Cap K

1NC
The affirmative is not an isolated instanceit is deeply embedded in the larger socioeconomic matrix of the status quo. Investment in transportation infrastructure is mechanism for amplifying the expansion of capital. The affirmatives investment will not be used to increase the greater social good but to increase inequalities in development.
FARMER 11 Professor of Sociology @ Roosevelt University (Stephanie, Uneven public transportation development in neoliberalizing Chicago, USA Environment and Planning A 43 p. 11551157, DS)
2 Uneven development and public transportation neoliberalism Since the production of space is inherently a social phenomenon, a theory of uneven geographic development should be attuned to the particular articulation of structural forces and social relations in capitalist society. Uneven geographic development is produced by a constellation of factors consisting of (1) the embedding of capital accumulation processes in space; (2) historical class, social, and political relations contingent to a geography that privileges some places, social groups, or activities over others; (3) the preexisting built environment; (4) institutional and political policies implemented in localities; and (5) consumption preferences (Harvey, 2006, page 78). Harvey (1999) sketches out the contours of uneven geographic development: ``Uneven development occurs as capital mobilizes particular places as forces of production creating a highly variegated capitalist geography consisting of an unequal distribution of productive forces, institutional arrangements, raw materials, the built environment and transport facilities, as well as differentiations of social relations and a litany of other factors shaping spatial relations'' (page 416). The specific configuration of market forces, state regulation, and class relations at work at a given time and place (the prevailing accumulation regime) profoundly shapes the development of the urban terrain. Contemporary urbanization processes are strongly shaped by the logic and policies of neoliberalism. Neoliberal ideology advocates the extension of market-based principles in the arena of the state in order to `liberate' both public services from so-called `state inefficiencies' and capital `squandered' by taxation that could be more profitability deployed by private actors. Accordingly, neoliberal regulatory frameworks promote market discipline over the state, usually achieved by such policy mechanisms as lowering taxes on businesses and the wealthy, shrinking or dismantling public services, and subjecting public services to the logic of markets through public ^ private partnerships or outright privatization. The creative ^ destructive processes

of neoliberal state strategy reconfigure the territorial organization of accumulation, and consequently produce new forms of uneven geographic development. The literature on neoliberal urbanization establishes the broader
processes of political, economic, and social restructuring and rescaling in response to declining profitability of the Fordist accumulation regime (Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Peck and Tickell, 2002). The roll-back of Fordist regulatory configurations and the roll-out of neoliberalization transformed the sociospatial hierarchy of regulatory frameworks with the nation-state as the center of state regulation to a more multiscalar regulatory framework articulated by the interactions of global, national, and local scales (Brenner and Theodore, 2002). Cities emerged as crucial sites of neoliberalization and institutional restructuring. In the United States, neoliberal policies restructured Fordist forms of territorial organization by devolving the relatively centralized, managerial ^ redistributive system of urban planning and financing at the federal level to subregional states and municipalities (Eisinger, 1998; Harvey, 1989). Thus localities were forced to finance local infrastructure, transit, housing, and other forms of collective consumption on their own or abandon them altogether. By starving cities of revenues, neoliberal state restructuring rendered states and municipalities more dependent upon locally generated tax revenues as well as intensifying intercity competition (Harvey, 1989). Cities starved by neoliberal state restructuring responded to their fiscal troubles by adopting entrepreneurial norms, practices, and institutional frameworks. Entrepreneurial municipal governments prioritize policies that create a good business climate and competitive advantages for businesses (Harvey, 1989; Smith, 2002) by ``reconstituting social welfare provisions as anticompetitive costs'', and by implementing ``an extremely narrow urban policy repertoire based on capital subsidies, place promotion, supply side intervention, central-city makeovers and local boosterism'' (Peck and Tickell, 2002, pages 47 ^ 48). In effect, neoliberal urbanization encourages local governments to retreat from social redistribution and integrated social welfare policies in favor of bolstering business activity (Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Peck and Tickell, 2002; Swyngedouw et al, 2002). As a consequence, entrepreneurial mayors emerged in the 1980s to forge alliances between government and business leaders (what I refer to as the `global city growth machine') under the banner of urban revitalization (Judd and Simpson, 2003). City space is mobilized ``as an arena both for market-oriented economic growth and for elite

consumption practices'' (Brenner and Theodore, 2002, page 21). The abandonment of Fordist planning, privileging a more integrated
urban form in favor of selective investment in privileged places, has resulted in what scholars have variously deemed as a fragmented, polarized, splintered, or quartered urbanity (Graham and Marvin, 2001; Marcuse and van Kempen, 2000; Sassen 1991; Swyngedouw et al, 2002). The

business-friendly policies and practices pursued by entrepreneurial urban governments must also be understood in relation to the global reorganization of production. Global cities emerged as the command and control nodes of the global economy, where multinational headquarters, producer services, and FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) firms cluster (Sassen, 1991). To lure multinational corporate headquarters, producer services, professional ^ managerial workers, and tourists to their city, municipal governments recreate urban space by prioritizing megaprojects and infrastructure that help businesses gain competitive advantages and keep them connected within global networks as well as providing financing and amenities for gentrification, tourism, and cultural consumption (Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Fainstein, 2008; Graham and Marvin,
2001; Peck and Tickell, 2002; Swyngedouw et al, 2002). These urban development strategies are ideologically and discursively legitimized by the global city growth machine as necessary for `global city' or `world-class city' formation (McGuirk, 2004; Wilson, 2004). Public

transportation policy is one dimension of spatial restructuring deployed by entrepreneurial governments to create place-based competitive advantages for global capital. Transportation represents a fixed, placebased geographic element where the local and the global interact; where global processes shape local geographies and where local politics shape global networks. As Keil and Young (2008) suggest, transportation should now be considered in relation to globalized trade and economic networks and consumptionoriented patterns of everyday life. Growth demands in cities experiencing gentrification, the development of luxury consumption spaces, and a surge of tourism have placed pressure on local agencies to expand airports, roads, and rail and public transit capacities. Large-scale urban redevelopment plans have made a comeback as city
planners conceive of megaprojects that concentrate new public transit investment in the revalorized core (Fainstein, 2008; Keil and Young, 2008; Swyngedouw et al, 2002).

[Specific Links go here]

Capitalism fuels a genocidal foreign policy that threatens global destruction.

Foster, co-editor of Monthly Review, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, 2k3 [John, The new Age of Imperialism,
Monthly Review 55.3] At the same time, it is clear that in

the present period of global hegemonic imperialism the United States is geared above all to expanding its imperial power to whatever extent possible and subordinating the rest of the capitalist world to its interests. The Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea Basin represent not only the bulk of world petroleum reserves, but
also a rapidly increasing proportion of total reserves, as high production rates diminish reserves elsewhere. This has provided much of the stimulus for the United States to gain greater control of these resourcesat the expense of its present and potential rivals. But U.S. imperial ambitions do not end there, since they are driven by economic ambitions that know no bounds. As Harry Magdoff noted in the closing pages of The Age of Imperialism in 1969, "it is the professed goal" of U.S. multinational corporations "to control as large a

share of the world market as they do of the United States market," and this hunger for foreign markets persists today. Florida-based Wackenhut Corrections Corporation has won prison privatization contracts in Australia, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Canada, New Zealand, and the Netherlands Antilles ("Prison Industry Goes Global," www.futurenet.org, fall 2000).Promotion of U.S. corporate interests abroad is one of the primary responsibilities of the U.S. state. Consider the cases of Monsanto and genetically modified food, Microsoft and intellectual property, Bechtel and the war on Iraq. It would be impossible to exaggerate how dangerous this dual expansionism of U.S. corporations and the U.S. state is to the world at large. As Istvan Meszaros observed in 2001 in Socialism or Barbarism, the U.S. attempt to seize global control, which is inherent in the workings of capitalism and imperialism, is now threatening humanity with the "extreme violent rule of the whole world by one hegemonic imperialist country on a permanent basis...an absurd and unsustainable way of running the world order."* This new age of U.S. imperialism will generate its own contradictions, amongst them attempts by other major powers to assert their influence, resorting to similar belligerent means , and all sorts of strategies by weaker states and non-state actors to engage in "asymmetric" forms of warfare. Given the unprecedented destructiveness of contemporary weapons, which are diffused ever more widely, the consequences for the population of the world could well be devastating beyond anything ever before witnessed. Rather than generatinga new "Pax Americana" the United States may be paving the way to new global holocausts. The greatest hope in these dire circumstances lies in a rising tide of revolt from below , both in the United States and globally. The growth of
the antiglobalization movement, which dominated the world stage for nearly two years following the events in Seattle in November 1999, was succeeded in February 2003 by the largest global wave of antiwar protests in human history. Never before has the world's population risen up so quickly and in such massive numbers in the attempt to stop an imperialist war. The new age of imperialism is also a new age of revolt. The

Vietnam Syndrome, which has so worried the strategic planners of the imperial order for decades, now seems not only to have left a deep legacy within the United States but also to have been coupled this time around with an Empire Syndrome on a much more global scale--something that no one really expected. This more than anything else makes it clear that the strategy of the American ruling class to expand

the American Empire cannot possibly succeed in the long run, and will prove to be its own--we hope not the world'sundoing

The alternative is to reject the affirmative. Our refusal opens up new space for change and is a prerequisite to effective political action.
Herod 4 (James, Author of Getting Free, The Strategy Described Abstractly, http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/GetFre/06.htm) 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 notseized 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, non-hierarchical, 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 laws of history. It will happen, and only happen, because we want it to, and because we know what were 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 cant simply stop participating in (but even here there are ways we can chip away at it). 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 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. Its 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 cooperative labor and cooperatively produced goods. Another clarification is needed. 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 should approach it. The thing is this: in order for capitalism to be destroyed millions and millions of people must be dissatisfied 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. 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. 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 The content of this vision is actually not new at all, but quite old. The long term goal of
communists, anarchists, and socialists has always been to restore community. Even the great peasant revolts of early capitalism sought to get free from external authorities and restore autonomy to villages. Marx defined communism once as a free association of producers, and at another time as a situation in which the free development of each is a condition for the free development of all. Anarchists have always called for worker and peasant self-managed cooperatives. The long term goals have always been clear: to abolish wage-slavery, to eradicate a social order organized solely around the accumulation of capital for its own sake, and to establish in its place a society of free people who democratically and cooperatively self-determine the shape of their social world.

Only a rejection of the ideology of capital can solve.

Johnston 4 (Department of Philosophy University of New Mexico, December, The Cynics Fetish: Slavoj Zizek and the Dynamics of Belief, International Journal of Zizek Studies, http://www.zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/8/24, DS)
On the basis of Lacanian theory, one

could argue that an act is something whose occurrence can only be determined retroactively (as per Freuds Nachtraglichkeit and Lacans apres-coup). It isnt until after a whole series of concrete actions have already been engaged in, and whose effects have temporally unfurled to a sufficient extent, that one is able to assess whether an act actually did happen. One always recognizes an act as such after-the-fact (iek himself acknowledges this too126). Thus, as Lacan insists, acts arent events brought about in the present by self-conscious volitional agents because, within the immediacy of the here-and-now, individuals arent able to determine or decide whether their actions will eventually qualify, through the verdict of subsequent history, as genuine acts strictly speaking. Individuals must first immerse themselves in action, since, without these particular interventions, there would be nothing to grasp later through hindsight as an act. Although an act is indeed not an action (and although far from every action can or does become an act), there is, nonetheless, no act without an action. A politics of the pure act, one that eschews engaging in any specifications concerning actions to be performed, is an empty politics without politics. The risk that this position refuses isnt the risk of the absolute Act and its always-possible failureit risks refusing the active
specification and performance of actions that might not end up becoming acts. The activity of thinking that iek hopes to facilitate again by toppling certain implicit ideological prohibitions must not allow itself to neglect grappling with the tangible details of, for instance, social and political policymaking. Is the passivity of awaiting the messianic future arrival of the undefined actmiracle the sole viable replacement for Ma rxs abandoned political project of communism? At some point soon, iek needs to explain what fills the vacuum remaining after he severs the positive prescriptive agenda of Marxism from its diagnostic-descriptive dimension. Perhaps the absence of a detailed practical roadmap in ieks political writings isnt 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 iek 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 moneys 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 substances powers. The external obstacle of the capitalist system exists exclusively on the condition that subjects, whether consciously or unconsciously, internally believe in itcapitalisms 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 capitalisms frail vulnerability is simultaneously the source of its enormous strength: Its vampiric symbiosis with individual human desire, and the fact that the late-capitalist cynics 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 iek 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.).

Links

Environment Link
The affirmatives strategy of environmental protection is a campaign of global capital, their ecological reform simply shifts consumerist ideology into the environment which renders everything into capital to be consumed.
Luke, Department of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 1997 Timothy W., The (Un)Wise (Ab)Use of Nature: Environmentalism as Globalized Consumerism? http://www.cddc.vt.edu/tim/tims/Tim528.htm All of these environmentalizing initiatives reveal different aspects of Nature's infrastructuralization in the disorganized and incomplete transnational campaigns of environmentalized capital's terraforming programs. The actions of the Worldwatch Institute, the Nature Conservancy, or the World Wildlife Fund, or the Sierra Club are frameworks within which a new habitus with its own environmentalized social relations of production and consumption can come alive by guarding habitat as the supremely perfect site of habitus. As Baudrillard observes, "the great signified, the great referent Nature is dead, replaced by environment, which simultaneously designates and designs its death and the restoration of nature as simulation model....we enter a social environment of synthesis in which a total abstract communication and an immanent manipulation no longer leave any point exterior to the system."115 Rendering wildlife, air, water, habitat, or Nature into complex new systems of rare goods in the name of environmental protection, and then regulating the social consumption of them through ecological activism shows how mainstream environmentalists are serving as agents of social control or factors in political economy to reintegrate the intractable equations of (un)wise (ab)use along consummational rather than consumptive lines. Putting earth first only establishes ecological capital as the ultimate basis of life. Infrastructuralizing Nature renders everything on Earth, or "humanity's home," into capital--land, labor, animals, plants, air, water, genes, ecosystems. And, mainstream environmentalism often becomes a very special kind of "home eco nomics" to manage humanity's indoors and outdoors household accounts. Household consumption is
always home consumption, because human economics rests upon terrestrial ecologics. Here the roots of ecology and economics intertwine through "sustainable development," revealing its truest double significance: sustainably managing the planet is the same thing

as

reproducing terrestrial stocks of infrastructorialized green capital. Whether or not environmentalists prevent the unwise abuse or promote wise use of natural resources is immaterial; everything they do optimizes the sign value of green goods and serves to reproduce global capital as environmentalized sites, stocks or spaces--an outcome that every Worldwatch Institute State of the World report or Club Sierra ecotour easily confirms.
Likewise, the scarcity measures of Nature Conservancy or World Wildlife Fund scare campaigns show how everything now has a price, including wildlife preservation or ecological degradation, which global markets will mark and meet in their (un)wise (ab)use of environmentalized resources.

Free Trade Link

Trade agreements are an extension of hegemonic capitalism Sakellaropoulos Asst Prof of Social Policy Panteion University & Sotiris Department of Sociology, University of the Aegean 2008 Spyros & Panagiotis Science & Society proquest
The role of international economic organizations such as the IMF and the World Bank was crucial, because they enforced neoliberal reforms and the lowering of trade and investment barriers. Equally important were the outcome of the GATT negotiations and the implementation of the WTO structure. This form of global political economy and the considerable influence exercised by the USA on these international institutions created a friendly environment for U. S. companies to maintain and expand their international activities. They also secured the support of business interests (and their political representatives) in other countries. At the same time, this strategy aimed at making sure that the dollar remained the global money; that U. S. and U. S.-controlled financial institutions were the primary medium for international money flows; that the USA would keep the seignorage advantage it had since the Bretton-Woods agreements (Gowan, 1999). Ideologically this was justified by the "globalization" rhetoric that became dominant in the 1990s.7 The United States' open endorsement of aggressive capitalist policies, restructuring of capitalist

production, attacks on the welfare state, defense of property rights (especially intellectual property rights), free trade and generally all forms of reinstatement of capital's power over labor on a global scale was an essential part of its hegemonic role. It was not just a domestic policy. It was more a strategic choice of class interests and a social basis for an expansive internationalization of capital, the very basis of modern imperialism (Wood,
2003). And although the growth of the financial sector has been described as a sign of the structurally weak and crisis-prone character of modern capitalism in general and the U. S. economy in particular (Brenner, 2002), we think that such a view underestimates the disciplinary character of international financial deregulation and the way it induces neoliberal policies and capitalist restructuring and enhances the hegemonic role of the United States (Rude, 2004). It was not only about the lower-

ing of trade barriers or financial liberalization. It has more to do with the removal of most forms of protection that had aimed at safeguarding less productive capitals and traditional petty bourgeois strata against international competition and at guaranteeing forms of class compromise. It was not only an openmarket policy serving U. S. firms; it also offered other capitalist social formations a way out of capitalist crisis and the use of international competition as pressure for capitalist restructuring. And this can explain why non-hegemonic formations might accept a global economic and financial architecture that actually puts greater stress on their domestic economies. We can say that with this

internationalization of capital and capitalist restructuring there has been some sort of objective dialectic of hegemony at work. The entire strategy of internationalization became a strategic consideration to incorporate all ex-socialist countries into the economic, political, and ideological practices of the imperialist chain by means of their adoption of free market policies, dismantling of all forms of social protection, abolition of all barriers to foreign investment and full compliance with the current American strategy (Gowan, 1990; Gowan, 1995).

Mandatory Zizek Card/Neutral Economy Link

The affirmatives ontological disposition paints the economy as a natural, neutral actor. This action prevents authentic advocacy and makes change impossible.
Zizek 99 (Slavoj, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies, The Ticklish Subject, page 352355) The big news of todays 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 Capitals freedom, the subordinated of the process of production to social control the radical repoliticization of the economy. That is to say: if the problem with todays 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 todays 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 in 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 bit 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 todays subject is perhaps more than ever caught in an inexorable compulsion that effectively runs his life. The
irony of history is that, in the Eastern European ex-Communist countries, the reformed Communists were the first to learn this lesson. Why did many of them return to power via free elections in the mid 1990s? This very return offers the ultimate proof that these states have in fact entered capitalism. That is to say: what do ex-Communists stand for today? Due to their privileged links with the newly emerging capitalists (mostly members of the old nomenklatura privatizing the companies they once ran), they are first and foremost the party of big Capital; furthermore, to erase the traces of their brief but none the less rather traumatic experience with politically active civil society, they as a rule ferociously

advocate a quick deideologization, a retreat from active civil society engagement into passive, apolitical consumerism the very two features which characterize contemporary capitalism. So dissidents are astonished to discover that they played
the role of vanishing mediators on the way from socialism to capitalism, in which the same class as before rules under a new guise. It is therefore wrong to claim that the ex-Communists return to power shows how people are disappointed by capitalism and long for the old socialist security in a kind of Hegelian negation of negation, it is only with the ex-Communists return to power that socialism was effectively negated - that is to say, what the political analysts (mis)perceive as 'disappointment with capitalism' is in fact disappointment with the ethico-political enthusiasm for which there is no place in 'normal' capitalism.36 We should thus reassert the old Marxist critique of 'reification': today,

emphasizing the depoliticized 'objective' economic logic against allegedly 'outdated' forms of ideological passions is the predominant ideological form, since ideology is always self-referential, that is, it always defines itself through a distance towards an Other dismissed and denounced as 'ideological'.37 For that precise reason - because the depoliticized economy is the disavowed 'fundamental fantasy of postmodern politics

a properly political act would necessarily entail the repoliticization of the economy: within a given situation, a gesture counts as an act only in so far as it disturbs ('traverses') its fundamental fantasy.

Hegemony Link
Hegemony produces an endless cycle of genocidal wars in the name of the sustaining capital.
Meszaros, Professor Emeritus, Philosophy and Political Theory, University of Sussex, in 7 (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

Racism Link
Race and class are reproduced within capitalist relations capitalism racializes subjects to force competition and divides social groups by obfuscating labor consciousness this is a way to mask contradiction and maintain capital accumulation
San Juan 3 (E, Fullbright lecturer @ U of Leuven, Belgium, Marxism and the Race/Class Problematic: A Re-Articulation, http://clogic.eserver.org/2003/sanjuan.html)
It seems obvious that racism

cannot be dissolved by instances of status mobility when sociohistorical circumstances change gradually or are transformed by unforeseen interventions. The black bourgeoisie continues to be harassed and stigmatized by liberal or multiculturalist practices of racism, not because they drive Porsches or conspicuously flaunt all the indices of wealth. Class exploitation cannot replace or stand for racism because it is the condition of possibility for it. It is what enables the racializing of selected markers, whether physiological or cultural, to maintain,
deepen and reinforce alienation, mystifying reality by modes of commodification, fetishism, and reification characterizing the routine of quotidian life. Race and class are dialectically conjoined in the reproduction of capitalist relations of exploitation and domination. 30. We might take a passage from Marx as a source of guidelines for developing a historical-materialist theory of racism which is not empiricist but dialectical in aiming for theorizing conceptual concreteness as a multiplicity of historically informed and configured determinations. This passage comes from a letter dated 9 April 1870 to Meyer and Vogt in which Marx explains why the Irish struggle for autonomy was of crucial significance for the British proletariat: . . . Every industrial and commercial center in England possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he feels himself a member of the ruling nation and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his country against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the 'poor whites' to the 'niggers' in the former slave states of the USA. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker at once the accomplice and stupid tool of the English rule in Ireland. This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organization. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it (quoted in Callinicos 1993). Here Marx sketches three parameters for the sustained viability of racism in modern capitalist society. First, the

economic competition among workers is dictated by the distribution of labor power in the labor-market via differential wage rates. The distinction between skilled and unskilled labor is contextualized in differing national origins, languages and traditions of workers, which can be manipulated into racial antagonisms. Second, the appeal of racist ideology to white workers, with their identification as members of the "ruling nation" affording--in W.E.B. DuBois's words--"public and psychological wage" or compensation. Like religion, white-supremacist nationalism provides the illusory resolution to the real contradictions of life for the working majority of citizens. Third, the ruling class reinforces and maintains these racial divisions for the sake of capital accumulation within the framework of its ideological/political hegemony in the metropolis and worldwide. 31. Racism and
nationalism are thus modalities in which class struggles articulate themselves at strategic points in history. No doubt social conflicts in recent times have involved not only classes but also national, ethnic, and religious groups, as well as feminist, ecological, antinuclear social movements (Bottomore 1983). The concept of "internal colonialism" (popular in the seventies) that subjugates national minorities, as well as the principle of self-determination for oppressed or "submerged" nations espoused by Lenin, exemplify dialectical attempts to historicize the collective agency for socialist transformation. Within the framework of the global division of labor between metropolitan center and colonized periphery, a Marxist program of national liberation is meant to take into account the extraction of surplus value from colonized peoples through unequal exchange as well as through direct colonial exploitation in "Free Trade Zones," illegal traffic in prostitution, mail-order brides, and contractual domestics (at present, the Philippines provides the bulk of the latter, about ten million persons and growing). National reality not entirely reducible to class exploitation but incomprehensible apart from it; that is, it

oppression has a concrete cannot be adequately understood without the domination of the racialized peoples in the dependent formations by the colonizing/imperialist power, with the imperial nation-state acting as the exploiting class, as it were (see San Juan 1998; 2002). 32. Racism arose with the creation and expansion of the capitalist world economy
(Wolf 1982; Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991). Solidarities conceived as racial or ethnic groups acquire meaning and value in terms of their place within the social organization of production and reproduction of the ideological-political order; ideologies of racism as collective social evaluation of solidarities arise to reinforce structural constraints which preserve the exploited and oppressed position of these "racial" solidarities. Such patterns of economic and political segmentation mutate in response to the impact of changing economic and political relationships (Geshwender and Levine 1994). Overall, there

is no denying the fact that national-liberation movements and

indigenous groups fighting for sovereignty, together with heterogeneous alliances and coalitions, cannot be fully understood without a critical analysis of the production of surplus value and its expropriation by the propertied class--that is, capital accumulation. As John Rex noted, different ethnic groups are placed in relations of cooperation, symbiosis or conflict by the fact that as
groups they have different economic and political functions.Within this changing class order of [colonial societies], the language of racial difference frequently becomes the means whereby men allocate each other to different social and economic positions. What the type of analysis used here suggests is that the exploitation of clearly marked groups in a variety of different ways is integral to capitalism and that ethnic groups unite and act together because they have been subjected to distinct and differentiated types of exploitation. Race relations and racial conflict are necessarily structured by political and economic factors of a more generalized sort (1983, 403-05, 407). Hence race

relations and race conflict are necessarily structured by the larger totality of the political economy of a given society, as well as by modifications in the structure of the world economy. Corporate profit-making via class exploitation on an international/globalized scale, at bottom, still remains the logic of the world system of finance capitalism based on historically changing structures and retooled practices of domination and subordination.

CO2 Pipelines Link

The affirmatives production-oriented approach is unethical and legitimizes unending consumption Lack 11
MA in Environmental Politics, MSc in Hydroecology, 25 years of professional work experience, as a geologist and hydrogeologist, in both public and private sectors, Fellow of the Geological Society Martin, Whats wrong with Clean Coal?, http://lackofenvironment.wordpress.com/category/carbon capture-and-storage/ The concept of Clean Coal is almost certainly an invention of the marketing departments of coal mining companies (analagous to safe cigarettes). In most cases, coal-burning power stations have already cleaned-up their act as
much as they can (as a result of the 30-yr old UN Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (LRTAP) which continues to help

the idea of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is almost certainly a ruse to make the continuance of business as usual seem acceptable and, the truly remarkable thing is that, governments around the world seem to have been duped by it. However, in
humanity minimise the effects of acid rain). Therefore coal cannot be made any cleaner than it already is! Similarly, addition to this, it would be inherently dangerous because, in order to be an effective mitigation strategy, the burried CO2 must never escape (see my earlier posts The tough guide to climate denial and Five questions for Chris Huhne). Why is this so hard for our polit icians to grasp? Why do they continue to insist that coal-burning power stations are acceptable? When we discovered that airborne asbestos dust was dangerous, we stopped mining it. When we discovered that inhaling smoke was dangerous, most of us stopped smoking. Now that our governments know (or at least they claim they know) that CO2 emissions endanger our stable climate, why are they falling over themselves to find ways to permit the continuance of business as usual? Could it be that, as Hansen suggests, the fossil fuel lobby is just too powerful? But I dig ress This week I intend to look at Coal, Gas, Oil, and the alternatives to fossil fuels, to examine our options. However, my focus today was supposed to be CCS because it is not a mitigation strategy, it is

not even an attempt to tackle the cause of the problem. On the contrary, it is an attempt to treat the symptoms; and it is an abdication of our responsibility for causing the problem. The solution to littering is not to employ more litter-pickers, it is to educate people to make them better citizens who do not despoil their environment. When the early European settlers of North America began to move west in search of new lands and new opportunities, a Frontier mentality was understandable. However, to retain such an attitude today is socially unacceptable and morally irresponsible: When you live in a wilderness, it is probably
safe to treat a passing river as your source of drinking water, washing room, and toilet. However, if you are unfortunate enough to live in a Mumbai slum, this will almost certainly contribute to causing your premature death. As a parent, I had to learn to discriminate between childish irresponsibility and disobedience. However, if, as a species, we geo-engineering) as a solution, we

go down the CCS route (and/or pursue many of the other forms of will be crossing the line from one to the other: That is to say, now that we know (or at least the vast majority accept that we know) that burning fossil fuels is changing our global climate, to find ways to excuse our behaviour rather than modify it is no longer just irresponsible; it is morally reprehensible. It is, as Hansen has said, a gross case of intergenerational injustice.

1NC Farmer Link XTN

The affirmatives public transportation policy is grounded in structures of inequality based on historical class relations in which certain social groups are privileged over others. This is the result of capital accumulation, and creates a geography of an unequal distribution of forces. Urbanization is inherently neoliberalist policy aimed toward advancing business interests and global markets over the well-being of the population, thats Farmer.

1NC Foster Impact XTN

The United States has an imperialist foreign agenda which is driven by the conquest of foreign markets by corporations, and is inextricably tied to the domination of capital. Imperialism will inevitably lead to asymmetric war as the US preys on weaker states, and with the advent of contemporary nuclear weapons will lead to global holocaust, thats Foster.

1NC Alt XTN

The alternative is a rejection of the affirmative. Our strategy is to not to tear down the structures of capitalism or reform them, but to abandon them. This is not a revolution and occurs on the level of everyday life, thats Herod. In addition, we must cure the intellectual ideology of capitalism to open up space for alternatives. Capitalism exists because subjects internally believe in it; we effectively create change through academic rejection, thats Johnston.

Impacts

War
The choice is revolution or nuclear Armageddon. Voting negative is the only way to put an end to the social antagonism that drives interstate competition and the global war on the poor.*[repeated card?]
Callinicos 04 (Alex, Director of the Centre for European Studies at Kings College, The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx, 2004 pg. 196-197)
At the same time, it is clear that in

the present period of global hegemonic imperialism the United States is geared above all to expanding its imperial power to whatever extent possible and subordinating the rest of the capitalist world to its interests. The Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea Basin represent not only the bulk of world petroleum reserves, but
also a rapidly increasing proportion of total reserves, as high production rates diminish reserves elsewhere. This has provided much of the stimulus for the United States to gain greater control of these resourcesat the expense of its present and potential rivals. But U.S. imperial ambitions do not end there, since they are driven by economic ambitions that know no bounds. As Harry Magdoff noted in the closing pages of The Age of Imperialism in 1969, "it is the professed goal" of U.S. multinational corporations "to control as large a

share of the world market as they do of the United States market," and this hunger for foreign markets persists today. Florida-based Wackenhut Corrections Corporation has won prison privatization contracts in Australia, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Canada, New Zealand, and the Netherlands Antilles ("Prison Industry Goes Global," www.futurenet.org, fall 2000).Promotion of U.S. corporate interests abroad is one of the primary responsibilities of the U.S. state. Consider the cases of Monsanto and genetically modified food, Microsoft and intellectual property, Bechtel and the war on Iraq. It would be impossible to exaggerate how dangerous this dual expansionism of U.S. corporations and the U.S. state is to the world at large. As Istvan Meszaros observed in 2001 in Socialism or Barbarism, the U.S. attempt to seize global control, which is inherent in the workings of capitalism and imperialism, is now threatening humanity with the "extreme violent rule of the whole world by one hegemonic imperialist country on a permanent basis...an absurd and unsustainable way of running the world order."* This new age of U.S. imperialism will generate its own contradictions, amongst them attempts by other major powers to assert their influence, resorting to similar belligerent means , and all sorts of strategies by weaker states and non-state actors to engage in "asymmetric" forms of warfare. Given the unprecedented destructiveness of contemporary weapons, which are diffused ever more widely, the consequences for the population of the world could well be devastating beyond anything ever before witnessed. Rather than generatinga new "Pax Americana" the United States may be paving the way to new global holocausts. The greatest hope in these dire circumstances lies in a rising tide of revolt from below , both in the United States and globally. The growth of
the antiglobalization movement, which dominated the world stage for nearly two years following the events in Seattle in November 1999, was succeeded in February 2003 by the largest global wave of antiwar protests in human history. Never before has the world's population risen up so quickly and in such massive numbers in the attempt to stop an imperialist war. The new age of imperialism is also a new age of revolt. The Vietnam Syndrome, which has so worried the strategic planners of the imperial order for decades, now seems not only to have left a deep legacy within the United States but also to have been coupled this time around with an Empire Syndrome on a much more global scale--something that no one really expected. This more than anything else makes it clear that the strategy of the American ruling class to expand

the American Empire cannot possibly succeed in the long run, and will prove to be its own--we hope not the world'sundoing

Ethics
Resisting the economic evaluation of populations is the ultimate ethical responsibility the current social order guarantees social exclusion on a global scale while simultaneously anonymizing violence in a way that makes impact calculation impossible. Zizek and Daly 2k4 (Slavoj and Glyn, Conversations with Zizek page 14-16, DS)
For Zizek it is imperative that we cut through this Gordian knot of postmodern protocol and recognize that our

ethico-political responsibility is to confront the constitutive violence of todays global capitalism and its obscene naturalization / anonymization of the millions who are subjugated by it throughout the world. Against the standardized positions of postmodern culture with all its pieties concerning multiculturalist etiquette Zizek is arguing for a politics that might be called radically incorrect in the sense that it break with these types of positions 7 and focuses instead on the very organizing principles of todays social reality: the principles of global liberal capitalism. This requires some care and
subtlety. For far too long, Marxism has been bedeviled by an almost fetishistic economism that has tended towards political morbidity. With the likes of Hilferding and Gramsci, and more recently Laclau and Mouffee, crucial theoretical advances have been made that enable the transcendence of all forms of economism. In this new context, however, Zizek argues that the problem that now presents itself is almost that of the opposite fetish. That is to say, the prohibitive anxieties surrounding the taboo of economism can function as a

way of not engaging with economic reality and as a way of implicitly accepting the latter as a basic horizon of existence. In an ironic Freudian-Lacanian twist, the fear of economism can end up reinforcing a de facto economic necessity in
respect of contemporary capitalism (i.e. the initial prohibition conjures up the very thing it fears). This is not to endorse any kind of retrograde return to economism. Zizeks point is rather that in rejecting economism we should not lose sight of the systemic power of ca pital in shaping the lives and destinies of humanity and our very sense of the possible. In particular we should not overlook Marxs central insig ht that in order to

create a universal global system the forces of capitalism seek to conceal the politico-discursive violence of its construction through a kind of gentrification of that system. What is persistently denied by neo-liberals such as Rorty (1989) and Fukuyama (1992) is that the gentrification of global liberal capitalism is one whose universalism fundamentally reproduces and depends upon a disavowed violence that excludes vast sectors of the worlds populations. In this way, neo-liberal ideology attempts to naturalize capitalism by presenting its outcomes of winning and losing as if they were simply a matter of chance and sound judgment in a neutral market place. Capitalism does indeed create a space for a certain diversity, at least for the central capitalist regions, but it is neither neutral nor ideal and its price in terms of social exclusion is exorbitant. That is to say, the human cost in terms of inherent global poverty and degraded life-chances cannot be calculated within the existing economic rationale and, in consequence, social exclusion remains mystified and nameless (viz. the patronizing reference to the developing world). And Zizeks point is that this mystification is magnified through capitalisms profound capacity to ingest its own excesses and negativity: to redirect (or misdirect) social antagonisms and to absorb them within a culture of differential affirmation. Instead of Bolshevism, the tendency today is towards a kind of political boutiquism that is readily sustained by postmodern forms of consumerism and lifestyle. Against this Zizek argues for a new universalism whose primary ethical directive is to confront the fact that our forms of social existence are founded on exclusion on a global scale. While it
is perfectly true that universalism can never become Universal (it will always require a hegemonic-particular embodiment in order to have any meaning), what is novel about Zizeks universalism is that it would not attempt to conceal this fact or reduce

the status of the abject Other to that of a glitch in an otherwise sound matrix.

Environment
Capitalism is the root cause of global warming and propels multiple scenarios for environmental catastrophe- ends in extinction- technology is irrelevant- only social transformation can solve.
Yixian 6, (Writer for Guerilla News Network, Our Greatest Gift, Our Most Terrible Curse,
http://yixian.gnn.tv/)
But its application has been found to be rather grander than this. The Second Law is now used to explain the big bang, the expansion of the cosmos and even suggests our inexorable passage through time towards the heat death of the universe. Its been called the most fundamental law in all of science. This law means that we, and all other species like us in the universe, rely on harnassing the natural world

to generate enegy in order to feed our various ambitions and necessities. The laws of thermodynamics also impose another restriction. There can exist no perpetual motion in the universe; no energy system can be perfect. The result in our lives is the production of waste when we generate energy. The way we live our lives today demands vast amounts of energy,
chiefly supplied at present by the burning of fossil fuels and nuclear power. The former of which releases CO2 into the environment, the latter which leaves radioactive waste currently very difficult to remove. It may be, even

if we do find alternate energy sources, the very fact that the way we live and the industries we use to power our lifestyles is becoming more energy demanding every year, at the current rate, our species can never be sustainable. At some point, we will have to change the way we live dramatically, to the point of shifting deep seated paradigms such as the values of economy, the value of material wealth in our lives and our obligation to the natural world, save disappearing from this universe entirely. Let us take the example of CO2 emissions. The Earths average near-surface atmospheric temperature rose 0.6 0.2 Celsius (1.1 0.4 Fahrenheit) in the 20th century. The prevailing scientific opinion on climate change is that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities. The increased amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) are the primary causes of the human-induced component of warming. They are released by the burning of fossil fuels, land clearing and agriculture, etc. and lead to an increase in the greenhouse effect. Greenhouse gases are transparent to shortwave radiation from
the sun. However, they absorb some of the longer infrared radiation emitted as black body radiation from the Earth, making it more difficult for the Earth to cool. How much they warm the world by is shown in their global warming potential. The atmospheric concentrations of

carbon dioxide and methane have increased by 31% and 149% respectively above pre-industrial levels since 1750. This is considerably higher than at any time during the last 650,000 years, the period for which reliable data has been extracted from ice cores. From less direct geological evidence it is believed that carbon dioxide values this high were last attained 40 million years ago. About three-quarters of the anthropogenic (man-made) emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere
during the past 20 years is due to fossil fuel burning. The rest of the anthropogenic emissions is predominantly due to land-use change, especially deforestation. Both primary and secondary effects of global warming such as higher temperatures, lessened snow cover, rising sea levels, and weather changes may

influence not only human activities but also ecosystems. Some species may be forced out of their habitats (possibly to extinction) because of changing conditions, while others may flourish.
Similarly, changes in timing of life patterns, such as annual migration dates, may alter regional predator-prey balance. The effect of advanced spring arrival dates in Scandinavia of birds that overwinter in subsaharan Africa has been ascribed to evolutionary adaptation of the species to climactic warming. Ocean pH is lowering as a result of increased carbon dioxide levels. Lowering of ocean pH

along with changing water temperature and ocean depth will have a direct impact on coral reefs. Another
suggested mechanism whereby a warming trend may be amplified involves the thawing of tundra, which can release significant amounts of the potent greenhouse gas methane that is trapped in permafrost and ice clathrate compounds. On top of this, the production of food will

suffer, causing eventual widespread famine, compacted by a huge spread in tropical diseases to previously unaffected regions of the world, contributing to a vast decrease in human life expectancy. At our current rate of industrial expansion, throwing the interests of the natural world and other species on Earth to the wind and instead blindly, possesively pursuing material wealth, a build up of waste leading to a big fry up, or some other extinction event, may be unavoidable. We must change RADICALLY to avoid this terrible
future. Indeed, climate change may well be the best opportunity in history for our species to finally reject political and economic tribalism, and unite itself, to overcome the greatest obstacle weve ever faced. But as yet, we are doing far, far too little. At the curren t rate, we will breach the

critical threshold of 300ppm CO2 in the atmosphere sooner than previously predicted, by which point the chance to redeem ourselves will finally have fled us, and the inevitable demise of life on Earth will be set in motion. Just 5 years ago there were be far less worried faces around. The issue of climate change was far less hot in the media, and there was very little real concern amongst the public. Perhaps it was the recent natural disasters and the heatwaves that did it. There a very many people today who now understand just what this means. The implications for

our future of huge. We have never faced such a crossroads in human history; down one path, destruction, down the other, survival.

Genocide
Capitalism causes endless genocide and spurs violent resistance that kills millions in the name of resource expansion.
Jalata 11 Professor of Sociology & Global Studies (Asafa, January 24th 2011, Terrorism from Above and Below in the Age of
Globalization, p.1-4)

As capitalism developed in Western Europe, the need for raw materials, minerals such as gold and silver, markets, and free or cheap labor expanded due to the desire to minimize the cost of production and to increase the accumulation of capital or wealth. The treasures captured outside of Europe by undis-guised looting, enslavement, and murder, Karl Marx (1967: 753754) writes, floated back to the mother-country and were there turned to capital. Most liberal and leftist scholars have failed to identify
and explain the role of state-sponsored or state terrorism that colonial officials, European companies, and ex-peditionary forces used during the expansion of the racialized capitalist world system to transfer the economic resources of the indigenous peoples to European colonial forces or settlers and their collaborators. The development of the nation-state and the capitalist world system occurred

through war making, violence and organized crime (Tilly, 1985: 170). We cannot clearly understand the essence and meaning
of global terrorism without comprehending the essence and characteristics of state terrorism since states were born and consolidated through violence. Under the guises of free markets, civilization, and Chris-tianity, forces of European states or state-

sponsored companies committed acts of terrorism and genocide that were, more or less, ignored. In fact, the issue
of terrorism only started to be addressed when, after World War I, colonized peoples in Africa and Asia began their liberation struggles against European co-lonial states. The terrorist attack on the life and liberty of American indigenous peoples by

European colonial powers and their collaborators destroyed existing institutions and econo-mies and exposed the conquered peoples to poverty and fa-mine-induced holocausts (Davis, 2001). Discussing how the cultural destruction of indigenous
peoples resulted in massive deaths, Karl Polanyi (1944: 159-160) argues, The catastrophe of the native community is a direct result of the rapid and vio-lent disruption of the basic institutions of the victim. These institutions are disrupted by the very fact that a market econo-my is foisted upon an entirely differently organized community; labor and land are made into a commodity, which, again, is only a short formula for the liquidation of every cultural institution in an organic society. The capitalist world economy that in the 19th century was permanently eliminating famine from Western Europe was

simultaneously accelerating famine and famine-induced deaths in the rest of the world: Millions died , not outside the modern world system, but in the very process of being forcibly incor-porated into its economic and political structures. They died in the golden age of Liberal
Capitalism; indeed, many were mur-dered by the theological application of the sacred p rinciples of [Adam] Smith (Davis, 2001: 9). Today,

mainstream Eu-ro-American scholars gloss over such crimes and refer to them as actions of discovery and civilization. State terrorism, genocide, and the destruction of indigenous institutions and the devastating consequences of famine have been closely inter-connected in the global capitalist world system. In addition, the international community rarely holds accountable its members that engage in state terrorism and genocide. Kurt
Jonassohn (1998: 24) recently noted that terrorist state leaders in develop-ing countries not only go unpunished, they are even rewarded. On the international scene they are accorded all the respect and courtesies due to government officials. They are treated in ac-cordance with diplomatic protocol in negotiations and are treated in the General Assembly of the United Nations. When they are finally ousted from their offices, they are offered asylum by countries that lack respect for international law, but have a great deal of respect for the ill-gotten wealth that such perpetra-tors bring with them. Despite the fact that some government elites claim that the state provides protection from domestic and ext ernal violence, governments organize and, wherever possible, monopolize the concentrated means of violence. The

distinction between legi-timate and illegitimate force makes no difference (Tilly, 1985: 171). Political
violence has always been involved in producing and maintaining structures, institutions, and organi-zations of privileged hierarchy and domination in society. Those who have state power, which incorporates the power to define terrorism, deny their involvement

in political violence or terrorism and confuse abstract theories about the state with reality. Based on an idealized
relationship between the state and society, philosophers and thinkers such as Hobbes, Hegel, Rousseau, and Plato have identified three functions of the state that would earn it legitimacy. According to state theories, the state protects and maintains internal peace and order in society; it organizes and protects national economic activities; it de-fends national sovereignty and national interests (Bushnell, et al., 1991: 6). In reality, most states violate most of these theo-retical principles by engaging in political repression and state terrorism in order to defend

the interests of a few powerful elites. Furthermore, the revolutionary theories of the state by Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin (1971)
remain a dream because states failed to introduce revolutionary social transformations that would eliminate oppression, repression, state terrorism, and the exploitation of people (Maguire, 1978). The occurrence of political repression, oppression, state ter-rorism, and dictatorship in the former Soviet Union, China and other former revolutionary countries demonstrate that the state has remained the site of violence despite its legitimating dis-course. As Charles Tilly (985: 18-19) puts it, political violence is closely related to the art of statecraft, and

most of the time, the state, like an unchained beast, ferociously [attacks] those who claim to be its master, its own citizens (Tilly, 1985: 7). Annamarie Oliverio (1998) criticizes scholars who produce definitions of terrorism on behalf of the state and promote outmoded concepts, analyses, and theories in state bureaucracy, the media, and in academia. The motivations of those who hold state power and

engage in state terrorism are to maintain the global economy, structures of politics, and hierarchies of cultures and peoples in order to extract economic resources. The main objective of those who engage in non-state terrorism is mainly to
politically respond to economic, political, and cultural inequalities. One common denominator of the theories of non-state terrorism is that it is mainly caused by grievances of one kind or another. These grievances involve national/religious/cultural oppression, eco-nomic

exploitation, political repression, massive human rights violations, attacks on life and liberty, state terrorism, and vari-ous forms of social injustices. Yet, whilst it is acknowledged that revolutions, social movements, and non-state terrorism generally involve grievances, all grievances do not result in revolutionary or social movements, nor do they all cause sub-versive terrorism. There must therefore be some intervening structural, conjunctural, and behavioral factors particularly that act to transform some grievances into non-state terrorism through some agencies of the aggrieved population. The combination of factors such as collective grievances, the continued oppressive and exploitative policies of state elites, the refusal of state actors to address longstanding grievances peacefully and fairly, the development of extreme ideologies in the form of religion or another ideology, and the emergence of leaders, ideologues, and cadres in aggrieved populations can facilitate the emergence of subversive terrorism. We cannot adequately
grasp the essence and characteristics of modern terrorism without understanding the larger cultural, social, economic, and political contexts in which it takes place. Since terrorism has been conceptualized, defined, and theorized by those who have contradictory interests and objectives and since the subject matter of terrorism is complex and elusive, there currently is a wide gap in establishing a common understanding of terrorism among scholars of terrorism studies. Most experts on the subject look at this issue from a narrow perspective by ignoring what I argue to be the reality: that terrorism is a social cancer for all human groups affected by it.

Value to Life
Capitalism kills value to life.
Sancho, 11 chair of the Annual World Conferences on the Science of Duality
[Louis Sancho; Fukyshima: Dying for Japan Inc.; published 3/29/2011; http://www.cerntruth.com/?p=257 ] I know you dont believe me. I know you think and believe the experts of the system. This is what you have learned. Those a re your memes to keep you happy. And that is right. It is what it is expected of you. Especially if you are a Japanese living close to the death zone. Because the

world you live in is NOT a world in which life has an infinite value. You live in the Financial-MilitaryIndustrial Complex (called in newspeak the Free market, the FMI system in complexity), a perfectly organized system that we complexity
theorists study scientifically as an evolving organic system, whose functions, equations, evolution and purpose is crystal clear to us though all this might be hidden to you. So if you want to keep happy, dont worry and dont read. Proba bly mankind is beyond salvation. And yet there is a certain beauty in knowing the truth, in being free at least in your mind, even if you are prisoner on the iron jail the FMI complex has built for all of us. Before II world war, the FMI complex was more obvious. The Matrix of fictions and marketing built today to appease the sheeple was not yet in place. Men had not been devolved into a short attention-span, visual neopaleolithic and ego-centric, anthropomorphic belief on our selfcentered position in the Universe. But now the FMI system controls our information, so we believe what it tells us. There is no confabulation theory here, but emergence, a concept of systems sciences that discharges full responsibility in the individuals and yet cr eates the same effect.

We humans have become completely dependent on machines organic systems of metal, more complex than we are, to which we transfer our form and evolve to reach higher degrees of energy and information
to exist and what is far worse, our beliefs have adapted to them subconsciously since the Bronze age in which we discovered the power of weapons. There was an age that has resurfaced from time to time in religions of love and social, ecological movements in which

people were aware that metal, weapons that kill our body, gold that hypnotize our mind and today machines that make us increasingly obsolete were dual fruits of the tree of science, some good some bad, and by
not distinguishing and pruning the bad fruits, such as the nuclear industry, in a free market where all goes, in an economic ecosystem in which weapons could predate on man, we would become extinct. All this wisdom was lost and soon selfish egocentric tribes that relied on weapons to impose their power (Indo-Europeans) or money to hypnotize and slave people (cananeans), came on top of all societies. And for 5000 years they built a matrix of ideological, self-centered fictions which now are common-sense, the ultimate beliefs. Those are the ideologies that sustain the Financial-Military-Industrial complex in which we live. They justify all the wrong paths with the same self-centered, myopic, short-span, individualist egotism that corporations, nations, nuclear scientists, bankers you name it show in everyday behavior. Yet behind those selfish memes of metal imprinted in our mind, there is still a natural genetic, biological program of love for nature, natural food, clean air, social love the genetic program of human evolution. And so a great deal of newspeak takes place within the

Financial-Military-Industrial Complex and the die-hard believers that worship with messianic zeal the evolution of weapons, machines and money as the future of mankind, to appease and convince people that the FMI system cares for us, that corporations serve us, that nations are the supreme meaning of our existence. And this duality between a brain-washed mankind who adores the wrong memes and a newspeak of caring is specially present in Japan; a nation founded by iron-horse warriors
coming from Korea, who became samurais and emperors (but this cannot be said, Japanese are kept in a state of neoteny, with infantile myths and self-restrain, and worship their traditions, the jail of their mind; displaying an extreme aggressive -passive behavior to people who might offend their sensibilities) and imprinted the happy peasants of the sun -god with an absolute slavery to the master. This samurai today rules japan and its corporations that manufacture machines with a submissive population that likes more their robots than the foreigners, because

it has

become lobotomized to a point in which so much restrain of otherwise natural feelings and inner emotions, makes them in external behavior closer to their robots than to human beings. How this is possible is
obvious: today the imprinting of our mind with the ideologies that make us love the FMI complex that is killing gaia starts at 3, when you are put in front of a TV. From then on, the nervous system of simultaneous indoctrination will imprint your brain wit h mass-media propaganda and the 3 ideologies that make of its 3 networks, the idols of mankind. The financial system has an ideology called capitalism that tells us money is NOT just a system of metal-information (evolved from gold, the most informative atom of the Universe into e-money, data in a computer), but the invisible hand of go(l)d, the meaning of it all, and its values must be respected. To explain you really the meaning of economics I would need an entire web-blog on complex economics which I have, so I will not insist on it. But the FMI complex is an evolving system

independent of man, which merely constructs it. So it has its own organization and goals. It has a global, digital brain called the world stock-market and a type of citizen called the corporation; but in system sciences I prefer to call it by its
biological function so we shall call corporations company-mothers of machines. 90% of the stock-market is dedicated to re=produce those machines, feed them with energy, provide them with information and within that scheme, we humans have only 2 functions: to

work=reproduce those machines and to test=consume them. Every time we work, we reproduce a machine or a part of it, every time we consume it we test it and vitalize it. Because the FMI system is an evolving ecosystem of
machines that is terraforming the Earth and substituting us, the super-organism of history as we substituted our fathers, the organism of life. That simple chain is the world you live in, evolving unrelentlessly: Gaia->History->The Metal-Earth (FMI complex).

And only if you are aware of that arrow of evolution we have set in motion, and we back with the 3 ideologies of mechanism (machines are the future of man, not organic systems of metal that substitute and make obsolete human beings), capitalism (money is the language of god, not a language whose values are different from those of words and give zero value to life and maximal value to machines and weapons) and nationalism (the idea that we are different races according to a piece of cloth, called a flag, so we must not love each other and evolve together as members of the same species, but use weapons to come up on top), we can interpret the world as it is, including Fukushima.

2NC ROB
The role of the ballot is whether to intellectually affirm or reject the ideology of capitalism Extend academic rejection is key open space in debate for alternatives thinking outside of the box is revolutionary

ATs

AT Perm
Permutation doesnt solve if we win a risk of a link argument you vote negative causes genocide
The perm fails - The politics of communism is incompatible with the state. Any attempt leads to the corruption of revolutionary politics.
Balso, Professor of Poetry at the European Graduate School, 10(Judith, The Idea of Communism, edited by Slavoj Zizek and Costas
Douzinas, pgs 25-26, AU) Politics proceeds on its own: I want to unpack that statement -with reference to several points. Politics has no appointment with history. If it

proceeds on its own because it is still true that the history of humanity has been the history of class struggle, politics is not to be confused with class struggle, and revolution is no longer the vector of politics. In my view, we have arrived at the end - not only necessary but salutary - of the idea that one carries out political work in order to see better days tomorrow. Today, the cynical reverse of this is the democratic practice of apologizing and expressing regrets for past times. As an African Jaiw-papierd friend told me: 'What we -want is for people to be treated well right now. Not that apologies are made tomorrow for the harm it has done to people today.' There is no rendezvous of politics with history. Politics takes as a guiding principle that it is the present that matters, a principle which imposes upon it the obligation of having always to begin again. Politics proceeds on its own because it must be organized -without reference to a party. The Stalinist party-State and the democratic State parties are proof of the fact that party fuses with State, and politics grows corrupt and criminal when it fuses with the State. Mao's project continued to search for a political space defined by the party and the
State. It gave organized forms to their dialectic and conflictual opposition, rather than their Stalinist fusion. But it did not establish a principle of disjunction and a distance between the State and politics. On this point, I refer you to Sylvain Lazarus's forthcoming text: 'Chercher ailleurs et autrement'.11 Politics proceeds on its own because it is not expressive of a class nor does it take, as its point of reference, an

already constituted people nor groups already in existence. Today, it is strictly a matter of decisions that are both personal and voluntary. Any political capacity belongs to those who have volunteered themselves for politics, and this is as true of the workers as of anyone else. Politics proceeds on its own because it must proceed at a distance from State politics, but also at a distance from people who have been capture by ideas and categories created by the State. Neither the social nor movement or the struggle can provide the categories proper to politics. Politics proceeds on its
own because its thought must be intrinsic to itself, and because this thought can derive no knowledge from any assessment of previous political processes unless, at the same time, it thinks' each question anew. Politics proceeds on its own because pronouncing on the State is not a matter of objective analysis, but is only possible from a perspective of a new political space that has been instituted at a distance from the State. The State is politically mobile. It is not only a 'system' or a 'machine'; it is also involved in a political process of constant change and readjustment. Marx asserted that the Commune was the direct antithesis of Empire. This is true, but one has to add that the Third Republic was, in its turn, the direct antithesis of the Commune; similarly the Welfare State was the corollary of the Stalinist State. Politics proceeds on its own, but it has

multiple and variable sites: hostels for foreign workers (foyers ouvrier), popular neighbourhoods (quatiers), factories, schools . . . This is the case not only because these are places where people live. It is also because these are the places where people organize themselves in order to declare -what it means for each to count for what he is, where he is. And what each individual counts for must be articulated through different names and different norms from those supplied by the State. One doesn't exchange the workers for 'the people' as one changes one's clothes. It is a matter of constituting political sites other than those organized by the State, and doing so among the people themselves. This is the condition for a politics organized as interior to people rather than from above. Finally, politics proceeds on its own because we are in an era when American and European war is devastating the world. The war in Gaza is a distillation of this new kind of war, which followed the 'Cold War'-era war. War today asserts the principle of pure power, of the State against people; it is an endless -war, because it is not accompanied by a concept of peace. What does facing up to war in this new mode of existence entail, when no revolution can any longer hope to
conjure war away, and when no State desires peace any longer?

Perm fails Attempting to reform capitalism from within only serves to stabilize its contradictions efforts at social reform only diffuse revolutionary momentum and are inevitably co-opted by the capitalist state. O'Shea, '05
Editor of The Socialist Alternative, 2005 (Louise , Understanding Marxism: Reform or Revolution?, Socialist Alternative, Volume: 91, http://www.sa.org.au/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=648&Itemid=106)
Luxemburg published a response to Bernstein in 1899 entitled Social Reform or Revolution. She mercilessly ridiculed the idea that capitalism could be reformed out of existence, likening the prospect to "chang[ing] the sea of capitalist bitterness into a sea of socialist sweetness by

to abandon the struggle for revolution in favour of reforms meant the abandonment of the struggle for socialism altogether. As Luxemburg put it, "whoever opts for the path of legal reform, in place of and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power, actually chooses not a calmer and slower road to the same aim, but a different aim altogether". Bernstein argued that trade unions and workers' cooperatives had the potential to transform capitalism into
progressively pouring into it bottles of social-reformist lemonade". Her central argument was that socialism. The main aim of trade unions, Luxemburg argued, was to "regulate capitalist exploitation within the market relations", by improving workers' wages and conditions, but not to overthrow the system of wage labour altogether. So a struggle limited by the unions would only result in a society characterised by more equitable distribution of wealth between workers and bosses. Revolution opens the prospect of a society without class divisions of any sort. The same logic applied to the capitalist state. As Engels outlined in 1898, the

state is a product of irreconcilable class divisions, the means by which "the most powerful, economically dominant class" goes about "holding down and exploiting the oppressed class". As such, its main function is to maintain capitalist order, not challenge it. This point was brutally demonstrated in Germany during the revolution of 1918.
Inspired by the Russian Revolution and enraged by the slaughter of the First World War, German workers rose up, forcing the Kaiser to flee. The remnants of the old regime turned to the SPD, by then controlled by the reformists, to form a government that could head off further revolutionary change. Luxemburg had led a split from the SPD the previous December to form an explicitly revolutionary organisation. Now her former comrades savagely crushed the revolution. SPD Minister Noske personally oversaw the hunting down and murder of Luxemburg and her collaborator, Karl Liebknecht, also a former SPD leader, in January 1919. The events in Germany clearly indicate that far

from socialists being able to impose their interests on the capitalist state, the state instead forces them to conform to the needs of maintaining capitalist order and the bosses' profits - which puts them on the wrong side of the barricades in the struggle for socialism. And if reformers go too far against the interests of capital, Luxemburg
was also clear about the consequences. She described how "as soon as democracy shows the tendency to negate its class character and become transformed into an instrument of the people, the democratic forms are sacrificed by the bourgeoisie and its state representatives."

AT Framework
A. Counter-interpretation the negative can advocate a non-policy option. B. Prefer the interpretation Knowledge itself is an instrumental commodity. Their interpretation would turn us all into technocrats incapable of autonomous thought, facilitating the functioning of capital.
Fotopoulos, political philosopher and economist, 2008 (Takis, The International Journal of INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY, Vol. 4,
(October 2008), http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/vol4/vol4_no4_takis_academic_rep_PRINTABLE.htm) No. 4

The transnational elite, in neoliberal modernity, works on a pilot scheme on education that is effectively based on the US case. This becomes obvious if we consider the drastic changes attempted at present in the European educational
space and their consequences on the systemic limitations of academic freedom. Thus, as early as 1999, the EUs Declaration of Bologna prescribed the creation of a European Space of Higher Education that would ensure: * The international competitiveness of European * The effective linking of higher education to the needs of society and those of the European labour market. The latter represents a direct linking of education to market needs, in contrast to the corresponding indirect linking Higher Education and during the statist (social democratic) era. In this sense, it summarises the content of neoliberal globalisation as far as education and research are concerned and has defining implications with respect to their content and, of course, their financing. Thus, it

is explicitly being declared now that the University is in the service of private enterprise, while at the same time the financing only of those courses and research projects which serve societys needs (as far as they are identified with market needs), is being introduced, through various direct and indirect methods. Knowledge, like everything else in a market economy/society, is becoming an instrumental commodity in the main aim of serving the market economy and the elites controlling it, irrespective of the real needs of society, the desires of educators and the educated and, by implication, the pure cognitive needs of science. It is not, therefore, surprising that in social-liberal Britain one can observe, as from the beginning of the last decade, a continuous shrinking in the number of theoretical courses being
offered (History, Political Economy, Philosophy, Arts, etc.[23]), in order to make way for practical courses directly linke d to the market (marketing, business studies, finance management, computing and so on). Needless to add that non-mainstream

economics, politics, and similar social sciences courses have been simply phased out in all universities apart from some elite universities on the grounds that such courses are not related to the demands of the market, as expressed by publications in mainstream journals and similar considerations. No wonder that the British
theoretical journal Capital & Class, on the basis of a well-documented study,[24] predicted ten years ago that non-mainstream economics will have been eliminated by now from British economic departments. Furthermore,

a similar process is in action in natural sciences as well, with Chemistry, Physics, and other departments closing down in response to market demands and being replaced by courses in forensic science and applied physics such as nanotechnology. Thus, according to the Royal Society of Chemistry, 28 chemistry departments closed in recent years, including the
famous Kings College London department where the double helix structure of DNA was investigated![25] All this was not the result of a satanic plot by the elites, but the inevitable outcome of neoliberal globalisation policies, which prescribe drastic cuts in tax rates (corporation tax, personal income tax, etc.) for the benefit of the privileged social strataalways for the sake of competitivenessfinanced through corresponding

This has inevitably led to the creation of an internal market, in the education sector and to an indirect privatization of study and research from below. Thus, * On the demand side, university applicants, facing todays rising unemployment
cuts in public spending in general and social spending (including spending on education) in particular. and underemployment, select objects of study which are in demand in the job market, and therefore choose the corresponding degree courses, indirectly helping the channelling of more public funds towards them. Also, * On the supply side, such practical courses easily secure sponsorship and private financing in general, both of which complement the dwindling public financing of education imposed by neoliberal globalisation. No wonder that this

process has already led to the mass production of pure technocrats,

with superficial general knowledge and, of course, without any capability of autonomous thought beyond the narrow and specialized contours of their discipline. This is consistent with the fundamental aim of
education in neoliberal modernity, which is the production of similar narrow-minded scientists, who are called upon to solve the technical problems faced by private enterprise in a way that will maximise economic efficiency. Naturally, this kind of mass production of similar scientists by no means implies that scientific rationalism has finally prevailed in thought. In the US, for instance, where this system of education has always been dominant, well-known

scientists within their own disciplines (even in the natural sciences!) are religious, or adopt various irrational systems of thought whose central ideas have been drawn not through rational methods (reason and/or empirical evidence) but through intuition, instinct, feelings, mystical experiences, revelation, etc. The outcome of this is a Jekyll-and-Hyde
scientist who is compelled to use the rational methodology of scientific research while wearing his/her scientific hat, yet who becomes an irrationalist of the worse kind once this hat is removed. This was a relatively rare phenomenon in Europe before neoliberal modernity, but the

present direct or indirect privatization of European universities is making such schizophrenic identities increasingly frequent.

Roleplaying macropolitics allows capitalism to pervade our communication vote neg for a more effective political methodology centered on micropolitical advocacy Pindar and Sutton, 2k (Ian and Paul, Introduction to The Three Ecologies, p. 8-13 LH)
Integrated world capitalism seeks to gain power over us by 'controlling and neutralizing the maximum number of existential refrains', thereby determining the limits within which we think, feel and live; a process of 'existential contraction'. We don't get out much; we tend to think what everyone else thinks, feel the same as everyone else; a strange passivity haunts our lives. As market-driven technologies provide new, ever more effective means of modifying our subjectivity at deeper and deeper levels, we are becoming more homogenized. The world is shrinking, and so are we. 'A vast majority of individuals are placed in a situation in which their personality is dwindling, their intentions are rapidly losing all consistency, the quality of their relations with others is dulled' (Guattari, 1989c: 19). For Guattari,
'consistency' is indissociable from heterogeneity, and much of The Three Ecologies is concerned with attaining consistency again, becoming heterogeneous, resingularizing ourselves, affirming

It is a question of making a pragmatic intervention in one's own life in order to escape from the dominant capitalistic subjectivity. The objective of the new ecological practices that Guattari outlines
our legitimate difference both from each other and from a notional 'Self'. is to 'activate isolated and repressed singularities that are turning around on themselves'. It isn't a question of exchanging one model or way of life for another, but of 'respond[ing] to the event as the potential bearer of new constellations of Universes of reference' (1995a: 18). The paradox is this: although these Universes are not pre-established reference points or models, with their discovery one realizes they were always already there, but only a singular event could activate them. In Chaosmosis, Guattari uses the example of a patient who is stuck in a rut, going round and round in circles. One day, on the spur of the moment, he decides to take up driving again. As he does so he immediately activates an existentializing refrain that opens up 'new fields of virtuality' for him. He renews contact with old friends, drives to familiar spots, and regains his self-confidence (1995a: l7). This is what Guattari calls 'a processual exploitation of event -centred "singularities"' (1995a: 7). It is notable that Guattari seems to have experienced something similar when he learned to drive at the comparatively late age of 35. His life changed dramatically when he got his driving licence: 'I became more independent, which eventually led, among other things, to a divorce' (1995a: 241; 1989a: 244). Guattari's favourite - Proustian - example of an existentializing refrain is the effect on Swann of the 'little phrase' from the Vinteuil sonata. This refrain has 'a sort of re-creative influence' upon Swann; he is 'like a confirmed invalid in whom, all of a sudden, a change of air and surroundings, or a new course of treatment, or sometimes an organic change in himself, spontaneous and unaccountable seems to have brought about such an

An existential Territory can either become stratified and trapped in 'deathly repetitions', as in the case of the tele-spectator in front of the screen watching advertisements, or is capable of being reactivated by a singular event, as in the case of the patient who takes up driving. The idea of a singular
improvement in his health that he begins to envisage the possibility, hitherto beyond all hope, of starting to lead belatedly a wholly different life'. event in one's life, which may be almost imperceptible but which has enormous repercussions, is borrowed from modern physics. It was apparent to the physicist James Clerk Maxwell as long ago as the nineteenth century that singular events or points might have a political - or what Guattari would call micropolitical - application and a catalyzing power: the system has a quantity of potential energy, which is capable of being transformed into motion, but which cannot begin to be so transformed till the system has reached a certain configuration, to attain which requires an expenditure of work, which in certain cases may be infinitessimally small, and in general bears no definite proportion to the energy developed in consequence thereof. For example, a rock loosed by frost and balanced on a singular point of the mountain -side, the little spark which kindles the great forest, the little word which sets the world a -fighting, the little scmple which prevents a man from doing his will, the little spore which blights all the potatoes, the little gemmule which makes us philosophers or idiots. Every existence above a certain rank has its singular points: the higher the rank, the more of them. At these points, influences arose physical magnitude is too small to be taken account of by a finite being, may produce results of the greatest importance. All real results produced by human endeavour depend on taking advantage of these singular points when they occur. Guattari is fascinated by the non-human aspect of subjectivity. Singularity is not individuality, although it is about being singular. It operates at a pre-personal, pre-individual level. In The Three Ecologies he compares our interior life or 'interiority' to a crossroads where several components of subjectification meet to make up who we think we are. The resingularization of subjectiviry, the liberation of singularities that are repressed by a dominant and dominating mass-media subjectivity, has nothing to do with individuals. Nevertheless, an expenditure of work is necessary in order for us to extend our existential Territories. One of the most insistent refrains n The Three Ecologies is that we must abandon scientific (or pseudo-scientific) paradigms and return to aesthetic ones. We need to continually reinvent our lives like an artist.

'Life,'

as Guattari has said elsewhere, (1989c: 20). It is an ongoing aesthetico-existential process. 'As we weave and unweave our bodies . . from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image' (Joyce, 1986: 159). In The Three Ecologies it is artists who provide us with the most profound insights into the human condition, not professional scientists or psychoanalysts. Goethe, Proust, Joyce, Artaud and Beckett are all cited, but there are many others. Biichner, for example, whose Lenz is a classic study in schizophrenia long before the term was invented and has been described as 'proof that poetic utterances can anticipate scientific advances by decades',13 or Sacher -Masoch, whose Venus in Furs diagnosed an entire condition to which he reluctantly gave his name.

'is like a performance, one must construct it, work at it, singularize it'

The best artists don't repeat themselves, they start over and over again from scratch, uncertain with each new
attempt precisely where their next experiment will take them, but then suddenly, spontaneously and unaccountably, as the painter Francis Bacon has observed, 'there comes something which your instinct seizes on as being for a moment the thing which you could begin to develop'. lf , only the tireless endeavour to explore new possibilities, to respond to the chance event - the singular point - that takes us off in a new direction. As Bacon once remarked, 'l always think of myself not so much as a painter but as a medium for accident and chance.'15

Life is a work in progress, with no goal in sight

C. Not a voter Education outweighs fairness its the only value we can take away from the activity Its predictable cap is the most generic kritik on the topic. Not infinitely regressive unlimited amount of policy options we could argue for Default to reasonability voting on procedurals encourages the punishment paradigm and shifts the debate to non-substantive issues

AT Cap Good Environment

The capitalist drive towards profits is the root cause of environmental destruction.
Foster 01 (John Bellamy, Professor of Sociology at University of Oregon, Ecology Against Capitalism Statistical Data Included) Capitalist economies are geared first and foremost to the growth of profits, and hence to economic growth at virtually any cost--including the exploitation and misery of the vast majority of the world's population. This rush to grow generally means rapid absorption of energy and materials and the dumping of more and more wastes into the environment--hence widening
environmental degradation. Just as significant as capitalism's emphasis on unending expansion is its short-term time horizon in determining investments. In evaluating any investment prospect, owners of capital figure on getting their investment back in a calculable period (usually quite short) and profits forever after. It is true that a longer-term perspective is commonly adopted by investors in mines, oil wells, and other natural resources. In these areas the dominant motives are obviously to

secure a supply of materials for the manufacture of a final product, and to obtain a rate of return that over the long run is exceptionally high. But even in these cases the time horizon rarely exceeds ten to fifteen years-a far cry from the fifty to one hundred year (or even more) perspective needed to protect the biosphere. With respect to those environmental conditions that bear most directly on human society, economic development needs to be planned so as to include such factors as water resources and their distribution, availability of clean water, rationing and conservation of non-renewable resources, disposal of wastes, and effects on population and the environment associated with the specific locations chosen for industrial projects. These all represent issues of sustainability, i.e., raising

questions of intergenerational environmental equity, and cannot be incorporated within the short-term time horizon of nonphilanthropic capital, which needs to recoup its investment in the foreseeable future, plus secure a flow of profits to warrant the risk and to do better than alternative investment opportunities. Big investors need to pay attention to the stock market, which is a source of capital for expansion and a facilitator of mergers and acquisitions. Corporations are expected to maintain the value of their stockholder's equity and to provide regular dividends. A significant part of the wealth of top corporate executives depends on the growth in the stock market prices of the stock options they hold. Moreover, the huge bonuses received by top corporate executives are influenced not only by the growth in profits but often as well by the rise in the prices of company stock. A long-run point of view is completely irrelevant in the fluctuating stock market. The perspective in stock market "valuation" is the rate of profit gains or losses in recent years or prospects for next year's profits. Even the much-trumpeted flood of money going into the New Economy with future prospects in mind, able momentarily to overlook company losses, has already had its comeuppance. Speculative investors looking to reap rich rewards via the stock market or venture capital may have some patience for a year or so, but patience evaporates very quickly if the companies invested in keep having losses. Besides investing their own surplus funds, corporations also borrow via long-term bonds. For this, they have to make enough money to pay interest and to set aside a sinking fund for future repayment of bonds. The short-term time horizon endemic to capitalist investment decisions thus becomes a critical factor in determining its overall environmental effects. Controlling emissions of some of the worst pollutants (usually through end-of-pipe methods) can have a positive and almost immediate effect on people's lives. However, the real protection of the environment requires a view of the needs of generations to come. A good deal of environmental long-term policy for promoting sustainable development has to do with the third world. This is exactly the place where capital, based in the rich

countries, requires the fastest return on its investments, often demanding that it get its initial investment back in a year or two. The time horizon that governs investment decisions in these as in other cases is not a

question of "good" capitalists who are willing to give up profits for the sake of society and future generations-or "bad" capitalists who are not-but simply of how the system works. Even those industries that typically look ahead must sooner or

later satisfy the demands of investors, bondholders, and banks. The foregoing defects in capitalism's relation to the environment are evident today in all areas of what we now commonly call "the environmental crisis," which encompasses problems as diverse as: global warming, destruction of the ozone layer, removal of tropical forests, elimination of coral reefs, overfishing, extinction of species, loss of genetic diversity, the increasing toxicity of our environment and our food, desertification, shrinking water supplies, lack of clean water, and radioactive contamination-to name just a few. The list is very long and rapidly getting longer, and the spatial scales on which these problems manifest themselves are increasing. In order to understand how the conflict between ecology and capitalism actually plays out at a concrete level related to specific ecological problems, it is useful to look at what many today

consider to be the most pressing global ecological issue: that of global warming, associated with the
"greenhouse effect" engendered when carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases" are emitted, trapping heat within the atmosphere. There is now a worldwide scientific consensus that to fail to stop the present global

warming trend will be to invite ecological and social catastrophe on a planetary scale over the course of the present century. But little has been achieved thus far to address this problem, which mainly has to do with the emission of fossil fuels.

AT CTP
We dont cede the political the alternative operates inside the political our Herod evidence is explicit about not advocating a revolution fighting capitalism on everyday level No uniqueness the political has already been ceded imperial capitalism is already entrenched in the system alt sovlves

AT Cap Good Poverty

You are simply on the wrong side of history. All of the objective and recent data points unmistakeably to the conclusion that capitalism creates grosser and more violent inequalities, your arguments to the contrary are ideologically obtuse.
Christian Fuchs, Unified Theory of Information Research Group, University of Salzburg, Critical Globalization Studies: An Empirical and Theoretical Analysis of the New Imperialism, Sdmce & Society, Vol. 74. No. 2, April 2010, 215-24
These definitions have in common not only emphasis on the increasing qtianlity. scale, and speed of social interactions, but also characterization of globalization as a general pbenomenon. If, for example, one considers world religions, the Roman empire, tbe empire of Han Cbina, tbe British Empire, tbe world market, colonialism, migration Hows that resulted from tbe Irisb potato bligbt, the system of submarine cables established in tbe middle of the 19tb century that formed tbe first global .system of communication, or the Internet, tben it becomes clear ihat globalization

indeed seems to have general aspects. However, general definitions pose the threat of constructing mythologies that see only positive sides of globalization and ignore the negative consequences of contemporary globalization processes. This can create the impression that society neither needs change nor can be altered by collective political action. It is therefore no wonder that some of tbe abovementioned authors are fairly
optimistic about tbe effects of contemporary globalization. Tbey speak of globalization resulting in the acceleration of tlie "consciousness of tbe global whole in the twentieth century. . . . tbe intensification of consciousne.ss of the world as a whole" (Robertson, 1992, 8), "emergent fonns of world interdependence and planetary consciousness" (Giddens, 1990,175), tbe creation ol "agrowing collective awareness or consciousness of the world as a shared social space" (Held and McGrew, 2007, 3), or argue that "htiman beings assume obligations towards tbe world as a whole" (Albrow, 1997, 83). Such formulations imply that contemporary globalization is bringing about increasing

freedom and equality, despite tbe fact that we live in a world of global inequality. One compelling example is the ratio of the average salary of Cbief Executive OIFicers (CEOs) of large U. S. corporations to that of an average U. S. worker, which currently stands at 245 to 1 (Sutcliffe, 2007). The developed world accounts for approximately 25% of the world's population, but has accounted for more than 70% of the world's wealth on a continuous basis since 1970 (Fuchs, 2008). The least developed countries' share of wealth has dropped from above 3% to just over 1% since 1980 (Fuchs, 2008). In 2008, the total sales of the ten topselling worldwide companies (US$2533.5 billion) were 2.3 times as large as the total gross domestic product (GDP) of the 22 least developed countries (US$1{)81.H billion) (Fuchs, 2008). These data indicate that we live in a world of persisting inequality that is a global phetiomenon, and that therefore people are not moving closer together, but tend to be more separated. Class divisions have been widening, not closing. Wealth and its distribtition are objective foundations of global consciotisness. If there are widening class divisions, then focusing on positive concepts such as global consciottsness for describing the contemporain world turns into an ideology. One can therefore conclude that uncritical optimism regarding globalization can easily turn into mythologizing. To refer to and to reload Lenin for explaining contemporary globalization is a
demythologizing move that cotinters the globalization optimism advanced by bourgeois thinkers. It furthermore serves the political task of repeating "in the present global conditions, the 'Leninian' gesture of reinventing the revolutionary project in the conditions of imperialism, colonialism, and world war" (Budgen, Kouvelakis and Zi2ek, 2007, 3).

AT Cap Good War

Global capitalism necessitates a new and more intense form of imperialism. Iraq and Afghanistan prove that global power wars are principally about the expansion of capital.
Christian Fuchs, Unified Theory of Information Research Group, University of Salzburg, Critical Globalization Studies: An Empirical and Theoretical Analysis of the New Imperialism, Sdmce & Society, Vol. 74. No. 2, April 2010, 215-24 Lenin defined the fifth characteristic of imperialism as the "monopolistic possession of the territories of the world which have been completely divided up" (Lenin, 1917, 237). Each dominant state exploits and draws super-profits from a part of the world. "Each of them, by means of trusts, cartels, finance capital, and debtor and creditor relations, occupies a monopoly position on the world market" (253). Lenin argues that under imperialism, all territories on the globe have come under the influence of capitalist countries. A re-division would be possible at any time, but not a new seizure. In imperialism, there are not just simply colonies and colony-owning countries, but also semi-colonies, politically independent countries, which are "enmeshed in the net of financial and diplomatic dependence" (234). Normal dependence under imperialism becomes "a link in the chain of operations of world finance capital" (235). Indicators that Lenin uses for the fifth characteristic include: the development of the percentage of territories that belong to the
European colonial powers, and the area and population under the control of certain colonial powers. Panitch and Gindin (2004, 2005) argue that the failure of classical theories of imperialism was their focus on inter-imperial rivalry and a reduction of state power to the economy (a similar critique of Lenin is made by Ahmad, 2004). Lenin never spoke of "inter-imperialist rivalry" as a characteristic feature of imperialism, but he did say that the division of the world has come to an end under imperialism (226f). This means that there is a global rule of capitalist

structures. Whether one, two, or more countries dominate, whether they enter military conflict or economic confiict these circumstances can all be explained as specific historical expressions of this characteristic. Lenin stressed the dynamic character of this division and therefore .speaks of possible re-divisions (Lenin, 1917, 227). The
only time Lenin mentioned rivalry in chapter VI of Imperialism was when he said that capitalist corporations try to "make it impossible for their rivals to compete" (232). He wrote that finance capital is the driving force of territorial conflicts: "Finance capital strives to seize the largest possible amount of land of all kinds and in any place it can" (233). This does not mean that there is necessarily an inter-imperialist military rivahy between countries. But it is wrong to conclude that there is no rivalry)- today. So for example the European Union

sees the United States as its biggest economic competitor and has therefore set itself the goal to become "the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the worid" until 2010 (Lisbon Agenda). There certainly is economic rivalry, although no major military rivalries between the major countries are present today. However, military interventions such as in Afghanistan and Iraq on the one hand and global terrorism on the other hand show that today there is militaiy rivalry among great powers concerning world influence and in certain parts of the globe. Both economic rivalry and military conflicts are indicative of what Lenin described as conflicts for hegemony between great powers (which must not necessarily be nation-states
because "great powers" are powerful actors, which can also be corporations, not only nationstates) that constitute "an essential feature of imperialism": "rivalry between a number of great powers in the striving for hegemony, i.e., for the conquest of territory, not so much directly for themselves, as to weaken the adversary and undermine his hegemony" (239). Tbe United States certainly is the dominant

global military power today and has been successful in imposing its will by military means without much resistance by Europe, Rvissia, (^hina, or other countries. The difference in military power can be gauged, for example, by government expenditures. In 2006, tbe EU2.'i countries devoted 10.8% of their total government expenditures to defen.se, 12.9% to
education, and 18.8% to health. By contrast, tbe corresponding shares for the LJnited States in 2008 were 17.1% on defense, 3.2% on education, and 11.2% on health. That the United States is a dominant global military power means only that it bas been

successful in being hegemonic, which does not mean that it will never again be challenged by others witb military means. 9 Finance capital today is the dominant form of capital. If there were really a fully American Empire, as Panitch and
Gindin say. then finance capital would have to be fully dominated by U. S. institutions. However, of 495 companies that are listed under the categories banking and diversified financiis in the Forbes 20()()\\?,i of the world's biggest companies in 2008, 100 (20.2%) are from the United States, 114 from the European Union (23.0%), and 178 (36.0%) from countries in East Asia/Southeast Asia/South Asia (China. Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand). This shows that there is not an American finance

empire, as claimed by Panitch and Gindin (2005), but that U. S. capital stands in fierce competition with European and Asian capita!. There are several competing explanations for the U. S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq (see

Callinicos, 2003a, 2005, 2007; Harvey, 2005. 2006; Panitch and Gindin, 2004, 2005; Wood, 2003b): securing access to oil as economic resource, securing worldwide geopolitical hegemony, the expansion of U. S. economic power in tbe face of deterioration of the U. S. position in export of capital and commodities and the strong position of Europe and China, the conquest of strategic countries in the Middle East iu order tt) be better equipped for limiting the infiuence of Islamic nations and groups that challenge Western world dominance, or the struggle for the extension of ueoliberal capitalism all over the world. It is imaginable that the these wars are caused by a combination of some or all of these elements. No

matter which factors one considers important, the war against Afghanistan and Iraq, global terrorism, and potential future wars against countries like Iran, Pakistan. Syria, Lebanon, Venezuela, or Bolivia, shows that war for securing geopolitical and economic infiuence and hegemony is an inherent feature of the new imperialism and of imperialism in general. Although investment, trade, concentration, transnationalization, neohberalization, structural adjustment, and financialization are economic strategies of imperialism that do not resort to militaiy means, it is likely that not all territories can be controlled by imperialist powers and that some resistance emerges. In order to contain these counter-movements, overcome crises, and secure economic infiuence for capital, in the last instance warfare is the ultimate outcome, a continuation of imperialism by non-economic means in order to foster economic ends. Statistical data show that economic ends can be important influencing factors for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Table 5 shows that foreign investments have boomed in Afghanistan since 2002 and in Iraq since 2003. Oil is the main economic resource in Iraq. In 2002, 99.3% of all exports from Iraq were fuels. In 2006, this level remained ata high level of 93.9% (UNGTAD). In 2006. the value of annual Iraq oil exports was 2.3 times the 2002 value. Table 6 shows the increase of Iraq fuel exports in absolute terms. In the same period (2002-2006), as fuel exports from Iraq climbed, the value of oil imports by the US increased by a factor of 2.8 and the value of oil imports by the UK by a factor of 3.8 (Table 7). These data suggest that investment opportunities and resotirce access are important, but certainly not the only factors in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan by the US and the UK. In 1988, the annual military expenses of the United States were $484 billion. There was a drop in spending after the end of the Cold War (1998: $329 billion). The new wars in Afghanistan and Iraq resulted in a rise to $441 billion in 2003 and $547 billion in 2007 (all valties in constant US$) (SIPRI Military Expenditure Database). In 2007, the United
States accotmted for the largest share of world military spending (45%), followed by the UK and Ghina (each 5%) {SIPRJ Yearbook 2008). Gomparing annual U. S. military spending for the years 2001 and 2006 shows a growth of 30% for overall expenditure, 47% for military operations and maintenance, and 58% for research, development, test and evaluation {SIPRI Yearbook 2007, 276). In 2006 41 U. S.

companies accounted for 63% of the sales of tbe top 100 arms-producing companies in the world (ibid.). In the period 1998- 2007, annual world military expenditures increased by 45%. These data show that the new imperialism is based on U. S. military hegemony in military outlays and activities. The U. S.-led war in Iraq and -Afghanistan is tbe practical validation of the presence of the fifth characteristic of imperialism today. Military conflicts that aim at territorial control and global hegemony and counter-hegemony are immanent features of the new imperialism. Lenin (1917, 264) argues tbat imperialism is leading to annexation and increased oppression and consequently also to increased resistance. 9/11 and the rise of global terrorism can be interpreted as a reaction to global U. S. economic, political, and cultural influence. This has resulted in a vicious cycle of global war that creates and secures spheres of Western infiuence and global terrorism that tries to destroy Western lifestyIes and Western dominance. At the time of Lenin, there was an organized labor movement that resisted
imperialism and culminated in the October Revolution. Under the new imperialism, the political left is marginal and hardly influences worid pohtics, which are dominated by Western imperialists and Islamic hardliners. Therefore today there seem to be much less political grounds for emancipatory transformations than at the time of Lenin. In the early 21st century, the formula no longer is "socialism or barbarism," but rather "barbarism or barbarism

AT Cap Inevitable
The argument that we cannot overcome capitalism saps the critical energy from revolution the system is only strong because we think it is Zizek in 1995 Slavoj, Ideology Between Fiction and Fantasy, Cardozo Law Review, page lexis
The problematic of "multiculturalism" that imposes itself today is therefore the form of appearance of its opposite, of the

massive presence of Capitalism as universal world system: it bears witness to the unprecedented homogenization of today's world. It is effectively as if, since the horizon of social imagination no longer allows us to entertain the idea of an eventual demise of Capitalism - since, as we might put it, everybody seems to accept that Capitalism is here to stay - the critical energy found a substitute outlet in fighting for cultural differences which leave the basic homogeneity of the capitalist world-system intact. So we are fighting our PC battles for the right of ethnic minorities, of gays and lesbians, of different "life-styles," etc., while Capitalism pursues its triumphant march - and today's critical theory, in the guise of "cultural studies," is doing the ultimate service to the unrestrained development of Capitalism by actively contributing in the ideological effort to render its massive presence invisible: in a typical postmodern "cultural critique," the very mention of Capitalism as world system tends to give rise to the accusation of "essentialism," "fundamentalism," etc.

AT Gibson Graham
Gibson-Grahams argument is nothing more than an appeal to liberal reforms within capitalism this short circuits the necessity of revolutions and is mere apologist for capitalism. Poitevin, PhD Cand Sociol @ UC-Davis, 2001 (Rene Francisco, The end of anti-capitalism as we knew it: Reflections on
postmodern Marxism, The Socialist Review, http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3952/is_200101/ai_n8932891)

But by far the most anticlimactic and disappointing outcome of the postmodern Marxist approach is that in its desire to get rid of "capitalocentrism,"44 they end up actually reconfiguring the very beast they seek to eliminate by disguising liberal reform as "noncapitalism." Nowhere is this more obvious than in J.K. Gibson-Graham's celebratory reading of The Full Monty, a film about a
group of British steelworkers who lose their jobs due to deindustrialization, and end up refashioning themselves as strippers as a way to reclaim their economic agency.45 The movie shows how the tragic loss of the town's steel mill creates a cascade effect that ends up reconfiguring the social fabric of that community. By the end of the movie, the ex-steelworkers are forced to rethink and renegotiate many types of relationships and identities, from constructions of masculinity and gender roles to economic identities even their wives have to get service jobs to make ends meet. Of particular interest for J.K. Gibson-Graham are the ways in which the movie overlaps with some of the themes of The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), especially with the ways in which The Full Monty "hinted at different narratives of class transformation, new awareness of class politics and an expanded range of class emotions."46 They also welcomed the way in which the unemployed men "are unable to draw sustenance from old models of resistance-style politics" (i.e., they cannot use the "old" labor/capital class struggle thing) and the way in which the characters in the film pursue what J.K. Gibson-Graham call "non-- capitalist economic relations." Never mind that old predictable "feeling of regret that the climactic one-night-stand striptease is so economically inconsequential" to the well-being of the ex-steelworker strippers, their families, and the community. Even though the ex-steelworkers are still poor at the end of the movie, what matters, according to J.K. GibsonGraham, is that there was a process of "becoming" that allowed the community to come together, not as ex-workers and ex-managers, or as husbands and wives, but as a "communal economic identity based upon self-value and identification across difference."47 This is important because it is the "communal economic identity" of the successful striptease venture that constitutes the precondition for imagining and engaging in "noncapitalist commodity production," such as worker collectives or self-employed workers. A key part of the ex-steelworkers' success, and an important strategy in postmodern Marxist politics, is that the ex-steelworkers do not pursue the "orthodox" line of worker's challenging capitalist control of industrial property, nor do they seem to care about circuits of capital or structural needs of accumulation. The problem with J.K. Gibson-Graham's celebratory reading of The Full Monty is that regardless of how sound the process of "becoming" might be for that community, and regardless of how well they might manage to get along afterwards, calling their striptease enterprise a "noncapitalist commodity production" that is "full of potential and possibilities" is wishful thinking at best and totally ludicrous at worst. Am I the only one who realizes that what JK. Gibson-Graham refer to as "noncapitalist commodity production" is actually sex work? Would JK. Gibson-Graham still embrace as "noncapitalist economic relations" ex-maquila workers along the U.S.-Mexican border deciding to do sex work a la The Full Monty as long as it brings the community together? Is prostitution OK as long as the prostitute's surplus is not being appropriated by someone else? My main point here is that throughout The Full Monty - and in J.K. Gibson-Graham's

review of the film as well - property relations are never questioned or challenged. In the postmodern/post-Marxist "noncapitalist" world, corporations get to keep ownership of the means of production and their profits, while working class communities continue to lap dance their way through "identification across difference" rather than doing union organizing. That this kind of argument can be presented not only as "noncapitalist" but also as Marxist thinking should be enough to
demonstrate the political bankruptcy of this paradigm. It is also interesting that JK Gibson-Graham maintain that challenging their analysis of The Full Monty, or not endorsing the politics of the film, "is inherently conservative and capitalocentric."48 I disagree strongly. The

politics advocated by J.K. Gibson-Graham through their reading of The Full Monty is nothing but liberal politics with post-structuralist delusions of grandeur. It is one thing to say that we are at a political conjuncture in which the thing to do is to work hard for reform, not "revolution." But it is another thing to argue that revolutionary practice cannot happen on epistemological grounds, and that all we can do is make capitalism as user friendly as possible while obscuring and co-opting the Marxist tradition. J.K. Gibson-Graham's reading of The Full Monty is both liberal and reactionary. What the postmodern Marxist's reading of The Full Monty demonstrates is that in their desire to get rid of "capitalocentrism" - the alleged obsession of Marxists with seeing "capitalism" everywhere - they end up reconfiguring and consolidating capitalism back in. In their unreflective romanticizing of reform, and in their haughty contempt for revolutionary thinking and politics, J.K-.Gibson-Graham's style of postmodern/post-Marxism delivers what boils down to good old-fashioned liberalism: a mild, state-administered "economic justice" platform centered around individual private liberties,

neatly packaged in postmodern gift wrapping. The bottom line is this: When one looks closely at what postmodern/post-Marxist theory actually offers, and after it is done "representing capitalism through the lens of overdetermination,"49 all one can strategize about is how to make capitalism more "user friendly." Gone is the project of getting rid of it. Strangely enough, postmodern/ post-Marxists do not regard these positions as a surrender of the
Marxist project at all, but rather, as the exact fulfillment of that commitment.50

AT Case Outweighs
The affs elevation of isolated examples of violence is a mode of blackmail meant to compel you to take immediate action rather than investigate the system of structural violence that sustains social relations of the status quo. The result of all their trying to superficially change things is that everything remains the same.
Zizek 2008 Slavoj Violence p 11-12
There is an old joke about a husband who returns home earlier than usual from work and finds his wife in bed with another man. The surprised wife exclaims: Why have you come back early? The husband furiously snaps back: What are you doing in bed with another man? The wife calmly replies: I asked you a question firstdont try to squeeze out of it by changing the topic! The same goes for violence: the task

is precisely to change the topic, to move from the desperate humanitarian SOS call to stop violence to the analysis of that other SOS, the complex interaction of the three modes of violence: subjective, objective, and symbolic. The lesson is thus that one should resist the fascination of subjective violence, of violence enacted by social agents, evil individuals, disciplined repressive apparatuses, fanatical crowds: subjective violence is just the most visible of the three. The notion of objective violence needs to be thoroughly historicised: it took on a new shape with capitalism. Marx described the mad, self-enhancing circulation of capital, whose solipsistic path of parthenogenesis reaches its apogee in todays meta-reflexive speculations on futures. It is far too simplistic to claim that the spectre of this self-engendering monster that pursues its path disregarding any human or environmental concern is an ideological abstraction and that behind this abstraction there are real people and natural objects on whose productive capacities and resources capitals circulation is based and on which it feeds like a gigantic parasite. The problem is that this abstraction is not only in our financial speculators misperception of social reality, but that it is real in the precise sense of determining the structure of the material social processes: the fate of whole strata of the population and sometimes of whole countries can be decided by the solipsistic speculative dance of capital, which pursues its goal of profitability in blessed indifference to how its movement will affect social reality. So Marxs point is not primarily to reduce this second dimension to the first one, that is, to demonstrate how the theological mad dance of commodities arises out of the antagonisms of real life. Rather his point is that one cannot properly grasp the first (the social reality of material production and social interaction) without the second: it is the selfpropelling metaphysical dance of capital that runs the show, that provides the key to real-life developments and catastrophes. Therein resides the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism, much more uncanny than any direct pre capitalist socio-ideological violence: this violence is no longer attributable to concrete individuals and their evil intentions, but is purely objective, systemic, anonymous. Here we encounter the Lacanian difference between reality and the Real: reality is the social reality of the actual people involved in interaction and in the productive processes, while the Real is the inexorable abstract, spectral logic of capital that determines what goes on in social reality. One can experience this gap in a palpable way when one visits a country where life is obviously in shambles. We see a lot of ecological decay and human misery. However, the economists report that one reads afterwards informs us that the countrys economic situation is financially soundreality doesnt matter, what matters is the situation of capital...

AT Alt=Violence
This is propaganda that obscures the horrific violence naturalized by capitalism.
Badiou, former Chair of Philosophy at cole normale suprieure, 2010. [The Idea of Communism pp. 24]
For various reasons, this propaganda machine is now obsolete, mainly because there is no longer a single powerful state claiming to be communist, or even socialist. Many rhetorical devices have of eourse been recycled in the 'war against terror' which, in France, has taken on the guise of an anti-Islamist crusade. And yet no one can seriously believe that a particularist religious ideology that is backward-looking in terms of its social vision, and fascistic in both its conception of action and its outcome, can replace a promise of universal emancipation supported by three centuries of critical, international and secular philosophy that exploited the resources of science and mobilized, at the very heart of the industrial metropolises, the enthusiasm of both workers and intellectuals. Lumping together Stalin and Hitler was already a sign of

extreme intellectual poverty: the norm by which any collective undertaking has to be judged is, it was argued, the number of deaths it causes. If that were really the case, the huge colonial genocides and massacres, the millions of deaths in the civil and world wars through which our West forged its might, should be enough to discredit, even in the eyes of 'philosophers' who extol their morality, the parliamentary regimes of Europe and America. What would be left for those who scribble about Rights? How could they go on singing the praises of bourgeois democracy as the only form of relative Good and making pompous predictions about totalitarianism when they are standing on top of heaps of victims? Lumping together Hitler, Stalin and Bin Laden now looks like a black farce. It indicates that our democratic West is none too fussy about the nature of the historic fuel it uses to keep its propaganda machine running. It is true that , these days, it has other fish to fry. After two short decades of cynically unequal prosperity, it is in the grip of a truly historical crisis and has to fall back on its 'democratic' pretensions, as it appears to have been doing for some time, with the help of walls and barbed-wire fe nces to keep out foreigners, a corrupt and servile media, overcrowded prisons and iniquitous legislation. The problem is that it is less and less capable of corrupting its local clientele and buying off the fero cious fore ign regimes of the Mubaraks and Musharrafs who are responsible for keeping watch on the flocks of the poor.