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1NC Link – Marx .................................................. 2
Cap Unstable ....................................................... 37
1NC Impact – Marx .............................................. 4
Cap = Unstable .................................................... 38
1NC Alt – Marx ..................................................... 5
AT: Inevitable...................................................... 39
1NC Link - Zizek ................................................... 7
AT: Spillover ....................................................... 40
1NC Impact - Zizek ............................................... 8
AT: Perm – Rejection Key ................................. 41
1NC Alt – Zizek ..................................................... 9
AT: Perm – Co-opted.......................................... 42
Link – Social Services ......................................... 10
AT: Perm – Totalitarianism Government ........ 43
Link – Health Care ............................................. 11
AT: Perm – Co-Opt ............................................ 44
Link – Threat Construction ............................... 12
AT: No Alternative ............................................. 45
Link - Moral Obligation ..................................... 13
AT: Robinson ...................................................... 46
Link-Hegemony ................................................... 14
AT: Robinson ...................................................... 47
AT: Link Turn – Post Politics ............................ 15
AT: Robinson ...................................................... 48
Cap  Patriarchy ............................................... 16
AT: Robinson ...................................................... 49
Cap  Genocide/Exclusion ................................ 17
Perm Solves.......................................................... 50
Cap  Racism ..................................................... 20
Perm – Work Within the System ....................... 51
Cap Extinction ................................................. 21
Cap  Poverty.................................................... 22
Cap  Poverty.................................................... 23
Cap Kills Democracy .......................................... 24
Cap  Terrorism ................................................ 25
!=Environment .................................................... 26
Cap Solves Extinction ......................................... 53
Socialism Bad ...................................................... 54
Robinson – No Solvency ..................................... 55
Robinson – Alt  Violence ................................ 56
Alt  No Value to Life ....................................... 57
No Root Cause ..................................................... 58
!=Bad Government ............................................. 27
!=China problems ............................................... 28
!=African Exploitation ........................................ 29
!= Arms Race ....................................................... 30
Collapse  Revolution ....................................... 31
Alt ......................................................................... 32
Alt - Traverse the Fantasy.................................. 33
Alt – Withdraw .................................................... 34
Alt Solves.............................................................. 35
Alt – Real Ethics .................................................. 36
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1NC Link – Marx
Providing social services explicitly undermines the economic balance of capitalism.
Bill Jordan, Dept. Social Work – U. Plymouth, Journal of Social Policy, “Public Services and the
Service Economy: Individualism and the Choice Agenda”, 35:143-162, 2006, Cambridge U. Press
Much as the original justifications of property and markets focused on the production of commodities, so did the
critique of liberal political economy. Two fundamental criticisms of capitalism were common to Marxian (Marx,
1867), Guild Socialist (Cole, 1920, 1927; Reckitt and Bechhofer, 1918) and underconsumptionist (Hobson, 1900;
Douglas, 1919, 1920) political mobilisations. First, the criteria by which finance capital chose to invest in
productive industry were derived entirely from the prospect of profit, and not at all from human needs; rentiers
were totally unaccountable to citizens, or to industrial stakeholders. Second, industrial production involved the
extraction of value from workers which yielded profit, but their wages were insufficient for them to purchase the
goods they produced. Although they disagreed about the exact mechanisms behind these injustices, their remedies all involved some
combination of state ownership, fiscal and monetary management, and income redistribution (Hutchinson and Burkitt, 1997; Hutchinson et al., 2002).
This focus on public finance and the processes of factory production meant that socialist revolutions and
social democratic reforms targeted the property of the rich and the power of industrialists, leaving the consequences for private services to
work themselves out. But as part of their new designs for societies, they created a more collectivised, planned and regulated
social environment, which balanced the productive side of the economy. Public services expressed the goals of
solidarity, security and justice. They were ‘designed to widen and deepen the expression of the spirit of democratic co-operation’,
practising in a ‘more equalitarian spirit’, with professional workers dealing with citizens in ‘a democratic way consistent with the spirit of the times’
(Cole, 1945: 29). So the aims of collectivised services were explicitly political and social; there was little economic theory to
inform their creation. The second-most quoted text in Beveridge's great works (after Keynes), A. C. Pigou's The Economics of Welfare (1920) contained
no references to health or education services. In the state socialist countries this political purpose was even more pronounced, reflected in the
programmes and priorities of public services, and proclaimed by insignia and banners throughout the built environment. Professionals in state services
under both ideological systems were acculturated through training, and co-opted through career incentives, to sustain these ideologies. In this way,
the public services became an important instrument throughout which political elites spread the new
collective values and standards of their regimes. They also balanced and compensated for the harsher features of urban and
industrial lifestyles, coercively imposed under state socialism, and more gradually developed in social democracies. Social housing schemes, for
example, reflected both the collectivist mindset of the planners, and the attempt to create a convivial environment; as they deteriorated (especially in
the UK and France), they demonstrated the failure of both aspects of that vision. Meanwhile, however, capitalism too was adapting and evolving
within this new social environment, and addressing those features of the critique of its earlier form which remained largely unresolved under these
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new regimes. New developments in private services played key roles in both major evolutions. First, neither state socialism nor social democracy
New services
allowed both capitalist industrial products and collectivist contexts to be adapted and used in
unconventional or subversive ways. Youth culture, working-class culture and ghetto culture were shaped both on the street and in the cafés, clubs,
gave workers or consumers much influence in the processes of planning what was produced, to what quality or specifications.
retail outlets and sports centres frequented by residents and denizens. Under state socialism, such manifestations were ritually suppressed (Fischer, 1992), but always
reappeared in new guises. Thus the private service sector was able to adapt and transform both capitalism and collectivism, giving groups without economic or political
power a far greater influence over how they lived their lives. In this way, it mitigated both the unresolved problem of democratic control under capitalism, and the
deficiencies of collective services. The second adaptation concerned financial services, and their capacity to compensate for the shortfall in workers' purchasing power
denounced by both socialists and underconsumptionists (Hobson, 1900; Douglas, 1919; Cole, 1933). By extending personal credit to an ever-wider spectrum of borrowers,
the banks, building societies and other institutions gave mortgages, loans, overdrafts, and eventually credit cards, to most of the population, enabling owner-occupation
and widespread ownership of cars and consumer durables. In the UK, personal indebtedness of these kinds totalled £1,000 billion by 2004; thus financial services sustained
a considerably higher level of private consumption than could have been enjoyed if citizens had been living week-to-week on their wages. Of course, both of these
adaptations involved the creation of businesses and employment: mainly in large-scale banks, insurance companies and finance houses in the financial sector, and in small
enterprises in the retail, leisure, recreation, personal and cultural services. By 1980, employment in the service sector was already expanding far more rapidly in all the
advanced capitalist economies than the industrial one, which was declining, in absolute terms, in all except the USA and Japan (Jordan, 1983). By 2002, service employment
neither socialism nor social democracy generated
distinctive new economic analyses of services. Their justifications for the public sector rested on the injustices of
material inequalities, the oppressions of industrial power, and the inefficiencies of market failure. The collective
infrastructures they constructed addressed these issues, and the rationale for public services was a political more
than an economic one. This left public policy on services exposed to a revived liberal political economy, building on the successful growth of
supplied around 70 per cent of the jobs in all these countries. I have argued that
private services.
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1NC Impact – Marx
Capitalism has put us on a path of extinction from environmental collapse—nuclear war does not
outweigh and we have a moral obligation to reject the system.
Paul M. Sweezy, Marxist economist and founder of Monthly Review magazine. “Capitalism and the
Environment.” October 2004. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1132/is_5_56/ai_n6338575
It is obvious that humankind has arrived at a crucial turning point in its long history. Nuclear war could terminate the
whole human enterprise. But even if this catastrophic ending can be avoided, it is by no means certain that the
essential conditions for the survival and development of civilized society as we know it today will continue to exist. We
live in and from a material environment consisting of land, water, and air which, historically, has always been considered to be and treated as infinitely durable and
usable. This does not mean indestructible. History records many instances of the destruction (i.e., rendering unusable for human purposes) of parts of the environment
by either natural processes or human agency. As far as the natural processes are concerned, they have been operating since long before there was human life and will
presumably continue to operate long after, and there is no reason to assume any unusual change in the foreseeable future. When it comes to destruction by human
agency, however, things are different. Small-scale destruction of parts of the environment have occurred throughout history, and on occasion the scale has grown to
quite impressive proportions (e.g., through desertification). But even the largest of these destructive processes have remained small compared to the size of the
environment as a whole. Tribes or even more complex societies have been wiped out or forced to move to new locations, but these were always local, not global,
disasters. And throughout the ages--in fact, right up to the time of people now alive--it was always taken for granted that this would continue to be the case. The reason
was a belief, perhaps rarely thought through or articulated, that the means possessed by human beings were too puny to be a threat to the sheer magnitude and
recuperative powers inherent in the environment. All this began to change with the explosion of the first A-bomb in August 1944. At first the new bomb was perceived
as essentially an improvement on already existing weapons, but an interrelated chain of events gradually led to a radical alteration of people's consciousness. The
Soviets got the bomb much sooner than had been expected, thus shattering the notion that the new force could somehow be monopolized and controlled. Then came the
H-bomb with its vastly greater destructive potential; and this in turn was followed by the escalating arms race between the superpowers which, despite much talk and a
few largely symbolic treaties, continues to this day. It is now commonplace that each superpower has the capability to wipe out its rival several times over, and
ongoing research into the consequences of all-out nuclear war has demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that the catastrophe could not be confined to the
belligerents but would inexorably spread, in such ghastly forms as radioactive poisoning and nuclear winter, to the entire globe. Thus in the incredibly short
time of less than half a century, humankind has gone from blissful confidence in the security of its habitat to the
certainty that its own survival, as well as the capacity of its natural environment to sustain life as we have known it,
could be cut short in an instantaneous paroxysm of nuclear violence. The full implications of this unprecedented change
in human consciousness will obviously not become clear for a long time to come. But it is already evident that sensitivity to
threats to the human habitat has spread rapidly from its origins in the overwhelming destructive power of nuclear
weapons to encompass a variety of ecological processes and trends, most of which have been known and even studied for
a century or more, but which have been increasingly seen in a new light since the beginning of the nuclear age. Once you
know for certain that human agency can render the planet unfit for human habitation, you can hardly help asking
whether nuclear weapons are the only possible source of such a catastrophe. Viewed from this angle, much that used
to be regarded as merely the unavoidable negative side of progress is now seen to be part of a looming threat to the
continuation of life on earth. It is hard to imagine a more fundamental change in perception and truly astonishing to reflect on how rapidly it has come
about. Within the framework of this perception, there are of course different positions. At one extreme are those who believe the danger is much exaggerated--perhaps
a reflection of the pessimistic spirit of the time, itself largely a product of the nuclear scare. Let the nuclear arms race be brought under control, which now seems
increasingly possible, and environmental deterioration will be seen in its true dimensions, not as a prelude to doomsday but as a series of problems that have been
created by human agency and can be dealt with in the same way. At the other extreme are those who argue that things have really gotten much worse in the last half
century and that we are now close enough to the point of no return to warrant the most gloomy forebodings. The way the arguments pro and con are presented, these
two positions often appear to be polar opposites. But this is an illusion: They actually have a common basis in the belief that if present trends continue to
operate, it is only a matter of time until the human species irredeemably fouls its own nest. Against this background it
seems clear that everyone who shares the belief in the fatal implications of current trends has a moral obligation on
the one hand to try to understand the processes that underlie these trends, and on the other to draw appropriate
conclusions about what has to be done to reverse them before it is too late.
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1NC Alt – Marx
Rejecting every instance of capitalism is key or else we’ll become slaves to the system.
Herod, 04 [James, http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/GetFre/4thEd/4-index.htm,
“Getting Free”, 4th Edition]
It is time to try to describe, at first abstractly and later concretely, a strategy for destroying capitalism. This
strategy, at its most basic, calls for pulling time, energy, and resources out of capitalist civilization and putting
them into building a new civilization. The image then is one of emptying out capitalist structures, hollowing them
out, by draining wealth, power, and meaning out of them until there is nothing left but shells. This is definitely an
aggressive strategy. It requires great militancy, and constitutes an attack on the existing order. The strategy clearly
recognizes that capitalism is the enemy and must be destroyed, but it is not a frontal attack aimed at
overthrowing the system, but an inside attack aimed at gutting it, while simultaneously replacing it with
something better, something we want. Thus capitalist structures (corporations, governments, banks, schools, etc.)
are not seized so much as simply abandoned. Capitalist relations are not fought so much as they are simply
rejected. We stop participating in activities that support (finance, condone) the capitalist world and start
participating in activities that build a new world while simultaneously undermining the old. We create a new
pattern of social relations alongside capitalist relations and then we continually build and strengthen our new
pattern while doing every thing we can to weaken capitalist relations. In this way our new democratic, nonhierarchical, non-commodified relations can eventually overwhelm the capitalist relations and force them out
of existence. This is how it has to be done. This is a plausible, realistic strategy. To think that we could create a whole new world of
decent social arrangements overnight, in the midst of a crisis, during a so-called revolution, or during the collapse of capitalism, is foolhardy. Our new social world must grow within the old, and in
opposition to it, until it is strong enough to dismantle and abolish capitalist relations. Such a revolution will never happen automatically, blindly, determinably, because of the inexorable, materialist
. It will happen, and only happen, because we want it to,
laws of history
and because we know what we’re doing and know how we want to live, and know
what obstacles have to be overcome before we can live that way, and know how to distinguish between our social patterns and theirs. But we must not think that the capitalist world can simply be
ignored, in a live and let live attitude, while we try to build new lives elsewhere. (There is no elsewhere.) There is at least one thing, wage-slavery, that we can’t simply stop participating in (but
Capitalism must be explicitly refused and replaced by something else. This
constitutes War, but it is not a war in the traditional sense of armies and tanks, but a war fought on a daily basis, on
the level of everyday life, by millions of people. It is a war nevertheless because the accumulators of capital will use coercion, brutality, and murder, as they have always done in
even here there are ways we can chip away at it).
the past, to try to block any rejection of the system. They have always had to force compliance; they will not hesitate to continue doing so. Nevertheless, there are many concrete ways that
individuals, groups, and neighborhoods can gut capitalism, which I will enumerate shortly. We must always keep in mind how we became slaves; then we can see more clearly how we can cease
being slaves. We were forced into wage-slavery because the ruling class slowly, systematically, and brutally destroyed our ability to live autonomously. By driving us off the land, changing the
property laws, destroying community rights, destroying our tools, imposing taxes, destroying our local markets, and so forth, we were forced onto the labor market in order to survive, our only
remaining option being to sell, for a wage, our ability to work. It’s quite clear then how we can overthrow slavery. We must reverse this process. We must begin to reacquire the ability to live
without working for a wage or buying the products made by wage-slaves (that is, we must get free from the labor market and the way of living based on it), and embed ourselves instead in
This strategy does not call for reforming capitalism, for
changing capitalism into something else. It calls for replacing capitalism, totally, with a new civilization. This is
an important distinction, because capitalism has proved impervious to reforms, as a system. We can sometimes
in some places win certain concessions from it (usually only temporary ones) and win some (usually short-lived)
improvements in our lives as its victims, but we cannot reform it piecemeal, as a system. Thus our strategy of
gutting and eventually destroying capitalism requires at a minimum a totalizing image, an awareness that we
are attacking an entire way of life and replacing it with another, and not merely reforming one way of life into
something else. Many people may not be accustomed to thinking about entire systems and social orders, but everyone knows what a lifestyle is, or a way of life, and that is the way we
cooperative labor and cooperatively produced goods. Another clarification is needed.
should approach it. The thing is this: in order for capitalism to be destroyed millions and millions of people must be dissat isfied with their way of life. They must want something else and see certain
existing things as obstacles to getting what they want. It is not useful to think of this as a new ideology. It is not merely a belief-system that is needed, like a religion, or like Marxism, or Anarchism.
. If this pressing
desire were a desire to live free, to be autonomous, to live in democratically controlled communities, to
participate in the self-regulating activities of a mature people, then capitalism could be destroyed. Otherwise
we are doomed to perpetual slavery and possibly even to extinction.
Rather it is a new prevailing vision, a dominant desire, an overriding need. What must exist is a pressing desire to live a certain way, and not to live another way
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1NC Link - Zizek
Moral obligations and social responsibility are only used to justify capitalistic intervention which is
merely driven by profit and the core of exploitation.
Zizek 06 [Slavoj Zizek, senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, “Nobody has to be
Vile”, April 6 2006, http://www.lacan.com/zizvile.htm]
Above all, liberal communists are true citizens of the world - good people who worry. They worry about populist
fundamentalism and irresponsible greedy capitalist corporations. They see the 'deeper causes' of today's
problems: mass poverty and hopelessness breed fundamentalist terror. Their goal is not to earn money, but to
change the world (and, as a by-product, make even more money). Bill Gates is already the single greatest
benefactor in the history of humanity, displaying his love for his neighbours by giving hundreds of millions of
dollars for education, the fight against hunger and malaria etc. The catch is that before you can give all this
away you have to take it (or, as the liberal communists would put it, create it). In order to help people, the
justification goes, you must have the means to do so, and experience - that is, recognition of the dismal failure of
all centralised statist and collectivist approaches - teaches us that private enterprise is by far the most effective way.
By regulating their business, taxing them excessively, the state is undermining the official goal of its own activity
(to make life better for the majority, to help those in need). Liberal communists do not want to be mere profitmachines: they want their lives to have deeper meaning. They are against old-fashioned religion and for spirituality,
for non-confessional meditation (everybody knows that Buddhism foreshadows brain science, that the power of
meditation can be measured scientifically). Their motto is social responsibility and gratitude: they are the first to
admit that society has been incredibly good to them, allowing them to deploy their talents and amass wealth, so they
feel that it is their duty to give something back to society and help people. This beneficence is what makes business
success worthwhile. This isn't an entirely new phenomenon. Remember Andrew Carnegie, who employed a
private army to suppress organised labour in his steelworks and then distributed large parts of his wealth for
educational, cultural and humanitarian causes, proving that, although a man of steel, he had a heart of gold? In
the same way, today's liberal communists give away with one hand what they grabbed with the other.
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1NC Impact - Zizek
Capitalism commodifies life – justifying every impact.
Internationalist Perspective, 2000 (“Capitalism and Genocide”, Issue #36, Spring 2000,
http://www.geocities.com/wageslavex/capandgen.html)
The real domination of capital is characterized by the penetration of the law of value into every segment of
social existence. As Georg Lukács put it in his History and Class Consciousness, this means that the commodity
ceases to be "one form among many regulating the metabolism of human society," to become its "universal
structuring principle." From its original locus at the point of production, in the capitalist factory, which is the
hallmark of the formal domination of capital, the law of value has systematically spread its tentacles to
incorporate not just the production of commodities, but their circulation and consumption. Moreover, the law of
value also penetrates and then comes to preside over the spheres of the political and ideological, including
science and technology themselves. This latter occurs not just through the transformation of the fruits of technology
and science into commodities, not just through the transformation of technological and scientific research itself
(and the institutions in which it takes place) into commodities, but also, and especially, through what Lukács
designates as the infiltration of thought itself by the purely technical, the very quantification of rationality, the
instrumentalization of reason; and, I would argue, the reduction of all beings (including human beings) to mere
objects of manipulation and control. As Lukács could clearly see even in the age of Taylorism, "this rational
mechanisation extends right into the worker's `soul'." In short, it affects not only his outward behavior, but her very
internal, psychological, makeup. The phenomenon of reification, inherent in the commodity-form, and its
tendential penetration into the whole of social existence, which Lukács was one of the first to analyze, is a
hallmark of the real domination of capital: "Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a
thing and thus acquires a `phantom objectivity', an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to
conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people." Reification, the seeming transformation of
social relations into relations between things, has as one of its outcomes what the German-Jewish thinker H.G.Adler
designated as "the administered man" [Der verwaltete Mensch]. For Adler, when human beings are administered,
they are treated as things, thereby clearing the way for their removal or elimination by genocide. The outcome
of such a process can be seen in the bureaucractic administration of the Final Solution, in which the organization of
genocide was the responsibility of desk killers like Adolf Eichmann who could zealously administer a system of
mass murder while displaying no particular hatred for his victims, no great ideological passion for his project,
and no sense that those who went to the gas chambers were human beings and not things. The features of the
desk killer, in the person of Eichmann, have been clearly delineated by Hannah Arendt. He is the high-level
functionary in a vast bureaucratic organization who does his killing from behind a desk, from which he rationally
plans and organizes mass murder; treating it as simply a technical task, no different than the problem of
transporting scrap metal. The desk killer is the quintessential bureaucrat functioning according to the
imperatives of the death-world. As a human type, the desk killer, that embodiment of the triumph of
instrumental reason, has become a vital part of the state apparatus of late capitalism.
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1NC Alt – Zizek
We must withdraw from the capitalist ideology.
Johnston 2007 [Adrian Johnston 2007 International Journal of Zizek Studies Vol 1. No. 0. 2007
http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/8/24]
Perhaps the absence of a detailed practical roadmap in Žižek’s political writings isn’t a major shortcoming. Maybe, at
least for the time being, the most important task is simply the negativity of the critical struggle, the effort to cure an
intellectual constipation resulting from capitalist ideology and thereby truly to open up the space for imagining
authentic alternatives to the prevailing state of the situation. Another definition of materialism offered by Žižek is
that it amounts to accepting the internal inherence of what fantasmatically appears as an external deadlock or
hindrance127 (with fantasy itself being defined as the false externalization of something within the subject, namely, the
illusory projection of an inner obstacle128). From this perspective, seeing through ideological fantasies by learning
how to think again outside the confines of current restrictions has, in and of itself, the potential to operate as a form
of real revolutionary practice (rather than remaining just an instance of negative/critical intellectual reflection). Why
is this the case? Recalling the earlier analysis of commodity fetishism, the social efficacy of money as the universal
medium of exchange (and the entire political economy grounded upon it) ultimately relies upon nothing 93 more
than a kind of “magic,” that is, the belief in money’s social efficacy by those using it in the processes of exchange.
Since the value of currency is, at bottom, reducible to the belief that it has the value attributed to it (and that
everyone believes that everyone else believes this as well), derailing capitalism by destroying its essential financial
substance is, in a certain respect, as easy as dissolving the mere belief in this substance’s powers. The “external”
obstacle of the capitalist system exists exclusively on the condition that subjects, whether consciously or
unconsciously, “internally” believe in it—capitalism’s life-blood, money, is simply a fetishistic crystallization of
a belief in others’ belief in the socioperformative force emanating from this same material. And yet, this point
of capitalism’s frail vulnerability is simultaneously the source of its enormous strength: Its vampiric symbiosis
with individual human desire, and the fact that the late-capitalist cynic’s fetishism enables the disavowal of
his/her de facto belief in capitalism, makes it highly unlikely that people can be persuaded to stop believing and
start thinking (especially since, as Žižek claims, many of these people are convinced that they already have ceased
believing). Or, the more disquieting possibility to entertain is that some people today, even if one succeeds in
exposing them to the underlying logic of their position, might respond in a manner resembling that of the Judas-like
character Cypher in the film The Matrix (Cypher opts to embrace enslavement by illusion rather than cope with the
discomfort of dwelling in the “desert of the real”): Faced with the choice between living the capitalist lie or
grappling with certain unpleasant truths, many individuals might very well deliberately decide to accept what
they know full well to be a false pseudo-reality, a deceptively comforting fiction (“Capitalist commodity fetishism
or the truth? I choose fetishism.”).
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Link – Social Services
Providing social services starts down the road to socialism and away from capitalism.
Richard Ebeling, Ludwig von Mises Prof. Econ. – Hillsdale College, “The Failure of Socialism and
Lessons for America, Part 2”, April, 1993, http://www.fff.org/freedom/0493b.asp
3. Nationalization of Social Services. The extent to which the socialist idea has triumphed in the 20th century is seen
most clearly in the very notion that there are certain goods and services that should be viewed as "social." The
provision of medical care, housing accommodations, legal services, retirement plans and the like are no different
than the provision of any of the other things people want and desire, and for which they pay a price in the market. It
would be just as easy to argue that shoes, clothing, food, entertainment, reading material and marital partners are
"socially necessary" commodities that every human being needs — and, therefore, that the state should be assigned the
task of providing them. It is indicative of the extent to which the socialist idea has penetrated the American psyche
that practically no one along the political spectrum in America is willing or courageous enough to question directly
and uncompromisingly the idea that the state should provide any such "social services" and to make the positive
case that the supplying of such "services" should be completely left up the private sector. In his 1920 book,
The Return to Laissez Faire, the English classical liberal Sir Ernest Benn argued that "a citizenship which is
actuated by Individualism will wash its hands of that 'citizenship by proxy' which is variously called social reform,
Socialism and Communism. All these shibboleths mean paying somebody else with other people's money to do
your own duty — a very different thing." By every individual doing his own duty, Benn meant that a free citizen in a
free country takes on the responsibility to plan and care for his own life. He associates with his fellow free men
on the basis of mutual, voluntary agreement and never expects others to bare the consequences or the costs
of his own actions through use of the power of the state. But, alas, Americans have lost the knowledge and
the desire for this type of free citizenship. As in 1922, when Ludwig von Mises penned his monumental work,
Socialism, "The socialist idea dominates the modern spirit ... it expresses the thoughts and the feelings of all." Its
domination is, indeed, so complete that Americans now increasingly crave what they say they oppose. And, as a
result, they will likely get even more of what they say they do not want.
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Link – Health Care
Government run healthcare is socialist. It violates the free market.
Lawrence R. Huntoon, MD, PhD and Pres. Elect – Association of American Physicians and Surgeons,
Medical Sentinel, “Health Care and the "Distributive Ethic" --- "Natural Rights" vs. Socialism”, 4:5,
1999, http://www.jpands.org/hacienda/huntoon3.html
In vew of Dr. Faria's essay, "Is There a Right to Health Care?" in the July/August 1999 issue of the Medical Sentinel,(1)
and an editorial which appeared last year in The New England Journal of Medicine,(2) which spoke of a "distributive
ethic" akin to corporate socialized medicine, and the collectivist drive toward a right to medical care in America
with new proposals for a 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to accomplish such a right,(3) I would like to
expound on this issue which is of utmost importance for the survival of the profession and what remains of private
medical care. We are told in Dr. Kassirer's editorial that physicians who agree to the distributive ethic of managed care essentially become agents of
the Plan instead of advocates for the patient.(2) According to Kassirer, the fundamental flaw in today's health care environment is the lack of
egalitarianism --- nationalized health care (socialized medicine). He tells us that "a system in which there is no equity is, in fact, already unethical."(2)
But aside from the fact that ethics is a quality of character that applies only to people not to "systems," his proposed solution of nationalized health care
suffers from the very flaw of "population-based" medicine and "distributive ethics," things which the author tells us are very bad. To illustrate the point,
we need only change the word "plan" in the author's quote to "government." His quote would then read, "In agreeing to a distributive ethic, are
physicians tacitly becoming agents of the [government] instead of agents for their patients?" The answer is a resounding Yes! Again, we need only
look to our Canadian neighbors to see the reality and horrors of government-run, distributive medicine. "Both
patients and physicians are jumping ship as the Canadian single-payer system begins to sink."(4) Canadian citizens are now buying personal medical
insurance that pays for care in the United States, care that they can't get in their "wonderful" government-controlled system when they need it.
Canadian physicians are also leaving Canada in droves, making the already existing shortage of physicians in some areas and in some specialties worse.
Dr. Robert Jackson, who left Toronto several years ago to practice in Dallas, Texas, explained his move by saying that "I don't like being considered the
bad guy all the time. Physicians are held responsible for the constant cuts. At the Orthopedic and Arthritic Hospital in Toronto, wards were closed and
the staff had to sell pizza to pay for repairing the elevators."(4) Dr. Jackson also tells us that staff physicians were limited to 25 joint replacements
per year. But what do you do if you're the 26th person in line...eh? Government doctors in Canada work long hours for low pay and at times are
expected by their government to work for no pay. Most spend on average two hours a day (unpaid labor) filling out government forms. Dr. Jackson's
diagnosis? "Pathological Egalitarianism." There are those who are constantly trying to convince us that egalitarianism is the only moral and ethical
choice in a society where people have unequal houses, unequal cars, unequal food, unequal money, and yes, unequal medical care. We are told
that the only way to fix this inequality is for Big Government to confiscate the fruits of one's labor and
"redistribute" them for the greatest good of the group. But this "distributive ethic" --- From Each According to His
Ability and To Each According to His Need --- is actually nothing more than socialism, a concept which has failed
miserably everywhere in the world that it has been tried. "Universal coverage" translates to minimalist coverage
(as in managed care), delayed access to medical care, and often no access to medical care. All of which begs the question:
How is forcing everyone into government-run minimalist coverage and lack of timely access better? As Walter E.
Williams observes, "Capitalism isn't popular but it works." It has provided access to more goods and services for
more people than any other system in the world. But he observes, capitalism isn't popular because it "is always
evaluated against the non-existent utopias of socialism or communism."(5) The key word is "non-existent" --there is no socialist utopia. Socialism simply doesn't work! Trying to link human rights to a "right to health care," such as has been done under the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights,(6) Article 25 is a truly unAmerican, socialist concept. Our Constitution is not the UN constitution. Under Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S.
Constitution, the powers of Congress are strictly limited. The father of our Constitution, James Madison, gave us stern warning about expanding the role of government "with
good intentions." He said, "With respect to the words General Welfare, I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in
a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by it creators." Indeed, you
will not even find the words "health care" in our Constitution. We also note that none of the God-given rights protected by our Constitution involve government taking
anything from anyone to satisfy another's "right." The new globalist (socialist) view of "rights," however, frequently involves government taking from some and giving to
others. Although
socialists would like to confuse us by trying to convince us that this is charity, it is nothing of the
sort. It is what the great French statesman Frederic Bastiat called legalized plunder, and it leads to discontent and destruction of peace in an otherwise
peaceful society. Although egalitarians are always quick to point out inequalities, for some unexplained reason, they never seem to appreciate one of
the most glaring inequalities which has brought us to the miserable state of managed care from which we suffer today. There is no tax equity. Because
of a peculiar hold-over from World War II, employees buy their medical care with pre-tax dollars, and everyone else has to buy their medical care with
after-tax dollars. Totally inequitable and totally unfair. If we had tax fairness and expansion of Medical Savings Accounts (MSAs), we could put power
back into the hands of patients, with advice from their physicians where it belongs. In a true free market, prices are controlled via direct interaction of
consumer and seller, something that does not exist today in the medical marketplace. Quality is maintained via healthy competition, not
via manipulation by managed care or government bureaucrats. Physicians could practice medicine again in the tradition of
Hippocrates as opposed to being agents of mangled care or government care, thus regaining the trust of their patients and respect for the profession. To
continue down the wrong path toward more "integrated delivery" or worse, government-run medicine is to sacrifice a noble profession on the false altar
of egalitarianism.
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Link – Threat Construction
Depictions of catastrophe as a reason to change the status quo – reinforce universal capitalism.
Zizk 01[Slavoj Zizek 2001 “On Belief” pg. 31-2)
The logic of this succession is thus clear enough: we start with the stable symbolic Order: we proceed to the
heroic suicidal attempts to break out of it; when the Oder itself seems threatened, we provide the matrix of
permutations which accounts for how the revolt itself is just the operator of the passage from one to another
form of the social link; finally, we confront the society in which the revolt itself is rendered meaningless, since,
in it, transgression itself is not only recuperated, but directly solicited by the system as the very form of its
reproduction. To put it in Hegel’s terms, the “truth” of the student’s transgressive revolt against the
Establishment is the emergence of a new establishment in which transgression is part of the game, solicited by
the gadgets which organize our life as the permanent dealing with excesses. Is, then, Lacan’s ultimate result a
conservative resignation, a kind of closure, or does this approach allow for a radical social change? The first thing to
take note of is that the preceding paradigms do not simply disappear in those which follow-they persist, casting a
shadow on them. The late capitalist global market society is by not means characterized by the undisputed rule
of the proliferating objects a: this very society is simultaneously haunted by the prospect of confronting the
Thing in its different guises – no longer predominantly the nuclear catastrophe, but the multitude of other
catastrophes that loom on the horizon (the ecological catastrophe, the prospect of an asteroid hitting the Earth, up
to the micro level of some virus going crazy and destroying human life). Further, more, as Miller himself
deployed apropos of the notion of intimacy, and as Lacan himself predicted in the early 1970s focusing on the “theft
of enjoyment” on the figure of the Other who either threatens to snatch from us the treasure of our “way of
life” and/or itself possesses and displays and excessive jouissance that eludes our grasp. In short, the passage from the
traumatic Thing to lichettes, to the “little bits of jouissance set the tone for a lifestyle” never fully succeeds the Thing
continues to cast its shadow, so that what we have today is the proliferation of the lifestyle lichettes against the
background of the ominous Thing, the catastrophe which threatens to destroy the precious balance of our
various life styles. This weakness of Miller’s description of the paradigms of jouissance has a deeper ground. Today,
in a time of continuous rapid changes, from the “digital revolution” to the retreat of old social forms, thought is more
than ever exposed to the temptation of “losing its nerve,” of precociously abandoning the old conceptual coordinates.
The media constantly bombard us with the need to abandon the “old paradigms”: if we are to survive, we have to
change our most fundamental notions of what constitutes personal identity, society environment, etc. New Age
wisdom claims that we are entering a new ”post-human” era; postmodern political thought tells us that we are entering
post-industrial societies, in which the old categories of labor, collectivity, class, etc., are theoretical zombies, no
longer applicable to the dynamics of modernization. The Third Way ideology and political practice is effectively
THE model of this defeat, of this inability to recognize how the New is here to enable the Old to survive.
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Link - Moral Obligation
Moral obligations and social responsibility are only used to justify capitalistic intervention which is
merely driven by profit and the core of exploitation.
Zizek 06 [Slavoj Zizek, senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, “Nobody has to be
Vile”, April 6 2006, http://www.lacan.com/zizvile.htm]
Above all, liberal communists are true citizens of the world - good people who worry. They worry about populist
fundamentalism and irresponsible greedy capitalist corporations. They see the 'deeper causes' of today's
problems: mass poverty and hopelessness breed fundamentalist terror. Their goal is not to earn money, but to
change the world (and, as a by-product, make even more money). Bill Gates is already the single greatest
benefactor in the history of humanity, displaying his love for his neighbours by giving hundreds of millions of
dollars for education, the fight against hunger and malaria etc. The catch is that before you can give all this
away you have to take it (or, as the liberal communists would put it, create it). In order to help people, the
justification goes, you must have the means to do so, and experience - that is, recognition of the dismal failure of
all centralised statist and collectivist approaches - teaches us that private enterprise is by far the most effective way.
By regulating their business, taxing them excessively, the state is undermining the official goal of its own activity
(to make life better for the majority, to help those in need). Liberal communists do not want to be mere profitmachines: they want their lives to have deeper meaning. They are against old-fashioned religion and for spirituality,
for non-confessional meditation (everybody knows that Buddhism foreshadows brain science, that the power of
meditation can be measured scientifically). Their motto is social responsibility and gratitude: they are the first to
admit that society has been incredibly good to them, allowing them to deploy their talents and amass wealth, so they
feel that it is their duty to give something back to society and help people. This beneficence is what makes business
success worthwhile. This isn't an entirely new phenomenon. Remember Andrew Carnegie, who employed a
private army to suppress organised labour in his steelworks and then distributed large parts of his wealth for
educational, cultural and humanitarian causes, proving that, although a man of steel, he had a heart of gold? In
the same way, today's liberal communists give away with one hand what they grabbed with the other.
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Link-Hegemony
Hegemony promotes capitalism.
Meszaros 7(Professor Emeritus(Istvan Meszaros, Hungarian Marxist philosopher and Professor Emeritus at U. Sussex.
“The Only Viable Economy,” Monthly Review, http://www.monthlyreview.org/0407meszaros.htm)
In our time, by contrast, we have to face up to the reality – and the lethal dangers – arising from global hegemonic
imperialism, with the United States as its overwhelmingly dominant power.7 In contrast to even Hitler, the
United States as the single hegemon is quite unwilling to share global domination with any rival. And that is not
simply on account of political/military contingencies. The problems are much deeper. They assert themselves
through the ever-aggravating contradictions of the capital system's deepening structural crisis. U.S. dominated
global hegemonic imperialism is an -- ultimately futile -- attempt to devise a solution to that crisis through the
most brutal and violent rule over the rest of the world, enforced with or without the help of slavishly "willing
allies," now through a succession of genocidal wars. Ever since the 1970s the United States has been sinking
ever deeper into catastrophic indebtedness. The fantasy solution publicly proclaimed by several U.S. presidents
was "to grow out of it." And the result: the diametrical opposite, in the form of astronomical and still growing
indebtedness. Accordingly, the United States must grab to itself, by any means at its disposal, including the most
violent military aggression, whenever required for this purpose, everything it can, through the transfer of the
fruits of capitalist growth -- thanks to the global socioeconomic and political/military domination of the United
States -- from everywhere in the world. Could then any sane person imagine, no matter how well armored by his or
her callous contempt for "the shibboleth of equality," that U.S. dominated global hegemonic imperialism would take
seriously even for a moment the panacea of "no growth"? Only the worst kind of bad faith could suggest such ideas,
no matter how pretentiously packaged in the hypocritical concern over "the Predicament of Mankind." For a variety of
reasons there can be no question about the importance of growth both in the present and in the future. But to say so
must go with a proper examination of the concept of growth not only as we know it up to the present, but also as we
can envisage its sustainability in the future. Our siding with the need for growth cannot be in favor of unqualified
growth. The tendentiously avoided real question is: what kind of growth is both feasible today, in contrast to
dangerously wasteful and even crippling capitalist growth visible all around us? For growth must be also
positively sustainable in the future on a long-term basis.
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AT: Link Turn – Post Politics
The promotion of a new approach to “politics” – Doesn’t address capitalism as the root cause.
Zizek 1999 (Slavok Zizek, The Ticklish Subject pp 343-44)
The big news of today's post-political age of the 'end of ideology' is thus the radical 'depoliticization of the sphere
of the economy: the way the economy functions (the need to cut social welfare, etc.) is accepted as a simple
insight into the objective state of things. However, as long as this fundamental depoliticization of the economic
sphere is accepted, all the talk about active citizenship, about public discussion leading to responsible collective
decisions, and so on, will remain limited to the 'cultural' issues of religious, sexual, ethnic and other way-of-life
differences, without actually encroaching upon the level at which long-term decisions that affect us all are made. In
short, the only way effectively to bring about a society in which risky long-term decisions would ensue from public
debate involving all concerned is some kind of radical limitation of Capital's freedom, the subordination of the process
of production to social control - the radical repoliticization of the economy'. That is to say: if the problem with
today's post-politics ('administration of social affairs') is that it increasingly undermines the possibility of a
proper political act, this undermining is directly due to the depoliticization of economics, to the common
acceptance of Capital and market mechanisms as neutral tools/ procedures to be exploited. We can now see
why today's post-politics cannot attain the properly political dimension of universality: because it silently
precludes the sphere of economy from politicization. The domain of global capitalist market relations is the Other
Scene of the so-called repoliticization of civil society advocated by the partisans of 'identity politics' and other
postmodern forms of politicization: all the talk about new forms of politics bursting out all over, focused on
particular issues (gay rights, ecology, ethnic minorities ... ), all this incessant activity of fluid, shifting identities,
of building multiple ad hoc coalitions, and so on, has something inauthentic about it, and ultimately resembles
the obsessional neurotic who talks all the time and is otherwise frantically active precisely in order to ensure
that something - what really matters - will not be disturbed, that it will remain immobilized.35 So, instead of
celebrating the new freedoms and responsibilities brought about by the 'second modernity', it is much more crucial to
focus on what remains the same in this global fluidity and reflexivity, on what serves as the very motor of this
fluidity: the inexorable logic of Capital. The spectral presence of Capital is the figure of the big Other which
not only remains operative when all the traditional embodiments of the symbolic big Other disintegrate, but
even directly causes this disintegration: far from being confronted with the abyss of their freedom - that is, laden
with the burden of responsibility that cannot be alleviated by the helping hand of Tradition or Nature - today's subject
is perhaps more than ever caught in an inexorable compulsion that effectively runs his life.
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Cap  Patriarchy
Cap is the root cause of patriarchy.
Meszaros, 95 (Istvan Meszaros, Hungarian Marxist philosopher and Professor Emeritus at U. Sussex. “Beyond Capital:
Toward a Theory of Transition.” p. 289)
Thus, given the economically secured extraction of surplus-labour and the corresponding mode of political decision
making under the private capitalist order of social metabolic reproduction, there can be absolutely no room in it for
the feminist agenda of substantive equality which would require a radical restructuring of both the constitutive cells
and the overall structural framework of the established system. No one in their right mind could even dream about
instituting such changes through the political machinery of the capitalist order, in no matter how high an office, without
exposing themselves to the danger of being labelled female Don Quixotes. There is no danger of introducing the feminist
agenda even by surprise in capitalist systems, since there can be no room at all for it in the strictly circumscribed framework
of political decision making destined to the role of facilitating the most efficient economic extraction of surplus-labour. Thus
it is by no means accidental that the Indhira Gandhis, Margaret Thatchers and Mrs Bandaranaikes of this world -and
the last one despite her original radical left credentials -did not advance in the slightest the cause of women's
emancipation; if anything, quite the opposite. The situation is very different in the postcapitalist systems of social metabolic reproduction and
political decision making. For, in virtue of their key position in securing the required continuity of surplus-labour extraction, they can initiate wholesale
changes in the ongoing reproduction process through direct political intervention. Thus the determination of the political personnel is of a very different
order here, in that its potential orientation is in principle much more open than under capitalism. For notwithstanding the mythology of the 'open Society’
(propagandized by authoritarian enemies like Hayek and Popper), under capitalism the objectives and mechanisms of 'market society' remain unreliable
taboos, strictly delineating the mandate and the unquestioning orientation of the political personnel who cannot and would not contemplate seriously
interfering with the established economic extraction of surplus-labour; not even in its socialdemocratic embodiment. This difference in potential openness in
the two systems creates in principle also a space for introducing elements of the feminist agenda, as indeed the shortlived postrevolutionary attempts testify
to it in Russia. However, the potential openness cannot be actualized on a lasting basis under the postcapitalist rule of capital, since the hierarchically
managed extraction of surplus-labour reasserts itself as the crucial determining characteristic of the social metabolism also under the changed circumstances.
Thus the whole question of political mandate must be suitably redefined, nullifying the possibility of both 'representation' (characteristic of the capitalist
parliamentary setup, with the totally unquestioning mandate of the representatives towards the established economic mode of surplus-labour extraction and
capital accumulation) and 'delegation', which used to characterize much of the socialist literature on the subject. An absolutely unquestionable,
depersonalized political authority the Party of the Party-state -must be superimposed over the individual political
personnel under the postcapitalist rule of capital, articulated in the form of the strictest hierarchical command
structure, oriented towards the maximal politically regulated extraction of surplus-labour. This is what apriori
excludes all possibility of 'making room for the feminist agenda'. Given the significantly different role of politics in the
two systems, under capitalism women may be safely allowed to occupy at times even the highest political position, whereas
under posrcapitalist conditions they must be unceremoniously excluded from it. Under the postcapitalist system, therefore,
even the limited attempts of women to establish a new type of family relation in furtherance of their age-old
aspirations, which spontaneously surfaced in the immediate postrevolutionary years, must be liquidated. For
inasmuch as the politically secured and safeguarded maximal extraction of surplus-labour remains the vital orienting
principle of the social metabolism, with its necessarily hierarchical command structure, the question of women's
emancipation, with its demand for substantive equality -and by implication: for a radical restructuring of the
established social order, from its smallest constitutive cells to its most comprehensive coordinating organs -cannot be
entertained for a moment.
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Cap  Genocide/Exclusion
Capitalism creates the idea of a pure community where the people with power and money can justifiably exclude and
murder the Other.
Internationalist Perspective, 2000 (“Capitalism and Genocide”, Issue #36, Spring 2000,
http://www.geocities.com/wageslavex/capandgen.html)
One of the most dramatic effects of the inexorable penetration of the law of value into every pore of social life,
and geographically across the face of the whole planet, has been the destruction of all primitive, organic, and
pre-capitalist communities. Capitalism, as Marx and Engels pointed out in the Communist Manifesto, shatters the bonds of immemorial custom
and tradition, replacing them with its exchange mechanism and contract. While Marx and Engels stressed the positive features of this development in the
Manifesto, we cannot ignore its negative side, particularly in light of the fact that the path to a human Gemeinwesen has so far been successfully blocked by
The negative side of that development includes the relentless
process of atomization, leaving in its wake an ever growing mass of rootless individuals, for whom the only
human contact is by way of the cash nexus. Those who have been uprooted geographically, economically, politically, and culturally, are
capital, with disastrous consequences for the human species.
frequently left with a powerful longing for their lost communities (even where those communities were hierarchically organized and based on inequality), for
the certainties and "truths" of the past, which are idealized the more frustrating, unsatisfying, and insecure, the world of capital becomes. Such longings are
These are stata and classes whose material
or mental conditions of life are linked to a past mode of production, who exist economically or culturally in
the past, even as they chronologically dwell in the present. In contrast to the two historic classes in the capitalist mode of
most powerfully felt within what Ernst Bloch has termed non-synchronous strata and classes.
production, the bourgeoisie and proletariat, which are synchronous, the products of the capitalist present, these non-synchronous strata include the peasantry,
the petty bourgeoisie, and -- by virtue of their mental or cultural state -- youth and white-collar workers. In my view, Bloch's understanding of nonsynchronicity needs to be extended to segments of the working class, in particular those strata of the blue-collar proletariat which are no longer materially
synchronous with the high-tech production process upon which late capitalism rests, and the mass of workers ejected from the production process by the
rising organic composition of capital and its comcomitant down-sizing. In addition, the even greater mass of peasants streaming into the shanty towns around
the great commercial and industrial metropolitan centers of the world, are also characterized by their non-synchronicity, their inability to be incorporated
into the hyper-modern cycle of capital accumulation. Moreover, all of these strata too are subject to a growing nostalgia for the past, a longing for
community, including the blue-collar communities and their institutional networks which were one of the features of the social landscape of capitalism
no matter how powerful this nostalgia for past community becomes, it cannot
be satisfied. The organic communities of the past cannot be recreated; their destruction by capital is
irreversible. At the same time, the path to a future Gemeinwesen, to which the cultural material and longings embodied in the non-synchronous classes
and strata can make a signal contribution, according to Bloch, remains obstructed by the power of capital. So long as this is the case, the
genuine longing for community of masses of people, and especially the nostalgia for past communities especially felt by the nonsynchronous strata and classes, including the newly non-synchronous elements which I have just argued must be added to them, leaves them
exposed to the lure of a "pure community" ideologically constructed by capital itself. In place of real organic and
earlier in the twentieth century. However,
communal bonds, in such an ideologically constructed pure community, a racial, ethnic, or religious identification is merely superimposed on the existing
condition of atomization in which the mass of the population finds itself. In addition to providing some gratification for the longing for community
which ties the bulk of the population
to the capitalist state on the basis of a race, ethnicity, or religion which it shares with the ruling class. This latter is extremely
animating broad strata of the population, such a pure community can also provide an ideological bond
important to capital, because the atomization which it has brought about not only leaves the mass of humanity bereft, but also leaves the ruling class itself
vulnerable because it lacks any basis upon which it can mobilize the population, physically or ideologically. The basis
upon which such a pure
community is constituted, race, nationality, religion, even a categorization by "class" in the Stalinist world,
necessarily means the exclusion of those categories of the population which do not conform to the criteria for
inclusion, the embodiments of alterity, even while they inhabit the same geographical space as the members of
the pure community. Those excluded, the "races" on the other side of the biological continuum, to use
Foucauldian terminology, the Other, become alien elements within an otherwise homogeneous world of the
pure community. As a threat to its very existence, the role of this Other is to become the scapegoat for the
inability of the pure community to provide authentic communal bonds between people, for its abject failure
to overcome the alienation that is a hallmark of a reified world. The Jew in Nazi Germany, the Kulak in
Stalinist Russia, the Tutsi in Rwanda, Muslims in Bosnia, blacks in the US, the Albanian or the Serb in Kosovo,
the Arab in France, the Turk in contemporary Germany, the Bahai in Iran, for example, become the embodiment of
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alterity, and the target against which the hatred of the members of the pure community is directed. The more
crisis ridden a society becomes, the greater the need to find an appropriate scapegoat; the more urgent the need for
In an extreme situation of social
crisis and political turmoil, the demonization and victimization of the Other can lead to his (mass) murder. In
the absence of a working class conscious of its historic task and possibilities, this hatred of alterity which permits capital to mobilize the
population in defense of the pure community, can become its own impetus to genocide. The immanent
tendencies of the capitalist mode of production which propel it towards a catastrophic economic crisis, also
drive it towards mass murder and genocide. In that sense, the death-world, and the prospect of an Endzeit cannot be separated from the
mass mobilization behind the integral state, the more imperious the need to focus rage against the Other.
continued existence of humanity's subordination to the law of value. Reification, the overmanned world, bio-politics, state racism, the constitution of a pure
the economic and ideological topography of the real domination of
capital, create the possibility and the need for genocide. We should have no doubt that the survival of
capitalism into this new millenium will entail more and more frequent recourse to mass murder.
community directed against alterity, each of them features of
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Cap  Racism
Capitalism created racism to exploit the lower class and marginalize groups for profits.
Rosenthal 06 [Dr. Steven Rosenthal 2006, Professor of Sociology "Capitalism, Racism, Imperialism, Communism,
Facism, and Other Related Concepts http://members.cox.net/smrose7/Marxist%20Concepts.html]
define racism as the
belief in the inferiority of a race of people. This is an inadequate definition for several reasons. First, racism is
not just a personal belief. It is a systematic ideology, a world view. Second, the belief in inferiority is just one of
many racist beliefs that make up the ideology of racism. For example, racist opposition to affirmative action
typically involves the false belief that blacks are getting special preferences, and that blacks are taking jobs and
college slots from whites. Third, racism is not only a belief or attitude. It is also behavior or practice--the practice of discrimination,
oppression, super-exploitation. To sum up, racism is not just the psychological hang-up of prejudiced individuals.
It is a pervasive feature of all capitalist societies throughout the world, enabling capitalists to maximize their
profits and power at the expense of the working class. The myth of race. In Sociology we generally say that race is a "social
Racism consists of both the practice of super-exploitation and its ideological justification. Many sociology textbooks
construct," which means that humans made up or invented races. Joseph L. Graves, Jr., the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in evolutionary
biology, recently published a book titled The Emperor's New Clothes. In that book Graves demonstrated many important points about race.
Scientifically, there are no biological races among humans. All humans alive today are descendents of common ancestors who
evolved in Africa about 130,000 years ago. There is one human race. Recent decoding of the human genome has
shown that we all possess virtually identical genes. The minor genetic variations among humans display no consistent
correlations with what people widely call races. Attitudes of racial antagonism have not always existed. The concept of race was
actually little developed until a few centuries ago, and the actual word racism did not come into use until the 20th century. Race and racism
were developed to promote and justify enslavement, extermination, and colonial conquest, which were the
foundations of the system of modern capitalism. For more discussion of this analysis, you can read an interview
with Joseph Graves. The invention of racism. Modern racism was developed by wealthy capitalist ruling classes
and their intellectual servants. They invented races in order to invent racism. That is, in order to justify the
murder, enslavement, and conquest of hundreds of millions of Africans, Asians, and indigenous Americans and
Australians, capitalists had to redefine them as members of distinct and inferior races . This process began around the time
of the first voyage of Christopher Columbus and continued through the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. Black historian Lerone Bennett, in The Road Not Taken, a
chapter from his book The Shaping of Black America, 1975, pp. 61-82, originally published in Ebony, vol. 25 (August, 1970), pp. 71-77), provided a good historical
analysis of how racism was developed in colonial North America. According to Bennett, the African, European, and Native American workers on the colonial
plantations were at first all indentured servants, that is, temporary slaves. They were largely unconcerned about the color of their skin. They worked together, made love
together, rebelled, and ran away together. The plantation owners, desperate to control their labor force, pushed Africans down into hereditary slavery in order to divide
They used their control of colonial society to impose laws intended to force blacks, whites, and reds
apart. Bennett shows that racism is not "natural." It is not something that is "just there." European laborers had
no inherent fear or dislike of Africans. A century of terror, law, and religious propaganda were required in
order to drive white and black labor apart in Colonial America. Class Struggle. Summarizing Lerone Bennett's analysis
and conquer.
using Marxist concepts, we could say that there was sharp class struggle in colonial North America between capitalist plantation owners and
working class indentured servants. The capitalists sought to suppress this class struggle by dividing the workers into
a
"white" race of indentured servants, a "black" race of permanent slaves, and an "Indian" race that was
mostly exterminated. Class struggle is the inevitable conflict that takes place between workers and the capitalists who exploit them. As Karl
Marx wrote in the opening pages of The Communist Manifesto, class struggle has been going on for thousands of years, ever since human societies
became divided into opposing classes. Primitive Accumulation. The process Lerone Bennett described is part of a global process that Karl Marx
called primitive accumulation. The first capitalists used the most primitive (that is, brutal and violent) methods to
accumulate the capital they needed and to create a vast class of proletarians (workers) who owned nothing but their
ability to work. They kidnapped and enslaved tens of millions of Africans and Native Americans and worked
them to death in gold and silver mines and on sugar and tobacco plantations. W.E.B. DuBois, in The World and
Africa, praised Marx, stating that "it was Karl Marx who made the great unanswerable charge of the sources of
capitalism in African slavery." Capitalism and Super-exploitation. Because racism is indispensible to capitalism,
racism did not die out after chattel slavery was abolished. Slavery has been replaced with other forms of racist
super-exploitation. W.E.B. DuBois devoted much of his sociological and historical writing to analyzing and explaining the centrality and
persistence of racism in modern societies. He wrote his Harvard Ph.D. dissertation on the British suppression of the slave trade. Why, DuBois
asked, did the British, who dominated and made the greatest profits from the slave trade, decide to suppress the trafficking of enslaved Africans in
the Americas during the early 19th century? It was not for humanitarian reasons, Dub Bois explained in The World and Africa (1944). As the
British extended their colonial rule over most of the African continent, they developed a system of colonialism that was far more profitable and far
more murderous than slavery had been. The British empire was based on the super-exploitation of native labor in their colonized homelands, so
they did not want to export their colonial population of cheap labor to their Spanish and Protuguese competitors in the Americas.
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Cap Extinction
Cap causes extinction
Charles Sullivan, photographer, free lance writer and social activist, 6/6/06
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13515.htm
As a result of human overpopulation, and capitalism’s inherent greed, virtually all of the world’s great ecosystems
are in decline or collapse. The earth’s ability to replenish herself and to sustain her immense biological diversity
(biological capital) is being diminished. So we are living in the midst of one of the planet’s great extinction episodes
and it is human induced. Every plant and animal that exists has an impact on the planet. It is therefore imperative that
we live gently and with minimal environmental impact, lest we impair the earth’s ability to sustain life. The concept
of the private ownership of nature simply does not produce a sound and responsible land ethic. Unbridled greed, like
that driving virtually all of our governmental policies, has no place in a sustainable culture. Enriching the world’s
wealthiest people at the expense of the biosphere is the worst kind of insanity imaginable. And that is exactly what
we are doing.
Extinction is inevitable in a world of capitalism—its literally try or die for the alternative
Charles Sullivan, photographer, free lance writer and social activist, 6/6/06
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13515.htm
Wherever the extractive industries have gone they have left polluted waters and depauperate landscapes, and
exhausted and impoverished workers in their wake. The company owners get rich while the workers continue to
live in abject poverty and are still dying in the mines. This is the legacy of capitalism, as witnessed by a historical
record that is beyond dispute. It is there for the entire world to see, as if etched in granite. You can see it in the face of
the miners and the impoverished remnant forest, in the toxic waste left behind in Butte, Montana, where the water
in the aftermath of copper mining has the acidity of battery acid. It makes no moral, ecological or economic sense
whatsoever for us to continue down this path of self-deception and self-annihilation. As we have seen, capitalism
produces only a few winners, and leaves death and devastation in its wake. Either we rebel or die. Think about the
kind of world we are leaving future generations. How can they ever forgive us this trespass?
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Cap  Poverty
Abandoning capitalism is the only way to alleviate the worst effects of poverty—human needs can
all be met if consumption at the top is dramatically decreased.
István Mészáros, Professor Emeritus in Philosophy and Political Theory, 2007, University of Sussex.
“The Only Viable Economy” http://www.monthlyreview.org/0407meszaros.htm
That is where the incorrigible divorce of capitalistic growth from human need and use -- indeed its potentially most
devastating and destructive counter-position to human need -- betrays itself. Once the fetishistic mystifications and
arbitrary postulates at the root of the categorically decreed false identity of growth and productivity are peeled away,
it becomes abundantly clear that the kind of growth postulated and at the same time automatically exempted from
all critical scrutiny is in no way inherently connected with sustainable objectives corresponding to human need. The
only connection that must be asserted and defended at all cost in capital's social metabolic universe is the false identity of
-- aprioristically presupposed -- capital expansion and circularly corresponding (but in truth likewise aprioristically
presupposed) "growth," whatever might be the consequences imposed on nature and humankind by even the most
destructive type of growth. For capital's real concern can only be its own ever enlarged expansion, even if that
brings with it the destruction of humanity. In this vision even the most lethal cancerous growth must preserve its
conceptual primacy over (against) human need and use, if human need by any chance happens to be mentioned at all. The
characteristically self-serving false alternative of "growth or no growth" is evident even if we only consider what
would be the unavoidable impact of the postulated "no growth" on the grave conditions of inequality and suffering
in capital's social order. It would mean the permanent condemnation of humanity's overwhelming majority to the
inhuman conditions which they are now forced to endure. For they are now in a literal sense forced to endure them,
by their thousands of millions, when there could be created a real alternative to it. Under conditions, that is, when it
would be quite feasible to rectify at least the worst effects of global deprivation: by putting to humanly commendable
and rewarding use the attained potential of productivity, in a world of now criminally wasted material and human
resources.
Capitalism is structurally incapable of addressing poverty—the argument that free markets help
the poor is a self-serving myth.
Istivan Meszaros professor emeritus at the University of Sussex, Beyond Capital, pg. xiii 1995
The attempt at divorcing effects from their causes goes hand in hand with the equally fallacious practice of
claiming the status of a rule for the exception. This is how it can be pretended that the misery and chronic
underdevelopment that necessarily arise from the neo-colonial domination and exploitation of the overwhelming
majority of humankind by a mere handful of capitalistically developed countries—hardly more than the G7—do not
matter at all. For, as the self-serving legend goes, thanks to the (never realized) ‘modernization’ of the rest of the
world, the population of every country will one fine day enjoy the great benefits of the ‘free enterprise system.’
The fact that the rapacious exploitation of the human and material resources of our planet for the benefit of a few
capitalist countries happens to be a non-generalizable condition is wantonly disregarded. Instead, the universal
viability of emulating the development of the ‘advanced capitalist’ countries is predicated, ignoring that neither the
advantages of the imperialist past, or the immense profits derived on a continuing basis from keeping the ‘Third World’ in
a structural dependency can be ‘universally diffused,’ so as to produce the anticipated happy results through
‘modernization’ and ‘free-marketization.’ Not to mention the fact that even if the history of imperialism could be re-written if
a sense diametrically opposed to the way it actually unfolded, coupled with the fictitious reversal of the existing
power relations of domination and dependency in favour of the underdeveloped countries, the general adoption of
the rapacious utilization of our plant’s limited resources—enormously damaging already, although at present
practiced only be the privileged tiny minority—would make the whole system instantly collapse.
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Cap  Poverty
Capitalism Causes Poverty
Moxley and Vilchez, ’09, Modern capitalism and the “swine flu” outbreak, Soclaist World.net,
http://socialistworld.net/eng/2009/05/1101.html
The neoliberal policies pursued by the ruling class have left nations around the world in shambles. Since the 1970s,
capitalism has attacked living standards, wages and conditions around the world in order to turn a profit, deepening
poverty and neglecting healthcare and basic human needs. Through free trade and globalisation, there was not only a
race to the bottom in wages but also in living conditions and infrastructure. Capitalism has created a world where
there are food surpluses while around 25,000 people die from hunger every day; a world where poor and working
class people die from treatable diseases because they don’t have the money to go to the doctor. Under capitalism, the
richest 10% own 85% of the wealth.
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CAPITALISM KRITIK
Cap Kills Democracy
Capitalism enables elites to dominate politics—it does not foster real democracy.
Robert B. Reich, former Harvard University professor, “How capitalism is killing democracy,” Foreign
Policy, September-October 2007
It was supposed to be a match made in heaven. Capitalism and democracy, we've long been told, are the twin
ideological pillars capable of bringing unprecedented prosperity and freedom to the world. In recent decades, the
duo has shared a common ascent. By almost any measure, global capitalism is triumphant. Most nations around the world
are today part of a single, integrated, and turbocharged global market. Democracy has enjoyed a similar renaissance.
Three decades ago, a third of the world's nations held free elections; today, nearly two thirds do. Conventional wisdom
holds that where either capitalism or democracy flourishes, the other must soon follow. Yet today, their fortunes are
beginning to diverge. Capitalism, long sold as the yin to democracy's yang, is thriving, while democracy is struggling
to keep up. China, poised to become the world's third largest capitalist nation this year after the United States and
Japan, has embraced market freedom, but not political freedom. Many economically successful nations--from
Russia to Mexico--are democracies in name only. They are encumbered by the same problems that have hobbled
American democracy in recent years, allowing corporations and elites buoyed by runaway economic success to
undermine the government's capacity to respond to citizens' concerns.Of course, democracy means much more than
the process of free and fair elections. It is a system for accomplishing what can only be achieved by citizens joining
together to further the common good. But though free markets have brought unprecedented prosperity to many, they
have been accompanied by widening inequalities of income and wealth, heightened job insecurity, and
environmental hazards such as global warming.
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Cap  Terrorism
Terrorism is inevitable in a capitalist world.
Foster and Clark Foster, John Bellamy and Clark, Brett 12/04 Monthly Review: Empire Of Barbarism
As Business Week declared "A new age of barbarism is upon us." But it is a mistake to attribute such barbarism
simply or in the main to social forces and nations in the periphery . Just as Marx came to invert the historical treatment
of barbarism as he condemned the colonial systems of his day, we need to recognize the barbarism of the strong and their
culpability in creating this new age. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the voice of the new barbarism, recently
stated: "At some point the Iraqis will get tired of getting killed" (USA Today, September 16, 2004). Presumably he was
referring to Iraqis killed by suicide bombers. Nevertheless, his statement remains inhuman in its implications in the
context of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Once declared there is no end to "The Global War on Terror,"
which ought to be called the Global War of Terror. Only the transcendence of capitalism, in the direction of
socialism, offers the possibility to escape from the current state of barbarism that is paving the way to new global
holocausts and a worsening ecological collapse. Daniel Singer wrote at the end of his Whose Millennium? "Socialism
may be a historical possibility, or even necessary to eliminate the evils of capitalism, but this does not mean that it will
inevitably take its place." We should heed his warning. The choice that we confront and that we will ultimately decide
through our struggles is whether "socialism" or "the ruins of imperialistic barbarism" is to be the future of
humankind.
Capitalism Causes Terrorism-Inequality of wealth
Slater, ‘06, The Huffington Post, The Root Causes of Terrorism and Why No One Wants to End Them,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/philip-slater/the-root-causes-of-terror_b_32466.html
Terrorists are people who have lost hope--hope for the possibility of peacefully creating a better world. They
may be middle-class and educated, as many terrorist leaders are, but their despair is one of empathy for the
plight of their people as a whole. The root causes of terrorism are pathological inequalities in wealth--not just in
Saudi Arabia but all over the Third World. Even in our own country Republican policies have in recent decades
created inequalities so extreme that while a few have literally more money than they can possibly use, the vast
majority are struggling to get by. A society that impoverishes most of its population in order to enrich a few
neurotically greedy individuals is a sick society. As Jared Diamond has shown, societies in which a few plunder
the environment at the expense of the many are headed for collapse. Fundamentalist religions and radical
ideologies are the common refuge of people without hope. Christianity has played this role for centuries. The rich
encourage the poor to accept the misery of this world as a passport to heaven, despite the fact that according to
Jesus they don't have a prayer of getting in themselves. This isn't really surprising. The rich wouldn't be caught
dead in a place where they let poor people in. Islamic fundamentalism is the latest drug being offered the poor and
desperate. It has the added appeal that you can not only get into heaven but also take vengeance at the same time.
Terrorism will never end until caps are placed on inequality. At this point Republicans usually start screaming
about communism and destroying 'freedom'. But no one's talking about ending capitalism. Capitalism is here to
stay, but like any system it will self-destruct without limits. Pure greed is not a sufficient basis for a viable social
system, and a pure free market system will self-destruct as surely as pure communism. As Lewis Mumford pointed
out years ago, no system can survive without contradictions, because humans are much more complex than
their ideologies.
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!=Environment
Capitalism destroys the environment- need to conform
League for the Fifth International, Save the Planet from capitalist destruction, 5/21/09
Under capitalism it is impossible to create a rational, lasting relation between man and nature, a relation that could
allow for a sustainable and lasting reproduction of humanity and its natural living conditions. As generalised
commodity production, the success and rationality of all economic activity is measured post festum, whether or not a
product finds buyer, a need on the market. Everything that does not conform to this is constantly threatened with
elimination from social or natural reproduction.
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!=Bad Government
Capitlism Causes Greedy Government – Liberia example proves
Zaza ’06, The Perspective, Liberia's Economy: Decorated Greedy System,
http://www.theperspective.org/articles/0829200601.html\
Is it not the use of the capitalist system that has made the culture of greed to permeate our society? Is it not because of greed
that, even after we executed 13 former government officials publicly, and subsequently fought a fourteen-year vicious
civil war, our representatives are still signing unscrupulous agreements and concessions? It is clear that since 1847,
capitalists continue to operate all of Liberia’s major economic activities ranging from rubber, to mining iron ore, to
wholesale to construction, etc. The transportation industry and government's offices are owned and operated by
capitalists. Even our education was and is still controlled by capitalists. In fact, one could argue that because government
did not invest in high school from 1847 until in the 70s, Liberia did not produce sufficient skilled manpower, an
incentive for employers.
Capitalism Causes wars of Punishment on Communist countries
Seligman, ’99, Socialist Action, http://www.socialistaction.org/news/199910/war.html Seligman was the
national secretary of Socialist Action.
The whole NATO war against Yugoslavia was a war of collective punishment on the Serbian people and on the
Kosovars as well, as shown by the use of cluster bombs, depleted-uranium coated bullets and the targets in Yugoslavia
itself-civilian targets of bridges, factories, hospitals, a passenger train, a television station, a bus, power generators,
potable water grids, a marketplace, the Chinese embassy. These ways that NATO conducted the war show that it was
not motivated in the least by humanitarianism.
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!=China problems
Recent Ethnic Violence in China has come from Capitalism
Main, 7-8-09, Ethnic tension in Urumqi, Xinjiang spills over into riots, Leaguge for the Fifth International,
http://www.fifthinternational.org/content/ethnic-tension-urumqi-xinjiang-spills-over-riots
In the short-term, and at the local level, the riots could be seen as the product of tension within a capital city that has
grown rapidly in the last decade so that the indigenous, Uighur, population is now only a small, and impoverished,
minority in an overwhelmingly Han city. However, purely local frictions would never lead to a death toll of hundreds,
deeper forces must be at work to result in slaughter on such a scale. Equally, they would not be a reason for President Hu
Jintao to cancel his attendance at the G8 meeting in Italy. Both the population movement and the poverty of the Uighurs
are products of the restoration of capitalism in China and Beijing's policy of consolidating its power over the more
peripheral regions which were on the fringes of Imperial China's territories. Indeed, the sequence of events which led to
the riots illustrates this very clearly.
The Aids crisis in China is because of a resurgence of Capitalism
Revolutionary Communist Party USA, ’09, Aids in China, http://rwor.org/a/v23/111019/1116/china_aids.htm
The AIDS crisis in China underscores how the restoration of capitalism in China has meant the return of widespread
poverty, misery and desperation for millions of people, especially in the countryside. The return of drug addiction,
prostitution, and poverty have provided fertile ground for the rampant spread of AIDS. And with China’s government-no longer operating to "serve the people," but instead constantly chasing after higher profits and foreign investments-there is no longer mass, affordable health care or mass health education. There is widespread ignorance about HIV/AIDS
and how it is spread, and so discrimination against people with the disease is common. Surveys show that in rural
villages, where AIDS is already a serious problem, only 34% of the people even know about HIV/AIDS. And even in big
cities like Beijing and Shanghai, more than 50% of high school students receive no sex education at all. Most medical
workers don’t understand how to take care of AIDS patients and don’t want to have contact with them for fear of contagion.
Many government officials in China have delayed or concealed reports on the AIDS epidemic. And local officials have
prevented people doing research on the spread of HIV from coming into some areas. One Chinese public health official
pointed out that it is hard for the authorities to admit the extent of the AIDS crisis because this would mean
acknowledging the widespread problems of prostitution and drug addiction--which basically had disappeared under
Mao. Officials are also concerned that admitting the seriousness of the AIDS crisis will hurt tourism, investment,
economic development, and the overall social stability of the country.
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!=African Exploitation
African Economic Problems caused by Capitlism imposed by Westerners
WSM, ’92, Famine in Somalia It's not a natural disaster: It's murder, Workers Solidarty Movment,
http://struggle.ws/ws92/famine37.html
External debt and falling commodity prices have had a crippling impact on African economies during the past decade.
In the 1970s Western banks encouraged many less developed countries to borrow heavily. This borrowing, supposedly
for roads and irrigation projects and so on was often siphoned off for personal use by dictators or wasted on useless
projects or on arms. The money was borrowed at low interest rates. Interest rates jumped from 6% to 18% in a few years,
dramatically increasing the debts. In 1990 African debt was double what it was in 1980. African countries were forced to call
in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to seek a way out of their problems. However the 'solutions' of the I.M.F. have
been to impose draconian and brutal cutbacks in health and education, and the abolition of food subsidies. This is a
capitalist solution to a problem caused by capitalism in the first place. Famine, desperate poverty and the complete
absence of health and education services are the result for millions of Africans.
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!= Arms Race
Capitalism cannot stop the arms race-limited focus
Socialist Labor Party, ’82, Why Capitalism Can’t Freeze the Arms Race,
http://www.slp.org/res_state_htm/arms_race82.html
In other words, the freeze campaign is premised upon a political concept that underlies many issue-oriented
movements: limit the focus of the movement to a "single issue," a "low common denominator" that many people could
readily agree with, in order to enlist the "broadest possible support." The reasoning behind this strategy is that it is better
to have more people supporting a limited objective than to have fewer people supporting a more comprehensive goal.
It is precisely because of its limited focus that the freeze concept could win the support of liberal politicians who are
nonetheless totally committed to the preservation of U.S. capitalism and who may intentionally or otherwise co-opt the
movement by pushing meaningless, ineffective legislation. The resolution introduced in Congress illustrates the point. Not
only is that congressional proposal for a freeze watered down and more vague than the original, it is a nonbinding
resolution and will not make any change in actual policy. It calls for the superpowers "to decide when and how to achieve
a mutual and verifiable freeze" on testing, production and deployment of nuclear weapons. This "when and how" provision
renders the concept meaningless. Even Ronald Reagan probably would support a nuclear arms freeze after the United
States has gotten far enough "ahead" in the arms race and acquired a "first strike" capability. In essence, then, the
liberal politicians in Congress, without seriously impeding the U.S. nuclear arms buildup, could serve as a lightning
rod by channeling much of the opposition to the arms race into support of useless electoral efforts or legislative
proposals.
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CAPITALISM KRITIK
Collapse  Revolution
Capitalism will collapse-impacts lead to Proletariat revolution
Pannekoek ’34, The theory of the collapse of capitalism, Marxist Internet Archives,
http://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1934/collapse.htm
The collapse of capitalism in Marx does depend on the act of will of the working class; but this will is not a free choice,
but is itself determined by economic development. The contradictions of the capitalist economy, which repeatedly
emerge in unemployment, crises, wars, class struggles, repeatedly determine the will to revolution of the proletariat.
Socialism comes not because capitalism collapses economically and men, workers and others, are forced by necessity
to create a new organization, but because capitalism, as it lives and grows, becomes more and more unbearable for the
workers and repeatedly pushes them to struggle until the will and strength to overthrow the domination of capitalism
and establish a new organization grows in them, and then capitalism collapses. The working class is not pushed to act
because the unbearableness of capitalism is demonstrated to them from the outside, but because they feel it generated within
them. Marx’s theory, as economics, shows how the above phenomena irresistibly reappear with greater and greater
force and, as historical materialism, how they necessarily give rise to the revolutionary will and the revolutionary act.
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Alt
We must reject the system – Post politics dominates current ideology and will co-opt any
movement.
Zizek 1999 (Slavok Zizek, The Ticklish Subject pp 198-9)
Today, however, we are dealing with another form of the denegation of the political, postmodern post-politics,
which no longer merely ‘represses’ the political, trying to contain it and pacify the ‘returns of the repressed’,
but much more effectively ‘forecloses’ it, so that the postmodern forms of the ethnic violence, with their
‘irrational’ excessive character, are no longer simple ‘returns of the repressed’ but, rather, represent a case of
the foreclosed (from the Symbolic) which, as we know from Lacan, returns in the Real. In post-politics, the
conflict of global ideological visions embodied in different parties which compete for power is replaced by the
collaboration of enlightened technocrats {economics, public opinion specialists…) and liberal multiculturalists:
via the process of negotiation of interests, a compromise is reached in the guise of a more or less universal Conesus.
Post-politics thus emphasizes the need to leave old ideological divisions behind and confront new issues, armed with
the necessary expert knowledge and free deliberation that takes people’s concrete needs and demands into account.
The best formula that expresses the paradox of post-politics is perhaps Tony Blair’s characterization of New Labour
as the ‘Radical Centre’: in the old days of ‘ideological’ political division, the qualification ‘radical’ was reserved
either for the extreme Left or for the extreme Right. The Centre was, by definition, moderate: measured 77by the
old standards, the term ‘Radical Centre’ is the same nonsense as ‘radical moderation’. What makes New Labour (or
Bill Clinton’s politics in the USA) ‘radical’ is its radical abandonment of the ‘old ideological divides’, usually
formulated in the guise of a paraphrase of Deng Xiaoping’s motto from the 1960s: ‘It doesn’t matter is a cat is red or
white: what matters is that it actually catches mice’: in the same vein, advocates of New Labour like to emphasizes
that one should take good ideas without any prejudice and apply them, whatever their ideological origins. And what
are these ‘good ideas’? The answer is, of course, ideas that work. It is here that we encounter the gap that
separates a political act proper from the ‘administration of social matters’ which remains within the
framework of existing sociopolitical relations: the political act (intervention) proper is not simply something
that works well within the framework of the existing relations, but something that changes the very framework
that determines how things work. To say that good ideas are ‘ideas that work’ means that one accepts in advance
the (global capitalist) constellation that determines what works (if, for example, one spends too much money on
education or healthcare, that ‘doesn’t work’, since it infringes too much on the conditions of capitalist
profitability). One can also put it in terms of the well-known definition of politics as the ‘art of the possible’:
authentic politics is, rather the exact opposite, that is, the art of the impossible – it changes the very parameters of
what is considered ‘possible’ in the existing constellation.
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Alt - Traverse the Fantasy
Capitalism alternatives will always be co-opted until we traverse the fantasy.
Bohm and Cock 2005 [Steffen Böhm and Christian Cock, Lecturer at University of Essex and Prof at
University of Exeter, “Everything you wanted to know about organization theory . . . but were afraid to ask
Slavoj Zizek”, The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review 2005]
For Zizek, Foucauldian ‘micro-political’ subject positions designate a form of subjectivity that corresponds to ‘late
capitalism’, which brings us back to his conception of the workings of capitalist ideology. His line of argument is
that today we are ‘allowed’, for example, to be gay, radical feminist and even cynical critics of capitalism. All
these different subject positions and identities are possible within contemporary capitalist relations – as long as
we still engage in the labour process and capitalist forms of accumulation and reproduction. ‘Late capitalism’
enables a whole host of differences without necessarily challenging the fundamental logic of capitalist relations –
this argument can also be connected to Hardt and Negri’s (2000) conceptions of ‘Empire’ as a fundamentally open
regime that enables a multitude of differences to exist (see also Mandarini, in this volume). Zizek’s point is that
rather than forming all sorts of different subject positions that aim to escape the core of capitalist fantasy, one
should engage the fundamental fantasy of capitalist relations in a direct, uncompromising fashion. The way
forward is therefore to ‘traverse the fantasy’ – a phrase which he borrows from the outcome of Lacanian therapy
(Kay, 2003).
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Alt – Withdraw
We must withdraw from the capitalist ideology.
Johnston 2007 [Adrian Johnston 2007 International Journal of Zizek Studies Vol 1. No. 0. 2007
http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/8/24]
Perhaps the absence of a detailed practical roadmap in Žižek’s political writings isn’t a major shortcoming. Maybe, at
least for the time being, the most important task is simply the negativity of the critical struggle, the effort to cure an
intellectual constipation resulting from capitalist ideology and thereby truly to open up the space for imagining
authentic alternatives to the prevailing state of the situation. Another definition of materialism offered by Žižek is
that it amounts to accepting the internal inherence of what fantasmatically appears as an external deadlock or
hindrance127 (with fantasy itself being defined as the false externalization of something within the subject, namely, the
illusory projection of an inner obstacle128). From this perspective, seeing through ideological fantasies by learning
how to think again outside the confines of current restrictions has, in and of itself, the potential to operate as a form
of real revolutionary practice (rather than remaining just an instance of negative/critical intellectual reflection). Why
is this the case? Recalling the earlier analysis of commodity fetishism, the social efficacy of money as the universal
medium of exchange (and the entire political economy grounded upon it) ultimately relies upon nothing 93 more
than a kind of “magic,” that is, the belief in money’s social efficacy by those using it in the processes of exchange.
Since the value of currency is, at bottom, reducible to the belief that it has the value attributed to it (and that
everyone believes that everyone else believes this as well), derailing capitalism by destroying its essential financial
substance is, in a certain respect, as easy as dissolving the mere belief in this substance’s powers. The “external”
obstacle of the capitalist system exists exclusively on the condition that subjects, whether consciously or
unconsciously, “internally” believe in it—capitalism’s life-blood, money, is simply a fetishistic crystallization of
a belief in others’ belief in the socioperformative force emanating from this same material. And yet, this point
of capitalism’s frail vulnerability is simultaneously the source of its enormous strength: Its vampiric symbiosis
with individual human desire, and the fact that the late-capitalist cynic’s fetishism enables the disavowal of
his/her de facto belief in capitalism, makes it highly unlikely that people can be persuaded to stop believing and
start thinking (especially since, as Žižek claims, many of these people are convinced that they already have ceased
believing). Or, the more disquieting possibility to entertain is that some people today, even if one succeeds in
exposing them to the underlying logic of their position, might respond in a manner resembling that of the Judas-like
character Cypher in the film The Matrix (Cypher opts to embrace enslavement by illusion rather than cope with the
discomfort of dwelling in the “desert of the real”): Faced with the choice between living the capitalist lie or
grappling with certain unpleasant truths, many individuals might very well deliberately decide to accept what
they know full well to be a false pseudo-reality, a deceptively comforting fiction (“Capitalist commodity fetishism
or the truth? I choose fetishism.”).
34
DDW 09
Tony, Sohan, Cherndawg
CAPITALISM KRITIK
Alt Solves
Zizek 98 [Slavoj Zizek, February 1998 “For a Leftist Appropriation of the European Legacy”,
http://www.lacan.com/zizek-leftist.htm]
Are we then condemned to the debilitating alternative of choosing between a knave or a fool, or is there a tertium
datur? Perhaps the contours of this tertium datur can be discerned via the reference to the fundamental European
legacy. When one says `European legacy', every self-respectful Leftist intellectual has the same reaction as Joseph
Goebbels had to culture as such-he reaches for his gun and starts to shoot out accusations of proto-Fascist Eurocentrist
cultural imperialism. However, is it possible to imagine a Leftist appropriation of the European political tradition?
Was it not politicization in a specific Greek sense which re-emerged violently in the disintegration of Eastern
European Socialism? From my own political past, I remember how, after four journalists were arrested and brought to
trial by the Yugoslav Army in Slovenia in 1988, I participated in the `Committee for the protection of the human
rights of the four accused'. Officially, the goal of the Committee was just to guarantee fair treatment for the four
accused; however, the Committee turned into the major oppositional political force, practically the Slovene version of
the Czech Civic Forum or East German Neues Forum, the body which coordinated democratic opposition, a de facto
representative of civil society. The program of the Committee was set up in four items; the first three directly
concerned the accused, while the devil which resides in the detail , of course, was the fourth item, which said that the
Committee wanted to clarify the entire background of the arrest of the four accused and thus contribute to creating the
circumstances in which such arrests would no longer be possible-a coded way to say that we wanted the abolishment
of the existing Socialist regime. Our demand `Justice for the accused four!' started to function as the metaphoric
condensation of the demand for the global overthrow of the Socialist regime. For that reason, in almost daily
negotiations with the Committee, the Communist Party officials were always accusing us of a `hidden agenda',
claiming that the liberation of the accused four was not our true goal, i.e. that we were `exploiting and manipulating
the arrest and trial for other, darker political goals'. In short, the Communists wanted to play the 'rational' depoliticized
game: they wanted to deprive the slogan `Justice for the accused four!' of its explosive general connotation, and to
reduce it to its literal meaning which concerned just a minor legal matter; they cynically claimed that it was us, the
Committee, who were behaving `non-democratically' and manipulating the fate of the accused, coming up with global
pressure and blackmailing strategies instead of focusing on the particular problem of the plight of the accused.
This is politics proper: this moment in which a particular demand is not simply part of the negotiation of interests, but
aims at something more, i.e. starts to function as the metaphoric condensation of the global restructuring of the entire
social space. The contrast is clear between this subjectivization of a part of the social body which rejects its
subordinated place in the social police edifice and demands to be heard at the level of egaliberte, and today's
proliferation of postmodern `identity-politics' whose goal is the exact opposite, i.e. precisely the assertion of one's
particular identity, of one's proper place within the social structure. The postmodern identity-politics of particular
(ethnic, sexual, etc.) life-styles fits perfectly the depoliticized notion of society in which every particular group is
`accounted for', has its specific status (of a victim) acknowledged through affirmative action or other measures
destined to guarantee social justice. The fact that this kind of justice rendered to victimized minorities requires an
intricate police apparatus (for identifying the group in question, for punishing the offenders against its rights-how
legally to define sexual harassment or racial injury, etc.-for providing the preferential treatment which should
outweigh the wrong this group suffered) is deeply significant. The postmodern `identity politics' involves the logic of
ressentiment, of proclaiming oneself a victim and expecting the social big Other to `pay for the damage', while
egaliberte breaks out of the vicious cycle of ressentiment. What is usually praised as `postmodern politics' (the pursuit
of particular issues whose resolution is to be negotiated within the 'rational' global order allocating to its particular
component its proper place) is thus effectively the end of politics proper.
35
DDW 09
Tony, Sohan, Cherndawg
CAPITALISM KRITIK
Alt – Real Ethics
We must risk the impossible and embrace and Ethics of the Real – Realizing capitalism is a selfbuilt ideology is a key starting point for its destruction.
Zizek and Daly 04 (Glyn Daly & Slavoj Zizek “Conversations with Zizek 18-19)
For Zizek, a confrontation with the obscenitites of abundance capitalism also requires a transformation of the
ethico-political imagination. It is no longer a question of developing ethical guidelines within the existing
political framework (the various institutional and corporate ethical committees’} but of developing a politicaization
of ethics: an ethics of the Real. The starting point here is an insistence of the unconditional autonomy of the subject;
of accepting that as human beings we are ultimately responsible for our actions and being-in-the-world up to
and including the construction of the capitalist system itself. Far from ample norm-making or refusing/reinforcing
existing social protocol, and ethics of the real tends to emerge through norm-breaking and in finding new
directions that, by definition, in the traumatic changes i.e. the Real in genuine ethical challenge. An ethics of the
Real does not simple defer to the impossible (or infinite Otherness) as an unpassible liquirzation that already
marks every act as a failure, incomplete and so on. Rather, such an ethics is one that fully accepts coldingency
but which is nonethesless prepared to risk the impossible in the sense of breaking out of standardized positions.
We might say that it is an ethics which is not only politically motivated but which also draws its strength from
the political itself. For Zizek an ethics of the Real {or Real ethics) means that we cannot rely on any form of
symbolic Other that would endorse our (in)decisions and (in)actions: for example, the ‘neutral’ financial data of
the stockmarkets; the expert knowledge of Beck’s ‘new modernity’ scientists; the economic and military councils of
the New World Order; the various (formal and informal) tribunals of political correctness; or any of the mysterious
laws of God, nature or the market. What Zizek affirms is a racial culture of ethical identification for the left in
which the alternative forms of militancy must first of all be militant with themselves. That is to say, they must
be militant in the fundamental ethical sense of not relying on the external/higher authority and in the
development of a political imagination that, like Zizek’s own thought, exploits us to risk the impossible.
36
DDW 09
Tony, Sohan, Cherndawg
CAPITALISM KRITIK
Cap Unstable
Capitalism is collapsing, government and big business is just a facade to keep the wheels turning
without gas.
The Herald 09 (Don Ferguson, 2009, "Capitalism itself is the cause of the worldwide economic crisis",
Lexis)
YOUR editorial ("What banks owe us: fairness and honesty", The Herald, April 4) reflects the current misconception
that finance capital, and casino banking, are the cause and not merely one effect of the present crisis of capitalism.
While holding no brief for the likes of Sir Fred Goodwin, it is self-serving and erroneous to ignore the fact that the
failed policies of political and economic leaders have their foundation in the very operation of capitalism itself.
To avoid a critique of the capitalist system, elites and their apologists blame its leaders and financial experts for their
"incompetence", "greed" and individual defects. Thus, rather than examine the causes and consequences of the
generation of enormous, unemployable surplus capital and profit, "failure of leadership" is blamed. Rather than
critique the power and influence of the capitalist class over the state, it is "wilful ignorance of what markets need" that
is the problem. Rather than study real class relations - the capitalist classes' assault on workers as "costs of
production" - it is the abstract "market" populated by imaginary "rational" capitalists that is cited. Nor is there any
understanding of how soaring profits, expanding markets, cheap credit, cowed labour and undue influence over state
instruments have wrought the inevitable crisis of capital well known to students of Karl Marx, and faithfully manifest
in the present situation. The moral and intellectual failures of the capitalist class and its political apologists are not
mere personal defects. The awful and unbearable truth for capitalism's cheerleaders is that the crash of the
western financial system is merely a symptom of the more profound collapse of capitalism currently under
way, the one described clearly in the classic formulation of Marx more than 150 years ago. Your conclusion that
"the lesson is that what has been lacking is confidence. That can be restored by a new banking order in which fair and transparent - remuneration is an essential component" is, I believe, wrong. Loss of confidence is an effect; its
cause is the failure of the specific mechanisms of profit creation, leading to crisis. That cannot be repaired within the
present paradigm. As we move towards the end of the beginning, in the words of one arch-apologist: "You ain't seen
nothin' yet." Dr John O'Dowd, 3 Downfield Gardens, Bothwell. REGARDLESS of the outcome of the present
economic crisis, it is clear the system that created it will not be allowed to return. The excesses of the past will be
moderated and capitalism will change to fit the new circumstances. This is an opportune time to modify our political
system as it has run out of control, much in the way of the economic system. The link is more than coincidental.
Democracy has lost much, if not all, of its fundamental connection with the public, along with its moral authority to
govern in our name.
37
DDW 09
Tony, Sohan, Cherndawg
CAPITALISM KRITIK
Cap = Unstable
Capitalism isn’t stable.
Iwai, Katsuhito 2008 PhD in econ from MIT and Tokyo, teacher at Yale [Dec 2008 “Global Financial
Crisis Shows Inherent Instability of Capitalism” http://www.tokyofoundation.org/en/articles/2008/globalfinancial-crisis-shows-inherent-instability-of-capitalism]
Why is capitalism unstable? Because it is fundamentally based on speculation. Consider carmakers, for
example. They build automobiles not for themselves but in the expectation that others will buy them to ride in.
There is an element of speculation in this process. Milton Friedman and his followers in mainstream economics,
however, claim that speculation leads to stability. Those investors who buy high and sell low, they argue, are irrational
and will promptly fall by the wayside. Only the rational investors who buy low and sell high will survive; this will
cause markets to be stable. What they assert may apply to an idyllic market where investors mediate between
producers and consumers. But, the activity in financial markets, including markets for stocks, bonds, foreign
currency and their derivatives, is of entirely different nature. It is professional investors and investment funds
that dominate the markets and compete with each other. They buy and sell based not on their forecasts of longterm demand/supply conditions but on their observations of each other’s movements and readings of each other’s
intentions. When a price is expected to rise or fall, it is not irrational to buy or sell more and move the price further up
or down, leading to speculative bubbles and panics. The more fundamental reason I believe that capitalism as a
whole is speculative and inherently unstable is that the money on which it is based is itself speculative. Money
has made the economy much more efficient by making it possible to conduct transactions without the trouble of
exchanging on a barter basis. But money has no intrinsic value. People are willing to hold it only because they
expect other people to accept it in exchange for something else, with the people who accept it expecting that yet
other people will accept it in turn. To hold money is, in other words, the purest form of speculation, and trust in it is
based on circular, bootstrap logic: Everybody uses money as money merely because everybody believes
everybody else uses it as money. In this light, we can see that money has two faces: It brings greater efficiency, but
at the same time it has the potential of causing great instability. In a capitalist economy supported by money, it is
impossible for efficiency and stability to coexist as claimed by the neoclassical economists. This bootstrap logic of
money also underlies the present financial crisis. The subprime loans that set off the crisis are extremely risky loans to
people with low creditworthiness. Because the risk of default on such loans is so high, a single subprime loan by itself
is unattractive as a financial product. But bundling many such loans together and securitizing them made the risks
seem diluted, and as a result of further bundling with numerous other financial instruments into big packages that were
then dispersed around the globe, the risks became invisible from the surface. As the financial products created in this
way were traded more and more steadily among numerous parties, they began to be considered readily convertible to
cash and other safe assets. They came to be seen as being like the money in which people place supreme trust. Here
again we see the workings of bootstrap logic: Everybody trusted the products as safe merely because everybody
believed everybody else trusted them as safe. But when the subprime loans whose risks were concealed therein
went bad, trust in all financial products toppled like a row of dominoes. This is the essence of the current
financial crisis. A major difference between this and the Asian currency crisis and other financial crises that preceded
it is that the value of the US dollar, the key currency of the international monetary system, may be severely shaken.
The instability of money as a purely speculative construct—a problem that has been concealed up to now—may
come to the surface henceforth in the form of the crisis in the key currency. I do not have space to discuss this
problem here, however.
38
DDW 09
Tony, Sohan, Cherndawg
CAPITALISM KRITIK
AT: Inevitable
Discourse about the inevitability of capitalism makes it inevitable – Capitalism is self-constructed
that can be changed.
Gibson-Graham, 06 (Graham is Professor of Geography for Clark University, Gibson has a PhD,“A
Postcapitalist Politics”, p. 53-54)
Why has Economy become an everyday term that denotes a force to be reckoned with existing outside of
politics and society-a force that constitutes the ultimate arbiter of possibility? How is it that waged labor, the
commodity market, and capitalist enterprise have come to be seen as the only "normal" forms of work, exchange, and
business organization? When was it that capitalism assumed dis-cursive dominance, becoming the only present form
of economy and all that. could be imagined as existing in the proximate future? And why do we have little to say these
days about an expansive and generative politics of noncapitalist construction ?l We are convinced that the answers
to these questions are connected to the almost total naturalization of "the economy" that has taken place in
pub¬lic discourse over recent decades, coinciding with the demise of socialism as an actually existing "alternative"
and growing alarm that, with globalization, the autonomy of national economies, and therefore their manageability, is
being undermined, This shift from an understanding of the economy as something that can be transformed, or at
least managed (by people, the state, the IMF), to something that governs society has involved a hegemonic move
by which representations of economy have slipped from their locations in discourse and landed "on the
ground," in the "real," not just separate from but outside of society. In these postmodern times, the economy is
denied the discursive mandate given to other social spheres and the consequences for the viability of any political
project of economic innovation are dire. If we are to enact new economies, we need to imagine "the economy"
differently-as something that is created in specific geographical contexts and in historically path-dependent
ways, but this is not an easy or straightforward project. As Timothy Mitchell argues, we are up against an already
existing eco¬nomic object materialized in socio-technical networks of calculation that have, since the 1930s, produced
the economy as a "singular and self-evident totali¬ty" (forthcoming)." The economic landscape has been molded
according to the imaginary functionings of a "self-contained and dynamic mechanism" known as "the
economy," and this representation is difficult to dislodge.
Capitalism isn’t inevitable–that is just an excuse to do nothing.
Brian Martin associate professor in Science, Technology & Society at the University of Wollongong,
Australia, Nonviolence versus Capitalism, 2001
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/01nvc/nvcall.html#ch7fns
Actually, it is absurd to say that capitalism is inevitable. This is really just an excuse for doing nothing to examine
and promote improvements and alternatives. The way society is organised is due to the actions of people, and these
actions can change. History shows a tremendous range of possibilities for human patterns of interaction. Furthermore,
technological development is creating new options for the structuring of work, communication and interaction.
Considering that capitalism is only a few hundred years old and continues to change, and that there is nothing
approaching agreement that the current system is ideal, the assumption of inevitability is very weak indeed. Defenders of
capitalism assume that there are only two basic options: either capitalism or some sort of system based on
authoritarian government, either state socialism or some other sort of dictatorship. (Capitalism is assumed to go hand in
hand with representative government, but this ignores those countries with capitalist economies and authoritarian politics,
including fascism and military dictatorship.) But of course there are more than these two options.
39
DDW 09
Tony, Sohan, Cherndawg
CAPITALISM KRITIK
AT: Spillover
Personal rejection is critical to moving away from capitalism—the system is only inevitable if we
treat it as such.
John Holloway Ph.D in Political Science from the University of Edinburgh, “Can we change the World
without taking power”, A debate between Holloway and Alex Callinicos, August 16th, 2005
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/5616
I don't know the answer. Perhaps we can change the world without taking power. Perhaps we cannot. The starting point:
for all of us, I think: is uncertainty, not knowing, a common search for a way forward. Because it becomes more and
more clear that capitalism is a catastrophe for humanity. A radical change in the organisation of society, that is,
revolution, is more urgent than ever. And this revolution can only be world revolution if it is to be effective. But it is
unlikely that world revolution can be achieved in one single blow. This means that the only way in which we can
conceive of revolution is as interstitial revolution, as a revolution that takes place in the interstices of capitalism, a
revolution that occupies spaces in the world while capitalism still exists. The question is how we conceive of these
interstices, whether we think of them as states or in other ways. In thinking about this, we have to start from where we
are, from the many rebellions and insubordinations that have brought us to Porto Alegre. The world is full of such
rebellions, of people saying NO to capitalism: NO, we shall not live our lives according to the dictates of capitalism, we
shall do what we consider necessary or desirable and not what capital tells us to do. Sometimes we just see capitalism as
an all-encompassing system of domination and forget that such rebellions exist everywhere. At times they are so small that
even those involved do not perceive them as refusals, but often they are collective projects searching for an alternative way forward and sometimes they are as big
as the Lacandon Jungle or the Argentinazo of three years ago or the revolt in Bolivia just over a year ago. All of these insubordinations are characterised by a drive
towards self-determination, an impulse that says, 'No, you will not tell us what to do, we shall decide for ourselves what we must do.' These refusals can be
seen as fissures, as cracks in the system of capitalist domination. Capitalism is not (in the first place) an economic
system, but a system of command. Capitalists, through money, command us, telling us what to do. To refuse to obey is
to break the command of capital.
40
DDW 09
Tony, Sohan, Cherndawg
CAPITALISM KRITIK
AT: Perm – Rejection Key
Compromise will only mask imperialistic capitalism—all out struggle is the only hope.
Michael Hardt, PhD In Comparative Literature from U Washington, and Antonio Negri, Professor @
U of Paris, “Empire” 2K
Even though their critiques of imperialism and capitalist expansion are often presented in strictly quantitative,
economic terms, the stakes for Marxist theorists are primarily political. This does not mean that the economic
calculations (and the critiques of them) should not be taken seriously; it means, rather, that the economic relationships
must be considered as they are really articulated in the historical and social context, as part of political relations of rule
and domination.[17] The most important political stake for these authors in the question of economic expansion is
to demonstrate the ineluctable relationship between capitalism and imperialism. If capitalism and imperialism are
essentially related, the logic goes, then any struggle against imperialism (and the wars, misery, impoverishment,
and enslavement that follow from it) must also be a direct struggle against capitalism. Any political strategy aimed
at reforming the contemporary configuration of capitalism to make it nonimperialist is vain and naive because the
core of capitalist reproduction and accumulation necessarily implies imperialist expansion. Capital cannot behave
otherwise-this is its nature. The evils of imperialism cannot be confronted except by destroying capitalism itself.
A sustainable economy cannot be created within capitalism. Their appeals to being “realistic”
demand that we turn away from an unworkable system.
Revolution US Communist Party newspaper. “Capitalism and the Consequences of Biofuels.” 3-27-07.
http://rwor.org/a/083-special/biofuels-en.html
Capitalism cannot deal with the environment in a sustainable and economically rational way for three basic
reasons: First, its logic is “expand-or-die”: to cheapen cost and to expand in order to wage the competitive battle and gain market share.
Companies like BP are locked in fierce competition with other companies. An article in the business section of the New York Times writes, “For investors in
alternatives to oil and gas, the driving force has been the belief that whoever develops the next great energy sources will enjoy the spoils that will make the gains
from creating the next Amazon.com or Google seem puny by comparison.” (3/16/2007) Second, the horizons of capitalism tend to be short
term. They seek to maximize returns quickly. They don’t think about the consequences in 10, 20, 30 years. In the
development of biofuels this means that they do not pay attention to long-term effects like soil depletion, water
usage, and cutting down ancient forests, or even increasing global warming. Third, capitalist production is by its
nature private. The economy is broken up into competing units of capitalist control and ownership over the means
of production. And each unit is fundamentally concerned with itself and its expansion and its profit. The economy,
the constructed and natural environment, and society cannot be dealt with as a social whole under capitalism. In the
article “Capitalism, the Environment, and Ecology Under Socialism” in Revolution #52 (6/25/2006) Raymond Lotta
wrote, “So capitalism is incapable of addressing environmental issues outside its framework of private ownership
and production for profit, and its blind logic of expansion. And on a world scale, we see the effects. But socialism
can address environmental issues in a sustainable, rational, and socially just way: because ownership of the means of
production is socialized as expressed through the proletarian state and this makes it possible to consciously plan
development; and because economic calculation is radically different.” The debate over these issues—how the world
has gotten to the point where the very survival of our species and the planet is being called into question, and what
must be done to change this—is too often ruled out of order. In the name of realism, opponents of the system too
often end up in debate over how to work within a system that is itself the problem. The debate over these issues
needs to be pried open as a crucial part of the struggle to save the planet.
41
DDW 09
Tony, Sohan, Cherndawg
CAPITALISM KRITIK
AT: Perm – Co-opted
Only turning away from the state can solve. Leftist movements will otherwise be co-opted back
within capitalist structures.
John Holloway Ph.D in Political Science from the University of Edinburgh, “Can we change the World
without taking power”, A debate between Holloway and Alex Callinicos, August 16th, 2005
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/5616
The question for us, then, is how do we multiply and expand these refusals, these cracks in the texture of domination?
There are two ways of thinking about this. The first says that these movements, these many insubordinations, lack
maturity and effectiveness unless they are focused, unless they are channelled towards a goal. For them to be effective, they
must be channelled towards the conquest of state power: either through elections or through the overthrowing of the existing state and the establishment of a new,
revolutionary state. The organisational form for channelling all these insubordinations towards that aim is the party. The question of taking state power is not so
much a question of future intentions as of present organisation. How should we organise ourselves in the present? Should we join a party, an organisational form
that focuses our discontent on the winning of state power? Or should we organise in some other way? The second way of thinking about the
expansion and multiplication of insubordinations is to say, 'No, they should not be all harnessed together in the
form of a party, they should flourish freely, go whatever way the struggle takes them.' This does not mean that there
should be no coordination, but it should be a much looser coordination. Above all, the principal point of reference is
not the state but the society that we want to create. The principal argument against the first conception is that it
leads us in the wrong direction. The state is not a thing, it is not a neutral object: it is a form of social relations, a form
of organisation, a way of doing things which has been developed over several centuries for the purpose of maintaining or
developing the rule of capital. If we focus our struggles on the state, or if we take the state as our principal point of
reference, we have to understand that the state pulls us in a certain direction. Above all, it seeks to impose upon us
a separation of our struggles from society, to convert our struggle into a struggle on behalf of, in the name of. It
separates leaders from the masses, the representatives from the represented; it draws us into a different way of talking, a different way of thinking. It pulls us into a
process of reconciliation with reality, and that reality is the reality of capitalism, a form of social organisation that is based on exploitation and injustice, on killing
and destruction. It also draws us into a spatial definition of how we do things, a spatial definition which makes a clear distinction between the state's territory and
the world outside, and a clear distinction between citizens and foreigners. It draws us into a spatial definition of struggle that has no hope of matching the global
movement of capital. There is one key concept in the history of the state-centred left, and that concept is betrayal. Time
and time again the leaders have betrayed the movement, and not necessarily because they are bad people, but just because
the state as a form of organisation separates the leaders from the movement and draws them into a process of
reconciliation with capital. Betrayal is already given in the state as an organisational form. Can we resist this? Yes, of
course we can, and it is something that happens all the time. We can refuse to let the state identify leaders or
permanent representatives of the movement, we can refuse to let delegates negotiate in secret with the
representatives of the state. But this means understanding that our forms of organisation are very different from
those of the state, that there is no symmetry between them.
42
DDW 09
Tony, Sohan, Cherndawg
CAPITALISM KRITIK
AT: Perm – Totalitarianism Government
Perm fails. Government control escalates to totalitarianism
Jack Douglas, Prof. Emeritus Soc. – UC San Diego, “The Myth of the Welfare State”, 1991, p. 40,
Google Print
The logic of totalitarian collectivism is simple, brutal, and entirely consistent. Once a people has decided--whether
actively or, more commonly, by default, by not actively stopping them--to allow politicians to decide by legislation, and
without severe constraints of custom, moral principle and constitutional law, what is right and wrong in such basic
realms of life as economic property rights, then there is no longer any logical constraint upon their exercise of
power in all other realms of life. As classical liberals saw, even in the vastly more simple and self-contained society of
the eighteenth century, without inviolate property rights no other rights can long be sustained. The government that
controls our property rights must ultimately control our right to the pursuit of happiness, our right to free speech
and to the publication of that speech, our right to take a spouse or have children, our right to work and choose an
occupation, our right to life itself--for all things of life are ultimately dependent upon material goods and, thus, upon
the controls of those goods we call property rights. The government that has the right to legislate gas prices in Texas,
or income redistribution nationwide, has every logical right to dictate research standards in physics, hiring standards
in sociology, wage rates for black teenagers in New York, parental care standards for all parents, the right to bear
children, the right to redefine life, and--the right to everything. When the American people, tempted by the ancient
enabling myth of the welfare state, used the power of their votes to give the politicians and, by inaction, the courts the
power to legislate away and rule away our ancient economic rights--our freedoms from unconstrained government control
of our property for the common welfare--they unknowingly gave them power to legislate away and rule away all our
ancient rights. Almost a hundred years ago, Theodore Roosevelt, one of the first heroes of the rationalistic state planning
of American progressivism proclaimed, "Every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to
regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it." The insidious implications of that "to whatever
degree" for the counterrevolution against the System of Natural Liberty became clear only slowly, but for almost a
century now the American state has been pursuing that relentless logic of totalitarian collectivism at an
accelerating rate.
43
DDW 09
Tony, Sohan, Cherndawg
CAPITALISM KRITIK
AT: Perm – Co-Opt
Defending one positions is – cominations like the permutation risk co-option.
Zizek 4’ [Slavoj Zizek 2004 “Conversations with Zizek” pg. 45]
On the one hand, I do consider myself an extreme Stalinist philosopher. That is to say, it’s clear where I stand. I don’t
belive in combining thigns, I hate this approach of taking a little bit from Lacan, a little bit from Foucault, a little
bit from Derrida. No, I don’t belive in this; I believe in clear-cut positions. I think that the most arrogant position
is thais apparent, multidisciplinary modesty of what I am saying now is not unconditional, it is just a hypotheses’
and so on. It really is a most arrogant postion. I think that the only way to be honest and exposse yourself to
criticism is to state clearly and dogmatically where you are. You must take the risk and have a postion.
44
DDW 09
Tony, Sohan, Cherndawg
CAPITALISM KRITIK
AT: No Alternative
The argument that there is no alternative to capitalism is both false and designed to keep elites in
power.
Istivan Meszaros professor emeritus at the University of Sussex, Beyond Capital, pg. xiii 1995
To many people the present state of affairs seems to be fundamentally unalterable, corresponding to Hegel’s
characterization of thinking and acting as right and proper—or ‘rational’ in his sense—only in submission to the
requirements of ‘universal permanent capital.’ Moreover, this impression of fateful unalterability seems to be
reinforced by the fact that one of the most often repeated political slogans offered by our decision makers as the
justification of their actions is: ‘there is no alternative.’ Such wisdom continues to be uttered without any concern
for how bleak it would be if this proposition were really true. It is much easier to resign oneself to the finality of
the predicament asserted in this blindly deterministic political slogan of our times—without even attempting to
assess, let alone question, its grievous implications—than to devise the necessary challenge to it. Curiously, however,
the politicians who never tire of repeating that there is no alternative to the existing order of affairs do not hesitate to
describe at the same time their own trade as ‘the art of the possible.’ They refuse to notice the latent contradiction
between the traditional self-justification of politics, as the socially beneficial ‘art of the possible,’ and the
uncritically advocated resignation to the rule of capital to which, in their view—claimed to be the only rationally
tenable view in ‘the real world’—there cannot be an alternative. For what on earth could be the meaning of politics
as the ‘pursuit of the socially commendable possible’ if the viability of any alternative to the imperatives of the ruling
order is apriori excluded as worse than hopeless because impossible? To be sure, the fact that so many decision makers—
in the East and West alike—embrace the idea that there can be no alternative to the prevailing determinations cannot be
considered simply a corrigible personal aberration of those who advocate it. On the contrary, this bleak idea emanates
from the present stage of development of the global capital system as such, with all its paralyzing
interdependencies and objectively narrowing margins of action. For in the ascending phase of development of
commodity society a whole range of meaningful alternatives could be contemplated (and successfully implemented)
in the interest of profitable capital accumulation and expansion by the dominant (as a rule also empire-building)
capitalist countries.
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AT: Robinson
Robinson’s ideology in a tautology of its own – their demand for rational morality succumbs to
systems of domination they do not criticize.
Dean 2005. Jodi. “Enjoyment as a category of Political Theory”, paper at the Annual Meeting of American Political
Science Association”, September 2004. __http://jeanicite.typepad.com/ i_cite/files/apsa_05_ enjoyment.doc__
Drawing from Louis Althusser’s theory of ideological interpellation, Zizek asks how the effect of belief in a cause
arises, how, in other words, a subject comes to recognize as hailed by an ideological institution (such as the state in
the form of the policeman saying, “hey, you!” or God’s call as made manifest through the practices, texts, and
institutions of the church). The subject may go about specific activities related to a cause, but why does the
subject recognize this particular cause as his own? Why does he respond to the hail? Why is it he who is hailed,
addressed, called? Zizek’s surprising answer is not that the subject has a preexisting good reason for
responding, not that the cause in some way corresponds to the subject’s deep or true interests. Rather, the
subject responds to a certain irrational injunction, that is, to the very fact of the groundless command. We
might think here of the word of God, binding because it is God’s word or of the fundamental authority of law as
grounded in the fact that it is law. In each case, if we point to something beyond God or law as the grounds for their
authority, we are positing something higher, something by which to judge God or law, say reason or morality. And, if
we then say that reason or morality is the ultimate authority, we get stuck in the same tautology: reason
authorizes because it is reasonable; morality authorizes because it is moral. Zizek conceives of this tautology as
an object, a sticking point, a residue of irrationality that serves as the very condition for the subject’s submission to the
ideological hail (objet petit a). Hence, he offers the following wordplay: jouis-sense, enjoyment-in-sense (enjoymeant) to capture the conjunction of the meaning offered by ideology with its ultimate core of meaninglessness or,
irrational enjoyment.17 Thus, unlike Foucault, Zizek emphasizes the subjectivization of the practices constitutive
of belief: belief in an ideological cause results from an excessive, traumatic kernel that resists symbolization or
incorporation into a signifying economy. The excess of the subject with respect to its practices, then, is not the
result of a multiplicity of competing hails (although this is not excluded). Instead, it is more fundamental: the
subject is the very failure of interpellation/symbolization, an absence that is marked (embodied/positivized) by
the irrational injunction.
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AT: Robinson
Robinson’s theory doesn’t preclude the focus of Lacan’s theory.
Lasse Thomassen, 2004 The British journal of politics and international relations vol 6 issue 4
pp558
Robinson believes that, since Lacan did not provide a specific theory of politics, but only a more abstract ontology,
all the political appropriations of Lacan can do is to subsume politics to pregiven Lacanian categories (p. 261). This
is obviously a potential danger, and one that must be avoided. One must insist that analytical categories are always
rearticulated when applied; as Wittgenstein has shown, there is no application that leaves intact the rule being applied.
But this does not preclude the theorisation of politics through categories that were not originally thought to apply
(directly or indirectly) to politics. This would assume a regional conception of politics: politics as determined as a
particular region with particular (essential) limits and requiring a theory only applicable to this region. This, in
turn, would require a theory transcending all regions and thus capable of delimiting the specifically political
region—again not a feasible alternative from a post-structuralist viewpoint. It is the merit of, among others, the
theorists considered by Robinson, that they have introduced a distinction between, on the one hand, politics as the
region of practices usually referred to as politics and, on the other hand, the political as the moment of the
contingent institution of politics and the social. The political cannot be reduced to a specific region, but instead refers
to a logic permeating society in its entirety, even if in some places more than others. Since the political understood
as contingency permeates politics, we can use the political as a principle of analysing politics. This is one of the
contributions of post-structuralist (including Lacanian) political theory.
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AT: Robinson
Robinson misreads the role of violence in Zizek’s theory- even if the revolution is, it is not a
defining feature of transcendent society
Lasse Thomassen, 2004 The British journal of politics and international relations vol 6 issue 4
pp558
According to Robinson, Lacanian political theory is inherently conservative. ‘Lacanians’, Robinson writes, ‘urge that
one reconcile oneself to the inevitability of lack. Lacanian politics is therefore about coming to terms with
violence, exclusion and antagonism, not about resolving or removing these’ (p. 260). And, about Mouffe, he
writes that, ‘as a Lacanian, Mouffe cannot reject exclusion; it is, on a certain level, necessary according to such a
theory’ (p. 263). Such assertions are only possible if we believe in the possibility of opposing exclusion to a
situation of non-exclusion, which is exactly what post-structuralists have challenged. Moreover, the poststructuralist (and Lacanian) view does not necessarily preclude the removal of any concrete exclusion. On the
contrary, the acknowledgement of the constitutivity of exclusion shifts the focus from exclusion versus nonexclusion to the question of which exclusions we can and want to live with. Nothing in the poststructuralist (and
Lacanian) view thus precludes a progressive politics. Of course, this is not to say that a progressive politics is
guaranteed—if one wants guarantees, post-structuralist political theory is not the place to look. There are
similar problems with Robinson’s characterisation of zizek’s ‘nihilistic variety of Lacanianism’: ‘the basic structure
of existence is unchangeable ... [ i ek’s] Lacanian revolutionism must stop short of the claim that a better world
can be constructed’ (p. 267). This, according to Robinson, ‘reflects an underlying conservatism apparent in even the
most radical-seeming versions of Lacanianism’ (p. 268). Again, the constitutivity of exclusion and violence does
not necessarily mean that ‘the new world cannot be better than the old’ (p. 268). The alternative to guaranteed
progress is not necessarily conservatism or nihilism, and the impossibility of a perfect society does not exclude
attempts at improvement—with the proviso that what counts as improvement cannot be established according
to some transcendental yardstick.
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AT: Robinson
He groups 6 authors together to reach his conclusions – can’t trust anything he says
Lasse Thomassen, 2004 The British journal of politics and international relations vol 6 issue 4
pp558
In the May 2004 issue of this Journal, Andrew Robinson (2004) reviewed recent books by Alain Badiou, Judith
Butler, Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj i ek, Chantal Mouffe and Yannis Stavrakakis under the heading ‘The politics of lack’.
Robinson argues that a post-structuralist conception of politics oriented by a notion of constitutive lack and inspired
by Lacanian psychoanalysis is fundamentally misguided. This approach to politics and political theory is guided
by the idea that identity is constituted around a fundamental lack at the heart of the subject, and that identity
is constituted through the identification with external objects, thus temporarily filling the lack. There are three
basic problems with this approach to politics, according to Robinson. First, as it relies on an abstract ontology, it is
unable to properly engage with concrete politics, and the study of politics is reduced to the subsumption of empirical
cases to pregiven ontological categories, which the former merely exemplify. Second, the kind of radical democratic
theory emerging from the lack/Lacanian approach is only radical in name, but in fact uncritical of existing liberal
democracy. Finally, this approach is conservative and nihilistic, according to Robinson, because it refuses the
possibility of progress.While Robinson makes some succinct points about some of the texts under consideration, I
would like to address some of the general points Robinson makes as well as the assumptions about political theorising
behind his critique of these authors. I shall address three points: (1) the use of the labels ‘Lacanian’ and ‘theorist of
lack’; (2) the relationship between ontology and politics; and (3) the alleged conservatism of the Lacanian political
theory.(1) Robinson tells us that, although there are differences among the books under review, ‘[t]here are,
however, sufficient similarities between the books under review here to suggest that they belong to a single
approach, sufficiently similar to each other and sufficiently different from other varieties of post-structuralism
to qualify as a distinct paradigm’ (p. 259). The ‘approach’ or ‘paradigm’ is referred to as ‘an ontology of lack’,
(p. 269), ‘[a]n approach to politics drawn from Lacanian psychoanalysis’ (p. 259), ‘Lacanian politics’ (p. 260)
and ‘Lacanianism’ (p. 267), and the theorists are referred to as ‘Lacanians’ (p. 260) and ‘Lacanian theorists’ (p.
268). Although the use of labels like these can be useful, one must be careful. First of all, although I would
contend that Mouffe could be classified as a theorist of lack, she is hardly a Lacanian. In the book reviewed by
Robinson, she makes only a general reference to Lacan (Mouffe 2000, 34). In addition, she makes reference to the
developments of an ethics of psychoanalysis inspired by the work of Lacan in the works of Slavoj i ek, Yannis
Stavrakakis and John Rajchman (Mouffe 2000, 137–139). These developments, she argues, dovetail with her own
approach, but neither she nor anyone else has ever claimed that she is ‘a Lacanian’ (Robinson 2004, 263). It thus
seems to be possible to be a ‘theorist of lack’ without being a ‘Lacanian’, and one should not confuse the two.
Indeed, it seems that we are dealing here with an instance of what Robinson is criticising, namely the subsumption of
a concrete instance (Mouffe) to an a priori category (‘Lacanian’) with no regard to the specificity of the former.
Moreover, there are important differences between the theorists reviewed by Robinson. Stavrakakis, for
instance, has criticised the work of Badiou and Zizek (Stavrakakis 2003), and Zizek has criticised Laclau for not
being radical enough (Butler, Laclau and i ek 2000). More examples could be given, but the important point here
is that when one talks about ‘approaches’ and ‘paradigms’, one must be careful to specify exactly what it is
that unites the theorists within the approach or paradigm. Robinson also recognises this: ‘The differences
between the texts under review mainly arise around the issue of how to articulate Lacanian themes into a concrete
political discourse’ (p. 261). That is, we can talk about a Lacanian approach or an approach inspired by an ontology of
lack even though there are differences in the extent to which the theorists interpret Lacanian themes or the ontology of
lack respectively. The identification of an approach can, for instance, serve as the focal point for a discussion of
the relative merits of different poststructuralist approaches (see Tønder and Thomassen (forthcoming)). Indeed,
Robinson seems to aim at precisely this; that is, Robinson’s aim is to rescue poststructuralist political theory
from Lacanian political theory (pp. 259, 268ff.). However, his critique of Lacanian political theory (as I shall call
it) seems to rest on a conception of political theory hardly reconcilable with what can broadly be referred to as
post-structuralism. What is at stake here is what kind of political theory is possible from a post-structuralist
perspective.
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Perm Solves
Total critique destroys coalition and the chance for any change. Partial critique is key to societal
change.
Kirshna 93 [Sankaran Krishna, Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, 1993,
Alternatives, v. 18, p. 400-401]
The dichotomous choice presented in this excerpt is straightforward: one either indulges in total critique,
delegitimizing all sovereign truths, or one is committed to “nostalgic,” essentialist unities that have become
obsolete and have been the grounds for all our oppressions. This leads to a disastrous politics, pitting
groups that have the most in common (and need to unite on some basis to be effective)
against each other. , this fratricidal critique is politically suicidal. It obliterates the space for a
political activism Like many a worthwhile cause in our times, they failed to garner sufficient support to
influence state policy. The response to that need not be a totalizing critique that delegitimizes all
narratives. The blackmail inherent in the choice offered between total critique and “ineffective” partial
critique, ought to be transparent. Among other things, it effectively militates against the construction
of provisional or strategic essentialisms in our attempts to create space for activist politics. In the next
section, I focus more widely on the genre of critical international theory and its impact on such an activist
politics.
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Perm – Work Within the System
There is no viable revolution at the moment, capital isn’t going away – as such the only
successful challenge must come from within the system, humanizing capital against itself,
pretending that there is an external revolution is the most disabling possible circumstance.
Zizek 2006. “Reloaded Revolutions”, http://www.lacan.com/ zizreloaded.html
To put it in the terms of the good old Marxist couple infrastructure-superstructure: one should take into account the
irreducible duality of, on the one hand, the I objective" material socio-economic processes taking place in reality as
well as, on the other hand, the politico-ideological process proper. What if the domain of politics is inherently sterile," a theatre of shadows, but nonetheless crucial in transforming reality? So, although economy is the real
site and politics a theater of shadows, the main fight is to be fought in politics and ideology. Take the
disintegration of the Communist power in the last years of 1980s: although the main event was the actual loss of state
power by the Communists, the crucial break occurred at a different level - in those magic moments when, although
normally Communists were still in power, people all of a sudden lost their fear and no longer took the threat seriously;
so, even if "real" battles with the police continued, everyone somehow new that "the game is over". The title The
Matrix Reloaded, is thus quite appropriate: if part 1 was dominated by the impetus to exit the Matrix, to liberate
oneself from its hold, part 2 makes it clear that the battle has to be won WITHIN the Matrix, that one has to
return to it. In The Matrix Reloaded, the Wachowski brothers thus consciously raised the stakes, confronting
us with all the complications and confusions of the process of liberation. In this way, they put themselves in a
difficult spot: they now confront an almost impossible task. If The, Matrix Revolutions were to succeed, it
would have to produce nothing less than the appropriate answer to the dilemmas of revolutionary politics
today, a blueprint for the political act the Left is desperately looking for. No wonder, then, that it miserably
failed - and this failure provides a nice case for a simple Marxist analysis: the narrative failure, the
impossibility to construct a "good story," which signals a more fundamental social failure. The first sign of this
failure is simply the contract with spectators broken. The ontological premise of The Matrix (part one) is a
straightforward realistic one: there is the "real reality" and the virtual universe of the Matrix which can be
entirely explained in the terms of what went on in reality. Matrix Revolutions break these rules: in it, the
"magic" powers of Neo and Smith extend into "real reality" itself (Neo can stop bullets there also, etc.). Is this not
like a detective novel in which, after a series of complex clues, the proposed solution would be that the murderer has
magic capacities and was able to commit his crime violating laws of our reality? The reader would feel cheated - the
same as in Matrix Revolutions, where the predominant tone is the one of faith, not knowledge. But even within this
new space there are inconsistencies. In the film's final scene, the meeting of the couple who makes the deal, the
(feminine) oracle and the (masculine) Architect, takes place within the virtual reality or the Matrix - why? They are
both mere computer programs, and the virtual interface is here only for the human gaze - computers
themselves do not communicate through the screen of the virtual imaginary, they directly exchange digital
bites... For which gaze is then this scene staged? Here, the film "cheats" and is taken over by the imaginary
logic.The third failure is a more narrative one: the simplicity of the proposed solution. Things are not really explained,
so that the final solution is more like the proverbial cutting of the Gordian knot. This is especially deplorable with
regard to the many interesting dark hints in Matrix Reloaded (Morpheus as a dangerous paranoiac, the corruption of
the ruling elite of the Zion City) which are left unexplored in Revolutions. The only interesting new aspect of
Revolutions - the focus on interworld, neither Matrix nor reality - is also underdeveloped. The key feature of the entire
Matrix series is the progressive need to elevate Smith into the principal negative hero, a threat to the universe, a kind
of negative of Neo. Who is effectively Smith? A kind of allegory of Fascist forces: a bad program (lone wild,
autonomized, threatening the Matrix. So the lesson of the film, is, at its best, that of an anti-Fascist struggle: the
brutal thugs Fascist developed by the Capital to control workers (by the Matrix to control humans) run our of
control, and the Matrix has to enlist the help of humans to crush them in the same way liberal capital had to
enlist the help, of Communists, its mortal enemy, to defeat Fascism... (Perhaps, from today's political perspective,
a more appropriate model would have been to imagine Israel on the verge of destroying Arafat and PLO, and then
making a deal with them for a truce if PLO destroys Hamas who run out of control... However, Revolutions colors this
anti-Fascist logic with potentially Fascist elements: although the (feminine) Oracle and the (masculine) Architect are
both just programs, their -difference is sexualized, so that the film's end is inscribed into the logic of the balance
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between the feminine and the masculine "principles." When, at the end of Matrix Reloaded, a miracle occurs in reality
itself, there are only two ways out left open: either postmodern Gnosticism or Christianity. That is to say, either we
shall learn, in part III, that "real reality" itself is just another matrix-generates spectacle, there being no last "real"
reality, or we enter the domain of divine magic. However, does, in Matrix Revolutions, Neo really turn into a Christ
figure? It May look so: at the very end of his duel with Smith, he turns into (another) Smith so that, when he dies,
Smith (all the Smiths) is (are) also destroyed... However, a closer looks renders visible a key difference: Smith is a
proto-Jewish figure, an obscene intruder who multiplies like rats, who runs amok and disturbs the harmony of Humans
and Matrix-Machines, so that his destruction enables a (temporary) class truce. What dies with Neo is this Jewish
intruder who brings conflict and imbalance; in Christ, or, the contrary, God himself becomes man so that, with the
death of Christ, this man (ecce homo) , God (of beyond) himself also dies. The true "Christological" version of the
Matrix trilogy would thus entail a radically different scenario: Neo should have been a Matrix program rendered
human, a direct human embodiment of the Matrix, so that, when he dies, the Matrix itself destroys itself. The ridicule
of the final pact cannot but strike the eye: the Architect has to promise the Oracle not only that the machines will no
longer fight men who are outside the Matrix, but that those. Humans who want to be set free from the Matrix will be
allowed to do it - how will they be given the choice? So, at the end, nothing is really resolved: the Matrix is here,
continuing to exploit humans, with no guarantee that another Smith will not emerge; the majority of humans will
continue their slavery. What leads to this deadlock is that, in a typical ideological short-circuit, the Matrix
functions as a double allegory: for the Capital (machines sucking energy out of us) and for the Other, the
symbolic order as such. Perhaps, however - and this would be the only way to (partially, at least) redeem
Revolutions - there is a sobering message in this very failure of the conclusion of the Matrix series. There is no
final solution on the horizon today, Capital is here to stay, and all we can hope for is a temporary truce. That is
to say, undoubtedly worse that this deadlock would have been a pseudo-Deleuzian celebration of the successful
revolt of the multitude.
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Cap Solves Extinction
Socialism is a road to death, suffering and the collapse of civilization. Only capitalism solves.
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Chairman – Ludwig von Mises Institute, “Everything You Love You Owe to
Capitalism”, 5/18/2008, http://mises.org/story/2982
On one hand there is nothing to say, really. You are surrounded by the blessings of capitalism. The buffet table, which
you and your lunch partners only had to walk into a building to find, has a greater variety of food at a cheaper price
than that which was available to any living person — king, lord, duke, plutocrat, or pope — in almost all of the
history of the world. Not even fifty years ago would this have been imaginable. All of history has been defined by
the struggle for food. And yet that struggle has been abolished, not just for the rich but for everyone living in
developed economies. The ancients, peering into this scene, might have assumed it to be Elysium. Medieval man
conjured up such scenes only in visions of Utopia. Even in the late 19th century, the most gilded palace of the richest
industrialist required a vast staff and immense trouble to come anywhere near approximating it. We owe this scene to
capitalism. To put it differently, we owe this scene to centuries of capital accumulation at the hands of free people
who have put capital to work on behalf of economic innovations, at once competing with others for profit and
cooperating with millions upon millions of people in an ever-expanding global network of the division of labor. The
savings, investments, risks, and work of hundreds of years and uncountable numbers of free people have gone into making this scene possible, thanks to
the ever-remarkable capacity for a society developing under conditions of liberty to achieve the highest aspirations of the society's members. And yet,
sitting on the other side of the table are well-educated people who imagine that the way to end the world's woes is through socialism. Now, people's
definitions of socialism differ, and these persons would probably be quick to say that they do not mean the Soviet Union or anything like that. That was
socialism in name only, I would be told. And yet, if socialism does mean anything at all today, it imagines that there can be
some social improvement resulting from the political movement to take capital out of private hands and put it into
the hands of the state. Other tendencies of socialism include the desire to see labor organized along class lines and given some sort of coercive
power over how their employers' property is used. It might be as simple as the desire to put a cap on the salaries of CEOs, or it could be as extreme as
the desire to abolish all private property, money, and even marriage. Whatever the specifics of the case in question, socialism
always means overriding the free decisions of individuals and replacing that capacity for decision making with an
overarching plan by the state. Taken far enough, this mode of thought won't just spell an end to opulent lunches. It
will mean the end of what we all know as civilization itself. It would plunge us back to a primitive state of
existence, living off hunting and gathering in a world with little art, music, leisure, or charity. Nor is any form of
socialism capable of providing for the needs of the world's six billion people, so the population would shrink
dramatically and quickly and in a manner that would make every human horror ever known seem mild by
comparison. Nor is it possible to divorce socialism from totalitarianism, because if you are serious about ending
private ownership of the means of production, you have to be serious about ending freedom and creativity too. You
will have to make the whole of society, or what is left of it, into a prison. In short, the wish for socialism is a wish for
unparalleled human evil. If we really understood this, no one would express casual support for it in polite company. It would be like saying, you
know, there is really something to be said for malaria and typhoid and dropping atom bombs on millions of innocents. Do the people sitting across the
table really wish for this? Certainly not. So what has gone wrong here? Why can these people not see what is obvious? Why can't people sitting amidst
market-created plenty, enjoying all the fruits of capitalism every minute of life, see the merit of the market but rather wish for something that is a proven
disaster? What we have here is a failure of understanding. That is to say, a failure to connect causes with effects.
This is a wholly abstract idea. Knowledge of cause and effect does not come to us by merely looking around a room, living in a certain kind of society, or observing statistics.
You can study roomfuls of data, read a thousand treatises on history, or plot international GDP figures on a graph for a living, and yet the truth about cause and effect can still
be evasive. You still might miss the point that it is capitalism that gives rise to prosperity and freedom. You might still be tempted by the notion of socialism as savior. Let
me take you back to the years 1989 and 1990. These were the years that most of us remember as the time when socialism collapsed in Eastern Europe and Russia. Events of
that time flew in the face of all predictions on the Right that these were permanent regimes that would never change unless they were bombed back to the Stone Age. On the
Left, it was widely believed, even in those times, that these societies were actually doing quite well and would eventually pass the United States and Western Europe in
And yet it collapsed. Even the Berlin Wall, that symbol of oppression and
slavery, was torn down by the people themselves. It was not only glorious to see socialism collapse. It was thrilling, from a
prosperity, and, by some measures, that they were already better off than us.
libertarian point of view, to see how states themselves can dissolve. They may have all the guns and all the power, and the people have none of those,
and yet, when the people themselves decide that they will no longer be governed, the state has few options left. It eventually collapses amid a societywide refusal to believe its lies any longer. When these closed societies suddenly became open, what did we see? We saw lands that time
forgot. The technology was backwards and broken. The food was scarce and disgusting. The medical care was
abysmal. The people were unhealthy. Property was polluted. It was also striking to see what had happened to the
culture under socialism. Many generations had been raised under a system built on power and lies, and so the
cultural infrastructure that we take for granted was not secure. Such notions as trust, promise, truth, honesty, and
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planning for the future — all pillars of commercial culture — had become distorted and confused by the ubiquity
and persistence of the statist curse.
Socialism Bad
Intellectuals have a responsibility to confront the violence of socialist totalitarianism. Socialism is
a product of intellectual advocacy. We must totally confront the lies of socialism.
Ludwig von Mises, Visiting Prof. Econ. – NYU, “Planned Chaos: The Alleged Inevitability of
Socialism (Part 11 of 11)”, 1947, http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=5314
Many people believe that the coming of totalitarianism is inevitable. The "wave of the future," they say, carries
mankind inexorably toward a system under which all human affairs are managed by omnipotent dictators. It is useless to
fight against the unfathomable decrees of history. The truth is that most people lack the intellectual ability and courage to resist a popular movement,
however pernicious and ill-considered. Bismarck once deplored the lack of what he called civilian courage, i.e., bravery in dealing with civic affairs on
the part of his countrymen. But neither did the citizens of other nations display more courage and judiciousness when faced with the menace of
communist dictatorship. They either yielded silently or timidly raised some trifling objections. One does not fight socialism by
criticizing only some accidental features of its schemes. In attacking many socialists’ stand on divorce and birth
control or their ideas about art and literature, one does not refute socialism. It is not enough to disapprove of the Marxian
assertions that the theory of relativity or the philosophy of Bergson or psychoanalysis is "bourgeois" moonshine . Those who find fault with
Bolshevism and Nazism only for their anti-Christian leanings implicitly endorse all the rest of these bloody
schemes. On the other hand, it is sheer stupidity to praise the totalitarian regimes for alleged achievements which
have no reference whatever to their political and economic principles. It is questionable whether the observations that in Fascist
Italy the railroad trains ran on schedule and the bug population of second-rate hotel beds was decreasing, were correct or not; but it is in any case of no
importance for the problem of Fascism. The fellow-travellers are enraptured by Russian films, Russian music and Russian caviar. But there lived greater
musicians in other countries and under other social systems; good pictures were produced in other countries too; and it is certainly not a merit of
Generalissimo Stalin that the taste of caviar is delicious. Neither does the prettiness of Russian ballet dancers or the construction
of a great power station on the Dnieper expiate for the mass slaughter of the Kulaks. The readers of picture magazines and
the movie-fans long for the picturesque. The operatic pageants of the Fascists and the Nazis and the parading of the girl-battalions of the Red army are
after their heart. It is more fun to listen to the radio speeches of a dictator than to study economic treatises. The entrepreneurs and technologists who
pave the way for economic improvement work in seclusion: their work is not suitable to be visualized on the screen. But the dictators, intent upon
spreading death and destruction, are spectacularly in sight of the public. Dressed in military garb they eclipse in the eyes of the moviegoers the
colourless bourgeois in plain clothes. The problems of society’s economic organization are not suitable for light talk at fashionable cocktail parties.
Neither can they be dealt with adequately by demagogues haranguing mass assemblies. They are serious things. They require painstaking studies. They
must not be taken lightly. The socialist propaganda never encountered any decided opposition. The devastating critique
by which the economists exploded the futility and impracticability of the socialist schemes and doctrines did not
reach the moulders of public opinion. The universities were mostly dominated by socialist or interventionist pedants not only in continental
Europe , where they were owned and operated by the governments, but even in the Anglo-Saxon countries. The politicians and the statesmen, anxious
not to lose popularity, were lukewarm in their defense of freedom. The policy of appeasement, so much criticized when applied in the case of the Nazis
and the Fascists, was practised universally for many decades with regard to all other brands of socialism. It was this defeatism that made the rising
generation believe that the victory of socialism is inevitable. It is not true that the masses are vehemently asking for socialism
and that there is no means to resist them. The masses favor socialism because they trust the socialist propaganda
of the intellectuals. The intellectuals, not the populace, are moulding public opinion. It is a lame excuse of the
intellectuals that they must yield to the masses. They themselves have generated the socialist ideas and indoctrinated the
masses with them. No proletarian or son of a proletarian has contributed to the elaboration of the interventionist and socialist programs. Their authors
were all of bourgeois background. The esoteric writings of dialectical materialism, of Hegel, the father both of Marxism and of German aggressive
nationalism, the books of Georges Sorel, of Gentile and of Spengler were not read by the average man; they did not move the masses directly. It was the
intellectuals who popularized them. The intellectual leaders of the peoples have produced and propagated the fallacies
which are on the point of destroying liberty and Western civilization. The intellectuals alone are responsible for
the mass slaughters which are the characteristic mark of our century. They alone can reverse the trend and pave
the way for a resurrection of freedom. Not mythical "material productive forces," but reason and ideas
determine the course of human affairs. What is needed to stop the trend toward socialism and despotism is
common-sense and moral courage.
54
DDW 09
Tony, Sohan, Cherndawg
CAPITALISM KRITIK
Robinson – No Solvency
Zizek’s Alternative fails to accomplish fundamental change—it is merely therapeutic for
individuals.
Robinson 04 (Andrew, PhD, political theory, University of Nottingham, “Introduction: The Basic
Zizekian Model,” Theory Blog, http://andyrobinsontheoryblog.blogsp...ogress_15.html)
Why does Zizek support the Act? Although he connects the Act to 'radicalism', he does not state
anywhere that the Act accomplishes any fundamental change in the deep structure of existence;
at best, it can temporarily suspend (for instance) exclusion. This is not an attempt to achieve a
better world (still less a perfect one!) but a purely structural attempt to restore something which
Zizek thinks is missing. In this sense, even in its 'radicalism', the Act is conservative. Zizek
seems to be restoring to psychoanalysis a naive conception of psychological health: via the ex
nihilo act, one can escape the logic of the symptom (DSST 178).
55
DDW 09
Tony, Sohan, Cherndawg
CAPITALISM KRITIK
Robinson – Alt  Violence
Zizek’s Alternative is radically nihilistic and accomplishes nothing political.
Robinson 04 (Andrew, PhD, political theory, University of Nottingham, “Introduction: The Basic
Zizekian Model,” Theory Blog, http://andyrobinsontheoryblog.blogsp...ogress_15.html)
It is important to realise that the Act is not revolutionary in the sense of creating something new
on the basis of an ideal, or an imaginary, or the restoration of an authentic pre-alienated state, or
any other process which would allow one to create something on the basis of a project and praxis.
The Act is radically nihilistic (see below). For Zizek, the subject can change nothing - all it can do is
add itself to reality by an act of claiming responsibility for the given What seems completely
missing here is any case for the Act that in any way justifies ethically the terrible nature of the Act,
both for its perpetrator and for others; one can only really accept Zizek's Act if one places at the
core of one's belief-system the importance of resolving dilemmas in some supposed deep structure
of existence, so what matters is not human or social consequences or any specific beliefs, but
merely the adoption of a structural position which solves contradictions in and thereby overcomes
the problems of a structure. Despite Zizek's repeated use of the term "ethics", therefore, this is in
many ways not an ethical system at all, but a kind of model of structural problem-solving - a
"therapy" for society, passed off as ethics.
56
DDW 09
Tony, Sohan, Cherndawg
CAPITALISM KRITIK
Alt  No Value to Life
The Zizekian alt requires an abandonment of ethics and accepting an obliteration of the
self – vote aff to reject these representations.
Robinson 04 (Andrew, PhD, political theory, University of Nottingham, “Introduction: The Basic
Zizekian Model,” Theory Blog, http://andyrobinsontheoryblog.blogsp...ogress_15.html)
Zizek's theory of the Act presupposes a belief that we are all basically worthless. "The ultimate
level of the ethical experience" is found in the utterly broken victim of the Nazi or Stalinist camps
(DSST 86), which means one "will be surprised to learn how even the darkest Stalinism harbours a
redemptive dimension" (DSST 88). these people were not dehumanised by the Nazis, but rather,
express an inhuman kernel of humanity (DSST 76-7). This kind of person is the " 'zero-level' of
humanity" which makes human symbolic engagement possible by wiping the slate of animal
instincts (DSST 77; NB the strong binary operative here, which is totally flawed: dogs show similar
modes of action when exposed to similar situations, such as Seligman's dogs in the 'learned
helplessness' experiments). Zizek thinks we all have had to go through this experience (DSST 778). This experience also negates the concept of authenticity (though not enough to stop Zizek
using it elsewhere): one can't say such victims are involved in an authentic existential project, but
it would be cynical to say they are living an inauthentic existence since it is others, not themselves,
who degrade them (DSST 78-9; I don't actually see why an external basis for subordination would
affect the concept of authenticity in the slightest; perhaps it would affect the strongest versions
which assume pure freedom, but it would not undermine, for instance, the later Sartre, since in
this case the authenticity of the project has been defeated by the practico-inert, leading to a state
of existence he terms "exis": a degraded existence without project). I think a Deleuzian analysis
would be more appropriate here: the dehumanisation of these victims results from the (temporary)
total victory of the Oedipal/authoritarian cage: flows and breaks are cut off or utterly contained
within an order of power/knowledge, with the political conclusion being that freedom exists in a
struggle with domination and that the struggle for freedom is necessary to prevent us being
reduced to this level. But this would be partly a causal account, whereas Zizek seems to want a
pure ethics. Where Zizek's account leads politically is far more sinister; Zizek cannot in all
seriousness criticise the inhumanity of the concentration camps if they simply reveal our essence,
and it is hard to see how one could oppose the Nazis if they did not dehumanise their victims or
treat them inhumanely. Indeed, such an excremental reduction is something Zizek elsewhere
praises, and his attempts to distance himself from Nazism have nothing to do with the inhumanity
of the camps; rather, they revolve around nit-picking over whether the Nazis really traversed the
fantasy or stopped short at a false act (see below). The Act is a submission: revolutionaries should
become "followers" of the truth-event and its call (TS 227; this reproduces with a reversed sign
Vaneigem's concept of the Cause as a form of alienation accepting utter self-obliteration, and
rejecting all compassion (TS 378).
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DDW 09
Tony, Sohan, Cherndawg
CAPITALISM KRITIK
No Root Cause
Capitalism isn’t the root of anything.
Aberdeen 3 [Richard Aberdeen 2003 “THE WAY A Theory of Root Cause and Solution”
http://freedomtracks.com/uncommonsense/theway.html]
A view shared by many modern activists is that capitalism, free enterprise, multi-national corporations and
globalization are the primary cause of the current global Human Rights problem and that by striving to change or
eliminate these, the root problem of what ills the modern world is being addressed. This is a rather unfortunate and
historically myopic view, reminiscent of early “class struggle” Marxists who soon resorted to violence as a means to achieve
rather questionable ends. And like these often brutal early Marxists, modern anarchists who resort to violence to solve the
problem are walking upside down and backwards, adding to rather than correcting, both the immediate and long-term Human
Rights problem. Violent revolution, including our own American revolution, becomes a breeding ground for poverty,
disease, starvation and often mass oppression leading to future violence. Large, publicly traded corporations are
created by individuals or groups of individuals, operated by individuals and made up of individual and/or group
investors. These business enterprises are deliberately structured to be empowered by individual (or group) investor greed.
For example, a theorized ‘need’ for offering salaries much higher than is necessary to secure competent leadership (often
resulting in corrupt and entirely incompetent leadership), lowering wages more than is fair and equitable and scaling back of
often hard fought for benefits, is sold to stockholders as being in the best interest of the bottom-line market value and thus, in
the best economic interests of individual investors. Likewise, major political and corporate exploitation of third-world
nations is rooted in the individual and joint greed of corporate investors and others who stand to profit from such
exploitation. More than just investor greed, corporations are driven by the greed of all those involved, including
individuals outside the enterprise itself who profit indirectly from it. If one examines “the course of human events”
closely, it can correctly be surmised that the “root” cause of humanity’s problems comes from individual human
greed and similar negative individual motivation. The Marx/Engles view of history being a “class” struggle ¹ does not
address the root problem and is thus fundamentally flawed from a true historical perspective (see Gallo Brothers for more
details). So-called “classes” of people, unions, corporations and political groups are made up of individuals who support the
particular group or organizational position based on their own individual needs, greed and desires and thus, an apparent
“class struggle” in reality, is an extension of individual motivation. Likewise, nations engage in wars of aggression, not
because capitalism or classes of society are at root cause, but because individual members of a society are individually
convinced that it is in their own economic survival best interest. War, poverty, starvation and lack of Human and
Civil Rights have existed on our planet since long before the rise of modern capitalism, free enterprise and multinational corporation avarice, thus the root problem obviously goes deeper than this. Junior Bush and the neoconservative genocidal maniacs of modern-day America could not have recently effectively gone to war against Iraq without
the individual support of individual troops and a certain percentage of individual citizens within the U.S. population, each
lending support for their own personal motives, whatever they individually may have been. While it is true that corrupt
leaders often provoke war, using all manner of religious, social and political means to justify, often as not, entirely ludicrous
ends, very rare indeed is a battle only engaged in by these same unscrupulous miscreants of power. And though a few
iniquitous elitist powerbrokers may initiate nefarious policies of global genocidal oppression, it takes a very great
many individuals operating from individual personal motivations of survival, desire and greed to develop these
policies into a multi-national exploitive reality. No economic or political organization and no political or social cause
exists unto itself but rather, individual members power a collective agenda. A workers’ strike has no hope of
succeeding if individual workers do not perceive a personal benefit. And similarly, a corporation will not exploit
workers if doing so is not believed to be in the economic best interest of those who run the corporation and who in
turn, must answer (at least theoretically) to individuals who collectively through purchase or other allotment of
shares, own the corporation. Companies have often been known to appear benevolent, offering both higher wages and
improved benefits, if doing so is perceived to be in the overall economic best interest of the immediate company and/or larger
corporate entity. Non-unionized business enterprises frequently offer ‘carrots’ of appeasement to workers in order to
discourage them from organizing and historically in the United States, concessions such as the forty-hour workweek,
minimum wage, workers compensation and proscribed holidays have been grudgingly capitulated to by greedy capitalist
masters as necessary concessions to avoid profit-crippling strikes and outright revolution.
58