Consumption Kritik
1nc
Consumption-oriented development policy is grounded within a global system of inequality and
militarism – the aff continues reactionary violence and environmental destruction
Byrne and Toly 6 [John – Head of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy – It’s a leading
institution for interdisciplinary graduate education, research, and advocacy in energy and environmental
policy – John is also a Distinguished Professor of Energy & Climate Policy at the University of Delaware –
2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Toly –
Directs the Urban Studies and Wheaton in Chicago programs - Selected to the Chicago Council on Global
Affairs Emerging Leaders Program for 2011-2013 - expertise includes issues related to urban and
environmental politics, global cities, and public policy, “Energy as a Social Project: Recovering a
Discourse,” p. 1-32]
From climate change to acid rain, contaminated landscapes, mercury pollution, and biodiversity loss, the
origins of many of our least tractable environmental problems can be traced to the operations of the
modern energy system. A scan of nightfall across the planet reveals a social dila that also accompanies
this system’s operations: invented over a century ago, electric light remains an experience only for the
socially privileged. Two billion human beings—almost one-third of the planet’s population—
experience evening light by candle, oil lamp, or open fire, reminding us that energy modernization has left
intact—and sometimes exacerbated—social inequalities that its architects promised would be
banished (Smil, 2003: 370 - 373). And there is the disturbing link between modern energy and war. 3 Whether
as a mineral whose control is fought over by the powerful (for a recent history of conflict over oil, see Klare, 2002b, 2004,
2006), or as the enablement of an atomic war of extinction, modern energy makes modern
life possible and threatens its future. With environmental crisis, social inequality, and military
conflict among the significant problems of contemporary energy-society relations, the importance of a
social analysis of the modern energy system appears easy to establish. One might, therefore, expect a lively and
fulsome debate of the sector’s performance, including critical inquiries into the politics, sociology, and political economy of modern energy.
Yet, contemporary discourse on the subject is disappointing: instead of a social analysis of energy
regimes, the field seems to be a captive of euphoric technological visions and associated studies of
“energy futures” that imagine the pleasing consequences of new energy sources and devices. 4 One
stream of euphoria has sprung from advocates of conventional energy, perhaps best represented by the
unflappable optimists of nuclear power 12 Transforming Power who, early on, promised to invent a “magical
fire” (Weinberg, 1972) capable of meeting any level of energy demand inexhaustibly in a manner “too cheap
to meter” (Lewis Strauss, cited in the New York Times 1954, 1955). In reply to those who fear
catastrophic accidents from the “magical fire” or the proliferation of nuclear weapons, a new promise is
made to realize “inherently safe reactors” (Weinberg, 1985) that risk neither serious accident nor intentionally harmful use of
high-energy physics. Less grandiose, but no less optimistic, forecasts can be heard from fossil fuel enthusiasts
who, likewise, project more energy, at lower cost, and with little ecological harm (see, e.g., Yergin and Stoppard,
2003). Skeptics of conventional energy, eschewing involvement with dangerously scaled technologies and
their ecological consequences, find solace in “sustainable energy alternatives” that constitute a second
euphoric stream. Preferring to redirect attention to smaller, and supposedly more democratic, options,
“green” energy advocates conceive devices and systems that prefigure a revival of human scale
development, local self-determination, and a commitment to ecological balance. Among supporters are
those who believe that greening the energy system embodies universal social ideals and, as a result, can
overcome current conflicts between energy “haves” and “havenots.” 5 In a recent contribution to this perspective,
Vaitheeswaran suggests (2003: 327, 291), “today’s nascent energy revolution will truly deliver power to the people” as “micropower meets
village power.” Hermann Scheer
echoes the idea of an alternative energy-led social transformation: the shift to
a “solar global economy... can satisfy the material needs of all mankind and grant us the freedom to
guarantee truly universal and equal human rights and to safeguard the world’s cultural diversity” (Scheer, 2002: 34). 6 The
euphoria of contemporary energy studies is noteworthy for its historical consistency with a
nearly unbroken social narrative of wonderment extending from the advent of steam power
through the spread of electricity (Nye, 1999). The modern energy regime that now powers
nuclear weaponry and risks disruption of the planet’s climate is a product of promises
pursued without sustained public examination of the political, social, economic, and
ecological record of the regime’s operations . However, the discursive landscape has occasionally included thoughtful
exploration of the broader contours of energy-environment-society relations. As early as 1934, Lewis Mumford (see also his two-volume Myth
of the Machine, 1966; 1970) critiqued the industrial energy system for being a key source of social and ecological alienation (1934: 196): The
changes that were manifested in every department of Technics rested for the most part on one central fact: the increase of energy. Size, speed,
quantity, the multiplication of machines, were all reflections of the new means of utilizing fuel and the enlargement of the available stock of
fuel itself. Power was dissociated from its natural human and geographic limitations: from the caprices of the weather, from the irregularities
that definitely restrict the output of men and animals. 02Chapter1.pmd 2 1/6/2006, 2:56 PMEnergy as a Social Project 3 By 1961, Mumford
despaired that modernity
had retrogressed into a lifeharming dead end (1961: 263, 248): ...an orgy of
uncontrolled production and equally uncontrolled reproduction: machine fodder and cannon
fodder: surplus values and surplus populations... The dirty crowded houses, the dank airless courts and alleys, the
bleak pavements, the sulphurous atmosphere, the over-routinized and dehumanized factory, the drill schools, the second-hand experiences,
the starvation of the senses, the remoteness from nature and animal activity—here are the enemies. The living organism demands a lifesustaining environment.
The impact is extinction – consumption-oriented politics is the root cause of their
environment/resources impacts – the aff causes error replication
Ahmed 12 Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research and
Development (IPRD), an independent think tank focused on the study of violent conflict, he has taught
at the Department of International Relations, University of Sussex "The international relations of crisis
and the crisis of international relations: from the securitisation of scarcity to the militarisation of
society" Global Change, Peace & Security Volume 23, Issue 3, 2011 Taylor Francis
The twenty-first century heralds the unprecedented acceleration and convergence of multiple, interconnected global crises – climate
change, energy depletion, food scarcity, and economic instability. While the structure of global economic
activity is driving the unsustainable depletion of hydrocarbon and other natural resources, this is
simultaneously escalating greenhouse gas emissions resulting in global warming. Both global warming and energy
shocks are impacting detrimentally on global industrial food production, as well as on global financial and
economic instability. Conventional policy responses toward the intensification of these crises have been decidedly
inadequate because scholars and practitioners largely view them as separate processes. Yet increasing evidence
shows they
are deeply interwoven manifestations of a global political economy that has breached the
limits of the wider environmental and natural resource systems in which it is embedded. In this context, orthodox IR's
flawed diagnoses of global crises lead inexorably to their ‘securitisation’, reifying the militarisation of
policy responses, and naturalising the proliferation of violent conflicts. Global ecological, energy and economic crises
are thus directly linked to the ‘Otherisation’ of social groups and problematisation of strategic regions
considered pivotal for the global political economy. Yet this relationship between global crises and
conflict is not necessary or essential, but a function of a wider epistemological failure to holistically
interrogate
their structural and
systemic causes . In 2009, the UK government's chief scientific adviser Sir John Beddington
warned that without mitigating and preventive action 'drivers' of global crisis like demographic expansion, environmental degradation and
energy depletion could lead to a 'perfect storm' of simultaneous food, water and energy crises by around 2030.1 Yet, for the most part,
conventional policy responses from national governments and international institutions have been decidedly inadequate. Part of the problem is
the way in which these crises are conceptualised in relation to security. Traditional disciplinary divisions in the social and natural sciences,
compounded by bureaucratic compartmentalisation in policy-planning and decision-making, has meant these crises are frequently approached
as largely separate processes with their own internal dynamics. While it is increasingly acknowledged that cross-disciplinary approaches are
necessary, these have largely failed to recognise just how inherently interconnected these crises are. As Brauch points out, 'most studies in
security debate since 1990 have ignored or failed to integrate the contributions of the
global environmental change community in the natural sciences. To a large extent the latter has also failed to integrate
the results of this debate.*" Underlying this problem is the lack of a holistic systems approach to thinking
about not only global crises, but their causal origins in the social, political, economic, ideological and
value structures of the contemporary international system. Indeed, it is often assumed that these contemporary
the environmental
structures are largely what need to be 'secured* and protected from the dangerous impacts of global crises, rather than transformed precisely
to ameliorate these crises in the first place. Consequently, policy-makers frequently overlook existing systemic
and
structural obstacles to the implementation of desired reforms. In a modest effort to contribute to the lacuna identified by
Brauch, this paper begins with an empirically-oriented, interdisciplinary exploration of the best
available data on four major global crises — climate change, energy depletion, food scarcity and global
financial instability — illustrating the systemic interconnections between different crises, and revealing that
their causal origins are not accidental but inherent to the structural failings and vulnerabilities of existing global
political, economic and cultural institutions. This empirical evaluation leads to a critical appraisal of orthodox
realist and liberal approaches to global crises in international theory and policy. This critique argues principally that
orthodox IR reifies a highly fragmented, de-historicised ontology
of the international system which
underlies a reductionist, technocratic and compartmentalised conceptual and methodological approach to
global crises. Consequently, rather than global crises being understood causally and holistically in the systemic
context of the structure of the international system, they are 'securitised* as amplifiers of traditional security threats, requiring
counter-productive militarised responses and/or futile inter-state negotiations. While the systemic causal context of global crisis
convergence and acceleration is thus elided, this simultaneously exacerbates the danger of reactionary violence, the
problematisation of populations in regions impacted by these crises and the
naturalisation of the
consequent proliferation of wars and humanitarian disasters . This moves us away from the
debate over whether resource 'shortages* or 'abundance* causes conflicts, to the question of how either can generate crises which undermine
conventional socio-political orders and confound conventional IR
discourses, in turn radicalising the processes of social
polarisation that can culminate in violent conflict.
We must begin with a social critique and analysis of the modern energy regime.
Ethical criticism of the existing energy regime cultivates alternatives to technocratic
consumption.
Barry 12 [John Barry, Reader Politics @ Queen’s University (Belfast), The Politics of Actually Existing
Unsustainability p. 284-290]
'Dissident' is perhaps a better and more accurate term to apply to greens than 'revolutionary', since while both share an opposition to the
prevailing social order, revolutionary is clearly more antagonistic rather than agonistic, to use the terms indicated in chapter 7. Dissidents seek
to direct a self transforming present in a more radical direction, whereas revolutionaries typically seek the complete destruction of the existing
order and then the construction of a new one. Greens as dissidents also begin from an acceptance of the inevitability of key aspects of this
transition-primarily around climate change and the end of the oil age-and thus see an answer to 'what is to be done?' in terms of managing and
shaping that inevitable transition, rather than building/re-building. Dissident also seems less extreme and dogmatic in its critique and its
demands, than those who advocate full-blown revolution. And given what was said in chapter 3 and elsewhere about the link between
creativity, flexibility, and adaptive fitness, it would be odd for green politics to be dogmatic revolutionaries animated by a sense of the
hopelessness of working within and through contemporary institutiohs or that there was nothing worth preserving within and from the
contemporary social order. Green
dissent could perhaps be (wrongly) described as somewhere on a continuum between 'reformism'
collective resilience in the face of actually
existing unsustainability.1 In his essay 'The Power of the Powerless', Vaclav Havel uses the story of a greengrocer
and 'revolution', a form of 'creative adaptive management' to create
who unthinkingly displays his 'loyalty' to the regime by displaying a Communist Party slogan in
his shop. This the greengrocer does 'ritualistically, since this is the only way the regime is
capable of acknowledging his display of loyalty' (Havel, 1978: 45). In a similar way, being a dutiful consumer
and not questioning economic growth could also perhaps be regarded as the way in which
loyalty to a dominant capitalist, consumer regime is ritualistically displayed, enacted, and affirmed . It is
for this reason, if not only this reason, that one completely misunderstands consumerism, consumption, and
being a 'consumer', if one views it solely individualistically as some economic-cum-metabolic act. As a
public display of loyalty , consuming is first and foremost a collective act, an individual joining others in a shared activity and
associated identity. So while critics such as Fromm are correct in highlighting the distinction in consumer culture between 'being' and 'having'
(Fromm, 1976), what these analyses often miss is that consumption is also an act of' belonging' and identity affirmation (Keat, 1994; Jackson,
2009b).It is for this reason that a refusal to consume is so damaging to the modern political and economic order and why to consciously choose
not to consume is perhaps one of the most politically significant acts one can do in a consumer society. And one that, the continual
performance (or rather non-performance) of which, further marks one out as a dissident, part of 'the great refusal' to use Marcuse's term
(Marcuse, 1964). That is, to
question economic growth under consumer capitalism is to be 'disloyal' to the
prevailing order. While for Havel living in what he calls the 'post-totalitarian' communist regime is 'living a lie', I do not want to go so far
and say that life in contemporary consumer capitalist democracies is in the same way to 'live a lie'. Rather what I would like to dwell upon is
Havel's notion of'living within the truth' and what this can offer for green dissidents. For
Havel 'living within the truth ... can
be any means by which a person or group revolts against manipulation: anything from a letter by
intellectuals to a workers' strike, from a rock concert to a student demonstration, from refusing to vote in the farcical elections, to
making an open speech at some official congress, or even a hunger strike' (Havel, 1986: 59-60). Though clearly written with the then communist
regime in mind, Havel's call to 'live in truth' is equally pertinent to consumer capitalism. As he puts it: The profound crisis of human identity
brought on by living within a lie, a crisis which in turn makes such a life possible, certainly possesses a moral dimension as well; it appears,
among other things, as a deep moral crisis in society. A
person who has been seduced by the consumer value system,
who has not roots in the order of being, no
sense of responsibility for anything higher than his or her own personal survival, is a
demoralized person . The system depends on this demoralization, deepens it, is in fact a projection of it into
society. (Havel, 1978: 62; emphasis added) Silence is of course a consequence and precondition for this demoralization,
and what power requires under consumer capitalism is passive and silent acquiescence as much as active participation. For Havel the reappropriation of individual responsibility is something to be actively striven for. This reverses or
whose identity is dissolved in an amalgam of the accoutrements of mass civilization, and
balances the usual focus on rights and freedoms with which often 'progressive' critiques of consumerism are couched. In Havel's response to
what Tim Jackson amongst others has called 'The Age of Irresponsibility' (Jackson, 2009b ), also connects with some of the green republican
arguments outlined in chapters 6 and 7, not least the stress on both the recovery of the good of politics and the centrality of the individual
citizen as a moral being and not just or only a consumer (or producer/worker or investor). As Jackson notes, 'the "age of irresponsibility" is not
about casual oversight or individual greed. The economic crisis is not a consequence of isolated malpractice in selected parts of the banking
sector. If there has been irresponsibility, it has been much more systemic, sanctioned from the top, and with one clear aim in mind: the
continuation and protection of economic growth' (Jackson, 2009b: 26; emphasis added). The
struggle Havel describes from
the 1968 'Prague Spring' between 'the system' and 'the aims of life' (Havel, 1978: 66) resonate green
concerns of the degradation of natural life-supporting systems and the undermining of
conditions promoting human conviviality, quality of life, and well-being (Barry, 2009b; De Geus, 2009, 2003;
Jackson, 2009a). What Havel goes on to say about political change and strategy in the context of a consumer culture is pertinent and important
for those seeking a transition away from unsustainability, 'Society is not sharply polarized on the level of actual political power, but ... the
fundamental lines of conflict run right through each person ' (Havel, 1978: 91; emphasis added). This is a profound
point, namely that it is difficult, if not impossible, to simply analyse actually existing unsustainability as an oppressive totalitarian regime in
which there is an identifiable 'them' dominating 'us'. Under consumer capitalism, debt-based consumption, and so on, we who live in these
societies are all implicated in its continuation. And while of course there are identifiable groups and institutions (such as large corporations,
financial wealth management firms, the leadership of mainstream political parties, key agencies of the nation state such as departments of
finance, global financial institutions such as the World Bank and the IMP, and what Sklair has called the
'transnational capitalist
class') who do benefit more from actually existing unsustainability, we have to face up to the fact
that 'ordinary people', that is, everyone also contributes (unequally of course) to the 'mundane'
operation of global capitalism and the exploitation of people and planet. The recognition of this is but
another way of drawing attention to the fact that capitalism, the
common sense of neoclassical economics, and so on
have achieved 'full spectrum' domination of hearts and minds, such that capitalism, and realistic
critiques of it, need to be viewed as cultural (and indeed psychological) projects . It is for this reason that I
canvassed the Transition movement in chapter 3, since it adopts an explicitly cultural and psychological approach. Of course such cultural and
psychological critical analyses are not exhausted by this movement and these cannot be a substitute for oppositional political struggle. This
'cultural turn' in green politics is, to my mind, linked to the 'postscarcity economics of sustainable
desire' outlined in chapter 5, and is premised firmly on a notion of human flourishing that lies beyond
production, 'supplyside' solutions , 'competiveness', and increasing 'labour productivity'. This notion of flourishing is not
anti-materialist. Let me make that abundantly clear, it is not an ascetic renunciation of materialism for its own sake, as if
material life is intrinsically unworthy or does not express valued modes of human being. Thus I do not accept the Fromm-inspired view that
materialism or indeed material consumption is simply a mode of 'having' and not 'being'. After all, the
critique should be
directed at consumerism and overconsumption, not materialism or consumption per se. At a basic level one can see how
communism and consumerism are two 'regimes of truth' -to return to the Foucauldian language used in chapter 4 imposing
their version of the truth, exacting payment, compliance, and subjectivity from their client
populations, quelling, distracting, and undermining dissidents, and using different but also some
shared techniques to continue. And the appropriate dissident, progressive attitude, and strategy
against both is, for Havel, ultimately an ethical one, an ethical and political life-affirming 'reconstitution of society' (Havel,
1978: 115). That Havel conceives consumer-capitalist and communist societies as comparable can be seen in his view that: traditional
parliamentary democracies can offer no fundamental opposition to the autonomism of technological
civilization, and the industrial-consumer society, for they, too, are being dragged helplessly along by it. People are
manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in the post-totalitarian societies ... the
omnipresent dictatorship of consumption, production, advertising, commerce, consumer culture, and all that flood of information. (Havel,
1978: 116; emphasis added) Some of the republican elements expressed in Havel's thought centre around 'responsibility' (Havel, 1986: 104). He
maintains that the abdication of responsibility in the name of consumer choice-what I have elsewhere described as the reduction of political
liberty to a consumer 'freedom of choice' (Barry, 2009a)-weakens the ethical and political capacities of citizens within liberal democracies.
Liberal consumer-citizens then become 'victims of the same autonomism, and are incapable of
transcending concerns about their own personal survival to become proud and responsible
members of the polis, making a genuine contribution to the creation of its destiny' (Havel, 1978: 116;
emphasis added). In this Havel is articulating concerns very close to the type of green republicanism outlined in this book. His concluding
comments in The Power of the Powerless also offer suggestive lines for interpreting the Transition movement. In a passage focusing on the
contours of what Havel calls the
'existential revolution' that is needed to renew the relationship of humans
to the 'human order and cosmopolitan responsibility', Havel notes that the structures needed to make this happen
'should naturally arise from below as a consequence of authentic "selforganization"; they should derive energy from a living dialogue with the
genuine needs from which they arise, and when these needs are gone, the structures should also disappear ... The decisive criterion of this
"selfconstitution" should be the structure's actual significance and not just a mere abstract norm' (Havel, 1978: 119). A better description of the
Transition movement's aims, motivations, and objectives would be hard to find. Havel goes on to describe these new, provisional, and practical
structures 'postdemocratic'. He describes the outlines of these 'authentic' political structures in this manner: Do not these groups emerge, live,
and disappear under pressure from concrete and authentic needs, unburdened by the ballast of hollow traditions? Is not their attempt to
create an articulate form of 'living within the truth' and to renew the feeling of higher responsibility in an apathetic society really a sign of some
rudimentary moral reconstitution? In other words, are riot these informed, non-bureaucratic dynamic and open communities that comprise the
'parallel polis' a kind of rudimentary prefiguration, a symbolic model of those more meaningful 'post-democratic' political structures that might
become the foundation of a better society? (Havel, 1978: 120-121). Fundamental here, I think, is Havel's call to responsibility and struggle
against the prevailing political order when it undermines quality of life, perpetuates injustice, or the denial or compromising of democratic
norms. In a similar vein Carla Emery puts it eloquently, 'People have to choose what they're going to struggle for. Life
is always a
struggle, whether or not you're struggling for anything worthwhile, so it might as well be for
something worthwhile' (in Astyk, 2008: 204). Or to phrase it differently: get busy living or get busy dying. WHAT IF WE ARE THE
PEOPLE WE'VE BEEN WAITING FOR? 289 As argued throughout this book in facing the many challenges of the present time-climate change,
peak oil, diminishing forms of social well-being, financial and economic crises, and the ecological liquidation of the foundations of life on the
planet-the most important response needed is one which explicitly focuses on imagination and creativity. As W. B. Yeats (long before Barak
Obama used a version of these sentiments) suggested, what is needed is for us 'to seek a remedy ... in audacity of speculation and creation'
(Yeats, 1926). While 'another
world is possible' it can only be possible if it is imagined, and perhaps
one of the most persistent obstacles to the transition away from actually existing
unsustainability apart from ignorance of the ecological and human costs of our capitalistconsumer way of life-is the stultifying grip of 'business as usual' and its limited and limiting horizons
of possible futures for ourselves and our societies. In many respects, our collective inability to respond
to 'limits to growth' is in large measure due to limits of creativity and imagination . We cannot, or find it
very difficult, to imagine a different social order. For Richard Norgaard the answer to our present ecological predicament is as difficult to
achieve as it is simple to express, 'We need a new life story. We need an overarching story that respects a diversity of life stories. Living
the
story of economic development is destroying humanity and nature and a good many other
species along with us. We need a master story that puts our hope, compassion, brains, sociality,
and diversity to new and constructive ends' (in Deb, 2009: xxiii). And if we follow Havel, it may be that this new story we
need is already here, in the same sense that the eco-feminist Mary Mellor (Mellor, 1995) has persuasively written that the sustainable
world, society, or mode of being is not some utopian 'there' but an already living, embodied,
engendered 'here' in the reproductive and exploited labour of women, in the 'core' economic
activity of caring and sharing and ... flourishing. The Polanyi-inspired attempt to 'reembed' the economy within human
social relations can be viewed as a defensive move to protect community from both the formal market and the state. Such protective
measures can include the expansion of the social economy, or the efforts by the Transition
movement in seeking to disrupt, slow down and re-conceptualize the economy. Such reactive measures
could all be thought of as seeking to defend and extend those sustainable practices in the here and now, that is, that already exist within
'actually existing unsustainability'. This is particularly the case with reproductive labour as outlined in this book. Actually it
is the
neoclassical economic view that is 'utopian' in promoting a fictitious and dangerous imaginary
of human life lived at 365/24/7 speed and a way of life completely out of synch not just with
human biological but also ecological time. And, it must be recalled, 'Mother Nature does not do bailouts'. As Havel
suggests, 'For the real question is whether the "brighter future" is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long
time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing
it?' (Havel, 1978: 122). Now there's an intriguing set of concluding thoughts-what if not only the resilient, sustainable way of life is 'always
already here', present, and available to us if we so choose-but also if it is indeed the case that 'we are the people we've been waiting for?' And
what of the hard greens, where do they and their analysis fit within this book? For it is fair to say that they have been shadowing the book.
While I discussed them briefly in the Introduction and made some casual comments about them and their diverse positions and prescriptions
throughout, I have not met them head on as it were. So it would be fitting for me to offer my thoughts on the place and status of the hard
green position. Are they basically correct? Do I agree with them (from the green republican acceptance of the time-bound and contingent
character of all human creations, including civilizations and societies) that they have identified the beginning of the end of our existing
capitalist, carbon-based civilization and societies? While I certainly admire their brutal honesty, I baulk at their jump from crisis to collapse, and
then from collapse to violence and 'de-civilization' (Elias, 2000; Hine and Kingsnorth, 2010). Their political analyses echo (almost always
unwittingly) the eco-authoritarian position of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The hard-green view in being so pessimistic means its pessimism
precludes a view of politics as the 'art of the possible', and a view of the inevitability of collapse can and does lead to de-politicized or even antipolitical responses. But surely the
challenge, as outlined by the green republican project of this book, is to embrace new
intelligibilities, ways of being, having, and doing, new identities and subjectivities, and new arts
of life, all must be part of a project to avert collapse?2 This is, as I see it, the point of green republican politics as a form of 'anticipatory
politics' to challenge the rule of the 'nee-liberal vulgate'. At this present moment, on the cusp of this 'Great Transition', what greens
need is to cultivate critical awareness, opposition, and dissent, to have the courage of their
convictions in analysing and resisting actually existing unsustainability, and outlining their vision for the
transition to a better society, in part to engage, inform, and prepare citizens for the coming changes that will characterize the decades ahead.
Greens need to be realistic and cleareyed in their disavowal of naive utopianism, but convinced of its basic conviction that another world is
possible, necessary, and desirable. And while on quiet mornings we may hear it coming, its arrival, like all major transitions in human history,
will demand political struggle. The battle for hearts, minds, and hands has begun, and my writing this book and you reading it are constitutive
of that struggle.
links
aquaculture links
Aquaculture locks in capitalist development cycles that destroy the natural world and
unequal development patterns
Clark and Clausen 8 [2008, Volume 60, Issue 03 (July-August), Monthly Review, Brett Clark teaches
sociology at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, Rebecca Clausen teaches sociology at Fort Lewis
College in Durango, Colorado, “The Oceanic Crisis: Capitalism and the Degradation of Marine
Ecosystem,” http://monthlyreview.org/2008/07/01/the-oceanic-crisis-capitalism-and-the-degradationof-marine-ecosystem]
Aquaculture: The Blue Revolution?¶ The
massive decline in fish stocks has led capitalist development to turn to a
new way of increasing profits—intensified production of fishes. Capitalist aquaculture represents not
only a quantitative change in the intensification and concentration of production; it also places
organisms’ life cycles under the complete control of private for-profit ownership.31 This new industry, it is
claimed, is “the fastest-growing form of agriculture in the world.” It boasts of having ownership from “egg to plate” and
substantially alters the ecological and human dimensions of a fishery.32¶ Aquaculture (sometimes also referred to as aquabusiness)
involves subjecting nature to the logic of capital. Capital attempts to overcome natural and social
barriers through its constant innovations. In this, enterprises attempt to commodify, invest in, and develop
new elements of nature that previously existed outside the political-economic competitive sphere: As
Edward Carr wrote in the Economist, the sea “is a resource that must be preserved and harvested….To enhance its uses, the water must
become ever more like the land, with owners, laws and limits. Fishermen must behave more like ranchers than hunters.”33¶ As
worldwide
commercial fish stocks decline due to overharvest and other anthropogenic causes, aquaculture is
witnessing a rapid expansion in the global economy. Aquaculture’s contribution to global supplies of fish increased from 3.9
percent of total worldwide production by weight in 1970 to 27.3 percent in 2000. In 2004, aquaculture and capture fisheries produced 106
million tons of fish and “aquaculture accounted for 43 percent.”34 According to Food and Agriculture Organization statistics, aquaculture is
growing more rapidly than all other animal food producing sectors. ¶ Hailed as the “Blue Revolution,” aquaculture
is frequently
compared to agriculture’s Green Revolution as a way to achieve food security and economic growth
among the poor and in the third world. The cultivation of farmed salmon as a high-value, carnivorous
species destined for market in core nations has emerged as one of the more lucrative (and controversial)
endeavors in aquaculture production.35 Much like the Green Revolution, the Blue Revolution may produce temporary
increases in yields, but it does not usher in a solution to food security (or environmental problems). Food
security is tied to issues of distribution. Given that the Blue Revolution is driven by the pursuit of profit, the desire for monetary
gain trumps the distribution of food to those in need.36¶ Industrial aquaculture intensifies fish production by
transforming the natural life histories of wild fish stocks into a combined animal feedlot. Like
monoculture agriculture, aquaculture furthers the capitalistic division of nature, only its realm of
operation is the marine world. In order to maximize return on investment, aquaculture must raise thousands of fish in a confined
net-pen. Fish are separated from the natural environment and the various relations of exchange found in a
food web and ecosystem. The fish’s reproductive life cycle is altered so that it can be propagated and
raised until the optimum time for mechanical harvest.¶ Aquaculture interrupts the most fundamental
metabolic process—the ability of an organism to obtain its required nutrient uptake. Because the most
profitable farmed fish are carnivorous, such as Atlantic salmon, they depend on a diet that is high in fishmeal and fish oil. For example, raising
Atlantic salmon requires four pounds of fishmeal to produce every one pound of salmon. Consequently, aquaculture production depends
heavily on fishmeal imported from South America to feed the farmed carnivorous species.37¶ The
inherent contradiction in
extracting fishmeal is that industries must increase their exploitation of marine fish in order to feed the
farm-raised fish—thereby increasing the pressure on wild stocks to an even larger extent. Such operations
also increase the amount of bycatch. Three of the world’s five largest fisheries are now exclusively harvesting
pelagic fish for fishmeal, and these fisheries account for a quarter of the total global catch. Rather than
diminishing the demands placed on marine ecosystems, capitalist aquaculture actually increases them,
accelerating the fishing down the food chain process. The environmental degradation of populations of marine species,
ecosystems, and tropic levels continues.38¶ Capitalist
aquaculture—which is really aquabusiness—represents a
parallel example of capital following the patterns of agribusiness. Similar to combined animal feedlots,
farmed fish are penned up in high-density cages making them susceptible to disease. Thus, like in the
production of beef, pork, and chicken, farmed fish are fed fishmeal that contains antibiotics, increasing concerns
about antibiotic exposure in society. In “Silent Spring of the Sea,” Don Staniford explains, “The use of antibiotics in
salmon farming has been prevalent right from the beginning, and their use in aquaculture globally has
grown to such an extent that resistance is now threatening human health as well as other marine
species.” Aquaculturists use a variety of chemicals to kill parasites, such as sea lice, and diseases that spread quickly throughout the pens.
The dangers and toxicities of these pesticides in the marine environment are magnified because of the long food chain.39¶ Once
subsumed into the capitalist process, life cycles of animals are increasingly geared to economic cycles of
exchange by decreasing the amount of time required for growth. Aquabusiness conforms to these
pressures, as researchers are attempting to shorten the growth time required for fish to reach market
size. Recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) has been added to some fish feeds to stimulate growth in fishes in aquaculture farms in
Hawaii. Experiments with fish transgenics—the transfer of DNA from one species to another—are being done to increase the rate of weight
gain, causing altered fish to grow from 60 percent to 600 percent larger than wild stocks.40 These growth mechanisms illustrate capitalist
aquaculture’s drive to transform nature to facilitate the generation of profit.¶ In addition, aquaculture
alters waste assimilation.
The introduction of net-pens leads to a break in the natural assimilation of waste in the marine
environment. The pens convert coastal ecosystems, such as bays, inlets, and fjords, into aquaculture
ponds, destroying nursery areas that support ocean fisheries. For instance, salmon net-pens allow fish feces and uneaten
feed to flow directly into coastal waters, resulting in substantial discharges of nutrients. The excess nutrients are toxic to the marine
communities that occupy the ocean floor beneath the net-pens, causing massive die offs of entire benthic populations.41 Other waste products
are concentrated around net-pens as well, such as diseases and parasites introduced by the caged salmon to the surrounding marine
organisms.
This risks extinction – only the alt can solve
Clark and Clausen 8 [2008, Volume 60, Issue 03 (July-August), Monthly Review, Brett Clark teaches
sociology at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, Rebecca Clausen teaches sociology at Fort Lewis
College in Durango, Colorado, “The Oceanic Crisis: Capitalism and the Degradation of Marine
Ecosystem,” http://monthlyreview.org/2008/07/01/the-oceanic-crisis-capitalism-and-the-degradationof-marine-ecosystem]
As a result, the system is inherently caught in a fundamental crisis arising from the transformation and
destruction of nature. István Mészáros elaborates this point, stating:¶ For today it is impossible to think of anything at all concerning
the elementary conditions of social metabolic reproduction which is not lethally threatened by the way in which capital relates to them—the
only way in which it can. This is true not only of humanity’s energy requirements, or of the management of the planet’s mineral resources and
chemical potentials, but of every facet of the global agriculture, including the devastation caused by large scale de-forestation, and even the
most irresponsible way of dealing with the element without which no human being can survive: water itself….In
the absence of
miraculous solutions, capital’s arbitrarily self-asserting attitude to the objective determinations of
causality and time in the end inevitably brings a bitter harvest, at the expense of humanity [and nature
itself].46¶ An analysis of the oceanic crisis confirms the destructive qualities of private for-profit
operations. Dire conditions are being generated as the resiliency of marine ecosystems in general is
being undermined.¶ To make matters worse, sewage from feedlots and fertilizer runoff from farms are transported by rivers to gulfs and
bays, overloading marine ecosystems with excess nutrients, which contribute to an expansion of algal production. This leads to oxygenpoor water and the formation of hypoxic zones—otherwise known as “dead zones” because crabs and fishes
suffocate within these areas. It also compromises natural processes that remove nutrients from the waterways.
Around 150 dead zones have been identified around the world. A dead zone is the end result of
unsustainable practices of food production on land. At the same time, it contributes to the loss of
marine life in the seas, furthering the ecological crisis of the world ocean.¶ Coupled with industrialized
capitalist fisheries and aquaculture, the oceans are experiencing ecological degradation and constant
pressures of extraction that are severely depleting the populations of fishes and other marine life. The
severity of the situation is that if current practices and rates of fish capture continue marine ecosystems
and fisheries around the world could collapse by the year 2050.47 To advert turning the seas into a watery grave,
what is needed is nothing less than a worldwide revolution in our relation to nature, and thus of
global society itself .
Claims of ‘sustainable’ aquaculture are a smokescreen for the invasive economic
model posed by the 1ac – aquaculture locks in neo-colonial production paradigms and
maintains a profound wealth gap
Macabuac 5 [Maria Cecilia F. Macabuac, PHD in Philosophy of Sociology, Virginia Polytechnic University,
July 15, 2005, “After the Aquaculture Bust,” http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-07242005083742/unrestricted/03Ch123.pdf]
The Boom-to-Bust Cycle of Aquaculture¶ Many, if not all, economies
of poor countries are dependent on exportoriented extractive¶ industries which include gas, oil, and mining ventures, logging, and agro-industrial
aquaculture¶ and plantations. Such extractive enclaves:¶ 1. are capital-intensive;¶ 2. are generally run by the state or
by large corporations, in ways that lead to high rates of¶ corruption, repression and conflict;¶ 3. use little
unskilled or semi-skilled labor;¶ 4. are geographically concentrated and create small pockets of wealth;¶ 5.
produce social and environmental problems that disproportionately impact the poor;¶ 41¶ 6. follow a
boom-and-bust cycle that creates economic insecurity (Ross 2001).¶ Many of the peripheral countries that are most
highly dependent on extractive industries¶ are classified as “ highly indebted poor countries ” (Ross 2001)-- demonstrating
the degree to¶ which these enterprises have failed to fuel either healthy economic growth for the nation or¶
alleviation of the impoverishment of citizens.¶ Aquaculture is one of those peripheral extractive
industries which booms only as long as¶ ecological resources and market prices are at supportive levels.
When environmental degradation¶ threatens the supply base or new producers enter the market and
cause price drops, aquaculture¶ operations tend to “bust” very quickly. Export-oriented shrimp ponds typically
bust only after five¶ to ten years of intensive farming, primarily because of shrimp diseases and ecological degradation¶ (McGinn 2002). Only a
few investments are directed toward reinvigoration of abandoned shrimp¶ farms while most corporations transfer to other promising areas,
leaving behind land and¶ waterways that will be unsuited for cultivation for several centuries (Skladany¶ et. al.¶ 1995).¶ While ecological
degradation accounts for the bust cycle in shrimp production, competition from¶ synthetics and from
alternative agricultural commodities (such as corn starch) are much more¶ likely to trigger bust cycles in
seaweed production. Between 1978 and 1984, the Philippines was¶ the top producer of seaweed. By 2000, China was the number one
exporter, followed by the¶ Philippines and Chile (Trade Data International 2003).¶ Worldwide, fish comprise 17 percent of the animal protein in
the human diet, and fish are the most¶ 42¶ important source of animal protein in the diets of peripheral populations. According to Shiva ¶
(2000: 43):¶ The two primary justifications for industrial aquaculture are the crisis of depletion¶ of marine resources and the crisis of
malnutrition among the poor in the Third¶ World. . . . Though pushed by both national and international organization as an¶ answer to world
food scarcity. . ., shrimp contributes little to the nutritional needs¶ of the world’s population, being a luxury item that is consumed mainly by
the rich¶ in the developed world.¶ On the one hand, aquaculture has vastly expanded world output of fish and marine foods.¶ On the other
hand, aquaculture
has now integrated into global commodity chains peripheral fish¶ and marine
resources, resulting in two impacts on the food chains of those poor countries that¶ undertake
aquaculture projects.¶ 1. Aquaculture removes fish and marine resources from local consumption chains
and¶ exports those foods to rich countries– thereby threatening traditional food chains in¶ producing
countries.¶ 2. Because less fish is available to peripheral populations, malnutrition and hunger are on the¶
rise, especially in those countries with large aquaculture and fishing sectors (Shiva 2000).¶ Despite all its purported
advantages, the Blue Revolution is really “food imperialism”¶ (Yoshinori 1987). Aquaculture is an industry controlled by corebased transnational corporations,¶ and it has concentrated control over the world’s fish and marine
foods into the hands of a few¶ companies. Rather than eradicating hunger or expanding resources to
feed peripheral populations,¶ aquaculture has further polarized world food distribution and
consumption. At the turn of the 21st century, the richest fifth of the world consumes nearly half of all
meat and fish, the poorest fifth¶ only 5 percent.¶ 4¶ While poor countries supply 85 percent of the
internationally traded fishery¶ products, core countries consume 40 percent of the world total supply of
fish (McGinn 1998).¶ 5¶ Core citizens have benefitted greatly from the new global food chains stimulated by
the¶ Blue Revolution, and they now consume three times more fish than people in the developing¶
countries. However, the horrible irony is that peripheral populations cannot afford the luxury¶ meats
available in abundance to core citizens, so they must rely on fish for animal protein. While¶ North
Americans and Western Europeans acquire more than 90 percent of their animal protein¶ from beef,
pork, and chicken, Africans and Asians are dependent on fish for about one-third of¶ their animal protein
(McGinn 1998). Aquaculture also drains away peripheral fish supplies for¶ uses outside the human food
chain. Non-food uses of fish in rich countries (such as animal feed¶ and oils) is greater than the total human consumption of fish in Latin
America, Africa and India¶ combined.¶ 6¶ In reality, fish resources are drained away to rich countries and threaten
the local food¶ chain in two ways. First, the aquaculture outputs overwhelmingly are exported to the
core as¶ luxury foods. Second, the production of those exports and of non-food uses of marine resources¶
requires high levels of inputs of other smaller fishes. Aquaculture and agro-industrial fisheries¶ redirect
resources from the human food chains to fishponds of producing countries (Shiva 2000:¶ 44¶ 7¶ For example, the
US price for shrimp dropped from $5 per pound to $3.38 in 2003 (Public Citizen 2004).¶ 8¶ In Malaysia, the high demands of prawn farms for
fish feed has also caused a shortage of fish for the salted fish¶ industry (Wilks 1995:122).¶ 43). Consequently, less fish are now available to poor
Asian consumers because aquaculture¶ requires
such high levels of inexpensive small fish as pond feed (Food and
agro-industrial fisheries consume more resources¶ than they
produce, thereby threatening food security even further. In 2000, 5.7 million tons of¶ cultured fish were produced in Asia,
requiring 1.1 million tons of feed, derived from a staggering¶ 5.5 million tons of wet-weight fish (Shiva 2000: 43). Thus, one ton of
smaller fish that are¶ typically a significant part of the diets of poor households are absorbed to cultivate
every ton of¶ export fish that will provide luxury sea cuisine for rich households.¶ Peripheral food security is
threatened in another way. While core consumers enjoy¶ declining prices that result from the expanding supply
of tropical shrimp and deep-sea specialty¶ fishes, the cost of fish rises in peripheral countries that engage
in export-oriented aquaculture¶ (Public Citizen 2004).¶ 7¶ In Indonesia, world demand for prawn has pushed up
local prices for¶ small fish, such as sardines, that were traditionally consumed by the poor. Ordinary
consumers in¶ Malaysia can no longer afford one kind of prawn (¶ Panaeidae)¶ because aquaculture producers¶
prefer to export this commodity at higher prices to Japan.¶ 8¶ In Sri Lanka, the traditional shrimp¶ curry
has disappeared from the diets of poor families because the pressure to export has driven up¶ prices
Agriculture¶ Organization 2004). To complicate matters,
(Yoshinori 1987).
Aquaculture causes environmental destruction – the 1ac’s prioritization of the Global
North in economic decision calculi is an unsustainable ecological model
Macabuac 5 [Maria Cecilia F. Macabuac, PHD in Philosophy of Sociology, Virginia Polytechnic University,
July 15, 2005, “After the Aquaculture Bust,” http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-07242005083742/unrestricted/03Ch123.pdf]
Ecological Degradation¶ In
every peripheral country where aquaculture has been prioritized, “satisfying the
huge¶ export market for cultivated shrimp has led to significant environmental damage” (Aksoy and¶ Beghin
2005: 277). The core can pay cheap prices for peripheral fish and marine resources¶ because most of the
real costs of production are externalized to the ecosystems and communities¶ of the Global South (Public
Citizen 2004:1). Fishpond systems deprive local people of their¶ traditional sources of fish, shellfish, timber,
and charcoal, and they weaken the natural capacity of¶ coastal ecosystems to filter and purify water, cycle
nutrients, remove contaminants, and buffer the¶ land from coastal storms and severe weather (McGinn
1998: 49, Primavera 1991). Through the¶ privatization of mangroves, large aquaculture operations expropriate from the public
commons¶ many ecological resources which local residents have historically used for subsistence and
for¶ small-scale enterprises (Bailey 1988). Poor coastal communities lose access to ecological goods¶ (such as
shells, oysters, weeds, and other types of fishes) which form a significant part of their¶ traditional diets and their cashearning capacity. Many subsistent fishing households that once¶ gathered food resources from
mangroves or shallow seas are shoved out of those ecosystems¶ when those natural resources are
reoriented for export production (Wilks 1995). In Malaysia, for¶ example, several thousand fishermen have suffered big declines in
fishcatch due to destruction of¶ mangroves and river pollution caused by aquaculture ponds along the coast. The aquaculture¶
industry has destroyed most of the mangroves in Ecuador’s coastal regions.¶ 9¶ Commercial¶ fishponds
and seaweed operations also compete with agriculture for fresh water and introduce salt¶ water into
waterways and navigation canals. In Bangladesh, for example, many farms have been¶ damaged by the flow of salt water from the shrimp
ponds to the rice-fields, greatly reducing the¶ farm output.¶ 10¶ Aquaculture
also draws high levels of water from
underground aquifers upon¶ which farms are dependent for irrigation. As the water level declines and the aquifer
compacts,¶ land subsidence occurs over time and the area becomes vulnerable to flooding (Primavera 1991).¶
Export-oriented aquaculture also threatens ecological biodiversity. On the one hand,¶ aquaculture ponds engage in mass¶
monocultural¶ production, using up the space that was once¶ occupied by hundreds of different species.
On the other hand, that export species must devour¶ high levels of smaller adjacent species if it is to be
produced at high export levels. For instance, 36¶ million tons of wild fish is needed to produce 7.2 million
tons of shrimps.¶ 11¶ In addition, export-¶ oriented shrimp production requires high inputs of antibiotics and
other chemicals. It is common¶ practice for fishponds and hatcheries to flush into nearby seas,
mangroves, and rivers excess lime,¶ organic wastes, pesticides, chemicals and disease microorganisms
(McGinn 1998). These waste¶ outputs:¶ 1. build up as silt and sedimentation in rivers, bays, and along coasts,
threatening all the¶ species in that habitat and all the human occupations dependent on that ecosystem¶
(McGinn 1998),¶ 2. can trigger harmful algae blooms (World Resources Institute 2001),¶ 3. or can cause the emergence
of resistant new strains of pathogens (Primavera 1991).¶ Moreover, escapes of genetically-modified fish can
invade the gene pool of wild fish and ¶ 47¶ them altogether (McGinn 1998).
Aquaculture expansion and maintenance produces violent cycles of poverty and
displacement – turns their starvation and poverty internals
Macabuac 5 [Maria Cecilia F. Macabuac, PHD in Philosophy of Sociology, Virginia Polytechnic University,
July 15, 2005, “After the Aquaculture Bust,” http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-07242005083742/unrestricted/03Ch123.pdf]
Unemployment, Poverty¶ and Displacement¶ While the
Blue Revolution has expanded food outputs, it has led to the
elimination of¶ employment opportunities for peripheral coastal populations. On the one hand, aquaculture
has¶ destroyed small-scale, family owned farms and enterprises to pave the way for corporate-owned¶
agribusiness enclaves (Bailey and Skladany 1991). In the global shrimp chain, for instance, small-¶ scale traditional ponds
have been aggregated to form larger, export-oriented, corporate-owned¶ prawn farms. “International
agencies help create a dualistic pattern of development, with benefits¶ skewed towards a limited
number of large-scale fishing enterprises rather than towards the far¶ more numerous small-scale subsector,” which often comprises 90 percent of the households¶ located in the areas where commercial aquaculture is entrenched (Bailey
1988b: 36). On the other¶ hand, export-oriented aquaculture industries employ far fewer laborers than do smallscale fishing¶ operations. The net result has been that unemployment has risen among fishing
households in¶ peripheral countries that have converted to Blue Revolution production strategies (Kurien
2002).¶ In the case of shrimp aquaculture, there are very few laborers involved in the entire production¶ process (Bailey and Skladany 1991).
One of the social impacts of globalized aquaculture is the¶ displacement of people and small local
businesses, thus depriving them of their traditional sources¶ of livelihood (Kurien 2002). Bangladesh
provides an enlightening example. Large landowners and¶ city-based absentee owners dominate shrimp
culture in the southern districts of Bangladesh. To¶ aggregate the natural resources essential to agroindustrial production, poor rice farmers have¶ been forcefully dislocated by the state and by invasive
gangs controlled by shrimp-farm owners.¶ 12¶ Little wonder, then, that export-oriented aquaculture has
exacerbated existing social¶ inequalities in poor countries. Because large aquaculture operations require high capital¶
investments for infrastructure, only the rich can engage in this venture. Small entrepreneurs are¶ effectively shut out
(Primavera 1991) because big businesses in joint ventures with foreign¶ investors monopolize the industry
and the credit offered by banks and financial institutions¶ (Kurien 2002). Shrimp farming has also been linked to
widespread human rights abuses. In¶ Thailand, China, Indonesia, India, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and the Philippines aquaculture has been¶
accompanied by land seizures, the displacement of tens of thousands of people, and the depletion,¶ salinization, and chemical pollution of
drinking water.¶ The requirement of certain shrimp species for brackish water means that, over¶ time, salts penetrate the water table, while
water exchange practices associated¶ with more intensive shrimp farms typically involve pumping water in from ¶ surrounding rivers or
groundwater supplies (thus depleting fresh water sources)¶ and then pumping out water from the ponds into canals, rivers and near-shore¶
waters. This process can lead to contamination of groundwater supplies and rivers¶ by pollutants (including pesticides, antibiotics and
disinfectants) and saltwater. . . .¶ (Environmental Justice Foundation 2003: 10).¶ After the advent of export-oriented shrimp farms, 20,000
fishers in Sri Lanka’s Puttalam¶ District were forced to migrate because their small-scale fish catches declined to levels that would¶ not support
their households. From Satkhira, Bangladesh and Andrah Pradesh state in India,¶ 49¶ 168,000 people have been displaced from rural areas to
overcrowded cities. Child labor supports¶ the aquaculture industry in many peripheral countries.
In Bangladesh, for example,
children¶ collecting shrimp fry to stock shrimp farms work 13 hours a day in and around water, leaving¶
many with skin and respiratory disorders. In addition, shrimp farming has been tied to murders of¶ activists
and laborers in five Latin American countries and in six Asian countries, including the¶ Philippines
(Environmental Justice Foundation 2003). On the one hand, export aquaculture has¶ not proven to be a capitalist
technological advance that has positively impacted world hunger. On¶ the other hand:¶ Where shrimp aquaculture has
expanded. . . many local peoples have seen their¶ ways of life destroyed, their economic system
undermined, their access to essential¶ resources cut off. They had no voice in what has been happening
to them. This is¶ an invisible type of human rights violation (Environmental Justice Foundation¶ 2003: 26).
economy links
Economic collapse is inevitable in their macroeconomic frame—gains are privatized
while costs are displaced onto the poor
Stiglitz, econ prof, 8—Professor of Economics at Columbia, Ph.D. from MIT, recipient of the Nobel
Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (Joseph, 7 July 2008, The End of Neo-liberalism?,
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stiglitz101/English, RBatra)
For a quarter-century, there has been a contest among developing countries, and the losers are clear: countries that pursued neo-liberal
policies not only lost the growth sweepstakes; when they did grow, the benefits accrued
disproportionately to those at the top.
Though neo-liberals do not want to admit it, their ideology also failed another test. No one can claim that financial
markets did a stellar job in allocating resources in the late 1990’s, with 97% of investments in fiber optics taking years to see any light. But at least that mistake had an unintended benefit: as
costs of communication were driven down, India and China became more integrated into the global economy.
The newly constructed homes built for families that
could not afford them get trashed and gutted as millions of families are forced out of their homes, in some
But it is hard to see such benefits to the massive misallocation of resources to housing.
communities, government has finally stepped in – to remove the remains. In others, the blight spreads. So even those who have been model citizens, borrowing prudently and maintaining
markets have driven down the value of their homes beyond their worst nightmares.
their homes, now find that
To be sure, there were some short-term benefits from the excess investment in real estate: some Americans (perhaps only for a few months) enjoyed the pleasures of home ownership and
living in a bigger home than they otherwise would have. But at what a cost to themselves and the world economy! Millions will lose their life savings as they lose their homes. And the housing
foreclosures have precipitated a global slowdown. There is an increasing consensus on the prognosis: this downturn will be prolonged and widespread.
free-market
rhetoric has been used selectively – embraced when it serves special interests and discarded when it
does not.
Nor did markets prepare us well for soaring oil and food prices. Of course, neither sector is an example of free-market economics, but that is partly the point:
Perhaps one of the few virtues of George W. Bush’s administration is that the gap between rhetoric and reality is narrower than it was under Ronald Reagan. For all Reagan’s free-trade
rhetoric, he freely imposed trade restrictions, including the notorious “voluntary” export restraints on automobiles.
Bush’s policies have been worse, but the extent to which he has openly served America’s military-industrial complex has been more naked. The only time that the Bush administration turned
green was when it came to ethanol subsidies, whose environmental benefits are dubious. Distortions in the energy market (especially through the tax system) continue, and if Bush could have
gotten away with it, matters would have been worse.
This mixture of free-market rhetoric and government intervention has worked particularly badly for
developing countries. They were told to stop intervening in agriculture, thereby exposing their farmers to devastating competition from the United States and Europe. Their
farmers might have been able to compete with American and European farmers, but they could not compete with US and European Union subsidies. Not surprisingly, investments
in agriculture in developing countries faded, and a food gap widened.
Those who promulgated this mistaken advice do not have to worry about carrying malpractice insurance. The costs will be borne by those in developing countries, especially the poor. This
year will see a large rise in poverty, especially if we measure it correctly.
Simply put, in a world of plenty, millions in the developing world still cannot afford the minimum nutritional
requirements. In many countries, increases in food and energy prices will have a particularly devastating effect on the
poor, because these items constitute a larger share of their expenditures.
The anger around the world is palpable. Speculators, not surprisingly, have borne more than a little of the wrath. The speculators argue: we are not the cause of the problem; we are simply
engaged in “price discovery” – in other words, discovering – a little late to do much about the problem this year – that there is scarcity.
Expectations of rising and volatile prices encourage hundreds of millions of farmers to
take precautions. They might make more money if they hoard a little of their grain today and sell it later; and if they do not, they won’t be able to afford it if next year’s crop is
smaller than hoped. A little grain taken off the market by hundreds of millions of farmers around the world adds
up.
Defenders of market fundamentalism want to shift the blame from market failure to government failure.
One senior Chinese official was quoted as saying that the problem was that the US government should have done more to help low-income Americans with their housing. I agree. But that
does not change the facts: US banks mismanaged risk on a colossal scale, with global consequences,
while those running these institutions have walked away with billions of dollars in compensation.
Today, there is a mismatch between social and private returns. Unless they are closely aligned, the market
system cannot work well.
But that answer is disingenuous.
Neo-liberal market fundamentalism was always a political doctrine serving certain interests. It was
never supported by economic theory. Nor, it should now be clear, is it supported by historical
experience. Learning this lesson may be the silver lining in the cloud now hanging over the global economy.
Administration of global economic order requires threat inflation and subversion—
results in greater overall violence
Neocleous, Prof of Gov, 8 [Mark Neocleous, Prof. of Government @ Brunel, Critique of Security, p95-]
In other words, the
new international order moved very quickly to reassert the connection between
economic and national security: the commitment to the former was simultaneously a commitment to the latter, and vice versa.
As the doctrine of national security was being born, the major player on the international stage would aim to use
perhaps its most important power of all – its economic strength – in order to re-order the world. And
this re-ordering was conducted through the idea of ‘economic security’.99 Despite the fact that ‘econ omic
security’ would never be formally defined beyond ‘economic order’ or ‘economic well-being’,100 the significant conceptual con sistency
between economic security and liberal order-building also had a strategic ideological role. By
playing on notions of ‘economic
well-being’, economic security seemed to emphasise economic and thus ‘human’ needs over
military ones. The reshaping of global capital, international order and the exercise of state power
could thus look decidedly liberal and ‘humanitarian’. This appearance helped co-opt the liberal
Left into the process and, of course, played on individual desire for personal security by using notions such as ‘personal
freedom’ and‘social equality’.101
Marx and Engels once highlighted the historical role of the bour geoisie in shaping the world according to its own interests. The need of a
constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere,
settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere . . . It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of
production; it compels them . . . to become bourgeois in themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.102
this ability to ‘batter down all Chinese walls’ would still rest heavily
on the logic of capital, but would also come about in part under the guise of security. The whole
world became a garden to be cultivated – to be recast according to the logic of security. In the space of
fifteen years the concept ‘economic security’ had moved from connoting insurance policies for working people to the desire to
shape the world in a capitalist fashion – and back again. In fact, it has constantly shifted between these registers ever since, being used
for the constant reshaping of world order and resulting in a comprehensive level of intervention
In the second half of the twentieth century
and policing all over the globe. Global order has come to be fabricated and administered
according to a security doctrine underpinned by the logic of capitalaccumulation and a
bourgeois conception of order. By incorporating within it a particular vision of economic order, the concept of national
security implies the interrelatedness of so many different social, econ omic, political and military factors that more or less any development
anywhere can be said to impact on liberal order in general and America’s core interests in particular. Not only could bourgeois Europe be
recast around the regime of capital, but so too could the whole international order as capital not only nestled, settled and established
connections, but also‘secured’ everywhere.
Security politics thereby became the basis of a distinctly liberal philosophy of global ‘intervention’,
fusing global issues of economic management with domestic policy formations in an ambitious
and frequently violent strategy. Here lies the Janus-faced character of American foreign policy.103 One face is the
‘good liberal cop’: friendly, prosperous and democratic, sending money and help around the globe when problems emerge, so
that the world’s nations are shown how they can alleviate their misery and perhaps even enjoy some prosperity. The other face is the
‘bad liberal cop’: should one of these nations decide, either through parliamentary procedure, demands for self-determination or violent
revolution to address its own social problems in ways that conflict with the interests of capital and the bourgeois concept of liberty, then
the authoritarian dimension of liberalism shows its face; the ‘liberal moment’ becomes the
moment of violence. This Janus-faced character has meant that through the mandate of security the US, as the national security
state par excellence, has seen fit to either overtly or covertly re-order the affairs of myriads of nations – those ‘rogue’ or ‘outlaw’ states on
the ‘wrong side of history’.104
‘Extrapolating the figures as best we can’, one CIA agent com mented in 1991,‘there have
been about 3,000 major covert
operations and over 10,000 minor operations – all illegal, and all designed to disrupt, destabilize, or
modify the activities of other countries’, adding that ‘every covert operation has been rationalized in
terms of U.S. national security’.105 These would include ‘interventions’ in Greece, Italy, France, Turkey, Macedonia, the
Ukraine, Cambodia, Indonesia, China, Korea, Burma, Vietnam, Thailand, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Cuba, the
Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Bolivia, Grenada, Paraguay, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Philippines, Honduras, Haiti, Venezuela, Panama,
Angola, Ghana, Congo, South Africa, Albania, Lebanon, Grenada, Libya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and many more, and
many of these more than once. Next up are the ‘60 or more’ countries identified as the bases of ‘terror cells’ by Bush in a speech on 1 June
2002.106 The methods
used have varied: most popular has been the favoured technique of liberal
security – ‘making the economy scream’ via controls, interventions and the imposition of neo-liberal
regulations. But a wide range of other techniques have been used: terror bombing; subversion;
rigging elections; the use of the CIA’s ‘Health Alteration Committee’ whose mandate was to
‘incapacitate’ foreign officials; drug-trafficking;107 and the sponsorship of terror groups,
counterinsurgency agencies, death squads. Unsurprisingly, some plain old fascist groups and parties
have been co-opted into the project, from the attempt at reviving the remnants of the Nazi
collaborationist Vlasov Army for use against the USSR to the use of fascist forces to undermine
democratically elected governments, such as in Chile; indeed, one of the reasons fascism flowed into Latin
America was because of the ideology of national security.108
Concomitantly, ‘national security’
has meant a policy of non-intervention where satisfactory ‘security
partnerships’ could be established with certain authoritarian and military regimes: Spain under Franco, the Greek junta,
Chile, Iraq, Iran, Korea, Indonesia, Cambodia, Taiwan, South Vietnam, the Philippines, Turkey, the five Central Asian republics that emerged
with the break-up of the USSR, and China. Either
way, the whole world was to be included in the
new‘secure’ global liberal order.
The result has been the slaughter of untold numbers. John Stock well, who was part of a CIA project in Angola
which led to the deaths of over 20,000 people, puts it like this:
Coming to grips with these U.S./CIA activities in broad numbers and figuring out how many people have been killed in the jungles of Laos or
the hills of Nicaragua is very difficult. But, adding them up as best we can, we
come up with a figure of six million
people killed – and this is a minimum figure. Included are: one million killed in the Korean War, two million killed in
the Vietnam War, 800,000 killed in Indonesia, one million in Cambodia, 20,000 killed in Angola – the operation I was part of – and 22,000
killed in Nicaragua.109
Note that the six million is a minimum figure, that he omits to mention rather a lot of other
interventions, and that he was writing in 1991. This is security as the slaughter bench of history. All of
this has been more than confirmed by events in the twentyfirst century: in a speech on 1 June 2002, which became the basis of the official
National Security Strategy of the United Statesin September of that year, President Bush
reiterated that the US has a
unilateral right to overthrow any government in the world, and launched a new round of
slaughtering to prove it.
While much has been made about the supposedly ‘new’ doctrine of preemption in the early twenty-first century, the policy of preemption
has a long history as part of national security doctrine. The
United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, the
greater is the risk of inaction – and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves . . . To
forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adver saries, the United States will, if necessary, act pre emptively.110
In other words, the security policy of the world’s only superpower in its current ‘war on terror’ is still
underpinned by a notion of liberal order-building based on a certain vision of ‘economic order’. The
National Security Strategy concerns itself with a ‘single sustainable model for national success’ based on ‘political and economic liberty’,
with whole sections devoted to the security benefits of ‘economic liberty’, and the benefits to liberty of the security strategy proposed.111
Kagan’s hegemony is responsible for domestic and global genocide – the impact is endless warfare
Pringle, International Relations @ NYU, April 16, 2012 [Joshua Pringle is a master's student of international
relations at New York University as well as the senior editor of Worldpress.org. access
4/26/12 http://www.worldpress.org/Americas/3904.cfm]
In his article "Not Fade Away: Against the Myth of American Decline," published in The New Republic,
Robert Kagan argues that American decline could put the entire world order at risk of collapse. In Kagan's
words:
"The present world order—characterized by an unprecedented number of democratic nations; a greater global prosperity, even with the
current crisis, than the world has ever known; and a long peace among great powers—reflects American principles and preferences, and was
built and preserved by American power in all its political, economic, and military dimensions. If American power declines, this world order will
decline with it."
Kagan insists that the idea of a liberal, democratic order surviving without the United States propping it up is "a pleasant illusion."
The degree of ethnocentricity that underlies Kagan's article would be hard to understate. In fact, the
words "ethnocentricity," "hubris" or "jingoism" fall short of characterizing a worldview that puts U.S. hegemony
on par with the life-sustaining power of the sun. To the people in countries who have found themselves on the
receiving end of brute U.S. influence—not to mention the generations of people inside U.S. borders who
have seen the myth of U.S. benevolence dispelled by their own struggles for civil rights or a living
wage—the illusion being weaved here is not so much a pleasant one.
Would Kagan have a different view of U.S. dominance if he had lived in Iran in 1953, when a CIA plot overthrew the
country's prime minister and replaced him with a brutal shah? Or if he'd lived in Guatemala in
1954?Lebanon in 1958, Brazil in 1964, Indonesia in 1965? How would he have felt living in one of
the South American countries in the 1970s that saw a U.S.-backed coup remove a popular government
while killing and torturing thousands in the process? The U.S. list of post-World
War II militaryinterventions is a long one, leading up to the recent invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and it
requires a very skewed vision of reality to think we were greeted as liberators each time our boots—
or bombs—hit the ground.
Kagan criticizes Iran and North Korea for defying "American demands that they cease their nuclear
weapons programs." Never mind the implicit assumption here that countries should obey U.S.
demands. Why does he think those countries might have wanted nuclear weapons in the first
place? Take a look at a map of U.S. military bases in all the countries surrounding Iran, and the picture
becomes clear pretty quickly.
Kagan complains that "Arabs and Israelis refuse to make peace, despite American entreaties." Again, put aside the implication
that U.S. "entreaties" should be treated as gospel. Such a statement ignores layers of geopolitical strategy embedded in the
conflict, which do not revolve completely around the United States. It also ignores the role that theUnited States has
played in perpetuating the conflict, by tacitly supporting Israel in its occupation of the West Bank
and blockade of the Gaza Strip.
Also absent from this narrow point of view is mention of the international agreements and institutions
that have managed to come together without U.S. ratification, such as the Kyoto Protocol or the
International Criminal Court. There is a world out there that keeps turning even when the United States isn't pushing it.
Throughout the article, the fiber of Kagan's language is laced with this implicit assumption that the United States should have
its hands in all matters of global importance—if anything, for the global good. When he talks of the Arab Spring spinning out of
U.S. control, he implies that this is a decidedly bad thing, not for reasons of U.S. strategic interest in the region, but for the sake
of liberal democracy. To non-Americans—or to Americans who have managed to avoid getting drunk on the Kool-Aid—this
must be insulting at the least.
The trouble is, Kagan's blindly nationalistic perspective is shared by so many Americans that he is able to
proceed on the basis of these assumptions without ever bothering to explain or justify them. The source of that nationalism
runs deep. It is
a nationalism that has survived the massacre of Native Americans,
the enslavement of blacks, the persecution of immigrants, the repression of
women, the exploitation of the poor working class and the imperialistic
conquest of foreign markets, and has still managed to come out clean on the other
side.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not about to trade in my U.S. citizenship anytime soon. But if we are to discuss the implications of U.S. dominance
entering a state of decline, we would be wise to first put that dominance in its proper context.
The United States is but a single
country, and to suggest that the prosperity of all others relies on it is to egregiously misrepresent the
hegemonic order.
offshore wind links
Wind reduces energy to mere techne – it’s focus on technological improvement and
progresses plays into a faulty historical narrative that ends up excluding the unheard
other from politics
Byrne and Toly 6 [John, Noah, “Energy as a Social Project: Recovering a Discourse” Transforming Power:
Energy, Environment, And Society in Conflict. Eds John Byrne, Noah Toly, and Leigh Glover. Pgs 1-32.
Transaction Publishers]
To date, the
greatest success in ‘real’ green energy development is the spread of wind power. From a
miniscule 1,930 MW in 1990 to more than 47,317 MW in 2005, wind power has come of age. Especially
noteworthy is the rapid growth of wind power in Denmark (35 percent per year since 1997), Spain (30 percent per year since 1997), and
Germany (an astonishing 68 percent per year since 2000), where policies have caused this source to threaten the hegemony of fossil fuels and
nuclear energy. Wind
now generates more than 20 percent of Denmark’s electricity and the country is the
world leader in turbine manufacture. And as the Danes have demonstrated, offshore wind has the
potential to skirt some of the land-use conflicts that have sometimes beset renewable energy
alternatives. Indeed, some claim that offshore wind alone might produce all of Europe’s residential electricity (Brown, 2004). National
energy strategists and environmental movements in and beyond Europe have recognized the achievements of the Danes, Spaniards, and
Germans with initiatives designed to imitate their success. What are the characteristics of this success? One envied feature is the remarkable
decline in the price of wind-generated electricity, from $0.46 per kWh in 1980 to $0.03 to $0.07 per kWh today (Sawin, 2004), very close to
conventionally-fueled utility generating costs in many countries, even before environmental impacts are included. Jubilant
over wind’s
winning market performance, advocates of sustainable energy foresee a new era that is ecologically
much greener and, yet, in which electricity remains (comparatively) cheap. Lester Brown (2003: 159) notes that wind satisfies seemingly
equally weighted criteria of environmental benefit, social gain, and economic efficiency: Wind is...clean. Wind energy does not produce sulfur
dioxide emissions or nitrous oxides to cause acid rain. Nor are there any emissions of health-threatening mercury that come from coal-fired
power plants. No mountains are leveled, no streams are polluted, and there are no deaths from black lung disease. Wind does not disrupt the
earth’s climate...[I]t is inexhaustible...[and] cheap. This would certainly satisfy the canon of economic rationalism. It is also consistent with the
ideology of modern consumerism. Its politics bestow sovereignty on consumers not unlike the formula of Pareto optimality, a situation in which
additional consumption of a good or service is warranted until it cannot improve the circumstance of one person (or group) without decreasing
the welfare of another person (or group).17 How would
one know “better off” from “worse off” in the wind-rich
sustainable energy era? Interestingly, proponents seem to apply a logic that leaves valuation of “better”
and “worse” devoid of explicit content. In a manner reminiscent of modern economic thinking, cheapand-green enthusiasts appear willing to set wind to the task of making “whatever”—whether that is the
manufacture of low-cost teeth whitening toothpaste or lower cost SUVs. In economic accounting, all of these
applications potentially make some in society “better off” (if one accepts that economic growth and higher incomes are signs of improvement).
Possible detrimental side effects or externalities (an economic term for potential harm) could be rehabilitated by
the possession of more purchasing power, which could enable society to invent environmentally friendly
toothpaste and make affordable, energy-efficient SUVs. Sustainable energy in this construct cooperates
in the abstraction of consumption and production. Consumptionof-what, -by-whom, and -for-what-purpose, and, relatedly,
production-of-what, -by-whom, and -for-what-purpose are not issues. The construct altogether ignores the possibility that
“more-is-better” consumptionproduction relations may actually reinforce middle class ideology and
capitalist political economy, as well as contribute to environmental crises such as climate change. In the
celebration of its coming market victory, the cheap-and-green wind version of sustainable energy
development may not readily distinguish the economic/class underpinnings of its victory from those of
the conventional energy regime. Wind enthusiasts also appear to be largely untroubled by trends
toward larger and larger turbines and farms, the necessity of more exotic materials to achieve results,
and the advancing complications of catching the wind. There is nothing new about these sorts of trends
in the modern period. The trajectory of change in a myriad of human activities follows this pattern. Nor
is a critique per se intended in an observation of this trend. Rather, the question we wish to raise is
whether another feature in this pattern will likewise be replicated—namely, a “technological mystique”
(Bazin, 1986) in which
social life finds its inspiration and hope in technical acumen and searches for
fulfillment in the ideals of technique (Mumford, 1934; Ellul, 1964; Marcuse, 1964; Winner, 1977, 1986; Vanderburg, 2005). This
prospect is not a distant one, as a popular magazine recently illustrated. In a special section devoted to thinking “After Oil,” National
Geographic approvingly compared the latest wind technology to a well-known monument, the Statue of Liberty, and noted that the new
machines tower more than 400 feet above this symbol (Parfit, 2005: 15 - 16). It was not hard to extrapolate from the story the message of Big
Wind’s liberatory potential. Popular Science also commended new wind systems as technological marvels, repeating the theme that, with its
elevation in height and complexity lending the technology greater status, wind can now be taken seriously by scientists and engineers
(Tompkins, 2005). A recent issue of The Economist (2005) included an article on the wonder of electricity generated by an artificial tornado in
which wind is technologically spun to high velocities in a building equipped with a giant turbine to convert the energy into electricity. Indeed,
wind is being contemplated as a rival able to serve society by the sheer technical prowess that has often been a defining characteristic of
modern energy systems. Obviously,
wind energy has a long way to go before it can claim to have dethroned
conventional energy’s “technological cathedrals” (Weinberg, 1985). But its mission seems largely to supplant
other spectacular methods of generating electricity with its own. The politics supporting its rapid rise
express no qualms about endorsing the inevitability of its victories on technical grounds. In fact, Big Wind
appears to seek monumental status in the psyche of ecologically modern society. A recent alliance of the American Wind
Energy Association and the U.S. electric utility industry to champion national (subsidized) investment in
higher voltage transmission lines (to deliver green-and-cheap electricity), illustrates the desire of Big
Wind to plug into Giant Power’s hardware and, correspondingly, its ideology (see American Wind Energy
Association, 2005, supporting “Transmission Infrastructure Modernization”). The transformative features of such a politics
are unclear. Indeed, wind power—if it can continue to be harvested by everlarger machines—may
penetrate the conventional energy order so successfully that it will diffuse, without perceptible
disruption, to the regime. The air will be cleaner but the source of this achievement will be duly noted:
science will have triumphed still again in wresting from stingy nature the resources that a wealthy life
has grown to expect. Social transformation to achieve sustainability may actually be unnecessary by this
political view of things, as middle-class existence is assured via clean, low-cost and easy-to-plug-in wind
power.
Market solutions make wind a neoliberal messiah—assumes a “natural” consumerism
that can’t be sustained
Glover et al 2006 – *Policy Fellow at the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy, University of
Delaware, **Directs the Urban Studies and Wheaton in Chicago programs, selected to the Chicago
Council on Global Affairs Emerging Leaders Program for 2011-2013, ***2007 Nobel Peace Prize winner,
Distinguished Professor of Energy & Climate Policy at the University of Delaware, Head of the Center for
Energy and Environmental Policy (Leigh Glover, Noah Toly, John Byrne, “Energy as a Social Project:
Recovering a Discourse”, in “Transforming Power: Energy, Environment, and Society in Conflict”, p. 1-32,
http://www.ceep.udel.edu/energy/publications/2006_es_energy_as_a_social_project.pdf, WEA)
The search for harmonized market-style policies to strengthen the energy¶ status quo in the
face of its mounting challenges reflects the growing political power of energy neoliberalism in an era of economic globalization¶ (Dubash,
2002; Dubash and Williams, 2006). The two processes build a com-¶ plimentary, if circular, politics in support of conventional energy: the logic is¶ that global economic
development requires energy use, which can only be¶ properly planned if international capitalist
institutions can be assured that¶ the lubricant of globalization, namely, the unfettered power of markets, is¶ established by
enforceable policy (Byrne et al., 2004). Correspondingly, resulting carbon emissions can only eventually be abated if economic globalization is protected so that international capitalist institutions find it
profitable¶ to begin to lower carbon emissions and/or sequester them.¶ 15¶ Consumers and¶ producers, rather than citizens, are judged to be the
proper signatories to the¶ social contract because these participants, without the stain of politics, can¶ find rational
answers to our problems.¶ In sum, conventionalists counsel against preconceiving the social and¶ environmental
requirements for an energy transition, preferring a continuation of the existing energy regime that promises to deliver a
“reasonable,”¶ “practical” future consistent with its past. Scheer (2002: 137) describes the¶ erroneous assumption in such reasoning: “The need for fossil energy is a¶ practical constraint that society
must respect, for better or worse; whereas¶ proposals for a swift and immediate reorientation...are denounced as irresponsible.” An orderly transition is thus forecast from the current energy ¶ status quo of fossil fuel and nuclear
energy dominance to a new energy status¶ quo with possibly less carbon, but surely with giant-sized fossil and nuclear¶ energy systems in wide use.¶ The Sustainable Energy Quest¶ The problems of the conventional energy
order have led some to regard¶ reinforcement of the status quo as folly and to instead champion sustainable ¶ energy strategies based upon non-conventional sources and a more intelligent ideology of managed relations
between energy, environment, and society consonant with environmental integrity. This regime challenger seeks to ¶ evolve in the social context that produced the conventional energy regime,¶ yet proposes to fundamentally
change its relationship to the environment (at¶ least, this is the hope). Technologies such as wind and photovoltaic electricity are purported to offer building blocks for a transition to a future in which¶ ills plaguing modernity and
unsolved by the conventional energy regime¶ can be overcome (Lovins, 1979; Hawken et al., 2000; Scheer, 2002; Rifkin,¶ 2003; World Bank, 2004b).¶ While technical developments always include social, material, ecological,
technologies,
even environmentally¶ benign ones, will be appropriated by social forces that predate them
and,¶ thereby, can be thwarted in the fulfillment of social promises attached to the¶ strategy.
Indeed, if unaccompanied by reflection upon the social conditions¶ in which the current energy regime thrives, the transition to a
renewable¶ energy regime may usher in very few social benefits and little, if any, political¶ and economic transformation. This is
the concern that guides our analysis¶ (below) of the sustainable energy movement.¶ At least since the 1970s when Amory Lovins (1979) famously posed the¶ choice between
intellectual, and moral infrastructures (Winner, 1977: 54 - 58; Toly, 2005),¶ and may, therefore, be key to promoting fundamentally different development pathways, it is also possible that
“hard” and “soft” energy paths, sustainable energy strategies¶ have been offered to challenge the prevailing regime. Sometimes the promise ¶ was of no more than “alternative” and “least cost” energy (Energy Policy ¶ Project of
the Ford Foundation, 1974a, 1974b; O’Toole, 1978; Sant, 1979),¶ but adjectives such as “appropriate,” “natural,” “renewable,” “equitable,” ¶ and even “democratic” have also been envisioned (Institute for Local SelfReliance,
2005; Scheer, 2002: 34).¶ 16¶ The need to depart from the past, especially in light of the oil crises of the 1970s and the energy-rooted threat of¶ climate change that has beset policy debate since the late 1980s, united¶ disparate
efforts to recast and reconceive our energy future.¶ Partly, early criticisms of the mainstream were reflective of a broader social ¶ agenda that drew upon, among other things, the anti-war and anti-corporate¶ politics of the
1960s. It was easy, for example, to connect the modern energy¶ regime to military conflicts of the period and to superpower politics; and it¶ was even easier to ally the mainstream’s promotion of nuclear power to the¶
objectives of the Nuclear Club. With evidence of profiteering by the oil ¶ majors in the wake of the 1973-1974 OPEC embargo, connecting the energy¶ regime with the expanding power of multinational capital was, likewise, not¶
difficult. Early sustainable energy strategies opposed these alliances, offering promises of significant political, as well as technological, change.¶ However, in the thirty years that the sustainable energy movement has¶ aspired to
change the conventional regime, its social commitments and politics have become muddled. A telling sign of this circumstance is the shifted¶ focus from energy politics to economics. To illustrate, in the celebrated work¶ of one of
the movement’s early architects, subtitles to volumes included¶ “breaking the nuclear link” (Amory Lovins’ Energy/War, 1981) and “toward¶ a durable peace” (Lovins’ Soft Energy Paths, 1979). These publications offered poignant
Today, however, the bestsellers of the movement chart a course toward¶
“natural capitalism” (Hawken et al., 2000), a strategy that anticipates synergies between soft path technologies
and market governance of energy-environment-society relations. Indeed, a major sustainable energy think tank has¶ reached the
challenges to the modern order and energy’s role in maintaining that order. ¶
conclusion that “small is profitable” (Lovins et al., 2002) in¶ energy matters and argues that the soft path is consistent with “economic¶ rationalism.” Understandably, a movement that sought basic change for a¶ third of a century
Without adaptation, the conventional energy
regime could have ignored soft path policy interventions¶ like demand-side management, integrated resource
planning, public benefits¶ charges, and renewable energy portfolio standards (see Lovins and Gadgil,¶ 1991; Sawin, 2004), all of
which have caused an undeniable degree of decentralization in energy-society relations. In this vein, it is clear that sustainability¶ proponents
must find ways to speak the language and communicate in the¶ logic of economic rationalism if they are to avoid being dismissed. We do not¶ fault the sustainable energy camp for being strategic. Rather, the
concern is¶ whether victories in the everyday of incremental politics have been balanced¶ by attention to the
broader agenda of systemic change and the ideas needed¶ to define new directions.¶ A measure of the sustainable energy initiative’s strategic
has found the need to adapt its arguments and strategies to¶ the realities of political and economic power.
success is the¶ growing acceptance of its vision by past adversaries. Thus, Small is Profitable was named ‘Book of the Year’ in 2002 by The Economist, an award¶ unlikely to have been bestowed upon any of Lovins’ earlier works.
As acceptance has been won, it is clear that sustainable energy advocates remain¶ suspicious of the oil majors, coal interests, and the Nuclear Club. But an¶ earlier grounding of these suspicions in anti-war and anti-corporate
Thus, it has been
suggested that society can turn “more profit¶ with less carbon,” by “harnessing corporate power
to heal the planet” (Lovins,¶ 2005; L. H. Lovins and A. B. Lovins, 2000). Similarly, Hermann Scheer (2002:¶ 323) avers: “The fundamental problem with
today’s global economy is not¶ globalization per se, but that this globalization is not based on the sun—the¶ only global force that is equally
available to all and whose bounty is so great¶ that it need never be fully tapped.” However, it is not obvious that market¶ economics and
globalization can be counted upon to deliver the soft path¶ (see e.g. Nakajima and Vandenberg, 2005). More problematic, as discussed¶ below,
the emerging soft path may fall well short of a socially or ecologically¶ transforming event if strategic victories and rhetorics that celebrate them¶
overshadow systemic critiques of energy-society relations and the corresponding need to align
the sustainable energy initiative with social movements to¶ address a comprehensive agenda of change.¶ Catching the Wind¶ To date, the greatest success in ‘real’ green energy development is the¶ spread of
politics¶ appears to have been superseded by one that believes the global economy¶ can serve a sustainability interest if the ‘raison de market’ wins the energy¶ policy debate.
wind power. From a miniscule 1,930 MW in 1990 to more than¶ 47,317 MW in 2005, wind power has come of age. Especially noteworthy is¶ the rapid growth of wind power in Denmark (35 percent per year since 1997),¶ Spain
(30 percent per year since 1997), and Germany (an astonishing 68¶ percent per year since 2000), where policies have caused this source to threaten¶ the hegemony of fossil fuels and nuclear energy. Wind now generates more¶
than 20 percent of Denmark’s electricity and the country is the world leader in ¶ turbine manufacture. And as the Danes have demonstrated, offshore wind has¶ the potential to skirt some of the land-use conflicts that have
sometimes beset¶ renewable energy alternatives. Indeed, some claim that offshore wind alone ¶ might produce all of Europe’s residential electricity (Brown, 2004). National ¶ energy strategists and environmental movements in
and beyond Europe have¶ recognized the achievements of the Danes, Spaniards, and Germans with initiatives designed to imitate their success. ¶ What are the characteristics of this success?
One envied
feature is the¶ remarkable decline in the price of wind-generated electricity, from $0.46 per¶ kWh in 1980 to $0.03 to $0.07 per kWh today (Sawin, 2004), very close to¶
conventionally-fueled utility generating costs in many countries, even before environmental impacts are included. Jubilant over wind’s winning market performance,
advocates of sustainable energy foresee a new era that is¶ ecologically much greener and, yet, in which electricity
remains (comparatively) cheap. Lester Brown (2003: 159) notes that wind satisfies seemingly¶ equally weighted criteria of environmental benefit, social gain, and economic efficiency:¶ Wind is...clean. Wind
energy does not produce sulfur dioxide emissions or nitrous¶ oxides to cause acid rain. Nor are there any emissions of health-threatening mercury¶ that come from coal-fired power plants. No mountains are leveled, no streams
are¶ polluted, and there are no deaths from black lung disease. Wind does not disrupt the ¶ earth’s climate...[I]t is inexhaustible...[and] cheap.¶
This would certainly satisfy the canon of economic rationalism.¶ It is also
consistent with the ideology of modern consumerism. Its politics¶ bestow sovereignty on
consumers not unlike the formula of Pareto optimality,¶ a situation in which additional consumption of a good or service is warranted¶ until it cannot improve the circumstance of one person (or group) without¶
decreasing the welfare of another person (or group).¶ 17¶ How would one know¶ “better off” from “worse off” in the wind-rich
sustainable energy era? Interestingly, proponents seem to apply a logic that leaves valuation of “better” and¶ “worse” devoid of
explicit content. In a manner reminiscent of modern economic thinking, cheap-and-green enthusiasts appear willing to set wind to¶ the task
of making “whatever”—whether that is the manufacture of low-cost¶ teeth whitening toothpaste or lower cost SUVs. In economic accounting, all¶ of these applications potentially make some in
society “better off” (if one¶ accepts that economic growth and higher incomes are signs of improvement). ¶ Possible detrimental side effects or externalities (an economic term for potential harm) could be rehabilitated by the
possession of more purchasing power,¶ which could enable society to invent environmentally friendly toothpaste¶ and make affordable, energy-efficient SUVs. Sustainable energy in this construct cooperates in the abstraction of
The¶ construct altogether
ignores the possibility that “more-is-better” consumption-production relations may actually reinforce middle class
ideology and¶ capitalist political economy, as well as contribute to environmental crises¶ such as climate change. In the celebration of its coming market
consumption and production. Consumption-of-what, -by-whom, and -for-what-purpose, and, relatedly,¶ production-of-what, -by-whom, and -for-what-purpose are not issues.
victory, the¶ cheap-and-green wind version of sustainable energy development may not¶ readily distinguish the economic/class underpinnings of its victory from those ¶ of the conventional energy regime.¶ Wind enthusiasts also
appear to be largely untroubled by trends toward¶ larger and larger turbines and farms, the necessity of more exotic materials to ¶ achieve results, and the advancing complications of catching the wind. There ¶ is nothing new
about these sorts of trends in the modern period. The trajectory of change in a myriad of human activities follows this pattern. Nor is a ¶ critique per se intended in an observation of this trend. Rather, the question¶ we wish to
raise is whether another feature in this pattern will likewise be¶ replicated—namely, a “technological mystique” (Bazin, 1986) in which social life finds its inspiration and hope in technical acumen and searches for¶ fulfillment in
the ideals of technique (Mumford, 1934; Ellul, 1964; Marcuse,¶ 1964; Winner, 1977, 1986; Vanderburg, 2005).¶ This prospect is not a distant one, as a popular magazine recently illustrated. In a special section devoted to thinking
“After Oil,” National Geographic approvingly compared the latest wind technology to a well-known¶ monument, the Statue of Liberty, and noted that the new machines tower¶ more than 400 feet above this symbol (Parfit, 2005:
15 - 16). It was not hard to¶ extrapolate from the story the message of Big Wind’s liberatory potential. ¶ Popular Science also commended new wind systems as technological marvels, repeating the theme that, with its elevation in
height and complexity¶ lending the technology greater status, wind can now be taken seriously by¶ scientists and engineers (Tompkins, 2005). A recent issue of The Economist¶ (2005) included an article on the wonder of
electricity generated by an artificial tornado in which wind is technologically spun to high velocities in a ¶ building equipped with a giant turbine to convert the energy into electricity.¶ Indeed, wind is being contemplated as a rival
wind energy has a long way to go before it
can claim to have¶ dethroned conventional energy’s “technological cathedrals” (Weinberg,¶ 1985). But its mission seems largely
to supplant other spectacular methods of¶ generating electricity with its own. The politics supporting its rapid rise¶ express no qualms about endorsing the inevitability of its victories on tech-¶ nical grounds. In fact, Big
Wind appears to seek monumental status in the¶ psyche of ecologically modern society. A recent alliance
able to serve society by the¶ sheer technical prowess that has often been a defining characteristic of modern energy systems. ¶ Obviously,
of the American¶ Wind Energy Association and the U.S. electric utility industry to champion¶ national (subsidized) investment in higher voltage transmission lines (to¶ deliver green-and-cheap electricity), illustrates the desire of
Big Wind to¶ plug into Giant Power’s hardware and, correspondingly, its ideology (see¶ American Wind Energy Association, 2005, supporting “Transmission Infrastructure Modernization”).
The
transformative features of such a politics are¶ unclear. Indeed, wind power—if it can continue to be harvested by everlarger machines—may
penetrate the conventional energy order so successfully that it will diffuse, without perceptible disruption, to the regime. The air¶ will be cleaner but the source of this achievement will be duly noted: science¶ will
have triumphed still again in wresting from stingy nature the resources¶ that a wealthy life has
grown to expect. Social transformation to achieve¶ sustainability may actually be unnecessary by this political view of things,
as¶ middle-class existence is assured via clean, low-cost and easy-to-plug-in wind¶ power.
hegemony links
Hegemony is discursively constructed and relies on antagonisms between a Self and
Other that results in annihilation
Herschinger 12 – lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of the Armed Forces
Munich, Germany
(Eva, “‘Hell Is the Other’: Conceptualising Hegemony and Identity through Discourse Theory”, Millennium - Journal of International Studies
September 2012 vol. 41 no. 1 65-90, dml)
Many IR-poststructuralists share with discourse theorists crucial commitments – most importantly, a specific understanding of language,
discourse and the role of contingency. To start with, language
does not merely reflect reality but constructs
reality: by speaking, something is done, for instance, in betting, giving a promise or naming a ship. 23 Thus, a
material ‘reality’ of course exists; however, there is no objective or ‘true’ meaning beyond
linguistic representations . 24 Discourse is conceived in analogy, as it is constitutive for the construction of knowledge and the
constitution of objects. While there are different notions of discourse, the Essex School conceptualises discourse as a ‘structured totality’, 25 a
system of meaningful practices, which relates differences to establish their meaning. In other words, the
meanings and the
identities of objects and subjects are formed through a system of practices embodied by
discourse. These practices are routinised forms of human and societal reproduction, which are material and
articulatory at the same time, since ‘human beings constantly engage in the process of linking together
different elements of their social lives in these continuous and projective sequences of human
action’. 26
This constant process of linking hints at the role of contingency in the Essex School. Although being defined as a totality, discourse is a
structure penetrated by contingency and temporality, marked by ruptures and breaches because the
relation between differences can constantly change and meaning is organised differently.
Attempts to fix meaning around closed structures are in vain : ‘neither absolute fixity nor absolute non-fixity is
possible’. 27 However, to allow for identity and social formation, the Essex School argues that meaning needs to
be partially fixed; that is, partial fixations bind the very flow of differences temporally. Such fixations are achieved as any discourse
situates itself as ‘an attempt to dominate the field of discursivity’ 28 and subjects search for a constitutive decision articulating social meaning
in one way rather than another. With regard to international counter-terrorist policies and drug prohibition measures, such
conceptualisations of language, discourse and contingency imply, on the one hand, that these policies are based on
specific, contingent linguistic representations of the security problem they want to address and
on specific, partially fixed constructions of Self and Other. On the other hand, these linguistic
representations fuel the actions of the respective countermeasures by making them intelligible
and legitimate. This is what I mean by conceptualising practices to be articulatory and material at the same time.
In the Essex School, hegemony is conceptualised against this background inasmuch as it builds on Gramsci’s claim
that the articulation of collective wills takes place in the midst of political struggles within state, economy and civil society. For Gramsci,
hegemony is the genuine political moment marked by an ideological struggle which tries to unify economic, political and intellectual objectives.
29 Hegemony is no longer confined to the attempt to form a political alliance but aims
at the total fusion of different
objectives, involving the creation of a collective will. The latter is forged via an ideological struggle which, according to Mouffe, is ‘a
process of disarticulation-rearticulation of given ideological elements in a struggle between two hegemonic principles to appropriate these
elements’. 30
As such, hegemony
is a discursive phenomenon produced through specific relations of forces.
Typically, these relations articulated in hegemonic practices organise the discursive space by
drawing boundaries and creating identities. In the Essex School context, such shaping of the discursive terrain is
encompassed by the logic of equivalence. While discursive elements are per se different, the logic of equivalence produces ‘equivalential
differences’. To explain: a,b,c are equivalent with regard to something identical underlying them all; thus, a,b,c are equivalent (But not
identical!) with respect to z. This ‘something identical’ is termed the ‘general equivalent’. 31 By contrast, the
logic of difference
encompasses the opposite movement as it extenuates the equivalential ties between elements, that is, it disperses
hegemonic
formations and disintegrates current identities. The logic relates discursive elements while preserving their difference –
indeed, difference makes them conceivable as elements: a is different from b,b from c and so on. Still, both logics ‘cannot do with or without
each other’, as a certain degree of difference is conditional to establish equivalential chains. One is diluted by what the other is trying to fix, but
none of the logics dominates a discourse completely as only partial fixations are possible. 32
Yet, to pursue my argument further, it
is necessary to establish a link between hegemony and the article’s
relational concept of identity, which states that in the process of identity construction, a Self and
corresponding Other(s) are created. While the terminology of a ‘Self’ is rarely employed in the Essex School context, (which
rather speaks of the ‘subject’), ties with the relational conceptualisation of identity in IR-poststructuralism are obvious when Laclau claims that
‘[t]here is no way that a particular group living in a wider community can live a monadic existence – on the contrary, part
of the
definition of its own identity is the construction of a complex and elaborated system of
relations with other groups’. 33 This clearly resonates with the IR-poststructuralist thought of difference being a requirement
built into the logic of identity. 34 However, IR-poststructuralism has expended some energy trying to outline that speaking of Self and
antagonistic Other(s) captures only half the story since the antagonistic Other is ‘often situated
within a more complicated set of identities’. 35 Identity construction produces varying degrees of otherness and does not
necessarily depend upon a juxtaposition to a radically threatening Other. 36 Still, the treatment of antagonistic and nonantagonistic Others involves some ‘combination of hierarchy , eradication , assimilation or
expulsion’ – and in the moment of a blocked identity ‘the self might be driven by the desire to move from a
relationship of mutuality and interdependence to one of autonomy and dominance’ . 37 These
dynamics show that in IR-poststructuralism, identities are fragmented and can only be partially fixed: identity ‘does not signal that stable core
of the self, unfolding from the beginning to end through all the vicissitudes of history without change’. 38 On the contrary, the
discursive
nature of identity always allows for alternative constructions against which other identity
notions are protected and defended: identities are subject to constant (re)writing in the sense of inscribing a particular
meaning so as to render more permanent that which is originally contingent. 39
By taking into account these congruent conceptualisations of identity being based on difference in the Essex School and IR-poststructuralism, I
argue that international hegemonies
are about creating a collective ‘Self’ juxtaposed to its antagonistic
Other, that is, that which the Self deems culpable of blocking its desired identity . 40 Central to this claim are
the operations of the logic of equivalence: modelling the discursive topography by outlining what a number of elements have in common and
drawing frontiers goes hand in hand with separating a discursive space into at least two diametrically opposed entities. In hegemonic relations,
the identities constructed are distinct from identities emerging in other contexts (for instance, between cooperation partners). 41 Identity
construction in the context of hegemonies is a process soaked in power, since the entities created
by the logic of equivalence are separated by an antagonistic frontier and are constructed as antagonistic
camps. Thus, the logic makes ‘reference to an “us– them” axis: two or more elements can be substituted for each
other with reference to a common negation or threat’. 42 Indeed, the joint project that the logic of equivalence links elements into
consists of countering a common enemy in order to achieve the vision of a world which is
blocked by the presence of the Other . According to the article’s conceptualisation of hegemony and identity, this is when
a Self and an Other are created – by outlining that elements are not equivalent in terms of sharing a positive property but in
terms of having a common enemy. And as this Self considers its identity as blocked by the Other, the latter
appears to be responsible for the failure of the Self to achieve its ‘full’ identity. The point is not that the
Self is ‘nothing’ because it cannot be a full presence of itself. Rather, the political actions of the Self will be shaped by
the idea that the annihilation of the enemy will permit the Self to become the fully constituted
identity it seeks to be. 43 A typical assertion in this respect would be: ‘if we only eliminated terrorism,
the world would be a peaceful and safe place’.
Hegemony is a paranoid fantasy---the most secure nation on earth sees threats to
empire everywhere, which legitimizes constant violence---you have an obligation to
place the structural violence that hegemony invisibilizes at the core of your decision
calculus
McClintock 9—chaired prof of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at UW–Madison. MPhil from
Cambridge; PhD from Columbia (Anne, Paranoid Empire: Specters from Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib,
Small Axe Mar2009, Issue 28, p50-74)
By now it is fair to say that the United States has come to be
dominated by two grand and dangerous hallucinations: the promise of
benign US globalization and the permanent threat of the “war on terror.” I have come to feel that we cannot understand the
extravagance of the violence
to which the US government has committed itself after 9/11—two countries invaded,
thousands of innocent
people imprisoned, killed, and tortured —unless we grasp a defining feature of our moment , that is, a deep and
disturbing doubleness with respect to power . Taking shape, as it now does, around fantasies of global omnipotence
(Operation Infinite Justice, the War to End All Evil) coinciding with
nightmares of impending attack, the U nited S tates has entered the
domain of paranoia : dream world and catastrophe.
For it is only in paranoia that one finds simultaneously and in such condensed form both
deliriums of absolute power and forebodings of perpetual threat.
Hence the spectral and nightmarish quality of the “war on terror,” a
limitless war against a limitless threat, a war vaunted by the US administration to encompass all
of space and persisting without end.
William Gibson calls elsewhere “
But the war on terror is not a real war, for “terror” is not an identifiable enemy nor a strategic, real-world target. The war on terror is what
a consensual hallucination,” 4 and the US government can fling its military might against ghostly apparitions and hallucinate a victory over all evil
only at the cost of catastrophic self-delusion and the infliction of great calamities elsewhere.
I have come to feel that we urgently need to make visible
imperial violence
(the better politically to challenge)
that now animate the war on terror. We need, as urgently, to illuminate the
those established but
concealed circuits of
continuities that connect those circuits
violence abroad with the vast, internal shadowlands of prisons and supermaxes—the modern “slave-ships on the middle passage to nowhere”—that have come to characterize the United States as a
of imperial
super-
carceral state. 5
Can we, the uneasy heirs of empire, now speak only of national things? If a long-established but primarily covert US imperialism has, since 9/11, manifested itself more aggressively as an overt empire, does the terrain and
object of intellectual inquiry, as well as the claims of
political responsibility,
not also extend beyond that useful fiction of the “exceptional nation” to embrace
the
shadowlands of empire? If so, how can we theorize the phantasmagoric, imperial violence that has come so dreadfully to constitute our kinship with the ordinary, but which also at the same
moment renders extraordinary the ordinary bodies of ordinary people, an imperial violence which in collusion with a complicit corporate media would render itself invisible,
emergency into fitful shadow and fleshly bodies into specters?
that happens elsewhere, an offshore
For
casting states of
imperialism is not something
fact to be deplored but as easily ignored. Rather, the force of empire comes to reconfigure,
from within , the nature and
violence of the nation-state itself, giving rise to perplexing questions: Who under an empire are “we,” the people? And who are the ghosted, ordinary people beyond the nation-state who, in turn, constitute “us”?
We now inhabit
a crisis of violence and the visible . How do we insist on seeing the violence that the
imperial state attempts to render invisible,
those under torture) obliged to inhabit the
while also seeing the ordinary people afflicted by that violence? For to allow the spectral, disfigured people (especially
haunted no-places and penumbra of empire to be made visible as ordinary people is to forfeit the
long-held
US
claim of moral and cultural exceptionalism, the traditional self-identity of the U nited S tates as the
uniquely superior, universal standard-bearer of moral authority, a tenacious, national mythology
of originary innocence now in tatters . The deeper question, however, is not only how to see but also how to theorize and oppose the violence without becoming beguiled by
the seductions of spectacle alone. 6
Perhaps in the labyrinths of torture
we must also find a way to speak with ghosts, for specters disturb the authority of
vision and the hauntings of popular memory disrupt the great forgettings of official history.
Paranoia
Even the paranoid have enemies.
—Donald Rumsfeld
Why paranoia? Can we fully understand the
cast—without understanding the
proliferating circuits of imperial violence —the very eclipsing of which gives to our moment its uncanny, phantasmagoric
pervasive presence of the paranoia
that has come, quite
violently , to manifest itself across the political and
cultural spectrum as a defining feature of our time? By paranoia, I mean not simply Hofstadter’s famous identification of the US state’s tendency toward conspiracy theories. 7 Rather, I conceive of
paranoia as an inherent contradiction with respect to power: a double-sided phantasm that oscillates precariously between deliriums of grandeur and nightmares of perpetual threat, a deep and dangerous doubleness with
respect to power that is held in unstable tension, but which, if suddenly destabilized (as after 9/11), can produce
pyrotechnic displays of violence . The pertinence of understanding
paranoia, I argue, lies in its peculiarly intimate and peculiarly dangerous relation to violence. 8
Let me be clear: I do not see paranoia as a primary, structural cause of US imperialism nor as its structuring identity. Nor do I see the US war on terror as animated by some collective, psychic agency, submerged mind, or
Hegelian “cunning of reason,” nor by what Susan Faludi calls a national “terror dream.” 9 Nor am I interested in evoking paranoia as a kind of psychological diagnosis of the imperial nation-state. Nations do not have
“psyches” or an “unconscious”; only people do. Rather, a social entity such as an organization, state, or empire can be spoken of as “paranoid” if the dominant powers governing that entity cohere as a collective
community around contradictory cultural narratives, self-mythologies, practices, and identities that oscillate between delusions of inherent superiority and omnipotence, and phantasms of threat and engulfment. The term
paranoia is analytically useful here, then, not as a description of a collective national psyche, nor as a description of a universal pathology, but rather as an analytically strategic concept, a way of seeing and being attentive
to contradictions within power, a way of making visible (the better politically to oppose) the contradictory flashpoints of violence that the state tries to conceal.
Paranoia is in this sense what I call a hinge phenomenon, articulated between the ordinary person and society, between psychodynamics and socio-political history. Paranoia is in that sense dialectical rather than binary, for
its violence erupts from the force of its multiple, cascading contradictions: the intimate memories of wounds, defeats, and humiliations condensing with cultural fantasies of aggrandizement and revenge, in such a way as to
be productive at times of unspeakable violence. For how else can we understand such debauches of cruelty?
A critical question still remains: does not something terrible have to happen to ordinary people (military police, soldiers, interrogators) to instill in them, as ordinary people, in the most intimate, fleshly ways, a paranoid
cast that enables them to act compliantly with, and in obedience to, the paranoid visions of a paranoid state? Perhaps we need to take a long, hard look at the simultaneously humiliating and aggrandizing rituals of
militarized institutions, whereby individuals are first broken down, then reintegrated (incorporated) into the larger corps as a unified, obedient fighting body
, the methods by which
schools , the military, training camps— not to mention the paranoid image-worlds of the corporate media—instill
paranoia in ordinary people and fatally conjure up collective but unstable fantasies of
omnipotence. 10 In what follows, I want to trace the flashpoints of imperial paranoia into the labyrinths of torture in order to illuminate three crises that animate our moment: the crisis of violence and the
visible, the crisis of imperial legitimacy, and what I call “the enemy deficit.” I explore these flashpoints of imperial paranoia as they emerge in the torture at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. I argue that Guantánamo is the
territorializing of paranoia and that torture itself is paranoia incarnate, in order to make visible, in keeping with Hazel Carby’s brilliant work, those contradictory sites where imperial racism, sexuality, and gender
catastrophically collide. 11
The Enemy Deficit: Making the “Barbarians” Visible Because night is here but the barbarians have not come. Some people arrived from the frontiers, And they said that there are no longer any barbarians. And now what shall
become of us without any barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.
—C. P. Cavafy, “Waiting for the Barbarians”
The barbarians have declared war.
—President George W. Bush
C. P. Cavafy wrote “Waiting for the Barbarians” in 1927, but the poem haunts the aftermath of 9/11 with the force of an uncanny and prescient déjà vu. To what dilemma are the “barbarians” a kind of solution? Every
modern empire faces an abiding
crisis of legitimacy
in that it flings its power over territories and peoples who have not consented to that power. Cavafy’s insight is that
an imperial
state claims legitimacy only by evoking the threat of the barbarians. It is only the threat of the
barbarians that constitutes the silhouette of the empire’s borders in the first place.
hallucination of the barbarians disturbs the empire with
On the other hand, the
perpetual nightmares of impending attack. The enemy is the abject of
empire: the rejected from which we cannot part. And without the barbarians the legitimacy of
empire vanishes like a disappearing phantom. Those people were a kind of solution.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the grand antagonism of the United States and the USSR evaporated like a quickly fading nightmare. The cold war rhetoric of totalitarianism, Finlandization, present
danger, fifth columnist, and infiltration vanished.
Where were the enemies now to justify the continuing escalation of the
military colossus? “And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?” By rights, the thawing of the
cold war should have prompted an immediate downsizing of the military ; any plausible external threat had simply ceased to exist.
Prior to 9/11, General Peter Schoomaker, head of the US Army, bemoaned the enemy deficit: “It’s no use having an army that did nothing but train,” he said. “There’s got to be a certain appetite for what the hell we exist
for.” Dick Cheney likewise complained: “
The threats have become so remote. So remote that they are difficult to
ascertain .” Colin Powell agreed: “Though we can still plausibly identify specific threats—North Korea, Iran, Iraq, something like that—the real threat is the unknown, the uncertain.” Before becoming
president, George W. Bush likewise fretted over the post–cold war dearth of a visible enemy: “We do not know who the enemy is, but we know they are out there.” It is now well established that the invasion of Iraq had
been a long-standing goal of the US administration, but there was no clear rationale with which to sell such an invasion. In 1997 a group of neocons at the Project for the New American Century produced a remarkable
report in which they stated that to make such an invasion palatable would require “a catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” 12
The 9/11 attacks came as a dazzling solution, both to the enemy deficit and the problem of legitimacy, offering the Bush administration what they would claim as a
political casus belli and
the military unimaginable license to expand its reach . General Peter Schoomaker would publicly admit that the attacks were an immense boon: “There is
a huge silver lining in this cloud. . . . War is a tremendous focus. . . . Now we have this focusing opportunity, and we have the fact that (terrorists) have actually attacked our homeland, which gives it some oomph.” In his
book Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke recalls thinking during the attack, “Now we can perhaps attack Osama Bin Laden.” After the invasion of Afghanistan, Secretary of State Colin Powell noted, “America will have a
continuing interest and presence in Central Asia of a kind we could not have dreamed of before.” Charles Krauthammer, for one, called for a declaration of total war. “We no longer have to search for a name for the postCold War era,” he declared. “It will henceforth be known as the age of terrorism.” 13
warming links
Focus on catastrophic warming overlooks the role of technologic organization in
driving environmental devastation
Eileen CRIST, Associate Professor of Science and Technology in Society at Virginia Tech University, 2007
[“Beyond the Climate Crisis: A Critique of Climate Change Discourse,” Telos, Volume 141, Winter,
Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Telos Press, p. 33-36]
While the dangers of climate change are real, I argue that there are even greater dangers in representing it
as the most urgent problem we face. Framing climate change in such a manner deserves to be challenged for
two reasons: it encourages the restriction of proposed solutions to the technical realm, by powerfully insinuating
that the needed approaches are those that directly address the problem; and it detracts attention from the planet's
ecological predicament as a whole, by virtue of claiming the limelight for the one issue that trumps all
others. Identifying climate change as the biggest threat to civilization, and ushering it into center stage as the highest priority problem, has
bolstered the proliferation of technical proposals that address the specific challenge. The race is on for figuring out what
technologies, or portfolio thereof, will solve "the problem." Whether the call is for reviving nuclear power, boosting the
installation of wind turbines, using a variety of renewable energy sources, increasing the efficiency of fossil-fuel use, developing carbonsequestering technologies, or placing mirrors in space to deflect the sun's rays, the
narrow character of such proposals is
evident: confront the problem of greenhouse gas emissions by technologically phasing them out,
superseding them, capturing them, or mitigating their heating effects. In his The Revenge of Gaia, for example,
Lovelock briefly mentions the need to face climate change by "changing our whole style of living."16 [end page 33] But the thrust of this work,
what readers and policy-makers come away with, is his repeated and strident call for investing in nuclear energy as, in his words, "the one
lifeline we can use immediately."17 In the policy realm, the
first step toward the technological fix for global warming is
often identified with implementing the Kyoto protocol. Biologist Tim Flannery agitates for the treaty, comparing the need
for its successful endorsement to that of the Montreal protocol that phased out the ozone-depleting CFCs. "The Montreal protocol," he
submits, "marks a signal moment in human societal development, representing the first ever victory by humanity over a global pollution
the deepening realization of the threat of
climate change, virtually in the wake of stratospheric ozone depletion, also suggests that dealing with global problems
treaty-by-treaty is no solution to the planet's predicament. Just as the risks of unanticipated ozone
depletion have been followed by the dangers of a long underappreciated climate crisis, so it would be
naïve not to anticipate another (perhaps even entirely unforeseeable) catastrophe arising after the (hoped-for) resolution of the
above two. Furthermore, if greenhouse gases were restricted successfully by means of technological shifts and
innovations, the root cause of the ecological crisis as a whole would remain unaddressed. The destructive
patterns of production, trade, extraction, land-use, waste proliferation, and consumption, coupled with
population growth, would go unchallenged, continuing to run down the integrity, beauty, and biological
richness of the Earth. Industrial-consumer civilization has entrenched a form of life that admits virtually no limits to its expansiveness
within, and perceived entitlement to, the entire planet.19 But questioning this civilization is by [end page 34] and large
sidestepped in climate-change discourse, with its single-minded quest for a global-warming techno-fix.20
Instead of confronting the forms of social organization that are causing the climate crisis—among numerous
other catastrophes—climate-change literature often focuses on how global warming is endangering the culprit,
and agonizes over what technological means can save it from impending tipping points.21 The dominant frame
problem."18 He hopes for a similar victory for the global climate-change problem. Yet
of climate change funnels cognitive and pragmatic work toward specifically addressing global warming, while muting a host of equally
monumental issues. Climate change
looms so huge [end page 35] on the environmental and political agenda
today that it has contributed to downplaying other facets of the ecological crisis: mass extinction of
species, the devastation of the oceans by industrial fishing, continued old-growth deforestation, topsoil
losses and desertification, endocrine disruption, incessant development, and so on, are made to appear
secondary and more forgiving by comparison with "dangerous anthropogenic interference" with the climate system. In what follows, I will
focus specifically on how climate-change discourse encourages the continued marginalization of the
biodiversity crisis—a crisis that has been soberly described as a holocaust,22 and which despite decades of scientific and
environmentalist pleas remains a virtual non-topic in society, the mass media, and humanistic and other
academic literatures. Several works on climate change (though by no means all) extensively examine the
consequences of global warming for biodiversity,23 but rarely is it mentioned that biodepletion predates
dangerous greenhouse-gas buildup by decades, centuries, or longer, and will not be stopped by a
technological resolution of global warming. Climate change is poised to exacerbate species and ecosystem losses—indeed, is
doing so already. But while technologically preempting the worst of climate change may temporarily avert some of those losses, such a
resolution of the climate quandary will not put an end to—will barely address—the ongoing destruction
of life on Earth.
Warming IMPACTS and framing as ANTHROPOGENIC used to promote acceptance of
capitalist growth
Smith 8
PhD Johns Hopkins 1982; Dist Prof) Political economy, urban social theory, space, nature-culture, history
and theory of geography (nsmith@gc.cuny.edu) Prof. SmithNeil Smith was trained as a geographer and
his research explores the broad intersection between space, nature, social theory and history. He
teaches in urban anthropology, cultural anthropology and environmental anthropology, and directs the
Center for Place Culture and Politics. His environmental work is largely theoretical, focusing on
questions of the production of nature. His urban interests include long term research on gentrification,
including empirical work in North America and Europe and a series of theoretical papers emphasizing
the importance of patterns of investment and disinvestment in the the real estate market. He also
writes more broadly on New York City, focusing especially on the "revanchist city" which has filled the
vacuum left in the wake of liberal urban theory.
Nature-washing and the Production of Nature Although the environmental movement was in full swing,
it would have been difficult in the early 1980s to anticipate the extent to which some broad acceptance
of the "production of nature" thesis—or whatever language we want to use—would become not just
radical orthodoxy but the stuff of front-page headlines. Global warming and humanly induced climate
change are no longer scarehead slogans of the environmental left but the bread, butter, and martini
lunches of Wall Street boardrooms. Granola green is supplanted by dollar green. Indeed the production
of nature has become in some respects the capitalist orthodoxy; climate change has been converted
from a threat on profits to a new sector of capitalist profitability. Sufficiently so that by 2003 the
Pentagon, in collaboration with the U.S.-based Global Business Network, could warn about the effects of
climatic change on "U.S. security" and advance a multibillion dollar program for climate security. But the
issue is not quite this simple. There seems to be no reasonable scientific basis on which to deny that
global warming is taking place and that intensifying social economies of production, reproduction, and
consumption contribute to that result. Quite the extent of this global social contribution to climatic
change, however, is not at all clear, and may well be incalculable. The problem is that to calculate such a
responsibility requires assuming either a static nature against which global warming can be definitively
measured—a demonstrably unrealistic scientific assumption—or else assuming some trajectory of
"natural" change (but how is that projected future to be assumed?) against which some human
component might be measured. There are of course sophisticated models of cyclic global climate
change based on data that reaches back to the nineteenth century (however geographically selective),
but accuracy in describing the past never guarantees one's predictions for the future. In the end, the
attempt to distinguish social vis-a-vis natural contributions to climate change is not only a fool's debate
but a fool's philosophy: it leaves sacrosanct the chasm between nature and society—nature in one
corner, society in the other—which is precisely the shibboleth of modern western thought that the
"production of nature" thesis sought to corrode. One does not have to be a "global warming denier"—
an interesting descriptor in itself—to be a skeptic concerning the ways that a global public is being
stampeded into accepting wave upon wave of technical, economic, and social change, framed as
necessary for immediate planetary survival . As part of a more comprehensive revival of a bankrupt
geographical determinism, global warming has become a convenient excuse for any number of social
sins. Beyond the obvious implications of melting ice caps, rising sea levels, shifting climate and
vegetation belts, flooded cities, and so forth, global warming can be summoned to exonerate many
social sins: increased summer crime in hot cities, crop failures, new migration patterns, record summer
heat in southeastern Europe, record rain and cold in northwestern Europe, a 35 percent reduction in
species diversity by 2.050, unprecedented increase in feline fertility in Toronto. . . . The apocalyptic tone
of imminent environmental doom suffuses virtually every aspect of daily life, present and future. Much
as corporate "greenwashing" in the 1990s absorbed green politics, recoding environmentalism to the
purpose of capitalist profit, the specter of global warming and of climate change is today deployed on
behalf of a certain " nature-washing." This may seem paradoxical. Nature-washing is the process by
which social transformations of nature are well enough acknowledged, but in which that socially
changed nature becomes a new super determinant of our social fate. It might well be society's fault for
changing nature, but it is the consequent power of that nature that brings on the apocalypse. The causal
power of nature is not compromised but would seem to be augmented by social injections into that
nature. The dichotomy of nature and society is maintained rather than weakened: "nature-washing"
accumulates a mountain of social effects into the causal dustbin of nature. Nature is the still far-off
Van Diemen's Land of social cause and consequence.
at: resource scarcity
Neoliberal resource management amplifies scarcity through symptom-driven
responses—their framework is analytically incapable of explaining their impacts
Ahmeda 2011 – PhD, Executive Director at the Institute for Policy Research and Development, and
Associate Tutor at the Department of International Relations, University of Sussex (Nafeez Mosaddeq,
Global Change, Peace & Security, 23.3, “The international relations of crisis and the crisis of international
relations: from the securitisation of scarcity to the militarisation of society”, WEA)
Yet such well-meaning recommendations often do not lead to sufficiently strong policy action by
governments to rein in energy sector corruption.68 Furthermore, it is painfully clear from the examples of Kyoto,
Copenhagen and Cancun that international cooperative state strategies continue to be ineffective, with
states unable to agree on the scale of the crises concerned, let alone on the policies required to address them. Indeed, while some modest successes were apparent
in the Cancun Accord, its proposed voluntary emissions regime would still likely guarantee – according to even mid-range climate models – a global average
temperature rise of 4°C or more, which would in turn culminate in many of the IPCC's more catastrophic scenarios.69 ¶
This calls into question
the efficacy of longstanding recommendations – such as Klare's – that the international community develop unprecedented
international mechanisms to coordinate the peaceful distribution of natural resources in the era of scarcity and environmental degradation.70 While at
face value such regulatory governance mechanisms would appear essential to avoid violent conflict over
depleting resources, they are posited in a socio-political and theoretical vacuum. Why is it that such potentially
effective international mechanisms continue to be ignored? What are the socio-political obstacles to their implementation? Ultimately,
the problem is that they overlook the structural and systemic causes of resource depletion and
environmental degradation.¶ Although neoliberalism shares neorealism's assumptions about the centrality of the state as a unitary rational
actor in the international system, it differs fundamentally in the notion that gains for one state do not automatically imply losses for another; therefore states are
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 organisation of the international system as an
unquestionable ‘given’, itself not subject to debate or reform.72¶ The focus is on developing the most optimal ways of
able to form cooperative, interdependent relationships conducive to mutual power gains, which do not necessarily generate tensions or conflict.71
maximising exploitation of the biophysical environment. The role of global political economic structures (such as centralised private resource-ownership and
neoliberalism
is axiomatically unable to view the biophysical environment in anything other than a rationalist, instrumentalist
fashion, legitimising the over-exploitation of natural resources without limits, and inadvertently subordinating the
‘global commons’ to the competitive pressures of private sector profit -maximisation and market-driven solutions,
rather than institutional reform.73 Mutual maximisation of power gains translates into the legitimisation of the unlimited exploitation of the
deregulated markets) in both generating global systemic crises and inhibiting effective means for their amelioration is neglected. As such,
biophysical environment without recognition of the human costs of doing so, which are technocratically projected merely as fixable aberrations from an optimal
Consequently, neoliberalism is powerless to interrogate how global political
economic structures consistently undermine the establishment of effective environmental regimes.¶ 2.4 The sociohistorical evacuation of the political ecology of power ¶ Global ecological, economic and energy crises thus expose a core contradiction at
the heart of modernity – that the material progress delivered by scientific reason in the service of
unlimited economic growth is destroying the very social and environmental conditions of modernity's very
existence. This stark contradiction between official government recognition of the potentially devastating security implications of resource scarcity and the
system of cooperative progress.74
continued abject failure of government action to mitigate these security implications represents a fundamental lacuna that has been largely overlooked in IR theory
It reveals an analytical framework that has focused almost exclusively on potential
symptoms of scarcity. But a truly complete picture of the international relations of resource scarcity would include not only a map of projected
and policy analysis.
impacts, but would also seek to grasp their causes by confronting how the present structure of the international system itself has contributed to the acceleration of
the present risk-oriented
preoccupation with symptoms is itself symptomatic of IR's insufficient self-reflection on its own role in
scarcity, while inhibiting effective national and international responses. ¶ It could be suggested that
preoccupation with
gauging the multiplicity of ways in which ecological, energy and economic crises might challenge security in coming decades
provides very little opening in either theory or policy to develop more effective strategies to
this problem. Despite the normative emphasis on ensuring national and international security, the literature's overwhelming
mitigate or prevent these heightened security challenges. On the contrary, for the most part, these approaches tend to highlight the necessity to maximise national
political–military and international regimes' powers so that states might be able to respond more robustly in the event that new threats like resource wars and state
the futility of this trajectory is obvious
failure do emerge. But
– a preoccupation with ‘security’ ends up becoming an unwitting
accomplice in the intensification of insecurity. ¶ The extent of orthodox IR theory's complicity in this predicament is evident in its reduction of inter-state relations to
balance-of-power dynamics, despite a lack of determinate bases by which to define and delineate the dynamics of material power. While orthodox realism focuses
inordinately on a military–political conceptualisation of national power, conventional attempts to extend this conceptualisation to include economic dimensions
(including the role of transnational corporations) – as well as production, finance, ideas and institutions beyond the state – do not solve the problem.75 This
Weberian proliferation of categorisations of the multiple dimensions of power, while useful, lacks a unifying explanatory order of determination capable of
rendering their interconnections intelligible. ¶ As Rosenberg shows in his analysis of the dynamics of distinctive geopolitical orders from Rome to Spain – and
Teschke in his exploration of the changing polities of continental Europe from the eighth to the eighteenth centuries – these orders have always been inseparably
conjoined with their constitutive relations of production as structured in the context of prevailing social–property relations, illustrating the mutually-embedded
nature of ‘economic’ and ‘extra-economic’ power.76 In contrast, orthodox IR axiomatically fragments the ‘economic’ and ‘extra-economic’ (and the latter further
into ‘military’, ‘political’, ‘cultural’, etc.) into separate, autonomous spheres with no grasp of the scope of their interconnection.77 ¶ It also dislocates both the state,
and human existence as such, from their fundamental material conditions of existence, in the form of their relationship to the biophysical environment, as mediated
through relations of production, and the way these are governed and contested through social–property relations.78 By externalising the biophysical environment –
and thus human metabolism with nature – from state praxis, orthodox IR simply lacks the conceptual categories necessary to recognise the extent to which sociopolitical organisational forms are mutually constituted by human embeddedness in the natural world.79 While further fragmenting the international into a
multiplicity of disconnected state units whose behaviour can only be analysed through the limited lenses of anarchy or hierarchy, orthodox IR is incapable of
situating these units in the holistic context of the global political economy, the role of transnational capitalist classes, and the structural pressures thereby exerted
the mediating structure of the global political economy – along with the
beliefs and behaviour of agents within it (through which this structure is constructed) – play a critical role in the
transformation of ecological or resource-related events into concrete politically-defined conditions of ‘scarcity’
that lead to crisis or conflict. A powerful example is provided by Davis in his study of the impact of the El Niño–Southern
Oscillation (ENSO) – the vast oscillation in air mass and Pacific Ocean temperature. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, ENSO created large-scale
droughts in many countries peripheral to the European empires, including those in Asia (India, China, Java, the Philippines
and Korea), and in Brazil, southern Africa, Algeria and Morocco. Davis shows that British ‘free market’ imperial policy converted
these droughts into foreseeable but preventable deadly famines, multiplying death tolls to gross proportions without any
historical precedent.81¶ In 1874–76, northern harvests were more than sufficient to provide reserves for the 1878
autumn crops deficit. But most of the grain from north-western Indian subsistence farming was controlled by a captive
export sector designed to stabilise British grain prices, which from 1876 to 1877 had increased due to poor harvests. This
generated a British demand that absorbed almost the entirety of north-western India's wheat surplus. Meanwhile, profits
from these grain exports were monopolised by wealthy property holders, moneylenders and grain merchants, as opposed to
on human and state behaviour.80¶ Indeed,
poor Indian farmers. India's newly-constructed modern railway system shipped grain from drought areas ‘to central depots for hoarding’, leading to exorbitant price
hikes that were ‘co-ordinated in a thousand towns at once’. Food prices rocketed out of the reach of ‘outcaste labourers, displaced weavers, sharecroppers and
poor peasants’. Consequently, ‘the poor began to starve to death even in well-watered districts “reputed to be immune to food shortages”’. Thus, between 1877
and 1878, grain merchants exported a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat to Europe while between 5.5 and 12 million Indians starved to death. This
catastrophe occurred ‘not outside the modern world system, but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures’.82
impacts
2nc extinction
Interconnected consumptive crises are accelerating—extinction
Nhanenge 7 [Jytte Masters @ U South Africa, “ECOFEMINSM: TOWARDS INTEGRATING THE CONCERNS
OF WOMEN, POOR PEOPLE AND NATURE INTO DEVELOPMENT]
There is today an increasing critique of economic development, whether it takes place in the North or in the South. Although
the world
on average generates
more and more wealth, the riches do not appear to "trickle down" to the poor and improve their
and economic inequality is growing. Despite the existence of development aid for more
than half a century, the Third World seems not to be "catching up" with the First World. Instead, militarism,
dictatorship and human repression is multiplied. Since the mid 1970, the critique of global economic activities
has intensified due to the escalating deterioration of the natural environment. Modernization,
industrialisation and its economic activities have been directly linked to increased scarcity of natural resources and
generation of pollution, which increases global temperatures and degrades soils, lands, water, forests and
air. The latter threat is of great significance, because without a healthy environment human beings and animals will
not be able to survive. Most people believed that modernization of the world would improve material well-being for all. However,
faced with its negative side effects and the real threat of extinction, one must conclude that somewhere
along the way "progress" went astray. Instead of material plenty, economic development generated a violent,
unhealthy and unequal world. It is a world where a small minority live in material luxury, while millions of
people live in misery. These poor people are marginalized by the global economic system. They are forced to
material well-being. Instead, poverty
survive from degraded environments; they live without personal or social security; they live in abject poverty, with hunger, malnutrition and
sickness; and they have no possibility to speak up for themselves and demand a fair share of the world's resources. The majority of these
people are women, children, traditional peoples, tribal peoples, people of colour and materially poor people (called women and Others).
They are, together with nature, dominated by the global system of economic development imposed by the
North. It is this scenario, which is the subject of the dissertation. The overall aim is consequently to discuss the unjustified domination of
women, Others and nature and to show how the domination
of women and Others is interconnected with the
domination of nature. A good place to start a discussion about domination of women, Others and nature is to disclose how they
disproportionately must carry the negative effects from global economic development. The below discussion is therefore meant to give an idea
of the "flip-side" of modernisation. It gives a gloomy picture of what "progress" and its focus on economic growth has meant for women, poor
people and the natural environment. The various complex and inter-connected, negative impacts have been ordered into four crises. The
categorization is inspired by Paul Ekins and his 1992 book "A new world order; grassroots movements for global change". In it, Ekins argues that
humanity is faced with four interlocked crises of unprecedented magnitude. These crises have the
potential to destroy whole ecosystems and to extinct the human race. The first crisis is the spread of
nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, together with the high level of military spending. The second crisis is
the increasing number of people afflicted with hunger and poverty. The third crisis is the environmental
degradation. Pollution, destruction of ecosystems and extinction of species are increasing at such a rate that
the biosphere is under threat. The fourth crisis is repression and denial of fundamental human rights by
governments, which prevents people from developing their potential. It is highly likely that one may add more crises to these four, or
categorize them differently, however, Ekins's division is suitable for the present purpose. (Ekins 1992: 1).
structural violence
Structural violence outweighs—don’t be fooled by neoliberal claims of inevitability
Hintjens 7 [Helen Hintjens is Lecturer in the Centre for Development Studies, University of Wales, “MDF
Understanding Development Better,” http://udb.global-connections.nl/sites/udb.globalconnections.nl/files/file/2923317.051%20-%20Position%20Paper%20Helen%20Hintjens.pdf]
From Johan Galtung, famous Norwegian peace ‘guru’, still alive and heads up TRANSCEND University on-line, has been working since 1960s
on showing that violence is
not OK. His Ghandian approach is designed to convince those who advocate
violent means to restore social justice to the poor, that he as a pacifist does not turn a blind eye to
social injustices and inequality. He extended therefore our understanding of what is violent,
coercion, force, to include the economic and social system’s avoidable injustices, deaths, inequalities.
Negative peace is the absence of justice, even if there is no war. Injustice causes structural violence
to health, bodies, minds, damages people, and must therefore be resisted (non-violently). Positive
peace is different from negative (unjust and hence violent) peace. Positive peace requires actively combating
(struggling peacefully against) social injustices that underpin structural violence. Economic and social,
political justice have to be part of peacebuilding. This is the mantra of most NGOs and even some agencies (we will look
later at NGO Action Aid and DFID as examples). Discrimination has to end, so does the blatant rule of money,
greater equality is vital wherever possible. All of this is the opposite of neo-liberal recipes for
success, which in Holland as in Indonesia, tolerate higher and higher levels of social inequality in the
name of efficiency. Structural violence kills far more people than warfare – for example one estimate in
DRC is that 4 million people have been killed in war since 1998, but NGOs estimate that an additional 6 million people
have died in DRC since then, from disease, displacement and hunger, bringing the total to an
unthinkable 10 million of 90 million est. population. “Since there exists far more wealth in the world
than is necessary to address the main economic causes of structural violence, the real problem is one
of priorities”…p. 307 “Structural violence…is neither natural nor inevitable”, p. 301 (Prontzos).
Overcorrection and hyper-vigilance are key to prevent invisible atrocities
Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois ‘4
(Prof of Anthropology @ Cal-Berkely; Prof of Anthropology @ UPenn)
(Nancy and Philippe, Introduction: Making Sense of Violence, in Violence in War and Peace, pg. 19-22)
This large and at first sight “messy” Part VII is central to this anthology’s thesis. It encompasses everything from the routinized, bureaucratized,
and utterly banal violence of children dying of hunger and maternal despair in Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33) to elderly African
Americans dying of heat stroke in Mayor Daly’s version of US apartheid in Chicago’s South Side (Klinenberg, Chapter 38) to the racialized class
hatred expressed by British Victorians in their olfactory disgust of the “smelly” working classes (Orwell, Chapter 36). In these readings violence
is located in the symbolic and social structures that overdetermine and allow the criminalized drug addictions, interpersonal bloodshed, and
racially patterned incarcerations that characterize the US “inner city” to be normalized (Bourgois, Chapter 37 and Wacquant, Chapter 39).
Violence also takes the form of class, racial, political self-hatred and adolescent self-destruction (Quesada, Chapter 35), as well as of useless (i.e.
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 mentalites of
everyday life shifts our attention to pathologies of class, race, and gender inequalities . More
preventable), rawly embodied physical suffering, and death (Farmer, Chapter 34).
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 leaps 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 protogenocidal
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 into 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 mortality 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 architecture of homes, in gender relations, in communal work, in the
exchange of gifts, and so forth - Bourdieu 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” - crimini di pace imagines a direct relationship between wartime and peacetime violence. Peacetime
crimes suggests the possibility that
war crimes are merely ordinary, everyday crimes of public consent applied systematic- ally 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 governmentengineered genocide in 1938, known as the Cherokee “Trail of Tears.” Peacetime crimes suggests 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 “strangle-holds.” 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 Black man, the undeserving 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 the “normative” socializing experience for 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 hypervigilance 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, depersonal- ization,
pseudospeciation, and reification which normalize atrocious behavior and violence toward
others. A constant self-mobilization for alarm, a state of constant hyperarousal is, perhaps, a
reasonable response to Benjamin’s view of late modern history as a chronic “state of
emergency” (Taussig, Chapter 31). We are trying to recover here the classic anagogic thinking that enabled Erving Goffman, Jules Henry,
C. Wright Mills, and Franco Basaglia among other mid-twentieth-century radically critical thinkers, to perceive the symbolic and structural
relations, i.e., between inmates and patients, between concentration camps, prisons, mental hospitals, nursing homes, and other “total
institutions.” Making
that decisive move to recognize the continuum of violence allows us to see the
capacity and the willingness - if not enthusiasm - of ordinary people, the practical technicians of
the social consensus, to enforce genocidal-like crimes against categories of rubbish people.
There is no primary impulse out of which mass violence and genocide are born, it is ingrained in
the common sense of everyday social life. The mad, the differently abled, the mentally
vulnerable have often fallen into this category of the unworthy living, as have the very old and
infirm, the sick-poor, and, of course, the despised racial, religious, sexual, and ethnic groups of
the moment. Erik Erikson referred to “pseudo- speciation” as the human tendency to classify some individuals or social groups as less
than fully human - a prerequisite to genocide and one that is carefully honed during the unremark- able peacetimes that precede the sudden,
“seemingly unintelligible” outbreaks of mass violence
. Collective denial and misrecognition are prerequisites for
mass violence and genocide. But so are formal bureaucratic structures and professional roles. The practical technicians of
everyday violence in the backlands of Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33), for example, include the clinic doctors who prescribe
powerful tranquilizers to fretful and frightfully hungry babies, the Catholic priests who celebrate the death of “angel-babies,” and the municipal
Everyday violence encompasses the implicit,
legitimate, and routinized forms of violence inherent in particular social, economic, and political
formations. It is close to what Bourdieu (1977, 1996) means by “symbolic violence,” the violence that is often “nus-recognized” for
bureaucrats who dispense free baby coffins but no food to hungry families.
something else, usually something good. Everyday violence is similar to what Taussig (1989) calls “terror as usual.” All these terms are meant to
reveal a public secret - the hidden links between violence in war and violence in peace, and between war crimes and “peace-time crimes.”
Bourdieu (1977) finds domination and violence in the least likely places - in courtship and marriage, in the exchange of gifts, in systems of
classification, in style, art, and culinary taste- the various uses of culture. Violence, Bourdieu insists, is everywhere in social practice. It is
misrecognized because its very everydayness and its familiarity render it invisible. Lacan identifies “rneconnaissance” as the prerequisite of the
social. The exploitation of bachelor sons, robbing them of autonomy, independence, and progeny, within the structures of family farming in the
European countryside that Bourdieu escaped is a case in point (Bourdieu, Chapter 42; see also Scheper-Hughes, 2000b; Favret-Saada, 1989).
Following Gramsci, Foucault, Sartre, Arendt, and other modern theorists of power-vio- lence, Bourdieu treats direct aggression and physical
violence as a crude, uneconomical mode of domination; it is less efficient and, according to Arendt (1969), it is certainly less legitimate. While
power and symbolic domination are not to be equated with violence - and Arendt argues persuasively that violence is to be understood as a
failure of power - violence, as we are presenting it here, is more than simply the expression of illegitimate physical force against a person or
group of persons. Rather, we need to understand violence as encompassing all forms of “controlling processes” (Nader 1997b) that assault
basic human freedoms and individual or collective survival. Our task is to recognize these gray zones of violence which are, by definition, not
obvious. Once again, the point of bringing into the discourses on genocide everyday, normative experiences of reification, depersonalization,
institutional confinement, and acceptable death is to help answer the question: What makes mass violence and genocide possible? In this
volume we are suggesting that
mass violence is part of a continuum, and that it is socially incremental
and often experienced by perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders - and even by victims
themselves - as expected, routine, even justified. The preparations for mass killing can be found in social sentiments
and institutions from the family, to schools, churches, hospitals, and the military. They harbor the early “warning signs” (Charney 1991),
the “priming” (as Hinton, ed., 2002 calls it), or the “genocidal continuum” (as we call it) that push social
consensus toward devaluing certain forms of human life and lifeways from the refusal of social
support and humane care to vulnerable “social parasites” (the nursing home elderly, “welfare
queens,” undocumented immigrants, drug addicts) to the militarization of everyday life (super-maximum-security
prisons, capital punishment; the technologies of heightened personal security, including the house gun and gated communities; and reversed
feelings of victimization).
2nc sustainability
Collapse is imminent—now is unique because public policy has exhausted the range of
viable fixes
Wallerstein, Ph.D., 11—senior research scholar at Yale University, PhD from Columbia (Immanuel,
January/ February 2011, “THE GLOBAL ECONOMY WON'T RECOVER, NOW OR EVER,”
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/01/02/unconventional_wisdom?page=0,9, RBatra)
the basic costs of all production have risen remarkably. There are the personnel expenses of
all kinds -- for unskilled workers, for cadres, for top-level management. There are the costs incurred as producers pass on the costs of
their production to the rest of us -- for detoxification, for renewal of resources, for infrastructure. And the democratization of the world has led
to demands for more and more education, more and more health provisions, and more and more
guarantees of lifetime income. To meet these demands, there has been a significant increase in taxation
of all kinds. Together, these costs have risen beyond the point that permits serious capital accumulation. Why not then
The problem is that
simply raise prices? Because there are limits beyond which one cannot push their level. It is called the elasticity of demand. The result is a growing profit squeeze, which is reaching a point
where the game is not worth the candle.
we are witnessing as a result is chaotic fluctuations of all kinds -- economic, political, sociocultural. These fluctuations
cannot easily be controlled by public policy. The result is ever greater uncertainty about all kinds of short-term decision-making, as well as frantic
realignments of every variety. Doubt feeds on itself as we search for ways out of the menacing uncertainty posed by
terrorism, climate change, pandemics, and nuclear proliferation.
The only sure thing is that the present system cannot continue. The fundamental political struggle is
over what kind of system will replace capitalism, not whether it should survive. The choice is between a
new system that replicates some of the present system's essential features of hierarchy and polarization and one that is relatively democratic
and egalitarian.
The extraordinary expansion of the world-economy in the postwar years (more or less 1945 to 1970) has been
followed by a long period of economic stagnation in which the basic source of gain has been rank
speculation sustained by successive indebtednesses. The latest financial crisis didn't bring down this system; it merely
exposed it as hollow. Our recent "difficulties" are merely the next-to-last bubble in a process of boom and bust the world-system has been undergoing since around 1970. The
What
last bubble will be state indebtednesses, including in the so-called emerging economies, leading to bankruptcies.
Most people do not recognize -- or refuse to recognize -- these realities. It is wrenching to accept that the historical system in which we are living is in structural crisis and will not survive.
Meanwhile, the system proceeds by its accepted rules. We meet at G-20 sessions and seek a futile consensus. We speculate on the markets.
We "develop" our economies in whatever way we can. All this activity simply accentuates the structural crisis. The real
action, the struggle over what new system will be created, is elsewhere.
Not sustainable
Naess, Aalborg Urban Planning professor, 2006
(Peter, “Unsustainable Growth, Unsustainable Capitalism”, Journal of Critical Realism, 5.2, ebsco, ldg)
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¶ into 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.¶ 20¶ 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 mentioned as a way to change¶ the content of growth in an environmentally sound way.¶ 21¶
However, 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 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 its¶ 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¶
Debt, offshoring, financialization, ecology prove – only shift from EMPIRE to
MULTITUDES averts extinction
Shor 10
http://www.stateofnature.org/locatingTheContemporary.html
Fran Shor teaches in the History Department at Wayne State University. He is the author of Dying
Empire: US Imperialism and Global Resistance (Routledge 2010).
Attributing the debilitation of the U.S. economy to a mortgage crisis or the collapse of the housing
market misses the truly epochal crisis in the world economy and, indeed, in capitalism itself. As
economist Michael Hudson contends, " the financial 'wealth creation' game is over . Economies
emerged from World War II relatively free of debt, but the 60-year global run-up has run its course.
Financial capitalism is in a state of collapse, and marginal palliatives cannot revive it ." According to
Hudson, among those palliatives is an ironic variant of the IMF strategies imposed on developing
nations. "The new twist is a variant on the IMF 'stabilization' plans that lend money to central banks to
support their currencies - for long enough to enable local oligarchs and foreign investors to move their
savings and investments offshore at a good exchange rate." The continuity between these IMF plans and
even the Obama administration's fealty to Wall Street can be seen in the person of Lawrence Summers,
now the chief economic advisor to Obama. As further noted by Hudson, "the Obama bank bailout is
arranged much like an IMF loan to support the exchange rate of foreign currency, but with the Treasury
supporting financial asset prices for U.S. banks and other financial institutions ... Private-sector debt
will be moved onto the U.S. Government balance sheet, where "taxpayers" will bear losses." [4]
So, here we have another variation of the working poor getting sapped by the economic elite! In fact,
one estimate of U.S. federal government support to the elite financial institutions is in the range of $10
trillion dollars, a heist of unimaginable proportions. [5] Given the massive indebtedness of the United
States, its reliance of foreign support of that debt by countries like China, which has close to $2
trillion tied up in treasury bills and other investments, a long-term crisis of profitability,
overproduction, and offshoring of essential manufacturing, it does not appear that the United
States and, perhaps, even the capitalist system can avoid collapse. Certainly, there are Marxist
economists and world-systems analysts who are convinced that the collapse is inevitable, albeit it may
take several generations to complete. The question becomes whether a dying system can be
resuscitated or, if something else can be put in its place. One of the most prominent world systems
scholars, Immanuel Wallerstein, puts the long-term crisis of capitalism and the alternatives in the
following perspective: Because the system we have known for 500 years is no longer able to guarantee
long-term prospects of capital accumulation, we have entered a period of world chaos. Wild (and
largely uncontrollable) swings in the economic, political, and military situations are leading to a
systemic bifurcation, that is, to a world collective choice about the kind of new system the world will
construct over the next fifty years. The new system will not be a capitalist system, but it could be
one of two kinds: a different system that is equally or more hierarchical and inequalitarian, or one that
is substantially democratic and equalitarian. [6] What Wallerstein overlooks is the possibility that a
global crisis of capitalism with its continuous overexploitation and maldistribution of essential
resources, such as water, could lead to a planetary catastrophe. [7] While Wallerstein and many of
the Marxist critics of capitalism correctly identify the long-term structural crisis of capitalism and offer
important insights into the need for more democratic and equalitarian systems, they often fail to realize
other critical predicaments that have plagued human societies in the past and persist in even more lifethreatening ways today. Among those predicaments are the power trips of civilization and
environmental destructiveness. Such power trips can be seen through the sedimentation of powerover in the reign of patriarchal systems and an evolutionary selection for that power-over which
contaminates society and social relationships. Certainly, many of those predicaments can also be
attributed to a 5000 year history of the intersection of empire and civilization. Anthropologist Kajsa
Ekholm Friedman analyzes that intersection and its impact in the Bronze Age as an "imperialist
project..., dependent upon trade and ultimately upon war." [8] However, over the long rule of empire
and especially within the last 500 years of the global aspirations of various empires, "no state or
empire," observes historian Eric Hobsbawm, "has been large, rich, or powerful enough to maintain
hegemony over the political world, let alone to establish political and military supremacy over the
globe." [9] While war and trade still remain key components of the imperial project today and
pretensions for global supremacy persist in the United States, what is just as threatening to the world
as we know it is the overexploitation and abuse of environmental resources. Jared Diamond
brilliantly reveals how habituated attitudes and values precluded the necessary recognition of
environmental degradation which, in turn, led to the collapse of vastly different civilizations, societies,
and cultures throughout recorded history. [10] He identifies twelve contemporary environmental
challenges which pose grave dangers to the planet and its inhabitants. Among these are the destruction
of natural habitats (rainforests, wetlands, etc.); species extinction; soil erosion; depletion of fossil
fuels and underground water aquifers; toxic pollution; and climate change, especially attributable to
the use of fossil fuels. [11] U.S. economic imperialism has played a direct role in environmental
degradation, whether in McDonald's resource destruction of rainforests in Latin America, Coca-Cola's
exploitation of underground water aquifers in India, or Union Carbide's toxic pollution in India. Beyond
the links between empire and environmental destruction, unless we also clearly understand and
combat the connections between empire and unending growth with its attendant "accumulation by
dispossession", we may very well doom ourselves to extinction . According to James Gustave Speth,
Dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, the macro obsession with growth is
also intimately related to our micro habituated ways of living. "Parallel to transcending our growth
fetish," Speth argues, "we must move beyond our consumerism and hyperventilating lifestyles ... This
reluctance to challenge consumption has been a big mistake, given the mounting environmental and
social costs of American "affluenza," extravagance and wastefulness." [12] Of course, there are
significant class and ethnic/racial differences in consumerism and lifestyle in the United States.
However, even more vast differences and inequities obtain between the U.S. and the developing world.
It is those inequities that lead Eduardo Galeano to conclude that "consumer society is a booby trap.
Those at the controls feign ignorance, but anybody with eyes in his head can see that the great majority
of people necessarily must consume not much, very little, or nothing at all in order to save the bit of
nature we have left." [13] Finally, from Vandana Shiva's perspective, "unless worldviews and lifestyles
are restructured ecologically, peace and justice will continue to be violated and, ultimately, the very
survival of humanity will be threatened ." [14] For Shiva and other global agents of resistance, the
ecological and peace and justice imperatives require us to act in the here and now. Her vision of
"Earth Democracy" with its emphasis on balancing authentic needs with a local ecology provides an
essential guidepost to what we all can do to stop the ravaging of the environment and to salvage the
planet. As she insists, "Earth Democracy is not just about the next protest or next World Social Forum; it
is about what we do in between. It addresses the global in our everyday lives, our everyday realities, and
creates change globally by making change locally." [15] The local, national, and transnational struggles
and visions of change are further evidence that the imperial project is not only being contested but
also being transformed on a daily basis. According to Mark Engler, "The powerful will abandon their
strategies of control only when it grows too costly for them to do otherwise. It is the concerted efforts
of people coming together in local communities and in movements spanning borders that will raise
the costs. Empire becomes unsustainable ... when the people of the world resist." [16] Whether in
the rural villages of Brazil or India, the jungles of Mexico or Ecuador, the city squares of Cochabama or
Genoa, the streets of Seattle or Soweto, there has been, and continues to be, resistance around the
globe to the imperial project. If the ruling elite and many of the citizens of the United States have not
yet accepted the fact that the empire is dying and with it the concentric circles of economic, political,
environmental, and civilizational crises, the global multitudes have been busy at work, digging its
future grave and planting the seeds for another possible world. [17]
at: democracy checks (o’kane)
Not in the context of runaway liberalism
Mitchell Dean, Professor of Sociology at Macquarie University, 2001, “Demonic Societies: Liberalism, biopolitics,
and sovereignty.” Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State, ed. Hanson and Stepputat, p. 50-1
Finally, although
liberalism may try to make safe the biopolitical imperative of the optimization of life, it
has shown itself permanently incapable of arresting—from eugenics to contemporary genetics---the
emergence of rationalities that make the optimization of the life of some dependent on the disallowing
of the life of others. I can only suggest some general reasons for this. Liberalism is fundamentally
concerned to govern through what it conceives as processes that are external to the sphere of
government limited by the respect for rights and liberties of individual subjects. Liberal rule thus fosters
forms of knowledge of vital processes and seeks to govern through their application. Moreover, to the
extent that liberalism depends on the formation of responsible and autonomous subjects through
biopolitics and discipline, it fosters the type of governmental practices that are the ground of such
rationalities. Further, and perhaps more simply, we might consider the possibility that sovereignty and biopolitics are so
heterogeneous to one another that the derivation of political norms from the democratization of the
former cannot act as a prophylactic for the possible outcomes of the latter. We might also consider the alternative
to this thesis, that biopolitics captures and expands the division between political life and mere existence,
already found within sovereignty. In either case, the framework of right and law can act as a resource for
forces engaged in contestation of the effects of biopower; it cannot provide a guarantee as the efficacy
of such struggle and may even be the means of the consolidation of those effects.
at: timeframe
Calling attention to timeframe is a shell game to obscure structural analysis—you have
time to think
Bilgin and Morton 4 (Pinar, Professor of International Relations – Biliken and Adam David, Senior
Lecturer and Fellow of the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice IR – University of
Nottingham, “From ‘Rogue’ to ‘Failed’ States? The Fallacy of Short-termism”, Politics, 24(3), p. 176-178)
Calls for alternative approaches to the phenomenon of state failure are often met with the criticism that such
alternatives could only work in the long term whereas ‘something’ needs to be done here and now.
Whilst recognising the need for immediate action, it is the role of the political scientist to point to the
fallacy of ‘short- termism’ in the conduct of current policy. Short-termism is defined by Ken Booth (1999,
p. 4) as ‘approaching security issues within the time frame of the next election, not the next generation’.
Viewed as such, short-termism is the enemy of true strategic thinking. The latter requires policymakers to rethink their longterm goals and take small steps towards achieving them. It also requires heeding against taking steps that might eventually become self-defeating. The United
States has presently fought three wars against two of its Cold War allies in the post-Cold War era, namely, the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban in
Afghanistan. Both were supported in an attempt to preserve the delicate balance between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Cold War policy of
supporting client regimes has eventually backfired in that US policymakers now have to face the instability they have caused. Hence the need for a comprehensive
understanding of state failure and the role Western states have played in failing them through varied forms of intervention. Although some commentators may
judge that the road to the existing situation is paved with good intentions, a truly strategic approach to the problem of international terrorism requires a more
sensitive consideration of the medium-to-long-term implications of state building in different parts of the world whilst also addressing the root causes of the
problem of state ‘failure’. Developing this line of argument further, reflection on different socially relevant meanings of ‘state failure’ in relation to different time
increments shaping policymaking might convey alternative considerations. In line with John Ruggie (1998, pp. 167–170), divergent issues might then come to the
fore when viewed through the different lenses of particular time increments. Firstly, viewed
through the lenses of an incremental time
frame, more immediate concerns to policymakers usually become apparent when linked to precocious assumptions
about terrorist networks, banditry and the breakdown of social order within failed states. Hence relevant players and events are readily identified (al-Qa’eda), their
attributes assessed (axis of evil, ‘strong’/’weak’ states) and judgements made about their long-term significance (war on terrorism). The key analytical problem for
policymaking in this narrow and blinkered domain is the one of choice given the constraints of time and energy devoted to a particular decision. These
factors lead policymakers to bring conceptual baggage to bear on an issue that simplifies but also
distorts information. Taking a second temporal form, that of a conjunctural time frame, policy responses
are subject to more fundamental epistemological concerns. Factors assumed to be constant within an incremental time frame are
more variable and it is more difficult to produce an intended effect on ongoing processes than it is on actors and discrete events. For instance, how long should the
‘war on terror’ be waged for? Areas of policy
in this realm can therefore begin to become more concerned with the
underlying forces that shape current trajectories. Shifting attention to a third temporal form draws attention to still different
dimensions. Within an epochal time frame an agenda still in the making appears that requires a shift in decision-making, away from a conventional problem-solving
mode ‘wherein doing nothing is favoured on burden-of-proof grounds’, towards a risk-averting mode, characterised by prudent contingency measures. To conclude,
in relation to ‘failed states’, the latter time frame entails reflecting on the very structural conditions shaping the problems of ‘failure’ raised throughout the present
discussion, which will demand lasting and delicate attention from practitioners across the academy and policymaking communities alike.
at: cap solves environment
Complex environmental externalities overwhelm normal resilience—production and
tech improvements are insufficient
Ehrenfeld, Rutgers biology professor, 2005 (David, “The Environmental Limits to Globalization”,
Conservation Biology Vol. 19 No. 2, ebsco, ldg)
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
The overall
decent income. And the enlightened opponents of globalization assert that the damage done by globalization to local communities everywhere, and the increasing
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
gap it causes between the rich and the poor, far outweigh the small amount of good globalization may do.
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
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
environmental pollution succeed (Fu 2004; Qin 2004; Xu 2004)?
examples of globalization's impact, some obvious, some less so, that a convincing argument about its effects and trends can be made. ¶ The Disappearance of Cheap
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
Energy¶
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 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 (Revkin 2004).
Globalization affects so many environmental systems in so many ways that negative
interactions of this sort are frequent and usually unpredictable .¶ 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;
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 hightech 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; Tromp
Bakhtiari 2004; Gerth 2004)—but it is abundantly clear that the
et al. 2003; Romm 2004). 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. ¶ 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)
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
state that:¶
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 bring about change. 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. These
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
renewable alternatives can only power a nonglobalized civilization that consumes less energy (Ehrenfeld 2003b). ¶ Already, as the
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, 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
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
(Youngquist & Duncan 2003;Romero 2004). ¶
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. ¶ Loss of Agricultural Biodiversity¶ Among the many other environmental
effects of globalization, one that is both obvious and critically important is reduced genetic and 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 subcontinent'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
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
global commerce (Hall & Ruane 1993).¶ Unfortunately, with globalization, remoteness is no longer tenable. Here is a poignant illustration.
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
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. 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 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
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
been catalyzed by globalization (Wright 1990). ¶ Aquaculture is another agriculture-related activity.
in marine environments…. [and underscore] the potential role of shipping in the global transport of zoonotic pathogens. ¶ Loss of Wild Species¶ 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 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 [Acersp.]) 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 (Phytophthora ramorum), which is probably also an introduced species that was spread by the international trade in horticultural plants (Rizzo &
Garbelotto 2003). 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, 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
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.
globalization.¶ Some
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 of this and other emerging infectious diseases of wildlife.” ¶ 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, into wild populations of banded mongooses (Mungos mungo) in Botswana
and suricates (Suricata suricatta) in South Africa. ¶ The Future of Globalization¶ 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
environmental side effects
a permanent state of affairs (Rees 2002; Ehrenfeld 2003a)? ¶ The principal
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
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
to
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
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 plant, and this, he explained, is why system-wide accidents in nuclear plants cannot be
predicted or eliminated by system design. 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.¶
Charles
The comparatively few commentators who have predicted 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
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.
between the world's diverse societies.” The result, Gray states, is that “
Capitalism commodities 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, ldg)
A peculiarity of capitalism, brought out by the Lauderdale Paradox, is that it feeds on scarcity. Hence, nothing is more dangerous to capitalism
as a system than abundance. Waste
and destruction are therefore rational for the system. Although it is often
supposed that increasing environmental costs will restrict economic growth, the fact is that 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 at 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 non-stop by capital’s laws of motion.38 In
fact, the growth of natural scarcity is seen as a golden opportunity in which to further privatize the
world’s commons. This tragedy of the 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, which is now seen as a new mega-market for global accumulation. The
drying up and contamination of freshwater 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. Gérard
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 despite the fact that
experiments in this respect thus far have been a failure — in reducing emissions. Here, the expansion of capital trumps actual public interest in
protecting the vital conditions of life. 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 itself, and launching
an ecological-cultural revolution. Indeed, from
the standpoint of capital accumulation, global 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 itself). 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 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 material
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 standpoint, 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 original sources of all wealth
— the soil and the worker.”
at: cap solves space
Only a dozen people could get off the rock in time, that means only the very wealthy survive—worse
than extinction.
William Ophuls, Professor of Political Science at Northwestern, 1997, Requiem For Modern Politics, p. 9
Contrary to the pronouncements of diehard technological optimists, space colonization is not an answer. The
entropic costs of lifting mass into orbit will restrict space exploration and eventual colonization to a tiny
vanguard. Extensive trade in matter and energy is also ruled out, except in some remote science-fictional future in which we have mastered the force of gravity. Nor can we
“decouple” ourselves from nature here on Earth, at least to the extent envisioned by those who would have us live in artificial ecologies based on such emergent technologies as
Even if these unproven technologies are eventually found to be both economically
practical and ecologically harmless, replacing nature as the maker of all the basic requisites of life for large
numbers of people will take infinitely more capital, knowledge, and managerial skill than we now possess or are
ever likely to acquire.
biotechnology, nanotechnology, and fusion power.
Asteroids aren’t a threat
Carl Sagan, David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences and Director of the Laboratory for
Planetary Studies at Cornell University, 1994, Pale Blue Dot, p. 313
Civilization-threatening impacts require bodies several hundred meters across, or more. (A meter is
about a yard; 100 meters is roughly the length of a football field.) They arrive something like once
every 200,000 years. Our civilization is only about 10,000 years old, so we should have no
institutional memory of the last such impact. Nor do we.
Capitalism guarantees extinction before we leave the rock—collapse of the system is
imminent
Li, teaches economics at the University of Utah, April 2008
[Ming, An Age of Transition: The United States, China, Peak Oil, and the Demise of Neoliberalism,
Monthly Review Vol 59 Iss 11, Proquest]
On February 1, Immanuel Wallerstein, the leading world system theorist, in his biweekly commentaries pronounced the year
2008 to be the year of the "Demise of the Neoliberal Globalization." Wallerstein begins by pointing out that
throughout the history of the capitalist world system, the ideas of free market capitalism with minimal
government intervention and the ideas of state regulated capitalism with some social protection have been
in fashion in alternating cycles. In response to the worldwide profit stagnation in the 1970s, neoliberalism
became politically dominant in the advanced capitalist countries, in the periphery, and eventually in the former socialist bloc.
However, neoliberalism failed to deliver its promise of economic growth, and as the global inequalities surged, much of
the world population suffered from declines in real incomes. After the mid-1990s, neoliberalism met with growing resistance throughout the
world and many governments have been under pressure to restore some state regulation and social protection. Confronted
with
economic crisis, the Bush administration has simultaneously pursued a further widening of inequality at home and
unilateral imperialism abroad. These policies have by now failed decisively. As the U nited S tates can no
longer finance its economy and imperialist adventure with increasingly larger foreign debt, the U.S. dollar, Wallerstein believes,
faces the prospect of a free fall and will cease to be the world's reserve currency. Wallerstein concludes: "The political
balance is swinging back....The real question is not whether this phase is over but whether the swing
back will be able, as in the past, to restore a state of relative equilibrium in the world-system. Or has too
much damage been done? And are we now in for more violent chaos in the world-economy and therefore in the world-system as a
whole?"9 Following Wallerstein's arguments, in the coming years we are likely to witness a major realignment of
global political and economic forces. There will be an upsurge in die global class struggle over the
direction of the global social transformation. If we are in one of the normal cycles of the capitalist worldsystem, then toward the end of the current period of instability and crisis, we probably will observe a return to the
dominance of Keynesian or state capitalist policies and institutions throughout the world. However, too much
damage has been done. After centuries of global capitalist accumulation, the global environment is on
the verge of collapse and there is no more ecological space for another major expansion of global
capitalism. The choice is stark-either humanity will permit capitalism to destroy the environment and
therefore the material basis of human civilization, or it will destroy capitalism first. The struggle for ecological
sustainability must join forces with the struggles of the oppressed and exploited to rebuild the global economy on the basis of production for
human needs in accordance with democratic and socialist principles. In this sense, we
have entered into a new age of
transition. Toward the end of this transition, one way or the other we will be in a fundamentally
different world and it is up to us to decide what kind of world it turns out to be.
Capitalism necessitates space militarization
Melbourne Indy Media “Anarchism and Human Survival: Russell's Problem” May 13, 2003
http://www.melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2003/05/47400.php
One may well ask what has all this to do with state capitalism? Consider the thinking behind the
militarisation of space, outlined for us by Space Command; “historically military forces have evolved to protect
national interests and investments – both military and economic. During the rise of sea commerce, nations built navies
to protect and enhance their commercial interests. During the westward expansion of the continental United States, military outposts and the
cavalry emerged to protect our wagon trains, settlements and roads”. The document goes on, “the emergence
of space power
follows both of these models”. Moreover, “the globalization of the world economy will continue, with a
widening between ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’. The demands of unilateral strategic superiority, long standing US
policy known as "escalation" or "full spectrum" dominance, compel Washington to pursue “space control". This means that,
according to a report written under the chairmanship of Donald Rumsfeld, "in the coming period the US will conduct operations to, from, in and
through space" which includes "power projection in, from and through space". Toward this end, Washington has resisted efforts in the UN to
create an arms control regime for space. As a result there will inevitably arise an arms race in space.
Nuclear war
Gordon R. Mitchell, member of CSIS Working Group on Theater Missile Defenses in the Asia-Pacific Region,
FLETCHER FORUM ON WORLD AFFAIRS, Winter 2001, p. 1-ff
A buildup of space weapons might begin with noble intentions of 'peace through strength' deterrence, but this
rationale glosses over the tendency that '… the presence of space weapons…will result in the increased
likelihood of their use'.33 This drift toward usage is strengthened by a strategic fact elucidated by Frank
Barnaby: when it comes to arming the heavens, 'anti-ballistic missiles and anti-satellite warfare technologies go
hand-in-hand'.34 The interlocking nature of offense and defense in military space technology stems from the
inherent 'dual capability' of spaceborne weapon components. As Marc Vidricaire, Delegation of Canada to the UN
Conference on Disarmament, explains: 'If you want to intercept something in space, you could use the same
capability to target something on land'. 35 To the extent that ballistic missile interceptors based in space can knock
out enemy missiles in mid-flight, such interceptors can also be used as orbiting 'Death Stars', capable of sending
munitions hurtling through the Earth's atmosphere. The dizzying speed of space warfare would
introduce intense 'use or lose' pressure into strategic calculations, with the spectre of split-second
attacks creating incentives to rig orbiting Death Stars with automated 'hair trigger' devices. In
theory, this automation would enhance survivability of vulnerable space weapon platforms. However, by taking
the decision to commit violence out of human hands and endowing computers with authority to make war,
military planners could sow insidious seeds of accidental conflict. Yale sociologist Charles Perrow has
analyzed 'complexly interactive, tightly coupled' industrial systems such as space weapons, which have many
sophisticated components that all depend on each other's flawless performance. According to Perrow, this
interlocking complexity makes it impossible to foresee all the different ways such systems could fail. As Perrow
explains, '[t]he odd term "normal accident" is meant to signal that, given the system characteristics, multiple and
unexpected interactions of failures are inevitable'.36 Deployment of space weapons with pre-delegated
authority to fire death rays or unleash killer projectiles would likely make war itself inevitable,
given the susceptibility of such systems to 'normal accidents'. It is chilling to contemplate the possible
effects of a space war. According to retired Lt. Col. Robert M. Bowman, 'even a tiny projectile reentering
from space strikes the earth with such high velocity that it can do enormous damage — even
more than would be done by a nuclear weapon of the same size!'. 37 In the same Star Wars technology
touted as a quintessential tool of peace, defence analyst David Langford sees one of the most destabilizing
offensive weapons ever conceived: 'One imagines dead cities of microwave-grilled people'.38
Given this unique potential for destruction, it is not hard to imagine that any nation subjected to space
weapon attack would retaliate with maximum force, including use of nuclear, biological, and/or
chemical weapons. An accidental war sparked by a computer glitch in space could plunge the
world into the most destructive military conflict ever seen.
at: cap solves war
Capitalism is the root cause of war
Dr. David Adams, 2002, former UNESCO Director of the Unit for the International Year for the Culture of
Peace, former Professor of Psychology (for 23 years) at Wesleyan University, specialist on the brain
mechanisms of aggressive behavior and the evolution of war, “Chapter 8: The Root Causes of War,” The
American Peace Movements, p. 22-28, http://www.culture-of-peace.info/apm/chapter8-22.html
To take a scientific attitude about war and peace, we must carry the causal analysis a step further. If peace movements are caused by wars and war threats, then we must ask, what are the
rs, it is necessary to dismiss a false analysis that
has been popularized in recent years, the myth that war is caused by a "war instinct." The best biological
and anthropological data indicate that there is no such thing as a war instinct despite the attempt of the
mass media and educational systems to perpetuate this myth. Instead, "the same species that invented
war is capable of inventing peace" (note 15). Since there are several kinds of war, it is likely that there are several different kinds of causes for war. There
causes of these wars, both in the short term and in the long term? Before analyzing the causes of wa
are two kinds of war in which the United States has not been engaged for over two centuries. The first are wars of national liberation such as the American Revolution or today's revolutions in
Nicaragua and South Africa being waged by the Sandinistas and the African National Congress. The second are wars of revolution in which the previous ruling class is thrown out and replaced
by another. In the British and French Revolutions of earlier eras the feudal land-owners were overthrown by the newly rising capitalist class. In the revolutions of this century in Russia, China,
. The six wars and threats of war that have
caused American peace movements in this century have been wars of imperial conquest, interimperialist rivalry, and capitalist-socialist rivalry. What are the root causes of these wars in the short
term? For the following analysis, I will rely upon some of America's best economic historians (note 16).
The Spanish-American and Philippine Wars of 1898, according to historian Walter LaFeber, were
inevitable military results of a new foreign policy devoted to obtaining markets overseas for American
products. The new foreign policy was the response to a profound depression that began in 1893 with
unemployment soaring to almost 20 percent. Farm and industrial output piled up without a market
because American workers, being unemployed, had no money to buy them. Secretary of State Gresham
"concluded that foreign markets would provide in large measure the cure for the depression." To obtain
such markets, the U.S. went into competition with the other imperialist empires such as Britain and
Spain. The U.S. intervened with a naval force to help overthrow the government of Hawaii in 1893,
intervened diplomatically in Nicaragua in 1894, threatened war with England over Venezuela in 1895,
and eventually went to war with Spain in 1898 and invaded the Philippines in 1898. To quote from the
title of LaFeber's book, the U.S. established a "new empire." American intervention in World War I again
rescued the economy from a depression. In 1914 and 1915, as war between the European imperialist
powers broke out, American unemployment was rising towards ten percent and industrial goods were
piling up without a market. One industrial market was expanding, however, the market for weapons in
Europe. The historian Charles Tansill concludes that "it was the rapid growth of the munitions trade
which rescued America from this serious economic situation." And since the sales went to Britain and France, it committed the U.S. to their
Cuba, etc. the capitalists, in turn, were overthrown by forces representing the working class and landless farmers
side in the war. Finance capital was equally involved: "the large banking interests were deeply interested in the World War because of wide opportunities for large profits." When bank loans to
Britain and France of half a billion dollars went through in 1915, "the business depression, that had so worried the Administration in the spring of 1915, suddenly vanished, and 'boom times'
prevailed." Of course, German imperialism did not stand idly by while the U.S. profited from arms shipments and loans to their enemies in the war. German submarine warfare against these
shipments finally provoked American involvement in the War. The rise of fascism in Europe was the direct result of still another cyclical depression, the Great Depression that gripped the
es. In his recent book on the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of fascism,
David Abraham has documented how major capitalists turned to Hitler to fill the vacuum of political
leadership when the economy collapsed. In part, the absence of political leadership "with the collapse of
the export economy at the end of 1931...drove German industry to foster or accept a Bonapartist
solution to the political crisis and an imperialist solution to the economic crisis. The "Bonapartist
solution", as Abraham calls it, was found in Hitler's Nazi Party. As he says, "By mid-1932, the vast
majority of industrialists wanted to see Nazi participation in the government." For these industrialists,
"an anti-Marxist, imperialist program was the least common denominator on which they could all agree,
and the Nazis seemed capable of providing the mass base for such a program." The appeasement of Hitler's promise to
entire capitalist world in the Thirti
smash the communists and socialists at home and to destroy the Soviet Union abroad expressed a new cause of capitalist war. Up until that time, inter-imperialist wars were simply the
response to economic contradictions at home and capitalist competition abroad. In part, World War II was yet another inter-imperialist war. But now a new cause of war was emerging
alongside of the old. The rise of socialism was a direct threat to the entire capitalist world. In addition to glutted domestic markets and competition for foreign markets, the capitalists now had
to face the additional problem that the overall foreign market itself was shrinking. Thus, they tended to support each other in the face of a common enemy. After World War II, there was a
particularly sharp shrinkage in the "free world" for capitalist exploitation as socialism and national liberation triumphed through much of the world. The U.S. and its allies responded by
demanding that the socialist countries open their doors to investment by capitalism. According to historian William Appleman Williams, "It was the decision of the United States to employ its
new and awesome power in keeping with the traditional Open Door Policy which crystallized the cold war." As Williams explains, "the policy of the open door, like all imperial policies, created
Diplomatic and military confrontation between the U.S. and USSR were used to
justify the Cold War and establishment of NATO, but the underlying issues were economic. As pointed
out by historians Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, "The question of foreign economic policy was not the
containment of Communism, but rather more directly the extension and expansion of American
capitalism according to its new economic power and needs." In addition to the new problem of shrinking world markets, there remained
and spurred onward a dynamic opposition."
the problem of cyclical depressions. Although unemployment was not bad in 1946 because industry was producing to meet the accumulated needs of the war-deprived American people, the
specter of another depression was very much a factor in the Cold War. As the Kolkos point out, "The deeply etched memory of the decade-long depression of 1929 hung over all American
The
Vietnam War was a continuation of the Cold War, as the United States tried to prevent further shrinkage
of the world capitalist economic system. The U.S. had already fought a similar war in Korea. In his
chapter, "The U.S. in Vietnam, 1944-66: Origins and Objectives," Gabriel Kolko calls the intervention of
the United States in Vietnam, "the most important single embodiment of the power and purposes of
American foreign policy since the Second World War." Elsewhere in his book, Kolko goes into detail
about the economic basis of American imperialism: access to raw materials, access to markets for
American products, and investment opportunities for American capital. The Vietnam War, he explains,
was not a conspiracy or simply a military decision. It was the natural result of "American power and
interest in the modern world." Finally we come to the question of what has caused the massive
escalation of the arms buildup under Presidents Carter and Reagan (and more recently under Bush,
father and son). To some extent, it is a response to the old problem of cyclical depressions. Since World
War II, each recession has been deeper than the last, until by 1981 unemployment reached double digits
for the first time since the Thirties. Government spending was needed to put people back to work. Would
plans for the postwar era....In extending its power throughout the globe the United States hoped to save itself as well from a return of the misery of prewar experience."
the government spend the money for military weapons or for civilian needs? A long line of Presidential candidates, standing for the military solution, have been supported in their campaigns
The growing
power of the military-industrial complex is a new and especially dangerous addition to the economic
causes of war. It reflects an economic crisis that goes even deeper than those of the past. In addition to
the cyclical depressions and the shrinkage of foreign markets, there is a new imbalance in the entire
structure of capitalism. There is an enormous increase in financial speculation and short-term profit
schemes. The military-industrial complex has risen to become the dominant sector of the American
economy because through the aid of state subsidies it generates the greatest short-term profits. Never
mind if the U.S. government goes into debt to banks and other financial institutions in order to pay for
military spending. The world of financial speculation does not worry about tomorrow. Not only does this
"military spending solution" endanger the security of the planet, but it also increases the risk of a major
financial collapse and subsequent depression. To summarize, we may point to the following causes of
American wars over the past century: 1) cyclical crises of overproduction and unemployment, 2) exploitation of poor colonial and neo-colonial
by the military-industrial complex against other candidates who were unable to wage a serious campaign for civilian spending instead of military spending.
countries by rich imperialist countries, 3) economic rivalry for foreign markets and investment areas by imperialist powers, 4) the attempt to stop the shrinkage of the "free world" - i.e. the
part of the world that is free for capitalist investment and exploitation, and 5) financial speculation and short-term profit making of the military-industrial complex. In the 1985 edition of this
book the argument was made that the socialist countries were escaping from the economic causation of war. In comparison to the capitalist countries, they did not have the same dynamic of
over-production and cyclical depression, with periods of enhanced structural unemployment. As for exploitation and imperialism, despite the frequent reference in the American media to
"Soviet imperialism," the direction of the flow of wealth was the opposite of what holds true under capitalist imperialism. Instead of the rich nations extracting wealth from the poor ones,
which is the case, for example between the U.S. and Latin America, the net flow of wealth proceeded from the Soviet Union towards the other socialist countries in order to bring them
towards an eventually even level of development. According to an authoritative source associated with the U.S. military-industrial complex, the net outflow from the Soviet Union amounted to
over forty billion dollars a year in the mid-1980's. In one crucial respect, however, the 1985 analysis was incorrect. It failed to take account of the military-industrial complex that had grown to
be the most powerful force of the Soviet economy, a mirror image of its equivalent in the West. The importance of this was brought home to those of us who attended a briefing on economic
conversion from military to civilian production that was held at the United Nations on November 1, 1990, a critical time for Gorbachev's program of Perestroika in the Soviet Union. The
speaker, Ednan Ageev, was the head of the Division of International Security Issues at the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He was asked by the Gorbachev administration to find out the
extent to which the Soviet economy was being used for military production. Naturally, he went to the Minister of Defense, where he was told that this information was secret. Secret even to
Gorbachev. In conversation, Ageev estimated that 85-90% of Soviet scientific researchers were in the military sector. That seems high until you realize that the Soviet's were matching U.S.
military research, development and production on the basis of a Gross National Product only half as large. Since about 40% of U.S. research and development was tied to the military at that
time, it would make sense that the Soviets would have had to double the U.S. percentage in order to keep pace. How could the Gorbachev administration convert their economy from military
to civilian production if they could not even get a list of defense industries? Keeping this in mind, along with the enormous militarization of the Soviet economy, it is not so surprising that the
Soviet economy collapsed, and with it the entire political superstructure. The origins of the Soviet military-industrial complex can be traced back to the Russian revolution which instituted
what Lenin, at one point, called "war communism". He warned that war communism could not succeed in the long run and that instead of a top-down militarized economy, a socialist economy
needed to be structured as a "cooperative of cooperatives." But war communism was entrenched during the Stalin years, carried out of necessity to an extreme during the Second World War,
and then perpetuated by the Cold War. The economic causation of the war system is not new. It originated long before capitalism and socialism. From its beginnings in ancient Mesopotamia,
the state was always associated with war, both to capture slaves abroad and to keep them under control at home. As states grew more powerful, war became the means to build empires and
to acquire and rule colonies. In fact, the economic causation of war probably extends back even further into ancient prehistory. From the best analysis I know, that of Mel and Carol Ember,
using the methods of cross-cultural anthropology, it would seem that war functioned as a means to survive periodic but unpredictable food shortages caused by natural disasters. Apparently,
tribes that could make war most effectively could survive natural disasters better than others by successfully raiding the food supplies of their neighbors. While particular wars can be analyzed,
as we have done above, in terms of immediate, short-term causes, there is a need to understand the war system itself, which is as old as human history. Particular wars are the tip of a much
deeper iceberg. Beneath war, there has developed a culture of war that is entwined with it in a complex web of causation. On the one hand, the culture of war is produced and reinforced by
each war, and, on the other hand, the culture of war provides the basis on which succeeding wars are prepared and carried out. The culture of war is a set of beliefs, attitudes and behaviors
that consists of enemy images, authoritarian social structure, training and arming for violence, exploitation of man and nature, secrecy and male domination. Without an enemy, without a
social structure where people will follow orders, without the preparation of soldiers and weapons, without the control of information, both propaganda and secrecy, no war can be carried out.
The culture of war has been so prevalent in history that we take it for granted, as if it were human nature. However, anthropologists point to cultures that are nowhere near as immersed in
the culture of war, and it is the opinion of the best scientists that a culture of peace is possible. Peace movements have not given enough attention to the internal use of the culture of war.
The culture of war has two faces, one facing outward and the other inward. Foreign wars are accompanied by authoritarian rule inside the warring countries. Even when there is no war threat,
armies (or national guards) are kept ready not just for use against foreign enemies, but also against those defined as the enemy within: striking workers, movements of the unemployed,
prisoners, indigenous peoples, just as in an earlier time they were used against slave rebellions. As documented in my 1995 article in the Journal of Peace Research (Internal Military
Interventions in the United States) the U.S. Army and National Guard have been used an average of 18 times a year, involving an average of 12,000 troops for the past 120 years, mostly against
actions and revolts by workers and the unemployed. During periods of external war, the internal wars are usually intensified and accompanied by large scale spying, deportations and witch
hunts. It would appear that we have once again entered such a period in the U.S. We are hardly alone in this matter. Needless to say, the culture of war was highly developed to stifle dissent in
the Soviet Union by Stalin and his successors of "war communism." The internal culture of war needs to be analyzed and resisted everywhere. For example, readers living in France should
question the role of the CRS. The internal use of the culture of war is no less economically motivated than external wars. The socialists at the beginning of the 20th Century recognized it as
"class war," carried out in order to maintain the domination of the rich and powerful over the poor and exploited. Not by accident, it has often been socialists and communists who are the first
to be targeted by the internal culture of war in capitalist countries. And they, in turn, have often made the most powerful critique of the culture of war and have played a leading role in peace
movements for that reason. Their historical role for peace was considerably compromised, however, by the "war communism" of the Soviet Union. With its demise, however, there is now an
opportunity for socialists and communists to return to their earlier leadership against war, both internal and external, and to insist that a true socialism can only flourish on the basis of a
First, let
us look back over the economic factors and movements of the previous century to see if the trends are
likely to continue. 1. Wars are likely to continue because, for the most part, their economic causes
remain as strong as ever: 1) cyclical crises of overproduction and unemployment, 2) exploitation of poor
colonial and neo-colonial countries by rich imperialist countries, 3) economic rivalry for foreign markets
and investment areas by imperialist powers, 4) the attempt to stop the shrinkage of the "free world" i.e. the part of the world that is free for capitalist investment and exploitation, and 5) financial
speculation and short-term profit making of the military-industrial complex. The fourth factor is not as prominent since the
culture of peace. In considering future prospects for the American Peace Movements, I shall begin with trends from the past and then consider different factors for the future?
collapse of the Soviet Union, but there is still evidence of this factor at work: for example, the attempted overthrow of the government of Venezuela in spring, 2002, was apparently linked to
its developing ties with socialist Cuba, especially in terms of its oil resources. Although the coup d'etat failed, there was a risk of plunging Venezuela into warfare, especially considering the
. Although the "war against terrorism" in Afghanistan, Philippines, etc.
and the associated military buildup is usually justified as revenge for the attacks of September 11, there
seems little doubt that there are economic motives involved as well, including the control of oil
resources from Central Asia as a supplement to those of the Middle East. At the same time, the massive
expansion of the military-industrial complex in the U.S. appears at some level to be intended as an
increase in government spending to hedge against declining non-military production, unemployment
and financial crises in the stock markets. 2. The American peace movements have been reactive in the
past, developing in response to specific wars or threats of war, and then disappearing when the war is
over or the threat is perceived to have decreased. In fact, this observation at the macro level is mirrored by an observation that I have made
increasingly internationalized war next door in Colombia
previously at a micro level: participants in peace movements have been motivated to an important degree by anger against the injustice of war. This dynamic seems likely to continue.
Governments, worried about the reactive potential of peace movements may attempt to engage in very brief wars, just as the U.S. government cut short the 1991 Gulf War after several weeks
to avoid an escalating peace movement. In the future, peace movements need to be broadened by linkages to other issues and by international solidarity and unity; otherwise they risk being
only temporary influences on the course of history, growing in response to particular wars and then disappearing again afterwards
opposition to the entire culture of war, not just to particular wars.
. The world needs a sustained
To be fully successful, the future peace movement needs to be
positive as well as negative. It needs to be for a culture of peace at the same time as it is against the culture of war. This requires that activists in the future peace movement develop a shared
vision of the future towards which the movement can aspire. I have found evidence, presented in the recent revision of my book Psychology for Peace Activists (note 17), that such a shared,
positive vision is now becoming possible, and, as a result, human consciousness can take on a new and powerful dimension in this particular moment of history.
alternative
2nc alt solves
Cross-apply framework—discussions at the academic level are more productive—
creates better a relationship to policy which is more important than trivial
simulation—if this approach is better we should win
Bilgin 5 Assistant Prof of International Relations at Bilkent University, REGIONAL SECURITY IN THE
MIDDLE EAST A CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE, p54The point is that a
broader security agenda requires students of security to look at agents other than the
state, such as social movements, nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) and individuals, instead of restricting their analysis to the
state’s agency. This is essential not only because states are not always able (or willing) to fulfil their side
of the bargain in providing for their citizens’ security, as noted above, but also because there already are
agents other than states – be it social movements or intellectuals – who are striving to provide for the
differing needs of peoples (themselves and others). This is not meant to deny the salience of the roles states play in the realm of security; on the
contrary, they remain significant actors with crucial roles to play.25 Rather, the argument is that the state’s dominant position as
an actor well endowed to provide (certain dimensions of) security does not justify privileging its agency.
Furthermore, broadening the security agenda without attempting a reconceptualisation of agency would
result in falling back upon the agency of the state in meeting non-military threats. The problem with
resorting to the agency of the state in meeting non-military threats is that states may not be the
most suitable actors to cope with them. In other words, the state being the most qualified actor in coping with some kinds of threats
does not necessarily mean it is competent (or willing) enough to cope with all. This is why students of critical approaches aim to
re-conceptualise agency and practice.¶ Critical approaches view non-state actors, in particular, social movements and intellectuals, as
potential agents for change (Cox 1981, 1999; Walker 1990b; Hoffman 1993; Wyn Jones 1995a, 1999). This echoes feminist approaches that have
emphasised the role of women’s agency and maintained that ‘women must act in the provision of
their own security’ if they are to make a change in a world where their security needs and concerns
are marginalised (Tickner 1997; also see Sylvester 1994). This is not necessarily wishful thinking on the part of a few
academics; on the contrary, practice indicates that peoples (as individuals and social groups) have taken certain
aspects of their own and others’ security into their own hands (Marsh 1995: 130–5; Turner 1998). Three successful
examples from the Cold War era – the Nestlé boycott, the anti-apartheid campaign for South Africa and the campaign against nuclear missile deployments in
Europe – are often viewed as having inspired the social movements of the post-Cold War era (Lopez et al. 1997: 230–1; Marsh 1995). Christine Sylvester (1994)
has also pointed to the examples of the Greenham Common Peace Camp in Britain (1980–89) and women’s producer cooperatives in Harare, Zimbabwe
(1988–90) to show how women have intervened to enhance their own and others’ security. These are excellent examples of how a
broader
conception of security needs to be coupled with a broader conception of agency.¶ It should be noted here that
the call of critical approaches for looking at the agency of non-state actors should not be viewed as allocating tasks to preconceived agents. Rather, critical
approaches aim to empower nonstate actors (who may or may not be aware of their own potential to make a change) to
constitute themselves as agents of security to meet this broadened agenda. Nor should it be taken to
suggest that all non-state actors’ practices are emancipatory.¶ Then, paying more attention to the agency of non-state
actors will enable students of security to see how, in the absence of interest at the governmental level (as is the case with the Middle East), nonstate actors could imagine, create and nurture community-building projects and could help in getting
state-level actors interested in the formation of a security community. It should, however, be noted that not all nonstate actors are community-minded – just as not all governments are sceptical of the virtues of community building. Indeed, looking at the agency
of nonstate actors is also useful because it enables one to see how non-state actors could stall
community-building projects.¶ In the Middle East, women’s movements and networks have been
cooperating across borders from the beginning of the Intifada onwards. Women’s agency, however,
is often left unnoticed, because, as Simona Sharoni (1996) has argued, the eyes of security analysts are often
focused on the state as the primary security agent. However, the Intifada was marked by Palestinian and Israeli-Jewish women’s
adoption of non-zerosum, non-military practices that questioned and challenged the boundaries of their political communities as they dared to explore new
forms of political communities (Mikhail-Ashrawi 1995; Sharoni 1995). Such activities included organising a conference entitled ‘Give Peace a Chance – Women
Speak Out’ in Brussels in May 1989. The first of its kind, the conference brought together about 50 Israeli and Palestinian women from the West Bank and Gaza
Strip together with PLO representatives to discuss the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The follow-up event took place in Jerusalem in December 1989 where
representatives of the Palestinian Women’s Working Committees and the Israeli Women and Peace Coalition organised a women’s day for peace which,
Sharoni noted, ‘culminated in a march of 6,000 women from West to East Jerusalem under the banner “Women Go For Peace”’ (Sharoni 1996: 107). Aside
from such events that were designed to alert public opinion of the unacceptability of the Israel/Palestine impasse as well as finding alternative ways of
peacemaking, women also undertook direct action to alleviate the condition of Palestinians whose predicament had been worsening since the beginning of the
Intifada (Mikhail-Ashrawi 1995). In this process, they were aided by their Western European counterparts who provided financial, institutional as well as moral
support. In
sum, women’s agency helped make the Intifada possible on the part of the Palestinian
women, whilst their Israeli- Jewish counterparts helped enhance its impact by way of questioning the
moral boundaries of the Israeli state.¶ The Intifada is also exemplary of how non-state actors could
initiate processes of resistance that might later be taken up by policy-makers. The Intifada began in
1987 as a spontaneous grassroots reaction to the Israeli occupation and took the PLO leadership
(along with others) by surprise.¶ It was only some weeks into the Intifada that the PLO leadership
embraced it and put its material resources into furthering the cause, which was making occupation as difficult as
possible for the Israeli government. Although not much came out of the Intifada in terms of an agree- ment with Israel on issues of concern for the people
living in the occupied territories, the
process generated a momentum that culminated in 1988 with the PLO’s
denouncement of terrorism. The change in the PLO’s policies, in turn, enabled the 1993 Oslo Accords,
which was also initiated by non-state actors, in this case intellectuals (Sharoni 1996). The point here is that it has been a
combination of top-down and bottom-up politics that has been at the heart of political change, be it the 1989 revolutions
in Eastern Europe, or Intifada in Israel/Palestine. ¶ Emphasising the roles some non-state actors, notably women’s networks, have played as agents of security is
not to suggest that all non-state agents’ practices are non-zero-sum and/or non-violent. For instance, there are the cases of Islamist movements such as FIS
(the Islamic Salvation Front) in Algeria and Hamas in the Occupied Territories that have resorted, over the years, to violent practices as a part of their strategies
that were designed to capture the state mechanism. However, although they may constitute threats to security in the Middle East in view of their violent
practices, what needs to be remembered is that both FIS and Hamas function as providers for security for some peoples in the Middle East – those who are
often neglected by their own states (Esposito 1995: 162–83). In other words, some Islamist movements do not only offer a sense of identity, but also propose
alternative practices and provide tangible economic, social and moral support to their members. However, the treatment women receive under the mastery of
such Islamist movements serves to remind us that there clearly are problems involved in an unthinking reliance on non-governmental actors as agents for
peace and security or an uncritical adoption of their agendas. ¶ Middle Eastern history is replete with examples of non-state actors resorting to violence and/or
adopting zero-sum practices in the attempt to capture state power. In fact, it is often such violent practices of nonstate actors (that is, terrorism or
assassination of political leaders) that are mentioned in security analyses. Nevertheless, the fact that not all non-state actors are fit to take up the role of
serving as agents of emancipatory change should not lead one to downplay the significant work some have done in the past, and could do in the future. After
all, not all states serve as providers of security; yet Security Studies continues to rely on their agency.¶ Then,
in order to be able to fulfil
the role allocated to them by critical approaches, non-state actors should be encouraged to move
away from traditional forms of resistance that are based on exclusionist identities, that solely aim to
capture state power or that adopt zero-sum thinking and practices. Arguably, this is a task for
intellectuals to fulfil. This is not to suggest that intellectuals should direct or instruct non-state actors. As Wyn Jones (1999: 162) has noted, the
relationship between intellectuals and social movements is based on reciprocity. The 1980s’ peace movements, for instance, are
good examples of intellectuals getting involved with social movements in bringing about change – in
this case, the end of the Cold War (Galtung 1995; Kaldor 1997). The relationship between intellectuals and
peace movements in Europe was a mutually interactive one in that the intellectuals encouraged and
led whilst drawing strength from these movements.¶ Emphasising the mutually interactive
relationship between intellectuals and social movements should not be taken to suggest that to
make a change, intellectuals should get directly involved in political action. They could also intervene
to provide a critique of the existing situation, what future outcomes may result if necessary action is
not taken at present, and by pointing to potential for change immanent in world politics. Students of
security could help create the political space that would enable the emergence of a Gorbachev, by
presenting such critique. It should, however, be emphasised that such thinking should be anchored in the potential immanent in world politics. In
other words, intellectuals should be informed by the practices of social movements themselves (as was the case
in Europe in the 1980s). The hope is that non-state actors such as social movements and intellectuals (who may or
may not be aware of their potential to make a change) may constitute themselves as agents when presented with an alternative reading
of their situation.¶ Lastly, intellectuals could make a change even if they limit their practices to thinking,
writing and self-reflection. During the Cold War very few security analysts were conscious and open about the impact their thinking and writing
could make. Richard Wyn Jones cites the example of Edward N. Luttwak as one such exception who admitted that ‘strategy is not a neutral pursuit and its only
purpose is to strengthen one’s own side in the contention of nations’ (cited in Wyn Jones 1999: 150). Still, such explicit acknowledgement of the political
dimension of strategic thinking was rare during the Cold War. On the contrary, students
of International Relations in general and
Security Studies in particular have been characterised by limited or no self-reflection as to the
potential impact their research could make on the subject of research (Wyn Jones 1999: 148–50).¶ To go back to the
argument made above about the role of the intellectual as an agent of security and the mutually constitutive relationship between theory and practice,
students of critical approaches to security could function as agents of security by way of reflecting
upon the practical implications of their own thinking and writing. Self-reflection becomes crucial when the relationship
between theory and practice is conceptualised as one of mutual constitution. State-centric approaches to security do not simply
reflect a reality ‘out there’ but help reinforce statism. Although it may be true that the consequences of these scholarly activities
are sometimes ‘unintended’, there nevertheless should be a sense of selfreflection on the part of scholars upon the potential consequences of their research
and teaching. The point here is that critical
approaches that show an awareness of the socially constructed
character of ‘reality’ need not stop short of reflecting upon the constitutive relationship between
theory and practice when they themselves are theorising about security. Otherwise, they run the risk
of constituting ‘threats to the future’ (Kubálková 1998: 193–201).
All their spillover claims link harder to them—it’s more pragmatic to reflect on social
dynamics than pretend we can reform politics from the campus, even if there’s no
exact blueprint—this is also a DA to the perm
Pepper 10 Prof Geography Oxford, Utopianism and Environmentalism, Environmental Politics, 14:1, 322, SAGE
Conclusion
Academic and activist opinion nonetheless frequently argues that
Utopian endeavour is necessary
for radical environmentalism and for related movements such
Utopianism is important within these movements to inspire hope and
provide 'transgressive' spaces , conceptual and real, in which to experiment within alternative paradigms . To
be truly transgressive, rather than lapsing into reactionary fantasy , ecotopias need to emphasise
as feminism, anarchism and socialism.
heuristic spaces and processes rather than laying down blueprints , and must be rooted in existing social and economic relations
rather than being merely a form of abstraction unrelated to the processes and situations operating in today's 'real' world.
Deep ecological and bioregional
literature, for instance, can seem regressively removed from today's world. Anti-modernism is evident, for instance, in
the form of future primitivism and the predilection for small-scale 're-embedded' societies echoing "traditional cultures'. Blueprinting is also
suggested by the strong metanarratives driven by (ecological) science. There is a remarkable
consensus amongst ideologically diverse ecotopian perspectives about what should be in
ecotopia, leaving relatively little as provisional and reflexive. Additionally, idealism in the negative sense is often rife in
This paper suggests that by these criteria, the transgressiveness of ecotopianism is ambiguous and limited.
ecotopianism.
However, idealism pervades reformist as well as radical environmentalism , and the principles behind ecological
modernisation - the much-favoured
mainstream policy discourse
about the environment —
premises that can be described as 'Utopian* in the pejorative sense
are founded on
used by Marxists.
That is, they do not
adequately and accurately take into account the socioeconomic dynamics of the capitalist system
they are meant to reform . Thus they fail to recognise that social-democratic and 'third way'
attempts to realise an environmentally sound, humane, inclusive and egalitarian capitalism are
ultimately headed for failure .
Notwithstanding these limitations of ecotopianism, given that the environmental problems featured in dystopian fiction for over a century seem increasingly to be materialising, it may be that
we will soon be clutching at ecotopias as beacons affirming Bloch's 'principle of hope* (1986).
And what of those who, despite these deepening environmental problems, still maintain that 'ecotopia' is Utopian fantasy in the worst sense,
while considering their reformist visions to be pragmatic and attainable? These "hard-nosed
realists*, as Terry Eagleton (2000, p.33)
ironically calls them, "who behave as though chocolate chip cookies and the IMF will be with us in
another 3000 years time", should realise that although the future may or may not be pleasant:
to deny that it will be quite different in the manner of post-histoire philosophising, is to offend
against the very realism on which such theorists usually pride themselves. To claim that human
affairs might feasibly be much improved is an eminently realistic proposition .
Moving toward CRITIQUE of structures INSTEAD of production fixes is best EVEN IF
they win some truth claims
Zehner 12
Green illusions,
Ozzie Zehner is the author of Green Illusions and a visiting scholar at the University of
California, Berkeley. His recent publications include public science pieces in Christian Science
Monitor, The American Scholar, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, The Humanist, The Futurist,
and Women’s Studies Quarterly. He has appeared on PBS, BBC, CNN, MSNBC, and regularly
guest lectures at universities
Since this book represents a critique of alternative energy, it may seem an unlikely manual for alternative-energy proponents. But it is. Building
alternative-energy infrastructure atop America's present economic, social, and cultural landscape is akin
to building a sandcastle in a rising tide. A taller sand castle won't help. The first steps in this book sketch a partial
blueprint for making alternative-energy technologies relevant into the future. Technological development alone will do little to
bring about a durable alternative-energy future. Reimagining the social conditions of energy use
will. Ultimately, we have to ask ourselves if environmentalists should be involved in the business of energy
production (of any sort) while so many more important issues remain vastly underserved. Over the next several decades, it's
quite likely that our power production cocktail will look very much like the mix of today, save for a few
adjustments in market share. Wind and biofuel generation will become more prevalent and the stage is set for nuclear power as well, despite
recent catastrophes. Nevertheless, these changes will occur over time—they will seem slow. Every power
production mechanism has side effects and limitations of its own, and a global shift to new forms
of power production simply means that humanity will have to deal with new side effects and
limitations in the future. This simple observation seems to have gotten lost in the cheerleading for alternativeenergy technologies. The mainstream environmental movement should throw down the green energy pom-poms and pull
out the bifocals. It is entirely reasonable for environmentalists to criticize fossil-fuel industries for the harms they instigate. It is, however,
entirely unreasonable for environmentalists to become spokespeople for the next round of ecological
disaster machines such as solar cells, ethanol, and battery-powered vehicles. Environmentalists pack the largest punch
when they instead act as power production watchdogs (regardless of the production method); past environmentalist
pressures have cleaned the air and made previously polluted waterways swimmable. This watchdog role will be vital in the future
as biofuels, nuclear plants, alternative fossil fuels, solar cells, and other energy technologies import new harms
and risks. Beyond a watchdog role, environmentalists yield the greatest progress when
addressing our social fundamentals, whether by supporting human rights, cleaning up elections, imagining new economic structures,
strengthening communities, revitalizing democracy, or imagining more prosperous modes of consumption. Unsustainable energy use is a
symptom of suboptimal social conditions. Energy use will come down when we improve these conditions: consumption patterns
that lead to debt and depression; commercials aimed at children; lonely seniors stuck in their homes because they can no longer drive; kids
left to fend for themselves when it comes to mobility or sexuality; corporate influence trumping citizen representation; measurements of the nation's health in
dollars rather than well-being; a media concerned with advertising over insight, and so on. These may not seem like environmental issues, and they certainly don't
they are the most important energy and environmental issues
seem like energy policy issues, but in reality
of our day.
Addressing them won't require sacrifice or social engineering. They are congruent with the interests of many Americans, which will make them easier to initiate and
. They are entirely realistic (as many are already enjoyed by other societies on the planet). They are, in a sense, boring. In fact,
fulfill
the only thing shocking about them is the degree to which they have been underappreciated in
contemporary environmental thought, sidelined in the media, and ignored by politicians. Even though these first steps don't
represent a grand solution, they are necessary preconditions if we intend to democratically
design and implement more comprehensive solutions in the future. Ultimately, clean energy is less energy.
Alternative-energy alchemy has so greatly consumed the public imagination over recent decades that the
most vital and durable environmental essentials remain overlooked and underfunded. Today energy executives hiss silvertongued fairy tales about clean-coal technologies, safe nuclear reactors, and renewable sources such as solar,
wind, and biofuels to quench growing energy demands, fostering the illusion that we can maintain our expanding
patterns of energy consumption without consequence. At the same time, they claim that these
technologies can be made environmentally, socially, and politically sound while ignoring a history that has
repeatedly shown otherwise. If we give in to accepting their conceptual frames, such as those pitting
production versus production , or if we parrot their terms
such as clean coal, bridge fuels, peacetime atom, smart growth, and
, then we have already lost. We forfeit our right to critical democratic engagement and
instead allow the powers that be to regurgitate their own terms of debate into our open upstretched mouths.
Alternative-energy technologies don't clean the air. They don't clean the water. They don't protect wildlife. They don't support
human rights. They don't improve neighborhoods. They don't strengthen democracy. They don't regulate themselves. They don't lower
atmospheric carbon dioxide. They don't reduce consumption. They produce power. That power can lead to durable
benefits, but only given the appropriate context. Ultimately, it's not a question of whether American society possesses the
clean energy
technological prowess to construct an alternative-energy nation. The real question is the reverse. Do we have a society capable of being powered by alternative
Future environmentalists will drop solar, wind, biofuels,
nuclear, hydrogen, and hybrids to focus instead on women's rights, consumer culture, walkable
neighborhoods, military spending, zoning, health care, wealth disparities, citizen governance, economic reform, and democratic
institutions. As environmentalists and global citizens, it's not enough to say that we would benefit by shifting our focus. Our very relevance
depends on it.
energy? The answer today is clearly no. But we can change that.
at: cede the political
Focusing on policy first absolves individual contribution and cedes the political---ensures their
impacts are inevitable and is an independent reason to vote negative
Trennel 6 Paul, Ph.D of the University of Wales, Department of International Politics, “The (Im)possibility
of Environmental Security”
Thirdly, it can be claimed that the
security mindset channels the obligation to address environmental issues in an
unwelcome direction. Due to terms laid out by the social contract “security is essentially something done by
states…there is no obligation or moral duty on citizens to provide security…In this sense security is
essentially empty…it is not a sign of positive political initiative” (Dalby, 1992a: 97-8). Therefore, casting an issue in
security terms puts the onus of action onto governments, creating a docile citizenry who await
instructions from their leaders as to the next step rather than taking it on their own backs to do something about
pressing concerns. This is unwelcome because governments have limited incentives to act on environmental
issues, as their collectively poor track record to date reveals. Paul Brown notes that “at present in all the large democracies
the short-term politics of winning the next election and the need to increase the annual profits of
industry rule over the long term interests of the human race” (1996: 10; see also Booth 1991: 348). There is no
clearer evidence for this than the grounds on which George W. Bush explained his decision to opt out of
the Kyoto Protocol: “I told the world I thought that Kyoto was a lousy deal for America…It meant that we had to cut emissions below
1990 levels, which would have meant I would have presided over massive layoffs and economic destruction” (BBC: 2006). The short-term
focus of government elites and the long-term nature of the environmental threat means that any policy
which puts the burden of responsibility on the shoulders of governments should be viewed with
scepticism as this may have the effect of breeding inaction on environmental issues. Moreover, governmental
legislation may not be the most appropriate route to solving the problem at hand. If environmental vulnerabilities are to be
effectively addressed “[t]he routine behaviour of practically everyone must be altered” (Deudney, 1990: 465). In the
case of the environmental sector it is not large scale and intentional assaults but the cumulative effect of small and seemingly innocent acts
such as driving a car or taking a flight that do the damage. Exactly how a legislative response could serve to alter “non-criminal apolitical acts by
individuals” (Prins, 1993: 176- 177) which lie beyond established categories of the political is unclear. Andrew Dobson has covered this ground
in claiming that the
solution to environmental hazards lies not in piecemeal legislation but in the fostering of
a culture of ‘ecological citizenship’. His call is made on the grounds that legislating on the environment, forcing people
to adapt, does not reach the necessary depth to produce long-lasting change, but merely plugs the problem temporarily. He
cites Italian ‘car-free city’ days as evidence of this, noting that whilst selected cities may be free of
automobiles on a single predetermined day, numbers return to previous levels immediately thereafter
(2003: 3). This indicates that the deeper message underlying the policy is not being successfully conveyed. Enduring environmental
solutions are likely to emerge only when citizens choose to change their ways because they understand that there
exists a pressing need to do so. Such a realisation is unlikely to be prompted by the top-down, state oriented
focus supplied by a security framework.
Only risk of a link turn—tech fixes create scientific authoritarianism—only the alt
enables deliberative citizenship
Byrne and Toly 6
http://seedconsortium.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/45925604/Byrne_etal.pdf
Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Established in 1980 at the University of Delaware, the
Center is a leading institution for interdisciplinary graduate education, research, and advocacy in energy
and environmental policy. CEEP is led by Dr. John Byrne, Distinguished Professor of Energy & Climate
Policy at the University. For his contributions to Working Group III of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) since 1992, he shares the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the Panel's authors and
review editors.
The Technique of Modern Energy Governance
While moderns usually declare strong preferences for democratic governance, their
preoccupation with technique and efficiency may preclude the achievement of such ambitions, or
require changes in the meaning of democracy that are so extensive as to raise doubts about its
coherence. A veneration of technical monuments typifies both conventional and sustainable energy
strategies and reflects a shared belief in technological advance as commensurate with, and even a
cause of, contemporary social progress. The modern proclivity to search for human destiny in the
march of scientific discovery has led some to warn of a technological politics (Ellul, 1997a, 1997b,
1997c; Winner, 1977, 1986) in which social values are sublimated by the objective norms of
technical success (e.g., the celebration of efficiency in all things). In this politics, technology and its use
become the end of society and members have the responsibility, as rational beings, to learn from the
technical milieu what should be valorized. An encroaching autonomy of technique (Ellul, 1964: 133 –
146) replaces critical thinking about modern life with an awed sense and acceptance of its
inevitable reality. From dreams of endless energy provided by Green Fossil Fuels and Giant
Power, to the utopian promises of Big Wind and Small-Is-Beautiful Solar, technical excellence powers
modernist energy transition s. Refinement of technical accomplishments and/or technological
revolutions are conceived to drive social transformation, despite the unending inequality that
has accompanied two centuries of modern energy’s social project. As one observer has noted
(Roszak, 1972: 479), the “great paradox of the technological mystique [is] its remarkable ability to
grow strong by chronic failure. While the treachery of our technology may provide many occasions
for disenchantment, the sum total of failures has the effect of increasing dependence on technical
expertise.” Even the vanguard of a sustainable energy transition seems swayed by the
magnetism of technical acumen, leading to the result that enthusiast and critic alike embrace a
strain of technological politics. Necessarily, the elevation of technique in both strategies to
authoritative status vests political power in experts most familiar with energy technologies and
systems. Such a governance structure derives from the democratic-authoritarian bargain
described by Mumford (1964). Governance “by the people” consists of authorizing qualified
experts to assist political leaders in finding the efficient, modern solution. In the narratives of both
conventional and sustainable energy, citizens are empowered to consume the products of the
energy regime while largely divesting themselves of authority to govern its operations. Indeed,
systems of the sort envisioned by advocates of conventional and sustainable strategies are not
governable in a democratic manner. Mumford suggests (1964: 1) that the classical idea of democracy
includes “a group of related ideas and practices... [including] communal self-government... unimpeded
access to the common store of knowledge, protection against arbitrary external controls, and a sense of
moral responsibility for behavior that affects the whole community.” Modern conventional and
sustainable energy strategies invest in external controls, authorize abstract, depersonalized
interactions of suppliers and demanders, and celebrate economic growth and technical excellence
without end. Their social consequences are relegated in both paradigms to the status of problemsto-be-solved, rather than being recognized as the emblems of modernist politics. As a result,
modernist democratic practice becomes imbued with an authoritarian quality, which
“deliberately eliminates the whole human personality, ignores the historic process, [and] overplays
the role of abstract intelligence, and makes control over physical nature, ultimately control over man
himself, the chief purpose of existence” (Mumford, 1964: 5). Meaningful democratic governance
is willingly sacrificed for an energy transition that is regarded as scientifically and technologically
unassailable.
at: energy not key
Energy is the crux of neolib—need to denaturalize their assumptions about
sustainability
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 13-14, ldg)
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
capitalisin 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 financial-economic 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 new and creative forms of capitalist governance of social conflicts.
What is clear is that, when discussing solutions to the energy crisis, economic¶ liberal ideologues
are quite open-minded. Rather than sticking to any one technology¶ to meet capitalisms everincreasing 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. Whether a new postpetrol regime crystalizes 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.
at: permutation
The perm fails—ad hoc reconfiguration of your relation to consumptive environmental
practices undermines critical thinking—the alt alone is the only conceptually coherent
approach—this also proves they cede the political through expertism and the logic of
fungibility and competition
Glover et al 2006 – *Policy Fellow at the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy, University of
Delaware, **Directs the Urban Studies and Wheaton in Chicago programs, selected to the Chicago
Council on Global Affairs Emerging Leaders Program for 2011-2013, ***2007 Nobel Peace Prize winner,
Distinguished Professor of Energy & Climate Policy at the University of Delaware, Head of the Center for
Energy and Environmental Policy (Leigh Glover, Noah Toly, John Byrne, “Energy as a Social Project:
Recovering a Discourse”, in “Transforming Power: Energy, Environment, and Society in Conflict”, p. 1-32,
http://www.ceep.udel.edu/energy/publications/2006_es_energy_as_a_social_project.pdf, WEA)
the current energy¶ discourse appears impoverished. Many of its leading
voices proclaim great¶ things will issue from the adoption of their strategies (conventional or sustainable),
yet inquiry into the social and political-economic interests that¶ power promises of greatness by either camp is
mostly absent. In reply, some¶ participants may petition for a progressive middle ground, acknowledging¶
that energy regimes are only part of larger institutional formations that organize political and economic power. It is true that
the political economy of¶ energy is only a component of systemic power in the modern order, but it¶ hardly follows that pragmatism
toward energy policy and politics is the reasonable social response. Advocates of energy strategies associate their
When measured in social and political-economic terms,
contributions with distinct pathways of social development and define the choice ¶ of energy strategy as central to the types of future(s) that can unfold. Therefore,
acceptance of appeals for pragmatist assessments of energy proposals,¶ that hardly envision
incremental consequences, would indulge a form of self-deception rather than represent a
serious discursive position.¶ An extensive social analysis of energy regimes of the type that Mumford¶ (1934; 1966; 1970), Nye (1999), and
others have envisioned is overdue. The¶ preceding examinations of the two strategies potentiate conclusions about ¶ both the governance ideology and the political
economy of modernist energy transitions that, by design, leave modernism undisturbed (except, perhaps, for its environmental performance). ¶ The Technique of
While moderns usually declare strong preferences for democratic governance, their
preoccupation with technique and efficiency may preclude the¶ achievement of such ambitions, or require changes in
the meaning of democracy that are so extensive as to raise doubts about its coherence. A veneration¶ of technical
monuments typifies both conventional and sustainable energy¶ strategies and reflects a shared
belief in technological advance as commensurate with, and even a cause of, contemporary social progress. The
Modern Energy Governance¶
modern¶ proclivity to search for human destiny in the march of scientific discovery ¶ has led some to warn of a technological politics (Ellul, 1997a, 1997b, 1997c; ¶
social values are sublimated by the objective¶ norms of technical success (e.g., the
celebration of efficiency in all things). In¶ this politics, technology and its use become the end of society and
members¶ have the responsibility, as rational beings, to learn from the technical milieu¶ what should be
valorized. An encroaching autonomy of technique (Ellul,¶ 1964: 133 – 146) replaces critical thinking about
modern life with an awed¶ sense and acceptance of its inevitable reality.¶ From dreams of endless energy provided by Green Fossil
Winner, 1977, 1986) in which
Fuels and Giant¶ Power, to the utopian promises of Big Wind and Small-Is-Beautiful Solar,¶ technical excellence powers modernist energy transitions. Refinement of
technical accomplishments and/or technological revolutions are conceived to¶ drive social transformation,
despite the unending inequality that has accompanied two centuries of modern energy’s social
project. As one observer has¶ noted (Roszak, 1972: 479), the “great paradox of the technological mystique ¶ [is] its remarkable ability to grow strong by chronic
failure. While the treachery of our technology may provide many occasions for disenchantment, the ¶ sum total of failures has the effect of increasing dependence
Even the vanguard of a sustainable energy transition seems swayed¶ by the
magnetism of technical acumen, leading to the result that enthusiast¶ and critic alike embrace
a strain of technological politics.¶ Necessarily, the elevation of technique in both strategies to
authoritative¶ status vests political power in experts most familiar with energy technologies ¶ and systems. Such a governance
on technical¶ expertise.”
structure derives from the democratic-authoritarian bargain described by Mumford (1964). Governance “by
the people”¶ consists of authorizing qualified experts to assist political leaders in finding¶ the efficient,
modern solution. In the narratives of both conventional and¶ sustainable energy, citizens are empowered to consume the
products of the¶ energy regime while largely divesting themselves of authority to govern its¶ operations.¶
Indeed, systems of the sort envisioned by advocates of conventional and¶ sustainable strategies are not governable in a
democratic manner. Mumford¶ suggests (1964: 1) that the classical idea of democracy includes “a group of¶ related ideas and practices... [including]
communal self-government... unimpeded access to the common store of knowledge, protection against arbitrary external controls, and a sense of moral
energy¶ strategies invest in external
controls, authorize abstract, depersonalized interactions of suppliers and demanders, and celebrate
economic growth and¶ technical excellence without end. Their social consequences are relegated in¶ both
paradigms to the status of problems-to-be-solved, rather than being¶ recognized as the emblems of modernist
politics. As a result, modernist democratic practice becomes imbued with an authoritarian quality,
responsibility for behavior that¶ affects the whole community.” Modern conventional and sustainable
which “deliberately eliminates the whole human personality, ignores the historic process, ¶ [and] overplays the role of abstract intelligence, and makes control over¶
physical nature, ultimately control over man himself, the chief purpose of ¶ existence” (Mumford, 1964: 5). Meaningful democratic governance is willingly sacrificed
for an energy transition that is regarded as scientifically¶ and technologically unassailable.¶ Triumphant Energy Capitalism¶
Where the power to
govern is not vested in experts, it is given over to¶ market forces in both the conventional and sustainable energy
programs. Just¶ as the transitions envisioned in the two paradigms are alike in their technical¶ preoccupations and governance ideologies, they are also alike in
their political-economic commitments. Specifically, modernist energy transitions operate in, and evolve from, a capitalist political economy. Huber and Mills (2005)¶
convinced that conventional techno-fixes will expand productivity and¶ increase prosperity to levels that will
erase the current distortions of inequality. Expectably, conventional energy’s aspirations present little threat to the¶ current energy political economy;
indeed, the aim is to reinforce and deepen ¶ the current infrastructure in order to minimize costs and sustain economic ¶ growth. The existing alliance of
government and business interests is judged¶ to have produced social success and, with a few
environmental correctives¶ that amount to the modernization of ecosystem performance, the conventional energy project fervently
anticipates an intact energy capitalism that¶ willingly invests in its own perpetuation.¶ While advocates of
are
sustainable energy openly doubt the viability of the ¶ conventional program and emphasize its social and environmental failings, ¶ there is little indication that
The modern
cornucopia will be powered by the profits of a¶ redirected market economy that diffuses
technologies whose energy sources¶ are available to all and are found everywhere. The sustainable energy project,¶ according to its architects,
capitalist organization of the energy system is¶ faulted or would be significantly changed with the ascendance of a renewables-based regime.
aims to harness nature’s ‘services’ with technologies and distributed generation designs that can sustain the same impulses of¶ growth and consumption that
Neither its corporate character, nor the class interests that propel¶
capitalism’s advance, are seriously questioned. The only glaring difference¶ with the conventional energy regime is the effort to modernize social
underpin the social project of conventional ¶ energy.
relations with nature.¶ In sum, conventional and sustainable energy strategies are mostly quiet ¶ about matters of concentration of wealth and privilege that are the
legacy of¶ energy capitalism, although both are vocal about support for changes consistent with middle class values and lifestyles. We are left to wonder why such¶
steadfast reluctance exists to engaging problems of political economy. Does ¶ it stem from a lack of understanding? Is it reflective of a measure of satisfaction with
the existing order? Or is there a fear that critical inquiry might¶ jeopardize strategic victories or diminish the central role of ‘energy’ in the ¶ movement’s quest?¶
Transition without Change: A Failing Discourse¶ After more than thirty years of contested discourse, the major ‘energy ¶ futures’ under consideration appear
committed to the prevailing systems of¶ governance and political economy that animate late modernity. The new ¶ technologies—conventional or sustainable—that
will govern the energy sector¶ and accumulate capital might be described as centaurian technics ¶ 21¶ in which¶ the crude efficiency of the fossil energy era is
bestowed a new sheen by high¶ technologies and modernized ecosystems: capitalism without smoky cities,¶ contaminated industrial landscapes, or an excessively
carbonized atmosphere.¶ Emerging energy solutions are poised to realize a postmodern transition ¶ (Roosevelt, 2002), but their shared commitment to capitalist
political economy¶ and the democratic-authoritarian bargain lend credence to Jameson’s assessment (1991) of postmodernism as the “cultural logic of late
Differences in ecological commitments between conventional and sustainable energy strategies still demarcate
a battleground that, we agree, is¶ important—even fundamental. But so also are the common aspirations of the¶ two camps. Each
sublimates social considerations in favor of a politics of ¶ more-is-better, and each regards the advance of energy
capitalism.Ӧ
capitalism with a¶ sense of inevitability and triumph. Conventional and sustainable energy ¶ visions equally presume that a social order governed by a ‘democratic’
ideal¶ of cornucopia, marked by economic plenty, and delivered by technological ¶ marvels will eventually lance the wounds of poverty and inequality and start ¶ the
Consequently, silence on questions of governance and social justice
healing process.
¶
is studiously observed by both
proposals. Likewise, both agree¶ to, or demur on, the question of capitalism’s sustainability.¶ 22¶ Nothing is said¶ on these questions because, apparently, nothing
needs to be.¶ If the above assessment of the contemporary energy discourse is correct, ¶ then the enterprise is not at a crossroad; rather, it has reached a point of ¶
inquiry into energy as a social¶ project will require the recovery of a critical
voice that can interrogate, rather¶ than concede, the discourse’s current moorings in technological
politics and¶ capitalist political economy. A fertile direction in this regard is to investigate¶ an energy-society order in which energy
acquiescence to things as they are. Building an
systems evolve in response to social¶ values and goals, and not simply according to the dictates of technique,¶
prices, or capital. Initial interest in renewable energy by the sustainability¶ camp no doubt emanated, at least in part, from the fact that its fuel price is¶ nonexistent and that capitalization of systems to collect renewable sources¶ need not involve the extravagant, convoluted corporate forms that manage ¶ the
misunderstood, in the attraction of renewable energy have been the
social origins of such emergent¶ possibilities. Communities exist today who address energy needs
outside the¶ global marketplace: they are often rural in character and organize energy¶ services that are immune to oil price spikes and do not
conventional energy regime. But forgotten, or
require water heated to¶ between 550º and 900º Fahrenheit (300º and 500º Celsius) (the typical temperatures in nuclear reactors). No energy bills are sent or paid
sustainability
is embodied in the¶ life-world of these communities, unlike the modern strategy that hopes to¶
design sustainability into its technology and economics so as not to seriously change its otherwise
unsustainable way of life.¶ Predictably, modern society will underscore its wealth and technical acumen as evidence of its superiority over
and governance¶ of the serving infrastructure is based on local (rather than distantly developed ¶ professional) knowledge. Needless to say,
alternatives. But smugness cannot¶ overcome the fact that energy-society relations are evident in which the bribe ¶ of democratic-authoritarianism and the
the democraticauthoritarian bargain and Western capitalism should be rejected:¶ God forbid that India should ever take to industrialization after the
manner of the¶ West. The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom (England) is today ¶ keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of
300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts. Unless the
unsustainability of energy capitalism¶ are successfully declined. In 1928, Mahatma Gandhi (cited in Gandhi, 1965: ¶ 52) explained why
capitalists of¶ India help to avert that tragedy by becoming trustees of the welfare of the masses and ¶ by devoting their talents not to amassing wealth for
themselves but to the service of¶ the masses in an altruistic spirit, they will end either by destroying the masses or¶ being destroyed by them.¶ As Gandhi’s remark
social inequality resides not in access to electric¶ light and other accoutrements of modernity, but in a world order
that places¶ efficiency and wealth above life-affirming ways of life. This is our social¶ problem, our energy
problem, our ecological problem, and, generally, our¶ political-economic problem.¶ The challenge of a social inquiry into energysociety relations awaits.
reveals,
Reconstructing unsustainable environmental practices to be sustainable is worse
De Angelis, East London political economy professor, 2009
(Massimo, “The tragedy of the capitalist commons”, December, http://turbulence.org.uk/turbulence5/capitalist-commons/, DOA: 7-2-12, ldg)
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.
Theoretical starting points are key—if their plan emerged from bad methodological
process you shouldn’t endorse it
Holleman 2012 – assistant professor of sociology at Amherst, PhD in sociology from the University of
Oregon (June, Hannah, sociology dissertation, University of Oregon, “Energy justice and foundations for
a sustainable sociology of energy”,
https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/12419/Holleman_oregon_0171A_104
10.pdf?sequence=1, WEA)
Problems associated with our energy regime are especially dramatic and represent ¶ one of the most formidable obstacles to realizing a society
that functions within ¶ ecological limits and free of oppression. Energy
studies thus provide an avenue in which ¶ the
problems of the system may be viewed through the lens of one of the limiting factors ¶ of social and ecological
change: our energy regime. This makes the critical sociology of ¶ energy a perfect site for more
inclusive theory that shines light on the workings of the ¶ system as a whole and the relationship
of its parts.¶ Recap: Energy justice and a sociology of energy for survival ¶ In 1988, Rosa, Machlis, and Keating called for renewed attention
to energy by ¶ sociologists given “that energy plays a crucial role, perhaps the crucial role, in the link ¶ between societies and their biophysical
environments” (155). They noted that energy is a ¶ persistent predicament for all societies, a “chronic problem that requires continuous ¶
attention and that, if there is a sustained lapse in attention, can turn into a crisis” (168). ¶ Climate change, representing precisely the kind of
crisis scholars have anticipated for ¶ over 100 years, though they were treated as so many Cassandras for saying so, indeed has ¶ renewed
scholarly attention to energy. However, sociology as a discipline still pays little ¶ attention to energy. Several explanations for this were offered
throughout this study. ¶ These include persistent disciplinary boundaries, specialization within sociology, and the ¶ lack of penetration of
ecological concerns into the discipline as a whole. Other reasons ¶ are related to the blinders imposed by capitalist ideology, including the
pervasiveness of ¶ modernization perspectives in social science, economic reductionism, and the related ¶ denial of social inequality and
ecological degradation as inherent and functional aspects ¶ of the capitalist system. Moreover, as many critical scholars have pointed out, the ¶
experiences and insights of too many people are left out of our theoretical developments. ¶ Our “analytical tools carry sociological bias, that is
to say, as long as its constructs are ¶ formulated in the absence of inputs by class, race, and sex-gendered others” (Salleh 2010, ¶ 215).
Perspectives are too often missing from people of the global South, poor people, ¶ people of color, women, lgbt people, and other historically
oppressed and disenfranchised ¶ social groups. The experience of other countries, like Cuba, which has defied capitalist ¶ logic in so many ways,
especially while experiencing its own version of peak oil, is rarely ¶ treated seriously in the mainstream literature (Hernández 2002). This
reflects that fact ¶ that social science has a long way to go toward becoming a people’s science with a basis ¶ in ecology (Lewontin and Levins
2007, 98).¶ Without
theoretical starting points that make the invisible visible, it is difficult for ¶
empirical work to proceed that is focused on the interface between social inequalities and ¶ ecological depredations, or energy
injustices, of the current energy regime. Therefore, ¶ much
contemporary work on energy, especially that
beholden to the dominate ideology, ¶ such as modernization perspectives, is neither truly sociological nor
ecological. It ¶ therefore does not offer a good starting point for energy studies. ¶ The theoretical
perspective offered here builds on the work of environmental ¶ sociologists such as feminist ecologists, environmental justice scholars, and
energy ¶ scholars, suggesting these have much to offer energy scholars by way of theoretical ¶ starting points. It also builds on ecological theory
through the case study of Ecuador and ¶ includes insights from my own research in Cuba. The point in this thesis is to put these ¶ developments
in a context in which they may complement one another so that they may ¶ inform the further development of the sociology of energy. This
context is the ecological ¶ rift theory of environmental sociology. This approach to the sociology of energy thus ¶ begins with the general
recognition that the social system inevitably “confronts natural ¶ systems and affects their ability to sustain life” (Clark and York 2005, 395-96).
The ¶ global patterns of ecological destruction, which threaten entire biospheric systems, and ¶ have resulted in species and cultural extinction
at unprecedented rates, “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” ¶ (Foster, Clark, and York 2010, 18). The ecohistorical
period of capitalism is defined by ¶ these depredations. “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” (18). The modern energy regime
is ¶ foundational to capitalist development, as the classical theorists already understood. ¶ Indeed, no energy regime in history can be
understood outside of the broader social ¶ contexts that drive energy developments and structure their outcomes. Energy
regimes ¶
reflect the social and ecological priorities of any society. And, in a dialectical manner, ¶ “key features of social
structure and change are conditioned by the availability of energy, ¶ the technical means for converting energy into usable forms, and the ways
energy is ¶ ultimately used” (Rosa, Machlis, and Keating 1988, 149). ¶ Moreover, from this perspective, it is understood that “the ecological rift
is, at ¶ bottom, the product of a social rift: the domination of human being by human being. The ¶ driving force is a society based on class,
inequality, and acquisition without end. At the ¶ global level it is represented by…the imperial division between…North and South, rich ¶ and
poor countries” (Foster, Clark, and York 2010, 47). This interface identified between ¶ ecological degradation, oppression, and inequality,
indicate the centrality of ¶ environmental justice within the broader ecological rift theory in environmental ¶ sociology. The further
development of the ecological rift framework, as presented in this ¶ study, illustrates the way in which the ecological rift is inherently bound
with the ¶ development of the modern race, gender, class, and colonial order of capitalism. ¶ Developed in this way, it both complements and
draws extensively on the work of ¶ feminist ecologists and other environmental justice scholars. Feminist ecologists have ¶ called for such
further theoretical integration in environmental sociology, citing the ¶ ecological rift framework as a basis for such a synthesis (Salleh 2010).
This study ¶ explicates the links between the ecological and social rift. On this basis, energy injustice, ¶ as the interface between social
inequalities and ecological depredations of the modern ¶ energy regime are made clear and the social limitations to facing energy crises, such
as ¶ climate change, are more recognizable. ¶ A sociology of energy concerned with energy justice works toward exposing the ¶ inequalities
embedded in the modern energy regime, and better explaining historical ¶ trends. For example, with an energy justice perspective it is much
easier to see why it is ¶ not the type of energy that is the problem, it is the role of energy in capitalist ¶ development that drives the abuses we
associate with oil, for example. ¶ Lacking an energy justice perspective, it took a long time for environmentalists ¶ and academics in wealthy
countries to see the social and ecological tragedies of biofuel ¶ developments, a popular ‘alternative’ energy. By the time reports emerged
documenting ¶ the routine ecological and social abuses in the biofuel industry, it already had received ¶ enough policy support to entrench its
growth as a fuel sector for the foreseeable future ¶ (Holleman 2012). Moreover, as York (2012) has made clear, ‘alternative energy’ does ¶ not
displace fossil fuel demand, and therefore cannot address climate change, but only ¶ adds to an ever-growing energy throughput with major
ecological and social ¶ consequences. The case of biofuel, as an example of this, proves that it is impossible to ¶ understand social energy
choices without linking critical ecology and social thought. It ¶ also is impossible to solve ecological crises, like global climate change, without ¶
addressing social inequality. As Anderson (1976) wrote, “the fact is that environmental ¶ degradation and social inequality are interrelated in
numerous ways and neither can be ¶ reversed without fundamentally altering the course of the other” (139).¶ Feminist ecologists and Marxist
scholars, among others, have linked ecological ¶ and social degradation to the immorality of capitalism, “which unabashedly celebrates ¶ wealth
while commonly ignoring poverty and environmental destruction generated in its ¶ wake” (Foster 2002, 88; see also Waring 1999 and Salleh
2010). This immorality “is in ¶ fact so institutionalized in society that it hardly appears immoral at all. Nevertheless all ¶ other moral standards
and bases of community are forced to give way before it” (88):¶ If land—is turned into mere real estate to be bought and ¶ sold by the highest
bidder, if the commons are enclosed and ¶ then exploited outside of any collective restraints, it is due ¶ to this reduction of everything to mere
economic value…In ¶ a society of this kind, people are forced to regard ¶ everything about them—the land, the rivers, the natural ¶ resources of
the earth, as well as their own labor power—as ¶ mere commodities, to be exploited for greater gain. (Foster ¶ 2002, 88) ¶ These scholars have
emphasized the need to transcend this system of institutionalized ¶ immorality, which treats the reproductive work of humans and nature as
value-less. This ¶ is in spite of the fact that capitalism is in the end dependent upon these labors. As noted ¶ above, the immorality of capitalism
is reflected in its economic reductionism wherein the ¶ bottom line is always the primary basis for assessing the worth any activity, person, or ¶
the environment.¶ Transcending this economic
reductionism requires methods of assessment based ¶
on completely different theoretical and methodological tools, reflecting an alternative¶ morality. This
requires replacing the focus on economic efficiency, with what Salleh ¶ (2010) calls “eco-sufficiency,” which emphasizes the long-term
provisioning of social ¶ and ecological reproduction and has nothing to do with exchange value, prices, or the ¶ bottom line of capital. Salleh
proposes the concept of metabolic value as new criteria for ¶ assessment. Metabolic
value refers to the “intrinsic
capacity for organic reproduction” of ¶ ecosystems and the regenerative labor done off capitalism’s accounting books
especially ¶ by women, peasants, etc. “in supporting ecological integrity and the social metabolism” ¶ (210, 212). Howard T. Odum’s work
in systems ecology reflects just such a system of ¶ assessment in terms of metabolic value, or
what Odum calls emergy. ¶ Odum developed emergy analysis as a framework for understanding
the economy ¶ in ecological accounting terms focused on the long-term provisioning necessary
for the ¶ reproduction of ecosystems and egalitarian social development. Emergy analysis
provides ¶ a basis for understanding economic processes, such as trade, individual commodities, and ¶ entire
societies, in terms of their ecological and social costs. This is accomplished by ¶ bringing the reproductive work of humans and ecosystems
under a common ecological, ¶ non-exchange oriented accounting framework, making this invisible embodied energy ¶ visible. ¶ In this study
emergy analysis is brought into social science as an alternative ¶ methodology and theoretical
framework for understanding ecological exchange and ¶ sustainability. Odum’s work provides a material basis
for a wider conception of ¶ sustainability, and its violation in the form of unequal exchange, connecting social and¶ ecological injustice.
Emergy helps make sense, in ecological terms, of the magnitude of ¶ the accumulated debts
associated with the ecological rift of capitalism and the modern ¶ energy regime. Emergy
analysis thus provides further empirical evidence of the enormity ¶ of the ecological debt owed
by the North to the South, and between extractive regions ¶ within countries and the wealthier areas they supply.
Odum’s work on Ecuador ¶ illustrates the strength of emergy analysis as an approach to making sense of energy ¶ flows and inequalities within
the modern energy regime. Emergy can help us evaluate ¶ and develop real energy alternatives, with ecology and equality as the criteria.
framework
2nc framework
Turns case and shuts down deliberation—implementation focus is reductionist and
displaces agency—our argument is that the framework for analysis is itself a political
choice
Adaman and Madra 2012 – *economic professor at Bogazici University in Istanbul, **PhD from UMassAmherst, economics professor (Fikret and Yahya, Bogazici University, “Understanding Neoliberalism as
Economization: The Case of the Ecology”, http://www.econ.boun.edu.tr/content/wp/EC2012_04.pdf,
WEA)
States as agents of economization
Neoliberal reason is therefore not simply about market expansion and the withdrawal of the ¶ welfare
state, but more broadly about reconfiguring the state and its functions so that the state ¶ governs its
subjects through a filter of economic incentives rather than direct coercion. In ¶ other words, supposed
subjects of the neoliberal state are not citizen-subjects with political and ¶ social rights, but rather
economic subjects who are supposed to comprehend (hence, ¶ calculative) and respond predictably
(hence, calculable) to economic incentives (and ¶ disincentives). There are mainly two ways in which states under the sway of
neoliberal reason ¶ aim to manipulate the conduct of their subjects. The first is through markets, or market-like ¶ incentivecompatible institutional mechanisms that economic experts design based on the ¶ behaviorist
assumption that economic agents respond predictably to economic (but not ¶ necessarily pecuniary)
incentives, to achieve certain discrete objectives. The second involves a ¶ revision of the way the bureaucracy
functions. Here, the neoliberal reason functions as an ¶ internal critique of the way bureaucratic dispositifs organize themselves: The typical
modus¶ operandi of this critique is to submit the bureaucracy to efficiency audits and subsequently ¶ advocate the subcontracting of various
functions of the state to the private sector either by fullblown privatization or by public-private partnerships.
While in the first case citizen-subjects are treated solely as economic beings, in the second case ¶ the
state is conceived as an
enterprise, i.e., a production unit, an economic agency whose ¶ functions are persistently submitted to various
forms of economic auditing, thereby suppressing ¶ all other (social, political, ecological) priorities
through a permanent economic criticism. ¶ Subcontracting, public-private partnerships, and
privatization are all different mechanisms ¶ through which contemporary governments embrace the
discourses and practices of ¶ contemporary multinational corporations. In either case, however, economic policy
decisions ¶ (whether they involve macroeconomic or microeconomic matters) are isolated from public ¶ debate and
deliberation, and treated as matters of technocratic design and implementation, ¶ while regulation, to the extent it
is warranted, is mostly conducted by experts outside political ¶ life—the so-called independent regulatory agencies. In the process,
democratic participation in ¶ decision-making is either limited to an already highly-commodified,
spectacularized, mediatized ¶ electoral politics, or to the calculus of opinion polls where consumer discontent can be ¶ managed through
public relations experts. As a result, a highly reductionist notion of economic ¶ efficiency ends up being the
only criteria with which to measure the success or failure of such ¶ decisions. Meanwhile, individuals with financial means
are free to provide support to those in ¶ need through charity organizations or corporations via their social responsibility channels.
Here, two related caveats should be noted to sharpen the central thrust of the argument¶ proposed in this chapter. First, the separation
of the economic sphere from the social-ecological whole is not an ontological given, but rather
a political project. By treating social¶ subjectivity solely in economic terms and deliberately trying to insulate policymaking from ¶ popular politics and democratic participation, the neoliberal project of economization makes a ¶
political choice. Since there are no economic decisions without a multitude of complex and ¶ over-determined social consequences,
the attempt to block (through economization) all ¶ political modes of dissent, objection and negotiation
available (e.g., “voice”) to those who are ¶ affected from the said economic decisions is itself a political choice. In short,
economization is ¶ itself a political project.
Yet, this
drive towards technocratization and economization—which constitutes the second ¶ caveat—does not mean
that the dirty and messy distortions of politics are gradually being ¶ removed from policy-making. On the
contrary, to the extent that policy making is being ¶ insulated from popular and democratic control, it becomes
exposed to the “distortions” of a ¶ politics of rent-seeking and speculation—ironically, as predicted by the
representatives of the ¶ Virginia School. Most public-private partnerships are hammered behind closed doors
of a ¶ bureaucracy where states and multinational corporations divide the economic rent among ¶
themselves. The growing concentration of capital at the global scale gives various industries ¶ (armament,
chemical, health care, petroleum, etc.—see, e.g., Klein, 2008) enormous amount ¶ of leverage over the governments (especially the
developing ones). It is extremely important, ¶ however, to note that this tendency toward rent-seeking is not a perversion of the
neoliberal ¶ reason. For much of neoliberal theory (in particular, for the Austrian and the Chicago schools), ¶ private
monopolies and other forms of concentration of capital are preferred to government ¶ control and
ownership. And furthermore, for some (such as the Virginia and the Chicago ¶ schools), rent-seeking is a natural implication of the
“opportunism” of human beings, even ¶ though neoliberal thinkers disagree whether rent-seeking is essentially economically efficient (as ¶ in
“capture” theories of the Chicago school imply) or inefficient (as in rent-seeking theories of ¶ the Virginia school imply) (Madra and Adaman,
2010).
This reconfiguration of the way modern states in advanced capitalist social formations govern ¶ the social manifests itself in all
domains of public and social policy-making. From education to ¶ health, and employment to insurance, there is an
observable shift from rights-based policymaking forged through public deliberation and participation, to
policy-making based solely on ¶ economic viability where policy issues are treated as matters of
technocratic calculation. In this ¶ regard, as noted above, the treatment of subjectivity solely in
behaviorist terms of economic ¶ incentives functions as the key conceptual choice that makes the
technocratization of public ¶ policy possible. Neoliberal thinking and practices certainly have a significant impact on the ¶ ecology. The next
section will focus on the different means through which various forms of ¶ neoliberal governmentality propose and actualize the economization
of the ecology.
Use the ballot to reclaim social pedagogy—skills and knowledge are force multipliers
for inequality unless we prioritize resistance in education—it’s your academic
responsibility
Giroux, cultural studies prof, 5—Global Television Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at
McMaster University, selected as the Barstow Visiting Scholar for 2003 at Saginaw Valley State
University, named as Distinguished Scholar at multiple institutions, Ph.D. (Henry, Fast Capitalism, 1.2
2005, “Cultural Studies in Dark Times: Public Pedagogy and the Challenge of Neoliberalism,” RBatra)
In opposition to these positions, I want to reclaim a tradition in radical educational theory and cultural studies in which pedagogy as a critical practice is central to
Pedagogy as both a language of critique and
possibility looms large in these critical traditions, not as a technique or a priori set of methods,
but as a political and moral practice. As a political practice, pedagogy is viewed as the outgrowth of
struggles and illuminates the relationships among power, knowledge, and ideology, while selfconsciously, if not self-critically, recognizing the role it plays as a deliberate attempt to influence how and
what knowledge and identities are produced within particular sets of social relations. As a moral
any viable notion of agency, inclusive democracy, and a broader global public sphere.
practice, pedagogy recognizes that what cultural workers, artists, activists, media workers, and others teach cannot be abstracted from what it means to invest in
The moral implications of pedagogy also
suggest that our responsibility as intellectuals for the public cannot be separated from the
consequences of the knowledge we produce, the social relations we legitimate, and the
ideologies and identities we offer up to students as well as colleagues.¶ Refusing to decouple
politics from pedagogy means, in part, creating those public spaces for engaging students in robust
public life, presuppose some notion of the future, or locate oneself in a public discourse.
dialogue, challenging them to think critically about received knowledge and energizing them to recognize
their own power as individual and social agents. Pedagogy has a relationship to social change in
that it should not only help students frame their sense of understanding, imagination, and
knowledge within a wider sense of history, politics, and democracy but should also enable them
to recognize that they can do something to alleviate human suffering, as the late Susan Sontag (2003) has
suggested. Part of this task necessitates that cultural studies theorists and educators anchor their own work, however diverse, in a radical project that seriously
engages the promise of an unrealized democracy against its really existing and greviously incomplete forms. Of crucial importance to such a project is rejecting the
any viable cultural
politics needs a socially committed notion of injustice if we are to take seriously what it means
to fight for the idea of the good society. Zygmunt Bauman (2002) is right in arguing that "if there is no room for the idea of wrong
assumption that theorists can understand social problems without contesting their appearance in public life. More specifically,
society, there is hardly much chance for the idea of good society to be born, let alone make waves" (p. 170).¶ Cultural studies' theorists need to be more forceful, if
democratic
societies are never too just, which means that a democratic society must constantly nurture the
possibilities for self-critique, collective agency, and forms of citizenship in which people play a
fundamental role in shaping the material relations of power and ideological forces that affect
their everyday lives. Within the ongoing process of democratization lies the promise of a
society that is open to exchange, questioning, and self-criticism, a democracy that is never
finished, and one that opposes neoliberal and neoconservative attempts to supplant the concept of
an open society with a fundamentalist market-driven or authoritarian one.¶ Cultural studies theorists
who work in higher education need to make clear that the issue is not whether higher education has
become contaminated by politics, as much as recognizing that education is already a space of
politics, power, and authority. At the same time, they can make visible their opposition to those
approaches to pedagogy that reduce it to a set of skills to enhance one's visibility in the
corporate sector or an ideological litmus test that measures one's patriotism or ratings on the rapture index.
not more committed, to linking their overall politics to modes of critique and collective action that address the presupposition that
There is a disquieting refusal in the contemporary academy to raise broader questions about the social, economic, and political forces shaping the very terrain of
higher education—particularly unbridled market forces, fundamentalist groups, and racist and sexist forces that unequally value diverse groups within relations of
teacher authority can be used to create the pedagogical
conditions for critical forms of education without necessarily falling into the trap of simply indoctrinating
students. For instance, many conservative and liberal educators believe that any notion of critical pedagogy that is self-conscious about its politics and
academic power.¶ There is also a general misunderstanding of how
engages students in ways that offer them the possibility for becoming critical—what Lani Guinier (2003:6) calls the need to educate students "to participate in civic
life, and to encourage graduates to give back to the community, which through taxes, made their education possible"—leaves students out of the conversation or
presupposes too much or simply represents a form of pedagogical tyranny. While such educators believe in practices that open up the possibility of questioning
among students, they often refuse to connect the pedagogical conditions that challenge how and what students think at the moment to the next task of prompting
them to imagine changing the world around them so as to expand and deepen its democratic possibilities. Teaching students how to argue, draw on their own
the culture of
argumentation and questioning relates to giving students the tools they need to fight
oppressive forms of power, make the world a more meaningful and just place, and develop a sense of social responsibility is missing in
experiences, or engage in rigorous dialogue says nothing about why they should engage in these actions in the first place. How
contemporary, progressive frameworks of education.¶ While no pedagogical intervention should fall to the level of propaganda, a pedagogy which attempts to
Pedagogy must address the relationships between
politics and agency, knowledge and power, subject positions and values, and learning and social
change while always being open to debate, resistance, and a culture of questioning . Liberal
educators committed to simply raising questions have no language for linking learning to forms
of public minded scholarship that would enable students to consider the important relationship between democratic public life and
education, or that would encourage students pedagogically to enter the sphere of the political, enabling them to
empower critical citizens can't and shouldn't try to avoid politics.
think about how they might participate in a democracy by taking what they learn into new locations and battlegrounds—a fourth grade classroom, a church, the
media, a politician's office, the courts, a campus—or for that matter taking on collaborative projects that address the myriad of problems citizens face on a local,
academics in the field of cultural studies need
to do more pedagogically than simply teach students how to argue and question. Students need much
more from their educational experience. Democratic societies need educated citizens who are steeped in more than the skills of argumentation. And it is
national, and global level in a diminishing democracy. ¶ In spite of the professional pretense to neutrality,
precisely this democratic project that affirms the critical function of education and refuses to
narrow its goals and aspirations to methodological considerations. As Amy Gutmann (1999) argues, education
is always political because it is connected to the acquisition of agency, the ability to struggle
with ongoing relations of power, and is a precondition for creating informed and critical citizens
who act on the world. This is not a notion of education tied to the alleged neutrality of the academy or the new conservative call for "intellectual
diversity" but to a vision of pedagogy that is directive and interventionist on the side of producing a substantive democratic society. This is what makes critical
pedagogy different from training. And it is precisely the failure to connect learning to its democratic functions and goals that provides rationales for pedagogical
approaches that strip critical and democratic possibilities from what it means to be educated. ¶ Cultural studies theorists and educators would do well to take
account of the profound transformations taking place in the public sphere and reclaim pedagogy as a central element of cultural politics. In part, this means once
the "power of the dominant order is not just economic, but
intellectual—lying in the realm of beliefs"(p. 66), and it is precisely within the domain of ideas that a
sense of utopian possibility can be restored to the public realm. Such a task suggests that
academics and other cultural workers actively resist the ways in which neoliberalism
discourages teachers and students from becoming critical intellectuals by turning them into human data banks.
again recognizing, as Pierre Bourdieu (2003) has insisted, that
Educators and other cultural workers need to build alliances across differences, academic disciplines, and national boundaries as part of broader efforts to develop
social movements in defense of the public good and social justice. No small part of this task requires that such groups make visible the connection between the war
at home and abroad. If the growing authoritarianism in the U.S. is to be challenged, it is necessary to oppose not only an imperial foreign policy, but also the
shameful tax cuts for the rich, the dismantling of the welfare state, the attack on unions, and those policies that sacrifice civil liberties in the cause of national
Opposing the authoritarian politics of neoliberalism, militarism, and neoconservatism
means developing enclaves of resistance in order to stop the incarceration of a generation of young black and brown men and women,
security.¶
the privatization of the commons, the attack on public schools, the increasing corporatization of higher education, the growing militarization of public life, and the
use of power based on the assumption that empire abroad entails tyranny and repression at home. But resistance needs to be more than local or rooted in the
specificity of particular struggles. Progressives need to develop national and international movements designed to fight the new authoritarianism emerging in the
United States and elsewhere. In part, this means revitalizing social movements such as civil rights, labor, environmental, and anti-globalization on the basis of
This suggests organizing workers, intellectuals,
students, youth, and others through a language of critique and possibility in which diverse
forms of oppression are addressed through a larger discourse of radical democracy, a discourse
that addresses not only what it means to think in terms of a general notion of freedom capable
of challenging corporate rule, religious fundamentalism, and the new ideologies of empire , but also
shared values and a moral vision rather than simply issue-based coalitions.
what it might mean to link freedom to a shared sense of hope, happiness, community, equality, and social justice. Democracy implies a level of shared beliefs,
practices, and a commitment to build a more humane future. Politics in this sense points to a struggle over those social, economic, cultural, and institutional forces
this fundamentally requires something prior—a reclaiming of the
social and cultural basis of a critical education that makes the very struggle over democratic politics meaningful and understandable
that make democracy purposeful for all people. But
as part of a broader affective, intellectual, and theoretical investment in public life (Couldry 2004).
This comes before any alt or perm args—plan focus rigs debate against investigating
assumptions—their model trains you not to defend the process by which you make
conclusions, which distorts policy analysis
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 favoured 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 from 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).
at: econ rationality good
Mainstream economics has been discredited—their valorization of market solutions is
the root cause of recent crises
Krugman 8 (Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate in economics, professor of economics at Princeton
University, 2008, “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?”,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.html)
I. MISTAKING BEAUTY FOR TRUTH¶ It’s hard to believe now, but not
long ago economists were congratulating
themselves over the success of their field. Those successes — or so they believed — were both theoretical and
practical, leading to a golden era for the profession. On the theoretical side, they thought that they had resolved their internal disputes.
Thus, in a 2008 paper titled “The State of Macro” (that is, macroeconomics, the study of big-picture issues like recessions), Olivier Blanchard of
M.I.T., now the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, declared that “the state of macro is good.” The battles of yesteryear, he
said, were over, and there had been a “broad convergence of vision.” And in the real world, economists
believed they had
things under control: the “central problem of depression-prevention has been solved,” declared
Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago in his 2003 presidential address to the American Economic Association. In 2004, Ben Bernanke,
a former Princeton professor who is now the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, celebrated the Great Moderation in economic
performance over the previous two decades, which he attributed in part to improved economic policy making.¶ Last year, everything came
apart.¶ Few
economists saw our current crisis coming, but this predictive failure was the least of the
field’s problems. More important was the profession’s blindness to the very possibility of
catastrophic failures in a market economy. During the golden years, financial economists came to believe that
markets were inherently stable — indeed, that stocks and other assets were always priced just right. There was nothing in the
prevailing models suggesting the possibility of the kind of collapse that happened last year. Meanwhile, macroeconomists were divided in their
views. But the main division was between those who insisted that free-market economies never go astray and those who believed that
economies may stray now and then but that any major deviations from the path of prosperity could and would be corrected by the all-powerful
Fed. Neither side was prepared to cope with an economy that went off the rails despite the Fed’s best efforts.¶ And in the wake of the crisis,
the fault lines in the economics profession have yawned wider than ever. Lucas says the Obama administration’s stimulus plans are “schlock
economics,” and his Chicago colleague John Cochrane says they’re based on discredited “fairy tales.” In response, Brad DeLong of the University
of California, Berkeley, writes of the “intellectual collapse” of the Chicago School, and I myself have written that comments from Chicago
economists are the product of a Dark Age of macroeconomics in which hard-won knowledge has been forgotten.¶ What happened to the
economics profession? And where does it go from here?¶ As I see it, the economics profession went
astray because
economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth. Until the
Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect
system. That vision wasn’t sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories of the Depression faded,
economists fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in
perfect markets, this time gussied up with fancy equations. The renewed romance with the idealized market was, to be sure, partly a response
to shifting political winds, partly
a response to financial incentives. But while sabbaticals at the Hoover Institution and job
opportunities on Wall Street are nothing to sneeze at, the central cause of the profession’s failure was the desire
for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical
prowess.¶ Unfortunately, this romanticized and sanitized vision of the economy led most economists to ignore all the
things that can go wrong. They turned a blind eye to the limitations of human rationality that
often lead to bubbles and busts; to the problems of institutions that run amok; to the imperfections of markets —
especially financial markets — that can cause the economy’s operating system to undergo sudden, unpredictable crashes; and to the dangers
created when regulators don’t believe in regulation.¶ It’s much harder to say where the economics profession goes from here. But what’s
almost certain is that economists will have to learn to live with messiness. That is, they will have to acknowledge the
importance of irrational and often unpredictable behavior, face up to the often idiosyncratic imperfections of markets and accept that an
elegant economic “theory of everything” is a long way off. In
practical terms, this will translate into more cautious
policy advice — and a reduced willingness to dismantle economic safeguards in the faith that markets
will solve all problems.
at: neolib concept fails
Ditching the neolib concept is useless—even if some populists use it unfairly, there are
distinct practices we’re critiquing with historical origins in the 20th century
Economist 2012 (10/13, “New brooms: How three Viennese thinkers changed the world”, from the print
edition, http://www.economist.com/node/21564533, WEA)
Mr Stedman Jones teases out the professorial squabbles. Hayek and Mises wanted their message to
be radical. Popper sought to woo as many as possible, even liberals and socialists. No hardliner, Popper
later saw flaws in market ideology, comparing it to a religion. Hayek, ever the Utopian, pressed ahead.
He started the Mont Pelerin Society to foster his ideas. Thus was neoliberalism founded. One hitch
with writing about it is that the word is frequently misused today. Leftists use “neoliberal” to
describe people whom they essentially do not like. Mr Stedman Jones seems to think the word
should not be ditched; the original pugilists against state control happily went by that name.
Milton Friedman, a Chicago economist who headed the second wave of state-bashers, preferred the
word “neoliberal” in a 1951 essay entitled, “Neoliberalism and Its Prospects”. He argued for a
“middle way” between the enemy of collectivism and the excesses of 19th-century liberalism. Victorian
liberals failed to grasp that laissez-faire could produce over-mighty individuals, Friedman
thought. The goal should not be laissez-faire, but market competition: this, he said, would protect men
from each other.
Friedman called for a new liberalism, seeing himself as the heir to Adam Smith , the 18th-century
defender of the individual. But the line between Smith and Friedman is not a straight one, as Mr
Stedman Jones points out. Smith thought one of the state’s jobs should be to build public works and
forge institutions that would otherwise fail under market pressure. Here he sounds more like Franklin
Roosevelt. Smith believed the state should fund schools, bridges and roads. Friedman said that was the
job of the private sector.
at: policy relevance
Owen’s wrong – theory doesn’t kill relevance – need to ask epistemological questions
to avoid policy failure – this card will win us the debate
Reus-Smit 12 – Professor of International Relations at the European University Institute, Florence
(Christian, “International Relations, Irrelevant? Don’t Blame Theory”, Millennium - Journal of International Studies June 2012 vol. 40 no. 3 525540, dml)
However widespread it might be, the
notion that IR’s lack of practical relevance stems from excessive
theorising rests more on vigorous assertion than weighty evidence. As noted above, we lack good
data on the field’s practical relevance, and the difficulties establishing appropriate measures are all too apparent in the
fraught attempts by several governments to quantify the impact of the humanities and social sciences more generally. Beyond this, though,
we lack any credible evidence that any fluctuations in the field’s relevance are due to more or less
high theory. We hear that policymakers complain of not being able to understand or apply much that appears in our leading journals, but it
is unclear why we should be any more concerned about this than physicists or economists, who take theory, even high theory, to be the
bedrock of advancement in knowledge. Moreover, there
is now a wealth of research, inside and outside IR, that shows
that policy communities are not open epistemic or cognitive realms, simply awaiting well-communicated,
non-jargonistic knowledge – they are bureaucracies, deeply susceptible to groupthink, that filter information
through their own intersubjective frames. 10 Beyond this, however, there are good reasons to believe that precisely the reverse of
the theory versus relevance thesis might be true; that theoretical inquiry may be a necessary
prerequisite for the generation of practically relevant knowledge. I will focus here on the value of metatheory,
as this attracts most contemporary criticism and would appear the most difficult of theoretical forms to defend.
Metatheories take other theories as their subject. Indeed, their precepts establish the conditions of possibility for second-order theories. In
general, metatheories divide into three broad categories: epistemology, ontology and meta-ethics. The first concerns the nature, validity and
acquisition of knowledge; the second, the nature of being (what can be said to exist, how things might be categorised and how they stand in
relation to one another); and the third, the nature of right and wrong, what constitutes moral argument, and how moral arguments might be
sustained. Second-order theories are constructed within, and on the basis of, assumptions formulated at the metatheoretical level.
Epistemological assumptions about what constitutes legitimate knowledge and how it is legitimately acquired delimit the
questions we ask and the kinds of information we can enlist in answering them. 11 Can social
scientists ask normative questions? Is literature a valid source of social-scientific knowledge? Ontological
assumptions about the nature and distinctiveness of the social universe affect not only what we ‘see’ but also how
we order what we see; how we relate the material to the ideational, agents to structures, interests to beliefs, and so on. If we
assume, for example, that individuals are rational actors, engaged in the efficient pursuit of primarily
material interests, then phenomena such as faith-motivated politics will remain at the far periphery of our
vision. 12 Lastly, meta-ethical assumptions about the nature of the good, and about what constitutes a valid moral argument, frame how we
reason about concrete ethical problems. Both deontology and consequentialism are meta-ethical positions, operationalised, for example, in the
differing arguments of Charles Beitz and Peter Singer on global distributive justice. 13
Most scholars would acknowledge the background, structuring role that metatheory plays, but argue that we can take our
metatheoretical assumptions off the shelf, get on with the serious business of research and leave explicit
metatheoretical reflection and debate to the philosophers. If practical relevance is one of our
concerns, however, there are several reasons why this is misguided.
Firstly, whether IR is practically relevant depends, in large measure, on the kinds of questions that
animate our research. I am not referring here to the commonly held notion that we should be addressing questions that
practitioners want answered. Indeed, our work will at times be most relevant when we pursue questions
that policymakers and others would prefer left buried. My point is a different one, which I return to in greater detail
below. It is sufficient to note here that being practically relevant involves asking questions of practice; not
just retrospective questions about past practices – their nature, sources and consequences – but prospective questions
about what human agents should do. As I have argued elsewhere, being practically relevant means asking questions
of how we, ourselves, or some other actors (states, policymakers, citizens, NGOs, IOs, etc.) should act. 14 Yet our ability, nay
willingness, to ask such questions is determined by the metatheoretical assumptions that structure
our research and arguments. This is partly an issue of ontology – what we see affects how we understand
the conditions of action, rendering some practices possible or impossible, mandatory or beyond the pale. If, for example, we
think that political change is driven by material forces, then we are unlikely to see
communicative practices of argument and persuasion as potentially successful sources of change. More than
this, though, it is also an issue of epistemology. If we assume that the proper domain of IR as a social science is
the acquisition of empirically verifiable knowledge, then we will struggle to comprehend, let
alone answer, normative questions of how we should act. We will either reduce ‘ought’ questions to ‘is’ questions,
or place them off the agenda altogether. 15 Our metatheoretical assumptions thus determine the macroorientation of IR towards questions of practice, directly affecting the field’s practical relevance.
Secondly, metatheoretical revolutions license new second-order theoretical and analytical possibilities while
foreclosing others, directly affecting those forms of scholarship widely considered most
practically relevant. The rise of analytical eclecticism illustrates this. As noted above, Katzenstein and Sil’s call for a pragmatic
approach to the study of world politics, one that addresses real-world problematics by combining insights from diverse research traditions,
resonates with the mood of much of the field, especially within the American mainstream. Epistemological
and ontological
debates are widely considered irresolvable dead ends , grand theorising is unfashionable, and gladiatorial contests
between rival paradigms appear, increasingly, as unimaginative rituals. Boredom and fatigue are partly responsible for this new mood, but
something deeper is at work. Twenty-five years ago, Sil and Katzenstein’s call would have fallen on deaf ears; the
neo-neo debate
that preoccupied the American mainstream occurred within a metatheoretical consensus, one that
combined a neo-positivist epistemology with a rationalist ontology. This singular metatheoretical framework defined
the rules of the game; analytical eclecticism was unimaginable. The Third Debate of the 1980s and early 1990s destabilised all of this;
not because American IR scholars converted in their droves to critical theory or poststructuralism (far from it), but because metatheoretical
absolutism became less and less tenable. The anti-foundationalist critique of the idea that there is any single measure of truth did not produce
a wave of relativism, but it did generate a widespread sense that battles on the terrain of epistemology were unwinnable. Similarly, the Third
Debate emphasis on identity politics and cultural particularity, which later found expression in constructivism, did not vanquish rationalism. It
did, however, establish a more pluralistic, if nevertheless heated, debate about ontology, a terrain on which many scholars felt more
comfortable than that of epistemology. One can plausibly argue, therefore, that the
metatheoretical struggles of the Third
a space for – even made possible – the rise of analytical eclecticism and its aversion to
metatheoretical absolutes, a principal benefit of which is said to be greater practical relevance.
Lastly, most of us would agree that for our research to be practically relevant, it has to be good – it
Debate created
has to be the product of sound inquiry, and our conclusions have to be plausible. The pluralists among us would also agree that different
research questions require different methods of inquiry and strategies of argument. Yet across
this diversity there are several
practices widely recognised as essential to good research. Among these are clarity of purpose, logical coherence,
engagement with alternative arguments and the provision of good reasons (empirical evidence, corroborating arguments textual
interpretations, etc.). Less often noted, however, is
the importance of metatheoretical reflexivity . If our
epistemological assumptions affect the questions we ask, then being conscious of these
assumptions is necessary to ensure that we are not fencing off questions of importance, and that if
we are, we can justify our choices. Likewise, if our ontological assumptions affect how we see the social
universe, determining what is in or outside our field of vision, then reflecting on these assumptions can prevent
us being blind to things that matter. A similar argument applies to our meta-ethical assumptions. Indeed, if deontology and
consequentialism are both meta-ethical positions, as I suggested earlier, then reflecting on our choice of one or other
position is part and parcel of weighing rival ethical arguments (on issues as diverse as global poverty and human
rights). Finally, our epistemological, ontological and meta-ethical assumptions are not metatheoretical
silos; assumptions we make in one have a tendency to shape those we make in another . The oftheard refrain that ‘if we can’t measure it, it doesn’t matter’ is an unfortunate example of epistemology supervening on ontology, something
that metatheoretical reflexivity can help guard against. In sum, like clarity, coherence, consideration
of alternative
arguments and the provision of good reasons, metatheoretical reflexivity is part of keeping us
honest, making it practically relevant despite its abstraction .
at: scenario planning
Energy scenario planning is political, not scientific—even if the exercise is good in the
abstract, their application of it for strategic gain is ideological blackmail—this card is
way more specific
Labban 12 Preempting Possibility: Critical Assessment of the IEA's World Energy Outlook 2010 (e-mail:
labban@rci.rutgers.edu) is visiting assistant professor of Geography at Rutgers University, Lucy Stone
Hall, 54 Joyce Kilmer Ave, Piscataway, NJ 08854. His research interests include critical theory, political
economy, development, energy, petroleum, geopolitics, international law, and finance. He is the author
of Space, Oil and Capital (Routledge, 2008).
Growing uncertainty about energy markets following the crises of the 1970s boosted long-term energy
forecasting as a planning device to prepare for an increasingly unpredictable future, on one hand, and as a techno -scientific
(read: politically neutral
and respectable)
environmental protection, on the other. Long-range
support for public policies
ostensibly aimed at increasing energy security and
forecasts, however, have invariably failed to produce accurate
predictions about all aspects of energy markets: primary energy supplies, energy substitutions, the relative shares of different fuels in
rely on an
assumption that the future is a smooth, gradual extension of the present at a constant rate with no structural changes or major
interruptions or aberrations. They also rely on empirical correlation rather than causality and cannot therefore
the energy mix, aggregate and sectoral energy demand, as well as carbon emissions.6 Because they rely on trend projections, forecasts also
explain underlying forces that drive demand, price, etc. Thus forecasts cannot predict a future that looks very
different from the present, let alone explain how possible futures might unfold, which makes them useful only in short-term, business-as-usual
projections. Because of such inherent limitations, which prevent forecasts from accurately predicting long-term technical developments, capital markets and
investment climates, let alone even more unpredictable processes such as government policies and geopolitical conflict, energy analysts, including the economists
at the IEA, have shifted from long-range predictive forecasts towards more normative scenario building in the analysis of long-range energy-related developments.
Scenario
analysis has its origins in corporate and military strategic planning.7 It was developed by Herman Kahn at the RAND corporation in the
1950s — to help the US Air Force think about ‘the unthinkable’— and pioneered by Shell in the early 1960s, initially as an internal
This technical move has a political dimension that is worth pondering in order to shed critical light on the significance of the WEO 2010 scenarios.
communications vehicle, to help the company respond more readily to
unexpected developments in energy markets
that might
affect the price of oil. Whereas forecasts predict what is most likely to happen in the future given current trends and projections, scenarios contemplate what is
possible if certain choices are made from within a hypothetical range of possibilities which typically includes a reference case describing what would happen if no
action is taken to alter the existing state of affairs in any fundamental manner. For this reason, scenarios not only describe hypothetical futures but must also
prescribe pathways and roadmaps, policies and actions, and identify ways and means to arrive at a desirable future and avoid undesirable fate. Unlike forecasts, in
which the future is determined by projections of current trends, scenarios assume a less deterministic development that allows subjects to make choices and whose
Scenarios are ‘desiring machines' , to borrow a term from Deleuze
and Guattari (1983): at the same time that they produce the desired future, they also produce the subject and
mechanism by which to actualize it. This occasionally operates in the form of blackmail: coercing action
in the present by showing the dire consequences of not acting. Despite obvious differences and assertions to the contrary,
energy scenarios are one type of predictive forecast which, however, does not treat current circumstances and trends as immutable,
agency, not the correlation of empirical facts, determines possible futures.
therefore allowing itself flexibility in projecting into the future (and an about-face if the future turns out differently) in order to effect change in the present. For
one, energy scenarios rely on forecasts about economic growth, population growth, energy demand, production and generation capacities, prices and costs, etc.,
hence the possibilities they construct are based on a set of predictions. Also, forecasting is often negatively implicit in scenario analysis.
The authors of WEO 2010, as of other Outlooks, are adamant that their scenarios are not forecasts. Yet, all three WEO 2010 scenarios are forecasts about the state
of the global economy in that they assume continued economic growth. They also assert that no matter what it will look like, the future is certainly not going to look
like the present because WEO 2010 predicts that governments will act on their policy promises, no matter how weakly, and in predictable manner: ‘it is certain that
energy and climate policies in many — if not most — countries will change, possibly in the way we assume in the New Policies Scenario’ (p. 62). Thus, eliminating
the abominable which is also impossible, WEO 2010 scenarios lay out two alternative futures that differ only quantitatively — one desirable, the other ‘realistic’, or
likely. The possible becomes what ensues from action according to the scenario's prescriptions or from absolute
lack of action and this is effected by actualizing future events and processes that may or may not occur, depending on what course of action governments take or
fail to take in the present. Scenarios
limit what is possible to what is desirable for their authors, or to its exact opposite, and
exclude possibilities that do not fall within this range. At the moment that scenarios produce possibilities they negate the very notion of
possibility.
Disaster consumerism means there is zero spillover from their politics and explicit ignorance
of solutions ---causes political anesthesia
Recuber 11 Timothy Recuber is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the Graduate Center of the City.
University of New York. He has taught at Hunter College in Manhattan "CONSUMING CATASTROPHE:
AUTHENTICITY AND EMOTION IN MASS-MEDIATED DISASTER" gradworks.umi.com/3477831.pdf
The emotional component of disaster consumption is therefore an important part of these processes.
Sociologists who study disaster have long disputed the conventional wisdom that mass panic is the
defacto public response to disasters, especially on the ground in affected communities (Quarantelli,
2001; Tierny, 2007). But while it is true that disaster-struck communities tend to exhibit a whole
host of positive, pro-social responses, it does not mean that mass media accounts of disaster
may not inspire panic in distant spectators who are less directly affected . Divorced from the kinds
of sustaining, ad-hoc, local communities that maintain order and provide support during and in the
immediate aftermath of disasters (see Solnit, 2009), those who merely consume distressing stories and
images at a distance may be more likely to take drastic measures or respond with maudlin or
hysterical emotional displays. Of course, mass media today tend to operate in crisis mode at all
times , even over seemingly trivial matters (McRobbie and Thornton, 1995), making the shock and
immediacy of disaster-related stories an overly familiar style of communication and thus, at times,
contributing to the onset of what has come to be known as “compassion fatigue” (Moeller, 1999). On
the other hand, and at the very least, American audiences of disasters have demonstrated over the
past decade that distant or unaffected spectators are likely to feel that they too have been
vicariously traumatized, and thus enfranchised to participate in mass-mediated rituals of
commemoration, or to claim the social and political status of victim (see Savage, 2006; Kaplan,
2005). 12
Such vicarious trauma is often the result of very genuine emotional responses by these distant
spectators. In fact, as discussed in Chapter Three, one of the most powerful norms that has emerged
regarding the role of the spectator of disaster is the obligation to show empathy towards those directly
affected. Media texts have particular ways of presenting the suffering others designed to draw out these
reactions, as I show through an analysis of two news programs, one reality television show, and one
documentary film devoted to Hurricane Katrina and the Virginia Tech shootings. This empathy for the
suffering of distant others is rehearsed today even in non-disaster related media programming, but it is
particularly prevalent when large-scale tragedies result in not only live television news broadcasts, but
also the many commemorative events and products whose proceeds are supposed to benefit those
distant others. Consuming such experiences and products marks one as an ethical, moral person
with the capacity to understand the pain of others. Unlike classical forms of Enlightenment
sympathy, however, in which detached spectators sought to actually alleviate the suffering of
unfortunate others whose causes they found worthy, the empathy on display when one buys a
Virginia Tech t-shirt or a record benefitting New Orleans musicians, or when one watches
television programs devoted to these disasters, seems to be as much about self-improvement
as the improvement of the conditions of those less fortunate. This is not to say that such
consumption is not driven by sincere concern for disaster victims, but simply that mass culture tends
to direct such concern towards viewing habits and consumption practices that help the selfimage of the viewer or purchaser at least as much as they help any disaster-stricken
communities.
The consumption of disaster thus encourages a kind of “political anesthesia” that reduces one’s
ability to recognize the collective solutions to problems, as well as one’s willingness to work towards
them (Szasz, 2007). Instead, the authentically threatening quality of disasters often nurtures a
paradoxically fantastic desire to secure the safety of oneself and one’s family through private
acts of consumerism . But these fantasies are often backwards looking; they envision the next disaster
as a similar chain of catastrophic events that , having recently happened, is actually unlikely to
happen again due either to officialdom’s new awareness of this problem or simply to the remote odds
of two similar disasters happening in such close succession. Of course, in the current American
political moment of ascendant neo-liberal governance, such individualistic strategies of
preventative consumption may constitute the only preventative measures being taken on one’s
behalf.
at: social science
IR is not a social science—and even if it were, that wouldn’t be nearly enough for
objective evaluation
BERNSTEIN ET AL. ’00 --- Steven , Richard Ned Lebow, Janice Gross Stein and Steven Weber,
University of Toronto, The Ohio State University, University of Toronto and University of California at
Berkeley. European Journal of International Relations 2000; 6; 43.
A deep irony is embedded in the history of the scientific study of international relations. Recent generations of scholars separated policy
from theory to gain an intellectual distance from decision-making, in the belief that this would enhance the 'scientific' quality of their
work. But
five decades of well-funded efforts to develop theories of international relations
have produced precious little in the way of useful, high confidence results. Theories abound,
but few meet the most relaxed 'scientific' tests of validity. Even the most robust
generalizations or laws we can state — war is more likely between neighboring states,
weaker states are less likely to attack stronger states — are close to trivial, have important
exceptions, and for the most part stand outside any consistent body of theory . A
generation ago, we might have excused our performance on the grounds that we were a
young science still in the process of defining problems, developing analytical tools and
collecting data. This excuse is neither credible nor sufficient; there is no reason to suppose
that another 50 years of well-funded research would result in anything resembling a valid
theory in the Popperian sense. We suggest that the nature, goals and criteria for judging social science theory should be
rethought, if theory is to be more helpful in understanding the real world. We begin by justifying our pessimism, both conceptually and
empirically, and argue that the
quest for predictive theory rests on a mistaken analogy between
physical and social phenomena. Evolutionary biology is a more productive analogy for social science. We explore the
value of this analogy in its 'hard' and 'soft' versions, and examine the implications of both for theory and research in international
relations.' We develop the case for forward `tracking' of international relations on the basis of local and general knowledge as an
alternative to backward-looking attempts to build deductive, nomothetic theory. We then apply this strategy to some emerging trends in
international relations. This
article is not a nihilistic diatribe against 'modern' conceptions of social
science. Rather, it is a plea for constructive humility in the current context of attraction to
deductive logic, falsifiable hypothesis and large- n statistical 'tests' of narrow propositions.
We propose a practical alternative for social scientists to pursue in addition, and in a complementary
fashion, to `scientific' theory-testing. Physical and chemical laws make two kinds of predictions. Some phenomena — the trajectories of
individual planets — can be predicted with a reasonable degree of certainty. Only a few variables need to be taken into account and they
can be measured with precision. Other mechanical problems, like the break of balls on a pool table, while subject to deterministic laws,
are inherently unpredictable because of their complexity. Small differences in the lay of the table, the nap of the felt, the curvature of each
ball and where they make contact, amplify the variance of each collision and lead to what appears as a near random distribution of balls.
Most predictions in science are probabilistic, like the freezing point of liquids, the expansion rate of gases and all chemical reactions.
Point predictions appear possible only because of the large numbers of units involved in interactions. In the case of nuclear decay or the
expansion of gases, we are talking about trillions of atoms and molecules. In
international relations, even more than
in other domains of social science, it is often impossible to assign metrics to what we think
are relevant variables (Coleman, 1964: especially Chapter 2). The concepts of polarity, relative power
and the balance of power are among the most widely used independent variables, but there
are no commonly accepted definitions or measures for them. Yet without consensus on
definition and measurement, almost every statement or hypothesis will have too much
wiggle room to be `tested' decisively against evidence. What we take to be dependent variables fare little
better. Unresolved controversies rage over the definition and evaluation of deterrence outcomes, and about the criteria for democratic
governance and their application to specific countries at different points in their history. Differences
in coding for even a
few cases have significant implications for tests of theories of deterrence or of the
democratic peace (Lebow and Stein, 1990; Chan, 1997). The lack of consensus about terms and their
measurement is not merely the result of intellectual anarchy or sloppiness — although the latter
cannot entirely be dismissed. Fundamentally, it has more to do with the arbitrary nature of the
concepts themselves. Key terms in physics, like mass, temperature and velocity, refer to aspects of
the physical universe that we cannot directly observe. However, they are embedded in theories with deductive implications that have
been verified through empirical research. Propositions containing these terms are
legitimate assertions about reality
because their truth-value can be assessed. Social science theories are for the most part
built on 'idealizations', that is, on concepts that cannot be anchored to observable
phenomena through rules of correspondence. Most of these terms(e.g. rational actor,
balance of power) are not descriptions of reality but implicit 'theories' about actors and
contexts that do not exist (Hempel, 1952; Rudner, 1966; Gunnell, 1975; Moe, 1979; Searle, 1995: 68-72).The
inevitable differences in interpretation of these concepts lead to different predictions in
some contexts, and these outcomes may eventually produce widely varying futures (Taylor,
1985: 55). If problems of definition, measurement and coding could be resolved, we would still
find it difficult, if not impossible, to construct large enough samples of comparable cases to
permit statistical analysis. It is now almost generally accepted that in the analysis of the causes of wars, the variation across
time and the complexity of the interaction among putative causes make the likelihood of a general theory extraordinarily low.
Multivariate theories run into the problem of negative degrees of freedom, yet international
relations rarely
generates data sets in the high double digits. Where larger samples do exist, they often group
together cases that differ from one another in theoretically important ways.' Complexity in the
form of multiple causation and equifinality can also make simple statistical comparisons misleading. But it is hard to elaborate more
sophisticated statistical tests until one has a deeper baseline understanding of the nature of the phenomenon under investigation, as well
as the categories and variables that make up candidate causes (Geddes, 1990: 131-50; Lustick, 1996: 505-18; Jervis, 1997). Wars — to
continue with the same example — are similar to chemical and nuclear reactions in that they have underlying and immediate causes.
Even when all the underlying conditions are present, these processes generally require a catalyst to begin. Chain reactions are triggered
by the decay of atomic nuclei. Some of the neutrons they emit strike other nuclei prompting them to fission and emit more neutrons,
which strike still more nuclei. Physicists can calculate how many kilograms of Uranium 235 or Plutonium at given pressures are
necessary to produce a chain reaction. They can take it for granted that if a 'critical mass' is achieved, a chain reaction will follow. This is
because trillions of atoms are present, and at any given moment enough of them will decay to provide the neutrons needed to start
thereaction. In a large enough sample, catalysts will be present in a statistical sense. Wars involve relatively few actors. Unlike the weak
force responsible for nuclear decay, their catalysts are probably not inherent properties of the units. Catalysts may or may not be
present, and their potentially random distribution relative to underlying causes makes it difficult to predict when or if an appropriate
catalyst will occur. If in the course of time underlying conditions change, reducing basic incentives for one or more parties to use force,
catalysts that would have triggered war will no longer do so. This
uncertain and evolving relationship between
underlying and immediate causes makes point prediction extraordinarily difficult . It also
makes more general statements about the causation of war problematic, since we have no
way of knowing what wars would have occurred in the presence of appropriate catalysts. It
is probably impossible to define the universe of would-be wars or to construct a
representative sample of them. Statistical inference requires knowledge about the state of
independence of cases, but in a practical sense that knowledge is often impossible to obtain
in the analysis of international relations. Molecules do not learn from experience. People do, or think they do.
Relationships among cases exist in the minds of decision-makers, which makes it very hard to access that information reliably and for
more than just a very small number of cases. We know that expectations and behavior are influenced by experience, one's own and
others. The
deterrence strategies pursued by the United States throughout much of the Cold
War were one kind of response to the failure of appeasement to prevent World War II.
Appeasement was at least in part a reaction to the belief of British leaders that the deterrent policies pursued by the continental powers
earlier in the century had helped to provoke World War I. Neither appeasement nor deterrence can be explained without understanding
the context in which they were formulated; that context is ultimately a set of mental constructs. We have descriptive terms like 'chain
reaction' or 'contagion effect' to describe these patterns, and hazard analysis among other techniques in statistics to measure their
strength. But neither explains how and why these patterns emerge and persist. The broader point is that the relationship between
human beings and their environment is not nearly so reactive as with inanimate objects. Social relations are not clock-like because the
values and behavioral repertories of actors are not fixed; people have memories, learn from experience and undergo shifts in the
vocabulary they use to construct reality. Law-like
relationships — even if they existed — could not
explain the most interesting social outcomes, since these are precisely the outcomes about
which actors have the most incentive to learn and adapt their behavior. Any regularities would be
`soft'; they would be the outcome of processes that areembedded in history and have a short half-life. They would decay quickly because
of the memories, creative searching and learning by political leaders. Ironically, the `findings' of social science contribute to this decay
(Weber, 1969; Almond and Genco, 1977: 496-522; Gunnell, 1982: Ch. 2; Ball, 1987: Ch. 4; Kratochwil, 1989; Rorty, 1989; Hollis, 1994: Ch.
9). Beyond these conceptual and empirical difficulties lies a familiar but fundamental difference of purpose. Boyle's Law, half-lives, or any
other scientific principle based on probability, says nothing about the behavior of single units such as molecules. For many theoretical
and practical purposes this is adequate. But social science ultimately aspires — or should aspire —to provide insight into practical world
problems that are generally part of a small or very small n. In international relations, the dynamicsa nd outcomes of single cases are often
much more important than any statistical regularities. The
conception of causality on which deductivenomological models are based, in classical physics as well as social science, requires
empirical invariance under specified boundary conditions. The standard form of such a statement is this
— given A, B and C, if X then (not) Y.4 This kind of bounded invariance can be found in closed systems . Open systems can be
influenced by external stimuli, and their structure and causal mechanisms evolve as a
result. Rules that describe the functioning of an open system at time T do not necessarily do so at T + 1 or T + 2. The boundary
conditions may have changed, rendering the statement irrelevant. Another axiomaticcondition may have been added, and the outcome
subject to multiple conjunctural causation. There is no way to know this a priori from the causal statement itself. Nor will complete
knowledge (if it were possible) about the system at time T necessarily allow us to project its future course of development. In a practical
sense, all social systems (and many physical and biological systems) are open. Empirical invariance does not exist in such systems,
andseemingly probabilistic invariances may be causally unrelated (Harre and Secord, 1973; Bhaskar, 1979; Collier, 1994; Patomaki,
1996; Jervis, 1997). As
physicists readily admit, prediction in open systems, especially non-linear
ones, is difficult, and often impossible. The risk in saying that social scientists can 'predict'
the value of variables in past history is that the value of these variables is already known to
us, and thus we are not really making predictions. Rather, we are trying to convince each other of the logic that
connects a statement of theory to an expectation about the value of a variable that derives from that theory. As long as we can establish
the parameters within which the theoretical statement is valid, which is a prerequisite of generating expectations in any case, this
'theory-testing' or 'evaluating' activity is not different in a logical sense when done in past or future time.5
Aff --- Consumption Answers
2ac consumption
Consumption is inevitable – we reform it
Doran and Barry 6 – worked at all levels in the environment and sustainable development policy
arena - at the United Nations, at the Northern Ireland Assembly and Dáil Éireann, and in the Irish NGO
sector. PhD--AND-- Reader in Politics, Queen's University School of Politics, International Studies, and
Philosophy. PhD Glasgow (Peter and John, Refining Green Political Economy: From Ecological
Modernisation to Economic Security and Sufficiency, Analyse & Kritik 28/2006, p. 250–275,
http://www.analyse-und-kritik.net/2006-2/AK_Barry_Doran_2006.pdf)
The aim of this article is to offer a draft of a realistic, but critical, version of green political economy to underpin the economic dimensions
of radical views of sustainable development. It is written explicitly with a view to encouraging others to respond to it in the necessary
collaborative effort to think through this aspect of sustainable development. Our position is informed by two important observations. As a
sign of our times, the crises that we are addressing under the banner of sustainable development (however inadequately) render the
distinction between what is ‘realistic’ and ‘radical’ problematic. It seems to us that the only realistic course is to revisit the most basic
assumptions embedded within the dominant model of development and economics. Realistically the only longterm option available is
radical. Secondly, we
cannot build or seek to create a sustainable economy ab nihilo, but must begin—in an
where we are, with the structures, institutions, modes of production, laws,
regulations and so on that we have. We make this point in Ireland with a story about the motorist who stops at the side of the
road to ask directions, only to be told: “Now Ma’m, I wouldn’t start from here if I were you.” ¶ This does not mean simply
accepting these as immutable or set in stone— after all, some of the current institutions, principles and structures
underpinning the dominant economic model are the very causes of unsustainable development— but we do need to recognise
that we must work with (and ‘through’—in the terms of the original German Green Party’s slogan of “marching through the
institutions”) these existing structures as well as changing and reforming and in some cases abandoning them
agonistic fashion—from
as either unnecessary or positively harmful to the creation and maintenance of a sustainable economy and society. Moreover, we have a
particular responsibility under the current dominant economic trends to name the neo-liberal project as the hegemonic influence on
economic thinking and practice. In the words of Bourdieu/Wacquant (2001), neoliberalism is the new ‘planetary vulgate’, which provides
the global context for much of the contemporary political and academic debate on sustainable development. For example, there is a clear
hierarchy of trade (WTO) over the environment (Multilateral Environmental Agreements) in the international rules-based systems. At the
boundaries or limits of the sustainable development debate in both the UK and the European Union it is also evident that the objectives of
competitiveness and trade policy are sacrosanct. As Tim Luke (1999) has observed, the relative success or failure of national economies in
head-to-head global competition is taken by ‘geo-economics’ as the definitive register of any one nation-state’s waxing or waning
international power, as well as its rising or falling industrial competitiveness, technological vitality and economic prowess. In this context,
many believe ecological considerations can, at best, be given only meaningless symbolic responses, in the continuing quest to mobilise the
Earth’s material resources. ¶ Our realism is rooted in the demos. The
realism with which this paper is concerned to promote
recognises that the path to an alternative economy and society must begin with a recognition of the
reality that most people (in the West) will not democratically vote (or be given the opportunity to vote)
for a completely different type of society and economy overnight. This is true even as the merits of a
‘green economy’ are increasingly recognised and accepted by most people as the logical basis for safeguards and
guarantees for their basic needs and aspirations (within limits). The realistic character of the thinking behind this article accepts that
consumption and materialistic lifestyles are here to stay. (The most we can probably aspire to is a
widening and deepening of popular movements towards ethical consumption, responsible investment, and
fair trade.) And indeed there is little to be gained by proposing alternative economic systems which start
from a complete rejection of consumption and materialism. The appeal to realism is in part an attempt to correct
the common misperception (and self-perception) of green politics and economics requiring an excessive degree of self-denial and a
puritanical asceticism (see Goodin 1992, 18; Allison 1991, 170– 78). While rejecting the claim that green political theory calls for the
complete disavowal of materialistic lifestyles, it
is true that green politics does require the collective re-assessment of such
economic signals and pedagogical attempts to encourage a delinking—in the
minds of the general populus—of the ‘good life’ and the ‘goods life’. This does not mean that we
need necessarily require the complete and across the board rejection of materialistic lifestyles. It must be the
lifestyles, and does require new
case that there is room and tolerance in a green economy for people to choose to live diverse lifestyles—some more sustainable than
others—so long as these do not ‘harm’ others, threaten long-term ecological sustainability or create unjust levels of socio-economic
inequalities. Thus, realism in this context is in part another name for the acceptance of a broadly ‘liberal’ or ‘post-liberal’ (but certainly not
anti-liberal) green perspective.2¶ 1. Setting Out¶ At the same time, while critical of the ‘abstract’ and ‘unrealistic’ utopianism that peppers
green and radical thinking in this area, we do not intend to reject utopianism. Indeed, with Oscar Wilde we agree that a map of the world
that does not have utopia on it, isn’t worth looking at. The spirit in which this
article is written is more in keeping with framing
green and sustainability concerns within a ‘concrete utopian’ perspective or what the Marxist geographer David
Harvey (1996, 433–435) calls a “utopianism of process”, to be distinguished from “closed”, blueprint-like and abstract
utopian visions. Accordingly, the model of green political economy outlined here is in keeping with Steven
Lukes’ suggestion that a concrete utopianism depends on the ‘knowledge of a self-transforming
present, not an ideal future’ (Lukes 1984, 158).¶ It accepts the current dominance of one particular model
of green political economy—namely ‘ecological modernisation’ (hereafter referred to EM)—as the preferred
‘political economy’ underpinning contemporary state and market forms of sustainable development,
and further accepts the necessity for green politics to positively engage in the debates and policies
around EM from a strategic (as well as a normative) point of view. However, it is also conscious of the limits and
problems with ecological modernisation, particularly in terms of its technocratic, supply-side and reformist ‘business as usual’
approach, and seeks to explore the potential to radicalise EM or use it as a ‘jumping off’ point for more
radical views of greening the economy. Ecological modernisation is a work in progress; and that’s the
point. ¶ The article begins by outlining EM in theory and practice, specifically in relation to the British state’s ‘sustainable development’
policy agenda under New Labour.3 While EM as currently practised by the British state is ‘weak’ and largely turns on the centrality of
‘innovation’ and ‘eco-efficiency’, the paper then goes on to investigate in more detail the role of the market within current
conceptualisations of EM and other models of green political economy. In particular, a potentially powerful
distinction (both
conceptually and in policy debates) between ‘the market’ and ‘capitalism’ has yet to be sufficiently explored and
exploited as a starting point for the development of radical, viable and attractive conceptions of green
political economy as alternatives to both EM and the orthodox economic paradigm. We contend that there is a role for the
market in innovation and as part of the ‘governance’ for sustainable development in which eco-efficiency
and EM of the economy is linked to non-ecological demands of green politics and sustainable
development such as social and global justice, egalitarianism, democratic regulation of the market and the
conceptual (and policy) expansion of the ‘economy’ to include social, informal and noncash economic
activity and a progressive role for the state (especially at the local/municipal level). Here we suggest that the
‘environmental’ argument or basis of green political economy in terms of the need for the economy to become
more resource efficient, minimise pollution and waste and so on, has largely been won. What that means is that no one
is disputing the need for greater resource productivity, energy and eco-efficiency. Both state and corporate/business
actors have accepted the environmental ‘bottom line’ (often rhetorically, but nonetheless important) as a conditioning factor in the pursuit
of the economic ‘bottom line’.
And, no impact – impossible to actualize an alternative system
Jones 11—Owen, Masters at Oxford, named one of the Daily Telegraph's 'Top 100 Most Influential
People on the Left' for 2011, author of "Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class", The
Independent, UK, "Owen Jones: Protest without politics will change nothing", 2011,
www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/owen-jones-protest-without-politics-will-changenothing-2373612.ht
My first experience of police kettling was aged 16. It was May Day 2001, and the anti-globalisation movement was at its peak. The turn-of-the-century anti-capitalist movement feels
largely forgotten today, but it was a big deal at the time. To a left-wing teenager growing up in an age of unchallenged neo-liberal triumphalism, just to have "anti-capitalism" flash up in
the headlines was thrilling. Thousands of apparently unstoppable protesters chased the world's rulers from IMF to World Bank summits – from Seattle to Prague to Genoa – and the
Today, as protesters in nearly a thousand cities across the world follow the example
set by the Occupy Wall Street protests, it's worth pondering what happened to the anti-globalisation movement.
Its activists did not lack passion or determination. But they did lack a coherent alternative to the neoliberal project. With no clear political direction, the movement was easily swept away by the jingoism
and turmoil that followed 9/11, just two months after Genoa.¶ Don't get me wrong: the Occupy movement is a glimmer of sanity amid today's economic
authorities were rattled.¶
madness. By descending on the West's financial epicentres, it reminds us of how a crisis caused by the banks (a sentence that needs to be repeated until it becomes a cliché) has been
cynically transformed into a crisis of public spending. The founding statement of Occupy London puts it succinctly: "We refuse to pay for the banks' crisis." The Occupiers direct their fire
at the top 1 per cent, and rightly so – as US billionaire Warren Buffett confessed: "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."¶
The Occupy movement has provoked fury from senior US Republicans such as Presidential contender Herman Cain who – predictably – labelled it "anti-American". They're right to be
worried: those camping outside banks threaten to refocus attention on the real villains, and to act as a catalyst for wider dissent.
But a coherent alternative to
the tottering global economic order remains, it seems, as distant as ever. ¶ Neo-liberalism crashes
around, half-dead, with no-one to administer the killer blow.¶ There's always a presumption that a crisis of capitalism is good news for
the left. Yet in the Great Depression, fascism consumed much of Europe. The economic crisis of the 1970s did lead to a resurgence of radicalism on both left and right. But, spearheaded
This time round, there doesn't even seem to be
an alternative for the right to defeat. That's not the fault of the protesters. In truth, the left has never recovered from
being virtually smothered out of existence . It was the victim of a perfect storm: the rise of the New
Right; neo-liberal globalisation; and the repeated defeats suffered by the trade union movement.¶ But, above all,
it was the aftermath of the collapse of Communism that did for the left. As US neo-conservative Midge Decter triumphantly put it: "It's
time to say: We've won. Goodbye." From the British Labour Party to the African National Congress, left-wing movements across the world hurtled to the right
in an almost synchronised fashion. It was as though the left wing of the global political spectrum had been sliced off.
That's why, although we live in an age of revolt, there remains no left to give it direction and purpose.
by Thatcherism and Reaganism, the New Right definitively crushed its opposition in the 1980s.
Abandoning nature causes extinction
Soulé 95 – Natural Resources Professor, California (Michael and Gary Lease, Reinventing Nature?, p 159-60, AG)
The decision has already been made in most places. Some of the ecological myths discussed here contain, either explicitly or implicitly, the
idea that nature is self-regulating and capable of caring for itself. This notion leads to the theory of management known as
benign neglect—nature will do fine, thank you, if human beings just leave it alone. Indeed, a century ago, a hands-off policy was the
best policy. Now it is not. Given nature's current fragmented and stressed condition, neglect will result in an
accelerating spiral of deterioration. Once people create large gaps in forests, isolate and disturb habitats, pollute, overexploit, and
introduce species from other continents, the viability of many ecosystems and native species is compromised, resiliency dissipates, and
diversity can collapse. When artificial disturbance reaches a certain threshold, even small changes can produce large effects, and these will be
compounded by climate change.' For example, a storm that would be considered normal and beneficial may, following widespread clearcutting,
cause disastrous blow-downs, landslides, and erosion. If global warming occurs, tropical storms are predicted to have greater force than now.
Homeostasis, balance, and Gaia are dangerous models when applied at the wrong spatial and temporal scales. Even fifty
years ago,
neglect might have been the best medicine, but that
third the number of people, and a world largely
was a world with a lot more big, unhumanized, connected spaces, a world with oneunaffected by chain saws, bulldozers, pesticides, and exotic, weedy
species. The alternative to neglect is active caring—in today's parlance, an affirmative approach to wildlands: to maintain and restore them,
to become stewards, accepting all the domineering baggage that word carries. Until humans are able to control their numbers
and their technologies, management is the only viable alternative to massive attrition of living nature.
The system’s sustainable
Kaletsky ’10
(Anatole, Masters in Economics from Harvard, Honour-Degree Graduate at King’s College and
Cambrdige, editor-at-large of The Times of London, founding partner and chief economist of GaveKal
Capital, He is on the governing board of the New York– based Institute for New Economic Theory (INET),
a nonprofit created after the 2007– 2009 crisis to promote and finance academic research in economics
outside the orthodoxy of “efficient markets.” From 1976 to 1990, Kaletsky was New York bureau chief
and Washington correspondent of the Financial Times and a business writer on The Economist,
The world did not end. Despite all the forebodings of disaster in the 2007– 09 financial crisis, the first decade of the
twenty-first century passed rather uneventfully into the second. The riots, soup kitchens, and bankruptcies predicted by many
of the world’s most respected economists did not materialize— and no one any longer expects the global
capitalist system to collapse, whatever that emotive word might mean. Yet the capitalist system’s survival does not mean that the precrisis faith in the wisdom of
financial markets and the efficiency of free enterprise will ever again be what it was before the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008. A return to decent economic
growth and normal financial conditions is likely by the middle of 2010, but will this imply a return to business as usual for politicians, economists, and financiers?
Although
globalization will continue and many parts of the world will gradually regain their prosperity of the precrisis period,
the traumatic effects of 2007– 09 will not be quickly forgotten. And the economic costs will linger for decades in the debts squeezing taxpayers and
government budgets, the disrupted lives of the jobless, and the vanished dreams of homeowners and investors around the world. For what collapsed on September 15, 2008, was not just
a bank or a financial system. What fell apart that day was an entire political philosophy and economic system, a way of thinking about and living in the world. The question now is what
will replace the global capitalism that crumbled in the autumn of 2008. The central argument of this book is that
nothing other than global capitalism.
The
global capitalism will be replaced by
traumatic events of 2007– 09 will neither destroy nor diminish the
fundamental human urges that have always powered the capitalist system— ambition, initiative, individualism, the
competitive spirit.
These natural human qualities will instead be redirected and reenergized to create a new
version of capitalism that will ultimately be even more successful and productive than the system it
replaced . To explain this process of renewal, and identify some of the most important features of the reinvigorated capitalist system, is the ambition of this book. This
transformation will take many years to complete, but some of its consequences can already be discerned. With the
benefit of even a year’s hindsight, it is clear that these consequences will be different from the nihilistic predictions from both ends of the political spectrum at the height of the crisis. On
anticapitalist ideologues seemed honestly to believe that a few weeks of financial chaos could bring
about the disintegration of a politico-economic system that had survived two hundred years of
the Left,
revolutions , depressions, and world wars. On the Right, free-market zealots insisted that private enterprise would be destroyed by government interventions that were clearly
A
balanced reassessment of the crisis must challenge both left-wing hysteria and right-wing hubris. Rather than
necessary to save the system— and many continue to believe that the crisis could have been resolved much better if governments had simply allowed financial institutions to collapse.
blaming the meltdown of the global financial system on greedy bankers, incompetent regulators, gullible homeowners, or foolish Chinese bureaucrats, this book puts what happened into
historical and ideological perspective. It reinterprets the crisis in the context of the economic reforms and geopolitical upheavals that have repeatedly transformed the nature of capitalism
capitalism has never been a static
system that follows a fixed set of rules, characterized by a permanent division of responsibilities between private enterprise and governments. Contrary to the teachings of modern
economic theory, no immutable laws govern the behavior of a capitalist economy. Instead, capitalism is an adaptive social system that mutates
and evolves in response to a changing environment. When capitalism is seriously threatened by a
since the late eighteenth century, most recently in the Thatcher-Reagan revolution of 1979– 89. The central argument is that
systemic crisis, a new version emerges that is better suited to the changing environment and replaces
the previously dominant form.
Once we recognize that capitalism is not a static set of institutions, but an evolutionary system that reinvents and reinvigorates
itself through crises, we can see the events of 2007– 09 in another light: as the catalyst for the fourth systemic transformation of capitalism, comparable to the transformations triggered
by the crises of the 1970s, the crises of the 1930s, and the Napoleonic Wars of 1803– 15. Hence the title of this book.
Consumption is inevitable – reducing resource consumption will lead to consumption
of other goods – that results in resource production
Wapner and Willoughby, 5 (Paul, Associate Professor and Director of the Global Environmental Politics
program, School of International Service at American University, and John, Professor of Economics at
American University, Chair of the Department of Economics, “The Irony of Environmentalism: The
Ecological Futility but Political Necessity of Lifestyle Change,” Ethics & International Affairs, Volume 19,
Issue 3, December 2005, pg. 77-89, Wiley Online Library, pdf, Tashma)
Considering what would happen if a group of environmentalists decided to cut back on their use of a key resource can also make this
point. Let’s say, for example, that I reduce my water consumption in an effort to save fresh water. There is no question that
this immediately reduces demand on water and thus helps to conserve a limited resource. But, in the act of doing so, I also pay less
to the water utility provider, and thus have more discretionary income. If I spend the money I save by not
consuming water on other resource-involved goods or activities, especially ones that indirectly use water (such as many
manufactured goods), the net environmental impact of my decision may be hard to discern . If I invest my savings in
conventional financial mechanisms, I will probably still end up inducing environmental harm. In short, resource restraint by some may not
translate directly into a collective reduction in resource use. This
underlines the difficulty of protecting the environment
through campaigns to change individual consumption patterns .
Alt fails – can’t overcome societal trends
Carolan, 4 (Michael S., Departments of Sociology and Environmental Studies, Whitman College,
“Ecological Modernization Theory: What About Consumption?,” Society & Natural Resources, Volume
17, Issue 3, pg. 247-260, Taylor and Francis, pdf, Tashma)
While in some respects our age is a postmaterial one, it is in other respects still very much the proverbial 800-pound material
gorilla . Few in this world are ready to give up on jewelry, cars , big-screen televisions, and computers ,
although many would like them produced in as ‘‘green’’ a manner as possible. And the billions that do not yet possess these
items are far from giving up on the idea of one day having them in their possession (Renner and Sampat 2002). We
must not base our hopes on a total dematerializing of the economy, for such hope is a chimera . Consumption will always
be tied to the material world , to some extent, and as such consumption will always be tied to the environment. As noted by
Michael Redclift (1996, 3), increased production requires increased consumption in ‘‘both volume and kind.’’
Engagement with technocracy is more effective than passive rejection
Jiménez-Aleixandre, professor of education – University of Santiago de Compostela, and PereiroMuñoz High School Castelao, Vigo (Spain), ‘2
(Maria-Pilar and Cristina, “Knowledge producers or knowledge consumers? Argumentation and decision
making about environmental management,” International Journal of Science Education Vol. 24, No. 11,
p. 1171–1190)
If science education and environmental education have as a goal to develop critical thinking and to promote
decision making, it seems that the acknowledgement of a variety of experts and expertise is of relevance to both.
Otherwise citizens could be unable to challenge a common view that places economical issues and technical
features over other types of values or concerns. As McGinn and Roth (1999) argue, citizens should be prepared to
participate in scientific practice, to be involved in situations where science is, if not created, at least used. The
assessment of environmental management is, in our opinion, one of these, and citizens do not need to possess all the technical knowledge to
be able to examine the positive and negative impacts and to weigh them up. The identification of instances of scientific practice in classroom
discourse is difficult especially if this practice is viewed as a complex process, not as fixed ‘steps’. Several instances were identified when it
could be said that students
acted as a knowledge-producing community in spite of the fact that the students,
doubts about their capacities to assess a project written by
particularly at the beginning of the sequence, expressed
experts and endorsed by a government office. Perhaps these doubts relate to the nature of the project, a ‘real life’ object that made its way
into the classroom, into the ‘school life’. As Brown et al. (1989) point out, there is usually a difference between practitioners’ tasks and
stereotyped school tasks and, it could be added, students are not used to being confronted with the complexity of ‘life-size’ problems.
However, as
the sequence proceeded, the students assumed the role of experts, exposing inconsistencies
in the project, offering alternatives and discussing it with one of its authors. The issue of expertise is worthy of attention and it
needs to be explored in different contexts where the relationships among technical expertise, values hierarchies and possible biases caused by
the subject matter could be unravelled. One of
the objectives of environmental education is to empower people
with the capacity of decision making; for this purpose the acknowledging of multiple expertise is crucial.
1ar consumption
Policies matter---effective energy choices depend on technical political literacy
Hodson 10 Derek, professor of education – Ontario Institute for Studies @ University of Toronto,
“Science Education as a Call to Action,” Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics and Technology
Education, Vol. 10, Issue 3, p. 197-206
**note: SSI = socioscientific issues
The final (fourth) level of sophistication in this issues-based approach is concerned with students findings ways of
putting their values and convictions into action, helping them to prepare for and engage in responsible
action, and assisting them in developing the skills, attitudes, and values that will enable them to take control of
their lives, cooperate with others to bring about change, and work toward a more just and sustainable
world in which power, wealth, and resources are more equitably shared. Socially and environmentally responsible
behavior will not necessarily follow from knowledge of key concepts and possession of the “right attitudes.” As Curtin (1991) reminded us, it is
important to distinguish between caring about and caring for. It is almost always much easier to proclaim that one cares about an issue than to
do something about it. Put simply, our values are worth nothing until we live them. Rhetoric and espoused values will not bring about social
justice and will not save the planet. We must change our actions. A politicized
ethic of care (caring for) entails active
involvement in a local manifestation of a particular problem or issue, exploration of the complex sociopolitical
contexts in which the problem/issue is located, and attempts to resolve conflicts of interest. FROM STSE
RHETORIC TO SOCIOPOLITICAL ACTION Writing from the perspective of environmental education, Jensen (2002) categorized the
knowledge that is likely to promote sociopolitical action and encourage pro-environmental behavior into four
dimensions: (a) scientific and technological knowledge that informs the issue or problem; (b) knowledge
about the underlying social, political, and economic issues, conditions, and structures and how they contribute to
creating social and environmental problems; (c) knowledge about how to bring about changes in society through direct or
indirect action; and (d) knowledge about the likely outcome or direction of possible actions and the
desirability of those outcomes. Although formulated as a model for environmental education, it is reasonable to suppose that
Jensen's arguments are applicable to all forms of SSI-oriented action. Little needs to be said about dimensions 1 and 2 in Jensen's framework
beyond the discussion earlier in the article. With regard to dimension 3, students
need knowledge of actions that are likely
to have positive impact and knowledge of how to engage in them. It is essential that they gain robust
knowledge of the social, legal, and political system(s) that prevail in the communities in which they live and develop a
clear understanding of how decisions are made within local, regional, and national government and within
industry, commerce, and the military. Without knowledge of where and with whom power of decision
making is located and awareness of the mechanisms by which decisions are reached, intervention is
not possible. Thus, the curriculum I propose requires a concurrent program designed to achieve a measure of political
literacy, including knowledge of how to engage in collective action with individuals who have different
competencies, backgrounds, and attitudes but share a common interest in a particular SSI. Dimension 3 also includes
knowledge of likely sympathizers and potential allies and strategies for encouraging cooperative action and group interventions. What Jensen
did not mention but would seem to be a part of dimension 3 knowledge is the nature of science-oriented knowledge that would
enable students to appraise the statements, reports, and arguments of scientists, politicians, and
journalists and to present their own supporting or opposing arguments in a coherent, robust, and
convincing way (see Hodson [2009b] for a lengthy discussion of this aspect of science education). Jensen's fourth category includes
awareness of how (and why) others have sought to bring about change and entails formulation of a vision of the kind of world in which we (and
our families and communities) wish to live. It is important for students to explore and develop their ideas, dreams, and aspirations for
themselves, their neighbors and families and for the wider communities at local, regional, national, and global levels—a clear overlap with
futures studies/education. An
essential step in cultivating the critical scientific and technological literacy on
which sociopolitical action depends is the application of a social and political critique capable of challenging
the notion of technological determinism. We can control technology and its environmental and social impact. More significantly, we can
control the controllers and redirect technology in such a way that adverse environmental impact is substantially
reduced (if not entirely eliminated) and issues of freedom, equality, and justice are kept in the forefront of
discussion during the establishment of policy.
Changing consumption isn’t enough. Simulating public positions in debate is vital to
refashioning environmental citizenship.
MacGregor and Szerszynski, Institute for Environment, Philosophy & Public Policy at Lancaster
University, ‘3 (Sherilyn and Bronislaw, “Environmental Citizenship and the Administration of Life”,
July, http://www.ncl.ac.uk/geps/research/politics/MacGregorandSzerszynskipap.doc)
Firstly, in relation to ‘changing one’s mind’, we want to argue that environmental citizenship should focus not on listing ways of changing values
and priorities but on participatory expertise (Torgerson, 1999:81, Fischer, 2000), on basic skills of citizenship such as informed scepticism
towards expert knowledge, on bringing a reflexive questioning angle to public debates, and so on. Environmental citizenship should not be
about changing one’s mind from wrong to right, but continuously cultivating a citizenly attitude towards environmental and other issues. This
does not mean simply changing private thoughts, but learning the habits of engaging in public thought. It is from this, rather than from the
In individual decisions such as those involved in consumption
practices, what should be encouraged is not rule-following but enlarged (Arendt, 1978) or dilemmatic (Billig et al.,
1988) thinking. Rather than such decisions being conceived as resulting from the monological operation of an isolated mind, based on
fixed knowledge and values, they should be seen as the result of an internal dialogue, a simulacrum of public
debate between different positions in the ideological dilemmas involved in ecological and other contemporary issues. Rather than
following of rules, that changes in practices should flow.
encouraging people to seek a pure, green self or subjectivity, securing an untroubled, private green ‘goodness’ through the application of green
knowledge and values – for example by following the Earth Charter – environmental citizenship should involve a continual openness to the
dilemmas and uncertainties of green action.
Secondly, concerning ‘doing one’s bit’, it
is problematic that environmental citizenship tends to be reduced to
lifestyle changes that can be confined to the private sphere. Not only does this risk obscuring questions of fairness and
equality (especially as regards the gendered division of unpaid domestic work), but it also obscures the structural (i.e., social,
economic, political) causes of environmental unsustainability. It seems naïve, even dangerous, to
assume that the cumulative effect of each small individual ‘bit’ will be enough to make up for the
tangled mess of much bigger bits of ecological destruction that occur (rather are allowed to occur)
simultaneously. (How much industrial pollution is emitted whilst aluminium cans are being washed and squashed in 25 million
households?) Green ‘lifestyle’ is here being conflated with citizenship, closing off the larger debate about the common good. Private acts
such as green consumer choices and recycling are about maintaining purity within oneself and following rules
rather than putting oneself at risk, getting ones hands dirty thorough appearing to others in the
political realm . It is not that we are arguing against recycling and green consumerism; rather we are arguing that it is possible to do it
and think about it differently; lifestyle change has be informed by public thought, reflective judgement and enlarged
thinking.
Permutation do both – solves better and the aff is a net-benefit
Bryant and Goodman 4 - * PhD in Politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies,
**Professor of Communication Studies
Raymond and Michael, “Consuming Narratives: The Political Ecology of 'Alternative' Consumption,”
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, Vol. 29, No. 3
The consumption practices of the conservation- and solidarity-seeking commodity cultures described here offer one
alternative to the call for a politics of redistribution. In the end, these cultures offer a privileged notion of transnational 'commun- ity' given
the relatively high cost of purchasing commodities such as organic cereal and fair trade coffee. True, commodities that 'speak' to 'altern- ative' consumers can
possibly make them more aware of what is happening to tropical environ- ments and small-scale producers. And yet, only those that can afford to pay the economic
premium can take part in this form of 'resistance'. Thus, 'moral' commodities may become 'alternative' in the larger sense by eschewing more progressive reconstructions of 'moral economy'. The creation of niche markets gives the North, albeit in geographi- cally variable ways, the ability to 'tune in but drop out' of both
conventional global economies and more demanding forms of resistance to social injus- tice and environmental degradation. A field of political
ecology
oriented towards the conceptual- ization of production and consumption dynamics is uniquely situated to
explore the ambiguities of North/South connections evinced by alternative consumption-related politics.
Third, this paper builds on work that challenges dualistic thinking that has bedevilled human geo- graphy for some time.
Examples of these schisms (and authors that challenge them) include those of nature/society (e.g. Murdoch 1997; Whatmore 2002), discursive/material (e.g. Cook
and Crang 1996) and cultural/economic (e.g. Jackson 2002b; Sayer 2001). Considering
together consumption and the
commoditization of political ecology narrat- ives further complicates the 'hybrid' or 'mutant' notions of landscape change and
development (Escobar 1999; Arce and Long 2000; Bebbington 2000). Breaking down the dualisms of production and
consumption thus should provide critical space from which to examine the political ecologies of
(alternative) development.9 In some ways, starting from processes of commoditization and associated narratives of development allows the
researcher to go 'forward' into the processes and meanings of consumption as well as 'backwards'
along the powerful socio-economic and ecological networks of production and development.
Alt doesn’t solve macro—any practical implementation wouldn’t make a dent in
individual or macro-level consumption patterns
Røpke 05 [Inge Røpke, Department for Manufacturing Engineering and Management Technical University of Denmark, Consumption in
ecological economics, International Society for Ecological Economics, April 2005, http://www.ecoeco.org/pdf/consumption_in_ee.pdf]
Compared to the other research questions, the
question about how to change consumption patterns in a more
sustainable direction is relatively under-researched in ecological economics. In relation to the fields of consumer
behaviour, economic psychology and environmental psychology, research on 'sustainable consumption' developed, and energy studies
provided new knowledge about energy saving behaviour – research that is sometimes reflected in ecological economics (an extensive review of
literature on consumer behaviour and behavioural change in relation to sustainable consumption can be found in (Jackson 2005)). The main
focus of this research is consumer choice and individual consumer behaviour, and sustainable
consumption is about choosing
more environmentally friendly products and services (e.g. organic food) and about recycling behaviour, water saving, room
temperature etc. The question is how to encourage consumers to make the environmentally correct choices, and measures such as labelling
and information campaigns are studied. This research has also tried to distinguish between different social groups or lifestyles to consider
whether the political measures should be tailored to different target groups (Empacher and Götz 2004). A successful contribution from this field
has been the NOA-model that describes consumer behaviour as the result of the consumer's Needs, Opportunities and Abilities (Ölander and
Thøgersen 1995; Gatersleben and Vlek 1998). For instance, the model is used as an organizing device in the OECD publication Towards
Sustainable Household Consumption 11(OECD 2002). The model opens up for public initiatives that can improve the opportunities for more
sustainable household behaviour, but neither the social construction of needs, nor the macro aspects of the model akre well developed.
However, the idea works well together with strategies for increased technological efficiency: more efficient products and services are provided,
and the consumers are encouraged to buy them. Whereas the
behavioural research usually focuses on individual
consumers or households and how they can be motivated to change behaviour, others have taken an
interest in bottom-up initiatives where consumers or citizens organize collectively to change their
lifestyle and consumption patterns – initiatives varying from mutual help to be 'green consumers' to the
establishment of eco-communities (Georg 1999; Michaelis 2004). Unfortunately, such initiatives still seem to have
marginal importance. In general, organizational measures are increasingly studied, both bottom-up initiatives and commercial
enterprises – for instance, car-sharing has been arranged in both ways (Prettenthaler and Steininger 1999). A widely promoted idea is to reduce
resource use by selling services instead of products, the so-called product-service system concept (Mont 2000; Mont 2004). In this way the final
services can be provided with fewer resources, as the provider will have an incentive to reduce costs also in the use phase, and as hardware can
sometimes be shared by several consumers. Most
of the practical steps to change consumption patterns and most
of the related research concern relatively marginal changes that are like a snowball in hell compared to
the challenge we face, if consumption patterns should deserve to be called sustainable – consistent with
a level of consumption that could be generalized to all humans without jeopardizing the basic
environmental life support systems. Very little is done to face the 'quantity problem'. At the level of research it is difficult to
translate the complexity of driving forces behind the ever-increasing consumption into suggestions for workable solutions, and at the level
of politics it is hard to imagine how to achieve support for such solutions. As the driving forces are as strong as ever,
all the small steps towards 'sustainable consumption' co-exist with a general worsening of the
situation – although many of these steps can be fine, they are far from sufficient.
Individual focus fails—consumers are always embedded in social normality.
Bartiaux 09 [Francoise Bartiaux, Institute of Demography at the Universite catholique de Louvain (UCL), Changing energy-related practices
and behaviours in the residential sector: Sociological approaches, 2009]
Consumers are definitely members of societies and not individual consumers, rational or not, obeying to
price signals and applying energy advice. They are living in socio-technical systems and their practices of
energy use and savings are embedded in social definitions of comfort, convenience, cleanliness and
connectedness (Shove, 2003; Gram-Hansen, 2008). Although there is a growing convergence between societies, these definitions are
time and location specific. So “environmentalists should argue for social and cultural diversity. They should do all that can be done to
engender multiple meanings of comfort, diverse conventions of cleanliness and forms of social order less reliant on individual modes of coordination” concludes Shove (2003, p. 199). Escalating
energy consumption has been explained by the interplay
between technological developments and the co-evolution of practices and norms. Will declining
consumption and energy savings be brought about by similar but reverse co-evolution patterns? It a microanalytical scale now, these co-evolutions may be transposed into combinations of several “factors” or
“domain”, which are not only numerous and complex, but also in competition and even paradoxical: the
same ‘factor’ has a double valence, being possibly a lever or a brake to changes in a more energy-saving
behaviour. This is summarised in the table below, presenting the major levers and barriers to changes in energy-related practices. Most
domains are made of social factors (e.g. technological developments) and aggregate charac-teristics (e.g. proportion of owners). Three points
are important to underline. Firstly, the
same factor can be experienced as a brake or as a lever; there is thus no
straightforward solution. Secondly, the weight that is given to the different lever factors also depends on
the action to be undertaken or on the practice to be changed. This process of priorities-setting is often
non conscious, except of course in situations where explicit advices are given, for example by an energy expert.
Thirdly, there is always a combination of several lever factors: none will thus be sufficient by itself.
However, one brake factor will be sufficient. (Bartiaux et al., 2006). If energy consumption is to be divided by ‘a factour four’
(von Weiszäcker, Lovins 8 and Lovins, 1997), or more, all the dimensions mentioned above indicate potential policy
implications in various forms, either for energy policies as such or more broadly in terms of urban planning, employment and
training policies and so on. On the whole, this synthesis calls for visible policies of sustainable energy consumption,
as these policies would provide discursive consciousness, social legitimacy and relief from making
individual “choice” that would be conflicting with social normality, as contextually defined.
Consumption focus fails-~--political action key
Bryant 12—prof of philosophy at Collin College (Levi, Black Ecology: A Pessimistic Moment,
larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/03/19/black-ecology-a-pessimistic-moment/)
So why is this an issue? It’s an issue because while environmentalists prescribe all sorts of action we need to take to avert the climate catastrophe,
it seems to me that in failing to engage in an ecology of social and political institutions they are whistling
past the graveyard by failing to address the question of the conditions under which action is possible. Here’s
the part where everyone gets angry with me. Given the way in which government and corporations are today intertwined , I
don’t think there’s much we can do to avert the coming catastrophe . As Morton says, referring to logical time, “the
catastrophe has already happened”. So what would it mean, I wonder, to take Morton’s thesis seriously? Here I know Tim will disagree with me. When I look at environmental discussions in
popular media and from many around me, I see the discussion revolving almost entirely around consumers. We’re told that we have to consume differently to
solve this problem. I agree that we need to consume differently, but I don’t see any feasible way in which driving fuel efficient cars, using less heat and
AC, eating less meat, etc will solve these problems. This is because the lion’s share of our climate change problems arise from the production and
distribution end of the equation, rather than the consumption end. They are problems arising from agricultural practices,
factories, and how we ship goods throughout countries and the world. The problem is that given the way in which
governments and corporations are intertwined with one another, and given the way in which third world countries are
dependent on fossil fuels for their development, and given the fact that only governmental solutions can address problems of
production and distribution, we’re left with no recourse for action. We can only watch helplessly while our bought and sold politicians continue to fiddle as the world burns.
Shifting consumption cannot solve
Alcott ‘8 (Blake ALCOTT Ecological Economist Masters from Cambridge in Land Economy ‘8 The
sufficiency strategy: Would rich-world frugality lower environmental impact? Ecological Economics 64
(4) p. Science Direct
The environmental sufficiency strategy of greater consumer frugality has become popular in ecological
economics, its attractiveness increasing along with awareness that not much can be done to stem population growth and that energy-efficiency
measures are either not enough or, due to backfire, part of the problem. Concerning the strategy's feasibility, effectiveness, and common
rationale, several conclusions can be drawn. • The
consequences of the strategy's frugality demand shift – price
reduction and the ensuing consumption rebound – are not yet part of mainstream discussion. • Contrary to
what is implied by the strategy's advocates, the frugality shift cannot achieve a one-to-one reduction in world
aggregate consumption or impact: Poorer marginal consumers increase their consumption. • The size of the
sufficiency rebound is an open question. • The concepts of ‘North’ and ‘South’ are not relevant to the consumption discussion. • Even if
the voluntary material consumption cuts by the rich would effect some lowering of total world
consumption, changing human behaviour through argument and exhortation is exceedingly difficult. •
While our moral concern for present others is stronger than that for future others, this intragenerational equity is in no way
incompatible with non-sustainable impact. • Since savings effected by any one country or individual can
be (more than) compensated by other countries and individuals, the relevant scale of any strategy is the
world. • No single strategy to change any given right-side factor in I = f(P,A,T) guarantees any effect on
impact whatsoever. • Right-side strategies in combination are conceptually complicated and perhaps more
costly than explicitly political left-side strategies directly lowering impact. • Research emphasis should be
shifted towards measures to directly lower impact both in terms of depletion and emissions. Lower
consumption may have advantages on the individual, community, or regional level. There is for instance some truth in the view of Diogenes
that happiness and quantity of consumption do not necessarily rise proportionally. Living lightly can offer not only less stress and more free
time but also the personal boon of a better sense of integrity, fulfilling the Kantian criterion that one’s acts should be possible universally
(worldwide). Locally it could mean cleaner air, less acid rain, less noise, less garbage, and more free space. And in the form of explicit,
guaranteed shifts of purchasing power to poorer people it would enable others to eat better or to buy goods such as petrol and cars. However,
given global markets and marginal consumers, one person’s doing without enables another to ‘do with’:
In the near run the former consumption of a newly sufficient person can get fully replaced. And given the
extent of poverty and the temptations of luxury and prestige consumption, this near run is likely to be
longer than the time horizon required for a relevant strategy to stem climate change and the loss of
vital species and natural resources.
2ac alternative
Desire for continued neoliberal growth is innate – poor countries won’t sign onto the
alt
Aligica ’03 (Paul Aligica, Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and Adjunct Fellow
at the Hudson Institute, “The Great Transition and the Social Limits to Growth: Herman Kahn on Social
Change and Global Economic Development”, April 21,
http://www.hudson.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=publication_details&id=2827)
Stopping things would mean if not to engage in an experiment to change the human nature, at least in an equally difficult experiment in
altering powerful cultural forces: "We firmly believe that despite
the arguments put forward by people who would like
to 'stop the earth and get off,' it is simply impractical to do so. Propensity to change may not be inherent in
human nature, but it is firmly embedded in most contemporary cultures. People have almost everywhere
become curious, future oriented, and dissatisfied with their conditions. They want more material goods and covet higher
status and greater control of nature. Despite much propaganda to the contrary, they believe in progress and future" (Kahn, 1976,
164). As regarding the critics of growth that stressed the issue of the gap between rich and poor countries and the issue of redistribution, Kahn
noted that what
most people everywhere want was visible, rapid improvement in their economic status
and living standards, and not a closing of the gap (Kahn, 1976, 165). The people from poor countries have as a
basic goal the transition from poor to middle class. The other implications of social change are
secondary for them. Thus a crucial factor to be taken into account is that while the zero-growth advocates and their
followers may be satisfied to stop at the present point, most others are not. Any serious attempt to
frustrate these expectations or desires of that majority is likely to fail and/or create disastrous counter
reactions. Kahn was convinced that "any concerted attempt to stop or even slow 'progress' appreciably (that is, to
be satisfied with the moment) is catastrophe-prone". At the minimum, "it would probably require the creation of
extraordinarily repressive governments or movements-and probably a repressive international system"
(Kahn, 1976, 165; 1979, 140-153). The pressures of overpopulation, national security challenges and poverty as well
as the revolution of rising expectations could be solved only in a continuing growth environment. Kahn
rejected the idea that continuous growth would generate political repression and absolute poverty. On the contrary, it is the limits-togrowth position "which creates low morale, destroys assurance, undermines the legitimacy of
governments everywhere, erodes personal and group commitment to constructive activities and
encourages obstructiveness to reasonable policies and hopes". Hence this position "increases enormously
the costs of creating the resources needed for expansion, makes more likely misleading debate and
misformulation of the issues, and make less likely constructive and creative lives". Ultimately "it is precisely
this position the one that increases the potential for the kinds of disasters which most at its advocates
are trying to avoid" (Kahn, 1976, 210; 1984).
No impact – every credible measure proves the world is getting better now
Ridley, visiting professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, former science editor of The Economist, and
award-winning science writer, 2010
(Matt, The Rational Optimist, pg. 13-15)
If my fictional family is not to your taste, perhaps you prefer statistics. Since
1800, the population of the world has
multiplied six times, yet average life expectancy has more than doubled and real income has risen
more than nine times. Taking a shorter perspective, in 2005, compared with 1955, the average human being on
Planet Earth earned nearly three times as much money (corrected for inflation), ate one-third more calories of
food, buried one-third as many of her children and could expect to live one-third longer. She was less
likely to die as a result of war, murder, childbirth, accidents, tornadoes, flooding, famine, whooping cough,
tuberculosis, malaria, diphtheria, typhus, typhoid, measles, smallpox, scurvy or polio. She was less likely, at
any given age, to get cancer, heart disease or stroke. She was more likely to be literate and to have finished
school. She was more likely to own a telephone, a flush toilet, a refrigerator and a bicycle. All this during a
half-century when the world population has more than doubled, so that far from being rationed by
population pressure, the goods and services available to the people of the world have expanded. It is, by
any standard, an astonishing human achievement. Averages conceal a lot. But even if you break down the world into
bits, it is hard to find any region that was worse off in 2005 than it was in 1955. Over that half-century, real
income per head ended a little lower in only six countries (Afghanistan, Haiti, Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Somalia), life expectancy in three
(Russia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe), and infant survival in none. In the rest they have rocketed upward. Africa’s rate of improvement has been
distressingly slow and patchy compared with the rest of the world, and many southern African countries saw life expectancy plunge in the
1990s as the AIDS epidemic took hold (before recovering in recent years). There were also moments in the half-century when you could have
caught countries in episodes of dreadful deterioration of living standards or life chances – China in the 1960s, Cambodia in the 1970s, Ethiopia
in the 1980s, Rwanda in the 1990s, Congo in the 2000s, North Korea throughout. Argentina had a disappointingly stagnant twentieth century.
But overall, after fifty years, the outcome for the world is remarkably, astonishingly, dramatically positive. The
average South Korean lives twenty-six more years and earns fifteen times as much income each year as he did in 1955 (and earns fifteen times
as much as his North Korean counter part). The
average Mexican lives longer now than the average Briton did in
1955. The average Botswanan earns more than the average Finn did in 1955. Infant mortality is lower
today in Nepal than it was in Italy in 1951. The proportion of Vietnamese living on less than $2 a day has
dropped from 90 per cent to 30 per cent in twenty years. The rich have got richer, but the poor have
done even better. The poor in the developing world grew their consumption twice as fast as the world
as a whole between 1980 and 2000. The Chinese are ten times as rich, one-third as fecund and twenty-eight years longer-lived
than they were fifty years ago. Even Nigerians are twice as rich, 25 per cent less fecund and nine years longer-lived than they were in 1955.
Despite a doubling of the world population, even the raw number of people living in absolute poverty
(defined as less than a 1985 dollar a day) has fallen since the 1950s. The percentage living in such absolute poverty
has dropped by more than half – to less than 18 per cent. That number is, of course, still all too horribly high, but the
trend is hardly a cause for despair: at the current rate of decline, it would hit zero around 2035 – though it probably
won’t. The United Nations estimates that poverty was reduced more in the last fifty years than in the previous 500.
Alt doesn’t solve the case – institutional focus key
Doran and Barry 6 – worked at all levels in the environment and sustainable development policy
arena - at the United Nations, at the Northern Ireland Assembly and Dáil Éireann, and in the Irish NGO
sector. PhD--AND-- Reader in Politics, Queen's University School of Politics, International Studies, and
Philosophy. PhD Glasgow (Peter and John, Refining Green Political Economy: From Ecological
Modernisation to Economic Security and Sufficiency, Analyse & Kritik 28/2006, p. 250–275,
http://www.analyse-und-kritik.net/2006-2/AK_Barry_Doran_2006.pdf)
The aim of this article is to offer a draft of a realistic, but critical, version of green political economy to underpin the economic dimensions
of radical views of sustainable development. It is written explicitly with a view to encouraging others to respond to it in the necessary
collaborative effort to think through this aspect of sustainable development. Our position is informed by two important observations. As a
sign of our times, the crises that we are addressing under the banner of sustainable development (however inadequately) render the
distinction between what is ‘realistic’ and ‘radical’ problematic. It seems to us that the only realistic course is to revisit the most basic
assumptions embedded within the dominant model of development and economics. Realistically the only longterm option available is
radical. Secondly, we
cannot build or seek to create a sustainable economy ab nihilo, but must begin—in an
where we are, with the structures, institutions, modes of production, laws,
regulations and so on that we have. We make this point in Ireland with a story about the motorist who stops at the side of the
road to ask directions, only to be told: “Now Ma’m, I wouldn’t start from here if I were you.” ¶ This does not mean simply
accepting these as immutable or set in stone— after all, some of the current institutions, principles and structures
underpinning the dominant economic model are the very causes of unsustainable development— but we do need to recognise
that we must work with (and ‘through’—in the terms of the original German Green Party’s slogan of “marching through the
agonistic fashion—from
institutions”) these
existing structures as well as changing and reforming
and in some cases abandoning
them
as either unnecessary or positively harmful to the creation and maintenance of a sustainable economy and society. Moreover, we have a
particular responsibility under the current dominant economic trends to name the neo-liberal project as the hegemonic influence on
economic thinking and practice. In the words of Bourdieu/Wacquant (2001), neoliberalism is the new ‘planetary vulgate’, which provides
the global context for much of the contemporary political and academic debate on sustainable development. For example, there is a clear
hierarchy of trade (WTO) over the environment (Multilateral Environmental Agreements) in the international rules-based systems. At the
boundaries or limits of the sustainable development debate in both the UK and the European Union it is also evident that the objectives of
competitiveness and trade policy are sacrosanct. As Tim Luke (1999) has observed, the relative success or failure of national economies in
head-to-head global competition is taken by ‘geo-economics’ as the definitive register of any one nation-state’s waxing or waning
international power, as well as its rising or falling industrial competitiveness, technological vitality and economic prowess. In this context,
many believe ecological considerations can, at best, be given only meaningless symbolic responses, in the continuing quest to mobilise the
Earth’s material resources. ¶ Our realism is rooted in the demos. The
realism with which this paper is concerned to promote
recognises that the path to an alternative economy and society must begin with a recognition of the
reality that most people (in the West) will not democratically vote (or be given the opportunity to vote)
for a completely different type of society and economy overnight. This is true even as the merits of a
‘green economy’ are increasingly recognised and accepted by most people as the logical basis for safeguards and
guarantees for their basic needs and aspirations (within limits). The realistic character of the thinking behind this article accepts that
consumption and materialistic lifestyles are here to stay. (The most we can probably aspire to is a
widening and deepening of popular movements towards ethical consumption, responsible investment, and
fair trade.) And indeed there is little to be gained by proposing alternative economic systems which start
from a complete rejection of consumption and materialism. The appeal to realism is in part an attempt to correct
the common misperception (and self-perception) of green politics and economics requiring an excessive degree of self-denial and a
puritanical asceticism (see Goodin 1992, 18; Allison 1991, 170– 78). While rejecting the claim that green political theory calls for the
complete disavowal of materialistic lifestyles, it
is true that green politics does require the collective re-assessment of such
economic signals and pedagogical attempts to encourage a delinking—in the
minds of the general populus—of the ‘good life’ and the ‘goods life’. This does not mean that we
need necessarily require the complete and across the board rejection of materialistic lifestyles. It must be the
lifestyles, and does require new
case that there is room and tolerance in a green economy for people to choose to live diverse lifestyles—some more sustainable than
others—so long as these do not ‘harm’ others, threaten long-term ecological sustainability or create unjust levels of socio-economic
inequalities. Thus, realism in this context is in part another name for the acceptance of a broadly ‘liberal’ or ‘post-liberal’ (but certainly not
anti-liberal) green perspective.2¶ 1. Setting Out¶ At the same time, while critical of the ‘abstract’ and ‘unrealistic’ utopianism that peppers
green and radical thinking in this area, we do not intend to reject utopianism. Indeed, with Oscar Wilde we agree that a map of the world
that does not have utopia on it, isn’t worth looking at. The spirit in which this
article is written is more in keeping with framing
green and sustainability concerns within a ‘concrete utopian’ perspective or what the Marxist geographer David
Harvey (1996, 433–435) calls a “utopianism of process”, to be distinguished from “closed”, blueprint-like and abstract
utopian visions. Accordingly, the model of green political economy outlined here is in keeping with Steven
Lukes’ suggestion that a concrete utopianism depends on the ‘knowledge of a self-transforming
present, not an ideal future’ (Lukes 1984, 158).¶ It accepts the current dominance of one particular model
of green political economy—namely ‘ecological modernisation’ (hereafter referred to EM)—as the preferred
‘political economy’ underpinning contemporary state and market forms of sustainable development,
and further accepts the necessity for green politics to positively engage in the debates and policies
around EM from a strategic (as well as a normative) point of view. However, it is also conscious of the limits and
problems with ecological modernisation, particularly in terms of its technocratic, supply-side and reformist ‘business as usual’
approach, and seeks to explore the potential to radicalise EM or use it as a ‘jumping off’ point for more
radical views of greening the economy. Ecological modernisation is a work in progress; and that’s the
point. ¶ The article begins by outlining EM in theory and practice, specifically in relation to the British state’s ‘sustainable development’
policy agenda under New Labour.3 While EM as currently practised by the British state is ‘weak’ and largely turns on the centrality of
‘innovation’ and ‘eco-efficiency’, the paper then goes on to investigate in more detail the role of the market within current
conceptualisations of EM and other models of green political economy. In particular, a potentially powerful
distinction (both
conceptually and in policy debates) between ‘the market’ and ‘capitalism’ has yet to be sufficiently explored and
exploited as a starting point for the development of radical, viable and attractive conceptions of green
political economy as alternatives to both EM and the orthodox economic paradigm. We contend that there is a role for the
market in innovation and as part of the ‘governance’ for sustainable development in which eco-efficiency
and EM
of the economy is linked to non-ecological demands of green politics and sustainable
development such as social and global justice, egalitarianism, democratic regulation of the market and the
conceptual (and policy) expansion of the ‘economy’ to include social, informal and noncash economic
activity and a progressive role for the state (especially at the local/municipal level). Here we suggest that the
‘environmental’ argument or basis of green political economy in terms of the need for the economy to become
more resource efficient, minimise pollution and waste and so on, has largely been won. What that means is that no one
is disputing the need for greater resource productivity, energy and eco-efficiency. Both state and corporate/business
actors have accepted the environmental ‘bottom line’ (often rhetorically, but nonetheless important) as a conditioning factor in the pursuit
of the economic ‘bottom line’.
2ac energy solves
Plan creates a paradigm shift in resource usage that can foster global access to
electricity without increasing structural violence
Blees 9 [“Integral Fast Reactors for the masses”, Brave New Climate, Posted on 12 February 2009 on
post by Barry Brook, Professor of Climate Change @ University of Adelaide, Tom Blees, National Center
for Atmospheric Research]
Chris, advances in technology include very real advances in efficiency of our electrical devices, which is why
California has been able to maintain a flat per capita electricity consumption for 30 years, and as someone who lives in California I can assure
you that our efficiency is far from draconian, and that we could do a LOT better with little effort. There
is no reason to believe that
new technologies will cause us to require ever-greater amounts of electricity. On the contrary, in fact. Besides,
you’re not going to get away from new technology, it’s an unstoppable evolutionary process (barring
utter catastrophe). Watch Star Trek. Maybe it’ll give you a little more optimistic view.¶ Developing countries, however, will
demand much more energy (electrical and otherwise) per person as they improve their standard of living.
With IFR technology it shouldn’t be a problem providing it safely, economically, and cleanly. We needn’t
go backwards, nor do we need to discourage every country from working toward a standard of living
that those in the developed countries take for granted, just so long as we recycle everything as I describe in Prescription for
the Planet. Between effortless recycling using plasma recyclers and power provided by IFRs, we can achieve
standard of living fairness without being worried about running out of resources. I realize that breaking
free of the zero-sum paradigm is a bit of a mind stretch, but it’s doable. That’s what P4TP is really all about:
illuminating the path to a post-scarcity society. The technologies are only the tools to get there.¶ There is nothing particularly
virtuous about a regression to some mythical “good old days.” And if we manage to utilize technologies
that allow us to be even profligate consumers of energy (though that’s really not necessary) without damaging the
environment or being unfair to our fellow man, that is not inherently a bad thing. There are a lot of mental
constructs that will have to be re-examined in light of the sort of resource revolution I propose in my book. It
won’t really matter if you drive around in a boron-powered zero-emission Hummer that’s made of garbage, what my son Shanti calls a “guiltfree car.” I urge you to read it not necessarily for the technological details but to get a picture of what the future could look like, a
far
brighter future than you might imagine.
Alt fails – rampant consumerism inevitable absent the plan
Blees 9 [“Integral Fast Reactors for the masses”, Brave New Climate, Posted on 12 February 2009 on
post by Barry Brook, Professor of Climate Change @ University of Adelaide, Tom Blees, National Center
for Atmospheric Research]
The approach in P4TP is one that recognizes the futility of relying on behavioral modification to effect
full compliance with guidelines of any kind. Look at recycling: Some people have 3 or 4 trash cans in their
kitchen to recycle in a still-not-entirely-effective manner. Most people have one, or two at most. Same with energy
conservation. Many people screw in twisty light bulbs and turn lights out when they leave a room. Yet many people don’t do one or the
other of these things, or both, even highly educated people who consider themselves environmentally conscious. If we’re trying to save
the planet, it behooves us to try to set things up in such a way that even egregiously irresponsible
people won’t be harming the environment when they proceed with their daily lives. And that CAN be
done. It might not sit well with those who consider frugality or responsible behavior or asceticism as
virtues, but that’s really beside the point. Those are value judgements about which our biosphere couldn’t care
less. Do you find rampant consumerism foolish? Me too. But I’d rather that people who don’t could
pursue their lifestyle in such a way that our planetary health doesn’t suffer because of it. Can that be
done? I believe so, and that is the sort of resource revolution that I sketch out in P4TP. We can still achieve a certain level of
energy responsibility by metering electricity, even if the fuel for the power plants is free, and we should
because that’ll prevent a lot of profligacy in energy use and thus prevent us having to build lots more
power plants needlessly. But to a great extent such behavioral modification is difficult in other spheres
(like recycling), and that’s where technological solutions are preferable. Likewise with driving: if our cars pollute, we
should drive less. If our cars don’t pollute, and if acquiring their fuel doesn’t require any sort of environmental insult, should we care?¶ If our
cultures are dysfunctional, we can try to improve them, but if we have the means to end the
environmental damage caused by cultural dysfunction, let’s work on that and worry about the
dysfunction on a different level. Too often the dissatisfaction (or even disgust) that those who consider themselves
environmentalists feel about what they perceive as their less mature fellow humans is reflected in a drive toward neo-primitivism, claiming that
we MUST diminish our standard of living (however that may be measured) if we are to avoid environmental catastrophe. They often express a
determination to force such changes in the sort of lifestyle of which they disapprove, whether through legislation, rationing, or other means.¶
It all gets very religion-like, with a disdain for the unvirtuous. Why not create a world where the
environmental impact of personal behavior is inconsequential, if possible. Let’s leave virtue out of it. It
certainly doesn’t seem like appealing to personal responsibility works too well anyway.¶ When you get right
down to it, are our societies today more dysfunctional than they ever were? I have my doubts about that. We’re evolving as a species. If we
can manage to not despoil our habitat to the point where it becomes unlivable perhaps we can continue
the progress. It’s pretty discouraging sometimes, I grant you that. But we’re all stuck on this ball for a short ride, so we
might as well make the best of it.
Aff --- Capitalism Answers
at: alternative
Alt fails – no transition
Kliman, 4 – PhD, Professor of Economics at Pace University
(Andrew, Andrew Kliman’s Writings, “Alternatives to Capitalism: What Happens After the Revolution?”
http://akliman.squarespace.com/writings/)
Have we faced the harsh reality that, unless th[e] inseparability between the dialectics of thought and of revolution does exist,
any country that does succeed in its revolution may retrogress, since the world revolution cannot occur
at one stroke everywhere and world capitalism continues to exist? … [Lenin’s] practice of the dialectic of thought as
well as of revolution underlined his call for a Third International. Raya Dunayevskaya, “Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 1985-86” I. Concretizing
the Vision of a New Human Society We
live at a moment in which it is harder than ever to articulate a liberatory
alternative to capitalism. As we all know, the collapse of state-capitalist regimes that called themselves
“Communist,” as well as the widespread failures of social democracy to remake society, have given rise to a widespread
acceptance of Margaret Thatcher’s TINA – the belief that “there is no alternative.” Yet the difficulty in articulating a
liberatory alternative is not mostly the product of these events. It is an inheritance from the past. To what extent has such an alternative ever
been articulated? There has been a lot of progress – in theory and especially in practice – on the problem of forms of organization – but new
organizational forms by themselves are not yet an alternative. A great many leftists, even
revolutionaries, did of course regard nationalized property and the State Plan, under the control of the
“vanguard” Party, as socialism, or at least as the basis for a transition to socialism. But even before
events refuted this notion, it represented, at best, an evasion of the problem. It was largely a matter of
leftists with authoritarian personalities subordinating themselves and others to institutions and power
with a blind faith that substituted for thought. How such institutions and such power would result in
human liberation was never made clear. Vague references to “transition” were used to wave the
problem away. Yet as Marxist-Humanism has stressed for more than a decade, the anti-Stalinist left is also partly responsible for the crisis
in thought. It, too, failed to articulate a liberatory alternative, offering in place of private- and state-capitalism little more than what Hegel
(Science of Logic, Miller trans., pp. 841-42) called “the empty negative … a presumed absolute”: The impatience that insists merely on getting
beyond the determinate … and finding itself immediately in the absolute, has before it as cognition nothing but the empty negative, the
abstract infinite; in other words, a presumed absolute, that is presumed because it is not posited, not grasped; grasped it can only be through
the mediation of cognition … . The
question that confronts us nowadays is whether we can do better. Is it
possible to make the vision of a new human society more concrete and determinate than it now is,
through the mediation of cognition? According to a long-standing view in the movement, it is not
possible. The character of the new society can only be concretized by practice alone, in the course of
trying to remake society. Yet if this is true, we are faced with a vicious circle from which there seems to
be no escape, because acceptance of TINA is creating barriers in practice. In the perceived absence of an alternative,
practical struggles have proven to be self-limiting at best. They stop short of even trying to remake
society totally – and for good reason. As Bertell Ollman has noted (Introduction to Market Socialism: The Debate among
Socialists, Routledge, 1998, p. 1), “People who believe [that there is no alternative] will put up with almost any
degree of suffering. Why bother to struggle for a change that cannot be? … people [need to] have a
good reason for choosing one path into the future rather than another.”
Alt doesn’t solve the case – gotta have a blueprint
Kliman, 4 – PhD, Professor of Economics at Pace University
(Andrew, Andrew Kliman’s Writings, “Alternatives to Capitalism: What Happens After the Revolution?”
http://akliman.squarespace.com/writings/)
Have we faced the harsh reality that, unless th[e] inseparability between the dialectics of thought and of revolution does exist,
any country that does succeed in its revolution may retrogress, since the world revolution cannot occur
at one stroke everywhere and world capitalism continues to exist? … [Lenin’s] practice of the dialectic of thought as
well as of revolution underlined his call for a Third International. Raya Dunayevskaya, “Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 1985-86” I. Concretizing
the Vision of a New Human Society We
live at a moment in which it is harder than ever to articulate a liberatory
alternative to capitalism. As we all know, the collapse of state-capitalist regimes that called themselves
“Communist,” as well as the widespread failures of social democracy to remake society, have given rise to a widespread
acceptance of Margaret Thatcher’s TINA – the belief that “there is no alternative.” Yet the difficulty in articulating a
liberatory alternative is not mostly the product of these events. It is an inheritance from the past. To what extent has such an alternative ever
been articulated? There has been a lot of progress – in theory and especially in practice – on the problem of forms of organization – but new
organizational forms by themselves are not yet an alternative. A great many leftists, even
revolutionaries, did of course regard nationalized property and the State Plan, under the control of the
“vanguard” Party, as socialism, or at least as the basis for a transition to socialism. But even before
events refuted this notion, it represented, at best, an evasion of the problem. It was largely a matter of
leftists with authoritarian personalities subordinating themselves and others to institutions and power
with a blind faith that substituted for thought. How such institutions and such power would result in
human liberation was never made clear. Vague references to “transition” were used to wave the
problem away. Yet as Marxist-Humanism has stressed for more than a decade, the anti-Stalinist left is also partly responsible for the crisis
in thought. It, too, failed to articulate a liberatory alternative, offering in place of private- and state-capitalism little more than what Hegel
(Science of Logic, Miller trans., pp. 841-42) called “the empty negative … a presumed absolute”: The impatience that insists merely on getting
beyond the determinate … and finding itself immediately in the absolute, has before it as cognition nothing but the empty negative, the
abstract infinite; in other words, a presumed absolute, that is presumed because it is not posited, not grasped; grasped it can only be through
the mediation of cognition … . The
question that confronts us nowadays is whether we can do better. Is it
possible to make the vision of a new human society more concrete and determinate than it now is,
through the mediation of cognition? According to a long-standing view in the movement, it is not
possible. The character of the new society can only be concretized by practice alone, in the course of
trying to remake society. Yet if this is true, we are faced with a vicious circle from which there seems to
be no escape, because acceptance of TINA is creating barriers in practice. In the perceived absence of an alternative,
practical struggles have proven to be self-limiting at best. They stop short of even trying to remake
society totally – and for good reason. As Bertell Ollman has noted (Introduction to Market Socialism: The Debate among
Socialists, Routledge, 1998, p. 1), “People who believe [that there is no alternative] will put up with almost any
degree of suffering. Why bother to struggle for a change that cannot be? … people [need to] have a
good reason for choosing one path into the future rather than another.”
2ac environment
Cap net good for environment – property rights
Veer 12 (Pierre-Guy, Independent journalist writing for the Von Mises Institute, 5/2, “Cheer for the Environment, Cheer for Capitalism,”
http://www.mises.ca/posts/blog/cheer-for-the-environment-cheer-for-capitalism/)
No Ownership, No Responsibility How
can such a negligence have happened? It’s simple: no one was the legitimate
owner of the resources (water, air, ground). When a property is state-owned – as was the case under communism –
government has generally little incentive to sustainably exploit it. In communist Europe, governments
wanted to industrialize their country in order, they hoped, to catch up with capitalist economies. Objectives
were set, and they had to be met no matter what. This included the use of brown coal, high in sulfur and
that creates heavy smoke when burned[4], and questionable farming methods, which depleted the soil. This lack of
vision can also be seen in the public sector of capitalist countries. In the US, the Department of Defense creates more dangerous waste than the
top five chemical product companies put together. In fact, pollution is such that cleanup costs are estimated at $20 billion. The same goes for
agriculture, where Washington encourages overfarming or even farming not adapted for the environment it’s in[5]. Capitalism, the Green
Solution In
order to solve most of the pollution problems, there exists a simple solution: laissez-faire
capitalism, i.e. make sure property rights and profitability can be applied. The latter helped Eastern
Europe; when communism fell, capitalism made the countries seek profitable – and not just cheap – ways to
produce, which greatly reduced pollution[6]. As for the former, it proved its effectiveness, notably with the Love Canal[7].
Property rights are also thought of in order to protect some resources, be it fish[8] or endangered
species[9]. Why such efficiency? Because an owner’s self-interest is directed towards the maximum
profitability of his piece of land. By containing pollution – as Hooker Chemicals did with its canal – he keeps
away from costly lawsuit for property violation. At the same time, badly managed pollution can diminish the
value of the land, and therefore profits. Any entrepreneur with a long-term vision – and whose property is safe
from arbitrary government decisions – thinks about all that in order to protect his investment. One isn’t foolish enough to
sack one’s property! In conclusion, I have to mention that I agree with environmentalists that it is importance to preserve the environment in
order to protect mother nature and humans. However, I strongly disagree with their means, i.e. government intervention. Considering it very
seldom has a long-term vision, it is the worst thing that can happen. In fact, one could says that most
environmental disasters are,
directly or indirectly, caused by the State, mainly by a lack of clear property rights. Were they clearer, they would let each and
everyone of us, out of self-interest, protect the environment in a better manner. That way, everyone’s a winner.
1ar environment
And, no environment impact
Norberg, 3 (Johan Norberg, Senior Fellow at Cato Institute, “In Defense of Global Capitalism”, p. 223)
It is a mistake, then, to believe that growth automatically ruins the environment. And claims that we would
need this or that number of planets for the whole world to attain a Western standard of consumption—those “ecological footprint”
calculations—are equally untruthful. Such a claim is usually made by environmentalists, and it is concerned, not so much with emissions
and pollution, as with resources running out if everyone were to live as we do in the affluent world. Clearly,
certain of the raw
materials we use today, in present day quantities, would not suffice for the whole world if everyone
consumed the same things. But that information is just about as interesting as if a prosperous Stone Age man were to say that, if
everyone attained his level of consumption, there would not be enough stone, salt, and furs to go around. Raw material
consumption is not static. With more and more people achieving a high level of prosperity, we start
looking for ways of using other raw materials. Humanity is constantly improving technology so as to
get at raw materials that were previously inaccessible, and we are attaining a level of prosperity that makes this
possible. New innovations make it possible for old raw materials to be put to better use and for
garbage to be turned into new raw materials. A century and a half ago, oil was just something black and sticky that people
preferred not to step in and definitely did not want to find beneath their land. But our interest in finding better energy sources led to
methods being devised for using oil, and today it is one of our prime resources. Sand has never been all that exciting or precious, but today
it is a vital raw material in the most powerful technology of our age, the computer. In the form of silicon—which makes up a quarter of the
There is a simple market mechanism that averts
shortages. If a certain raw material comes to be in short supply, its price goes up. This makes
everyone more interested in economizing on that resource, in finding more of it, in reusing it, and in
trying to find substitutes for it.
earth's crust— it is a key component in computer chips.
Cap solves the environment—history is on our side
Bhagwati 4 – Economics Professor, Columbia (Jagdish, In Defense of Globalization, p 144-5, AG)
The belief that specific pollutants, such as sulfur dioxide, resulting from increased economic activity will rise in urban areas as per capita income
increases depends on two assumptions: that all activities expand uniformly and that pollution per unit output in an activity will not diminish.
But neither assumption is realistic. As income rises, activities that cause more pollution may contract and those that cause less pollution may
expand, so the sulfur dioxide concentration may fall instead of rise. In fact, as
development occurs, economies typically shift
from primary production, which is often pollution intensive, to manufactures, which are often less so, and then to traded
services, which are currently even less pollution-intensive. This natural evolution itself could then reduce the pollution-intensity
of income as development proceeds. Then again, the available technology used, and technology newly invented, may become more
environment-friendly over time. Both phenomena constitute an ongoing, observed process. The shift to environment-friendly technology can
occur naturally as households, for example, become less poor and shift away from indoor cooking with smoke-causing coal-based fires to stoves
using fuels that cause little smoke. 19 But this shift is often a result also of environment-friendly technological innovation prompted by
regulation. Thus, restrictions on allowable fuel efficiency have promoted research by the car firms to produce engines that yield more miles per
gallon. But these regulations
are created by increased environmental consciousness, for which the environmental
is, in turn, associated with increased incomes. Also,
revelations about the astonishing environmental degradation in the Soviet Union and its satellites underline how
the absence of democratic feedback and controls is a surefire recipe for environmental neglect. The fact that economic growth
groups can take credit. And the rise of these environmental groups
generally promotes democracy, as discussed in Chapter 8, is yet another way in which rising income creates a better environment. In all these
ways, then, increasing incomes can reduce rather than increase pollution. In fact, for several pollutants, empirical studies have found a bellshaped curve: pollution levels first rise with income but then fall with it. 20 The economists Gene Grossman and Alan Krueger, who estimated
the levels of different pollutants such as sulfur dioxide in several cities worldwide, were among the first to show this, estimating that for sulfur
dioxide levels, the peak occurred in their sample at per capita incomes of $5,000–6,000. 21 Several historical
examples can also be
adduced: the reduction in smog today compared to what the industrial revolution produced in European cities in the nineteenth
century, and the reduced deforestation of United States compared to a century ago.
2ac resilience
Capitalism is sustainable and resilient
Seabra 12 (Leo, has a background in Communication and Broadcasting and a broad experience which
includes activities in Marketing, Advertising, Sales and Public Relations, 2/27, “Capitalism can drive
Sustainability and also innovation,” http://seabraaffairs.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/capitalism-candrive-sustainability-and-also-innovation/)
There are those who say that if the world does not change their habits, even the end of economic
growth, and assuming alternative ways of living, will be a catastrophe. “Our lifestyles are unsustainable. Our
expectations of consumption are predatory.Either we change this, or will be chaos”. Others say that the pursuit of unbridled
economic growth and the inclusion of more people in consumption is killing the Earth. We have to create
alternative because economic growth is pointing to the global collapse. “What will happen when billions of Chinese decide to adopt the lifestyle
of Americans?” I’ll disagree if you don’t mind… They
might be wrong. Completely wrong .. Even very intelligent people wrongly
interpret the implications of what they observe when they lose the perspective of time. In the vast scale of time (today, decades, not
centuries) it is the opposite of what expected, because they start from a false assumption: the future is the
extrapolation of this. But not necessarily be. How do I know? Looking at history. What story? The history
of innovation, this thing generates increases in productivity, wealth, quality of life in an unimaginable
level. It is innovation that will defeat pessimism as it always did. It was innovation that made life today is
incomparably better than at any other time in human history. And will further improve. Einstein, who was
not a stupid person, believed that capitalism would generate crisis, instability, and growing impoverishment.
He said: “The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the true source of evil.” The only way to eliminate this
evil, he thought, was to establish socialism, with the means of production are owned by the company. A centrally controlled economy would
adjust the production of goods and services the needs of people, and would distribute the work that needed to be done among those in a
position to do so. This would guarantee a livelihood to every man, women and children. Each according to his possibilities. To each according to
their needs. And
guess what? What happened was the opposite of what Einstein predicted. Who tried the
model he suggested, impoverished, screwed up. Peter Drucker says that almost of all thinking people of the
late nineteenth century thought that Marx was right: there would be increased exploitation of workers by employers. They
would become poorer, until one day, the thing would explode. Capitalist society was considered inherently
unsustainable. It is more or less the same chat today. Bullshit. Capitalism, with all appropriate
regulations, self-corrects. It is an adaptive system that learns and changes by design. The design is just
for the system to learn and change. There was the opposite of what Einstein predicted, and held the
opposite of what many predict, but the logic that “unlike” only becomes evident over time. It wasn’t obvious
that the workers are those whom would profit from the productivity gains that the management science
has begun to generate by organizing innovations like the railroad, the telegraph, the telephone .. to
increase the scale of production and cheapen things. The living conditions of workers today are infinitely
better than they were in 1900. They got richer, not poorer .. You do not need to work harder to produce
more (as everyone thought), you can work less and produce more through a mechanism that is only now becoming apparent, and that
brilliant people like Caetano Veloso still ignores. The output is pursuing growth through innovation, growth is not
giving up. More of the same will become unsustainable to the planet, but most of it is not what will
happen, will happen more different, than we do not know what is right. More innovative. Experts, such as
Lester Brown, insist on statements like this: if the Chinese also want to have three cars for every four inhabitants, as in the U.S. today, there will
be 1.1 billion cars there in 2030, and there is no way to build roads unless ends with the whole area used for agriculture. You will need 98
million barrels of oil per day, but the world only produces about 90 million today, and probably never produce much more. The mistake is to
extrapolate today’s solutions for the future. We can continue living here for 20 years by exploiting the same resources that we explore today?
Of course not. But the other question is: how
can we encourage the stream of innovations that will enable the
Chinese, Indians, Brazilians, Africans .. to live so as prosperous as Americans live today? Hey, wake up …
what can not stop the engine of innovation is that the free market engenders. This system is self
correcting, that is its beauty. We do not need to do nothing but ensure the conditions for it to work
without distortion. The rest he does himself. It regulates itself.
2ac permutation
Perm – do the plan and _______ – the alt doesn’t solve capitalism – the perm is key
Wolfenstein 2k PhD in politics from Princeton, professor of political science at UCLA, PhD in psychoanalysis (Victor, Inside/outside
Nietzsche, p 235-6, AG)
As to the matter of political aims, we
have no choice but to live with the disjunction between the potential for
realizing the project of human emancipation and the recognition that this potential is not going to be
realized any time soon. In the foreseeable future, we are not going to be able to go beyond capitalism. We cannot
hope for the emergence of a society in which the free development of each individual is a condition for the free development of all. Capitalism
is a system of structurally determined inequality; its normal and necessary operations preclude genuine social democracy. This is the sobering
premise of contemporary emancipatory politics. Yet from its inception, capitalism
has combined emancipatory and
oppressive tendencies. We must resist the temptation of one-dimensionalizing it one way or the other. Putting
the point pragmatically, we can hope and work for the realization of progressive policy aims so long as
these do not (unduly?) inhibit the process of capital accumulation or threaten the power relationships
that maintain them. This defines a substantial field for political action, one in which outcomes are contingent and
not determinable in advance. It is an abnegation of political responsibility not to take advantage of these
potentialities, even if social injustices and metabolic imbalances cannot be altogether eliminated. To carry
the argument a bit further, the realization of progressive political aims depends on collective action, ultimately at
national or even international levels. Local action, vital as it may be, just is not enough. We critical theorists—
must be prepared for a war on two fronts: against the hegemonic power of capitalist ruling classes, on the one side, and
against sometimes diffuse, sometimes organizationally embodied, ur-fascistic tendencies, on the other. The fissiparous tendency in
leftist politics, sometimes celebrated in postmodern discourse, puts us at a terrible strategic and
tactical disadvantage. The dangers of a dissent-stiffling leftist hegemony, although not a mere phantasy, are far less pressing than the
risks of self-fragmentation and political incoherence. In this regard, the more things change, the more they stay the same: resistance politics
must be both dialectically self-unifying and perspectivally self-differentiating.
2ac sustainability
Capitalism is sustainable – no alternative
Rogoff, 12/23/11[Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Harvard University, and was formerly chief economist at the IMF. Is
Modern Capitalism Sustainable?, http://www.namibian.com.na/news/full-story/archive/2011/december/article/is-modern-capitalismsustainable/]
CAMBRIDGE – I
am often asked if the recent global financial crisis marks the beginning of the end of modern
capitalism. It is a curious question, because it seems to presume that there is a viable replacement waiting
in the wings. The truth of the matter is that, for now at least, the only serious alternatives to today’s dominant Anglo-American
paradigm are other forms of capitalism. Continental European capitalism, which combines generous health and
social benefits with reasonable working hours, long vacation periods, early retirement, and relatively equal income
distributions, would seem to have everything to recommend it – except sustainability. China’s Darwinian
capitalism, with its fierce competition among export firms, a weak social-safety net, and widespread
government intervention, is widely touted as the inevitable heir to Western capitalism, if only because
of China’s huge size and consistent outsize growth rate. Yet China’s economic system is continually
evolving. Indeed, it is far from clear how far China’s political, economic, and financial structures will continue to transform themselves, and
whether China will eventually morph into capitalism’s new exemplar. In any case, China is still encumbered by the usual social, economic, and
financial vulnerabilities of a rapidly growing lower-income country. Perhaps the real
point is that, in the broad sweep of
history, all current forms of capitalism are ultimately transitional. Modern-day capitalism has had an
extraordinary run since the start of the Industrial Revolution two centuries ago, lifting billions of
ordinary people out of abject poverty. Marxism and heavy-handed socialism have disastrous records by
comparison. But, as industrialisation and technological progress spread to Asia (and now to Africa), someday the struggle for subsistence
will no longer be a primary imperative, and contemporary capitalism’s numerous flaws may loom larger. First, even the leading capitalist
economies have failed to price public goods such as clean air and water effectively. The failure of efforts to conclude a new global climatechange agreement is symptomatic of the paralysis. Second, along with great wealth, capitalism has produced extraordinary levels of inequality.
The growing gap is partly a simple byproduct of innovation and entrepreneurship. People do not complain about Steve Jobs’s success; his
contributions are obvious. But this is not always the case: great wealth enables groups and individuals to buy political power and influence,
which in turn helps to generate even more wealth. Only a few countries – Sweden, for example – have been able to curtail this vicious circle
without causing growth to collapse. A third problem is the provision and distribution of medical care, a market that fails to satisfy several of the
basic requirements necessary for the price mechanism to produce economic efficiency, beginning with the difficulty that consumers have in
assessing the quality of their treatment. The problem will only get worse: health-care costs as a proportion of income are sure to rise as
societies get richer and older, possibly exceeding 30% of GDP within a few decades. In health care, perhaps more than in any other market,
many countries are struggling with the moral dilemma of how to maintain incentives to produce and consume efficiently without producing
unacceptably large disparities in access to care. It is ironic that modern capitalist societies engage in public campaigns to urge individuals to be
more attentive to their health, while fostering an economic ecosystem that seduces many consumers into an extremely unhealthy diet.
According to the United States Centers for Disease Control, 34% of Americans are obese. Clearly, conventionally measured economic growth –
which implies higher consumption – cannot be an end in itself. Fourth, today’s capitalist systems vastly undervalue the welfare of unborn
generations. For most of the era since the Industrial Revolution, this has not mattered, as the continuing boon of technological advance has
trumped short-sighted policies. By and large, each generation has found itself significantly better off than the last. But, with the world’s
population surging above seven billion, and harbingers of resource constraints becoming ever more apparent, there is no guarantee that this
trajectory can be maintained. Financial crises are of course a fifth problem, perhaps the one that has provoked the most soul-searching of late.
In the world of finance, continual technological innovation has not conspicuously reduced risks, and might well have magnified them. In
principle, none
of capitalism’s problems is insurmountable, and economists have offered a variety of
market-based solutions. A high global price for carbon would induce firms and individuals to internalise the cost of their polluting
activities. Tax systems can be designed to provide a greater measure of redistribution of income without necessarily involving crippling
distortions, by minimising non-transparent tax expenditures and keeping marginal rates low. Effective pricing of health care, including the
pricing of waiting times, could encourage a better balance between equality and efficiency. Financial systems could be better regulated, with
stricter attention to excessive accumulations of debt. Will capitalism be a victim of its own success in producing massive wealth? For
now,
as fashionable as the topic of capitalism’s demise might be, the possibility seems remote. Nevertheless, as
pollution, financial instability, health problems, and inequality continue to grow, and as political systems remain paralysed, capitalism’s future
might not seem so secure in a few decades as it seems now.
2ac cap solves war
Cap net decreases war—capitalist peace theory
Harrison 11 (Mark, Department of Economics, University of Warwick, Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of
Birmingham, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, Stanford University, “Capitalism at War”, Oct 19
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/academic/harrison/papers/capitalism.pdf)
Capitalism’s Wars America is the world’s preeminent capitalist power. According to a poll of more than 21,000 citizens of 21 countries in the
second half of 2008, people tend on average to evaluate U.S. foreign policy as inferior to that of their own country in the moral dimension. 4
While this survey does not disaggregate respondents by educational status, many apparently knowledgeable people also seem
to
believe that, in the modern world, most wars are caused by America; this impression is based on my experience of
presenting work on the frequency of wars to academic seminars in several European countries. According to the evidence,
however, these beliefs are mistaken. We are all aware of America’s wars, but they make only a small
contribution to the total. Counting all bilateral conflicts involving at least the show of force from 1870 to
2001, it turns out that the countries that originated them come from all parts of the global income
distribution (Harrison and Wolf 2011). Countries that are richer, measured by GDP per head, such as America
do not tend to start more conflicts, although there is a tendency for countries with larger GDPs to do so. Ranking countries
by the numbers of conflicts they initiated, the United States, with the largest economy, comes only in
second place; third place belongs to China. In first place is Russia (the USSR between 1917 and 1991). What do
capitalist institutions contribute to the empirical patterns in the data? Erik Gartzke (2007) has re-examined the
hypothesis of the “democratic peace” based on the possibility that, since capitalism and democracy are highly correlated
across countries and time, both democracy and peace might be products of the same underlying
cause, the spread of capitalist institutions. It is a problem that our historical datasets have measured the spread of
capitalist property rights and economic freedoms over shorter time spans or on fewer dimensions than political variables. For
the period from 1950 to 1992, Gartzke uses a measure of external financial and trade liberalization as most likely to signal robust markets and a
laissez faire policy. Countries
that share this attribute of capitalism above a certain level, he finds, do not
fight each other, so there is capitalist peace as well as democratic peace. Second, economic liberalization
(of the less liberalized of the pair of countries) is a more powerful predictor of bilateral peace than democratization,
controlling for the level of economic development and measures of political affinity.
1ar cap solves war
Cap solves war—causes economic, not military competition
Gartzke 5—Former associate prof of pol sci, Columbia. Former associate prof of pol sci, USCD. PhD in
International Relations, Formal/Quantitative Methods from U Iowa (Erik, “Future Depends on
Capitalizing on Capitalist Peace,” 1 October 2005, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=5133,)
With terrorism achieving "global reach" and conflict raging in Africa and the Middle East, you may have missed a startling fact - we
are
living in remarkably peaceable times. For six decades, developed nations have not fought each other. France
and the United States may chafe, but the resulting conflict pitted french fries against "freedom fries," rather than French soldiers against U.S.
"freedom fighters." Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac had a nasty spat over the EU, but the English aren't going to storm Calais any time soon. The
present peace is unusual. Historically, powerful nations are the most war prone. The conventional wisdom is that
democracy fosters peace but this claim fails scrutiny. It is based on statistical studies that show democracies typically don't fight other
democracies. Yet, the same studies show that democratic nations go to war about as much as other nations overall. And more recent research
makes clear that only the affluent
democracies are less likely to fight each other. Poor democracies behave much like nondemocracies when it comes to war and lesser forms of conflict. A more powerful explanation is emerging from newer,
and older, empirical research - the "capitalist peace." As predicted by Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Norman Angell and others,
nations with high levels of economic freedom not only fight each other less, they go to war less often, period.
Economic freedom is a measure of the depth of free market institutions or, put another way, of capitalism. The "democratic peace" is a mirage
created by the overlap between economic and political freedom. Democracy and economic freedom typically co-exist. Thus,
if economic
freedom causes peace, then statistically democracy will also appear to cause peace. When democracy and
economic freedom are both included in a statistical model, the results reveal that economic freedom is considerably more potent in
encouraging peace than democracy, 50 times more potent, in fact, according to my own research. Economic freedom is highly statistically
significant (at the one-per-cent level). Democracy does not have a measurable impact, while nations with very low levels of economic freedom
are 14 times more prone to conflict than those with very high levels. But, why would free markets cause peace? Capitalism is not only an
immense generator of prosperity; it is also a revolutionary source of economic, social and political change. Wealth no longer arises primarily
through land or control of natural resources. New Kind of Wealth Prosperity
in modern societies is created by market
competition and the efficient production that arises from it. This new kind of wealth is hard for nations to "steal"
through conquest. In days of old, when the English did occasionally storm Calais, nobles dreamed of wealth and power in conquered
lands, while visions of booty danced in the heads of peasant soldiers. Victory in war meant new property. In a free market
economy, war destroys immense wealth for victor and loser alike. Even if capital stock is restored, efficient production
requires property rights and free decisions by market participants that are difficult or impossible to co-ordinate to the victor's advantage. The
Iraqi war, despite Iraq's immense oil wealth, will not be a money-maker for the United States. Economic freedom
is not a guarantee of peace. Other factors, like ideology or the perceived need for self-defence, can still result in violence. But, where
economic freedom has taken hold, it has made war less likely. Research on the capitalist peace has profound
implications in today's world. Emerging democracies, which have not stabilized the institutions of economic freedom, appear to be at least as
warlike - perhaps more so - than emerging dictatorships. Yet, the United States and other western nations are putting immense resources into
democratization even in nations that lack functioning free markets. This is in part based on the faulty premise of a "democratic peace." It may
also in part be due to public perception. Everyone approves of democracy, but "capitalism" is often a dirty word.
However, in recent decades, an increasing number of people have rediscovered the economic virtues of the "invisible hand" of free markets.
We now have an additional benefit of economic freedom - international peace. The actual presence of peace in
much of the world sets this era apart from others. The empirical basis for optimistic claims - about either democracy or capitalism - can be
tested and refined. The
way forward is to capitalize on the capitalist peace, to deepen its roots and extend it
to more countries through expanding markets, development, and a common sense of international purpose. The risk today is
that faulty analysis and anti-market activists may distract the developed nations from this historic opportunity.
at: cap root cause
Capitalism’s not the root cause of anything
Larrivee 10— PF ECONOMICS AT MOUNT ST MARY’S UNIVERSITY – MASTERS FROM THE HARVARD
KENNEDY SCHOOL AND PHD IN ECONOMICS FROM WISCONSIN, 10 [JOHN, A FRAMEWORK FOR THE
MORAL ANALYSIS OF MARKETS, 10/1, http://www.teacheconomicfreedom.org/files/larrivee-paper1.pdf]
The Second Focal Point: Moral, Social, and Cultural Issues of Capitalism Logical errors abound in critical commentary on
capitalism. Some critics observe a problem and conclude: “I see X in our society. We have a capitalist
economy. Therefore capitalism causes X.” They draw their conclusion by looking at a phenomenon as it appears only in one
system. Others merely follow a host of popular theories according to which capitalism is particularly bad. 6 The solution to such
flawed reasoning is to be comprehensive, to look at the good and bad, in market and non-market systems. Thus
the following section considers a number of issues—greed, selfishness and human relationships, honesty and truth, alienation and work
satisfaction, moral decay, and religious participation—that have often been associated with capitalism, but have
also been
problematic in other systems and usually in more extreme form. I conclude with some
evidence for the view that
markets foster (at least some) virtues rather than undermining them. My purpose is not to smear communism or to make the simplistic
argument that “capitalism isn’t so bad because other systems have problems too.” The
critical point is that certain people
thought various social ills resulted from capitalism, and on this basis they took action to establish
alternative economic systems to solve the problems they had identified. That they failed to solve the
problems, and in fact exacerbated them while also creating new problems, implies that capitalism
itself wasn’t the cause of the problems in the first place, at least not to the degree theorized.
Cap isn’t the root cause of war
MacKenzie 3—prof of economics at Coast Guard Academy. Former prof of economics at Kean. BA in Economics and Management
Science at Kean. MA in Economics from U Connecticut. PhD in economics from George mason (DW, “Does Capitalism Require War?,” 7 April
2003, http://mises.org/story/1201,)
Perhaps the oddest aspect of these various, but similar, claims is that their proponents appeal so often to historical examples. They often
claim that history shows how capitalism is imperialistic and warlike or at least benefits from war. Capitalism supposedly
needs a boost from some war spending from time to time, and history shows this. Robert Higgs demonstrated that the wartime
prosperity during the Second World War was illusory[i]. This should come to no surprise to those who lived through the
deprivations of wartime rationing. We do not need wars for prosperity, but does capitalism breed war and imperialism anyway? History is
rife with examples of imperialism. The Romans, Alexander, and many others of the ancient world waged imperialistic wars. The Incan
Empire and the empire of Ancient China stand as examples of the universal character of imperialism. Who could possibly claim that
imperialism grew out of the prosperity of these ancient civilizations? Imperialism precedes modern
industrial capitalism by many centuries. Uneven wealth distribution or underconsumption under capitalism obviously
did not cause these instances of imperialism. Of course, this fact does not prove that modern capitalism lacks its own
imperialistic tendencies. The notion that income gets underspent or maldistributed lies at the heart of most claims that capitalism either needs
or produces imperialistic wars. As J.B. Say argued, supply creates its own demand through payments to factors of production. Demand Side
economists Hobson and Keynes argued that there would be too little consumption and too little investment for continuous full employment.
We save too much to have peace and prosperity. The difficulty we face is not in oversaving, but in underestimating the workings of markets and
the desires of consumers. Doomsayers have been downplaying consumer demand for ages. As demand side economist J.K. Galbraith claimed,
we live in an affluent society, where most private demands have been met. Of course, Hobson made the same claim much earlier. Earlier and
stranger still, mercantilists claimed that 'wasteful acts' such as tea drinking, gathering at alehouses, taking snuff, and the wearing of ribbons
were unnecessary luxuries that detracted from productive endeavors. The prognostications of esteemed opponents of capitalism have
consistently failed to predict consumer demand. Today, consumers consume at levels that few long ago could have imagined possible. There is
no reason to doubt that consumers will continue to press for ever higher levels of consumption. Though it is only a movie, Brewster's Millions
illustrates how creative people can be at spending money. People who do actually inherit, win, or earn large sums of money have little trouble
spending it. Indeed, wealthy individuals usually have more trouble holding on to their fortunes than in finding ways to spend them. We are
never going to run out of ways to spend money. Many of the complaints about capitalism center on how people save too much. One should
remember that there really is no such thing as saving. Consumers defer consumption to the future only. As economist Eugen Böhm-Bawerk
demonstrated, people save according to time preference. Savings diverts resources into capital formation. This increases future production.
Interest enhanced savings then can purchase these goods as some consumers cease to defer their consumption. Keynes' claim that animal
spirits drive investment has no rational basis. Consumer preferences are the basis for investment. Investors forecast future consumer demand.
Interest rates convey knowledge of these demands. The intertemporal coordination of production through capital markets and interest rates is
not a simple matter. But Keynes' marginal propensities to save and Hobson's concentration of wealth arguments fail to account for the real
determinants of production through time. Say's Law of Markets holds precisely because people always want a better life for themselves and
those close to them. Falling interest rates deter saving and increase investment. Rising interest rates induce saving and deter investment. This
simple logic of supply and demand derives from a quite basic notion of self interest. Keynes denied that the world worked this way. Instead, he
claimed that bond holders hoard money outside of the banking system, investment periodically collapses from 'the dark forces of time and
uncertainty, and consumers save income in a mechanical fashion according to marginal propensities to save. None of these propositions hold
up to scrutiny, either deductive or empirical. Speculators do not hoard cash outside of banks. To do this means a loss of interest on assets.
People do move assets from one part of the financial system to another. This does not cause deficient aggregate demand. Most money exists in
the banking system, and is always available for lending. In fact, the advent of e-banking makes such a practice even less sensible. Why hoard
cash when you can move money around with your computer? It is common knowledge that people save for homes, education, and other
expensive items, not because they have some innate urge to squirrel some portion of their income away. This renders half of the market for
credit rational. Investors do in fact calculate rates of return on investment. This is not a simple matter. Investment entails some speculation.
Long term investment projects entail some uncertainty, but investors who want to actually reap profits will estimate the returns on investment
using the best available data. Keynes feared that the dark forces of time and uncertainty could scare investors. This possibility, he thought,
called for government intervention. However, government intervention (especially warfare) generally serves to increase uncertainty. Private
markets have enough uncertainties without throwing politics into the fray. The vagaries of political intervention serve only to darken an already
uncertain future. Capital markets are best left to capitalists. Nor is capital not extracted surplus value. It comes not from exploitation. It is
simply a matter of people valuing their future wellbeing. Capitalists will hire workers up to the point where the discounted marginal product of
their labor equals the wage rate. To do otherwise would mean a loss of potential profit. Since workers earn the marginal product of labor and
capital derives from deferred consumption, Marxist arguments about reserve armies of the unemployed and surplus extraction fail. It is quite
odd to worry about capitalists oversaving when many complain about how the savings rate in the U.S. is too low. Why does the U.S., as the
world's 'greatest capitalist/imperialist power', attract so much foreign investment? Many Americans worry about America's international
accounts. Fears about foreigners buying up America are unfounded, but not because this does not happen. America does have a relatively low
national savings rate. It does attract much foreign investment, precisely because it has relatively secure property rights. Indeed, much of the
third world suffers from too little investment. The claims of Marxists, and Hobson, directly contradict the historical record. Sound theory tells us
that it should. The Marxist claim that capitalists must find investments overseas fails miserably. Larry Kudlow has put his own spin on the false
connection between capitalism and war. We need the War as shock therapy to get the economy on its feet. Kudlow also endorses massive
airline subsidies as a means of restoring economic prosperity. Kudlow and Krugman both endorse the alleged destructive creation of warfare
and terrorism. Kudlow has rechristened the Broken Window fallacy the Broken Window principle. Kudlow claims that may lose money and
wealth in one way, but we gain it back many time over when the rebuilding is done. Kudlow and Krugman have quite an affinity for deficits.
Krugman sees debt as a sponge to absorb excess saving. Kudlow see debt as a short term nuisance that we can dispel by maximizing growth.
One would think that such famous economists would realize that competition does work to achieve the goal of optimum growth based on time
preference, but this is not the case. While these economists have expressed their belief in writing, they could do more. If the destruction of
assets leads to increased prosperity, then they should teach this principle by example. Kudlow and Krugman could, for instance, help build the
economy by demolishing their own private homes. This would have the immediate effect of stimulating demand for demolition experts, and the
longer term affect of stimulating the demand for construction workers. They can create additional wealth by financing the reconstruction of
their homes through debt. By borrowing funds, they draw idle resources into use and stimulate financial activity. Of course, they would both
initially lose wealth in one way. But if their thinking is sound, they will gain it back many times over as they rebuild. The truth is that their beliefs
are fallacious. Bastiat demonstrated the absurdity of destructive creation in his original explanation of the opportunity costs from repairing
broken windows. Kudlow is quite clear about his intentions. He wants to grow the economy to finance the war. As Kudlow told some students,
"The trick here is to grow the economy and let the economic growth raise the revenue for the war effort"[ii]. Kudlow also praises the Reagan
Administration for growing the economy to fund national defense. Here Kudlow's attempts to give economic advice cease completely. His
argument here is not that capitalism needs a shot in the arm. It is that resources should be redirected towards ends that he sees fit. Kudlow is a
war hawk who, obviously, cannot fund this or any war personally. He instead favors using the state to tax others to fund what he wants, but
cannot afford. He seems to think that his values matter more than any other's. Why should anyone else agree with this? Kudlow tarnishes the
image of laissez faire economics by parading his faulty reasoning and his claims that his wants should reign supreme as a pro-market stance.
Unfortunately, it is sometimes necessary to defend capitalism from alleged advocates of liberty, who employ false dogmas in pursuit of their
own militaristic desires. Capitalism
neither requires nor promotes imperialist expansion. Capitalism did not
create imperialism or warfare. Warlike societies predate societies with secure private property. The idea that inequity or underspending
give rise to militarism lacks any rational basis. Imperialistic tendencies exist due to ethnic and nationalistic bigotries,
and the want for power. Prosperity depends upon our ability to prevent destructive acts. The dogma of destructive
creation fails as a silver lining to the cloud of warfare. Destructive acts entail real costs that diminish available opportunities. The idea that we
need to find work for idle hands in capitalism at best leads to a kind of Sisyphus economy where unproductive industries garner subsidies from
productive people. At worst, it serves as a supporting argument for war. The more recent versions of the false charges against capitalism do
nothing to invalidate two simple facts. Capitalism
generates prosperity by creating new products. War inflicts poverty by
destroying existing wealth. There is no sound reason to think otherwise.
2ac at ethics
And, that means the plan and the perm are the most moral option
Crouch, 12 [Sustainability, Neoliberalism, and the Moral Quality of Capitalism Colin Crouch Professor
Emeritus, University of Warwick, UK, Business & Professional Ethics Journal, 31:2, 2012 pp. 363–374
DOI: 10.5840/bpej201231218]
To ask such a question as whether capitalism might have become ‘evil’ implies that capitalism might also
be moral, and that takes us to the heart of a deep, long-running debate. For orthodox economic theory, a firm has
neither the duty nor the right to decide what is moral behaviour (Jensen 2001; Sternberg 2000). Its task is to maximize profits. If it tries to do
this in ways that morally offends customers, it will lose business and therefore have to change its behaviour if it wants to achieve its goal. In this
way, morality would be imposed in the market on firms, not hierarchically by them. If not many customers are interested in morality, then so
Capitalism by itself is not capable of being either moral or evil. It responds to the society around
it, and cannot display a higher morality than that society. Furthermore, it is not democratic if an
economic system imposes certain moral values on people, as state socialism used to do . It is better, it can
be argued, if the economy enables us to express our own moral preferences—or not, if we have none—and
the capitalist market does this better than any other system . An amoral but open, liberal capitalism is thus
be it.
seen as the best vehicle for morality in complex, multi-cultural, secularized societies in which many people
would like to act in an ethical way, many do not care, and where there is in any case diversity and disagreement over how ethical behaviour is
to be defined.