Link – Hegemony · Web viewWest Coast Publishing1. Capitalism Good/Bad. Capitalism Good/Bad....

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Capitalism Good/Bad

Capitalism Bad – Marxism Shell................................................................................................................................................................................2Capitalism Bad – Link – Hegemony...........................................................................................................................................................................3Capitalism Bad – Link – Hegemony...........................................................................................................................................................................4Capitalism Bad – Link – Ruling-Class Narratives.......................................................................................................................................................5Capitalism Bad – Link – Foreign Policy.....................................................................................................................................................................6Capitalism Bad – Extinction......................................................................................................................................................................................7Capitalism Bad – Extinction......................................................................................................................................................................................8Capitalism Bad – War................................................................................................................................................................................................9Capitalism Bad – Genocidal Violence.....................................................................................................................................................................10Capitalism Bad – Genocidal Violence.....................................................................................................................................................................11Capitalism Bad – Poverty........................................................................................................................................................................................12Capitalism Bad – Moral Obligation.........................................................................................................................................................................13Capitalism Bad – Flawed Ontology.........................................................................................................................................................................14Capitalism Bad – Environment...............................................................................................................................................................................15Capitalism Bad – Warming.....................................................................................................................................................................................16Capitalism Bad – Democracy..................................................................................................................................................................................17Capitalism Bad – Alternative – Withdrawal............................................................................................................................................................18Capitalism Bad – Alternative – Withdrawal............................................................................................................................................................19Capitalism Bad – Alternative – Social Movements.................................................................................................................................................20Capitalism Bad – Alternative – Marxism................................................................................................................................................................21Capitalism Bad – Alternative – Marxism................................................................................................................................................................22Capitalism Bad – Alternative Solvency...................................................................................................................................................................23Capitalism Bad – Alternative Solvency...................................................................................................................................................................24Capitalism Bad – Alternative Solvency...................................................................................................................................................................25Capitalism Bad – A2: Permutation..........................................................................................................................................................................26Capitalism Bad – A2: Permutation..........................................................................................................................................................................27Capitalism Bad – A2: Permutation..........................................................................................................................................................................28Capitalism Bad – A2: Space.....................................................................................................................................................................................29Capitalism Bad – A2: Growth..................................................................................................................................................................................30Capitalism Bad – A2: Alternative is Violent............................................................................................................................................................31Capitalism Bad – A2: Robinson and Tormey...........................................................................................................................................................32

Capitalism Good – Mass Violence..........................................................................................................................................................................33Capitalism Good – Terrorism..................................................................................................................................................................................34Capitalism Good – Environment.............................................................................................................................................................................35Capitalism Good – Space........................................................................................................................................................................................36Capitalism Good – Warming...................................................................................................................................................................................37Capitalism Good – Middle East Stability.................................................................................................................................................................38Capitalism Good – Israeli-Lebanon Relations.........................................................................................................................................................39Capitalism Good – Poverty.....................................................................................................................................................................................40Capitalism Good – Poverty.....................................................................................................................................................................................41Capitalism Good – Quality of Life...........................................................................................................................................................................42Capitalism Good – A2: Resource Scarcity...............................................................................................................................................................43Capitalism Good – A2: Root Cause of Violence......................................................................................................................................................44Capitalism Good – Alternative is Oppressive.........................................................................................................................................................45Capitalism Good – Alternative is Oppressive.........................................................................................................................................................46Capitalism Good – Alternative Fails – Capitalism Inevitable..................................................................................................................................47Capitalism Good – Alternative Fails – Capitalism Inevitable..................................................................................................................................48Capitalism Good – Alternative Fails – Capitalism Inevitable..................................................................................................................................49Capitalism Good – Marxism Fails............................................................................................................................................................................50Capitalism Good – Marxism Fails............................................................................................................................................................................51Capitalism Good – Marxism Dehumanizes.............................................................................................................................................................52Capitalism Good – Marxism is Immoral..................................................................................................................................................................53Capitalism Good – Marxism is Violent....................................................................................................................................................................54Capitalism Good – Class-Consciousness Fails.........................................................................................................................................................55Capitalism Good – Permutation Solves..................................................................................................................................................................56


Capitalism Bad – Marxism Shell

A. WORKING PEOPLE ARE SILENCED FROM ALL BOURGEOIS FOREIGN POLICY DISCUSSIONJack Barnes, National Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, NEW INTERNATIONAL 7, 1991, p. 199.

The tactical divisions in the ruling class are real, and we haven’t found it difficult to explain the reasons for them. They enable us to see the dangerous character of the con—promoted by the bourgeois press—that the debate in Congress pushes us further from the war. The truth is the opposite. The imperialist assumptions and goals shared by both Democratic and Republican party politicians, and the bipartisan policies they have already set in motion, are the very ingredients propelling forward the probability that the siege war will become a massive ground war (perhaps with a devastating air war as a prelude). Workers and farmers, as well as any authentic opponent of Washington’s course toward war, have no voice, no representatives in Congress of any kind.

B. CAPITALISM UTILIZES ADVOCACIES LIKE THE AFFIRMATIVE TO PUT FORWARD ILLUSORY GENERAL INTERESTS, PERPETUALLY JUSTIFYING THE NEED FOR FURTHER IDEOLOGICAL CONTROLKarl Marx and Frederick Engels, founders of modern socialist theory, THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY, 1991, p. 54.

Just because individuals seek only their particular interest, which for them does not coincide with their communal interest, the latter will be imposed on them as an interest “alien” to them, and “independent” of them, as in its turn a particular, peculiar “general” interest: or they themselves must remain within this discord, as in democracy. On the other hand, too, the practical struggle of those particular interests, which constantly really run counter to the communal and illusory communal interests, makes practical intervention and control necessary through the illusory “general” interest in the form of the State.

C. REJECTION OF CAPITALISM IS NECESSARY FOR SURVIVAL: PERMUTATIONS ARE ONLY WISHFUL THINKINGIstvan Meszaros, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex, 2001.SOCIALISM OR BARBARISM: FROM THE ‘AMERICAN CENTURY’ TO THE CROSSROADS, p. 80.

Those who talk about the “third way” as the solution to our dilemma, asserting that there can be no room for the revival of a radical mass movement, either want to deceive us by cynically calling their slavish acceptance of the ruling order “the third way,” or fail to realize the gravity of the situation, putting their faith in a wishfully non-conflictual positive outcome that has been promised for nearly a century but never approximated even by one inch. The uncomfortable truth of the matter is that if there is no future for a radical mass movement in our time, there can be no future for humanity itself. If I had to modify Rosa Luxemburg’s dramatic words, in relation to the dangers we now face, I would add to “socialism or barbarism” this qualification: “barbarism if we are lucky.” For the extermination of humanity is the ultimate concomitant of capital’s destructive course of development. And the world of that third possibility, beyond the alternatives of “socialism or barbarism,” would be fit only for cockroaches, which are said to be able to endure lethally high levels of nuclear radiation.


Capitalism Bad – Link – Hegemony

US hegemony just props up the capitalist system, which will inevitably collapseNick Beams, National Secretary of Australian Socialist Equality Party, 2003 “The Political Economy of American Militarism, part 2” July 2, www.wsws.org/articles/2003/jul2003/nb2-j11_prn.shtml

The immediate impetus for the drive to global domination by the US is rooted in the crisis of capitalist accumulation, expressed in the persistent downward pressure on the rate of profit and the failure of the most strenuous efforts over the past 25 years to overcome it. But it is more than this. At the most fundamental level, the eruption of US imperialism represents a desperate attempt to overcome, albeit in a reactionary manner, the central contradiction that has bedeviled the capitalist system for the best part of the last century.The US came to economic and political ascendancy as World War I exploded. The war, as Trotsky analysed, was rooted in the contradiction between the development of the productive forces on a global scale and the division of the world among competing great powers. Each of these powers sought to resolve the contradiction by establishing its own ascendancy, thereby coming into collision with its rivals. The Russian Revolution, conceived of and carried forward as the first step in the international socialist revolution, was the first attempt of a detachment of the working class to resolve the contradiction between world economy and the outmoded nation-state framework on a progressive basis. Ultimately, the forces of capitalism proved too strong and the working class, as a result of a tragic combination of missed opportunities and outright betrayals, was unable to carry this program forward. But the historical problem that had erupted with such volcanic force—the necessity to reorganise the globally developed productive forces of mankind on a new and higher foundation, to free them from the destructive fetters of private property and the nation-state system—did not disappear. It was able to be suppressed for a period. But the very development of capitalist production itself ensured that it would come to the surface once again, even more explosively than in the past. The US conquest of Iraq must be placed within this historical and political context. The drive for global domination represents the attempt by American imperialism to resolve the central contradiction of world capitalism by creating a kind of global American empire, operating according to the rules of the “free market” interpreted in accordance with the economic needs and interests of US capital, and policed by its military and the military forces of its allies. This deranged vision of global order was set out by Bush in his address to West Point graduates on June 1, 2002. The US, he said, now had the best chance since the rise of the nation-state in the seventeenth century to “build a world where great powers compete in peace instead of prepare for war.” Competition between great nations was inevitable, but war was not. That was because “America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge thereby making the destabilising arms races of other eras pointless and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace.” This proposal to reorganise the world is even more reactionary than when it was first advanced in 1914. The US push for global domination, driven on as it is by the crisis in the very heart of the profit system, cannot bring peace, much less prosperity, but only deepening attacks on the world’s people, enforced by military and dictatorial forms of rule.

US hegemony only exists to further global capitalism through military interventionsJohn Bellamy Foster, editor of the Monthly Review, December 2001, “Imperialism and ‘Empire’,” The Monthly Review, Vol 53, No 7, http://www.monthlyreview.org/1201jbf.htm

At the present stage of the global development of capital, Mészáros insists, “it is no longer possible to avoid facing up to a fundamental contradiction and structural limitation of the system. That limitation is its grave failure to constitute the state of the capital system as such, as complementary to its transnational aspirations and articulation.” Thus it is here that “the United States dangerously bent on assuming the role of the state of the capital system as such, subsuming under itself by all means at its disposal all rival powers,” enters in, as the closest thing to a “state of the capital system .” (pp. 28-29). But the United States, while it was able to bring a halt to the decline in its economic position relative to the other leading capitalist states, is unable to achieve sufficient economic dominance by itself to govern the world system—which is, in any case, ungovernable. It therefore seeks to utilize its immense military power to establish its global preeminence.* “What is at stake today,” Mészáros writes, 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. This is what the ultimate rationality of globally developed capital requires, in its vain attempt to bring under control its irreconcilable antagonisms. The trouble is, though, that such rationality—which can be written without inverted commas, since it genuinely corresponds to the logic of capital at the present historical stage of global development-—is at the same time the most extreme irrationality in history, including the

http://www.monthlyreview.org/1201jbf.htm#hegemony


Nazi conception of world domination, as far as the conditions required for the survival of humanity are concerned (pp. 37-38).


Capitalism Bad – Link – Hegemony

Global wars are just an outgrowth of US hegemonic attempts to further the capitalist orderJohn Bellamy Foster, editor of the Monthly Review, December 2001, “Imperialism and ‘Empire’,” The Monthly Review, Vol 53, No 7, http://www.monthlyreview.org/1201jbf.htm

Among the disquieting developments that Socialism or Barbarism points to are: the enormous toll in Iraqi civilian causalities during the war on Iraq and the death of more than a half million children as a result of sanctions since the war; the military onslaught on and occupation of the Balkans; the expansion of NATO to the East; the new U.S. policy of employing NATO as an offensive military force that can substitute for the United Nations; U.S. attempts to further circumvent and undermine the United Nations; the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade; the development of the Japan-U.S. Security treaty aimed at China; and the growth of an aggressive U.S. military stance with regard to China—increasingly seen as the emerging rival superpower. Over the longer run even the present apparent harmony between the United States and the European Union cannot be taken for granted, as the United States continues to pursue its quest for global domination. Nor is there an answer to this problem within the system at this stage in the development of capital. Globalization, Mészáros argues, has made a global state imperative for capital, but the inherent character of capital’s social metabolic process, which demands a plurality of capitals, makes this impossible. “The potentially deadliest phase of imperialism” thus has to do with the expanding circle of barbarism and destruction that such conditions are bound to produce.

US military deployments are the vital internal link to the exercise of global capitalismMonthly Review, 2002, v. 52, no. 10, “U.S. Military Bases and Empire,” http://www.monthlyreview.org/0302editr.htm

The United States, as we have seen, has built a chain of military bases and staging areas around the globe, as a means of deploying air and naval forces to be used on a moment’s notice—all in the interest of maintaining its political and economic hegemony. These bases are not, as was the case for Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, simply integral parts of a colonial empire, but rather take on even greater importance, “in the absence of colonialism.”* The United States, which has sought to maintain an imperial economic system without formal political controls over the territorial sovereignty of other nations, has employed these bases to exert force against those nations that have sought to break out of the imperial system altogether, or that have attempted to chart an independent course that is perceived as threatening U.S. interests. Without the worldwide dispersion of U.S. military forces in these bases, and without the U.S. predisposition to employ them in its military interventions, it would be impossible to keep many of the more dependent economic territories of the periphery from breaking away. U.S. global political, economic, and financial power thus require the periodic exercise of military power. The other advanced capitalist countries tied into this system have also become reliant on the United States as the main enforcer of the rules of the game. The positioning of U.S. military bases should therefore be judged not as a purely military phenomenon, but as a mapping out of the U.S.-dominated imperial sphere and of its spearheads within the periphery. What is clear at present and bears repeating is that such bases are now being acquired in areas where the United States had previously lost much of its “forward presence,” such as in South Asia, the Middle East/Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean, or in regions where U.S. bases have not existed previously, such as the Balkans and Central Asia. There can be no doubt, therefore, that the last remaining superpower is presently on a course of imperial expansion, as a means of promoting its political and economic interests, and that the present war on terrorism, which is in many ways an indirect product of the projection of U.S. power, is now being used to justify the further projection of that power. For those who choose to oppose these developments there should be no illusion. The global expansion of military power on the part of the hegemonic state of world capitalism is an integral part of economic globalization. To say no to this form of military expansionism is to say no at the same time to capitalist globalization and imperialism and hence to capitalism itself.


Capitalism Bad – Link – Ruling-Class Narratives

1. ALL POLICY ACTIONS REPRODUCE CAPITALIST CONSCIOUSNESSSamir Amin, Director of Third World Forum in Dekar, Senegal, July-August 2003.MONTHLY REVIEW, p. 15.

Politically, the U.S. state is designed to serve the economy and nothing else, abolishing the contradictory and dialectical relationship between economy and politics. The genocide carried out against the Native Americans, the enslavement of the blacks, the successive waves of immigration into the United States leading to the predominance of ethnic and racial conflict, as manipulated by the ruling class, at the expense of the maturation of class consciousness—have all combined to produce the political monopoly of U.S. society by the single party of capital. Both segments of this party share the same strategic global vision, though addressing their rhetoric to different “constituencies,” themselves drawn from the less than half of U.S. society that believes sufficiently in the system to bother voting. Not benefiting from the tradition by which the social democratic workers’ parties and the communists marked the formation of modern European political culture, American society does not have the ideological instruments at its disposal to allow it to resist the dictatorship of capital. On the contrary, capital shapes every aspect of this society’s way of thinking, and reproduces itself by reinforcing the kind of deep-seated racism that allows U.S. society to see itself as constituting a master race.

2. UPHOLDING RULING CLASS NARRATIVES ENTRENCHES CAPITALIST DOMINANCEKarl Marx and Frederick Engels, Founders of Modern Socialist Theory, 1991.THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY, p. 64.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.

3. ACCEPTING BOURGEOIS EXPLANATIONS FOR HARMS UNDERMINES REVOLUTIONARY CONSCIOUSNESSJack Barnes, National Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, 1994.NEW INTERNATIONAL 10, p. 316.

All these “explanations” have one thing in common: the problem for them has nothing to do with capitalism, only with its “excesses.” Impoverishment, unemployment, racism, women’s oppression, ecological destruction, fascism, and war have nothing necessarily to do with the fact that one class comprising a tiny percentage of the population grows wealthy off the labor of working people in city and countryside who make up the overwhelming majority. And, of course, their solutions have nothing to do with workers organizing themselves politically to transform their self-defense organizations, the unions, into the vanguard of a social movement of all the oppressed and exploited. Their solution has nothing to do with working people forging a revolutionary movement to fight for a workers and farmers government, open the road to socialism, and begin transforming themselves into more truly human beings as they do so. These are the conclusions the capitalist rulers do not want workers and youth to begin drawing.


Capitalism Bad – Link – Foreign Policy

1. THE LOGIC OF CAPITAL REQUIRES THE SYSTEMATIC EXCLUSION OF THE WORKING CLASS, GUARANTEEING IDEOLOGICAL CAMOFLAUGE IN ALL POLICYMAKINGIstvan Meszaros, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex, 2001. SOCIALISM OR BARBARISM: FROM THE ‘AMERICAN CENTURY’ TO THE CROSSROADS, p. 71-72.

The hierarchical/conflictual articulation of capital remains the system’s overall structuring principle, no matter how large, indeed how gigantic even, its constitutive units might be. This is due to the innermost nature of the system’s decision-making processes. Given the irreconcilable structural antagonism between capital and labor, the latter must be categorically excluded from all meaningful decision making. This must be the case not only at the most comprehensive level but even at the constitutive “microcosms” in the particular productive units. For capital, as the alienated power of decision making, cannot possibly function without making its decisions absolutely unquestioned (by the labor force) in the particular workshops, or by the rival production complexes at the intermediary level, in a given country, or even at the most comprehensive scale (by the commanding personnel in charge of other internationally competing units). This is why capital’s mode of decision making—in all known and feasible varieties of the capital system—must be a top-down authoritarian way of managing the various enterprises. Understandably, therefore, all talk about labor “sharing power” with, or “participating” in the decision-making processes of capital belongs to the realm of pure fiction, if not to the cynical camouflage of the real state of affairs.

2. THE WORKING CLASS NEEDS CRITICAL SPACE TO DISCUSS AND PROTEST BOURGEOIS FOREIGN POLICYJack Barnes, National Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, 1991. NEW INTERNATIONAL 7, p. 199.

What the working class movement needs is space to organize a broad public discussion of the connection between the rulers’ war policies at home and abroad; space to organize active opposition to those policies in the factories and through our unions; space to join with all those willing to debate the issues in a civil manner, and to take out protest to the streets; space to engage in politics in the class interests of workers, farmers, and our allies here and around the world.

3. THE WORKING CLASS HAS NO FOREIGN POLICY: SUPPORTING BOURGEOIS SOLUTIONS PITS WORKERS AGAINST ONE ANOTHERJack Barnes, National Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, 1991. NEW INTERNATIONAL 7, p. 200.

The working class has no foreign policy. The labor movement has no foreign policy. The labor officialdom faithfully pushes the foreign policy of the employers and does what the bosses tell them to do. But the labor movement—the workers, the ranks, who are the unions—has no foreign policy. The classes who die in the wars waged by the bosses’ parties and the government—and who are pitted in those wars against working people like ourselves in other countries—have no foreign policy.

4. U.S. FOREIGN POLICY IS AN EXTENSION OF CAPITALIST DISCIPLINARY TACTICSJack Barnes, National Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, 1991. NEW INTERNATIONAL 7, p. 109.

This helps us understand more concretely how the foreign policy of the U.S. imperialist rulers is an extension of their domestic policy, not vice versa. There can be big differences at any given time as to the amount of force the rulers feel they need to apply in a concentrated way abroad and at home, depending on the depth of the economic and social crisis and resistance of the toilers. But all the methods that the rulers use against toilers abroad will be used when necessary against workers and farmers at home, and build on methods they are already using here. The rulers don’t have one set of standards toward working people in Basra and another toward working people in Brooklyn, Des Moines, and Los Angeles. The fate of the former simply shows the future of the latter, if power is not wrested by the exploited from the hands of the exploiters.


Capitalism Bad – Extinction

1. EACH DELAY IN OPPOSING CAPITALISM THREATENS HUMAN SURVIVALIstvan Meszaros, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex, 2001. SOCIALISM OR BARBARISM: FROM THE ‘AMERICAN CENTURY’ TO THE CROSSROADS, p. 9.

Indeed, the uncritical defenders of the established order confidently anticipate that not only the coming century but the whole of the next millennium is destined to conform to the unchallengeable rules of Pax Americana. Yes, no matter how much the relation of forces has been realigned in capital’s favor in the last decade, the deep-seated causes beneath the major social earthquakes of the twentieth century mentioned above—to which one could add quite a few more, positive and negative alike, including two world wars—have not been resolved by subsequent developments. On the contrary, with every new phase of forced postponement the capital system’s contradictions can only be aggravated, bringing with them ever greater danger for the very survival of humanity.

2. WE MUST CONFRONT AMERICAN CAPITALISM TO AVOID HUMAN EXTINCTIONIstvan Meszaros, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex, 2001.SOCIALISM OR BARBARISM: FROM THE ‘AMERICAN CENTURY’ TO THE CROSSROADS, p. 9-10.

The insolubility of our social antagonisms, coupled with capital’s uncontrollability, may well continue to generate for some time the atmosphere of triumphalism as well as the disorienting illusions of permanency, as they did in the recent past. But in due course the accumulating and destructively intensifying problems must be confronted. For if the next century is really going to be capital’s triumphant “American century,” there will be no more centuries for humans afterwards, let alone a full millennium.

3. ABANDONMENT OF LIBERAL ILLUSIONS IS THE KEY TO RESIST U.S. IMPERIALISM, WHICH WILL DESTROY HUMANITYSamir Amin, Director of Third World Forum in Dekar, Senegal, July-August 2003.MONTHLY REVIEW, p. 21.

The militarist program adopted by the United States now threatens all peoples. It is the expression of the logic adopted by Adolf Hitler—to change social and economic relations by military force in favor of the master race of the day. This program, now filling toe foreground, overdetermines all political circumstances, since the pursuit of such a program weakens advances obtainable through social and democratic struggle. Halting the U.S. militarist program becomes, therefore, a major aim and responsibility for all. Success in this struggle will depend on the capacity of people everywhere to rid themselves of liberal illusions, since there will never be an authentically liberal globalized economy.

4. CAPITALISM THREATENS THE FOUNDATIONS OF HUMAN SURVIVALSlavoj Zizek, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 1999, The Ticklish Subject, pg. 350-351

The paradigmatic case of 'risk', which is not simply one among many out risk 'as such', is that of a new scientific-technological invention put to use by a private corporation without proper public democratic debate and control, then generating the spectre of unforeseen cata¬strophic long-term consequences. However, is not this kind of risk rooted in the fact that the logic of market and profitability is driving privately owned corporations to pursue their course and use scientific and techno¬logical innovations (or simply expand their production) without actually taking account of the long-term effects of such activity on the environ¬ment, as well as the health of humankind itself? Thus - despite all the talk about a 'second modernity' which compels us to leave the old ideological dilemmas of Left and Right, of capitalism versus socialism, and so on, behind - is not the conclusion to be drawn that in the present global situation, in which private corporations outside public political control are making decisions which can affect us all, even up to our chances of survival, the only solution lies in a kind of direct socialization of the productive process - in moving towards a society in which global decisions about the fundamental orientation of how to develop and use productive capacities at the disposal of society would somehow be made by the entire collective of the people affected by such decisions?


Capitalism Bad – Extinction

1. EACH DELAY IN OPPOSING CAPITALISM THREATENS HUMAN SURVIVALIstvan Meszaros, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex, 2001. SOCIALISM OR BARBARISM: FROM THE ‘AMERICAN CENTURY’ TO THE CROSSROADS, p. 9.

Indeed, the uncritical defenders of the established order confidently anticipate that not only the coming century but the whole of the next millennium is destined to conform to the unchallengeable rules of Pax Americana. Yes, no matter how much the relation of forces has been realigned in capital’s favor in the last decade, the deep-seated causes beneath the major social earthquakes of the twentieth century mentioned above—to which one could add quite a few more, positive and negative alike, including two world wars—have not been resolved by subsequent developments. On the contrary, with every new phase of forced postponement the capital system’s contradictions can only be aggravated, bringing with them ever greater danger for the very survival of humanity.

2. WE MUST CONFRONT AMERICAN CAPITALISM TO AVOID HUMAN EXTINCTIONIstvan Meszaros, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex, 2001.SOCIALISM OR BARBARISM: FROM THE ‘AMERICAN CENTURY’ TO THE CROSSROADS, p. 9-10.

The insolubility of our social antagonisms, coupled with capital’s uncontrollability, may well continue to generate for some time the atmosphere of triumphalism as well as the disorienting illusions of permanency, as they did in the recent past. But in due course the accumulating and destructively intensifying problems must be confronted. For if the next century is really going to be capital’s triumphant “American century,” there will be no more centuries for humans afterwards, let alone a full millennium.

3. ABANDONMENT OF LIBERAL ILLUSIONS IS THE KEY TO RESIST U.S. IMPERIALISM, WHICH WILL DESTROY HUMANITYSamir Amin, Director of Third World Forum in Dekar, Senegal, July-August 2003.MONTHLY REVIEW, p. 21.

The militarist program adopted by the United States now threatens all peoples. It is the expression of the logic adopted by Adolf Hitler—to change social and economic relations by military force in favor of the master race of the day. This program, now filling toe foreground, overdetermines all political circumstances, since the pursuit of such a program weakens advances obtainable through social and democratic struggle. Halting the U.S. militarist program becomes, therefore, a major aim and responsibility for all. Success in this struggle will depend on the capacity of people everywhere to rid themselves of liberal illusions, since there will never be an authentically liberal globalized economy.


Capitalism Bad – War

Capitalism leads to war and extinctionIstvan Mezaros, Professor Emeritus at the University of Sussex, April 2000, Socialism or Barbarism, p. 37-38

The military dimension of all this must be taken very seriously. It is no exaggeration to say-in view of the formerly quite unimaginable destructive power of armaments accumulated in the second half of the twentieth century-that we have entered the most dangerous phase of imperialism in all history. For 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. This is what the ultimate rationality of globally developed capital requires, in its vain attempt to bring under control its irreconcilable antagonisms. The trouble is, though, that such rationality-which can be written without inverted commas, since it genuinely corresponds to the logic of capital at the present historical stage of global development-is at the same time the most extreme form of irrationality in history, including the Nazi conception of world domination, as far as the conditions required for the survival of humanity are concerned. When Jonas Salk refused to patent his discovery, the polio vaccine, insisting that it would be like wanting "to patent the sun," he could not imagine that the time would come when capital would attempt to do just that, trying to patent not only the sun but also the air, even if that had to be coupled with dismissing any concern about the mortal dangers which such aspirations and actions carried with them for human survival. For the ultimate logic of capital in its processes of decision making can only be of a categorically authoritarian "top-down" variety, from the microcosms of small economic enterprises to the highest levels of political and military decisionmaking. But how can one enforce the patents taken out on the sun and the air? There are two prohibitive obstacles in this regard, even if capital-in its drive to demolish its own untranscendable limits- must refuse to acknowledge them. The first is that the plurality of capitals cannot be eliminated, no matter how inexorable and brutal the monopolistic trend of development manifest in the system. And the second, that the corresponding plurality of social labor cannot be eliminated, so as to turn the total labor force of humankind, with all its national and sectional varieties and divisions, into the mindless "obedient servant" of the hegemonically dominant section of capital. For labor in its insurmountable plurality can never abdicate its right of access to the air and the sun; and even less can it survive for capital's continued benefit-an absolute must for this mode of controlling social metabolic reproduction-without the sun and the air.

Capitalism can only result in unending warSamir Amin, director of the Third World Forum in Senegal, 2004, The Liberal Virus, pg. 23-4

In fact, the global expansion of capitalism, because it is polar¬izing, always implies the political intervention of the dominant powers, that is, the states of the system’s center, in the societies of the dominated periphery. This expansion cannot occur by the’ force of economic laws alone; it is necessary to complement that with political support (and military, if necessary) from states in the service of dominant capital. In this sense, the expansion is always entirely imperialist even in the meaning that Negri gives to the term (“the projection of national power beyond its fron¬tiers,” on condition of specifying that this power belongs to cap¬ital). In this sense, the contemporary intervention of the United States is no less imperialist than were the colonial conquests of the nineteenth century Washington’s objective in Iraq, for exam¬ple, (and tomorrow elsewhere) is to put in place a dictatorship in the service of American capital (and not a “democracy”), enabling the pillage of the country’s natural resources, and noth¬ing more. The globalized “liberal” economic order requires per¬manent war—military interventions endlessly succeeding one another—as the only means to submit the peoples of the periph¬ery to its demands.


Capitalism Bad – Genocidal Violence

Capitalism is responsible for genocide and violence.Internationalist Perspective, Spring 2000, “Capitalism and Genocide”, #36, Accessed 4/29/09, http://www.geocities.com/wageslavex/capandgen.html

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.

Capitalism creates a system that rewards genocidal violence.Joel Kovel, Professor at Bard, 2002, The Enemy of Nature, P. 141

Capital produces egoic relations, which reproduce capital. The isolated selves of the capitalist order can choose to become personifications of capital, or may have the role thrust upon them. In either case, they embark upon a pattern of non-recognition mandated by the fact that the almighty dollar interposes itself between all elements of experience: all things in the world, all other persons, and between the self and its world: nothing really exists except in and through monetization. This set-up provides an ideal culture medium for the bacillus of competition and ruthless self-maximization. Because money is all that ‘counts’, a peculiar heartlessness characterizes capitalists, a tough-minded and cold abstraction that will sacrifice species, whole continents (viz. Africa) or inconvenient sub-sets of the population (viz. black urban males) who add too little to the great march of surplus value or may be seen as standing in its way The presence of value screens out genuine fellow-feeling or compassion, replacing it with the calculus of profit-expansion. Never has a holocaust been carried out so impersonally. When the Nazis killed their victims, the crimes were accom¬panied by a racist drumbeat; for global capital, the losses are regrettable necessities.

Capitalism creates a world of genocidal biopolitics were unending violence is unstoppable. Internationalist Perspective, Spring 2000, “Capitalism and Genocide”, #36, Accessed 4/29/09, http://www.geocities.com/wageslavex/capandgen.html

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).


Capitalism Bad – Genocidal Violence

Capitalism makes genocidal violence inevitable.Internationalist Perspective, Spring 2000, “Capitalism and Genocide”, #36, Accessed 4/29/09, http://www.geocities.com/wageslavex/capandgen.html

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.

Capitalism creates a world of pure death where all violence is possibleInternationalist Perspective, Spring 2000, “Capitalism and Genocide”, #36, Accessed 4/29/09, 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!


Capitalism Bad – Poverty

1. Capitalism is the root cause of wealth disparityTony Wilsdon, writer for the Socialist Alternative, 2005, Accessed May 28, 2008, http://www.socialistworld.net/eng/2005/09/26us.html

Today, we see a world economic slowdown, with U.S. corporations shutting down production here in search of areas that produce higher rates of profit. The economic engine of jobs, which helped some workers in previous generations to get out of the ghettos, will not be reoccurring. The vast majority of jobs created under Clinton and Bush have been low-wage jobs, which have replaced higher-wage jobs. Under the rule of capitalism, the majority of the public faces further sharp attacks on their living standards and quality of life, with a growing number being forced into dire poverty, homelessness, and destitution. Capitalism is a system designed to produce for private profit, not for public need. It is only by taking decision-making out of the corporate boardrooms and placing them under the democratic control of the majority that the economy can provide for our needs. To do that, we need to bring into public ownership the largest 500 corporations and financial institutions.

2. The wealth disparity created by Capitalism is the greatest crime against humanityTony Wilsdon, writer for the Socialist Alternative, 2005, Accessed May 28, 2008, http://www.socialistworld.net/eng/2005/09/26us.html

To boost their profits, employers have ruthlessly attacked wages, benefits, and working conditions. Both political parties collaborated in refusing to raise the minimum wage, resulting in tens of million of workers seeing their living standards drop below the poverty line. Restrictions have been increased on eligibility for unemployment benefits. Fewer and fewer workers now qualify for any unemployment benefits, resulting in tens of millions dropping off the rolls and forced to live without any income. Inherent in capitalism has been the maintenance of a sizeable pool of unemployed workers living on the edge of poverty who are desperate for jobs. It keeps workers competing with each other to get jobs, allowing corporate owners to keep wages low. This was first described by Karl Marx, the founder of scientific socialism, as an essential weapon used by capitalists to keep down wages. When this political and economic system is judged by future inhabitants of the planet, this policy will be judged, correctly, as one of the greatest crimes against humanity.

3. The Capitalist empire breeds poverty globallyJohn Stoltenberg, Free Speech Community, 2007, Accessed May 28, 2008, http://community.freespeech.org/how_capitalism_creates_poverty_in_the_world

The war in Iraq to secure Iraqi oil resources for American oil companies, and the war in Afghanistan to secure a safe route for a pipeline for American oil companies from oil fields in Central Asia to a port on the Indian Ocean, are military methods for expanding the American capitalist empire. This article points out that foreign aid is a much more effective way of achieving the same goal. One of the problems with all of this is the American people are paying for building and defending this American capitalist commercial empire that is designed to only benefit the American capitalist class, Corporate America and their political elite. The costs to the American people of expanding and maintaining American capitalisms vast, oppressive commercial empire vastly outweigh any benefits they may receive from this empire.

4. Capitalism can’t solve inequality – structural contradictions are inherentJohn Bellamy Foster, editor of the Monthly Review, December 2001, “Imperialism and ‘Empire’,” The Monthly Review, Vol 53, No 7, http://www.monthlyreview.org/1201jbf.htm

According to this analysis, the period of capitalism’s historic ascendance has now ended. Capitalism has expanded throughout the globe, but in most of the world it has produced only enclaves of capital. There is no longer any promise of the underdeveloped world as a whole “catching-up” economically with the advanced capitalist countries—or even of sustained economic and social advance in most of the periphery. Living conditions of the vast majority of workers are declining globally. The long structural crisis of the system, since the 1970s, prevents capital from effectively coping with its contradictions, even temporarily.


The extraneous help offered by the state is no longer sufficient to boost the system. Hence, capital’s “destructive uncontrollability”— its destruction of previous social relations and its inability to put anything sustainable in their place—is coming more and more to the fore (pp. 19, 61).


Capitalism Bad – Moral Obligation

Resisting capitalism is your primary ethical responsibilitySlajov Zizek, philosopher and Glyn Daly, 2004, Conversations with Zizek, p. 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 istic 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 . 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.


Capitalism Bad – Flawed Ontology

Prefer all of our impact evidence, their truth claims are trapped in a capitalist ontology which predetermines how knowledge is produced Freya Schiwy, PhD Candidate in Romance Studies at Duke, & Michael Ennis, PhD Candidate in Lit at Duke, 2002, Views from the South 3.1

The essays gathered in this dossier respond to issues raised during the workshop “Knowledges and the Known: Capitalism and the Geopolitics of Knowledge,” held at Duke University in November 2000. They address concerns about the possibilities for critical knowledge production at a moment when national state structures are reconfiguring into global institutions and when technologies (like gene prospecting) and epistemic regimes (like property rights and human rights) are installing the particular as a new universal, following the legacy of Enlightenment philosophy and Western political theory. They ask how knowledge production is linked to location and subjectivity and what the importance of these critical perspectives can be when neoliberal capitalism increasingly instrumentalizes and commodifies knowledge, reinforcing the growing dependence of universities around the world on corporate money. It is precisely within this context that Oscar Guardiola-Rivera engages current critical theory from the perspective of coloniality. Although the essays by Catherine Walsh and Javier Sanjinés address contemporary indigenous uprisings in the Andes, these movements are not their object of study. Instead of being about knowledge production in the Andes, all three of these articles are efforts to think about epistemology from the Andes.1


Capitalism Bad – Environment

Capitalism will cause eco-doom by 2013 through global warmingMinqi Li, teaches economics at the University of Utah, August 2008, “Climate Change, Limits to Growth, and the Imperative for Socialism,” The Monthly Review, http://monthlyreview.org/080721li.php

The 2007 assessment report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirms that it is virtually certain that human activities (mainly through the use of fossil fuels and land development) have been responsible for the global warming that has taken place since the industrial revolution. Under current economic and social trends, the world is on a path to unprecedented ecological catastrophes.1 As the IPCC report was being released, new evidence emerged suggesting that climate change is taking place at a much faster pace and the potential consequences are likely to be far more dreadful than is suggested by the IPCC report. The current evidence suggests that the Arctic Ocean could become ice free in summertime possibly as soon as 2013, about one century ahead of what is predicted by the IPCC models. With the complete melting of the Arctic summer sea ice, the disintegration of the Greenland ice sheets may become unavoidable, threatening to raise the sea level by five meters or more within this century. About half of the world’s fifty largest cities are at risk and hundreds of millions of people will become environmental refugees.2

We should let capitalism collapse now instead of later – key to save the environmentGlen, Barry, PhD, the President and Founder of Ecological Internet, January 4, 2008 “Economic Collapse and Global Ecology,” http://www.countercurrents.org/barry140108.htm

We know that humanity must reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% over coming decades. How will this and other necessary climate mitigation strategies be maintained during years of economic downturns, resource wars, reasonable demands for equitable consumption, and frankly, the weather being more pleasant in some places? If efforts to reduce emissions and move to a steady state economy fail; the collapse of ecological, economic and social systems is assured. Bright greens take the continued existence of a habitable Earth with viable, sustainable populations of all species including humans as the ultimate truth and the meaning of life. Whether this is possible in a time of economic collapse is crucially dependent upon whether enough ecosystems and resources remain post collapse to allow humanity to recover and reconstitute sustainable, relocalized societies. It may be better for the Earth and humanity's future that economic collapse comes sooner rather than later , while more ecosystems and opportunities to return to nature's fold exist. Economic collapse will be deeply wrenching -- part Great Depression, part African famine. There will be starvation and civil strife, and a long period of suffering and turmoil. Many will be killed as balance returns to the Earth. Most people have forgotten how to grow food and that their identity is more than what they own. Yet there is some justice, in that those who have lived most lightly upon the land will have an easier time of it, even as those super-consumers living in massive cities finally learn where their food comes from and that ecology is the meaning of life. Economic collapse now means humanity and the Earth ultimately survive to prosper again. Human suffering -- already the norm for many, but hitting the currently materially affluent -- is inevitable given the degree to which the planet's carrying capacity has been exceeded. We are a couple decades at most away from societal strife of a much greater magnitude as the Earth's biosphere fails. Humanity can take the bitter medicine now, and recover while emerging better for it; or our total collapse can be a final, fatal death swoon. A successful revolutionary response to imminent global ecosystem collapse would focus upon bringing down the Earth's industrial economy now. As society continues to fail miserably to implement necessary changes to allow creation to continue, maybe the best strategy to achieve global ecological sustainability is economic sabotage to hasten the day. It is more fragile than it looks.

Capitalism collapses the environmentSlajov Zizek, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2003, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, pg. 134

In some sense, we can in fact argue that, today, we are approaching a kind of "end of time": the self-propelling explosive spiral of global capitalism does seem to point toward a moment of (social, ecological, even subjective) collapse, in which total dynamism, frantic activity, will coincide with a deeper immobility. History will be abolished in the eternal present of multiple narrativizations; nature will be abol¬ished when it becomes subject to biogenetic manipulation; the very permanent transgression of the norm will assert itself as the uncondi¬tional norm. . . . However, the question "When does ordinary time get caught in the messianic twist?" is a misleading one: we cannot de¬duce the emergence of messianic time through an


"objective" analysis of historical process. "Messianic time" ultimately stands for the intru¬sion of subjectivity irreducible to the "objective" historical process, which means that things can take a messianic turn, time can become "dense," at any point.


Capitalism Bad – Warming

1. Capitalism ensures future global warmingJoseph Tanniru, Member of the Students for Social Equality, 1999, World Socialist Website, Accessed May 28, 2008, http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/oct1999/warm-o25.shtml

The leading cause of human-produced CO2 comes from the combustion of fossil fuels, especially oil and coal. At present, oil and coal are essential energy sources for all of humanity. Thus, it is not possible simply to limit the consumption of oil and coal, as was done with ozone-depleting CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons). Indeed, as various countries such as China and India continue the process of industrialization, and as human population in general increases, more energy will be consumed. In order to curb the process of global warming there must be a change in the means of energy production on a world scale, from oil and coal to more efficient sources such as solar power. If no societal restrictions were placed on human development, this in itself would certainly be a solvable problem. Already the basic technology exists that would allow for such a change. In a capitalist society, however, the main stimulus for change is not concern for human or environmental welfare, but rather the continual drive for profit.

2. The effects of the plan on global warming are nil unless capitalism collapsesJoseph Tanniru, Member of the Students for Social Equality, 1999, World Socialist Website, Accessed May 28, 2008, http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/oct1999/warm-o25.shtml

Those nations who currently and potentially have control over oil and coal reserves have a vested interest in maintaining the energy status quo. Given these facts it is not surprising that every attempt to institute carbon emission reduction measures has proved ineffective. The treaties upon which the international capitalist community has actually reached an agreement have been utterly useless. The Kyoto treaty signed in 1997 was so full of loopholes (euphemistically called "flexibilities" by the US government)—such as "emissions trading," whereby the industrial nations can buy CO2 credits from other nations whose emissions were below the level stipulated in the treaty—that no basic change could occur. In addition, a viable means of enforcing such treaties does not, and will never, exist. Nevertheless, the treaty failed ratification in the United States Congress, and has proved ineffective on an international level.[2]

3. A Marxist approach is most effective at a sustainable livelihood and preventing warmingJacob Middleton, UK Watch Contributor, 2005, Socialist Review, Accessed May 28, 2008, http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=9583

There is a lot of propaganda, misinformation and some facts of history about Marx's ecology that give people these perceptions. The irony is even though Marx is portrayed as anti-environmental, we are increasingly relying on his ideas in order to understand the relationship between environment and society. He actually came up with an understanding of sustainable development. He specifically argued that we have to protect the earth - he talked about what would happen if we destroyed the soil, creating the metabolic rift between human beings and nature. The Marxist notion of metabolic rift is now being used by various thinkers to analyse the problems of the oceans, global warming and so on. There are no other thinkers of that period, the 19th century, who really had such a penetrative insight into the relationship between ecological crises and the construction of our society.

4. The alternative incorporates critical knowledge’s that are more effective at promoting sustainabilityFreya Schiwy, PhD Candidate in Romance Studies at Duke, & Michael Ennis, PhD Candidate in Lit at Duke, 2002, Views from the South 3.1

The overarching question of whether and how critical knowledges can counteract the epistemic, juridical, and ethical models that guide the privileging of particularities as universals in the restructuring and creation of global institutions. This question seems related to the possibilities for producing sustainable knowledge within social movements. Our discussions endeavored to maintain both critical negativity and constructive imagining. In this sense, we saw a move toward thinking utopia as a necessary part of politically engaged intellectual projects, and not merely as a supplement to critical and descriptive projects.


Capitalism Bad – Democracy

1. Several specific examples proves Capitalism impedes democracy progressRobert Reich, former Professor of Economics @ Harvard, 2007, How Capitalism is Killing Democracy, Foreign Policy, p. np

Free markets were supposed to lead to free societies. Instead, today's supercharged global economy is eroding the power of the people in democracies around the globe. Welcome to a world where ... government takes a back seat to big business. Conventional wisdom holds that where either capitalism or democracy flourishes, the other must soon follow. Yet today, their fortunes are beginning to diverge. Capitalism ... is thriving, while democracy is struggling to keep up. China ... has embraced market freedom, but not political freedom. Many economically successful nations-from Russia to Mexico-are democracies in name only. They are encumbered by the same problems that have hobbled American democracy in recent years, allowing corporations and elites ... to undermine the government's capacity to respond to citizens' concerns

2. Capitalism inherently devalues the role of the individual, which collapses democracyRobert Reich, former Professor of Economics @ Harvard, 2007, How Capitalism is Killing Democracy, Foreign Policy, p. np

Why has capitalism succeeded while democracy has steadily weakened? Democracy has become enfeebled largely because companies, in intensifying competition for global consumers and investors, have invested ever greater sums in lobbying, public relations, and even bribes and kickbacks, seeking laws that give them a competitive advantage over their rivals. The result is an arms race for political influence that is drowning out the voices of average citizens. The only way for the citizens in us to trump the consumers in us is through laws and rules that make our purchases and investments social choices as well as personal ones.

3. Capitalism favors multinational corporations at the expense of the democratic populousRobert Reich, former Professor of Economics @ Harvard, 2007, How Capitalism is Killing Democracy, Foreign Policy, p. np

Let us be clear: The purpose of democracy is to accomplish ends we cannot achieve as individuals. But democracy cannot fulfill this role when companies use politics to advance or maintain their competitive standing, or when they appear to take on social responsibilities that they have no real capacity or authority to fulfill. That leaves societies unable to address the tradeoffs between economic growth and social problems such as job insecurity, widening inequality, and climate change. As a result, consumer and investor interests almost invariably trump common concerns.


Capitalism Bad – Alternative – Withdrawal

1. Only a total withdrawal ends our fetish for global CapitalAdrian Johnston, interdisciplinary research fellow in psychoanalysis at Emory University, 2004, Culture and Society, Vol. 9, i3, pg. 259

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 simply 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 of the real"): faced with the choice between living the capitalist lie or wrestling 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").

2. Acting outside of Capital leads to greater solvencyAdrian Johnston, interdisciplinary research fellow in psychoanalysis at Emory University, 2004, Culture and Society, Vol. 9, i3, pg. 259

Perhaps the absence of a detailed political roadmap in Zizek's recent 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 to truly 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 hindrance (Zizek, 2001d, pp 22-23) (with fantasy itself being defined as the false externalization of something within the subject, namely, the illusory projection of an inner obstacle, Zizek, 2000a, p 16). 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 merely an instance of negative/critical intellectual reflection). Why is this the case? Recalling the 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.

3. Total reorientation of our approach towards Capital is the only way to break the reigns of the “Invisible Hand”Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Professor at the Universidad Javeriana’s Insituto Pensar in Bogota, 2002, Views From the South

To “reinvent the political” means to “open up” the possibilities of political imagination both in theory and in practice. To do so “under the present conditions of globalization” means to take into account that we live in ideology, thus to account for the persistence of modern/colonial power relations and knowledge discourses that function by erasing their links with economic structures and with literacy as power. They do so because their exercise of power dwells, precisely, in their apparent disconnection with economy and politics so that


“the global” appears as a specter, a virtual reality that is never fully actualized, thus always deferring itself through successive crises.


Capitalism Bad – Alternative – Withdrawal

1. Radical negation and withdrawal can completely collapse capitalismSlavoj Zizek, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies, 1999, The Ticklish Subject, pg. 91-92

With regard to the opposition between abstract and concrete Universal¬ity, this means that the only way towards a truly 'concrete' universality leads through the full assertion of the radical negativity by means of which the universal negates its entire particular content: despite misleading appearances, it is the 'mute universality’ of the neutral container of the particular content which is the predominant form of abstract universality. In other words, the only way for a Universality to become 'concrete' is to stop being a neutral-abstract medium of its particular content, and to include itself among its particular subspecies. What this means is that, paradox¬ically, the first step towards 'concrete universality ' is the radical negation of the entire particular content: only through such a negation does the Universal gain existence, become visible 'as such'.

2. A negative act of withdrawal is a prerequisite for any positive actions taken upon the worldSlavoj Zizek, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies, 1999, The Ticklish Subject, pg. 153-154

It would therefore be tempting to risk a 'Badiouian-Pauline reading of the end of psychoanalysis, determining it as a New Beginning, a symbolic 'rebirth' - the radical restructuring of the analysand's subjectivity in such a way that the vicious cycle of the superego is suspended, left behind. Does not Lacan himself provide a number of hints that the end of analysis opens up the domain of Love beyond Law, using the very Pauline terms to which Badiou refers? Nevertheless, Lacan's way is not that of St Paul or Badiou: psychoanalysis is not 'psychosynthesis'; it does not already posit a 'new harmony', a new Truth-Event; it - as it were - merely wipes the slate clean for one. However, this 'merely' should be put in quotation marks, because it is Lacan's contention that, in this negative gesture of 'wiping the slate clean', something (a void) is confronted which is already 'sutured' with the arrival of a new Truth-Event. For Lacan negativity, a negative gesture of withdrawal precedes any positive gesture of enthusi¬astic identification with a Cause: negativity functions as the condition of (im)possibility of the enthusiastic identification - that is to say, it lays the ground, opens up space for it but is simultaneously obfuscated by it and undermines it.

3. The Alternative allows re-imagination of the political economy, leads to better solvencyOscar Guardiola-Rivera, Professor, Universidad Javeriana’s Insituto Pensar in Bogota, 2002, Views from the South

To “reinvent the political” means to “open up” the possibilities of political imagination both in theory and in practice. To do so “under the present conditions of globalization” means to take into account that we live in ideology, thus to account for the persistence of modern/colonial power relations and knowledge discourses that function by erasing their links with economic structures and with literacy as power. They do so because their exercise of power dwells, precisely, in their apparent disconnection with economy and politics so that “the global” appears as a specter, a virtual reality that is never fully actualized, thus always deferring itself through successive crises.

4. Criticism and rejection opens an important door, we must diagnose the disease to find the solutionMichael Parenti, Ph.D., Yale noted lecturer and professor, 1995, Democracy for the Few, ST, Marin’s Press, p. 5

Sometimes the complaint is made: “You’re good at criticizing the system, but what would you put in its place?” the implication being that unless you have a finished blueprint for a better society, you should refrain from pointing out existing deficiencies and injustices. But this book is predicated on the notion that it is desirable and necessary for human beings to examine the society in which they live, possibly as a step toward making fundamental improvements. It is unreasonable to deman that we refrain from making a diagnosis of an illness until we have perfected a cure. For how can we hope to find solutions unless we really understand the problem. (In any case, suggestions for fundamental changes are offered in the closing chapter and in other pars of the book)


Capitalism Bad – Alternative – Social Movements

1. Voting negative reveals the socio-economic problems of the status quo, helps to overthrow capitalismJohn Kane, Prof. @ Grifith University, 1995, Theory, Practice, and the “Realistic Outlook” of Karl Marx, Theory and Practice: NOMOS XXXVII, p. 414

The principal way in which theory was to “grip” the proletariat was by revealing to it the true nature of its socio-economic position. This meant exposing the reality that underlay the illusory appearances of capitalist production and exchage, and showing, as well, how these appearances were necessary to the legitimation of the whole system and existed precisely for that purpose. We might note with respect to Marx’s epistemolofy here, that though the proof of the analysis might be held to rest in its effect on workers, their enlightenment presumably depended on their identifying the analysis as independently true. At any rate, in coming to appreciate that the free exchange of commodities conceals the reality of labor exploitation, that the free selling of labor power for wages masks a condition of semi-slavery, that the eternal truths of morality and the rational commands of law conceal the coercive hand of the dominant class, workers come in a new consciousness of themselves as having being degraded to the status of objects or commodities, and in this very act of understanding they constitute themselves as active subjects who in their practice may abolish the system that degrades them.

2. Socialism protects the environment and prevents capitalist uprising, our movement taps into the success of the existing movementWorld Socialist, 1996, Accessed May 28, 2008, http://www.worldsocialism.org/articles/slower_than_the_speed.php

This movement already exists as the movement for world socialism. It is vital that those who see the need for world co-operation in dealing with the problems facing all of humanity should join its ranks to swell its voice of sanity and thereby contribute to the work of preparing practical programmes of action which could be implemented once the socialist political objective is achieved. This political objective is one of democratically gaining political control with a view to taking the means of production and the earth's resources out of the hands of the world's capitalist class and placing them at the free disposal of the whole world's community. How could world socialism set about the work of establishing a world energy system which would be adequate for the material needs of the world community but which could also work within the natural systems of the environment in a non-destructive way? Two factors have to be accepted. First, the overall amount of energy supply required in socialism as part of its general strategy of productive development would be immense, arguably greater than the amount which capitalism currently produces.

3. Breaking away from focus on development allows self-liberationDrucilla Barker, Hollins University Women’s Studies Chair, Summer, 1998, Hypatia, p. np

The language of development economics reads like a chapter in the Enlightenment dream, a dream that promised an orderly progress from poverty and ignorance to prosperity and modernity. It is a discourse infused with the Enlightenment ideal of innocent knowledge, an ideal that masks the instrumental role that development has played in maintaining global structures of neocolonialism and dependency. Instead of progress and prosperity, much of the world has experienced profound poverty, growing income inequality, high debt burdens, and environmental degradation. By the 1980s, even the proponents of development had agreed that their policies had been largely unsuccessful. Policy interventions designed to foster economic growth and alleviate poverty were abandoned in favor of neoliberal orthodoxies (Escobar 1995, 73-94). Privatization, trade liberalization, and fiscal austerity were the new strategies that would enable free-market capitalism to work its magic. Missing from this analysis, however, was any awareness of the role that development rhetoric and policies played in producing underdevelopment, exploitation, and oppression.(1)


Capitalism Bad – Alternative – Marxism

1. EMBRACING MARXIST METHODOLOGY IS THE ONLY ALTERNATIVE TO EXTINCTIONIstvan Meszaros, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex, 2001.SOCIALISM OR BARBARISM: FROM THE ‘AMERICAN CENTURY’ TO THE CROSSROADS, p. 79-80.

There are no escape routes for workable conciliatory evasions. Yet, even if it can be asserted with certainty that the historical phase of global hegemonic imperialism, too, must fail, because it is incapable of resolving or postponing forever the system’s explosive contradictions, this can promise no solution for the future. Many of the problems we have to confront—from chronic structural unemployment to the major international economic and political/military conflicts indicated above, as well as to the ever more widespread ecological destruction in evidence everywhere—require concerted action in the very near future. The timescale of such action may be measured perhaps in a few decades, but certainly not in centuries. We are running out of time. Thus, only a radical alternative to the established mode of controlling social metabolic reproduction can offer a way out of capital’s structural crisis.

2. EMBRACING MARXIST CRITICISM IS NECESSARY FOR SURVIVAL Eleanor Burke Leacock, Former Chair of Anthropology, City College of New York, 1993. “Introduction,” THE ORIGIN OF THE FAMILY, PRIVATE PROPERTY AND THE STATE, p. 66.

The existence of human consciousness and purpose introduced a type of complexity into the operations of human society that is not found in the rest of nature. In the past it was common to assume that, although society still eluded our grasp, social control of natural processes was a mere matter of time. The awesome feat of landing on the moon would seem to verify such an assumption had it not come at a time when we have been forced to recognize that the piecemeal approach to natural processes that has characterized Western science is powerless to stop the “blind laws” of nature from asserting themselves at a more complex level and rendering the earth unfit for human life. The world, like society, is a product of history, of meteorological and geological history. Comfortable regularities (in the time and space limits of our solar system) like the atomic progression of minerals and the law of gravity function within the context of interconnecting and changing relationships of unlimited complexity. Now the fact that man is but an aspect of this complex whole has unavoidably asserted itself. Humanity cannot for much longer muddle through the mess it has gotten into. It will take understanding to save us, and at the present stage of history, at least, the kind of understanding called Marxist.

3. CHALLENGING CAPITALIST IDEOLOGY IS NECESSARY FOR HUMAN SURVIVALIstvan Meszaros, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex, 2001.SOCIALISM OR BARBARISM: FROM THE ‘AMERICAN CENTURY’ TO THE CROSSROADS, p. 37-8.

It is no exaggeration to say—in view of the formerly quite unimaginable destructive power of armaments accumulated in the second half of the twentieth century—that we have entered the most dangerous phase of imperialism in all history. For 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. This is what the ultimate rationality of globally developed capital requires, in its vain attempt to bring under control its irreconcilable differences. The trouble is, though, that such rationality—which can be written without inverted commas, since it genuinely corresponds to the logic of capital at the present historical stage of global development—is at the same time the most extreme form of irrationality in history, including the Nazi conception of world domination, as far as the conditions required for the survival of humanity are concerned.


Capitalism Bad – Alternative Solvency

Only the alternative can solveEduardo Smith, April 30, 2009, “The Economic Crisis: The Only Response is the Class Struggle,” Internationalism no150, p1

For revolutionaries there is only one solution to the crisis and that is sending capitalism once and of all to dustbin of history. This is the historical task of the world working class. But this will not happen automatically. A social revolution that will leave behind the ‘prehistory' of humanity by overcoming the exploitation of man by man, the divisions of society into classes, the existence of nations.... can only be the product of a conscious and collectively organized effort of the world proletariat. Of course this revolution will not fall out of the sky; it can't only be the result of a prolonged class struggle of which today we are only seeing the beginnings around the world. Faced with relentless attacks workers need to respond by refusing to submit to the logic of capitalism and developing the class struggle to its ultimate conclusion: the overthrow of capitalism. The task is immense, but there is no other way out.

We have an obligation to spread the news that capitalism is unsustainable in order to transition to socialismJoel Kovel, Professor of Social Studies at Bard College, 2002, The Enemy of Nature, p. 222-23

If one believes that capital is not only basically unjust but radically unsustainable as well, the prime obligation is to spread the news, just as one should feel obliged to tell the inhabitants of a structurally unsound house doomed to collapse of what awaits them unless they take drastic measures. To continue the analogy, for the critique to matter it needs to be combined with an attack on the false idea that we are, so to speak, trapped in this house, with no hope of fixing it or getting out. The belief that there can be no alternative to capital is ubiquitous and no wonder, given how wonderfully convenient the idea is to the ruling ideology.2 That, however, does not keep it from being nonsense, and a failure of vision and political will. Whether or not the vision of ecosocialism offered here has merit, the notion that there is no other way of organizing an advanced society other than capital does not follow. Nothing lasts for ever, and what is humanly made can theoretically be unmade.

We have to restructure our criticism of the prevailing order to end the ruling class – they’re stuck in a framework of government advocacy which legitimates the established orderMas’ud Zavarzadeh, Dept English @ Syracuse, 1994, “The Stupidity that Consumption is Just as Productive as Production,” The Alternative Orange, V 4, Fall/Winter, http://www.etext.org/Politics/AlternativeOrange/4/v4nl_cpp.html

My concern is with the practices by which the post-al left, through dialogue, naturalizes (and eroticizes) the violence that keeps capitalist democracy in power. What is violent? Subjecting people to the daily terrorism of layoffs in order to maintain high rates of profit for the owners of the means of production or redirecting this violence (which gives annual bonuses, in addition to multi-million dollar salaries, benefits and stock options, to the CEOs of the very corporations that are laying off thousands of workers) against the ruling class in order to end class societies? What is violent? Keeping millions of people in poverty, hunger, starvation, homelessness, and deprived of basic health care, at a time when the forces of production have reached a level that can, in fact, provide for the needs of all people, or trying to over throw this system? What is violent? Placing in office, under the alibi of "free elections," post-fascists (Italy) and allies of the ruling class (Major, Clinton, Kohl, Yeltsin) or struggling to end this farce? What is violent? Reinforcing these practices by "talking" about them in a "reasonable" fashion (i.e. within the rules of the game established by the ruling class for limited reform from "within") or marking the violence of conversation and its complicity with the status quo, thereby breaking the frame that represents "dialogue" as participation-when in fact it is merely a formal strategy for legitimating the established order? Any society in which the labor of many is the source of wealth for the few—all class societies are societies of violence, and no amount of "talking" is going to challenge that objective fact. "Dialogue" and "conversation" are aimed at arriving at a consensus by which this violence is made more tolerable, justifiable and naturalized.



Only by withdrawing support for the government as currently constituted, can we solve.Tony Wilsdon, Activist and Freelance Author, September 18, 2005, The Socialist Alternative, Accessed 4/27/09, http://www.socialistalternative.org/literature/katrina/logic.html

To achieve this means breaking from giving any support to the two big-business political parties - the Republicans and Democrats. They are both fully implicated in creating the present mess we are in. We need to build a new political party to represent our interests as workers, the poor, and young people, and which points a finger at the real villains, the super-rich and the capitalist system. Freed from control by corporate sponsors, this workers' party could put forward a program that addresses our needs. It would be able to end this system of capitalism, which has been responsible for enriching a tiny group of billionaires at a time of massive need and poverty. We could then create a new democratic socialist society, where the working-class majority would have the power rather than the 1% who are rewarded under this system.

The act of rejection is an important political stance that is in line with Marxist revolution.Adam Katz, English Instructor at Onodaga Community College, 2000, Postmodernism and the Politics of “Culture.” P. 131-132.

Thus, despite Ross’s references to economic and historical determina¬tions, his investigation into New Age philosophy ultimately considers it to be a cultural matter, determined by inexplicable needs and desires. This means that although the critic can mark its differences from his or her own practices and commitments, he or she cannot critique it in the sense of inquiring into its conditions of possibility and political effects. The no¬tion that desire is a mechanism of hegemony and articulated within the dominant ideology and that it is therefore what most needs to be ex¬plained is completely excluded in the dominant discourses of postmodern cultural studies. All that is called for in these discourses is an updating of cultural forms, to allow for greater freedom—for some—within the exist¬ing social arrangements. The role of the critic, then, is to sympathize with this desire and establish its legitimacy regardless of the various and at times questionable forms it might take.

Doing nothing solves better – continuing to act will just replicate the affirmative harmsSlavoj Zizek, famous philosopher, 2004, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, p. 71

The stance of simply condemning the postmodern Left for its accommodation, however, is also false, since one should ask the obvious difficult question: what, in fact, was the alternative? If today’s ‘post-politics’ is opportunistic pragmatism with no principles, then the predominant leftist reaction to it can be aptly characterized as ‘principle opportunism’: one simply sticks to old formulae (defence of the welfare state, and so on) and calls them ‘principles’, dispensing with the detailed analysis of how the situation has changed – and thus retaining one’s position of Beautiful Soul. The inherent stupidity of the ‘principled’ Left is clearly discernable in it standard criticism of any analysis which proposes a more complex picture of the situation, renouncing any simple prescriptions on how to act: ‘there is no clear political stance involved in your theory’ – and this from people with no stance but their ‘principled opportunism’. Against such a stance, one should have the courage to affirm that, in a situation like today’s, the only way really to remain open to a revolutionary opportunity is to renounce facile calls to direct action, which necessarily involve us in an activity where things change so that the totality remains the same. Today’s predicament is that, if we succumb to the urge of directly ‘doing something’ (engaging in the anti-globalist struggle, helping the poor…) we will certainly and undoubtedly contribute to the reproduction of the existing order. The only way to lay the foundations for a true, radical change is to withdraw from the compulsion to act, to ‘do nothing’ – thus opening up the space for a different kind of activity.



Only a radical rejection of capitalist practices can solve.Adam Katz, English Instructor at Onodaga Community College, 2000, Postmodernism and the Politics of “Culture.” P. 127-128.

Virno does recognize the danger that a politics predicated upon Exodus, by downgrading the “absolute enmity” implicit in the traditional Marxist assumption that class struggle in its revolutionary form issues in civil war, leads to the assumption that one is “swimming with the current” or is being driven “irresistibly forward” (1996, 203). A politics aimed at the establishment of liberated zones within capitalism under the assumption that the state will wither away without actually being “smashed” leads to the problematic one sees over and over again in postmodern cultural studies: “doing what comes naturally” as radical praxis. To counter this, Virno redefines the “unlimitedly reactive” “enmity” of the “Multitude” in terms of the “right to resistance” (206): What deserve to be defended at all costs are the works of “friendship.” Violence is not geared to visions of some hypothetical tomorrow, but functions to ensure respect and a continued existence for things that were mapped out yesterday. It does not innovate, but acts to prolong things that are already there: the autonomous expressions of “acting-in-concert” that arise out of general intellect, organisms of non-representative democracy, forms of mutual protection and assistance (welfare, in short) that have emerged outside of and against the realm of State Administration. In other words, what we have here is a violence that is conservational (206). The decisiveness of the question of absolute enmity becomes clear if we ask a rather obvious question: What distinguishes autonomous expressions from any privatized space (say, Internet chat rooms) that withdraws from the common in the name of friendships, mutual aid, or, for that matter, networks, gated communities, or whatever? In short, nothing can lead more directly to the death of revolutionary politics than the assumption that the days of absolute enmity are over. Autonomous expressions necessarily lead to the esoteric and the singular as the paths of least resistance. Therefore (as in all Left-Nietzscheanisms), they take as their main enemy the programmatic and the decidable, transforming liberation into a private, simulacral affair, regardless of their denunciations of capitalism. I will return to this issue in the next two chapters, but I want to conclude this discussion by stressing that only theory and action that establish spaces that bring the common out into the open—before an outside (theory and judgment) so as to make visible the concentrated political-economic force of the ruling class—can count as a genuinely “new” politics.

Only critique can throw off the shackles of capitalismAdam Katz, English Instructor at Onodaga Community College. 2000. Postmodernism and the Politics of “Culture.” Pg. 141.

Any discussion of the public intellectual, especially in connection with the various crises framing such discussions (of the humanities, of the Left or leftist intellectuals, of the university, of the public sphere) needs to be grounded in the assumption that only as a result of sustained theoretical struggle—the contention of foundational claims made exoteric—will any genuine critique emerge from the site of theory. Also, it will only be possi¬ble to do anything more than conceal the roots of the aforementioned cri¬sis if such critiques make visible the polemics constitutive of the public sphere and if they do so by siding with the polemic of theory against com¬mon sense. This, of course, requires implicating common sense in the op¬erations of global capitalism through ideology critique. Only in this way, by defending the public “rights” of theory and the theoretical grounds of politics, will it be possible to explain anything, that is, to offer critiques of ideology and expose the structures of violence appearing (anti)politically.


Capitalism Bad – A2: Permutation

Only total rejection of the capitalist system and reform efforts like the aff, can solve.Working Class Freedom, May 21, 2008, Accessed 4/29/09, http://www.workingclassfreedom.com/index.php?display=cgd.vs.activism

The socialist analysis of society shows that capitalism itself is the underlying cause of most of the problems which the social activists want to solve. The social activists attack the symptoms but ignore the cause. Social activists work to reform capitalism, socialists work to eliminate capitalism: the cause of the problems. If people eliminate the cause of the problems, the problems will not keep cropping up. Instead of trying to fix the symptoms, year in and year out, over and over again, forever, people can eliminate the cause, once. Then we can all get on with living our lives in a world where solutions actually solve problems, instead of just covering up symptoms. This approach can be emotionally difficult. It may even mean that someone dies today, who might have been saved by social activism. A simple analogy to explain the socialist perspective: If a pipe bursts and the water is rising on the floor, one can start bailing the water out while it continues to flow in, or one can turn the water off, and then start bailing. It may take a while to find the tap, and some valuables might be destroyed while searching, but unless the water is turned off, the water will continue to rise and bailing is rather pointless.

Complete rejection of the affirmative is necessary for anti-capitalism to be successful. Slavoj Zizek, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies in Ljubljana, 2004, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, p. 83-84

There is a will to accomplish the ‘leap of faith’ and step outside the global circuit at work here, a will which was expressed in an extreme and terrifying manner in a well-known incident from the Vietnam War: after the US Army occupied a local village, their doctors vaccinated the children on the left arm in order to demonstrate their humanitarian care; when, the day after, the village was retaken by the Vietcong, they cut off the left arms of all the vaccinated children. .. . Although it is difficult to sustain as a literal model to follow, this complete rejection of the enemy precisely in its caring ‘humanitarian’ aspect, no matter what the cost, has to be endorsed in its basic intention. In a similar way, when Sendero Luminoso took over a village, they did not focus on killing the soldiers or policemen stationed there, but more on the UN or US agricultural consultants or health workers trying to help the local peasants after lecturing them for hours, and then forcing them to confess their complicity with imperialism pub¬licly, they shot them. Brutal as this procedure was, it was rooted in an acute insight: they, not the police or the army, were the true danger, the enemy at its most perfidious, since they were ‘lying in the guise of truth’ — the more they were ‘innocent’ (they ‘really’ tried to help the peasants), the more they served as a tool of the USA. It is only such a blow against the enemy at [their]his best, at the point where the enemy ‘indeed helps us’, that displays true revolutionary autonomy and ‘sovereignty (to use this term in its Bataillean sense). If one adopts the attitude of ‘let us take from the enemy what is good, and reject or even fight against what is bad’, one is already caught in the liberal trap of ‘humanitarian aid’.

The plan is overwhelmed with the logic of capitalism, any inclusion of their advocacy dooms solvency.Adam Katz, English Instructor at Onodaga Community College, 2000, Postmodernism and the Politics of “Culture.” P.199.

The core of these antinomies is the unity of necessity and violence in the wage relation. This is the relation that requires daily ratification and thereby undermines the distinction between coercion and consent, that produces the conditions of its own reproduction and hence makes knowledge and apologia inseparable, and that requires a constant intellectual and material attack on the conditions of collective power required for submitting all hierarchical relations to public inspection. A certain polemical line—interested in pursuing questions of coercion and consent, knowledge and justification, and power and authority to their “logical conclusions”—is thus cut off at the roots. The human rights worldview produces and conceals the antinomy of complicity and powerlessness while rendering necessary, as historically concrete “radical alterity,” the pursuit of that polemical line as it is cut off categorically (in


actually existing relations between power, knowledge, and principles). That is, radical alterity is ideology critique as the foundational mode of political action.



Tinkering with the system is rooted in capitalist ideology – only complete rejection can solveIstavan Meszaros, Prof. Emeritus @ Univ. Sussex, 1995 Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of Transition, London: Merlin Press, pg 105-6

The reason why capital is structurally incapable of addressing causes as causes—in contrast to treating all newly arising challenges and complications as more or less successfully manipulatable effects—is because it happens to be its own causal foundation: a varitable, unholy ‘causa sui’. Anything that might aspire at socioeconomic legitimacy and viability must be accompanied within its predetermined structural framework. For as a mode of social metabolic control capital cannot tolerate the intrusion of any principle of socioeconomic regulation that might constrain its expansion-oriented dynamics. Indeed, expansion as such is not simply a relative—to a greater or lesser extent commendable, and in that light under certain circumstances freely adopted whereas under other consciously rejected—economic function but an absolutely necessary way of displacing the capital system's emerging problems and contradictions, in accord with the imperative of avoiding like plague their underlying causes. The self propelling causal foundations of the system cannot be questioned under any circumstance. If troubles appear in it, they must be treated as temporary ‘disfunctions’, to be remedied by reasserting with ever greater rigour the imperative of expanded reproduction. It is for this reason that there can be no alternative to the pursuit of expansion—at all cost—in all varieties of the capital system. So long ad the scope for unobstructed expansion is objectively present, the process of displacing the system’s contradictions can go on unhindered. When things do not go well, i.e., when there is a failure in economic growth and corresponding advancement, the difficulties are diagnosed in terms of the circular proposition which runs away from the underlying causes and highlights only their consequences by saying that ‘there is not enough growth.’ Dealing with problems in this perverse circular way , constantly repeating even at times of major recessions that ‘everything is in place’ for healthy expansion, creates the illusion that capital’s mode of social metabolic control is in no need of fundamental change. Legitimate change must be always envisaged as limited alteration and improvement of what is already given. Change must be brought about by innovation undertaken strictly at the instrumental level, which is supposed to make it self evidently beneficial. Since, however, the necessary historical qualifying conditions and implications of continued expansion are systematically disregarded or brushed aside as irrelevant, the assumption of the permanence and unquestionable viability of capital's causa sui is utterly fallacious.

Only a completely negative move can solve – the alternative is a prerequisite to ethical politicsSlavoj Zizek, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies in Ljubljana, 1999, The Ticklish Subject, p.153-154

It would therefore be tempting to risk a 'Badiouian-Pauline reading of the end of psychoanalysis, determining it as a New Beginning, a symbolic 'rebirth' - the radical restructuring of the analysand's subjectivity in such a way that the vicious cycle of the superego is suspended, left behind. Does not Lacan himself provide a number of hints that the end of analysis opens up the domain of Love beyond Law, using the very Pauline terms to which Badiou refers? Nevertheless, Lacan's way is not that of St Paul or Badiou: psychoanalysis is not 'psychosynthesis'; it does not already posit a 'new harmony', a new Truth-Event; it - as it were - merely wipes the slate clean for one. However, this 'merely' should be put in quotation marks, because it is Lacan's contention that, in this negative gesture of 'wiping the slate clean', something (a void) is confronted which is already 'sutured' with the arrival of a new Truth-Event. For Lacan negativity, a negative gesture of withdrawal precedes any positive gesture of enthusi¬astic identification with a Cause: negativity functions as the condition of (im)possibility of the enthusiastic identification - that is to say, it lays the ground, opens up space for it but is simultaneously obfuscated by it and undermines it. For this reason, Lacan implicitly changes the balance between Death and Resurrection in favour of Death: what 'Death' stands for at its most radical is not merely the passing of earthly life, but the 'night of the world', the self-withdrawal, the absolute contraction of subjectivity, the severing of its links with 'reality' - this is the 'wiping the slate clean' that opens up the domain of the symbolic New Beginning, of the emergence of the 'New Harmony' sustained by a newly emerged Master-Signifier.



Permutation doesn’t solve – fails to disturb the systemSlavoj Zizek, famous philosopher, 2008, In Defense of Lost Causes, p. 33

The "worldless" character of capitalism is linked to this hegemonic role of scientific discourse in modernity, a feature clearly identified already by Hegel who wrote that, for us moderns, art and religion no longer obey absolute respect: we can admire them, but we no longer kneel down in front of them, our heart is not really with them —today, only science (conceptual knowledge) deserves this respect. "Postmodernity" as the "end of grand narratives" is one of the names for this predicament in which the multitude of local fictions thrives against the background of scientific discourse as the only remaining universality deprived of sense. Which is why the politics advocated by many a leftist today, that of countering the devastating world-dissolving effect of capitalist moder nization by inventing new fictions, imagining "new worlds " (like the Porto Alegre slogan "Another world is possible!"), is inadequate or, at least, profoundly ambiguous: it all depends on how these fictions relate to the underlying Real of capitalism — do they just supplement it with the imaginary multitude, as the postmodern "local narratives" do, or do they disturb its functioning? In other words, the task is to produce a symbolic fiction (a truth) that intervenes into the Real, that causes a change within it.29


Capitalism Bad – A2: Space

Capitalism isn’t key to space – just a tactic to divert attention from exploitationJulien Tort, UNESCO, July 28 2005, Working paper for the Ethical Working Group on Astrobiology and Planetary Protection of ESA (EWG) “Exploration and Exploitation: Lessons Learnt from the Renaissance for Space Conquest” http://portal.unesco.org/shs/en/ev.php-URL_ID=6195&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=-465.html

The scenario in which extraterrestrial room is used as a response to the degradation of the terrestrial environment also leads us to the second question that may be asked when considering the parallel between the conquest of the West and the exploration of space. While the possibility of colonizing celestial bodies may seem distant, it diverts attention from terrestrial issues in a very real way. The paradigm of the accumulation of Capital is profoundly bound to the pollution and the overexploitation of natural resources. Likening space exploration to the discovery of America may then be misleading and dangerous. There is –most probably— no new earth to be discovered through space conquest and it is, so far, unlikely that any relief can come from outer space for environmental pain. Furthermore, even if the possibility of human settlements on other celestial bodies was likely, would it still be right to neglect the terrestrial environment, with the idea that we can go and live elsewhere when we are done with this specific planet (again a scenario that science fiction likes: see for example the end of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation)? In a way, the presentation of space as a new area for conquest and expansion tends to deny that the model of the limitless exploitation of natural resources is facing a crisis.


Capitalism Bad – A2: Growth

Capitalism isn’t key to growth – drains the GDP with profitW. J. Kowalski, doctoral candidate in Architectural Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University, March 2000, Anti Capitalism Modern Theory and Historical Origins, http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/w/x/wxk116/antic/

Most companies use resources and human labor to generate profits for absentee owners, whether corporations, sole proprietors, or stockholders. The figure below illustrates the flow of wealth. The company will maintain the highest prices for consumer goods that the market will bear, while simultaneously paying the lowest wages that the workers will tolerate. The company employees receive a fraction of what their true labor is worth while the quality of the overpriced goods is kept at a minimum. The owners, non-working profiteers, will sacrifice even human health and the environment in their greed for excessive profits. In general, owners who do not actively participate in the operations perform no function other than parasitism and the existence of such a practice highlights a fundamental flaw of capitalism -- corporate non-entities are guaranteed the right to profit while human beings do not even have a guaranteed right to subsistence. The pie charts below show the effect of eliminating profits from the average Housing sole proprietorship (see these business statistics for the data on this and other industries). Maximum production requires foregoing profits and, therefore, the elimination of payments to any parties who are not working. Only salaries and expenses can be paid out. In a such a profitless company there is no drain on resources, as illustrated in the figure below, and all resources can be efficiently devoted to increasing production and improving quality. The profitless company is a self-owned entity in which the employees are the stewards. The company becomes an engine for generating essential goods and services and increasing employment. In a profitless system all prices drop to their natural levels and all workers are paid the true value of their labor. The synergy of profitless capitalism is illustrated in the figure below. When a complete range of companies goes profitless and single-source to each other, all of their costs begin dropping. The result is a synergy that could double or quadruple the GDP. The continuous construction of homes and other goods at cost would accelerate the standard of living and provide continuous employment. The reduced consumer costs would make everyone wealthy in the sense that they could live comfortably. Business taxes would also transfer to income taxes from increased employment, and so would not be negatively affected. By putting production before profit on a national scale we would effectively be prioritizing poverty, which is the only cause worth pursuing in the modern world, and implicitly includes the control of all diseases, social and otherwise. In profitless capitalism only those who work are paid although everyone would be guaranteed subsistence. The entire nation would ratchet itself up to a high standard of living without the drain on the economy produced by profiteering. The rich could keep what they have, but they would no longer be paid for doing nothing. Without interest paid on loans or capitalized funds being held in suspension, all available credit dollars would end up financing growth and production and thereby keep employment universal. The beauty of profitless capitalism is that it puts all the people to work directly for their own benefit. Instead of the fruits of their labors being drained off as profits and diverted to useless enterprise, their efforts are immediately and directly used for improving the quality of life. The people would be actively solving all of their most pressing problems instead of sitting in stagnation. All of this from a simple shift of paradigm.


Capitalism Bad – A2: Alternative is Violent

1. Our alternative reverses oppression and violenceSlavoj Zizek, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 1989, The Sublime Object of Ideology, pg. 3-4

It is upon the unity of these two features that the Marxist notion of the revolution, of the revolutionary situation, is founded: a situation of metaphorical condensation in which it finally becomes clear to the everyday consciousness that it is not possible to solve any particular ques¬tion without solving them all - that is, without solving the fundamental question which embodies the antagonistic character of the social totality. In a 'normal', pre-revolutionary state of things, everybody is fighting his own particular battles (workers are striking for better wages, feminists are fighting for the rights of women, democrats for political and social freedoms, ecologists against the exploitation of nature, participants in the peace movements against the danger of war, and so on). Marxists are using all their skill and adroimess of argument to convince the partici¬pants in these particular struggles that the only real solution to their problem is to be found in the global revolution: as long as social relations are dominated by Capital, there will always be sexism in relations between the sexes, there will always be a threat of global war, there will always be a danger that political and social freedoms will be suspended, nature itself will always remain an object of ruthless exploitation. . . . The global revolution will then abolish the basic social antagonism, enabling the formation of a transparent, rationally governed society.

2. Our alternative does not celebrate violence, just realizes that it is inevitableSlavoj Zizek, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2003, Liberation Hurts, Accessed May 28, 2008, http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/rasmussen.htm

A kind of litmus test is - this always works on all my friends - “How do you stand toward Fight Club, the movie?” All the liberals claim, “Ah, it’s proto-fascist, violent, blah, blah, blah.” No, I am for it. I think the message of Fight Club is not so much liberating violence but that liberation hurts. What may falsely appear as my celebration of violence, I think, is a much more tragic awareness. If there is a great lesson of the 20th-century history, it’s the lesson of psychoanalysis: The lesson of totalitarian subordination is not “renounce, suffer,” but this subordination offers you a kind of perverted excess of enjoyment and pleasure. To get rid of that enjoyment is painful. Liberation hurts.

3. Without violence, revolution would not be possibleSlavoj Zizek, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2003, Liberation Hurts, Accessed May 28, 2008, http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/rasmussen.ht

. But, of course, now, I’m not saying what Elizabeth Wright, who edited a reader about me, thought. I love her, an English old lady. I had tea with her once, and she said, “I liked your book, The Fragile Absolute, but something bothered me. Do I really have to kill my son to be ethical?” I love this total naïveté. Of course not! My point was to address the problem of totalitarian control. The problem is: how does a totalitarian power keep you in check? Precisely by offering you some perverse enjoyment, and you have to renounce that, and it hurts. So, I don’t mean physical violence, or a kind of fetishization of violence. I just mean simply that liberation hurts. What I don’t buy from liberals is this idea of, as Robespierre would have put it, “revolution without revolution,” the idea that somehow, everything will change, but nobody will be really hurt. No, sorry, it hurts.


Capitalism Bad – A2: Robinson and Tormey

1. Robinson and Tormey’s theory relies on a conflation of the political and politicsLasse Thomassen, Department of Government, University of Essex, 2004, The British Journal of Politics & International Relations Volume 6 Issue 4, p. 558

Robinson believes that, since Lacan did not provide a specific theory of politics, but only a more abstract ontology, all the political appropriations of Lacan can do is to subsume politics to pregiven Lacanian categories (p. 261). This is obviously a potential danger, and one that must be avoided. One must insist that analytical categories are always rearticulated when applied; as Wittgenstein has shown, there is no application that leaves intact the rule being applied. But this does not preclude the theorisation of politics through categories that were not originally thought to apply (directly or indirectly) to politics. This would assume a regional conception of politics: politics as determined as a particular region with particular (essential) limits and requiring a theory only applicable to this region.

2. Our alternative can effectively permeate societyLasse Thomassen, Department of Government, University of Essex, 2004, The British Journal of Politics & International Relations Volume 6 Issue 4, p. 558

This, in turn, would require a theory transcending all regions and thus capable of delimiting the specifically political region—again not a feasible alternative from a post-structuralist viewpoint. It is the merit of, among others, the theorists considered by Robinson, that they have introduced a distinction between, on the one hand, politics as the region of practices usually referred to as politics and, on the other hand, the political as the moment of the contingent institution of politics and the social. The political cannot be reduced to a specific region, but instead refers to a logic permeating society in its entirety, even if in some places more than others. Since the political understood as contingency permeates politics, we can use the political as a principle of analysing politics. This is one of the contributions of post-structuralist (including Lacanian) political theory.

3. Withdrawing from Capital does not preclude progressive politicsLasse Thomassen, Department of Government, University of Essex, 2004, The British Journal of Politics & International Relations Volume 6 Issue 4, p. 558

According to Robinson, Lacanian political theory is inherently conservative. 'Lacanians', Robinson writes, 'urge that one reconcile oneself to the inevitability of lack. Lacanian politics is therefore about coming to terms with violence, exclusion and antagonism, not about resolving or removing these' (p. 260). And, about Mouffe, he writes that, 'as a Lacanian, Mouffe cannot reject exclusion; it is, on a certain level, necessary according to such a theory' (p. 263). Such assertions are only possible if we believe in the possibility of opposing exclusion to a situation of non-exclusion, which is exactly what post-structuralists have challenged. Moreover, the post-structuralist (and Lacanian) view does not necessarily preclude the removal of any concrete exclusion. On the contrary, the acknowledgement of the constitutivity of exclusion shifts the focus from exclusion versus non-exclusion to the question of which exclusions we can and want to live with. Nothing in the post-structuralist (and Lacanian) view thus precludes a progressive politics. Of course, this is not to say that a progressive politics is guaranteed—if one wants guarantees, post-structuralist political theory is not the place to look.


Capitalism Good – Mass Violence

Capitalism is on-balance the best system for solving violence and mass atrocity. Dr. Andrew Bernstein, Professor of Philosophy Pace University, September 29, 2005, Capitalism Magazine, Accessed 4/29/09, http://www.andrewbernstein.net/articles/01_globalcap.htm

But what is not clear to many people is the nature of freedom. For centuries, political philosophers have written about the virtues of freedom, and for millenia men have hungered, fought and died for it. However, no one until Ayn Rand defined its essential nature. In her influential novel, Atlas Shrugged, and in such non-fiction works as Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal, she shows that the fundamental attribute of freedom is: the absence of physical coercion. For men to be free, they must be able to act on the best rational judgment of their own minds without physical force initiated against them. “Freedom, in a political context, has only one meaning: the absence of physical coercion.” 3 A man’s freedom of action may be violated either by private individuals or by the government, and by one means only – by the initiation of force against him. Private individuals who initiate force are criminals, and men form governments to protect themselves from these. But the government itself is potentially the gravest danger to an individual’s freedom, because it has a legal monopoly on the use of force in a given geographical region. A government that is dictatorial threatens men in a manner far worse than that of a common criminal. Murderous tyrants like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao tse Tung and Pol Pot killed vastly more innocent victims than did thugs like Al Capone and John Gotti. It is against the government that men’s freedom needs to be most urgently protected. It is well in this regard to remember George Washington’s famous warning that, “Government, like fire, is a dangerous servant.” For men to be free, the initiation of force must be banned from human life. This is just as true of governmental force as of its private use. The use of force must be legally limited to retaliation against those who start it. Human beings require a written Constitution with a Bill of Rights to protect them from the state. The Constitution must legally outlaw the initiation of force by the government, as well as by private citizens. Capitalism requires, as a matter of principle, a universal ban on the initiation of force.

The alternative to capitalism is violence and famine.Radley Balko, Freelance Writer, October 9, 2002, FoxNews, Accessed 4/29/09, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,65278,00.html

These studies, taken together, paint a telling picture of the state of humanity, and of what steps we can take to make it even better. When countries embrace free markets, trade, and political freedom, they thrive. Incomes grow. Lifespans lengthen. Social maladies mend. When nations isolate themselves from international markets, when they deny citizens free elections, free press, and property, they falter. Incomes wane. Disease and famine swell. Strife looms. Communist and isolated North Korea, for example, has lost 10 percent of its population -- two million people -- to famine since 1995. And that’s in an allegedly "developed" country. Anti-globalization protesters can rail all they like against the evils of capitalism, international markets and classical liberalism. But the numbers are unmistakable. Wealth is the only remedy for poverty, and capitalism is the only real way to create wealth.

The alternative to capitalism is brutal violence and oppressive dictators. Dr. Andrew Bernstein, Professor of Philosophy Pace University, September 29, 2005, Capitalism Magazine, Accessed 4/29/09, http://www.andrewbernstein.net/articles/01_globalcap.htm

But today, despite the lessons of the past, political dictatorships even worse than those of feudal Europe proliferate across the globe. For example, though Communism today may be in its death throes, it butchered 100 million innocent victims in 80 years and still enslaves and murders innocent men in China, in Cuba and in North Korea. More broadly, statism – the subjugation of the individual by the state – exists everywhere. Brutal theocracies and military dictatorships in the Middle East murder their own citizens, and sponsor terrorist attacks against the world’s freest country, the United States. In Africa, individual rights and liberty are non-existent – the continent bristles with military and/or tribal dictatorships. For too long the situation was no different in Haiti and only slightly better throughout Latin and South America, where sundry tin pot dictators were and remain the rule. Today, more than 225 years after the American Revolution, freedom is virtually unknown around the globe. In North Korea, Communist oppression is unspeakable. As merely one example, political prisoners are enslaved, starved and used for target practice by guards and troops. In Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, the torture and execution of political prisoners was routine. In Afganistan, the Taliban denied the right to an independent life to the entire female gender,


oppressing by that policy alone one/half of the country’s population. Further, to be brutally honest, any degree of freedom is virtually unknown on the African continent.14


Capitalism Good – Terrorism

1. Middle Eastern capitalism is critical to solving terrorismLeon Hadar, research fellow in foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, 2006, Business Times Singapore, p. np

Clearly, the Doha Round was a way to link America's strategy to promote its interests and values in the Middle East, the efforts to continue to liberalise global trade and the US-led war on terrorism. In fact, one of the reasons that the latest round of trade negotiations was launched in the capital of one of the most prosperous economies in the Middle East after the terrorist attacks of Sept 11, 2001 was to demonstrate that contrary to Al-Qaeda's ideology, Islam and capitalism were compatible, and that an economy like that of Qatar, committed as it is to the principles of free trade, can thrive at the centre of the Arab Middle East. Moreover, the message coming out of the post-9/11 Doha meeting was that liberalising global trade which creates the conditions for economic growth in the Third World could also be the most effective way to weaken the appeal of Islamic radicalism. It was Al-Qaeda and its terrorist networks - and not the Middle East and the Muslim world - that were not compatible with free markets and economic prosperity. It is in this context that we have to consider the collapse of the talks in Geneva aimed at reaching a global market-opening agreement under the auspices of the World Trade Organisation. Yes, the breakdown in the talks had to do with the technical and somewhat esoteric problems involving farm subsidies and related trade policies and their intertwining with domestic politics. But against the backdrop of the mess in Iraq and Lebanon and the inability of the US and its allies to resolve the crises there, the decision to shelve the five-year-old talks to dismantle market barriers provided a very dramatic and even tragic soundtrack to the current depressing Middle Eastern movie. Indeed, the original ambition of the Doha Round was to produce an agreement by the end of 2004 and boost trade by as much as $800US billion, according to the World Bank. The bank has already scaled back its prediction of a trade accord's value to as little as $96US billion, and the current deadlock would threaten even this kind of modest gains. Estimates show that relatively open economies had a gross domestic product more than seven times higher, and grew at a rate more than eight times as fast, than the least open economies. Hence the stalemate in the Doha Round will only make it more certain that it would be impossible to lift out of poverty millions of people in the Middle East (and elsewhere), ensuring that the environment in that region would be conducive to promoting Osama bin Laden's strategy of hatred and violence.

2. Nuclear Terrorism is the greatest threat we faceGraham Allison, founding dean of Harvard’s modern JFK School of Government and Director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, 2005, The American Prospect, pg. 1

The gravity of the potential consequences requires that the president give absolute priority to this challenge. In the Cold War, we recognized that preventing a global nuclear war was a necessary condition for pursuing any other objective. In Ronald Reagan's oft-quoted one-liner, "A nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought." The face of that danger today is a nuclear terrorist attack on an American city. This would be a world-altering event. The categorical imperative, therefore, is to do everything technically feasible on the fastest possible time line to prevent it.

3. A Bioterror attack will lead to extinctionJohn Steinbruner, senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute and holder of the Sydnet Stein Chair in International Security, 1997, Foreign Policy

The use of a pathogen, by contrast, is an extended process whose scope and timing cannot be precisely controlled. For most potential biological agents, the predominant drawback is that they would not act swiftly or decisively enough to be an effective weapon. But for a few pathogens - ones most likely to have a decisive effect and therefore the ones most likely to be contemplated for deliberately hostile use - the risk runs in the other direction. A lethal pathogen that could efficiently spread from one victim to another would be capable of initiating an intensifying cascade of disease that might ultimately threaten the entire world population. The 1918 influenza epidemic demonstrated the potential for a global contagion of this sort but not necessarily its outer limit.


Capitalism Good – Environment

Growth improves environmental outcomes – research provesTerry L. Anderson, executive director of Property and Environment Research Center, 2004, “You Have to Admit It's Getting Better,” Hoover Inst.

The doomsayers contend that such growth will ultimately deplete natural resources and destroy the environment, but Lomborg finds positive correlations between economic growth and environmental quality. He correlates the World Bank’s environmental sustainability index with gross domestic product per capita across 117 nations, concluding that “higher income in general is correlated with higher environmental sustainability” (Lomborg 2001, 32). This idea is known as the “environmental Kuznets curve,” based on Nobel laureate Simon Kuznets’s earlier work on patterns of economic growth. Measuring environmental quality (for example, air quality) on the vertical axis and economic performance (for example, the gross domestic product, or GDP) on the horizontal axis, the relationship displays a J-curve. At lower levels of income, environmental quality can deteriorate as people trade environmental quality for economic growth. But as Bruce Yandle, Maya Vijayaraghavan, and Madhusudan Bhattarai review in Chapter 3, all studies show that the relationship between environmental quality and economic performance becomes positive at higher levels of income because environmental quality is what economists call an income-elastic good. In other words, if income rises 10 percent, the demand for environmental quality rises more than 10 percent. Generally, the (annual) income level at which the turning point occurs is between $4,000 and $8,000, with the demand for water quality turning upward at lower levels of income than the income levels at which the demand for endangered species preservation turns upward.

Overpopulation is undermining the environment – not capitalismTerry L. Anderson, executive director of Property and Environment Research Center, 2004, “You Have to Admit It's Getting Better,” Hoover Inst.

Some observers attribute nearly all of the world’s maladies to excessive population growth. More specifically, they claim that population growth has at least three adverse effects on human well-being. First, it increases the number of people that are impoverished, the proportion of the community that is impoverished, and the severity of the impoverishment. Second, it increases environmental degradation—the misuse of natural resources, with adverse consequences on many dimensions of human well-being. And finally, it prevents environmental enhancement by holding back the savings and investment that would permit environmentally sustainable economic growth and retards the agricultural productivity that would encourage environmentally friendly agriculture and conservation (Ahlburg 1994; Kelley and McGreevey 1994).

Capitalism is key to solving global warmingJanet Whitman, 2-19-2008, Financial Post, http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=317551

Global warming may soon get a saviour more effective than Al Gore and his doomsday Power-Point presentations: capitalism. The former U.S. vice-president, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year for his work on climate change, is credited with bringing widespread attention to the issue. But the huge moneymaking opportunity in going green will be the big driver that leads to the reining in of the release of greenhouse gasses, experts say. Money already is pouring into environmental initiatives and technologies in the United States. Experts expect investment in the area to explode over the next few years if, as anticipated, the government here imposes restrictions on the release of gases believed to be behind climate change. "Capitalism will drive this," said Vinod Khosla, founding chief executive of Sun Microsystems and a longtime venture capitalist. Mr. Khosla, speaking on a panel at a recent investment summit on climate change at United Nations headquarters here, said getting consumers to curb their energy use has never worked -- unless they've had a financial incentive. "If we make it economic, it will happen," he said. The expected government-mandated cap on carbon emissions already is fueling innovation. Venture capitalists, for instance, are investing in new technologies that would make cement -- a major producer of carbon emissions -- actually absorb carbon instead. Cement makers could practically give the product away and reap the financial reward from government carbon credits.


Capitalism Good – Space

Capitalist resource exploitation is key to getting to spaceSylvia Engdahl, professor at New York’s New School for Social Research, former computer systems specialist for the SAGE Air Defense System and author. “Space and Human Survival,” 2000 http://www.sylviaengdahl.com/space/survival.htm

I have called this stage in our evolution the “Critical Stage.” Paul Levinson [the Director of Connected Education] uses different terminology for the same concept. He says that we have only a narrow window to get into space, a relatively short time during which we have the capability, but have not yet run out of the resources to do it. I agree with him completely about this. Expansion into space demands high technology and full utilization of our world’s material resources (although not destructive utilization). It also demands financial resources that we will not have if we deplete the material resources of Earth. And it demands human resources, which we will lose if we are reduced to global war or widespread starvation. Finally, it demands spiritual resources, which we are not likely to retain under the sort of dictatorship that would be necessary to maintain a “sustainable” global civilization. Because the window is narrow, then, we not only have to worry about immediate perils. The ultimate, unavoidable danger for our planet, the transformation of our sun, is distant—but if we don’t expand into space now, we can never do it.

Space is key to preventing extinctionJames Oberg, space writer and a former space flight engineer based in Houston, 1999, Space Power Theory, http://www.jamesoberg.com/books/spt/new-CHAPTERSw_figs.pdf

We have the great gift of yet another period when our nation is not threatened; and our world is free from opposing coalitions with great global capabilities. We can use this period to take our nation and our fellow men into the greatest adventure that our species has ever embarked upon. The United States can lead, protect, and help the rest of [hu]mankind to move into space. It is particularly fitting that a country comprised of people from all over the globe assumes that role. This is a manifest destiny worthy of dreamers and poets, warriors and conquerors. In his last book, Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan presents an emotional argument that our species must venture into the vast realm of space to establish a spacefaring civilization. While acknowledging the very high costs that are involved in manned spaceflight, Sagan states that our very survival as a species depends on colonizing outer space. Astronomers have already identified dozens of asteroids that might someday smash into Earth. Undoubtedly, many more remain undetected. In Sagan’s opinion, the only way to avert inevitable catastrophe is for mankind to establish a permanent human presence in space. He compares humans to the planets that roam the night sky, as he says that humans will too wander through space. We will wander space because we possess a compulsion to explore, and space provides a truly infinite prospect of new directions to explore. Sagan’s vision is part science and part emotion. He hoped that the exploration of space would unify humankind. We propose that mankind follow the United States and our allies into this new sea, set with jeweled stars. If we lead, we can be both strong and caring. If we step back, it may be to the detriment of more than our country.

Space colonization leads to a transformation of consciousness that solves war – solves any reason capitalism is badFrank White, SETI researcher, 1990, The SETI Factor

Many scholars and scientists see benefits in opening up the “space frontier.” It provides an opportunity to divert nationalistic energies away from war and toward peaceful cooperation ventures; it also offers an expanded range in which to work out new forms of societal and political interaction. In the Overview Effect, I pointed out that space exploration also provides an opportunity for human awareness to evolve and transform itself because it provides us with a new perspective on the earth, the universe, and ourselves. The defining feature of the space development subculture is a refusal to consider the future of humanity as confined to the surface of one planet. While members of the space development community may be concerned about the future of Earth, it is not because they plan to stay here. They see themselves as the leaders in creating a “spacefaring civilization,” and making humanity into a “multi-planet species.”


Capitalism Good – Warming

1. Capitalism leads to new inventions that solve Global WarmingJanet Whitman, Contributor to the Financial Post, February 2008, Financial Post, Accessed May 28, 2008, http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=317551

Global warming may soon get a saviour more effective than Al Gore and his doomsday Power-Point presentations: capitalism. The former U.S. vice-president, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year for his work on climate change, is credited with bringing widespread attention to the issue. But the huge moneymaking opportunity in going green will be the big driver that leads to the reining in of the release of greenhouse gasses, experts say. Money already is pouring into environmental initiatives and technologies in the United States. Experts expect investment in the area to explode over the next few years if, as anticipated, the government here imposes restrictions on the release of gases believed to be behind climate change. "Capitalism will drive this," said Vinod Khosla, founding chief executive of Sun Microsystems and a longtime venture capitalist. Mr. Khosla, speaking on a panel at a recent investment summit on climate change at United Nations headquarters here, said getting consumers to curb their energy use has never worked -- unless they've had a financial incentive. "If we make it economic, it will happen," he said. The expected government-mandated cap on carbon emissions already is fueling innovation. Venture capitalists, for instance, are investing in new technologies that would make cement -- a major producer of carbon emissions -- actually absorb carbon instead.

2. Capitalism creates technological innovations that protect resources and the environmentRay Scott Percival, PhD and Associate Editor of the Popper Forum, 1996, The Critical Rationalist, Vol. 01, No. 02, Accessed May 28, 2008, http://elm.eeng.dcu.ie/~tkpw/tcr/tcr-home/

Machlup suggests that every new invention furnishes a new idea for potential combination with vast numbers of existing ideas "...[and] the number of possible combinations increases geometrically with the number of elements at hand" (Machlup 1960, p. 156). It is this latter idea of an increasing number of possible permutations of the available elements of technology as the stock increases, when combined with the idea of a reduced likelihood of duplicate discoveries as the number of possibilities increases faster than the number of potential technology producers, that seems most compelling to me.


Capitalism Good – Middle East Stability

1. Capitalism is necessary to win hearts and minds in the Middle EastWalter Russell Mead, Senior Fellow @ the Council on Foreign Relations, August 2004, Boston Globe, Accessed May 28, 2008, http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/08/29/now_for_the_hard_part/?page=full

To win hearts and minds in the Middle East, America must do more than proclaim its adherence to impressive human ideals. We must show concretely how the application of those ideals in our policies towards the Middle East promises to help people there achieve the goals that are important to them. Some of these goals are, naturally enough, material. America's strategy in Europe after World War II recognized that it wasn't enough to oppose communism intellectually and militarily. We had to show people that capitalism worked - that the material abundance that communism promised was something that capitalism could deliver. The Marshall Plan aimed to help Europe get back on its feet economically, and as prosperity returned to a devastated Europe the communist message progressively lost its appeal. We must find ways of helping Arabs build prosperous, middle-class societies and demonstrate that inter-civilizational cooperation brings concrete benefits for the large majority.

2. Winning hearts and minds is key to Middle Eastern StabilityAli Alarabi, Arab Writers Group, September 2007, Accessed May 28, 2008http://arabwritersgroup.wordpress.com/2007/09/11/alarabi-winning-arab-hearts-and-minds-for-immediate-release/

So long as these kind policies continue to dominate American foreign policy, the US stands to win neither the hearts nor the minds of the Arab world. Consequently such policies will breed more resentment and fuel discontent that eventually might manifest itself through violent expression.


Capitalism Good – Israeli-Lebanon Relations

1. Capitalism Solves Israeli-Lebanon RelationsJohn Blundell, Director General of the Institute of Economic Affairs, 2006, The Business, p. np

David Ricardo's potent insight - Comparative Advantage - remains far more important than relative armour. "Money is colour-blind," said Nelson Mandela, wisely. Money is equally blind to religious or national or tribal affiliations. In that bustling enclave of capitalism, Dubai, people swap and bargain without fretting about illusory supernatural divisions. Is it fanciful and impractical to urge the Middle East to relax both holy messages from the mullah-cracies or the deformed notions of Arab socialism? What the "arc of terrorism" needs is what we need in Britain - the rule of law and open markets, a society based on contracts not on rank. This needs no jargon. What is lacking is the elusive quality - trust. President Bush agrees with this, if you look beneath the military headlines. He wants to establish a US-Middle East Free Trade Area by 2013. He promises a "step by step pathway" to "deeper trade and economic partnership". He intends to integrate a series of bilateral free trade agreements. Bob Zoellick, the US Trade Representative, told the World Economic Forum in 2003 that there is no tension between Islam and liberal or capitalist economies. There seems no blasphemy in confirming Mohammed was a property-rights-respecting trader who praised commercial freedom. I am not sufficiently knowledgeable on Islamic history but I gather it is agreed Islam's early dynamic included free trade and lower taxes than its neighbours. What modern item of devilish Western technology do Middle Eastern households most covet? They barter or buy satellite dishes. Television is a strange force for shared experiences. Is it too optimistic to think digital signalling may be a force for mutual understanding? If this seems all a little Utopian, I invite you to reflect how rapidly the obliterated economies of Germany and Japan revived after 1946. The malignant Nazi system or the Imperial Japanese delusions evaporated. Two militaristic regimes were transformed into peaceful capitalistic lighthouses. The floundering and decaying economies of Arabia could boom. If the international consensus is that a UN "peacekeeping force" must get between Lebanon and Israel, let them not be an impediment to freedom of trade. Mutual dependence makes for prosperity. Beirut and Jerusalem should swap goods and services - not missiles. When goods do not cross borders armies will.

2. Israel-Lebanon conflict leads to global warJames Stuart, Alternative Writer, 2006, Accessed May 28, 2008, http://www.alt3.co.uk/DISCUSSION_files/Lebanon.htm

If the brave souls of Lebanon fall … who will be next? The eyes of the extremists will then turn to those rich states on the periphery of the region – and they will strip those states bare to feed their addiction and leave such a trail of destruction that will be truly unbearable, that will be truly shameful. Lebanon is crucial to the stability of the entire Middle East region. It is crucial to the stability of the world. This is where a stand must be taken lest the extremists, and the madmen from external states who inspire the extremists, gain too much strength, too much momentum. Lebanon may be a small country yet here is where the heart of the world will either beat strongly or will cease to beat at all. If there is a wider instability there will only be a wider destruction – and will be too much to stop.


Capitalism Good – Poverty

1. CAPITALISM IS THE MOST EFFECTIVE SYSTEM FOR ENDING POVERTY AND IMPROVING LIVING CONDITIONS.Bill Emmott, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist, 20:21 VISION, 2003, pp. 272-273.

The findings of history are quite simple, even if it is not becoming any easier to implement them. To believe them, however, one must first believe in capitalism and in the fact that it has been the only successful generator of sustained improvements in human welfare that has so far been discovered. The next thing is to work out what it is that makes capitalism tick. Or, put another way, one must find out what is different about the places where it ticks and the places where it doesn’t. That is what an international study, Economic Freedom of the World, has sought to do every year since it was first published, in 1996, by eleven economic think tanks around the world led by the Fraser Institute in Canada. The correlations it finds between sustained economic success and aspects of capitalist circumstances suggest that most of the explanations lie in how poor countries are governed, rather than in natural disadvantages or unfairness by the rich. Those suspicious of free-marketeers should note that conclusion: it is government, or the lack of it, that makes the crucial difference. The aim of the study was to see whether countries in which people had more economic freedom were also richer and grew more rapidly. But the study also sought to define economic freedom, in the hope of capturing and measuring the things that matter in making capitalism work. Broadly, economic freedom means the ability to do what you want with whatever property you have legally acquired, as long as your actions do not violate other people’s rights to do the same. Goods and services do not, alas, fall like manna from heaven; their arrival depends on property rights and the incentives to use and create them. So the issues surrounding those are what matter: Are property rights legally protected? Are people hemmed in by government regulations and trade barriers, or fearful of confiscation? Are their savings under attack from inflation, or can they do what they want with their money? Is it economically viable for parents to send their kids to school? The study’s authors initially found seventeen measures of these things, expanded in the 2001 update to twenty-one, and rated 102 (now 123) countries on each of them, going back, if possible, to 1975. They then had to find ways to weight the measures according to their importance, and used a panel of economists to do so. The conclusion was abundantly clear: the freer the economy, the higher the growth and the richer the people. This was especially so for countries that maintained a fairly free economy for many years, since before individuals and companies will respond to such freedom they need to feel confident that it will last.

The best economists agree that capitalism solves poverty.Donald Bourdreaux, Chairman Department of Economics George Mason University, May 27, 2008, USA Today, Accessed 4/29/09, http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2008/05/capitalism-has.html

Capitalism has moved billions out of poverty Commentary writer Alan Webber applauds the idea of the so-called social business — one that "has a social cause, not just a financial goal." Webber also tells us: "Think of it as capitalism with a human face" ("Giving the poor the business," The Forum, Wednesday). I don't question Webber's uncritical assumption that social businesses will work. I do, however, question his hackneyed suggestion that the face of for-profit capitalism is inhuman. No other economic system but capitalism has lifted billions of people so decisively out of poverty. Economist Joseph Schumpeter noted this fact in 1942: "Electric lighting is no great boon to anyone who has money enough to buy a sufficient number of candles and to pay servants to attend them. "It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as a rule improvements that would mean much to a rich man. "Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort."


Capitalism Good – Poverty

Capitalism is the economic system with the best chance to solve poverty – international economies prove.Dr. Andrew Bernstein, Professor of Philosophy Pace University, September 29, 2005, Capitalism Magazine, Accessed 4/29/09, http://www.andrewbernstein.net/articles/01_globalcap.htm

This is the fundamental reason that the capitalist nations have created the enormous prosperity they have, a staggering amount of wealth undreamed of in the pre-capitalist eras and societies. The correlation between freedom and wealth in the world today is stunning. The Index of Economic Freedom, published jointly by the Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation, shows this clearly. The Index ranks 155 nations in terms of freedom and shows the economic results. For example, Hong Kong, ranked number one in freedom, has a per capita GDP of $21,726. In less than 50 years, the freedom of Hong Kong fueled its growth from destitution to wealth, including for millions of penniless refugees who fled mainland Communism. Singapore, ranked number two in freedom, enjoys a per capita GDP of $31,139. The United States, ranked number five in freedom, has a per capita GDP of $31,201. 11 The freedom of the capitalist countries has created the most upwardly mobile societies of history, with hundreds of millions of human beings currently enjoying middle class comforts – people whose ancestors were poor just one or two centuries ago, or, in some cases, just decades ago. Further, according to the U.S. government, the poverty threshold for a family of four in 1997 was an annual income of roughly $16,400, i.e., at or below a per capita income of $4,100 per year. This certainly constitutes poverty by the standards of capitalist nations. But what are the standards of non-capitalist nations? 12

International studies prove capitalism solves world poverty. Radley Balko, Freelance Writer, October 9, 2002, FoxNews, Accessed 4/29/09, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,65278,00.html

At about the same time a hodgepodge of protesters descended on Washington, D.C. last month to protest capitalism, globalization and free trade, the United Nations and the Institute for International Studies released a triad of studies declaring that humanity is, for the most part, in the best condition it’s ever been. World poverty is down. Income gaps are narrowing. And the reasons for all of this are, to the protesters’ chagrin, none other than capitalism, globalization and free trade. The first study is the 2002 edition of the United Nations’ annual "Human Development Report." The report informs us that as of 2002, 140 of the world’s 200 countries -- 70 percent -- now hold multi-party elections. Eighty-two countries representing 57 percent of the human population are fully democratic, the highest percentage in human history. After a century in which totalitarianism -- Nazism, fascism and communism -- killed more than 170 million people, a clear move toward universal political freedom is afoot. The numbers on world economics are good, too. World poverty fell more than 20 percent between 1990 and 1999, a decade of aggressive globalization. The number of world Internet users is expected to double by 2005 to one billion. In those regions of the world most sympathetic to liberal reform, the news is even better. In ten years, poverty halved in in East Asia and the Pacific regions. Since 1990, 800 million people have gained new access to improved water supplies, and 750 million to improved sanitation. In the last 30 years, infant mortality rates have dropped from 96 deaths per 1,000 live births to just 56.


Capitalism Good – Quality of Life

1. EMPIRICALLY, CAPITALISM IS KEY TO QUALITY OF LIFE.Bill Emmott, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist, 20:21 VISION, 2003, p. 25.

Capitalism is what brought, directly or indirectly, the improvements in human welfare that were seen during the twentieth century. Its resources and incentives produced the technological developments that altered our lives, from antibiotics to MRI scans, from telephones to computers, from motor cars to jet airliners, from oil refining to air conditioning. In countries that enjoy such developments, capitalism has paid for education, health care, welfare support, vacations and pensions. For most of the second half of the twentieth century, especially the 1980s and 1990s, the lure of those benefits proved strong enough to make most people accept capitalism even if they could not bring themselves to love it.

2. CAPITALISM BOOSTS LIVING STANDARDS BECAUSE IT IS DRIVEN BY POSITIVE CHANGE.Bill Emmott, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist, 20:21 VISION, 2003, pp. 208-209.

Capitalism, challenged though it was, had a remarkable twentieth century. It succeeded in raising the living standards of the rich countries of mankind in a spectacular fashion, achieving the most rapid, sustained rise in living standards in human history. In poorer countries, too, the more moderate rise in living standards that was achieved also meant that, on this measure at least, the twentieth century was their best century in history. This spectacular success was based on capitalism’s ability to bring about change, change in the way things are done and for whom they are done, all in the search for profit. That search generates capitalism’s energy, its innovativeness, the temptations it offers people and organizations to risk their money and their effort on new ventures. However, capitalism’s success has depended also on a sort of financial chutzpah among conventional banks and stock market investors which is shown by their willingness to lend and venture money they do not physically possess in the hope, indeed expectation, that this sleight of hand will not be challenged and that, in any case, by the time the reckoning occurs (if it ever does), enough money will have been made to cover the loans or investments, with profits on top. It is, one might say, a triumph of the willingness to defy reality, in order better to create a new reality. Or it is a triumph of the willingness to use other people’s money to create more for oneself.

3. FREEDOM IS INTRINSICALLY VALUABLE.Amartya Sen, Nobel Economics Laureate, Lament University Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University, DEVELOPMENT AS FREEDOM, 1999, pp. 16-17.

But—most fundamentally—political liberty and civil freedoms are directly important on their own, and do not have to be justified indirectly in terms of their effects on the economy. Even when people without political liberty or civil rights do not lack adequate economic security (and happen to enjoy favorable economic circumstances), they are deprived of important freedoms in leading their lives and denied the opportunity to take part in crucial decisions regarding public affairs. These deprivations restrict social and political lives, and must be seen as repressive even without their leading to other afflictions (such as economic disasters). Since political and civil freedoms are constitutive elements of human freedom, their denial is a handicap in itself. In examining the role of human rights in development, we have to take note of the constitutive as well as the instrumental importance of civil rights and political freedoms. These issues are examined in chapter 6.


Capitalism Good – A2: Resource Scarcity

1. Capitalism ensures innovation to tap into infinite resourcesRay Scott Percival, PhD and Associate Editor of the Popper Forum, 1996, The Critical Rationalist, Vol. 01, No. 02, Accessed May 28, 2008, http://elm.eeng.dcu.ie/~tkpw/tcr/tcr-home/

But this very pressure creates the incentive for further inventions which not only compensate for the increased demand but increase production to lower costs and prices below their pre-shortage values. (This is the best explanation for the results of extensive historical research. cf. Boserup 1981) (34) So the argument moves from whether there is a fixed amount of copper in a mine or the Earth etc., to whether there are diminishing returns in the long run given (a) the growth of our total imaginative capacity (World 2) and (b) the growth of our inventions and in general our World 3 objective knowledge. Both of these increase with increases in population, since the more people there are, the more minds there are to work on problems of scarcity and add to our objective knowledge.

2. Capitalism creates infinite resources, prevents resource conflictsRay Scott Percival, PhD and Associate Editor of the Popper Forum, 1996, The Critical Rationalist, Vol. 01, No. 02, Accessed May 28, 2008, http://elm.eeng.dcu.ie/~tkpw/tcr/tcr-home/

So the argument moves from whether there is a fixed amount of copper in a mine or the Earth etc., to whether there are diminishing returns in the long run given (a) the growth of our total imaginative capacity (World 2) and (b) the growth of our inventions and in general our World 3 objective knowledge. Both of these increase with increases in population, since the more people there are, the more minds there are to work on problems of scarcity and add to our objective knowledge. (35) We have shown that it is the volume of services we obtain from a resource that is the most meaningful index of the quantity of a resource. Having established this, it becomes possible to envision the uninterrupted physical depletion of a non-renewable resource in a never ending process in which the total volume of services obtainable per unit of physical resource increases practically forever.

3. Oil is Abiotic which prevents depletionPatrick Mooney, of the Institute of Unlearning, 2004, Accessed May 28, 2008, http://www.the7thfire.com/peak_oil/peak_oil_introduction.htm

At the heart of this important debate is the work of scientists in Russia and the Ukraine, which has been strongly advanced since its official birth in 1951. Trapped in a containment policy by the Western Powers during the Cold War, the Soviet Union realized that it was cut off from much of the world's oil reserves. It therefore turned its brightest minds onto the question of petroleum production. The belief that petroleum was a fossil fuel, therefore biological in its origin, was first advanced in the 18th century. Within fifty years, however, leading scientists in Germany and France had attacked the theory of petroleum's biological roots. It was not seriously challenged again until the Soviet scientists thoroughly crushed the idea by the 1960's. Despite these efforts, the theory remains powerfully in place in the West and petroleum is still largely regarded as a non-renewable resource. What the modern Russian and Ukrainian scientists have extensively proven is that petroleum is abiotic, meaning that it is not derived from long decayed biological matter. While the Soviet Union did not survive long enough to see the physical benefits of this theory, modern Russia certainly has. It has been reported in several sources this year that Russia has become the world's leading producer and exporter of oil. This achievement has brought Russia from the brink of collapse at the end of the Cold War to the brink of being a superpower yet again. The implications of this science are simply staggering. Not only will the already existing oil fields one day fill up again, but new oil reserves can be found simply by digging deeper into the earth.


Capitalism Good – A2: Root Cause of Violence

1. Capitalism is not the root cause of conflict, imperialism is more likely to cause warDW MacKenzie, PhD in Economics from George Mason, 2003, Accessed May 28, 2008, http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1201

Perhaps the oddest aspect of these various, but similar, claims is that their proponents appeal so often to historical examples. They often claim that history shows how capitalism is imperialistic and warlike or at least benefits from war. Capitalism supposedly needs a boost from some war spending from time to time, and history shows this. Robert Higgs demonstrated that the wartime prosperity during the Second World War was illusory[i]. This should come to no surprise to those who lived through the deprivations of wartime rationing. We do not need wars for prosperity, but does capitalism breed war and imperialism anyway? History is rife with examples of imperialism. The Romans, Alexander, and many others of the ancient world waged imperialistic wars. The Incan Empire and the empire of Ancient China stand as examples of the universal character of imperialism. Who could possibly claim that imperialism grew out of the prosperity of these ancient civilizations? Imperialism precedes modern industrial capitalism by many centuries. Uneven wealth distribution or underconsumption under capitalism obviously did not cause these instances of imperialism.

2. War leads to capitalism, capitalism does not lead to warDW MacKenzie, PhD in Economics from George Mason, 2003, Accessed May 28, 2008, http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1201

Capitalism neither requires nor promotes imperialist expansion. Capitalism did not create imperialism or warfare. Warlike societies predate societies with secure private property. The idea that inequity or underspending give rise to militarism lacks any rational basis. Imperialistic tendencies exist due to ethnic and nationalistic bigotries, and the want for power. Prosperity depends upon our ability to prevent destructive acts. The dogma of destructive creation fails as a silver lining to the cloud of warfare. Destructive acts entail real costs that diminish available opportunities. The idea that we need to find work for idle hands in capitalism at best leads to a kind of Sisyphus economy where unproductive industries garner subsidies from productive people. At worst, it serves as a supporting argument for war. The more recent versions of the false charges against capitalism do nothing to invalidate two simple facts. Capitalism generates prosperity by creating new products. War inflicts poverty by destroying existing wealth. There is no sound reason to think otherwise.

3. Capitalism does not promote interstate conflictDW MacKenzie, PhD in Economics from George Mason, 2003, Accessed May 28, 2008, http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1201

Capitalists will hire workers up to the point where the discounted marginal product of their labor equals the wage rate. To do otherwise would mean a loss of potential profit. Since workers earn the marginal product of labor and capital derives from deferred consumption, Marxist arguments about reserve armies of the unemployed and surplus extraction fail. It is quite odd to worry about capitalists oversaving when many complain about how the savings rate in the U.S. is too low. Why does the U.S., as the world's 'greatest capitalist/imperialist power', attract so much foreign investment? Many Americans worry about America's international accounts. Fears about foreigners buying up America are unfounded, but not because this does not happen. America does have a relatively low national savings rate. It does attract much foreign investment, precisely because it has relatively secure property rights. Indeed, much of the third world suffers from too little investment. The claims of Marxists, and Hobson, directly contradict the historical record. Sound theory tells us that it should. The Marxist claim that capitalists must find investments overseas fails miserably.


Capitalism Good – Alternative is Oppressive

Their alternative leads to an explosion of racism and oppression.Cornel West, Professor Yale University, 1988, Marxism and the Interp. Of Culture, ed. Nelson and Grossberg, p. 18-19

I shall argue that there are four basic conceptions of Afro-American oppression in the Marxist tradition. The first conception subsumes Afro-American oppression under the general rubric of working-class exploitation. This viewpoint is logocentric in that it elides and eludes the specificity of Afro-American oppression outside the workplace; it is reductionistic in that it explains away rather than explains this specificity. This logocentric and reductionistic approach results from vulgar and sophisticated versions of economism. I understand economism to be those forms of Marxist theory that defend either simple monodeterminist or subtle multideterminist causal relations between an evolving economic base upon a reflecting and refracting ideological superstructure, thereby giving a priori status to class subjects and modes of production as privileged explanatory variables. 1n regard to Afro-American oppression, economism and its concomitant logocentric and reductionistic approach holds that African people in the United States of America are not subjected to forms of oppression distinct from general working-class exploitation. Historically, this position was put forward by the major figures of the U.S. Socialist party (notwithstanding its more adequate yet forgotten 1903 resolution on the Negro question), especially Eugene Debs. In an influential series of articles, Debs argued that Afro-American oppression was solely a class problem and that any attention to its alleged specificity “apart from the general labor problem” would constitute racism in reverse.4 He wrote, “we [the socialists] have nothing to do with it [the race question], for it is their [the capitalists’] fight. We have simply to open the eyes of as many Negroes as we can and do battle for emancipation from wage slavery, and when the working class have triumphed in the class struggle and stand forth economic as well as political free men, the race problem will disappear.” In the meantime, Debs added, “we have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all races. The Socialist Party is the party of the whole working class regardless of color.”5 My aim is not simply to castigate the U.S. Socialist party or insinuate accusative charges of racism against Debs. Needless to say, the Socialist party had many distinguished black members and Debs had a long history of fighting racism. Rather, I am concerned with the fact that the Second International economism in the U.S. Socialist party lead to a logocentric and reductionistic approach to Afro-American oppression, thereby ignoring, or at best downplaying strategies (as opposed to personal moral duties) to struggle against racism.

The alternative to capitalism is a fundamental destruction of individual rights and liberty. Dr. Andrew Bernstein, Professor of Philosophy Pace University, September 29, 2005, Capitalism Magazine, Accessed 4/29/09, http://www.andrewbernstein.net/articles/01_globalcap.htm

The rule of law is fundamental to capitalism. The courts must protect all manifestations of individual rights, including property rights and the sanctity of contracts. They must protect honest men from thieves and criminals of every variety, whether they commit fraud or overt acts of physical coercion, whether they are private individuals or government bureaucrats or regulators. This is an especially urgent point in the early 21st century when former Communist nations seek to move to a capitalist system without first instituting the rule of law. Whether in states of the former Soviet Union or in Albania or elsewhere, if gangsters control significant elements of a society or its economy it will be impossible to protect property rights and enforce contracts. Legitimate businessmen will then be killed or intimidated, private investment will be withheld, and the attempt to implement a free economy will founder. Any hope to create a capitalist system rests on the antecedent requirement of establishment of the rule of law. In the absence of this, all such attempts are doomed to fail.


Capitalism Good – Alternative is Oppressive

Their alternative causes transition wars and extinctionJ.R. Nyquist, IR expert, 2-4-2005, “The Political Consequences of a Financial Crash,” Financial Sense, www.financialsense.com/stormw...2005/0204.html

Should the United States experience a severe economic contraction during the second term of President Bush, the American people will likely support politicians who advocate further restrictions and controls on our market economy – guaranteeing its strangulation and the steady pauperization of the country. In Congress today, Sen. Edward Kennedy supports nearly all the economic dogmas listed above. It is easy to see, therefore, that the coming economic contraction, due in part to a policy of massive credit expansion, will have serious political consequences for the Republican Party (to the benefit of the Democrats). Furthermore, an economic contraction will encourage the formation of anti-capitalist majorities and a turning away from the free market system. The danger here is not merely economic. The political left openly favors the collapse of America’s strategic position abroad. The withdrawal of the United States from the Middle East, the Far East and Europe would catastrophically impact an international system that presently allows 6 billion people to live on the earth’s surface in relative peace. Should anti-capitalist dogmas overwhelm the global market and trading system that evolved under American leadership, the planet’s economy would contract and untold millions would die of starvation. Nationalistic totalitarianism, fueled by a politics of blame, would once again bring war to Asia and Europe. But this time the war would be waged with mass destruction weapons and the United States would be blamed because it is the center of global capitalism. Furthermore, if the anti-capitalist party gains power in Washington, we can expect to see policies of appeasement and unilateral disarmament enacted. American appeasement and disarmament, in this context, would be an admission of guilt before the court of world opinion. Russia and China, above all, would exploit this admission to justify aggressive wars, invasions and mass destruction attacks. A future financial crash, therefore, must be prevented at all costs. But we cannot do this. As one observer recently lamented, “We drank the poison and now we must die.”


Capitalism Good – Alternative Fails – Capitalism Inevitable

1. Anti-Statist alternatives are co-opted by the Internal Revenue ServiceHarry Browne, Libertarian Writer, Former Presidential Candidate and Free-Markey Analyst, 2007, Accessed May 28, 2008, http://www.harrybrowne.org/articles/JailBait.htm

First, it doesn't matter whether you believe the income tax is "legal." Whether or not it is, many people who don't pay income tax are put in prison. One of the best-known promoters of these schemes has been in prison three times — each time for tax evasion, and is now facing a possible fourth prison term. During his time in prison, he figures out what was wrong with his plan — and he comes out with a new, safer way of getting around the system. He tries it — and eventually goes back to prison. Many others who have tried these schemes have paid for it with prison time. If they want to do that to protest the income tax system, that's their privilege. Most of them, however, went to prison because they thought there was a way to evade taxes without danger. No matter how strong the argument someone makes to claim you don't have to pay income tax, remember that the question isn't: Is the logic correct? The question is: Do people go to prison for following it? And they do. Is that what you want to risk?

2. Individuals will never join on to a movement that resists capitalism, they are heavily invested in their jobsJames Q. Wilson, Professor at Harvard University, 1997, for a White House Task Force, Accessed May 28, 2008, http://www.cis.org.au/Events/JBL/JBL97.htm

Alienation. I think Karl Marx was wrong, it is not work that produces alienation, it is idleness. People by and large prefer work to non work, even though in many parts of the world society has done its best to encourage non work. In the United States, people when asked how they feel about their jobs almost uniformly say they like their work. Americans are gloomy about the decency of their culture and the justice of their politics; it may be one of the supreme ironies of our time that they are often more satisfied with their employer than with their community. If so, Marx has been stood squarely on his head.

3. Strong anti-socialist forces make the spread of capitalism inevitable, and the alternative impossibleMerrill Goozner, Editor of Prospect, 2005, Accessed May 28, 2008, http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=can_we_housebreak_capitalism

Finally, progressives have a structural problem as well. Because the benefits of regulation are spread over the entire population, progressives have no natural collective voice beyond the understaffed and poorly funded public-interest community that monitors the regulatory process. These are countered by corporate special interests and scofflaws, who are well financed, well organized, and well placed in the corridors of power through an army of lawyers, lobbyists, and strategic campaign contributions. Because this political power usually operates behind the scenes, progressives are hard put to stir up public will to counter corporate efforts.

4. Capitalism is too strong to be taken down from belowWill Serwetman, JD Suffolk Law, 1997, Accessed May 28, 2008, http://www.ninjalawyer.com/writing/marx.html

Despite the various crises of the past century, capitalism thrives and shows no major signs of strain. Despite Marx's predictions, capitalism is perfectly capable of inventing new markets to replace saturated ones. If stereo manufacturers can no longer find a market for their goods, they close down and invest their money in a new industry, such as cable television or computers. The crisis of overproduction will never happen because capitalism is flexible and will sacrifice it's short t rm goals to achieve its long term ones. Marx also never took into account the effect government regulation and welfare would have on the capitalist system. Any business naturally desires monopolies over its markets, but when that is achieved, the consequences are disastrous. The final stage of capitalism, in which trusts and monopolies prevent the economy from running naturally and efficiently, has been prevented by legislation and unionization. None of the problems Marx predicted are unavoidable as long as we do not sink to the level of sharks.



1. Capitalism is sustainable and too reflexive to be taken down by Marxist movementsWill Serwetman, JD Suffolk Law, 1997, Accessed May 28, 2008, http://www.ninjalawyer.com/writing/marx.html

Marx utilizes the Hegelian dialectic in his attempt to prove that capitalism will inevitably collapse from the crisis of overproduction and the class conflict caused by enmiseration and alienation. Capitalism, he felt, would inevitably be replaced by socialism. Marx died waiting for this revolution to come about, and it never has. Even the Russian and Chinese revolutions cannot be viewed as results of capitalism collapsing, nor can they be seen as socialist states because they retain post-revolution ary class structures and are not radical democracies. While Rosa Luxemberg wrote that while the capitalism will inevitably consume itself and that socialism is a possible option, I go so far as to question the Marxist logic that capitalism is doomed to collapse. The capitalist that Marx evokes in his work is only a caricature of the behavior of capitalists and does not reflect reality as history has shown it to be. Successful capitalists are smart enough to plan for long-term profits in addition to the short-term. Like anyone else, they will make mistakes and learn from them.

2. Humans are naturally competitive which makes Capitalism inevitableWill Serwetman, JD Suffolk Law, 1997, Accessed May 28, 2008, http://www.ninjalawyer.com/writing/marx.html

Because Marx's materialist view on humanity does not acknowledge our nature, his ideal reflects the same mistakes. If human nature can be changed, as he feels it can simply by changing our society that we live in, why should we live with the inequities of capitalism? The problem is that his assumptions are backed by no credible arguments. If one accepts the materialist conception of the world at face value, then most of what Marx wrote will be consistent. If one disagrees with the way Marx sees manki nd, however, and takes a more Nietzschean view, the Marxist ideal is a prescription for disaster. Due to our naturally distrustful, greedy, and ambitious natures, which precede capitalism, humans will not motivate themselves to do anything unless there is a reward. Their survival instinct won't let them. Competition isn't just good for men--it's necessary.

3. Fierce competition encourages progressive evolution and ensures the survival of humanityWill Serwetman, JD Suffolk Law, 1997, Accessed May 28, 2008, http://www.ninjalawyer.com/writing/marx.html

Competing for resources forces us to establish our identities and do more than just sit there and exist. Our will to power drives us to accumulate food, money, and control in order to maximize our chances of survival and reproduction. As long as our nature remains unchangeable, We will never be able to adjust to life in a Marxist society. Marx's economic theory is flawed as well, since it ignores the role of individuals and looks only at groups. The genius of a few individuals is all that has kept mankind raised from the life in nature that Hobbes called "brutish, nasty and short." The individuals responsible for these achievements were generally not rewarded until the advent of capitalism and is industrial revolution, which has increased our rates of progress exponentially. If these few contributors weren't punished for their differences , they spent their lives working humbly under the "patronage" of feudal lords. Capitalism encourages individuals to make their contributions and spread them throughout the world, raising all of mankind higher and higher from our natural, animal-lik e existence.

4. Capitalism is resilient and reflexive, if it starts to hurt the environment then workers will just clean up the messFred Magdoff, Contributor to the Monthly Review, 2002, http://www.monthlyreview.org/0902magdoff.htm

There are fortunetellers among the left who believe that either the economic crisis or the environmental crisis, or both, will become so pronounced and severe that the system will collapse upon itself. It is always dangerous to predict future developments. However, capitalism has proven resilient in the face of recurring crises. When a serious challenge to the system occurs and normal means of control do not seem to work, a version of fascism is always a possibility. But this has rarely been necessary within those countries at the center of the system, given that most information sources used by “first world” workers are little more than


propaganda outlets for capitalism. Workers all too often come to accept their existing positions in the system, the gross disparities of wealth, and the recurrent economic downturns as “normal.”



1. CAPITALISM IS INEVITABLE; ACTIVISTS SHOULD HELP IT DEVELOP POSITIVELY.Bill Emmott, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist, 20:21 VISION, 2003, p. 26.

Since all the progress that has been, and will be, seen in technology and in general welfare has arisen from capitalist activities, and since no alternative set of ideas has emerged to give hope to poorer countries that they can match the rich world’s progress by adopting anything other than capitalism, it might seem reasonable to assume that capitalism is likely to be simply a given for the twenty-first century. One way or another, it will be a feature of life during the next hundred years. That is surely true. But all the difference in the world, and for the world, is contained in that phrase, “one way or another.” How much technology develops, how it develops, how well-off we become in material terms, how big a problem the relative poverty of the underdeveloped world will pose for the developed countries, how the planet’s environment serves to limit or enable our activities and circumscribe or enhance our lives: all these questions depend on the way capitalism develops, or rather the way it is allowed to develop.

2. RESISTANCE TO CAPITALISM CAN NEVER SUCCEED.Terry Boswell, Professor of Sociology, Emory University, and Christopher Chase-Dunn, Director of the Institute for Research on World-Systems, University of California-Riverside, THE SPIRAL OF CAPITALISM AND SOCIALISM, 2000, p. 1.

Over fifty years after publication of THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS, we are not only still pushing the rock but the summit is now obscured from view. Contemporary theories of the modern world, including world-systems theory as well as Marxist, feminist, and ecological perspectives, much less liberal or realist ones, appear to offer no solution to Camus’s condemnation. To be sure, we now know much more about the operations of modern capitalism, especially about its history and dynamics at the global level. Decades of research on capitalist development have substantiated the reality of a world-system with steady structures, repeating cycles, and one-way trends. To change the cycles or structures would be to alter the fundamental dynamics of capitalist accumulation and interstate competition. Yet every national state is involved in accumulation and competition; every state that tried to exit the system has failed. No matter how “revolutionary,” no state or bloc of states has ever had the leverage to fundamentally alter the system or to escape from it. The impression we are left with is one of the impermeability of the global capitalist system to the actions of individual states, much less of social movements or revolutions from below.

3. THEY CAN’T STEM THE TIDE OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM – IT’S INEVITABLE AND ON-BALANCE GOOD.Lawrence Kudlow, Former Reagan Economic Advisor, January 25, 2008, Real Clear Politics, Accessed 4/29/09, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/01/capitalism_doesnt_work_mr_gate.html

Gates says he has witnessed steep income and cultural inequities in his travels around the world, in particular to Africa. But for this he should blame the absence of capitalist principles, not capitalism itself. Even the most compassionate corporate executives are not going to bring prosperity to impoverished countries with statist economies. Until Africa's nations undertake the market-oriented reforms that have boosted China and the other Asian Tigers -- like South Korea and Taiwan -- they will continue to rank at the bottom of the world prosperity scale. The Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal 2008 Index of Economic Freedom reveals how free-market economics is spreading like wildfire, while state-run socialism is on the decline. And it's no wonder why. The free-market countries are prospering mightily, while the least-free economies are mired in poverty. We're talking North Korea, Cuba, Zimbabwe and Iran. Also noteworthy is Venezuela. As the neo-socialist Hugo Chavez attempts to adopt Fidel Castro's failed economic model, he's sinking his nation toward Cuba-type poverty. Economist Mark Perry, on his Carpe Diem blog site, reports that both the U.S. share of world GDP and its global stock market capitalization are shrinking. But this isn't a bad thing at all. It doesn't mean that America is heading downward. On the contrary, it means that newly freed economies are heading up. The reality here is that the rising tide of global capitalism is lifting all boats that employ it. Capitalism works. It's a good thing. It's the key to unlocking a nation's prosperity. In fact, free-market capitalism is the greatest anti-poverty program ever devised by man.


Capitalism Good – Marxism Fails

1. THE MARXIST FRAMEWORK IS FLAWED: MATERIALITY DOESN’T COME BEFORE IDEOLOGYAlan Carter, Lecturer in Political Theory at University College, Dublin, 1988.MARX: A RADICAL CRITIQUE, p. 34.

That humanity must eat in order to think is no doubt true. But it is no less true that humanity must think in order to eat! One or two individuals might get away with being fed by others and survive without thinking, but the human species could not do so for long. For human society to reproduce itself people must plant crops, build houses, etc.—all of which require planning and thought. Moreover, it is done with certain conceptions in mind and within the confines of certain social practices. Such practices are not merely economic but are also, usually, either political or religious or both. If mental preconceptions are necessary for humanity to feed, shelter and clothe itself, why should these, by the same token, not be the substructure upon which the economic base is founded? In any case, why should the necessity of Marx’s base necessarily explain the character of those spheres for which it is necessary? As M.M. Bober aptly points out: “To write a book, one needs paper, pen and ink; but paper, pen and ink do not explain what is in the book.” The underlying thought in Marx’s theory is that if humanity is to reproduce itself and its society, then it must engage in material production. Because material production is necessary it determines the nature of society. But we can reply that society is also reproduced through its ideological and political practices. It is, therefore, reproduced by factors other than production.

2. THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN BASE AND SUPERSTRUCTURE IS UNTENABLEAlan Carter, Lecturer in Political Theory at University College, Dublin, 1988.MARX: A RADICAL CRITIQUE, p. 36.

Lacking empirical proofs Marx resorts to a priori deductions. But the remarks on consciousness have introduced so much controversy into the theory as to have engendered conceptual chaos. The most obvious problem which arises involves the apparent intrusion of ostensibly superstructural elements into the base. For example, advanced production techniques are based on scientific knowledge, yet this is surely ideal—hence superstructural. Legal conceptions intrude into how production is organized, so how is the base to be distinguished from the superstructure?

3. MARXISM IS FALSE SCIENCE DESIGNED TO COVER UP THE FAILURES OF SOCIALISMJoshua Muravchik, Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, November-December 2002.FOREIGN POLICY, p. 36.

The first of the many ironies surrounding this cult was its claim to be scientific. In Manchester, where he was sent by his father to be isolated from radical influences, the young Engels searched out the followers of Welsh industrialist and social reformer Robert Owen. The Owenites had hit upon the idea of “socialism,” a term they coined, and set out to demonstrate its efficacy by means of experimental communities. Scores of such experiments yielded uniform results: the settlements collapsed, usually within the span of two years. Engels was well aware of this record but brushed it aside. He and Marx, a pair of 20-something children of privilege, believed they had discovered a pattern to history that would produce socialism regardless of human will or ingenuity. (“It is not a matter of what this or that proletarian or even the proletariat as a whole pictures at present as its goal,” wrote Marx in their first collaborative work, The Holy Family. “It is a matter of what the proletariat…will historically be compelled to do.”) In short, they substituted prophecy for experimentation and thereby claimed to have elevated socialism from the plane of utopia to that of science.


Capitalism Good – Marxism Fails

1. HISTORY DISPROVES MARXISM IN EVERY INSTANCEJoshua Muravchik, Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, November-December 2002.FOREIGN POLICY, p. 36.

From the moment Marx and Engels penned the theory, it proved false on every front. Over the course of the second half of the 19th century, the standard of living of workers in Europe, far from falling, roughly doubled—a trend that continued apace until the outbreak of World War I. Concomitantly, the middle classes did not disappear but grew many times larger, and the wealth of the capitalists, although it certainly multiplied, became more dispersed, not more concentrated.

2. THE MARXIST DIALECTIC IS NONSENSICAL AND DOES NOT PROVIDE AN ALTERNATIVE TO TRADITIONAL THOUGHTJoshua Muravchik, Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, November-December 2002.FOREIGN POLICY, p. 38.

Finally, what of those who forswear the doctrine but claim to employ Marxism as an analytic tool? Many of those who make this claim write with Hegelian obscurity. Perhaps the analytic tool is the “dialectic,” the Marxian claim to a distinctive form of reasoning more penetrating than conventional logic, and a term one still sees bandied about. Engels gave this idea its fullest explication (in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific), pointing out that by conventional logic “a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else.” As an example, he cited the conventional view that a creature is either alive or dead. This premise is wrong, he said, because the precise moment of death is hard to determine. Dialectic allows us to see that a thing can simultaneously exist and not exist, be both dead and alive, he explained. But does the difficulty of determining a precise moment of death really imply that at some point a creature is both dead and alive? What could that possibly mean? The entire rhetorical sand castle was demolished in a single sentence by philosopher Sydney Hook: State a proposition that would be false according to conventional logic, but true according to dialectic.”

3. MARXISM IS INSTRUMENTALIST AND REDUCES CONSCIOUS REFLECTION INTO IMPERSONAL FORCES OF PRODUCTIONJurgen Habermas, Professor of Philosophy at University of Frankfurt, 1968.KNOWLEDGE AND HUMAN INTEREST, Marxist Internet Archive Web Site, Accessed Sept. 10, 2003. http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/habermas.htm.

Marx reduces the process of reflection to the level of instrumental action. By reducing the self-positing of the absolute ego to the more tangible productive activity of the species, he eliminates reflection as such as a motive force of history, even though he retains the framework of the philosophy of reflection. His re-interpretation of Hegel's Phenomenology betrays the paradoxical consequences of taking Fichte's philosophy of the ego and undermining it with materialism. Here the appropriating subject confronts in the non-ego not lust a product of the ego but rather some portion of the contingency of nature. In this case the act of appropriation is no longer identical with the reflective re-integration of some previously externalised part of the subject itself. Marx preserves the relation of the subject's prior positing activity (which was not transparent to itself), that is of hypostatisation, to the process of becoming conscious of what has been objectified, that is of reflection. But, on the premises of a philosophy of labour, this relation turns into the relation of production and appropriation, of externalisation and the appropriation of externalised essential powers. Marx conceives of reflection according to the model of production. Because he tacitly starts with this premise, it is not inconsistent that he does not distinguish between the logical status of the natural sciences and of critique.


Capitalism Good – Marxism Dehumanizes

1. MARXISM REDUCES ALL OF SOCIAL LIFE TO ECONOMIC LAWSJurgen Habermas, Professor of Philosophy at University of Frankfurt, 1968.KNOWLEDGE AND HUMAN INTEREST, Marxist Internet Archive Web Site, Accessed Sept. 10, 2003. http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/habermas.htm.

Invoking the model of physics, Marx claims to represent "the economic law of motion of modern society" as a "natural law." In the Afterword to the second edition of Capital, Volume I he quotes with approval the methodological evaluation of a Russian reviewer. While the latter goes along with Comte emphasising the difference between economics and biology on the one hand and physics and chemistry on the other, and calls attention in particular to the restriction of the validity of economic laws to specific historical periods, he nevertheless equates this social theory with the natural sciences. Marx has only one concern, to demonstrate through precise scientific investigation the necessity of definite orders of social relations and to register as irreproachably as possible the facts that serve him as points of departure and confirmation. Marx considers the movement of society as a process of natural history, governed by laws that are not only independent of the will, consciousness, and intention of men but instead, and conversely, determine their will, consciousness, and intentions. In order to prove the scientific character of his analysis, Marx repeatedly made use of its analogy to the natural sciences. He never gives evidence of having revised his early intention, according to which the science of man was to form a unity with the natural sciences:

2. SINCE MARX BASES HIS CRITIQUE ON SCIENCE, HE REDUCES SOCIAL LIFE TO TECHNOLOGICAL CONTROLJurgen Habermas, Professor of Philosophy at University of Frankfurt, 1968.KNOWLEDGE AND HUMAN INTEREST, Marxist Internet Archive Web Site, Accessed Sept. 10, 2003. http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/habermas.htm.

The development of fixed capital indicates the extent to which general social knowledge has become an immediate force of production, and therefore [!] the conditions of the social life process itself have come under the control of the general intellect. So far as production establishes the only framework in which the genesis and function of knowledge can be interpreted, the science of man also appears under categories of knowledge for control. At the level of the self-consciousness of social subjects, knowledge that makes possible the control of natural processes turns into knowledge that makes possible the control of the social life process. In the dimension of labour as a process of production and appropriation, reflective knowledge changes into productive knowledge. Natural knowledge congealed in technologies impels the social subject to an ever more thorough knowledge of its "Process of material exchange" with nature. In the end this knowledge is transformed into the steering of social processes in a manner not unlike that in which natural science becomes the power of technical control.


Capitalism Good – Marxism is Immoral

1. MARXISM IGNORES MORALITYRonald Aronson, Professor and Chair of Interdisciplinary Studies at Wayne State University, 1995.AFTER MARXISM, p. 235.

For most of its career, Marxism suppressed its normative foundation. It drew enormous power from the fact that it made its promises in the name of science and history, which did not appear debatable, rather than morality, which did. It called for action, not discussion, to realize the good. And it insisted that the good was coming about. In this sense it seemed infinitely more solid than any morality-centered politics. Its basis for action, the deep security it gave people about being right, was certainly underpinned by moral conviction, but as absorbed into the very movement of history. Indeed, as I argued in Chapters 2 and 4, the ability to point to real events and processes that were making its project come true is precisely what allowed Marxism to stress objective processes and the importance of understanding them through science. But this positivism depended on a profound Hegelian faith that the world-historical dialectic was bringing about human emancipation—that the good was being realized by history itself.

2. IGNORING MORALITY DOOMS PROGRESSIVE POLITICS AND ALLOWS RIGHTISTS TO CO-OPT POLITICAL CHANGERonald Aronson, Professor and Chair of Interdisciplinary Studies at Wayne State University, 1995.AFTER MARXISM, p. 237.

The Left’s moral feebleness turns out to be part of a more general modern ailment, which may help explain why the Right, so abstract and hollow in its moralizing, has found its appeals so successful. There seems to be no living language, no network of concepts, available for use today. Talk about right and wrong, MacIntyre points out, operates with “an impoverished moral vocabulary.” Because the Enlightenment tradition tried, but failed, to find a rational basis for morality, we are left today with claims for individual autonomy but without the ability to rationally demonstrate, or even seriously to argue about, right and wrong. Rather, our “interminable” contemporary moral debate turns on incommensurable and unprovable claims.


Capitalism Good – Marxism is Violent

1. MARXIST REVOLUTIONS GUARANTEE ENDLESS HUMAN SUFFERINGJoshua Muravchik, Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, November-December 2002.FOREIGN POLICY, p. 38.

Others who invoke this analytic tool seek to convey sympathy for the poor, but Marxism adds nothing on this score to what is found in the Torah or the Sermon on the Mount. For others, it means a materialist interpretation of human motives, but the history of Marxism itself refutes this claim. For still others, it signifies a fascination with revolution. But after a century of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, surely we have learned that far from constituting a leap “from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom,” as Marx put it, revolution has more often been a leap into a bottomless abyss of human suffering.

2. GENUINE LIBERATION REQUIRES REFORMS AS WELL AS REVOLUTION: THE CRITICISM OBJECTIFIES HUMAN CHOICES, MEANING WE’RE NEVER GENUINELY LIBERATEDRonald Aronson, Professor and Chair of Interdisciplinary Studies at Wayne State University, 1995.AFTER MARXISM, p. 100.

The problem is that if free space is to be possible within capitalism, then not only a genuinely emancipatory revolution must be possible, but also various kinds of reforms short of revolution, and the deliberate creation of new and yet unimagined countervailing tendencies—as well as the proletariat’s acceptance of capitalism. Both human nature and capitalism would then have to be so modifiable that many other outcomes are equally possible, outcomes far short of socialism. On the other hand, if we are in the midst of a deterministic, objectivist process that is indeed unfolding on its own, the transition to socialism would never bring about a qualitatively different reality. Human beings would never truly be liberated from the general law of historical materialism that the socioeconomic base determines the political and cultural superstructure. It would be patently absurd that the free world foreseen by Marx could unfold through historic necessity, a function of economic changes, unrelated, as Engels (following Hegel) said, to the actors’ conscious intent.

3. MARX’S OVEREMPHASIS ON OBJECTIVITY PAVED THE WAY FOR STALINISMRonald Aronson, Professor and Chair of Interdisciplinary Studies at Wayne State University, 1995.AFTER MARXISM, p. 101.

The core of Wellmer’s criticism nevertheless remains: Marx did not adequately appreciate the subjective side of the revolutionary process. The plain fact is that most of his scientific attention was biased toward the objective processes leading to the establishment and transformation of capitalism. Most of his theoretical formulations stressed the role of these processes. Marx devoted himself to studying and understanding the objective processes because ultimately he regarded proletarian revolution as the more or less unproblematic result of these processes. This bias gave Engels, Kautsky, and later, Lenin and Stalin, support for their ever more systematically objectivist readings of Marxism.


Capitalism Good – Class-Consciousness Fails

1. THE MARXIST ALTERNATIVE FAILS: AWARENESS OF CAPITALISM’S PROBLEMS DOES NOT CAUSE WORKER SOLIDARITY, BECAUSE WORKERS CAN SIMPLY PASS THEIR MISERY ONTO THE THIRD WORLDAlan Carter, Lecturer in Political Theory at University College, Dublin, 1988.MARX: A RADICAL CRITIQUE, p. 44-45.

Consequently, history has not borne out Marx’s immiseration thesis (much to the chagrin of contemporary Marxists); except, perhaps, on an international scale. But even if that is so, it would, rather than aid the Marxist position concerning growing class solidarity, undermine it. First, with regard to the international issue, Marx argued that capitalism would seek ever greater markets abroad, so immiseration on a world and not just a national scale is quite compatible with his theory. Lenin attempted to deal with the question of the relationship between the advanced and developing nations in his work on imperialism. He argued that the centralization and accumulation of capital in the advanced countries leads to involvement abroad, and that the capitalist class is able to create super-profits by establishing colonies. He remarks “Obviously, out of such enormous superprofits (since they are obtained over and above the profits which capitalists squeeze out of the workers of their ‘own’ country) it is possible to bribe the labor leaders and the upper stratum of the labor aristocracy.” But why is it not conceded that the whole of the proletariat of the advanced nations might be bribed by the super-exploitation of the Third World? And if western workers have a disproportionately high standard of living due to the exploitation of the Third World, the interests of European or North American workers are not the same as those of the poorer countries.

2. MARXIST CONSCIOUSNESS FAILS: WE WILL NOT SEE OUR COMMON INTERESTS OPPOSED TO CAPITALISM; RATHER, WE WILL PASS OUR EXPLOITATION ONTO OTHERSAlan Carter, Lecturer in Political Theory at University College, Dublin, 1988. MARX: A RADICAL CRITIQUE, p. 45.

This is of the greatest consequence, since it directly concerns the question of the termination of class society. Marx put his faith in the western proletariat because he saw it as the “universal class.” An important consideration in this assessment of the proletariat is, as G.H. Sabine has written, that “because the proletariat lay at the bottom of the social structure, with no class below it to be exploited, a proletarian revolution would not merely transfer the power to exploit but would abolish exploitation.” If, however, the western proletariat has a higher standard of living because of the super-exploitation of the Third World, then it can no longer be claimed that the proletariat has no class below it, or that its interests are “universal.”

3. CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS IS IMPOSSIBLE: CAPITALISM WILL NOT REVEAL UNIVERSAL INTERESTSAlan Carter, Lecturer in Political Theory at University College, Dublin, 1988.MARX: A RADICAL CRITIQUE, p. 46.

Marx assumes that the proletarians would gain class consciousness through seeing that they have a common cause. It is supposed to be revealed to them through the greater interrelations between producers in the capitalist system, which has a greater division of labor than any previous mode of production had. It is for this reason that Marx thought the proletariat more revolutionary than the peasantry, which he likened to a sack of potatoes because they were enclosed units and not so interrelated in an economic structure as the proletariat. But industrial action by one group of workers inconveniences other workers. When the miners or electricity workers go on strike, other workers experience inconvenience. This greater interrelation, rather than revealing a common interest, sets one group of workers against another. This is not to say that the proletariat does not have a common interest in overthrowing capitalism, but that the system does not reveal it.


Capitalism Good – Permutation Solves

1. Decentralization fractures local movements that would otherwise fight capitalAlex Callinicos, Socialist Director, 2005, ZMag, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=8520

I agree it isn’t easy. John was very honest and talked about the difficulties with his strategic conception, and I agree there are difficulties with the approach I am defending. Combining centralisation with self-organisation is not easy. But without a degree of centralisation we will be defeated. If we simply have fragmented and decentralised and localised activity, all cultivating our autonomous gardens, capital can isolate us and destroy or incorporate us piece by piece. And we cannot address problems like climate change unless we have the capacity to coordinate and, to a degree, to centralise for global change. We cannot reduce CO2 emissions to the necessary level without global coordination. We will not achieve the world we want to see if we simply rely on the fragment and the local.

2. Merely walking away from the state allows power to sustain itselfAlex Callinicos, Socialist Director, 2005, ZMag, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=8520

John [Hollaway] invites us essentially to turn our backs on the state. He says that we should carry out what he calls an ‘interstitial’ revolution. It’s been summed up by other thinkers sharing the same ideas as John as life despite capitalism. We should all try and cultivate our autonomous gardens despite the horrors of capitalism. The trouble is that the state won’t leave us alone and that is because capitalism itself, the system that different states sustain, won’t leave us alone. Capitalism today is invading the gardens of the world to carve them up and turn them into branches of agribusiness or suburban speculation and won’t leave us alone. We cannot ignore the state, because the state is the most concentrated single form of capitalist power. This means strategically we have to be against the state, to pursue the revolution against the state.

3. A pure withdrawal from capitalism ensures catastrophe, instead we should fight from withinAlex Callinicos, Socialist Director, 2005, ZMag, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=8520

Does this mean we ignore the existing state and do not ever put demands on the capitalist state? No. The existing capitalist states try to legitimise themselves to win the consent of those they oppress and exploit. This means that if we organise effectively, we can force reforms out of capitalism. Also, if we ignore the state, that means we will be indifferent to struggles over privatisation. For example, at the minute George Bush wants to privatise the pensions system in the US. Do we say we don’t care about that because the social security system in the US is organised by the state? I think, no. Finally, many workers these days are employed by the state. Part of the process of privatisation means those employees of private companies replace these workers. Often that means the service to the public is worse and the conditions and wages of those employed by those companies get worse. But if we are not indifferent to the state, that does not mean we can rely on it. In the long run capitalism and the state which seeks to sustain it will seek to take back any reforms it concedes temporarily. That is what they are seeking to do at the present time.

4. Focus on policy changes is the best approach to solving environmental catastropheRobert Elliot and Arran Gare, Professors of Philosophy, 1983, A Collection of Readings, p. np

Changes in environmental practices and attitudes will not be achieved by waiting for alternative paradigms to be adopted; indeed they are so far from being politically acceptable as to be commonly dismissed (as noted) as “politically unrealistic”. While alternative paradigms can fulfill all the roles of ideal models, for instance, providing bases for argument, positions to fall back on and around which to consolidate, and states to aim from their main function is ideological; they are not where the main focus of action should be if requisite change is to be effected. That action has to be directed where and as it has been directed in the past – against the sources of environmental despoliation, primary organizations; and those supposed to regulate them, further public organizations in the shape of governmental bodies – with a view to persuading them, or helping to make it so, that the despoliation is not in the general interests, or in the narrow organizational interests. Alternatively, the action may be directed with a view to blocking, delaying


or otherwise hindering their despoiling operations, by both institutional procedures and direct action. If changes are to effect there is no alternative – if far too much of the environment is valuable is not to be lost – to action (of a broadly political type). Philosophy, though relevant is not enough.

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