1NC – REDUCE ≠ ELIMINATE

A. Interpretation - Reduce excludes eliminate.

Words and Phrases 02 (vol 36B, p. 80)

Mass. 1905. Rev.Laws, c.203, § 9, provides that, if two or more cases are tried together in the superior court,
the presiding judge may “reduce” the witness fees and other costs, but “not less than the ordinary witness fees,
and other costs recoverable in one of the cases” which are so tried together shall be allowed. Held that, in
reducing the costs, the amount in all the cases together is to be considered and reduced, providing that there
must be left in the aggregate an amount not less than the largest sum recoverable in any of the cases. The word
“reduce,” in its ordinary signification, does not mean to cancel, destroy, or bring to naught, but to diminish,
lower, or bring to an inferior state.—Green v. Sklar, 74 N.E. 595, 188 Mass. 363.

B. Violation – the affirmative completely eliminates US military or police presence

C. Voting issue –

1. limits – they create six more affirmatives and explode the topic literature base; we have to be
accountable for the entire peace movement and answer critical affs which require distinct
strategies

2. predictability – our evidence signifies the ordinary meaning of reduce; moving beyond the
ordinary meaning of words sets a precedent to interpret the all other words unpredictably
3. Topicality is a voting issue for education and fairness
 A-SPEC 1NC

A)INTERPRETATION-THE AFF MUST SPECIFY AGENT

B)VIOLATION-USFG IS NOT AN ACTOR

Brovero in ‘94
(Adrienne, Immigration Policies Expert, http:www.wfu.edu/Student-organizations/debate/MiscSites/DRGArticles/Brovero1994Immigration.htm)

The problem is that there is no agent specified. The

The problem is not that there is not a plan; this time there is on.

federal government does not enact policies, agents or agencies within the federal
government enact policies. The agent enacting a policy is a very important aspect of the policy. For some of the same reasons the
affirmative team should specify a plan of action, the affirmative team should specify an agent of action.

C)VOTERS

1. GROUND-DENY SPECIFIC LINKS TO DISADS, IMPLEMENTATION

TAKEOUTS, AND AGENTS CPS- 90 PERCENT OF POLICY IS
IMPLEMENTATION

2. NO SOLVENCY-BROVERO INDICATES USFG DOES NOT ENACT

POLICIES

3. NOT TOPICAL-THERE NOT FIRM ON AGENT WHICH VIOLATES

RESOLVED “TO TAKE A FIRM COURSE OF ACTION”- FROM RANDOM
HOUSE
SOMETHING IS STIRRING IN THE HEARTS OF THE OPPRESSED. THE MUFFLED CRIES OF HUNGER
AND SUBORDINATION ARE RESONATING ON AN INCREASINGLY GLOBAL SCALE. THE RESONANCE
OF COLLECTIVE ORGANIZATION, TRANSNATIONAL DIASPORA, GLOBAL LABOR MIGRATION, IS
EMERGING FROM THE RUBBLE OF THE GLOBAL ECONOMY. THE INSURGENCY IS HERE THE
QUESTION IS WHAT TACTICS WILL THE STATE USE IN RESPONSE. THE AFFIRMATIVE DEMAND IS
THE FIRST VOLLEY IN THE COUNTER-INSURGENCY, A SLY MANEUVER OF CO-OPTATION, COUNTER-
REVOLUTION IN THE NAME OF MODERATED CAPITALISM.
David Graeber, Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, December 8th
[2008 http://endofcapitalism.com/2008/12/08/reawakening-the-revolutionary-imagination/#more-472]
We are clearly at the verge of another mass resurgence of the popular imagination. It shouldn’t be that difficult.
Most of the elements are already there. The problem is that, our perceptions having been twisted into knots by
decades of relentless propaganda, we are no longer able to see them. Consider here the term “communism.”
Rarely has a term come to be so utterly reviled. The standard line, which we accept more or less unthinkingly, is
that communism means state control of the economy, and this is an impossible utopian dream because history
has shown it simply “doesn’t work.” Capitalism, however unpleasant, is thus the only remaining option. But in
fact communism really just means any situation where people act according to the principle of “from each
according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”—which is the way pretty much everyone always
acts if they are working together to get something done. If two people are fixing a pipe and one says “hand me the wrench,” the other doesn’t say, “and what do
I get for it?”(That is, if they actually want it to be fixed.) This is true even if they happen to be employed by Bechtel or Citigroup. They apply principles of communism because it’s the only thing that really
works. This is also the reason whole cities or countries revert to some form of rough-and-ready communism in the wake of natural disasters, or economic collapse (one might say, in those circumstances,
markets and hierarchical chains of command are luxuries they can’t afford.) The more creativity is required, the more people have to improvise at a given task, the more egalitarian the resulting form of
communism is likely to be: that’s why even Republican computer engineers, when trying to innovate new software ideas, tend to form small democratic collectives. It’s only when work becomes standardized
and boring—as on production lines—that it becomes possible to impose more authoritarian, even fascistic forms of communism. But the fact is that even private companies are, internally, organized
communistically.
Communism then is already here. The question is how to further democratize it. Capitalism, in turn, is just one possible way of managing communism—and, it has become increasingly clear, rather a
disastrous one. Clearly we need to be thinking about a better one: preferably, one that does not quite so systematically set us all at each others’ throats.
All this makes it much easier to understand why capitalists are willing to pour such extraordinary resources into
the machinery of hopelessness. Capitalism is not just a poor system for managing communism: it has a
notorious tendency to periodically come spinning apart. Each time it does, those who profit from it have to
convince everyone—and most of all the technical people, the doctors and teachers and surveyors and insurance
claims adjustors—that there is really no choice but to dutifully paste it all back together again, in something like
the original form. This despite the fact that most of those who will end up doing the work of rebuilding the
system don’t even like it very much, and all have at least the vague suspicion, rooted in their own innumerable
experiences of everyday communism, that it really ought to be possible to create a system at least a little less
stupid and unfair.

This is why, as the Great Depression showed, the existence of any plausible-seeming alternative—even one so
dubious as the Soviet Union in the 1930s—can turn a downswing into an apparently insoluble political crisis.
Those wishing to subvert the system have learned by now, from bitter experience, that we cannot place our faith
in states. The last decade has instead seen the development of thousands of forms of mutual aid association,
most of which have not even made it onto the radar of the global media. They range from tiny cooperatives and
associations to vast anti-capitalist experiments, archipelagos of occupied factories in Paraguay or Argentina or
of self-organized tea plantations and fisheries in India, autonomous institutes in Korea, whole insurgent
communities in Chiapas or Bolivia, associations of landless peasants, urban squatters, neighborhood alliances,
that spring up pretty much anywhere that where state power and global capital seem to temporarily looking the
other way. They might have almost no ideological unity and many are not even aware of the other’s existence,
but all are marked by a common desire to break with the logic of capital. And in many places, they are
beginning to combine. “Economies of solidarity” exist on every continent, in at least eighty different countries.
We are at the point where we can begin to perceive the outlines of how these can knit together on a global level,
creating new forms of planetary commons to create a genuine insurgent civilization.
Visible alternatives shatter the sense of inevitability, that the system must, necessarily, be patched together in the same form—this is why it became such an
imperative of global governance to stamp them out, or, when that’s not possible, to ensure that no one knows about them. To become aware of it allows us to see everything we are already doing in a new
light. To realize we’re all already communists when working on a common projects, all already anarchists when we solve problems without recourse to lawyers or police, all revolutionaries when we make
something genuinely new.

THE AFFIRMATIVE’S FOCUSE ON A SINGLE ISSUE OF CAPITALISM’S NEGATIVITY SUCKS UP

CRITICAL ENERGIES BETTER SPENT ON THE TOTAL ERADICATION OF CAPITALISM

HEROD 2004, TYPESETTER, WRITER, LECTURER, AND NON-SECTARIAN SOCIAL CRITIC, (JAMES,
GETTING FREE 4TH ED. ONLINE,
HTTP://SITE.WWW.UMB.EDU/FACULTY/SALZMAN_G/STRATE/GETFRE/C.HTM)

We cannot destroy capitalism with single-issue campaigns. Yet the great bulk of the
energies of radicals is spent on these campaigns. There are dozens of them: campaigns to preserve the
forests, keep rent control, stop whaling, stop animal experiments, defend abortion rights, stop toxic dumping, stop the killing of baby
seals, stop nuclear testing, stop smoking, stop pornography, stop drug testing, stop drugs, stop the war on drugs, stop police
brutality, stop union busting, stop red-lining, stop the death penalty, stop racism, stop sexism, stop child abuse, stop the re-emerging
slave trade, stop the bombing of Yugoslavia, stop the logging of redwoods, stop the spread of advertising, stop the patenting of
genes, stop the trapping and killing of animals for furs, stop
irradiated meat, stop genetically modified foods, stop human cloning, stop the death squads in Colombia, stop the World Bank and
the World Trade Organization, stop the extermination of species, stop corporations from buying politicians, stop high stakes
educational testing, stop the bovine growth hormone from being used on milk cows, stop micro radio from being banned, stop global
warming, stop the militarization of space, stop the killing of the oceans, and on and on. What
we are doing is spending
our lives trying to fix up a system which generates evils far faster than we can ever
eradicate them. Although some of these campaigns use direct action (e.g., spikes in the trees to stop the
chain saws or Greenpeace boats in front of the whaling ships to block the harpoons),

for the most part the campaigns are directed at passing legislation in Congress to correct
the problem. Unfortunately, reforms that are won in one decade, after endless agitation,
can be easily wiped off the books the following decade, after the protesters have gone
home, or after a new administration comes to power. These struggles all have value and are needed.
Could anyone think that the campaigns against global warming, or to free Leonard Peltier, or to aid the East Timorese ought to be
abandoned?Single issue campaigns keep us aware of what's wrong, and sometimes even
win. But in and of themselves, they cannot destroy capitalism, and thus cannot really fix
things. It is utopian to believe that we can reform capitalism. Most of these evils can only
be eradicated for good if we destroy capitalism itself and create a new civilization. We
cannot afford to aim for anything less. Our very survival is at stake. There is one
singleissue campaign I can wholehearted endorse: the total and permanent eradication
of capitalism.

The military is a vital instrument in the sustenance of capitalism

Peoples Liberation Party IN 08

(“Bosses’ Will Need More Soldiers for Imperialists Wars,” The Communist, summer 2008, page
45).

The armed forces are as essential to the bosses as their factories. Soldiers produce nothing themselves, but under capitalism,
they are necessary to the ruling class to mine surplus value. Without the millions of
workers handed rifles, the bosses could not defend their interest overseas, extract the raw materials to feed
their factories, or secure their ability to exploit the working class at home. The only reason the
military exists is to help provide for the bosses the framework within which the produced surplus value is guaranteed to come to
them. It is a tool of the bosses, used to preserve their system. Any slogan to change its use-without
overthrowing the system- such as “Out of Iraq and into Darfur”- will only help this weapon be used
to exploit other workers. The military is the trump card for the ruling class. It is used to secure their interest when
coercion fails. All their negotiations, both with the workers and other rulers are held under the shadow of their army. They tell the
workers “You don’t have to sign the contract, but try to strike and see what happens.” At the same time, the fatal flaw in their set-
up is that they must rely on the same workers they exploit to fill the ranks of their armies, and die in their wars.

Resources and territory are the root of every great power war.
Ted Trainer. 1.7.2008. “WAR; ALL JAMIE NEEDS TO KNOW.” <http://ssis.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/war.html>
If we take a look at the past we see a close connection between war and the quest for resources,
markets and territory. Some wars have been due to other causes, including religious and ethnic
antagonisms, but most has been contests over access to resource wealth.
Consider World War 1. It is tempting to say it was clearly a morally open and shut case. "We
British didn't start it. It was those Germans and Japanese." But they were only doing what
Britain had done previousy. Over a 200 year period Britain conquered the biggest empire ever,
fighting more than 70 wars and slaughtering who knows how many thousands of people in the
process, then shipping out their wealth. Yet when the Germans and Japanese tried to get into the
same game and started taking Britain's "possessions" the British reacted in outrage to "defend
their interests". They had not the slightest doubt that their position was morally pure while the
Germans and Japanese were diabolically evil.
World Wars I and II can be seen as attempts by Germany to challenge British global domination,
to get into the business of conquering territory and controlling markets, in order to become a
"great imperial power" too. The last 500 years has been largely about the struggle between
Portugal, Spain, Holland, France, Germany, Britain and the US to dominate the world. Dominate
means impose the rules and arrangements th at ensure you get most of the wealth on terms that
favour you.
But what about Hitler? Aren't there cases where there is no doubt we have to fight against an
unambiguously evil villain? But you shouldn't have let it come to that, and it would not have had
you been sensible long before. The time to stop a war is many years before it breaks out, and
the way to stop it usually involves you refusing to take part in the grabbing that leads to it.
World War I was largely about imperial grabbing. After it was over the victors carved up for
themselves what had been the Turkish empire, ignoring the needs and the rights of the people in
those regions. They punished Germany severely at Versailles, helping to set up World War II. If
you had really wanted to avoid World War II you should have started working seriously on the
problem no later than perhaps 1880 before the imperial scramble to carve up Africa began and
that would have got you nowhere if you were not prepared to relinquish the underlying drive to
get more and more of the world's wealth.
 1NC ETHICS
WE HAVE AN A PRIORI ETHICAL OBLIGATION TO REJECT THE VIOLENCE OF GLOBAL
CAPITALISM. THEIR UTILITARIAN RATIONALE CANNOT ACCOUNT FOR THE DEGRADED
LIFE CHANCES OF BILLIONS ACROSS THE GLOBE. THERE MAY BE SOME THINGS WORSE
THAN DEATH, BUT THE SAD THING IS YOU WILL NEVER KNOW, BECAUSE CAPITALISM
MAKES ITS VICTIMS ANONYMOUS.
Daly 2004, (Glyn, Risking The Impossible) http://www.lacan.com/zizek-daly.htm
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 today's 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" 6 etiquette - Zizek is arguing for a politics that might be called "radically
incorrect" in the sense that it breaks with these types of positions 7 and focuses instead on the very organizing principles of today's 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 move recently Laclau and Mouffe,
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 few 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. Zizek's point is rather that in rejecting economism we should not lose sight of the systemic power of capital in shaping the fives and
destinies of humanity and our very sense of the possible. In particular we should not overlook Marx's central insight that in order to create a universal global system the forces of capitalism seek to conceal the
What is persistently denied by neo-liberals; such as Rorty (1989) and
politico-discursive violence of its construction through a kind of gentrification of that system.
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 world's population. 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 judgement
in a neutral marketplace.
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 Zizek's point is that
this mystification is magnified through capitalism's 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 Zizek's universalism is that it would not attempt to conceal this fact or to reduce the status of the abject Other to that of a "glitch" in an otherwise sound
matrix.
*************************************<CONTINUED after omitting 4 paragraphs- if you want the full text, just ask.>**************************************
It is along these lines that Zizek affirms the need for a more radical intervention in the political imagination. The modem (Machiavellian) view of politics is usually presented in terms of a basic tension
between (potentially) unlimited demands/appetites and limited resources; a view which is implicit in the predominant "risk society" perspective where the central (almost Habermasian) concern is with more
and better scientific information. The political truth of today's world, however, is rather the opposite of this view. That is to say, the demands of the official left (especially the various incarnations of the
Third Way left) tend to articulate extremely modest demands in the face of a virtually unlimited capitalism that is more than capable of providing every person on this planet with a civilized standard of
living.
For Zizek, a confrontation with the obscenities of abundance capitalism also requires a transformation of the ethico-political imagination. It is no longer a question of developing ethical guidelines within the
existing political framework (the various institutional and corporate "ethical committees") but of developing a politicization of ethics; an ethics of the Real. 8 The starting point here is an insistence on the
unconditional autonomy of the subject; of accepting
that as human beings we are ultimately responsible for our actions and being-in-the-world up to
and including the construction of the capitalist system itself. Far from simple norm-making or refining/reinforcing existing social protocol, an ethics of the Real tends to emerge
through norm-breaking and in finding new directions that, by definition, involve traumatic changes: i.e. the Real in genuine ethical challenge. An ethics of the Real does not simply defer to the impossible (or
infinite Otherness) as an unsurpassable - horizon that already marks every act as a failure, incomplete and so on. Rather, such an ethics is one that fully accepts contingency but which is nonetheless prepared
to risk the impossible in the sense of breaking out of standardized positions. We might say that it is an ethics which is not only politically motivated but which also draws its strength from the political itself.
For Zizek an ethics of the Real (or Real ethics) means that we cannot rely on any form of symbolic Other that would endorse our (in)decisions
and (in)actions: for example, the "neutral" financial data of the stockmarkets; the expert knowledge of Beck's "new modernity" scientists; the economic and military councils of the New World Order; the
Zizek affirms is a radical culture of ethical
various (formal and informal) tribunals of political correctness; or any of the mysterious laws of God, nature or the market. What
identification for the left in which the alternative forms of militancy must first of all be militant with "themselves". That is to say, they must be
militant in the fundamental ethical sense of not relying on any external/higher authority and in the development of a political
imagination that, like Zizek's own thought, exhorts us to risk the impossible.

And, the absence of historical-materialist criticism guarantees the existence of U.S.

exceptionalism. The state’s attempt to overcome the contradictions of capitalism results
in new forms of imperial violence culminating in extinction.

Foster, Oregon University Department of Sociology Professor, 05

(John B., Monthly Review, http://www.monthlyreview.org/0905jbf.htm, September,)

From the longer view offered by a historical-materialist critique of capitalism, the direction that would be taken by U.S.
imperialism following the fall of the Soviet Union was never in doubt. Capitalism by its very logic is a globally expansive system.
The contradiction between its transnational economic aspirations and the fact that politically it remains rooted in particular nation
states is insurmountable for the system. Yet, ill-fated attempts by individual states to overcome this contradiction are just as much
a part of its fundamental logic. In present world circumstances, when one capitalist state has a virtual monopoly of the means of
destruction, the temptation for that state to attempt to seize full-spectrum dominance and to transform itself into the de facto global
state governing the world economy is irresistible. As the noted Marxian philosopher István Mészáros observed in Socialism or
Barbarism? (2001)—written, significantly, before George W. Bush became president: “What is at stake today is not the control of
a particular part of the planet—no matter how large—putting at a disadvantage but still tolerating the independent actions of some
rivals, but the control of its totality by one hegemonic economic and military superpower, with all means—even the most extreme
authoritarian and, if needed, violent military ones—at its disposal.” The unprecedented dangers of this new global disorder are
revealed in the twin cataclysms to which the world is heading at present: nuclear proliferation and hence increased chances of the
outbreak of nuclear war, and planetary ecological destruction. These are symbolized by the Bush administration’s refusal to sign
the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to limit nuclear weapons development and by its failure to sign the Kyoto Protocol as a first
step in controlling global warming. As former U.S. Secretary of Defense (in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations) Robert
McNamara stated in an article entitled “Apocalypse Soon” in the May–June 2005 issue of Foreign Policy: “The United States has
never endorsed the policy of ‘no first use,’ not during my seven years as secretary or since. We have been and remain prepared to
initiate the use of nuclear weapons—by the decision of one person, the president—against either a nuclear or nonnuclear enemy
whenever we believe it is in our interest to do so.” The nation with the greatest conventional military force and the willingness to
use it unilaterally to enlarge its global power is also the nation with the greatest nuclear force and the readiness to use it whenever
it sees fit—setting the whole world on edge. The nation that contributes more to carbon dioxide emissions leading to global
warming than any other (representing approximately a quarter of the world’s total) has become the greatest obstacle to addressing
global warming and the world’s growing environmental problems—raising the possibility of the collapse of civilization itself if
present trends continue. The United States is seeking to exercise sovereign authority over the planet during a time of widening
global crisis: economic stagnation, increasing polarization between the global rich and the global poor, weakening U.S. economic
hegemony, growing nuclear threats, and deepening ecological decline. The result is a heightening of international instability. Other
potential forces are emerging in the world, such as the European Community and China, that could eventually challenge U.S.
power, regionally and even globally. Third world revolutions, far from ceasing, are beginning to gain momentum again,
symbolized by Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution under Hugo Chávez. U.S. attempts to tighten its imperial grip on the Middle
East and its oil have had to cope with a fierce, seemingly unstoppable, Iraqi resistance, generating conditions of imperial
overstretch. With the United States brandishing its nuclear arsenal and refusing to support international agreements on the control
of such weapons, nuclear proliferation is continuing. New nations, such as North Korea, are entering or can be expected soon to
enter the “nuclear club.” Terrorist blowback from imperialist wars in the third world is now a well-recognized reality, generating
rising fear of further terrorist attacks in New York, London, and elsewhere. Such vast and overlapping historical contradictions,
rooted in the combined and uneven development of the global capitalist economy along with the U.S. drive for planetary
domination, foreshadow what is potentially the most dangerous period in the history of imperialism.
 1NC MARCUSE ALTERNATIVE
ALT TEXT: REJECT REFORMISM IN FAVOR OF COMMUNAL RELATIONS OF SOLIDARITY OUTSIDE
THE STATE TO SHELTER THE OPPRESSED FROM GLOBAL CAPITALISM.
ONLY BY REJECTING CAPITALISM'S DRIVE TO COMMODIFY CAN WE ACCELERATE THE INSURGENT
ALTERNATIVES ARISING ALL AROUND US. THIS IS CRITICAL- WE MUST CALL CAPITALISM'S BLUFF
OF “THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE” OR WE WILL ALL FACE THE EQUALITY OF NUCLEAR EXTINCTION.
Marcuse, German Philosopher and Professor at Columbia and Harvard, 1969 (Herbert, member of the
Frankfurt School, An Essay on Liberation, p. 85-91).
What kind of life? We are still confronted with the demand to state the "concrete
alternative." The demand is meaningless if it asks for a blueprint of the specific
institutions and relationships which would be those of the new society: they cannot be
determined a priori; they will develop, in trial and error, as the new society develops. If
we could form a concrete concept of the alternative today, it would not be that of an
alternative; the possibilities of the new society are sufficiently "abstract," i.e., removed
from and incongruous with the established universe to defy any attempt to identify them
in terms of this universe. However, the question cannot be brushed aside by
saying that what matters today is the destruction of the old, of the powers that be,
making way for the emergence of the new. Such an answer neglects the essential fact
that the old is not simply bad, that it delivers the goods, and that people have a real
stake in it. There can be societies which are much worse – there are such societies today.
The system of corporate capitalism has the right to insist that those who work for its
replacement justify their action.
But the demand to state the concrete alternatives is justified for yet another reason.
Negative thinking draws whatever force it may have from its empirical basis: the actual
human condition in the given society, and the "given" possibilities to transcend this
condition, to enlarge the realm of freedom. In this sense, negative thinking is by virtue of
its own internal concepts "positive": oriented toward, and comprehending a future which
is "contained" in the present. And in this containment (which is an important aspect of the general
containment policy pursued by the established societies), the future appears as possible liberation. It
is not the only alternative: the advent of a long period of "civilized" barbarism, with or
without the nuclear destruction, is equally contained in the present. Negative thinking,
and the praxis guided by it, is the positive and positing effort to prevent this utter
negativity.
The concept of the primary, initial institutions of liberation is familiar enough and concrete enough: collective
ownership, collective control and planning of the means of production and distribution.
This is the foundation, a necessary but not sufficient condition for the alternative: it
would make possible the usage of all available resources for the abolition of poverty,
which is the prerequisite for the turn from quantity into quality: the creation of a reality in
accordance with the new sensitivity and the new consciousness. This goal implies
rejection of those policies of reconstruction, no matter how revolutionary, which are
bound to perpetuate (or to introduce) the pattern of the unfree societies and their needs.
Such false policy is perhaps best summed up in the formula "to catch up with, and to
overtake the productivity level of the advanced capitalist countries." What is wrong with
this formula is not the emphasis on the rapid improvement of the material conditions but
on the model guiding their improvement. The model denies the alternative, the
qualitative difference. The latter is not, and cannot be, the result of the fastest possible attainment of
capitalist productivity, but rather the development of new modes and ends of production "new" not only (and
perhaps not at all) with respect to technical innovations and production relations, but with
respect to the different human needs and the different human relationships in working
for the satisfaction of these needs. These new relationships would be the result of a "biological"
solidarity in work and purpose, expressive of a true harmony between social and
individual needs and goals, between recognized necessity and free development -the
exact opposite of the administered and enforced harmony organized in the advanced
capitalist (and socialist?) countries. It is the image of this solidarity as elemental, instinctual, creative force
which the young radicals see in Cuba, in the guerrillas, in the Chinese cultural revolution.
Solidarity and cooperation: not all their forms are liberating. Fascism and militarism have developed a deadly
efficient solidarity. Socialist solidarity is autonomy: selfdetermination begins at home -and that is with every I,
and the We whom the I chooses. And this end must indeed appear in the means to attain it, that is to say, in the
strategy of those who, within the existing society, work for the new one. If the socialist relationships of
production are to be a new way of life, a new Form of life, then their existential quality
must show forth, anticipated and demonstrated, in the fight for their
realization. Exploitation in all its forms must have disappeared from this fight: from the work
relationships among the fighters as well as from their individual relationships. Understanding,
tenderness toward each other, the instinctual consciousness of that which is evil, false,
the heritage of oppression, would then testify to the authenticity of the rebellion. In short,
the economic, political, and cultural features of a classless society must have become the basic needs of those
who fight for it. This ingression of the future into the present, this depth dimension of the
rebellion accounts, in the last analysis, for the incompatibility with the traditional forms of the political
struggle. The new radicalism militates against the centralized bureaucratic communist as
well as against the semi-democratic liberal organization. There is a strong element of
spontaneity, even anarchism, in this rebellion, expression of the new sensibility,
sensitivity against domination: the feeling, the awareness, that the joy of freedom and
the need to be free must precede liberation. Therefore the aversion against preestablished Leaders,
apparatchiks of all sorts, politicians no matter how leftist. The initiative shifts to small groups, widely
diffused, with a high degree of autonomy, mobility, flexibility.
CONTINUED…
Not regression to a previous stage of civilization, but return to an imaginary temps perdu
in the real life of mankind: progress to a stage of civilization where [hu]man has learned
to ask for the sake of whom or of what he[or she] organizes his society; the stage where he
checks and perhaps even halts his incessant struggle for existence on an enlarged scale, surveys what has been
achieved through centuries of misery and hecatombs of victims, and decides that it is enough, and that it is
time to enjoy what he has and what can be reproduced and refined with a minimum of
alienated labor: not the arrest or reduction of technical progress, but the elimination of
those of its features which perpetuate man's subjection to the apparatus and the
intensification of the struggle for existence -to work harder in order to get more of the
merchandise that has to be sold. In other words, electrification indeed, and all technical
devices which alleviate and protect life, all the mechanization which frees human energy
and time, all the standardization which does away with spurious and parasitarian
"personalized" services rather than multiplying them and the gadgets and tokens of
exploitative affiuence. In terms of the latter (and only in terms of the latter), this would certainly be a
regression -but freedom from the rule of merchandise over man is a precondition of freedom.
The construction of a free society would create new incentives for work. In the
exploitative societies, the so-called work instinct is mainly the (more or less effectively)
introjected necessity to perform productively in order to earn a living. But the life
instincts themselves strive for the unification and enhancement of life; in nonrepressive
sublimation they would provide the libidinal energy for work on the development of a
reality which no longer demands the exploitative repression of the Pleasure Principle. The
"incentives" would then be built into the instinctual structure of men. Their sensibility
would register, as biological reactions, the difference between the ugly and the beautiful,
between calm and noise, tenderness and brutality, intelligence and stupidity, joy and
fun, and it would correlate this distinction with that between freedom and servitude.
Freud's last theoretical conception recognizes the erotic instincts as work instincts -work
for the creation of a sensuous environment. The social expression of the liberated work
instinct is cooperation, which, grounded in solidarity, directs the organization of the
realm of necessity and the development of the realm of freedom. And there is an answer
to the question which troubles the minds of so many men of good will: what are the
people in a free society going to do? The answer which, I believe, strikes at the heart of
the matter was given by a young black girl. She said: for the first time in our life, we shall
be free to think about what we are going to do.