
indigenous communities in Bolivia, there is an underlying sense that the default condition of life is (lower-case) “abundance” or enoughness and that when “scarcity”
appears, it is likely to be the result of intrusion by profiteers. 49
Free Trade – 1NC
Free trade is a neoliberal fantasy that wrecks local populations because of asymmetrical
power and information
Fridell, Saint Mary’s international development studies Canada research chair, 2013
(Gavin, “Debt Politics and the Free Trade ‘Package’: the case of the Caribbean”, Third World Quarterly, 34.4,
Taylor and Francis)
As a concept, free trade has a long history dating back hundreds of years, but its most recent popularity has been
driven by the rise of neoliberalism to political-economic and ideological hegemony among powerful states and
international financial institutions beginning in the 1970s. Neoliberals are deeply opposed to state intervention in the economy, which they
feel is bound to be inefficient compared with the unregulated market, which serves as a ‘hidden hand’ responding efficiently and accurately to the actions of countless
individuals through the undistorted market signals of supply and demand. The basic framework of neoliberalism has set the stage for most of the mainstream debate
around the role that state and state agencies should or should not play in the economy. Yet the very idea that the state can be taken out of the market overlooks much
of the history of capitalism and the capitalist state. This history reveals that capitalist social and political relations have always required a strong state to create and
reproduce them, and that rich nations in the North as well as the newly industrialised countries (NICs) in East Asia and Latin America have all developed historically
behind protective walls of import controls, tariffs, levies, quotas and preferences designed to protect domestic industry and enhance export industry. 5 The neoliberal
claim that the state can be taken out of the market is generally not premised on an examination of this history, but rather on economic modelling based on
mathematical formulas that posit the existence of a free trade world and then seek to uncover why the world does not conform to the model. Neo-Keynesian,
heterodox and Marxist political economists have long critiqued the theoretical foundations of these models, in particular their speculative assumptions around human
nature (assumed to be universally self-interested, competitive and accumulative), methodological individualism (atomised individuals are taken to be the foundation of
society as opposed to social and collective wholes, such as institutions or classes), and equilibrium (economy and society are assumed to be moving towards a
This critique has been extended to
economic trade theory, which posits the benefits of free trade on the basis of speculative modelling that ignores
imperfect information and assumes a fairly effortless transition from one industry to another in search of
‘comparative advantage’, whereas this is seldom the case given the limits imposed by existing technology, geography, historical path dependence, the fixed
cost of physical infrastructure and the skills and training of the existing workforce. Moreover, in the long history of world trade, power and
politics have frequently played a much greater role than market singles in determining trade patterns, with imperial
powers imposing trade relations on subjugated regions to the benefit of the ‘core’ and significant disadvantage of the
‘periphery’. 7 In the contemporary political context ftas have been criticised for being ineffective at evenly eliminating trade barriers, while containing
relatively static balance between supply and demand as opposed to being dynamic and constantly changing). 6
components that go well beyond trade, such as extensive protections for intellectual property and transnational investment rights that entail a ‘new constitutionalist
framework’ well beyond the mandate of liberalising trade. 8 The
politics of ‘free trade’ has seldom led to free trade results, something
that has been recognised by well known economists from divergent political positions. These economists have denounced the
lack of genuine multilateral trade negotiations and blamed ‘ideology’ and ‘politics’ for leading to policies that are inconsistent with economic trade theory. 9 Beyond
this, economists have had little to say about ideology and politics and prefer to exclude them from mathematical formulations. Yet, far from being mere distortions,
politics and ideology are central to human life and cannot be separated from the economic realm; they provide a key insight to the broad and diverse field of political
economy. To suggest otherwise is to examine supposedly strictly economic issues with key dynamic forces left out. ‘Free trade’ is in fact central to understanding the
history and current social context of the global political economy but not from the vantage point of the narrow lens of neoclassical economic trade theory. Rather
than being a straightforward and objective technical, scientific or policy issue, ‘free trade’ is a complicated political,
economic and ideological ‘package’ rooted in complex social, historical and cultural forces. 10 Free trade ideology
and free trade politics are at least as important as free trade economics, if not more so given the relatively scant
examples of actual free trade economics in practice. The assumption that economics can be separated from politics and ideology is itself partly a
consequence of the powerful ideological force of neoliberalism. 11 Despite its proponents’ claims to scientific, value-neutral objectivity, neoliberalism is in fact
This fantasy is reproduced through the
efforts of free trade foundations, research centres, corporate media, and academic and popular commentators who
produce ‘knowledge’ biased in favour of the material and political interests of economic and political elites,
powerful states and Northern-dominated ‘international’ institutions that possess immense financial power and
influence. 13 At the same time, more than a ‘trick or illusion duping the poor, gullible masses’, argues Dean, the free trade fantasy is embedded in our everyday
highly ideologically charged and dependent on what Jodi Dean refers to as the ‘free trade fantasy’. 12
practices and seeks to answer ‘who we are’—‘we are those who trade freely, who value freeness’. The power of the free trade fantasy is to ‘link together a set of often
conflicting and contradictory promises of enjoyment and explanations for its lack (for people’s failure to enjoy, despite all the promises that they would).’ Dean states:
In neoliberal ideology, the fantasy of free trade covers over persistent market failure, structural inequalities, the
prominence of monopolies, the privilege of no-bid contracts, the violence of privatisation, and the redistribution of
wealth to the ‘have mores’. Free trade thus sustains at the level of fantasy what it seeks to avoid at the level of
reality—namely, actually free trade among equal players, that is, equal participants with equal opportunities
to establish the rules of the game, access information, distribution, and financial networks, and so forth. 14 The
fantasy of free trade not only tells us how to satisfy our desires (through free trade), but also explains why our desires have not yet been fulfilled. Despite history and
current events perpetually revealing major oversights in the expectations of free traders, proponents continue to insist that these instances are mere deviations from
how the world should operate, fulfilling what Dean refers to as ‘the “excuses, excuses” role of fantasy’. 15 The free trade fantasy fills in for the failings of actually
existing ‘free trade’.
Good Governance/Accountability – 1NC
The rhetoric of democratic accountability is a trojan horse for neo-liberal dominance by
the U.S.
Evans, Southampton politics professor, 2001
(Tony, the Politics of Human Rights pg. 86-88)
Democracy and Global Order Why then have the generally held assumptions about human rights and democracy been so vigorously promoted in some quarters? The
answer to this question is found by looking at the failure of development in the less developed world. According to this argument, the threat of social unrest, which
would disrupt the supply of raw materials, restrict investment opportunities and severely damage prospects for exploiting low-cost labour, cannot be avoided by using
coercive policing and military suppression, as it was during the Cold War period. During the Cold War such coercion was legitimated by the argument that the threat
of communism justified support for any tyrannical government provided it was avowedly anti-communist (Mahbubani 1992). Violence was justified 'because the
Third World people were being killed to protect them from the evil incarnate -communism' (Shivji 1999: 257). The collapse of the Soviet bloc removed this rationale
for maintaining order at the expense of human rights and justice. Instead, policy
makers turned to democracy as the moral justification for
maintaining economic and political relations with governments known to violate human rights . This left those who trade with
repressive regimes, or those who want to maintain cordial relations for political reasons, with the dilemma of promoting a new rationale that justified continuing
economic and political relations. The distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, which assumes that the former represents a transitory stage in the
move to full democracy, while the latter does not, offers a well-known foundation for resolving this dilemma (Kirkpatrick 1982). The
success of this move
can be judged by the way that the democracy discourse increasingly replaces the human rights discourse in US
foreign policy circles (Carothers 1994). Through this device, it remains legitimate to continue with economic
relationships, to call for extended aid programmes and to develop new trade and business relations, unhindered by
moral concerns, provided a country has created the institutions of democracy. However, the promotion of democracy
was not necessarily concerned with social justice, human rights, human security or ideas of human worth, but the
need to create an appropriate global order for the continued expansion of global capital. In support of this aim, powerful
capitalist states sought to promote democracy in its procedural guise : as a set of democratic institutions rather than as
a means of achieving social and economic transformation that would have empowered the poor and the socially
excluded. This form of 'low-intensity democracy' may be understood as a component of 'low-intensity conflict', a
policy that the US sought to promote as a means of securing anti-communist and antireformist support that avoided either
unstable representative democratic systems or military dictatorship: Democracy was thus used as a form of intervention. Its intent was
to pre-empt either progressive reform or revolutionary change. Beyond seeking to demobilise popular forces, it also sought to
legitimise the status quo. Authoritarianism was thus discredited and delegitimised. The new 'democratic' regime, which temporarily enjoys
increased legitimacy, can in fact undertake economic and social policies of 'adjustment' that impose new hardships
on the general population and compromise economic sovereignty. The paradox of Low Intensity Democracy is that a civilianised
conservative regime can pursue painful and even repressive social and economic policies with more impunity
and with less popular resistance than can an openly authoritarian regime . From the point ofview of the US and conservative
domestic elites in these countries, this quality must make it an interesting and useful alternative to traditional overt authoritarianism. (Gills, Rocamora & Wilson 1993:
8) This paradox does not escape the consciousness of citizens where low-intensity democracy operates. As incidents of resistance to globalization often remind us, the
economic conditions suffered by many people, together with an absence of basic liberties, stimulates challenges to established systems of government, which are seen
'domestically as predatory and corrupt and internationally, servile executors of the economic agenda of ruling classes of the major OECD nations' (Cheru 1997: 164).
By adopting a definition of democracy that places emphasis on the creation of formal institutions, which promises limited changes to civil and political rights but has
'repressive abuses of human rights continue usually against the familiar targets of
labour, students, the left and human rights activists' (Gills, Rocamora & Wilson 1993: 21). For those countries who adopt the institutions of lowintensity democracy, the economic support offered by international financial institutions and aid programmes, together with the promise of
corporate investment, is conditional upon maintaining a particular type of democracy that plays a crucial role in
maintaining the conditions of globalization. If reformist groups attempt to transcend the limitations imposed by lowintensity democracy, and instead promote a version of popular democracy that includes social reform and justice, then
support is withdrawn and the spectre of military intervention surfaces (Chomsky 1998). In short, democracy often means little
little to say about economic and social reform,
more than a 'thin veneer of Western parliamentary institutions and the 'rule of law', all of which are intended to subdue ethnic, cultural and religious tensions in the
effort to secure an order fit for economic growth and development (Mahbubani 1992). For critics of democracy, however, the claim to have established a democratic
form of government must rest upon something more than the introduction of formal institutions, which often do nothing to provide for social, economic and political
reforms or the rights of the people. In countries where low-intensity democracy operates, governments
give little attention to developing an
open, rights-based culture. On the contrary, the governments of low-intensity democracies commonly work to ensure that trade unions are weak, wages are
kept at a level beneath that necessary for a dignified life, non-governmental organizations are marginalized or declared illegal and the press and media are censored.
The practice of offering fledgling democracies technical and training assistance to strengthen some state institutions
-the police and the military, for example -can provide the means for maintaining a domestic order that pays little
attention to human rights and social justice (Carothers 1994; HRW 1999). Furthermore, the social structures and traditions that support low intensity
democracy often mean that in practice access to public office is restricted to particular groups. While the existence of the institutions of democracy may help to
legitimate external relations, particularly where the established democracies of advanced technological states remain squeamish about trading with authoritarian
governments, the protection of universal human rights is not necessarily guaranteed. Although some
commentators defend the introduction of
low-intensity democracy, arguing that it is the first stage in a journey that ends in full democratic participation and
social reform, Gills, Rocamora and Wilson argue that it is more accurate to understanding it as an end in itself -as a way of
maintaining an order that supports the interests of global and national capital.
Immigration – 1NC
Expanding immigration serves to smooth the excesses of neoliberalism via labor flexibility
Wise et al., Penn social sciences PhD, 2010
(Raul, “Reframing the debate on migration, development and human rights: fundamental elements”, October,
http://rimd.reduaz.mx/secciones_documentos/959ReframingtheDebate.pdf)
The official discourse of neoliberal globalization rests on the ideology of the free market, the end of history, representative democracy and, more
recently, the war on terrorism. In practice, however, it promotes the interests of large corporations and a single, exclusive mode of
thought, nullifying all alternatives. While the prevalent discourse exalts the notion of citizenship and citizen rights and opportunities in a democracy
with an open economy and full political participation, the latter is constrained to a limited electoral offer and often curtailed by an exclusionary political system. At the
demands of a market
economy at the service of multinational corporate interests, which turns the vast majority of the population into cheap means of
production and objects of consumption. In addition, the so-called welfare state has been dismantled under the sway of mercantilism, and the
satisfaction of most basic needs is conditioned by the market, where communal goods and public services are offered as new spaces for privatization. Labor
flexibility, sustained by a massive workforce surplus and the systematic deprivation of labor rights, becomes a
mechanism through which to increase business competitiveness and extraordinary profits . All of this, in turn,
seriously undermines the social, economic, political and environmental fabric, leading to considerable damage. The
same time, fundamental human rights are systematically undermined and subverted by the doctrine of national security and the
advancement of structural reform in peripheral countries has led to increasing social debt, a fact that remains unacknowledged by governments and the entrenched
powers.
Incentives – 1NC
Aff’s logic of incentives presumes universal rationality and drives for profit-re-entrenches
neoliberalism.
Reno, Michigan anthropology PhD, 2011
(Joshua, “Motivated Markets: Instruments and Ideologies of Clean Energy in the United Kingdom”, Cultural
Anthropology Volume 26, Issue 3, pages 389–413, August 2011, Wiley)
To grapple with these ongoing efforts of social transformation, I
focus on the Renewables Obligation (RO) of England and Wales, which involves the
creation of a government-sponsored market in virtual “renewability” to subsidize the production of renewable
energy and generate demand for it. Although there are many ways of accomplishing these goals, Euro-American economists and
government officials tend to favor polices that utilize financial incentives . Like markets in carbon offsets, renewable energy
policy in the United Kingdom is a form of neoliberal governance; rather than merely force compliance it seeks to
motivate individuals through financial incentives. Such policies rely on assumptions about how individuals can be
motivated to act in accordance with policy directives. Economic interests, it is thought, can be harnessed as a
political mechanism to bolster green virtues; the assumption being that the actors in question possess a desire
for wealth that can be channeled into reform: Homo economicus and Homo ecologicus are made one through market design. According to the
material sociology of finance, broadly associated with the work of Michel Callon (1998, 2009) and Donald MacKenzie (2009) among others, individual actors
in a market can approximate the “economically rational” self-interest described by economists with the help of the
various technical devices they have at their disposal. A person at a grocery store, for example, is not alone, but may be accompanied by an
itemized list, a calculator, coupons, signs advertizing special deals, price tags, a receipt, and so on. “Interests are not given,” writes MacKenzie, “ they are
calculated” as part of larger sociotechnical arrangements of persons and an assortment of market device s (2009:25). I
discuss the relationship between participants in the United Kingdom's renewable energy sector and different environmental and economic devices that facilitate their
market devices channel environmental and economic motivations as well as
reshape them into new and potentially alienating forms.
actions, focusing in particular on the different ways
Integration – 1NC
Integrating economies is the key to neoliberal control
Phillips, Sheffield political economy professor, 2005
(Nicola, “U.S. Power and the Politics of Economic Governance in the Americas”, Latin American Politics and
Society, 47.4, December, Wiley)
The process of hemispheric integration represents a key dimension of the neoliberal project, both in the Americas and in the
wider global political economy. It represents a device by which this global project is further embedded in the region and the
region is further embedded in the globalizing world economy, reflecting “the triumph of economic lib- eralism, of faith in export-led growth
and of belief in the centrality of the private sector to development processes” (Payne 1996, 106). Hemi- spheric regionalism thus represents a
specific strategy on the part of its primary agents-various governments and business interests-to “lock in” a
political economy and a mode of social organization that are ide- ologically and strategically hospitable to the
rules of the neoliberal game. Of these agents, the U.S. government has been the principal driv- ing force, and the exercise of its
hegemonic power since the early 1970s has been molded systematically to the purpose of disseminating the twin values of neoliberalism and democracy. The
hemispheric project thus constitutes not only an attempt further to reinforce the parameters of a neoliberal (and democratic) political economy in the Americas, but
also to consolidate the foundations of U.S. hegemony itself in the global and regional contexts.
Oil AFFs – 1NC
Oil extraction in Mexico is neo-colonialism-maintains asymmetry in power dynamics
de Regil, , The Jus Semper Global Alliance, 2004
(Alvaro, “The Neo-Capitalist Assault in Mexico: Democracy vis-à-vis the logic of the market”,
http://www.jussemper.org/Resources/Economic%20Data/Resources/Neo-capAssaultMexico.pdf)
North-South relationships, from the post-war onward, keep the asymmetric structures that continue to amply benefit the metropolis and their
partners in the periphery. Despite the repeated demands to balance the terms of trade for the commodities of the Third World in the last fifty years, the North always
maintained an absolute negative, as it continues to do to this date, to open its markets to the primary products of the South. Nonetheless, the countries of the Third
World demand for decades from the U.S. and the rest of the G7 a treatment similar to that given to Europe and Japan during the period of reconstruction, asking for
asymmetric conditions to benefit their terms of trade. It is thought that it should be of considerable importance for the U.S. to develop the South so to insure the longterm growth of the world’s capitalist economy and to eliminate the possibility of the advancement of communism in the Third World. It is a demand similar to that
applied to equalize the development of the countries of the European Mediterranean basin. But the big powers openly refuse to support the South’s development.
The fact is that the South plays a fundamental role in the
world’s capitalist exploitative system. Besides the advantageous conditions for the North in the terms of trade in the exchange of goods and services,
the North also extracts profit margins far greater from its operations in the South . Selling manufactured products at high prices and
buying cheap commodities is one thing, but directly participating in the exploitation of the South’s natural resources represents
far greater benefits. Often enough, with the direct support of the South’s oligarchies, incredible conditions for the extraction of resources
are obtained, including the labour used, which are then commercialised globally –these are precisely the conditions that moved Cardenas to expropriate the
oil. In the case of manufacturing, the royalties for the use of licences and brands are typically one of the best profits sources for the North. And if a transnational
Thus, the failure of the recent WTO conference in Cancun is not at all surprising.
decides to invest in the South, it is because the comparative advantages guaranteed by the oligarchies, especially in labour, secure profit margins far greater than those
obtained in the North. This has been the essential role of the oligarchies in the centre-periphery holy alliance. Besides offering wages perversely miserable, the
governments from the
South offer all kinds of fiscal incentives and an infrastructure to attract foreign direct investment and compete
amongst themselves to offer the most beneficial conditions to the transnationals and least beneficial for their countries in exchange for a small share in the
operation and their support to remain in power. This scheme has generated incredible comparative advantages for the North. In 1978 the income of U.S. transnationals
in the South accounted for 35% of their total foreign income, despite the South accounting for only 25% of their investments, because the South’s productivity was
65% greater at the expense of the misery of workers. 5 This partnership between big capital in the North and the oligarchies of the South, the only ones benefiting
from the arrangement, is the key factor behind NAFTA. It
is a re-edition of neo-colonialism where the centre and the periphery not
only participate in an asymmetric exchange of manufactured products and commodities, but where transnationals
already have as well direct control of almost all sectors of the Mexican economy and of the factors of production, including the
unrestrained use of labour, with the total connivance of the political-entrepreneurial oligarchy. Economists such as Prebisch and Ankie Hoogvelt depict this
relationship within the so-called Dependency Theory. 6 The theory argues that the
North acts upon the South with a predatory attitude and
imposes its political will, and if necessary its military power, to extract the asymmetric conditions that it wants . The
North requires the natural resources as well as labour and the sale of its machinery, finished products and technology to sustain the economic
growth of its corporations. The terms of trade and foreign investment are negatively asymmetric, thus; at the end, it extracts a net benefit extraordinarily
favourable. Unfortunately, except for Asian countries such as South Korea that give priority to social welfare by following its own model, the great majority of
It is precisely this relationship, where the Mexican politicalentrepreneurial oligarchy continues to choose to remain a client of the centres of power of global capital that continues
to block Mexico’s development.
governments in the South elect the easy way of partnering with the North.
The plan locks in a neoliberal approach to energy and social relations---fossil fuel
incentives create an unsustainable market model that causes social and ecological crisis
Di Muzio, Helsinki postdoctoral research fellow, 2012
(Tim, Global Crises and the Crisis of Global Leadership, pg 83-5)
Current trends, then, are patently unsustainable. However, the scale of the social transformation needed to move towards a post-carbon
pattern of social reproduction is enormous, and demands nothing less than bold global, national and local community participation and leadership. I would like to
suggest here that, although civil society organizations and policy-makers
recognize the severity of the task, the solutions currently
being proposed are issued from neoliberal governmental discourses that may exacerbate the looming crisis of
social reproduction. Neoliberal governmentality is a method and strategy of rule that prioritizes the anarchy of private
enterprise, economic growth, market mechanisms and individual responsibility over long-term democratic public planning for
sustainable forms of social reproduction. A recent study has suggested how entrenched and widespread neoliberal policies are, while others have elaborated on and
refined Michel Foucault’s initial investigation of neoliberal governmentality (Burchell, Gordon and Miller 1991; Saad-Filho and Johnston 2005). My own purpose
here is not to assess these interventions but, rather, to offer a brief conceptualization of neoliberal governmentality and then to show how this mode of rule approaches
some of the challenges mentioned above. The
politico-strategic rationality that animates neoliberal mentalities of rule starts from
the notion that human beings are individual rational actors who pursue their interests by making cost–benefit
calculations. For neoliberals, it is impossible for public policymakers to know the individual interests of each
person, let alone the sum total of these interests. This leads neoliberals to argue that complex societies should be coordinated by
price signals in the market, since these are the most effective and efficient conveyors of information. Moreover, as markets are the primary conveyors of
information and allocators of goods and services, they should not be limited by spatial or political boundaries, since this would distort information and constrain
human possibilities. In
this rendition of human purpose, there can be no shared, collective or planned vision for a political
community to achieve other than preparing for market competition. For neoliberals, to do so would be anathema, because it would imply that
some individual or group is imposing its own will on everyone else. However, this starting point is not grounded in an empirically
verifiable human nature or ontology for neoliberals; it is a norm or state to be achieved by actively creating the
productive constraints that will provide the guidelines and rules for shaping human behaviour, so that it increasingly
resembles the behaviour of an imagined Homo economicus abstracted from natural limits. In other words, neoliberals are not against
planning, as they want to arrange liberty artificially so that individuals can compete to pursue their own ends; however, they are against particular forms of planning
the utopian goal of neoliberal
governmentality is a political community of entrepreneurial firms and individuals that should largely govern themselves
according to their interests, defined as financial or material gain. In doing so, these activities are presumed to generate economic growth.
However, this politico-strategic rationality is not just directed at creating the conditions of existence for calculating individuals. The government itself is
supposed to be subjected to the same market criteria or imperatives. Policies are to be assessed and audited based on
their ability to foster private enterprise. Government programmes are to be evaluated for their costs and what they return to the political
community, and against the possibility that market forces would be better allocators of publicly provided goods and services. For this reason, some of the main
tactics and techniques employed by neoliberal governors include commodification, privatization, deregulation, ‘responsibilizing’
individuals and creating incentives for firms. What this means in the context of the looming crisis of social reproduction is that market
mechanisms and the consumer and investment choices of individuals and firms will be responsible for meeting the challenges of a
post-carbon world order (Bernstein 2002; Conca 2000; Levy and Newell 2002; Mansfield 2004). For example, in place of a coordinated government
that would have individuals directed towards some specific end not of their choosing. What this means is that
programme designed to prepare populations for the end of a highly energy-intensive consumerist lifestyle and drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions,
individual responsibility is promoted. These include attempts at reducing personal consumption, conserving energy, recycling waste, buying green organic products,
retrofitting houses for energy efficiency, promoting the use of reusable shopping bags, green reskilling and encouraging home gardening, just to mention a few
initiatives. At
the level of the firm, incentives are currently directed at promoting a corporate-led green capitalism while at
the same time continuing to promote the discovery and extraction of fossil fuels for energy use. Policies to encourage green capitalism
include mandating greater fuel efficiency and hybrid cars, funding the research and development of carbon-sequestration and green technologies to control pollution
and liberalizing energy markets and making them more competitive. A look at some leading energy policies from the United States and the European Union shows
that they also include incentives for firms to exploit renewable energy opportunities in solar, wind, biomass, geothermal, hydroelectric and tidal power, with some
claims that renewables should make up a certain percentage of the total primary mix by a given date (White House 2010). For instance, on this last point, the European
Union’s energy policy aims to have 20 per cent of its primary energy come from renewable sources by 2020 (European Commission 2010). Another leading policy
response to global warming has been the promotion of cap and trade systems that allow corporations to pollute up to a point and thereafter purchase permits for
additional pollution (Bond 2008). In other words, neoliberals undoubtedly recognize that a form of social reproduction reliant on fossil fuels and ecological
degradation poses significant challenges. The
question is this: are neoliberal policies that privilege individual responsibility,
private enterprise and market mechanisms capable of preparing world society for a post-carbon-dependent social
order within a timeframe that avoids serious crises?
AFF positions fossil fuels as something unique instead of in their historical context. -this
recreates scarcity and the systems that produce it
Hildyard, Corner House director, 2012
(Nicholas, Corner House has aimed to support democratic and community movements for environmental and social
justice, former co-editor of the Ecologist, “Energy Security For What? For Whom?”, February,
http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/sites/thecornerhouse.org.uk/files/Energy%20Security%20For%20Whom%20For
%20What.pdf, DOA: 7-5-12)
Indeed, far from being a result of chance, carelessness or incorrect values, the ambiguity of “energy security” is the historical outcome of a painstaking, complicated,
centuries-long process of myth- and fetish construction. The myth is a myth about Nature and Society, Body and Mind that has been around at least since the time of
Descartes. The
fetish is a persistent habit of seeing the oil (or other fossil fuels or the machines they run) as having special or unique
“magical” powers capable of driving history, rather than as a “social product of intense political battles over the production and reproduction of life
itself” 92 – a habit perceptible in phrases such as “the oil curse”, “peak oil”, “no blood for oil”, “the thirst for oil,”
“energy grabs”, “the need to reduce consumption”, even “supply and demand”. 93 Neither myth nor fetish denies the destructiveness of
the Energy and Security systems. They work, rather, to depoliticise it, decontextualise it and give it the dignity
of inexorable tragedy. The myth and the fetish achieve this through multiple acts of translation. In the key, overarching translation, the historically-specific
dynamic of abstraction that has enlisted elites in a project of unlimited quantitative growth is reinterpreted as, and simplified into, an eternal, metaphysical, Cartesian
opposition between Nature and Society. On
the one side is a passive, rightless, limited reservoir of raw materials. On the other is
an active humanity relentlessly, mathematically encroaching on this reservo ir. The resultant unavoidable “scarcity” makes it simply
unrealistic to hold that there is a right to life on either side. In the version of the myth propounded by the Reverend Thomas Malthus two centuries ago, it is Nature
herself who extinguishes that right to live of both human and nonhuman beings: she “bids the poor man begone” at the same time that the “poor man” himself, like the
rich, treats nonhuman beings as a mere “resource”. 94 In
the myth, the peculiar logic of accumulation for accumulation’s sake that
has become entrenched among a minority over the past few hundred years becomes a formal characteristic of human
beings as such, in the form of needs that have always been in principle infinite. Thus demand for petrol or coal,
instead of being the complex product of a complex history (see Box: “A story that is too simple”, p.77), is oversimplified into
being an outgrowth of a primitive, unending “demand for energy” required to meet an inborn imperative for
“development”. Upper-case Energy, instead of being recognised as a historical upstart, is treated as if it has always
been there. In the myth, the only promise of a secure future lies in either trying, against the odds, to wring ever
more from Nature forever, or in forcibly controlling humanity’s inbuilt tendencies to take more and more, or both. On the one hand – in the realm
of upper-case Energy – perpetual “productivity increases” must be undertaken and the quantities of raw materials or
ecosystem services of which the nonhuman world consists given the human protection they need to sur vive. On the other
hand, “population control” and similar measures must be undertaken to check inexorable human encroachment on these passive materials. Or to put it another
way: the challenge of “energy security” becomes either to produce more Energy (find more oil, develop “alternative” oils such as
agrofuels) or to “reduce consumption” (“change individual values”, develop “hypercars”). In a constant theme of the myth, endlessly
increasing production relieves scarcity rather than being an integral part of it; mechanistic “consumption reductions”
somehow make “security” possible even if they leave the logic of accumulation untouched. Thus the myth obliquely acknowledges that Energy only creates the need
for more Energy, and Security for more Security. In
an indirect way, it recognises the contradictions between Energy and
“energies”, between Security and “security”. But it does so only to oversimplify them into the operations of
destiny. Attempts to stave off this destiny through manipulating either the Nature or the Society side of the antagonism inevitably carry the air of stopgaps: there
is no solution, the myth seems to say, beyond a cascade of temporary technofixes . This is the famous Malthusian “pessimism” that
has served business so well for 200 years and whose constraining spirit continues to dominate technical writing about resources and the environment: a distorted
translation of a contingent politics of endless accumulation into a poetic expression of fatalism. The myth unfolds in countless variations every day. In 2003, for
example, the belief took hold among many that what motivated the US-led war in Iraq was stuff – strategically valuable Nature in the form of oil – combined with
human “greed”. People grab stuff, the myth tells us, to relieve scarcity: thus “energy grabs”. Energy security is a problem of “supply”. Not only is the complexity of
the relationships in which oil is enmeshed translated into magical qualities possessed by the coveted substance itself; even the landscapes that are its richest sources
acquire a certain sinister mystique. Thus Dick Cheney muses on the enigma that “the good Lord has seen fit” to put so much oil and gas “where, all things considered,
one would not normally choose to go”. 96 The
myth transforms a scenario in which complex forms of violence connected with
finance and empire create scarcities into a scenario in which, instead, a primitive, irreducible, inbuilt scarcity creates
violence (see Box: “A Story that is Too Simple”). Reactionary fetishisms about oil stoke an obsession with “protecting” its
sources, intensifying ethnic conflict, resentment against the West and an atmosphere of threat; “progressive” oil
fetishisms suggest that the way forward is to control grabbing – maybe by lowering the number of grabbers, maybe by reducing their greed or
militarism, or maybe just by giving them some substitute stuff that will satisfy their urge to grab. Either way, the roots of scarcity and energy
insecurity are left untouched. Repeating the myth of a primordial tendency to scarcity sanctions the processes
that engender more scarcity, just as “securitising” everything tends to give rise to more insecurities.
Renewables – 1NC
Allowing market principles to dictate the transition to renewables short circuits it—creates
resource wars that only the alt can solve.
Abramsky, former Institute of Advanced Studies in Science, Technology and Society fellow,
2010
(Kolya, Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution: Social Struggles in the Transition to a Post-Petrol World, pg 267)
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-out process to the
market. It is hoped that rising oil and coal prices will make these fuels 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.
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
However, leaving the phase-out of oil and coal to the market has at least three crucial implications.
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 conflictive 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 firms, and
competition between states. This translates to massive inequalities, hierarchies, and austerity measures being
imposed on labor (both in and outside the energy sector); 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. On
the other hand, as the renewable energy sector
expands globally, it is becoming increasingly clear that the only possible basis for an emancipatory transition
towards renewable energy is by ensuring that a significant proportion of the sector is held under common or
public ownership for non-commercial use. This includes the relevant infrastructures, technologies, and knowledge. It is likely that, as the sector
expands, so too will struggles over its ownership. Of particular importance here is the struggle for non-commercial technology transfer against the iron straitjacket of
the international patent regimes.
Renewables – 2NC
Market control of renewables fails:
1. Fossil Fuels-they’ll still be used which offsets renewable benefits AND causes a focus on
short term profit which prevents investment in a long term transition
2. Competition-it means profit trumps sustainability-this concentration of power
terminates in military conflicts to determine who controls necessary resources
Prioritizing control of renewables via commons instead of enclosures-is the only way to
access their emancipatory potential-that’s Abramsky
3. Creating renewables for profits is worse than just using fossil fuels-side effects and
tradesoff with long term solutions.
Zehner, visting scholar at University California Berkley, 2012
(Ozzie Green Illusions, pg 172-3)
A central project of this book is to interrogate the assumption that alternative energy is a viable path to prosperity. I have not only outlined the many side effects,
drawbacks, risks, and limitations of alternative technologies but have also indicated that we cannot assume that shifting to them will lower our fossil-fuel use.
Alternative-energy production expands energy supplies, placing downward pressure on prices, which spurs demand,
entrenches energy-intensive modes of living, and finally brings us right back to where we started: high demand and
so-called insufficient supply.3 In short, we create an energy boomerang—the harder we throw, the harder it will come
back to hit us on the head. More efficient solar cells, taller wind turbines, and advanced biofuels are all just ways of throwing harder. Humans have been
subject to the flight pattern of this boomerang for quite some time and there is no reason to suppose we have escaped its whirling trajectory today. In the existing
American context, increasing
alternative-energy production will not displace fossil-fuel side effects but will instead
simply add more side effects to the mix (and as we have seen, there are plenty of alternative-energy side effects to be wary of). So instead of a
world with just the dreadful side effects of fossil fuels, we will enter into a future world with the dreadful side
effects of fossil fuel plus the dreadful side effects of alternative-energy technologies—hardly a durable formula for
community or environmental prosperity. If we had different political, legal, and economic structures and backstops to assure that alternative-energy production would
directly offset fossil-fuel use, these technologies might make more sense. But it will take years to institute such vital changes. Focusing
our efforts on
alternative-energy production now only serves to distract us from the real job that needs to be done. Worse yet, if
fundamental economic, social, and cultural upgrades are not instituted, the project of alternative energy is bound to fail, which would
likely lead to crippling levels of public cynicism toward future efforts to produce cleaner forms of power . As it stands
now, even if alternative-energy schemes were free, they might still be too expensive given their extreme social costs and striking inability to displace fossil-fuel use.
But as it turns out, they aren't free at all—they're enormously expensive.
4. Plan’s market logic focuses on individual action---this masks institutional arrangements
which are the deeper cause of environmental destruction
Muldoon, Carelton University, 2006
(Annie, “Where the Green Is: Examining the Paradox of Environmentally Conscious Consumption”, Electronic
Green Journal, 1(23), online pdf, DOA: 6-28-12)
One of the problems with green consumption, according to its detractors, is that it supports the corporate ideal that places
environmental responsibility on the shoulders of individuals. Many assert that this narrow focus masks larger
structures that continue to ensure that wealthy corporations routinely benefit from pollution and the mass
extraction of resources. There are facts to support this claim. The instantly recognizable anti-litter slogan and campaign entitled ‘Keep America Beautiful’
was orchestrated in 1953 by glass, aluminium, paper and steel container manufacturers (Stauber & Rampton, 1995; Berlet & Burke, 1992). These included Pepsi,
Coca-Cola, Seagram’s, Dupont, Dow, and Procter and Gamble (Darnovsky, 1996; Hyde, 2005). The KAB campaign was created as an alternative to ‘bottle bill’
legislation that sought to have producers charge a deposit for bottles and cans, repaid to the customer upon their return (Stauber & Rampton, 1995; Berlet & Burke,
1992). In setting up the KAB campaign, these companies effectively moved the environmental onus from those creating the bottles, to those who threw them on the
side of the highway. This significant shift has helped to create a culture that looks to individuals to repair the damage caused, in large part, by producers. The role
KAB played in creating this context cannot be overstated. Not even Dr. Seuss is beyond reproach with regards to the “individualization of responsibility” (Maniates,
2002, p. 45). His beloved environmental tale entitled The Lorax has been criticized for contributing to the persistent, and corporately supported, notion that individual
actions are the most important way to repair ecological damage. In the story, a business owner (called the Once-ler) repents for his greedy and destructive past, and
encourages his young friend to plant a tree to symbolize a future commitment to the environment. Michael Maniates claims that the story unintentionally “echoes and
amplifies an increasingly dominant, largely American response to the contemporary environmental crisis. This response half-consciously understands environmental
degradation to be the result of individual shortcomings (the Once-ler’s greed, for example), best countered by action that is staunchly individual” (2002, p. 45).
Although it is doubtful that Mr. Maniates holds Dr. Seuss directly responsible for such a pervasive worldview, his point is well illustrated and well taken. Maniates
later states that green
consumption threatens ‘real’ environmental activism, and detracts from larger corporate structures
that continue to go unchallenged: This collective obsessing over an array of “ green consumption” choices . . . is noisy and vigorous, and thus
comes to resemble the foundations of meaningful social action. But it is not, not in any real and lasting way that
might alter institutional arrangements and make possible radically new ways of living that seem required .
(2002, p. 52) Finally, he states that people must reclaim their citizenship by placing civic involvement before consumption: “Confronting the consumption
problem demands, after all, the sort of institutional thinking that the individualization of responsibility patently
undermines. It calls too for individuals to understand themselves as citizens in a participatory democracy first, working together to change broader policy and
larger social institutions, and as consumers second” (Maniates, 2002, p. 47). These are convincing and purposeful arguments that challenged my premise: save the
world through shopping?
A2: Plan Increase State Intervention
Their intervention strengthens market forces-still links.
Paterson et al., Ottawa political science professor, 2012
(Matthew, “Neoliberal Climate Policy: From market fetishism to the developmental state”, Environmental Politics
Volume 21, Issue 2, ebsco)
Our argument in this article is that the
central problem with these analyses lies in the way that they conceive of neoliberalism
either purely at the level of ideology, or in terms of at roll-out of financial interests, in other words, they tend to take too seriously
the ideological claims made by market fundamentalists about how neoliberal states in practice operate, and thereby tend to over-represent the place
of commodification and privatization logics in neoliberal policy. Instead, we argue that a more conceptually nuanced
depiction of neoliberal climate policy would acknowledge that, while commodification and greater use of market
instruments are indeed salient elements of the contemporary response, they are merely one aspect of it, and have not crowded out (or
successfully trumped) other competing logics in the policy process. In particular, neoliberal ideology does not negate
the state`s structural role in creating the conditions for stable growth and accumulation . Regarding climate
change, this entails broad action to establish new modes of regulation for things like energy and environmental security and
using the specific forms that climate policy takes as means to promote new forms of accumulation and sectoral
growth. At best, neoliberal ideology provides a contextual backdrop for these policy objectives and can thereby alter the ways that policies manifest under market
fundamentalist conditions, but it does not alter them in any basic manner.
Impact
Economic Rationality – 1NC
Economic rationality prioritizes short term profit over the well-being of environment and
human life-makes extinction inevitable
Nhanenge, South Africa development studies masters, 2007
(Jytte, “Ecofeminsm: Towards Integrating The Concerns Of Women, Poor People And Nature Into Development”,
February, http://uir.unisa.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10500/570/dissertation.pdf?sequence=1, DOA: 7-4-12)
Generation of wealth was an important part of the Scientific Revolution and its modern society. The scientific discipline of economics therefore became a significant
means for wealth creation. However, since it is founded on similar dualised premises as science, also economics
became a system of domination
and exploitation of women, Others and nature. The following discussion is intended to show that. The way in which economics, with its priority
on masculine forces, becomes dominant relates to web-like, inter-connected and complex processes, which are not always clearly perceived. The below
discussions try to show how the dualised priority of the individual over society, reason over emotion, self-interest
over community-interest, competition over cooperation, and more pairs, generate domination that leads to the four
crises of violence and war, poverty, human oppression and environmental degradation . The aim in sum is to show how
the current perspective of economics is destroying society (women and Others) and nature. The following discussion is consequently a critique of
economics. It is meant to highlight some elements that make economics a dominant ideology, rather than a system of
knowledge. It adopts a feministic view and it is therefore seen from the side of women, poor people and nature. The critique is extensive, but not exhaustive. It is
extensive because economics is the single most important tool used by mainstream institutions for development in the South. Thus if we want to understand why
development does not alleviate poverty, then we first need to comprehend why its main instrument, economics, cannot alleviate poverty. A critical analysis of
economics and its influence in development is therefore important as an introduction to next chapter, which discusses ecofeminism and development. However, the
critique is not exhaustive because it focuses only on the dualised elements in economics. It is highly likely that there are many more critical issues in economics,
which should be analyzed in addition to the below mentioned. However, it would exceed this scope. Each of the following 10 sections discusses a specific issue in
economics that relates to its dualised nature. Thus, each can as such be read on its own. However, all sections are systemically interconnected. Therefore each reenforces the others and integrated, they are meant to show the web of masculine forces that make economics dominant towards women, Others and nature. The
first three sections intend to show that economics sees itself as a neutral, objective, quantitative and universal
science, which does not need to be integrated in social and natural reality. The outcome of this is, however, that economics cannot
value social and environmental needs. Hence, a few individuals become very rich from capitalising on free social and natural
resources, while the health of the public and the environment is degraded . It also is shown that the exaggerated focus on
monetary wealth does not increase human happiness. It rather leads to a deteriorating quality of life. Thus, the false
belief in eternal economic growth may eventually destroy life on planet Earth . The next section shows that economics is based
on dualism, with a focus solely on yang forces. This has serious consequences for all yin issues: For example, the priority on individualism over
community may in its extreme form lead to self-destruction. Similarly, the priority on rationality while excluding
human emotions may end in greed, domination, poverty, violence and war . The next section is important as a means to
understanding "rational" economics. Its aim is to clarify the psychological meaning of money. In reality, reason and emotion are interrelated parts of the human mind;
they cannot be separated. Thus,
economic "rationality" and its focus on eternal wealth generation are based on personal
emotions like fears and inadequacies, rather than reason. The false belief in dualism means that human beings are lying to themselves, which
results in disturbed minds, stupid actions with disastrous consequences. The focus on masculine forces is consequently psychologically
unhealthy; it leads to domination of society and nature, and will eventually destroy the world . The following three
sections are intending to show that the new global capitalism is doing just that. First, the neo-liberal economical scheme is presented. Secondly, its application in the
Third World as Structural Adjustment Programmes and as the New Economic Partnership for African Development is critiqued. Thirdly, the extreme application of
the disturbed "rational" human mind, manifested in the form of an institutional psychopath "the corporation", is discussed. After concluding that economics is a
patriarchal system of domination, alternative economic models, which can support women, Others and nature, are presented.
Economic Rationality – EXTN
Neoliberalism organizes everything via economic rationality-this makes populations
expendable and makes growth the ultimate priority.
Brown, Berkeley political theory professor, 2004
(Wendy, “Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy”, Theory and Event Volume 7, Number 1, 2003,
project muse)
1) The political sphere, along with every other dimension of contemporary existence, is
submitted to an economic rationality, or put the
all dimensions of human life are cast in terms
of a market rationality. While this entails submitting every action and policy to considerations of profitability, equally
important is the production of all human and institutional action as rational entrepreneurial action, conducted according to
a calculus of utility, benefit, or satisfaction against a micro-economic grid of scarcity, supply and demand, and moral
value-neutrality. Neo-liberalism does not simply assume that all aspects of social, cultural and political life can be reduced to such a calculus, rather it develops
institutional practices and rewards for enacting this vision. That is, through discourse and policy promulgating its criteria, neo-liberalism produces
rational actors and imposes market rationale for decision-making in all spheres. Importantly then, neo-liberalism involves a
other way around, not only is the human being configured exhaustively as homo oeconomicus,
normative rather than ontological claim about the pervasiveness of economic rationality and advocates the institution building, policies, and discourse development
appropriate to such a claim. Neo-liberalism is a constructivist project: it does not presume the ontological givenness of a thoroughgoing economic rationality for all
domains of society but rather takes as its task the development, dissemination, and institutionalization of such a rationality. This point is further developed in (2)
below. 2) In contrast with the notorious laissez faire and human propensity to "truck and barter" of classical economic liberalism, neo-liberalism does not conceive
either the market itself or rational economic behavior as purely natural. Both are constructed -- organized by law and political institutions, and requiring political
intervention and orchestration. Far from flourishing when left alone, the economy must be directed, buttressed, and protected by law and policy as well as by the
dissemination of social norms designed to facilitate competition, free trade, and rational economic action on the part of every member and institution of society. In
Lemke's account, "In the Ordo-liberal scheme, the market does not amount to a natural economic reality, with intrinsic laws that the art of government must bear in
mind and respect; instead, the market can be constituted and kept alive only by dint of political interventions . . . competition, too, is not a natural fact . . . this
fundamental economic mechanism can function only if support is forthcoming to bolster a series of conditions, and adherence to the latter must consistently be
guaranteed by legal measures" (193). The neo-liberal formulation of the state and especially specific legal arrangements and decisions as the pre- and ongoing
condition of the market does not mean that the market is controlled by the state but precisely the opposite, that the market is the organizing and regulative principle of
the state and society and this along four different lines: a)The state openly responds to needs of the market, whether through monetary and fiscal policy, immigration
policy, the treatment of criminals, or the structure of public education. In so doing, the state is no longer encumbered by the danger of incurring the legitimation
deficits predicted by 1970s social theorists and political economists such as Nicos Poulantzas, Jurgen Habermas, or James O'Connor.6 Rather, neo-liberal rationality
extended to the state itself indexes state success according to its ability to sustain and foster the market and ties state legitimacy to such success. This is a new form of
legitimation, one that "founds a state" according to Lemke, and contrasts with the Hegelian and French revolutionary notion of the constitutional state as the emergent
universal representative of the people. As Lemke describes Foucault's account of Ordo-liberal thinking, "economic
liberty produces the legitimacy
for a form of sovereignty limited to guaranteeing economic activity . . . .a state that was no longer defined in terms
of an historical mission but legitimated itself with reference to economic growth" (196). b)The state itself is enfolded
and animated by market rationality, not simply profitability, but a generalized calculation of cost and benefit
becomes the measure of all state practices. Political discourse on all matters is framed in entrepreneurial terms; the state must not simply
concern itself with the market but think and behave like a market actor across all of its functions, including law.7
c)Putting (a) and (b) together, the health and growth of the economy is the basis of state legitimacy both because the state is forthrightly
responsible for the health of the economy and because of the economic rationality to which state practices have been submitted. Thus, "It's the economy,
stupid" becomes more than a campaign principle; rather, it expresses the legitimacy principle of the state and the
basis for state action -- from Constitutional adjudication and campaign finance reform to welfare policy to foreign policy, including warfare and
the organization of "homeland security."
Environment – 1NC
Globalization makes extinction inevitable- social and environmental factors build positive
feedbacks create a cascade of destruction - only massive social reorganization of society can
produce sustainable change and save the planet
Ehrenfeld, Rutgers biology professor, 2005
(David, “The Environmental Limits to Globalization”, Conservation Biology Vol. 19 No. 2, ebsco)
Ehrenfeld ‘5,
The overall environmental changes brought about or accelerated by globalization are, however, much easier to describe for the near
future, even if the long-term outcomes are still obscure. Climate will continue to change rapidly (Watson 2002); cheap energy and other resources
(Youngquist 1997; Hall et al. 2003; Smil 2003), including fresh water (Aldhous 2003; Gleick 2004), will diminish and disappear at an
accelerating rate; agricultural and farm communities will deteriorate further while we lose more genetic diversity among crops
and farm animals (Fowler & Mooney 1990; Bailey & Lappé 2002; Wirzba 2003); biodiversity will decline faster as terrestrial and aquatic
ecosystems are damaged (Heywood 1995); harmful exotic species will become ever more numerous (Mooney & Hobbs 2000); old
and new diseases of plants, animals, and humans will continue to proliferate (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 1995-present; Lashley &
Durham 2002); and more of the great ocean fisheries will become economically—and occasionally biologically—extinct (Myers & Worm 2003).
Although critics have taken issue with many of these forecasts (Lomborg 2001; Hollander 2003), the critics' arguments seem more political than
scientific; the data they muster in support of their claims are riddled with errors, significant omissions, and
misunderstandings of environmental processes (Orr 2002). Indeed, these environmental changes are demonstrably and frighteningly real. And
because of these and related changes, one social prediction can be made with assurance: globalization is creating an environment that will
prove hostile to its own survival.
This is not a political statement or a moral judgment. It is not the same as saying that globalization ought to be stopped. The enlightened advocates of globalization claim that globalization could give the poorest residents of the poorest countries a chance to enjoy a decent income.
And the enlightened opponents of globalization assert that the damage done by globalization to local communities everywhere, and the increasing gap it causes between the rich and the poor, far outweigh the small amount of good globalization may do. The debate is vitally important, but the fate of globalization is unlikely to be determined by who wins it. Al Gore remarked about the
political impasse over global warming and the current rapid melting of the world's glaciers: “Glaciers don't give a damn about politics. They just reflect reality” (Herbert 2004). The same inexorable environmental reality is even now drawing the curtains on globalization. Often minimized in the United States, this reality is already painfully obvious in China, which is experiencing the
most rapid expansion related to globalization. Nearly every issue of China Daily, the national English-language newspaper, features articles on the environmental effects of globalization. Will efforts in China to rein in industrial expansion, energy consumption, and environmental pollution succeed (Fu 2004; Qin 2004; Xu 2004)? Will the desperate attempts of Chinese authorities to
mitigate the impact of rapid industrialization on the disastrously scarce supplies of fresh water be effective (Li 2004; Liang 2004)? The environmental anxiety is palpable and pervasive. The environmental effects of globalization cannot be measured by simple numbers like the gross domestic product or unemployment rate. But even without such summary statistics, there are so many
. Among the environmental impacts of globalization, perhaps the most
significant is its fostering of the excessive use of energy, with the attendant consequences. This surge in energy use was
inevitable, once the undeveloped four-fifths of the world adopted the energy-wasting industrialization model of the
developed fifth, and as goods that once were made locally began to be transported around the world at a tremendous cost of energy. China's booming
examples of globalization's impact, some obvious, some less so, that a convincing argument about its effects and trends can be made
production, largely the result of its surging global exports, has caused a huge increase in the mining and burning of coal and the building of giant dams for more
electric power, an increase of power that in only the first 8 months of 2003 amounted to 16% (Bradsher 2003; Guo 2004). The many environmental effects of the coal
burning include, most importantly, global warming. Fossil-fuel-driven
climate change seems likely to result in a rise in sea level,
massive extinction of species, agricultural losses from regional shifts in temperature and rainfall, and, possibly,
alteration of major ocean currents, with secondary climatic change.
Other side effects of coal burning are forest decline, especially from increased nitrogen deposition; acidification of freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems from
nitrogen and sulfur compounds; and a major impact on human health from polluted air. Dams, China's alternative method of producing electricity without burning fossil fuels, themselves cause massive environmental changes. These changes include fragmentation of river channels; loss of floodplains, riparian zones, and adjacent wetlands; deterioration of irrigated terrestrial environments
and their surface waters; deterioration and loss of river deltas and estuaries; aging and reduction of continental freshwater runoff to oceans; changes in nutrient cycling; impacts on biodiversity; methylmercury contamination of food webs; and greenhouse gas emissions from reservoirs. The impoundment of water in reservoirs at high latitudes in the northern hemisphere has even caused a
small but measurable increase in the speed of the earth's rotation and a change in the planet's axis (Rosenberg et al. 2000; Vörösmarty & Sahagian 2000). Moreover, the millions of people displaced by reservoirs such as the one behind China's Three Gorges Dam have their own environmental impacts as they struggle to survive in unfamiliar and often unsuitable places. Despite the
importance of coal and hydropower in China's booming economy, the major factor that enables globalization to flourish around the world—even in China—is still cheap oil. Cheap oil runs the ships, planes, trucks, cars, tractors, harvesters, earth-moving equipment, and chain saws that globalization needs; cheap oil lifts the giant containers with their global cargos off the container ships
onto the waiting flatbeds; cheap oil even mines and processes the coal, grows and distills the biofuels, drills the gas wells, and builds the nuclear power plants while digging and refining the uranium ore that keeps them operating. Paradoxically, the global warming caused by this excessive burning of oil is exerting negative feedback on the search for more oil to replace dwindling supplies.
The search for Arctic oil has been slowed by recent changes in the Arctic climate. Arctic tundra has to be frozen and snow-covered to allow the heavy seismic vehicles to prospect for underground oil reserves, or long-lasting damage to the landscape results. The recent Arctic warming trend has reduced the number of days that vehicles can safely explore: from 187 in 1969 to 103 in 2002
Globalization affects so many environmental systems in so many ways that negative interactions of this sort are
frequent and usually unpredictable.
(Revkin 2004).
Looming over the global economy is the imminent disappearance of cheap oil. There is some debate about when global oil production will peak—many of the leading petroleum geologists predict the peak will occur in this decade, possibly in the next two or three years
(Campbell 1997; Kerr 1998; Duncan & Youngquist 1999; Holmes & Jones 2003; Appenzeller 2004; ASPO 2004; Bakhtiari 2004; Gerth 2004)—but it is abundantly clear that the remaining untapped reserves and alternatives such as oil shale, tar sands, heavy oil, and biofuels are economically and energetically no substitute for the cheap oil that comes pouring out of the ground in the
Arabian Peninsula and a comparatively few other places on Earth (Youngquist 1997). Moreover, the hydrogen economy and other high-tech solutions to the loss of cheap oil are clouded by serious, emerging technological doubts about feasibility and safety, and a realistic fear that, if they can work, they will not arrive in time to rescue our globalized industrial civilization (Grant 2003;
Even energy conservation, which we already know how to implement both technologically and as part of
an abstemious lifestyle, is likely to be no friend to globalization, because it reduces consumption of all kinds, and
consumption is what globalization is all about
Tromp et al. 2003; Romm 2004).
. In a keynote address to the American Geological Society, a noted expert on electric power networks, Richard Duncan (2001), predicted widespread, permanent electric blackouts by 2012, and the end of industrial, globalized civilization
by 2030. The energy crunch is occurring now. According to Duncan, per capita energy production in the world has already peaked—that happened in 1979—and has declined since that date. In a more restrained evaluation of the energy crisis, Charles Hall and colleagues (2003) state that: The world is not about to run out of hydrocarbons, and perhaps it is not going to run out of oil from
unconventional sources any time soon. What will be difficult to obtain is cheap petroleum, because what is left is an enormous amount of low-grade hydrocarbons, which are likely to be much more expensive financially, energetically, politically and especially environmentally. Nuclear power still has “important…technological, economic, environmental and public safety problems,” they
continue, and at the moment “renewable energies present a mixed bag of opportunities.” Their solution? Forget about the more expensive and dirtier hydrocarbons such as tar sands. We need a major public policy intervention to foster a crash program of public and private investment in research on renewable energy technologies. Perhaps this will happen—necessity does occasionally
. But I do not see renewable energy coming in time or in sufficient magnitude to save globalization . Sunlight, wind,
geothermal energy, and biofuels, necessary as they are to develop, cannot replace cheap oil at the current rate of use without disastrous environmental side effects.
bring about change
These renewable alternatives can only power a nonglobalized civilization that consumes less energy
(Ehrenfeld 2003b). Already, as the output of the giant
Saudi oil reserves has started to fall (Gerth 2004) and extraction of the remaining oil is becoming increasingly costly, oil prices are climbing and the strain is being felt by other energy sources. For example, the production of natural gas, which fuels more than half of U.S. homes, is declining in the United States, Canada, and Mexico as wells are exhausted. In both the United States and
Canada, intensive new drilling is being offset by high depletion rates, and gas consumption increases yearly. In 2002 the United States imported 15% of its gas from Canada, more than half of Canada's total gas production. However, with Canada's gas production decreasing and with the “stranded” gas reserves in the United States and Canadian Arctic regions unavailable until pipelines
are built 5–10 years from now, the United States is likely to become more dependent on imported liquid natural gas (LNG). Here are some facts to consider. Imports of LNG in the United States increased from 39 billion cubic feet in 1990 to 169 billion cubic feet in 2002, which was still <1% of U.S. natural gas consumption. The largest natural gas field in the world is in the tiny Persian
Gulf state of Qatar. Gas is liquefied near the site of production by cooling it to −260°F (−162°C), shipped in special refrigerated trains to waiting LNG ships, and then transported to an LNG terminal, where it is off-loaded, regasified, and piped to consumers. Each LNG transport ship costs a half billion dollars. An LNG terminal costs one billion dollars. There are four LNG terminals in
the United States, none in Canada or Mexico. Approximately 30 additional LNG terminal sites to supply the United States are being investigated or planned, including several in the Bahamas, with pipelines to Florida. On 19 January 2004, the LNG terminal at Skikda, Algeria, blew up with tremendous force, flattening much of the port and killing 30 people. The Skikda terminal,
From
LNG to coal gasification to oil shale to nuclear fission to breeder reactors to fusion to renewable energy, even to
improvements in efficiency of energy use (Browne 2004), our society looks from panacea to panacea to feed the
ever-increasing demands of globalization. But no one solution or combination of solutions will suffice to meet this
kind of consumption. In the words of Vaclav Smil (2003): Perhaps the evolutionary imperative of our species is to ascend a
ladder of ever-increasing energy throughputs, never to consider seriously any voluntary consumption limits and stay
on this irrational course until it will be too late to salvage the irreplaceable underpinnings of biospheric services that
will be degraded and destroyed by our progressing use of energy and materials. Among the many other
environmental effects of globalization, one that is both obvious and critically important is reduced genetic and
renovated by Halliburton in the late 1990s, will cost $800 million to $1 billion to replace. All major ports in the United States are heavily populated, and there is strong environmental opposition to putting terminals at some sites in the United States. Draw your own conclusions about LNG as a source of cheap energy (Youngquist & Duncan 2003; Romero 2004).
cultural diversity in agriculture. As the representatives of the petrochemical and pharmaceutical industries' many subsidiary seed corporations sell their
patented seeds in more areas previously isolated from global trade, farmers are dropping their traditional crop varieties, the reservoir of
our accumulated genetic agricultural wealth, in favor of a few, supposedly high-yielding, often chemical-dependent
seeds. The Indian agricultural scientist H. Sudarshan (2002) has provided a typical example. He noted that Over the last half century, India has probably grown over
30,000 different, indigenous varieties or landraces of rice. This situation has, in the last 20 years, changed drastically and it is predicted that in another 20 years, rice
diversity will be reduced to 50 varieties, with the top 10 accounting for over three-quarters of the sub-continent's rice acreage. With
so few varieties left,
where will conventional plant breeders and genetic engineers find the genes for disease and pest resistance,
environmental adaptations, and plant quality and vigor that we will surely need? A similar loss has been seen in varieties of
domestic animals. Of the 3831 breeds of ass, water buffalo, cattle, goat, horse, pig, and sheep recorded in the twentieth century, at least 618 had become extinct by the
century's end, and 475 of the remainder were rare. Significantly, the countries with the highest ratios of surviving breeds per million people are those that are most
peripheral and remote from global commerce (Hall & Ruane 1993). Unfortunately,
with globalization, remoteness is no longer tenable .
Here
is a poignant illustration. Rural Haitians have traditionally raised a morphotype of long-snouted, small black pig known as the Creole pig. Adapted to the Haitian climate, Creole pigs had very low maintenance requirements, and were mainstays of soil fertility and the rural economy. In 1982 and 1983, most of these pigs were deliberately killed as part of swine disease control efforts
required to integrate Haiti into the hemispheric economy. They were replaced by pigs from Iowa that needed clean drinking water, roofed pigpens, and expensive, imported feed. The substitution was a disaster. Haitian peasants, the hemisphere's poorest, lost an estimated $600 million. Haiti's ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide (2000), who, whatever his faults, understood the
environmental and social effects of globalization, wrote There was a 30% drop in enrollment in rural schools… a dramatic decline in the protein consumption in rural Haiti, a devastating decapitalization of the peasant economy and an incalculable negative impact on Haiti's soil and agricultural productivity. The Haitian peasantry has not recovered to this day…. For many peasants the
. The globalization of food has led to the introduction of
“high-input” agricultural methods in many less-developed countries, with sharply increasing use of fertilizers,
insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, irrigation pumps, mechanical equipment, and energy. There has been a
correspondingly sharp decline in farmland biodiversity—including birds, invertebrates, and wild crop relatives—much of which is critically
extermination of the Creole pigs was their first experience of globalization. The sale of Mexican string beans and South African apples in Michigan and Minnesota in January is not without consequences
important to agriculture through ecosystem services or as reservoirs of useful genes (Benton et al. 2003). The combination of heavy fertilizer use along with excessive
irrigation has resulted in toxic accumulations of salt, nitrates, and pesticides ruining soils all over the world, along with the dangerous drawdown and contamination of
underground reserves of fresh water (Hillel 1991; Kaiser 2004; Sugden et al. 2004). Although
population growth has been responsible for
some of this agricultural intensification, much has been catalyzed by globalization (
Wright 1990). Aquaculture is another agriculture-related activity. Fish and shellfish farming—much of it for
export—has more than doubled in the past 15 years. This industry's tremendous requirements for fish meal and fish oil to use as food and its degradation of coastal areas are placing a great strain on marine ecosystems (Naylor et al. 2000). Other unanticipated problems are occurring. For instance, the Scottish fisheries biologist Alexander Murray and his colleagues (2002) report that
infectious salmon anemia … is caused by novel virulent strains of a virus that has adapted to intensive aquacultural practices and has exploited the associated [ship] traffic to spread both locally and internationally…. Extensive ship traffic and lack of regulation increase the risk of spreading disease to animals raised for aquaculture and to other animals in marine environments…. [and
. The reduction of diversity in agriculture is paralleled by a loss and reshuffling of wild
species. The global die-off of species now occurring, unprecedented in its rapidity, is of course only partly the result
of globalization, but globalization is a major factor in many extinctions . It accelerates species loss in several ways. First, it
increases the numbers of exotic species carried by the soaring plane, ship, rail, and truck traffic of global trade. Second, it is responsible
for the adverse effects of ecotourism on wild flora and fauna (Ananthaswamy 2004). And third, it promotes the development and
exploitation of populations and natural areas to satisfy the demands of global trade, including, in addition to the agricultural and energy-related
underscore] the potential role of shipping in the global transport of zoonotic pathogens
disruptions already mentioned, logging, over-fishing of marine fisheries, road building, and mining. To give just one example, from 1985 to 2001, 56% of Indonesian
Borneo's (Kalimantan) “protected” lowland forest areas—many of them remote and sparsely populated—were intensively logged, primarily to supply international
timber markets (Curran et al. 2004). Surely
one of the most significant impacts of globalization on wild species and the
ecosystems in which they live has been the increase in introductions of invasive species (
Vitousek et al. 1996; Mooney & Hobbs 2000). Two examples are zebra mussels (Dreissena
polymorpha), which came to the Great Lakes in the mid-1980s in the ballast water of cargo ships from Europe, and Asian longhorn beetles (Anoplophera glabripennis), which arrived in the United States in the early 1990s in wood pallets and crates used to transfer cargo shipped from China and Korea. Zebra mussels, which are eliminating native mussels and altering lake ecosystems,
clog the intake pipes of waterworks and power plants. The Asian longhorn beetle now seems poised to cause heavy tree loss (especially maples [Acer sp.]) in the hardwood forests of eastern North America. Along the U.S. Pacific coast, oaks (Quercus sp.) and tanoaks (Lithocarpus densiflorus) are being killed by sudden oak death, caused by a new, highly invasive fungal disease organism
Estimates of the annual cost of the damage caused by invasive
species in the United States range from $5.5 billion to $115 billion. The zebra mussel alone, just one of a great many terrestrial,
(Phytophthora ramorum), which is probably also an introduced species that was spread by the international trade in horticultural plants (Rizzo & Garbelotto 2003).
freshwater, and marine exotic animals, plants, and pathogens, has been credited with more than $5 billion of damage since its introduction (Mooney & Drake 1986;
Cox 1999). Invasive
species surely rank among the principal economic and ecological limiting factors for globalization.
Some introduced species directly affect human health, either as vectors of disease or as the disease organisms
themselves.
For example, the Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus), a vector for dengue and yellow fevers, St. Louis and LaCrosse encephalitis viruses, and West Nile virus, was most likely introduced in used truck tires imported from Asia to Texas in the 1980s and has spread widely since then. Discussion of this and other examples is beyond the scope of
this article. Even the partial control of accidental and deliberate species introductions requires stringent, well-funded governmental regulation in cooperation with the public and with business. Many introductions of alien species cannot be prevented, but some can, and successful interventions to prevent the spread of introduced species can have significant environmental and economic
benefits. To give just one example, western Australia has shown that government and industry can cooperate to keep travelers and importers from bringing harmful invasive species across their borders. The western Australian HortGuard and GrainGuard programs integrate public education; rapid and effective access to information; targeted surveillance, which includes preborder, border,
and postborder activities; and farm and regional biosecurity systems (Sharma 2004). Similar programs exist in New Zealand. But there is only so much that governments can do in the face of massive global trade. Some of the significant effects of globalization on wildlife are quite subtle. Mazzoni et al. (2003) reported that the newly appearing fungal disease chytridiomycosis (caused by
Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis), which appears to be the causative agent for a number of mass die-offs and extinctions of amphibians on several continents, is probably being spread by the international restaurant trade in farmed North American bullfrogs (Rana catesbeiana). These authors state: “Our findings suggest that international trade may play a key role in the global dissemination
Even more unexpected findings were described in 2002 by Alexander et al., who noted that
expansion of ecotourism and other consequences of globalization are increasing contact between free-ranging
wildlife and humans, resulting in the first recorded introduction of a primary human pathogen , Mycobacterium tuberculosis,
of this and other emerging infectious diseases of wildlife.”
into wild populations of banded mongooses (Mungos mungo) in Botswana and suricates (Suricata suricatta) in South Africa. The known effects of globalization on the
environment are numerous and highly significant. Many others are undoubtedly unknown. Given these circumstances, the first question that suggests itself is: Will
globalization, as we see it now, remain a permanent state of affairs (Rees 2002; Ehrenfeld 2003a)? The
principal environmental side effects of
globalization—climate change, resource exhaustion (particularly cheap energy), damage to agroecosystems, and the
spread of exotic species, including pathogens (plant, animal, and human)—are sufficient to make this economic
system unstable and short-lived. The socioeconomic consequences of globalization are likely to do the same. In my book The Arrogance of Humanism
(1981), I claimed that our ability to manage global systems, which depends on our being able to predict the results
of the things we do, or even to understand the systems we have created, has been greatly exaggerated. Much of our
alleged control is science fiction; it doesn't work because of theoretical limits that we ignore at our peril. We live in a dream world in which reality
testing is something we must never, never do, lest we awake. In 1984 Charles Perrow explored the reasons why we have trouble predicting
what so many of our own created systems will do, and why they surprise us so unpleasantly while we think we are managing them. In his book Normal Accidents,
which does not concern globalization, he listed the critical characteristics of some of today's complex systems. They
are highly interlinked, so a
change in one part can affect many others, even those that seem quite distant. Results of some processes feed back
on themselves in unexpected ways. The controls of the system often interact with each other unpredictably. We have only indirect ways of finding out
what is happening inside the system. And we have an incomplete understanding of some of the system's processes. His example of such a system is a nuclear power
I would argue that
globalization is a similar system, also subject to catastrophic accidents, many of them environmental—events that
we cannot define until after they have occurred, and perhaps not even then. The comparatively few commentators who have predicted
plant, and this, he explained, is why system-wide accidents in nuclear plants cannot be predicted or eliminated by system design.
the collapse of globalization have generally given social reasons to support their arguments. These deserve some consideration here, if only because the environmental
and social consequences of globalization interact so strongly with each other. In 1998, the British political economist John Gray, giving scant attention to
environmental factors, nevertheless came to the conclusion that globalization is unstable and will be short-lived. He said, “There is nothing in today's global market
that buffers it against the social strains arising from highly uneven economic development within and between the world's diverse societies.” The
result, Gray
states, is that “The combination of [an] unceasing stream of new technologies, unfettered market competition and
weak or fractured social institutions” has weakened both sovereign states and multinational corporations in their
ability to control important events. Note that Gray claims that not only nations but also multinational corporations, which are widely touted as
controlling the world, are being weakened by globalization. This idea may come as a surprise, considering the growth of multinationals in the past few decades, but I
believe it is true. Neither
governments nor giant corporations are even remotely capable of controlling the environmental
or social forces released by globalization,
without first controlling globalization itself. Two of the social critics of globalization with the most dire predictions about its doom are themselves masters of the process. The late Sir James Goldsmith, billionaire financier, wrote in 1994, It must
surely be a mistake to adopt an economic policy which makes you rich if you eliminate your national workforce and transfer production abroad, and which bankrupts you if you continue to employ your own people…. It is the poor in the rich countries who will subsidize the rich in the poor countries. This will have a serious impact on the social cohesion of nations. Another free-trade
billionaire, George Soros, said much the same thing in 1995: “The collapse of the global marketplace would be a traumatic event with unimaginable consequences. Yet I find it easier to imagine than the continuation of the present regime.” How much more powerful these statements are if we factor in the environment! As globalization collapses, what will happen to people, biodiversity,
and ecosystems? With respect to people, the gift of prophecy is not required to answer this question. What will happen depends on where you are and how you live. Many citizens of the Third World are still comparatively self-sufficient; an unknown number of these will survive the breakdown of globalization and its attendant chaos. In the developed world, there are also people with
resources of self-sufficiency and a growing understanding of the nature of our social and environmental problems, which may help them bridge the years of crisis. Some species are adaptable; some are not. For the nonhuman residents of Earth, not all news will be bad. Who would have predicted that wild turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo), one of the wiliest and most evasive of woodland
birds, extinct in New Jersey 50 years ago, would now be found in every county of this the most densely populated state, and even, occasionally, in adjacent Manhattan? Who would have predicted that black bears (Ursus americanus), also virtually extinct in the state in the mid-twentieth century, would now number in the thousands (Ehrenfeld 2001)? Of course these recoveries are
unusual—rare bright spots in a darker landscape. Finally, a few ecological systems may survive in a comparatively undamaged state; most will be stressed to the breaking point, directly or indirectly, by many environmental and social factors interacting unpredictably. Lady Luck, as always, will have much to say. In his book The Collapse of Complex Societies, the archaeologist Joseph
Tainter (1988) notes that collapse, which has happened to all past empires, inevitably results in human systems of lower complexity and less specialization, less centralized control, lower economic activity, less information flow, lower population levels, less trade, and less redistribution of resources. All of these changes are inim ical to globalization. This less-complex, less-globalized
condition is probably what human societies will be like when the dust settles. I do not think, however, that we can make such specific predictions about the ultimate state of the environment after globalization, because we have never experienced anything like this exceptionally rapid, global environmental damage before. History and science have little to tell us in this situation. The end of
the current economic system and the transition to a postglobalized state is and will be accompanied by a desperate last raid on resources and a chaotic flurry of environmental destruction whose results cannot possibly be told in advance. All one can say is that the surviving species, ecosystems, and resources will be greatly impoverished compared with what we have now, and our
descendants will not thank us for having adopted, however briefly, an economic system that consumed their inheritance and damaged their planet so wantonly. Environment is a true bottom line—concern for its condition must trump all purely economic growth strategies if both the developed and developing nations are to survive and prosper. Awareness of the environmental limits that
globalized industrial society denies or ignores should not, however, bring us to an extreme position of environmental determinism. Those whose preoccupations with modern civilization's very real social problems cause them to reject or minimize the environmental constraints discussed here (Hollander 2003) are guilty of seeing only half the picture. Environmental scientists sometimes
fall into the same error. It is tempting to see the salvation of civilization and environment solely in terms of technological improvements in efficiency of energy extraction and use, control of pollution, conservation of water, and regulation of environmentally harmful activities. But such needed developments will not be sufficient—or may not even occur—without corresponding social
change, including an end to human population growth and the glorification of consumption, along with the elimination of economic mechanisms that increase the gap between rich and poor. The environmental and social problems inherent in globalization are completely interrelated—any attempt to treat them as separate entities is unlikely to succeed in easing the transition to a
Integrated change that combines environmental awareness, technological innovation, and an altered
world view is the only answer to the life-threatening problems exacerbated by globalization (Ehrenfeld 2003b).
postglobalized world.
Environment – 2NC
1. Extinction inevitable-ag failure, disease, biodiversity and ecosystem destruction and
climate change are all caused by neoliberalism
Prefer the impact because negative feedbacks and multiple vectors increase the probably
and magnitude AND default neg because the resilience of nature and our ability to predict
and manage catastrophe are always over estimated.
2. Multiple negative vectors.
Haque, Singapore political science professor, 1999
(M. Shamshul, “The Fate of Sustainable Development Under Neo-Liberal Regimes in Developing Countries”,
International Political Science Review April 1999 20.2, Sage)
As discussed above, under neo-liberal regimes in developing countries, the role of the state has diminished, and market forces have increasingly taken over the
dominant socioeconomic role. The critics of neo-liberal policies maintain, however, that market
forces are not only inappropriate for sustaining the
major cause of environmental destruction (see Stokke, 1991: 17; Hempel, 1996: 83). The detrimental
impact of the market system on nature is largely due to intensive competition among market forces for further profit and accumulation. In
Weaver’s view (1973: 109): “ Each firm must pollute in order to compete with other firms , and each nation must pollute in order to compete
with other nations.” More importantly, under the neo-liberal (pro-market) state, as the role of the state in anti-poverty programs and welfare subsidies has
diminished, there have been worsening conditions of poverty and inequality in many developing countries (especially in Africa and Latin
America), and these negative changes have had adverse effects on environment and sustainability (as outlined above). According
to Hempel (1996: 75–76), poverty often leads to various forms of environmental destruction, including the overexploitation
of natural resources, degradation of land, and diminishment of various species, because the rural poor often have no
choice but to use forests for food and firewood and over-cultivate croplands. At the same time, increases in the urban poor cause
overcrowding and the contamination of water.
environment, but are, in fact, a
Many of these effects are directly attributable to neo-liberal policies of stabilization and structural adjustment, under which governments adopt austerity measures, reduce subsidies, lay off workers, and withdraw welfare benefits. 6
During the period 1980–92, a period when neo-liberal policies were in ascendance, the number of people in poverty in Latin America rose from 136 million to 266 million, while in Africa the number increased from 270 million in 1986 to 335 million in 1990 (Veltmeyer, 1993: 2083–2084; Sharma, 1994: 202). Even in the economically “successful” Asian countries, the extent of poverty
remains quite significant. 7 The overall standards of living have dropped in most African and Latin American countries due to adjustment-related reductions in social services, increases in food prices, decline in real wages, and reduced access to health and education facilities (Leftwich, 1994: 367; Smith, 1991: 33). In the developing world as a whole, more than 25 percent of the
population today lives in poverty, and almost 34 percent lives on an income of less than one US dollar per day (UNDP, 1997: 3). This increased level of poverty under neo-liberal policies has a critical impact on the environment, particularly due to a further dependence of the poor on unexploited natural resources (Bello, Cunningham and Rau, 1994: 57). In the case of Africa
,
due to growing poverty and increasing dependence on imported food, there has been a considerable increase in overcropping, over-fertilization, and overgrazing on new lands
(James, 1996: 3). In countries such as Cameroon, Mali, Zambia, Tanzania, Pakistan, and Vietnam, the reduction of government subsidies for fertilizer adversely affected small farmers who had
to intensify agricultural production by expanding agricultural lands, thereby accelerating deforestation and soil degradation (Reed, 1996: 314). In addition, reductions in subsidies and the withdrawal of welfare and antipoverty programs have increased inequalities among various income groups, which has worsened the poverty situation even further. Beyond poverty, economic inequality
implies the expansion and further enrichment of the more affluent classes, which leads to excessive consumption and environmental degradation. In Latin America today, after a decade of neo-liberal policies, the top 20 percent of the population earns 20 times the amount earned by the poorest 20 percent (Bello, Cunningham, and Rau, 1994: 52). In Chile, one of the earliest and most
an increase in the
income of the affluent elite is likely to strengthen the desire for an over-consumption of nonrenewable resources,
automobiles, building materials, and other luxury items and foodstuffs, which may have adverse impacts on the
environment (Hempel, 1996: 79; Simonis, 1990: 13). Neo-liberal policies of deregulation and privatization can also have an adverse impact on environment and
sustainability. First, due to deregulation and privatization, the prices of goods and services that are essential to low-income
families, have (in the short run at any rate) increased, placing greater pressure on natural resources and the environment. The prices of
ardent followers of neoliberalism, while the income of the richest 10 percent of households increased from approximately 36 to 47 percent (as a percentage of national income), the income of the poorest 40 percent of households decreased from 19 to 13 percent during 1979–89 (Veltmeyer, 1993: 2083). Such
agricultural inputs such as fertilizer, for example, have increased in developing countries such as Cameroon, Mali, Zambia, Tanzania, Pakistan, and Vietnam, reducing
the capacity of small farmers to effectively use these inputs and forcing them to expand agricultural production by cultivating marginal lands (Reed, 1996). In
addition, as deregulation leads to an increase in the prices of commercial fuel, low-income families begin to use more firewood for heating and cooking, resulting in
further deforestation in countries such as Cameroon (Reed, 1996: 69). Second,
deregulation and budget cuts have reduced the capacity of
the state to enforce laws related to environmental protectio n. Similar to the United States’ experience of a diminishing regulatory capacity of
the Environmental Protection Agency caused by a 50 percent reduction in its budget under the Reagan administration (King, 1987: 158), there has been a significant
decline in the administrative capacity of environmental agencies or institutions in developing countries. For example, in El Salvador, due to budget cuts, the capacity
of the directorate for renewable natural resources has declined and its monitoring function has been suspended; in Jamaica, the public sector has lost its capacity to
regulate industries and enforce environmental standards; in Venezuela, a reduction in public spending has weakened state institutions such as the ministry of
environment; and in Cameroon, budget cuts in the forestry service have weakened government supervision over logging, worsening the degradation of forests (Reed,
1996: 69, 169, 210). Deregulation
and privatization have also contributed to increased foreign direct investment (FDI) in
developing countries, which often accentuates environmental problems. In many of these countries, major sectors such as mining and
manufacturing have come under direct control of foreign investors, especially due to their acquisition of the recently privatized state enterprises. The outflows of FDI
from the United States, Japan, France, Britain, and Germany increased from $61 billion in 1986 to $156 billion in 1990, and by 1990 the number of foreign affiliates
of transnational corporations reached 147 000 (The Economist, 1992: 6–9). The
recent upsurge of FDI in developing countries is due not only to the
minimal environmental standards and requirements: it is
much easier and cheaper for foreign companies to marginalize pollution and restoration costs in developing countries in the process of
availability of their undervalued privatized assets and cheap labor, but also their
producing industrial goods. There is evidence that the adoption of neo-liberal policies in Tanzania, Zambia, Jamaica, and Venezuela has resulted in significant
increases in foreign investment in the mining sector (copper, oil, alumina, iron, gold), with corresponding increases in environmental degradation (Reed, 1996: 307).
Under the neo-liberal policy framework, there is a common bias for liberalizing trade and expanding exports to accelerate economic growth (Colclough, 1991: 8). In
developing countries, such an export-led
economic orientation has led to an expansion of cash-crop production in the
agricultural sector.
under the auspices of free trade and export opportunities, the expansion of banana production led to deforestation
and excessive use of chemical fertilizers in Costa Rica;
Recently, due to the liberalized trade system, there have been more incentives for rich farmers to expand this export-led production of cash crops, including cocoa and coffee in Cameroon, sesame and soy beans in Tanzania, cotton in Mali, sugarcane in Jamaica, and bananas in Venezuela (Reed, 1996: 309). However, it has
been pointed out that the expansion of agricultural exports based on trade liberalization has often been harmful to local eco logical systems (Redclift, 1987: 60). In Asia, Africa, and Latin America, under programs of structural adjustment, policy-makers have expanded modern agricultural exports to the detriment of the environment and overall resource balance (Reed, 1996: 17). For
instance,
timber production caused deforestation and unsustainable exploitation of natural resources in Tanzania and Chile; and cassava and rubber production encouraged the elimination of virgin forests and the use
of marginal lands in Thailand (Devlin and Yap, 1994; Reed, 1996; Bello, Cunningham and Rau, 1994). Export-led production also includes the mining and manufacturing sectors. For instance, in line with structural adjustment, Jamaica has increased its production of bauxite and cement, worsening the problems of dust pollution (Reed, 1996: 195). The export-led industries in the newly
Trade liberalization has also contributed to
increased international economic inequality between advanced capitalist nations and developing countries .
industrialized countries such as Taiwan and Thailand, have created severe environmental problems with respect to industrial waste, water pollution, deforestation, and pesticide contamination (see Devlin and Yap, 1994: 54–55).
Notwithstanding the neo-liberal attempts to draw public attention away from these growing inequalities in international economic structures (Brohman, 1995: 134),
the reality is that by 1992, the average per capita income of the 23 high-income countries reached US$22 160, while
1.3 billion people in the developing world lived in absolute poverty and another 3.1 billion had an average annual
income of less than US$310 (Reed, 1996: 39). This increasing international inequality is not isolated from neoliberal policies. Trade liberalization in
particular has led to massive transfers of resources from developing countries to advanced capitalist nations (Martin, 1993). This international inequality
implies that while people in affluent industrial nations expand their over-consumption even further, people in lowincome countries suffer from poverty and hunger, thereby increasing negative pressures on the environment at
both ends of the development spectrum (Cooper, 1995). As previously discussed, it is a primary objective of neo-liberal policy to enhance economic growth and
productivity based on the principles of market competition. In conceptualizing development, the neo-liberals tend to over-emphasize economic
growth while underestimating the importance of economic equalit y, environmental concerns, and sustainability. Thus, in its recent report,
the UNDP identifies different categories of market-based economic growth—for example, “jobless growth” which indicates a growth path that has failed to expand
employment in many developing countries (e.g., Pakistan, India, Egypt, Ghana), and “ruthless growth” which, particularly in Latin American countries, has resulted in
increased poverty despite higher growth rates (UNDP, 1996: 57–60). This
increased poverty under the facade of economic growth is
likely to have adverse impacts on the environment due to an excessive use or exploitation of forests, lands, and other
resources. Second, the spirit of economic growth, as articulated under structural adjustment programs, is harmful to the environment and
sustainability, because it tends to justify any programs and projects which enhance growth regardless of their environmental
implications. More specifically, structural adjustment programs have failed to “internalize environmental costs associated with production and disposal of
commodities and manufactured goods” (Reed, 1996: 17). Redclift (1987: 59) suggests that under structural adjustment programs, “the pursuit of economic
growth, unchecked by environmental considerations, can accelerate, among other things, topsoil losses, the scarcity
of fresh water, the deterioration of grassland and deforestation.” Third, economic growth is often pursued through a
rapid expansion of industrialization which, under conditions of weak governmental regulation, leads to the wellknown consequences of rapid resource depletion, emission of hazardous gases, and pollution of air and water.
French (1990: 104)
points out that the establishment of more industries in developing countries is likely to increase the airborne toxic-chemical emissions at a rapid pace. In Taiwan, an impressive rate of economic growth based on massive industrialization has caused serious water contamination and air pollution, and in Venezuela there is an increasing degradation of inland waters due to the expansion of
the petrochemical industry (Reed, 1996; UNDP, 1996). These and similar experiences in numerous developing countries have led to widespread criticism of the growth myopia underlying the current neo-liberal policy. Stokke (1991: 27) views market-based economic growth as “the very root of the ecological crisis,” and, for Redclift, (1987: 56), “resource depletion and unsustainable
development are a direct consequence of growth itself” (see also UNDP, 1996: 63; Simonis, 1990: 9.) With regard to the relationship between economic growth and sustainability, Daly (1990: 45) also mentions that “it is precisely the nonsustainability of growth that gives urgency to the concept of sustainable development.” Given the predominance of growth within the neo-liberal value
As indicated above, the consumerist culture of industrial capitalism—which
has been associated with industrial expansion, mass production, mechanized agriculture, toxic chemicals, and the
excessive use of fossil fuels—has been considered one of the main causes of environmental disorders. The spread of
consumerism on a global scale constitutes a major ecological thre at. Some scholars have made an observation that if the total
world population would adopt the Western mode of consumption and industrial production, it would be necessary to
have five to six more planets for resource plundering and waste disposal (Ullrich, 1992; Sachs, 1992; Durning, 1991; Haque, 1998).
set, the entire debate as to the role of growth and sustainable development must be taken up anew (see Langhelle, this issue).
Such perspectives have not, however, hindered a considerable expansion of market-oriented consumerism all over the world. The extension of consumerism to
developing nations is not isolated from the recent upsurge of trade liberalization and foreign investment under the neo-liberal regimes in these countries.
Transnational capital and international trade are inseparable from the global consumption culture.
The worldwide expansion of this culture has also been aided
by the unprecedented proliferation of global commercial media, due in part to the recent deregulation of media in developing countries. Today, television media such as MTV Music Television and Murdoch’s Star TV are focusing on millions of Asians, especially teenagers, as potential consumers of various modern commodities (Fuller, 1994). Western patterns of consumption have
become nearly the universal indicators of status and success (Hempel, 1996: 80). In India, millions of consumers are replacing their indigenous food items with imported food products, and, in China, during 1982–87, the percentage of people owning refrigerators increased from 1 percent to 20 percent and color televisions from 1 percent to 35 percent (see Durning, 1991; Haque, 1998).
The expansion of consumerism and increases in demands for imported products have been complemented by the
recent withdrawal of many import restrictions. For instance, based on the opportunities created by recent trade liberalization, there has been a
significant increase in the import of used cars and buses in developing countries such as Tanzania, Zambia, El Salvador, Jamaica, and Vietnam: since there are hardly
any emission inspections in these countries, the use of such imported vehicles has seriously worsened urban air pollution (Reed, 1996: 312). An increase in the
consumption of other imported foreign goods—encouraged by free trade— may lead to similar negative impacts on the environment. Ideologically,
this
expansion of consumerism reflects the agenda of global capitalism, which largely survives and expands on
consumerism. Thus, as long as regimes in developing countries are committed to the capitalist neo-liberal policies, it is hardly possible to stop the expansion of
ecologically detrimental consumerism. As expressed quite simply by Gotlieb (1996: 11): “ Capitalism requires the consumption of nature.
3. Necessitates systems that are catastrophic for the environment.
Mander, International Forum on Globalizaton, and Retallack, The Ecologist 2002
(Jerry and Simon “Intrinsic Environmental Consequences of Trade-Related Transport,”. Alternatives to Economic
Globalization: A Better World is Possible, The International Forum on Globalization, pg 26-7)
The central feature of an export-oriented production model is that it dramatically increases transport and shipping
activity. In the half-century since Bretton Woods, there has been about a twenty-five-fold increase in global transport activity. As global transport
increases, it in turn requires massive increases in global infrastructure development. This is good for large
corporations like Bech-tel, which get to do the construction work: new airports, seaports, oil fields, pipelines for the oil, rail lines, highspeed highways. Many
of these are built in areas with relatively intact wilderness, biodiversity, and coral reefs, or they are built in rural
areas. The impact is especially strong now in South and Central America, where there have been tremendous investments in infrastructure development in
wilderness regions, often against great resistance from native communities like the U'wa in Colombia, the Kuna in Panama, and many different groups in Ecuador.
The problems also occur in the developed world. In the United Kingdom a few years ago, there were protests by two hundred thousand people against huge new
highways jammed through rural landscapes so that trucks could better serve the global trading system. Both the indigenous protestors and the rural English were
Increased global trade increases fossil fuel use as
well, contributing to global warming. Ocean shipping carries nearly 80 percent of the world's international trade in
goods. The fuel commonly used by ships is a mixture of diesel and low-quality oil known as "Bunker C," which is particularly polluting because of high levels of
protesting the same thing—the ecological destruction of their region to serve globalization.
carbon and sulfur. If not consumed by ships, it would otherwise be considered a waste product. The shipping industry is anticipating major growth over the next few
years; the port of Los Angeles alone projects a 50 percent increase over the next decade. Increased
air transport is even more damaging than
shipping. Each ton of freight moved by plane uses forty-nine times as much energy per kilometer as when it's moved
by ship. A physicist at Boeing once described the pollution from the takeoff of a single 747 like "setting the local gas station on fire and flying it over your
neighborhood." A two-minute takeoff by a 747 is equal to 2.4 million lawnmowers running for twenty minutes. Ocean pollution from shipping has
reached crisis levels, and there have been direct effects of these huge ships on wildlife and fisheries. Even more
serious, possibly, is the epidemic increase of bioinvasions, a significant cause of species extinction . With the growth of
global transport, billions of creatures are on the move. Invasive species, brought by global trade, often out compete native species and bring pollution or health crises.
In the United States, the emergence of the West Nile virus where it never existed before is due to increased transport activity. So is the spread of malaria and dengue
fever. Ocean
shipping also requires increased refrigeration—contributing to ozone depletion and climate change—
and an increase in packaging and the wood pallets used for cargo loading; these are little-noted but significant
factors in increased pressure on global forests. Global conversion of agriculture from diverse, small-scale local farms
to giant, chemical-intensive industrial production for export markets has also brought terrible environmental
destruction to lands and waters across the planet. (See also chapter 6.) The central point is this: if you are going to
design a system built on the premise that dramatically increased global trade and transport is good, you are
guaranteed to bring on these kinds of environmental problems. They are intrinsic to the model.
4. Globalization creates massive overshoot.
Rees et al., University of British Colombia Applied Human Ecologist, 2003
(William: University of British Colombia Director. Laura Westra: York University philosophy professor “When
Consumption Does Violence: Can There be Sustainability and Environmental Justice in a Resource Limited
World?”, pg 108-112)
The sheer scale of human activity now ensures that the environmental impacts are global in scope . Of the world's
major fish stocks, 70 per cent are being fished at or beyond their sustainable limits8 ; logging and land conversion to
accommodate human demand has shrunk the world's forests by half9 and so-called 'development' claimed half the world's
wetlands in the 20th century. Overall, half the world's land-mass has already been transformed for human purposes and
more than half of the planet's accessible fresh water is being used by people. One result of the shrinking area of 'natural' habitats is a
biodiversity loss rate 1000 times greater than the 'background' rate. Meanwhile, more atmospheric nitrogen is fixed and injected into terrestrial ecosystems by humans
than by all natural terrestrial processes combined; stratospheric ozone depletion now affects both the Southern and Northern hemispheres; atmospheric carbon dioxide
has increased by 30 per cent in the industrial era and is now higher than at any time in at least the past 160,000 years;10 mean global temperature has reached a similar
record high and the world seems to be plagued by increasingly variable climate and more frequent and violent extreme weather events (Lubchenco, 1998, Tuxill,
1998, WRI/UNEP, 2001, Vitousek et al, 1997). Significantly,
the WRI/UNEP report also makes the case that it is the world's poor
- those most directly dependent on local ecosystems for their livelihoods - who suffer the most when ecosystems are
degraded or collapse. It is precisely these ecological trends that pose the threat of 'vast human misery' and the
'irretrievable [mutilation]' of our planetary home. Moreover, their proximate causes are well known to science - the clearing of forests, the
conversion of natural ecosystems to high-input 'production' agriculture, over-fishing, the combustion of fossil fuels, the excessive discharge of biophysically active
chemicals, etc - all in the service of economic and population growth. One might reasonably expect, therefore, that the global political process and policy-makers
everywhere would be acting affirmatively to relieve the pressure under the banner of sustainable development. There
has, in fact, been a great
increase in high-sounding rhetoric and a flurry of environmental legislation in various countries around the world. However,
economic growth remains the focal item on the political agenda. Even Principle 2 of the 1992 'Rio Declaration on Environment and
Development', while recognizing the need for humans to live in harmony with nature, emphasizes that, 'States have, in accordance with the Charter of the United
Nations and the principles of international law, the sovereign right to exploit their own resources pursuant to their own environmental and developmental policies...'
provided that domestic economic activities don't damage other states or areas beyond the limits of national jurisdiction (UNCED, 1992). Such assertions of the
inalienable right to develop, however qualified, may be politically necessary to achieve international agreement on soft-law affecting environment and development.
However, they remain ecologically naive and functionally ineffective in protecting either local resource or global life support systems. On the one hand then, the
world appears to be wakening to the reality of the ecological crisis. On the other, we remain in deep denial of the extent of the value shift and behavioural transition
needed to avoid disaster. Conventional
'sustainable development' doctrine insists that there is no inherent conflict between
the economy and the environment — with improved management and technology, the world should be able to eat its
economic cake and have the environment too (see also Blowers' critique of ecological modernization in Chapter 3). Such optimism might even be
justified under strictly specified conditions but these conditions cannot emerge from contemporary development models. In present circumstances, demand for
nature's 'goods and services' will continue to climb exponentially. For the first time, however, we can anticipate significant shortfalls in
supply. There simply isn't enough 'nature' to go around under prevailing growth-bound 'development' assumptions. The ecological (and social) footprints of
consumption The size of the potential shortfall is clearly revealed by ecological footprint analysis. Ecological footprinting estimates human demand (or 'load') on the
Earth in terms of the ecosystem area required to provide basic material support for any defined population (Rees, 1992,1996). Thus, the ecological footprint of a
specified population is the atea o£ land and watet ecosystems teqoked on a continuous basis to produce the resources that the population consumes, and to assimilate
the wastes that the population produces, wherever on Earth the relevant land/water may be located. A complete eco-footprint analysis includes both the area the
population 'appropriates' through commercial trade and the area required to provide certain free land and water-based services of nature (ie the carbon sink function)
(Rees, 2001, Wackernagel and Rees, 1996). As
noted above, population ecological footprints are based on material consumption
where consumption is defined in ecological and physical rather than in economic (dollar) terms (see NRC, 1997 for various
definitions). Indeed, ecologists explicitly classify humans as consumer organisms since virtually everything we do — including all economic activity — involves the
consumptive use of so-called 'resources' first produced by ecosystems or through other natural processes. (The simplest example is our dependence on green plants
(primaryproducers) for all our food.) In
physical terms, consumption involves the irreversible transformation of available
energy and material partly into useful products, but mainly into waste (and even the useful products eventually
become waste), in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics . The second law dictates that the economic use of resources
invariably results in an increase in net entropy - the dissipation of available energy and the degradation of useful materials. In our view, human societies exceed the
carrying capacity of their supportive ecosystems when the growing economy-as-dissipative-structure results in resource depletion and the pollution of air, water and
land. This conceptualization is compatible with Stern's (1997) working definition of consumption as 'human or human-induced transformations of materials and
energy'. So
defined, consumption is ecologically significant to the extent that 'it makes materials or energy less
available for future use, moves a biophysical system toward a different state or, through its effects on those systems,
threatens human health, welfare or other things people value' (Stern, 1997). Eco-footprint analysis takes the additional step of converting the
material and energy flows associated with consumption into a corresponding ecosystem area - the land and water area a study population effectively 'appropriates'
from nature to produce its resources and to assimilate (at least some of) its wastes. And a revealing 'additional step' it is. Eco-footprinting shows that the residents of
the US, Canada, many Western European and other high-income countries each require five to ten hectares (12-25 acres) of productive land/water to support their
consumer lifestyles. By contrast, the citizens of the world's poorest countries have average eco-footprints of less than one hectare. Even burgeoning China's per capita
eco-footprint is only 1.2 hectares (Wackernagel et al, 1999).11 Given
the size of their citizens' per capita eco-footprints, it should come
as no surprise that many high-income countries exceed their domestic bio-productivity by 100 per cent or more.
Indeed, many industrial nations impose ecological footprints on the Earth several times larger than their political territories. In effect, the enormous
purchasing power of the world's richest countries enables them to finance massive 'ecological deficits' by
appropriating through commercial trade or natural flows the unused productive capacity of other nations and the
global commons. Even the apparent biophysical surpluses of large seemingly under-populated countries like Canada and Australia are taken up by the
ecological deficits of other countries. Most importantly, quantifying the ecological deficits of rich countries should force recognition of the fact that much of the
ecological damage afflicting developing countries and their peoples is caused not by consumption to satisfy local needs, but rather by intensive export-oriented
production to satisfy developed world demand. Consumption by the world's wealthy causes much ecological destruction around the world. But, as noted, distance and
Eco-footprinting thus underscores the gross
inequity characterizing use of the Earth's productive capacity. Figure 5.1 allocates the biophysical output of the planet to a selection of
wealth insulate the rich from the negative consequences of their consumer lifestyles (see Box 5.1).
countries in proportion to their 1977 populations (based on data from Wackernagel et al, 1999). The figure also shows each country's eco-footprint as a proportion of
the Earth's total productive land/water area. This
comparison reveals that wealthy market economies like those of the US, Canada
and Western Europe appropriate two to five times their equitable share of the planet's productive land/water, much
of it through trade. By contrast, low-income countries like India, Bangladesh and even China use only a fraction of
their equitable population-based allocation. The prevailing forces of globalization tend to exacerbate rather than
level these gross eco-economic inequities. Eco-footprinting also shows that the world economy has already exceeded
global ecological limits. There are only about 9 billion hectares of productive cropland, pasture and forest on Earth and perhaps 3
billion hectares of equivalent shallow ocean - this marine area produces about 96 per cent of the global fish catch - for a total of 12 billion productive hectares.
However, with an estimated average eco-footprint of 2.8 hectare per capita (Wackernagel et al, 1999), the present
human population already has a total eco-footprint of almost 17 billion hectares. These data suggest we have
overshot the Earth's long term human carrying capacity by as much as 40 per cent. How can this be? A population can live
in overshoot - ie, beyond its ecological means - for a limited period by depleting vital ecosystems and drawing down non-renewable resource stocks. (This 'capital
empirical proof of human overshoot is the stuff of daily headlines —
ozone depletion, atmospheric and climate change, land degradation, fisheries collapse, biodiversity losses, etc. Since
liquidation' permanently reduces future carrying capacity.) The
the wealthy fifth or so of humanity consumes 80+ per cent of global economic output, the rich alone effectively 'appropriate' the entire capacity of Earth in important
dimensions. The ecosphere itself is now a scarce resource. This dooms to failure any efforts to secure sustainability with justice through sheer material growth. There
simply isn't sufficient natural income — the 'goods and services' of nature — to support even the present world population at Northern material standards while
simultaneously maintaining the functional integrity of the ecosphere.12 Developing
countries cannot follow today's high-income countries
along their historical path to material excess, using prevailing technologies, without undermining global
sustainability (see also Daly, 1991). Herein lies the ecological root of international eco-apartheid. Meanwhile, 2 or 3 billion
additional people are expected to arrive at the feast by 2050 (and we still have to account for the independent habitat needs of the millions of other species with whom
we share the planet). If the world cannot safely expand its way to sustainability (see also Haavelmo and Hansen, 1991, Goodland, 1991, Goodland and Daly, 1993),
we will have to discover other ways of relieving the material impoverishment of half of humanity. For example, developed world consumers might start to think
seriously of ways of reducing their bloated ecological footprints to create the ecological space required for needed growth in the developing world. To
summarize, eco-footprinting underscores the fact that consumption, particularly over-consumption by the rich, is the
principal driver of ecosystems degradation, frequently even in developing countries. This contrasts with the popular view that
subsistence activities by the poor are the most important cause of ecological decay in the South and that'... the surest
way to improve [the] environment is to become rich' (Beckerman, 1992). Eroding ecosystems and changing climate
may directly harm innocent, economically marginalized peoples, but the distal cause is often the unsustainable
lifestyles of the world's wealthy.
Tipping points coming.
Foster et al., Oregon sociology professor, 2010
(John, The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth, pg 14-8)
It is common today to see this ecological rift simply in terms of climate change, which given the dangers it poses and the intractable problems for capitalism it
presents has grabbed all the headlines. But recently scientists—in a project led by Johan Rockstrom at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and including Crutzen
and the leading U.S. climatologist, James Hansen—have
developed an analysis of nine "planetary boundaries" that are crucial to
maintaining an earth-system environment in which humanity can exist safely. Climate change is only one of these,
and the others are ocean acidification, stratospheric ozone depletion, the nitrogen and the phosphorus cycles, global
freshwater use, change in land use, biodiversity loss, atmospheric aerosol loading, and chemical polluti on. For the last
two, atmospheric aerosol loading and chemical pollution, there are not yet adequate physical measures, but for the other seven processes clear
boundaries have been designated. Three of the boundaries—those for climate change, ocean acidification, and stratospheric
ozone depletion—can be regarded as tipping points, which at a certain level lead to vast qualitative changes in the earth system that would
threaten to destabilize the planet, causing it to depart from the "boundaries for a healthy planet." The boundaries for the other four processes—the
nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, freshwater use, change in land use, and biodiversity loss—are better viewed as signifying the onset of
irreversible environmental degradation. Three processes have already crossed their planetary boundaries:
climate change, the nitrogen cycle, and biodiversity loss. Each of these can therefore be seen, in our terminology, as constituting an
extreme "rift" in the planetary system. Stratospheric ozone depletion was an emerging rift in the 1990s, but is now stabilizing, even subsiding. Ocean
acidification, the phosphorus cycle, global freshwater use, and land system change are all rapidly emerging global
rifts, though not yet extreme. Our knowledge of these rifts can be refined, and more plan-etary rifts may perhaps be discovered in the future. Nevertheless,
the analysis of planetary boundaries and rifts, as they present themselves today, helps us understand the full scale of the ecological crisis now confronting humanity.
The simple point is that the planet is being assaulted on many fronts as the result of human-generated changes in the
global environment.4 In the planetary boundaries model developed by Rockstrom and his associates, each ecological process has a preindustrial value (that is, the level reached before the advent of industrial
capitalism), a pro-posed boundary, and a current status. In the case of climate change the preindustrial value was 280 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere; its proposed boundary is 350 ppm
(necessary if tipping points such as a catastrophic rise in sea level are to be avoided); and its current status is 390 ppm. Biodiversity loss is measured by the rate of extinction (number of species lost per million species per year). The
preindustrial annual rate, referred to as the "natural" or "background" rate of species loss, was 0.1-1 per million; the proposed boundary is 10 per million; whereas the current rate is greater than 100 per million (100-1,000 times the
preindustrial back-ground rate). With respect to the nitrogen cycle, the boundary is con-cerned with the amount of nitrogen removed from the atmosphere for human use in millions of tons per year. Before the rise of industrial
capitalism (more specifically before the discovery of the Haber-Bosch process early in the twentieth century), the amount of nitrogen removed from the atmosphere was 0 tons. The proposed boundary, to avoid irreversible degradation
In each of these extreme rifts, the stability of the earth system as we
know it is being endangered. We are at red alert status. If business as usual continues, the world is headed within the next
few decades for major tipping points along with irreversible environmental degradation, threatening much of
humanity. Biodiversity loss at current and projected rates could result in the loss of upward of a third of all living species this century. The pumping of more and
more nitrogen into the biosphere is resulting in the creation of dead zones in lakes and ocean regions (a phenomenon also affected by phosphorus). Each one of
these rifts by itself constitutes a global ecological crisis. These ruptures reveal that the limits of the earth system are
not determined by the sheer physical scale of the economy but by the particular rifts in natural processes that are
generated.5 The emerging rifts in the other ecological processes, which have not yet overshot their boundaries, are scarcely less threatening. For the phosphorus cycle (categorized as part of a single planetary boundary
of the earth system, is 35 million tons per year. The current status is 121 million tons per year .
together with the nitrogen cycle), the preindustrial quantity flowing into the oceans per year was approximately 1 million tons; the proposed boundary is 11 million tons (based on the assumption that ocean anoxic events begin at ten
times the background rate); and its current status is already 8.5 to 9.5 million tons. In regard to ocean acidification, the value refers to a global mean saturation state of arag-onite (a form of calcium carbonate) in surface seawater. A
decline in the number indicates an increase in the acidity of the ocean. The preindustrial value was 3.44 (surface ocean aragonite saturation state); the proposed boundary—after which there would be a massive die-down of shellforming organisms—is 2.75; and the current status is 2.90. In the case of freshwater use, the preindustrial annual consumption of freshwater in km3 (cubic kilometers) was 415; the estimated boundary is 4,000 km3 (marking a
threshold beyond which the irreversible degradation and collapse of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems is likely); and the current rate of consumption is 2,600 km3. For change in land use, the parameters are set by the percentage of
global ice-free land surface converted to cropland. In preindustrial times, this percentage was very low. The proposed boundary is 15 percent (after which there is the danger of triggering catastrophic effects on ecosystems), and the
current status is 11.7 percent. In each of these emerging rifts, we are faced with an orange alert status, in which we are rapidly moving toward extreme conditions, whereby we will pass the planetary boundaries, undermining the earth
system that supports the conditions of life. No measure for chemical pollution has yet been determined, but proposals include measuring the effects of persistent organic pollu-tants (otherwise known as POPs), plastics, endocrine
Likewise, no measure has yet been determined for atmospheric aerosol
loading (the overall particulate concentration in the atmosphere on a regional basis), which can disrupt monsoon
systems, lead to health problems, and interact with climate change and freshwater boundaries. Stratospheric ozone depletion is the one
disrupters, heavy metals, and nuclear waste on ecosystems and the earth system in general.
previously emerging rift that was brought under control (as far as anthropogenic drivers were concerned) in the 1990s, reducing what was a rapidly growing threat to life on the planet due to an increase in ultraviolet radiation from the
sun. The preindustrial value of ozone concentration was 290 (Dobson Units—the measurement of atmospheric ozone columnar density, where 1 Dobson Unit is defined as 0.01 millimeters thick under standard pressure and
temperature); the proposed planetary boundary is a concentration of 276 (after which life on the planet would experience devastating losses); and the current status is 283. Between 60°S and 60°N latitude, the decline in stratospheric
ozone concentrations has been halted. Nevertheless, it will take decades for the Antarctic ozone hole to disappear, and Arctic ozone loss will likely persist for decades. Life on the planet had a close call.6 The mapping out of planetary
Although in recent years the environmental threat has come to be seen by
many as simply a question of climate change, protecting the planet requires that we attend to all of these planetary
boundaries, and others not yet determined. The essential problem is the unavoidable fact that an expanding
economic system is placing additional burdens on a fixed earth system to the point of planetary overload . It has been
estimated that in the early 1960s humanity used half of the planet's biocapacity in a year. Today this has risen to an overshoot of 30 percent
beyond the earth's regenerative capacity. Business-as-usual projections point to a state in which the ecological
footprint of humanity will be equivalent to the regenerative capacity of two planets by the mid-2030s.7 Rockstrom and his
boundaries in this way gives us a better sense of the real threat to the earth system.
associates concluded their article in Nature by stating: "The evidence so far suggests that, as along as the [planetary boundary] thresholds are not crossed, humanity
has the freedom to pursue long-term social and economic development." Although
this is undoubtedly true, what is obviously not
addressed in this conclu-sion—but is clearly the point of their whole analysis—is that these thresholds have in some
cases already been crossed and in other cases will soon be crossed with the continuation of business as usual. Moreover,
this can be attributed in each and every case to a primary cause: the current pattern of global socioeconomic development, that is, the capitalist mode of production
and its expansionary tendencies. The whole problem can be called "the global ecological rift," referring to the overall break in the human relation to nature arising
from an alienated system of capital accumulation without end.'
Global Warming – 1NC
Root cause of global warming is neoliberal drive for profit-try or die for reorganizing social
relations
Abramsky, former Institute of Advanced Studies in Science, Technology and Society fellow,
2010
(Kolya, Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution: Social Struggles in the Transition to a Post-Petrol World, pg 7-9)
The stark reality is that the only two recent periods that have seen a major reduction in global CO2emissions both
occurred in periods of very sudden, rapid, socially disruptive, and painful periods of forced economic degrowth —
namely the breakdown of the Soviet bloc and the current financial-economic crisis. Strikingly, in May 2009, the International Energy Agency reported that, for the
first time since 1945, global demand for electricity was expected to fall. Experience
has shown that a lot of time and political energy have
been virtually wasted on developing a highly-ineffective regulatory framework to tackle climate change . Years of COPs
and MOPs—the international basis for regulatory efforts— have simply proven to be hot air. And, not surprisingly, hot air has resulted in global warming. Only
unintended degrowth has had the effect that years of intentional regulations sought to achieve . Yet, the dominant
approaches to climate change continue to focus on promoting regulatory reforms, rather than on more fundamental
changes in social relations. This is true for governments, multilateral institutions, and also large sectors of so-called "civil society," especially the major
national and international trade unions and their federations, and NGOs. And despite the patent inadequacy of this approach, regulatory efforts will certainly continue
to be pursued. Furthermore, they may well contribute to shoring up legitimacy, at least in the short term, and in certain predominantly-northern countries where the
effects of climate changes are less immediately visible and impact on people's lives less directly. Nonetheless, it is becoming increasingly clear that solutions will not
be found at this level. The
problem has to do with production, not regulation. The current worldwide system of production
is based on endless growth and expansion, which is simply incompatible with a long term reduction in emissions and
energy consumption. Despite the fact that localized and punctual moments of reduction may well still occur, the overall energy consumption and emissions of
the system as a whole can only increase. All the energy-efficient technologies in the world, though undoubtedly crucial to any
long term solution, cannot, on their own, square the circle by reducing the total emissions of a system whose
survival is based on continual expansion. This is not to say that developing appropriate regulation is not important—it is completely essential.
However, the regulatory process is very unlikely to be the driving force behind the changes, but rather a necessary facilitation process that enables wider changes.
Furthermore, regulation that is strong enough to be effective is only likely to come about once wider changes in production are already underway. Energy
generation and distribution plays a key role in shaping human relations. Every form of energy implies a particular organization of work
and division of labor (both in general, and within the energy sector, in particular). The most significant social, economic, cultural, political, and technological
transformations in history were associated with shifts in energy generation: from hunting and gathering to agriculture, from human and animal power for transport and
production to wind and the steam engine, from coal to oil and nuclear fission as drivers of industry and war. All these transformations have led to increased
concentration of power and wealth. And a very real possibility exists that the coming transformation in the world's energy system will result in similar shifts in power
relations. But we live in interesting times. The
ecological and social carrying-capacity of our planet and existing social relations
are overstretched, snapping in different places. This will trigger a major change in the next few decades, but
nobody knows in which direction. Consequently, the most important single factor determining the outcome of
this change will be the intensity, sophistication, and creativity of grassroots social mobilization .
Global Warming – EXTN
Rejecting neoliberalism is key to prevent watered down solutions that make climate change
inevitable.
Foster et al., Oregon sociology professor, 2010
(John, The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth, pg 108-111)
Human activities, primarily fossil fuel combustion and deforestation are unequivocally responsible for the observed
warming of the earth’s atmosphere.2 In the 1990s, global carbon emissions increased 0.9 percent per year, but in 2000-2008 they increased by 3.5
percent per year, presenting a scenario outside of the range of possibilities considered in the 2007 IPCC report.3 This recent escalation has been due to economic
growth, rising carbon intensity, and the continuing degradation of ecosystems that serve as natural carbon sinks.4 At the PICC meeting held in Copenhagen in March
2009, several research noted how global climate conditions had gone from bad to worse: "Emissions
are soaring, projections of sea level rise
are higher than expected, and climate impacts around the world are appearing with increasingly frequency."5 The carbon
dioxide concentration in the atmosphere \has increased from the preindustrial level of 280 parts per million (ppm) to 390 ppm in 2010 (higher than ever before during
recorded human history), with an average rate of growth of 2 ppm per year. Climatologists had previously indicated that an increase above 450 ppm would be
extremely dangerous, given that various positive feedbacks would be set in motion, furthering climate change. But 450 ppm is now seen as too high, given that—
because of inadequate knowledge—most climate models failed to consider "slow" climate feedback processes such as the disintegration of ice sheets and the release
of greenhouse gases from soils and the tundra.6 Hansen and his colleagues warn that "if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization
developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest" that carbon dioxide must be reduced to "at most 350
ppm."7 Thus
it is imperative to act now, since we have already surpassed the limit, and the longer we exceed this point
and the further we push up these numbers, the greater the threat of creating irreversible environment changes with
dire consequences. Global temperature is already at the warmest it has been during the Holocene (the last 12,000 years, which includes the rise of human
civilization). Climate change has shifted the habitat zones for animals and plants and influenced the hydrologic cycle. Specific positive feedbacks have been set in
motion, so that even if carbon dioxide emissions do not increase further, significant additional warming would still occur. Society, through its expanding production
and the resulting carbon emissions, is already in the process of racing off the cliff. For instance, the thawing of the tundra will release massive quantities of the potent
greenhouse gas methane. The melting of ice and snow throughout the planet will reduce the earth's reflectivity, accelerating the warming process. Drought conditions
Other related trends include a rapidly increasing
extinction rate, growing severity of weather events, rising sea levels, and expanding numbers of ecological refugees
throughout the world. Under these circumstances of what can be called, without hyperbole, threatened apocalypse, it is critically important to assess what
will cause "the loss of the Amazon rainforest," greatly diminishing natural sequestration.8
forces are driving the ecological crisis, especially the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere.9 What is abundantly clear at this point is that the logic of capital
The motor of capitalism is competition, which ensures that each
firm must grow and reinvest its "earnings" (surplus) in order to survive. By its nature, capital is self-expanding value,
and accumulation is its sole aim. Hence, capitalism as a system does not adhere to nor recognize the notion of
enough. Joseph Schumpeter observed that "stationary capitalism would be a coundtadictio in adjecto. The capitalist economy must increase in
scale and intensity. The earth and human labor are systematically exploited/robbed to fuel this juggernaut. Today we
are threatened by the transformation of the entire atmosphere of the earth as a result of economic processes.
Although mitigation of and/or adaptation to climate change is definitely on the global agenda, there remains a real
danger that it will be hijacked by mainstream economics, which plays a critical role in constraining possible social responses. The threatening
accumulation runs in direct opposition to environmental sustainability.
imperfections of this are clearly revealed in the work of Nicholas Stern am, William Nordhaus, who represent the limits of variance that exist within the neoclassical
economics mainstream on the issue of climate change. In the most progressive neoclassical treatment of global warming, Stern argues that carbon dioxide equivalent
concentration in the atmosphere (which includes other greenhouse gases as well) should be stabilized at 550 ppm.11 This corresponds to an atmospheric carbon
dioxide concentration of 480 ppm and a rise in global temperature of 3-4°C (6.1-7.2°F) above preindustrial levels.1* Even though this exceeds atmospheric carbon
targets proposed by climatologists. Stern insists that efforts to limit greenhouse gases to levels below this I should not be attempted, given that they "are unlikely to be
economically viable" and would threaten the economic system.13 In other words, t he
level of atmospheric carbon is not to be determined by
ecological considerations in this conception, but by what the present economic system will permit. Nordhaus, the most
prominent U.S. economic analyst of climate change, suggests that only modest reductions in greenhouse gas emissions should be implemented in the short term, and
in the long term more ambitious reductions could be put into place.14 In support of this "climate-policy ramp," he argues against drastic attempts to stabilize
emissions this century. Instead he insists on an "optimal path" that would slow the growth of carbon emissions, peaking at about 700 ppm by 2175, with a global
average temperature approaching 6°C (10.8°F) above preindustrial levels. This way the economy will be permitted to grow, allowing for various investments in
welfare-enhancing areas of the economy to address whatever risks may arise from climate changes. Taking strong measures to reduce carbon levels, even to the extent
proposed by Stern, is seen by Nordhaus as being too economically costly.
Both of these options, offered by orthodox economists who are
seen as taking pro-environment positions, would lead to atmospheric carbon dioxide stabilization goals that many
scientists see as catastrophic. Thus the mainstream economics of climate change directs us toward an ecologically
unsustainable target—one that climatologists believe would imperil human civilization itself, and could result in
deaths in the millions, even billions, plus the loss of countless numbers of species.15
Governmentality – 1NC
Neoliberalism creates disciplining governmentality-renders all populations manageable
and disposable.
Fletcher, UC Santa Barbara cultural anthropology PhD, 2010
(Robert, “Neoliberal environmentality: Towards a poststructuralist political ecology of the conservation debate”,
Conservation and Society8. 3 (Jul 2010): 171-181, proquest)
Hence, whereas Foucault's initial formulation of governmentality stood opposed to discipline, subsequently discipline became one form of
governmentality among others. In his next year's Birth of biopolitics lectures then, Foucault clearly distinguishes between 'disciplinary' and 'neoliberal'
modes of governmentality operating according to quite different principles. While a disciplinary governmentality operates principally through the internalisation of
social norms and ethical standards to which individuals conform due to fears of deviance and immorality, and which they thus exercise both over themselves and one
another, a
neoliberal governmentality seeks merely to create external incentive structures within which individuals,
understood as self-interested rational actors, can be motivated to exhibit appropriate behaviours through manipulation of incentives. Neoliberal
governmentality thus constitutes 'an environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjugation of
individuals' characteristic of a disciplinary governmentality (Foucault 2008: 260). It is 'a governmentality which will act on the environment
and systematically modify its variables' (2008: 271). While neoliberalism is often described as a straightforward revival of the classical liberalism of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, Foucault claims that the two philosophies are in reality quite different. In the economy envisioned by liberal theorists such as Adam Smith,
the state's main role was to intervene subsequently, in the market's effects, to ensure free and fair transactions (for instance, by punishing unscrupulous
businesspeople). According
to the neoliberal architects on the other hand, the state must intervene at the outset to
construct the market itself. It must intervene, in other words, to 'make the market possible' (Foucault 2008: 146). In addition,
whereas classical liberalism sought merely to carve an autonomous space for a market economy to operate according to its own unique laws within a society
overwhelmingly dominated by sovereign authority, neoliberalism does something quite different: It
prescribes the market as the model not
only for behaviour within the economic realm but in the rest of society as well . That is, it seeks to extend the type of
government rationality operating within the market into other realms (e.g., politics and social relations). All of these realms become viewed as
spaces, like the market, in which rational actors compete to maximise their use of scarce resources, and thus
governance in all such areas should entail the construction of appropriate incentive structures to direct actors'
behaviour in beneficial ways. In this vision, then, 'the market is no longer a principle of government's self-limitation',
as in liberalism; rather, 'it is a principle turned against it' (2008: 247). Similarly, while neoliberalism represents a 'return of homo economicus', the
neoliberal rational actor is conceptualised quite differently than that envisioned within classical liberal thought. Whereas a liberal homo economicus
was seen to express her/his self-interest through exchange and consumption for maximum personal utility, the
neoliberal rational actor manifests her/his own self-interest through enterprise and competition for maximum
profit. Thus, while the liberal rational actor's self-interest naturally converged with others' to produce sociallydesirable ends, the competitive neoliberal homo economicus, left to her/his own devices, will undermine social goals, and
thus governmental policy must correct for this reality by encouraging, through the creation of appropriate incentive structures, the
direction of individual self-interest towards socially-productive ends. Hence, whereas the liberal homo economicus should be left alone for the most part to pursue its
her/his self-interest, the
neoliberal subject by contrast is 'someone manageable, someone who responds systematically to
systematic modifications artificially introduced into the environment' (2008: 270). In Foucault's reading, then, the neoliberal state is, by
design, profoundly interventionist, as noted above. This understanding may help to clarify what Bοscher (2010: 656) characterises as the common academic depiction
of 'neoliberalism's ambivalence towards the state-on the one hand, that the state is all that is 'bad' while, on the other hand, that the state is necessary as an 'enabling
environment' (Moore 1999)'. Harvey (2005), as noted above, views the majority of state economic intervention as antithetical to neoliberal doctrine, yet as a necessary
corrective to the ravages of neoliberal policy, the devastating effects of which require amelioration through state policy. This builds on Polanyi's (1944) earlier
analysis of the so-called 'double movement' of free-market capitalism, in which the market's inevitable negative consequences inspire resistance on the part of those
adversely affected by such consequences, thus demanding a response by the state in the form of social policies to support the dispossessed and quell the dissidence
that would otherwise intensify. Similarly, Peck and Tickell (2002: 384) describe 'a shift from the pattern of deregulation and dismantlement so dominant during the
1980s, which might be characterized as 'roll-back neoliberalism', to an emergent phase of active state-building and regulatory reform-an ascendant moment of 'roll-out
neoliberalism''. They view this transition to 'roll-out' policy as a response to the 'perverse economic consequences and pronounced social externalities' (Peck & Tickell
2002: 388) of the earlier 'roll-back' phase, describing the former as an 'aggressive reregulation, disciplining, and containment of those marginalized or dispossessed by
Foucault's analysis (advanced in 1979, long before 'roll-out' neoliberalism was ever
conceived), by contrast, suggests that, notwithstanding contemporary neoliberals' common claim to practice a
wholly technocratic 'antipolitics' (Ferguson 1991; Bοscher 2010), neoliberal state regulation was not merely an afterthe-fact reaction to free market excess but an explicit intention from the outset. The profound difference between neoliberal
the neoliberalism of the 1980s' (2002: 389).
governmentality and a disciplinary art of government can be clearly seen in one of the examples that Foucault provides, namely the two regimes' approaches to
curbing criminality. Within a disciplinary governmentality, as Foucault famously described in Discipline and punish (1977), criminals are viewed as deviant
individuals, possessing an aberrant morality that compels anti-social behaviour. Criminality must thus be addressed through efforts to replace these anti-social values
with norms of proper, 'normal' behaviour, by means of which individuals will subsequently self-regulate, due less to fear of punishment than of being branded deviant
or immoral. This, of course, is the essence of Foucault's (1977) well-known 'panopticon' model for how power operates within modern society in particular. Within a
neoliberal governmentality, by contrast, criminals are viewed not as abnormal deviants but merely rational actors like everyone else seeking to maximise their utility
through the most promising avenues available within their subjective horizons. Addressing criminality, therefore, requires not intervening into subjects' internal states
but merely altering the incentive structures within which criminals operate in order to make crime more costly than obeying the law.
Hence, whereas
incarceration within disciplinary governmentality is a means (at least in part) to compel criminals to internalise
societal norms, under neoliberalism it is merely an additional imposed expense intended to alter the cost-benefit
ratio of the prospect of a future crime and thereby reduce the total quantity that criminals will elect to commit.
Foucault's different governmentalities have divergent implications concerning the exercise of 'biopower' as well. Biopower is, of course, Foucault's
(e.g., 1978, 2003) term to describe a form of power, particularly prevalent within modern western societies, that
seeks not merely to impose sovereign will upon a collection of subjects, but instead to legitimate authority through the
claim that governance serves to enhance the health and vitality of the subject 'population'-for instance, by implementing programmes to reduce death and morbidity
while 'sovereign' power claims the right to 'take life or let live',
biopower claims the inverse authority to 'make live and to let die' (2003: 241).
rates, increase birth and literacy rates, and so on. As Foucault describes,
Latin America – 2NC
Neoliberal engagement in the Americas ensures structural violence, environmental collapse
and insecurity-only radical change solves
Nef, South Florida Latin American and Caribbean Studies director, 2008
(Jorge, Capital, Power, and Inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean, pg 142-7)
Thus, from a long-range structural perspective, social upheavals, some of them violent, have not withered away in the region, although their manifestations have
changed. My analysis strongly suggests that the
politics of limited democratization combined with neoliberal economics, while an
imposes built-in constraints that block the realization of a
truly stable and sustainable system of democratic politics in the Americas. Nor is this combination of limited democracy with
neoliberalism a guarantee against expanding corruption and widespread popular alienation. In fact, the opposite seems to be the case. Moreover, if the
neoliberal economic policies continue to fail to produce a better standard of living for the alienated majorities (as is
currently the case throughout the Americas), and should the structural crisis deepen, these civilian regimes will likely be
replaced once again by repressive civil-military regimes in the name of national security. A subtler form of national
improvement over the atrocious human rights abuses of the military dictatorships,
security ideology is the cultural "software" of the security establishments in most countries of the Americas and a regular staple in the training of the military, police,
and paramilitary forces throughout the hemisphere. The "Communist" subversion of yesteryear is being replaced by new internal enemies: "terrorism," "anarchy," and
"drug traffickers." In fact,
anything that threatens the investment climate, or the core elites' interests, qualifies as a threat to
national security and as a candidate for enemy status. Growing U.S. military involvement, as in Plan Colombia, is a case in point. Moreover, the
post-9/11 atmosphere has had a most deleterious effect on the prospects for democracy in the Americas because it has given those in control of the U.S. government
As the entire region
becomes more closely integrated, a potentially dysfunctional system of mutual vulnerability is taking shape. Its
impact on the life of millions throughout the Americas could be catastrophic. The preservation of the status quo
points toward scenarios where unemployment, poverty, violence, criminality, health hazards, environmental threats,
drug addiction, refugee flows, massive population displacements, repression, and environmental decay feed upon
each other and transcend national boundaries. The regional drug-trading regime is a dramatic illustration of this interconnectedness. The ties
the opportunity to assume a hard-line "counterterrorist" posture that justifies authoritarian measures and the violation of civil rights.
that link the drug trade together begin with peasant producers in the economically depressed Andean region and include the crime syndicates that produce, transport,
and import these addictive commodities, the corrupt officials who assist them, the local retailers who sell the drugs, and the end users, ranging from the destitute to
those in high social standing. Under these circumstances, the linkages of mutual vulnerability between North and South and their multiple accelerators, including the
contingent mode of labor relations, create a spiraling lose-lose situation: a negatives core game. Without profound changes in both the societies of the South and the
Short of a radical reorganization
of the pattern of governance throughout the Americas, including decision making, accountability, and regional
cooperation, multiple and critical dysfunctions are likely to increase within these societies . In recent years, the Americas have
North, the possibility of arresting or reversing the existing serious threats to human security will remain doubtful.
been undergoing a rapid and multidimensional process of globalization, a term often used synonymously with modernization and Americanization (Fukuyama
1999).14 But this process has not necessarily benefited most countries, let alone their people, as Geoffrey Garrett ( 2004) has observed: Middle-income countries have
not done nearly as well under globalized markets as either richer or poorer countries, and the ones that have globalized the most have fared the worst .... The ultimate
irony facing globalization's missing middle may be that the more the free trade project flounders in Latin America, the greater will be the pressure on people in the
region to migrate to the United States. Migration will, in turn, squeeze employment and wages for the American manufacturing middle class even more. (Garrett 2004,
96) Globalization does not involve just a series of purely random, mechanically preordained stages of development operating outside the realm of concrete actors'
interests, objectives, and rules. Rather, this process unfolds within a system of intentional regulations (and deregulations) that affect the very way the "game" of
globalization and its outcomes play out. Globalization in the Americas is not exempt from these eminently political regulatory policies, which the global actors can
create and change. Politics still matters, and what matters in politics is who governs. Regional security cannot be equated with short-term business confidence, the
magic of the marketplace, or a messianic vision of a hemispheric "Manifest Destiny," or "wars" on terrorism, or fending off the "Hispanic threat" (Huntington 2004).
On the other hand, a breakdown of democratic development, prosperity, and equity, together with the increase of tensions in the more volatile regions of the
hemisphere, would have a direct and most deleterious effect upon the well-being and security of the people all over the Americas. The weakness of democratic
institutions and their inability to move from democratic transition and elected plutocracies to the consolidation of popular rule is a critical structural flaw in the
security system of the Western Hemisphere. As a 2005 report from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) in Sweden indicates
(see table 5.2), Key democratic institutions in the Americas are not performing to the entire satisfaction of citizens. Some segments of the population feel and are
effectively excluded from politics and its processes, particularly women, youth and indigenous peoples. In many countries, democratic institutions remain weak,
especially political parties and representative bodies. Politicians are mistrusted everywhere, yet the majority of Latin Americans say that political parties are vital to
democracy. Once in office, Latin American governments often fail to forge the political alliances needed to govern and to facilitate needed reforms (otherwise known
as a "crisis of governability"). (IDEA 2005) A similar observation could be made of North America (Stoker 2006, 36-37). It is becoming obvious that the Cold War's
end did not automatically bring about a Fukuyama-type scenario of the "end of History," with global prosperity, peace, and democracy for all (Fukuyama 1989). The
two-decade-old democratic transition in the region has not been synonymous with either the entrenchment of participatory practices or with responsible government,
let alone with the enhancement of human dignity. The
"safe," "limited," "low-intensity," and substantially meaningless democracy
brokered and supported by Washington and encapsulated in the famous, unilateral "Washington Consensus" is
fundamentally flawed. This model of democratic development, peddled by transition theorists and the neoauthoritarians at the core of the hemispheric order,
impedes more than facilitates the emergence of a sustainable security community for the whole region. So does the persistence of neoliberal
economic dogmatism and the rebirth of national security doctrines designed to fight elusive and perpetual global
enemies. That narrowly defined concept of military security as practiced in the Americas is, in fact, a major
cause of insecurity. This link underpins the insurmountable contradiction between globalization and
militarization (Benftez-Manaut 2004, 59). In this context, real regime change throughout the Americas is a necessary condition for human security and the
well-being of the vast majority of its peoples.
Laundry List – 1NC
Neolbieralism produces crises, securitizes them and militarily lashes out against them-this
cycle triggers every impact and terminates in extinction.
Mosaddeq, Sussex University IR professor, 2010
(Nafeez, “Globalizing Insecurity: The Convergence of Interdependent Ecological, Energy, and Economic Crises”, 720, http://yalejournal.org/2010/07/globalizing-insecurity-the-convergence-of-interdependent-ecological-energy-andeconomic-crises/, DOA: 6-29-12)
The logic of ‘growth’ – as currently defined – is driving the depletion of hydrocarbon and other natural resources at
unprecedented, and unsustainable, rates, and thereby accelerating human-interference with the earth’s climate. Both
climate change and energy crises are detrimentally impacting our ability to sustain global food production . Water shortages and
hotter weather are destroying the viability of agriculture, while predicted fuel shortages are set to undermine agribusiness which is heavily
dependent on fossil fuels. The increasing inability to meet consumer demand for food is also linked to the industrial overexploitation of the soil, as well as a fundamentally flawed international system of food distribution . Finally, the world
economy remains in bad health, generating widening North-South inequalities, and fuelling unsustainable ‘virtual’ growth trajectories
in the North. The ‘Washington Consensus’ has proven to be intimately bound up with the destruction of the
environment, the exhaustion of the soil, the unsustainable depletion of resources and raw materials, and the
unrestrained de-balancing of the Earth’s complexly interdependent ecosystems. If anything, this signifies that we are in era of
civilizational transition to a new post-carbon era. Yet what social form we transition to, remains our collective choice. Currently, conventional ‘securitization’ of these
global crises results in their conceptualization as “threat-multipliers” of traditional security issues such as “political instability around the world, the collapse of
governments and the creation of terrorist safe havens.” By implication, climate change will serve to amplify the threat of international terrorism, particularly in regions
with large populations and scarce resources.[xlvi] For instance, a U.S. Department of Defence and Department of the Army report, 2008 Army Modernization
Strategy, forecasts the future of international conflict up to 2050: “We have entered an era of persistent conflict... a security environment much more ambiguous and
unpredictable than that faced during the Cold War... We face a potential return to traditional security threats posed by emerging near-peers as we compete globally for
depleting natural resources and overseas markets.” The report then highlights the danger of “resource competition induced by growing populations and expanding
economies,” particularly due to a projected “youth bulge” in the South, which “will consume ever increasing amounts of food, water and energy.” Climate change will
“compound” the destabilization of the South through humanitarian crises, population migrations and other complex emergencies.[xlvii] ‘Securitizing’
global
crises, then, leads to strategies of militarization designed to boost an individual state’s resilience to crisis through
intensification of control mechanisms. On the other hand, we have strategies of international cooperation to establish new global governance regimes
by which states can develop treaties and agreements to encourage mitigating action. Unfortunately, as has become painfully clear in Kyoto and more recently in
Copenhagen, while
the first set of ‘securitization’ strategies proceeds apace, the second set of cooperative strategies
continues to result in dismal failure, with states unable to agree on the scale of the crises concerned, let alone the
policies required to address them. In some ways, each of these strategies can be broadly associated with the two predominant approaches to
International Relations theory, namely neorealism and neoliberalism. Neorealism understands interstate competition, rivalry and warfare as inevitable functions of
states’ uncertainty about their own survival, arising from the anarchic structure of the international system. Gains for one state are losses for another, and each state’s
attempt to maximize its power relative to all other states is simply a reflection of its rational pursuit of its own security. The upshot, of course, is the normalization of
political violence in the international system, including practices such as over-exploitation of energy and the environment, as a ‘rational’ strategy – even though this
ultimately amplifies global systemic insecurity. Inability to cooperate internationally and for mutual benefit is thus seen as an inevitable outcome of the simple,
axiomatic existence of multiple states. The problem is that neorealism cannot explain in the first place the complex interdependence or worsening of global crises.
Unable to situate these crises in the context of an international system that is not simply a set of states, but a transnational global structure based on a specific
exploitative relationship with the natural world, neorealism can only theorize global crises as ‘new issue areas’ appended to existing security agendas.[xlviii] Yet, by
the very act of ‘securitizing’ global crises, neorealism renders itself impotent to prevent or mitigate them by addressing their root structural causes. In effect, despite
its emphasis on the reasons why states seek security, neorealism’s approach to issues like climate change actually guarantees greater insecurity by promoting policies
which frame these issues purely as amplifiers of threats. Neorealism thus entirely negates its own theoretical and normative value. For if ‘security’ is the fundamental
driver of state foreign policies, then why are states chronically incapable of effectively ameliorating the global systemic amplifiers of ‘insecurity’? Although
neoliberalism shares neorealism’s assumptions about the centrality of the state as a rational actor in the international
system, it differs fundamentally in the notion that gains for one state do not automatically imply losses for another. As such, states are able to form cooperative,
interdependent relationships conducive to mutual power gains, which do not necessarily generate tensions or conflict. While neoliberalism therefore
encourages international negotiations and global governance mechanisms for the resolution of global crises, it
implicitly accepts the contemporary social, political and economic organization of the international system as an
unquestionable ‘given’ that cannot be subject to debate or reform. The focus, then, is on developing the most optimal ways of
exploiting the natural world to the maximal extent, and neglected is the very role of global political economic structures (such as
ridiculously deregulated markets) in both generating global crises and inhibiting effective means for their amelioration .
Arguably, neoliberalism has difficulty viewing the natural world in anything other than a rationalist, instrumentalist
fashion, legitimizing the over-exploitation of natural resources without limits, and inadvertently
subordinating ecological, energy, food and human security to the competitive pressures of private sector
profit-maximization.[xlix] Both theoretical approaches focus on trying to understand different aspects of inter-state behaviour – conflictual and cooperative
respectively – but each lacks the capacity to address the relationship of the inter-state system itself to the natural world as
a key analytical category for understanding the acceleration of global crises. In doing so, they are unable to acknowledge the
profound irrationality of collective state behaviour, which systematically erodes this relationship, globalizing
insecurity on a massive scale – in the very process of seeking security. Indeed, by reducing this destructive state
behaviour to a function of instrumental reason, both approaches rationalize the deeply irrational collective human
actions that are destroying the very conditions of our existence. For our civilization to begin tackling these crises
effectively, we need to fundamentally re-orient our understanding of the conditions and subjects of security, based
on a new perspective which re-integrates human life as interdependent with, and inextricably embedded in, its
natural environment.[l] This requires a holistic vision of human and ecological security, which recognizes that significant global structural policy reforms are
the only means to protect human life, national survival, and civilizational continuity into the 21st century. That is not to belittle the urgent task of adaptation, but to
recognize that we will save more lives and treasure if we act preventively by re-thinking the efficacy of our current way of life.
Structural Violence – 1NC
Neoliberalism orders the world that renders economically vulnerable societies disposablecreates structural violence and war
Giroux, McMaster cultural studies professor, 2008
(Henry, “Beyond the biopolitics of disposability: rethinking neoliberalism in the New Gilded Age”, Social
Identities; Sep2008, Vol. 14 Issue 5, p587-620, ebsco)
The mutually determining forces of every deepening inequality and an emerging repressive state apparatus have
become the defining features of neoliberalism at the beginning of the new millennium. Wealth is now redistributed upwards to
produce record high levels of inequality, and corporate power is simultaneously consolidated at a speed that threatens to erase the most critical gains made over the
last fifty years to curb the anti-democratic power of corporations. Draconian
policies aimed at hollowing out the social state are now
matched by an increase in repressive legislation to curb the unrest that might explode among those populations
falling into the despair and suffering unleashed by a ‘savage, fanatical capitalism’ that now constitutes the neoliberal war against the public good, the
welfare state, and ‘social citizenship’ (Davis & Monk, 2007, p. ix). Privatization, commodification, corporate mergers, and asset
stripping go hand in hand with the curbing of civil liberties, the increasing criminalization of social problems, and
the fashioning of the prison as the preeminent space of racial containment (one in nine black males between the ages of 20 and 34 are
incarcerated) (Associated Press, 2008). The alleged morality of market freedom is now secured through the ongoing immorality
of a militarized state that embraces torture, war, and violence as legitimate functions of political sovereignty and the
ordering of daily life. As the rich get richer, corporations become more powerful, and the reach of the punishing state extends itself further, those forces and public
spheres that once provided a modicum of protection for workers, the poor, sick, aged, and young are undermined, leaving large numbers of people impoverished and
with little hope for the future. David Harvey (2005) refers to this primary feature of neoliberalism as ‘accumulation by dispossession’, which he enumerates as all of
those processes such as the privatization and commodification of public assets, deregulation of the financial sector, and the use of the state to direct the flow of wealth
upward through, among other practices, tax policies that favor the rich and cut back the social wage (p. 7). As Harvey (2005) points out, ‘All of these processes
amount to the transfer of assets from the public and popular realms to the private and class privileged domains’, and the overwhelming of political institutions by
powerful corporations that keep them in check (p. 161). Zygmunt
Bauman (2007) goes further and argues that not only does
capitalism draw its life blood from the relentless process of asset stripping, but it produces ‘the acute crisis of the
‘‘human waste’’ disposal industry, as each new outpost conquered by capitalist markets adds new thousands or millions to the mass of men and women
already deprived of their lands, workshops, and communal safety nets’ (p . 28). The upshot of such policies is that larger segments of the
population are now struggling under the burden of massive debts, unemployment, lack of adequate health care, and a
brooding sense of hopelessness. What is unique about this type of neoliberal market fundamentalism is not merely the antidemocratic notion that the
market should be the guide for all human actions, but also the sheer hatred for any form of sovereignty in which the government could promote the general welfare.
As Thom Hartmann (2005) points out, governance under the regime of neoliberalism has given way to punishment as one of the central features of politics. He
describes the policies endorsed by neoliberals as follows: Government
should punish, they agree, but it should never nurture, protect,
or defend individuals. Nurturing and protecting, they suggest, is the more appropriate role of religious institutions,
private charities, families, and perhaps most important corporations . Let the corporations handle your old-age pension. Let the
corporations decide how much protection we and our environment need from their toxins. Let the corporations decide what we’re paid. Let the corporations decide
what doctor we can see, when, and for what purpose But the
punishing state does more than substitute charity and private aid for government backed social
cultivates a culture of fear and suspicion towards all those
others immigrants, refugees, Muslims, youth, minorities of class and color, and the elderly who in the absence of dense social networks and
social supports fall prey to unprecedented levels of displaced resentment from the media, public scorn for their vulnerability, and
increased criminalization because they are both considered dangerous and unfit for integration into American society. Coupled
with this rewriting of the obligations of sovereign state power and the transfer of sovereignty to the market is a widely endorsed assumption that regardless of
the suffering, misery, and problems faced by human beings, they ultimately are not only responsible for their fate
but are reduced to relying on their own sense of survival. There is more at stake here than the vengeful return of an older colonial fantasy that
provisions, or criminalize a range of existing social problems; it also
regarded the natives as less than human, or the emerging figure of the disposable worker as a prototypical figure of the neoliberal order though the histories of racist
exclusion inform the withdrawal of moral and ethical concerns from these populations. 10 There
is also the unleashing of a powerfully
regressive symbolic and corporeal violence against all those individuals and groups who have been ‘othered’
because their very presence undermines the engines of wealth and inequality that drive the neoliberal dreams of
consumption, power, and profitability. What is distinct about these complex registers of sovereignty is the emergence of a fundamentally new mode of politics in
which state power not only takes on a different register but in many ways has been modified by the sovereignty of the market. While the state still has the power of the
law to reduce individuals to impoverishment and to strip them of civic rights, due process, and civil liberties, neoliberalism increasingly wields its own form of
sovereignty through the invisible hand of the market, which now has the power to produce new configurations of control, regulate social health, and alter human life in
new and profound ways. This
shift in sovereignty, power, and the political order points to the importance of biopolitics as
an attempt to think through not only how politics uses power to mediate the convergence of life and death, but also
how sovereign power proliferates those conditions in which individuals marginalized by race, class, and gender
configurations are ‘stripped of political significance and exposed to murderous violence’ (Ziarek, 2008, p. 90).
Structural Violence – EXTN
Social invisibility causes extinction – produces backgrounds of structural violence that
makes conflict and environmental collapse inevitable
Szentes, Corvinus University professor emeritus, 2008
(Tamas, “Globalisation and prospects of the world society”,
http://www.eadi.org/fileadmin/Documents/Events/exco/Glob.___prospects_-_jav..pdf, DOA: 7-4-12)
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” Kothari, R. (1987). 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 pattern s, the prevailing patterns of development,
originating in the business environment of the most developed market economies , and motivated by the business interests of the
transnational companies, are generating selfish individualism versus solidarity, cruel competition versus cooperation, and
irrational consumerism, i.e. spending on luxurious, health- and environment-damaging items, versus basic needs
orientation. , 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 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
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
reconciliation, by non-violent conflict management, and thus also a global governance with a really global institutional system.
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. 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-sumgames: 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.
Structural violence is the proximate cause of all war- creates priming that psychologically
structures escalation
Scheper-Hughes et al., Berkeley anthropology professor, 2004
(Nancy Introduction: Making Sense of Violence, in Violence in War and Peace, pg. 19-22)
Absolutely central to our approach is a blurring of categories and distinctions between wartime and peacetime
violence. Close attention to the “little’ violences produced in the structures, habituses and mentalities of everyday life shifts
our attention to pathologies of class, race and gender inequalities. More important, it interrupts the voyeuristic
tendencies of “violence studies” that risk publicly humiliating the powerless who are often forced into complicity
with social and individual pathologies of power because suffering is often a solvent of human integrity and dignity. Thus, in this
anthology we are positing a violence continuum comprised of a multitude of “small wars and invisible genocides”
(see also Scheper-Hughes 1996; 1997; 2000b) conducted in the normative social spaces of public schools, clinics, emergency rooms, hospital wards,
nursing homes, courtrooms, public registry offices, prisons, detention centers, and public morgues. The violence continuum also refers to the ease
with which humans are capable of reducing the socially vulnerable into expendable nonpersons and assuming the
license –even the duty-to kill, maim, or soul-murder. We realize that in referring to a violence and a genocide continuum we are flying in the
face of a tradition of genocide studies that argues for the absolute uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust and for vigilance with respect to restricted purist use of the term
genocide itself (see Kuper 1985; Chaulk 1999; Fein 1990; Chorbajian 1999). But we hold an opposing and alternative view that, to the contrary, it is absolutely
necessary to make just such existential leas in purposefully linking violent acts in normal times to those of abnormal times. Hence the title of our volume: Violence in
War and in Peace. If (as we concede) there is a moral risk in overextending the concept of “genocide” into spaces and corners of everyday life where we might not
ordinarily think to find it (and there is), an even greater risk lies in failing to sensitize ourselves, in misrecognizing proto-genocidal practices and sentiments daily
enacted as normative behavior by “ordinary” good-enough citizens. Peacetime crimes, such as prison construction sold as economic development to impoverished
communities in the mountains and deserts of California, or the evolution of the criminal industrial complex in to the latest peculiar institution for managing race
relations in the United States (Waquant, Chapter 39), constitute the “small wars and invisible genocides” to which we refer. This applies to African American and
Latino youth morality statistics in Oakland, California, Baltimore, Washington DC, and New York City. These are “invisible” genocides not because they are secreted
away or hidden from view, but quite the opposite. As
Wittgenstein observed, the things that are hardest to perceive are those which
are right before our eyes and therefore taken for granted. In this regard, Bourdieu’s partial and unfinished theory of violence (see Chapters 32
and 42) as well as his concept of misrecognition is crucial to our task. By including the normative everyday forms of violence hidden in
the minutiae of “normal” social practices-in the architectures of homes, in gender relations, in communal work, in the exchange of gifts and so forthBourdieu forces us to reconsider the broader meanings and status of violence, especially the links between the
violence of everyday life and explicit political terror and state repression. Similarly, Basaglia’s notion of “peacetime crimes” imagines
a direct relationship between wartime and peacetime violence. Peacetime crimes suggest the possibility that war crimes are merely
ordinary, everyday crimes of public consent applied systematically and dramatically in the extreme context of war. Consider the parallel uses of rape during
peacetime and wartime, or the family resemblances between the legalized violence of US immigration and naturalization border raids on “illegal aliens’ versus the US
government-engineered genocide in 1938 known as the Cherokee “Trial of Tears.” Peacetime crimes suggest that everyday forms of state violence make a certain kind
of domestic peace possible. Internal “stability’ is purchased with the currency of peacetime crimes, many of which take the form of professionally applied “strangleholds.” Everyday forms of state violence during peacetime make a certain kind of domestic “peace” possible. It is an easy-to-identify peacetime crime that is usually
maintained as a public secret by the government and by a scared or apathetic populace. Most subtly, but no less politically or structurally, the phenomenal growth in
the United States of a new military, postindustrial prison industrial complex has taken place in the absence of broad-based opposition, let alone collective acts of civil
disobedience. The public consensus is based primarily on a new mobilization of an old fear of the mob, the mugger, the rapist, the lack man, the under serving poor.
How many public executions of mentally deficient prisoners in the United States are needed to make life feel more secure for the affluent? What can it possibly mean
when incarceration becomes “normative” socializing experience of ethnic minority youth in a society, i.e., over 33 percent of young African American men (Prison
Watch 2002). In
the end it is essential that we recognize the existence of a genocidal capacity among otherwise
good-enough humans and that we need to exercise a defensive hyper vigilance to the less dramatic, permitted,
and even rewarded everyday acts of violence that render participation in genocidal acts and policies possible
(under adverse political or economic conditions), perhaps more easily than we would like to recognize. Under the violence continuum we include, therefore, all
expressions of radical social exclusion, dehumanization, depersonalization, pseudospeciation, and reification which normalize atrocious behavior and violence toward
others. A constant self-mobilization for alarm, a state of constant hyper arousal is, perhaps, a reasonable response to Benjamin’s view of late modern history as a
chronic “state of emergency” (Taussig, Chapter 31).
Value to Life – 1NC
Neoliberalism makes disposable those it renders have nots and makes them socially
invisible
Giroux, McMaster cultural studies professor, 2008
(Henry, “Beyond the biopolitics of disposability: rethinking neoliberalism in the New Gilded Age”, Social
Identities; Sep2008, Vol. 14 Issue 5, p587-620, ebsco)
Any attempt to address the current biopolitics of neoliberalism and disposability must begin by decoupling what has become a
powerful hegemonic element in neoliberal rationality the presupposition that the market is synonymous with democracy
and the final stage in ‘the telos of history’ (Davis, 2008). Against this ideological subterfuge, it is crucial for intellectuals and others not only to reveal neoliberalism as
a historical and social construction, but also to make clear the various ways in which its regime of truth and power is being resisted by other countries, particularly as
‘its magic seems to have faded in the laboratories of the south, especially in Latin America, where once Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Ecuador were crowded
together as its poster children’ (Martin, 2007, p. 20). Equally important
is the necessity to make visible and critically analyze the
matrix of ideological and economic mechanisms at work under neoliberalism and how the latter are producing a
growing inequality of wealth and power throughout the globe . And, yet, revealing the underlying material relations of power, institutions,
and political rationality at work in the biopolitics of neoliberalism while important is not enough. What must also be addressed in resisting the
biopolitics of neoliberalism is its concerted assault on the very possibility of politics, democracy, and the
educational conditions that make them possible. Central to such a challenge is the necessity to address how
neoliberalism as a pedagogical practice and a public pedagogy operating in diverse sites has succeeded in reproducing in the social
order a kind of thoughtlessness, a social amnesia of sorts, that makes it possible for people to look away as an
increasing number of individuals and groups are made disposable , relegated to new zones of exclusion marked by the
presupposition that life is cheap, if not irrelevant, next to the needs of the marketplace and biocapital. Of course, there is more at stake here than providing a genealogy
of neoliberal economics, politics, and hegemony, there is also, as Zygmunt Bauman (2004, 2005, 2006) has pointed out, a need to situate the biopolitics of
neoliberalism within a growing economy of individuation and privatization, the current collapse of the social state, the transfer of power to larger global political
Under the reign of
neoliberalism and its rabid market fundamentalism, society is no longer protected by the state. A s neoliberalism
reproduces with deadly results the multi-leveled economies of wealth and power, it also decouples economics from
public life and morality from market forces, and in doing so creates with little opposition endless numbers of
disposable populations who are stripped of their most basic rights and relegated to the axis of irrelevance. As
forces, the death of long term projects that embrace a democratic future, and a dissolution of all democratic social forms.
Bauman (2006) points out, against the most basic principles of a viable democracy, neoliberalism produces disposable populations that are now not only considered
‘untouchables, but unthinkables’. He writes: In the habitual terms in which human identities are narrated, they are ineffable. They are Jacques Derrida’s
‘undecidables’ made flesh. Among people like us, praised by others and priding ourselves on arts of reflection and self-reflection, they are not only untouchables, but
unthinkables. In a world filled to the brim with imagined communities, they are the unimaginables. And it is by refusing them the right to be imagined that the others,
assembled in genuine hoping to become genuine communities, seek credibility for their own labours of imagination. (pp. 4546) This
logic of disposability
is about more than the extreme examples portrayed by the inhabitants of Agamben’s cam p. The biopolitics of disposability both
includes and reaches beyond the shocking image of the overcrowded refugee camps and the new American Gulag that includes the massive incarceration mostly
people of color, special prisons for immigrants, torture sites such as Abu Ghraib, and the now infamous Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Disposable
populations now include the 60 million people in the United States living one notch about the poverty line, the growing
number of families living on bare government subsistence, the 46 million Americans without health insurance, the over 2,000,000 persons incarcerated in prisons, the
the workers who are one paycheck away
from the joining the ranks of the disposable and permanently excluded, and the elderly whose fixed incomes and
pensions are in danger of disappearing. 16 On a global level, the archetypes of otherness and disposability can be
found in ‘disease-ridden Africa’, the Orientalist paradigm that now defines the Arab world, those geopolitical spaces
that house the growing refugee camps in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and North America, and those countries
from Iraq to Argentina that have suffered under neoliberal economic polices in which matters of structural adjustment are
young people laboring under enormous debt and rightly sensing that the American dream is on life support,
synonymous with the dictates of what Naomi Klein (2007) calls ‘disaster capitalism’. The camp increasingly becomes the exemplary institution of global neoliberal
capital succinctly defined by Zygmunt Bauman (2003) as ‘garrisons of extraterritoriality’, functioning largely as ‘dumping grounds for the indisposed of and as yet
unrecycled waste of the global frontier-land’ (p. 138). A biopolitics that struggles in the name of democratic education and politics becomes impossible unless
individual and political rights are protected and enabled by social rights.
This means in part that collective opposition to the punishing
state and the sovereignty of the market has to be waged in the name of a democracy that takes up the struggle for a social state
that not only provides social protections and collectively endorsed insurance but also redistributes wealth and income so as to eliminate the
inequalities that fuel and reproduce the power of neoliberalism and its war on the welfare state, its promotion of an
expanded military, its contracting out of major public services, and its call for a law-andorder state of (in)security.
Biopolitics as a concept in this struggle is essential because it makes visible a neoliberal regime in which politics not only makes
life itself a site of radical unequal struggle, but under the power of global capital produces a politics of disposability in which exclusion and
death become the only mediators of the present for an increasing number of individuals and groups. If the exclusion of vast
numbers of people marginalized by race, class, age, and gender was once the secret of modernity, late modern politics has amplified its power to exclude large
numbers of diverse groups from a meaningful social existence, while making the logic of disposability central to its definition of politics, and, as I have argued, its
modes of entertainment. But there is something more distinctive about neoliberal biopolitics and a post-9/11 world than an obsession with necropolitics, where the
state of exception becomes routine, a war against terrorism mimics that which it opposes, and death-dealing modes of inequality strengthen, despite the growing
modes of global resistance, the increase in humanitarian aid, the escalating call for more rights legislation, and the growing influence of international law (Comaroff,
2007, p. 207). Neoliberalism’s
politics of disposability not only are maintained merely through disciplinary and
regulatory powers, but also work primarily as a form of seduction, a pedagogy in which matters of subjectification,
desire, and identities are central to neoliberalism’s mode of governing. Pedagogy functions as a form of cultural politics and
governmentality understood as a moral and political practice that takes place in a variety sites outside of schools. In this instance, pedagogy anchors governmentality
in ‘domain of cognition’ functioning largely as ‘a grid of insistent calculation, experimentation, and evaluation concerned with the conduct of conduct’ (Dillon, 1995,
p. 330). But there is more at work here than the ‘domains of cognition’ that shape common sense, there is also a pedagogy of fantasy and desire producing a kind of
‘emotional habitus’ through the ever present landscapes of entertainment (Illouz, 2007). There is in this case a pedagogical apparatus and mode of seduction that in the
name of entertainment invites spectators to watch an unfolding ‘theatre of cruelty’ expanding across the globe to laugh at exclusion and humiliation rather then be
moved to challenge it. And it is precisely at this intersection of pedagogy and politics that neoliberalism must be challenged.
War – 1NC
Globalization causes war-exacerbates all the proximate causes.
Staples, International Network on Disarmament and Globalization chair, 2000
(Steven, “The relationship between globalization and militarism”, Social Justice, 27.4, proquest)
Economic inequality is growing; more conflict and civil wars are emerging.
It is important to see a connection between these two situations. Proponents of global economic integration argue that globalization
promotes peace and economic development of the Third World. They assert that "all boats rise with the tide" when investors and corporations make higher profits. However, there is precious little evidence that this is true and substantial evidence of the opposite. The United Nation's Human Development Report (U.N. Development Programme, 1999: 3) noted that globalization is creating
The
mainstream media frequently oversimplify the causes of these wars, with claims they are rooted in religious or ethnic differences. A
closer inspection reveals that the underlying source of such conflicts is economic in nature. Financial instability, economic
inequality, competition for resources, and environmental degradation -- all root causes of war -- are
exacerbated by globalization. The Asian financial meltdown of 1997 to 1999 involved a terrible human cost. The
economies of Thailand, South Korea, and Indonesia crumbled in the crisis.
. Political upheaval and conflict ensued,
costing thousands of lives. Meanwhile, other countries watched as their neighbors suffered the consequences of
greater global integration. In India, citizens faced corporate recolonization, which spawned a nationalistic political movement. Part of the political
program was the development of nuclear weapons -- seen by many as the internationally accepted currency of
power. Nuclear tests have put an already conflict-ridden region on the brink of nuclear war. 2. Globalization Fuels the Means to Wage War The world
economic system promotes military economies over civilian economies, pushing national economic policies toward
military spending. The World Trade Organization (WTO), one of the main instruments of globalization, is largely based on the premise
that the only legitimate role for a government is to provide for a military to protect the interests of the country and a police force to ensure
order within. The WTO attacks governments' social and environmental policies that reduce corporate profits ,
new threats to human security. Economic inequality between Northern and Southern nations has worsened, not improved. There are more wars being fought today -- mostly in the Third World -- than there were during the Cold War. Most are not wars between countries, but are civil wars where the majority of deaths are civilians, not soldiers.
These countries, previously held up by neoliberal economists as the darlings of globalization, were reduced to riots and financial ruin. The
International Monetary Fund (IMF) stepped in to rescue foreign investors and impose austerity programs that opened the way for an invasion by foreign corporations that bought up assets devalued by capital flight and threw millions of people out of work
and it has succeeded in having national
laws that protect the environment struck down. Yet the WTO gives exemplary protection to government actions that develop, arm, and deploy armed forces and supply a military establishment. Article XXI of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) allows governments free reign for actions taken in the interest of national security. For example, in 1999 a WTO trade panel
ruled against a Canadian government program that provided subsidies to aerospace and defense corporations for the production of civilian aircraft. Within weeks, the Canadian military announced a new $30 million subsidy program for the same Canadian corporations, but this time the money was for production of new weapons (Canadian Press, 1999). In this case, the government was
The $309-billion U.S. military budget dwarfs the
budgets of all its potential enemies combined, and with the collapse of the Soviet Union the U.S. faces no imminent
military challengers. This large budget is, for all practical purposes, a corporate subsid y. Because the corporations involved
happen to be building weapons, the subsidy is protected under GATT's Article XXI. The use of military spending to develop a country's
industrial and economic base has not been lost on Third World countries .
forced down the path of a military economy. Contrast this WTO ruling with the billions of dollars the Pentagon gives to American weapons corporations for developing and producing military aircraft.
Though struggling to lift itself from apartheid-era poverty and accompanying social problems, South Africa is spending billions of dollars on
aircraft, warships, and even submarines in an effort to develop its economy. South Africa stipulated that the arms it buys must be partially manufactured in South Africa. Finance Minister Trevor Manuel explained that the increase in military spending would allow "the National Defence Force to upgrade equipment, while providing a substantial boost to South African industry, foreign
investment, and exports" (Engelbrecht, 1999). South Africa's performance requirements would be wide open to WTO challenges if they were for building schools, hospitals, transportation infrastructure, or virtually anything except weapons. South Africa is about to make the same mistake Northern industrialized countries made: it is creating new military projects that will become
When the current weapons orders have been filled and government funding dries up,
weapons corporations will have to find new customers to maintain current job levels, driving the arms trade and
potentially causing a whole new arms race in the region.
Globalization
and the transnationalization of defense/military corporations have replaced the military-industrial complex of the
Cold War economy with a military-corporate complex of the new global economy
dependent on perpetual government funding, drawing money away from essential social programs.
The Military-Corporate Complex Since the end of the Cold War, President Eisenhower's 1960s-era military-industrial complex has been fundamentally challenged by globalization. Globalization has
weakened the powers of the nation-state, while freeing corporations to move profits and operations across national boundaries. Defense/military contractors, once considered part of the national industrial base and regulated and nurtured as such, are becoming detached from the nation-state and are able to pursue their interests independently.
. This is based upon the dominance of corporate interests over those of the state. The weakened state is no longer
able to reign in weapons corporations and is trapped increasingly by corporate interests: greater military spending, state subsidies, and a liberalization of the arms trade. Increased military production and the proliferation of weaponry take place without considering the costs of militarization to international diplomacy and peace. In many industrialized nations, government military
spending has increased since the end of the Cold War. Lockheed Martin, Boeing, BAe Systems (formerly British Aerospace), Raytheon, Thomson-CSF, and DaimlerChrysler Aerospace are all part of the military-corporate complex. Formerly national in orientation, these corporations have become transnational, with enormous revenues and tremendous economic and political power.
Boeing alone has global sales of over $50 billion and has swallowed up several competitors to become the world's largest maker of military aircraft, including advanced fighters, bombers, helicopters, and missiles. Boeing is the largest U.S. exporter, with customers in 145 countries, employees in more than 60 countries, and operations in 27 U.S. states. Worldwide, over 200,000 people
receive paychecks from Boeing. Weapons corporations on both sides of the Atlantic have been merging at an unprecedented rate in recent years. In the U.S., Boeing has merged with McDonnell Douglas, Hughes Helicopters, and Rockwell International; Lockheed with Martin Marietta and General Dynamics; Northrop with Grumman and Westinghouse; and Raytheon with Hughes
Aerospace & Defense and Texas Instruments Defense. In Europe, British Aerospace has taken over GEC Marconi, and France's Aerospatiale Matra has merged with Germany's DaimlerChrysler Aerospace and Spain's CASA. Weapons corporations are merging to compete more forcefully for a dominant share of the lucrative but highly competitive global arms market. In 1998, arms
. Until the late 1990s, transatlantic mergers of defense/military contractors had been
prohibited by governments due to national security concerns . In 1999, however, the Pentagon admitted that U.S. and European mergers were
inevitable and accorded national treatment to BAe Systems, allowing it to be awarded military contracts as if it were an American corporation. These mergers
produce ever-larger and more powerful weapons-producing corporations. These newly merged corporations are able
to greatly influence, even dictate, government defense and military policy.
imports amounted to $22 billion, with Third World countries accounting for over half of this market
Government regulations have been weakened or removed altogether. For example, export controls designed to prevent weapons from being
sold to countries at war or to countries that violate human rights are narrowly interpreted so that they do not interfere with corporate profits. Foreign embassies and trade missions abroad are used to aid arms sales. 3. The Threat of Military Force Is Used to Protect Corporate Interests According to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, "the hidden hand of the market will never
As
globalization extends the reach of corporate interests around the world, a matching military capacity must be
deployed to protect those interests.
Globalization is driving a global war economy and
creating the conditions for tremendous loss of human life. Many writers and researchers have documented the decline in
human rights, social justice, environmental standards, and democracy caused by globalization . The inevitable
outcome of globalization will be more wars -- especially in the Third World where globalization has its harshest effects. Meanwhile, the elites of
work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps" (Friedman, 1999). Friedman illuminates the strategic relationship that exists between corporations and militaries.
This is the underlying reason the U.S. military maintains the capacity to wage two major wars in different regions of the world simultaneously. There is nothing new about Friedman's "hidden fist." Military supremacy has always been a prerequisite for economic integration
into a sphere of influence or an empire. One can see this in the settling of the New World, when the network of military forts and outposts suppressed First Nations peoples and opened North America for settlers, prospectors, and industry barons. Outer space is the next frontier to be made safe for corporations, according to U.S. military strategists. In Vision for 2020, the U.S. Space
Command revealed that the "U.S. Space Command [is] dominating the space dimensions of military operations to protect U.S. interests and investment" (United States Space Command, 1997). Conclusion
the industrialized world are confident that the global economy will continue to provide them with wealth created from the resources and labor of the Third World.
Their technologically advanced militaries will protect them and their investments, insulating them from the violent effects of globalization.
Unsustainable
Neoliberalism commodifies environmental destruction-means it can’t self-correct
Foster et al., Oregon sociology professor, 2010
(John, The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth, pg 69-72)
A peculiarity
of capitalism, brought out by the Lauderdale Paradox, is that it feeds on scarcity. Hence, nothing is more
Although it is often supposed that
increasing environmental costs will restrict economic growth, such costs continue to be externalized under
capitalism on nature (and society) as a whole. This perversely provides new prospects for private profits through the selective commodification of parts of
nature (public wealth. All of this points to the fact that there is no real feedback mechanism, as commonly supposed, from
rising ecological costs to economic crisis, that can be counted on to check capitalism's destruction of the biospheric
conditions of civilization and life itself. By the perverse logic of the system, whole new industries and markets aimed
profiting on planetary destruction, such as the waste management industry and carbon trading, are being opened up. These new markets
are justified as offering partial, ad hoc "solutions" to the problems generated nonstop by capital's laws of motion.38 The growth of natural scarcity is
seen as a golden opportunity which to further privatize the world's commons . This tragedy of privatization of the commons only
accelerates the destruction of the natural environment , while enlarging the system that weighs upon it. This is best illustrated by the rapid privatization of fresh water,
dangerous to capitalism as a system than abundance. Waste and destruction are therefore rational for the system.
which is now seen as a new mega-market for global accumulation. The drying up and contamination of fresh water diminishes public wealth, creating investment opportunities for capital, while profits made from selling increasingly
scarce water are recorded as contributions to income and riches. It is not surprising, therefore, that the UN Commission on Sustainable Development proposed, at a 1998 conference in Paris, that governments should turn to "large
multinational corporations" in addressing issues of water scarcity, establishing "open markets" in water rights. Gerard Mestrallet, CEO of the global water giant Suez, has openly pronounced: "Water is an efficient product. It is a
product which normally would be free, and our job is to sell it. But it is a product which is absolutely necessary for life." He further remarked: "Where else [other than in the monopolization of increasingly scarce water resources for
private gain] can you find a business that's totally international, where the prices and volumes, unlike steel, rarely go down?"39 Not only water offers new opportunities for profiting on scarcity. This is also the case with respect to fuel
and food. Growing fuel shortages, as world oil demand has outrun supply—with peak oil approaching—has led to increases in the prices of fossil fuels and energy in general, and to a global shift in agriculture from food crops to fuel
crops. This has generated a boom in the agrofuel market (expedited by governments on the grounds of "national security" concerns). The result has been greater food scarcities, inducing an upward spiral in food prices and the spiking
of world hunger. Speculators have seen this as an opportunity for getting richer quicker through the monopolization of land and primary commodity resources.40 Similar issues arise with respect to carbon-trading schemes, ostensibly
aimed at promoting profits while reducing carbon emissions. Such schemes continue to be advanced even though experiments in this respect have thus far failed to reduce emissions. Here, the expansion of capital trumps actual public
At all times, ruling-class circles actively work to prevent radical structural change in this as
in other areas, since any substantial transformation in social-environmental relations would mean challenging the
treadmill of production and launching an ecological-cultural revolution. Indeed, from the standpoint of capital accumulation, global
interest in protecting the vital conditions of life.
warming and desertification are blessings in disguise, increasing the prospects of expanding private riches. We are thus driven back to Lauderdale's question: "What
opinion," he asked, "would be entertained of the understanding of a man, who, as the means of increasing the wealth of... a country should propose to create a scarcity
of water, the abundance of which was deservedly considered one of the greatest blessings incident to the community? It is certain, however, that such a projector
would, by this means, succeed in increasing the mass of individual riches."41 Numerous
ecological critics have, of course, tried to address
the contradictions associated with the devaluation of nature by designing new green accounting systems that would
include losses of "natural capital."42 Although such attempts are important in bringing out the irrationality of the
system, they run into the harsh reality that the current system of national accounts does accurately reflect capitalist
realities of the non-valuation/undervaluation of natural agents (including human labor power). To alter this, it is necessary to transcend the
system. The dominant form of valuation in our age of global ecological crisis is a true reflection of capitalism's
mode of social and environmental degradation—causing it to profit on the destruction of the planet . In Marx's
critique, value was conceived of as an alienated form of wealth.43 Real wealth came from nature and labor power and was associated with the fulfillment of genuine
human needs. Indeed, "it would be wrong," Marx wrote, "to say that labour which produces use values is the only source of the wealth produced by it, that is of mater,
wealth Use-value always comprises a natural element... Labour is a natural condition of human existence, a condition of material interchange [metabolism] between
man and nature." From this slant point, Lauderdale's paradox was not a mere enigma of economic analysis but rather the supreme contradiction of a system that, as
Marx stressed, developed only by "simultaneously undermining the origin sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker."44
The system is unsustainable – the alt is try or die
Shearman, Adelaide University emeritus medicine professor, 2007
(David, The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy, pg 4-6)
This impending crisis is caused by the accelerating damage to the natural environment on which humans depend
for their survival. This is not to deny that there are other means that may bring catastrophe upon the earth. John Gray for example5 argues that destructive
war is inevitable as nations become locked into the struggle for diminishing resources. Indeed, Gray believes that war is caused by the same instinctual behavior that
we discuss in relation to environmental destruction. Gray regards population increases, environmental degradation, and misuse of technology as part of the
inevitability of war. War
may be inevitable but it is unpredictable in time and place, whereas environmental degradation
is relentless and has progressively received increasing scientific evidence. Humanity has a record of doomsayers,
most invariably wrong, which has brought a justifiable immunity to their utterances. Warnings were present in The
Tales of Ovid and in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, and in more recent times some of the predictions from Thomas Malthus and from the
Club of Rome in 1972, together with the “population bomb” of Paul Ehrlich, have not eventuated. The frequent
apocalyptic predictions from the environmental movement are unpopular and have been vigorously attacked. So it must be
asked, what is different about the present warnings? As one example, when Sir David King, chief scientist of the UK government, states that
“in my view, climate change is the most severe problem that we are facing today, more serious than the threat of terrorism,”6 how is this and other recent statements
different from previous discredited prognostications? Firstly, they
are based on the most detailed and compelling science produced
with the same scientific rigor that has seen humans travel to the moon and create worldwide communication
systems. Secondly, this science embraces a range of disciplines of ecology, epidemiology, climatology, marine and
fresh water science, agricultural science, and many more, all of which agree on the nature and severity of the
problems. Thirdly, there is virtual unanimity of thousands of scientists on the grave nature of these problems. Only a
handful of skeptics remain. During the past decade many distinguished scientists, including numerous Nobel Laureates, have warned that humanity has perhaps one or
two generations to act to avoid global ecological catastrophe. As but one example of this multidimensional problem, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
climate change is but one of a host of
interrelated environmental problems that threaten humanity. The authors have seen the veils fall from the eyes of many scientists when
(IPCC) has warned that global warming caused by fossil fuel consumption may be accelerating.7 Yet
they examine all the scientific literature. They become advocates for a fundamental change in society. The frequent proud statements on economic growth by
humanity has moved one step closer to
doom. Science underpins the success of our technological and comfortable society. Who are the thousands of scientists who issue the warnings we choose to
treasurers and chancellors of the exchequer instill in many scientists an immediate sense of danger, for
ignore? In 1992 the Royal Society of London and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences issued a joint statement, Population Growth, Resource Consumption and a
Sustainable World,8 pointing out that the environmental changes affecting the planet may irreversibly damage the earth’s capacity to maintain life and that humanity’s
own efforts to achieve satisfactory living conditions were threatened by environmental deterioration. Since 1992 many more statements by world scientific
organizations have been issued.9 These substantiated that most environmental systems are suffering from critical stress and that the
developed countries are the main culprits. It was necessary to make a transition to economies that provide increased human welfare and less consumption of energy
and materials. It seems inconceivable that the consensus view of all these scientists could be wrong . There have been numerous
international conferences of governments, industry groups, and environmental groups to discuss the problems and develop strategy, yet widespread deterioration of the
environment accelerates. What is the evidence? The Guide to World Resources, 2000 –2001: People and Ecosystems, The Fraying Web of Life10 was a joint report of
the United Nations Development Program, the United Nations Environment Program, the World Bank, and the World Resources Institute. The
state of the
world’s agricultural, coastal forest, freshwater, and grassland ecosystems were analyzed using 23 criteria such as food
production, water quantity, and biodiversity. Eighteen of the criteria were decreasing, and one had increased (fiber production, because of the
destruction of forests). The report card on the remaining four criteria was mixed or there was insufficient data to make a judgment. In 2005, The Millennium
Ecosystem Assessment Synthesis Report by 1,360 scientific experts from 95 countries was released.11 It stated that approximately 60
percent of the
ecosystem services that support life on earth—such as fresh water, fisheries, and the regulation of air, water, and
climate—are being degraded or used unsustainably. As a result the Millennium Goals agreed to by the UN in 2000 for addressing poverty
and hunger will not be met and human well-being will be seriously affected.
Math unequivocally goes NEG.
Naess, Aalborg Urban Planning professor, 2006
(Peter, “Unsustainable Growth, Unsustainable Capitalism”, Journal of Critical Realism, 5.2, ebsco)
Those who believe that economic growth can be de-coupled from environmental loads and resource consumption will probably answer that we must (and will)
become even more proficient in the art of dematerialisation, i.e. produce more and more while continually decreasing the resource input and environmental impacts
per unit produced. But
as growth continues over a long time span, quite dramatic reduction factors will be needed in order
to prevent resource consumption and environmental load from increasing. With a growth rate of three and a half per
cent per year over a period of 100 years, obtaining a halving of the annual resource consumption and environmental load would
require dematerialisation down to 1.6 per cent of the present level , that is, by a factor of 62. If expected global
population growth is also taken into consideration, along with the even higher growth rates recommended by the World Commission
in developing countries in order to raise their standard of living, then the necessary dematerialisation factor in industrial
countries is even higher, probably over 100. And notice that this reduction factor must be the average for all sectors— both where the
potential for dematerialisation is high and in sectors where a disconnection of growth from environmental load is difficult. Even with a more moderate
growth rate, for example 2.1% per year, which is more similar to the growth actually experienced in Western European countries in recent years, the
world’s total production would increase by a factor of 8 after 100 years, 64 after 200 years, and 32,858 after 500
years. If the environmental load is to be half the present level, an average dematerialisation factor of more than
65,000 would be required by the middle of this millennium! The absurdity of these scenarios illustrates how
untenable it is to believe that growth in consumption and production can continue infinitely without running into
ecological limits. The dogma of the possibility of decoupling growth in production and consumption from exploitation of natural resources and environmental
degradation is therefore not valid, at least not in a long-term perspective. The belief that production and consumption can be multiplied
again and again out of nothing is the alchemy of neoclassical economics.
Increasing complexity undermines resiliency and creates diminishing returns.
Naess, Aalborg Urban Planning professor, 2006
(Peter, “Unsustainable Growth, Unsustainable Capitalism”, Journal of Critical Realism, 5.2, ebsco)
The idea that greater efficiency and substitution of consumption away from the most harmful categories are sufficient to
ensure environmentally sustainable development has been criticised by a number of prominent economists. 17 For one
thing, there is an absence of institutional frameworks for changing the quality of growth. The need for such frameworks in order to
prevent private initiatives from causing negative impacts was recognised already by the classical economic theorist
Adam Smith. History has so far shown that capitalist companies are strongly opposed to the introduction of such frameworks.
18 Even if institutional frameworks were installed, it is doubtful that continual economic growth could be made
environmentally sustainable. According to Herman Daly, ‘sustainable growth’ is an oxymoron. In its physical dimension, the economy is an
open subsystem of the earth’s ecosystem, which is finite, non-growing and materially closed. As the economic subsystem
grows, it incorporates an ever greater proportion of the total ecosystem i nto itself and must reach a limit at 100 percent, if not before. 19
Admittedly, the earth receives an amount of solar energy several orders of magnitude greater than the energy utilised for human purposes. However, the natural
resources exploited in order to increase consumption and production are not confined to energy, but include a range of raw materials, chemicals and foodstuffs as well.
Growth in production facilities, infrastructure and housing standards also occupies space and contributes to the fragmentation of ecosystems. Moreover, the utilisation
and distribution of solar energy for human purposes requires material installations (e.g., solar heat panels, photovoltaic cells, transmission lines and batteries), and
some of the components may cause pollution during material extraction, production or disposal after use, and/or have a limited durability. 2 As indicated above,
shifting from the polluting production of industrial society to the allegedly cleaner and less environmentally harmful commodities of post-industrial society has been
extensive outsourcing of manufacturing
industries from wealthy countries to Third World countries with lower labour costs during recent decades indicates
that there is no post-industrial society on a global scale. There is also a question as to whether there is not
considerable material resource consumption associated with most of the activities of the service sector , which is often
mentioned as a way to change the content of growth in an environmentally sound way. 21 However,
highlighted as a less environmentally loading sphere than the manufacturing industries. Many of these service businesses are quite transport intensive. The food and
beverages served in a restaurant are, for example, often imported from far corners of the world, and thus contain considerable indirect energy consumption. Scientific
work, which is often mentioned as an activity leaving few ecological imprints in itself, is also increasingly based on heavily polluting international air travel. 22
Moreover, new scientific knowledge often facilitates extended material consumption. Apart from it growth impetus
through technological development, the contribution of science to economic growth is probably quite limited.
Basically, almost all kinds of service represent the results of human labour in connection with some capital asset. Any increase in service activities in order to obtain
economic gains would need to be performed without any increase in these service-oriented capital assets if the ecological requirements were to be met. 23 The
microchip is often considered an outstanding example of dematerialisation since both its economic value and its user-value are high, whereas the weight of the product
is minimal. However, the production of such a complex system as a microprocessor involves a number of more or less hidden costs. According to a study conducted
by the United Nations University in Tokyo, the relative consumption of secondary materials is substantially higher in the production of microchips than is the case for
traditional commodities. The results of the study suggest that the production of such complex and highly organised systems as microprocessors involves a
mechanism—termed ‘secondary materialisation’—working in the opposite direction to dematerialisation. Secondary
materialisation is the apparent
tendency for ever more complex products to require increasing amounts of secondary materials and energy in order
to render possible the lower level of entropy characterising these products, compared to traditional commodities.
Entropy is the thermodynamic notion for the opposite of order. A highly organised system is a low-entropy system obtained through
the input of labour and energy. It requires enormous amounts of energy to transform the heap of sand making up the raw material of the microchip into a
microchip that can function inside a computer. The production of a microchip weighing two grammes requires more than one and a half kilograms of fossil energy, 72
grammes of chemical substances, 32 litres of water and 700 grammes of nitrogen and other gases. 24
A2: Capitalism Good
Alt doesn’t eliminate capitalism-but rather creates social forms in spite of capitalism.
De Angelis, East London political economy professor, 2004
(Massimo, “Separating the Doing and the Deed: Capital and the Continuous Character of Enclosures”, Historical
Materialism; 2004, Vol. 12 Issue 2, p57-87, ebsco)
As we have seen, since commons emerge out of a
relational social field, they are defined in opposition to enclosures. In other words, just as capital’s drive for accumulation must identify a
common as limit for its expansion and thus outline strategies of new enclosures, 67 so the building of alternatives to capital must identify a
strategic space in which current enclosures are limiting the development of new commons. To be able to identify, so
to speak, ‘them’ as the limit of ‘our’ project would be a great strength, a strength that is based on processes of political recomposition
and constitution of projects that pose the concrete question of alternatives here and now, and not in a distant future . In other words, life despite
capitalism and not life after capitalism. How can we politically invert capital’s strategies and identify enclosures as limits for non-market social
However, we must be fully aware of the implications of this discourse on commons.
interactions and as a strategic space for new commons? This is the true strategic challenge faced by the many articulations of today’s global justice and solidarity
movement. As I have argued elsewhere, to be
viable and desirable, a process for the definition and constitution of alternatives
requires nothing less than participatory, inclusive and democratic forms of organisation that found their political practice on
formulating and addressing questions such as ‘What do we want?’, ‘How do we go about getting it?’ and ‘Who is “we”?’. 68 Raising and addressing these
naïve questions as part of our political practice implies that we participate in the production of a discursive inversion
of the ‘ordinary run of things’, and the opening up of the many spaces for alternatives and the problematisation of
their articulation.
Neoliberalism is different from capitalism
Klein, London School of Economics Milibrand Fellow, 2007
(Naomi, “The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” pgs. 24-5)
I am not arguing that all forms of market systems are inherently violent. It is
eminently possible to have a market-based economy that
requires no such brutality and demands no such ideological purit y. A free market in consumer products can coexist with free public health
care, with public schools, with a large segment of the economy—like a national oil company—held in state hands. It's equally possible to require
corporations to pay decent wages, to respect the right of work¬ers to form unions, and for governments to tax and
redistribute wealth so that the sharp inequalities that mark the corporatist state are re¬duced. Markets need not
be fundamentalist. Keynes proposed exactly that kind of mixed, regulated economy af¬ter the Great Depression, a revolution
in public policy that created the New Deal and transformations like it around the world. It was exactly that system of compromises, checks and balances that
Friedman's counterrevolution was launched to methodically dismantle in country after country. Seen
in that light, the Chicago School strain of
capital¬ism does indeed have something in common with other dangerous ideologies: the signature desire for
unattainable purity, for a clean slate on which to build a reengineered model society. This desire for godlike powers of
total creation is precisely why free-market ideologues are so drawn to crises and disasters. Nonapoc-alyptic reality is simply not hospitable to their ambitions. For
thirty-five years, what has animated Friedman's counterrevolution is an attraction to a kind of freedom and possibility available only in times of cataclysmic change—
when people, with their stubborn habits and insistent demands, are blasted out of the way—moments when democracy seems a practical impossibility.
A2: Capitalist Peace/Gartzke Evidence
Gartzke’s model has significant missing values which biases its findings
Han, British Columbia political science MA, 2012
(Zhen, “The Capitalist Peace Revisited: A New Liberal Peace Model and the Impact of Market Fluctuations”,
March, https://circle.ubc.ca/bitstream/handle/2429/41809/ubc_2012_spring_han_zhen.pdf?sequence=1)
The missing value problem needs serious attention for the students who study liberal peace models. Dafoe finds
that missing values in Gartzke’s models are systematically associated with its major explanatory variable—market
openness96 , thus leads to a biased conclusion. For example, China, the U.S.S.R, and North Korea were involved in
several militarized interstate conflicts, but a significant part of the market openness is missing for these
countries97, and excluding these cases from the model leads to a bias. While Dafoe assigns value 1 (least open to financial market)
to all the missing values of China, U.S.S.R and North Korea, he finds that market openness lost its significance and democracy become significant again98. But
Dafoe’s approach can be problematic as well, because these nations may be open to each other while staying closed to the west or the global financial markets. In case
of North Korea, foreign capital from the U .S.S.R and China are pivotal to the survival of the regime.
Correcting for those missing values proves market liberalization causes conflict--Gartzke’s backwards
Han, British Columbia political science MA, 2012
(Zhen, “The Capitalist Peace Revisited: A New Liberal Peace Model and the Impact of Market Fluctuations”,
March, https://circle.ubc.ca/bitstream/handle/2429/41809/ubc_2012_spring_han_zhen.pdf?sequence=1)
Model 1 replicates Model 5 of Gartzke’s capitalist peace paper100. A major difference between the findings of Model 1 and
Gartzke’s capitalist peace Model 5 is that, Model 1 of this paper shows that higher level of financial market openness is positively
associated with more conflict, while Gartzke finds his market openness index is negatively associated with more conflict101. As Dafoe points out,
Gartzke’s finding can be damaged by the missing values in his market openness variable, and the temporal
dependence and cross-sectional dependence are not properly controlled 102. Model 1 pays close attention to these
problems, and finds that, at least in this period, market openness is positively associated with more conflicts. As the
data of this paper focuses on a different time period, this result does not suggest Gartzke is wrong, but further explanation of why market openness is positively
associated with more conflict is necessary. The low value of democracy is negatively associated with conflicts, and this finding is consistent with the argument of
democratic peace theory. The positive impact of the high value of democracy possibly shows that a discrepant dyad—when the democracy low value is controlled—is
more likely to fight each other. As Choi points out, the interpretation of the democracy high variable is often difficult, but it seems the democratic peace theory is well
supported by this data. The traditional commercial peace theory, which focuses on the trade dependency created by international commodity trade, is also supported
by this model. Development makes noncontiguous states more likely to fight each other, as the development facilitated the capacity of states to project power to a
longer distance, but development also makes contiguous states less likely to fight each other103. This finding supports that the interaction effect between contiguity
and development is also robust in this period. Being a major power makes the state more likely to be involved in conflicts. Similar to this finding, a state is more likely
to be involved in MIDs if its national power index is higher. However, formal alliances have no significant impact on the probability of MIDs. Model 2 replaces the
high value of democracy with the democracy distance variable104 . Since the democracy distance variable is a linear transformation of the high value of
democracy105 , this replacement produces identical results to Model 1, but the interpretation of democratic peace in this model is much easier. The positive and
significant impact of the democracy distance variable supports the expectation from Choi: politically different countries— the authoritarian states and the democratic
states—are more likely to fight each other 106 . Different political ideology can be the underlining reason for tension. As this paper suggests before, since many
pacifying mechanisms available for democracies do not exist in autocratic and discrepant dyads, the same democracy distance should have different impact in
different types of dyad. Model 3.1 applies this proposal and makes the lower value of democracy interact with the democracy distance variable. The findings are
impressive: The negative coefficient of the lower value of democracy becomes significant again; the coefficient of democracy distance loses its significance, but the
interaction effects between these two variables are positively significant. This finding supports the democratic peace argument: countries are less likely to fight if they
both are highly democratic, but this pacifying effect has been mitigated if the democracy distance is getting bigger. Figure 1 presents a prediction of the probability of
conflict based on Model 3.1. It shows that the probability of conflict is almost the same for autocratic and discrepant dyads, and both of them are much higher than the
probability for democratic dyads. Model 3.2 replaces the low value of democracy with a three-category indicator of dyad type 107 and makes the dyad type indicator
interacting with the democracy distance variable. The result shows that, compared with the base category (democratic dyad), the risk of fighting is higher in the other
two types of dyads. In the base category, democratic distance does not have significant impact on their chance of fighting. Figure 2 shows how the predicted
probability of conflict, based on Model 3.2, changes across different dyad types. The predicted probability shows that one can confidently claim that democratic dyads
are more peaceful than other types of dyad, but the upward trend, which is similar to the trend showing in the predicted chance of fighting for autocracies, shows that
bigger democracy distance leads to more conflicts in these two types of dyads. The discrepant dyad group generally behaves similarly to the autocracy group, except
that the downward trend of the curve, showing that instead of fighting for different democratic ideology, shows discrepant dyads often fight for other reasons.
However, the confidence interval of the discrepant dyad group largely overlaps with the confidence interval of the autocracy group, so more data are needed to
distinguish whether discrepant dyads behave differently from autocracy dyads. In conclusion, this paper argues that the democratic peace model can be improved by
interacting the democracy distance variable with the other democracy measurement of the dyad. Findings from these interaction models support the dyadic claim that
―democratic countries are unlikely to fight each other‖, but they also suggest one cannot extend this claim to the monadic level. Democratic countries are not more
peaceful, as the chance of conflicts is high in a discrepant dyad. Increasing ideological differences, as measured by the democracy distance variable in these models,
higher market openness can lead to more
conflicts. This positive correlation might be explained by the spillover effect of market fluctuation. In order to capture the impact of
can increase the chances of conflicts. On the commercial peace aspect, Model 1 of this paper suggests that
market fluctuation, Model 4 added a set of variables related to the measurement of foreign capital net inflows to the model. The results show that, once the capital
flow factors are considered in the model, the market openness variable loses its significance, and a
higher level of capital net inflow is positively
associated with more interstate conflicts. The missing value indicator of capital net inflows is included in the model to control the damage caused by
missing data in the capital net inflow variable. This missing indicator is positive and significant, suggesting that missing economic data are systematically associated
with militarized conflicts. The lagged capital net inflows variable, measured as the percentage of GDP, is included in the model, and higher level of capital net inflows
is associated with a higher risk of conflicts. The
change of capital net inflow variable, which is measured by the level of current capital net inflows
also positively associated with more conflicts, meaning the risk of
conflict is higher if there are more foreign capitals pouring into the country. These findings support the theory of this
paper that large capital inflows can destabilize the domestic economy and cause crises, but they are also contrary to the conventional
minus the level of the one-year lagged capital net inflows, is
understanding that foreign capital will leave the conflicting region. However, it can be explained by the following reasons.
Market liberalization increases statistical risk of war
Han, British Columbia political science MA, 2012
(Zhen, “The Capitalist Peace Revisited: A New Liberal Peace Model and the Impact of Market Fluctuations”,
March, https://circle.ubc.ca/bitstream/handle/2429/41809/ubc_2012_spring_han_zhen.pdf?sequence=1)
The third causal mechanism is socialization
theory. Market integration provides more forums allowing national policy makers
to meet, thus policy transparency can be increased, and misinterpretations, which can lead to more conflicts, are reduced 62 . Similar
policy interests can also be developed through the socialization processes63. ***TO FOOTNOTES*** 63 This is the hypothesis 3 in Gartzke’s
Capitalist Peace argument. Gartzke, 2007. ***END FOOTNOTES*** However, Waltz argues that as the number of contracts increases
through international market integration, the number of contract default will also increase 64; therefore, socialization
under globalization can work in a negative way and make conflicts more likely. On the other hand, the socialization effect
caused by financial market integration can be limited, as the highly professionalized nature of financial markets creates interactions only within
a small group of experts. Chewieroth suggests that state leaders often have little to say in the norm building of international financial structure, and the self-interested
bureaucrats of IMF and other international financial organizations have a significant impact on financial liberalization65. These discussions suggest there are some
reasons to argue that the pacifying effects of financial liberalization are not as strong as commodity international trade. The causal mechanisms of conventional
the possible negative impact of liberalization needs to be
considered, as liberalization does not always bring stability. Financial market fluctuations, often marked by significant
amount of capital inflows and outflows, can destabilize economy and cause further crisis. While the negative impact of large
capital outflows, often known as the capital flight, are well recognized, this paper suggests that large capital inflows can be risky too . One can observe
commercial peace may not function well with the financial integration. Furthermore,
a large foreign capital inflow in cases of speculative accumulation, which often leads to financial crises when market confidence starts to collapse. The Asian Crisis in
1997 is an example of this type of crisis66. A large capital inflow also can be observed if the state is consistently borrowing from international financial markets to fix
its budget deficits, such as the case in the 2011 Euro crisis. In both cases, large
capital net inflows destabilize the economy and causes
economic crisis. In the processes discussed above, higher level of financial deregulation provides the tool for states to borrow
more from foreign capitals market, and it also encourages foreign capitals to take the risk of entering a foreign market,
as liberalization guarantee foreign capitals can pull out at any time as they want. For these reasons, it is reasonable to observe increasing capital net inflows67 before a
crisis breaks out, and a
higher level of liberalization increases the vulnerability of the state . These discussions lead to the Hypothesis 5
higher level of financial liberalization leads to a higher chance of having militarized interstate
conflicts. H6: A higher level of capital flight leads to a higher chance of having militarized interstate Conflicts.
and 6 of this thesis. H5: A
A2: Environmental Kuznets Curve
Impossible on a global scale and just a tool to perpetuate neoliberalism
Okereke, Smith School Head of the Climate and Development Centre, 2008
(Chukwimerije, Senior Research Fellow, Global Justice and Neoliberal Environmental Governance: Ethics,
sustainable development and international co-operation, 180-1)
Another key element in the neoliberal environmental governance philosophy that requires close examination is the argument that Western-style industrialization and
The logic, as noted, is that capitalist
economies provide both the wealth and the technological know-how that are required to maintain a high standard of
living, enforce advanced environmental regulations and secure sound ecological integrity. According to this view, it is better to
capitalist economies are merely necessary stages that must be passed on the road to an ecologically stable society.
concentrate on pursuing industrial economic growth worldwide as this would provide a share of surplus that could be plugged back to improve environmental
standards globally. Again, the fact that the environmental quality of the industrialized countries is generally better is used to buttress this argument. Now, there is no
doubt that a certain degree of poverty leads to a greater despoliation of the environment. For example, a considerable amount of energy could be saved if the millions
of people in developing countries who currently depend on woodburning for their daily cooking and heating needs were to have access to more energy-efficient
heating systems. As the Brundtland Report clearly admits, poverty can lead to more environmental destruction under some circumstances. However, it
is very
difficult to stretch this argument to say that Western-style capitalism is an inevitable prerequisite for achieving
global environmental sustainability. First, as many empirical studies show, about 10 times more resources would be
needed if the whole of the global population was to consume as many resources as those in the industrialized
countries. Studies deploying the concept of the 'ecological footprint' and 'ecological space' make it clear that the economic prosperity achieved by the developed
countries was, and still is, heavily 'dependent on extra territorial productive capacity through trade or appropriated natural flows' (Nijkamp et al. 2004: 751; cf.
Wackernagel and Silverstein 2000). In
many cases these studies indicate that the developed countries have already exceeded
their share of the world's resources and are feeding on those of the developing countries (Wackernagel and Rees 1996; Haberl
etal 2004, Monfreda 2004). These data show, as Wackernagel and Silverstein (2000: 393) put it, that 'their footprint has grown larger than their actual territories can
sustain, such that they now run an "ecological deficit"'. In fact, those who 'emphasize the positive potentials' (McCarthy 2004: 328) between capitalist growth and
environmental justice are wont to neglect the extent to which the material prosperity enjoyed in the North is directly related to the environmental degradation and
economic poverty that is experienced in the South (Gokay 2006; Okereke 2006b). For example, to the same extent that industrialized countries have built their
development on cheap oil, oil-producing developing countries have been deprived of valuable income and opportunities for improved well-being (Gokay 2006;
Fouskas 2006; Mofford 2006). Even
now, developed countries, which comprise 25 per cent of the world's population,
consume 70 per cent of the world's energy, 85 per cent of its timber and 78 per cent of its metals. The degree of inequity is so glaring that even an
EU White Paper on Growth, Competitiveness and Employment (cited in Carley and Spapens 1998: 29) has had to admit that: Extrapolating current
industrial consumption and production patterns to the entire world would require ten times the existing resources,
which illustrates the scope for possible distribution tensions and ecological problems at a global level if current
tendencies are not curbed. Sachs (1999) argues that, prior to the rise of the notion of sustainable development, established thinking favoured the reasoning
that there are no limits to growth. The concept of limitless growth, he says, went hand in hand with the notion of the superabundance of environmental resources. For
Sachs, the establishment of dominant thinking in favour of limitless growth created an atmosphere under which the
justice discourses became effectively marginalized in international economic arrangements, with discussions on
development and economic growth dominating the arena (Sachs 1999). The process (oversimplified) is as follows. With the notion of
well-being firmly entrenched in economic prosperity, international justice came to be seen not so much as
concerning itself with (re)distributing wealth among nations but as increasing the total 'pie' that is available and
creating more opportunities for more nations to share in the unending resources through free trade, export
stimulation and economic aid. This perception was supported by the hegemonic idea that there is no alternative
to the market, nor indeed is any alternative desirable, as the market is seen as providing the best means of
increasing wealth, spreading development and reducing injustices (Bhagwati 1993: 42^49). This is the logic behind the flurry of
international development aid and related activities, which are mostly presented as acts of international justice (Okereke 2006a).
A2: Environment Resilient
Environmental resilience theory gets co-opted by corporate elites and is wrong- justifies
regulatory rollback and liability limitation while ignoring the timescape clash between fast
extraction and slow recovery
Nixon, University of Wisconsin-Madison English professor, 2011
(Rob, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, pgs. 21-22)
That said, we need to be cautious about romanticizing the noncom-pliance that may inhere in a targeted resource: relative to the accelerated plunder involved, say, in
the "second scramble" for Africa—as American, Australian, Chinese, European, and South African corporations cash in on resource-rich, regulation-poor, war-
The recent turn within environmental studies toward
celebrating the creative resilience of ecosystems can be readily hijacked by politicians, lobbyists, and corporations
who oppose regulatory controls and strive to minimize pollution liability. Co-opting the "nature-and-time-willheal" argument has become integral to attempts to privatize profits while externalizing risk and cleanup,
both of which can be delegated to "nature's business." This was dramatically illustrated by the Deepwater Horizon disaster— in the laxity
fractured societies—the resistance posed by nature itself should not be overstated.42
that contributed to the blowout and in the aftermath. Big Oil and government agencies both invoked natural resilience as an advance strategy for minimizing oversight.
Before the blowout, the Minerals Management Service of the U.S. Interior Department had concluded that "spills in deep water are not likely to affect listed birds. .. .
Deepwater spills would either be transported away from coastal habitats or prevented, for the most part, from reaching coastal habitats by natural weathering
processes."43 Even
after the disaster, this line of reasoning persisted. Oil industry apologist Rep. Don Young (R-AK),
testifying at congressional hearings on the blowout, knew exactly how to mine this "natural agency" logic: the Deepwater Horizon spill was "not an environmental disaster," he declared. "I will say that again and again because it is a
natural phenomenon. Oil has seeped into this ocean for centuries, will continue to do it. ... We will lose some birds, we will
lose some fixed sea-life, but overall it will recover."44 BP spokesman John Curry likewise explained how industrious microbes would cleanse
the oil from the gulf: "Nature," he concluded sanguinely, "has a way of helping the situation."45 BP representatives repeatedly invoked the capacity of marine life to
metabolize hydrocarbons and the dispersing powers of microbial degradation. But
in conscripting nature as a volunteer clean up crew, BP
and its Washington allies downplayed the way ravenous microbes, in consuming oxygen, thereby starved other
organisms and exacerbated expanding oceanic dead zones.46 What will be the long-term cascade effect of the slow violence, the mass dieoffs, of phyloplankton at the food chain base? It is far too early to tell. In short, the very environment that high-risk, deep-water drilling endangered was conscripted
by industry through a kind of natural out-sourcing. And so Big Oil's invocation of nature's healing powers needs to be recognized as part of a broader strategy of
image management and liability limitation by greenwashing. Natural
agency can indeed take unexpected, sometimes heartening forms,
but we should be alert to the ways corporate colossi and governments can hijack that logic to grant themselves
advance or retrospective absolution. Crucially, for my arguments about slow violence, the time frames of damage
assessment and potential recovery are wildly out of sync. The deep-time thinking that celebrates natural healing is
strategically disastrous if it provides political cover for reckless corporate short-termism.47
A2: Globalization Good
No trickle down-comaparative advantage and freely competitive markets don’t existglobalization only increases inequality.
McLauren, Friends of the Earth Trust Ltd head of policy and research, 2003
(Duncan,.“Environmental Space, Equity and the Ecological Debt,” Just Sustainabilities Development in an Unequal
World, pg 32-4)
The driving forces behind increasing resource exploitation, consumption and growing inequality lie both at national levels, where the excesses of the Reagan md
Thatcher years have yet to be fully reversed, and in global economic policy. Bolides of economic liberalization and deregulation, reinforced by structural adjustment
programmes under one name or another, are exacerbating inequalities not only between, but also within countries. Indeed, as we saw earlier, the
only
development model presently open for 'developing' countries wolves exploiting more resources, more rapidly - in
direct opposition to the operatives for reduced global resource use suggested by the environmental space analysis —
and export the majority of them to 'developed' countries. This dependence on the export of commodities has arisen from a combination of debt
— often incurred through Northern export credit agencies as the result of project failures (Hildyard, 1999); structural adjustment prescriptions; and tariff escalation
under General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and now World Trade Organization (WTO) rules which hamper the ability of poorer countries to develop
The prescription today
is more liberalization, based in the increasingly discredited theory of comparative advantage that assumes capital
immobility, when in fact capital moves increasingly freely. The shortcomings of this prescription are also practical,
as commodity markets are not freely competitive, but dominated by oligopolistic multinational corporations. In such
circumstances greater liberalization risks leaving commodity exporters - even those with honest democratic governments structurally disadvantaged on an uneven playing field. As modern economic theory suggests, such asymmetries in power, like those in
information, cannot be corrected by more liberalization and deregulation (for a simple overview see Sweeting, 1998). Such an
approach also opens the door to further increases in corruption (Hawley, 2000). Alternative prescriptions - such as the establishment of international
processing and manufacturing exports (House of Commons Environment Committee, 1996, Environmental Audit Committee, 1999).
commodity related environmental agreements (ICREAs) to support commodity prices in return for environmental standards in production, or developed country
Globalization
in the real world has extended economic inequalities at both ends of the scale . Global financial and currency markets
have permitted the emergence of a wealthy, rootless global speculator class and corrupt elites . Globalization has
extended inequalities based on 'winner takes all' markets, where the rewards to the 'best' far exceed those to
the rest (Frank and Cook, 1995). The threat of capital mobility has demolished the economic security of many working-class people. Budget discipline and
taxation regimes with linked transfers to poor commodity exporting countries — have so far remained on the fringes of the debate (Rahim, 1994).
structural adjustment programmes have slashed the resources available in the poorest countries for even rudimentary welfare programmes. Even in many richer
countries there are concerns over the growth or emergence of a poor, uneducated and unhealthy underclass in which life-chances are severely curtailed.
Globalization is exacerbating inequalities between countries and regions too. The failed experiments in rapid
structural adjustment in the former Soviet Union highlight such problems and offer a clear indictment of the
institutions promoting the process. The gains from trade liberalization under the Uruguay round of GATT went mainly to the US, EU and Japan. Africa
was a net loser (Goldin et al, 1993). Such differences are effectively threatening the creation of a global underclass of countries
unable to establish national sustainable development strategies because they lack access to the necessary resources.
But the alternative to liberalization and deregulation at the global scale is not a retreat to protectionism - at least not as long as social justice
is a concern. Protectionism risks institutionalizing existing inequalities between nations and groups through fossilizing access to resources, technology and capital.
Worse still it can culturally exacerbate xenophobia and legitimate the worst excesses of racism, in the hands (and rhetoric) of populist politicians. This path would be
equally bad for the underclasses - both people and countries - leaving billions out in the cold, or perhaps more literally 'out in the heat' of global warming. Fortunately,
uncritical rapid liberalization is not the only alternative to protectionism, whatever popular politics might imply. There
are a host of emerging
proposals for global and regional structures and agreements on investment and trade which support environmental
and social goals - including scope for capital and exchange controls to regulate and control 'hot money' and
destabilizing speculation, investment conditions and corporate regulation to manage and direct foreign direct
investment to support sustainability, and commodity agreements which increase prices, reduce volumes and promote
fair trade (see for example WDM, 1999, FOE-US et al, 1999, Mines, 2000, FOEI, 2000).
Entire theory of globalization has no empirical basis.
Rees et al., University of British Colombia Applied Human Ecologist, 2003
(William: University of British Colombia Director. Laura Westra: York University philosophy professor “When
Consumption Does Violence: Can There be Sustainability and Environmental Justice in a Resource Limited
World?”, pg 102-107)
"Those suffering from eco-apartheid in poorer countries can expect little succour from the prevailing international
development model. Indeed, the case can be made that globalization and market-based export-led development are causally linked to both poverty and ecoviolence. Certainly the explosive growth of the human enterprise, the widespread degradation of local ecosystems, the
destruction of community, the erasure of traditional knowledge-systems and the inequitable distribution of impacts
— good and bad — are accelerated or enhanced by contemporary globalization, expanding material trade and economic integration. It needn't be
this way. One can imagine a form of enhanced internationalization (not homogenizing globalization) based on national integrity, respect for local community and
managed fair trade that could bring greater ecological stability and economic security to a larger proportion — and certainly to the largest absolute number — of
human beings than any previous arrangement in history. Why, then, is globalization today more associated with the world's most pressing crises than with possible
solutions in the minds of so many concerned citizens? We believe the answer to this question lies in sociopolitical context, the particular set of facts, values, beliefs
and assumptions upon which contemporary globalization is founded. Globalization
today is very much a social construct, but it is one
that undermines democracy and civil society while favouring the interests of those imposing it by further
concentrating wealth and power in their hands. The myth of competitive equilibrium Contemporary globalization is based on
the near-universal acceptance of neo-liberal (neo-classical) market economics as the basis for international
'development'. However, as economists themselves increasingly acknowledge, this model is flawed to its core. To begin, neo-liberal
economics is founded on a model of 'general competitive equilibrium' , a prominent distinguishing feature of which is that it bears little
relationship to the real economy (Ormerod, 1997). In theory, a free-market competitive equilibrium is optimally efficient — demand equals supply in every market
and all resources are fully utilized. At equilibrium, no individual or firm can be made better off by altering the ailocation of resources in any way without making
someone worse off. (This is a state know as 'Pareto optimality'. Note that by definition, it means any government intervention in the marketplace in defence of the
this depends on the following critical assumptions: • diminishing
marginal returns in consumption and production; • perfect competition among a hyper-infinite continuum of traders
(buyers and sellers) none of whom can individually influence prices; • all traders have perfect knowledge of all
present and future markets; and • there are an infinite number of future markets. Clearly, none of these necessary
conditions for competitive equilibrium obtain in the real world . In fact, increasing returns to production are often a fact of modern
economies and, far from hyper-infinity, the number of corporate traders in many sectors is steadily decreasing toward oligarchy
as firms attempt to hone their competitive edges through mergers and acquisitions .4 This places smaller locally based producers
everywhere at a distinct disadvantage, subverts competition, diminishes consumer choice and ultimately allows powerful firms to control prices. Finally, no
participating 'trader' can have perfect knowledge of even a single local market, let alone of a theoretical hyperinfinity of present and future markets. Ormerod concludes that'... there appear to be so many violations of the conditions under which competitive
public interest would introduce inefficiencies.) However, all
equilibrium exists that it is hard to see why the concept survives, except for the vested interests of the economics profession and the link between prevailing political
ideology and the conclusions which the theory of general equilibrium provides' (Ormerod, 1997, p66). James K Galbraith makes a similar point in his devastating
condemnation of the year 2000 meeting of the American Economics Association (AEA) (Galbraith, 2000). Despite
the fact that the empirical
evidence 'flatly contradicts' each of the five leading ideas of modern economics, discussion of the 'great issues of
economic policy' were missing from the program of the AEA. Given its evident dissociation from the real world, Galbraith argues that
'modern economics ... seems to be, mainly, about itself (Galbraith, 2000, pi, original emphasis). He goes on: 'But self-absorption and consistent
policy error are just two of the endemic problems of the leading American economists. The deeper problem is the
nearly complete collapse of the prevailing economic theory - of the structure of thought that supports their policy
ideas. It is a collapse so complete, so pervasive, that the profession can only deny it by refusing to discuss theoretical
questions in the first place' (Galbraith, 2000, p4). Untrammelled trade: Corroding communities and ecosystems In a particularly pernicious sleight of hand,
today's political economy implicitly (sometimes explicitly) equates human welfare with income growth, and concurrently advances the untrammelled marketplace as
the well-spring and arbiter of social values. Indeed, in globalist circles sustainable development is essentially equated with sustained growth of per capita world
product (gross domestic product at the national level). Globalists
go so far as to argue that chronic poverty in the developing world is
a primary cause of ecological degradation and that the only sure way to eliminate poverty (and 'fix' the environment)
is through growth (Beckerman, 1992). Since trade can relieve local shortages (thus seeming to increase local carrying capacity) and catalyze growth, more
liberal or 'free' trade is a mainstay of contemporary globalization. In theory, if each country specializes in those few goods or commodities in which it has a
comparative advantage and trades for everything else, the world should be able to maximize gross material efficiency and therefore total output. With this singular
goal in mind, globalization
creates an increasingly prominent role for transnational corporations, encourages the
transportation of resources and manufactured goods all over the planet, facilitates the instantaneous opportunistic
movement of finance capital across national boundaries in search of the highest returns and generally encourages the
integration of regional and national economies (Korten, 1995). These trends represent a threat to national
sovereignty, to accountable democracy and to economic stability, even as they undermine options for
community economic development. Meanwhile, corporate agglomeration fosters today's characteristic trickle-up (or flood) of wealth to the top. It
should be apparent that the competitive scramble to raise gross domestic product (GDP) relegates non-market and
essential common-pool values to a decidedly secondary place in international development. The modern market model eschews moral and
ethical considerations, ignores distributive inequity, abolishes 'the common good' and undermines intangible values such as loyalty to person and place, community,
self-reliance and local cultural mores. Similarly,
qualities and functions of nature that have no ready market value become
invisible to the decision-making process (effectively pricing them at zero). In these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the model is not
adequately delivering, even on its own terms. Despite increasing GDP growth, chronic poverty prevails in many developing countries and the income gap between
high-income Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries and the South is growing. The
absolute gap is widening
everywhere and even the relative income gap is increasing for most regions. (East Asia is the major exception — per capita incomes
have gone from one tenth to almost one fifth of those in the high-income OECD countries since 1960). In 1970 the richest 10 per cent of the
world's citizens earned 19 times as much as the poorest 10 per cent. By 1997 the ratio had increased to 27:1. By that
time, the wealthiest 1 per cent of the world's people commanded the same income as the poorest 57 per cent. (Income ratios reflect purchasing power parity [data from
UNDP, 2001]). Far from raising all boats, the rising economic tide is stranding the flimsiest craft on the reefs of despair, deepening the misery of millions of
impoverished people. Here
are the economic roots of eco-apartheid. We should also note that contrary to conventional theory (and common
to the mutual benefit of both partners is actually no longer the objective . This is because
much of the globally competitive scramble for international markets is driven by debt . The compulsive drive 'to maximize
understanding), balanced trade
exports, minimize imports and create a trade imbalance ... represents a financial struggle between [firms and] nations; a struggle which is entirely the result of the
debt-financed financial system and the fact that all nations trade from a position of gross insolvency' (Rowbotham 1998, p88, emphasis added). Because
so
much 'income' at all levels of society goes into debt servicing, almost all countries suffer from chronically
inadequate purchasing power to absorb the output of their domestic economies . In today's world, therefore, firms and countries
attempt to maximize the net inflow of debt-free money by selling abroad. Since trade is a 'zero-sum game' there will be winners and
losers — for every net exporter of debt-free cash (or material) there must be a net importer. As similar enterprises
invade each others' markets, the result is a global trading system in which 'goods that could easily be produced locally flow backwards and forwards across the country
... and across the whole world' at great ecological and social cost to most trading partners and the world at large (Rowbotham 1998, p89). The
intense
competition bids down prices, encourages overproduction and consumption, undermines local/regional firms and
economies, and eliminates surpluses needed for sound resource management. Among other things, these forces have generated a
chronic global farm income crisis which extends even to rich farming nations like the US and Canada.5 Meanwhile, the exploding demand for
transportation, much of it non-essential, burns up a third of the world's precious oil supplies and contributes to
climate change. In short, the rhetorical veil of efficiency actually conceals one of the most wasteful and
destructive economic systems imaginable.6 The contemporary economy presses particularly hard on developing countries. For example, the need
to meet international debt charges explains much of the cash-cropping for export that dominates agriculture in many developing world countries. Meanwhile, the land
reforms, the introduction of intensive cropping methods, and the economic 'structural adjustments' required as a condition for the development loan in the first place,
often have devastating impacts on the local environment, on subsistence production and on local community integrity (see Box 5.1). These factors also help drive
urbanization in much of the developing world as 'inefficient' traditional farmers and field hands are driven from the land or have their markets undercut by corporate
producers or imports.7 Despite
these costs and sacrifices, commodity exports under prevailing terms of trade generally fail
to generate sufficient income to dissolve the debt. Forty-seven nations still have &per capita GDP of less than US$855 and remain heavily
indebted, their governments owing foreigners the equivalent of at least 18 months of export earnings. Many debtor nations spend more of their
income servicing debts to the world's richest nations than providing social services to their own impoverished
citizens (Roodman, 2001). The international debt crisis leaves 'emerging economies' unable to cope with problems of social inequity, uncontrolled urbanization and
eco-injustice. Perverse economics erodes human welfare We can hardly overstate the extent to which today's extreme 'free-market' thinking actually perverts sound
economics. Good
economic theory would indeed have us maximize welfare, but recognizes that
production/consumption is only one factor in the equation. A healthy environment, natural beauty, stable communities, safe neighbourhoods,
economic security, social justice, a sense of belonging and countless other life-qualities contribute to human well-being. Thus, to the extent that people value any of
these non-market and public goods more than they might value a little more material consumption, forgoing additional production/income growth to obtain these
goods (ie through taxation) is actually sound economics — it would increase net social welfare (Heuting, 1996). The
point is that with a more
comprehensive and equitable agenda, the technologies and tendencies to globalization could be turned to enhancing
not only income security, but also many other values that make life worthwhile . As it stands, available data suggest that the
prevailing international development paradigm may actually be destroying more unmeasured yet real wealth, much of it in the common pool, than is accruing to
is gross market failure — in a total social cost/benefit framework, it is clearly uneconomic to allow
the destruction of two dollars' worth of resources or the global commons so that some individual or firm can realize
one more dollar of profit. Sound economics gives governments a legitimate role in protecting and enhancing the public interest whenever the market fails to
do so. Yet, in today's world, government intervention in the economy is reviled — globalists all sing in the deregulation choir. To summarize, the dominant
'development' paradigm has brought us to the point where sustained material growth destroys ecosystems,
impoverishes the planet, diminishes the human spirit and visits violence upon whole poor communities. But it
also further enriches a powerful minority, mainly the already wealthy - and this poses a major barrier to change. Those who benefit most from the
prevailing development model are isolated by distance and wealth from its negative consequences. Their feedback
from 'development' is all positive. Since in the real world wealth is very much equated with power, those who would 'save the world' will have to
private interests. This
overcome the resistance of those who perceive that their interests lie with the status quo. The increasing pace and scale of human-induced ecological change
underscores the urgency of this task
A2: Technology/Efficiency Solves
Consumption out paces efficiency, innovation is only used to further profit AND locks in
existing social relations
Foster et al., Oregon sociology professor, 2010
(John, The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth, pg 41-4)
Ecological modernization theorists simply added to this the corporate green-washing claim that the eco-modernizing
tendencies intrinsic to capitalism or "the market system" allowed the "expansion of the limits" of growth . Ecological
modernization, according to its leading advocate, Arthur Mol, is the belief that "an environmentally sound society" can be created without reference to "a variety of
other social criteria and goals, such as the scale of production, the capitalist mode of production, workers' influence, equal allocation of economic goods, gender
criterion, and so on. Including the latter set of criteria might result in a more radical programme (in the sense of moving away from the present social order), but not
necessary a more ecologically radical programme." As another leading ecological modernization theorist, Maarten Hajer, has acknowledged, ecological modernization
"does not call for any structural change but is, in this respect, basically a modernist and technocratic approach to the environment that suggests that there is a technoinstitutional fix for the present problems." For this reason, ecological modernization sees no reason to address the reality of capitalism. In Hajer's words, "It is ...
obvious that ecological modernization ... does not address the systemic features of capitalism that make the system inherently wasteful and unmanageable."76 This
rigid notion of ecological modernization as a mere correction in the original modernizing tendency of society leaves
little room for considerations of social inequality. Additionally, ecological modernization thinkers do not normally address
the larger problems of the global ecological crisis, s uch as global warming, or the forms taken human-nature interactions.77 Rather than
engaging in an overarching critique of the historical relation between society and nature, the increasingly dominant ecological modernization perspective takes all of
this for granted.
It begins and ends with the notion of techni (technics), which is both cause and effect, problem and
solution: at most a question of technological innovation coupled with the appropriate forms of ecological
management. Ecological modernization is thus all about the development and management of green technologies (techniques), displacing the old,
environmentally harmful operations. Entrepreneurs are deemed to be an important driver of this transition, as they respond to increasing environmental consciousness
among the public and pursue important innovations as far as products and technologies. "The basic notion of the ecological modernization processes," as the principal
sociological advocates of this perspective state, is "aimed at 'regaining one of the crucial design faults of modernity'" through technological innovation.78 The
standard way in which to square the expanding circle (or spiral) of capitalist production is to bring in the black box
of technology as constituting the solution to all problems. Yet, technology cuts both ways. "The assumption of some
critics that technological change is exclusively a part of the solution and no part of the problem," Herman Daly writes, "is
ridiculous on the face of it and totally demolished by the work of Barry Commoner [in The Closing Circle] (1971). We need not
accept Commoner's extreme emphasis on the importance of the problem-causing nature of post-World War II technology (with the consequent downplaying of the
roles of population and affluence) in order to recognize that recent technological change has been more a part of the problem than of the solution."79 To be sure,
But ecological modernizers in sociology and sustainable-developers
in mainstream economics go beyond this by arguing that technology can work magic: "dematerializing" economic
production so that the capitalist economy can then walk on a ir (or create a "weightless society"), thereby continuing its relentless
technological change is a necessary part of any ecological solution.
expansion— but with a rapidly diminishing effect on the environment. Needless to say, such technological fantasies have no basis in reality.80 Still, technological
optimism is pervasive in the ecological literature (and especially among ecological modernization theorists). All sorts of "positive-sum" and "win-win" technical fixes
are proposed. Hajer speaks confidently of the "technicisation of ecology" as the answer to the ecological crisis. In this view, "microelectronic technologies are
presented as the solution for the juggernaut effect'" of capitalism.81 Technological
change is promoted in an attempt to argue that social
relations (of power and property) can remain the same—whereas it is merely values, consciousness, and knowledge that
change, and that direct technological innovation. Such views are worse than those of necromancers of old, since
they wish away all pretenses to a scientific understanding in the name of science. Not only are the basic
physics of thermodynamics set aside, but the way in which technology is embedded within the social system is
also ignored.82 The notion that economic production in general under the present system can continually expand without ecological waste and degradation (the
dematerialization hypothesis) goes against the basic laws of physics. As the brilliant ecological economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen wrote: "Had economics
recognized the entropic nature of the economic process, it might have been able to warn its co-workers for the betterment of mankind—the technological sciences—
Although new technologies (and
indeed much older technologies) can accomplish great things in terms of reducing the environmental impact per unit
of production, the scale effects of economic expansion generally override any energy/environmental savings (a
phenomenon known as the Jevons Paradox).84 Since 1975 the amount of energy expended per dollar of GDP in the
United States has decreased by half, marking an increase in energy efficient by that amount. But at the same time the overall
consumption of energy by U.S. society has risen by some 40 percent. New environmental technologies are adopted not
on the basis of their value in creating a sustainable relation to the environment but on the basis of the profit
considerations of corporations, which rarely converge with ecological requirements. As economist Juliet Schor notes, "Firms are reluctant to
install technologies whose gains they cannot capture. A decentralized system of solar and wind , for example, may have
technical superiorities such as avoiding the power loss that accompanies long-distance power generation in centralized facilities. But if the
technologies are small-scale and easy to replicate, large firms have difficulty capturing the profits that make
investments desirable."86 Indeed, the single-minded goal of technological innovation under capitalism is
that 'bigger and better' washing machines, automobiles, and superjets must lead to 'bigger and better' pollution."83
expansion of production, profits, accumulation, and wealth for those at the top , not protection of the environment. According
to Donella Meadows and her co-authors in The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update: "If a society's implicit goals are to exploit nature,
enrich the elites, and ignore the long term, then that society will develop technologies and markets that destroy the
environment, widen the gap between the rich and the poor, and optimize for short-term gains. In short, that society
develops technologies and markets that hasten a collapse instead of preventing it."87
Alt key to make efficiency sustainable.
Zehner, visting scholar at University California Berkley, 2012
(Ozzie Green Illusions, pg 175)
There's another problem. Even
though energy consumers might not spend their efficiency savings to buy more energy, they
may choose to spend these savings on other products or endeavors that still lead to energy consumption. In this case,
energy-efficiency measures can unintentionally inspire other types of consumption, leaving overall energy footprints
unchanged or even larger. This occurs at the macroeconomic level as well. In short, energy-efficiency savings frequently lead to larger profits, which spur more
growth and thus higher energy consumption. For instance, another Rocky Mountain Institute study shows that reducing drafts, increasing natural
light, and otherwise making workplaces more efficient, can increase worker productivity by as much as 16 percent.6
This higher productivity allows firms to grow, and the resulting labor cost savings can be spent on new machinery ,
buildings, or expansion. These rebound effects often dwarf the original energy-efficiency effects, leading to far greater overall energy
consumption.7 In fact, the authors of a central report on the rebound effect conclude, " While the promotion of energy efficiency has an
important role to play in achieving a sustainable economy, it is unlikely to be sufficient while rich countries continue
to pursue high levels of economic growth."8 Thus, efficiency efforts will only prove effective as long as we
institute contemporaneous reforms to move from a consumption-based economy to one grounded in
sufficiency.
Tech optimism creates complacency with unsustainably.
Wallis, Berkeley liberal arts professor, 2009
(Victor, “Beyond “Green Capitalism”, http://encuentro5.org/home/sites/default/files/Microsoft%20Word%20%20Wallis%20BGC%20eng.pdf, DOA: 7-2-12)
Cutting across all corporate insertions into the environmental debate is the assumption that the basic instruments for responding to ecological crisis are technology and
the market. The
technological fixation has been a constant of capitalist development. Initially focused on maximizing labor
productivity, it is continuously replenished by ever more miraculous applications, especially in the spheres of communication and of genetic engineering. The
unending proliferation of innovations – a hallmark of late capitalism 7 – lends credence, in public perception, to the
idea that there is no challenge that technology cannot overcome. The unstated premise behind such claims is that the
selection of any technology will continue to reflect corporate interests, which in turn reflect the goals implicit in
market competition, i.e., profit-maximization, growth, and accumulation. While green technologies – e.g., renewable energy sources – may
attract a degree of corporate attention (thanks mainly to social/political pressure), nothing short of a change in the basic locus
of economic decision-making will stop certain corporations from continuing to pursue established [non-green]
lines of production. Insofar as they must nonetheless try to present themselves in green clothing, they will not
hesitate to misrepresent the questions at stake and to invoke technological “solutions” that have little chance of
being successfully implemented.
Tech focus masks the need to address deeper causes.
Faucet, Corporate Watch researcher, 2010
(Claire, Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution: Social Struggles in the Transition to a Post-Petrol World, pg
303-4)
Focusing on technological solutions ignores how the problem of climate change is caused, why it continues to
worsen, and how much needs to be done to stop it. Even the IPCC now suggests that 85 percent cuts in global greenhouse gas emissions are
needed by 2050.2 Technology simply cannot deliver these levels of reduction without accompanying changes to demand,
which will require economic and social transformation. Technologies that encourage consumers to maintain high
energy use and fossil fuel dependency—such as carbon capture and storage—fail to address unsustainable consumption levels
that are the basis of rich-country economies and the cause of both climate change and other critical sustainability crises such as peak oil, declining
soil fertility, and fresh water supplies. The central problem is consumption—or more appropriately over-consumption—of fossil
fuels and of forest and land resources—and the key motivation be-hind this over-consumption is corporate profit: in
a word, capitalism. Technological improvements will not tackle over-consumption or growth in demand; this requires radical changes to economic systems.
Without such changes, any technology-based emissions reductions will eventually be eaten up by continued rising
demand for energy and consumer goods—efficiency gains will be converted into greater consumption, not reduced
emissions in the long-term. This is due to the simple fact that capitalism has to have an increased energy base in order to continually expand production
and consumption. It cannot use less energy. Techno-fixation has masked the incompatibility of climate change solutions and
unlimited economic (and energy) growth. A rational approach to a certain problem and a set of uncertain solutions might be to say that
consumption should be limited to sustainable levels from now, with the possibility of increasing in future, when new technologies come on stream. Instead, the
approach taken has been to continue consuming at the same destructive levels, with the expectation that new
technologies will come on stream. A rational solution is impossible because our economic system forces us into
irrational short-termist decisions. To make rational decisions, a new framework of social relations would need to be built. The persistent claim
that a solution is just around the corner has allowed politicians and corporations to cling to the mantra that tackling
climate change will not impact economic growth. In 2005, in his address to the World Economic Forum, Tony Blair said, "If we put forward, as a
solution to climate change, something that would impact on economic growth, it matters not how justified it is, it will simply not be agreed to [emphasis added]."3
While this view may be slowly changing, it has delayed real action for years.
Jevons paradox-it is empirically true
Foster et al., Oregon sociology professor, 2010
(John, The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth, pg 177-9)
Technological optimists have tried to argue that the rebound effect is small , and therefore environmental problems can be solved
largely by technological innovation alone, with the efficiency gains translating into lower throughput of energy and materials (dematerialization). Empirical evidence
of a substantial rebound effect is, however, strong. For
example, technological advancements in motor vehicles which have
increased the average miles per gallon of vehicles by 30 percent in the United States since 1980, have not reduced
the overall emissions used by motor vehicles. Fuel consumption per vehicle stayed constant, while the efficiency gains led to the augmentation,
not only the numbers of cars and trucks on the roads (and the miles driven), but also their size and "performance" (acceleration rate, cruising speed etc.)—so that
SUVs and minivans now dot U.S. highways. At the macro level, the Jevons
Paradox can be seen in the fact that, even though the United
States has managed to double its energy efficiency since 1975, its energy consumption has risen dramatically. Over
the last thirty-five years, Juliet Schor notes energy expended per dollar of GDP has been cut in half. But rather than falling, energy demand has increased, by roughly
40 percent. Moreover, demand is rising fastest in those sectors that have had the biggest efficiency gains —transport and
residential energy use. Refrigerator efficiency improved by 10 percent, but the number of refrigerators in use rose by 20 percent. In aviation, fuel consumption per
mile fell by more than 40 percent, but total fuel use grew by 150 percent because passenger miles rose. Vehicles are a similar story. And with soaring demand, we've
had soaring emissions. Carbon
dioxide from these two sectors has risen 40 percent, twice the rate of the larger economy.
Economists and environmentalists who try to measure the direct effects of efficiency on the lowering of price and
the immediate rebound effect generally tend to see the rebound effect as relatively small, in the range of 10 to 30 percent in highenergy consumption areas such as home heating and cooling and cars. But once the indirect effects, apparent at the macro level, are
incorporated, the Jevons Paradox remains extremely significant . It is here at the macro level that scale effects come to bear:
improvements in energy efficiency can lower the effective cost of various products, propelling the overall economy and expanding overall energy use.31 Ecological
economists Mario Giampietro and Kozo Uno argue that the
Jevons Paradox can only be understood in a macro-evolutionary model,
where improvements in efficiency result in changes in the matrices of the economy such that the overall effect is to
increase scale and tempo of the system as a whole. Most analyses of the Jevons Paradox remain abstract, based on isolated technological effects,
and removed from the historical process. They fail to examine, as Jevons himself did, the character of industrialization. Moreover, they are still further removed from
a realistic understanding of the accumulation-driven character of capitalist development. An
economic system devoted to profits, accumulation,
and economic expansion without end will tend to use any efficiency gains or cost reductions to expand the overall
scale of production. Technological innovation will therefore be heavily geared to these same expansive ends . It is
no mere coincidence that each of the epoch-making innovations (namely, the steam engine, the railroad, and the automobile) that
dominated the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries were characterized by their importance in driving capital accumulation
and the positive feedback they generated with respect to economic growth as a whole—so that the scale effects on the economy arising from their development
necessarily overshot improvements in technological efficiency.33 Conservation
in the aggregate is impossible for capitalism, however
much the output/input ratio may be increased in the engineering of a given product. This is because all savings tend to
spur further capital formation (provided that investment outlets are available). This is especially the case where core industrial resources—what Jevons
called "central materials" or "staple products"—are concerned.
A2: Local Systems Bad
Local systems are comparatively better and more sustainable.
Cavanagh et al., Institute for Policy Studies Director, 2002
(John, Jerry Mander, Sarah Anderson, Debi Barker, Majude Barlow, Walden, Bello Robin Broad ,Tony Clarke,
Edward Goldsmith, Randall Hayes, Colin Hines, Ander Kimbrell, David Korten, Sara Larrain Helena NorberHodge, Simon Retallack Vandana Shiva, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz. Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better
World is Possible, pg 117-120)
In the face of the globalization juggernaut and its widely propagated Utopian visions, advocates of more decentralized, localized alternative paths tend to meet fierce
criticism and disbelief about the viability of such solutions. We
have already mentioned how advocates of globalization assert that
local systems are less democratic than the advancing global political constructs . We have already agreed that local governance does
not guarantee democracy, human rights, equity, or good governance. We join others in citing examples where local governance has been authoritarian, oppressive,
even brutal. Nevertheless,
bringing governance and economies down to smaller-scale systems—where people are closer
to the sources of power-offers far greater opportunity and promise for democratic participation than the present model.
There are many examples of this throughout the world, some among indigenous populatio ns, some in smaller communities, and
some in large cities such as Brazil's Porto Alegre and Curitiba (for more on this, see chapter 6). Globalization, on the other hand, offers no
democratic promise. Globalization actually guarantees absentee rule by giant corporations that are designed to
act solely in their own economic interests and have no real concern about conditions faced in the daily lives of most people. The real choice,
therefore, is between allowing corporate-led systems controlled from faraway cities, or attempting to strengthen
forms that may bring power back to the local, where opportunity for democracy, equity, and attention to local social and environmental conditions
still exists. The better choice seems obvious to the authors of this report, though vigilance is mandatory. As for defining and upholding human rights, that is the
preserve of appropriate international agreements among nations, which have sufficient powers to institute sanctions of the kind that helped bring down the white racist
regime in South Africa a few decades ago. Keep in mind that subsidiarity envisions a role for higher-order rules, whether national or global. It just insists that these
rules be few and truly consensual, especially if they are going to restrict local action. It is worth noting that such sanctions as were applied in South Africa would now
be far more difficult to introduce because they are nearly outlawed by the rules of the WTO. In fact, such sanctions would be explicitly banned by the new FTAA
agreement or any reiterations of the proposed multilateral agreement on investment (MAI) that was fought off by activists a few years ago. Many of the elements of
the MAI continue to resurface in other agreements, including the WTO's proposed new investment agreement. (If such rules had been in place twenty years ago,
Nelson Mandela would likely still be in jail. So much for the globalizers as protectors of human rights.) Other
critiques of localization are
essentially restatements of the many theoretical benefits of global free trade: that wealth will "trickle down" to the poor,
that prices will be lower, and that greater diversity (of products) will exist in the marketplace. On the first point, that globalization lifts people
from poverty, this is manifestly, tragically false. As chapter i of this volume explained, the benefits of globalization actually
trickle up to the very wealthy. It accelerates gaps between rich and poor within countries and among countries . (A
special report by the IFG, Docs Globalization Help the Poor? provides more data on this phenomenon.) As for globalization bringing a greater diversity of products,
that may be the case for some product categories and some segments of society that can take advantage of expanded choices in foreign cars, designer clothing, and
exotic cheeses a meats, for example. But
in many cases, localization increases the diversity of products: we think it is better to
have one thousand microbreweries than one Coors, and many varieties of tomato and potato rather than the
industrial, single-crop variety. In any case, for most people who are simply trying to feed their families, product
diversity is an abstraction. Meanwhile, cultural diversity and biodiversity—which affect everyone—are actively suppressed by the globalization model. It
is true that the global marketplace does sometimes bring cheaper products in sectors where competition still exist s.
This is because the rules of free trade encourage free entry of foreign agricultural and manufactured goods, sometimes with lower prices. However, these
lower prices do not signify a new efficiency brought by globalization. Often they signify export dumping (when
domestic overproduction threatens high domestic prices and profits). They are also the result of high levels of direct
subsidies, of subsidies through infrastructure development, or of the outlandish subsidies caused by the externalization of environmental or social costs of
industrial monocultures, as explained earlier. If these subsidized costs—which ultimately are paid for by taxpayers and ordinary
people—were actually included in the price of commodity imports, they would not be cheaper . Even if they were cheaper,
however, is it better social policy for a country or community to sacrifice the vitality and cohesion of its economic system—especially the production of food staples,
Indeed, today
local companies may offer lower prices, and local banks may offer lower rates, yet these entities fare poorly because
of the superior marketing clout of giant firms and banks. In any case, all of this activity is based on the tenuous theory of comparative
which also has important environmental and cultural benefits—on the chance that consumers can save pennies at the supermarket? We think not.
advantage. Under comparative advantage concepts, the viability of economic systems depends entirely upon whether the importing community can pay for its imports
Export
markets are variable, volatile, and unreliable. More than one nation is now facing a hunger crisis caused by the
failure of comparative advantage theories, as export prices crash. Others argue against localization by positing that small businesses
usually pay lower wages and offer fewer benefits, and few are unionized. In fact, this is often untrue. Over time, as small companies grow, early
employees usually get big salary boosts and increased benefits. Another argument is that it is harder to regulate one
hundred mini-mills than one giant smokestack. Perhaps this is true, but weigh against this the political clout of the
with the earned income from export items in which it has this so-called comparative advantage in production. In practice, this neat formula rarely works.
giant, which eliminates regulation, and the fact that local residents are usually the best judges of local smokestack s.
Finally there is the argument is that some communities are better endowed than others. This is certainly true. Hence, redistribution mechanisms are needed.
Framework
Framework – 2NC
Our interpretation is the judge should be an intellectual grading the foundation upon
which 1AC stems from---if we win the foundations of the aff are suspect we should win
irrespective of hypothetical enactment
Method first key-otherwise alternative modes of knowledge concerning neoliberalism are
delegitimized..
Gunder et al., Aukland University senior planning lecturer, 2009
(Michael, Planning in Ten Words or Less: A Lacanian Entanglement with Spatial Planning pgs 111-2)
The hegemonic network, or bloc, initially shapes the debates and draws on appropriate policies of desired success,
such as the needs of bohemians, knowledge clusters, or talented knowledge workers, as to what constitutes their desired enjoyment (cobblestones,
chrome and cappuccinos at sidewalk cafes) and what is therefore lacking in local competitiveness. In tum, this defines what is blighted and
dysfunctional and in need of economic, spatial planning, or other, remedy. Such an argument is predicated on a
logic, or more accurately a rhetoric, that a lack of a particular defined type of enjoyment, or competitiveness (for surely they
are one and the same) is inherently unhealthy for the aggregate social body. Lack and its resolution are generally presented as
technical, rather than political issues. Consequently, technocrats in partnership with their "˜dominant stakeholders`
can ensure the impression of rationally seeking to produce happiness for the many whilst, of course, achieving their
stakeholders' specific interests (Gunder and Hillier 2007a, 469). The current "˜post-democratic` milieu facilitates the above
through avoidance of critical policy debate challenging favored orthodox positions and policy approaches. Consideration of
policy deficiencies, or alternative solutions, are eradicated from political debate so that while "˜token institutions of
liberal democracy' are retained conflicting positions and arguments are negated (Stavrakakis 2003, 59). Consequently, "˜the safe
names in the field who feed the policy orthodoxy are repeatedly used or their work drawn upon. by different stakeholders. while
more critical voices are silenced by their inability to shape policy debates' (Boland 2007, 1032). The economic
development or spatial planning policy analyst thus continues to partition reality ideologically by deploying
only the orthodox "˜successful' or "˜best practice' economic development or spatial planning responses . This
further maintains the dominant, or hegemonic, status quo while providing "˜a cover and shield against critical
thought by acting in the manner of a "buffer" isolating the political held Rom any research that is independent and radical in its conception as in its implications for
public policy' (Wacquant 2004, 99). At the same time, adoption of the hegemonic orthodoxy tends to generate similar policy
responses for every competing local area or city-region. largely resulting in a zero-sum game (Blair and Kumar 1997).
Policy making isn’t grounded in objectivity but cherry picking. Means a residual link takes
out the aff because the ideological underpinnings of their knowledge is inaccurate.
Bristow, Cardiff University economic geographer senior lecturer, 2005
(Gillian, “Everyone's a ‘winner’: problematising the discourse of regional competitiveness”, Journal of Economic
Geography, June, oxford journals)
This begs the question as to why a discourse with ostensibly confused, narrow and ill-defined content has become so salient in regional
economic development policy and practice as to constitute ‘the only valid currency of argument’ (Schoenberger, 1998, 12). Whilst
alternative discourses based around co-operation can be conceived (e.g. see Hines, 2000; Bunzl, 2001), they have as yet failed to make a significant impact on the
dominant view that a particular, quantifiable form of output-related regional competitiveness is inevitable, inexorable and ultimately beneficial. The
answer
appears to lie within the policy process, which refers to all aspects involved in the provision of policy direction for the work of the public sector.
This therefore includes ‘the ideas which inform policy conception, the talk and work which goes into providing the
formulation of policy directions, and all the talk, work and collaboration which goes into translating these into practice’ (Yeatman, 1998; p. 9). A major
debate exists in the policy studies literature about the scope and limitations of reason, analysis and intelligence in policy-making—a debate which has been re-ignited
with the recent emphasis upon evidence-based policy-making (see Davies et al., 2000). Keynes is often cited as the main proponent of the importance of ideas in
However, Majone
(1989) has significantly challenged the assumption that policy makers engage in a purely objective, rational,
technical assessment of policy alternatives. He has argued that in practice, policy makers use theory, knowledge and
evidence selectively to justify policy choices which are heavily based on value judgements. It is thus
policy making, since he argued that policy-making should be informed by knowledge, truth, reason and facts (Keynes, 1971, vol. xxi, 289).
persuasion (through rhetoric, argument, advocacy and their institutionalisation) that is the key to the policy process, not the logical
correctness or accuracy of theory or data. In other words, it is interests rather than ideas that shape policy
making in practice. Ultimately, the language of competitiveness is the language of the business community. Thus, critical to understanding
the power of the discourse is firstly, understanding the appeal and significance of the discourse to business interests
and, secondly, exploring their role in influencing the ideas of regional and national policy elites.
Questioning underlying structure of neoliberalism first is key-otherwise policy analysis is
predetermined in favor of the market.
Murphy, Miami sociology professor, 2005
(John, Globalization with a Human Face, pg 11-13)
Murphy 4
The process of development, now commonly referred to as globalization, has been analyzed in a variety of ways . The
political, cultural, and economic aspects of globalization, for example, have been the focus of attention of many books and articles for quite some time. What is
missing, however, is a deeper level of analysis that Leonardo Boff believes is necessary to correctly understand social growth and the allocation of
resources.' In this chapter, this approach is referred to as an ontological Assessment. Within this context of development, the term ontological
refers to the base, or conceptual foundation, of a particular rendition of growth . No matter what theory is adopted,
an image of how the social world operates is conveyed. And as part of this picture, questions are presupposed about the
prospects for growth, who controls this process, the range of acceptable possibilities, and the source of all change.
These considerations serve as the background assumptions that gradually begin to dictate how development
will proceed. These precepts, in other words, establish the parameters of the version of reality that is suggested,
often quite subtly, by a particular theory of development. For this reason, these issues are referred to as ontological
or foundational. This is not to say that political analysis is irrelevant when globalization. Nonetheless, in the absence of ontological questions
political assessment is not often very insightful. For example, take the problem of alienation. Often capitalism is presumed to be the key culprit
with regard to producing this personal and social malady. Without a doubt, workers are treated as commodities within this production system, and thus they are
transformed into objects and become alienated, as Marx says, from themselves, other persons, and the social world in general. But is a change at the political level
sufficient to address this condition? Subsequent to the work of the Frankfurt School, for example, the answer to this query is no. Does a shift to the collective
ownership of the means of production necessarily guarantee the eradication of alienation? Many traditional Marxists believed that this linkage was essential to
building a new, more humane world. Nonetheless, they were wrong, and their lack of insight into important ontological issues contributed to discrediting in many
intellectual circles a theory that otherwise provided a trenchant critique of capitalism. Shifting to collective ownership, simply put, did not address the origin or
grounding of production systems. As a result, workers within socialism, similar to those within capitalism, were integrated into a system of production that was
understood to exist sui generis. The result of this maneuver, of course was more—although unexpected—alienation, because the workplace was assumed to be
unrelated to human desires and interests. Most important at this juncture is that many persons nowadays are criticizing globalization in an equally superficial manner.
Economic and political analyses are inaugurated with the aim of illustrating the inhumanity of this worldwide process. In the opinion of many critics, not much more
proof is required to demonstrate the economic and cultural inequities that this trend has spawned. Many cultures have been decimated because of the so-called
adjustment policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The rich seem to be getting richer, while others are falling into despair and
becoming increasingly marginalized. But is this sort of critique automatically enlightening? Clearly the dismal living conditions of much of the world are revealed; the
divide between the rich and poor countries has never been clearer. Yet what about the prospects for change? As Giulio Girardi describes, this sort of research has
simply reinforced in the minds of many persons the idea that this situation is normal? The message is that the world is comprised of rich and poor people, and that the
human condition is undoubtedly nasty in many places throughout the world. Accordingly,
the rich appear to have a historical mandate to
govern the world and amass wealth at the expense of the rest of humanity. Proposing change is simply folly that
contradicts human nature. So what is needed to alter this scenario? Referring back to Marx, at the heart of the revolution must be philosophy .
Ontological questions must be raised, in other words, so that a critique of globalization is not equated with
cynicism and inaction, or merely providing alternatives, such as a welfare net, that are touted to humanize this
process. What is needed, instead, is a new relationship between globalization and those who are affected by this activity. But,
again, this shift is not necessarily a part of political analysis. The necessary change must be made initially at
the level of ontology, and then political practice may be much more fruitful. Persons may be able to control their lives, instead
of being subjected to another insensitive political system. And with respect to globalization, they will be able to do more than simply adjust to economic policies that
are equated with rationality and general improvement.
If we win framework it means the following:
1. Dismiss perms-they have to justify their 1AC world view and can’t sever their reps-best
for ground and education because it prevents aff conditionality and depate is an academic
activity.
2. Plan is not offense-questions whether the alt increases energy are not relevant-point of
stais is whether the aff perpetuates neoliberal social relations in advocating energy
production—if that is bad you reject the aff because the plan responds to a poorly
constructed and dangerous model of the world.
3. Discount all their answers-accepting the frame of neoliberalism gears solutions to be
watered down or delegitimized
Faber and McCarthy, Northeastern University Philanthropy and Environmental Justice
Research Project, 2003
(Daniel R Faber Director; Deborah McCarthy Research Associate, College of Charleston Assistant Professor of
Sociology and Anthropology. “Neo-Liberalism, Globalization and the Struggle for Ecological Democracy Linking
Sustainability and Environmental Justice.” Pg 56-7)
As we move further into the new millennium, the mainstream US ecology movement is confronting an immense paradox. On the one hand, over the last three decades
environmentalists have built one of the more broadly based and politically powerful new social movements in this
country's history. As a result, US governmental policies for protecting the environment and human health are among the most stringent in the world. On the
other hand, despite having won many important battles, it is becoming increasing apparent that the traditional
environmental movement is losing the war for a healthy planet. With the ascendancy of neo-liberalism, globalization
and the growing concentration of corporate power over all spheres of life, the ability of the movement to solve the
ecological crisis is undermined. While there is no doubt that ecological problems would be much worse without the mainstream environmental
movement and current system of regulation, it is also clear that the traditional strategies and policy solutions being employed are proving to be
increasingly impaired. Most existing environmental laws are poorly enforced and overly limited in prescription ,
emphasizing, for instance, ineffectual pollution control measures which aim to limit public exposure to 'tolerable levels' of industrial toxins rather than promo ting
pollution prevention measures which prohibit whole families of dangerous pollutants from being produced in the first place. In addition, other problems such as the
acceleration of sprawl and the growth in US emissions of greenhouse gases continue to worsen. The US system of environmental regulation may be among the best in
the world, but it is grossly inadequate for safeguarding human health and the integrity of nature. Perhaps the most critical factor for explaining the hegemony of neoliberalism and the growing incapacity of the state to adequately address the ecological crisis is what Robert Putnam has termed the decline in social capital — those
social networks and assets that facilitate the education, coordination and cooperation of citizens for mutual benefit (Putnam, 2000). Over
the past
generation, the social networks that integrate citizens into environmental organizations and other civic institutions
have seriously deteriorated in communities across the country. The resulting decline in social capital inhibits genuine citizen participation
in the affairs of civil society and engagement in the realm of politics, including the ability to tackle environmental problems in an equitable and effective fashion
(Borgos and Douglas, 1996). With
interactions that build mutual trust eroded, greater sectors of the populace become
increasingly cynical of their ability to collectively effect meaningful ecological and social changes . Instead, a growing
number of people retreat into what Jurgen Habermas (1975) terms civil privatism, with an emphasis on personal lifestyle issues such as career advancement, social
mobility and conspicuous consumption. When
social and environmental problems are confronted, increasingly
individualized or 'privatized' solutions become the favoured response . As a result, the various racial, ethnic, class and religious
divides in American society become accentuated, as the 'haves' increasingly disregard the needs of the ‘have nots': witness the attack on affirmative action, the social
safety net, labour rights and ecological protection in favour of reduced taxes, fiscal conservatism and increasingly harsh punishments for criminal misconduct.
Unfortunately, too many mainstream environmental organizations adapt corporate-like organizational models that
further inhibit broad-based citizen involvement in environmental problem-solving. For these groups, citizen engagement means
simply sending in membership dues, signing a petition and writing the occasional letter to a government official. As stated by William Shutkin (2000, ppl-20), there
is a 'tendency for many non-profit environmental organizations to treat members as clients and consumers of
services, or volunteers who help the needy, rather than as participants in the evolution of ideas and projects that
forge our common life'. In the effort to conduct studies, draft legislation and organize constituencies to support passage of environment-friendly initiatives,
the mainstream movement has gravitated toward a greater reliance on law and science conducted by professional
experts. The aim of this move towards increased professionalization is to regain legitimacy and expert status in
increasingly hostile neo-liberal policy circles. The effect, however, is to reduce internal democratic practices within some environmental
organizations and state regulatory agencies. The focus on technical-rational questions, solutions and compromises, rather
than issues of political power and democratic decision-making, is causing a decline in public interest and
participation in national environmental politics (Faber and O'Connor, 1993)./
Framework – EXTN
Conceptions of the state as a competitive entity lock in neoliberalism only refusing the aff’s
framing can create space for other ways of constructing the state and global economy
Fougnerm Bilkent IR professor, 2006
(Tore, “The state, international competitiveness and neoliberal globalisation: is there a future beyond ‘ the
competition state?”, Review of International Studies, project muse)
The basic idea informing this article has been that the transgression of something that is currently conceived as a given ‘fact of life’ can be facilitated by showing both
that what is, has not always been and, in consequence, need not always be in the future; and that what is, is internal not to an unchanging nature, but rather to politics
or relations of power. In accordance with this, the article has showed that the problem of international competitiveness has a quite specific history of emergence and
transformation internal to state and global forms of governance, and that the
discourse of international competitiveness is currently at the
centre not only of how state authorities conduct their business, but also how their conduct is shaped and manipulated
by other actors in the world political economy. The broader significance of this (re)problematisation of the problem of
international competitiveness lies in its potential contribution to the opening up of a space of possibility for the state
to become something other than a competitive entity. In this connection, the issue at stake today is not so much the
absence of state conceptions that somehow run counter to the neoliberal one of the state as a competitive entity, as the hegemonic
position of the neoliberal problem and discourse of competitiveness as such. If the latter is left unchallenged , as is the case in much of the competition
state literature, then alternative state conceptions will unavoidably be assessed in terms of international
competitiveness and, in consequence, stand little chance of prevailing in any but distorted and marginal
ways.83 Against this background, the historisation and politicisation of the problem of international competitiveness provided in this article can contribute both to
make the concept of international competitiveness fall from its current grace, and increase people’s receptivity to both existing and prospective alternatives to the
neoliberal conception of the state. With
regard to the prospect of the state becoming something other than a competitve entity,
an opening might also follow from how the state has been shown to be constituted as a three-headed troll that is
competitive, disciplined and sovereign within the context of contemporary efforts at neoliberal global governance. As
sovereign entities, states retain the option to put an end to capital mobility, and thereby both reverse the power relationship that currently characterises their relations
with transnational capital, and deny non-state actors the opportunity to act upon and manipulate their conduct at a distance. The
key point to note,
however, is that the hegemony of neoliberalism as a rationality of government has led states to practice sovereignty
in a way that effectively subjects them to such external discipline and governance – this, by engaging in efforts to
constitute a global marketplace. Moreover, neoliberal global governance is considered such a precious undertaking today that state authorities
have voluntarily, if not proactively, adapted to it by both exercising a high degree of self-discipline, and acting on themselves and
their populations as competitors in a global market for investment. While an understanding of the state as an externally disciplined
entity has the potential to stimulate popular opposition and resistance to contemporary forms of neoliberal global governance – in part, because
many people simply do not appreciate being forced to do things that they otherwise would not want to do – this understanding seems at present to be
much less prevalent in the popular imagination than the one of the state as a competitive entity. Given both the seemingly
ahistorical and apolitical nature of the problem of international competitiveness, and how the quest for improved competitiveness can rather easily be represented as
part of a positive national project, this
situation can be claimed to inhibit the emergence of more broadly-based popular
resistance.84 Against this background, the (re)problematisation of the problem of international competitiveness
provided in this article can contribute to de-legitimise attempts to rally people behind national competitiveness
projects, and provide additional stimulus to popular opposition and resistance to contemporary efforts to constitute a
global marketplace.85 In the final analysis, however, the possibility for the state to become something other than a competitive entity is likely to depend also
on a more general de-hegemonisation of neoliberalism as a rationality of government. The reason for this is that the constitution and governance of the state as a
competitive entity is most properly considered as integral to a more comprehensive process in and through which subjects of various kinds are thus constituted and
governed in all spheres and at all levels of social life. As
of today, economic logic has so successfully colonised human thought and
conduct that it seems unlikely that decolonisation related to states and interstate relations can be achieved if the logic
as such continues to reign almost supreme in social life more generally. Considered in this broader context, the
present article makes but a modest contribution to more comprehensive efforts aimed at enabling individuals and
collectivities alike to break free from an increasingly imperialistic neoliberal governmentality.
A2: Experts Good
Expertise is not objective but leveraged to create the presence of rationality and neutralityempirically this only furthers neoliberal globalization.
Faber, Northeastern sociology professor, 2008
(Daniel, Capitalizing on Environmental Injustice: The Polluter-Industrial Complex in the Age of Globalization, pg
103-106)
As we have seen, owners, chief executive officers, lobbyists, lawyers, and other "representatives" of the polluterindustrial complex occupy key positions of power in the federal government and exert decisive influence over most
policy battles. Nevertheless, the state bureaucracy, including those agencies charged with protecting the environment, are staffed with
thousands of lower- and middle-level career state managers that operate with a significant degree of autonomy from
the governing power structure. These government officials are often dedicated to fulfilling the mission of the agency and experience a high degree of
public scrutiny and legal oversight in the performance of their duties. Hence, it is of the utmost importance to create public and private
ideological mechanisms for socializing state employees to act in accordance with the predilections of capital. Perhaps
the most important mechanism for exercising ideological control over state managers, as well as
policymakers, involves the production of scientific knowledge and information . Government regulators establish various
regulatory controls and standards for industry based on scientific studies of the health dangers posed by various pollutants and toxic substances as well as by
conducting environmental impact reviews of business and state projects. Wresting
control away from ecologically minded "independent"
scientists in favor of industry-sponsored researchers is key if government regulations are to be thwarted, weakened,
or overturned. The corporate production of science is also key to the public relations campaigns waged by the
polluter-industrial complex to convince the American people that environmental problems are imagined or
overblown or even that "toxic sludge is good for you." Over the past three decades and more, the polluter-industrial complex has utilized a wide
variety of tactics to obscure the dangerous effects of their products to government agencies. These tactics include contracting outside scientists
to conduct research designed to show that a particular production process or product is safe or to organize groups of
industry-friendly "third-party" sci-entists in the form of scientific advisory boards. Such boards work in coordination with
neoliberal policy institutes and think tanks, industry "front groups," corporate lobbyists, and public relations firms to support industry as-sertions in the regulationsetting and policy making processes and in the courts, where they testify as expert witnesses in tort litigation lawsuits. Scientific advisory boards also launch attacks in
the press on scientists and scientific work that claim environmental harm is resulting from corporate practices. The Public Relations firm Burson-Marsteller, for
instance, has organized a number of phony grassroots (Astroturf) organizations to battle the genuine "grassroots" movements.113 Dow Chemical, for instance, has
contributed to the formation of ten "greenwash" front groups, including the Alliance to Keep Americans Working, the Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy, the
Astroturf front groups and
closely related policy institutes often rely on the work of "scientific" writers hostile to liberal environmental
regulation and science, such as Elizabeth Whelan, Toxic Terror: The Truth behind the Cancer Scare', Dixie Lee Ray, Environmental Overkill', Michael
American Council on Science and Health, Citizens for a Sound Economy, and the Council for Solid Waste Solutions.114
Fumento, Science under Siege', and Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute, Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Plastic. Whelan, for example, incorrectly argued that
the EPA's experts did not think that Uniroyal Corporation's pesticide Alar posed a threat to human health. However, the EPAs Carcinogen Assessment Group labeled
Alar a "probable human carcinogen"—a judgment reiterated by the U.S. National Toxicology Program. Whelan, who has received support from Monsanto, is what
Consumer Reports labels a "public interest pretender"— one that publishes deceptive or misleading information around the true hazards posed by the polluterindustrial complex.115 The
aim of these actions by such writers is to produce enough "doubt" in order to thwart
regulatory action by state officials and secure the least restrictive possible regulatory environment as well as
to avert legal liability for resulting deaths or injuries. Scientific advisory boards and corporate-sponsored "researchers" are often effective
because they provide an appearance of "scientific legitimacy" in support of industry claims. As part of the liberal regime of environmental
regulation, the polluter-industrial complex has been especially successful in creating a "risk paradigm" approach .
The risk paradigm focuses on the regulation of individual pollutants at "acceptable levels" of public exposure
utilizing a variety of scientific and engineering tools, including risk assessment, toxicological testing, epidemiological investigations, and so forth. This risk
paradigm assumes that scientists can know "safe" exposure doses to toxins and that public exposure rates can
be controlled. Magnified by industry pressures to make speedy regulatory and policy decisions with inadequate information, however, a lack of data showing
any "harmful" impact is typically misconstrued by state officials as evidence of safety. Most chemicals are approved without any restrictions. In the United States, the
lack of government health data on chemicals is startling. The vast majority of the 70,000 and more chemicals registered for use by industry have not undergone
adequate long-term testing for their health and environmental impacts. A recent study by the Environmental De-fense Fund found that 75 percent of the high-profile,
high-volume chemicals used by industry lack even the most minimal health testing information.116 The regulation of toxic substances is instead based on permitting
the use and release of toxic substances in "amounts that the producers and users claim are essential for them" to be profitable. Only in a few nightmare cases, where
the obvious health and environmental impacts of the substance in question has resulted in a large public outcry, have much stricter regulations or the banning of a
specific chemical (such as DDT) actually occurred.117 Most toxicity testing and health research on chemicals is initially conducted by the manufacturer and then
submitted to the government. In addition, with deeper and deeper cuts in government research budgets becoming more profound in the new millennium, the EPA and
The reports
coming out of these industry investigations have a profound impact in shaping the "un-derstanding" and behavior of
government policymakers and regulators, in-cluding EPA staff.118 However, as has been documented in recent
other agencies are increasingly forced to rely on regulated companies and industry-affiliated institutions instead of their own scientists to supply data.
years in countless investigations, corporations that make up the polluter-industrial complex have repeatedly
withheld, falsified, or altered their own internal studies that show their products to be harmful . The suppression of such research includes the true health dangers posed by polyvinyl chloride plastic, lead, tobacco, silicon dust, asbestos, and many other substances. In fact, as in the case of
lead and vinyl—two substances causing devastating health impacts among workers and EJ communities throughout the country—entire in-dustries have banded
together to deny and suppress information about the toxic nature of their products. The studies conducted by industry are clearly not reliable, yet the government
continues to utilize these studies to the detri-ment of public health.119 The
corruptive impacts of the polluter-industrial complex extends
to America's universities. A recent study of corporate funding of academic research reveals that more than half of
the university scientists who received gifts from drug or biotechnology companies admitted that the donor expected
to exert influence over their work. The concern is so widespread that many scientific journals, including the prestigious New England Journal of
Medicine, now require that the source of support for the investigator's research be clearly iden¬tified.120 For instance, an influential study published in the Journal of
Occupational and Environmental Medicine exonerating hexavalent chromium from causing high rates of cancer in five villages in northeastern China was retracted in
2006 (hexavalent chromium, also known as industrial chromium or chromium-6, is classified by the EPA as a known carcinogen). The retraction occurred when the
Wall Street Journal revealed that the article was conceived, drafted, and edited by consultants for Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), which was embroiled in toxic-tort
litigation over hexavalent-chromium contamination in California. The PG&E consultants submitted the 1997 article for publication without disclosing their own or
PG&E's involvement to the journal.121 PG&E had a major stake in overturning the science on the harmful impacts of hexavalent chromium. It was during the 1990s
that law firm employee Erin Brockovich put together the cancer cluster stories from over 600 plaintiffs from Hinkley, California, in a successful multi-million-dollar
lawsuit against PG&E. The
polluter-industrial complex is also attempting to undermine the ability of independent and
government-sponsored scientists and institutions to conduct research that may prove damaging to capital, including
efforts to fire or blackball researchers.122 With the Republican takeover of Congress in the mid-1990s, industry pressure resulted in the dismantling of
the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). Serving as perhaps the most important scientific advisory office in the country, OTA's twenty-three-year body of work
included some 750 reports and assessments on subjects ranging from acid rain to climate change. Created in 1972 during the Nixon administration, OTA was
politically "neutral," serving to provide technical studies and scientific information in an accessible manner to both sides of aisle. However, the OTA drew increased
opposition over the years from the polluter-industrial complex because the analyses provided by the office often revealed dangers associated with pollution.123
Alternative
1NC
Our alternative is to decolonize economic engagement. Questioning the politics of space
and knowledge that make engagement an economic tool of manipulation is key to
sustainable development.
Walsh, Estudios Culturales Latinoamericanos de la Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar,
2012
(Catherine, “The Politics of Naming”, Cultural Studies, 26.1, Project Muse)
Cultural Studies, in our project, is constructed and understood as more than a field of ‘study’. It is broadly understand as a formation, a field of possibility and
expression. And it is constructed as a space of encounter between disciplines and intellectual, political and ethical projects that seek to combat what Alberto Moreiras
called the impoverishment of thought driven by divisions (disciplinary, epistemological, geographic, etc.) and the socio-political-cultural fragmentation that
increasingly makes social change and intervention appear to be divided forces (Moreiras 2001). As such, Cultural Studies is conceived as a place of plural-, inter-,
transand in-disciplinary (or undisciplined) critical
thinking that takes as major concern the intimate relationships between culture,
knowledge, politics and economics mentioned earlier, and that sees the problems of the region as both local and global. It is
a space from which to search for ways of thinking, knowing, comprehending, feeling and acting that permit us to
intervene and influence: a field that makes possible convergence and articulation, particularly between efforts, practices, knowledge
and projects that focus on more global justice, on differences (epistemic, ontological, existential, of gender, ethnicity, class, race, nation,
among others) constructed as inequalities within the framework of neo-liberal capitalism. It is a place that seeks answers, encourages
intervention and engenders projects and proposals. It is in this frame of understanding and practice in our Ph.D. programme in Latin-American Cultural Studies at the
Universidad Andina Simo´n Bolı´var, that this broad description-definition continues to take on more concrete characteristics. Here I can identify three that stand out:
the inter-cultural, the inter-epistemic and the de-colonial. The
inter-cultural has been and still is a central axis in the struggles and
processes of social change in the Andean region. Its critical meaning was first affirmed near the end of the 1980s in the Ecuadorian indigenous
movement’s political project. Here inter-culturality was positioned as an ideological principal grounded in the urgent need for a radical transformation of social
structures, institutions and relationships, not only for indigenous peoples but also for society as a whole. Since then, inter-culturality has marked a social, political,
ethical project and process that is also epistemological;6 a project and a process that seek to re-found the bases of the nation and national culture, understood as
homogenous and mono-cultural. Such call for re-founding does not to simply add diversity to what is already established, but rather to rethink, rebuild and interculturalize the nation and national culture, and with in the terrains of knowledge, politics and life-based visions. It is this understanding of the inter-cultural that is of
interest. Concretely, we are interested in the spaces of agency, creation, innovation and encounter between and among different subjects, knowledges, practices and
visions. Referring to our project of Cultural Studies as (inter)Cultural Studies, enables and encourages us to think from this region, from the struggles, practices and
processes that question Eurocentric, colonial and imperial legacies, and work to transform and create radically different conditions for thinking, encountering, being
and coexisting or co-living. In a similar fashion, the
inter-epistemic focuses on the need to question, interrupt and transgress the
Euro-USA-centric epistemological frameworks that dominate Latin-American universities and even some Cultural Studies
programmes. To think with knowledges produced in Latin America and the Caribbean (as well as in other ‘Souths’,
including those located in the North) and by intellectuals who come not only from academia, but also from other projects ,
communities and social movements are, for us, a necessary and essential step, both in de-colonization and in creating other conditions of
knowledge and understanding. Our project, thus, concerns itself with the work of inverting the geopolitics of knowledge,
with placing attention on the historically subjugated and negated plurality of knowledge, logics and rationalities, and with the
political-intellectual effort to create relationships, articulations and convergences between them. The de-colonial element is intimately related to the two preceding
points. Here our interest is, on one hand, to make evident the thoughts, practices and experiences that both in the past and in the present have endeavoured to challenge
the colonial matrix of power and domination, and to exist in spite of it, in its exterior and interior. By colonial matrix, we refer to the hierarchical system of racial
civilizational classification that has operated and operates at different levels of life, including social identities (the superiority of white, heterosexual males),
ontological-existential contexts (the dehumanization of indigenous and black peoples), epistemic contexts (the positioning of Euro-centrism as the only perspective of
knowledge, thereby disregarding other epistemic rationalities), and cosmological (the control and/or negation of the ancestral-spiritual-territorial-existential bases that
govern the life-systems of ancestral peoples, most especially those of African Diaspora and of Abya Yala) (see Quijano 1999). At the centre or the heart of this matrix
is capitalism as the only possible model of civilization; the imposed social classification, the idea of ‘humanity’, the perspective of knowledge and the prototype life-
by defending the interests of social
domination and the exploitation of work under the hegemony of capital, ‘the ‘‘racialization’’ and the
‘‘capitalization’’ of social relationships of these models of power, and the ‘‘eurocentralization’’ of its control, are in
the very roots of our present problems of identity,’ in Latin America as countries, ‘nations’ and States (Quijano 2006). It is precisely
system that goes with it defines itself through this capitalistic civilizational lens. As Quijano argues,
because of this that we consider the de-colonial to be a fundamental perspective. Within our project, the de-colonial does not seek to establish a new paradigm or line
of thought but a critically-conscious understanding of the past and present that opens up and suggests questions, perspectives and paths to explore. As such, and on the
other hand, we are interested in stimulating methodologies and pedagogies that, in the words of Jacqui Alexander (2005), cross the fictitious boundaries of exclusion
and marginalization to contribute to the configuration of new ways of being and knowing rooted not in alterity itself, but in the principles of relation, complement and
commitment. It
is also to encourage other ways of reading, investigating and researching, of seeing, knowing, feeling,
hearing and being, that challenge the singular reasoning of western modernity, make tense our own disciplinary frameworks of
‘study’ and interpretation, and persuade a questioning from and with radically distinct rationalities, knowledge, practices and civilizational-life-systems. It is
through these three pillars of the inter-cultural, the inter-epistemic and the de-colonial that we attempt to understand
the processes, experiences and struggles that are occurring in Latin America and elsewhere . But it is also here that we
endeavour to contribute to and learn from the complex relationships between culture-politics-economics, knowledge and power in the world today; to unlearn to
relearn from and with perspectives otherwise. Practices, experiences and challenges In this last section, my interest is to share some of the particularities of our
doctorate programme/project, now in its third cycle; its achievements and advancements; and the challenges that it faces in an academic context, increasingly
characterized regionally and internationally, by disciplinarity, depolitization, de-subjectivation, apathy, competitive individualism and nonintervention. Without a
doubt, one of the unique characteristics of the programme/ project is its students: all mid-career professionals mainly from the Andean region and from such diverse
fields as the social sciences, humanities, the arts, philosophy, communication, education and law. The connection that the majority of the students have with social and
cultural movements and/or processes, along with their dedication to teaching or similar work, helps to contribute to dynamic debate and discussion not always seen in
academia and post-graduate programmes. Similarly, the faculty of the programme stand out for being internationally renowned intellectuals, and, the majority, for
their commitment to struggles of social transformation, critical thinking and the project of the doctorate itself. The curriculum offering is based on courses and
seminars that seek to foment thinking from Latin American and with its intellectuals in all of their diversity comprehend, confront and affect the problems and
realities of the region, which are not only local but global. The
pedagogical methodological perspective aforementioned works to stimulate
processes of collective thought and allow the participants to think from related formations , experiences and research topics and
to think with the differences disciplinary, geographical, epistemic and subjective thereby fracturing individualism by dialoguing, transgressing and inter-crossing
boundaries. Trans-disciplinarity, as such, is a fundamental position and process in our project. The fact that the graduate students come from an array of different
backgrounds provides a plurality in which the methodologicalpedagogical practice becomes the challenge of collectively thinking, crossing disciplinary backgrounds
and creating new positions and perspectives, conceived and formed in a trans-disciplinary way. The majority of courses, seminars and professors, also assume that this
is a necessary challenge in today’s world when no single discipline and no single intellectual is capable alone of analyzing, comprehending or transforming social
reality. Nevertheless, trans-disciplinary gains continue to be a point of criticism and contention, especially given the present trend to re-discipline the LatinAmerican
university. As Edgardo Lander has argued (2000a), this tendency reflects the neo-liberalization of higher education, as well as the increasing conservatism of
intellectuals, including those that previously identified as or to continue to identify themselves as progressives and/or leftists. To establish oneself in a discipline or
presume truth through a discipline, a common practice today, is to reinstall the geopolitics of knowing. This, in turn, strengthens Euro-USA-centrism as ‘the place’ of
theory and knowledge. As such, the subject of dispute is not simply the trans-disciplinary aspect of Cultural Studies but also its ‘indisciplinary’ nature, that is, the
effort central to our project to include points of view that come from Latin America and thinkers who are not always connected to academia (see Walsh et al. 2002).
Our interest is not, as some claim, to facilitate the agendas or cultural agency of subaltern groups or social movements, promote activism or
simply include other knowledge forms, but instead to build a different political-intellectual project a political-intellectual project otherwise.
Such project gives centrality to the need to learn to think from, together and with LatinAmerican reality and its
actors, thereby stimulating convergences, articulations and inter-culturalizations that aim at creating an academia that is committed to
life itself. Such a perspective does not eliminate or deny knowledge conceived in Europe or North America usually named as
‘universal’ or its proponents and thinkers. Instead, it incorporates such knowledge as part of a broader canon and worldview that
seeks pluriversality, recognizing the importance of places and loci of enunciation. For our project, all of this serves to highlight the
doubly complicated situation that is still in flux. On one hand, there is the negative association with trans-disciplinarity and the academic suppositions that accompany
it, particularly in the area of research; this requires that our theses be doubly rigorous. And, on the other hand, there is the geopolitical limitation not only of
disciplines but also of academic disciplining. To argue, as we do, that knowledge and thought are also produced outside of universities and, in dialogue with Hall, that
political movements also produce and provoke theoretic moments and movements, is to question and challenge the academic logic and the authority of a universal and
singular reasoning and science. We will, through such questioning and challenges, always be marginalized, placed on the fringe, under a microscope, criticized and
disputed. Because of this, the challenges that we have encountered have been many. On one hand, there are those challenges that many face in the Latin-American
academic context: the real difficulties of financing, infrastructure and research support. On the other hand, are the challenges that come with the traditional academic
disciplinary structure, its de-politization and de-subjectification. Here the challenge is to transgress the established norms of neutrality, distance and objectivity. It is
also to confront the standards that give little relevance to historically subjugated groups, practices and knowledges, and to the interlinking of race, ethnicity, gender
and sexuality with the structures and models of power and knowledge. It is to make evident past and present struggles that give real meaning to the arguments of
heterogeneity, decoloniality and inter-culturality. Here the criticism and dispute comes from many sides: from those who describe these efforts as too politicized (and,
as such, supposedly less ‘academic’), uni-paradigmatic (supposedly limited to only one ‘line of thought’), fundamentalist (supposedly exclusionary of those subjects
not marked by the colonial wound) and as obsessed with conflict (and therefore far from the tradition of ‘culture’, its letters and object of study). These challenges
together with the tensions, criticisms and disputes that they mark often times make the path more difficult. Still, and at the same time, they allow us to clarify the
distinctive and unique aspects of our project and its motivations to continue with its course of construction, insurgence and struggle. Our concern here is not so much
with the institutionalizing of Cultural Studies. Better yet, and in a much broader fashion, we are concerned with epistemic inter-culturalization, with the decolonialization and pluriversalization of the ‘university’, and with a thinking from the South(s). To place these concerns, as argued here, within a perspective and a
politics of naming: ‘(inter)Cultural Studies in de-colonial code,’ is to open, not close, paths. Conclusion In concluding the reflections I have presented here, it is useful
to return to a fundamental point touched by Stuart Hall: ‘intervention’. In particular and with Hall, I refer
to the will to intervene in and transform
the world, an intervention that does not simply relate to social and political contexts and fields, but also to epistemology and
theory. That is to an intervention and transformation in and a de-colonization of the frameworks and logics of our
thinking, knowing and comprehending. To commit oneself in mind, body and spirit as Frantz Fanon argued. To consider Cultural Studies today a project of
political vocation and intervention is to position and at the same time build our work on the borders of and the boundaries between university and society. It is to
seriously reflect on whom we read and with whom we want and/or need to dialogue and think, to understand the very
limits or our knowledge. And precisely because of this, it is to act on our own situation, establishing contacts and exchanges of different kinds in a
pedagogicalmethodological zeal to think from and think with, in what I have elsewhere called a critical inter-culturality and de-colonial pedagogy (Walsh 2009). In
universities and societies that are increasingly characterized by nonintervention, auto-complacency, individualism and
apathy, intervention represents, suggests and promotes a position and practice of involvement, action and complicity. To take on such a
position and practice and to make it an integral part of our political-intellectual project is to find not only ethical meaning in work on culture
and power, but also to give this work some heart. That is to say, to focus on the ever-greater need and urgency of life. To call these Cultural
Studies or critical (inter)Cultural Studies is only one of our options, and part of the politics of
naming.
Solvency – 2NC
Letting Latin America chart its own course is key-top down technocratic approaches
empirically fail AND delegitimize alternatives
Roberts, Cornell government professor, 2009
(Kenneth, Beyond Neoliberalism in Latin America?, pg 1-7)
In recent years voters in Latin America have elected a series of left-of-center presidents, starting with Venezuela in 1998 and continuing (to date) with Chile, Brazil,
Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Paraguay. Although this political "left turn" has bypassed a number of countries, and the new governments that
are part of it comprise a remarkably heterogeneous lot, there seems little doubt that the political winds have shifted in the region. The
turn to the left has
followed a decade-and-a-half of free market or "neoliberal" reform, when technocrats throughout the region-with
staunch support from the U.S. government and international financial institutions-forged a powerful policymaking
consensus around the virtues of free trade, deregulated markets, and private entrepreneurship. Since it is not clear whether the
region's new leftist governments have identified, much less consolidated, viable alternatives to market liberalism, it is far too early to claim that Latin America has
entered a post-neoliberal era of development. What is clear, however, is that the
shift to the left signals a "repoliticization" of development
issues in Latin America-that is, a demise of the "Washington Consensus" (Williamson 1990) for free market capitalism and the onset of a highly contested
search for alternatives that lie "beyond neoliberalism." In short, Latin America is no longer (if it ever was) suspended at "the end of politics "
(Colburn 2002), where technocratic consensus is complemented (or secured) by a combination of social demobilization,
political resignation, and mass consumeris m. The repoliticization of development has both policy and process
dimensions. On the policy front, it signifies that neoliberalism is no longer the only game in town; although predefined
socialist alternatives to capitalism have long since evaporated, vigorous debates have emerged around non-neoliberal "varieties of capitalism" that envision a more
active role for state power in asserting national autonomy, shaping investment priorities, ameliorating inequalities, and providing social services and other public
goods. In terms of process, repoliticization
entails the emergence or revival of popular subjectivities that are contesting
the technocratic monopolization of policymaking space-in some cases at the ballot box, in others on the streets. Repoliticization,
therefore, involves a reciprocal interaction between the rise of new actors and an expansion of the issue agenda to
include a broader range of alternatives. This book tries to make sense of these new subjectivities-that is, to identify some of Latin America's new
social and political actors and to explain the origins, inspirations, and interests that lie behind their activation. In contrast to much of the emerging work on Latin
America's left turn, we
look beyond the rise of left-leaning governments and their policy choices to focus attention on the
socioeconomic and cultural terrain in which new political options are being forged . Individual chapters thus explore how
neoliberalism has shaped and constrained popular subjects by breaking down some traditional actors, transforming others, and providing a stimulus for the emergence
of new ones-at least some of which bear the seeds of potential social orders beyond neoliberalism. Our approach starts with the recognition that neoliberal "structural
adjustment" programs represented much more than a simple change in development policies. By slashing tariffs and other trade barriers, privatizing state-owned
enterprises and social services, and deregulating markets to encourage the free flow of capital, neoliberal reforms realigned existing relationships among states,
markets, and societies in fundamental ways (Garret6n 2003a). As such, they transformed the social, political, and cultural landscapes that had developed during the
mid-twentieth-century era of state-led import-substitution industrialization (ISI). Initially, this meant breaking down the popular collective subjects of the lSI era-in
particular, organized labor and labor-based parties-and imposing market discipline over everlarger swaths of social life. As labor unions weakened, however, new
popular subjects, such as community-based organizations and indigenous movements, that rejected the insecurities of market individualism and its commodification of
social relationships began to emerge. Their diverse attempts to reweave the social fabric are the primary focus of this volume. The essays included here trace many of
the contours of this rapidly evolving, neoliberal social and political landscape. Collectively, the essays explore three basic sets of questions. First, what are the new
patterns of social interaction generated by the process of market restructuring, and how do these reshape the ways in which societal interests and identities are
articulated, organized, and represented in the political arena? Interests and identities are often redefined as market reforms create new economic niches (or destroy old
ones), commodify social relationships, alter traditional uses of land, water, or natural resources, and shift the scale or locus of public policymaking. Second, what new
social and political actors have emerged, and how do they respond to the multifaceted changes associated with market restructuring? Traditional actors may enter into
decline, but new ones invariably arise; we must ask, then, how these new actors are constituted, how they adapt to market opportunities and insecurities, and what
strategies they follow when they try to enter the political arena, redefine the policy agenda, and contest public authority. Third, and finally, to what extent do these
actors and their responses provide the building blocks for new paths of social, economic, and political development that might be more equitable and inclusive than
those that have characterized the neoliberal era? What
lies "beyond neoliberalism" is unlikely to be determined by grand
ideological visions or political blueprints; instead, it will be constructed piece by piece , from below, through the
grassroots participation and decentralized experimentation of new popular subjects . This volume offers no simple answers to these
complex questions, much less a new theory of neoliberal politics. Instead, it offers a series of portraits written from a variety of disciplinary perspectives about how
people adapt and respond-both individually and collectively-when their economic moorings shift and the social fabric is torn asunder. These portraits are hardly
comprehensive; they do not cover every country in Latin America, much less all the stations in the region's heterogeneous and fragmented sociocultural landscape.
The editors do not claim that the particular set of actors and issues included in this volume is the best or the only one that could have been chosen. Nevertheless, we
have selected topics based on their importance and the quality of research they have generated, and we believe our portraits jointly illuminate the diverse experiences
of social actors during the neoliberal era. These portraits provide compelling evidence that capitalism is, as Schumpeter (1950) aptly characterized it, a force of
"creative destruction" that simultaneously breaks down and reconfigures various fields of social interaction. Our chapters are replete with examples of the dialectical
interplay between capitalism's advance and the social, cultural, and political responses it elicits-though not, as will become evident, in the manner classically
envisioned by Marx. These responses, whether deliberate or reactive, bear the seeds of what may in fact lie beyond neoliberalism, a horizon that remains opaque but is
increasingly being sketched by a diverse array of popular movements in the region. As explained later, the various dimensions of this dialectical interplay lie beyond
the scope of any single academic discipline, making an interdisciplinary approach vital to a more comprehensive understanding. An Integral Approach to Economic
Reform, Social Change, and Political Response Social and political changes in Latin America have long been conditioned by patterns of economic development. This
can be seen, for example, in the nineteenth-century association between oligarchic politics and agro-export development models, or in the rise of populist social and
political mobilization during the early stages of industrialization in the middle of the twentieth lower class groups. These demands were typically funneled through the
corporatist intermediary channels of mass party and union organizations, which brokered exchanges between states and organized societal interests. In short, lSI
encouraged groups-defined primarily in terms of class categories-to self-organize in order to advance their interests in a policymaking environment where states
increasingly penetrated and regulated social and economic relationships, including labor markets and land tenure arrangements. Together, these two processes
encouraged strong labor and, in some cases, peasant movements to develop, which in turn provided a social foundation for Latin America's first mass party
organizations. The social, cultural, and political construction of popular subjects during the lSI era was thus anchored in the favorable combination of rapid
industrialization, state interventionism, and social reform. These linkages between state-led industrialization and grassroots organization were frayed, however, by
economic pressures and political polarization in the 1960s and 1970s (O'Donnell 1973), and they were largely severed by the debt crisis of the 1980s. While neoliberal
structural adjustment policies helped restore economic stability in the aftermath of the debt crisis, they exacerbated-indeed, they often institutionalized-the social
dislocations wrought by the crisis itself. Changes in labor markets-in particular growing informalization, a greater reliance on subcontracting and temporary labor, and
flexible rules for hiring and firing-made collective action in the workplace increasingly difficult to sustain, leading to a sharp decline in trade union density in most of
the region. Likewise, the parcelization of landholdings and the penetration of market relations in the countryside undermined historic patterns of peasant mobilization
for land reform in much of the region (Kurtz 2004). The retreat of the state subjected new sectors of the economy and society to market discipline, undermining the
rationale and effectiveness of collective action aimed at eliciting state redress . Historic labor-based parties entered into decline or adapted in part by distancing
themselves from labor and other organized mass constituencies. This trend that was propelled both by the structural conditions of neoliberal capitalism and by
technological advances in political communication (most prominently, television) that rendered mass party organizations increasingly dispensable for electoral
mobilization. Following the restoration of democratic rule in most of Latin America in the 1980s, U.S.-style media-based advertising and campaign tactics diffused
rapidly across the region, allowing candidates to appeal directly to voters without the mediation of mass membership party organizations. Latin America entered the
new millennium, then, largely devoid of the mass social and party organizations that dominated the landscape during the populist/lSI era. Labor movements had been
downsized and politically marginalized, and they were less capable of representing the diverse interests and identities of a precarious and in formalized workforce.
Likewise, where they survived at all, mass parties were transformed into professionalized or patronage-based electoral machines (see, e.g., Levitsky 2003); elsewhere,
they were displaced by independent personalities and populist outsiders. The dominant trends pointed toward a fragmentation and pluralization of civil society-with a
multitude of interests, identities, and decentralized groups struggling to make their voices heard (Ox horn 1998a)-and a deinstitutionalization of political
A bottom-up perspective is
thus essential to understand how the demise of lSI and the transition to neoliberalism realigned the social landscape
in ways that disarticulated the class-based popular subjects of the lSI era. Such a perspective is also essential, however, for explaining
popular responses to market liberalization and the openings that eventually emerged for the construction of new
types of collective subjects that bear the seeds of what may lie beyond neoliberalism. Neoliberal reforms are directedindeed, often imposed-by state officials in collaboration with (or under the pressure of) transnational power centers, but civil
society and grassroots actors are hardly passive bystanders (Arce 2005). These actors invariably seek to exploit, resist,
evade, or cope with state initiatives, and their responses often produce outcomes that are quite different from those
envisioned by policymakers and economic elites. In particular, grassroots actors employ a variety of measures to alleviate material hardships and
representation, as evidenced by extreme levels of electoral volatility and the rise of personality-based, antiparty candidates.
reduce exposure to market insecurities; as Karl Polanyi (1944) argues, there are social and political limits to the commodification of social relationships, and these
limits may be quickly breached in contexts of egregious inequalities such as those prevailing in contemporary Latin America. Popular
responses thus
attempt to reweave a social fabric torn by economic crisis and market dislocation. These responses are often local,
decentralized, and territorially based, building on traditions of communitybased organizing, or focused on ethnic and cultural
claims rather than the class/corporatist patterns of interest representation that were hallmarks of the lSI era. Although new popular subjects may not initially target
public authorities or policymaking arenas, grassroots activism often becomes politicized over time, posing the formidable challenge analyzed by Benjamin Goldfrank
in chapter three-that of translating local initiatives into nationallevel political alternatives. This challenge highlights the importance of a bottom-up perspective in the
construction of new popular subjects in the neoliberal era. The primary objectives of this volume, then, are to develop an interdisciplinary perspective on the multiple
forms of societal responses to market liberalization and to assess their effects. We do this in four principal fields where neoliberalism has altered the social landscape:
electoral politics, ethnic mobilization, environmental governance, transnational migration. In each area we explore new patterns of social interaction, identify various
responses, and analyze the potential impact of emerging popular subjects.
Infusing public and educational spaces with critiques of neoliberalism is key to establish
new social relations
Henderson et al., Rochester doctoral candidate, 2011
(Joseph, “Contesting global neoliberalism and creating alternative futures”, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural
Politics of Education, 32.2, Taylor and Francis)
Contesting neoliberalism necessitates that we situate neoliberal policies within the larger neoliberal discourse
promoting markets, competition, individualism, and privatization. Analysing education policies in the USA, whether the push for mayoral control in Rochester, New
York (see Duffy, 2010; Hedeen, 2010; Ramos, 2010), school reform policies under Renaissance 2010 in Chicago, or Race to the Top under the Obama administration,
requires that we understand how reforms such as using standardized testing are presented as efficient, neutral responses to the problem of raising student achievement,
rather than examining the root causes of student failure, including lack of decent paying jobs and health care, and under-funded schools. Current policies reinforce
neoliberalism and leave the status quo intact. Similarly, if we look at education in Sub-Saharan Africa, we must situate schools within the hollowing out of the state,
and the lack of adequate funding for education and other social services such as health care. For example, in Uganda, as in several other Sub-Saharan countries, the
global recession has contributed to drug shortages, making it impossible to treat the growing number of AIDS patients (McNeil, 2010). Yet, under more social
Furthermore, education is increasingly contested, as the
plutocracy promotes education as a means of producing productive, rather than critical, employees. Schools are
more often places where teachers and students learn what will be on the test rather than seeking answers to questions
that cry out for answers, such as how to develop a healthy, sustainable environment or communities where people
are actually valued for who they are rather than what they contribute to the economy. Instead, we must ask what
kinds of relations do we want to nurture, what kinds of social relations, what kind of work do we want to do,
and what kinds of culture and technologies do we want to create . These questions require that we rethink schools so that teachers and
students can engage in real questions for which the answer will make a difference in the quality of our lives. These questions also require that we
rethink our relationship to a specific kind of ‘free’ marketplace that is not, in fact, inevitable . By problematizing the
idea of neoliberal marketization, we can begin to construct new markets that actually value commonly held
democratic policies the state would play a larger role in providing health care.
resources and local communities. In our own educational efforts, we ask just these kinds of questions. For example, we are working with students
and teachers in Africa with the goal of having them become community resources in alternative, reliable, and healthy energy resources. We note that two billion
people in the developing world still lack natural gas, propane or other modern fuels used for cooking or heating their homes, and 1.5 billion people live entirely
without electricity. Those without modern fuels rely typically on wood or dung for fuel, which are often used for unventilated indoor cook stoves that produce smoke
and gases that result in numerous illnesses. A United Nations report notes ‘two million people die every year from causes associated with exposures to smoke from
cooking with biomass and coal’ (Legros, Havet, Bruce, & Bonjour, 2009, p. 2). Furthermore, children and adults who rely on biomass are much more likely to die
from pneumonia and chronic lung diseases. Our hope is to work with students to provide reliable and safer energy without contributing to global climate change. At
the same time we are working with schools in the USA to develop alternatives to electricity generated by coal by working with students to conserve energy and
develop alternative energy resources. Rather than seeing themselves as individuals responsible only to themselves, we are encouraging students to see themselves as a
community participating in determining their local and global futures. Contesting
neoliberalism, then, needs to occur at three levels, the
discursive, the political, and the pedagogical. First, we need to analyse the ways in which particular discourses have
become dominant and the interconnections between what is occurring at the local, national, and global levels.
Understanding events in Chicago, Mexico, or Uganda requires that we examine how global neoliberal discourses and policies promote the withering away of the state
except for its role in promoting a climate conducive to capital investment through low taxes, deregulation, and the availability of finance capital. Second,
we
need to examine and contest the way in which power has been concentrated in the hands of the corporate and
political elite. In Chicago, under Renaissance 2010, they have destroyed working-class neighbourhoods and replaced them with upscale housing and boutique
schools (Lipman, in press). In New York City, the mayor has gained control over the city's schools by secretly and unilaterally choosing Cathleen Black, CEO of a
major media corporation, as the next Chancellor, completely disempowering and disenfranchising the public (Chen & Barbaro, 2010). In response to events in
Chicago and New York, parents, community youth groups, and teachers are working, separately and together, to resist school privatization and the destruction of
neighbourhoods. Possibilities for real community-based reform have increased with the election of the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) to the Chicago
Teachers Union on a platform of democratic unionism and opposition to privatization and Renaissance 2010. In New York City parents and community groups are
Third, schools must engage students in raising the essential
questions of our time, whether these be about climate change, environmental sustainability, or rebuilding
communities in a socially just way. We need to develop a social democratic approach to government,
governance, and education that promotes critical analysis and active participation in creating an alternative
to neoliberalism.
organizing against the Cathleen Black's appointment as school Chancellor.
Try or die-only way to create a system not centered on profit.
Sachs et al., Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy, 2012
(Wolfgang, “Critique of the Green Economy Toward Social and Environmental Equity”,
http://boell.org/downloads/Critique_of_the_Green_Economy.pdf, DOA: 6-27-12)
Experts now argue over whether we should expect a slight
rise in economic output year on year or zero growth punctuated by upswings and downswings . Yet that takes no account of
the green transformation of society and the economy. A strategy of eco-efficiency (“better”), environmental sustainability
(“different”) and self-restraint (“less”) has fewer prospects of growth. In a post-growth society the renewable sectors of the economy will
need to grow while the fossil ones shrink, but on balance it must be assumed that in the long term growth rates will be negative. How will a non-growing
economy work, if everyone has a lower income than before ? To this key question, which will define the next few decades, there are broadly
In all the old industrial countries the times of high economic growth are past.
speaking two answers – a reactionary one and a progressive one. The reactionary answer involves enduring a period of loss of growth accompanied by increasing
inequality, social exclusion and impoverishment. The
progressive one sees us investing in a new model of wealth that ensures that
everyone has enough, because it is based on a different equilibrium between the economy and society. The progressive answer does not just fall from the
sky; we must prepare for it over the forthcoming years and decades. Strengthening society as against the economy needs new types of infrastructure for different ways
of thinking. The
commons are a fundamental feature of our present reality. People can only survive and thrive if they
have access to nature, to family and friends, and to language and culture. While this may seem obvious, it is hard to find a
public and political language in which to talk about the commons. If we speak of the economy, the concepts of the
market and the state dominate everything else. If we speak of politics, what comes to mind is the polarization of right and left. Hardly
anyone mentions the commons – as though nothing of significance exists outside the market and the state . These two
concepts are like two communicating tubes: a lot of market on one side and not much state on the other; not much market on one side and a lot of state on the other.
Yet historians and anthropologists have long been at pains to point out that exchanging goods via the market or via the state are only two ways in which goods can be
distributed – there is a third way: exchange in the community. The first way is governed by the principle of competition and the second by the principle of planning,
while in the third the emphasis is on mutuality. In any society the three distributive principles usually mingle, but over the last two centuries something new has
happened: the principle of mutuality has steadily lost ground. Since
Adam Smith the relationship between the market and the state,
between competition and planning, has become the main dispute, while the principle of mutuality has become the
big loser. Social groups such as families, relatives, neighborhoods, networks of friends, cooperatives and similar
economic forms have been sucked into a vortex of decline from which by turns the market and the state have
emerged victorious. In a post-growth society this development must be reversed. Or rather: it must move forwards. The
commons are another source of wealth in addition to the market and the state. They form the basis of social
communities, especially at four levels: Firstly, at the natural level all humans depend on water, forests, soil, fishing grounds, species diversity, countryside, air and the atmosphere and on the life processes embedded in
them. As biological beings they have a right to natural assets, regardless of and with precedence over any private ownership of natural stocks. Secondly, at the social level places such as squares, parks, courtyards and public gardens,
as well as post-work leisure, holidays and free time, are essential if social networks are to develop. Thirdly, as far as the cultural level is concerned, it is obvious that language, memory, customs and knowledge are basic to the creation
of any material or non-material product. As cultural beings, the spirits and fates of every person ultimately rely on the achievements of others. And finally, fourthly, at the digital level: production and exchange on the Internet work
best if access to stored data is not impeded. For free navigation in the virtual world it is important that neither software codes nor the wealth of uploaded documents, sounds and pictures are locked away by excessive property claims.
Restoring the strength of the commons requires a different perspective on the economy . What actually is property? And what legitimates the
ownership of property? What sounds like a philosophical discussion has practical consequences. If the concept of property does not discriminate clearly between possession and use there is little hope either for the shepherd who lets
his sheep graze here one day and there the next, or for the Internet surfer who downloads articles and pictures. And what actually is competition? If competition is understood as “costriving” (and the German word for competition,
“Konkurrenz,” has the same Latin root as the English “concur”) rather than as “survival of the fittest,” then small traders and software specialists can breathe again. And what does creating value actually mean? If it means only
And – the most fundamental
question of all – what actually is money? If we make no distinction between money as a means of exchange and
credit and money as a means of enrichment and speculation, the whole economy is listing dangerously – in nautical
terms it is a disaster waiting to happen. Looking at the economy from a different angle reveals important aspects
that could be relevant to a no-growth economy. Alongside the formal economy there is a relational economy that is concerned not with
monetary value created by selling goods and services, then work in the home, neighborhood services, community organizations and peer groups are left out in the cold.
material things but with relationships between people. The ambit of the relational economy is wide and can range from traditional associations such as sports clubs
and church communities, together with businesses of the classical type such as shops and repair services, to post-modern manifestations such as car-sharing schemes
and community solar energy projects. Different forms of commitment can arise: friendships, self-help groups and neighborhood services as well as welfare
organizations, local businesses and Internet services. Forms
of the relational economy can be found in different sectors : relating to food,
the core is an economy that is built on
the care of the sick and elderly, service provision and everyday needs, and in sports and entertainment. At
social relationships, a “care economy.” It cares for children, young people, the sick and the elderly. It brings together parents, educators and carers of all types. Of course it also demonstrates the
difficulties that a relational economy has to contend with: care work, family relationships, local communities and private organizations will need to be financially and structurally reorganized. This reorganization must also extend to
relationships between the genders if the inherited gender-based division of labor that is predicated on gender hierarchy is not to become even more firmly entrenched. The “care economy,” and with it the whole concept of the
Caring must undergo a political and social revaluation. In the process, paid and
the relational economy appeals to different
motives and norms than the market and the state. Competition and achievement, routine and loyalty certainly occur and can be a component of the
relational economy, will be derailed if men and women do not participate equally.
unpaid work must be redistributed – not just between the genders, but primarily so. Moreover,
social commons, but they can never replace voluntary action and selforganization, cooperation and enterprise. Whether in the development of Wikipedia or of urban
community gardens or in the running of old people’s clubs and nursery schools – the virtue of cooperation is writ large. Cooperation,
with all the
attendant difficulties, is held in higher regard than competition, shared curiosity is valued more than hoarding
egotism. Things are more successful if they are done with passion, commitment and a sense of responsibility – this is an old lesson that classical business
administration has been slow to learn. How can an economy function without growing? This is a big question that cannot be
answered without considering the hidden dimensions of wealth – and in particular of the care economy. One of these
dimensions is the social commons. Although private wealth is the most frequently highlighted aspect of wealth, all the variants of community wealth
are just as important. Moreover, they harbor the opportunity of creating forms of a “distributed economy” based on the model of distributed energy production – in
Above all, though, it has become possible to
imagine a form of wealth with less money. Because in the social commons services are not provided for monetary
reasons, but out of a sense of community spirit, interest or solidarity, needs can be met with a lesser investment of money. For example, just as Wikipedia would
other words, forms of local production that are linked, globally if necessary, via the Internet.
be unaffordable if all the authors and editors had to be paid a fee, older people in a housing project provide caring services for each other that could never be paid for
from public care budgets. The
reinvention of the commons is therefore vital to the creation of an economic order for
the 21st century that has been freed from the dictate of growth.
4. Leads to more localized structures which solve better and are more democratic
North, Liverpool Geography professor, 2010
(Peter, “Eco-localisation as a progressive response to peak oil and climate change – A sympathetic critique”,
Geoforum, 41.4, Science Direct)
The core of localisation is a claim that economic decisions should focus not on profit maximisation and economic
efficiency to the exclusion of all else, but on meeting needs as locally as possible (Curtis, 2002). In contrast with neoliberal globalisers
who call for the deregulation of economic decision making, localisers call for the re-regulation and re-embedding of economics into
nations, regions or local communities. Shuman (2001, p. 6) argues that localisation ‘‘does not mean walling off the outside
world” in a nationalist autarkic project. Rather, it is an argument against an integrated world economy based on a global
division of labour without the regulation of labour and environmental standards. Against unsustainable and
unequal neoliberal globalisation, localists argue that decisions about where to locate any given economic
activity should not be based on cost alone, subsidised by cheap fuel and with CO2 emissions externalised .
Localists argue for a focus first on producing as much as possible as locally as possible, then within the shortest
possible distance, with international trade only as a last resort for goods and services that really cannot be produced more locally (for
example, tea or citrus in the UK). Consequently, Localisation suggests developing diverse economies at the lowest level
appropriate for that activity: in places, localities and regions firstly, then countries, or groups of countries where a lower level does not make sense. It is an
argument for economic subsidiarity (Scott Cato, 2006). Localists object to the loss of local control associated with neoliberal globalisation. They object to
decisions about a local economy being made by elites far away with no commitment to or even knowledge of the
places they affect through their decisions, often to its detriment. In practice, localisation means developing community-owned local
economic institutions like worker-owned and run co-operatives, communal gardens and restaurants, local power generation, local money, and communal forms of land
ownership DeFilippis, 2004. Localists
do not argue against connections out of the locality per se: rather they argue against a
reification of connection as always inevitable and always good. Connections should be consciously entered into,
controlled, and ended when they are damaging. Normatively, localisers argue that local diversity and local distinctiveness are good in and of
themselves. Globalisation, they argue, is the ‘McDonaldization’ of society and economy, (Ritzer, 2004) the domination of the global brand (Klein, 2000). Drawing on
conceptions of what is thought to be good about the natural world, localisers
argue for societies and economies that are diverse,
interdependent and resilient. A variety of local economies mirrors nature’s diversity, facilitating experimentation and the development of more effective
practices and models. Localised economies connected to each other combine diversity with interdependence without uniformity. They claim that diverse
localised economies across space are more resilient in the face of external shocks . Economies reliant on economic
monocultures are vulnerable to price fluctuations and changes in demand for the single product created by the
monoculture, whereas in diverse and connected localised economies, if demand for the product created by one part of the economy breaks down, there are plenty
of alternatives to take its place. Localisation is not autarky or complete national self sufficien cy as practiced by Soviet Russia or Nazi
Germany in the 1930s, Cuba in the Special Period, or North Korea or Myanmar today. Ed Mayo (in Douthwaite, 1996, p. ix) argues: ‘‘Some . . . imagine the aim of
economic localisation is complete self-sufficiency at the village level. In
fact, localisation does not mean everything being produced
locally, nor does it mean an end to trade. It simply means creating a better balance between local, regional, national
and international markets. It also means that large corporations should have less control, and communities more over
what is produced; and that trading should be fair and to the benefit of both parties.. . . Localisation is not about isolating communities
from other cultures, but about creating a new, sustainable and equitable basis on which they can interact.” Woodin and
Lucas (2004:69) quote the New Economics Foundation, for whom localisation is ‘‘a relative term. It means different things to different people and depends on
context. For example, your local TV station is likely to be further away than your local corner shop. For some of us local refers to our street. For others it means our
village, town, city or region. However we think of it, ‘local’ usually connects to a group of people and the things they depend on – whether shops, health services,
schools or parks. Think of local as that surrounding environment and network of facilities that is vital to our quality of life and well-being.” Woodin and Hines (2004,
p. 30) argue: ‘‘By ‘localisation’, we mean a set of interrelated and self reinforcing policies that actively discriminate in favour of the local. In practice, what
constitutes ‘the local’ will obviously vary from country to country. Some countries are big enough to think in terms of increased self reliance within their own borders,
while smaller countries would look first to a grouping of their neighbours. This approach provides a political and economic framework for people, community groups
and businesses to rediversify their own economies. . . Localisation
involves a better-your neighbour supportive internationalism
where the flow of ideas, technologies, information, culture, money and goods has, as its end goal, the protection and
rebuilding of national economies worldwide. Its emphasis is not competition for the cheapest, but co-operation for
the best.” Thus, for aeroplane production, a regional block of countries might be appropriate (Hines, 2004, p. 38). It would not make sense, for example, for there
to be a producer of wind turbine machines, hydroelectric power stations, or solar panels, at much below the national scale.
Movements DA – Cuba – Shell
Letting Cuba chart its own course is key to create meaningful alternatives to neoliberalism
Huish, Simon Fraser geography PhD, 2009
(Robert, “Cuba vs. Globalization: Chronicle of Anti-imperialism, Solidarity and Co-operation”, 1-27,
http://globalautonomy.ca/global1/dialogueItem.jsp?index=SN08_Huish.xml)
There is an episode of "The Simpsons" where Homer is sent to hell, and, held captive in the ironic-punishment division, he is fed an endless quantity of donuts. But in
the end, he enjoys his punishment and the devil eventually scratches his head and gives up. The ironic punishment dealt to Cuba by the Western world was exclusion
from globalization with barring it from the World Trade Organization, embargoes against multi-national corporations, and forbidding "assistance" from the World
Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). Now at "the end of globalism" as John Ralston Saul (2005) put it, it is Cuba, in relation to other clients of the Bank and
Cuba weathered its castigation
by stabilizing its economy, improving education and health indicators, expanding its global outreach to other
countries, and bolstering trade. Cuba has also taken the helm of the non-aligned movement, is a principle architect of
two United Nations human rights commissions, and is innovating new trade and solidarity movements with other socalled "developing countries." The United States and its allies approach globalization in a certain way, and figured
that excluding Cuba from it would be fitting punishment. But Cubans see globalization quite differently and act against neo-liberal benefits to
the IMF, which has made out well from the ironic punishment. While Homer enjoyed his gluttony from his punishment,
their own advantage. James Wolfensohn, the former president of The Bank, stated that he thinks "Cuba has done a great job on education and health. We just have
nothing to do with them in the present sense, and they should be congratulated on what they've done"(The Scotsman, 2 May 2001). Indeed the social gains Cuba has
achieved on the edge of globalization are impressive in comparison to other countries in the Global South. Considering that in the early 1990s Cuba lost 87 percent of
its exports and its gross domestic product (GDP) collapsed by 35 percent, many economists figured it a recipe to see the country blown off the map (Cole 1998).
With the tightening of the US embargo in 1993, again in 1997, and once more in 2003, the country has managed to
not just maintain, but actively strengthen, many of its domestic social programs. Cuba boasts the best doctor to patient ratio in the
world, and its health indicators are on par with wealthy nations. Over 99 percent of the population is literate, and country's twenty-six universities do not charge
tuition to nationals, all the while offering thousands of scholarships to foreigners. Compare this with neighbouring Haiti where 47 percent of people are illiterate and
Cuba's economy has grown by a steady 5 to 7 percent
per year, and this is in large part thanks to its international commercial partnerships with 140 countries which have
been formed under very different conditions than neo-liberalism (Grogg 2007). While Cuba was forced out of
globalization, many countries in the South that were "invited in" have fared poorly, and the poor of those countries
have fared miserably. Case by case, country by country, the story of globalization from the point of view of the
destitute has seen intentional de-investment in public services in order to repay foreign debts. Restructuring economies and
few Haitian's have access to the country's anemic higher education facilities (CIA 2008).
restructuring lives so the South exports soybeans, flowers, and peanuts but imports milk, medicine, tourists, and TV shows at extortionist prices. Although the United
States is the world's most indebted country no one seems rushed to demand payments from Washington. Yet, at the turn of the millennium the Global South was
repaying its foreign debt at the rate of US $250,000 per minute (Galeano 2000). In India the economy sees children stitch soccer balls rather than go to school. In
Ecuador, Honduras, and Nicaragua the export-oriented economy sees many of tomorrow's scholars go as far as grade six before setting out on a long-life of banana
picking, because from the point of view of financial directors bananas are more important than public schools. In places like Haiti medical clinics are few and trained
doctors fewer, loan repayments limit the imagination of financial directors to seldom invest in clinics and rarely train doctors. Within this economic climate, the 800
million souls suffering from chronic hunger are doomed to the fate of the empty plate until the free market decides to lower food prices. Neo-liberal globalization has
seen development as a disaster for the poor, and a good way of maintaining inequity for the advantage of the elite. Former Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin
recently had enough of this and had to say something. Martin, also a former Finance Minister, business tycoon, and advisor to the IMF, said that "the rich countries
cannot claim any longer that they have a moral hold on virtue" (The Globe and Mail, 21 July 2008). Martin's words are a big step towards realizing that the
development discourse did not work out. As Cuba sees it, over 400 years of "development" by way of colonialism and imperialism has not turned out well for the
Global South, but more recently, neo-liberalism's promise of rising livelihoods for all humanity through efficiency, technology, and communication can be thrown out
for rot. Instead, in light of the continually growing global social inequality, it is well recognized that neo-liberalism was a project of moving resources,
communication, and political power more securely into the hands of the elite. In considering this point of view, if we are to build a dialogue on globalization, what
should we discuss? Should we build a research dialogue just for the sake of furthering knowledge? Should we envision future promises of hope through advancements
in technology, communication, and the efficiency of transport? Should we continue to bear witness to the immeasurable suffering because we haven't learned to share
our food, medicine, water, and dessert? Rather, shouldn't
we build a dialogue on how to improve the human condition by making
the world a safer place for those who suffer injustice ? Some may consider this more of a political project rather than a purely academic pursuit,
but if the pursuit of knowledge is done in order to improve humanity then certainly we can justify a dialogue that actively seeks to reduce social inequality as a means
of improving humanity. Both Appadurai (2000) and de Sousa Santos (Santos, Nunes and Meneses 2007) said that finding commonalities in a global dialogue on
globalization can be difficult thanks to rigid epistemological or institutional frameworks. However, as Paul Farmer (2003) points out, no culture is content to suffer
through poverty, and overcoming the worldwide absence of badly needed resources for the poor should be seen as universal grounds to build a dialogue on how
humanity has fared through globalization. If
we are to pursue such a dialogue, and I think that we should, we need knowledge,
experience, and idealism. We need knowledge of the apertures globalization has created for improving the human
condition; specifically in how communication and technology can work to build understanding and heal injustices. We need experience of resisting
the vices of inequity, and building a society where the quality of life has improved by people working to take care of
other people. A great deal of development studies literature focuses on grassroots organizations and community-level initiatives, and incidentally overlooks
building social capital through the public good and through the state. And here is where Cuba offers tremendous know-how in
overcoming economic catastrophe, improving livelihoods at home and sharing its gains with those who need it the
most, regardless of where in the world they are. As well, we need idealism. In this state of horrendous global inequality the thought of global health care
provision, global food security, global education, and global environmental stewardship may be utopian, but it is badly needed. Neo-liberal technocracy has
insisted that we look out for number one; strength lies with the ego and weakness is a symptom of solidarity. As
Galeano (2000) put it, "the system feeds neither the body nor the heart: many are condemned to starve for a lack of bread and many more for a lack of embraces."
Surely within globalization, as a worldwide network of communication and technology, there is room for sharing bread and time for making embraces. While Cuba
In this paper, I highlight Cuba's approach to
globalization. I discuss the ontological perspective, the social reality, and the pursuit of policy for a globalization of
solidarity. In fact, Cuba's approach to globalization is one aiming to use existing tools to improve the quality of life
for the poor and destitute in the Global South. It sees global networks as being vital for humanity in the twentyfirst century, but it also understands that these networks have been clogged with an ideology that is
dangerous for much of the world and the lived environment. I believe that by discussing Cuba's take on
globalization we can build a dialogue of knowledge, experience, and idealism aimed at improving the human
condition through equity, social justice, and compassion.
was left out of the globalization project, by no means does the country dismiss the entire concept.
Move towards commons solves extinction-its try or die neg
Smith, UCLA history PhD, 2007
(Richard, “The Eco-suicidal Economics of Adam Smith”, June, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 18.2, JSTOR)
So there you have it: insatiable growth and consumption is destroying
the planet and dooming humanity-but without ceaselessly
growing production and insatiably rising consumption, we would be even worse off. Such is the lunatic suicidal logic of
capitalist economics. Adam Smith's fatal error was his assumption that the "most effectual" means of promoting the public interest of society is to just ignore
it and concentrate instead on the pursuit of economic self-interest. In the 18th century, this narcissistic economic philosophy had little impact on the natural world.
Today it has a huge impact and is, moreover, totally at odds with the world's scientific bodies who are crying out for a PLAN to stop global warming and save nature.
Capitalist Limits to Corporate Environmentalist!! Corporations aren't necessarily evil, but corporate managers are legally responsible to their owners, the shareholders,
and not to society. This means that the critical
decisions about production and resource consumption -decisions that affect our health
and survival-are mainly the private prerogative of large corporations and are often only marginally under the control of governments. The
blunt reality of this situation was well summed up by Joel Bakan in his recent book (and film), The Corporation: Corporations are created by law and imbued with
purpose by law. Law dictates what their directors and managers can do, what they cannot do, and what they must do. And, at least in the United States and other
industrialized countries, the corporation, as created by law, most closely resembles Milton Friedman's ideal model of the institution: it compels executives to prioritize
the interests of their companies and shareholders above all others and forbids them from being socially responsible - at least genuinely so.38 So when
corporate
and societal interests conflict, even the "greenest" of corporate CEOs often have no choice but to make decisions
contrary to the interests of society. British Petroleum's CEO, Lord John Browne, is good example. In the late 1990s, Browne had an environmental
epiphany, broke ranks with oil industry denial, and became the first oil company executive to warn that fossil fuels are accelerating global warming. BP adopted the
motto "Beyond Petroleum" in its advertisements, painted its service stations green and yellow, and bought a boutique solar power outfit. But under Browne, BP has
spent far more on advertising its green credentials than it invests in actual green power production. Fully 99 percent of its investments still go into fossil fuel
exploration and development, while solar power is less than 1 percent and seems to be declining. 9 In 1999, BP spent $45 million to buy the solar power outfit
Solarex. By comparison, BP paid $26.8 billion to buy Amoco in order to enlarge its oil portfolio. BP's 2004 revenues topped $285 billion, while its solar power sales
were just over $400 million. In February 2006, Browne told his board that the company had more than replenished its marketed output in 2005 with new proven
reserves of oil and gas, and that "with more than 20 new projects due on stream in the next three years, and assuming the same level of oil price, the annual rate of
increase should continue at some 4 percent through 2010."40 So, far from shifting to renewable sources of energy, BP is not only expanding its output of fossil fuels
but increasing its overall reliance on fossil fuel sources of profit. BP now possesses proven reserves of 19 billion barrels produced in 23 countries, and the company
currently explores for oil in 26 countries. Given the proven and stupendous profits of oil production versus the unproven profitability of alternative energy, how can
Brown go "green" in any serious way and remain responsible to his owner-investors?41 Were he to do so, he would soon be out of a job.42 Ecosocialism or Collapse
If we're going to stop the capitalist economic locomotive from driving us off the cliff, we are going to have to
fundamentally rethink our entire economic life, reassert the visible hand of conscious scientific, rational economic planning, and implement
democratic control over our economies and resources. We're going to have to construct an entirely different kind of economy , one that
can live within its ecological means. Such an economy would have to be based around at least the following principles: An Ecosocialist Economy of Stasis First, in a
world of fast-diminishing resources, a sustainable global economy can only be based on near-zero economic growth on average. That means that to
survive,
humanity will have to impose drastic fixed limits on development, resource consumption, the freedom to consume,
and the freedom to pollute. Given existing global inequities and the fact that the crisis we face is overwhelmingly caused by overconsumption in the
industrialized North, equity can only be achieved by imposing massive cutbacks in the advanced countries combined with a program of rational planned growth to
develop the Third World, with the aim of stabilizing at zero growth on average. This will require drastically cutting back many lines of production, closing down
others entirely, and creating socially and environmentally useful jobs for workers made redundant by this transition. This will also require physical rationing of many
Human survival will thus require a profound rethinking of our most
fundamental ideas-bourgeois ideas-of economic freedom. For too long, many Americans, in particular, have come to identify their notion of
critical resources on a per capita basis for every person on the planet.
"freedom," if not their very being and essence, with insatiable consumption-unlimited freedom of "choice" in what to buy. But 50 styles of blue jeans, 16 models of
SUVs and endless choices in "consumer electronics" will all have dramatically less value when Bloomingdales is under water, Florida disappears beneath the waves,
malarial mosquitos blanket Long Island beaches, and the U.S. is overrun with desperate environmental refugees from the South. Once we as a society finally admit the
"inconvenient truth" that we have no choice but to drastically cut production and severely reduce consumer choice, it will also become apparent that we have to put in
place a planned economy that will meet our needs and those of future generations as well as the other species with whom we share the planet. A Restructured
Economy of Production for Social Need and for Use Second, we need to massively restructure the global economy. Enormous sectors in the global capitalist
economy-plastics, packaging, much of the manufactured consumer electronics, petrochemical-based and other synthetic products, many pharmaceuticals, all
genetically modified foods, and the vast and ever-growing production of arms-are either completely unnecessary or waste increasingly scarce resources and produce
needless pollution.44 Our parents did without nearly all of this before WWII, and they were not living in caves. Many lines of production and most retail industries are
built around unnecessary replacement and designed-in obsolescence. How much of the American economy from cars and appliances to clothes is purposefully
designed to be "consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever-increasing rate"46 so the cycle of waste production can begin all over again? How
much of the planet's natural resources are consumed every year in completely unnecessary annual model changes, fashion updates, and "new and improved" products
whose only purpose is simply to sell and sell again? If a global population of 6 to 9 billion people is going to survive this century, what choice do we have but to
reorganize the global economy to conserve what shrinking natural resources we have left, reorient production for need rather than profit, design products to last as
long as possible, enforce as close to total recycling as possible, and aim for as close to zero pollution as is possible? A Socialist Economic Democracy Third: an
ecosocialist democracy. Endless growth or stasis? Resource exhaustion or conservation? Automobilization of the planet or enhanced public transport? Deforestation or
protection of the wild forests? Agro poisons or organic farming? Hunt the fish to extinction or protect the fisheries? Raze the Amazon forest to grow MacBurgers or
promote a more vegetarian diet? Manufacture products designed to be "used up, burned up, consumed as rapidly as possible" or design them to last, be repaired,
recycled and also shared? Enforce private interests at the expense of the commons or subordinate private greed to the common good? In today's globalized world,
Who can make these critical economic and moral decisions in society's
interest and in the interest of preserving a habitable planet? In Adam Smith's view, which is still the operable maxim of modern
capitalists and neoliberal economists, we should all just "Look out for Number 1," and the common good will take care of itself. If
Smith were right, the common good would have taken care of itself long ago, and we wouldn't be facing catastrophe.
After centuries of Smithian economics, the common good needs our immediate and concentrated attention. Corporations can't make such decisions
in the best interests of society or the future, because their legal responsibility is to their private owners. The only way such decisions
can be scientifically rational and socially responsible is when everyone who is affected participates in decisionmaking. And time is running out. We don't have 20 or 30 years to wait for Ford and GM to figure out how they can make a buck on electric cars. We don't have 60
decisions about such questions will determine the fate of humanity.
or 70 years to wait while investors in coal-powered power plants milk the last profits out of those sunk investments before they consider an alternative. Humanity is at
a crossroads. Either we find a way to move toward a global economic democracy in which decisions about production and consumption are directly and
democratically decided by all those affected, or the alternative will be the continuing descent into a capitalist war of all-against-all over ever-diminishing resources
that can only end in the collapse of what's left of civilization and the global ecology. To be sure, in an economic democracy, society would sometimes make mistakes
in planning. We can't have perfect foresight, and democracies make mistakes. But at least these would be honest mistakes. The conclusion seems inescapable:
Either we democratize the economy, construct the institutions of a practical working socialist democracy, or we face ecological and
social collapse.
Movements DA – Cuba – EXTN
It is keyy to the spread of economic democracy globally
Harrington, former Chesapeake Climate Action Network field director, 2013
(Keith, “New Cuba: Beachhead for Economic Democracy Beyond Capitalism”, 1-17, http://truthout.org/opinion/item/13918-the-new-cuba-a-beachhead-for-economic-democracy-we-should-support)
The year 2012 may have been the United Nation's International Year of Cooperatives, but 2013
may turn out to be the more historic year for
worker-ownership if the Cubans have anything to say about it. To listen to the mainstream American media, however, you'd never know it.
As a video supplement to a recent New York Times article makes clear, the corporate press has already made up its mind on how the story of Cuba's economic
liberalization is bound to end: "In a state defined by all-consuming communism for the past 50 years,capitalist change comes in fits and starts, and only at the pace that
the government is willing to allow."[Emphasis added] In other words, Cuba's post-communist story ends just like China's - in capitalism, because according to
orthodox dogma, there's nowhere else to go. Trapped by the limited possibilities of this dichotomist capitalism-or-communism mentality, mainstream commentators
lack the perspective needed to appreciate (much less inform others) that
a transition away from a state-dominated command economy
might conceivably lead to a type of market that is very distinct from our elite-shareholder-dominated and profitfixated capitalist model. But that is precisely the nuanced story we find in Cuba when we dig just below the surface
and consider the very guidelines the Cuban government has adopted to steer the transition process. Since the state unveiled
its nuevos lineamientos or new guidelines for economic development in 2010, the easing of government restrictions on private entrepreneurial activity has only
constituted a single aspect of a much broader picture of change. Unfortunately, The New York Times and its ilk have gotten so hung up on the privatization shift, that
Specifically, the government is
placing high priority on the development of worker-owned-and-managed firms and has recently passed a law
intended to launch an experimental cadre of 200 such firms. Under the law, workers - rather than government bureaucrats or elite boards of
they've left out crucial details about the types of private enterprises the Cuban government is attempting to foster.
directors - will democratically run the businesses, set their own competitive prices, determine wages and salaries and decide what to do with the profits they generate.
In other words, Cuba's new worker cooperatives will operate pretty much along the same lines as their successful cousins in the capitalist world, including Spain's
Mondragon Cooperative Corporation. But what
sets the Cuban cooperative experiment apart and renders it such an
incredible opportunity for the global worker-cooperative movement, is its occurrence in a political-economic
milieu that is currently free from the distorting effects of capitalist competition . This is significant because while cooperatives
have proven just as competitive as capitalist firms in a capitalist context, when capitalist profits and growth assume top priority, workerowned firms may be compelled to act more like capitalist firms and subordinate core objectives such as worker
empowerment and well-being, community development and environmental sustainability. Indeed, as cooperatives grow, even
the percentage of actual worker owners in their ranks has been known to decline, as we've seen with Mondragon. In short, the worker-ownership
movement could greatly benefit from a national-scale economic environment that will allow cooperative
enterprises to develop according to their own particular democratic nature and exhibit their true potential,
free from the profit-above-all dictates of capitalism. No country bears as much promise in this respect than
contemporary Cuba. Nevertheless, for Cuba's experiment to work, all efforts should be made to steer the economy and the behavior of the
country's emergent private entrepreneurial class in a direction that comports with the ethos and objectives of economic democracy. Above all, this would
likely require severe restrictions, if not an outright ban, on the entry of large foreign capitalist firms or the
establishment of large domestic capitalist firms. For, as economists such as Jamee Moudud of Sarah Lawrence University and many
structuralist thinkers have pointed out, as jobs and tax revenues become dependent on the success of capitalist firms, societies become constrained in their ability to
Accordingly, during the early years of the cooperative
experiment, Cuba should seek to limit foreign direct investment to cooperative or triple-bottom-line firms as much as possible, facilitate
joint-ventures between such firms and its own cooperatives and continue to seek industrial loans largely from committed social
democratic partners such as Venezuela, and other "pink-tide" trade partners.
pursue developmental paths that do not prioritize capitalist accumulation.
Cuba provides a key platform and model to spread economic democracy
Boillat et al., Natural Resources Institute, 2012
(Sebastian, “What economic democracy for degrowth? Some comments on the contribution of socialist models and
Cuban agroecology”, 3-20, Futures, 44.6, ebsco)
Cuba faces the challenging task of going beyond productivist developmentalism inherited both from the Soviet bloc and from the capitalist West [29]. The country
now widely recognizes that the conventional agricultural model leads to an increased dependency on imports, a weak food security, an increased vulnerability against
world market trends, growing indebtedness and severe environmental degradations [21,45].
In this context, the Cuban experience with
agroecology is a promising and unique example of ‘‘degrowth’’ as no such transition could be observed anywhere
else on a large scale. A relatively egalitarian society (froman economic viewpoint) combined with strong public policies and the absence of landlord and
agribusiness interests undoubtedly represent a key advantage in achieving such a transition. However, the centralized Soviet-type heritage has promoted industrial
farms to the detriment of smaller-sized self-managed farms (especially UBPCs) more inclined to adopt a degrowth-oriented path. Because state farms – the favorite
model – were managed by administrators applying large-scale receipts of chemical use in export monoculture, the system has separated managers and producers,
neglected traditional knowledge, and prevented agricultural production adapted to local natural conditions [20,29]. Smaller production units and more democratic
management are clearly the keys to pursue sustainable degrowth in this context. Although the Cuban government ascribes to this option, there is yet a long way t
overcome resistance to change after many years of centrally-planned productivism. This
empirical example suggests that theoretical models
of self-managed socialism have the kind of realistic economic democracy that is best suited for a large-scale
degrowth transition. Indeed, a voluntary reduction in material and energy consumption is only possible in an economic
democracy that makes people responsible, as a community, for the environmental consequences of their own
production and consumption pattern. People are directly responsible because, in Schweickart’s model, investment is socialized, workers have to
manage their own enterprise, and there is no privileged class manipulating votes according to vested interest. Outside the pressure of amass consumption society,
people can get closer to some of their true needs, the most important of them being fundamentally immaterial. In such economic democracy, people would have no
choice but stay connected to the state of their natural resources. Combined together, these different elements open the way for a very real degrowth-oriented path. In
this sense, we argue that a non-capitalist system provides a greater potential for achieving sustainable degrowth than a capitalist system. The
Cuban
experience certainly provides some important lessons along these lines but many questions, experiences and debates
will be necessary to build a new mobilizing eco-socialist model being at the same time efficient, democratic and
sustainable. The strengths and weaknesses of the Cuban experience show nevertheless that alternatives do exist and
that people are not bound to repeat the same errors of centrally-planned productivism, capital concentration, work
alienation or the elusive quest for infinite growth. According to Martı´nez-Alier et al. [1], ‘‘for sustainable
degrowth to be successful one important step would be to provide a platform on which social movements from the
North and the South, including conservationists, trade unions, small farmers movements and those movements from
the South that defend a low environmental impact economy, can converge’’. In particular, the conditions under
which such convergence can develop must be better understood and patiently promoted. The lessons from Cuban
agriculture are part of this understanding.
Movements DA – Link – EXTN
US economic presence is zero-sum with progressive solutions to globalization
Salazar, Cuban political scientist and sociology PhD, 2012
(Luis, “The Current Crisis of US Domination over the Americas”, Critical Sociology, 38.2, March, SAGE)
This region will continue to provide one of the main sites for predatory activity of the most powerful multinational
and transnational corporations, particularly those whose headquarters reside in the US, Canada, and the EU. The
governments of this tripartite union will most likely continue pursuing the ‘minimization’ of their states while
backing the deformed ‘free market democracies’ currently prevailing throughout the Western hemisphere. The globalized
pursuit of profit will enjoy steady support from the political, military, and media representatives of the transnationalized sectors of the US, Canadian, Latin American,
and Caribbean ruling classes, as well as support from de facto powers, the bureaucratic–military apparatuses. There
will be a continuing deployment
of diverse instruments of hard power (coercion and force), articulating counter-reform, counterrevolutionary, and
expansionist actions in the Western hemisphere through blind and unilateral versions of a ‘security state–free trade–
representative democracy’ tri-medley. The Obama Administration will continue pursuing a modular multilateralism with those countries in the Americas
that it considers ‘democratic’ and cooperative with the war against ‘narco-terrorism’, and this will include those currently governed by what Jorge G. Castañeda calls
the ‘modern, democratic, globalized and market-oriented left’ (Castañeda, 2008: 7). All
of this together with the use of other instruments of
soft-power (‘public diplomacy’) will be directed at efforts to ‘contain’ and, if possible, depose those Latin American
governments who are members of ALBA-TCP (Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela). Attempts will be made to wean away the
three participating countries of the Eastern Caribbean as well as to disrupt the efforts at political consensus, economic integration, and cooperation being headed by
UNASUR. Likewise, there will be attempts to avert or dilute as much as possible the consolidation of CELAC. This will be bolstered by the presence of rightist
governments such as Chile which heads the pro tempore presidency of the Rio Group until 2012 and will do anything possible to prevent the Latin American
‘community’ from reaching agreements that undermine their preferred pillars of the Inter-American System. Alongside of all these maneuvers, there will be new and
multi-leveled social and political conflicts, both internal and external, within most of the 33 independent or semi-independent states and in some of the 18 colonial
territories currently located south of Florida and the Rio Grande (Suárez Salazar and García Lorenzo, 2008).7 In some countries, these conflicts will contribute to the
maturation of the subjective conditions needed to challenge the system of domination imposed by the United States. In spite of the differences, contradictions, and
internal weaknesses that will not easily change in the short term, the formation of those turbulent conditions will be nourished by the continuation of socialist, antiimperialist, anti-colonialist, democratic, and popular spirit manifested by the Cuban, Venezuelan, Bolivian, and Ecuadorian revolutions. Despite the ‘generational
transition’ taking place in Cuban society within its political leadership, the popular character of the Cuban state will not be destroyed nor will the legitimacy of the
institutions created by the Revolution or the majority popular support it continues to enjoy. This will be evidenced by the emergence of a political consensus that
mandates actions be taken to ‘update’ the Cuban economic model. The participation of broad sectors of the citizenry in this process begins with the VI Congress of the
Cuban Communist Party in 2011 (Castro R, 2010a,b) and will continue in the 2012–13 general elections. Meanwhile in Venezuela, there will likely be significant
political-institutional conflicts derived from the increased number of oppositional seats in the National Assembly that resulted from the September 2010 elections,
complicating the prospects for the administration of President Hugo Chávez. In any case, the relative majority of the 165 seats in the Venezuelan National Assembly
will continue to be held by supporters of the Bolivarian Revolution. This will guarantee ‘democratic governability’ through the presidential elections in 2012 when the
Venezuelan United Socialist Party (PSUV) will be well-positioned to win re-election of the current Venezuelan president. Maintaining electoral power will not permit
the Venezuelan government to avoid the exacerbation of domestic social, political, and ideological contradictions in the country nor free it from the multidimensional
actions of its adversaries aimed at foiling the domestic and international advances of the Bolivarian revolution. Rather, they will continue and in the end help make
even more acute the existing conflicts between the Venezuelan government and other Latin American and Caribbean governments that support the actions of the
Obama Administration. Washington will seek to ‘isolate’ the Bolivarian revolution and weaken the various regional instances of political consensus, economic
cooperation and integration it has helped sponsor. Among the rightist governments likely to cooperate in that effort figure Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Honduras,
Mexico, and Panama. In Peru, the political representatives of rightist forces, such as the followers of Fujimori, worked hard to attempt to block the change of internal
and external policies that had been announced by the new Peruvian President Ollanta Humala (2011–15). Simultaneously, their Nicaraguan peers, supported by
successive US administrations, will do anything possible to delegitimize and isolate Daniel Ortega’s government, at least within the sphere of the System of Central
American Integration (SICA). Meanwhile, the Obama Administration will work to achieve the international recognition of the coup-installed Honduran government
headed by Porfirio Lobo. It will also support a candidate favorable to US interests in the presidential elections in Guatemala in 2011, while attempting to weaken the
influence of the FMLN on the current Salvadoran government. Bolivia and Ecuador, besides trying to solve their conflicts with diverse sectors of the popular
movement and in particular with some indigenous organizations, will have to face the constant presence of counter-reform and counterrevolutionary forces. These will
include the neo-fascist forces of the Bolivian oppositional provinces as well as the powerful oligarchic groups in Guayaquil that fuel reactionary political, economic,
social, and ideological-cultural politics. To help confront these forces, the governments of Evo Morales and Rafael Correa will benefit from the solidarity of the other
ALBA-TCP member countries. Both nations will also have the support of most of the governments of UNASUR member states, including President Dilma Rousseff
of the Brazilian Worker’s Party (PT). In Argentina, most probable is the re-election of President Cristina Fernández. This notwithstanding, the difficulties that have
been encountered in reforming the ‘neodevelopmentalist’ logic of MERCOSUR and in strengthening its supranational institutionality will persist. The Paraguayan
right will carry on with its actions directed to ‘constitutionally disable’ President Fernando Lugo and to sabotage the parliamentary ratification required for the full
incorporation of Venezuela into MERCOSUR. Moreover, none of the member states will manage to transcend the limits imposed by their domestic policies within the
ever more ‘globalized’ financial system, nor modify the way that US and European interested transnationals use MERCOSUR as a complementary part of their global
commodity chains, particularly those related to the production of soy and agro-combustibles. The reflection of standing commitments in the international politics of
Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay will also hinder the deepening of UNASUR commitments. Nevertheless, UNASUR will go on operating by virtue of the
interest that most of the 12 member countries have in institutionalizing it. It will have to operate in spite of the contradictions and resistant stances of rightist-led
governments, especially Chile and Colombia. The persistence of contradictions among MERCOSUR member states also include conditions imposed upon the
governments of Guyana and Suriname, whose foreign policies must remain harmonized with other governments who are members of CARICOM. The People’s
Progressive Party, expected to retain power after the October 2011 elections, and the favorable attitude toward UNASUR held by the Suriname government headed by
Desiré Bouterse (2010–14) will continue to mark the major differences which those countries have with other Caribbean governments controlled by the social and
political forces interested in strengthening their asymmetric alliances with the US and the EU. Despite their own disputes, these two governments are akin to the
CSME, the ALBA-Caribbean agreements, and are for more autonomous development strategies in cooperation with Brazil. Similar stances will continue to prevail in
CARICOM in general and should war break out in the Middle East region, the spike in oil prices will simply reinforce this tendency. From all of this, it follows that
the Cuban, Venezuelan, Bolivian, and Ecuadoran revolutions will continue to be the epicenter of the dynamic between the reform, revolution, reformism, counterreform, and counterrevolution. The Obama Administration and his main allies will continue scheming against the processes of change unfolding in these countries,
and they will try to fracture their alliances with the reformist or reforming governments of Brazil and Argentina. At the same time, Washington will try to pry the
Eastern Caribbean states away from ALBA-TCP, something that has already begun in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines after the December 2010 elections. The US
goal is to weaken all those social and political forces that support the continuity of the ALBA-Caribbean agreements. In Haiti, Washington will continue to maintain a
‘protectorate’ over the country. Likewise, it will go on boosting the economic-commercial agreements in the field of ‘security’ signed with the governments of
Mexico, CARICOM, and with the majority of the Central American countries, along with Colombia, Panama, Peru, and the Dominican Republic. These agreements –
and the weakness of the opposing political forces – will favor the election of the candidate of the Partido de la Liberación Dominicana in the presidential elections that
will be held in the Dominican Republic in late 2012. In the interim period, the US government will do anything within its reach to defeat Colombia’s and Mexico’s
insurgent organizations through military means and by working with political, media, and military representatives of the Colombian and Mexican ruling classes. Every
attempt will be made to neutralize the challenges posed to their domination by the exacerbation of political and social struggles (with certain political–military
expressions) in Mexico and, in particular, the frustrated presidential aspirations of Andrés Manuel López Obrador. In a similar vein, Washington will enact diverse
actions devised to prevent the maturation of socio-political actors grouped in the National Resistance Front who are in opposition to the illegitimate Honduran coupinstalled government headed by Porfirio Lobo, who recently obtain the recognition of the OAS. The synergy of all these resistances will help prevent the deepening of
the ‘new Pan-American Order’. Nevertheless, the social and political, state and non-state forces opposed to this ‘order’ will not be able to reverse all the advances that
were earlier obtained and institutionalized during the last decade of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century. This includes all those norms that
currently regulate the celebration of the Summits of the Americas (next to be hosted by Colombia in 2013), the structure and operations of the Inter-American System,
and all of the Treaties that juridically legitimize the ‘security-free market democracy’ binomial. As
is demonstrated by the historical evidence,
the only brakes on unbridled fulfillment of these hegemonic objectives will be the diverse struggles and multi-tiered
resistances of state and non-state subjects of the Americas. To do this implies establishing global solidarity with
alter-globalization sectors across different parts of the world and establishing alliances between the reformist and
reforming governments and other powers competing with the US, particularly the BRICS countries. As the introduction of
this article indicated, the future is far from predetermined. It unfolds in an arena of conflicts where political and social subjects, internal and external, battle one
another to defend their power and interests. Each of these ‘actors’ will fight to build a particular desired future. The results of these struggles may produce several
We can infer that the future of US domination in the
Western hemisphere will be subject to multiple (and in some cases, unforeseeable) global, continental, and national
occurrences. As has occurred on other occasions, any defeat or collapse of will on the part of the progressive, reforming or revolutionary governments identified
alternative scenarios that are impossible to fully describe in the space of this essay.
in previous pages will likely facilitate a recomposition of this system. This does not mean, however, that the always present contradictions between dominant US
groups and diverse Canadian, Latin American, and Caribbean social and political sectors will disappear. Rather, these contradictions will become even more acute,
Be it small or large, it will contribute to an
accelerated formation of subjective and objective conditions that the region’s popular movement requires in its
search for anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist solutions. In the end, every socio-political process that develops in this hemisphere, regardless of
particularly in the event that any new popular victory occurs which this author was unable to foresee.
being national in form, has a hemispheric and global scope. In the years to come, it will furthermore become very difficult for some national or plurinational states
(just as it was for the Cuban socialist transition) to become disconnected from the system and the capitalist world economy. Nevertheless,
there is already
growing evidence that the unipolarity resulting from the end of the Cold War will be increasingly substituted by a
multipolarity that in turn opens up new opportunities for popular change in the Americas. The ability to build on
these opportunities will remain closely linked to the steady erosion of US hegemony and directly proportional
to the capacity that regional leaders, organizations, and socio-political movements exhibit to reach and
consolidate political–state power. Their success will also rest upon creating comprehensive and integrated development in their corresponding
countries. Without reforms or revolutions that shift the deformed bases of the dependent, peripheral, and under-developed capitalism prevalent among the
hemisphere’s 33 national-states and 18 colonial territories, there will no genuine and independent integration of our countries.
A2: Cede the Political
Neoliberalism normalizes imperialism and the dismantlement of democracy-it allows for
the execution of populations for the purpose of profit.
Brown, Berkeley political theory professor, 2004
(Wendy, “Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy”, Theory and Event Volume 7, Number 1, 2003,
project muse)
An assault on liberal democratic values and institutions has been plenty evident in particular recent events : civil liberties
undermined by the USA Patriot Acts and Total Information Awareness (later renamed Total Terror Awareness) scheme, Oakland police shooting wood and rubber
bullets at peaceful anti-war protesters, a proposed Oregon law to punish all civil disobedience as terrorism (replete with 25 year jail terms), and McCarthyite
deployments of patriotism to suppress ordinary dissent and its iconography. It is
evident as well in the staging of aggressive imperial wars
and ensuing occupations along with the continued dismantling of the welfare state and progressive taxation schemes already
stripped by the Reagan, Bush Sr. and Clinton administrations. It has been more subtly apparent in "softer" events: the de-funding of public
education that led 84 Oregon school districts to sheer almost a month off of the school year in spring 2003 and delivered provisional pink slips to thousands of
California teachers at the end of the 2002-03 academic year.14 Or the debate about whether
anti-war protests constituted unacceptable costs
for a financially strapped cities -- even many critics of current U.S. foreign policy expressed anger at peaceful civil disobedients for the expense and
disruption they caused, implying that the value of public opinion and protest should be measured against its dollar cost.15 Together these phenomena
suggest a transformation of American liberal democracy into a political and social form for which we do not yet
have a name, a form organized by a combination of neo-liberal governmentality and imperial world politics,
contoured in the short run by conditions of global economic and global security crises. They indicate a form in which the
contemporary imperial agenda is able to take hold precisely because the domestic soil has been loosened for it
by neo-liberal rationality. This form is not fascism or totalitarian as we have known them historically nor are these appellations likely to be most helpful
identifying or criticizing it.16 Rather, this is a political condition in which the substance of many of the significant features of constitutional
and representative democracy have been gutted, jettisoned, or end-run, even as they continue to be promulgated ideologically,
serving as a foil and shield for their undoing and for the doing of death elsewhere. These features include civil liberties equally
distributed and protected; a press and other journalistic media minimally free from corporate ownership on one side and state control on the other; uncorrupted and
unbought elections; quality public education oriented, inter alia, to producing the literacies relevant to informed and active citizenship; government openness, honesty
and accountability; a judiciary modestly insulated from political and commercial influence; separation of church and state; and a foreign policy guided at least in part
by the rationale of protecting these domestic values. None of
these constitutive elements of liberal democracy was ever fully realized
in its short history -- they have always been compromised by a variety of economic and social powers from white
supremacy to capitalism. And liberal democracies in the First World have always required other peoples to pay -- politically, socially, and economically -for what these societies have enjoyed, that is, there has always been a colonially and imperially inflected gap between what has been valued in the core and what has
been required from the periphery. So it is important to be precise here. Ours
is not the first time in which elections have been bought,
manipulated and even engineered by the courts, the first time the press has been slavish to state and corporate power,
the first time the U.S. has launched an aggressive assault on a sovereign nation or threatened the entire world with
its own weapons of mass destruction. What is unprecedented about this time is the extent to which basic principles and
institutions of democracy are becoming anything other than ideological shells for their opposite as well as the extent to
which these principles and institutions are being abandoned even as values by large parts of the American population. This includes the development of the most
secretive government in 50 years (the gutting of the Freedom of Information Act was one of the quiet early accomplishments of the current Administration, the
"classified" status of its more than 1000 contracts with Halliburton one of its more recent); the plumping of corporate wealth combined with the elimination of social
spending reducing the economic vulnerability of the poor and middle classes; a bought, consolidated, and muffled press that willingly cooperates in its servitude
(emblematic in this regard is the Judith Miller (non)scandal, in which the star New York Times journalist wittingly reported Pentagon propaganda about Iraqi WMDs
as journalistically discovered fact); and intensified policing in every corner of American life -- airports, university admissions offices, mosques, libraries, workplaces - a policing undertaken both by official agents of the state and by an interpellated citizenr y.
A potentially permanent "state of emergency"
combined with an infinitely expandable rhetoric of patriotism overtly legitimates undercutting the Bill of Rights and
legitimates as well abrogation of conventional democratic principles in setting foreign policy, principles that include
respect for nation state sovereignty and reasoned justifications for war. But behind these rhetorics there is another
layer of discourse facilitating the dismantling of liberal democratic institutions and practices, a govermentality of neo-liberalism that
eviscerates non-market morality and thus erodes the root of democracy in principle at the same time that it
raises the status of profit and expediency as the criteria for policy making.
They cede the political- neoliberalism collapses the public sphere and creates a drive for
accumulation that ends in extinction
Giroux, McMaster cultural studies professor, 2006
(Henry, “Dirty Democracy and State Terrorism: The Politics of the New Authoritarianism in the United States”,
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 26.2 (2006) 163-177, project muse)
While it would be ludicrous to suggest that the United States either represents a mirror image of fascist ideology or mimics the systemic racialized terror of Nazi
Germany, it is not unreasonable, as Hannah Arendt urged in The Origins of Totalitarianism, to learn to recognize how different elements of fascism crystallize in
different historical periods into new forms of authoritarianism. Such antidemocratic elements combine in often unpredictable ways, and I believe they can be found
currently in many of the political practices, values, and policies that [End Page 164] characterize U.S. sovereignty under the Bush administration. Unchecked
power at the top of the political hierarchy is increasingly matched by an aggressive attack on dissent throughout the
body politic and fuels both a war abroad and a war at home. The economic and militaristic powers of global capital—spearheaded by U.S.
corporations and political interests—appear uncurbed by traditional forms of national and international sovereignty, the implications of which are captured in David
Harvey's serviceable phrase "accumulation by dispossession." Entire
populations are now seen as disposable, marking a dangerous
moment for the promise of a global democrac y.8 The discourse of liberty, equality, and freedom that emerged with
modernity seems to have lost even its residual value as the central project of democracy. State sovereignty is no longer
organized around the struggle for life but an insatiable quest for the accumulation of capital, leading to what Achille
Mbembe calls "necropolitics," or the destruction of human bodies.9 War, violence, and death have become the principal
elements shaping the biopolitics of the new authoritarianism that is emerging in the United States and
increasingly extending its reach into broader global spheres, from Iraq to a vast array of military outposts and prisons around the world.
As the state of emergency, in Giorgio Agamben's aptly chosen words, becomes the rule rather than the exception, a number of powerful antidemocratic tendencies
threaten the prospects for both American and global democracy.10 The first is a market
fundamentalism that not only trivializes democratic
values and public concerns but also enshrines a rabid individualism, an all-embracing quest for profits, and a social Darwinism in which
misfortune is seen as a weakness—the current sum total being the Hobbesian rule of a "war of all against all" that replaces any
vestige of shared responsibilities or compassion for others. The values of the market and the ruthless workings of finance capital become the
template for organizing the rest of society. Everybody is now a customer or client, and every relationship is ultimately judged in
bottom-line, cost-effective terms as the neoliberal mantra "privatize or perish" is repeated over and over again. Responsible citizens
are replaced by an assemblage of entrepreneurial subjects, each tempered in the virtue of self-reliance and forced to face the increasingly difficult challenges of the
social order alone. Freedom
is no longer about securing equality, social justice, or the public welfare but about unhampered trade in
goods, financial capital, and commodities. As the logic of capital trumps democratic sovereignty, low-intensity warfare at
home chips away at democratic freedoms, and high-intensity warfare abroad delivers democracy with bombs,
tanks, and chemical warfare. The global cost of these neoliberal commitments is massive human suffering and
death, delivered not only in the form of bombs and the barbaric practices of occupying armies but also in structural adjustment
policies in which the drive for land, resources, profits, and goods are implemented by global financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund. Global lawlessness and armed violence accompany the imperative of free trade, the virtues of a market without boundaries, and the promise of a
Under such conditions, human
suffering and hardship reach unprecedented levels of intensity. In a rare moment of truth, Thomas Friedman, the columnist for the New
Western-style democracy imposed through military solutions, ushering in the age of rogue sovereignty on a global scale.
York Times, precisely argued for the use of U.S. power—including military force—to support this antidemocratic world order. He claimed that "the hidden hand of
the market will never work without the hidden fist. . . . And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the US
Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."11 As Mark Rupert points out, "In Friedman's twisted world, if people are to realize their deepest aspirations—the longing
for a better life which comes from their very souls—they must stare down the barrel of [End Page 165] Uncle Sam's gun."12 As neoliberals in the Bush administration
implement policies at home to reduce taxation and regulation while spending billions on wars abroad, they slash funds that benefit the sick, the elderly, the poor, and
young people. But public resources are diverted not only from crucial domestic problems ranging from poverty and unemployment to hunger; they are also diverted
from addressing the fate of some 45 million children in "the world's poor countries [who] will die needlessly over the next decade," as reported by the British-based
group Oxfam.13 The
U.S. commitment to market fundamentalism elevates profits over human needs and consequently
offers few displays of compassion, aid, or relief for millions of poor and abandoned children in the world who do not
have adequate shelter, who are severely hungry, who have no access to health care or safe water, and who succumb needlessly to the ravages of AIDS and other
diseases.14 For instance, as Jim Lobe points out, "U.S. foreign aid in 2003 ranked dead last among all wealthy nations. In fact, its entire development aid spending in
2003 came to only ten percent of what it spent on the Iraq war that year. U.S. development assistance comes to less than one-fortieth of its annual defense budget."15
Carol Bellamy, the executive director of UNICEF, outlines the consequences of the broken promises to children by advanced capitalist countries such as the United
States. She writes, Today
more than one billion children are suffering extreme deprivations from poverty, war, and
HIV/AIDS. The specifics are staggering: 640 million children without adequate shelter, 400 million children without
access to safe water, and 270 million children without access to basic health services. AIDS has orphaned 15 million
children. During the 1990s alone, war forced 20 million children to leave their homes.16
A2: Human Nature
Human nature can be changed- its not set in advance and pedagogical transformation in
this debate can change economic preference formation
Schor, Boston College economics professor, 2010
(Julie, Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth, pgs. 11-2)
And we don’t have to. What’s odd about the narrowness of the national economic conversation is that it leaves out theoretical advances in economics and related
fields that have begun to change our basic understandings of what motivates and enriches people. The
policy conversation hasn’t caught up to
what’s happening at the forefront of the discipline. One of the hallmarks of the standard economic model, which
hails from the nineteenth century, is that people are considered relatively unchanging . Basic preferences, likes and dislikes, are
assumed to be stable, and don’t adjust as a result of the choices people make or the circumstances in which they find themselves. People alter their behavior in
response to changes in prices and incomes, to be sure, and sometimes rapidly. But
there are no feedback loops from today’s choices to
tomorrow’s desires. This accords with an old formulation of human nature as fixed, and this view still dominates the
policy conversation. However, there’s a growing body of research that attests to human adaptability. Newer thinking in behavioral
economics, cultural evolution, and social networking that has developed as a result of interdisciplinary work in
psychology, biology, and sociology yields a view of humans as far more malleable. It’s the economic analogue to recent findings
in neuroscience that the brain is more plastic than previously understood, or in biology that human evolution is happening on a time scale more compressed than
scientists originally thought. As
economic actors, we can change, too. This has profound implications for our ability to shift
from one way of living to another, and to be better off in the process . It’s an important part of why we can both reduce ecological impact
and improve wellbeing. As we transform our lifestyles, we transform ourselves. Patterns of consuming, earning, or interacting that may seem unrealistic or even
negative before starting down this road become feasible and appealing. Moreover, when big changes are on the table, the narrow tradeoffs of the past can be
superseded. If
we can question consumerism, we’re no longer forced to make a mandatory choice between well-being
and environment. If we can admit that full-time jobs need not require so many hours, it’ll be possible to slow down
ecological degradation, address unemployment, and make time for family and community. If we can think about knowledge differently, we can expand
social wealth far more rapidly. Stepping outside the “there is no alternative to business-as-usual” thinking that has been a
straitjacket for years puts creative options into play. And it opens the doors to double and triple dividends: changes that yield benefits on more
than one front. Some of the most important economic research in recent years shows that a single interventio n—a community
reclamation of a brownfield or planting on degraded agriculture land—can solve three problems. It regenerates an ecosystem, provides income for the
restorers, and empowers people as civic actors. In dire straits on the economic and ecological fronts, we have little choice but to
find a way forward that addresses both. That’s what plenitude offers.
A2: Perm Do Both
Neoliberalism coopts reform. Pragmatism for Latin American governments results in
control by international capital.
Boron, Buenos Aires political science professor, 2008
(Atilio, The New Latin American Left, pg 242-245)
THE CURSE OF CONSERVATIVE 'POSSIBILISM' Given the above, and granting the existence of alternatives to neo-liberalism, a disturbing
question arises: is there room for neo-liberal policies? The answer must be qualified. In some cases it is an unequivocal yes; in others, the response is
still positive, but with some reservations. Let us consider the most optimistic case: Brazil. When one asks friends in the Brazilian government why it has not pursued
an economic policy that diverges, even slightly, from the rules of the Washington Consensus and that aims to be something other than an intensification of the neoliberal policies that preceded it, the response from Brasilia is an exact replica of what is taught in US business school textbooks: Brazil needs to gain the confidence of
international investors, we need foreign capital and we must observe strict fiscal discipline, because if we don't, the country risk rating will go sky high, and no one
will invest a single dollar in Brazil. This was the premise that guided Lula's first term, and nothing suggests that things will be any different following his re-election.
It does not require a great deal of effort to demonstrate the weakness of that argument. If there is a country in the world that has all the necessary conditions to pursue
a successful post-neo-liberal policy, it is Brazil. If Brazil cannot do it, who can? Rafael Correa's Ecuador? Taban\ Vazquez's Uruguay? Evo Morales' Bolivia? Perhaps
Venezuela, under the leadership of Hugo Chavez, or even Argentina, but only with a strong political will and under extremely favourable international conditions.
Brazil, on the other hand, has everything. It covers an immense territory that encompasses every kind of natural resource. It has huge agricultural and livestock
resources, enormous mineral wealth, phenomenal sources of renewable energy in some of the largest rivers on the planet, 8,000 kilometres of coastline with extremely
rich fish stocks, a population of close to 200 million inhabitants, one of the most important industrial infrastructures in the world, a society weighed down with
poverty but with a high level of social and cultural integration, a first-class intellectual and scientific elite, and an exuberant and pluralistic culture. Furthermore,
Brazil has sufficient capital, and a potential tax base of extraordinary magnitude, although one which remains unexploited owing to the power of the moneyed classes
who have vetoed any initiative in this direction. If, with this super-abundance of conditions, Brazil cannot extricate itself from neo-liberalism, then we are lost, and the
best we can do is to prostrate ourselves humbly before the verdict of history that consecrates the final and definitive victory of the markets. Fortunately, that is not
tlie'case. The corollary of ' conservative possibilism', beloved offspring of the pensee unique, is that nothing can change, not even in a country with Brazil's
exceptional conditions. Going beyond the horizon of the possible and abandoning the dominant economic consensus, certain eminent government officials assure us,
would expose Brazil to terrible penalties that would put an end to the Lula government. Nevertheless, a close look at the recent economic history of Argentina may be
instructive. 'Possibilism' was intensely cultivated in Argentina, from the early days of Raul Alfonsin's government to the final catastrophic moments under Fernando
de Ia Rua's administration. This false realism, ceaselessly promoted by neo-liberal think-tanks throughout the world, drove Argentina to the worst crisis in its history
by shackling political will and the administration of the state to the whims and the greed of the markets. What is more, when in the middle of the deepest and most
extensive crisis the country had ever known, Buenos Aires defaulted on the foreign debt and began timidly implementing some heterodox policies- the clearest
example of which was the cancellation of approximately 70 per cent of foreign debt bonds -the country started on a path of very high rates of economic growth,
comparable only to those of China, which have continued uninterrupted for four years now (through early 2007, as the first edition of this book went to press). As I
noted in an analysis written prior to Lula's assumption of office, the 'possibilist' temptation always lies in wait for any government driven by reformist aims (Boron,
2003b). Faced with the objective and subjective impossibility of revolution - a characteristic feature of the current situation not only in Brazil but in the region as a
whole -
a misunderstood notion of common sense leads to accommodation with one's adversaries, and to a search for
some small escape route within the interstices of reality that will avoid total capitulation . The only problem with this strategy is
that history teaches us that it is later impossible to avoid the transition from 'possibilism' to immobilism, and then to catastrophic
defeat. This was clearly the Argentine experience with the 'centre left' Alianza government, and more generally with social-democratic governments in Spain, Italy
and France. In more general terms, this was also Max Weber's theoretical conclusion when he stated, in the final paragraph of his celebrated lecture 'Politics as a
Vocation' , that 'all historical experience confirms the truth - that man would not have attained the possible unless time and time again he had reached out for the
impossible' (Weber, 1982). Weber's words are all the more important in a continent such as ours, in which the lessons of history indisputably demonstrate that real
without a bold utopian
political vision capable of mobilising people, reformist impulses die out, government leaders capitulate,
revolutions were needed to institute some reforms in the social structures of the most unjust region of the planet, and that
and their
governments end up focusing on the disappointing administration of daily tasks. The hopes invested in vigorous reformism, while undoubtedly possible, should not
mean turning a deaf ear to the warnings of Rosa Luxemburg, who argued that social reforms, however genuine and energetic they may be, do not change the nature of
the pre-existing society. What happens is that as revolution is not on the immediate agenda of the great masses of Latin America, social reform becomes the most
likely alternative, above all in times of retreat and defeat such as those that have characterised the international system since the implosion of the Soviet Union and the
disappearance of the socialist camp. Reform, Luxemburg also reminds us, is not a revolution that advances slowly, or in stages, until, with the imperceptibility of the
traveller who crosses the equator - to use Edouard Bernstein's famous metaphor - it arrives at socialism. A century of social-democratic reformism in the West
irrefutably demonstrated that reforms are not enough to 'overcome' capitalism. It did, without a doubt, produce significant changes 'within the system', but it failed in
its stated goal of 'changing the system'. In the current national and international context, reformism appears to offer the only opportunity for moving forward, until the
The mistake of many reformists, however,
has been to confuse necessity with virtue. Even if reforms are currently all that can be achieved, this does not make
them adequate tools for building socialism. They can, if undertaken in a certain way, constitute an invaluable contribution to advancing in that direction, but
necessary objective and subjective conditions can be created for the pursuit of more promising alternatives.
they are not the path that will lead us to that destination. In the present circumstances, they are what is possible, but not what is desirable in a barbaric world in need of
fundamental transformation, not simply marginal adjustments. If, as the Zapatistas say, it is a question of 'creating a new world', such an undertaking greatly exceeds
If the reforms are imbued with energy
and build popular power, that is to say, if they modify the existing correlation of forces, shifting it in favour of the
condemned of the earth, then those reforms contain a transformational potential of extraordinary importance. This is
the kind of reformism that, for now and in the absence of a better alternative, we need to see in Latin America. The case of Argentina
the cautious limits of reform. However, we cannot wait with our arms folded for the ' decisive day' to arrive.
demonstrates that in practice even a country that is far weaker and more vulnerable than Brazil can grow despite the very bad (according to Joseph Stiglitz) advice
given to Argentina by the IMF for decades and the highly publicised support of the ' international financial community', which today lavishes Lula with the same
praise that it previously reserved for the Menem administration. Is
it a characteristic of ' realism ' to follow the advice of those who,
according to Stiglitz, became the principal promoters of crisis throughout the world ? Crises that, incidentally, enriched speculators
and parasites -those for whom the phlegmatic John M. Keynes recommended euthanasia- while condemning the rest to servility. What serious economist - and we are
speaking of economists, not spokespersons for business interests disguised as economists - can believe that a country can grow and develop by fostering economic
recession through exorbitant interest rates, reducing public spending, constricting the internal market, increasing unemployment, restricting consumption, facilitating
the flow of speculative short-term capital and overwhelming the poorest members of the population with indirect taxation, while subsidising the rich, and
consolidating the right of large monopolies to go untaxed? Can this be the path to liberating our countries from the ravages of neo-liberalism? Successive Argentine
presidents opted for governing according to the rules of 'possibilism', calming the markets and punctually satisfying every one of its complaints. The voices of big
capital and the IMF resonated deafeningly in Buenos Aires, and the government of the day did not hesitate for a minute in responding to their commands. That same
government, however, was deaf to the groans and cries of the condemned. The results are plain to see. The Brazilian experience during Lula's first term painfully
proved that neither a respectable leadership nor what was once a great party of the masses like the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers' Party, PT) was enough to
guarantee the correct course of government. Brasilia has gone down the wrong road, at the end of which we will not find a new, more just and democratic society - the
goal that gave birth to the PT little more than 20 years go - but rather a capitalist structure more unjust and less democratic than the previous one. A country in which
the dictatorship of capital, with a pseudo-democratic veneer, will be even stronger than before, demonstrating that George Soros was right when he advised the
Brazilian people not to bother electing Lula, because the markets would govern the country in any case.
1. All links are disads to the perm---they shouldn’t be able to sever their 1AC justifications--that’s the framework debate---voter for negative ground.
2. Alt is competitive-opposite of AFF + links to the plan
3. Try or die for the alternative alone.
De Angelis, East London political economy professor, 2009
(Massimo, “The tragedy of the capitalist commons”, December, http://turbulence.org.uk/turbulence-5/capitalistcommons/, DOA: 7-2-12)
This platform of management of the global commons is based on one key assumption: that capitalist disciplinary markets
are a force for good, if only states are able to guide them onto a path of environmentally sustainable and socially
inclusive growth. What this view forgets is that there is little evidence that global economic growth could be achieved with lower greenhouse gas emissions, in
spite of increasingly energy-efficient new technologies, which in turn implies that alternatives might just be necessary to stop climate change. This raises the question
of how we disentangle ourselves from the kind of conception of commons offered by Stiglitz, which allow solutions based on capitalist growth. COMMON
INTERESTS? Commons
also refer to common interests. To stay with the example of climate change, if there is any chance of significantly
reducing greenhouse gas emissions – without this implying some form of green authoritarianism – it is because there is a common interest in doing so. But
common interests do not exist per se, they have to be constructed, a process that has historically proven to be riddled
with difficulties – witness the feminist movement’s attempts to construct a ‘global sisterhood’; or the workers’ movement’s project of a ‘global proletariat’.
This is partly the case because capitalism stratifies ‘women’, ‘workers’ or any other collective subject in and
through hierarchies of wages and power. And therein lies the rub, because it is on the terrain of the construction of common
global interests (not just around ecological issues, but also intellectual commons, energy commons, etc.) that the
class struggle of the 21st century will be played out. This is where the centre of gravity of a new politics will lie. There are thus two possibilities.
Either: social movements will face up to the challenge and re-found the commons on values of social justice in spite of,
and beyond, these capitalist hierarchies. Or: capital will seize the historical moment to use them to initiate a new round of
accumulation (i.e. growth). The previous discussion of Stiglitz’s arguments highlights the dangers here. Because Stiglitz moves swiftly from the presumed
tragedy of the global commons to the need to preserve and sustain them for the purpose of economic growth. Similar arguments can be found in UN and World Bank
reports on ‘sustainable development’, that oxymoron invented to couple environmental and ‘social’ sustainability to economic growth. Sustainable
development is simply the sustainability of capital. This approach asserts capitalist growth as the sine qua non
common interest of humanity. I call commons that are tied to capitalist growth distorted commons, where capital has
successfully subordinated non-monetary values to its primary goal of accumulation. The reason why common interests
cannot simply be postulated is that we do not reproduce our livelihoods by way of postulations – we cannot eat them, in short. By and large, we reproduce
our livelihoods by entering into relations with others, and by following the rules of these relations. To the extent that the
rules that we follow in reproducing ourselves are the rules of capitalist production – i.e. to the extent that our reproduction depends on money – we should
question the operational value of any postulation of a common interest, because capitalist social relations imply
precisely the existence of injustices, and conflicts of interest. These exist, on the one hand, between those who
produce value, and those who expropriate it; and, on the other, between different layers of the planetary hierarchy.
And, it is not only pro-growth discourses that advocate the distorted commons that perpetuate these conflicts at the
same time as they try to negate them. The same is true of environmental discourses that do not challenge the existing
social relations of production through which we reproduce our livelihoods . Given that these assertions are somewhat abstract, let us try
to substantiate them by testing a central environmental postulate on subjects who depend on capitalist markets for the reproduction of their livelihoods.
4. Outright rejection of neoliberalism is key to solve
Abramsky, former Institute of Advanced Studies in Science, Technology and Society fellow,
2010
(Kolya, Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution: Social Struggles in the Transition to a Post-Petrol World, pg 1314)
Whether for pragmatic or ideological reasons, it is common to downplay the centrality of capitalist social relations
and their role in climate change and energy production, trade, and consumption . Consequently, the conflicting nature of the
transition process towards a new energy system is also downplayed. An important result of all this is the widely-held belief that capital
does not need to be expansive or at least that it doesn't have to be based on ever-expanding energy consumption. The
liberal capitalists' discourse is based on a value judgment that says that continuous capitalist growth is
desirable. That judgment is then naturalized, and becomes a tacit assumption that then forms the basis of
pragmatic solutions to the material requirements of energy production and consumption in a given context of class relations. The closely-related
"environmental" approach is based on a strong ethical desire for "change," but does not imagine challenging the
fundamental value premises of capitalism or the material relations behind it . Neither of these premises, nor the material requirements
for their satisfaction, can be wished away for the sake of a pragmatic engagement. States and corporations will do anything in their power to maintain capitalist social
relations as the fundamental form of reproducing our livelihoods. Furthermore,
the experience of capitalist renewable energy regimes of
the past stands as a reminder that social relations of production, based on enclosures and exploitation, are not
exclusively associated with fossil fuels and nuclear energy. There is nothing automatically emancipatory about
renewable energies. Energy looks set to play a crucial role in the realignment of economic and social planning, following the deepening world financialeconomic and, in all probability, a soon-to-follow political crisis. In order to re-launch a new cycle of accumulation, capital must tackle this energy crisis, and the
world economic crisis creates a context in which to promote new attacks on the current composition of the waged and unwaged working class, on its forms of
organization and resistance. A new wave of structural adjustments, expropriations, enclosures, market and state discipline will most likely be attempted, together with
when discussing solutions to the energy crisis,
economic liberal ideologues are quite open-minded. Rather than sticking to any one technology to meet capitalisms
ever-increasing energy need, which will never go away as long as capitalist social relations continue, all possibilities
are left open. These options consist of a combination of oil, so-called "clean coal," natural gas, nuclear energy, and a whole host of "renewable" technologies.
new and creative forms of capitalist governance of social conflicts. What is clear is that,
Whether a new post-petrol regime crystallizes in the face of different struggles is of course open—and what kind of regime and at what pace it might take shape
remains to be seen. What
happens will depend on how and to what extent capital is able to successfully restructure
planetary relations and weaken and divide the worldwide circulation of struggles . The combination of financialeconomic and energy-climate crises gives capital great possibilities to justify its actions under the twin slogans "save
the planet" and "save the economy" Hence, the planners' coming pragmatism might help capital to create a common
ground with some sections of the environmental movement, a so called "green capitalism." Should this occur, it would, in
all probability, be the ruin of environmental and social justice causes. On the other hand, it might also help emancipatory struggles
throughout the world to further de-legitimize capital's priorities in the management of these crises, especially if movements are able to re-compose themselves across
the global wage hierarchy and establish links furthering models of social cooperation and production based on pursuits of values that are alternative to capital's.
Two framing issues:
1. Any justification for the perm is just proof that the alt solves the case---we only need to
win a residual link because stepping back and exploring the roots of their descriptions
produces more effective engagement.
2. No net benefit to the perm-all their advantages are intellectually suspect-both are on
framework.