1nc – capitalism k – link – generic inservice kritik lecture /yim 1 1nc – capitalism k –...

FBISD Inservice Kritik Lecture /Yim 1

1NC – Capitalism K – Link – Generic

THE STATE STRUCTUALLY IMPOSESES CAPITALISM FORMS OF SOCIAL RELATIONS TO ENSURE THE PERPETUAL MAINTENANCE OF CPAITAL’S DOMINATON. Joel Kovel, Professor of Social Studies at Bard College, The Enemy of Nature, 2002, p. 124-25 The state is what steps forward to manage this conflict so that the ruling class gets its way without causing society to fly apart. It is the state’s province to deal with class contradiction as it works itself out in numberless ways to build its armies and use them in conquest (thereby reinforcing patriarchal and violent values), to codify property to set forth laws to punish those who would trangress property relations and to regulate contracts between individuals who play by the rules, to institutionalize police, courts and prisons to back up those laws, or to certify what is proper and right in the education of the young, or the marriage of the sexes, or establish the religions that justify God’s ways to mere man , or to institutionalize science and education — in sum, to regulate and enforce the class structure, and to channel the flux of history in the direction of the elites. The state institutionalizes patriarchy as well as class, and hence maintains the societal ground for the gendered bifurcation of nature. Furthermore, inasmuch as the modern state is also a nation-state, it employs the attachment of a people to its land as a source of legitimation, and thus incorporates the history of nature into myths of wholeness and integrity. All aspects of the domination of nature are in fact woven into the fabric by means of which the state holds society together, from which it follows that to give coherence to this narrative and make a difference in it, we have to attend to the state and its ultimate dependance upon maintaining the class structure. All of this is to play a basic role in the unfolding of contemporary ecological struggles, as we discuss in the next section.


1NC – Capitalism K – Link – Advantage

LEADERSHIP EXPANDS NEOLIBERAL ECONOMICS- THE EXPANSION OF MILITARY POWER IS INCREASINGLY USED TO ENFORCE AND INTEGRATE MARKETS INTO THE GLOBAL ECONOMY Remy Herrera researcher at the National Centre for Scientific Research Monthly Review, May 2006 http://www.monthlyreview.org/0506herrera.htm

Even the regulating mechanisms of global capitalism are in crisis. Today, the fundamental feature of the power of global finance under U.S. hegemony is its militarization. This is measured less by the rise in the “military burden” indicator—military spending as a percentage of GDP—than by the aggressive expansion of U.S. military bases worldwide, as well as by the growing presence of transnational corporations within the military-industrial complex. The name of globalization is imperialism, and an imperialism more and more openly enforced by war. Finance is at war against whoever tries to carry out or affirm autonomous development, and such development is the basic cause of the imperialist wars supporting finance. In Iraq, for instance, there is the obvious desire of capital to control the oil. However, there is a still more decisive reality: what is at stake and what makes this and other wars necessary for high finance is the reproduction of the conditions that allow capital’s power to be maintained and to grow. The capitalist class can no longer retain its power except by war. It is interesting to note that neoclassical economists have begun in earnest to develop a defense economics, but so far they have been unsuccessful. One reason for this failure is the inability of neoclassical economics to deal with conflict, a real problem in an analysis of war!


1NC – Capitalism K – Link – Specific

CAPITALISM IS DEPENDENT UPON NEW FORMS OF TRANSPORTATION. Cox and Alm 2008 (W. Michael and Richard; Library of Economics and Liberty, “Creative Destruction,” Conscience Encyclopedia of Economic http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/CreativeDestruction.html) The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates. (p. 83) Entrepreneurs introduce new products and technologies with an eye toward making themselves better off—the profit motive. New goods and services, new firms, and new industries compete with existing ones in the marketplace, taking customers by offering lower prices, better performance, new features, catchier styling, faster service, more convenient locations, higher status, more aggressive marketing, or more attractive packaging. In another seemingly contradictory aspect of creative destruction, the pursuit of self-interest ignites the progress that makesothers better off. Producers survive by streamlining production with newer and better tools that make workers more productive. Companies that no longer deliver what consumers want at competitive prices lose customers, and eventually wither and die. The market’s “invisible hand”—a phrase owing not to Schumpeter but to Adam Smith—shifts resources from declining sectors to more valuable uses as workers, inputs, and financial capital seek their highest returns. Through this constant roiling of the status quo, creative destruction provides a powerful force for making societies wealthier. It does so by making scarce resources more productive.


1NC – Capitalism K – Impact – Util/Root Cause

THEY ARE MISSING THE ROOT CAUSE OF WAR. CAPITALISM NECESSITATES LARGE-SCALE SYSTEMATIC MURDER AND GENOCIDE. ALL THE AFF IMPACTS ARE INEVITABLE IF WE ALLOW CAPITALISM’S CONTINUED EXISTENCE Internationalist Perspective 2K (Internationalist Perspective #36, spring 2000, http://www.geocities.com/wageslavex/capandgen.html) Mass death, and genocide, the deliberate and systematic extermination of whole groups of human beings, have become an integral part of the social landscape of capitalism in its phase of decadence. Auschwitz, Kolyma, and Hiroshima are not merely the names of discrete sites where human beings have been subjected to forms of industrialized mass death, but synecdoches for the death-world that is a component

of the capitalist mode of production in this epoch. In that sense, I want to argue that the Holocaust, for example, was not a Jewish catastrophe, nor an atavistic reversion

to the barbarism of a past epoch, but rather an event produced by the unfolding of the logic of capitalism itself. Moreover,

Auschwitz, Kolyma, and Hiroshima are not "past", but rather futural events, objective-real possibilities on the Front of history, to use concepts first articulated by the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch. The ethnic cleansing which has been unleashed in Bosnia and Kosovo, the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, the mass death to which Chechnya has been subjected, the prospect for a nuclear war on the Indian sub-continent, are so many examples of the future which awaits the human species as the capitalist mode of production enters a new millenium. Indeed, it is just such a death-world that constitutes the meaning of one pole of the historic alternative which Rosa Luxemburg first posed in the midst of the slaughter inflicted on masses of conscripts during World War I: socialism or barbarism! Yet, confronted by the horror of Auschwitz, Kolyma, and Hiroshima, Marxist theory has been silent or uncomprehending. While I am convinced that there can be no adequate theory of mass death and genocide which does not link these phenomena to the unfolding of the logic of capital, revolutionary Marxists have so far failed to offer one. Worse, the few efforts of revolutionary Marxists to grapple with the Holocaust, for example, as I will briefly explain, have either degenerated into a crude economism, which is one of the hallmarks of so-called orthodox Marxism, or led to a fatal embrace of Holocaust denial; the former being an expression of theoretical bankruptcy, and the latter a quite literal crossing of the class line into the camp of capital itself. Economism, which is based on a crude base-superstructure model (or travesty) of Marxist theory, in which politics, for example, can only be conceived as a direct and immediate reflection of the economic base, in which events can only be conceived as a manifestation of the direct economic needs of a social class, and in the case of the capitalist class, the immediate need to extract a profit, shaped Amadeo Bordiga's attempt to "explain" the Holocaust. Thus, in his "Auschwitz ou le Grand Alibi" Bordiga explained the extermination of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis, as the reaction of one part of the petty bourgeoisie to its historical demise at the hands of capital by "sacrificing" its other -- Jewish -- part so as to save the rest, an undertaking welcomed by big capital, which could thereby liquidate a part of the petty bourgeoisie with the support of the rest of that same class. Quite apart from an economism which simply

ignores the dialectic between the economy on the one hand, and the political and ideological on the other (about which more later), such an "explanation" asks us to conceive of genocide not as the complex outcome of the unfolding of the operation of the law of value in the diverse spheres of social life, but as the direct outcome of the utilitarian calculation of segments of the petty bourgeoisie and big capital. Auschwitz, the veritable hallmark of the fundamental irrationality of late capital, is transformed by Bordiga into a rational calculation of its direct profit interests on the part of the capitalists. However, an undertaking which fatally diverted the scarce resources (material and financial) of Nazi Germany from the battlefields of the imperialist world war, simply cannot, in my view, be comprehended on the basis of a purely economic calculus of profit and loss on the part of "big capital." While Bordiga's reaction to Auschwitz fails to provide even the minimal bases for its adequate theorization, the reaction of the militants of La Vieille Taupe, such as Pierre Guillaume, constitutes a political betrayal of the struggle for communist revolution by its incorporation into the politics of Holocaust denial. For Guillaume, Auschwitz can only be a myth, a fabrication of the allies, that is, of one of the imperialist blocs in the inter-imperialist world war, because it so clearly serves their interests in mobilizing the working class to die in the service of democracy; on the alter of anti-fascism. Hence, La Vieille Taupe's "fervor to contest the evidence of its [the Holocaust's] reality by every means possible, including the most fraudulent. For the evidence of genocide is just so many deceptions, so many traps laid for anticapitalist radicality, designed to force it into dishonest compromise and eventual loss of resolve." It is quite true that capital has utilized antifascism to assure its ideological hegemony over the working class, and that the Holocaust has been routinely wielded for more than a generation by the organs of mass manipulation in the service of the myth of "democracy" in the West (and by the state of Israel on behalf of its own imperialist aims in the Middle-East). And just as surely the ideology of antifascism and its functionality for capital must be exposed by revolutionaries. Nonetheless, this does not justify the claims of Holocaust denial, which not only cannot be dissociated from anti-Semitism, but which constitutes a denial of the most lethal tendencies inherent in the capitalist mode of production, of the very barbarism of capitalism, and thereby serves as a screen behind which the death-world wrought by capital can be safely hidden from its potential victims. This latter, in its own small way, is the despicable

contribution of La Vieille Taupe, and the basis for my conviction that it must be politically located in the camp of capital. Marxism is in need of a theory of mass death and genocide as immanent tendencies of capital, a way of comprehending the link (still obsure) between the death-world symbolized by the smokestacks of Auschwitz or the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima and the unfolding of the logic of a mode of production based on the capitalist law of value. I want to argue that we can best grasp the link between capitalism and genocide by focusing on two dialectically inter-related strands in the social fabric of late capitalism: first, are a series of phenomena linked to the actual unfolding of the law of value, and more specifically to the completion of the transition from the formal to the real domination of capital; second, are a series of phenomena linked to the political and ideological (this latter understood in a non-reductionist sense, as having a material existence) moments of the rule of capital, specifically to the forms of capitalist hegemony. It is through an analysis of the coalescence of vital elements of these two strands

in the development of capital, that I hope to expose the bases for the death-world and genocide as integral features of capitalism in the present epoch. The real domination of capital is characterized by the penetration of the law of value into every segment of social existence. As Georg Lukács put it in his History and Class Consciousness, this means that the commodity ceases to be "one form among many regulating the metabolism of human society," to become its "universal structuring principle." From its original locus at the point of production, in the capitalist factory, which

is the hallmark of the formal domination of capital, the law of value has systematically spread its tentacles to incorporate not just the production of commodities, but their circulation and consumption. Moreover, the law of value also penetrates and then comes to preside over the spheres of the political and ideological, including science and technology themselves. This latter occurs not just through the transformation of the fruits of technology and science into commodities, not just through the transformation of technological and scientific research itself (and the institutions in which it takes place) into commodities, but also, and especially, through what Lukács designates as the infiltration of thought itself by the purely technical, the very quantification of rationality, the instrumentalization of reason; and, I would

argue, the reduction of all beings (including human beings) to mere objects of manipulation and control. As Lukács could clearly see even in the age of Taylorism, "this rational mechanisation extends right into the worker's `soul'." In short, it affects not only his outward behavior, but her very internal, psychological, makeup. The phenomenon of reification, inherent in the commodity-form, and its tendential penetration into the whole of social existence, which Lukács was one of the first to analyze, is a hallmark of the real domination of capital: "Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a `phantom objectivity', an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people." Reification, the seeming transformation of social relations into relations between things, has as one of its outcomes what


1NC – Capitalism K – Impact – Util/Root Cause

the German-Jewish thinker H.G.Adler designated as "the administered man" [Der verwaltete Mensch]. For Adler, when human beings are administered, they are treated as things, thereby clearing the way for their removal or elimination by genocide. The outcome of such a process can be seen in the bureaucractic administration of the Final Solution, in which the organization of genocide was the responsibility of desk killers like Adolf Eichmann who could zealously administer a system of mass murder while displaying no particular hatred for his victims, no great ideological passion for his project, and no sense that those who went to the gas chambers were human beings and not things. The features of the desk killer, in the person of Eichmann, have been clearly delineated by Hannah Arendt. He is the high-level functionary in a vast bureaucratic organization who does his killing from behind a desk, from which he rationally plans and organizes mass murder; treating it as simply a technical task, no different than the problem of transporting scrap metal. The desk killer is the quintessential bureaucrat functioning according to the imperatives of the death-world. As a human type, the desk killer, that embodiment of the triumph of instrumental reason, has become a vital part of the state apparatus of late capitalism. Here, the Lukácsian concept of reification, the Adlerian concept of the administered man, and the Arendtian portrait of the desk killer, can be joined to Martin Heidegger's concept of das

Gestell, enframing, in which everything real, all beings, including humans, are treated as so much Bestand, standing-reserve or raw material, to be manipulated at will. This reduction of humans to a raw material is the antechamber to a world in which they can become so many waste products to be discarded or turned into ashes in the gas chambers of Auschwitz or at ground zero at Hiroshima. While the reification which attains its culminating point in the real domination of capital may contain within itself the possibility of mass murder and its death-world, it does not in and of itself explain the actual unleashing of the genocidal potential which, because of it, is now firmly ensconced within the interstices of the capitalist mode of production. To confront that issue, I want to elucidate two concepts which, while not directly linked by their authors to the unfolding of the capitalist law of value, can be refunctioned to forge such a link, and have already been effectively wielded in the effort to explain genocide: the concept of the obsolescence of man [Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen], articulated by the German-Jewish philosopher Günther Anders, and the concept of bio-politics, articulated by Michel Foucault. For Anders, the first industrial revolution introduced the machine with its own source of power as a means of production, while the second industrial revolution saw the extension of commodity production to the whole of society, and the subordination of man to the machine. According to Anders, the third industrial revolution, in the epoch of which humanity now lives, has made humans obsolete, preparing the way for their replacement by machines, and the end of history (Endzeit). For Anders, the Holocaust marked the first attempt at the systematic extermination of a whole group of people by industrial means, opening the way for the extension of the process of extermination to virtually the whole of the human species; a stage which he designates as "post-civilized cannibalism" [postzivilisatorischen Kannibalismus], in which the world is "overmanned", and in which Hiroshima marks the point at which "humanity as a whole is eliminatable"[tötbar]. Anders's philosophy of technology is unabashedly pessimistic, leaving virtually no room for Marxist hope (communist revolution). Nonetheless, his vision of a totally reified world, and technology as the subject of history, culminating in an Endzeit, corresponds to one side of the dialectic of socialism or barbarism which presides over the present epoch. Moreover, Anders's concept of an overmanned world can be fruitfully linked to the immanent tendency of the law of value to generate an ever higher organic composition of capital, culminating in the present stage of automation, robotics, computers, and information technology, on the bases of which ever larger masses of living labor are ejected from the process of production, and, indeed, from the cycle of accumulation as a whole, ceasing to be -- even potentially -- a productive force, a source of exchange-value, in order to become an insuperable burden for capital, a dead weight, which, so

long as it lives and breathes, threatens its profitability. This "obsolescence of man" can at the level of total capital thereby create the necessity for mass murder; inserting the industrial extermination of whole groups of people into the very logic of capital: genocide as the apotheosis of instrumental reason! Reason transmogrified into the nihilistic engine of destruction which shapes the late capitalist world. Michel Foucault's concept of bio-power can also be refunctioned to explicitly link it to the basic tendencies of the development of capitalism, in which case it provides a point of intersection between the triumph of the real domination of capital economically, and the political and ideological transformation of capitalist rule, while at the same time making it possible to grasp those features of capital which propel it in the direction of genocide. The extension of the law of value into every sphere of human existence, the culminating point of the real domination of capital, is marked by the subordination of the biological realm itself to the logic of capital. This stage corresponds to what Foucault designates as bio-politics, which encapsulates both the "statification of the biological", and the "birth of state racism". Bio-politics entails the positive power to administer, manage, and regulate the intimate details of the life -- and death -- of whole populations in the form of technologies of domination: "In concrete terms ... this power over life

evolved in two basic forms ... they constituted ... two poles of development linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations. One of these poles ... centered on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls, all this was ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the human body. The second ... focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a bio-politics of the population." Such a bio-politics represents the subjugation of biological life in its diverse human forms to the imperatives of the law of value. It allows capital to mobilize all the human resources of the nation in the service of its expansion and aggrandizement, economic and military. The other side of bio-politics, of this power over life, for Foucault, is what he terms "thanatopolitics," entailing an awesome power to inflict mass death, both on the population of one's enemy, and on one's own population: "the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual's continued existence. .... If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers ... it is because power is situated at the level of life, the

species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population." Nuclear, chemical, and biological, weapons make it possible to wield this power to condemn whole populations to death. Bio-politics, for Foucault, also necessarily entails racism, by which he means making a cut in the biological continuum of human life, designating the very existence of a determinate group as a danger to the population, to its health and well-being, and even to its very life. Such a group, I would argue, then, becomes a biological (in the case of Nazism) or class enemy (in the case of Stalinism, though the latter also claimed that biological and hereditary characteristics were linked to one's class origins). And the danger represented by such an enemy race can necessitate its elimination through physical removal (ethnic cleansing) or extermination (genocide). The Foucauldian concept of bio-politics allows us to see how, on the basis of technologies of domination, it is possible to subject biological life itself to a formidable degree of control, and to be able to inflict mass death on populations or races designated as a biological threat. Moreover, by linking this concept to the real domination of capital, we are able to see how the value-form invades even the biological realm in the phase of the real domination of capital. However, while bio-power entails the horrific possibility of genocide, it is Foucault's ruminations on the binary division of a population into a "pure community" and its Other, which allows us to better grasp its necessity. Such a perspective, however, intersects with the transformations at the level of the political and ideological moment of capital, and it is to these, and what I see as


1NC – Capitalism K – Impact – Util/Root Cause vital contributions to their theorization by Antonio Gramsci and Ernst Bloch, that I now want to turn in an effort to better elucidate the factors that propel capital in the direction of mass death and genocide. What is at issue here is not Gramsci's politics, his political practice, his interventions in the debates on strategy and tactics within the Italian Communist Party, where he followed the counter-revolutionary line of the Stalinist Comintern, but rather his theorization of the political and ideological moment of capital, and in particular his concept of the "integral state", his understanding of the state as incorporating both political and civil society, his concept of hegemony, and his understanding of ideology as inscribed in practices and materialized in institutions, which exploded the crude base-superstructure model of orthodox Marxism and its vision of ideology as simply false consciousness, all of which have enriched Marxist theory, and which revolutionaries ignore at their peril. In contrast to orthodox Marxism which has equated the state with coercion, Gramsci's insistence that the state incorporates both political and civil society, and that class rule is instanciated both by domination (coercion) and hegemony (leadership) allows us to better grasp the complex and crisscrossing strands that coalesce in capitalist class rule, especially in the phase of the real domination of capital and the epoch of state capitalism. For Gramsci, hegemony is the way in which a dominant class installs its rule over society through the intermediary of ideology, establishing its intellectual and cultural leadership over other classes, and thereby reducing its dependence on coercion. Ideology, for Gramsci, is not mere false consciousness, but rather is the fo for him, ideology is no mere superstructure, but has a material existence, is materialized in praxis. The state which rests on a combination of coercion and hegemony is what Gramsci designates as an integral state. It seems to me, that one major weakness of the Gramscian concept of hegemony is that he does not seem to apply it to the control exercised over an antagonistic class. Thus, Gramsci asserts that one dominates, coerces, antagonistic classes, but leads only allied classes. Gramsci's seeming exclusion of antagonistic classes from the ideological hegemony of the dominant class seems to me to be misplaced, especially in the epoch of state capitalism, when the capitalist class, the functionaries of capital, acquire hegemony, cultural and intellectual leadership and control, not just of allied classes and strata (e.g. the middle classes, petty bourgeoisie, etc.), but also over broad strata of the antagonistic class, the working class itself. Indeed, such hegemony, though never total, and always subject to reversal (revolution), is the veritable key to capitalist class rule in this epoch. One way in which this ideological hegemony of capital is established over broad strata of the population, including sectors of the working class, is by channeling the disatisfaction and discontent of the mass of the population with the monstrous impact of capitalism upon their lives (subjection to the machine, reduction to the status of a "thing", at the point of production, insecurity and poverty as features of daily life, the overall social process of atomization and massification, etc.), away from any struggle to establish a human Gemeinwesen, communism. Capitalist hegemony entails the ability to divert that very disatisfaction into the quest for a "pure community", based on hatred and rage directed not at capital, but at the Other, at alterity itself, at those marginal social groups

which are designated a danger to the life of the nation, and its population. One of the most dramatic effects of the inexorable penetration of the law of value into every pore of social life, and geographically across the face of the whole planet, has been the destruction of all primitive, organic, and pre-capitalist communities. Capitalism, as Marx and Engels pointed out in the Communist Manifesto, shatters the bonds of immemorial custom and tradition, replacing them with its exchange mechanism and contract. While Marx and Engels stressed the positive features of this development in the Manifesto, we cannot ignore its negative side, particularly in light of the fact that the path to a human Gemeinwesen has so far been successfully blocked by capital, with disastrous consequences for the human species. The negative side of that development includes the relentless process of atomization, leaving in its wake an ever growing mass of rootless individuals, for whom the only human contact is by way of the cash nexus. Those who have been uprooted geographically, economically, politically, and culturally, are frequently left with a powerful longing for their lost communities (even where those communities were hierarchically organized and based on inequality), for the certainties and "truths" of the past, which are idealized the more frustrating, unsatisfying, and insecure, the world of capital becomes. Such longings are most powerfully felt within what Ernst Bloch has

termed non-synchronous strata and classes. These are stata and classes whose material or mental conditions of life are linked to a past mode of production, who exist economically or culturally in the past, even as they chronologically dwell in the present. In contrast to the two historic classes in the capitalist mode of production, the bourgeoisie and proletariat, which are synchronous, the products of the capitalist present, these non-synchronous strata include the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie, and -- by virtue of their mental or cultural state -- youth and white-collar workers. In my view, Bloch's understanding of non-synchronicity needs to be extended to segments of the working class, in particular those strata of the blue-collar proletariat which are no longer materially synchronous with the high-tech production process upon which late capitalism rests, and the mass of workers ejected from the production process by the rising organic composition of capital and its comcomitant down-sizing. In addition, the even greater mass of peasants streaming into the shanty towns around the great commercial and industrial metropolitan centers of the world, are also characterized by their non-synchronicity, their inability to be incorporated into the hyper-modern cycle of capital accumulation. Moreover, all of these strata too are subject to a growing nostalgia for the past, a longing for community, including the blue-collar communities and their institutional networks which were one of the features of the social landscape of capitalism

earlier in the twentieth century. However, no matter how powerful this nostalgia for past community becomes, it cannot be satisfied. The organic communities of the past cannot be recreated; their destruction by capital is irreversible. At the same time, the path to a future Gemeinwesen, to which the cultural material and longings embodied in the non-synchronous classes and strata can make a signal contribution, according to Bloch, remains obstructed by the power of capital. So long as this is the case, the genuine longing for community of masses of people, and especially the nostalgia for past communities especially felt by the non-synchronous strata and classes, including the newly non-synchronous elements which I have just argued must be added to them, leaves them exposed to the lure of a "pure community" ideologically constructed by capital itself. In place of real organic and communal bonds, in such an ideologically constructed pure community, a racial, ethnic, or religious identification is merely superimposed on the existing condition of atomization in which the mass of the population finds itself. In addition to providing some gratification for the longing for community animating broad strata of the population, such a pure community can also provide an ideological bond which ties the bulk of the population to the capitalist state on the basis of a race, ethnicity, or religion which it shares with the ruling class. This latter is extremely important to capital, because the atomization which it has brought about not only leaves the mass of humanity bereft, but also leaves the ruling class itself vulnerable because it lacks any basis upon which it can mobilize the population, physically or ideologically.The basis upon which such a pure community is constituted, race, nationality, religion, even a categorization by "class" in the Stalinist world, necessarily means the exclusion of those categories of the population which do not conform to the criteria for inclusion,

the embodiments of alterity, even while they inhabit the same geographical space as the members of the pure community. Those excluded, the "races" on the other side of the biological continuum, to use Foucauldian terminology, the Other, become alien elements within an otherwise homogeneous world of the pure community. As a threat to its very existence, the role of this Other is to become the scapegoat for the inability of the pure community to provide authentic communal bonds between people, for its abject failure to overcome the alienation that is a hallmark of a reified world. The Jew in Nazi Germany, the Kulak in Stalinist Russia, the Tutsi in Rwanda, Muslims inrm in which humans acquire consciousness, become subjects and act, constituting what he terms a

"collective will". Moreover Bosnia, blacks in the US, the Albanian or the Serb in Kosovo, the Arab in France, the Turk in contemporary Germany, the Bahai in Iran, for example, become the embodiment of alterity, and the target against which the hatred of the members of the pure community is directed. The more crisis ridden a society becomes, the greater the need to find an appropriate scapegoat; the more urgent the need for mass mobilization behind the integral state, the more imperious the need to focus rage against the Other. In an extreme situation of social crisis and political turmoil, the demonization and victimization of the Other can lead to his (mass) murder. In the absence of a working class conscious of its historic task and possibilities, this hatred of alterity which permits capital to mobilize the population in defense of the pure community, can become its own impetus to genocide. The immanent tendencies of the capitalist mode of production which propel it towards a catastrophic economic crisis, also drive it towards mass murder and genocide. In that sense, the death-world, and the prospect of an Endzeit cannot be separated from the continued existence of humanity's subordination to the law of value. Reification, the overmanned world, bio-politics, state racism, the constitution of a pure community directed against alterity, each of them features of the economic and ideological topography of the real domination of capital, create

the possibility and the need for genocide. We should have no doubt that the survival of capitalism into this new millenium will entail more and more frequent recourse to mass murder


1NC – Capitalism K – Impact – Value to Life

THE AFFIRMATIVES POLITICS MAKES DECISION MAKING IMPOSSIBLE BECAUSE WE CANNOT SEE THROUGH THE IDEOLOGICAL BLINDERS THEY DENY- WE HAVE AN ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITY TO REJECT THEIR IDEOLOGICAL ADHERENCE TO GLOBAL CAPITALISM THERE MAY BE SOME THINGS WORSE THAN DEATH, BUT YOU’LL NEVER KNOW BECAUSE CAPITALISM MAKES ITS VICTIMS ANONYMOUS. Zizek and Daly 2k4 (Slavoj and Glyn, Conversations with Zizek page 14-16) 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’ 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 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 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. Zizek’s point is rather that in rejecting economism we should not lose sight of the systemic power of capital in shaping

the lives 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 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 world’s 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 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 reduce the status of the abject Other to that of a ‘glitch’ in an otherwise sound matrix.


1NC – Capitalism K – Alternative

THE ALTERNATIVE IS TO WITHDRAW FROM THE IDEOLOGY OF CAPITALISM. THE ABSENCE OF A POLITICAL ROADMAP ISN'T IMPORTANT, SIMPLY IMAGINING A WORLD BEYOND CAPITALISM IS REVOLUTIONARY. JOHNSTON 2k7 (Asssitant Professor of Philosopher, International Journal of Zizek Studies p. 23-24 http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/8/24) Perhaps the absence of a detailed practical roadmap in Zizek's political writings isn't a major shortcoming. Maybe, at least for the time being, the most important task is simply the negativity of the critical struggle, the effort to cure an intellectual constipation resulting from capitalist ideology and thereby truly to open up the space for imagining authentic alternatives to the prevailing state of the situation. Another definition of materialism offered by Zizek 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 more than a kind of "magic," that is, the belief in money's social efficacy by those using it in the processes of exchange. Since the value of currency is, at bottom, reducible to the belief that it has the value attributed to it (and that everyone believes that everyone else believes this as well), derailing capitalism by destroying its essential financial substance is, in a certain respect, as easy as dissolving the mere belief in this substance's powers. The "external" obstacle of the capitalist system exists exclusively on the condition that subjects, whether consciously or unconsciously, "internally" believe in it—capitalism's life-blood, money, is simply a fetishistic crystallization of a belief in others' belief in the socio-performative force emanating from this same material. And yet, this point of capitalism's frail vulnerability is simultaneously the source of its enormous strength: Its vampiric symbiosis with individual human desire, and the fact that the late-capitalist cynic's fetishism enables the disavowal of his/her de facto belief in capitalism, makes it highly unlikely that people can be persuaded to stop believing and start thinking (especially since, as Zizek 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 ofthe 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.").


1NC – Capitalism K – Alternative Framework/Role of Ballot

REJECT THE 1AC IT WILL AMOUNT TO NOTHING MORE THAN ANOTHER FAILED ATTEMPT AT MARKET REFORM THAT ENSURES THE CONTINUATION OF CAPITALIST VIOLENCE – ONLY THE RADICAL WITHDRAWL EXPRESSED BY THE ALTERNATIVE CAN OPEN UP THE SPACE FOR A TRULY ETHICAL ACT OUTSIDE THE CONFINES OF CAPITALIST IDEOLOGY. VALENTIC, 8 (Tonci, Prof. @ Univ. of Zagreb, “Symbolic Violence and Global Capitalism”, International Journal of Zizek Studies, 2:2, online) In the contemporary world violence has become an inescapable part of modern life. Beside its

coercive character and brutality, it also troubles us with its two major characteristics which obstruct any clear and theoretical analysis: violence often seems to be random and irrational and its motives seem incomprehensible. Violence is often described as the exertion of physical force so as to injure or abuse, and the word usually stands for forceful human destruction of property or injury to persons, usually intentional, and forceful verbal and emotional abuse that harms others. In this essay I would like to tackle the notion of violence in

contemporary philosophical discussion, having in mind that violent acts cannot be fully grasped neither by scholarly empirical analysis (e.g. sociological, psychological or political) nor by media coverage of violence. That is to say, there are very few possible theoretical standpoints that can fully address this problem today, going much deeper below the surface which is, almost without exemption, always focused on violence undertaken by some easily identifiable agents (such as

terrorism, assaults, riots, ethnic cleansing, murders, wars, etc.). I would argue that, in order to philosophically analyze that problem we have to assume completely opposite approach, i.e. to start to think about violence in terms of its symbolic and systemic character instead of focusing on clearly visible acts. In order to do so, I will concentrate on several authors whose ideas are stimulating and might be challenging or placed against the line of contemporary discussion. First of all, I will refer to Slavoj Žižek`s recent book Violence that provides some contentious insights on the subject. In addition, ideas of such authors as Hannah Arendt, Etienne Balibar, Ju�rgen Habermas, or Walter Benjamin will also be discussed in accordance with the

main purpose of this essay which is to emphasize that violence stem from the system itself; it represents the very "heart of darkness" of contemporary multicultural societies, which ultimately means that every violent act is deeply rooted in all liberal-democratic countries in the world. In other words, we should pay more attention to the catastrophic consequences of the functioning of our economic and political systems as systemic violence than to the violence represented, for example, by Islamic suicide bombers or even riots on the streets in Europe (such as those in suburbs in Paris a few years ago or recent one in Denmark). The mayor task of philosophical analysis of violence in contemporary world should be developing a theory of political violence. Obviously, there are numerous theories on the respective issue, but very few of them reflect properly today's global socio-political constellation. For example, authors like Weber or Arendt provided noteworthy insight, but they cannot fully cope with issues we are dealing today in the beginning of 21st century. The main problem with violence is that it doesn't have always a deep-lying cause based on rational articulation, which means it is impossible to understand it only using arguments of classical political theory or moral philosophy: one had to incorporate psychoanalysis and semiotic or symbolic interpretation as well. Wherein should we search for relationship between violence and

politics in today's world? Since violence is a complex phenomenon, several things have to be taken into account: first of all, it is always primarily a "structural" problem, an "objective" feature of today's capitalist societies. Second, as I mentioned before, structural (or objective) violence is placed in the very heart of capitalism itself (this is the idea that Slavoj Žižek advocates - relying on the idea which came from Balibar and is even earlier extracted out of Marxism). Third, violence does not necessarily refer to activity or any deeds: passivity can also be violent. The major point here is, as Žižek would put it, that violence presented in media (such as suicidal bombings, humanitarian crisis, terrorist attack, and so on) actually blinds us to the objective violence in the world where we become "perpetrators and not just innocent victims". As Žižek would argue, we consistently overlook the objective or "symbolic" violence embodied in language and its forms, i.e. democratic state's monopoly on legitimate violence. He asserts that "subjective and

objective violence cannot be perceived from the same standpoint: subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of the non-violent zero-level, as a perturbation of the “normal” peaceful



state of things; however, objective violence is precisely the violence sustaining this “normal” state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive

something as [visible] violence – in order to perceive it, one has to perform a kind of parallax shift". The horror of violent acts and empathy for the victims inexorably function as a lure which prevents us from thinking, for example when we are forced to act urgently, or when confronted with "humanitarian politics" of human rights that serves as the ideology of military interventionism for specific economic-political purposes, which utterly prevents any radical socio-political transformation (i.e. charity becomes the humanitarian mask hiding the face of economic exploitation). Having that in mind, there are four possible theoretical tasks one should undertake in order to clearly articulate a theory of political violence: 1) to point out that "structural" violence is in the heart of global capitalism, 2) to deconstruct media's coverage of crime, terrorism as well as humanitarian crisis, 3) to unravel true motives of terrorists, 4) to expose racism and racial violence as fear which is deeply rooted in the liberal and tolerant multicultural societies obsessed with political correctness. Therefore, as Žižek has pointed out, subjective violence we see (the one with a clear identifiable agent) is only the tip of an iceberg made up of "systemic" violence. Regarding systemic violence, it should be emphasized that every state is in a way founded on violence, as many authors have pointed out so far. In the classical definition by Max Weber, the modern state is "that human community within which a defined territory successfully claims for itself the monopoly of legitimate physical violence [or legitimate use of physical force]". Relation between state and violence has particularly been emphasized in classical Marxist theory. Hannah Arendt in her essay on violence accurately affirmed that "violence had not generally been regarded as essential to revolution until recently". In standard Marxist terms, revolutionary violence is a mean of bringing into existence a just society (e.g. a Communist one). Most roots of the theoretical analysis of violence stem from the ideological dimension of Marxism which became the basis for a theory of political violence as such. The very idea that violence may be justified by just ends is today inherently prone to excess, so when Fredric Jameson, for example comments that violence represent a sign of the "authenticity of the revolutionary process", one cannot ignore understated irony in that sentence (or, Arendt who claims that "violence can be justifiable, but it never will be legitimate"). Today's liberal-democratic attitude is based on the idea that acknowledging any aggressive act means to "politically suspend the ethical". Nevertheless, as I mentioned before, today we cannot use same parameters or same tools in the analysis. For example, today's focus on terrorism as a "global" destructing force demands thinking about the way in which ideological frameworks are deployed in justification of violence. That is to say, now one has to try to reformulate distinction between political power and the mere exercise of social violence, as Arendt has done. Going one more time back to Marxist ideas, it is of crucial importance to rethink its classical concepts in a way Balibar did. His critique of the Hegelian-Marxist notion of "converting" violence exclusively into an instrument of historical Reason, i.e. a force that begets a new social formation, ends up with a conclusion that Marxism is fundamentally unable to think any excess of violence that cannot be fully integrated into the narrative of historical Progress. A step further has been taken in Žižek`s recent book on violence where he, following Balibar`s notion of excessive, non-functional violence (not grounded in any utilitarian or ideological reasons), develops a stubbornly provocative idea how we should

relate to it: instead of "aggressive passivity" when people act all the time in such a way that nothing really changes, the solution is in the "passive-aggressive behavior". "Withdrawal into passivity" is thus proclaimed to be the only viable solution on how to react to the violence in contemporary world. This is the reference point of the everlasting utopian idea of revolution. As we know, the revolution without violence is the same kind of a dream of a "revolution without revolution", as Robespierre had put it. Speaking of arguments against "big" political interventions in world today, which aim at a global transformation based on the experience of 20th century catastrophes that unlashed horrible crimes and modes of violence, Žižek in another book names three main approaches regarding that problem: 1) Habermasian approach: he sees Enlightenment basically as emancipatory process with no inherent "totalitarianism", i.e. the violence is born due to the fact it has not been finished yet: 2) Adorno-Horkheimer approach (where one should also include Agamben) – the essence of Enlightenment is today's "administered world" (verwaltete Welt): 3) Balibar sees modernity as a process which opens up both freedoms and dangers. Violence by the oppressor is, paradoxically, better than charity because it openly confesses itself. The ultimate reference to the problem of violence can be found in Benjamin's seminal essays "Theses on Philosophy of History" and "Critique of Violence", two crucial texts which Žižek also analyses at the end of his book. Benjamin drowns his reflections on violence from Georges Sorel, making an apology for a "divine violence" understood as "the heroic assumption of the solitude of the sovereign decision". Divine violence is precisely not a direct intervention of the omnipotent God to punish humankind for its excesses; it ought to be understood as a cataclysmic, purifying violence of the sovereign ethnical deed, quite dissimilar from famous Heidegger's assertion that "only a God can still save us" ("nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten"). "Domain of pure divine violence is the real domain of sovereignty, the domain within which killing is neither an expression of personal pathology (idiosyncratic destructive drive), nor a crime (or its punishment), nor a sacred sacrifice. It is neither aesthetic, nor ethical, nor religious (a sacrifice to dark gods). So, paradoxically, divine violence does partially overlap with the bio-political disposal of homini sacer: in both cases, killing is neither a crime nor a sacrifice. Those annihilated by divine violence are fully and completely guilty: they are not sacrificed, since they are not worthy of being sacrificed to and accepted by God - they are annihilated without being made a sacrifice." This is why Giorgio Agamben`s biopolitical theory perfectly fits into this new theory of violence, giving us deep insights into the structure of the contemporary political constellation. How to define a form of subjectivity that will be truly revolutionary violence, confronting the inauthentic, excessive and illegitimate violence of the state? One should focus more on those "useless" and "excessive" outbursts of violence which display hatred of the Otherness, in accordance with the post-political multiculturalist

universe of tolerance for difference. The problem is that today's "radical democracy" is not "radical" enough: it basically accepts the liberal-capitalist horizon, and the logic of liberal capitalism is so total it makes any alternative unthinkable. Does it ultimately mean that, for example, Žižek offers an alternative which is genuinely progressive and transformative, or does he bring about only the empty negativity of "active nihilism"? Does "doing nothing" means that "resistance is surrender"? Today's Left reacts in a wide variety of ways to the hegemony of global capitalism and its political supplement, liberal democracy. It might accept hegemony but continue to fight for reform within its rules (e.g. Third way) or to do nothing and wait for an outburst of "divine violence". It is not



enough to merely reform the existing system; we need to radically transform the world. Of course, Žižek is not a ground-breaking author regarding that issue: many anti-capitalists assert that "capitalism is violent", believing that private property, trade and profit survive only because state (or police) violence defends them and that capitalist economies unavoidably need war to expand. His notion of "systemic" violence also heavily relies on numerous theories on "structural violence" denoting a form of violence in which social institutions kill people slowly by preventing them from meeting their basic needs, leading further to social conflicts. What is really innovative, and in a way provocative, in his book is the idea of passivity: It is "better to do nothing than to engage in localized acts whose ultimate function is to make the system run smoother (acts like providing the space for the multitude of new subjectivities, etc.) The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to “be active,” to “participate,” to mask the Nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, “do something,” academics participate in meaningless “debates,” etc., and the truly difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw from it. Those in power often prefer even a “critical” participation, a dialogue, to silence – just to engage us in a “dialogue,” to make it sure our ominous passivity is broken." What would then be the most plausible theoretical answer and practical advice regarding this theoretical puzzle in which violence is utterly invisible and does not refer any more to "exertion of physical force in order to injure or abuse", or to intentional and forceful human destruction? We need to rethink it in terms of new biopolitical and biosocial constellation where revolutionary or emancipatory potential might be placed at the same time in the passivity and violent activity. The first step would be, paradoxically, to point out the meaningless of violence, to reject all teleological and theological justifications and empirical analysis, and finally to listen in theoretical silence instead of participating in the noise it constantly produces.


2AC – Capitalism K – Case Outweighs

( ___ ) Framework – Evaluate the implementation of the affirmative versus the implementation of the alternative – key to prevent artificial impact calculus and check against infinite number of discursive frameworks AND Aff choice is the tiebreaker for competitive equity and fairness or it justifies permutation do the affirmative then the alternative for incompatibility. ( ___ ) Case Outweighs

A. Magnitude B. Timeframe C. Probability


2AC – Capitalism K – Link Level

( ___ ) Perm – Do Both The kritik alone fails – criticizing the plan head-on pushes the alternative aside – examining the plan with the criticism in the background allows constant criticism Zizek 89, Senior Researcher in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, Codirector of the Center for Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London, and Distinguished Fashion Expert for Abercrombie and Fitch Quarterly, ’89 (Slavoj, Autumn, “Looking Awry” October, Vol 50 p 30-55, JSTOR) By means of a metaphor of the way anamorphosis functions in painting, Bushy tries to convince the queen that her sorrow has no foundation, that its reasons are null, but the crucial point is the way his metaphor splits, redoubles itself, i.e., the way he entangles himself in contradiction. First ("sorrow's eye, glazed with blinding tears, / Divides one thing entire to many objects"), he refers to the simple, commonsense opposition between a thing as it is "in itself," in reality, and its "shadows," reflections in our eyes, subjective impressions multiplied because of our anxieties and sorrows. When we are worried, a small difficulty assumes giant proportions; we see the thing as far worse than it really is. The metaphor at work here is that of a glass surface sharpened, cut in such a way that it reflects a multitude of images; instead of the tiny substance, we see its "twenty shadows." In the following verses, however, things become complicated. At first sight it seems that Shakespeare only illustrates the fact that "sorrow's eye . . . divides one thing entire to many objects" with a metaphor from the domain of painting ("Like perspectives, which rightly gaz'd upon/Show nothing but confusion; ey'd awry/Distinguish form"), but what he really accomplishes is a radical change of terrain. From the metaphor of a sharpened glass surface he passes to the metaphor of anamorphosis, the logic of which is quite different. A detail of a picture that "rightly gaz'd," i.e., from a straightforward, frontal view, appears a blurred spot, assumes clear, distinct shapes once we look at it "awry," from aside. The verses which apply this metaphor back to the queen's anxiety and sorrow are thus profoundly ambivalent: "so your sweet majesty, / Looking awry upon your lord's departure, / Finds shapes of grief more than himself to wail; / Which, look'd on as it is, is nought but shadows / Of what is not." That is to say, if we take the comparison between the queen's look and the anamorphic look literally, we would be obliged to state that precisely by "looking awry," i.e., from aside, she sees the thing in its clear and distinct form, in opposition to the "straightforward," frontal view which sees only an indistinct confusion (and, incidentally, the further development of the drama fully justifies the queen's most sinister presentiments), But, of course, Bushy did not "want to say" this. His intention was to say quite the opposite: by means of an imperceptible subreption, he returned to the first metaphor (that of a sharpened glass) and "wanted to say" that, because her view is distorted by sorrow and anxiety, the queen sees causes for alarm where a closer, matter-of-fact look attests that there is next to nothing in it. What we have here are thus two realities, two "substances." On the level of the first metaphor, we have the commonsense reality as "substance with twenty shadows," as a thing split into twenty reflections by our subjective view; in short, as a substantial "reality" distorted by our subjective perspective (inflated by our anxiety, etc.). If we look at a thing straight on, from a matter-of-fact perspective, we see it "as it really is," while the look puzzled by our desires and anxieties ("looking awry") gives us a distorted, blurred image of the thing. On the level of the second metaphor (anamorphosis), however, the relation is exactly the opposite: if we look at a thing straight on, i.e., from a matter-of-fact, disinterested, "objective" perspective, we see nothing but a formless spot. The object assumes clear and distinctive features only if we look at it "from aside," i.e., with an "interested" look, with a look supported, permeated, and "distorted" by a desire. This is precisely the Lacanian objet petit a, the object-cause of desire, an object which is, in a way, posited by the desire itself. The paradox of desire is that it posits retroactively its own cause, i.e., an object that can be perceived only by the look "distorted" by desire, an object that does not exist for an "objective" look. In other words, the objet petit a is always, by definition, perceived in a distorted way, because, outside this distortion, "in itself," it does not exist, i.e., because it is nothing but the embodiment, the materialization of this distortion, of this surplus of confusion and perturbation introduced by desire into so-called "objective reality." Objet petit a is "objectively" nothing, it is nothing at all, nothing of the desire itself which, viewed from a certain perspective, assumes the shape of "something." It is, as is formulated in an extremely precise manner by the queen in her response to Bushy, her "something grief" begot by "nothing" ("For nothing hath begot my something grief "). Desire "takes off" when "something" (its object-cause) embodies, gives positive existence to its "nothing," to its void. This "something" is the anamorphic object, a pure semblance that we can perceive clearly only by "looking awry." It is precisely (and only) the logic of desire that belies the notorious wisdom that "nothing comes from nothing." In the movement of desire, "something comes from nothing." It is true that the object-cause of desire is a pure semblance, but this does not prevent it from triggering off a whole chain of consequences which regulate our "material," "effective" life and deeds.


2AC – Capitalism K – Link Level

( ___ ) Perm- Do the plan and reject other instances of Capitalism ( ___ ) Only using capitalism to fight capitalism can be effective Monthly Review, March 1990, v. 41, no. 10, p 38 No institution is or ever has been a seamless monolith. Although the inherent mechanism of American capitalism is as you describe it, oriented solely to profit without regard to social consequences, this does not preclude significant portions of that very system from joining forces with the worldwide effort for the salvation of civilization, perhaps even to the extent of furnishing the margin of success for that very effort.


2AC – Capitalism K – Impact Level

( ___ ) Capitalism is both moral and just. Thompson ’93 C. Bradley Thompson, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Ashland University, ON PRINCIPLE v1n3, “Socialism vs. Capitalism: Which is the Moral System”, October 1993 Despite the intellectuals’ psychotic hatred of capitalism, it is the only moral and just social system. Capitalism is the only moral system because it requires human beings to deal with one another as traders--that is, as free moral agents trading and selling goods and services on the basis of mutual consent. Capitalism is the only just system because the sole criterion that determines the value of thing exchanged is the free, voluntary, universal judgement of the consumer. Coercion and fraud are anathema to the free-market system. It is both moral and just because the degree to which man rises or falls in society is determined by the degree to which he uses his mind. Capitalism is the only social system that rewards merit, ability and achievement, regardless of one’s birth or station in life. ( ___ ) Cap Prevents War Collier, 2k. (Paul Collier, director, Development Research Group at the World Bank; professor of economics at Oxford, 2000, in Greed and Grievance, ed. Berdal and Malone, pp. 97-98) The only result that supports the grievance approach to conflict is that a prior period of rapid economic decline increases the risk of conflict. Each 5 percent of annual growth rate has about the same effect as a year of education for the population in reducing the risk of conflict. Thus, a society in which the economy is growing by 5 percent is around 40 percent safer than one that is declining by 5 percent, other things equal. Presumably, growth gives hope, whereas rapid decline may galvanize people into action. Inequality, whether measured in terms of income or landownership, has no effect on the risk of conflict according to the data. This is, of course, surprising given the attention inequality has received as an explanation of conflict. The results cannot, however, be lightly dismissed. For example, the measures of inequality have proved to be significant in explaining economic growth and so are evidenfly not so noisy as to lack explanatory power. Nor is our result dependent upon a particular specification. Anke Hoeffler and I have experimented with well over a hundred variants of our core specification, and in none of these is inequality a significant cause of conflict. (By contrast, primary commodity exports are always significant.)



( ___ ) Space A SUBPOINT – Growth key to Space Robin Hanson, assistant professor of economics, George Mason University, Oct. 18, 2001, URL: http://hanson.gmu.edu/wildideas.html If our growth does not stop, it must continue. And it cannot continue this long without enabling and encouraging massive space colonization. Spatial/material growth requires it, technical growth enables it, and economic growth induces technical growth. B SUBPOINT – Key to Survival MARK CARREAU, The Houston Chronicle, October 19, 2002, Saturday 3 STAR EDITION, SECTION: A; Pg. 01 With Apollo astronaut John Young leading the charge, top aerospace experts warned Friday that humanity's survival may depend on how boldly the world's space agencies venture into the final frontier. Only a spacefaring culture with the skills to travel among and settle planets can be assured of escaping a collision between Earth and a large asteroid or devastation from the eruption of a super volcano, they told the World Space Congress. "Space exploration is the key to the future of the human race," said Young, who strolled on the moon more than 30 years ago and now serves as the associate director of NASA's Johnson Space Center. "We should be running scared to go out into the solar system. We should be running fast." Scientists believe that an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs more than 60 million years ago, and are gathering evidence of previously large collisions. "The civilization of Earth does not have quite as much protection as we would like to believe," said Leonid Gorshkov, an exploration strategist with RSC Energia, one of Russia's largest aerospace companies. "We should not place all of our eggs in one basket."



( ___ ) Proliferation A SUBPOINT – Economic Growth Solves Proliferation Silk, 93. (Leonard Silk, Pace Econ Professor. 1993. “Dangers of Slow Growth” Foreign Affairs.) In the absence of such shifts of human and capital resources to expanding civilian industries, there are strong economic pressures on arms-producing nations to maintain high levels of military production and to sell weapons, both conventional and dual-use nuclear technology, wherever buyers can be found. Without a revival of national economies and the global economy, the production and proliferation of weapons will continue, creating more Iraqs, Yugoslavias, Somalias, Cambodias – or worse. B SUBPOINT – Proliferation Causes Extinction Utgoff, 2k2. (Victor A. Utgoff, Deputy Director of Strategy, Forces, and Resources Division of Institute for Defense Analysis. “Proliferation, Missile Defence and American Ambitions” Survival, Summer, pg. 90.) In sum, widespread proliferation is likely to lead to an occasional shoot-out with nuclear weapons, and that such shoot-outs will have a substantial probability of escalating to the maximum destruction possible with the weapons at hand. Unless nuclear proliferation is stopped, we are headed toward a world that will mirror the American Wild West of the late 1800s. With most, if not all, nations wearing nuclear 'six-shooters' on their hips, the world may even be a more polite place than it is today, but every once in a while we will all gather on a hill to bury the bodies of dead cities or even whole nations.


2AC – Capitalism K – Alternative Level

( ___ ) Their authors are wrong—capitalism will never collapse, multiple warrants prove The Times (India) 10/5/11 (“This debate is irrelevant” http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/opinion/edit-page/Need-to-look-beyond-capitalism/articleshow/articleshow/5261702.cms) Here we go again. Ever since the credit crisis at the end of 2007 morphed into a full-blown financial debacle with the demise of Lehman Brothers in September last year, some commentators have seized on it as ultimate proof that Karl Marx was right, after all, and that capitalism is doomed to failure. Mankind's only saving grace is socialism, and the sooner world economy is restructured to a communist framework, the better off we'll be. Representatives at the 11th meeting of the communist and workers' parties in New Delhi

made a declaration to precisely that effect on Sunday. Such an argument is particularly galling, coming as it does 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism as any kind of alternative to a capitalist system because of people's revolutions within its fold. Over the past couple of years, the capitalist system has certainly faced its share of challenges. But unlike what over-enthusiastic commentators would have us believe, the system is not near collapse. Indeed, the way the world is recovering from the crisis is proof positive that capitalism, as a system, is flexible enough to absorb the shocks dealt out by circumstance and to adapt itself to accommodate the interests of as many groups as possible. Many of the newfound supporters of socialism mistakenly believe that John Maynard Keynes, whose particular brand of economics has made a comeback since the financial crisis began, was a socialist. Keynes is the man who rescued capitalism by injecting it with a sense of social

responsibility. It is also an unalterable fact that several of Eastern Europe's formerly communist nations were mired in poverty until freed from the shackles of socialism. India and China, among other Asian nations, have made tremendous strides in reducing absolute poverty over the last two decades by embracing market reforms. Capitalism's demise has been greatly exaggerated. Indeed, each crisis makes it more resilient, because this is a system that can learn from its mistakes. Socialism might seem attractive now, 20 years after it stopped being a viable alternative, but most would agree that life under that system was rather less bearable than life is today.



( ___ ) Your socialist revolution is nothing more than an excuse for mass killing----every genocide in history, without exception, has been carried out by aspiring socialist revolutionists like you George Irbe, Canadian Department of Environment and political journalist, 1/26/01 (http://jonjayray.netfirms.com/irbe.html) Kuehnelt-Leddihn has conducted studies into the historical origins of modern Leftism. His first book, published in 1974 as "Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse", was updated in 1990 as "Leftism Revisited". In his view, humans are subject to two basic drives: identity and diversity. The drive for diversity creates a demand for individual liberty. But the co-existing drive for identity, which, incidentally, Hayek ascribes to the inherited vestiges of ancient tribalism, nurtures a desire to be identified with a group and to seek conformity, sameness and equality within that group. Kuehnelt-Leddihn proposes that undesirable characteristics like fear and hatred of people outside ones group, and envy of classes of people perceived to be better off or superior to ones own class are psychological malignancies inherent in the drive for identity; and that the bloody outrages of Leftist revolutions are manifestations of unrestrained mass venting of the blind rage aroused by envy and xenophobic hatred. Kuehnelt-Leddihn makes the following observations about the first instance of organized selective mass murders in modern times that occurred during the French Revolution: 'In spite of Rousseauistic fancies, the depravity of which the average man is capable soon became evident. People literally danced around the guillotines. Various military and civil commanders openly and officially boasted about their bestial deeds, which in all their sick horror were perpetrated above all against the "internal enemy". Kuehnelt-Leddihn relates from the available historical record of the French Revolution graphic descriptions of macabre atrocities and of campaigns to exterminate entire populations in the name of the revolution. In his words: 'Mass murder had become the order of the day in France'. Further on he draws a telling comparison between the French Revolution and those that followed in the 20th century: 'The picture painted by dogmatic socialism in action is strikingly similar to that of the French Revolution. And no wonder, since the leadership had a very similar sociological structure: bitter and confused members of the nobility, murderously idealistic intellectual bourgeois, and alienated wicked priests, friars, and seminarians. There was almost the same mob violence, high-flown speeches, declamatory writings, destruction of ancient buildings, desecration of tombs and cemeteries, furious attacks against religion, one-track political thinking, and turmoil in the countryside accompanied by arson and robbery'. At least since Marx and Engels, if not before, Leftists have explained their revolutions in terms of class struggle, and have postured themselves as devoted champions of the noble cause of the working class. In the above quotation Kuehnelt-Leddihn reminds us that the coercive utopians and the simply opportunistic criminal rogues who led the revolutions came from every social and economic class. [continues] George Watson, a historian of the modern era who is presently engaged in writing a comprehensive history of socialism, puts it well in an article in the Dec.31, 1995 issue of the National Review, titled "Never blame the left". He writes: "The Left is perceived as kind and caring, despite its extensive history of promoting genocide."; and further: ".. in modern Europe, genocide has been exclusively a socialist idea, ever since Engels proclaimed it in Marx's journal the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in January-February 1849. Ever since then everyone who has advocated genocide has called himself a socialist, without exception



( ___ ) Turn – Transition Wars Kothari, 82. (Kothari, Professor of Political Science at University of Delhi, 1982. “Towards a Just Social Order” pg. 571) Attempts at global economic reform could also lead to a world racked by increasing turbulence, a greater sense of insecurity among the major centres of power -- and hence to a further tightening of the structures of domination and domestic repression – producing in their wake an intensification of the old arms race and militarization of regimes, encouraging regional conflagrations and setting the stage for eventual global holocaust.


2AC – Capitalism K – Theory Level

( ___ ) The alt is vague – that lets them shift out of any disads to the alt and also lets them recharacterize it in the 2ar – its not reciprocal – voting issue for competitive equity ( ___ ) Utopian fiat is bad – not reciprocal since we are stuck to the resolution – and also sidesteps the core literature base of the topic – also forces the 2AC to spend extra time to compensate ( ___ ) Floating PIKs Bad – Voting issue for fairness – A) Multiple Worlds – kritik conditionality moots 1AC because they can decide

to solve case – destroys 2AC time allocation and 1AR strategy. B) Ground – Kritik steals all of the 1AC – forces 2AC to generate all new

offense. ( ___ ) No text to Alt Bad voting issue for fairness

A. Reciprocity- You’d laugh at an aff that proposes a plan but didn’t write a text

B. Moving target bad- Text is the only stable advocacy, otherwise they can dodge out of turns and solvency attacks by changing their alternative in the next speech.

C. Time and strategy skew- We don’t know what the alternative actually is until the rebuttals, wasting our only constructive to create offense against the K.

D. Can’t prove competitiveness- We don’t know what we can perm if there’s no text, and they’ll just change their alt accordingly

1nc – capitalism k – link – generic inservice kritik lecture /yim 1 1nc – capitalism k –...

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