1NC
Neoliberalism has normalized the state of exception to the extent that average
Americans are spied on. An increasingly large number of individuals are no longer
needed for production so they are made disposable and consigned to zones of
surveillance.
Giroux, 14
(Henry A. Giroux, Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department
and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. Neoliberalism and the Machinery of
Disposability (Tuesday, 08 April 2014 09:24 By Henry A Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed)
Under the regime of neoliberalism, especially in the United States, war has become an extension of
politics as almost all aspects of society have been transformed into a combat zone. Americans now live
in a society in which almost everyone is spied on, considered a potential terrorist, and subject to a
mode of state and corporate lawlessness in which the arrogance of power knows no limits. The state of
exception has become normalized. Moreover, as society becomes increasingly militarized and political concessions
become relics of a long-abandoned welfare state hollowed out to serve the interest of global markets, the collective sense of
ethical imagination and social responsibility toward those who are vulnerable or in need of care is now viewed
as a scourge or pathology. What has emerged in this new historical conjuncture is an intensification of
the practice of disposability in which more and more individuals and groups are now considered
excess, consigned to zones of abandonment, surveillance and incarceration. Moreover, this politics of
disappearance has been strengthened by a fundamental intensification of increasing depoliticization,
conducted largely through new modes of spying and the smothering, if not all-embracing, market-driven power of
commodification and consumption. Citizens are now reduced to data, consumers, and commodities and as
such inhabit identities in which they increasingly "become unknowables, with no human rights and
with no one accountable for their condition."[1] Within this machinery of social death, not only does moral
blindness prevail on the part of the financial elite, but the inner worlds of the oppressed are constantly being remade under the
force of economic pressures and a culture of fear. According to João Biehl, as the realpolitik of disposability "comes
into sharp visibility . . . tradition, collective memory, and public spheres are organized as phantasmagoric scenes, [that] thrive on the
"energies of the dead," who remain unaccounted for in numbers and law."[2] Economists such as Paul Krugman and Robert Reich have argued
that we are in a new Gilded Age, one that mimics a time when robber barons and strikebreakers ruled, and the government and economy were
controlled by a cabal that was rich, powerful and ruthless.[3] And, of course, blacks, women and the working class were told to mind their place
in a society controlled by the rich. What is often missing in these analyses is that what is new in the second Gilded Age is not just about the
moral sanctioning of greed, the corruption of politics by big money, and the ruthlessness of class power. What
is unique is the rise of
a brutal punishing-incarceration state that imposes its power on the dispossessed, the emergence of a
surveillance state that spies on and suppresses dissenters, the emergence of vast cultural apparatuses
that colonize subjectivity in the interests of the market, and a political class that is uninterested in
political concessions and appears immune from control by nation states. The second Gilded Age is really
a more brutal form of authoritarianism driven by what psychologist Robert Jay Lifton rightly calls a
"death-saturated age," in which matters of violence, survival and trauma now infuse everyday life. [4]
... life has become completely unbearable for over half of the American public living in or near
poverty.
The impact is political disposability - a market-driven view of society undoes the social
contract and incentivizes political inactivity – when social problems are reduced to
personal problems, people can be disposed of. Neoliberalism makes insecurity and
war inevitable.
Giroux, 14
(Henry A. Giroux, Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a
Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. Neoliberalism and the Machinery of Disposability
(Tuesday, 08 April 2014 09:24 By Henry A Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed))
Discarded by the corporate state, dispossessed of social provisions and deprived of the economic, political and social conditions
that enable viable and critical modes of agency, expanding populations of Americans now find themselves inhabiting zones of
abandonment marked by deep inequalities in power, wealth and income. Such zones are sites of rapid disinvestment, places
marked by endless spectacles of violence, and supportive of the neoliberal logics of containment,
commodification, surveillance, militarization, cruelty and punishment. These zones of hardship and
terminal exclusion constitute a hallmark signature and intensification of a neoliberal politics of
disposability that is relentless in the material and symbolic violence it wages against the 99% for the benefit of the new financial elite.
Borrowing from Hannah Arendt, one could say that capitalist expropriation, dispossession and disinvestment has reached a point where life has
become completely unbearable for over half of the American public living in or near poverty.[5] Evidence of such zones can be seen in the war
against immigrants, poor minorities, the homeless, young people living in debt, the long-term unemployed, workers, the declining middle class,
all of whom have been pushed into invisible communities of control, harassment, security and the governing-through-punishment complex.
The promises of modernity regarding progress, freedom and hope have not been eliminated; they
have been reconfigured, stripped of their emancipatory potential and subordinated to the logic of a
savage market instrumentality and individualization of the social. Dispossession and disinvestment have
invalidated the promises of modernity and have turned progress into a curse for the marginalized and a blessing for the superfinancial elite. Modernity has reneged on its undertaking to fulfill the social contract, however disingenuous or limited,
especially with regards to young people. Long-term planning and the institutional structures that support them are now
weakened, if not eliminated, by the urgencies of privatization, deregulation, flexibility and short-term investments. Social
bonds have given way under the collapse of social protections and the welfare state and are further
weakened by the neoliberal insistence that there are only "individual solutions to socially produced
problems." [6] "There’s simply the reluctance ever to imagine what the other person is experiencing." Neoliberalism’s
disposability machine is relentlessly engaged in the production of an unchecked notion of individualism that both dissolves
social bonds and removes any viable notion of agency from the landscape of social responsibility and ethical considerations.
Absorbed in privatized orbits of consumption, commodification and display, Americans vicariously
participate in the toxic pleasures of a mode of authoritarianism characterized by the reactionary
presence of the corporate state, the concentration of power and money in the upper 1% of the
population, the ongoing militarization of all aspects of society, and the ongoing, aggressive
depoliticization of the citizenry. In its current historical conjuncture, the authoritarian state is controlled by a handful of
billionaires (eg., the Koch Brothers), their families (eg., the Waltons) and a select class of zombie-like financial and corporate
elite who now control the commanding economic, political and cultural institutions of American society. Mechanisms of
governance have been transformed into instruments of war. Violence has become the organizing force of a society driven by a
toxic notion of privatization in which it becomes difficult for ideas to be lifted into the public realm. Under such
circumstances, politics is eviscerated because it now supports a market-driven view of society that has
turned its back on the idea that "Humanity is never acquired in solitude." [7] That is, society has come
undone in terms of the social contract and in doing so has turned its back on most Americans whose
lives and futures are no longer determined by social spaces that give them a voice and provide the conditions for autonomy,
freedom and equality. This violence against the social mimics is not just the death of the radical imagination, but also a notion
of banality made famous by Hannah Arendt, who argued that at the root of totalitarianism was a kind of thoughtlessness, an
inability to think, and a type of outrageous stupidity in which, "There’s simply the reluctance ever to imagine what the other
person is experiencing."[8] The plight of disposable populations can be seen in the fact that millions of Americans are
unemployed and are receiving no long-term benefits. Shockingly, the only source of assistance for one in 50 Americans "is
nothing but a food stamp card." [9] Close to half of all Americans live on or beneath the poverty line while "more than a million
public school students are homeless in the United States; 57 percent of all children are in homes considered to be either lowincome or impoverished; and half of all American children will be on food stamps at least once before they turn 18 years old."
[10] At the same time, the 400 richest Americans "have as much wealth as 154 million Americans combined, that’s 50 percent
of the entire country [while] the top economic 1% of the US population now has a record 40 percent of all wealth and more
wealth than 90 percent of the population combined." [11] Within this system of power and disposability, the
ethical grammars that draw our attention to the violence of such suffering disappear while
dispossessed populations lose their dignity, bodies, and material goods and homes. The fear of losing
everything, the horror of the engulfing precarity, the quest to merely survive, and the impending
reality of social and civil death have become a way of life for the 99% in the United States. Under the
politics of disposability, the grammars of suffering, cruelty, and punishment have replaced the value
of compassion, social responsibility and civic courage. Young people are not seen as troubled but
viewed as a source of trouble; rather than viewed as being "at risk," they are the risk and subject to a
range of punitive policies. The severity of the consequences of this shift in modernity under neoliberalism among youth
is evident in the fact that this is the first generation, as Zygmunt Bauman argues, in which the "plight of the outcast may stretch
to embrace a whole generation." [12] He rightly argues that today’s youth have been "cast in a condition of liminal drift, with
no way of knowing whether it is transitory or permanent." 3] [1Youth no longer occupy the hope of a privileged place that was
offered to previous generations. They now inhabit a neoliberal notion of temporality marked by a loss of faith in progress along
with the emergence of apocalyptic narratives in which the future appears indeterminate, bleak and insecure. Heightened
prospects and progressive visions pale and are smashed next to the normalization of market-driven government policies that
wipe out pensions, eliminate quality health care, raise college tuition, and produce a harsh world of joblessness, while giving
millions to banks and the military. Students, in particular, now find themselves in a world in which heightened expectations
have been replaced by dashed hopes and a world of onerous debt. [14] What has changed about an entire generation of young
people includes not only neoliberal society’s disinvestment in youth and the permanent fate of downward mobility but also the
fact that youth live in a commercially carpet-bombed and commodified environment that is unlike anything experienced by
those of previous generations. Nothing has prepared this generation for the inhospitable and savage new
world of commodification, privatization, joblessness, frustrated hopes, surveillance and stillborn
projects. [15] The present generation has been born into a throwaway society of consumers in which
both goods and young people are viewed increasingly as redundant and disposable or they are merely
valued as consumers and commodities. In this discourse, young people are not seen as troubled but viewed as a source of
trouble; rather than viewed as being "at risk," they are the risk and subject to a range of punitive policies. The structures of
neoliberal modernity do more than disinvest in young people and commodify them, they also transform the protected space of
childhood into a zone of disciplinary exclusion and cruelty, especially for those young people further marginalized by race and
class who now inhabit a social landscape in which they are increasingly disparaged as flawed consumers. With no adequate role
to play as consumers, many youth are forced to inhabit "zones of social abandonment," extending from bad schools to bulging
detention centers to prisons. [16] Youth have become a marker for a mode of disposability in which their fate is defined largely
through the registers of a society that throws away resources, people and goods. These are zones where the needs of young
people are not only ignored, but where many young people, especially poor minority youth, are subjected to conditions of
impoverishment and punishment that underserve them and often criminalize their behavior. For example, with the hollowing
out of the social state and the rise of the punishing state, the circuits of state repression, surveillance and disposability
increasingly "link the fate of blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, poor whites, and Asian Americans" to a crime youth complex,
which now serves as the default solution to major social problems. [17] Within these "zones of abandonment" and social death,
poor minority and low-income youth are viewed as out of step, place, and time and defined largely as "pathologies feeding on
the body politic," exiled to spheres of "terminal exclusion." [18] As the welfare state is hollowed out, a culture of compassion is
replaced by a culture of violence, cruelty and atomization. Within the existing neoliberal historical conjuncture,
there is a merging of violence and governance and the systemic disinvestment in, and breakdown of,
institutions and public spheres that have provided the minimal conditions for democracy. A
generalized fear now shapes American society - one that thrives on insecurity, precarity, dread of
punishment, and a perception of constant lurking threats. Americans occupy a historical conjuncture in which
everything that matters politically, ethically and culturally is being erased - either ignored, turned into a commodity or simply
falsified. In the United States and many other countries, the state monopoly on the use of violence has not only intensified
since the 1980s, but is unashamedly sanctioned by the new extremists in power. Under the regime of neoliberalism,
this new-found embrace of social Darwinism and the culture of violence has been directed against
young people, poor minorities, immigrants and, increasingly, women. Abandoned by the existing political
system, young people are placing their bodies on the line, protesting peacefully across the globe while trying to produce a new
language, politics, long-term institutions, and "community that manifests the values of equality and mutual respect that they
see missing in a world that is structured by neoliberal principles." [19] Such movements are not simply about reclaiming space
but also about producing new ideas, generating new conversations, and introducing a new political language. While there has
been considerable coverage in the progressive media since 2001 given to the violence being waged against the movement
protesters in Brazil, the United States, Greece and elsewhere, it is important to situate such violence within a broader set of
categories that enables a critical understanding of not only the underlying social, economic and political forces at work in such
assaults, but also makes it possible to reflect critically on the distinctiveness of the current historical period in which they are
taking place. For example, it is difficult to address such state-sponsored violence against young people without analyzing the
devolution of the social state, emergence of a politics of disposability, and the corresponding rise of the warfare and punishing
state. The merging of the military-industrial-academic-cultural complex and unbridled corporate power points to the need for strategies that
address what is specific about the current warfare state and the neoliberal project and how different interests, modes of power, social
relations, public pedagogies, and economic configurations come together to shape its politics of domestic terrorism, cruelty, and zones of
disposability. Such a conjuncture is invaluable politically in that it provides a theoretical opening for making the practices of the neoliberal
revolution visible to organize resistance to its ideologies, policies and modes of governance. It also points to the conceptual power of making
clear that history remains an open horizon that cannot be dismissed through appeals to the end of history or end of ideology.[20] It is precisely
through the indeterminate nature of history that resistance becomes possible and politics refuses any guarantees and remains open. As a mode
of public pedagogy, a state of permanent war needs willing subjects to abide by its values, ideology and narratives of fear and violence. A
number of neoliberal societies, including the United States, have become addicted to violence. War provides jobs, profits, political payoffs,
research funds, and forms of political and economic power that reach into every aspect of society. As war becomes a mode of sovereignty and
rule, it erodes the distinction between war and peace. Increasingly fed by a moral and political frenzy, warlike values produce and endorse
shared fears as the primary register of social relations. Shared fears and the media-induced panics that feed them produce more than a culture
of fear. Such hysteria also feeds the growing militarization of the police, who increasingly use their high-tech scanners, surveillance cameras
and toxic chemicals on anyone who engages in peaceful protests against the warfare and corporate state. Images abound in the mainstream
media of such abuses. As
a mode of public pedagogy, a state of permanent war needs willing subjects to
abide by its values, ideology and narratives of fear and violence. Such legitimation is largely provided
through a market-driven culture addicted to production of consumerism, militarism, and organized violence,
largely circulated through various registers of popular culture that extend from high fashion and Hollywood movies to the
The market-driven spectacle of war
demands a culture of conformity, quiet intellectuals and a largely passive republic of consumers. But it
also needs subjects who find intense pleasure in the spectacle of violence. As the pleasure principle is
creation of violent video games and music concerts sponsored by the Pentagon.
unconstrained by a moral compass based on a respect for others, it is increasingly shaped by the need for intense excitement and a neverending flood of heightened sensations. In this instance, unfamiliar violence such as extreme images of torture and death become banally
familiar, while familiar violence that occurs daily is barely recognized and relegated to the realm of the unnoticed and unnoticeable. As an
increasing volume of violence is pumped into the culture, yesterday’s spine-chilling and nerve-wrenching violence loses its shock value. As the
need for more intense images of violence accumulates, the moral indifference and desensitization to violence grows, while matters of cruelty
and suffering are offered up as fodder for sports, entertainment, news media, and other outlets for seeking pleasure. Marked by a virulent
notion of hardness and aggressive masculinity, a
culture of violence has become commonplace in a society in which
pain, humiliation and abuse are condensed into digestible spectacles endlessly circulated through extreme sports,
reality TV, video games, YouTube postings, and proliferating forms of the new and old media. But the ideology of hardness and the economy of
pleasure it justifies are also present in the material relations of power that have intensified across the globe since the 1970s.
Conservative
and liberal politicians alike now spend millions waging wars around the globe, funding the largest
military state in the world, providing huge tax benefits to the ultra-rich and major corporations, and
all the while draining public coffers, increasing the scale of human poverty and misery, and
eliminating all viable public spheres—whether they be the social state, public schools, public transportation, or any other aspect
of a formative culture that addresses the needs of the common good. State violence, particularly the use of torture, abductions, and targeted
assassinations are now justified as part of a state of exception that has become normalized. A "political culture of hyper punitiveness" has
become normalized and accelerates throughout the social order like a highly charged electric current. [21] A symptomatic example of the way
in which violence has saturated everyday life can be seen in the growing acceptance of criminalizing the behavior of young people in public
schools. Behaviors that were normally handled by teachers, guidance counselors, and school administrators are now dealt with by the police
and the criminal justice system. The consequences have been disastrous for young people. Not only do schools resemble the culture of prisons,
but young children are being arrested and subjected to court appearances for behaviours that can only be termed as trivial. This is not merely
barbarism parading as reform - it is also a blatant indicator of the degree to which sadism and the infatuation with violence have become
normalized in a society that seems to take delight in dehumanizing itself.
As the social is devalued along with rationality,
ethics, and any vestige of democracy, spectacles of war, violence, and brutality now merge into forms
of collective pleasure that constitute an important and new symbiosis between visual pleasure,
violence, and suffering. The control/punishing society is now the ultimate form of entertainment as
the pain of others, especially those considered disposable and powerless, has become the subject not of compassion but of ridicule and
amusement. My emphasis here is on the sadistic impulse and how it merges spectacles of violence and brutality with forms of collective
pleasure that often lend support and sway public opinion in favor of social policies and "lawful" practices that create zones of abandonment for
youth. No society can make a claim to being a democracy as long as it defines itself through shared fears rather than shared responsibilities,
especially in regards to young people. Widespread violence now functions as part of an anti-immune system that turns the economy of genuine
pleasure into a mode of sadism that creates the foundation for sapping democracy of any political substance and moral vitality that might
counter a politics of disposability more generally. The prevalence of violence throughout American society suggests the need for a politics that
not only negates the established order and the proliferating zones of disappearance and dispossession of subjects rendered useless or
burdensome, but also imagines new radical visions in which the future diverges from the dark conditions of the present. [22] In this discourse,
critique merges with a sense of realistic hope, and individual struggles merge into larger social movements.
At the heart of the
oppression experienced by young people and others are ideologies, modes of governance, and
policies that embrace a pathological individualism, a distorted notion of freedom, and a willingness
both to employ state violence to suppress dissent and abandon those suffering from a collection of
social problems ranging from dire poverty and joblessness to homelessness. In the end, these are stories about
disposability in which growing numbers of young people are considered dispensable and a drain on the body politic, the economy, and the
sensibilities of the rich and powerful. Rather than work for a more dignified life, most young people now work simply to survive - that is, if they
can find work - in a survival-of-the-fittest society in which getting ahead and accumulating capital, especially for the ruling elite, is the only
game in town. In the past, public values have been challenged and certain groups have been targeted as superfluous or redundant. But what is
new about the politics of disposability that has become a central feature of contemporary American politics is the way in which such
antidemocratic practices have become normalized in the existing neoliberal order. A politics of inequality and ruthless power disparities is now
matched by a culture of cruelty soaked in blood, humiliation and misery. Private injuries are not only separated from public considerations by
such narratives, but accounts of poverty and exclusion have become objects of scorn. Similarly, all noncommercial public spheres where such
stories might get heard are viewed with contempt, a perfect supplement to the chilling indifference to the plight of the disadvantaged and
disenfranchised. As politics is disconnected from its ethical and material moorings, it becomes easier to punish and imprison young people than
to educate them. From the inflated rhetoric of the political right to market-driven media peddling spectacles of violence, the influence of these
criminogenic and death-saturated forces in everyday life is undermining our collective security by justifying cutbacks to social supports and
restricting opportunities for democratic resistance. Saturating mainstream discourses with anti-public narratives, the neoliberal machinery of
social death effectively weakens public supports and prevents the emergence of much-needed new ways of thinking and speaking about
politics in the 21st century.
Surveillance is culturally constructed and rooted in economics – Zero risk of plan
solvency –only resisting the ideology and norms of neoliberal surveillance can solve
Price, 14
(David- prof of anthropology @ Saint Martin’s U, “The New Surveillance Normal: NSA and Corporate Surveillance in
the Age of Global Capitalism,” https://monthlyreview.org/2014/07/01/the-new-surveillance-normal/)
Notions of privacy and surveillance are always culturally constructed and are embedded within
economic and social formations of the larger society. Some centralized state-socialist systems, such as the USSR or East
Germany, developed intrusive surveillance systems, an incessant and effective theme of anti-Soviet propaganda. The
democratic-socialist formations, such as those of contemporary northern Europe, have laws that significantly limit the forms of
electronic surveillance and the collection of metadata, compared to Anglo-U.S. practice. Despite the significant limitations
hindering analysis of the intentionally secret activities of intelligence agencies operating outside of public accountability and
systems of legal accountability, the documents made available by whistleblowers like Snowden and
WikiLeaks, and knowledge of past intelligence agencies’ activities, provide information that can help us develop
a useful framework for considering the uses to which these new invasive electronic surveillance
technologies can be put.¶ We need a theory of surveillance that incorporates the political economy of
the U.S. national security state and the corporate interests which it serves and protects. Such analysis
needs an economic foundation and a view that looks beyond cultural categories separating commerce
and state security systems designed to protect capital. The metadata, valuable private corporate data, and
fruits of industrial espionage gathered under PRISM and other NSA programs all produce information of
such a high value that it seems likely some of it will be used in a context of global capital. It matters
little what legal restrictions are in place; in a global, high-tech, capitalist economy such information is
invariably commodified. It is likely to be used to: facilitate industrial or corporate sabotage operations
of the sort inflicted by the Stuxnet worm; steal either corporate secrets for NSA use, or foreign corporate secrets for U.S.
corporate use; make investments by intelligence agencies financing their own operations; or secure personal financial gain by
individuals working in the intelligence sector.¶ The rise of new invasive technologies coincides with the decline
of ideological resistance to surveillance and the compilation of metadata. The speed of Americans’
adoption of ideologies embracing previously unthinkable levels of corporate and state surveillance
suggests a continued public acceptance of a new surveillance normal will continue to develop with
little resistance. In a world where the CIA can hack the computers of Senator Feinstein—a leader of the one of the three
branches of government—with impunity or lack of public outcry, it is difficult to anticipate a deceleration in the pace at which
NSA and CIA expand their surveillance reach. To live a well-adjusted life in contemporary U.S. society requires the development
of rapid memory adjustments and shifting acceptance of corporate and state intrusions into what were once protective spheres
of private life. Like all things in our society, we can expect these intrusions will themselves be
increasingly stratified, as electronic privacy, or illegibility, will increasingly become a commodity
available only to elites. Today, expensive technologies like GeeksPhone’s Blackphone with enhanced PGP encryption, or
Boeing’s self-destructing Black Phone, afford special levels of privacy for those who can pay.¶ While the United States’ current
state of surveillance acceptance offers little immediate hope of a social movement limiting corporate or government spying,
there are enough historical instances of post-crises limits being imposed on government surveillance
to offer some hope. Following the Second World War, many European nations reconfigured long-distance billing systems to not record
specific numbers called, instead only recording billing zones—because the Nazis used phone billing records as metadata useful for identifying
members of resistance movements. Following the Arab Spring, Tunisia now reconfigures its Internet with a new info-packet system known as
mesh networks that hinder governmental monitoring—though USAID support for this project naturally undermines trust in this system.27
Following the Church and Pike committees’ congressional investigations of CIA and FBI wrongdoing in the 1970s, the Hughes-Ryan Act brought
significant oversight and limits on these groups, limits which decayed over time and whose remaining restraints were undone with the USA
PATRIOT Act. Some future crisis may well provide similar opportunities to regain now lost contours of privacies. Yet hope for immediate change
¶
remains limited. It will be difficult for social reform movements striving to protect individual privacy to limit state and corporate surveillance.
Today’s surveillance complex aligned with an economic base enthralled with the prospects of
metadata appears too strong for meaningful reforms without significant shifts in larger economic
formations. Whatever inherent contradictions exist within the present surveillance system, and
regardless of the objections of privacy advocates of the liberal left and libertarian right, meaningful
restrictions appear presently unlikely with surveillance formations so closely tied to the current
iteration of global capitalism.
***Topic Links***
Surveillance
The neoliberal state only interpolates two kinds of beings: consumers and criminals.
This is the root cause for surveillance -piecemeal reforms like the aff inevitably fail.
Passavant, 5 (Paul, Associate Professor of Political Science and PhD in Political Science “The Strong
Neo-liberal State: Crime, Consumption, Governance” 8/3/2005
https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v008/8.3passavant.html Project Muse LAO)
With the end of the Cold War, we have seen the reemergence of the racial discourse of Western
civilization versus the savage or barbarian as the predominant mode for mapping the world and
America's place within it.34 The Bush National Security Strategy makes clear a twist to this racial
discourse that has become particularly prominent since September 11th. As this document indicates, the
enemy of "civilized nations" -- and the American "homeland" -- is "terrorism."35 This document borrows from the racial
discourse that underwrote 19th century colonialism and imperialism, but with an important difference.
Now, the other is
no longer represented merely as racially inferior but also as a criminal. The Bush National Security
Strategy articulates together two strands of the present -- consumer capitalism and fear of crime. As
William Finnegan has noted, it is both interesting and odd that a national securitystrategy would devote as much space as the
Bush Strategy does to discussing economic policy.36 As is clear from the section entitled "Ignite a New Era of Global Economic
Growth through Free Markets and Free Trade," however, it is in fact official U.S. policy to promote -- presumably
through military means since this has been identified as a vital U.S. national security interest by its placement in the Bush
National Security Strategy -- a neo-liberal global economic regime.
Freedom to be a consumer is the form of
freedom that U.S. policy seeks to make enduring through U.S. military operations as the strategy
represents political difference -- those who oppose the promotion of the neo-liberal capitalist enterprise
-- as criminal: the terrorists. This only makes clear what had been prefigured in the immediate aftermath of September
11th by The New Republic's Peter Beinart who also represented anti-global capital protesters as equivalent to terrorists in an
article published in the September 24, 2001 issue of that magazine.37 Thus, U.S. national security policy is an external
projection of the consumer-criminal double.The political mentality of the consumer-criminal double
based in a politics of fear that identifies the risk of certain threats as beyond toleration informed
political practices prior to September 11th. For example, the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty
Act of 1996 (AEDPA) extended the government's power to obtain Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
(FISA) warrants, warrants that are excepted from Fourth Amendment protections in the name of national security's need for
counter-intelligence. The Fourth Amendment limits governmental searches to situations where there is "probable cause" of a
crime, the suspect being searched is presented with the warrant, knows that he or she is being searched (the "knock and
FISA warrants, however, are under no such
limitations -- in "spy world" the object of surveillance must not know that he or she is being searched -and the basis for the warrant remains secret so that should a target of surveillance be charged with a
crime, that person could not challenge the grounds on which the warrant was issued. While the 1978
announce" rule), and can challenge the constitutionality of the warrant.
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act sought to create something of a "wall" (better described as a "filter") between spy world
and civil society (it was passed in the wake of the Church Committee revelations about J. Edgar Hoover's misuse of power to spy
on civil rights organizations and individuals based on their political beliefs), the AEDPA began to circumvent that wall
by allowing the government to spy on not only those suspected of having committed terrorist acts, but
on those who provide "material support" for organizations deemed by the Secretary of State to be
"terrorist."49 This change, which would have brought those who worked to end apartheid in South Africa by supporting the
African National Congress (ANC) within the law's provisions if it had been in effect during the 1980s (since the Reagan
administration considered the ANC to be a terrorist organization), allows the government to identify those it deems to be
intolerable risks and to act preemptively to prevent possible future illegal action.50
Contemporary manifestations of surveillance are a product of neoliberal influence of
the security industry
Monahan 10 (Tornin, Professor of Communication Studies at The University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity)
Placed in context, specifically in a neoliberal context, surveillance can be interpreted instead as
contributing to individual and collective fears specific market-oriented responses to them. Scholars have
found, for instance, that the presence of surveillance cameras can generate experiences of fear in people who presume there
must be a discernable threat to which the cameras are responding. Security companies have both generated and
fed off public ears to grow into a $215-billion industry, catering to government agencies businesses,
and individuals alike with their high-tech security “solutions.” Surveillance melds with other forms of
fortification as well, such as walls, to regulate inclusion and exclusion as a form of risk management. The
empirical validity of such risks is apparently irrelevant. For example, statistically speaking, schools continue to be
some of the safest places for children, much safer than the home, the street, or other settings, yet the demand or surveillance
systems and police in schools has reached an all-time high. The convergence of the surveillance and neoliberalism
supports the production of insecurity subjects, of people who perceive the inherent dangerousness of
others and take actions to minimize exposure to them, even when the danger is spurious. Social
exclusions and inequalities become more collateral damage in the battle for the semblance of
personal safety, not political problems for which society has collective responsibility.
Advanced surveillance capabilities only exist to protect the state from constructed
threats in a global economy
Gill 1995 (Stephen,
The Global Panopticon? The Neoliberal State, Economic Life, and Democratic Surveillance
Source: Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Jan.-Mar. 1995), pp. 1-49 Published by: Sage
Publications, Inc.)
The introduction of information technology in general, and surveillance capabilities in particular, in the
context of the growing influence of neoliberal discourses, is often introduced by and may favor
internationally mobile fractions of capital, especially corporate capital and financial services firms. The tendency of
these fractions of capital is to deepen their activity within civil society and the economy as well as to internationalize as they
seek to maximize profits and offset risks. The use of surveillance and sorting techniques for maximizing
knowledge about and influence over workers, savers, and consumers appears to be growing. At the
same time, when surveillance and information technologies are introduced in the workplace and in the
wider society they tend to provoke both resistance (e.g., neo-Luddism) and nihilism (e.g., computer
hackers using Pentagon computers to store pornography). These technologies also offer some democratic
potential if used with appropriate processes of accountability and in the context of democratic controls. Another key
impetus for the widening use of surveillance techniques is the internal and external response of
certain political elements within state apparatuses to problems associated with economic
globalization and interstate rivalry, and in particular to the perception of the loss of control,
regulatory effectiveness, or indeed authority over economic activity within national boundaries.
Whereas mobile capital is associated with the interdependence (or capitalist) principle of world order,
the territorial and political logic of state surveillance is often associated with the reinforcement or
persistence of nationalist blocs and security complexes. Such blocs may seek to restrict or to channel
the freedom and mobility of such capital for reasons of national security.
Surveillance has the dual function of disciplining society into free-market ideologies
and securing the body politic from threats to the social order – criticism of surveillance
must begin with a recognition of this dual function.
Deukmedjian in 2013(John Edward, Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminology,
University of Windsor, “Making Sense of Neoliberal Securitization in Urban Policing and Surveillance,”
CRS/RCS, 50.1)
Securitization is enmeshed with neoliberalization and comes into focus through a retracting Keynesian rationality. A
mentality of disequilibrium creates the conditions for the deemphasis of disciplinary-surveillance
practices in preference to practices of security surveillance. Indeed, consider neoliberalism’s antithesis: within the highly
expansive regulatory and socialistic politics of communism what do we find? Following the 1917 October Revolution one of the first decrees of
the Council of People’s Commissars called for the establishment of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution, Sabotage and Speculation, which formed the basis of the longstanding KGB of the Soviet Union (Conquest 1968). The Soviets quickly
established a highly centralized and networked security-surveillance apparatus to identify, contain through the use of the Gulag, or otherwise
eliminate threats to the revolution. At the same time centralized apparatuses of disciplinary surveillance were never prioritized by the Soviet
government since the communal system was expected to ideally be self-disciplinary (Shearer 2009). Neoliberalization
fundamentally entails market and financial securitization. At the same time, surveillance apparatuses for the
reproduction of disciplined populaces present roadblocks to free market enterprise. A Beckerian entrepreneur,
for example, takes risks rather than rationally calculates or structurally constitutes equilibrium—and centrifugal security-surveillance facilitates
an ever-widening circuit of risk taking (Becker 1976; Foucault 2008). We see both trends in policing and surveillance from about the 1970s.
Among the most significant events include Kelling et al.’s (1974) report on the Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment. Funded by the Police
Foundation, Kelling’s teammonitored the effects of both saturated random patrol and no patrol over a period of one year. Kelling found that
motorized patrol had no statistically significant effect on either fear of crime or crime rates. Kelling et al.’s findings are not surprising—though
perhaps because of the benefit of hindsight. The study applied centrifugal experimental design—a scientific design—to measure the efficacy of
a centripetal disciplinary practice. Few caught on, and Kelling became highly influential in the years and decades to come, armed with a study
that undermined not only the practice of patrol, but also its rational governance through crime statistics and reforms in its efficiency. In the
decade that followed there was an onslaught of academic criticism over various aspects of disciplinary policing. Spelman and Brown’s (1981)
study, for example, pointed out that rapid response to calls by police only led to a small (3 percent) proportion of arrests in serious cases;
Shearing (1984) noted that only a very small proportion of calls were in fact about reporting crime; and Ericson (1982) found that the vast
majority of police work focused on maintaining public order through discipline (rather than fighting crime). Until
1993, both
government and academics advocated the adoption of community policing as the solution to many of
these problematizations (see, e.g., Normandeau and Leighton 1990). Whether through programs like Neighbourhood Watch,
Community Consultative Groups, Family Group Conferencing, community policing held out the promise for accomplishing the following dual
ends: first, community policing promised to improve police-public relations and information and intelligence flows from the public for guiding
resource deployments and facilitating investigations; second, community policing promised to reduce the financial costs of monitoring and
disciplining the population because communities would now be mobilized and empowered to watch and discipline their own. Ultimately,
what separated police-community programs in the 1950s from the community policing of the 1980s and
1990s was that the disciplining of “the social” was no longer considered to be a social good, but rather
an activity driven by market competition and a requirement to download costs. In this sense, O’Malley and Palmer
(1996) were quite accurate with their assessment: community policing represents a fundamental realignment of the police provision in postKeynesian or neoliberal governance away from centralized disciplinary surveillance. What
many understandably did not realize
at that time (given the prevailing governmental discourses surrounding community governance) was that there was a parallel
emphasis on instituting security surveillance. The Audit Commission (1993) was perhaps among the first to advocate costeffectiveness through an “intelligence-led” approach. The Audit Commission advocated the identification and targeting
of prolific offenders through the cultivation and use of informant assets. In essence it advocated for
practices of security surveillance. Unlike the nineteenth century where the development of security surveillance was
overshadowed by a primary focus on disciplinary surveillance, the Audit Commission called for security surveillance to become a primary focus
of police. Still, this meant that during the 1990s there was, depending on place and time, the dual emphasis: on
the one hand for
police to primarily focus on community policing and on the other to focus on intelligence-led policing. This
dual emphasis remains to this day (see Maguire and John 2006) and not only in policing but governance more broadly (i.e., downloading
discipline/uploading security). Among
the more significant trends that have caught the attention of scholars is
the development and expanse of interoperable security-surveillance networks that interconnect
variousmilitary and civil governmental agencies and private providers within a pluralizing market
(Deukmedjian and Cradock 2009; Dupont 2004; Lippert and O’Connor 2006). Networks are not new. But it seems that we are
witnessing greater horizontal (rather than hierarchically funneled) interagency and intraagency flows
and practices. That said, if we were to apply Foucault’s concepts of centripetal and centrifugal function, we can easily see that hierarchical
networks are disciplinary-surveillance assemblages—the bottom-up flows of knowledge and expertise increasingly
focus until they reach some point, and it is that focal point from which action is directed back downward
to the bottom. A disciplinary organization is thus susceptible to “decapitation.” Horizontal networks are expansive, boundless, and
centrifugal and as such they afford and engender security. A horizontal network can continue to function even if some of its “nodes” regularly
fail, provided redundancy is sufficiently diffuse. Of course, and we have seen this with the financial crisis of 2008 and are seeing it currently in
Europe, if a network is insufficiently diffuse and instead contains a small number of critical nodes, then the network is vulnerable to their
failure. Still, what is lacking is a better understanding of the interactions between security and disciplinary surveillance within neoliberal
deregulation and desocialization. If nodes are market enterprises functioning within an ever more detailed and ever expansive competitive
space—one that requires tuning and the identification of someminimum degree of regulation determined by market trends, then nodes
increasingly require central arbitration in the determination of their tolerances and intolerances (cf. Foucault 2008).
Tolerance is
increasingly situated in the continuum of private, local, and individual auspices of self-discipline and
surveillance, while intolerance is situated in the continuum of security surveillance and force. The balancing
of tolerance and intolerance across this fluid network12 rather than being driven by some equilibrium found in nature is driven by the
disequilibrium engendered by neoliberal market politics. Given its centrifugal logic, neoliberalism
promotes more risk taking
and greater flows of capital and hence promotes more security surveillance on risk taking to identify,
disrupt, preempt, contain, prepare for, and increase resiliency toward activity that is seen to potentially
cause network instability or failure. We can thus begin to appreciate both the present shedding of disciplinary-surveillance
provisions and the securitization of neoliberal economies. If sovereign competition now primarily takes place through a politics of free market
capital growth and deregulation, then the protection, preparedness, and resiliency, indeed the insurance (Ericson, Barry, and Doyle 2000) of
sovereign markets against problematic risks becomes a paramount function of governance. Neoliberalization
animates both the
securitization of free markets and the devolution of market discipline through such strategies.
Neoliberalism is not terminal: it functions continuously to deregulate, to desocialize, and to promote
greater and diverse risk taking and this must be achieved through ever-expansive apparatuses of
security surveillance to address the multiform risks that threaten markets. Seen in this light, there are an endless
array of risks that require governmental planning, preparation, and monitoring. Some extreme examples range from the RCMP Integrated
Security Unit’s preparation against terrorists potentially using artificial snow makingmachines to disperse highly radiological material at the
2010 Vancouver Olympic Games (Matas 2009), to a 2007 USDA Factsheet that considers food contamination risks in the event of
“extraterrestrial hostile action” (Food Safety and Inspection Service 2007).
Bulk Data
Bulk data collections functions as a barbed wire fence that depoliticizes issues like
privacy and reduces the capacity for public debate – restrictions are just a placebo to
make us think we have agency
Morozov, 13
(Evgeny- former fellow @ Stanford and Georgetown,“The Real Privacy Problem”
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520426/the-real-privacy-problem/)
In the last few decades, as we began to generate more data, our institutions became addicted. If you withheld the data and
severed the feedback loops, it’s not clear whether they could continue at all. We, as citizens, are caught in an odd
position: our reason for disclosing the data is not that we feel deep concern for the public good. No,
we release data out of self-interest, on Google or via self-tracking apps. We are too cheap not to use
free services subsidized by advertising. Or we want to track our fitness and diet, and then we sell the data. Simitis
¶
knew even in 1985 that this would inevitably lead to the “algorithmic regulation” taking shape today, as politics becomes
“public administration” that runs on autopilot so that citizens can relax and enjoy themselves, only to be nudged, occasionally,
whenever they are about to forget to buy broccoli.¶ Habits, activities, and preferences are compiled, registered,
and retrieved to facilitate better adjustment, not to improve the individual’s capacity to act and to
decide. Whatever the original incentive for computerization may have been, processing increasingly
appears as the ideal means to adapt an individual to a predetermined, standardized behavior that
aims at the highest possible degree of compliance with the model patient, consumer, taxpayer, employee,
or citizen.¶ What Simitis is describing here is the construction of what I call “invisible barbed wire” around our intellectual and
social lives. Big data, with its many interconnected databases that feed on information and algorithms
of dubious provenance, imposes severe constraints on how we mature politically and socially. The
German philosopher Jürgen Habermas was right to warn—in 1963—that “an exclusively technical
civilization … is threatened … by the splitting of human beings into two classes—the social engineers
and the inmates of closed social institutions.Ӧ The invisible barbed wire of big data limits our lives to
a space that might look quiet and enticing enough but is not of our own choosing and that we cannot
rebuild or expand. The worst part is that we do not see it as such. Because we believe that we are free
to go anywhere, the barbed wire remains invisible. Worse, there’s no one to blame: certainly not Google, Dick
Cheney, or the NSA. It’s the result of many different logics and systems—of modern capitalism, of bureaucratic
governance, of risk management—that get supercharged by the automation of information processing and
by the depoliticization of politics.¶ The more information we reveal about ourselves, the denser but
more invisible this barbed wire becomes. We gradually lose our capacity to reason and debate; we no
longer understand why things happen to us. But all is not lost. We could learn to perceive ourselves as trapped
¶
within this barbed wire and even cut through it. Privacy is the resource that allows us to do that and, should we be so lucky,
even to plan our escape route.¶ This is where Simitis expressed a truly revolutionary insight that is lost in contemporary privacy
debates: no progress can be achieved, he said, as long as privacy protection is “more or less equated with an individual’s right
to decide when and which data are to be accessible.” The trap that many well-meaning privacy advocates fall
into is thinking that if only they could provide the individual with more control over his or her data—
through stronger laws or a robust property regime—then the invisible barbed wire would become
visible and fray. It won’t—not if that data is eventually returned to the very institutions that are
erecting the wire around us.
Commercial interests of the data-power administration mean that even new
restrictions on surveillance will be circumvented – data hunger is a tenant of
neoliberalism.
Morozov, 13
(Evgeny- former fellow @ Stanford and Georgetown,“The Real Privacy Problem”
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520426/the-real-privacy-problem/)
First, let’s address the symptoms of our current malaise. Yes, the commercial interests of technology
companies and the policy interests of government agencies have converged: both are interested in
the collection and rapid analysis of user data. Google and Facebook are compelled to collect ever
more data to boost the effectiveness of the ads they sell. Government agencies need the same data—
they can collect it either on their own or in coöperation with technology companies—to pursue their own programs.¶ Many of
those programs deal with national security. But such data can be used in many other ways that also undermine privacy. The
Italian government, for example, is using a tool called the redditometro, or income meter, which analyzes receipts and
spending patterns to flag people who spend more than they claim in income as potential tax cheaters. Once mobile payments
replace a large percentage of cash transactions—with Google and Facebook as intermediaries—the data collected by these
companies will be indispensable to tax collectors. Likewise, legal academics are busy exploring how data mining can be used to
craft contracts or wills tailored to the personalities, characteristics, and past behavior of individual citizens, boosting efficiency
and reducing malpractice.¶ On another front, technocrats like Cass Sunstein, the former administrator of the Office of
Information and Regulatory Affairs at the White House and a leading proponent of “nanny statecraft” that nudges citizens to do
certain things, hope that the collection and instant analysis of data about individuals can help solve problems like obesity,
climate change, and drunk driving by steering our behavior. A new book by three British academics—Changing Behaviours: On
the Rise of the Psychological State—features a long list of such schemes at work in the U.K., where the government’s nudging
unit, inspired by Sunstein, has been so successful that it’s about to become a for-profit operation.¶ Thanks to smartphones
or Google Glass, we can now be pinged whenever we are about to do something stupid, unhealthy, or
unsound. We wouldn’t necessarily need to know why the action would be wrong: the system’s
algorithms do the moral calculus on their own. Citizens take on the role of information machines that
feed the techno-bureaucratic complex with our data. And why wouldn’t we, if we are promised slimmer
waistlines, cleaner air, or longer (and safer) lives in return? This logic of preëmption is not different from that of
the NSA in its fight against terror: let’s prevent problems rather than deal with their consequences.
Even if we tie the hands of the NSA—by some combination of better oversight, stricter rules on data
access, or stronger and friendlier encryption technologies—the data hunger of other state institutions
would remain. They will justify it. On issues like obesity or climate change—where the policy makers are quick to add
¶
that we are facing a ticking-bomb scenario—they will say a little deficit of democracy can go a long way.¶ Here’s what that
deficit would look like: the new digital infrastructure, thriving as it does on real-time data contributed by
citizens, allows the technocrats to take politics, with all its noise, friction, and discontent, out of the
political process. It replaces the messy stuff of coalition-building, bargaining, and deliberation with
the cleanliness and efficiency of data-powered administration.¶ This phenomenon has a meme-friendly name:
“algorithmic regulation,” as Silicon Valley publisher Tim O’Reilly calls it. In essence, information-rich democracies have reached
a point where they want to try to solve public problems without having to explain or justify themselves to citizens. Instead, they
can simply appeal to our own self-interest—and they know enough about us to engineer a perfect, highly personalized,
irresistible nudge.
NSA
Metadata has been commodified – justifications for mass surveillance will always
emerge in a neoliberal system
Price, 14
(David- prof of anthropology @ Saint Martin’s U, “The New Surveillance Normal: NSA and Corporate
Surveillance in the Age of Global Capitalism,” https://monthlyreview.org/2014/07/01/the-newsurveillance-normal/)
The National Security Agency (NSA) document cache released by Edward Snowden reveals a need to retheorize the role of state and corporate surveillance systems in an age of neoliberal global capitalism.
While much remains unknowable to us, we now are in a world where private communications are legible in previously
inconceivable ways, ideologies of surveillance are undergoing rapid transformations, and the
commodification of metadata (and other surveillance intelligence) transforms privacy. In light of this,
we need to consider how the NSA and corporate metadata mining converge to support the interests of
capital.¶ This is an age of converging state and corporate surveillance. Like other features of the political economy, these
shifts develop with apparent independence of institutional motivations, yet corporate and spy agencies’ practices
share common appetites for metadata. Snowden’s revelations of the NSA’s global surveillance programs raises the
possibility that the state intelligence apparatus is used for industrial espionage in ways that could unite governmental
intelligence and corporate interests—for which there appears to be historical precedent. The convergence of the
interests, incentives, and methods of U.S. intelligence agencies, and the corporate powers they serve,
raise questions about the ways that the NSA and CIA fulfill their roles, which have been described by
former CIA agent Philip Agee as: “the secret police of U.S. capitalism, plugging up leaks in the political dam
night and day so that shareholders of U.S. companies operating in poor countries can continue enjoying the rip-off.”1¶ There is a
long history in the United States of overwhelming public opposition to new forms of electronic surveillance. Police,
prosecutors, and spy agencies have recurrently used public crises—ranging from the Lindbergh baby
kidnapping, wars, claimed threats of organized crime and terror attacks, to marshal expanded state
surveillance powers.2 During the two decades preceding the 9/11 terror attacks, Congress periodically considered
developing legislation establishing rights of privacy; but even in the pre-Internet age, corporate interests scoffed at the need for
any such protections. Pre–2001 critiques of electronic-surveillance focused on privacy rights and threats to boundaries between
individuals, corporations, and the state; what would later be known as metadata collection were then broadly understood as
violating shared notions of privacy, and as exposing the scaffolding of a police state or a corporate panopticon inhabited by
consumers living in a George Tooker painting.
***Advantage Links***
Climate Change
Globalisation treats carbon as a commodity which depolotisizes climate change. Only
the alternative solves climate change.
Moon, 2013 http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/xmlui/handle/10063/3089 Emma moon is a professor at the university of Wellington
Climate change exists both as a symptom and as a cause of many social ills. It is as urgent as it is complex. Climate
change is being
addressed internationally through mechanisms heavily influenced by neoliberal globalisation and based around
market mechanisms for the trading of carbon dioxide as a commodity, such as the Kyoto Protocol. This has
contributed to increasing de-politicisation of the climate change issue. Contestation of neoliberal solutions to climate
change has resulted in the birth of climate justice principles which unite action against the systemic
causes of climate change. At the heart of action on climate change are young people- historically
active citizens and advocates for radical change. In the context of de-politicisation and a post-political
carbon consensus, young activists have been influenced by dominant neoliberal discourse. This research
will explore the repercussions of a post-political carbon consensus in producing youth-led spaces of contestation in Aotearoa New Zealand. The
case study for this research, youth-driven organisation Generation Zero, advocates for post-political carbon consensus by running campaigns on
changes to the national Emissions Trading Scheme and other policy-based work. In this thesis, I will describe the extent to which young people
within Generation Zero are influenced by the neoliberal discourse and the implications this has for the role of climate justice and radical
activism. This research will contribute to the literature around the de-politicisation of climate change as it describes the impact that this has on
youth activism and thus the opportunity for future spaces of dissent.
Neoliberalism causes global warming
Greatrex, 14
http://www.academia.edu/7526715/The_Ultimate_Crisis_of_Neoliberal_Globalization_The_Case_of_Cli
mate_Change Gareth Greatrex is a professor of political science at Newcastle
Worst still is Africa, where poverty increased from 40.1 percent in 1986 to 45.9 percent in 2001. There is a growing global
awareness in the midst of an unprecedented climate and financial crisis, that the neoliberal doctrine is
having a negative impact on poverty, inequality and the environment. dismantling the means for public
steering of society to meet social needs, [neoliberal globalization] has made it nearly impossible to
correct the global climate crisis. Furthermore, it is a prominent factor in its rise. The drive for profit and competitive
advantage is the primary motivation on which capitalism relies, and the fuel that drives it is the
ceaseless exploitation of natural resources. The ascendance of neoliberalism has facilitated, and
indeed subjugated the environment to that exploitation, leading to the prolific rise of GHG,
deforestation, and a multitude of other ecological detriments. The connection is neatly illustrated with some simple
statistics Global GDP rose from 13,764 billion to 44,925 billion (226%); The global population expanded from 3.7 billion to 6.5 billion (75%);
Global carbon emissions increased from 14GT to 28GT (100%); Atmospheric CO2 rose from 322ppm to 379ppm (15%). The arrival of neoliberal
ideology in tandem with globalization has led to the rising power of MNCs, the geographical separation of the production process leading to
ecologically uneven terms of trade between the North and South, and a burgeoning global middle class with Western appetites for
consumption. The consequences for climate change of each are explored below. The Rising Dominance of Multinational Corporation.
Cloud computing
Cloud computing allows for increased surveillance -new laws won’t resolve the
demand for data as it plays a key role in sustaining neoliberalism
Morozov, 13
(Evgeny- former fellow @ Stanford and Georgetown,“The Real Privacy Problem”
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520426/the-real-privacy-problem/)
1967, The Public Interest, then a leading venue for highbrow policy debate, published a provocative essay by Paul Baran, one of
the fathers of the data transmission method known as packet switching. Titled “The Future Computer Utility,” the essay
speculated that someday a few big, centralized computers would provide “information processing …
the same way one now buys electricity.” Our home computer console will be used to send and receive messages—
¶
like telegrams. We could check to see whether the local department store has the advertised sports shirt in stock in the desired
The information would be up-to-theminute and accurate. We could pay our bills and compute our taxes via the console. We would ask
color and size. We could ask when delivery would be guaranteed, if we ordered.
questions and receive answers from “information banks”—automated versions of today’s libraries. We would obtain up-to-theminute listing of all television and radio programs … The computer could, itself, send a message to remind us of an impending
anniversary and save us from the disastrous consequences of forgetfulness.¶ It took decades for cloud computing to
fulfill Baran’s vision. But he was prescient enough to worry that utility computing would need its own
regulatory model. Here was an employee of the RAND Corporation—hardly a redoubt of Marxist
thought—fretting about the concentration of market power in the hands of large computer utilities
and demanding state intervention. Baran also wanted policies that could “offer maximum protection to the
preservation of the rights of privacy of information”:¶ Highly sensitive personal and important business information will be
stored in many of the contemplated systems … At present, nothing more than trust—or, at best, a lack of technical
sophistication—stands in the way of a would-be eavesdropper … Today we lack the mechanisms to insure adequate safeguards.
Because of the difficulty in rebuilding complex systems to incorporate safeguards at a later date, it appears desirable to
anticipate these problems.¶ Sharp, bullshit-free analysis: techno-futurism has been in decline ever since.¶ All the privacy
solutions you hear about are on the wrong track.¶ To read Baran’s essay (just one of the many on utility computing published at
the time) is to realize that our contemporary privacy problem is not contemporary. It’s not just a
consequence of Mark Zuckerberg’s selling his soul and our profiles to the NSA. The problem was recognized
early on, and little was done about it.¶ Almost all of Baran’s envisioned uses for “utility computing” are purely commercial.
Ordering shirts, paying bills, looking for entertainment, conquering forgetfulness: this is not the
Internet of “virtual communities” and “netizens.” Baran simply imagined that networked computing would allow us to
do things that we already do without networked computing: shopping, entertainment, research. But also: espionage,
surveillance, and voyeurism.¶ If Baran’s “computer revolution” doesn’t sound very revolutionary, it’s
in part because he did not imagine that it would upend the foundations of capitalism and bureaucratic
administration that had been in place for centuries. By the 1990s, however, many digital enthusiasts
believed otherwise; they were convinced that the spread of digital networks and the rapid decline in
communication costs represented a genuinely new stage in human development. For them, the
surveillance triggered in the 2000s by 9/11 and the colonization of these pristine digital spaces by
Google, Facebook, and big data were aberrations that could be resisted or at least reversed. If only we could
now erase the decade we lost and return to the utopia of the 1980s and 1990s by passing stricter laws, giving users more
control, and building better encryption tools!¶ A different reading of recent history would yield a different agenda for the future.
The widespread feeling of emancipation through information that many people still attribute to the
1990s was probably just a prolonged hallucination. Both capitalism and bureaucratic administration
easily accommodated themselves to the new digital regime; both thrive on information flows, the
more automated the better. Laws, markets, or technologies won’t stymie or redirect that demand for
data, as all three play a role in sustaining capitalism and bureaucratic administration in the first place.
Something else is needed: politics.
Cybersecurity
The drive for cyber-security is the product of neoliberal markets and private sector
control over the military
Greenwald 13
(Greenwald, Glenn. "Pentagon's New Massive Expansion of 'cyber-security' Unit Is about Everything
except Defense." The Guardian. N.p., 28 Jan. 2013. Web. Greenwald is an author, lawyer, journalist)
This all culminated when Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, last October, warned of what he called a "cyber-Pearl Harbor". This "would cause
physical destruction and the loss of life, an attack that would paralyze and shock the nation and create a profound new sense of vulnerability."
Identifying China, Iran, and terrorist groups, he outlined a parade of horribles scarier than anything since Condoleezza Rice's 2002 Iraqi
"mushroom cloud": "An aggressor nation or extremist group could use these kinds of cyber tools to gain control of critical switches. They could
derail passenger trains, or even more dangerous, derail passenger trains loaded with lethal chemicals. They could contaminate the water supply
in major cities, or shut down the power grid across large parts of the country." As usual, though, reality is exactly the opposite. This massive
new expenditure of money is not primarily devoted to defending against cyber-aggressors. The US itself is the world's leading cyber-aggressor.
A major purpose of this expansion is to strengthen the US's ability to destroy other nations with cyber-attacks. Indeed, even the Post report
notes that a major component of this new expansion is to "conduct offensive computer operations against foreign adversaries". It
is the US
- not Iran, Russia or "terror" groups - which already is the first nation (in partnership with Israel) to
aggressively deploy a highly sophisticated and extremely dangerous cyber-attack. Last June, the New York Times'
David Sanger reported what most of the world had already suspected: "From his first months in office, President Obama
secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran's main nuclear
enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America's first sustained use of cyberweapons." In fact,
Obama "decided to accelerate the attacks . . . even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer
of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran's Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet." According
to the Sanger's report, Obama himself understood the significance of the US decision to be the first to use serious and aggressive cyberwarfare: "Mr. Obama, according to participants in the many Situation Room meetings on Olympic Games, was acutely aware that with every
attack he was pushing the United States into new territory, much as his predecessors had with the first use of atomic weapons in the 1940s, of
intercontinental missiles in the 1950s and of drones in the past decade. He repeatedly expressed concerns that any American acknowledgment
that it was using cyberweapons - even under the most careful and limited circumstances - could enable other countries, terrorists or hackers to
justify their own attacks." The
US isn't the vulnerable victim of cyber-attacks. It's the leading perpetrator of
those attacks. As Columbia Professor and cyber expert Misha Glenny wrote in the NYT last June: Obama's cyber-attack on Iran
"marked a significant and dangerous turning point in the gradual militarization of the Internet." Indeed,
exactly as Obama knew would happen, revelations that it was the US which became the first country to use cyber-warfare against a sovereign
country - just as it was the first to use the atomic bomb and then drones - would make it impossible for it to claim with any credibility (except
among its own media and foreign policy community) that it was in a defensive posture when it came to cyber-warfare. As Professor Glenny
wrote: "by introducing such pernicious viruses as Stuxnet and Flame, America has severely undermined its moral and political credibility." That's
why, as the Post reported yesterday, the DOJ is engaged in such a frantic and invasive effort to root out Sanger's source: because it reveals the
obvious truth that the US is the leading aggressor in the world when it comes to cyber-weapons. This significant expansion under the Orwellian
rubric of "cyber-security" is thus a perfect microcosm of US military spending generally. It's
all justified under by the claim that
the US must defend itself from threats from Bad, Aggressive Actors, when the reality is the exact
opposite: the new program is devoted to ensuring that the US remains the primary offensive threat to
the rest of the world. It's the same way the US develops offensive biological weapons under the guise of
developing defenses against such weapons (such as the 2001 anthrax that the US government itself says
came from a US Army lab). It's how the US government generally convinces its citizens that it is a
peaceful victim of aggression by others when the reality is that the US builds more weapons, sells more
arms and bombs more countries than virtually the rest of the world combined. Threats to privacy and internet
freedom Beyond the aggressive threat to other nations posed by the Pentagon's "cyber-security" programs, there is the profound
threat to privacy, internet freedom, and the ability to communicate freely for US citizens and foreign
nationals alike. The US government has long viewed these "cyber-security" programs as a means of monitoring and controlling the
internet and disseminating propaganda. The fact that this is all being done under the auspices of the NSA and the
Pentagon means, by definition, that there will be no transparency and no meaningful oversight. Back in
2003, the Rumsfeld Pentagon prepared a secret report entitled "Information Operations (IO) Roadmap", which laid the foundation for this new
cyber-warfare expansion. The Pentagon's self-described objective was "transforming IO into a core military competency on par with air, ground,
maritime and special operations". In other words, its key objective was to ensure military control over internet-based communications: It
further identified superiority in cyber-attack capabilities as a vital military goal in PSYOPs (Psychological Operations) and "information-centric
fights": And it set forth the urgency of dominating the "IO battlespace" not only during wartime but also in peacetime: As a 2006 BBC report on
this Pentagon document noted: "Perhaps the most startling aspect of the roadmap is its acknowledgement that information put out as part of
the military's psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans." And while
the report paid lip service to the need to create "boundaries" for these new IO military activities, "they don't seem to explain how." Regarding
the report's plan to "provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum", the BBC noted: "Consider that for a moment. The US
military seeks the capability to knock out every telephone, every networked computer, every radar system on the planet." Since then, there
have been countless reports of the exploitation by the US national security state to destroy privacy and undermine internet freedom. In
November, the LA Times described programs that "teach students how to spy in cyberspace, the latest frontier in espionage." They "also are
taught to write computer viruses, hack digital networks, crack passwords, plant listening devices and mine data from broken cellphones and
flash drives." The program, needless to say, "has funneled most of its graduates to the CIA and the Pentagon's National Security Agency, which
conducts America's digital spying. Other graduates have taken positions with the FBI, NASA and the Department of Homeland Security." In
2010, Lawrence E. Strickling, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information, gave a speech explicitly announcing that
the US intends to abandon its policy of "leaving the Internet alone". Noting that this "has been the nation's Internet policy since the Internet
was first commercialized in the mid-1990s", he decreed: "This was the right policy for the United States in the early stages of the Internet, and
the right message to send to the rest of the world. But that was then and this is now." The documented power of the US government to
monitor and surveil internet communications is already unfathomably massive. Recall that the Washington Post's 2010 "Top Secret America"
series noted that: "Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other
types of communications." And the Obama administration has formally demanded that it have access to any and all forms of internet
communication. It is hard to overstate the danger to privacy and internet freedom from a massive expansion of the National Security State's
efforts to exploit and control the internet. As Wired's Singel wrote back in 2010: "Make no mistake, the military industrial complex now has its
eye on the internet. Generals want to train crack squads of hackers and have wet dreams of cyberwarfare. Never shy of extending its power,
the military industrial complex wants to turn the internet into yet another venue for an arms race". Wildly exaggerated cyber-threats are the
pretext for this control, the "mushroom cloud" and the Tonkin Gulf fiction of cyber-warfare. As Singel aptly put it: "the only war going on is one
for the soul of the internet." That's the vital context for understanding this massive expansion of Pentagon and NSA consolidated control over
cyber programs. Bonanza for private contractors As always, it
is not just political power but also private-sector profit
driving this expansion. As military contracts for conventional war-fighting are modestly reduced,
something needs to replace it, and these large-scale "cyber-security" contracts are more than
adequate. Virtually every cyber-security program from the government is carried out in conjunction
with its "private-sector partners", who receive large transfers of public funds for this work. Two weeks
ago, Business Week reported that "Lockheed Martin Corp., AT&T Inc., and CenturyLink Inc. are the first companies to sign up for a US program
giving them classified information on cyber threats that they can package as security services for sale to other companies." This is part of a
government effort "to create a market based on classified US information about cyber threats." In May, it was announced that "the Pentagon is
expanding and making permanent a trial program that teams the government with Internet service providers to protect defense firms'
computer networks against data theft by foreign adversaries" - all as "part of a larger effort to broaden the sharing of classified and unclassified
cyberthreat data between the government and industry." Indeed, there is a large organization of defense and intelligence contractors devoted
to one goal: expanding the private-public merger for national security and intelligence functions. This organization - the Intelligence and
National Security Alliance (INSA) - was formerly headed by Adm. McConnell, and describes itself as a "collaboration by leaders from throughout
the US Intelligence Community" which "combines the experience of senior leaders from government, the private sector, and academia." As I
detailed back in 2010, one
of its primary goals is to scare the nation about supposed cyber-threats in order to
justify massive new expenditures for the private-sector intelligence industry on cyber-security measures
and vastly expanded control over the internet. Indeed, in his 2010 Op-Ed, Adm. McConnell expressly acknowledged that the
growing privatization of internet cyber-security programs "will muddy the waters between the traditional roles of the government and the
private sector." At the very same time McConnell published this Op-Ed, the INSA website featured a report entitled "Addressing Cyber Security
Through Public-Private Partnership." It featured a genuinely creepy graphic showing the inter-connectedness between government institutions
(such as Congress and regulatory agencies), the Surveillance State, private intelligence corporations, and the Internet: Private-sector profit is
now inextricably linked with the fear-mongering campaign over cyber-threats. At one INSA conference in 2009 - entitled "Cyber Deterrence
Conference" - government officials and intelligence industry executives gathered together to stress that "government and private sector actors
should emphasize collaboration and partnership through the creation of a model that assigns specific roles and responsibilities." As intelligence
contractor expert Tim Shorrock told Democracy Now when McConnell - then at Booz Allen - was first nominated to be DNI: Well, the NSA, the
National Security Agency, is really sort of the lead agency in terms of outsourcing . . . . Booz Allen is one of about, you know, ten large
corporations that play a very major role in American intelligence. Every time you hear about intelligence watching North Korea or tapping alQaeda phones, something like that, you can bet that corporations like these are very heavily involved. And Booz Allen is one of the largest of
these contractors. I estimate that about 50% of our $45 billion intelligence budget goes to private sector contractors like Booz Allen. This publicprivate merger for intelligence and surveillance functions not only vests these industries with large-scale profits at public expense, but also the
accompanying power that was traditionally reserved for government. And unlike government agencies, which are at least subjected in theory
to some minimal regulatory oversight, these private-sector actors have virtually none, even as their surveillance and intelligence functions
rapidly increase. What Dwight Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex has been feeding itself on fear campaigns since it was born. A
never-ending carousel of Menacing Enemies - Communists, Terrorists, Latin American Tyrants, Saddam's chemical weapons, Iranian mullahs has sustained it, and Cyber-Threats are but the latest. Like all of these wildly exaggerated cartoon menaces, there is some degree of threat
posed by cyber-attacks. But, as Singel described, all
of this can be managed with greater security systems for public
and private computer networks - just as some modest security measures are sufficient to deal with the
terrorist threat. This new massive expansion has little to do with any actual cyber-threat - just as the invasion
of Iraq and global assassination program have little to do with actual terrorist threats. It is instead all about strengthening the US's offensive
cyber-war capabilities, consolidating control over the internet, and ensuring further transfers of massive public wealth to private industry
continue unabated. In other words, it perfectly follows the template used by the public-private US National Security State over the last six
decades to entrench and enrich itself based on pure pretext.
Democracy/Turns case arg
Neoliberalism renders problems personal and quells collective action, preventing
deliberative democracy. This causes a litany of social ills – poverty, racism, Ann
Coulter to name a few – and turns the case.
Giroux, 5
(Henry, Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University,, “The Terror of
Neoliberalism: Rethinking the Significance of Cultural Politics” 2005
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/college_literature/v032/32.1giroux.html Project Muse LAO)
Within the discourse of neoliberalism, democracy becomes synonymous with free markets, while issues
of equality, racial justice, and freedom are stripped of any substantive meaning and used to disparage
those who suffer systemic deprivation and chronic punishment. Individual misfortune, like democracy
itself, is now viewed as either excessive or in need of radical containment. The media, largely
consolidated through corporate power, routinely provide a platform for high profile right-wing pundits
and politicians to remind us either of how degenerate the poor have become or to reinforce the central
neoliberal tenet that all problems are private rather than social in nature. Conservative columnist Ann
Coulter captures the latter sentiment with her comment that “[i]nstead of poor people with hope and
possibility, we now have a permanent underclass of aspiring criminals knifing one another between having
illegitimate children and collecting welfare checks” (qtd. in Bean 2003, para.3). Radio talk show host Michael Savage, too,
exemplifies the unabashed racism and fanaticism that emerge under a neoliberal regime in which
ethics and justice appear beside the point. For instance, Savage routinely refers to non-white countries
as “turd world nations,” homosexuality as a “perversion” and young children who are victims of gunfire
as “ghetto slime” (qtd. in Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting 2003, para.2, 6, 5). As Fredric Jameson has argued in The
Seeds of Time, it has now become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (1994, xii). The breathless
rhetoric of the global victory of free-market rationality spewed forth by the mass media, right-wing
intellectuals, and governments alike has found its material expression both in an all-out attack on
democratic values and in the growth of a range of social problems including: virulent and persistent
poverty, joblessness, inadequate health care, apartheid in the inner cities, and increasing inequalities
between the rich and the poor. Such problems appear to have been either removed from the
inventory of public discourse and social policy or factored into talk-show spectacles in which the public
becomes merely a staging area for venting private interests Henry A. Giroux 9 Within the discourse of neoliberalism that has
taken hold of the public imagination, there is no way of talking about what is fundamental to civic life, critical
citizenship, and a substantive democracy. Neoliberalism offers no critical vocabulary for speaking
about political or social transformation as a democratic project. Nor is there a language for either the ideal of
public commitment or the notion of a social agency capable of challenging the basic assumptions of corporate ideology as well
as its social consequences. In its dubious appeals to universal laws, neutrality, and selective scientific research,
neoliberalism “eliminates the very possibility of critical thinking, without which democratic debate
becomes impossible” (Buck-Morss 2003, 65-66).This shift in rhetoric makes it possible for advocates of
neoliberalism to implement the most ruthless economic and political policies without having to open up
such actions to public debate and dialogue. Hence, neoliberal policies that promote the cutthroat
downsizing of the workforce, the bleeding of social services, the reduction of state governments to
police precincts, the ongoing liquidation of job security, the increasing elimination of a decent social wage, the creation of a
society of low-skilled workers, and the emergence of a culture of permanent insecurity and fear hide behind
appeals to common sense and allegedly immutable laws of nature.
Drones
The rise of drones in the modern surveillance state is response to a neoliberal society.
Charles Mudede • Feb 7, 2013 at 12:12 pm (“Drones and the Logic of Post-Neoliberalism”,
http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2013/02/07/drones-and-the-logic-of-post-neoliberalism)
The second Iraq war was neoliberalism's abandonment of the New Economy narrative and, in the face of
deepening economic crises, its turn to Keynesian militarism (rather than a reversion to its economics—the program it began replacing in 1973)
as a way to survive the collapse of its legitimacy, which eventually happened in 2008. But the war
failed because, one, it never
stopped being a war (the persistence of insurgents) and, two, it also lost legitimacy (no WMDs). Drones can be seen as
capitalism's response to the collapse of the 30-year neoliberal project and the decline of Keynesian
militarism (which began with the end of history—1989). Drones present power with a form of control that's difficult for the
institutions established by mass society (institutions that were key to the formation of state military power—which comes down
not to governing a massive population but increasing the speed that it can be transformed into a massive army) to check or disrupt.
Because they can operate outside of politics, drones connect with the logic capitalism. But it's precisely by this
connection that this form of crisis management has access to and pervades all of the spheres of our market-oriented social production: A tiny
new open source drone kit made by Bitcraze is buzzing its way to market this spring, targeted at hackers and modders who want to explore
droning indoors as well as out. Marcus Eliasson, Arnaud Taffanel, and Tobias Antonsson are the engineers behind the Swedish startup now
accepting pre-orders for a palm-sized quadcopter called the Crazyflie Nano. (Not to be confused with the Norwegian-made nano-copter used by
British troops in Afghanistan.) The trio used only open source material for the project, from mechanics to hardware and code. Not only was it a
nod to the open source mantra, it saved them a ton of time; all three have day jobs and have spent the last three years working evenings on the
Crazyflie Nano.
Our armament culture creates a obsession of drones in popular culture
The deadly
serious tone of counter-terrorism discourse is somewhat undermined by the excesses of
armament culture and the evident but suppressed child-like pleasures that drive police militarisation. However the fusion of
technology, pleasure and militarism within the drone has potentially grave implications. It signals that a
consumer militarism driven by cultural and emotional linkages between violence and masculinity is being indulged by the
nation state as part of a systematic militarisation of internal security. The evident gap between the fantasy
and the reality of the policing drone becomes secondary to its role as a prop within the performances of militarised
masculinity that are central to ‘war’ (on crime/ drugs/terror) as a governing strategy. Cole (2013a) notes that much of the controversy over
American use of drones overseas pertains to disagreements over the definition of war, and yet in relation to internal security, a militarised
ideology of crime control is so hegemonic and pervasive that it has circumvented basic ethical and legal debate. However there is an obvious
similarity between the ‘signature strikes’ of military drones that kill otherwise unknown targets on the basis of a ‘profile’ of suspicious activity
(Cole 2013b), and the manner in which disadvantaged and ethnic minority communities are differentially impacted by new surveillance
technologies and paramilitary policing strategies, sometimes to lethal effect (see McCulloch and Sentas 2006). Singer (2012) has asked ‘Do
drones undermine democracy?’ by reducing the political risks associated with engaging in war, but the same
question might be asked in relation to police drones and ‘playing’ at war. Within armament culture, boys and men are enjoined to
seek simulations of war in order to affirm their relations with one another and establish their masculine bona fides; peace appears positively
boring in comparison. Like other manifestations of armament culture, drones
are appealing to police because they are
embedded within a pervasive cultural code of military signs and symbols promising the rush and thrill of masculine conflict
and, ultimately, victory. For Baudrillard (1981) the signs within such cultural systems are free-floating and entirely interchangeable however this
paper has highlighted how militarism retains its compelling qualities because it offers imaginary solutions to the contradictions inherent in
material, social and economic relations. As such, it retains its linkages to the ‘real’ even as it penetrates and obscures it, reconstituting
gendered anxieties into internal and external ‘threats’ whose neutralisation legitimises self-renewal through violence. Behind the prerogatives
of the pleasure and thrill of the drones is an emerging mode of governmentality that does not recognise the social and economic determinants
of crime. Instead it views criminals as potential targets for a weaponised engagement through which militarised masculinity can be renewed for
the aggrandisement of police, as individuals and as a group, but also for the neoliberal state. Anecdotal reports of female drone pilots are
making their way into the mass media (e.g. Abe 2012) but the linkage between femininity and militarism is not a straightforward story of
empowerment but rather it continues to be characterized by official efforts to ‘maintain the sorts of masculinity that enhance militarism’ (Enloe
2000: 271). The predominance of men in paramilitary units, and the overt reconstruction of an aggressive masculinity within the paramilitary
ethos more generally, suggests that the militarization of crime control is a mode by which threatened formations of masculine values and
practice are preserved within a changing social and cultural landscape. Central to this dynamic are the feelings of pleasure and excitement that
intersect in the drone, and hence the integration of such technology into policing symbolises a dual obfuscation: Crime as ‘game’, or crime as
‘war’? Or crime as ‘war game’? Crime control strategies based on the ‘logic’ of armament culture, with its dreams of omniscient surveillance
and supreme firepower, have Toys for the Boys 173 123 consistently produced results counter to their stated aims by inciting resistance to
‘shock and awe’ tactics. Nonetheless the
failings of militarism as a mode of crime control is continually eclipsed by
a technological fetishism based on militarised hardware that promises triumph and affirmation through
violence. This is a telling measure of the potency of militarism as a symbolic code of gendered displacement
and defence against social change
Economy
The affirmative is the “growth at any cost” approach that is at the center of
neoliberalism
Khan 15
(Khan, Mohammed Adil. "Putting ‘Good Society’ Ahead of the Economy: Overcoming Neoliberalism's
Growth Trap and Its Costly Consequences Server Login." Sustainable Development 23.1 (2015): 5563. UMKC University Libraries Proxy Server Login. 23 Feb. 2015. Web. 14 July 2015)
The idea of neoliberalism in its current form has evolved over the past 20 years or so and is a compact of economic,
political and lifestyle systems that envisages free trade and open markets, privatization, deregulation
and state-guided corporate-led economic interventions that regards economic growth as the most
important if not the only goal of a society. Furthermore, as part of economic strategy neoliberalism induces lifestyle
aspirations that are significantly consumerist and materialist in character (Thorsen and Lie, 2014). As an economic
philosophy, the idea of neoliberalism emerged among European liberal scholars in the 1930s, mainly to strike a balance between the conflicting
philosophies of classical liberalism (a laissez-faire capitalist set of ideas) and collectivist central planning. However, over time, neoliberal theory
has changed significantly: it has shifted away from the laissez-faire doctrine of classical liberalism to what is now more of a managed market
economic system that in exchange of mutual gratifications thrives on concessions granted by states, revealing two interlinking and
contradictory trends – on the one hand the strategy has yielded significant economic growth for many, and on the other it has entailed
numerous adverse social, environmental and moral consequences that are deeply concerning (Stiglitz, 2002; Intriligator, 2003; Hertz, 2003;
Shrivastava and Kothari, 2014; Piketty, 2014). Leading and influential
international organizations such as the World Bank
and the International Monetary Fund aggressively promote this model right across the board. In the context of the
above, this paper endeavours to discuss two key issues: it explains (i) how over the years the whole notion of
growth/‘development’ has morphed itself into its current neoliberal growth-at-any-cost phenomenon
and describes how this is affecting us socially, politically, behaviourally and environmentally , and (ii) how the
notion of a ‘good society’ as our end goal that envisages balancing economic growth with social, moral and environmental nourishing has the
potential to overcome neoliberalism's growth trap and help us in building societies that are economically enhancing, socially just and
environmentally sustainable. Furthermore, it is also argued that a ‘good society’ trajectory should be regarded as not only an end goal but also
the operating framework of all activities including those that relate to growth and ‘development’ in a society.
Hegemony
Can’t decouple hegemony and neoliberalism -American power is the engine driving
market expansion
Nixon, 11
(Rob, Rachel Carson Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Slow Violence and the
Environmentalism of the Poor, pgs. 33-36)
There are signs that the environmental humanities are beginning to make some tentative headway toward incorporating the impact of U.S. imperialism on the poor in the global SouthVitalis's book America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (2008) is an outstanding instance, as are powerful recent essays by Elizabeth DeLoughrey on the literatures
associated with American nuclear colonialism in the Pacific, Susie O'Brien on Native food security, colonialism, and environmental heritage along the U.S-Mexican border, and Pablo
Mukherjee's groundbreaking materialist work on Indian environmental literatures,'? Yet despite such vitally important initiatives, the environmental humanities in the United States
remain skewed toward nation-bound scholarship that is at best tangentially international and, even then, seldom engages the environmental fallout of U.S. foreign policy head on.
superpower parochialism, that is, a combination
of American insularity and America's power as the preeminent empire of the neoliberal age to
rupture the lives and ecosystems of non- Americans, especially the poor, who may live at a
geographical remove but who remain intimately vulnerable to the force fields of U.S. foreign policy.
What's at stake is not just disciplinary parochialism but, more broadly, what one might call
To be sure, the U.S. empire has historically been a variable force, one that is not monolithic but subject to ever-changing internal fracture. The U.S., moreover, has long been-and is
increasingly-globalized itself with all the attendant insecurities and inequities that result. However, to argue that the United States is subject to globalization-through, for example,
blowback from climate change-does not belie the disproportionate impact that U.S. global ambitions and policies have exerted over socioenvironmental landscapes internationally.
Ecocritics-and literary scholars more broadly-faced with the challenges of thinking through vast differences in spatial and temporal scale commonly frame their analyses in terms of
interpenetrating global and local forces. In such analyses cosmopolitanism-as a mode of being linked to particular aesthetic strategies-does much of the bridgework between extremes
critics have subjected to far less scrutiny is the role of the national-imperial as a mediating
force with vast repercussions, above all, for those billions whom Mike Davis calls "the global residuum.'?" Davis's image is a
of scale. What
suggestive one, summoning to mind the remaindered humans, the compacted leavings on whom neoliberalism's inequities bear down most heavily. Yet those leavings, despite their
aggregated dehumanization in the corporate media, remain animate and often resistant in unexpected ways; indeed, it is from such leavings that grassroots antiglobalization and the
how can we attend more imaginatively
to the outsourced conflicts inflamed by our unsustainable consumerism, by our military
adventurism and unsurpassed arms industry, and by the global environmental fallout over the past
three decades of American-led neoliberal economic policies? (The immense environmental toll of militarism is particularly
environmentalism of the poor have drawn nourishment. As American writers, scholars, and environmentalists
burdensome: in 2009, U.S. military expenditure was 46.5 percent of the global total and exceeded by 10 percent the expenditure of the next fourteen highest-ranked countries
How, moreover, can we engage the impact of our outsized consumerism and militarism on
the life prospects of people who are elsewhere not just geographically but elsewhere in time, as slow violence seeps long term into ecologiescombined.)"
rural and urban-on which the global poor must depend for generations to come? How, in other words, can we rethink the standard formulation of neoliberalism as internationalizing
profits and externalizing risks not just in spatial but in temporal terms as well, so that we recognize the full force with which the externalized risks are out sourced to the unborn? It is
a pervasive condition of
empires that they affect great swathes of the planet without the empire's populace
being aware of that impact-indeed, without being aware that many of the affected places even exist. How many Americans are aware of the continuing socioenvironrnental
fallout from U.S. militarism and foreign policy decisions made three or four decades ago in, say, Angola or Laos? How many could even place those nation-states on a map? The
imperial gap between foreign policy power and on-the-street awareness calls to mind George Lamming's shock, on arriving in Britain in the early 1950s, that most Londoners he met
had never heard of his native Barbados and lumped together all Caribbean immigrants as Jamaicans.'?' What I call superpower parochialism has been shaped by the myth of American
exceptionalism and by a long-standing indifference-in the U.S. educational system and national media-to the foreign, especially foreign history, even when it is deeply enmeshed with
U.S. interests. Thus, when considering the representational challenges posed by transnational slow violence, we need to ask what role American indifference to foreign history has
If all empires create acute disparities between global
power and global knowledge, how has America's perception of itself as a young, forwardthrusting nation that claims to flourish by looking ahead rather than behind exacerbated the
difficulty of socioenvironmental answerability for ongoing slow violence?" Profiting from the
played in camouflaging lasting environmental damage inflicted elsewhere.
asymmetrical relations between a domestically regulated environment and unregulated environments abroad is of course
not unique to America, But since World War II, the United States has wielded an unequalled power to
bend the global regulatory climate in its favor. As William Finnegan notes regarding the
Washington Consensus, "while we make the world safe for multinational corporations, it is by no
means clear that they intend to return the favor."? The unreturned favor weighs especially heavily on
impoverished communities in the global South who must stake their claims to environmental justice
in the face of the Bretton Woods institutions (the World Bank, the IMF), the World Trade Organization, and the G8
(now G20) over which the United States has exercised disproportionate influence. That influence has been
exercised, as well, through muscular conservation NGOs (the Nature Conservancy, the World Wildlife Fund, and Conservation International prominent among them) that have a long history of
disregarding local human relations to the environment in order to implement American- and
European-style conservation agendas. Clearly, the beneficiaries of such power asymmetries are not just American
but transnational corporations, NGOs, and governments from across the North's rich nations, often working hand-in-fist
with authoritarian regimes.
Human Rights
Neoliberalism leads to abuse of the labor market and ultimately systematic human
rights abuses
Christa Wichterich No Daye (20 years after: the Women’s Human Rights paradigm in the neoliberal
context, http://wideplus.org/20-years-after-the-womens-human-rights-paradigm-in-the-currentneoliberal-context/
Twenty years later, a lot of frustration about global governance has built up: The MDGs have not cohesively been
rooted in the human rights paradigm and have not included gender mainstreaming in a systematic way. Feminist networks tried to intervene
into macro-economics and the trade agenda, into the WTO- and FTA‐regime. However,
it seemed to be impossible to introduce
a human rights agenda in order to balance and correct the free trade paradigm and investment rights of
the corporate sector including the financial market. Market rights overrule and undermine the human rights
agenda. The multiple crises mirror that global governance completely failed to regulate the expansion of the capitalist economy that is
corporate‐driven, growth‐oriented, resource‐ and emission-intensive. It is not guided and hardly tamed by a rights and needs framework. As a
result we
are confronted with a new multipolar power structure, deepening inequalities and man‐made “natural”
disasters all over the planet. The rise and primacy of economic and financial governance has led in the countries of the
North to “post‐democracy” (Colin Crouch), a shrinking of democratic space and decision making, a loss of
transparency and accountability, and a loss of public goods and commons. States to whom we addressed our rights
claims have abandoned and corrupted their role as developmental and welfare states. Through austerity regimes coined as the only
solution to the debt crisis, states facilitate the reconfiguration of capitalism and the dismantling of the European social
model. Austerity is a highly disciplinary regime that shifts economic power to the market and social responsibilities to the individuals. It
downloads costs to the private households in terms of precarisation of wage and pension, unemployment, dismantling of public services and
social security, increase in VAT as well as the privatisation of public goods. Austerity systematically
undermines citizens’
rights and subjects them to so-‐‐called internal constraints and the logic of efficiency, productivity and
competition while creating an ideological consensus that everybody has to sacrifice something. Additionally, costs are shifted to the
Global South e.g. to the offshore production of plenty of cheap consumer goods which flood the markets in the north. Textile exports
from Bangladesh to the EU boomed in 2010 – actually in the middle of the EU crisis. The horrible
incidents in the global textile industries revealed once again that fashion brands, retail labels and discounters from the North
pressurize manufacturers in the South to minimize production costs, leading to the unregulated, unsafe construction of factories, the
intensification of exploitation of mostly female labour, and the disregard of safety standards, minimum
wages and labour rights. Low priced consumer goods in crisisprone Europe are supposed to compensate for the precarisation of
livelihoods and lack of social security and to pacify citizens. This kind of human rights violations correspond with the absence of human or
workers rights clauses in trade agreements.
Human rights are intrinsically tied to the state system-human rights are selfconsciously presented as a force that can reverse the evils of the squo.
SAMUEL MOYN 2014 (Professor of Law and History, Harvard University, A POWERLESS COMPANION: HUMAN RIGHTS IN
THE AGE OF NEOLIBERALISM, Vol. 77:147)
It is worthwhile to begin by to establishing how much work would be required—certainly far beyond that done so
far—to
regard human rights as an apology for “neoliberal” capitalism, in part because of how much work Karl Marx’s
own texts leave to be done. And this is so for two overlapping sets of reasons. For one thing, there were the different phases in Marx’s own
account of rights, which provide an inadvertent reminder of how institutionally new international human rights today are. Second, there is
massive distance between the globalizing capitalism to which he bore witness and our world. Even if his own work provides considerable
resources for thinking about rights generally, it falls silent when it comes to the specificities of our problem, both because of the “neoliberal”
form of our capitalism as well as the globalizing reformism of our rights movements. Marx, of
course, offers his most famous
criticism of “human rights” in On the Jewish Question, where he takes the French Declaration of the Rights of
Man and Citizen as an index of the failure of political emancipation compared to the “human
emancipation” for which he calls.17 Yet in this early text, Marx usefully makes central (even if he fails to effectively theorize) what may
have been the central fact of the rights of man for most of their history: they have long been constituted within the state.18 There is, of course,
no doubt that the political language of natural rights had an elective affinity, or an even deeper relationship, with the birth and expansion of
capitalist social relations, and Marx eventually understood that the reduction of rights to his original statist framework was misleading.19 Yet it
remains of great interest that, in taking the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789 as his early prooftext,
Marx believed that a moral philosophy of natural rights in its most abstract formulations depends in
history on the agency of the state (even nation-state) to be politically operationalized.20 Marx did not take this 17. See KARL MARX
& FRIEDRICH ENGELS, THE MARX-ENGELS READER (Robert C. Tucker ed., 2d ed. 1978). 18. See id. at 23–24. 19. The classic argument is C.B.
MACPHERSON, THE POLITICAL THEORY OF POSSESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM: HOBBES TO LOCKE (1962). 20. Historians such as Richard Tuck have
diagnosed a much deeper causal relationship than Marx himself perceived between the ascendancy of rights in early modern natural law theory
and the perfection of modern state as the essential and long-term forum of their political meaning. See RICHARD TUCK, THE RIGHTS OF WAR
AND PEACE: POLITICAL THOUGHT AND THE INTERNATIONAL ORDER FROM GROTIUS TO KANT (2001). I followed Tuck’s general argument
somewhat slavishly in my own book in distinguishing international human rights. See Moyn, supra note 1, at ch.1. MOYN_BOOKPROOF (DO
NOT DELETE) 1/9/2015 12:33 AM No. 4 2014] A POWERLESS COMPANION 153 alliance to be a contingent mistake; to him, it was rather a core
feature of the rise of rights. Textually, to put it differently,
Marx’s critique of human rights is a critique of political
emancipation within the state. If his critique is directed at the formal abstraction of rights, then it is abstraction within a
(rather institutionally concrete and historically specific) forum of the political citizenship provided by the state.21
Marx’s insistence on the limits of the state as an agent of emancipation, alongside his lack of interest in
the state-making many have prized down through the era of twentieth-century decolonization, should
thus not distract from the fact that his own framing of the significance of the rights of man in his most
classical treatment fails to link them to the workings of global capital. Whether or not Marx’s critique transposes
easily to the abstractions of rights in moral philosophy, then, it definitely requires significant theoretical work—and ultimately, a changed
account from that early essay—to apply it to modern-day international and global human rights politics. When they became a newly prestigious
mobilizational and legal option, international human rights politics broke in fundamental ways with the statist framework within which Marx
himself worked and the institutionalized rights politics that he observed in the French Revolution. If anything, the
centrality of the
state to bourgeois order indeed meant that the response of working men had to be itself globalizing,
though certainly not in the mode of contemporary human rights activists. None of this means that the
entanglements of “human rights” and “modern capitalism” (including “neoliberalism”) do not exist, but
it does mean that they are not obvious, even or especially for Marxists, who must build rather than assume an account of them.
And as much as Marx’s own theoretical evolution after On the Jewish Question provides better grounds for success in this venture, it also
leaves severe obstacles. For one thing, it is also true, as recent research has shown, that Marx himself was by no means above invoking rights as
a basis of progressive reform, in spite of his apparently totalistic rejection of them before.22 Indeed, as Andrew Sartori emphasizes, the
constitutive emancipatory promise of liberalism and its rights talk as Marx understood both as much authorized intermittent criticisms of
capitalism (and empire) as obfuscated their obvious depredations.23 But the real challenge is that Marx’s ultimate critique of rights is general,
going to the relation between the globalization of capital, property ownership, and social abstraction, rather than anything so narrow and 21.
That was why the
response to a bourgeois regime of rights required the liquidation of the distinction
between the state and civil society, and though perhaps not what Engels later called the “withering away” of the state. 22. See DAVID LEOPOLD,
THE YOUNG KARL MARX: GERMAN PHILOSOPHY, MODERN POLITICS, AND HUMAN FLOURISHING 150–63 (2009); Justine Lacroix & Jean-Yves Pranchère, Karl Marx
fut-il vraiment un opposant aux droits de l’homme?: Émancipation individuelle et théorie des droits, 62 REVUE FRANÇAISE DE SCIENCE POLITIQUE 433 (2012) (both
demonstrating Marx’s deployment of rights talk for the sake of emancipation). 23. ANDREW SARTORI, LIBERALISM IN EMPIRE: AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY (2014). I
am very grateful to Professor Sartori for assistance with this part of the article. MOYN_BOOKPROOF (DO NOT DELETE) 1/9/2015 12:33 AM 154 LAW AND
CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS [Vol. 77:147 particular as an analysis of international human rights regimes and movements (which, if they existed in his time, did not
interest him). When he evolved beyond the juvenilia of On the Jewish Question, Marx altered his presentation of bourgeois rights to moderate the statist emphasis
of his early account. But these
theoretical shifts were really in the service of an account emphasizing how a
(potentially) globalizing set of market relations required a set of social abstractions that might
comfortably take formal individual rights as its legal form. Hence Marx’s claim in Capital that the capitalist market
is a very Eden of the innate rights of man. . . . [There individuals] contract as free persons, who are equal before the law.
Their contract is the final result in which their joint will finds a common legal expression. . . . [E]ither in
accordance with the preestablished harmony of things, or under the auspices of an omniscient providence, they all work together to
their mutual advantage, for the common weal, and in the common interest.24 Yet even in the evolved form of
Marx’s critique, there is a drastic set of differences between that general account—which might fit, for example, the modern globalization of
markets and the globalization of property rights quite well—and some specific account needed to capture the particularity of international
human rights regimes and movements in the last several decades.25 After all, neoliberal capitalism is a specific episode in the history of
capitalism that Marx never knew. More important for my purposes here, today,
human rights are often self-consciously
presented (though not with great plausibility, as I ultimately argue) as a force that can or will moderate or even reverse the
evils of the current form of global market relations. Stereotypically, and to some extent really, human rights legal orders and
mobilizational politics have lost their associations to the defense of freedom of contract and private property—there are other bodies of law,
and other movements, for that purpose. Rather, in human rights regimes from the United Nations processes to treaty mechanisms, and in
human rights movements from Amnesty International to global antipoverty campaigns, the goal is to ameliorate the suffering of others or even
insist upon the basis for justified, though minimal, redistribution. Whatever one wants to say about human rights as they exist today, in short,
must depart radically from Marx’s early work, and build 24. 1 KARL MARX, CAPITAL: A CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 280 (Ben Fowkes
trans., 1976). 25. As Marx’s own treatments imply, appeal to natural and human rights remained more common in his own era as cited
rationales for the protection of free contract and private property. In fact neoliberals today refer much more rarely to the justificatory basis of
natural or human rights than their nineteenth-century forebears did in defense of their economic liberalism, presumably because reformists
and humanitarians have so successfully captured the language for their cause. Compare ROBERT GREEN MCCLOSKEY, AMERICAN
CONSERVATISM IN THE AGE OF ENTERPRISE 1865–1910, ch.5 (1951) (entitled “Judicial Conservatism and the Rights of Man”), with Samuel
Moyn, Nationalism and Capitalism as Nineteenth-Century Rights Movements, in OXFORD HANDBOOK OF HUMAN RIGHTS HISTORY (Devin O.
Pendas ed., forthcoming) (both demonstrating the popularity of libertarian rights talk in the nineteenth century). MOYN_BOOKPROOF (DO NOT
DELETE) 1/9/2015 12:33 AM No. 4 2014] A POWERLESS COMPANION 155 substantially on his later work. And though Marx could not have
theorized either neoliberalism or human rights as they are now known, he might not have been surprised to learn that the chief objection to
the latter is that they share the same historical era as the former without unsettling it.
Human rights rest on a state-centric conception of citizenship. Rights become
afforded by the nation-state, as it is transformed from a protector of social rights to a
regulator meant to benefit market economics
Evans in 2000 (Tony, Department of Politics, University of Southampton, Alternatives: Social
Transformation & Humane Governance, Oct-Dec2000, Vol. 25, Issue 4, CITIZENSHIP AND HUMAN
RIGHTS IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION)
Three broad criticisms of the project to promote international citizenship are important to the critique of
neoliberal thinking on universal human rights. First, although the central aim in proposing an international citizenship is to
find a solution to the statecitizen vs. humanity problem, Linklater's project remains largely statecentric. As long as state
citizenship remains integral to developing international citizenship, "international citizenship appears to
depend on the idea of the state-citizen, with other notions of political identity and rights effectively only
developing via the permission of the state."[47] This suggests that the rights attached to international
citizenship are bestowed from above, rather than demanded and developed from below, notwithstanding recent reports of
movements organized to resist further globalization in many regions of the world.[48] Given that the idea of international citizenship
is in part a response to the demand for greater democracy under conditions of globalization, conditions that alienate people from
existing social institutions, the statecentric focus seems ambiguous.[49] On the one hand, proponents argue that new
forms of transnational association are stimulated by a desire to reestablish control over political life,
following the perceived failure of the state to act in the interests of citizens, while on the other, the state is
presented as integral to developing new forms of international political association .[50] Moreover, the
observation that global politics is now characterized by a multiplicity of transnational actors , including nongovernmental organizations, transnational corporations, international financial institutions, and international organizations, is seen
by proponents of international citizenship as an exciting and revolutionary phenomenon that demands a
new democratic project for global governance. Following this observation, much academic and political energy has been
put into proposals that seek to promote democracy within a framework of some kind of global governance in which the state permits
the "development of multiple forms of citizenship."[51] What
this project fails to acknowledge, however, is that the
development of transnational association generates new forms of loyalty that may not be conducive to
new forms of democracy, including the protection of human rights . Indeed, some of the new transnational
associations, particularly those concerned with transnational corporations and financial institutions, may actually
encourage the very practices that democracy and citizenship are supposed to ameliorate .[52] Furthermore,
although the idea of citizenship assumes some kind of equality,[53] civil society is not free of social, political, and
economic inequalities. By failing to note the undemocratic nature of transnational associational life, and
capital's need to maintain inequality, proponents of international citizenship fail to take full account of
social and economic power. As Pasha and Blaney have pointed out, most of the recent interest in global
democracy and human rights "does not move our imagination beyond a liberal frame" but , rather, points to
"a failure to attend to the mutually constitutive relationship of civil society, capitalism, and the liberal state ,"
which offers a distorted view of the emancipatory possibilities associated with transnational associational
movements.[54]
The global human rights regime is part of a process of ideological homogenization.
Human rights are only defended in the name of civil and political rights, pushing
economic and social rights to the periphery.
Evans in 2000 (Tony, Department of Politics, University of Southampton, Alternatives: Social
Transformation & Humane Governance, Oct-Dec2000, Vol. 25, Issue 4, CITIZENSHIP AND HUMAN
RIGHTS IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION)
Although the neoliberal consensus accepts the universality and unity of all internationally agreed human
rights in formal and legal terms, the political practice of promoting civil and political rights to the exclusion
of economic and social rights has a long history within the modern human-rights regime. We have only to
recall that the decision to draft a nonbinding Universal Declaration of Human Rights, rather than a single, legally binding covenant,
was itself a consequence of disagreements between Western countries who sought to prioritize civil and political rights and Socialist
and less-developed countries who favored economic, social, and cultural rights.[21] With the collapse of the Cold War and
the increasing pace of globalization, the
role of universal human rights seems to have taken a new turn in world
neoliberal interests have coopted the idea of human rights as a justification for grabbing "even more of the world's (and their own nations')
resources than they previously had" and to "steal back the concessions to social democracy that were
forced out of them at the end of the Second World War."[22] It remains common practice to prioritize trade issues over
those of human rights, although the rhetoric often suggests otherwise. Globalization has strengthened the conviction
that human life is of value only insofar as it contributes to the greater value of economic growth and the
global expansion of capital.[23] As Michael Lewis has observed, while Secretary of State Madeleine Albright continues to
politics. Instead of fulfilling its intention of offering protection to the weak and the vulnerable,
speak in the language of human rights and values, "the world would be more true to itself if the American embassies were sold off to
American investment banks as foreign branch offices."[24] This is not to suggest that the discourse on universal
human rights is of no further interest to the neoliberal consensus. On the contrary, the defense of human
rights as civil and political rights, including the right to own and dispose of property freely, promotes the
accumulation of capital at the expense of distributive policies that could have empowered the poor. Thus,
although "property and investment rights are protected in exquisite detail" under GATT and NAFTA, the rights of workers, women,
children, the poor, and future generations (environmental rights) are ignored.[25] Underpinning the move to a global
economy is an ideology of modernity, which rests upon the twin goals of economic growth and
development, defined as increasing global capital accumulation and consumption . The central means of
achieving these goals in all countries, whether the wealthy North or the impoverished South, is strategic planning at
the global level, global management, and the creation of global regimes and agreements . Ideological
convergence has the effect of homogenizing and limiting the policy choices of governments. The global
human-rights regime provides the quintessential values on which this program of convergence and
homogenization is built. Global management requires adherence to rules that ensure all countries
conform to the development model so that the "hidden hand" of the market can operate efficiently.
Consequently, responsibility for defining and implementing the rules governing the international economy
shift away from the state toward international institutions. Where in the past the state could hope to adopt national
strategies for ordering the national economy--including perhaps the nationalization of key industries--the global organization of
production and finance means that the state no longer initiates policy; rather, it reacts to global economic decision-making forces
against which it can mount little resistance. The WTO speeches of President Clinton and Prime Minister Blair cited earlier seem to
confirm this.
Neoliberalism rests on the artificial divide between public and private, with the state
seen as a regulator to promote noninterference in the private sphere. This denies
individuals economic, social, and cultural rights while masking the larger structural
economic problems that cause human rights violations in the first place
Evans in 2000 (Tony, Department of Politics, University of Southampton, Alternatives: Social
Transformation & Humane Governance, Oct-Dec2000, Vol. 25, Issue 4, CITIZENSHIP AND HUMAN
RIGHTS IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION)
Second, the project for an international citizenship does not avoid the problems that arise in the
relationship between the citizen and civil society described by the neoliberal conception of citizenship.
Central to these problems is the notion that the neoliberal citizen is "defended from the state by a series
of rights which enable a plurality of ways in which individuals can live their lives within the private sphere
of civil society,"[62] thus separating public from private life. In this standard neoliberal interpretations of
the state-citizen relationship, the task of protecting the freedom of the individual from interference in the
pursuit of economic interests is assigned to the public sphere of the state. Citizenship is therefore
concerned with protecting civil and political rights, rights that the state guarantees in the name of the
private sphere of civil society. Although, in formal terms, economic and social rights are often afforded
formal parity with civil and political rights, according to the neoliberal conception of citizenship, civil and
political rights must be prioritized in order to provide the conditions for wealth creation. Citizens can turn
their attention to honoring a duty to support the least fortunate only when these conditions are achieved.
This approach to universal rights has a long history, one that is readily found in the postwar debate on human rights. For example,
although the well-known "Four Freedoms" speech made by President Roosevelt during 1941 included the freedom from want, he
defined this to mean "economic understanding which will secure for every nation a healthy peace-time life for its inhabitants
everywhere in the world."[63] Thus the freedom from want did not suggest that the deprived and excluded had a right to claim
assistance from those who benefited most from the global economy, but rather that states accepted a duty to remove structural,
commercial, and cultural barriers between states that threatened the potential expansion of neoliberalism on a global scale.[64] A
more recent manifestation of this can be seen in the World Bank's policy that equates a market-based system with civil society and
advises that assistance must concentrate "on re-creating the conditions that will allow the private sector and institutions of civil
society to resume commercial activities" following war and civil disruption.[65] This is reflected in the general definition of
citizenship adopted by neoliberals, which provides for legal rights and rights of participation but only "the
duty to promote the widest possible good."[66] While the citizen has the right to seek legal protection if
personal and political freedoms are threatened, those suffering economic deprivation have no such rights
but must, instead, rely upon the good faith of duty holders. The duty placed upon the citizen is not even
one to protect the poor and vulnerable from further violations, a duty that implies positive action, but
rather the lesser requirement to promote their cause in some indeterminate fashion. Such an approach echoes
arguments that have often punctuated debates in the human-rights regime developed at the United Nations. For example, the
exchanges at Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco over whether the United Nations Charter itself should call for the promotion or
protection of human rights and the prolonged debates during preparation for the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
over the distinction between rights and duties.[67] Furthermore, fostering a duty to promote human rights in the
interest of the widest possible good tends to reinforce the centrality of the individual in the human-rights
debate at the expense of structural causes of violations. Current practices that are the cause of many
human-rights violations--practices that are legitimated by neoliberal freedoms exercised within existing
structures--are marginalized and are less likely to present a challenge to the dominant value system.[68]
These criticisms suggest that the attempt to secure universal civil, political, and economic rights through
the medium of citizenship may, in fact, reinforce a set of values that support current exclusionary
practices found in globalization. Notwithstanding the addition of duties as well as rights in the modern interpretation of
citizenship, the idea of the international citizen does not offer a convincing argument for securing human
rights in the age of globalization. It fails because it confuses the rights of the individual with the rights of the citizen and does
not take full account of the relationship between civil society, the state, and the citizen.
Individualism
Neoliberalism gives the promises of “hard work” leading to success, but doesn’t
accommodate for racism. It will always deny the racist tendencies of institutions.
David J. Roberts and Minelle Mahtani 18 FEB 2010 (‘Neoliberalizing Race, Racing Neoliberalism: Placing “Race” in Neoliberal
Discourses’ http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2009.00747.x/abstract)
Specifically, it has meant the establishment of a market orientation to this relationship. Ideally, within
a neoliberal theorization
of society, the success of the individual is directly related to his/her work output. Modalities of difference, such as
race, do not predetermine one’s success as each individual is evaluated solely in terms of his or her economic contribution to society. What
becomes clear is that this ideal relationship is not equally realized by all members in society. For
immigrants to Canada, there appears to be a different set of rules and expectations. Herein lies the
double-edged sword of neoliberalism. Constituting the immigrant as not-quite Canadian allows for the
continued disconnect between their ability to play the neoliberal game and the rewards that they
receive for successful play. This can be seen through policies that continue to disregard foreign degrees or other credentials that is at
the heart of the deskilling process, for example. Yet, as immigrants are racialized within the economy of Canada, claims of racism under
neoliberalism are fundamentally ruled as outside of the way in which society—especially Canadian society—is structured. Davis, again, provides
a useful articulation of this process: Under neoliberal racism the relevance of the raced subject, racial identity and racism is subsumed under
the auspices of meritocracy. For in
a neoliberal society, individuals are supposedly freed from identity and
operate under the limiting assumptions that hard work will be rewarded if the game is played according
to the rules. Consequently, any impediments to success are attributed to personal flaws. This attribution
affirms notions of neutrality and silences claims of racializing and racism (Davis 2007:350). As a consequence,
neoliberalism effectively masks racism through its value-laden moral project: camouflaging practices anchored in
an apparent meritocracy, making possible a utopic vision of society that is non-racialized. David Theo Goldberg’s
articulation of racist culture is particularly useful in understanding how race is both evoked and suppressed under neoliberal discourse.
Goldberg’s project in Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning is to “map the overlapping terrains of racialized expression, their
means and modes of discursive articulation, and the exclusions they license with the view to contending and countering them” (Goldberg
1993:9). His central thesis is that modern
racist culture is marked, fundamentally, by its refusal to acknowledge
the role that racism plays in everyday structures of society and how these structures work to
fundamentally disguise and, simultaneously, reify the power of racism within society. He intricately describes
the ways liberalism sanctions racist institutions and reproduces racial knowledge with every outwardly progressive gesture, which works to
normalize racism as just an aspect of life. Along similar lines, Henry Giroux insists that the meanings and definitions of racism alter for each
generation, and that the challenge for scholars is to develop a new language for understanding how race redefines the relationship between
the public and the private (Giroux 2008). Giroux points out that
race, and in particular, long histories of racism and
injustice are effectively eradicated within neoliberal discourse because human agency is understood as a
series of individualized choices: “success is attributed to . . . entrepreneurial genius while those who do
not succeed are viewed either as failures or utterly expendable . . . neoliberal racism either dismisses the
concept of institutional racism or maintains that it has no merit” (Giroux 2008:65, 71). Thus, in trying to understand the
connection between race and neoliberalism, it is important to examine not just the momentary eruptions of race or racism that seemingly
result from neoliberal policy reforms, and instead consider race as an organizing principle of society that neoliberalism reinforces and modifies.
As Giroux reminds us, “even more than being saturated with race, neoliberalism also modifies race” (Giroux 2005; see Davis 2007:349).
Neoliberalist policy is sneaky because it can force the hand of apparent race-blindness by insisting that
race does not play an important role. What our analysis of the discourses on immigration in The Globe and Mail suggests is that
the neoliberal myth that contribution to society will translate into acceptance is undermined by processes of racialization and racism within
Canadian society.
Immigrants are vital for the continued success of the economy and are invited to enter the
workforce as neoliberal subjects, but are not necessarily rewarded with the ascendancy normally
offered to neoliberal (read: white) citizens. This is not just because the policies resulting from neoliberal reforms have disparate
impacts on racialized or immigrant groups, but rather that the
race and the racialization of immigrants is embedded in
the philosophical underpinning of these policies.
Internet
Neoliberalism manifests itself through the Internet: corporations use it to trade
private data for cash
Morozov 11, (Evgeny, Senior Editor at the New Republic, “Two Decades of the Web: A Utopia No
Longer” 6/22/11 http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/science-and-technology/morozov-web-noutopia-twenty-years-short-history-internet LAO)
Why the venture capitalists found the internet so appealing is a mystery: the market for online
advertising at the time was tiny and the number of internet users negligible. In 1995, there were only 15m users,
according to the website Internet World Stats. Start-ups were everywhere, but most were trading in promises of a bright future,
not real services. The investors’ disregard for traditional methods of gauging financial performance—which eventually led to
the dotcom bubble—suggests that their judgement was clouded by a toxic combination: rhetoric from the
internet’s New Age cheerleaders; and neoliberal promises of new ways of doing commerce. Pets.com, which
sold pet products to retail customers, is a textbook example. At one point, the website was spending close to $12m on advertising on revenues
of $619,000. In 2000, the company collapsed in a heap of debt.The logical end of this ever-increasing personalisation is of each user having his
or her own online experience. This is a far cry from the early vision of the internet as a communal space. Instead of the internet, we may as well
start talking of a billion “internets”—one for each user. Even the browser, the last bastion of shared experience, is on the way out, replaced by
a panoply of apps for mobile phones and tablets such as the iPad that each provide a customised experience. This seems a clear deviation from
the original plan.It is not the only deviation. For
many internet users, empowerment was an illusion. They may think
they enjoy free access to cool services, but in reality, they are paying for that access with their privacy.
Much of our information-sharing seems trivial—should we really care that some company knows what
music we like? But, once this information is analysed alongside data from other similar services, it can
generate insights about individuals and groups that are deeply interesting to most marketers and
intelligence agencies. Based on its extensive data-mining across the web, RapLeaf, a San Francisco start-up, came up with
the conclusion that Google’s engineers tend to eat more junk food than Microsoft’s. If they can find out what you eat, they can
find out what you read as well; from there, it’s not so hard to predict your political preferences—and
manipulate you. We are careening towards a future where privacy becomes a very expensive
commodity. There are already several start-ups providing privacy “at a fee.” Ironically, venture
capitalists love these companies, and are busily funding solutions to the very problems they have previously helped to
create. The removal of online material is also a booming industry. For a fee that ranges from $3,000 to
$15,000, a company such as Reputation.com can ensure that any sensitive information is buried deep in
the last pages of Google’s search results, or disappears from the internet altogether. That company rose to
prominence after it removed from the internet hundreds of photos of a Californian teenager who died in a car crash, at the
request of the victim’s family. This, too, creates new kinds of inequalities: the maintenance of online reputation is dependent
on ability to pay. At this point, the law can intervene, as in Finland, for example, where employers are banned from Googling
the names of prospective employees. In Germany too, companies cannot check a potential employee’s social networking sites;
but it is unlikely that such measures would take off in countries with weaker employment protection laws. ¶ While we are
being empowered as consumers, we are simultaneously being disempowered as citizens, something
that the cyber-libertarian digital prophets didn’t foresee. “Electronic town halls” never took off either.
When Barack Obama tried to hold one shortly after being elected president, the most popular question posed to him
concerned the legalisation of mari-juana. The internet does not and cannot replace politics—it augments and
amplifies it. The Tea Party in the US does not limit its activism to social media, but uses it as part of a broader political
campaign. Politics is still primary and technology secondary.
The US approach to internet diplomacy reflects western neoliberal norms privileging
corporations over public interest and social good
Prabir and Bailey 14
(Purkayastha, Prabir, and Rishab Bailey. "U.S. Control of the Internet: Problems Facing the Movement to
International Governance." (August 2014): n. pag. Web. 14 July 2015. Prabir is a founder of the Delhi
Science Forum and is a well-known science and engineering activist. Bailey is a consultant for the society
for knowledge commons in India and an expert on IT and communication law)
The view of the multistakeholder model embedded in the IANA transition offered by the Obama
administration is—in our view—a neoliberal multistakeholder model.41 It demands that governments play
little role in internet governance, and that any role they actually play be placed on an equal footing with
other stakeholders, and decisions on all aspects of Internet governance be made through consensus.
Any criticism of such a model, or discussions on the different roles and responsibilities of different
stakeholders, are then labeled a multilateral or a statist model paving the way for repressive
governments to capture the Internet. Such a binary formulation—multistakeholder versus multilateral—
misses the fact that while some issues such as technical protocols can be worked out between various
stakeholders through a consensual process (global standards are created in this way), the issues change when public
policy is involved. Essentially, policy issues demand that a concept of public interest be introduced to
override the sectoral interest of certain stakeholders. The neoliberal multistakeholder model of decision
making—with all stakeholders on an equal footing, and through consensus—does not take into account
that stakeholders have differing interests. For example, corporations and consumers have obvious differences in objectives.
This model, in effect, gives veto power to private corporations and denies public good or public interest.
Such a model would allow the corporate stakeholder section to block any consumer interest regulation
simply by not allowing consensus to form on the issue. The problem with such a model also becomes apparent if we take
examples from other sectors. In pharmaceuticals, for instance, there is agreement that all stakeholders, including pharmaceutical companies,
should make decisions by consensus on issues such as safety or the pricing of drugs. If such a principle had indeed been followed for retrovirals
in AIDS treatment, for example, it would have meant a death sentence for a large number of AIDs patients. Public interest demands that states
regulate drug prices in the interests of their people; similarly, for the safety of drugs.
The US abuses the internet through censorship and the regulation of online property
in the name of national security
Prabir and Bailey 14
Purkayastha, Prabir, and Rishab Bailey. "U.S. Control of the Internet: Problems Facing the Movement to
International Governance." (August 2014): n. pag. Web. 14 July 2015. Prabir is a founder of the Delhi
Science Forum and is a well-known science and engineering activist. Bailey is a consultant for the society
for knowledge commons in India and an expert on IT and communication law
The DNS and the IP address system—the basis on which the interconnected, interoperable network runs—is, juridically
speaking, controlled through ICANN.25 There are thirteen root servers with a “hidden” or “master”
server which updates all thirteen public root servers.26 Together these servers act as the central
repository of the Internet’s address book. The Master Server is operated by VeriSign Inc. (formerly Network Solutions Inc.),
though it is subject to oversight by ICANN, and, ultimately, the U.S. Department of Commerce. The present procedure for
modifying the authoritative root zone file is that the requests from TLD operators are received by
ICANN, which forwards them to the Department of Commerce for approval.27 The Department of
Commerce then transmits the approved requests to VeriSign, which edits and generates the new root
zone file. The unilateral control of the DNS system by the United States is problematic for a variety of
reasons. The most important of these is that it enables the U.S. government to control the creation and
deletion of online property. We have seen instances of the U.S. government or courts forcing registries
the world over to remove domain names from the addressing system.28 This is what happened, for
example, with Wikileaks and ‘.iq’ before the Iraq war. The problem is not that the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National
Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA)—the body tasked with the IANA contract—routinely interferes with ICANN
decisions. The
control of the DNS system by the U.S. government U . S . & G L O B A L I N T E R N E T G O V E R N A N C E 109
means that it can be used in a U.S. version of permanent war based on global “national security”
concerns to harm organizations and other countries. It is important to stress that the U.S. control over the DNS is not just
through the Department of Commerce, but also through the U.S. judicial system, which has jurisdiction over ICANN and VeriSign. The United
States also continues to have technical and economic leverage over the digital ecosystem. What this means is that the bulk of billions of dollars
of virtual real estate is “owned” by registries in the United States and other developed countries. Verisign has revenue of over a billion dollars
for the g-TLD of .com, created by the U.S. enclosure of the global domain name system.
ICANN currently generates revenue of
about $400 million from the DNS system—all registrars have to give a part of the money they realize from sale of domains.
(Registrars are retailers of domain names, registries are wholesalers.) It is a myth that the functions carried out by organizations such as IANA
and ICANN are purely “technical” in nature. The day-to-day maintenance and administration of the DNS system is a technical matter—but the
policies imposed for the management of the DNS space are public in nature. For example:
Law and race
Legal approaches to racial equality ignore market ideologies that construct the
individual as free and equal – this prevent racial consciousness in the area of economic
subordination.
Valdez & Cho in 2011 (Francisco & Sumi, Professor of Law, University of Miami & Professor of Law,
DePaul University College of Law, “Critical Race Materialism: Theorizing Justice in the Wake of Global
Neoliberalism”, Connecticut Law Review,
http://archive.connecticutlawreview.org/documents/ValdesandCho.pdf)
Although Critical Race Theory (CRT) has produced an impressive, if not wide-ranging, set of scholarly and political projects deconstructing law in the past two
decades, we suggest a new iteration to theorizing justice that we call “critical race materialism.” Critical
race materialism signifies an
approach to interpreting law and society by reading the past to understand how “race” (in an intersectional, nonessentialized sense) and economics are deeply constitutive. In this sense, law is reflective of synergistic cultural
practices and values that are raced (gendered, sexed) and classed, and identity categories are
constructed and reinstantiated by law. By adopting this term, we hope to emphasize the primacy of an interimbricated analysis of culture and
material structure as mutually reinforcing that returns to CRT’s original ambition twenty years ago. Going forward, we argue that two undeniable forces—global
neoliberalism and its attendant “social structures of accumulation,” combined with the decline of the U.S. as the unipolar
hyper power in the existing worldsystem—demand that a structural economic analysis that exceeds the
boundaries of the nation-state figures more prominently alongside a structural racial/identitarian
analysis in our critical assessments of law and society. Such restructuring to our analyses also requires an accompanying restructuring to agenda-setting and
organizing to achieve racial and social justice in the wake of global neoliberalism.1 Our analysis helps shed light on an intriguing question posed by Kimberlé
Williams Crenshaw in her lead Article to this volume that, she points out, is seldom-asked: “Why did [Critical Race
Theory] emerge out of law, and perhaps not some of the other fields where similar pressures were
percolating?”2 We consider this question from the particular temporal and spatial vantage point of CRT’s emergence and dissemination in the late stages of
the Cold War era within the world economic system. In short, CRT sprung from law here, in the United States, because core
elites in this nation-state most successfully have used law not only to create markets for oppression and
injustice, but to do so along intensely racialized grids of political, cultural, and material stratification.
Intentionally and insistently, privileged elites in the U.S. have deployed to incentivize racialized exploitation of
humans and the planet’s resources with great zeal and for greater profits. Yet, these dispossessing
accumulations, which disproportionately impact the subalterns in the U.S., are accompanied by facial
neutrality, and by intensified racial erasure that increasingly is pushed both from within and without
that existing framework of nation-states. Within the traditional nation-state,3 the legal regime of
colorblindness and its new normative counterpart, post-racial politics and discourse, combine to erase
liberational color consciousness. Beyond the nationstate, and in the service of a world economic system, the fundamentalist
ideology that the profit motive and “free” trade treat all humans equally inhibits racialized or identitybased analysis and problem-solving in ways that predictably entrench the racial hierarchy of colonialism
and imperialism under the banner of global neoliberalism. In this sense, the practice of racialized
colorblindness and post-racialism (think antiaffirmative action statutes upheld as constitutional that demand elimination of “racial preferences,”
effectively excluding racial minorities from viable remedies) within the nation-state or within the world-system is the colorline
of the twenty-first century, both in content and consequence. In each of these contexts—within and beyond the
traditional nation-state— law proves central to race, and the strategic erasure of cultural and material
subordination based on identity in the service of white privilege is the racial project of the moment.
Prisons
The neoliberal state’s focus on consumption requires less production – those no
longer needed to maximize production are rendered useless, ending up in prisons
Passavant, 5
(Paul, Associate Professor of Political Science and PhD in Political Science “The Strong Neo-liberal State:
Crime, Consumption, Governance” 8/3/2005
https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v008/8.3passavant.html Project Muse LAO)
Today, scholars contend that disciplinary institutions are everywhere in crisis, and that we should understand this crisis as a
shift towards post-disciplinary societies of control.20 In control societies, new communications technologies enable the
coordination of deterritorialized production, telecommuting, extensive surveillance of public places through CCTV, an intimate
surveillance of workers through keystroke counts (or GPS technology for non-office workers), and a simultaneous control and
incitement of consumption through credit ratings and supermarket discount cards.21
The turn from the Keynesian
welfare state and its institutions of social solidarity to the post-Fordist neo-liberal state has produced
especially glaring consequences in the areas of criminology and penology. During the era of the welfare
state, imprisonment rates in the U.S. decreased in relation both to the number of crimes recorded and
offenders convicted. In the period between 1973 and the late 1990s, however, the number of inmates
incarcerated increased by more than 500 percent, the rate of incarceration per 1000 index crimes nearly
quadrupled, and the prison population has become significantly racially disproportionate.22 In the U.S., we
have witnessed, particularly in the 1990s, a period offalling crime rates and rising imprisonment rates. David Garland describes
these trends by contending that the "prison has once again transformed itself," meaning that the prison fulfills a
different function under post-Fordist economic conditions than it did under Fordist conditions. 23 Rather than being
understood as a correctional institution to reform individuals and to prepare them to return as productive members of society
to the production line, the prison is seen now as an institution to incapacitate and to contain
monsters. Otherwise put, due to the positioning of the U.S. in the global capitalist economy and its
coinciding shift from the production-oriented Fordist state to the consumer-oriented post-Fordist state,
there is less need for maximizing production in the United States. This means, in turn, that prisons are
becoming institutions to warehouse increasingly large numbers of subjects no longer needed as workers
and poorly suited as consumers to contain the threat they potentially pose to this consumer capitalist
order.2
Privacy
Increased surveillance and piece-meal reforms like the aff cannot resolve matters of
privacy- Neoliberalism necessarily expands the scope of surveillance
Bowley & Loo, 12
(Barbara and Dennis, “Secrecy, Surveillance, and Suppression: Neoliberalism and the Rise of Public Order
Policies, 26 Oct. 2012, http://www.stateofnature.org/?p=5345)
Given this distorted political framework in which the entire populace is now perceived as a threat – because nearly the entire
population is threatened by neoliberal policies [2] and because authorities cannot carry out these policies except through
concealment and misdirection so that ordinary forms of public supervision and observation, free speech and assembly, and
what used to be investigative journalism and the watchdog function of mass media become deeply threatening – it comes as
no surprise to see the creation of a security state in which data collection has reached Orwellian
levels. An explosion in the amount of surveillance of the populace is the new norm, in addition to a
sea change in the manner in which data have been and are being collected. This information is being used to
intimidate, extort, and suppress the public (including public officials such as any members of Congress or other public officials
such as governors [3] who might think to protest even aspects of the radically changing nature of the political system).¶
Although conventional surveillance techniques such as wiretapping have been in existence as long ago
as the 19th century, with the rise of neoliberalism, the scope of surveillance has increased by
quantum leaps, with the unholy alliance of neoliberal policies and the technological infrastructure of a
wired society. Now surveillance has extended to the dragnet sweeps of emails, web-browsing activity, and tracking of GPS
¶
information. Authorities have expanded the scope of their surveillance of religious activities and peaceful political protests,
making routine that which had been proscribed during the 1960s’ era. Richard Nixon’s attempts to quash the anti-war and civil
rights movements and to punish his political foes by, among other things, wiretapping Democrats, led to his resigning in the
face of certain impeachment. As an indication of the difference between the 1960s’ era and contemporary American politics,
Bush and Cheney’s transgressions make Nixon look like a moderate or even liberal, and yet Bush and Cheney were not forced to
resign by Congress. In fact, when Bush and Cheney were caught lying and breaking the law, Congress under a Democratic
majority (beginning in 2006) and with a Democrat in the White House (as of 2009), retroactively approved of those
transgressions and granted immunity from prosecution for crimes as grotesque as wars of aggression, torture, and murder by
torture.¶ The trajectory of Bush and Cheney’s activities has not lessened under Obama; it has only become more secretive and is
best described as a rebranding and intensification of the Bush regime’s policies. In explaining his refusal to prosecute Bush and
Cheney et al for torture and their felonious circumvention of the FISA court with massive warrantless surveillance, Obama
declared that he’s “looking forward, not backward.” Looking backward, of course, is exactly how jurisprudence works: you are
prosecuting someone for doing something in the past because you cannot rightly prosecute him or her for something they have
not yet done.¶ One can, however, “look forward” if you hold people on the basis of suspicion that they
might commit a terrorist act in the future. Obama has said he will do – and has been doing – exactly
this. It is a testament to the degree to which neoliberalism’s attitudes towards facts and the truth – if
it’s not convenient, then deny it and/or suppress it and offer a fictional version in its place – has taken
over the public sphere that the mass media raised not even a mild protest when Obama stated that he
would hold individuals indefinitely, even after all other judicial processes were completed, if he
thought that they posed a future threat.
Race/Anti-blackness
Neoliberalism creates racism and massive inequality- ensures that black populations
stay in poverty while white elites control the economy
-neoliberalism will create and re-create anti-black policies – the plan is irrelevant
Rivera 14
(Enrique, Reporter for NPR, pursuing PhD in Latin American studies at Vanderbilt University “Reading
Neoliberal Anti-Blackness into the Dominican Republic’s Immigration Policies” 2014
https://nacla.org/news/2014/2/2/reading-neoliberal-anti-blackness-dominican-republic%E2%80%99simmigration-policies LAO)
Anti-Black, anti-Haitianism has deep roots in the Dominican Republic, despite the fact that the vast majority of
Dominicans are of African descent. Anti-Haitianism commenced in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when
Haitian revolutionaries launched the only successful slave revolt in human history. The Haitians occupied Santo Domingo
(present day Dominican Republic) with the aim of guarding the revolution against its western enemies, and of extending
abolition to the eastern side of the island. Most critics have failed to recognize, however, the central role of
neoliberalism in the Dominican Republic’s most recent wave of anti-Black policies. The Dominican
Republic has followed neoliberal doctrine for decades, maintaining low tariffs in order to induce foreign
trade, and relying on tourism, low-wage jobs from international corporations, and cheap export
products such as sugarcane to sustain its economy. Although the country’s economy has expanded
during the past decade, this wealth has flowed to a small elite sector of society and has failed to “trickle
down” to most Dominicans. Even the World Bank’sconservative estimations state that over 40 percent
of Dominicans live in poverty, while 15 percent are unemployed. The minimum wage varies according to profession, but
is as low as $39 a month. For Haiti, neoliberal rule is manifested in a sweatshop economy that produces
goods for multinational corporations, such as The GAP, Target, and Wal-Mart. These neoliberal
practices expose the entrenched connections between racism and capitalism: they are designed to
benefit white elites, while ensuring the poverty of Black laborers. These policies fuel anti-Black attitudes,
as many Dominicans are frustrated with the paralyzing effects of neoliberalism, which have brought
extreme inequality, and blame the inability of the country’s wealth to “trickle down” on the presence of
Black “outsiders” who are supposedly taking jobs and wasting government money. This recent wave of
anti-Black laws should be seen, therefore, as an attempt by the Dominican government to reign in the
effects of a global neoliberal order—one that they have arduously promoted.
Neoliberal markets are built on racialized and imperialist stratification and allows the
establishment of elites
Valdez & Cho in 2011 (Francisco & Sumi, Professor of Law, University of Miami & Professor of Law,
DePaul University College of Law, “Critical Race Materialism: Theorizing Justice in the Wake of Global
Neoliberalism”, Connecticut Law Review,
http://archive.connecticutlawreview.org/documents/ValdesandCho.pdf)
Residing in the belly of this beast, CRT is positioned like no other formation to understand, map and challenge the continuation of this status
quo:
CRT work during the past two decades has helped to make plain that, for so long as legal profits are
made by racialized subjugation, racialized subjugation not only will continue but also flourish.4 This view, we
hope, helps to explain not only why CRT emerged where it did during the closing decades of the last century, but also why it remains uniquely
We will then consider
challenges confronting CRT’s relevance in this century, where the struggle for social justice under global
neoliberalism must be understood to transcend the boundaries of the nation-state. We begin in Part I with a
brief materialist account of the larger world economic system5 and its “social structures of accumulation”
that evolve following World War II that allow core identitarian elites in the United States to enjoy a
“golden age” of unprecedented economic prosperity and political prominence. CRT emerges at the
moment of accumulation crisis due to the decline of these established social structures of accumulation,
positioned to unmask and resist the latest practices of racial injustice both within and beyond the nation-state.
and prior to the emergence of the new social structures of accumulation not yet consolidated or identified at the time. Part I also elucidates
the connection between this transitional moment in capital accumulation and its connection to law, hegemony, and counter-hegemonic
movements. We conclude Part I with a summary of the fundamental role of law in the constitution both of society and of hegemonic Euroheteropatriarchy as an expression of that system (and the nation-state), ending with the promise of CRT as a counter-hegemonic ideology. We
then turn in Part II to
similar dynamics and concerns regarding law and race under the increasingly
globalized politics and world system of domination and subjugation based on old, racialized patterns of
colonial and imperial power politics and on the prophesized rise of the so-called “market-state.”6
Throughout this account, we observe how both national and transnational trajectories of legal politics and rule-making dovetail today in the
practice of neocolonial racial erasure, in order to help discern future projects and pending priorities for a next generation of CRT scholarship
and praxis. In related future work, we
will continue this analysis to help identify key features of the new and current
social structure of accumulation—global neoliberalism—and identify the ways in which the law is
deployed in its service to perpetuate identity-based systems of privilege and oppression established
during colonial and imperial eras. We will also suggest how CRT might operate with a midterm agenda to attempt to counteract
and resist global neoliberalism’s structuring of accumulation, and the particular challenges and difficulties of doing so as (mostly) law professors
The twentieth century witnessed the consolidation of internationalized capitalist
markets and a hierarchical world-system of nation-states built upon the architecture of colonialism and
imperialism, a material and cultural architecture designed substantially and persistently in the forms of identitarian systems of
stratification, including racialized (and gendered) stratification.8 Thus, the transnational dynamics of colonial and imperial
subjugation never did stop, and certainly not at the gates of any particular nation or state. That century thereby occasioned both
the consolidation of public, national sovereignties in the form of nation-states that enabled established
identitarian elites to construct the modern world-system and its exploitation-based economy, and
continued colonial and imperial power logics that increasingly (and ironically) have put the nation-state itself under
new pressures.
from the Global North.
Neoliberalism segregates racially without being openly racist to improve their
governing actions
Goldberg in 08 (David Theo, “Racisms without Racism” PMLA, Vol. 123, No. 5, Special Topic:
Comparative Racialization (Oct., 2008), pp. 1712-1716, JSTOR)
The concept of racisms without racism, then, is the peculiar expression of neoliberalizing globalization. It is
the way of governing distinction, in the global scheme of enduring freedom, considered too different
and difficult to deal with. It is the (^institutionalizing of racism gone private, the privatizing of institutionalized racisms. Racisms
cut off from their historical fertilizer. Racisms born again, renewed, but shorn of referential language. The inherited critical
vocabulary for identifying, articulating, and condemning them no longer fits. This vocabulary comprises political expressions
unrecognized as free because they are driven by forces outside themselves, illegible to those external to
their circles of persuasion. At worst, they are projected as beastly violence against the inevitable advance
of freedom and democracy. The consequent counterviolence of containment cannot possibly be racist not just because no races exist
but also because the threatening expressions it seeks to contain are unrecognized as properly human. The projected action as
metonym for the person, for the (national) character, is beastly, monstrous, mutant, after all. They behead; doing so is a
condition of their culture. The action is outside legitimate human conduct. Hence, we can't be racist just as we don't torture.
Even though a bad apple or two may. The individualization of wrongdoing, its localization as a personal and so private expression
of preferences, erases institutional racisms as a conceptual possibility. As strictly and reductively moral matters, racist
acts and institutional patterns or effects are unlikely to be prosecuted under the law; they are regarded
as personally offensive, morals offenses, more like consuming pornography than causing injury. Even "hate
crimes," as crimes exacerbated by hate, are recognized as crimes first, crimes accentuated by a condition that makes the matter worse, the
potential sentence longer. The personalization of hate, its psychologizing of an irreducibly social condition, is an add-on, a legislative
afterthought, institutionalizing a matter that by premise ought not to be but just won't go away.
These are the awkwardnesses, the
inconsistencies, produced when racist expression is restricted to the private sphere, when racisms
proliferate in the reductive impossibility of being recognized as precisely racist. Racisms without racism
offer (up) a porous social prophylaxis, condomizing neo liberalizing society as much against itself as
against its constitutive outsides. The society resorts to two interactive modes of prophylactic population management. As fuel to
financialized interaction, privatized preferences, and the incessant expansion of capital and informational flows and individual consumption, it
orchestrates mixtures of people across de mographic divides. These
mixtures, nevertheless, are constrained by cultural and
criterial horizons identified with structures of racial whiteness. Where mixture fails to contain, constrain,
and conduct flows where rogue elements (threaten to) disrupt commerce? The violent force of securitystate apparatuses is invoked to prevent interruption of the circulations conducive to wealth production
for the fortunate few. Racial neoliberalism, in the final analysis, extends by building silently on the
structural conditions of racism while evaporating the very categories of their recognizability. It is, as I have
undertaken to reveal, nothing short of racisms without racism.
Social Media/Media in general
Neoliberalism normalizes and commercializes mainstream media.
Robert McChesney, (Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy,
The New Press, 2013, http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/debate-is-idiot-distraction-accelerationism-and-the-politics-of-theinternet/)
The most interesting aspect of the book is its focus on the internet’s impact on news media, an area which
celebrants have been particularly emphatic about apparently innovative and more democratic changes taking place. The
research suggests otherwise. Studies have shown that the proliferation of media in recent years has led to less
and less original reporting. McChesney points to a 2010 Pew Centre for the People and the Press study
which examined how news stories were generated and received among the public, focusing on the Baltimore
area. Eight out of ten stories regurgitated already published information while more than ninety-five per cent of
original news stories were still generated by old media, particularly the Baltimore Sun. However the Sun’s production of original news stories
was down more than thirty per cent from ten years ago and seventy-three per cent from twenty years ago. The decline of journalism was
underway before the internet but it has nevertheless accelerated the crisis. No more than six companies control more than eighty per cent of
the American news.
Fewer journalists are attempting to cover more and more areas with the inevitable
consequence that the vast majority of news stories originate from official sources and press releases rather than
independent investigation. The feeling that we are increasingly inundated with ‘news’ disguises a decline in
actual investigative journalism. The pressure to keep journalistic content free online means increasingly
commercialized sources of funding have to be found with the result that content is increasingly dictated by advertising. The senior
editors of the Washington Post, for example, “have embraced the view that studying [Internet user] traffic patterns can be a useful way to
determine where to focus the paper’s resources”. Their unambiguous aim is to “find the content that will appeal to desired consumers and to
the advertisers who wish to reach affluent consumers. In this relationship, advertisers hold all the trump cards, and the news media have little
leverage. In the emerging era of ‘smart’ advertising, this means shaping the content to meet the Internet profiles of desired users, even
personalizing news stories alongside personalized ads.” When AOL purchased the Huffington Post in 2011 an internal memo from AOL CEO Tim
Armstrong summed up the editorial/commercial logic: he ordered all editors to evaluate future stories on the basis of “traffic potential,
revenue potential, edit quality and turnaround time. All stories, he said are to be evaluated according to the ‘profitability consideration’.” Such
downward economic pressure on journalists again leaves it increasingly likely for news stories to offer
little more than rewrites of PR press releases. The corporate corruption of mainstream media is well
known and has led to enthusiastic embraces of alternatives such as Wikileaks. However, the relative weakness
of WikiLeaks’ impact on public opinion in proportion to the shocking details of the released documents is a striking and
unsettling testament to right-wing hegemony in the media, and the power of institutional channels of popular communication
in framing narratives and opinion. Following the release of secret documents to the public, Heather Booke described
how “documents languished online and only came to the public’s attention when they were written up
by professional journalists. Raw material alone wasn’t enough”. McChesney then highlights the complete
lack of independent journalism to respond to the U.S. government’s successful PR and media blitz to
discredit WikiLeaks: How revealing that a news media that almost never does investigative work on the national security state or its
relations with large corporations does not come to the defense of those who have the courage to make such information public! Citizen
journalism, blogging and alternative media provide some necessary alternatives to vacuous mainstream reporting.
Neoliberalism fetishizes critical discussion though alternative news and social media
Robert McChesney, (Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy,
The New Press, 2013, http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/debate-is-idiot-distraction-accelerationism-and-the-politics-of-theinternet/)
Valorizing such media can, however, lead to a sense of insular segregation from the popular sphere: the
already-converted preach to each other within micro-communities. It can be sometimes easy to forget the disparity of
opinion between your twitter feed and the majority of the electorate. Amidst the celebratory rhetoric about its
democratizing nature, we need to be reminded of the limitations and shortcomings of alternative media.
McChesney’s research on the limitations of apparently ‘democratic’ and participatory media finds a
more militant reinforcement in the theoretical work of Jodi Dean. Her work on communicative
capitalism identifies a technological fethishism among many media theorists, bloggers, leftists, and
conscientious web participants, which covers over a lack on the part of the subject. The fetish appeases
guilt and sustains a somewhat deluded faith that we are well-informed, politically engaged citizens. The
technological fetish condenses and simplifies political complexities such as organisation, struggle,
sustaining strategic modes of resistance over a period of time, and representation, into one problem to be solved:
information. The problem is simply that we need to be better informed. Persistently framing the debate in terms of
information, as WikiLeaks-enthusiasts and advocates of participatory media regularly do, does not pay adequate attention to media hegemony
and the way in which narratives are deeply embedded in the social psyche, despite an abundance of information that contradicts those
narratives. As Dean also emphasises, valorising micro-political
activity and online debates through social media
“displaces political energy from the hard work of organisation and struggle.” We are persistently invited to ‘join the
debate’, share an article, and express our opinion in a variety of ways. We feel like we are politically engaged when really, as Nick Land put it,
“debate is idiot distraction”. The
persistent exhortations to indulge in debates where apparently YOUR opinion counts
contributes to and fosters an (un)critically relativist culture. Everything, we are often led to believe, is subjective, and thus it
becomes more and more difficult to assert authoritative criticism. The technology fetish encourages immediacy over sustained reflection and
engagement. Filesharing is political. A website is political. Everything is political. Theoretically endowing banal quotidian action with a ‘political’
status was prominent in much neo-anarchist theory before web 2.0 but it has, again, been even more problematically exacerbated in online
activity.
The ‘everything is political’ mantra is a dangerous one because, while true in itself, its discursive use can encourage a paradoxical
depoliticization and retreat from politics into individual ethics, which actually plays into the hands of power and capital. An interesting example
of this kind of techno-political optimism is McKenzie Wark’s updating of the Situationist International in which he makes such claims as: “every
kid with a BitTorrent client is an unconscious Situationist.” Again, this sense of immediacy and insistence that peer-to-peer file-sharing is
political operates as an unthreatening form of micro-politics and horizontalism. McChesney’s book also hints at these misguided approaches to
technology and politics in his criticism of the arrogance of hackers who, he says, often persist in the naïve faith that the “the revolutionary
nature of the technology could trump the monopolizing force of the market”. The valorization of such horizontal politics frequently encourages
a complacency and sense of self-satisfaction with one’s own apparent radicalism, which leaves little hope of ever having an impact on the
public at large. Zones of spontaneous autonomy, whether on the street or online, pose little threat to prevailing ideology and often only come
into popular consciousness in the form of a carnivalesque sideshow to actual political struggle. Faced with repeated insistences that ‘everything
is political’, it begins to feel like nothing is political. McChesney’s research on the development of the internet and inadequacies of online
journalism, Dean’s theory of communicative capitalism, and the insufficient responses of advocates of neo-anarchist micro-politics on the left
all attest to a persistent lowering of the horizon of ambition which neo-liberalism imposes on political and cultural activity. Don’t worry if rightwing hegemony poisons public opinion and creates horrible social divisions: you can find a quick release for your rage on an obscure ‘lefty’ blog
that a few of your mates might read. These impotent responses are symptomatic of the engulfing power of neoliberalism, not condemnations
of individual actors. The fact that intellectually discredited neoliberalism continues in zombie-like form seems to have actually strengthened the
stronghold of capitalist realism, as described by Mark Fisher, in leftist responses as well as the popular imagination. The resurgence of
accelerationist theory in recent years points towards strategies of engagement with technology, politics and media which audaciously attempt
to seriously raise the horizon of ambition. Accelerationism was coined as a term of critique by Benjamin Noys in his compelling theoretical work
The Persistence of the Negative. Noys used the term to identify and critique a strange trend in the wake of May 68 among French thinkers,
most notably Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard and Baudrillard. The common thread was a nihilist embrace of forces of disenchantment as the
means for achieving a “strange kind of liberation through absolute immersion in the flows and fluxes of a libidinised capitalism”. Leftist politics
often entails slowing things down, putting on the emergency brake. On the contrary, this thought embraces speeding things up, embracing the
flows of the market. Nick Land took up this trajectory with the CCRU in the nineties embracing a deterritorialization free of the caution which
Deleuze and Guattari advised. Land attempted to uproot the association of the market with capitalism arguing that the latter is stagnating while
the former can be used to deterritorialize and accelerate towards a post-human post-capitalist society. Where Land’s writing was an antipolitical celebration of the irrelevance of human agency, the emergence of a left accelerationism in recent years offers a more enlightened
politicized theory. Land’s misconception of capital as a sole and primary accelerator of innovation is even more glaringly obvious in its divorce
from reality today. As Alex Williams has written: Technological progress, rather than erasing the personal, has become almost entirely
Oedipalized, ever more focused on supporting the liberal individual subject. The very agent which Land identified as the engine of untold
innovation has run dry. This is alienation of an all-too familiar, ennui-inducing kind, rather than a coldly thrilling succession of future-shocks. All
of this opens up a space for the political again: if we desire a radically innovative social formation, capital alone will not deliver. The CCRU
embraced technology and the internet for the potential of acceleration and immersive intensity. On the level of consumption however, our
experience of technology is not especially immersive. The relentless circulation of information, and mere accumulation of gadgetery and apps,
among other less than exhilarating developments, has led to a dispersal of attention and something akin to a state of permanent distraction.
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi has written (in Precarious Rhapsody and other works) on how time and stimuli are being accelerated while experience is
being decelerated. The hyper-abundance of information available, the sense of permanent distraction and increasingly precarious nature of
labour for a cognitive workforce means that anxiety prevails over intensity. Late Capitalism’s hijacking of our time to feel or experience takes
the ultimate form of disconnection, for Berardi, in online pornography. There is no time for the slow immersive intensity of erotic experiences,
replaced instead by the quick-fix neuro-short-circuiting of pornography. While Berardi has written on the decelerative nature of consumption
and experience in online and everyday activity, Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds have written on deceleration in cultural production. As Fisher
put it recently, reinforcing Reynolds’s argument in Retromania: We live in a moment of profound cultural deceleration. The first two decades of
the current century have so far been marked by an extraordinary sense of inertia, repetition, and retrospection, uncannily in keeping with the
prophetic analyses of postmodern culture that Fredric Jameson began to develop in the 1980s. Tune the radio to the station playing the most
contemporary music, and you will not encounter anything that you couldn’t have heard in the 1990s. A sense of cultural deceleration has
repeatedly manifest itself in nostalgia, whimsicality, and retreat and regression from politics. This has been equally characteristic of many
cultural attitudes towards the internet. While the advance of the net has had its major disappointments, the logical conclusion should not be to
disconnect. When middle-class bestselling writers like Jonathan Franzen berate virtually everything about the internet and implores writers to
‘disconnect’ , it not only betrays a completely clueless understanding of the realities of cultural and cognitive production for the twenty first
century anxiety-ridden precarious worker, it also feebly and misguidedly responds to technological advances with an injunction to disengage
and switch off. Rhetoric which encourages us to ‘disconnect’ comes across as a literary equivalent of folk troubadours such as Bon Iver, who
leave the frantic pace of gentrified city life to go and find themselves anew in a cabin in the woods, armed with nothing but an acoustic guitar
and a broken heart. Responses to disappointments with contemporary culture and technology do not have to result in self-indulgent retreat.
Accelerationist aesthetics refuses such vain quests for a ‘lost identity’ and searches instead to rediscover ‘future-shock’, to awaken us from a
sense of ahistorical slumber in a perpetual now. As a political proposition, accelerationism has not been entirely convincing, as strong critiques
by Benjamin Noys in particular attest. However it opens up a space of debate and a desire to engage with political thought on an ambitious
macro-level, which I suggested has been lacking in much leftist writing on the internet. In relation to the media in particular, it offers
challenging provocations. It critiques neo-anarchist thought and activism for too often abandoning the struggle for hegemony and for not giving
sufficient consideration of how to effectively communicate radical ideas on a genuinely popular level. While not giving up on the democratising
potential of new media, the Accelerationist Manifesto rightly insists that traditional media are still crucial in the framing of popular narratives
and thus these institutions need to be fought for and brought as close as possible to popular control through wide-scale media reform. The
manifesto offers a provocative challenge to micro-politics. The rhetoric has a somewhat unsavoury macho tone which warrants critical rebukes.
However its particular raising of political thought to a macro- level of complexity that simultaneously engages with the popular is enticing: “We
believe the most important division in today’s left is between those that hold to a folk politics of localism, direct action, and relentless
horizontalism, and those that outline what must become called an accelerationist politics at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity,
globality, and technology. The former remains content with establishing small and temporary spaces of non-capitalist social relations,
eschewing the real problems entailed in facing foes which are intrinsically non-local, abstract, and rooted deep in our everyday infrastructure.
The failure of such politics has been built-in from the very beginning. By contrast, an accelerationist politics seeks to preserve the gains of late
capitalism while going further than its value system, governance structures, and mass pathologies will allow.” Technology is thus embraced but
the manifesto is careful to distance itself from ‘techno-utopianism’. It is not given inherent qualitative judgements but considered in relation to
a socio-political dialectic. Technology is a tool to be used in aiding radical communication and accelerating towards a post-capitalist society. It
can also be a source of exhilaration, but one always influenced by socio-political factors shaping it. It is thus, as Robert McChesney’s research
demonstrates, not to be valorized in itself. While accelerationism is the subject of warranted criticism for possible political complicity with
neoliberalism and a problematically macho tone, accelerationist writing is also criticised for self-conscious seriousness . The tone of
seriousness, however, actually carries a compelling implicit argument: in an era saturated by nostalgia and regressive whimsicality in culture
and politics, and a dearth of ambition, we would do well to approach collective experience with a sense of seriousness. Accelerationist theory
carries the implicit demand that we raise the standards of what passes for culture, and reinvest cultural production with a sense of authority (as
well as cultural criticism for that matter), while explicitly arguing for a maximal politics of collective self-mastery, that issues a necessary
challenge to the limitations of micro-political ‘direct action’.
Terrorism/Islamophobia
Neoliberalism creates a consumer-criminal binary where those who are not good
consumers are deemed terrorists.
Passavant, 5
(Paul, Associate Professor of Political Science and PhD in Political Science “The Strong Neo-liberal State:
Crime, Consumption, Governance” 8/3/2005
https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v008/8.3passavant.html Project Muse LAO)
With the end of the Cold War, we have seen the reemergence of the racial discourse of Western
civilization versus the savage or barbarian as the predominant mode for mapping the world and
America's place within it.34 The Bush National Security Strategy makes clear a twist to this racial discourse that has
become particularly prominent since September 11th. As this document indicates, the enemy of "civilized nations" -and the American "homeland" -- is "terrorism."35 This document borrows from the racial discourse that
underwrote 19th century colonialism and imperialism, but with an important difference. Now, the
other is no longer represented merely as racially inferior but also as a criminal. The Bush National
Security Strategy articulates together two strands of the present -- consumer capitalism and fear of
crime. As William Finnegan has noted, it is both interesting and odd that a national security strategy would devote as much
space as the Bush Strategy does to discussing economic policy.36 As is clear from the section entitled "Ignite a
New Era of Global Economic Growth through Free Markets and Free Trade," however, it is in fact
official U.S. policy to promote -- presumably through military means since this has been identified as a vital
U.S. national security interest by its placement in the Bush National Security Strategy -- a neo-liberal global economic
regime. Freedom to be a consumer is the form of freedom that U.S. policy seeks to make enduring
through U.S. military operations as the strategy represents political difference -- those who oppose the
promotion of the neo-liberal capitalist enterprise -- as criminal: the terrorists. This only makes clear what had
been prefigured in the immediate aftermath of September 11th by The New Republic's Peter Beinart who also represented
anti-global capital protesters as equivalent to terrorists in an article published in the September 24, 2001 issue of that
magazine.37 Thus, U.S. national security policy is an external projection of the consumer-criminal double.
In the months immediately after September 11th, the government engaged in a virtual roundup of Arab
and Muslim non-citizens, detaining more than 1,200 people.44 Utilizing a number of different
mechanisms, such as a "Special Registration" program for males from predominantly Arab and Muslim
countries between the ages of 16 to 45, a "voluntary" interview program that targeted 5,000 young
males who had entered the United States after January 1, 2000 from countries with an al-Qaeda
"presence" (extended to include Iraqi-born individuals who might be either citizens or non-citizens), or
Operation Liberty Shield that is detaining asylum seekers from 33 nations or territories where al-Qaeda
is "believed" to operate, the United States has continued this policy of preventative detention for nonEuropeans.45 One estimate puts the number of domestic detentions as of May, 2003 at over 5,000, while thousands more
have been placed in deportation proceedings.46 The government has also directed that the names of those detained postSeptember 11th , and the deportation proceedings of what the executive branch deems to be "special interest" cases, remain
secret. In words that eerily echo the suspension of the Weimar Constitution, a federal appeals court judge wrote, upholding
secret court proceedings, "in the wake of September 11, 2001," the "primary national policy must be selfpreservation."47 Today, even if a person should prevail in deportation proceedings, new rules provide for the continued
detention of the individual pending the government's appeal.48 Although not one of those detained through these
mechanisms has been charged with any involvement in the September 11 attacks, this policy of zero-risk
acceptability urged by Bush and embraced by Ashcroft means that the U.S. is implementing a policy that
identifies certain subjects -- those who bear signs that read "potential terrorist" for the "civilized" -- as
presumed guilty in increasing numbers. Under such a logic, this presumption is no problem since there is
the possibility (which cannot be ruled out epistemologically however unlikely probabilistically) that these subjects could be
either potential terrorists or members of a sleeper cell (potentially potential terrorists).
Women’s Rights
Neoliberalism marginalizes attempts to improve women’s rights
Christa Wichterich No Date (20 years after: the Women’s Human Rights paradigm in the neoliberal
context, http://wideplus.org/20-years-after-the-womens-human-rights-paradigm-in-the-currentneoliberal-context/)
In the 1990s, it was the biggest achievement of the international women’s movement and the global women’s lobby to
introduce the women’s rights paradigm, including violence against women as human rights abuse, into the
human rights agenda of the UN and into the various global governance regimes like environment and
sustainability, population and development, peace and security. These interventions raised a lot of hope that through
participation in various global governance regimes, quantitative and substantial, it could be insured that women’s human rights would be
respected, protected, promoted and fulfilled. However, the
rise of the women’s human rights paradigm coincided with
the emergence of the neo-liberal global order. Neoliberalism is based on a withdrawal of the state from the market, an
economisation, privatisation and financialisation of many goods that have been outside of the market, and with a shift of responsibility to the
individual as entrepreneur of her/himself. While this neoliberal turn implies an attack on livelihoods and social cohesion, increasingly weaker
sections of society and women were included into the liberalised markets. They got more access to paid
labour and to financial services such as microcredit, mortgage, private insurances and credit cards. But
this was a highly paradoxical economic and financial inclusion: the majority of women got precarious, low‐
paid, flexible, informal jobs, or micro- and subprime‐credits with high interest rates that pulled many of
them into indebtedness. Still, for many women, those new market opportunities implied a step forward in terms of access to market
rights and individual empowerment. Nancy Fraser called this dilemma or trap an “uncanny congruence” of
feminism and neo-liberalism. The neo-liberal political regime incorporates, sucks in or makes use of the human rights and the gender
equality agenda and it co-opts progressive discourses and language.
MPX
Santos
Neoliberalism creates a paradoxical system that destroys the world in pursuit of
attempting to save humanity- leads to genocide, dehumanization, and countless
human rights abuses.
Santos, 3
(Boaventura de Sousa, Leading Portuguese social theorist, director of the Center for Social Studies at the University
of Coimbra, from Collective suicide or globalization from below? Published on Eurozine)
According to the German philosopher Franz Hinkelammert, living in Costa Rica, the West has repeatedly been under
the illusion that it should try to save humanity by destroying part of it. This is a salvific and sacrificial destruction,
committed in the name of the need to fulfill radically all the possibilities opened up by a given social and political reality over which it is
supposed to have total power. This is
how it was in colonialism, with the genocide of indigenous peoples, and the African slaves.
This is how it was in the period of imperialist struggles, which caused millions of deaths in two world wars and many other
colonial wars. This is how it was in Stalinism, with the Gulag and in Nazism, with the holocaust. And now today, this is how it
is in neoliberalism, with the collective sacrifice of the periphery of the world system. With the war against Iraq, it
is fitting to ask whether what is in progress is a new genocidal and sacrificial illusion, and what its scope might be. It is above all appropriate to
ask if the new illusion will not herald the radicalization and the ultimate perversion of the western illusion: destroying all of humanity in the
illusion of saving it. Sacrificial
genocide arises from a totalitarian illusion that is manifested in the belief that
there are no alternatives to the present-day reality and that the problems and difficulties confronting it arise from failing to
take its logic of development to its ultimate consequences. If there is unemployment, hunger and death in the Third World,
this is not the result of market failures; instead, it is the outcome of the market laws not having been
fully applied. If there is terrorism, this is not due to the violence of the conditions that generate it; it is due, rather, to the fact
that total violence has not been employed to physically eradicate all terrorists and potential terrorists. This political logic
is based on the supposition of total power and knowledge, and on the radical rejection of alternatives; it is ultra-conservative in that it aims to
infinitely reproduce the status quo. Inherent to it is the notion of the end of history. During
the last hundred years, the West
has experienced three versions of this logic, and, therefore, seen three versions of the end of history: Stalinism, with its logic of
insuperable efficiency of the plan; Nazism, with its logic of racial superiority; and neoliberalism, with its logic of insuperable
efficiency of the market. The first two periods involved the destruction of democracy. The last one trivializes democracy,
disarming it in the face of social actors sufficiently powerful to be able to privatize the State and international institutions in their favour. I have
described this situation as a combination of political democracy and social fascism. One current manifestation of this
combination resides in the fact that intensely strong public opinion, worldwide, against the war is found to be incapable of halting the war
machine set in motion by supposedly democratic rulers. At all these moments, a
death drive, a catastrophic heroism, predominates,
the idea of a looming collective suicide, only preventable by the massive destruction of the other.
Paradoxically, the broader the definition of the other and the efficacy of its destruction, the more likely collective suicide becomes. In its
sacrificial genocide version, neoliberalism is a mixture of market radicalization, neoconservatism and Christian fundamentalism. Its
death
drive takes a number of forms, from the idea of "discardable populations", referring to citizens of the Third
World not capable of being exploited as workers and consumers, to the concept of "collateral damage", to refer
to the deaths, as a result of war, of thousands of innocent civilians. The last, catastrophic heroism, is quite clear on two facts:
according to reliable calculations by the Non-Governmental Organization MEDACT, in London, between 48 and 260 thousand civilians will die
during the war against Iraq and in the three months after (this is without there being civil war or a nuclear attack); the war will cost 100 billion
dollars, - and much more if the costs of reconstruction are added - enough to pay the health costs of the world's poorest countries for four
years. Is it possible to fight this death drive? We must bear in mind that, historically, sacrificial destruction has always been linked to the
economic pillage of natural resources and the labor force, to the imperial design of radically changing the terms of economic, social, political
and cultural exchanges in the face of falling efficiency rates postulated by the maximalist logic of the totalitarian illusion in operation. It is as
though hegemonic powers, both when they are on the rise and when they are in decline, repeatedly go through times of primitive
accumulation, legitimizing the most shameful violence in the name of futures where, by definition, there is no room for what must be
destroyed. In today's version, the period of primitive accumulation consists of combining neoliberal economic globalization with the
globalization of war. The machine of democracy and liberty turns into a machine of horror and destruction. In
opposition to this, there is the ongoing movement of globalization from below, the global struggle for social justice, led by social movements
and NGOs, of which the World Social Forum (WSF) has been an eloquent manifestation. The WSF has been a remarkable affirmation of life, in
its widest and most inclusive sense, embracing human beings and nature. What challenges does it face before the increasingly intimate
interpenetration of the globalization of the economy and that of war? I am convinced that this new situation forces the globalization from
below to re-think itself, and to reshape its priorities. It is well-known that the WSF, at its second meeting, in 2002, identified the relationship
between economic neoliberalism and imperial warmongering, which is why it organized the World Peace Forum, the second edition of which
took place in 2003. But this is not enough. I believe that a strategic shift is required. Social movements, no matter what their spheres of
struggle, must give priority to the fight for peace, as a necessary condition for the success of all the other struggles. This means that they must
be in the frontline of the fight for peace, and not simply leave this space to be occupied solely by peace movements. All the movements against
neoliberal globalization are, from now on, peace movements. We are now in the midst of the fourth world war (the third being the Cold War)
and the spiral of war will go on and on. The principle of non-violence that is contained in the WSF Charter of Principles must no longer be a
demand made on the movements; now it must be a global demand made by the movements. This emphasis is necessary so that, in current
circumstances, the celebration of life can be set against this vertiginous collective suicide. The peace to be fought for is not a mere absence of
war or of terrorism. It is rather a peace based upon the elimination of the conditions that foster war and terrorism: global unjustice, social
exclusion, cultural and political discrimination and oppression and imperialist greed. A new, cosmopolitan humanism can be built above and
beyond western illuminist abstractions, a humanism of real people based on the concrete resistance to the actual human suffering imposed by
the real axis of evil: neoliberalism plus war.
War
War and neoliberalism are intrinsically linked, this leads to a system where a
sovereign body and human rights are obsolete
Von Werlhof, 8
(By Prof. Claudia von Werlhof is professor emerita of women's studies at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Innsbruck.
From Global Research: Center on Globalization. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudia_von_Werlhof)
Neoliberalism and war are two sides of the same coin (Altvater/Chossudovsky/Roy/Serfati 2003, Mies 2005). Free
trade, piracy, and war are still “an inseparable three” – today maybe more so than ever. War is not only “good for the
economy” (Hendersen 1996), but is indeed a driving force and can be understood as the “continuation of economy with other
means”. War and economy have become almost indistinguishable (Werlhof 2005 b). Wars about resources (Klare
2001) – especially oil and water – have already begun. The Gulf Wars are the most obvious examples. Militarism once
again appears as the “executor of capital accumulation” (Luxemburg 1970) – potentially everywhere and enduringly. Human rights and
rights of sovereignty have been transferred from people, communities and governments to corporations
(Clarke 1998). The notion of the people as a sovereign body has practically been abolished. We have witnessed a coup
of sorts. The political systems of the West and the nation state as guarantees for and expression of the international division of labor in the
modern world system are increasingly dissolving (Sassen 2000). Nation states are developing into “periphery states” according to the inferior
role they play in the proto-despotic “New World Order” (Hardt/Negri 2001, Chomsky 2003). Democracy appears outdated. After all, it “hinders
business” (Werlhof 2005 a). The “New World Order” implies a new division of labor that does no longer distinguish between North and South,
East and West – today, everywhere is South. An according International Law is established which effectively functions from top to bottom
(“top-down”) and eliminates all local and regional communal rights. And not only that: many such rights are rendered invalid both retroactively
and for the future (cf. the “roll back” and “stand still” clauses in the WTO agreements, Mies/Werlhof 2003). The
logic of neoliberalism
as a sort of totalitarian neo-mercantilism is that all resources, all markets, all money, all profits, all
means of production, all “investment opportunities”, all rights, and all power belong to the corporations
only. To paraphrase Richard Sennett (2005): “Everything to the Corporations!” One might add: “Now!” The corporations are free to do
whatever they please with what they get. Nobody is allowed to interfere. Ironically, we are expected to rely on them to find a way out of the
crisis we are in. This puts the entire globe at risk since responsibility is something the corporations do not have or know. The times of social
contracts are gone (Werlhof 2003 a). In fact, pointing out the crisis alone has become a crime and all critique will soon be defined as “terror”
and persecuted as such (Chossudovsky 20
Environment
Neoliberalism commercializes natural resources leading to environmental destruction
Von Werlhof, 8
(By Prof. Claudia von Werlhof is professor emerita of women's studies at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Innsbruck.
From Global Research: Center on Globalization. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudia_von_Werlhof)
Austria is part of the world system too. It is increasingly becoming a corporate colony (particularly of German
corporations). This, however, does not keep it from being an active colonizer itself, especially in the East (Hofbauer 2003, Salzburger 2006).
Social, cultural, traditional and ecological considerations are abandoned and give way to a mentality of
plundering. All global resources that we still have – natural resources, forests, water, genetic pools – have turned into
objects of “utilization”. Rapid ecological destruction through depletion is the consequence. If one makes more profit by cutting down
trees than by planting them, then there is no reason not to cut them (Lietaer 2006). Neither the public nor the state interferes, despite global
warming and the obvious fact that the clearing of the few remaining rain forests will irreversibly destroy the earth’s climate – not to even speak
of the many other negative effects of such action (Raggam 2004). Climate,
animal, plants, human and general ecological
rights are worth nothing compared to the interests of the corporations – no matter that the rain forest is no
renewable resource and that the entire earth’s ecosystem depends on it. If greed – and the rationalism with which it is economically enforced –
really was an inherent anthropological trait, we would have never even reached this day. The commander of the Space Shuttle that circled the
earth in 2005 remarked that “the center of Africa was burning”. She meant the Congo, in which the last great rain forest of the continent is
located. Without it there will be no more rain clouds above the sources of the Nile. However, it needs to disappear in order for corporations to
gain free access to the Congo’s natural resources that are the reason for the wars that plague the region today. After all, one needs petrol,
diamonds, and coltan for mobile phones.
The forests of Asia have been burning for many years too, and in late 2005 the Brazilian
parliament has approved the clearing of 50% of the remaining Amazon. Meanwhile, rumors abound that Brazil and Venezuela have
already sold their rights to the earth’s biggest remaining rain forest – not to the US-Americans, but to the supposedly
“left” Chinese who suffer from chronic wood shortage and cannot sustain their enormous economic growth and economic superpower
ambitions without securing global resources. Given today’s race for the earth’s last resources, one wonders what the representatives of the
World Trade Organization (WTO) thought when they accepted China as a new member in 2001. They probably had the giant Chinese market in
mind but not the giant Chinese competition. After all, a quarter of the world’s population lives in China. Of course it has long been established
that a further expansion of the Western lifestyle will lead to global ecological collapse – the faster, the sooner (Sarkar 2001). Today,
everything on earth is turned into commodities, i.e. everything becomes an object of “trade” and
commercialization (which truly means “liquidation”: the transformation of all into liquid money). In its neoliberal stage it is not enough
for capitalism to globally pursue less cost-intensive and preferably “wageless” commodity production. The objective is to transform
everyone and everything into commodities (Wallerstein 1979), including life itself. We are racing blindly towards the violent
and absolute conclusion of this “mode of production”, namely total capitalization/liquidation by “monetarization” (Genth 2006). We are not
only witnessing perpetual praise of the market – we are witnessing what can be described as “market fundamentalism”. People believe in the
market as if it was a god. There seems to be a sense that nothing could ever happen without it. Total global maximized accumulation of
money/capital as abstract wealth becomes the sole purpose of economic activity. A “free” world market for everything has to be established –
a world market that functions according to the interests of the corporations and capitalist money. The installment of such a market proceeds
with dazzling speed. It creates new profit possibilities where they have not existed before, e.g. in Iraq, Eastern Europe or China. One thing
remains generally overlooked: The abstract wealth created for accumulation implies the destruction of nature as concrete wealth. The result is
a “hole in the ground” (Galtung), and next to it a garbage dump with used commodities, outdated machinery, and money without value.
However, once all concrete wealth (which today consists mainly of the last natural resources) will be gone, abstract wealth will disappear as
well. It will, in Marx’ words, “evaporate”. The fact that abstract wealth is not real wealth will become obvious, and so will the answer to the
question which wealth modern economic activity has really created. In the end it is nothing but monetary wealth (and even this mainly exists
virtually or on accounts) that constitutes a “monoculture” controlled by a tiny minority. Diversity is suffocated and millions of people are left
wondering how to survive. And really: how do you survive with neither resources nor means of production nor money? The nihilism of our
economic system is evident. The whole world will be transformed into money – and then it will “disappear”. After
all, money cannot be eaten. What no one seems to consider is the fact that it is impossible to re-transform commodities, money, capital and
machinery into nature or concrete wealth. It
seems that underlying all economic “development” is the assumption
that “resources”, the “sources of wealth” (Marx), are renewable and everlasting – just like the “growth”
they create (Werlhof 2001 a). The treachery of this assumption becomes harder and harder to deny. For example, the “peak” in oil
production has just been passed – meaning we are beyond exploiting 50% of all there is. Ironically though, it seems
like the prospect of some resources coming to an end only accelerates the economic race. Everything natural is commercialized in
dimensions not seen before, with unprecedented speed and by means of ever more advanced technology. The ultimate goal remains to create
new possibilities of investment and profit, in other words: new possibilities of growth able to create new accumulation possibilities – future
ones included. The material limits of such a politics become clearer day by day: the global ecological, economic, monetary, social, and political
collapse (Diamond 2005) it inevitably leads to has already begun. “Global West End.” How else can we understand the fact that in times when
civilization has reached its alleged zenith, a human being starves every second (Ziegler 2004)? How can such a politics be taken seriously? It is in
every sense a crime. Unfortunately, the facade of trivial “rationality” – what Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil” – behind which it
operates, still makes it invisible to many. People do not recognize its true character. This is a result of the enormous crisis of spirit and soul that
accompanies the material crisis that many of us remain unaware of; namely, the annihilation of matter through its transformation into
commodity, which we, in delusion, call “materialism” (I call it “patriarchy”, Werlhof 2001 a). The original
richness of mat(t)er
(“mother earth”) is now giving way to a barren wasteland that will remain unrecognized by many as long as
their belief in “progress” will block their views. The last phase of patriarchy and capitalism is not only without sense but it will
soon be without life as well: kaputalism. It seems impossible not to ask oneself how the entire economy came to follow one motive only: the
monism of making money. Especially since this does not only apply to the economy, but also to politics, science, arts and even our social
relations. The notion that capitalism and democracy are one is proven a myth by neoliberalism and its “monetary totalitarianism” (Genth 2006).
The primacy of politics over economy has been lost. Politicians of all parties have abandoned it. It is the corporations that dictate politics.
Where corporate interests are concerned, there is no place for democratic convention or community control. Public space disappears. The “res
publica” turns into a “res privata”, or – as we could say today – a “res privata transnationale” (in its original Latin meaning, “privare” means “to
deprive”). Only those in power still have rights. They give themselves the licenses they need, from the “license to plunder” to the “license to
kill” (Mies/Werlhof 2003, Mies 2005). Those who get in their way or challenge their “rights” are vilified, criminalized and to an increasing
degree defined as “terrorists”, or, in the case of defiant governments, as “rogue states” – a label that usually implies threatened or actual
military attack, as we can see in the cases of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq, and maybe Syria and Iran in the near future. US President Bush
has even spoken of the possibility of “preemptive” nuclear strikes should the US feel endangered by weapons of mass destruction
(Chossudovsky 2005). The European Union did not object (Chossudovsky 2006).
Poverty
Neoliberalism destroys the environment, fosters a large lower class, and ensures the
poor stay prove – statistics prove
Khan, 15
(Khan, Mohammed Adil. "Putting ‘Good Society’ Ahead of the Economy: Overcoming Neoliberalism's Growth Trap
and Its Costly Consequences Server Login." Sustainable Development 23.1 (2015): 55-63. UMKC University Libraries
Proxy Server Login. 23 Feb. 2015. Web. 14 July 2015)
It is true that, measured in GDP terms, neoliberal economic policies have made many countries better
off economically (Levy, 2012), but not without social and environmental costs (Shrivastava and Kothari, 2014). Noting
the emerging incongruities between economic growth and social development Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz observes that ‘Maximizing
GDP is not the same as maximizing wellbeing’ (UN, 2012a). The link between neoliberal economic system
and the lingering and systemic inequality is now well recorded: on a $2.50 a day income, 50% of the
world's population are poor; 6.6 million children have either already died or face death each year, half of
them from preventable diseases; and 35% of the world's women face domestic violence daily (Bordo et al.,
2004; Piketty, 2014). In the US itself, the home of neoliberalism, the top 1% own 25% of all income (Davies et al.,
2008). According to Nobel Laureate Professor Robert J. Shiller, rising economic inequality in the United States and other countries is ‘the most
important problem that we are facing now today’ (Job Market Monitor, 2013). Reflecting on the neoliberalism economic system's
arrangements, which are inherently exploitative, Stiglitz (2002) observes that ‘Those at the top have learned how to suck out money from the
rest in ways that the rest are hardly aware of’, and that, even though politics shape the market, under neoliberalism, politics itself has been
hijacked by the ‘financial elites’. Similarly, Michael Kelecki (22 June 1899–18 April 1970) once observed that ‘The capitalists get what they spend
and the workers spend what they get’. Neoliberalism's corporation-induced growth strategy, whichthat is often pursued through state
patronage, relies heavily on maximization of profit, mostly through cost minimization, and this is frequently achieved through payment of low
salaries to workers, poor provisioning of worker safety and security and also neglect and/or outright abuse of environmental standards (War on
Want, 2009). In this regard, the case of Bangladesh is quite instructive – the textile sector that provides 80% of its export dollars and supply
clothing to major western designer outlets encounters worst cases of labour rights abuses, manifested through obscenely low salary and
substandard and/or non-existent work place safety and security arrangements (Ahamed, 2013). Some also argue that there is a correlation
between neoliberalism, conspicuous consumption especially by the rich and the privileged and the worldwide rise in the incidence of crime, in
the sense that ‘the
act of consumption and the display of opulence drive home the reality of social and
economic inequality within a community’, which contributes to crime, corruption, drug abuse, social exclusion and erosion of
virtues of empathy, contributing to tensions and fracturing of societies (Richardson, 1994; Hoadley, 2011; Hicks and Hicks, 2012). In this regard,
Mycoo (2006) points out that the reason for the recent rise in gated communities of upper and middle income classes in major cities worldwide
is ‘directly traced to the failure of governments to close the growing divide between rich and poor and to solve the accompanying wave of
crime and fear of violence’ (Mycoo, 2006, p. 1). Many also argue that there is a cogent relationship between neoliberalism and the rise in ‘waron-terror ’/‘regime-change’ activities etc. and argue that these incursions are nothing but ‘resource wars’ that are warranted by competition for
the control of cheap sources of natural resources, especially fossil fuel, the latter a key ingredient in neoliberalism's expanding cycle of
production, consumption, profit and growth (Klare, 2002). 4
Laundry List
Capitalism makes extinction inevitable—steering away from the destructive system is
the only option
Farbod 2/6/15 (Faramarz Farbod, teaches Political Science at Moravian College, “It's Capitalism,
Stupid!”, 2/6/15, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2015/farbod020615.html, 7/14/15)
Global capitalism is the 800-pound gorilla. The twin ecological and economic crises, militarism, the rise
of the surveillance state, and a dysfunctional political system can all be traced to its normal operations. We
need a transformative politics from below that can challenge the fundamentals of capitalism instead of
today's politics that is content to treat its symptoms. The problems we face are linked to each other and to the
way a capitalist society operates. We must make an effort to understand its real character. The fundamental question of our time is whether we can go
beyond a system that is ravaging the Earth and secure a future with dignity for life and respect for the planet. What has capitalism done to us lately? The best
science tells us that this is a do-or-die moment. We
are now in the midst of the 6th mass extinction in the planetary
history with 150 to 200 species going extinct every day, a pace 1,000 times greater than the 'natural'
extinction rate.1 The Earth has been warming rapidly since the 1970s with the 10 warmest years on record
all occurring since 1998.2 The planet has already warmed by 0.85 degree Celsius since the industrial
revolution 150 years ago. An increase of 2° Celsius is the limit of what the planet can take before major
catastrophic consequences. Limiting global warming to 2°C requires reducing global emissions by 6% per
year. However, global carbon emissions from fossil fuels increased by about 1.5 times between 1990
and 2008.3 Capitalism has also led to explosive social inequalities. The global economic landscape is littered with rising
concentration of wealth, debt, distress, and immiseration caused by the austerity-pushing elites. Take the US. The richest 20 persons have as
much wealth as the bottom 150 million.4 Since 1973, the hourly wages of workers have lagged behind
worker productivity rates by more than 800%.5 It now takes the average family 47 years to make what a
hedge fund manager makes in one hour.6 Just about a quarter of children under the age of 5 live in
poverty.7 A majority of public school students are low-income.8 85% of workers feel stress on the job.9
Soon the only thing left of the American Dream will be a culture of hustling to survive. Take the global society.
The world's billionaires control $7 trillion, a sum 77 times the debt owed by Greece to the European banks.10
The richest 80 possess more than the combined wealth of the bottom 50% of the global population (3.5
billion people).11 By 2016 the richest 1% will own a greater share of the global wealth than the rest of us
combined.12 The top 200 global corporations wield twice the economic power of the bottom 80% of the
global population.13 Instead of a global society capitalism is creating a global apartheid. What's the nature of the
beast? Firstly, the "egotistical calculation" of commerce wins the day every time. Capital seeks maximum
profitability as a matter of first priority. Evermore "accumulation of capital" is the system's bill of health; it is slowdowns or reversals that
usher in crises and set off panic. Cancer-like hunger for endless growth is in the system's DNA and is what has set it on a tragic collision course with Nature, a finite
category. Secondly,
capitalism treats human labor as a cost. It therefore opposes labor capturing a fair share
of the total economic value that it creates. Since labor stands for the majority and capital for a tiny minority, it follows that classism and
class warfare are built into its DNA, which explains why the "middle class" is shrinking and its gains are never secure. Thirdly, private interests
determine massive investments and make key decisions at the point of production guided by
maximization of profits. That's why in the US the truck freight replaced the railroad freight, chemicals were used extensively in agriculture, public
transport was gutted in favor of private cars, and big cars replaced small ones. What should political action aim for today? The political class has no
good ideas about how to address the crises. One may even wonder whether it has a serious
understanding of the system, or at least of ways to ameliorate its consequences. The range of solutions offered tends to be of a technical,
legislative, or regulatory nature, promising at best temporary management of the deepening crises. The trajectory of the system, at any rate, precludes a return to
its post-WWII regulatory phase. It's left to us as a society to think about what the real character of the system is, where we are going, and how we are going to deal
with the trajectory of the system -- and act accordingly. The
critical task ahead is to build a transformative politics capable of
steering the system away from its destructive path. Given the system's DNA, such a politics from below must include efforts to
challenge the system's fundamentals, namely, its private mode of decision-making about investments and about what and how to produce. Furthermore, it
behooves us to heed the late environmentalist Barry Commoner's insistence on the efficacy of a strategy of prevention over a failed one of control or capture of
pollutants. At a lecture in 1991, Commoner remarked: "Environmental pollution is an incurable disease; it can only be prevented"; and he proceeded to refer to "a
law," namely: "if you don't put a pollutant in the environment it won't be there." What
is nearly certain now is that without
democratic control of wealth and social governance of the means of production, we will all be
condemned to the labor of Sisyphus. Only we won't have to suffer for all eternity, as the degradation of
life-enhancing natural and social systems will soon reach a point of no return.
Islamophobia
Neoliberal education is Islamophobic – it promotes a racist ideological revolution
against ‘Islamic terrorism’
Kabel 14 Ahmed Kabel (Al Akhawayan University, Morocco), 2014, Islamophobia Studies Journal “The
Islamophobia-Neoliberal-Educational Complex” http://f.hypotheses.org/wpcontent/blogs.dir/1460/files/2015/05/ISJ_2014-15_Fall_Issue_-Final_VolumeL.pdf#page=58
The Islamophobic-Neoliberal-Educational Complex epitomizes the ideological site in which American
neo-imperial designs in the Muslim world are enacted. It rests on the Islamophobic instrumentalization
of education and reform to institute a wide-ranging cultural and conceptual reconfiguration of the
Muslim world for global hegemony. This Complex operates at the intersection of American educational imperialism, Islamophobic
securitization and neoliberalization. One of the very early instances of this project was the White Revolution devised
by the Kennedy administration for the Shah of Iran to counteract the threat of a ‘red’ revolution in the
country. The ‘Revolution’ was meant to strengthen secularism, garner support for the Pahlavi regime and also importantly weaken the
clerical class. This benevolent educational ‘aid’ was conditioned on economic ‘modernization’ and the privatization of national assets (Dorn and
Ghodsee 2012, 387-388). These schemes of liberal-capitalist-oriented education were integral to the global scheme of the production of liberalcapitalist Last Man in the third world. This cultural reconversion has transmuted into the more gigantic project of producing the ‘Neoliberal
Man’, to which we shall now turn. The Islamophobic-Neoliberal-Educational Complex is hinged on two broad packages of neoliberalization as
antidotes to the ‘Muslim Threat’: neoliberalization from above and neoliberalization from below. The nexus of the ‘war on terror’ and
neoliberalization from above is epitomized in Bush I’s National Security Strategy. One fundamental fulcrum of the war on terror is to ‘ignite a
new era of global economic growth through free markets and free trade’ (White House 2002).
A necessary prelude to such free
market ignition is a global conflagration of violence, as Afghanistan and Iraq amply show in addition to
the numerous ‘invisible’ small wars around the globe (Scahill 2013). Embracing free trade and free markets holds
magnificent things in store for humanity, so we are promised. They generate prosperity and growth, a necessary endeavor for imprinting the
‘habits of liberty’ (White House 2002, 17). Shrouding imperial ambitions in the thick veil of high-sounding moral ideals is not an entirely novel
colonial ploy. In
tandem with global neoliberal restructuring, neoliberalization from below forms the
centerpiece of the ideological war for hearts and minds (and pockets) to de-radicalize young Muslims.
Neoliberalization in this context takes on a vast social and cultural dimension. It is not simply an economic dogma
concerned with the reshuffling of economic structures. It is a full-blown social program predicated on a set of ‘values’ and
predispositions congruent with the broader neoliberal project. The discourses and policy packages imposing ‘free trade’,
privatization, deregulation, the slashing of public spending, free market legal infrastructures at the top dovetail with the ‘grassroots’ social
programs foisting a slew of values smacking of a neoliberal ideology. These mainly concern individual choice, individual responsibility, initiative,
entrepreneurship, skills and freedom. Education then becomes the site where these laboratory experiments in neoliberal engineering are
carried out. The
aim of education in the neoliberal age is to improve the skills of the ‘labor force and the
population as a whole’ and enhance the propagation of ideas that boost ‘productivity and opportunity’
(National Endowment for Democracy 2012, 17). In the same vein, the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI), launched in the same spirit as
the NSS, subsumes among its goals ‘the development of skills that lead to job and opportunity’ and ‘promote entrepreneurship’ (US
Department of State 2008, 2). This should not be taken lightly as ‘economic populism’, so admonishes the National Endowment for Democracy.
This necessitates ‘fundamental institutional reforms that will … foster entrepreneurship, and promote changes in the educational system to
raise labor productivity and provide young people with the skills needed to compete in a global economy’. The strategic significance
of these neoliberal professions is not limited to the economic transformation they are meant to effect.
Their centrality lies precisely in the capacity to instigate a wider and long-term ideological revolution
against ‘Islamic terrorism’. In this regard, neoliberal ‘Education is the best hope of turning young people
away from violence and extremism’ (Center for Strategic and International Studies 2007, 37). Neoliberal education thus
functions as a bulwark against the ‘Islamic threat’, domesticating the minds of young Muslims and
inoculating their propensity for extremism. Neoliberalism meets education meets Islamophobia.
Alt Solvency
Refusing the “natural” desire for capital breaks down the ideology of neoliberalism.
Fisher, 13
(Mark- program leader of the MA in Aural and Visual Cultures @ Goldsmiths University of London, “How to kill a
zombie: strategizing the end of neoliberalism,” https://www.opendemocracy.net/mark-fisher/how-to-kill-zombiestrategizing-end-of-neoliberalism)
The emphasis on direct action, though, conceals a despair about the possibility of indirect action. Yet
it is via indirect action that the control of ideological narratives is achieved. Ideology isn’t about what
you or I spontaneously believe, but about what we believe that the Other believes – and this belief is still
determined to a large extent by the content of mainstream media.¶ Neo-anarchist doctrine maintains that we should abandon mainstream
media and parliament – but our abandoning it has only allowed the neoliberals to extend their power and influence. The neoliberal right might
preach the end of the state, but only while ensuring that it controls governments.¶ Only the horizontalist left believes the rhetoric about the
obsolescence of the state. The danger of the neo-anarchist critique is that it essentializes the state, parliamentary democracy and “mainstream
media” – but none of these things is forever fixed. They are mutable terrains to be struggled over, and the shape they now assume is itself the
effect of previous struggles. It seems, as times, as if the horizontalists want to occupy everything except parliament and the mainstream media.
But why not occupy the state and the media too? Neo-anarchism isn’t so much of a challenge to capitalist realism as it is one of its effects.
Anarchist fatalism – according to which it is easier to imagine the end of capitalism than a left-wing Labour Party – is the complement of the
capitalist realist insistence that there is no alternative to capitalism.¶ None of this is to say that occupying mainstream media or politics will be
enough in themselves. If New Labour taught us anything, it was that holding office is by no means the same thing as winning hegemony. Yet
without a parliamentary strategy of some kind, movements will keep foundering and collapsing. The task is to make the links between the
extra-parliamentary energies of the movements and the pragmatism of those within existing institutions.¶ Retrain ourselves to adopt a war
mentality ¶ If you want to consider the most telling drawback of horizontalism, though, think about how it looks from the perspective of the
enemy. Capital must be delighted by the popularity of horizontalist discourses in the anti-capitalist movement. Would you rather face a
carefully co-ordinated enemy, or one that takes decisions via nine-hour “assemblies”? ¶ Which isn’t to say that we should fall back into the
consoling fantasy that any kind of return to old school Leninism is either possible or desirable. The
fact that we have been left
with a choice between Leninism and anarchism is a measure of current leftist impotence.¶ It’s crucial
to leave behind this sterile binary. The struggle against authoritarianism needn’t entail neoanarchism, just as effective organization doesn’t necessarily require a Leninist party. What is required, however, is taking
seriously the fact that we are up against an enemy that has no doubt at all that it is in a class war, and which devotes many of
its enormous resources training its people to fight it. There’s a reason that MBA students read The Art of War and if we are to
make progress we have to rediscover the desire to win and the confidence that we can.¶ We must learn to overcome certain
habits of anti-Stalinist thinking. The danger is not any more, nor has it been for some time, excessive
dogmatic fervor on our side. Instead, the post-68 left has tended to overvalue the negative capability
of remaining in doubt, scepticism and uncertainties - this may be an aesthetic virtue, but it is a political vice. The
self-doubt that has been endemic on the left since the 60s is little in evidence on the right – one reason
that the right has been so successful in imposing its programme. Many on the left now quail at the thought of formulating a
programme, still less “imposing” one. But we have to give up on the belief that people will spontaneously
turn to the left, or that neoliberalism will collapse without our actively dismantling it. ¶ Rethink
solidarity¶ The old solidarity that neoliberalism decomposed has gone, never to return. But this does not mean that we are
consigned to atomized individualism. Our challenge now is to reinvent solidarity. Alex Williams has come up with the
suggestive formulation “post-Fordist plasticity” to describe what this new solidarity might look like. As Catherine Malabou has
shown, plasticity is not the same as elasticity. Elasticity is equivalent to the flexibility which neoliberalism
demands of us, in which we assume a form imposed from outside. But plasticity is something else: it
implies both adaptability and resilience, a capacity for modification which also retains a ‘memory’ of
previous encounters. Rethinking solidarity in these terms may help us to give up some tired assumptions. This kind of
solidarity doesn't necessarily entail overarching unity or centralized control. But moving beyond unity needn’t lead us into the
flatness of horizontalism, either. Instead of the rigidity of unity – the aspiration for which, ironically, has contributed to the
left’s notorious sectarianism - what we need is the co-ordination of diverse groups, resources and desires.
The right have been better postmodernists than us, building successful coalitions out of
heterogeneous interest groups without the need for an overall unity. We must learn from them, to
start to build a similar patchwork on our side. This is more a logistical problem than a philosophical one.¶ In addition to the
plasticity of organizational form, we need also to pay attention to the plasticity of desire. Freud said that the libidinal drives are
“extraordinarily plastic”. If desire is not a fixed biological essence, then there is no natural desire for
capitalism. Desire is always composed. Advertisers, branders and PR consultants have always known this, and the struggle
against neoliberalism will require that we construct an alternative model of desire that can compete
with the one pushed by capital’s libidinal technicians.¶ What’s certain is that we are now in an
ideological wasteland in which neoliberalism is dominant only by default. The terrain is up for grabs, and
Friedman’s remark should be our inspiration: it is now our task to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive
and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.
Movements against neoliberalism can solve – they have produced new methods of
organizing space and governance
Harvey, 11
(Ryan, writer, an organizer with the Civilian-Soldier Alliance, “Globalization” Is Coming Home: Protests Spread as
Financial Institutions Target Global North”, Thursday 27 October 2011, http://www.truth-out.org/world-finallyfighting-infection-neoliberalism/1320164620?q=globalization-coming-home-protests-spread-financial-institutionstarget-global-north/1319721791)
Though it reads like a mystical story of upheaval, to say that the protests in Europe or Wisconsin were
“inspired by” the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia is only half true; they were inspired by the successful
protests, but they were also pushed forward by similar conditions being imposed on them by many of
the same institutions. There can be no denying that there is a strong, energetic relationship between the
Arab Spring and all of these movements that have emerged since then. However, it is a relationship that mostly
exists through consciousness rather than direct communication, and has manifested as a series of
movements that are globally understood to be linked, much like the “movement of movements” of the “antiglobalization” years. Though the Indignados knew little of the Wisconsin protests, their movement bore
many similarities to it in terms of organization, demands, disagreement over vague or direct purpose,
size, and relations with the community. In both Madison and Barcelona, a few hundred people remaining in a fixed
location with little previous organizational connections brought hundreds of thousands of people together on multiple
occasions. In both cities, a shared space became an epicenter of cultural and social change. And in both
cities, after a little over a month, the protests disintegrated with a mixture of success and shortcoming.
In reflection, participants from both movements feel everything from celebration to confused defeat, some believing their
actions did not push hard enough, others seeing them as the early stages only for future events. Shortcomings aside, the
Indignados, the movement in Wisconsin and the protests now spreading from Wall Street expose a new, directly
democratic, non-dogmatic politic, one that has been clearly inspired by movements of the last ten years,
but which also includes a wide variety of people with a range of political affiliations and visions. Perhaps the main
characteristic of all of these movements, and their main strength, is the creation of social spaces in
which movements can host dialogue and experience fast-paced social changes and collective
transformation. This is why Tahrir Square became a symbol, and why the Capitol in Wisconsin and the Plaça Catalunya
became sites to defend and celebrate. Whereas many movements struggle constantly to find collective space, usually through
the hosting of regular marches or demonstrations, the establishment of such spaces as the encampments in the Plaça
Catalunya or at Occupy Wall Street, allows for a more rapid sense of power to develop, often leading to a more
horizontal arrangement of power within a movement. They also create space for real debate and
dialogue around issues of power and privilege. A number of essays and videos discussing race, sexism, class privilege,
and homophobia within the “occupation movement” have gone viral over the last two weeks. Interestingly, almost all of these
have been written with a sense of urgency, not to discredit the occupations, but to urge those participating to push them to
new levels, to move them beyond their traditional comfort zones, to help them grow by ensuring they take on issues that have
historically killed emerging social movements in the United States. Such collectively organized spaces, with their
rejection of traditional leadership models and their emphasis on the empowerment of their participants,
have the capacity to become key focal points of transformation for this generation. That is, if their participants
are able to recognize their shared power and learn from the needed critique mentioned above. Perhaps they will, as has Egypt’s
Tahrir Square, become both the symbols and sites of global revolt against the neoliberal economies of the corporate-era. Of
course, there are still many battles ahead, but it is certain that what happens next in New York may be influential
throughout the world. It seems accurate to say that right now, the whole world really is watching.
AT: Perm
The alternative reframes politics as educative – this is necessary to reclaim agency in
order to challenge elite control. The permutation is a type of reform that still plays
into dominant notions of politics – only a politics that is counter to the norm can
solve.
Giroux, 14
(Henry A. Giroux, Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a
Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. Neoliberalism and the Machinery of Disposability
(Tuesday, 08 April 2014 09:24 By Henry A Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed))
As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, the biggest threat to the Gilded Age autocrats is solidarity . . . Before
this dangerously authoritarian mindset has a chance to take hold of our collective imagination and
animate our social institutions, it is crucial that all Americans think critically and ethically about the
coercive forces shaping US culture - and focus our energy on what can be done to change them. It will not be enough
only to expose the falseness of the propaganda pumped out by the commanding neoliberal cultural apparatuses. We also
need to create alternative narratives about what the promise of democracy might be for our children
and ourselves. This demands a break from established political parties, the creation of alternative public
spheres in which to produce democratic narratives and visions, and a notion of politics that is educative,
one that takes seriously how people interpret and mediate the world, how they see themselves in relation to others, and what
it might mean to imagine otherwise in order to act otherwise. At stake here is more than a call for reform. The
American public needs to organize around a revolutionary ideal that enables people to hold power, participate in the process of
governing, and create public institutions and discourses capable of explaining and reversing chronic injustices and power
relations evident everywhere in society. This is a revolution that not only calls for structural change, but for a
transformation in the ways in which subjectivities are created, desires are produced, and agency itself is
safeguarded as crucial to any viable notions of community and freedom. Democracy requires, at the very least, a type of
education that fosters a working knowledge of citizenship and the development of individuals with the capacity to be selfreflective, passionate about the collective good, and able to defend the means by which ideas are translated into the worldly
space of the public realm. It is not enough to wait for the Occupy Movement to revitalize itself. [23] That is important, but is too
limited a call for change. Such a struggle is impossible without an alliance among unions, working people, students, youth,
educators, feminists, environmentalists and intellectuals. In particular, organized labor, students, educators, and youth have to
provide the base of a broader organization and social movement designed to dismantle casino capitalism. Such an alliance has
to be built around defending the common good, public values, economic and racial justice and environmental sustainability. As
Noam Chomsky has pointed out, the biggest threat to the Gilded Age autocrats is solidarity and rightly so . The time has
come for a surge of opposition in the name of democracy, one designed to save the planet from
destruction and for a social order in which economic justice is matched with a reverence for care for the
other. Politics becomes meaningless without a vision, a willingness to develop a radical collective
imagination rooted in a formative culture that nourishes a vibrant sense of critique, civic courage, and sustained
collective struggle. Any struggle that matters will have to reimagine and fight for a society in which it becomes possible once
again to dream the project of a substantive democracy. This means, as Ulrich Beck has pointed out, looking for politics in
new spaces and arenas outside of traditional elections, political parties, and "duly authorized agents." [24] It suggests
developing public spaces outside of the regime of predatory corporatism and engaging in a type of
counter politics that shapes society from the bottom up.
Government reform is not enough to dismantle the inequalities caused by Neoliberal
regimes
Jeffrey A.
Winters 2011 (PROFESSOR, DIRECTOR OF THE EQUALITY DEVELOPMENT AND GLOBALIZATION STUDIES (EDGS) PROGRAM AT NORTHWESTERN
UNIVERSITY; Oligarchy In The U.S.A.- How The Wealth Defense Industry Protects The Ultra-Rich: The .0001% “Oligarchy, or Democracy?”; The Oldspeak Journal)
To argue that the United States is a thriving oligarchy does not imply that our democracy is a sham: There are
many policies about
which oligarchs have no shared interests. Their influence in these areas is either small or mutually canceling. Though it may
strike at the heart of elitism, greater democratic participation is not an antidote to oligarchic power. It is
merely a potential threat. Only when participation challenges material inequality – when extreme wealth is
redistributed – do oligarchy and democracy finally clash. The answer to the question of inequality, then, is troubling.
Wars and revolutions have destroyed oligarchies by forcibly dispersing their wealth, but a democracy
never has. Democracy and the rule of law can, however, tame oligarchs. A campaign to tame oligarchs is a struggle
unlikely to fire the spirits of those outraged by the profound injustices between rich and poor. However,
to those enduring the economic and political burdens of living among wild oligarchs, it is an achievement that can improve the absolute welfare
of average citizens, even if the relative gap between them and oligarchs widens rather than narrows. A graduate student in one of my seminars
– resisting my terminology – once declared that the “U.S. has rich people, not oligarchs.” More than anything else, that statement claims that
somehow American democracy has managed to do something no other political system in history ever has: strip the holders of extreme wealth
of their inherent power resources and the political interests linked to protecting those fortunes. Of course, this hasn’t happened. But it is
endlessly fascinating that we’re now in a moment when Americans are once again asking fundamental questions about how the oligarchic
power of wealth distorts and outflanks the democratic power of participation.
AT: FW
Engaging institutions is doomed to fail – market logic necessitates authoritarianism.
Only the alternative can create true democratic engagement.
Giroux 13
(Henry Giroux, currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the
English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University,
“Hope in the Age of Looming Authoritarianism,” 02 December 2013, http://www.truthout.org/opinion/item/20307-hope-in-the-age-of-looming-authoritarianism#_edn2)
The language of the market now offers the primary index of what possibilities the future may hold,
while jingoistic nationalism and racism register its apocalyptic underbelly. As a market economy
becomes synonymous with a market society, democracy becomes both the repressed scandal of
neoliberalism and its ultimate fear.[vi] In such a society, cynicism replaces hope, public life
collapses into the ever-encroaching domain of the private while social ills and human suffering
become more difficult to identify, understand, and engage critically. Zygmunt Bauman points
out that "the exit from politics and withdrawal behind the fortified walls of the private" means not
only that society has stopped questioning itself but also that those discourses, social relations and
public spaces in which people can speak, exercise, and develop the capacities and skills necessary
for critically encountering the world atrophy and disappear.[vii] The result is that "in our
contemporary world, post 9/11, crisis and exception [have] become routine, and war, deprivation,
and [the machineries of death] intensify despite ever denser networks of humanitarian aid and ever
more rights legislation."[viii]¶ In addition, the depoliticization of politics and the increasing
transformation of the social state into the punishing state have rendered possible the emergence of
a new mode of authoritarianism in which the fusion of power and violence increasingly
permeates all aspects of government and everyday life.[ix] This mad violence creates an intensifying cycle rendering citizens' political activism
dangerous, if not criminal. On the domestic and foreign fronts, violence is the most prominent feature of dominant ideology, policies and governance. Soldiers are idealized, violence
becomes an omniscient form of entertainment pumped endlessly into the culture, wars become the primary organizing principle for shaping relations abroad, and a corrosive and
deeply rooted pathology becomes not the mark of a few individuals but of a society that, as Erich Fromm once pointed out, becomes entirely insane.[x] Hannah Arendt's "dark times"
the concentrated power of the corporate, financial, political, economic and cultural elite
have created a society that has become a breeding ground for psychic disturbances and a pathology
that has become normalized. Greed, inequality and oppressive power relations have generated the
death of the collective democratic imagination.¶ Howard Zinn wrote in the early 1970s that the
"world is topsy-turvy, that things are all wrong, that the wrong people are in jail and the wrong
people are out of jail, that the wrong people are in power and the wrong people are out of power,
that the wealth is distributed in this country . . . in such a way as not simply to require small
reform but to require a drastic reallocation of wealth."[xi] Zinn's words are more prescient today than when he wrote them more
have arrived as
than 40 years ago. As American society becomes more militarized, civil liberties are under siege at all levels of government. Bush and Obama have participated in illegal legalities
instituting state torture and targeted assassinations, among other violations. At the local level, police all over the country are expanding their powers going so far as to subject people
to invasive body searches, even when they had been stopped for only minor traffic violations. One man in New Mexico was stopped for failing to come to a complete stop at a stop sign.
On the baseless claim of harboring drugs, he was taken to a hospital and underwent, without consent, eight anal cavity searches, including a colonoscopy.[xii] No drugs were found.
When the police believe they have the right to issue warrants that allow doctors to perform enemas and colonoscopies without consent and anyone can be seized for such barbarous
practices, domestic terrorism takes on a new and perilous meaning. Similarly, young people are being arrested in record numbers in schools that have become holding centers for lowincome and minority youths.[xiii]¶ Growing inequality in wealth and income have destroyed any vestige of democracy in America.[xiv] Twenty individuals in the United States,
including the infamous Koch brothers, have a total net worth of more than half a trillion dollars, about $26 billion each, while "4 out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near
poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives."[xv] More than 40 percent of recent college graduates are living with their parents while mega corporations and wealthy
We blame the poor, homeless, unemployed and recent graduates suffocating
under financial debt for their plight as if individual responsibility explains the ballooning gap
in wealth, income and power and the growing state violence that supports it. Poor people end up in debtor jail for not paying parking tickets or their bills while the corrupt
farmers get huge government subsidies.
heads of banks, hedge funds and other financial services who engage in all manner of corruption and crime, swindling billions from the public coffers, are rarely prosecuted to the full
The new global market tyranny has no language for promoting the social good,
public well-being and social responsibility over the omniscient demands of self-interest, crippling the
extent of the law.[xvi]¶
radical imagination with its relentless demands for instant pleasure, a compulsive pursuit of materialism and a Hobbesian belief in war-of-all-against all ethic. Increasingly, the social
and cultural landscapes of America resemble the merging of malls and prisons. American life suffers from the toxin of socially adrift possessive, individualism and a debilitating notion
of freedom and privatization. Both of which feed into the rise of the surveillance and punishing state with its paranoiac visions of absolute control of the commanding heights of power
and its utter fear of those considered disposable, excess and capable of questioning authority.¶ Authoritarianism has a long shadow and refuses simply to disappear into the pages of a
fixed and often forgotten history. We are currently observing how its long and dynamic reach extends from the dictatorships of Latin America in the 1970s to the current historical
moment in the United States. We witness its darkness in the market ideologies, modes of disappearance, state-sanctioned torture, kill lists, drone murders of innocent civilians, attacks
on civil liberties, prosecutions of whistleblowers and the rise of a mass incarceration state that now connects us to the horrors that took place in the dictatorships in Chile, Argentina
and Uruguay. I was reminded of this recently when I received a passionate and insightful letter from Dr. Adriana Pesci, who offers this warning to Americans by drawing on the
I have also noticed the ongoing creation, by
people such as you, of a new language designed to counteract the offensive of the neoliberal
system. Latin America started going through this process some 15 years ago, and is still at it, at much human cost and after a horrendous history of repression and torture that
horrors of the killing machine that fueled the military dictatorship in Argentina. She writes:¶
dates from some 35 or 40 years back. The centurions of the system are very unimaginative and their responses are very predictable once you studied them for a while. This is how it
was possible for many left leaning Latin Americans to know by early 2003, and before the debacle of Abu Graib was made public, that the American forces' use of systematic torture in
Iraq was sanctioned from the top down, and that there were no excesses or errors ("excess,""errors" were those same words used by the dictatorships throughout Latin America).¶ In
the past few years, and because I follow the news regularly, I have noticed a slow but steady evolution of the United States towards what I can only call a variation on a theme. It
reminds me of my past as a very young person in Argentina, the same methods, the same words, the same excuses. I wish I could warn those at risk. I wish to pass along what I know,
I would like to believe that our experiences can be used by others to make their
suffering less, and I would like to believe, that the language that was created to describe, denounce
and punish what was done to us in the name of neoliberalism and development is the patrimony of
humankind and it is there to be used to defend ourselves from the attacks of a dehumanizing
system that would like to chew us, ground us to a pulp and spit us all.[xvii]¶ Historical
consciousness matters because it illuminates, if not holds up to critical scrutiny, those forms of
tyranny and modes of authoritarianism that now parade as common sense, popular wisdom or
just plain certainty. In this case, the American public will not repeat history as farce (as Marx once
suggested) but as a momentous act of systemic violence, suffering and domestic warfare. If the act
of critical translation is crucial to a democratic politics, it faces a crisis of untold proportions in the
United States. In part, this is because we are witnessing the deadening reduction of the citizen to a
consumer of services and goods that empties politics of substance by stripping citizens of their
political skills, offering up only individual solutions to social problems and dissolving all
obligations and sense of responsibility for the other in an ethos of unchecked individualism and a narrowly privatized linguistic universe.
because I have a sense of foreboding.
The logic of the commodity penetrates all aspects of life while the most important questions driving society no longer seem concerned about matters of equity, social justice and the
fate of the common good. The most important choice now facing most people is no longer about living a life with dignity and freedom but facing the grim choice between survival and
As the government deregulates and outsources key aspects of governance, turning over the
provisions of collective insurance, security and care to private institutions and market-based forces,
it undermines the social contract, while "the present retreat of the state from the endorsement of
social rights signals the falling apart of a community in its modern, 'imagined' yet institutionally
safeguarded incarnation."[xviii]Moreover, as social institutions give way to machines of allembracing surveillance and containment, social provisions disappear, the exclusionary logic of
ethnic, racial and religious divisions render more individuals and groups disposable, excluded from
public life - languishing in prisons, dead-end jobs or the deepening pockets of poverty - and
effectively prevented from engaging in politics in any meaningful capacity. The specters of human suffering, misfortune and misery caused by
dying.¶
social problems are now replaced with the morally bankrupt neoliberal discourses of personal safety and individual responsibility. At the same time, those who are considered
"problems," excess or disposable disappear into prisons and the bowels of the correctional system. The larger implications that gesture toward a new authoritarianism are clear.
Angela Davis captures this in her comment that "according to this logic the prison becomes a way of disappearing people in the false hope of disappearing the underlying social
The invisibility of power feeds ignorance, if not complicity itself. Under such
circumstances, politics seems to take place elsewhere - in globalized regimes of power that are
indifferent to traditional political geographies, such as the nation state, and hostile to any notion
of collective responsibility to address human suffering and social problems.¶
problems they represent."[xix]
AT: Cede the Political
Individual freedom and agency are a myth under neoliberalism – it is a guise for elite
control and the suppression of public dialogue.
Roy Karadag 2010 ( Post-Doctoral Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne. Neoliberal restructuring in
Turkey: From state to oligarchic capitalism “Introduction”)
For more than three decades, countries around the world have been coping, more or less effectively, with pressures to establish a market-based economy.
Transformations in the current age of neoliberalism challenged the Fordist growth models of the postWorld War II era and put an
end to Keynesian economic policies in both industrialized and late developing countries. The end of the Bretton Woods
international financial architecture and the oil price revolutions in the 1970s set the stage for the translation of neoclassical ideas into the economic policies known
as “Reaganomics” and “Thatcherism” in the 1980s and into the discourses and practices of the international financial institutions (IFIs). We
may go so far
as to conclude that the phase of “embedded liberalism” (Ruggie 1982) was succeeded by an era of
embedded neoliberalism in which the contradictions of global capitalism are veiled by the hegemonic
ideology of individual freedom and prosperity, reminiscent of the first “Age of Capital” (Hobsbawm 1975) in the nineteenth
century.1 In contrast to the challenges facing the capitalist democracies of the West, these changes exerted much higher adaptation pressures
on late developing countries. The high interest-rate policy of the United States further aggravated the foreign debt problems of most
developing countries. In the early 1980s, the IFIs began to enforce structural adjustment programs which were designed not only to overcome
the short-term financial crises of those countries, but also to initiate systemic changes towards export-oriented and market-based economic
orders. The policies bundled in the so-called “Washington consensus” (Williamson 1990) were intended to liberalize inward-oriented
economies, with the intended effect that the rules and mechanisms of world market competition would finally erase the efficiency-inhibiting
measures of the state.
However, as can be seen three decades after that shift began, neither in
industrialized Western OECD countries nor in late developing countries did these globalization pressures
lead to the expected result of convergence towards a liberal market economy. The countries affected did
not resort to the economists’ standard responses of state withdrawal and market liberalization. On the contrary,
even though the pressures on national economic models are obviously present, the results of the reform paths
actually pursued are much more divergent than neoclassical economists could have imagined. The reasons for this
divergence are many and arise from specific political, socio-economic, and cultural contexts. Accordingly, the
explanation presented here is a historical-institutionalist account of Turkish capitalism. I argue that what
emerged in Turkey’s twentieth-century capitalist development was a state capitalist economic order,
institutionalized and controlled by new nationalist state elites in the 1920s and 1930s. Similar to other late
developers, the state bureaucracy operated as the original source of capitalist accumulation. Through top-down
structured corporatist arrangements, linked to the new variety of ethnonationalist identities, state
elites sought to maintain social control in a rapidly changing and industrializing socio-economic
environment. The inherent dynamism resulted from the introduction of representative, electoral-democratic institutions
that slowly undermined the position of state elites. Efforts by “Kemalist” elites to regain control of the political process and
economic developments did not manage to reshape the national arena. The political and economic crisis dynamics of the late
1970s were resolved by the decision, backed by the Turkish Armed Forces, to dismantle the state capitalist framework and to
introduce liberal economic restructuring reforms. However, if we must interpret the post-1980 transformations,
we can conclude that those reforms resulted in the emergence of what is here labeled “oligarchic
capitalism.” The fragmentation of the political arena, the end of corporatist social control, and the establishment of
new, closed elite political business cartels that capture the state represent the crucial elements of
oligarchic dynamics that have undermined state power and institutional trust. The outcome of neoliberal restructuring experiments, therefore, depends
crucially on preexisting and changing power structures and relations in the course of state transformations. These recent changes have to be framed within a
historical-institutional explanation of where these power structures and change dynamics come from. In this paper, based on arguments concerning the political
embeddedness of economies, they are linked to the emergence and erosion of Turkey’s state capitalist model. Only by depicting historically grown power structures
is it possible to assess the impact of the most recent phase of financial regulation under the moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party, led by Prime Minister
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Unsustainable
We are in a period of gradual economic decay- neolib is unsustainable
Streek, 14
(Wolfgang, “How Will Capitalism End?” New Left Review 2014, http://newleftreview.org/II/87/wolfgangstreeck-how-will-capitalism-end)
There is a widespread sense today that capitalism is in critical condition, more so than at any time
since the end of the Second World War. [1] Looking back, the crash of 2008 was only the latest in a
long sequence of political and economic disorders that began with the end of postwar prosperity in
the mid-1970s. Successive crises have proved to be ever more severe, spreading more widely and
rapidly through an increasingly interconnected global economy. Global inflation in the 1970s was followed by
rising public debt in the 1980s, and fiscal consolidation in the 1990s was accompanied by a steep increase in private-sector
indebtedness. [2] For four decades now, disequilibrium has more or less been the normal condition of the ‘advanced’ industrial
the crises of postwar OECD capitalism have
become so pervasive that they have increasingly been perceived as more than just economic in
nature, resulting in a rediscovery of the older notion of a capitalist society—of capitalism as a social
order and way of life, vitally dependent on the uninterrupted progress of private capital
accumulation.¶ Crisis symptoms are many, but prominent among them are three long-term trends in
the trajectories of rich, highly industrialized—or better, increasingly deindustrialized—capitalist
countries. The first is a persistent decline in the rate of economic growth, recently aggravated by the
events of 2008 (Figure 1, below). The second, associated with the first, is an equally persistent rise in
overall indebtedness in leading capitalist states, where governments, private households and non-financial as well
as financial firms have, over forty years, continued to pile up financial obligations (for the US, see Figure 2, below). Third,
economic inequality, of both income and wealth, has been on the ascent for several decades now
(Figure 3, below), alongside rising debt and declining growth. Steady growth, sound money and a modicum of social equity,
world, at both the national and the global levels. In fact, with time,
spreading some of the benefits of capitalism to those without capital, were long considered prerequisites for a capitalist
political economy to command the legitimacy it needs. What must be most alarming from this perspective is that the three
critical trends I have mentioned may be mutually reinforcing. There is mounting evidence that increasing inequality may
be one of the causes of declining growth, as inequality both impedes improvements in productivity
and weakens demand. Low growth, in turn, reinforces inequality by intensifying distributional conflict,
making concessions to the poor more costly for the rich, and making the rich insist more than before on strict observance of the
‘Matthew principle’ governing free markets: ‘For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but
from him that hath not shall be taken even that which he hath.’ [3] Furthermore, rising debt, while failing to halt the decline of
economic growth, compounds inequality through the structural changes associated with financialization—which in turn aimed
to compensate wage earners and consumers for the growing income inequality caused by stagnant wages and cutbacks in
public services.¶ Can what appears to be a vicious circle of harmful trends continue forever? Are there counterforces that might
break it—and what will happen if they fail to materialize, as they have for almost four decades now? Historians inform us that
crises are nothing new under capitalism, and may in fact be required for its longer-term health. But what they are talking about
are cyclical movements or random shocks, after which capitalist economies can move into a new equilibrium, at least
temporarily. What we are seeing today, however, appears in retrospect to be a continuous process of
gradual decay, protracted but apparently all the more inexorable. Recovery from the occasional Reinigungskrise is one
thing; interrupting a concatenation of intertwined, long-term trends quite another. Assuming that ever lower growth,
ever higher inequality and ever rising debt are not indefinitely sustainable, and may together issue in a crisis
that is systemic in nature—one whose character we have difficulty imagining—can we see signs of an impending reversal?
Collapse of neoliberalism is inevitable because of economic and environmental
trends – multiple structural trends make resuscitation impossible, which means
its try-or-die for the alt
Li, 10
(Minqi, Chinese Political Economist, world-systems analyst, and historical social scientist, currently an
associate professor of Economics at the University of Utah “The End of the “End of History”: The
Structural Crisis of Capitalism and the Fate of Humanity”, Science and Society Vol. 74, No. 3, July 2010,
290–305)
In 2001, the U. S. stock market bubble started to collapse, after years of “new economy” boom. The
Bush administration took advantage of the psychological shock of 9/11, and undertook a series of
“preemptive wars” (first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq) that ushered in a new era of intensified inter-state conflicts.
Towards the end of 2001, Argentina, which was regarded as a neoliberal model country, was hit by a
devastating financial crisis. Decades of neoliberalism had not only undermined the living standards of the working classes,
but also destroyed the material fortunes of the urban middle classes (which remained a key social base for neoliberalism in
Latin America until the 1990s). After the Argentine crisis, neoliberalism completely lost political legitimacy in
Latin America. This paved the way for the rise of several socialist-oriented governments on the
continent. After the 2001 global recession, the global economy actually entered into a mini–golden age.
The big semi-peripheral economies, the so-called “BRICs” (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) became the
most dynamic sector. The neoliberal global economy was fueled by the super-exploitation of the
massive cheap labor force in the semi-periphery (especially in China). The strategy worked, to the extent
that it generated massive amounts of surplus value that could be shared by the global capitalist classes.
But it also created a massive “realization problem.” That is, as the workers in the “emerging markets”
were deprived of purchasing power, on a global scale, there was a persistent lack of effective demand
for the industrial output produced in China and the rest of the semi-periphery. After 2001, the problem
was addressed through increasingly higher levels of debt-financed consumption in the advanced
capitalist countries (especially in the United States). The neoliberal strategy was economically and
ecologically unsustainable. Economically, the debt-financed consumption in the advanced capitalist
countries could not go on indefinitely. Ecologically, the rise of the BRICs greatly accelerated resource
depletion and environmental degradation on a global scale. The global ecological system is now on the
verge of total collapse. The world is now in the midst of a prolonged period of economic and political
instability that could last several decades. In the past, the capitalist world system had responded to
similar crises and managed to undertake successful restructurings. Is it conceivable that the current crisis will
result in a similar restructuring within the system that will bring about a new global “New Deal”? In three respects, the
current world historical conjuncture is fundamentally different from that of 1945. Back in 1945, the
United States was the indisputable hegemonic power. It enjoyed overwhelming industrial, financial, and military
advantages relative to the other big powers and, from the capitalist point of view, its national interests largely coincided with
the world system’s common and long-term interests. Now, U. S. hegemony is in irreversible decline. But none of
the other big powers is in a position to replace the United States and function as an effective hegemonic
power. Thus, exactly at a time when the global capitalist system is in deep crisis, the system is also
deprived of effective leadership.4 In 1945, the construction of a global “New Deal” involved primarily
accommodating the economic and political demands of the western working classes and the nonwestern elites (the national bourgeoisies and the westernized intellectuals). In the current conjuncture,
any new global “New Deal” will have to incorporate not only the western working classes but also the
massive, non-western working classes. Can the capitalist world system afford such a new “New Deal” if
it could not even afford the old one? Most importantly, back in 1945, the world’s resources remained
abundant and cheap, and there was still ample global space for environmental pollution. Now, not only
has resource depletion reached an advanced stage, but the world has also virtually run out of space for
any further environmental pollution.
Aff
Framing
Methods shouldn’t come first – they are a means to an end. Elevating them ignores
real world impacts
Fearon and Wendt 2000
(James, Professor of Poli Sci at Stanford, Alexander, Professor of IR at Ohio State, Handbook of
International Relations, ed. Carlsnaes, p. 68)
It should be stressed that in advocating a pragmatic view we are not endorsing method-driven social science. Too
much research in international relations chooses problems of things to be explained with a view to whether the
analysis will provide support for one or another methodological “ism”. But the point of IR scholarship should
be to answer questions about international politics that are of great normative concern, not to
validate methods. Methods are means, not ends in themselves. As a matter of personal scholarly choice it
may reasonable to stick with one method and see how far it takes us. But since we do not know how far that is, if
the goal of the discipline is insight into world politics then it makes little sense to rule out one or the
other approach on a priori grounds. In that case a method indeed becomes a tacit ontology, which
may lead to neglect of whatever problems it is poorly suited to address. Being conscious about these
choices is why it is important to distinguish between the ontological, empirical, and pragmatic levels of the
rationalist – constructivist debate. We favor the pragmatic approach on heuristic grounds, but we
certainly believe a conversation should continue on all three levels.
Extinction outweighs structural violence.
Bostrum, 12
(Professor of Philosophy at Oxford, directs Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute and winner of the Gannon Award,
Interview with Ross Andersen, correspondent at The Atlantic, 3/6 [Nick. “We're Underestimating the Risk of
Human Extinction”. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/were-underestimating-the-risk-ofhuman-extinction/253821/])
Bostrom, who directs Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, has argued over the course of several
papers that human extinction risks are poorly understood and, worse still, severely underestimated
by society. Some of these existential risks are fairly well known, especially the natural ones. But
others are obscure or even exotic. Most worrying to Bostrom is the subset of existential risks that
arise from human technology, a subset that he expects to grow in number and potency over the next
century. Despite his concerns about the risks posed to humans by technological progress, Bostrom is
no luddite. In fact, he is a longtime advocate of transhumanism---the effort to improve the human
condition, and even human nature itself, through technological means. In the long run he sees
technology as a bridge, a bridge we humans must cross with great care, in order to reach new and
better modes of being. In his work, Bostrom uses the tools of philosophy and mathematics, in
particular probability theory, to try and determine how we as a species might achieve this safe
passage. What follows is my conversation with Bostrom about some of the most interesting and
worrying existential risks that humanity might encounter in the decades and centuries to come, and
about what we can do to make sure we outlast them. Some have argued that we ought to be
directing our resources toward humanity's existing problems, rather than future existential risks,
because many of the latter are highly improbable. You have responded by suggesting that existential
risk mitigation may in fact be a dominant moral priority over the alleviation of present suffering.
Can you explain why? Bostrom: Well suppose you have a moral view that counts future people as
being worth as much as present people. You might say that fundamentally it doesn't matter whether
someone exists at the current time or at some future time, just as many people think that from a
fundamental moral point of view, it doesn't matter where somebody is spatially---somebody isn't
automatically worth less because you move them to the moon or to Africa or something. A human
life is a human life. If you have that moral point of view that future generations matter in proportion
to their population numbers, then you get this very stark implication that existential risk mitigation
has a much higher utility than pretty much anything else that you could do. There are so many
people that could come into existence in the future if humanity survives this critical period of time--we might live for billions of years, our descendants might colonize billions of solar systems, and there
could be billions and billions times more people than exist currently. Therefore, even a very small
reduction in the probability of realizing this enormous good will tend to outweigh even immense
benefits like eliminating poverty or curing malaria, which would be tremendous under ordinary
standards.
HR Link turn
Human rights exists outside of neoliberal economics and can be used as leverage
against it.
Moyn, 14
(Samuel – prof of law & history @ Harvard, “A Powerless Companion: Human Rights in the Age of Neoliberalism,”
http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4711&context=lcp)
“Neoliberalism,” especially in leftist discourse, often does massive work in diverse settings of argument, coming close
through its overuse to functioning as a call for explanation rather than the real thing. And with its moral charge, it is
sometimes deployed like holy water, sprinkled liberally for safety’s sake to ward off evil. Although its
rise as an item of discourse and apotropaic talisman reflects understandable anger, it is also
symptomatic of explanatory confusion.11 Nonetheless, as David Singh Grewal and Jedediah Purdy indicate in their
introduction to this issue, citing an inadequate shorthand for the complex of individualist thought, market solutions, and state
retrenchment both domestically and internationally is better than omitting these topics altogether, as American legal
scholarship has so far done to its detriment.12 But looking beyond America, the prominence of neoliberalism as a
category in scholarship about human rights means that the exact nature of the linkage of the two
requires as much attention as the omission of the former from thinking about the latter. “Human rights,
as with power and money, became a means to an end of globalizing neoliberal democracy,” Stephen Hopgood remarks in his
much noticed recent study, in a commonplace observation.13 And yet,
so far, Marxists such as Wendy Brown, Susan Marks,
and others have offered indeterminate and unsubstantiated claims that do not suffice to plausibly
elevate the chronological coincidence of human rights and neoliberalism into a factually plausible
syndrome. For there is a long way from historical “coincidence” or companionship—which there
certainly has been between neoliberalism and the human rights phenomenon—to actual causality and
complicity. “We would do well to take the measure of whether and how the centrality of human rights discourse might render .
. . other political possibilities more faint,” Brown has argued in a classic indictment at the center of the recent commentary.14
Even this displacement theory, about which Brown explicitly invites further reflection rather than offering a strong conclusion,
is weak compared to the much stronger accusation of complicity that Brown and others simultaneously offer. Though it seems
likely that some displacement of other schemes of justice has indeed occurred thanks to the rise of human rights, I do not think
a much stronger claim is likely to work.16 To say that human rights were coincident with or part of the context
of neoliberal victory is not only not to say more—it is also not to say much. In particular, it is not to say that
neoliberalism has required human rights to make its way in the world—or vice versa. Picayune an agenda as it
might seem to specify how weakly related the ascent of human rights appears to the market fundamentalism of our time, I
suggest that the finding of only a tenuous relationship between the two has substantial ramifications for judging human rights
and their spectacular rise in the last few decades—and thus for assessing the mainstream position. Excusing human rights from
causally abetting the free market victory of the neoliberal age is, after all, no defense of their prominence today. It is
certainly worth considering the possibility that human rights provide some sort of moral leverage
against neoliberal developments. However, even if the value of the normative guidance that human rights provide is
undoubted, the trouble is that it amounts to little more than a set of mostly rhetorical admonitions. Worse, by focusing on a
minimum floor of human protection, human rights norms prove inadequate in facing the reality that neoliberalism has
damaged equality locally and globally much more than it has basic human rights outcomes (which, in some cases, it may indeed
have advanced). It is hardly less distressing, but, so far, much more justifiable to conclude that human rights have not
made enough of a difference in the short timeframe and global space they share with their neoliberal
frère ennemi. They have been condemned to watch but have been powerless to deter. Added to the fact that human rights
at least as canonically established have nothing to say about the principal value of equality that neoliberalism threatens, it
seems hard to conclude that they are a useful resource in response. If my perspective in between Marxism and the mainstream
is adequate, it also follows that there is not much critical or political value in opposing human rights out of
understandable outrage at neoliberalism. Instead, the economic transformations of the current era
force a heavy burden on those concerned to formulate or to find a more serious analytical account of
economic transformations and to offer more robust political resistance than they have marshaled so
far. And since human rights idioms, approaches, and movements are unlikely to offer either—and, indeed, do not
strive to do so when it comes to inequality—they should stick to their minimalist tasks outside the
socioeconomic domain, in part to avoid drawing fire for abetting the stronger companion of their historical epoch.
Human rights is ideologically unrelated to neolib - At most they will win human rights
and neolib share a historical period
Moyn, 14
(Samuel – prof of law & history @ Harvard, “A Powerless Companion: Human Rights in the Age of
Neoliberalism,” http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4711&context=lcp)
After all, neoliberal capitalism is a specific episode in the history of capitalism that Marx never knew.
More important for my purposes here, today, human rights are often self-consciously presented (though not with great
plausibility, as I ultimately argue) as a force that can or will moderate or even reverse the evils of the current form of global
market relations. Stereotypically, and to some extent really, human rights legal orders and mobilizational politics
have lost their associations to the defense of freedom of contract and private property—there are other
bodies of law, and other movements, for that purpose. Rather, in human rights regimes from the United Nations processes to
treaty mechanisms, and in human rights movements from Amnesty International to global antipoverty campaigns, the
goal is to ameliorate the suffering of others or even insist upon the basis for justified, though minimal,
redistribution. Whatever one wants to say about human rights as they exist today, in short, must depart radically from
Marx’s early work, and build substantially on his later work. And though Marx could not have theorized either
neoliberalism or human rights as they are now known, he might not have been surprised to learn that
the chief objection to the latter is that they share the same historical era as the former without
unsettling it.
Perm
Capitalism and technology are inevitable – only socio-political action solves.
Williams and Srnicek, 13
(Alex, Writer for the New York Times, Nick, University College London International Relations, Continental
Philosophy, Historical Materialism ,“#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics” 5/14/13
http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/ LAO)
Since 1979, the hegemonic global political ideology has been neoliberalism, found in some variant throughout
the leading economic powers. In spite of the deep structural challenges the new global problems present to it, most
immediately the credit, financial, and fiscal crises since 2007 – 8, neoliberal programmes have only evolved in the sense of
deepening. This continuation of the neoliberal project, or neoliberalism 2.0, has begun to apply another round of structural
adjustments, most significantly in the form of encouraging new and aggressive incursions by the private sector into what
remains of social democratic institutions and services. This is in spite of the immediately negative economic and social effects of
such policies, and the longer term fundamental barriers posed by the new global crises.6. In the absence of a radically
new social, political, organisational, and economic vision the hegemonic powers of the right will
continue to be able to push forward their narrow-minded imaginary, in the face of any and all evidence.
At best, the left may be able for a time to partially resist some of the worst incursions. But this is to be Canute against an
ultimately irresistible tide. To generate a new left global hegemony entails a recovery of lost possible futures, and indeed the
recovery of the future as such.4. A deeper tension within neoliberalism is in terms of its self-image as the
vehicle of modernity, as literally synonymous with modernisation, whilst promising a future that it is constitutively
incapable of providing. Indeed, as neoliberalism has progressed, rather than enabling individual creativity, it
has tended towards eliminating cognitive inventiveness in favour of an affective production line of
scripted interactions, coupled to global supply chains and a neo-Fordist Eastern production zone.
A vanishingly small cognitariat of elite intellectual workers shrinks with each passing year — and increasingly so as algorithmic automation
winds its way through the spheres of affective and intellectual labour. Neoliberalism, though positing itself as a necessary historical
development, was in fact a merely contingent means to ward off the crisis of value that emerged in the 1970s. Inevitably this was a sublimation
of the crisis rather than its ultimate overcoming. As Marx was aware, capitalism cannot be identified as the agent of true acceleration. Similarly,
the assessment of left politics as antithetical to technosocial acceleration is also, at least in part, a severe misrepresentation. Indeed, if the
political left is to have a future it must be one in which it maximally embraces this suppressed accelerationist tendency. We do not want to
return to Fordism. There can be no return to Fordism. The capitalist “golden era” was premised on the production paradigm of the orderly
factory environment, where (male) workers received security and a basic standard of living in return for a lifetime of stultifying boredom and
social repression. Such a system relied upon an international hierarchy of colonies, empires, and an underdeveloped periphery; a national
hierarchy of racism and sexism; and a rigid family hierarchy of female subjugation. For all the nostalgia many may feel, this regime is both
undesirable and practically impossible to return to. 5. Accelerationists want to unleash latent productive forces. In this project,
the
material platform of neoliberalism does not need to be destroyed. It needs to be repurposed towards
common ends. The existing infrastructure is not a capitalist stage to be smashed, but a springboard to
launch towards post-capitalism. 7. We want to accelerate the process of technological evolution. But what we are arguing for is
not techno-utopianism. Never believe that technology will be sufficient to save us. Necessary, yes, but never sufficient without socio-political
action. Technology and the social are intimately bound up with one another, and changes in either potentiate and reinforce changes in the
that
technology should be accelerated precisely because it is needed in order to win social conflicts. 9. To
do so, the left must take advantage of every technological and scientific advance made possible by
capitalist society. We declare that quantification is not an evil to be eliminated, but a tool to be used
in the most effective manner possible. Economic modelling is — simply put — a necessity for making
intelligible a complex world. The 2008 financial crisis reveals the risks of blindly accepting mathematical models on faith,
yet this is a problem of illegitimate authority not of mathematics itself. The tools to be found in social network
other. Whereas the techno-utopians argue for acceleration on the basis that it will automatically overcome social conflict, our position is
analysis, agent-based modelling, big data analytics, and non-equilibrium economic models, are
necessary cognitive mediators for understanding complex systems like the modern economy. The
accelerationist left must become literate in these technical fields. We have three medium term concrete goals. First, we need to build an
intellectual infrastructure. Mimicking the Mont Pelerin Society of the neoliberal revolution, this is to be tasked with creating a new ideology,
economic and social models, and a vision of the good to replace and surpass the emaciated ideals that rule our world today. This is an
infrastructure in the sense of requiring the construction not just of ideas, but institutions and material paths to inculcate, embody and spread
them. 17. We need to construct wide-scale media reform. In spite of the seeming democratisation offered by the internet and social media,
traditional media outlets remain crucial in the selection and framing of narratives, along with possessing the funds to prosecute investigative
journalism. Bringing these bodies as close as possible to popular control is crucial to undoing the current presentation of the state of things. 18.
Finally, we need to reconstitute various forms of class power. Such a reconstitution must move beyond the notion that an organically generated
global proletariat already exists. Instead it must seek to knit together a disparate array of partial proletarian identities, often embodied in postFordist forms of precarious labour. 19. Groups
and individuals are already at work on each of these, but each is on
their own insufficient. What is required is all three feeding back into one another, with each modifying the contemporary
conjunction in such a way that the others become more and more effective. A positive feedback loop of
infrastructural, ideological, social and economic transformation, generating a new complex
hegemony, a new post-capitalist technosocial platform. History demonstrates it has always been a broad
assemblage of tactics and organisations which has brought about systematic change; these lessons must be learned.
The alternative ensures mass death and destruction, only the permutation solves
Monbiot, 9
(George – honorary doctorates from both U of St. Andrews and U of Essex, British investigative journalist and
political activist, “Is there any point in fighting to stave off industrial apocalypse?”
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/aug/17/environment-climate-change)
If I have understood you correctly, you are proposing to do nothing to prevent the likely collapse of industrial
civilisation. You believe that instead of trying to replace fossil fuels with other energy sources, we should let the system
slide. You go on to say that we should not fear this outcome.¶ How many people do you believe the world could support without
either fossil fuels or an equivalent investment in alternative energy? How many would survive without modern industrial
civilisation? Two billion? One billion? Under your vision several billion perish. And you tell me we have nothing to
fear.¶ I find it hard to understand how you could be unaffected by this prospect. I accused you of denial before; this looks more
like disavowal. I hear a perverse echo in your writing of the philosophies that most offend you: your macho assertion that we
have nothing to fear from collapse mirrors the macho assertion that we have nothing to fear from endless growth. Both
positions betray a refusal to engage with physical reality.¶ Your disavowal is informed by a misunderstanding. You maintain that
modern industrial civilisation "is a weapon of planetary mass destruction". Anyone apprised of the palaeolithic massacre of the
African and Eurasian megafauna, or the extermination of the great beasts of the Americas, or the massive carbon pulse
produced by deforestation in the Neolithic must be able to see that the weapon of planetary mass destruction is not the
current culture, but humankind.¶ You would purge the planet of industrial civilisation, at the cost of billions of lives, only to
discover that you have not invoked "a saner world" but just another phase of destruction.¶ Strange as it
seems, a de-fanged, steady-state version of the current settlement might offer the best prospect
humankind has ever had of avoiding collapse. For the first time in our history we are well-informed
about the extent and causes of our ecological crises, know what should be done to avert them, and
have the global means – if only the political will were present – of preventing them. Faced with your
alternative – sit back and watch billions die – Liberal Democracy 2.0 looks like a pretty good option.
Neolib Inevitable
Neoliberalism is inevitable – elites suppress opposition
Vakulabharanam, 12
(faculty member with the School of Economics at the University of Hyderabad, India [Vamsi
Vakulabharanam,., Why Does Neoliberalism Persist Even After the Global Crisis?, 12/20/12,
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/12/why-does-neoliberalism-persist-even-after-the-globalcrisis.html]
The 2007-9 crisis in global capitalism brought a new energy and focus to the heterodox economists, and
more broadly to the critics of neoliberalism from different arenas of society. It seemed clear at that time that
neoliberalism had run its course when it met its structural contradiction – with the burst of the US housing bubble and the
concomitant financial crises across the world, it looked like the avenues through which demand was being generated were
closed and the system was poised for structural change. Three years later, Southern Europe is witnessing an intense socalled sovereign debt crisis with the working people bearing the brunt of it, and real economies in the developed world are
continuing to witness slow growth. The US seems to be under the threat of the so-called fiscal cliff (which
seems more like a political event rather than an economic one). The economies that grew quickly during
the neo-liberal period, like China and India, have slowed down considerably. Across the globe, we seem
to be going through a period of uncertainty without a clear path ahead. Yet, neoliberalism persists.
Why? There are multiple explanations for this. Bailout packages of various governments were directed
at rescuing financial capital, and this has pitted the interests of financial capital against the interests of
the majority. The global left has not been strong enough to take advantage of the crisis to better
represent the interests of the majority. Governments across the world, after a brief gap, have returned
to their neoliberal posture of supporting financial capital and so forth. There is truth in all these explanations. However,
we need to broaden the array of explanations both to take into account the spatial diversity of neoliberalism, as well as to
deepen our analytical understanding of this persistence. I offer one such explanation from field explorations in India to add to
the existing explanations. This addition is not simply academic, but it shows the need for deeper political engagement to bring
about systemic change, given that our explanations of the structural contradictions of neoliberalism are on the mark. In two
recent field visits that we (a group of local researchers) undertook to understand the persistence of neoliberalism at the
concrete level, we found some interesting phenomena. Both these visits were in the state of Andhra Pradesh in South India.
The first visit was in the region of Telangana, which is highly politicized right now, as the people of the region are fighting for a
separate state within the Indian nation-state. The second visit was to a tribal habitat in the northeastern region of the same
state, where communist struggles have been active for a while. In both these areas, there are continued appropriations of
common lands, common resources and minerals, such as Granite and Bauxite by local and foreign capitalist elites aided by the
State. In the process, these elites are destroying the local livelihoods without creating credible alternative. Both these are
classic cases of primitive accumulation or accumulation by dispossession, a process that has centrally defined neoliberalism
over the last thirty-five years across the globe. Accumulation by dispossession operates in our times through the
following modes of appropriation. First, it operates through the acquisition of lands from small
producers such as peasants, tribal people, artisans and the urban poor in the name of Special Economic
Zones and the like. Some of the lands acquired thus, have became open to speculative enterprises of real estate dealers.
Second, there has been a large-scale privatization drive in most countries that has made public sector
enterprises alienate their properties at throwaway prices to private players. Third, and these are the cases that
we have focused on – commons have been appropriated with ease either because the laws governing them
are weak or because common properties are often meddled with by the State. What we found in these two
regions is that the particular modes of appropriation that have come into being with great force during the neoliberal period
have persisted even after the crisis. Why is this the case? One explanation that ties in with the explanations above is that
resistance has not been strong enough or effective from the people and their social movements or from the larger left
movements. The other explanation that we offered is that neoliberalism has been able to create structures of
populism that are deeply entrenched. The local elites have pursued a three-fold strategy for the
continued appropriation of the commons. First, they (with the support of the State) have put in place
various populist policy imperatives that have temporarily addressed the consumption needs of the
majority without altering the deeper neoliberal structural forces that have inhibited employment growth and wage growth
over the last thirty years. For example, there are schemes such as housing or subsidized food for the poor even as their
productive resources such as land are acquired by the elites/states. These have tended to perpetuate themselves after the
global crisis, even with the loud demands for austerity. Second, the elites have continued to appropriate common
and public resources to keep their own accumulation levels above an acceptable minimum in a time of
slowdown of accumulation opportunities through regular economic growth. Resistance is sought to be
controlled through populism of the kind discussed above. Even in regions that are highly politicized, such as Telangana, the
leadership of the movement has been hand-in-glove with the local elites who gain consistently through the perpetuation of
these appropriation practices.Third, professionals and middle classes have been the beneficiaries of a system
that has thrived on the creation of enclave economies where there is a sharing of rents among the elites
and these professional groups. These professional classes have taken up key positions in the
government, media, corporate executive roles, and as intermediaries between the elites and the
working people who use the commons. The broad support of these classes for the local elites has
played a key role in the perpetuation of neoliberalism. As long as these processes persist, neoliberalism will
be strong on the ground, with the elites and non-elites bound together in the larger neoliberal system
through the different, yet entangled processes of appropriation, rent sharing and populism. Of course, this cannot go on,
since the logic of austerity is bound to create contradictions in the path of populism. However, this contradiction may unfold
very differently across space and time, as not all governments are going to react identically to the demands of austerity. The 1%
in the US (that the Occupy movement has targeted) or the top decile of the population (in countries like China and India)
continue to benefit from the perpetuation of the neoliberal configuration while they are pitted against their large majorities. As
long as the political groups on the ground do not make their voices heard loudly enough against the top 1% or the top 10%, and
as long as there are continued benefits for the elites from the perpetuation of neoliberalism, the system
will persist.
Sustainable
Neolib is sustainable- there are no limits to growth
Bisk, 12
(Tsvi- director of the Center for Strategic Futurist Thinking and contributing editor for strategic thinking
for The Futurist magazine, “No Limits to Growth,”
https://www.wfs.org/Upload/PDFWFR/WFR_Spring2012_Bisk.pdf]
The Case for No Limits to Growth Notwithstanding all of the above, I want to reassert that by
imagineering an alternative future—based on solid science and technology— we can create a situation
in which there are “no limits to growth.” It begins with a new paradigm for food production now under
development: the urban vertical farm. This is a concept popularized by Prof. Dickson Despommier of
Columbia University.30 A 30-story urban vertical farm located on five square acres could yield food for
fifty thousand people. We are talking about high-tech installations that would multiply productivity by a
factor of 480: four growing seasons, times twice the density of crops, times two growing levels on each
floor, times 30 floors = 480. This means that five acres of land can produce the equivalent of 2,600
acres of conventionally planted and tended crops. Just 160 such buildings occupying only 800 acres
could feed the entire city of New York. Given this calculus, an area the size of Denmark could feed the
entire human race. Vertical farms would be self-sustaining. Located contiguous to or inside urban
centers, they could also contribute to urban renewal. They would be urban lungs, improving the air
quality of cities. They would produce a varied food supply year-round. They would use 90% less water.
Since agriculture consumes two-thirds of the water worldwide, mass adoption of this technology would
solve humanity’s water problem. Food would no longer need to be transported to market; it would be
produced at the market and would not require use of petroleum intensive agricultural equipment. This,
along with lessened use of pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers, would not only be better for the
environment but would eliminate agriculture’s dependence on petroleum and significantly reduce
petroleum demand. Despite increased efficiencies, direct (energy) and indirect (fertilizers, etc.) energy use represented
over 13% of farm expenses in 2005-2008 and have been increasing as the price of oil rises.31 Many of the world’s damaged
ecosystems would be repaired by the consequent abandonment of farmland. A “rewilding” of our
planet would take place. Forests, jungles and savannas would reconquer nature, increasing habitat and
becoming giant CO2 “sinks,” sucking up the excess CO2 that the industrial revolution has pumped into
the atmosphere. Countries already investigating the adoption of such technology include Abu Dhabi,
Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and China—countries that are water starved or highly populated. Material
Science, Resources and Energy The embryonic revolution in material science now taking place is the key
to “no limits to growth.” I refer to “smart” and superlight materials. Smart materials “are materials that
have one or more properties that can be significantly changed in a controlled fashion by external
stimuli.” 32 They can produce energy by exploiting differences in temperature (thermoelectric
materials) or by being stressed (piezoelectric materials). Other smart materials save energy in the manufacturing process
by changing shape or repairing themselves as a consequence of various external stimuli. These materials have all passed
the “proof of concept” phase (i.e., are scientifically sound) and many are in the prototype phase. Some
are already commercialized and penetrating the market. For example, the Israeli company Innowattech
has underlain a one-kilometer stretch of local highway with piezoelectric material to “harvest” the
wasted stress energy of vehicles passing over and convert it to electricity.33 They reckon that Israel has
stretches of road that can efficiently produce 250 megawatts. If this is verified, consider the tremendous
electricity potential of the New Jersey Turnpike or the thruways of Los Angeles and elsewhere. Consider
the potential of railway and subway tracks. We are talking about tens of thousands of potential
megawatts produced without any fossil fuels. Additional energy is derivable from thermoelectric
materials, which can transform wasted heat into electricity. As Christopher Steiner notes, capturing
waste heat from manufacturing alone in the United States would provide an additional 65,000
megawatts: “enough for 50 million homes.”34 Smart glass is already commercialized and can save
significant energy in heating, airconditioning and lighting—up to 50% saving in energy has been achieved in retrofitted
legacy buildings (such as the former Sears Tower in Chicago). New buildings, designed to take maximum advantage of this and
other technologies could save even more. Buildings consume 39% of America’s energy and 68% of its electricity.
They emit 38% of the carbon dioxide, 49% of the sulfur dioxide, and 25% of the nitrogen oxides found in the air.35 Even greater
savings in electricity could be realized by replacing incandescent and fluorescent light bulbs with LEDS which use 1/10th the
electricity of incandescent and half the electricity of fluorescents. These three steps: transforming waste heat into
electricity, retrofitting buildings with smart glass, and LED lighting, could cut America’s electricity
consumption and its CO2 emissions by 50% within 10 years. They would also generate hundreds of thousands of
jobs in construction and home improvements. Coal driven electricity generation would become a thing of the
past. The coal released could be liquefied or gasified (by new environmentally friendly technologies) into the energy
equivalent of 3.5 million barrels of oil a day. This is equivalent to the amount of oil the United States imports from the Persian
Gulf and Venezuela together.36 Conservation of energy and parasitic energy harvesting, as well as urban
agriculture would cut the planet’s energy consumption and air and water pollution significantly. Wasteto-energy technologies could begin to replace fossil fuels. Garbage, sewage, organic trash, and
agricultural and food processing waste are essentially hydrocarbon resources that can be transformed
into ethanol, methanol, and biobutanol or biodiesel. These can be used for transportation, electricity
generation or as feedstock for plastics and other materials. Waste-to-energy is essentially a recycling of
CO2 from the environment instead of introducing new CO2 into the environment. Waste-to-energy also
prevents the production, and release from rotting organic waste, of methane—a greenhouse gas 25
times more powerful than CO2. Methane accounts for 18% of the manmade greenhouse effect. Not as much as CO2,
which constitutes 72%, but still considerable (landfills emit as much greenhouse gas effect, in the form of methane, as the CO2
from all the vehicles in the world). Numerous prototypes of a variety of waste-to-energy technologies are
already in place. When their declining costs meet the rising costs of fossil fuels, they will become
commercialized and, if history is any judge, will replace fossil fuels very quickly—just as coal replaced
wood in a matter of decades and petroleum replaced whale oil in a matter of years. Superlight Materials
But it is superlight materials that have the greatest potential to transform civilization and, in conjunction
with the above, to usher in the “no limits to growth” era. I refer, in particular, to car-bon nanotubes—
alternatively referred to as Buckyballs or Buckypaper (in honor of Buckminster Fuller). Carbon
nanotubes are between 1/10,000th and 1/50,000th the width of a human hair, more flexible than
rubber and 100-500 times stronger than steel per unit of weight. Imagine the energy savings if planes, cars, trucks, trains,
elevators—everything that needs energy to move—were made of this material and weighed 1/100th what they weigh now. Imagine the types
of alternative energy that would become practical. Imagine the positive impact on the environment: replacing many industrial processes and
mining, and thus lessening air and groundwater pollution. Present costs and production methods make this impractical but that infinite
resource—the human mind—has confronted and solved many problems like this before. Let us take the example of aluminum. A hundred fifty
years ago, aluminum was more expensive than gold or platinum.37 When Napoleon III held a banquet, he provided his most honored guests
with aluminum plates. Less-distinguished guests had to make do with gold! When the Washington Monument was completed in 1884, it was
fitted with an aluminum cap—the most expensive metal in the world at the time—as a sign of respect to George Washington. It weighed 2.85
kilograms, or 2,850 grams. Aluminum at the time cost $1 a gram (or $1,000 a kilogram). A typical day laborer working on the monument was
paid $1 a day for 10-12 hours a day. In other words, today’s common soft-drink can, which weighs 14 grams, could have bought 14 ten-hour
days of labor in 1884.38 Today’s U.S. minimum wage is $7.50 an hour. Using labor as the measure of value, a soft drink can would cost $1,125
today (or $80,000 a kilogram), were it not for a new method of processing aluminum ore. The Hall-Héroult process turned aluminum into one
of the cheapest commodities on earth only two years after the Washington Monument was capped with aluminum. Today aluminum costs $3 a
kilogram, or $3000 a metric ton. The soft drink can that would have cost $1,125 today without the process now costs $0.04. Today
the
average cost of industrial grade carbon nanotubes is about $50-$60 a kilogram. This is already far
cheaper in real cost than aluminum was in 1884. Yet revolutionary methods of production are now
being developed that will drive costs down even more radically. At Cambridge University they are
working on a new electrochemical production method that could produce 600 kilograms of carbon
nanotubes per day at a projected cost of around $10 a kilogram, or $10,000 a metric ton.39 This will do
for carbon nanotubes what the Hall-Héroult process did for aluminum. Nanotubes will become the
universal raw material of choice, displacing steel, aluminum, copper and other metals and materials. Steel presently costs about
$750 per metric ton. Nanotubes of equivalent strength to a metric ton of steel would cost $100 if this Cambridge process (or others being
pursued in research labs around the world) proves successful. Ben Wang, director of Florida State’s High Performance Materials Institute claims
that: “If
you take just one gram of nanotubes, and you unfold every tube into a graphite sheet, you can
cover about two-thirds of a football field”.40 Since other research has indicated that carbon nanotubes
would be more suitable than silicon for producing photovoltaic energy, consider the implications.
Several grams of this material could be the energy-producing skin for new generations of superlight
dirigibles—making these airships energy autonomous. They could replace airplanes as the primary means to
transport air freight. Modern American history has shown that anything human beings decide they want done can be done in
20 years if it does not violate the laws of nature. The atom bomb was developed in four years; putting a man on the moon took
eight years. It is a reasonable conjecture that by 2020 or earlier, an industrial process for the inexpensive
production of carbon nanotubes will be developed, and that this would be the key to solving our energy, raw
materials, and environmental problems all at once. Mitigating Anthropic Greenhouse Gases Another vital component of a “no
limits to growth” world is to formulate a rational environmental policy that saves money; one that would gain wide grassroots
support because it would benefit taxpayers and businesses, and would not endanger livelihoods. For example, what do sewage
treatment, garbage disposal, and fuel costs amount to as a percentage of municipal budgets? What are the costs of waste
disposal and fuel costs in stockyards, on poultry farms, throughout the food processing industry, and in restaurants? How much
aggregate energy could be saved from all of the above? Some experts claim that we could obtain enough liquid fuel from
recycling these hydrocarbon resources to satisfy all the transportation needs of the United States. Turning the above
waste into energy by various means would be a huge cost saver and value generator, in addition to
being a blessing to the environment. The U.S. army has developed a portable field apparatus that turns a
combat unit’s human waste and garbage into bio-diesel to fuel their vehicles and generators.41 It is
called TGER—the Tactical Garbage to Energy Refinery. It eliminates the need to transport fuel to the
field, thus saving lives, time, and equipment expenses. The cost per barrel must still be very high.
However, the history of military technology being civilianized and revolutionizing accepted norms is
long. We might expect that within 5-10 years, economically competitive units using similar technologies
will appear in restaurants, on farms, and perhaps even in individual households, turning organic waste
into usable and economical fuel. We might conjecture that within several decades, centralized sewage
disposal and garbage collection will be things of the past and that even the Edison Grid (unchanged for
over one hundred years) will be deconstructed. The Promise of Algae Biofuels produced from algae
could eventually provide a substantial portion of our transportation fuel. Algae has a much higher
productivity potential than crop-based biofuels because it grows faster, uses less land and requires only
sun and CO2 plus nutrients that can be provided from gray sewage water. It is the primo CO2 sequesterer because
it works for free (by way of photosynthesis), and in doing so produces biodiesel and ethanol in much higher volumes per acre than corn or other
crops. Production costs are the biggest remaining challenge. One Defense Department estimate pins them at more than $20 a gallon.42 But
once commercialized in industrial scale facilities, production cost could go as low as $2 a gallon (the
equivalent of $88 per barrel of oil) according to Jennifer Holmgren, director of renewable fuels at an energy subsidiary of
Honeywell International.43 Since algae uses waste water and CO2 as its primary feedstock, its use to produce transportation fuel or feedstock
for product would actually improve the environment. The Promise of the Electric Car There are 250 million cars in the United States. Let’s
assume that they were all fully electric vehicles (EVs) equipped with 25-kWh batteries. Each kWh takes a car two to three miles, and if the
average driver charges the car twice a week, this would come to about 100 charge cycles per year. All told, Americans would use 600 billion
kWh per year, which is only 15% of the current total U.S. production of 4 trillion kWh per year. If supplied during low demand times, this would
not even require additional power plants.
If cars were made primarily out of Buckypaper, one kWh might take a car
40-50 miles. If the surface of the car was utilized as a photovoltaic, the car of the future might
conceivably become energy autonomous (or at least semi-autonomous). A kWh produced by a coal-fired power plant
creates two pounds of CO2, so our car-related CO2 footprint would be 1.2 trillion pounds if all electricity were produced by
coal. However, burning one gallon of gas produces 20 pounds of CO2.44 In 2008, the U.S. used 3.3 billion barrels of gasoline,
thereby creating about 3 trillion pounds of CO2. Therefore, a switch to electric vehicles would cut CO2 emissions by 60% (from
3 trillion to 1.2 trillion pounds), even if we burned coal exclusively to generate that power. Actually, replacing a gas car with an
electric car will cause zero increase in electric draw because refineries use seven kWh of power to refine crude oil into a gallon
of gasoline. A Tesla Roadster can go 25 miles on that 7 KWh of power. So the electric car can go 25 miles using the same
electricity needed to refine the gallon of gas that a combustion engine car would use to go the same distance. Additional
Strategies The goal of mitigating global warming/climate change without changing our lifestyles is not naïve. Using proven
Israeli expertise, planting forests on just 12% of the world’s semi-arid areas would offset the annual CO2
output of one thousand 500-megawatt coal plants (a gigaton a year).45 A global program of foresting
60% of the world’s semi-arid areas would offset five thousand 500-megawatt coal plants (five gigatons
a year). Since mitigation goals for global warming include reducing our CO2 emissions by eight gigatons
by 2050, this project alone would have a tremendous ameliorating effect. Given that large swaths of semi-arid
land areas contain or border on some of the poorest populations on the planet, we could put millions of the world’s
poorest citizens to work in forestation, thus accomplishing two positives (fighting poverty and
environmental degradation) with one project. Moving agriculture from its current fieldbased paradigm
to vertical urban agriculture would eliminate two gigatons of CO2. The subsequent re-wilding of vast
areas of the earth’s surface could help sequester up to 50 gigatons of CO2 a year, completely reversing the
trend. The revolution underway in material science will help us to become “self-sufficient” in energy. It will also enable us to
create superlight vehicles and structures that will produce their own energy. Over time, carbon nanotubes will replace
steel, copper and aluminum in a myriad of functions. Converting waste to energy will eliminate most of
the methane gas humanity releases into the atmosphere. Meanwhile, artificial photosynthesis will suck
CO2 out of the air at 1,000 times the rate of natural photosynthesis.46 This trapped CO2 could then be
combined with hydrogen to create much of the petroleum we will continue to need. As hemp and other
fast-growing plants replace wood for making paper, the logging industry will largely cease to exist. Selfcontained fish farms will provide a major share of our protein needs with far less environmental damage
to the oceans. Population Explosion or Population Implosion One constant refrain of anti-growth advocates is that we are
heading towards 12 billion people by the end of the century, that this is unsustainable, and thus that we must proactively
reduce the human population to 3 billion-4 billion in order to “save the planet” and human civilization from catastrophe. But
recent data indicates that a demographic winter will engulf humanity by the middle of this century.
More than 60 countries (containing over half the world’s population) already do not have replacement
birth rates of 2.1 children per woman. This includes the entire EU, China, Russia, and half a dozen
Muslim countries, including Turkey, Algeria, and Iran. If present trends continue, India, Mexico and
Indonesia will join this group before 2030. The human population will peak at 9-10 billion by 2060, after
which, for the first time since the Black Death, it will begin to shrink. By the end of the century, the
human population might be as low as 6 billion-7 billion. The real danger is not a population explosion;
but the consequences of the impending population implosion.47 This demographic process is not being
driven by famine or disease as has been the case in all previous history. Instead, it is being driven by the greatest Cultural
Revolution in the history of the human race: the liberation and empowerment of women. The fact is that even
with present technology, we would still be able to sustain a global population of 12 billion by the end of
the century if needed. The evidence for this is cited above.
Growth good and sustainable --- prosperity helps the environment and scarcity selfcorrects
Lomborg, 12
(Bjørn, Adjunct Professor at the Copenhagen Business School and head of the Copenhagen Consensus Center,
contrarian, Foreign Affairs, Sep/Oct 2012, “Is Growth Good? Resources, Development, and the Future of the
Planet/Lomborg Replies”)
Lomborg Replies
The Limits to Growth predicted catastrophe: humanity would deplete natural resources and pollute itself to death. Its solution
was less economic growth, more recycling, and organic farming. My essay documented how the book's predictions were wildly
off, mainly because its authors ignored how innovation would help people overcome environmental
challenges.Because the book's goal was so dramatic-averting the end of the world- its recommendation was for society to simultaneously
do everything in its power to forestall that outcome. Today, much of the environmental movement continues to evince such alarmism and,
consequently, is unable to prioritize. Developed countries focus as much on recycling, which achieves precious little at a high cost, as they do on
attaining the much larger benefits from tackling air pollution, a massive, if declining, threat. Meanwhile, some
environmentalists'
demands are simply counterproductive. Avoiding pesticides, for example, means farming more land less
efficiently, which leads to higher prices, more hunger, more disease (because of a lower intake of
fruits and vegetables), and less biodiversity.
My essay argued that although the The Limits to Growth's analysis has been proved wrong, much of its
doomsaying and policy advice still pervades the environmental debate 40 years later. These four
critiques, instead of refuting my argument, in fact vindicate it.
First, only Dennis Meadows really tries to defend The Limits to Growth's predictions of collapse, and he does so with little conviction. Second,
at least some of the responses accept in principle that society needs to prioritize among its different
environmental goals and that economic growth will make achieving them easier-in Frances Beinecke's words,
" prosperity
often leads to greater environmental protection ." Third, all four of the critiques of my essay rely on the
language of doom to motivate action, which, to the detriment of the environment, convinces society that it must pursue all its environmental
goals at once, regardless of the costs and benefits. Finally, by
focusing on the threats of economic growth to the
environment, the authors generally neglect that growth has lifted billions of people out of grinding
poverty and that others may remain poor because of the developed world's environmental concerns,
real or imagined. wrong again Defending The Limits to Growth, Meadows curiously complains that I address only the original book,
which is "long out of print." He then posits that my case rests on one table from that book, on resource depletion, which he says I misrepresent.
That is incorrect on several counts. First, it is patently false to claim, as Meadows does by way of a quotation from Matthew Simmons, that
"nowhere in the book was there any mention about running out of anything by 2000." (Jørgen Randers makes a similar point.) The Limits to
Growth quoted approvingly the first annual report by the U.S. government's Council on Environmental Quality, in 1970: "It would appear at
present that the quantities of platinum, gold, zinc and lead are not su/cient to meet demands. At the present rate of expansion . . . silver, tin
and uranium may be in short supply even at higher prices by the turn of the century." Meadows' own table publicized "the number of years
known global reserves will last at current global consumption," showing that gold, lead, mercury, silver, tin, and zinc would not last to the year
2000. The instances go on. According
to the book's model, the main driver of the global system's so-called
collapse would be the depletion of resources, and averting that outcome was the book's widely publicized rallying cry. So
focusing on that aspect of the book can hardly be called a misrepresentation. What is more, claiming that this is my only critique ignores that I
also showed how the book got pollution wrong and how its analysis of collapse simply did not follow. Meadows and Randers both claim that in
their model, pollution consisted of long-lived toxics, not air pollution. In fact, they were much more vague on this question in 1972. In the best
case for their predictions of deadly pollution, they meant air pollution, which today accounts for about 62 percent of all environmental deaths,
according to the World Bank and the World Health Organization. But if they indeed meant long-lived toxics, their
prediction that
"pollution rises very rapidly, causing an immediate increase in the death rate" has been clearly
disproven by the declining global death rate and the massive reductions in persistent pollutants. John
Harte and Mary Ellen Harte put forth a similarly weak defense of The Limits to Growth, as they do not challenge my data. They quote an article
by the ecologists Charles Hall and John Day to say that The Limits to Growth's results were "almost exactly on course some 35 years later in
2008." This is simply wrong when it comes to resource levels, as the data in my original article shows, and indeed the cited article contains not a
single reference for its claims about oil and copper resource reductions. Harte and Harte further argue that the increase in the cost of resources
during the last ten years is evidence of "the limitations on the human enterprise." Meadows claims that this uptick may "herald a permanent
shifting the trend." Yet neither carries through the argument, because the empirical data from the past 150 years overwhelmingly undermine it.
The reason is that
a temporary increase in the scarcity of a resource causes its price to rise, which in turn
encourages more exploration, substitution, and innovation across the entire chain of production,
thereby negating any increase in scarcity. Harte and Harte demonstrate the unpleasant arrogance that
accompanies the true faith, claiming that I "deny" knowledge, promote "scientific misconceptions," and display
"scientific ignorance." They take particular issue with my assertion that ddt is a cheap solution to malaria, stating
that I overlooked the issue of biological resistance. In fact, all malarial treatments face this problem, but ddt less so
than the others. Whereas many malarial treatments, such as dieldrin, work only by killing insects, ddt also repels
and irritates them. Dieldrin strongly selects for resistance, whereas ddt works in three ways and even repels 60
percent of ddt-resistant mosquitoes. false alarm All four critiques contain grand dollops of doom. Beinecke invokes
"alarming" environmental problems from overfishing to the destruction of the rain forests and global warming.
These are real issues, but they, too, deserve
practical thinking and careful prioritization. Fish and rain forests, like other resources
subject to political control, tend to be overused. By contrast, when resources are controlled by individuals and private
groups, their owners are forced to weigh long-term sustainability. Indeed, Beinecke's response reflects the most
unfortunate legacy of The Limits to Growth: because of its persistent belief that the planet is in crisis, the environmental movement suggests
tackling all environmental problems at once. This is impossible, of course, so society ends up focusing mainly on what catches the public's
attention. Beinecke acknowledges that campaigns to enact environmental policy "emerged from what people saw with their own eyes: raw
sewage in the Great Lakes, smog so thick that it obscured the George Washington Bridge, oil despoiling Santa Barbara's pristine beaches." Yet
the smog killed more than 300,000 Americans annually, whereas the effects of the oil spills, although serious, were of a much lower order of
magnitude. She claims that the U.S. Clean Air Act somehow contradicts my argument, when I in fact emphasized that society should have
focused much more on cleaner air. Today, roughly 135,000 Americans still die from outdoor air pollution each year, and two million people,
mostly in the developing world, die from indoor air pollution. Instead of focusing on the many negligible environmental problems that catch the
public's attention, as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency did when it focused so heavily on pesticides in the 1970s and 1980s,
government should tackle the most important environmental problems, air quality chief among them. Beinecke misses this tradeoa
entirely.Harte and Harte demonstrate a similar lack of proportion and priority. In response to my claim that a slightly larger portion of the
world's arable land- roughly five percent-will need to be tapped in order to feed humanity, they offer an unsubstantiated fear that such an
expansion would undermine "giant planetary ecosystems." Yet when they fret about pesticides, they seem impervious to the fact that
eschewing them would require society to increase the acreage of land it farms by more than ten times that amount. cool downIf The Limits to
Growth erred in some of its quantitative projections, then perhaps, as Harte and Harte put it, its "qualitative insights [are] still valid today."
Randers cites global warming as the new reason the book was right. Discussing his predictions for high carbon dioxide emissions, Randers
writes, "This future is unpleasantly similar to the 'persistent pollution scenario' from The Limits to Growth."¶ But the comparison is unfounded
and leads to poor judgment. In The Limits to Growth's original formulation, pollution led to civilizational decline and death. Although many
environmentalists discuss global warming in similarly cataclysmic terms, the scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
project instead a gradually worsening drag on development. Standard analyses show a reduction of zero to five percent of global gdp by 2100,
in a world where the average person in the developing world will be 23 times as rich as he or she is today.¶ Moreover, although the responses
to my essay invoke global warming as a new rallying cry for environmental activism, they fail to suggest specific actions to avert it. Harte and
Harte claim that "the scientific community knows how to transition to renewable clean energy." Sure, developed countries have the technical
know-how to adopt clean energy, but they have not done so because it would still be phenomenally expensive. Policies aimed
at
stopping climate change have failed for the last two decades because much of the environmental
movement, clutching dearly to The Limits to Growth's alarmism and confident sense of purpose, has
refused to weigh the costs and benefits and has demanded that countries immediately abandon all
polluting sources of energy. Many economists, including the 27 climate economists involved in the 2009 Copenhagen
Consensus on Climate conference, have pointed out smarter ways forward. The best means of tackling global warming would
be to make substantial investments in green energy research and development, in order to find a way to produce clean energy
at a lower cost than fossil fuels. As one of the leading advocates of this approach, I cannot comprehend how Harte and Harte
could claim that I do not support clean-energy innovation. Unfortunately, the world will be hard-pressed to focus on
smarter environmental policies until it has expunged the dreadful doom of The Limits to Growth. And
unless the environmental movement can overcome its fear of economic growth, it will also too easily
forget the plight of the billions of poor people who require, above all, more and faster growth.
Neolib Good
Sweeping economic collapse would be worse – war and environmental exploitation
become inevitable
Monbiot, 9
(George – honorary doctorates from both U of St. Andrews and U of Essex, British investigative journalist and
political activist, “Is there any point in fighting to stave off industrial apocalypse?”
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/aug/17/environment-climate-change)
The interesting question, and the one that probably divides us, is this: to what extent should we welcome the likely collapse of
industrial civilisation? Or more precisely: to what extent do we believe that some good may come of it?¶ I detect in your
writings, and in the conversations we have had, an attraction towards – almost a yearning for – this apocalypse, a sense that
you see it as a cleansing fire that will rid the world of a diseased society. If this is your view, I do not share it. I'm sure we can
agree that the immediate consequences of collapse would be hideous: the breakdown of the systems
that keep most of us alive; mass starvation; war. These alone surely give us sufficient reason to fight on, however
faint our chances appear. But even if we were somehow able to put this out of our minds, I believe that what is likely to
come out on the other side will be worse than our current settlement.¶ Here are three observations: 1 Our
species (unlike most of its members) is tough and resilient; 2 When civilisations collapse, psychopaths take over; 3 We seldom
learn from others' mistakes.¶ From the first observation, this follows: even if you are hardened to the fate of humans, you can
surely see that our species will not become extinct without causing the extinction of almost all others.
However hard we fall, we will recover sufficiently to land another hammer blow on the biosphere. We will continue to do so
until there is so little left that even Homo sapiens can no longer survive. This is the ecological destiny of a species
possessed of outstanding intelligence, opposable thumbs and an ability to interpret and exploit
almost every possible resource – in the absence of political restraint. From the second and third observations, this
follows: instead of gathering as free collectives of happy householders, survivors of this collapse will be
subject to the will of people seeking to monopolise remaining resources. This will is likely to be
imposed through violence. Political accountability will be a distant memory. The chances of conserving any
resource in these circumstances are approximately zero. The human and ecological consequences of the first
¶
global collapse are likely to persist for many generations, perhaps for our species' remaining time on earth. To imagine that
good could come of the involuntary failure of industrial civilisation is also to succumb to denial. The answer to your question –
what will we learn from this collapse? – is nothing.¶ This is why, despite everything, I fight on. I am not fighting to sustain
economic growth. I am fighting to prevent both initial collapse and the repeated catastrophe that follows. However faint
the hopes of engineering a soft landing – an ordered and structured downsizing of the global economy
– might be, we must keep this possibility alive. Perhaps we are both in denial: I, because I think the fight is still
worth having; you, because you think it isn't.
Neolib decreases poverty and fosters peace
Bandow, 1
(Doug - Senior Fellow at Cato, “Globalization Serves the World's Poor,” 25 April 2001,
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=4310)
Despite the worst efforts of violent protestors in Quebec, leaders of countries throughout the Western hemisphere concluded
their Summit of the Americas by proposing a broad free-trade agreement. Bringing more of the world's poor into the
global economy is the best hope for raising them out of poverty. Curiously, globalization has become
the latest cause celebre of left-wing activists. These First-World demonstrators self-righteously pose as defenders of
Third-World peoples, even as they advocate leaving the latter destitute. The process of development, of moving traditional,
agricultural societies into the Industrial and Information age, is extraordinarily painful. It was difficult enough for Western
societies, which took hundreds of years to develop. It is even harder for today's developing states, which are attempting to
Economist Joseph
Schumpeter termed capitalism "creative destruction." Every innovation creates losers: automobiles
ruined the buggy industry, computers destroyed the typewriter industry. It is fair to encourage the development of
social institutions to ease the transition. It is not fair to shut off development. Some trendy Western
activists wax eloquent on the wonders of rural living. Presumably they have never visited a poor
country, let alone a poor countryside. For instance, when I traveled the hills of eastern Burma with the relief group Christian
telescope the process into a few decades. But that pain must be endured to achieve a better life.
Freedom International, I found ethnic Karen villagers living in wooden huts open to rain and insects. There was neither
electricity nor running water. People lacked latrines and let their livestock run loose; filth was everywhere. In such
circumstances, life is hard, disease is rampant, and hope is nonexistent. No wonder people flee to the city. Not one Quebec
protestor would likely choose such a "dignified" way of life. Indeed, the problems of globalization must always be "compared to
what?" Yes, factories pay low wages in Third World countries. But workers in them have neither the education nor the skills to
be paid at First World levels. Their alternative is not a Western university education or Silicon Valley computer job, but an even
lower-paying job with a local firm or unemployment. The choice is clear: according to Edward Graham of the
Institute of International Economics, in poor countries, American multinationals pay foreign citizens
an average of 8.5 times the per capita GDP. Overall, the process of globalization has been good for the
poor. During the 1980s, advanced industrialized countries grew faster than developing states. In the 1990s, as globalization
accelerated, poor nations grew at 3.6 percent annually, twice that of their richer neighbors. Despite the illusion of left-wing
activists that money falls from the sky, poverty has been the normal condition of humankind throughout most of history. As
even Marx acknowledged, capitalism is what eliminated the overwhelming poverty of the preindustrial world. That remains the case today. Resource endowment, population level and density, foreign aid transfers,
past colonial status none of these correlate with economic wealth. Only economic openness does. The latest volume of the
Economic Freedom in the World Report, published by the Cato Institute and think tanks in 50 other countries, finds that
economic liberty strongly correlates with economic achievement. Policies that open economies
strongly correlate with economic growth. By pulling countries into the international marketplace, globalization
encourages market reforms. With them comes increased wealth. Concern over the distribution of income understandably
remains, but if nothing is produced, there is nothing to distribute. And, in fact, globalization has shared its benefits widely. In a
recent World Bank report, economists David Dollar and Aart Kraay conclude that the "income of the poor rises one-
for-one with overall growth." Globalization also has important political ramifications. Freedom is indivisible;
economic liberty tends to undercut political controls. Countries such as South Korea and Taiwan threw off
authoritarian dictatorships once their burgeoning middle classes demanded political rights to match economic
opportunities. International investment and trade also help dampen nationalism and militarism. Globalization is
not enough: rising levels of foreign commerce did not prevent World War I, for instance. Ye t investment and
trade create important economic incentives for peace. They also put a human face on people who
might otherwise seem to be the enemy. The result is a better environment in which to promote
international harmony. Like most human phenomena, globalization has ill, as well as good, effects. But the latter
predominate. In most ways for most people, globalization is a positive.
Statistics prove neolib is good for human rights and peace
Soysa et al. 11
(Norwegian University of Science and Technology professor [Indra de, “Does Being Bound Together
Suffocate, or Liberate? The Effects of Economic, Social, and Political Globalization on Human Rights,
1981–2005”, KYKLOS, Vol. 64 – February 2011 – No. 1, 20–53, ebsco])
There is a large volume of research on human rights and their determinants, but theoretical models and empirical evidence on
the effects of globalization on the extent of human rights are sparse. The empirical evidence on this subject that does exist
assess very simple dimensions of globalization, typically measures such as the level of trade openness or the penetration of FDI
(Hafner-Burton 2005). Instead of these commonly-used proxies of globalization, we use an index that aggregates
several factors that in combination capture how globalized a country is along three main dimensions—
economic, political, and social globalization (Dreher et al. 2008). As far as we are aware, no study has estimated how
differentially these three dimensions of globalization affect government respect for human rights and the degree of political
terror, an important normative policy concern as well as a crucial aspect of future socio-political development. We employ
panel data for 118 countries for which there is complete data (94 developing and 24 developed
countries) over the period 1981–2005 (25 years). Our results are easily summarized: globalization and
the disaggregated components along economic, social, and political dimensions predict higher human
rights, controlling for a host of other factors. These results are robust to instrumental variables
techniques that allow us to assess the endogenous nature of the relationship between human rights
and globalization. The results support those who argue that increased globalization could build peace
and social progress, net of all the other factors such as democracy and higher levels of income.
Capitalism key to environmental protection
Taylor 2003, director of natural resource studies at CATO, Aprill 22, 2003
[Jerry, Happy Earth Day? Thank Capitalism, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3073]
Indeed, we
wouldn't even have environmentalists in our midst were it not for capitalism. Environmental
amenities, after all, are luxury goods. America -- like much of the Third World today -- had no environmental
movement to speak of until living standards rose sufficiently so that we could turn our attention from simply providing for
food, shelter, and a reasonable education to higher "quality of life" issues. The richer you are, the more likely you are to be an
environmentalist. And people
wouldn't be rich without capitalism. Wealth not only breeds environmentalists,
it begets environmental quality. There are dozens of studies showing that, as per capita income initially rises from
subsistence levels, air and water pollution increases correspondingly. But once per capita income hits between $3,500 and $15,000 (dependent
upon the pollutant), the ambient concentration of pollutants begins to decline just as rapidly as it had previously increased. This
relationship is found for virtually every significant pollutant in every single region of the planet. It is an
iron law. Given that wealthier societies use more resources than poorer societies, such findings are indeed counterintuitive. But the data
don't lie. How do we explain this? The obvious answer -- that wealthier societies are willing to trade-off the economic
costs of government regulation for environmental improvements and that poorer societies are not -- is
only partially correct. In the United States, pollution declines generally predated the passage of laws mandating
pollution controls. In fact, for most pollutants, declines were greater before the federal government passed its panoply of environmental
regulations than after the EPA came upon the scene. Much of this had to do with individual demands for environmental
quality. People who could afford cleaner-burning furnaces, for instance, bought them. People who wanted
recreational services spent their money accordingly, creating profit opportunities for the provision of untrammeled nature. Property values
rose in cleaner areas and declined in more polluted areas, shifting capital from Brown to Green investments. Market
agents will
supply whatever it is that people are willing to spend money on. And when people are willing to spend money on
environmental quality, the market will provide it. Meanwhile, capitalism rewards efficiency and punishes waste. Profithungry companies found ingenious ways to reduce the natural resource inputs necessary to produce all
kinds of goods, which in turn reduced environmental demands on the land and the amount of waste that flowed through smokestacks and
water pipes. As we learned to do more and more with a given unit of resources, the waste involved (which manifests itself in the form of
pollution) shrank. This trend was magnified by the shift away from manufacturing to service industries, which
characterizes wealthy, growing economies. The latter are far less pollution-intensive than the former. But the former are necessary
prerequisites for the latter. Property
rights -- a necessary prerequisite for free market economies -- also provide strong
incentives to invest in resource health. Without them, no one cares about future returns because no one can
be sure they'll be around to reap the gains. Property rights are also important means by which private desires for
resource conservation and preservation can be realized. When the government, on the other hand, holds a monopoly on
such decisions, minority preferences in developing societies are overruled (see the old Soviet block for details). Furthermore, only wealthy
societies can afford the investments necessary to secure basic environmental improvements, such as sewage treatment and electrification.
Unsanitary water and the indoor air pollution (caused primarily by burning organic fuels in the home for heating and cooking needs) are directly
responsible for about 10 million deaths a year in the Third World, making poverty the number one environmental killer on the planet today.
Capitalism can save more lives threatened by environmental pollution than all the environmental
organizations combined.
AT: Alt
The transition to socialism is no longer feasible and that only a reform in capitalism
can solve.
Callinicos, 3
(Alex -Professor of European Studies, “An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto”)
One of the merits of Hines's argument for localization is that it brings out into the open the issue of the
nation-state. The state is generally seen as one of the main victims of economic globalization: does it
follow that it is a potential ally of the anti-capitalist movement? Hines answers this question in the affirmative.
Even greater stress is laid on the nation-state as an agent of desirable social transformation by those
who advocate, as an alternative to neo-liberalism, the return to a more regulated capitalism. It is this
position that I have chosen to call 'reformist anti-capitalism'. In the classical labour movement
'reformism' referred to the strategy of social democracy of achieving socialism by parliamentary means.
Few contemporary social democrats believe that a socialist alternative to capitalism is any longer
feasible. Instead they seek to regulate and humanize capitalism. Reformist anticapitalists differ from localists in
the sense that they focus on the national and the international levels as the main fields of action. It is in fact begging an
important question to describe the aim of this variant of anti-capitalism as a return to a more regulated
capitalism. This accurately captures the aim of important strands of the reformist wing of the movement. Patrick
Bond argues that within what he calls the 'New Social Movements' who seek 'to promote the globalization of
people and halt or at a minimum radically modify the globalization of capital' there is an ongoing debate over
whether energy should be invested in helping Post-Washington Consensus reforms constitute a global state
regulatory capacity – expanding upon embryos like the IMF and World Bank, WTO, United Nations and BIS – or
whether in contrast the immediate task should be defunding and denuding the legitimacy of the current sites of
international regulation so as to reconstitute progressive politics on the national scale.'
Anti-Capitalist movements are easily quashed
Callinicos, 2003
(Alex -Professor of European Studies, “An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto”)
(1) Dialogue. The established powers can respond to major challenges from below in two ways —
repression or incorporation. In other words, they can seek simply to crush a movement for change by
the use of coercive and juridical power, or instead to weaken it by making limited concessions designed
to divide the movement, in particular by winning over the more moderate elements and isolating the
radicals. The anti-capitalist movement has so far faced both responses. The repressive reaction was most visible
in the police violence at Genoa; the antiterrorism legislation passed by the United States, Britain, and other leading states after
11 September represents a very serious longer-term threat to all those engaging in direct action. But there have also been
efforts by different sections of what one might broadly call the international capitalist establishment to draw the movement
into dialogue.
The movement will be met with violence
Callinicos, 2003
(Alex -Professor of European Studies, “An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto”)
The police charged violently. We fought back and I stand by our response as a political fact. Nonetheless,
for us to also take up militaristic tactics would be crazy and political suicide. At Genoa there were all the
forces of order, the army, the secret services of the eight most powerful – both economically and
militarily – nations on the planet. Our movement can't measure up with that type of military power. We
would be crushed within three months . . . Two, three years ago we thought at length about how to act in a conflict without it
becoming destructive. Our technique was different: we stated publicly what we wanted to do, letting it be known
that if the police attacked us, we would defend ourselves only with shields and padding. It was our rule
because it was essential that we create conflict and consensus about the objectives that we set up for ourselves. In Genoa we
expected that more or less the same thing as usual would happen. They deceived us . . . The police forces used
firearms, even though they had assured us that they would not. The right to demonstrate that [Italian Foreign
Minister Renato] Ruggiero agreed was an inalienable right was run over under the wheels of the police armoured cars." The
right-wing government of Silvio Berlusconi had dramatically altered the rules of the game. In doing so it drew attention to a
truth long stressed by classical Marxism –that the state, as concentrated and organized violence, acts as the last line of
defence of capitalist property relations. After Genoa, an intense debate developed within the anticapitalist movement over whether or not it should abandon mass protests altogether for fear of the
violence they were attracting, both from the police and from the Black Bloc (which many believed had been infiltrated by
agents provocateurs).' But the deeper difficulty posed by Genoa concerned how the movement could confront the centralized
power of the capitalist state without reproducing the hierarchical and authoritarian structures it was seeking to challenge.
Celebrations of fragmentation and dispersal are of no help whatsoever in addressing this problem.