1NC – Framework
Interpretation
A. The ballot’s sole purpose is to answer the resolutional question: Is the outcome of the enactment of a
topical plan better than the status quo or a competitive policy option? They violate this by claiming
‘advantages’ independent of the plan and they do not defend governmental action. It’s a voting issue.
“Resolved” before a colon reflects a legislative forum
Army Officer School ’04
(5-12, “# 12, Punctuation – The Colon and Semicolon”, http://usawocc.army.mil/IMI/wg12.htm)
The colon introduces the following: a. A list, but only after "as follows," "the following," or a noun for which the list is an
appositive: Each scout will carry the following: (colon) meals for three days, a survival knife, and his sleeping bag. The
company had four new officers: (colon) Bill Smith, Frank Tucker, Peter Fillmore, and Oliver Lewis. b. A long quotation
(one or more paragraphs): In The Killer Angels Michael Shaara wrote: (colon) You may find it a different story from the
one you learned in school. There have been many versions of that battle [Gettysburg] and that war [the Civil War]. (The
quote continues for two more paragraphs.) c. A formal quotation or question: The President declared: (colon) "The only
thing we have to fear is fear itself." The question is: (colon) what can we do about it? d. A second independent clause which
explains the first: Potter's motive is clear: (colon) he wants the assignment. e. After the introduction of a business letter:
Dear Sirs: (colon) Dear Madam: (colon) f. The details following an announcement For sale: (colon) large lakeside cabin
with dock g. A formal resolution, after the word "resolved:" Resolved: (colon) That this council petition the
mayor.
B. Grammar is a voting issue: allowing other frameworks justifies arbitrarily changing the
question of the debate to an infinite number of alternatives, destroying predictable limits and
ensuring the aff always wins. Grammar is the only predictable basis for determining meaning;
it’s the foundation for how words interact
And, Plan Focus
1) Only our framework preserves it --- the role of the ballot is to answer the resolutional question: Should
the federal government expand its visa policy? Considering any impact other than the outcome of the
enactment of the plan creates the illogical decision where you vote Aff even though their policy is a bad
idea that should not be affirmed.
2) This teaches the best decision-making skills. Changing the role of the ballot from a yes/no question
about the desirability of the plan to something else. This undermines the singular logical purpose of
debate: the search for the best policy.
Framework is a voting issueHaving the resolution as the point of stasis is crucial to us debating; this does not reject their
advocacy, as long as it is grounded in the topic
Panetta et. al ’10
(Chair Edward M. Panetta, University of Georgia; co-author, William Mosley-Jensen,
University of Georgia Members Dan Fitzmier, Northwestern University Sherry Hall, Harvard
University Kevin Kuswa, University of Richmond Ed Lee, Emory University David Steinberg,
University of Miami (FL) Fred Sternhagen, Concordia College (MN) John Turner, Dartmouth
College, “Navigating Opportunity: Policy Debate in the 21st Century”, “Controversies in Debate
Pedagogy: Working Paper”, p. 220)
For adherents to the traditional mode of debate, when one retreats from grounding stasis in the annual proposition,
there are two predicted intellectual justifications that surface. First, there is the claim that the existence of a
resolution (without substantive content) and time limits is enough of a point of departure to allow for a debate.
For traditionalists, this move seems to reduce the existing stasis to the point that it has no real meaning. How
does the resolution mold the argument choices of students when one team refuses to acknowledge the
argumentative foundation embedded in the sentence? What educational benefit is associated with the
articulation of a two-hour and forty-five minute limit for a debate and decision where there is not an agreed
point of departure for the initiation of the debate? Second, advocates of moving away from a resolutionbased
point of stasis contend that valuable arguments do take place. Yes, but that argumentation does not meet some
of the core assumptions of a debate for someone who believes that treatment of a stated proposition is a
defining element of debate. Participants in a debate need to have some type of loosely shared agreement to
focus the clash of arguments in a round of debate. Adherence to this approach does not necessarily call for the
rejection of innovative approaches, including the use of individual narratives as a form of support or the
metaphorical endorsement of the proposition. This perspective on contest debate does, however, require
participants to make an effort to relate a rhetorical strategy to the national topic.
Topicality is a voting issue because without stasis, debate is impossible
Shively ‘2K
(Ruth Lessl, Assistant Prof Political Science – Texas A&M U., Partisan Politics and Political Theory, p. 181-2)
The requirements given thus far are primarily negative. The ambiguists must say "no" to-they must reject and limitsome ideas and actions. In what follows, we will also find that they must say "yes" to some things. In particular, they must
say "yes" to the idea of rational persuasion. This means, first, that they must recognize the role of agreement in political
contest, or the basic accord that is necessary to discord. The mistake that the ambiguists make here is a common one. The
mistake is in thinking that agreement marks the end of contest-that consensus kills debate. But this is true only if the
agreement is perfect-if there is nothing at all left to question or contest. In most cases, however, our agreements are highly
imperfect. We agree on some matters but not on others, on generalities but not on specifics, on principles but not on their
applications, and so on. And this kind of limited agreement is the starting condition of contest and debate. As John
Courtney Murray writes: We hold certain truths; therefore we can argue about them. It seems to have been one of
the corruptions of intelligence by positivism to assume that argument ends when agreement is reached. In a basic sense,
the reverse is true. There can be no argument except on the premise, and within a context, of agreement. (Murray
1960, 10) In other words, we cannot argue about something if we are not communicating: if we cannot agree on
the topic and terms of argument or if we have utterly different ideas about what counts as evidence or good
argument. At the very least, we must agree about what it is that is being debated before we can debate it. For
instance, one cannot have an argument about euthanasia with someone who thinks euthanasia is a musical
group. One cannot successfully stage a sit-in if one's target audience simply thinks everyone is resting or if
those doing the sitting have no complaints. Nor can one demonstrate resistance to a policy if no one knows that
it is a policy. In other words, contest is meaningless if there is a lack of agreement or communication about
what is being contested. Resisters, demonstrators, and debaters must have some shared ideas about the
subject and/or the terms of their disagreements. The participants and the target of a sit-in must share an
understanding of the complaint at hand. And a demonstrator's audience must know what is being resisted. In short,
the contesting of an idea presumes some agreement about what that idea is and how one might go about
intelligibly contesting it. In other words, contestation rests on some basic agreement or harmony.
Continued page 184…
But, again, the response to the ambiguist must be that the practice of questioning and undermining rules, like all other
social practices, needs a certain order. The subversive needs rules to protect subversion. And when we look more
closely at the rules protective of subversion, we find that they are roughly the rules of argument discussed above.
In fact, the rules of argument are roughly the rules of democracy or civility: the delineation of boundaries
necessary to protect speech and action from violence, manipulation, and other forms of tyranny.
1NC – Cede the Political Kritik
The aff is a refusal to engage in traditional politics, abdicating social responsibility and causing
extinction
Boggs, 97 (Carl, National University, Los Angeles, Theory and Society, “The great retreat: Decline of the public sphere in
late twentieth-century America”, December, Volume 26, Number 6,
http://www.springerlink.com.proxy.library.emory.edu/content/m7254768m63h16r0/fulltext.pdf)
The decline of the public sphere in late twentieth-century America poses a series of great dilemmas and challenges.
Many ideological currents scrutinized here – localism, metaphysics, spontaneism, post-modernism, Deep
Ecology – intersect with and reinforce each other. While these currents have deep origins in popular
movements of the 1960s and 1970s, they remain very much alive in the 1990s. Despite their different outlooks
and trajectories, they all share one thing in common: a depoliticized expression of struggles to combat and
overcome alienation. The false sense of empowerment that comes with such mesmerizing impulses is
accompanied by a loss of public engagement, an erosion of citizenship and a depleted capacity of individuals in large
groups to work for social change. As this ideological quagmire worsens, urgent problems that are destroying the
fabric of American society will go unsolved – perhaps even unrecognized – only to fester more ominously in
the future. And such problems (ecological crisis, poverty, urban decay, spread of infectious diseases, technological
displacement of workers) cannot be understood outside the larger social and global context of internationalized
markets, finance, and communications. Paradoxically, the widespread retreat from politics, often inspired by localist
sentiment, comes at a time when agendas that ignore or sidestep these global realities will, more than ever, be reduced to
impotence. In his commentary on the state of citizenship today, Wolin refers to the increasing sublimation and dilution of
politics, as larger numbers of people turn away from public concerns toward private ones. By diluting the life of
common involvements, we negate the very idea of politics as a source of public ideals and visions. 74 In the
meantime, the fate of the world hangs in the balance. The unyielding truth is that, even as the ethos of antipolitics becomes more compelling and even fashionable in the United States, it is the vagaries of political power that will
continue to decide the fate of human societies. This last point demands further elaboration. The shrinkage of politics
hardly means that corporate colonization will be less of a reality, that social hierarchies will somehow disappear, or that
gigantic state and military structures will lose their hold over people’s lives. Far from it: the space abdicated by a broad
citizenry, well-informed and ready to participate at many levels, can in fact be filled by authoritarian and reactionary
elites – an already familiar dynamic in many lesser-developed countries. The fragmentation and chaos of a Hobbesian
world, not very far removed from the rampant individualism, social Darwinism, and civic violence that have been so much
a part of the American landscape, could be the prelude to a powerful Leviathan designed to impose order in the face
of disunity and atomized retreat. In this way the eclipse of politics might set the stage for a reassertion of politics in more
virulent guise – or it might help further rationalize the existing power structure. In either case, the state would likely
become what Hobbes anticipated: the embodiment of those universal, collective interests that had vanished from civil
society. 75
This failure to engage the political process turns the affirmative into spectators who are
powerless to produce real change.
Rorty 98 – professor emeritus of comparative literature and philosophy, by courtesy, at Stanford University (Richard,
“ACHIEVING OUR COUNTRY: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America”, 1998, Pg. 7-9)
Such people find pride in American citizenship impossible, and vigorous participation in electoral politics pointless. They
associate American patriotism with an endorsement of atrocities: the importation of African slaves, the slaughter of Native
Americans, the rape of ancient forests, and the Vietnam War. Many of them think of national pride as appropriate only for
chauvinists: for the sort of American who rejoices that America can still orchestrate something like the Gulf War, can still
bring deadly force to bear whenever and wherever it chooses. When young intellectuals watch John Wayne war
movies after reading Heidegger, Foucault, Stephenson, or Silko, they often become convinced that they live in a
violent, inhuman, corrupt country. They begin to think of themselves as a saving remnant-as the happy few who
have the insight to see through nationalist rhetoric to the ghastly reality of contemporary America. But this
insight does not move them to formulate a legislative program, to join a political movement, or to share in a
national hope. The contrast between national hope and national self-mockery and self-disgust becomes vivid when one
compares novels like Snow Crash and Almanac of the Dead with socialist novels of the first half of the century-books like
The Jungle, An American Tragedy, and The Grapes of Wrath. The latter were written in the belief that the tone of the
Gettysburg Address was absolutely right, but that our country would have to transform itself in order to fulfill Lincoln's
hopes. Transformation would be needed because the rise of industrial capitalism had made the individualist rhetoric of
America's first century obsolete. The authors of these novels thought that this rhetoric should be replaced by one in which
America is destined to become the first cooperative commonwealth, the first classless society. This America would be one
in which income and wealth are equitably distributed, and in which the government ensures equality of opportunity as
well as individual liberty. This new, quasi-communitarian rhetoric was at the heart of the Progressive Movement and the
New Deal. It set the tone for the American Left during the first six decades of the twentieth century. Walt Whitman and
John Dewey, as we shall see, did a great deal to shape this rhetoric. The difference between early twentieth-century leftist
intellectuals and the majority of their contemporary counterparts is the difference between agents and spectators. In the
early decades of this century, when an intellectual stepped back from his or her country's history and looked at it
through skeptical eyes, the chances were that he or she was about to propose a new political initiative. Henry
Adams was, of course, the great exception-the great abstainer from ·politics. But William James thought that Adams'
diagnosis of the First Gilded Age as a symptom of irreversible moral and political decline was merely perverse. James's
pragmatist theory of truth was in part a reaction against the sort of detached spectators hip which Adams affected. For
James, disgust with American hypocrisy and self-deception was pointless unless accompanied by an effort to
give America reason to be proud of itself in the future. The kind of proto- Heideggerian cultural pessimism
which Adams cultivated seemed, to James, decadent and cowardly. "Democracy," James wrote, "is a kind of
religion, and we are bound not to admit its failure. Faiths and utopias are the noblest exercise of human reason,
and no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down fatalistically before the croaker's picture. "2
The alternative is to Vote neg to engage politics
Institutional approaches are the only way to avoid the collapse of all movements and effectively
challenge the flawed state policies.
Grossberg, 92 (Lawrence, Morris Davis Professor of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, “We Gotta Get Out of this Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture”, page 388-389)
The demand for moral and ideological purity often results in the rejection of any hierarchy or organization. The
question-can the master's tools be used to tear down the master's house?-ignores both the contingency of the
relation between such tools and the master's power and, even more importantly, the fact that there may be no
other tools available. Institutionalization is seen as a repressive impurity within the body politic rather than as
a strategic and tactical, even empowering, necessity. It sometimes seems as if every progressive organization is
condemned to recapitulate the same arguments and crisis, often leading to their collapse. 54 For example,
Minkowitz has described a crisis in Act Up over the need for efficiency and organization, professionalization and even
hierarchy,55 as if these inherently contradicted its commitment to democracy. This is particularly unfortunate since Act
Up, whatever its limitations, has proven itself an effective and imaginative political strategist. The problems are obviously
magnified with success, as membership, finances and activities grow. This refusal of efficient operation and the
moment of organization is intimately connected with the Left's appropriation and privileging of the local (as the
site of democracy and resistance). This is yet another reason why structures of alliance are inadequate, since they often
assume that an effective movement can be organized and sustained without such structuring. The Left needs to
recognize the necessity of institutionalization and of systems of hierarchy, without falling back into its own
authoritarianism. It needs to find reasonably democratic structures of institutionalization, even if they are
impure and compromised.
The desire for pure politics undermines a litany of meaningful possibilities at overcoming
domination
Grossberg, 92 (Lawrence, Morris Davis Professor of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, “We Gotta Get Out of this Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture”, page 396)
Above all, rethinking the possibility of
a Left politics will require a new model of intellectual and political
authority which does not begin by confidently judging every investment, every practice, every articulation and
every individual. It will have to measure both intellectual and political progress by movement within the fragile
and contradictory realities of people's lives, desires, fears and commitments, and not by some idealized utopia
nor by its own theoretical criteria. It will offer a moral and progressive politics which refuses to "police" everyday life
and to define a structure of "proper" and appropriate behaviors and attitudes. An impure politics—certainly, without the
myth of a perfect reflexivity which can guarantee its authority (for authority is not an intellectual prize). A contaminated
politics, never innocent, rooted in the organization of distance and densities through which all of us move together and
apart, sometimes hesitatingly, at other times recklessly. A politics that attempts to move people, perhaps just a little at
first, in a different direction. But a politics nonetheless, one which speaks with a certain authority, as limited and frail as
the lives of those who speak it. It will have to be a politics articulated by and for people who are inevitably implicated in
the contemporary crisis of authority and whose lives have been shaped by it. A politics for and by people who live in the
contemporary world of popular tastes, and who are caught in the disciplined mobilization of everyday life . A politics for
people who are never innocent and whose hopes are always partly defined by the very powers and inequalities
they oppose. A modest politics that struggles to effect real change, that enters into the often boring challenges of
strategy and compromise. An impure politics fighting for high stakes.
1NC Tournament recognition CP
Text: We believe the better way to recognize hotel attendants is to remove this discussion from
the confines of an intercollegiate debate. Instead, tournament hosts should recognize hotel
attendants in whatever way the hosting squad believes is best. We suggest that Harvard return
to the earlier practice of hosting a public forum wherein we could discuss the role of hotel
attendants in the debate community.
The Counterplan is mutually exclusive because any permutation will have to include the
affirmative’s 1AC advocacy in this debate which is the link to our offense. Fundamentally, we
are offering an approach to recognizing hotel attendants and they are defending that they
should win this debate round. These approaches are not compatible and if we win the
disadvantages to using the competitive format and solvency for our counterplan then you vote
negative.
The Counterplan solves the case better for two reasons:
First, attempting to create recognition through a competitive debate round is structurally
flawed since there are no written records of decisions and there is little collective memory of
what happened in any given debate
Atchison and Panetta, 09
(Jarrod Atchison, Phd Rhetoric University of Georgia, Assistant Professor and Director of debate at Wake Forest
University, and Edward Panetta, Phd Rhetoric Associate Professor University of Pitt and Director of Debate at Georgia,
Intercollegiate Debate and Speech Communication, Historical Developments and Issues for the Future, “Intercollegiate
Debate and Speech Communication: Issues for the Future,” The Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, Lunsford, Andrea,
ed. (Los Angeles: Sage Publications Inc., 2009) p. 317-334)
In addition to the structural problems, the collective forgetfulness of the debate community reduces the impact
that individual debates have on the community. The debate community is largely made up of participants who
debate and then move on to successful careers. The coaches and directors that make up the backbone of the
community are the people with the longest cultural memory, but they are also a small minority of the
community when considering the number of debaters involved in the activity. This is not meant to suggest that
the activity is reinvented every year-certainly there are conventions that are passed down from coaches to
debaters and from debaters to debaters. However, the basic fact remains that there are virtually no
transcriptions available for the community to read, and, therefore, it is difficult to substantiate the claim that
the debate community can remember anyone individual debate over the course of several generations of
debaters. Additionally, given the focus on competition and individual skill, the community is more likely to
remember the accomplishments and talents of debaters rather than a specific winning argument. The debate
community does not have the necessary components in place for a strong collective memory of individual
debates. The combination of the structures of debate and the collective forgetfulness means that any strategy
for creating community change that is premised on winning individual debates is less effective than seeking a
larger community dialogue that is recorded and/or transcribed. A second problem with attempting to create
community change in individual debates is that the debate community is comprised of more individuals than
the four debaters and one judge that are present in every round. Coaches and directors have very little space for
engaging in a discussion about community issues. This is especially true for coaches and directors who are not
preferred judges and, therefore, do not have access to many debates. Coaches and directors should have a
public forum to engage in a community conversation with debaters instead of attempting to take on their
opponents through the wins and losses of their own debaters.
Second, attempting to create recognition through competition generates backlash. Inevitably,
the losing team is frustrated that the affirmative requires them to be the sacrificial lamb in the
name of creating broader change which undermines any recognition the affirmative hopes the
broader community will achieve.
Atchison and Panetta, 09 (Jarrod Atchison, Phd Rhetoric University of Georgia, Assistant Professor and Director
of debate at Wake Forest University, and Edward Panetta, Phd Rhetoric Associate Professor University of Pitt and
Director of Debate at Georgia, Intercollegiate Debate and Speech Communication, Historical Developments and Issues for
the Future, “Intercollegiate Debate and Speech Communication: Issues for the Future,” The Sage Handbook of Rhetorical
Studies, Lunsford, Andrea, ed. (Los Angeles: Sage Publications Inc., 2009) p. 317-334)
Competition has been a critical component of the interest in intercollegiate debate from the beginning, and it
does not help further the goals of the debate community to dismiss competition in the name of community
change. The larger problem with locating the "debate as activism" perspective within the competitive
framework is that it overlooks the communal nature of the community problem. If each individual debate is a
decision about how the debate community should approach a problem, then the losing debaters become
collateral damage in the activist strategy dedicated toward creating community change. One frustrating
example of this type of argument might include a judge voting for an activist team in an effort to help them
reach elimination rounds to generate a community discussion about the problem. Under this scenario, the
losing team serves as a sacrificial lamb on the altar of community change.
Downplaying the important role of competition and treating opponents as scapegoats for the failures of the
community may increase the profile of the winning team and the community problem, but it does little to
generate the critical coalitions necessary to address the community problem, because the competitive focus
encourages teams to concentrate on how to beat the strategy with little regard for addressing the community
problem. There is no role for competition when a judge decides that it is important to accentuate the publicity
of a community problem. An extreme example might include a team arguing that their opponents' academic
institution had a legacy of civil rights abuses and that the judge should not vote for them because that would be
a community endorsement of a problematic institution. This scenario is a bit more outlandish but not
unreasonable if one assumes mat each debate should be about what is best for promoting solutions to diversity
problems in the debate community.
1NC 2nd Counterplan
Jack and I affirm that our labor would not be possible without the labor of hotel room
attendants.
Their use of collective pronouns like “we” signifies a mental break with reality – shows the attempt to
reconstruct a unified national community that never existed
Mack, 1985 (John E., The Cambridge Hospital, Harvard University, Cambridge, “Toward a Collective
Psychopathology of the Nuclear Arms Competition,” Political Psychology, Vol. 6, No. 2, June)
But we sense at a deeper level that there is a way in which the arms race really does resemble a severe mental illness, that it is quite literally psychotic, albeit in some unusual or unfamiliar way. Something close to what I have in mind was captured in the emphasis on
illusions surrounding nuclear weapons at the Third Congress of the International Physicians for the Preven- tion of
Nuclear War held in Holland in 1983. Among the "various illusions" considered were "limited or prolonged nuclear
war, nuclear superiority, the possibility of rational planning, the illusory security which is based on the instability of
ever-burgeoning nuclear arsenals, and the false hope placed on defensive systems to protect threatened
populations" (IPPNW, 1983, p. 2). We are coming to realize that something has gone seriously wrong when the survival of life on the entire
planet is threatened in order to protect the in- terests, values, or security of a particular national group (Kull, 1983). The purpose of this
article is to examine how the nuclear arms competition fulfills the conditions of a severe collective psychiatric
disorder in a formal, literal, or scientific sense, to describe the manifestations of this con- dition and the emotional forces which perpetuate it,
and, finally, to suggest how such knowledge might contribute to reversing its dangerous momentum. By a collective
disorder I mean one that resides in the thinking, feeling, behavior, and patterns of relating of a political community
or nation as a whole. I will try to show that the manifestations of such a disorder may be seen to hold our society in
its grip even though not all of its individual members participate actively in each of the elements of the total
disturbance. In the discussion which follows we cannot avoid employing metaphor or analogy in some degree. For a
nation, or other collectivity, cannot literally think, feel, or behave as an individual, even though political scientists
and other analysts of national politics and international relations use personal pronouns such as "we," "us," and
"they" in referring to national entities and their conduct .
The impact is totalitarian violence – communities must instead be founded on
difference, not commonality
Secomb, 2000 (Linell, lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of Sydney, “Fractured Community,” Hypatia, 15.2)
The desire for a community founded on communion and union is evident in both everyday discourses and in philosophical debates.
In the media, on the streets and in café discussions there is talk of the destruction of neighborly relations and communal sharing as a result of
the encroachment of industrialization, modernity, and postmodernity. Community, it is said, has been shattered or consumed by
the metropolis, by the mass exterminations of world war, death camps, and colonization, and by the isolation engendered by advanced
transport, communication, media, and entertainment systems. Everywhere there are attempts to resurrect old structures of
commonality or new formations of world, national, and sub-cultural communities. This concern about the loss of, and need to
recreate, congenial community is also evident in recent philosophical reflections on the political. The ideal of community founded on unity is
evoked, debated, and reformulated in a diversity of configurations, from G. W. F. Hegel's Sittlichkeit to liberal social contract theories and
communitarian communalism. Despite the numerous differences between these formulations, they all conceive of community as an attempt to
achieve agreement and unity. Community is understood, in these philosophical approaches, as a unified political body founded on consensus and
commonality. [End Page 133] Against these formulations of unified community, I propose in this paper an interpretation of
community as an expression of difference and diversity that is made manifest through disagreement and disunity.
While disagreement is generally conceived as a threat to community and as a sign of the imminent collapse of community, I will
argue instead that disagreement disrupts the formation of a totalizing identity, or commonality. The creation of a
totalizing unity is the movement of totalitarianism and unfreedom . Disagreement, on the other hand, holds a space
open for diversity and for freedom. It is not disagreement, resistance, and agitation that destroy community. It is rather the
repression or suppression of difference and disagreement in the name of unity and consensus which destroys the
engagement and interrelation of community. I argue that the conception of a unified community of commonality destroys
freedom, alterity, and heterogeneity. It is only within a community that acknowledges disagreement and fracture that
difference and freedom flourish. This interpretation of community as productive disagreement is supported by the experience of
Australian community, and in particular the relation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. For over two hundred years
Aboriginal people have resisted the dominant legal lie of terra nullius (which created the legal fiction that Australia was an
uninhabited country before its English occupation and that therefore there was no need to recognize the rights of the Aboriginal people). 1 It
was, in part, a persistent disagreement and fracture within the Australian community that allowed this legal myth to
be challenged and recently, finally, revoked. It is this disagreement and fracture which enables community and not, as is usually assumed,
agreement, commonality, and unity. This ideal of an agreeable community defaces alterity, extinguishes freedom, and
imposes a conformity and identity that annihilates the heterogeneity, surprise, and generosity of social relation .
Case
There’s no reason biopolitical control from hotel rooms causes genocide- their impact evidence
assumes much larger biopolitical control
State won’t try to eliminate impure populations
Dickinson, University of Cincinnati, 04 (Edward Ross, “Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About
“Modernity,” Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, March)
In an important programmatic statement of 1996 Geoff Eley celebrated the fact that Foucault’s ideas have “fundamentally directed attention away from institutionally centered
conceptions of government and the state . . . and toward a dispersed and decentered notion of power and its ‘microphysics.’”48 The “broader, deeper, and less visible
But the “power-producing effects
in Foucault’s ‘microphysical’ sense” (Eley) of the construction of social bureaucracies and social knowledge, of “an entire institutional apparatus and
system of practice” ( Jean Quataert), simply do not explain Nazi policy.50 The destructive dynamic of Nazism was a product
not so much of a particular modern set of ideas as of a particular modern political structure, one that could
realize the disastrous potential of those ideas. What was critical was not the expansion of the instruments and disciplines of
biopolitics, which occurred everywhere in Europe. Instead, it was the principles that guided how those instruments
and disciplines were organized and used, and the external constraints on them. In National Socialism, biopolitics was shaped by a
totalitarian conception of social management focused on the power and ubiquity of the völkisch state. In
democratic societies, biopolitics has historically been constrained by a rights-based strategy of social
management. This is a point to which I will return shortly. For now, the point is that what was decisive was actually politics at the level of the state.
A comparative framework can help us to clarify this point. Other states passed compulsory sterilization laws in the 1930s — indeed,
individual states in the United States had already begun doing so in 1907. Yet they did not proceed to the next steps adopted by
National Socialism — mass sterilization, mass “eugenic” abortion and murder of the “defective.” Individual figures in,
for example, the U.S. did make such suggestions. But neither the political structures of democratic states nor their legal and
political principles permitted such policies actually being enacted. Nor did the scale of forcible sterilization in other countries match that
of the Nazi program. I do not mean to suggest that such programs were not horrible; but in a democratic political
context they did not develop the dynamic of constant radicalization and escalation that characterized Nazi
policies.
ideological consensus” on “technocratic reason and the ethical unboundedness of science” was the focus of his interest.49
The aff ignores domestic labor- its recognition is crucial to understand modern capitalismthese are people the aff excluded in their decision to talk about hotels
Emily M. Nett, University of Manitoba, Canadian Journal of Sociology, Autumn 81, p 527-9
According to the introduction, the idea for the book was conceived in 1977. Compelled to look back, I recall the mid-seventies as a time when feminists of various persuasions came to realize
that the most resistent-to-change aspect of women's condition in society was domestic work. In essence, these essays, writ- ten by Marxists, are reactions to the views on that subject of radical
feminists (for example, Briskin, p. 144, and Blumenfeld and Mann, pp. 268 ff. and p. 301), and "bourgeois economists" (Fox, p. 179), as well as an intellectual inter- change with each other.
The major questions about women raised in the essay are those generally familiar to both family sociologists and feminists but the is- sues into which they devolve and the answers at which
they arrive are undoubt- edly more accessible and exciting to readers intimately familiar with the in- house debates of Marxist feminism since the 1960s. Any one who has only a slight acquaintance,
or none, with this tradition (if writings originating a little over ten years ago can be termed "tradition"), will only be informed by the es- says. The ideas of Margaret Benston, Mariarosa Dalla Costa,
John Harrison, Wally Seccombe and Jean Gardiner, Susan Himmelweit and Maureen Mackintosh, along with the basic texts of Marx and Engels, are the sources of inspiration and argument for
these youthful (I presume) contributors. The brief surveys and critiques, in Fox's introduction, of these publications between 1969 and 1975 pave the way for the uninitiated reader, as do her
excellent summaries at the outset of each chapter tying together the essays.
Wally Seccombe's first chapter provides a general introduction to the Marx- t discussion of women's
domestic labor. He makes an analysis in the abstract of the effects of the capitalist mode of production on
married women, contend- ing it engenders "a powerful antithesis between the production of the human
species and the production of its material means of subsistence" (p. 51). He pro- ceeds to examine
particularly "patriarchal" family relations in "historical" capi- talism, outlining the conditions whereby the
husband's wage created a central division of sexual hierarchy in the domestic family. In his second essay,
the fifth chapter of the book, Seccombe moves his historical analysis into the present, ar- guing that the
labor power of the working class is less and less able to realize its value, with the consequence that the state
has been subsidizing the full costs of labor power's expanded reproduction (i.e., education and job-training)
in the interests of capital. This move is seen as ultimately in contradiction with the working class's
increased purchase of commodities for household use and labor. He concludes that the state's present
measures to deal with the resultant economic problems (cutbacks to education and social welfare) can only
impose heavier burdens on women, in the form of intensified domestic work, a double day of labor, and
even being driven out of the labor market entirely.
In the second chapter Bruce Curtis locates the origins of a domestic sphere separate from productive labor
in the struggle for a family life, in which both working-class women and men were opposed by capital. The
state, he claims, played a direct role in the process of proletarianization, removing working women and
children from the industrial labor force, and thus creating the industrial reserve army of labor.
Linda Briskin, Chapter 3, is also concerned about the split between work and home. With women's wage
work segregated in low-skill, low-pay sectors of the economy, increases in women's participation in the
labor force are com- prehended in the context of the inherent contradiction in capitalism between the
need to turn all labor into wage labor and its perpetual need for privatized do- mestic labor. This has the
worst effects on women.
In Chapter 4 Bonnie Fox shows how married women's growing involvement in the wage work force results
from the way they must weigh household wage income against savings made when their domestic labor is
substituted for commodity purchases. Her conclusion is that working class wives find it harder and
harder to do that balancing regardless of the strategy they choose, because of "commoditization" as well as
spiraling levels of aspiration in middle class families.
In the final piece, Emily Blumenfeld and Susan Mann argue that the nature of work done in the home is
antithetical to the requirements of capitalist pro- duction and is impossible to be socialized. Capitalists are
not willing to bear the costs (of daycare, for example), and for the capitalist state to do it would create
irresolvable problems for the state and capital. Blumenfeld and Mann end their contribution with the final
prescription for action. According to them, ". . . this leaves women in capitalist society with no other
alternative than the tran- scendence of capitalist society itself as the path to their liberation."
This is the biggest challenge to capitalism
C. L'Hirondelle Housework Under Capitalism witten March 2000, revised March 2005,
http://www.livableincome.org/ahousework.htm
I've worked laying sod, painting cars, selling donuts, flipping burgers and working in an office yet nothing
compares with the intense and high stress work of being "only a mom". Housework and unpaid care work gets
no recognition, no status, and is the most wearing work I have ever done. The idea of the "worker" gets some
glory. Paid work gets status, recognition and pay. It is "real" work, no matter what kind of work it is. But the
subject of unpaid household labor gets ignored even by most social justice and labour groups. The most
common and essential work in the world is done for free yet it is invisible everyone except those who do it.
Maria Mies in her book Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale emphasizes that the non-wage labour of
women and other non-wage labourers as slaves, contract workers and peasants in colonies "constitutes the
perennial basis upon which 'capitalist productive labour' can be built up and exploited."
Domestic labour is a central process of industrial capitalism and yet as a woman who was immersed in it for years and as an activist who has attended countless meetings and protests and who has read
stacks of progressive magazines, I was unaware of the role that domestic labour played in the larger economic picture. Even though I was intimately familiar and often exhausted by domestic labor, I had
never understood its significance.
I found my first book on the subject of unpaid work at a closing-out sale of a feminist bookstore in Victoria several years ago. At one dollar, it was the cheapest book on the discount table. There was a stack
of them. The book, More Than a Labor of Love by Meg Luxton, examined three generations of housewives in Flin Flon, Manitoba.
Meg Luxton writes that the political left has tended to focus on the 'production of the means of existence and have left out of their analysis the production of human beings themselves" and that the eight
hour work day does not fully explain capitalist labour processes. Maria Mies also points out that Marx defined productive labour as production of surplus value and thus "theoretically contributed to the
removal of all 'nonproductive' labour ... from public visibility."
All industry is built on the backs of unpaid workers all over the world. Most of these unpaid workers are women
and most of the unpaid work takes place in the home. Domestic labor does two things: It reproduces humans -labour power-- and it prepares and maintains workers to go to work daily. Canada estimated in 1994 that the
value of housework, if it were paid, would be $318 billion.
The variety of tasks you must do when you look after home and children are endless: cook, maid, laundress, health-care provider, mediator, teacher, counselor, secretary, transporter of children and
household supplies, entertainment and social planner, special events coordinator, appointment keeper, and if you have a husband you are also his status enhancer (which will increase his potential
income) and must also keep your 'looks' or you may find yourself divorced, trying to feed your children with an income of 73% less than when you were married.
All this work goes on quietly, unheroically, with no awards, medals or statues of recognition. With other jobs
you 1) get paid and 2) have free time away from work and 3) you work usually with others as opposed to the
isolation of working by yourself doing care and housework. Mothers are told they get paid in "hugs", however
try paying your landlord or grocery store with hugs.
Many women in the world who toil away for no pay are ground into an early grave through the physical
exertion of bearing and raising children while struggling against squalor, disease and poverty. But we probably
only think of ourselves as workers when we work outside of home. This was noted by writer Susan Stasser for her book Never Done when during an
interview an 88- year-old woman said she could not believe that her unpaid work (as opposed to her "jobs") could have any importance to a historian.
One of the first women to challenge the view that domestic labor was not productive work was Maria-Rosa Dalla Costa, who wrote from Italy in 1972 that the housewife and her labour was the basis for the
process of capital accumulation. Capital commands the unpaid labour of the housewife as well as the paid labourer.
Dalla Costa saw the family as a colony dominated by capital and state. She rejected the artificially created division between waged and unwaged labour and said that you could not understand exploitation
of waged labour until you understood the exploitation of unpaid labour.
Other feminist writers have criticized this viewpoint because it does not acknowledge that men directly benefit from having women work in the home. Heidi Hartmann writes in Women & Revolution that
while union men early in the 19th century wanted women, children, and 'non-whites' out of the work force
because it lowered their wages. They asked for a wage for men high enough so that their wives could afford to
stay home and tend to the house and children.
Hartmann sees this as men colluding with capital for their own personal benefit and capital realized that
housewives produced and maintained healthier workers and future workers. So the family wage cemented the
partnership between patriarchy and capital. Men benefited directly from controlling women's labour and
capital benefited from the efficient unpaid maintenance and reproduction of workers.
The tradition of women working for free in the home, and men working for wages out of the home, has changed. Many women now have paid employment in addition to their unpaid household and family
care work. Ruth Schwartz Cowen notes in her book More Work for Mother, while the tasks that women do in the home have changed, the time spent on domestic labour has not.
This is partly because houseworkers and mothers today in industrialized countries are held to higher standards of cleanliness, have more appliances to clean, spend more time as consumers (approximately
8 hours a week buying and transporting goods which were previously delivered), face greater pressure to provide enriching experiences for their children, have less help from adult relatives, and not nearly
enough help from male partners. When both male and female household partners have full-time jobs, the woman still does significantly more housework than the man --15 more hours per week, totaling
an extra month of 24-hour days each year.
Single parents find themselves trying to comply with two incompatible demands by society: 1) be a good mother and, 2) don't be a leech and earn a living. Both goals are compromised causing continuous
stress, anxiety and guilt. It is extremely difficult to be a good mother when you do not have enough money to do the job. It is extremely difficult to earn a living when you are trying to competently raise
healthy children.
In Feminist Issues (Fall 1992), Reva Landau warns women that the consequence of leaving paid work for a few years to look after kids will bring lifelong economic penalties through missed promotions,
training opportunities, and pension contributions. Men who have a partner working in the home for free have an unfair advantage over women in the workplace who do not have a free labourer at home
tending to their needs.
Around the world women are coming to the conclusion that if men refuse to do their share of domestic work, women must go on strike. This is the idea behind the Global Women's Strike, started initiated
by the National Women's Council of Ireland, International Wages for Housework Campaign and the International Women Count Network for International Women's Day in 2000. It is estimated that
women make up 52% of the adults on this planet and do 75% of the work required to maintain 100% of the population. Organizers of the Global Women's Strike assert that whoever is doing all this work
has real power to effect change.
But, as Maria Mies points out in Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, there must be solidarity between women in overdeveloped and underdeveloped countries if we want to make this change:
"If one set of women tries to better its material condition as wage-workers, or as consumers, not as human beings, capital will try to offset its possible losses by squeezing another set of women."
However an underlying theme of some feminist literature seems to be that 1) women should have the right to be well paid oppressors too and 2) in order to do this children should be mass produced in
.
Women who provide all this free labour in a market system where nothing else is free must stop being so nice.
It makes us sick, poor and tired. Why do we continue to do so much extra free work that is only strengthening a
system that is killing us and the planet?
daycare centres. Allowing everybody equal opportunity to be an oppressor is not a solution Nor is warehousing children so parents can do jobs that exploit other people or the environment.
Anyone (male or female) who does unpaid care work of any kind (looking after elders, children, or family members with illness or disability) faces financial penalty. World society has not declared that they
want the human species to go extinct, therefore this work is not a "lifestyle choice", it is work that is essential for society and the economy to function. Historically men have never wanted to do this work,
mostly they still don't although there are some exceptions. But men are not all rushing to quit their jobs to stay at home and raise the kids. It is not surprising then that women around the world are now on
an unorganized strike -- a baby strike-- causing birth rates to fall in all countries except those with high infant mortality rates. (See Mothernomics)
At some point, all those who do care work for people and the planet must "work to rule," do the least amount of unpaid work as possible, then call for strike days and holidays. In BC in 2003 and 2004 the
Status of Women Action Group organized a series of Womyn's Walkouts, based on some of the goals of the Global Women's Strike, with the demand to do away with the punitive and starvation-level
welfare system and replace it with a universal guaranteed livable income. In 2005 SWAG formed a "Women's Anti-Slavery Committee" and declared March 8 (International Women's Day) to be a holiday.
It is also high time that we invisible workers at least got a few words of recognition from those who raise their fists about "worker's" rights, whose calls for "solidarity" only extend to those who get a pay
cheque.
Unpaid labor is a taboo subject because acknowledging it would undermine the ideological foundations of the
market economy. The owners of the world would have to admit that they can only prosper by not paying for
75% of the true work of the planet. Not speaking about unpaid labour allows capitalist industry to go on
profiting without ever recognizing the true cost of doing business. Nobody likes talking about slavery.
Extinction outweighs
Schell 82, (Jonathan ,journalist, FATE OF THE EARTH, 1982, p. 184.)
The death of our species resembles the death of an individual in its boundlessness, its blankness, its removal beyond experience, and its tendency to baffle human thought and feeling, yet as soon as one mentions the hope of
survival the similarities are clearly at an end. For while individual death is inevitable, extinction can be avoided; while every person must die, mankind can be saved. Therefore, while reflection on death may lead to
, reflection on extinction must lead to exactly the opposite response: to arousal, rejection, indignation, and action.
Extinction is not something to contemplate, it is something to rebel against. To point this out might seem like stating the obvious if it were
not that one the whole the world’s reaction to the peril of extinction has been one of numbness and inertia, much as
though extinction were as inescapable as death is. Even today, the official response to the sickening reality before us is conditioned by a grim fatalism, in which the hope of
resignation and acceptance
ridding the world of nuclear weapons, and thus of surviving as a species, is all but ruled out of consideration as “utopian” or “extreme” – as though it were “radical” merely to want to go on living and to want one’s
descendants to be born. And yet if one gives up these aspirations one has given up on everything. As a species, we have as yet done nothing to save ourselves. The slate of action is blank. We have organizations for the
preservation of almost everything in life that we want but no organization for the preservation of mankind. People seem to have decided that our collective will is too weak or flawed to rise to this occasion. They see the
violence that has saturated human history, and conclude that to practice violence is innate in our species. They find the perennial hope that peace can be brought to the earth once and for all a delusion of the well-meaning who
have refused to face the “harsh realities” of international life – the realities of self-interest, fear, hatred, and aggression. They have concluded that these realities are eternal ones, and this conclusion defeats at the outset any
hope of taking the actions necessary for survival. Looking at the historical record, they ask what has changed to give anyone confidence that humanity can break with its violent past and act with greater restraint. The answer
of course, is that everything has changed. To the old “harsh realities” of international life has been added the immeasurably harsher new reality of the peril of extinction. To the old truth that all men are brothers has been
added the inescapable new truth that not only on the moral but also on the physical plane the nation that practices aggressio n will itself die. This is the law of the doctrine of nuclear deterrence – the doctrine of “mutual
assured destruction” – which “assures” the destruction of the society of the attacker. And it is also the law of the natural world, which, in its own version of deterrence, supplements the oneness of mankind with a oneness of
if we fail
in our obligation life will actually be taken away from us, individually and collectively. Each of us will die, and
as we die we will see the world around us dying. Such imponderables as the sum of human life, the integrity of the
terrestrial creation, and the meaning of time, of history, and of the development of life on earth, which were once left to
contemplation and spiritual understanding, are now at stake in the political realm and demand a political response from every
person. As political actors, we must, like the contemplatives before us, delve to the bottom of the world, and, Atlas-like, we must take
the world on our shoulders.
nature, and guarantees that when the attack rises above a certain level the attacker will be engulfed in the general ruin of the global ecosphere. To the obligation to honor life is now added the sanction that