Neoliberalism Criticism

1NCThe affirmative begins their attempt at reform from a position that has already been scripted for them by systems of the neoliberal education system. The reforms of the affirmative are simply an attempt to outsource the work of educators to the private sectorGibson and Ross 07E. Wayne Ross, Rich Gibson, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, authors of “Neoliberlaism and Education Reform,” 2007. file:///Users/carver/Downloads/Neoliberalism%20and%20Ed%20Reform%20(Complete%20Proofs%202006).pdf

George W. Bush’s blueprint to reform education, known as the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2002, crystallizes key neoliberal and

neoconservative business-oriented education policies. Two main components of this reauthorization of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act— mandatory high stakes testing and education privatization—have a long history, going back to the free-market proposals of Milton Friedman (1962), Chubb and Moe’s (1990)

argument for introduction of market forces and school choice, and the education reforms advocated under Reagan. Beginning with A Nation at Risk (National Commission, 1983) and other education reform

manifestos of the 1980s, there has been a steady push for standards, accountability, and regulation of schools, teachers, and students and an explicit linkage of corporate interests with educational practices and goals. The business rhetoric of efficiency and performance standards and theredefinition of education to serve the labor market has become the common vocabulary of education policy. Indeed, apart from Bush’s failed proposal to use public funds for vouchers for private school tuition, NCLB is not unlike Clinton and Gore’s emphasis on standards and tests. It was, after all, Clinton who declared Chicago, with its high-stakes testing and sanctions for failure, a model for the nation. Scholars have examined ways in which accountability, centralized regulation, and standardization undermine democratic purposes of public education, intensify inequality, and bring schools increasingly under the economic and cultural domination of corporations (see e.g., Apple, 2001; Aronowitz & Giroux, 1993; Ascher, Fruchter & Berne, 1996; Lipman, 2004; McNeil, 2000; Molnar, 1996; Saltman, 2000). NCLB solidifies and streamlines these trends, while also promoting favorite neoconservative causes, including dismantling bilingual education, military recruitment in schools, school prayer, sexual abstinence, and attacks on gays and lesbians. In this chapter, I focus on implications of NCLB for intensified race and class inequality in the context of neoliberal globalization, the stratified labor force, and the cultural politics of racism. This analysis draws on data from the Texas state education accountability system and from Chicago’s accountability-based school reform begun in 1995. Both were models for key elements of NCLB and both provide data on the effects of these policies over time. NCLB has succeeded in redefining education reform in the United States. This is not only because it has been widely supported by politicians, neoliberal and neoconservative intellectuals, and business, but also because it speaks to real problems. Proponents justify tough accountability measures by pointing to the profound

failure of public schools, particularly their failure to educate children of color (see “Don’t Turn Back the Clock,” 2003). Tough accountability measures suggest that something is finally being done to make sure that all children can read and do math, with schools, educators, and students held accountable for results. Tying educational programs to accountability for results (test scores) resonates with the often repeated idea that schools have not improved despite a proliferation of reforms—in Bush’s words “Congress has created hundreds of programs . . . without asking whether

or not the programs produce results.” NCLB also follows the pervasive neoliberal logic that the market can do all things better than public institutions, from managing retirement funds, to providing health care, to running prisons. Test scores serve as a surrogate for productivity, and business is called on to supplement the work of educators, who by definition have failed.

Capitalism is the root cause of violence – it trains and educates its citizens to prepare for strife and conflict, turning the affirmative’s education policies. Vattimo and Zabala 11 Gianni Vattimo, emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Turin and a member of the European Parliament, and Santiago Zabala, ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the Pompue Fabra University, Hermeneutic Communism, Columbia: New York, NY (2011), pg 47-54

Although reports from many other states also warn of a future rife with wars (over water, immigration, and infectious diseases),19 the fact that "absolute poverty" and "comparative disadvantage" are now also considered threats for the security of framed democracies inevitably poses "other" alarms than the ones indicated by Fukuyama and Kagan. As we can see, the coming threats are not limited to Russia, China, and India, which, as Kagan explains, have become "responsible shareholders," but rather come from everyone who is not part of framed democracy's neoliberal capitalism . This is why we

do not believe the next wars will primarily be against other states20 but rather against those "useless shareholders," who, for

the most part, are t he weak, poor, and oppressed citizens, as highlighted in the defense reports . As we argue, the weak do not possess a different history but rather exist at history's margins; that is, they represent the discharge of capitalism and are present not only in the Third World but also in the slums of Western metropolises. These slums are not only becoming larger as we write but also are where the majority of the population is forced to

live because of the concentration of capital. While in the West the slums are becoming battlegrounds, in some South American states, as we will see in chapter 4, they have become territories for social improvement through communist initiatives. In sum, the conflicts of the twenty-first century will not be caused by the return of history,

as Fukuyama and Kagan predict, but rather by its own ends: liberal states. The fact that framed democracy is already preparing to fight and win such urban wars indicates how within our democratic system change is almost impossible and also how the oppressive effects of capitalism are predicted to increase. As Meiksins Wood explained, whether "national or global, [capitalism] is driven by a certain systemic imperatives, the imperatives of competition, profit-maximization and accumulation, which inevitably require putting 'exchange-value' before 'use-value' and profit before people ."21 These are systemic imperatives of dominion, supremacy, and control over others, and they result in such metaphysical systems as liberalism, where the power of the individual becomes the only substance. Our goal in this chapter is to demonstrate how framed democracy's liberal, financial, and security measures regulate one another in order both to conserve our current "lack of emergencies" and to impose necessary emergencies. If the democracies' chief priority is to conserve what Heidegger called the "lack of emergencies," that is, the neutrality achieved through science's liberal essence, modern states still have an essential function, contrary to the opinion of many contemporary thinkers.22 This function is not limited to the historical, racial, or linguistic identification of a state's citizens but

extends to other states: "liberal states" are also "liberating states"; that is, they liberate other states from undemocratic regimes. The recent imposed liberalization of Iraq and Afghanistan (also called "state building") occurred under the orders of other liberal states and as a consequence of the essence of liberalism. It is also in the name of this essence that democracy is imposed today as the best system of government even when it becomes corrupt. As we mentioned in the previous chapter, the "liberal essence" of science consists in its ideal of objectivity, that is, establishing "truth" or "freedom" as only what legally enters within the established, recognized, and framed democratic order.It must be for these reasons that Carl Schmitt

viewed "liberalism as a coherent, all-embracing, metaphysical system"23 and that Heidegger viewed it as another product, with fascism, capitalism, and communism, of subjectivist metaphysics.24 This is why within metaphysically framed democracies liberalism avoids change: while democratic elections are procedures for possible change, liberalism is the realm within which such change presents itself through elections, finance, and institutions. Liberal electoral results represent humanity's unconditional self-legislation, in other words, the focus on "the I"25 from which stems liberalism. But this vision from a pure "I," according to Heidegger, is impossible to achieve, because there are no experiences that ever set man beyond himself into an unentered domain from within which man as he is up to now could become questionable. That is—namely, that self-security—that innermost essence of "liberalism," which precisely for this rea-son has the appearance of being able to freely unfold and to sub-scribe to progress for all eternity. . . . Thus, it now took only a few years for "science" to realize that its "liberal" essence and its "ideal of objectivity" are not only compatible with the political-national "orientation" but also indispensable to it. And hence "science" as well as "worldview" must now unanimously agree that the talk of a "crisis" of science was actually only a prattle.2

Vote negative to endlessly critique capital. Reform is impossible when capital controls the conditions of reform. Meszaros 08 [Istvan, Chair of Philosophy at the University of Sussex, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time, p323-328]

The unreality of postulating the sustainable solution of the grave problems of our social order within the formal and legal

framework and corresponding constraints of parliamentary politics arises from the fundamental misconception of the structural determinations of capital’s rule, as represented in all varieties that assert the dualism of civil society and the political state. The difficulty, insurmountable within the parliamentary framework is this that since capital is actually in control of all vital aspects of the social metabolism, it can afford to define the separately constituted sphere of political legitimation as a strictly formal

and legal matter, thereby necessarily excluding the possibility of being legitimately challenged in its substantive sphere of socioeconomic reproductive operation. Directly or indirectly, capital controls everything, including the parliamentary legislative process, even if the latter is supposed to be fully independent from capital in many theories that fictitiously hypostatize the “democratic equality” of all political forces participating in the legislative process. To envisage a very different relationship to the powers of decision making in our societies, now completely dominated by the forces of capital in every domain, it is necessary to radically challenge capital itself as the overall controller of social metabolic reproduction.¶ What makes this problem worse for all those who are looking for significant change on the margins of the established political system is that the latter can claim for itself genuine constitutional legitimacy in its present mode of functioning, based on the historically constituted inversion of the actual state of the material reproductive affairs. For inasmuch as the capital is not only the “personification of capital” but simultaneously functions also “as the personification of the social character of labor, of the total workshop as such,” the system can claim to represent the vitally necessary

productive power of society vis-à-vis the individuals as the basis of their continued existence, incorporating the interest of all. In this way capital asserts itself not only as the de facto but also the de jure power of society, in its capacity as the objectively given necessary condition of societal reproduction, and thereby as the constitutional

foundation to its own political order. The fact that the constitutional legitimacy of capital is historically founded on the ruthless expropriation of the conditions of social metabolic reproduction- the means and material of labor-from the producers, and therefore capital’s claimed “constitutionality” (like the origin of all constitutions) is unconstitutional, is an unpalatable truth which fades away in the mist of a remote past. The “social productive powers of labor, or productive power or social labor, first develop historically with the specifically capitalist mode of production, hence appear as something immanent in the capital-relation and inseparable from it.¶ This is how capital’s mode of social metabolic reproduction becomes eternalized and legitimated as a lawfully unchallengeable system. Legitimate contest is admissible only in relation to some minor aspects of the unalterable overall structure. The real state of affairs on thee plane of socioeconomic reproduction-i.e., the actually exercised productive power of labor and its absolute necessity for securing capital’s own reproduction- disappears from sight. Partly because of the ignorance of the very far from legitimate historical origin of capital’s “primitive accumulation” and the concomitant, frequently violent, expropriation of property as the precondition of the system’s present mode of functioning; and partly because of the mystifying nature of the established productive and distributive relations. As Marx notes: The objective conditions of labor do not appear as subsumed under the worker; rather, he appears as

subsumed under them. Capital employs Labor. Even this relation is in its simplicity is a personification of things and a reification of persons.¶ None of this can be challenged and remedied within the framework of parliamentary political reform. It would be quite absurd to expect the abolition of the “personification of things and the reification of persons” by political decree, and just as absurd to expect the proclamation of such an intended reform within the framework of capital’s political institutions. For the capital system cannot function without the perverse overturning of the relationship between persons and things: capital’s alienated and reified powers dominate the masses of the people. Similarly it would be a miracle if the workers who confront capital in the labor process as “isolated workers” could reacquire mastery over the social productive powers of their labor by some political decree, or even by a whole series of parliamentary reforms enacted under capital’s order of social metabolic control. For in these matters there can be no way of avoiding the irreconcilable conflict over the material stakes of “either/or”¶ Capital can neither abdicate its-usurped-social productive powers in favor of labor, nor can I share them with labor, thanks to some wishful but utterly fictitious “political compromise.” For they constitute the overall controlling power of societal reproduction in the form of “the rule of wealth over society.” Thus it is impossible to escape, in the domain of the fundamental social metabolism, the severe logic of either/or. For either wealth, in the shape of capital, continues to rule over human society, taking it to the brink of self-destruction, or the society of associated producers learns to rule over alienated and reified wealth, with productive powers arising from the self-determinated

social labor of its individual-but not longer isolated-members. Capital is the extra-parliamentary force par excellence. It cannot possibly be politically constrained by parliament in its power of social metabolic control. This is why the only mode of political representation compatible with capital’s mode of functioning is one that effectively denies the possibility of contesting its material power. And precisely because capital is the extra-parliamentary force par excellence, it has nothing to fear from the reforms that can be enacted within its parliamentary political framework.¶ Since the vital issue on which everything else hinges is that “the objective conditions of labor do not appear as subsumed under the worker” buy, on the contrary, “he appears as subsumed under them,” no meaningful change is feasible without addressing the issue both in a form of politics capable of matching capital’s extra-parliamentary powers and modes of action, and in the domain of material reproduction. Thus the only challenge that could affect the power of capital, in a sustainable manner, is one which would simultaneously aim at assuming the system’s key productive functions, and at acquiring control over the corresponding political decision making processes in all spheres, instead of being hopelessly constrained by the circular confinement of institutionally legitimated political action to parliamentary legislation.¶ There is a great deal of critique of formerly leftwing political figures and of their now fully accommodating parties in the political debates of the last decades. However, what is problematic about such debates is that by overemphasizing the role of personal ambition and failure, they often continue to envisage remedying the situation with in the same political institutional framework that, in fact, greatly favors the criticized “personal betrayals” and the painful “party derailments.” Unfortunately, though the advocated and hoped for personal and government changes tend to reproduce the same deplorable results.¶ All this could not be very surprising. The reason why the now established political institutions successfully resist significant change for the better is because they are themselves part of the problem and not of the solution. For in their immanent nature they are the embodiment of the underlying structural determinations and contradictions through which the modern capitalist state- with its ubiquitous network of bureaucratic constituents- has been articulated and stabilized in the course of the last four hundred years. Naturally, the state was formed not as a one-sided mechanical result but through its necessary reciprocal interrelationship to the material ground of capital’s historical unfolding, as not only being shaped by the latter but also actively shaping it as much as historically feasible under the prevailing- and precisely through the interrelationship also changing- circumstances.¶ Given the insuperably centrifugal determination of capital’s productive microcosms, even at the level of the giant quasi-monopolistic transnational corporations, only the modern state could assume and fulfill the required function of being the overall command structure of the capital system.¶ Inevitably, that meant the complete alienation of the power of overall decision making from the producers. Even the “particular personifications of capital” were strictly mandated to act in accord with the structural imperatives of their system. Indeed the modern state, as constituted on the material ground of the capital system, is the paradigm of alienation as regards the power of comprehensive decision making. It would be therefore extremely naïve to imagine that the capitalist state could willingly hand over the alienated power of systemic decision making to any rival actor who operates within the legislative framework of parliament.¶ Thus,

in order to envisage a meaningful and historically sustainable societal change, it is necessary to submit to a radical critique both the material reproductive and the political inter-determinations of the entire system, and not simply some of the contingent and limited political practices. The combined totality of the material reproductive determinations and the all-embracing political command structure of the state together constitutes the overpowering reality of the capital system. In this sense, in view of the unavoidable question arising from the

challenge of systemic determinations, with regard to both socioeconomic reproduction and the state, the need for a comprehensive political transformation-in close conjunction to the meaningful exercise of society’s vital productive functions without which far-reaching and lasting political change is inconceivable-becomes inseparable from the problem characterized as the withering away of the state . Accordingly, in the historic task of accomplishing “the withering away of the state,” self-management through full participation, and the permanently sustainable overcoming of parliamentarism by a positive form of substantive decision-making are

inseparable.¶ This is a vital concern and not “romantic faithfulness to Marx’s unrealizable dream,” as some people try to discredit and dismiss it. In truth, the “withering away of the state”

refers to nothing mysterious or remote but to a perfectly tangible process that must be initiated right in our own historical time. It means, in

plain language, the progressive reacquisition of the alienated power of political decision making by the individuals in their enterprise of moving toward a genuine socialist society. Without the reacquisition of this power- to which not only the capitalist state but also the paralyzing inertia of the structurally well-entrenched material reproductive practices are fundamentally opposed- neither the new mode of political control of society as a whole by its individuals is conceivable, nor indeed the nonadversarial and thereby cohesive and plannable everyday operation of the particular productive and distributive units by the self-managing freely associated producers. Radically superseding adversariality, and thereby securing the material

and political ground of globally viable planning- an absolute must for the very survival of humanity, not to mention the potentially enriched self realization- of its individual members- is synonymous with the withering away of the state as an ongoing historical enterprise.

LinksThe affirmative’s claims come from an ethic informed by neoliberalism. This makes the affirmative a vehicle for global capital, not an effective tool for education reform. Elteren ‘9 (Mel Van, Associate Professor of Social Sciences at Tilburg University, “Neoliberalism and Transnational Capitalism in the American Mold”, Journal of American Studies, 2009, pg. 186, ProQuest Research Library)

US neoliberal think tanks (such as the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institute, the Center for the Study of American

Business and the American Enterprise Institute), experts, and mentors had gained significant influence in the media, in education, in professional organizations, and in politics. They had also been influential to economists, globalizing politicians, and businessmen abroad, for example, in various countries in Latin

America.28 Since about 1990 neoliberalism had dominated most economics departments in the major US research universities as well as the business schools (including those of prestigious universities such as Stanford

and Harvard). The US research universities were also training grounds for many foreigners who took what they learn back to their countries of origin (in education, research, the media, and policymaking), as well as into international institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank, and the UN. Thus a transnational discourse of neoliberalism had been created that had a global reach.29 Other sources of inspiration were the frequent speaking tours of American management gurus abroad and a widespread focus on American companies and management practices in media and business magazines. A significant influence in the diffusion of the American way of management30 in many Western and Westernized parts of the world was also the large number of popular books on management originating in the United States, either in their original version, in translation, or as summarized in books written by local management thinkers. Particularly in Europe, there were some counter strains in management thinking that recognized gaps between management theory as derived from North American business schools and local practices. They advocated a management style more based on local characteristics, such as the political and cultural pluralism of Western Europe.31 During the previous few decades Japan had often been mentioned in this connection as a country especially apt in borrowing US management practices and adapting them to the local environment. The question arises to what extent existing practices differ from the American-style corporate model. The keiretsu system of tight relationships with suppliers and financial institutions had been a distinctive feature of Japanese businesses’ institutional framework, one which constrained the ‘‘Americanization’’ of Japanese corporate policies. The system’s group ties with permanent suppliers hindered free competition to set price levels of their products. But since the stagnation of the 1990s there had been much pressure on Japan to give up the close relationships and cross-subsidies concerned, and to adopt the US

competitive model. We must also remember that US corporate capitalism both at home and abroad did not always live up to its self-professed free-market doctrine either. While ‘‘embedded liberalism’’ as it developed during the postwar boom was in decay,32 American ‘‘ free enterprise capitalism’’ was still subjected to various government interventions, albeit hardly of a New Deal type any longer Recently, within European business circles occasional calls had been made for completely abandoning the US corporate model, referring to its overemphasis on narrow-minded shareholder interests and short-term thinking by mighty, self-interested CEOs obsessed by stock market results, and its associated highly competitive, individualistic culture within the firm. The Dutch entrepreneur Donald Kalff, for example, suggested that instead of continuing or adopting this ‘‘ sharks model’’ one should build on the various valuable business models that could still be found in Continental Europe and which were closer to European norms and values – models which aimed first of all for economic value addition rather than mere financial profit. This would entail more pluriformity in managerial thinking and a more teamoriented corporate culture based on trust and cooperation. In this conception, the primary focus was on social innovation, since technology and financial investments were abundantly available in Europe.33 Dissenting voices such as these are

notable exceptions to the general rule, however. The overall trend towards US-style managerial thinking remained a fact.

Public education has already been shaped by neoliberal forces. The affirmative’s reform serves only to mask the operation of the market-logic now present in public education. Giroux, 12Henry Giroux (born September 18, 1943) is an American and Canadian scholar and cultural critic. One of the founding theorists of critical pedagogyin the United States, he is best known for his pioneering work in public pedagogy, cultural studies, youth studies, higher education, media studies, and critical theory. In 2002 Routledge named Giroux as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period.

Public education is under assault by a host of religious, economic, ideological and political fundamentalists. The most serious attack is being waged by advocates of neoliberalism, whose reform efforts focus narrowly on high-stakes testing, traditional texts and memorization drills. At the heart of this approach is an aggressive attempt to disinvest in public schools, replace them with charter schools, and remove state and federal governments completely from public education in order to allow education to be organized and administered by market-driven forces.[1] Schools would “become simply another corporate asset bundled in credit default swaps,” valuable for their rate of exchange and trade value on the open market.[2] It would be an understatement to suggest that there is something very wrong with American public education. For a start, this counter-revolution is giving rise to punitive evaluation schemes, harsh disciplinary measures, and the ongoing deskilling of many teachers that together are reducing many excellent educators to the debased status of technicians and security personnel. Additionally, as more and more wealth is distributed to the richest Americans and corporations, states are drained of resources and are shifting the burden of such deficits on to public schools and other vital public services. With 40 percent of wealth going to the top 1 percent, public services are drying up from lack of revenue and more and more young people find themselves locked out of the dream of getting a decent education or a job while being robbed of any hope for the future. As the nation’s schools and infrastructure suffer from a lack of resources, right-wing politicians are enacting policies that lower the taxes of the rich and mega corporations. For the elite, taxes constitute a form of class warfare waged by the state against the rich, who view the collection of taxes as a form of state coercion. What is ironic in this argument is the startling fact that not only are the rich not taxed fairly, but they also receive over $92 billion in corporate subsidies. But there is more at stake here than untaxed wealth and revenue, there is also the fact that wealth corrupts and buys power. And this poisonous mix of wealth, politics and power translates into an array of anti-democratic practices that creates an unhealthy society in every major index, ranging from infant mortality rates, to a dysfunctional political system.[3] What is hidden in this empty outrage by the wealthy is that the real enemy here is any form of government that believes it needs to raise revenue in order to build infrastructures, provide basic services for those who need them, and develop investments such as a transportation system and schools that are not tied to the logic of the market. One consequence of this vile form of class warfare is a battle over crucial resources, a battle that has dire political and educational consequences especially for the poor and middle classes, if not democracy itself. Money no longer simply controls elections; it also controls policies that shape public education. One indicator of such corruption is that hedge fund managers now sit on school boards across the country doing everything in their power to eliminate public schools and punish unionized teachers who do not support charter schools. In New Jersey, hundreds of teachers have been sacked because of alleged budget deficits. Not only is Governor Christie using the deficit argument to fire teachers, he also uses it to break unions and balance the budget on the backs of students and teachers. How else to explain Christie’s refusal to oppose reinstituting the “millionaires taxes,” or his cravenly support for lowering taxes for the top 25 hedge fund officers, who in 2009 raked in $25 billion, enough to fund 658,000 entry-level teachers.[4] In this conservative right-wing reform culture, the role of public education, if we are to believe the Heritage Foundation and the likes of Bill Gates-type billionaires, is to produce students who laud conformity, believe job training is more important than education, and view public values as irrelevant. Students in this view are no longer educated for democratic citizenship. On the contrary, they are now being trained to fulfill the   need for human capital . [5] What is lost in this approach to schooling is what Noam Chomsky calls “creating creative and independent thought and inquiry, challenging perceived beliefs, exploring new horizons and forgetting external constraints.”[6] At the same time, public schools are under assault not because they are failing (though some are) but because they are one of the few public spheres left where people can learn the knowledge and skills necessary to allow them to think critically and hold power and authority accountable. Not only are the lines between the corporate world and public education blurring, but public schooling is being reduced to what Peter Seybold calls a “corporate service station,” in

which the democratic ideals at the heart of public education are now up for sale.[7] At the heart of this crisis of education are larger questions about the formative culture necessary for a democracy to survive, the nature of civic education and teaching in dark times, the role of educators as civic intellectuals and what it means to understand the purpose and meaning of education as a site of individual and collective empowerment.

Attempted reforms will fail because education is losing its ability to politically empower students. This means that even if the affirmative solves in the short term, they are creating generations of an academy that cannot deal with real problems, which turns the affirmative. Giroux, 12Henry Giroux (born September 18, 1943) is an American and Canadian scholar and cultural critic. One of the founding theorists of critical pedagogyin the United States, he is best known for his pioneering work in public pedagogy, cultural studies, youth studies, higher education, media studies, and critical theory. In 2002 Routledge named Giroux as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period.This current right-wing emphasis on low-level skills removes the American public from examining the broader economic, political, and cultural forces that bear down on the school. Matters concerning the influence on schools of corporations, text book publishers, commercial industries and the national security state are rendered invisible, as if schools and the practices they promote exist in a bubble. At work here is a pedagogy that displaces, infantilizes and depoliticizes both students and large segments of the American public. Under the current regime of neoliberalism, schools have been transformed into a private right rather than a public good. Students are now being educated to become consumers rather than thoughtful, critical citizens. Increasingly as public schools are put in the hands of for-profit corporations, hedge fund elites, and other market driven sources, their value is derived for their ability to turn a profit and produce compliant students eager to join the workforce.[8] What is truly shocking about the current dismantling and disinvestment in public schooling is that those who advocate such changes are called the new educational reformers. They are not reformers at all. In fact, they are reactionaries and financial mercenaries who are turning teaching into the practice of conformity and creating curricula driven by an anti-intellectual obsession with student test scores, while simultaneously turning students into compliant subjects, increasingly unable to think critically about themselves and their relationship to the larger world. This poisonous virus of repression, conformity and instrumentalism is turning public education into a repressive site of containment, a site devoid of poetry, critical learning and soaring acts of curiosity and imagination. As Diane Ravitch has pointed out, what is driving the current school reform movement is a profoundly anti-intellectual project that promotes “more testing, more privately managed schools, more deregulation, more firing of teachers [and] more school closings.”[9] There are no powerful and profound intellectual dramas in this view of schooling, just the muted rush to make schools another source of profit for finance capital with its growing legion of bankers, billionaires and hedge fund scoundrels.

ImpactsCapitalism is a protection racket—it’s the root cause of every impact. Left unaddressed, it’ll cause extinction—only a revolution can solve Robinson, 16(William I, professor of sociology, global studies and Latin American studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/35596-sadistic-capitalism-six-urgent-matters-for-humanity-in-global-crisis)

In these mean streets of globalized capitalism in crisis, it has become profitable to turn poverty and inequality into a tourist attraction. The South African Emoya Luxury Hotel and Spa company has made a glamorized spectacle of it. The resort recently advertised an opportunity for tourists to stay "in our unique Shanty Town ... and experience traditional township living within a safe private game reserve environment." A cluster of simulated shanties outside of Bloemfontein that the company has constructed "is ideal for team building, braais, bachelors [parties], theme parties and an experience of a lifetime," read the ad. The luxury accommodations, made to appear from the outside as shacks, featured paraffin lamps, candles, a battery-operated radio, an outside toilet, a drum and fireplace for cooking, as well as under-floor heating, air conditioning and wireless internet access. A well-dressed, young white couple is pictured embracing in a field with the corrugated tin shanties in the background. The only thing missing in this fantasy world of sanitized space and glamorized poverty was the people themselves living

in poverty. Escalating inequalities fuel capitalism's chronic problem of over-accumulation. The "luxury shanty town" in South Africa is a fitting metaphor for global capitalism as a whole. Faced with a stagnant global economy, elites have managed to turn war, structural violence and inequality into opportunities for capital, pleasure and entertainment. It is hard not to conclude that unchecked capitalism has become what I term "sadistic capitalism," in which the suffering and deprivation generated by capitalism become a source of aesthetic pleasure, leisure and entertainment for others.

I recently had the opportunity to travel through several countries in Latin America, the Middle East, North Africa, East Asia and throughout North America. I was on sabbatical to research what the global crisis looks like on the ground around

the world. Everywhere I went, social polarization and political tensions have reached explosive dimensions. Where is the crisis headed, what are the possible outcomes and what does it tell us about global capitalism and

resistance? This crisis is not like earlier structural crises of world capitalism, such as in the 1930s or 1970s. This one is fast becoming systemic. The crisis of humanity shares aspects of earlier structural crises of world capitalism, but

there are six novel, interrelated dimensions to the current moment that I highlight here, in broad strokes, as the "big

picture" context in which countries and peoples around the world are experiencing a descent into chaos and uncertainty. 1) The level of global social polarization and inequality is unprecedented in the face of out-of-control, over-accumulated capital. In January 2016, the development agency Oxfam published a follow-up to its report on global inequality that had

been released the previous year. According to the new report, now just 62 billionaires -- down from 80 identified by the agency

in its January 2015 report -- control as much wealth as one half of the world's population, and the top 1% owns more wealth than the other 99% combined. Beyond the transnational capitalist class and the upper echelons of the global power bloc, the richest 20 percent of humanity owns some 95 percent of the world's wealth, while the bottom 80 percent has

to make do with just 5 percent. This 20-80 divide of global society into haves and the have-nots is the new global social apartheid. It is evident not just between rich and poor countries, but within each country, North and South, with the rise of new affluent high-consumption sectors alongside the downward mobility, "precariatization," destabilization and expulsion

of majorities. Escalating inequalities fuel capitalism's chronic problem of over-accumulation: The

transnational capitalist class cannot find productive outlets to unload the enormous amounts of surplus it has accumulated, leading to stagnation in the world economy. The signs of an impending depression are everywhere. The front

page of the February 20 issue of The Economist read, "The World Economy: Out of Ammo?" Extreme levels of social polarization present a challenge to dominant groups. They strive to purchase the loyalty of that 20 percent, while at the same time dividing the 80 percent, co-opting some into a hegemonic bloc and repressing the rest. Alongside the spread of frightening new systems of social control and repression is heightened dissemination through the culture industries and corporate

marketing strategies that depoliticize through consumerist fantasies and the manipulation of desire. As "Trumpism" in the United States so well illustrates, another strategy of co-optation is the manipulation of fear and insecurity among the downwardly mobile so that social anxiety is channeled toward scapegoated communities. This psychosocial mechanism of displacing mass anxieties is not new, but it appears to be increasing around the world in the face of the structural destabilization of capitalist globalization. Scapegoated communities are under siege, such as the Rohingya in Myanmar, the Muslim minority in India, the Kurds in Turkey, southern African immigrants in South Africa, and Syrian and Iraqi

refugees and other immigrants in Europe. As with its 20th century predecessor, 21st century fascism hinges on such manipulation of social anxiety at a time of acute capitalist crisis. Extreme inequality requires extreme violence and repression that lend to projects of 21st century fascism. 2) The system is fast reaching the ecological limits to its reproduction. We have reached several tipping points in what environmental scientists refer to as nine crucial "planetary boundaries." We have already exceeded these boundaries in three areas -- climate change, the nitrogen cycle and diversity loss. There have been five previous mass extinctions

in earth's history. While all these were due to natural causes, for the first time ever, human conduct is intersecting with and fundamentally altering the earth system. We have entered what Paul Crutzen, the Dutch environmental scientist and Nobel Prize winner, termed the Anthropocene -- a new age in which humans have transformed up to half of the world's

surface. We are altering the composition of the atmosphere and acidifying the oceans at a rate that undermines the conditions for life. The ecological dimensions of global crisis cannot be understated. "We are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed," observes Elizabeth Kolbert in her best seller, The Sixth Extinction. "No other creature has ever managed this ... The Sixth Extinction will continue to determine the course of life long after everything people have written and painted and built has been ground into dust." Capitalism cannot be held solely responsible. The human-nature contradiction has deep roots in civilization itself. The ancient Sumerian empires, for example, collapsed after the population over-salinated their crop soil. The Mayan city-state network collapsed about AD 900 due to deforestation. And the former Soviet Union wrecked havoc on the environment. However,

given capital's implacable impulse to accumulate profit and its accelerated commodification of nature, it is difficult to imagine that the environmental catastrophe can be resolved within the capitalist system. "Green capitalism" appears as an oxymoron, as sadistic capitalism's attempt to turn the ecological crisis into a profit-making opportunity , along with the conversion of poverty into a tourist attraction. 3) The sheer magnitude of the means of violence is unprecedented, as is the concentrated control over the means of global communications and the production and circulation of knowledge, symbols and images. We have seen the spread of frightening new systems of social control and repression that have brought us into the panoptical surveillance society and the age of thought control. This real-life Orwellian world is in a sense more perturbing than that described by George Orwell in his iconic novel 1984. In that fictional world, people were compelled to give their obedience to the state ("Big Brother") in exchange for a quiet existence with guarantees of employment, housing and other social necessities. Now, however, the corporate and political powers that be force obedience even as the means of survival are denied to the vast majority. Global apartheid involves the creation of "green zones" that are cordoned off in each locale around the world where elites are insulated through new systems of spatial reorganization, social control and policing. "Green zone" refers to the nearly impenetrable area in central Baghdad that US occupation forces established in the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The command center of the occupation and select Iraqi elite inside that green zone were protected from the violence and chaos that engulfed the country. Urban areas around the world are now green zoned through gentrification, gated communities, surveillance systems, and state and private violence. Inside the world's green zones, privileged strata avail themselves of privatized social services, consumption and entertainment. They can work and communicate through internet and satellite sealed off under the protection of armies of soldiers, police and private security forces. Green zoning takes on distinct forms in each locality. In Palestine, I witnessed such zoning in the form of Israeli military checkpoints, Jewish settler-only roads and the apartheid wall. In Mexico City, the most exclusive residential areas in the upscale Santa Fe District are accessible only by helicopter and private gated roads. In Johannesburg, a surreal drive through the exclusive Sandton City area reveals rows of mansions that appear as military compounds, with private armed towers and electrical and barbed-wire fences. In Cairo, I toured satellite cities ringing the impoverished center and inner suburbs where the country's elite could live out their aspirations and fantasies. They sport gated residential complexes with spotless green lawns, private leisure and shopping centers and English-language international schools under the protection of military checkpoints and private security police. In other cities, green zoning is subtler but no less effective. In Los Angeles, where I live, the freeway system now has an express lane reserved for those that can pay an exorbitant toll. On this lane, the privileged speed by, while the rest remain one lane over, stuck in the city's notorious bumper-to-bumper traffic -- or even worse, in notoriously underfunded and underdeveloped public transportation, where it may take half a day to get to and from work. There is no barrier separating this express lane from the others. However, a near-invisible closed surveillance system monitors every movement. If a vehicle without authorization shifts into the exclusive lane, it is instantly recorded by this surveillance system and a heavy fine is imposed on the driver, under threat of

impoundment, while freeway police patrols are ubiquitous. Outside of the global green zones, warfare and police containment have become normalized and sanitized for those not directly at the receiving end of armed aggression. "Militainment" -- portraying and even glamorizing war and violence as entertaining spectacles through Hollywood films and television police shows, computer games and corporate "news" channels

-- may be the epitome of sadistic capitalism. It desensitizes, bringing about complacency and indifference. In between the green zones and outright warfare are prison industrial complexes, immigrant and refugee repression and control systems, the criminalization of outcast communities and capitalist schooling. The omnipresent media and cultural apparatuses of the corporate economy, in particular, aim to colonize the mind -- to undermine the ability to think critically and outside the dominant worldview. A neofascist culture emerges through militarism, extreme masculinization, racism and racist mobilizations against scapegoats. 4) We are reaching limits to the extensive expansion of capitalism. Capitalism is like riding a bicycle: When you stop pedaling the bicycle, you fall over. If the capitalist system stops expanding outward, it enters crisis and faces collapse. In each earlier structural crisis, the system went through a new round of extensive expansion -- from waves of colonial conquest in earlier centuries, to the integration in the late 20th and early 21st centuries of the former socialist countries, China, India and other areas that had been marginally outside the system.

There are no longer any new territories to integrate into world capitalism. Meanwhile, the privatization of education, health care, utilities, basic services and public land are turning those spaces in global society that were outside of capital's control into "spaces of capital." Even poverty has been turned into a commodity. What is there left to commodify?

Where can the system now expand? With the limits to expansion comes a turn toward militarized accumulation -- making wars of endless destruction and reconstruction and expanding the militarization of social and political institutions so as to continue to generate new opportunities for accumulation in the face of stagnation. 5) There is the rise of a vast surplus population inhabiting a "planet of slums," alienated from the productive economy, thrown into the margins and subject to these sophisticated systems of social control and destruction . Global

capitalism has no direct use for surplus humanity. But indirectly, it holds wages down everywhere and makes new systems of 21st century slavery possible. These systems include prison labor, the forced recruitment of miners at gunpoint by warlords contracted by global corporations to dig up valuable minerals in the Congo, sweatshops and exploited immigrant communities (including the rising tide of immigrant female caregivers for affluent populations). Furthermore, the global working class is experiencing accelerated "precariatization." The "new precariat" refers to the proletariat that faces capital under today's unstable and precarious labor relations -- informalization, casualization, part-time, temp, immigrant and contract labor. As communities are uprooted everywhere, there is a rising reserve army of immigrant labor. The global working class is becoming divided into citizen and immigrant workers. The latter are particularly attractive to transnational capital, as the lack of citizenship rights makes them particularly vulnerable, and therefore, exploitable. The challenge for dominant groups is how to contain the real and potential rebellion of surplus humanity, the immigrant workforce and the precariat. How can they contain the explosive contradictions of this system?

The 21st century megacities become the battlegrounds between mass resistance movements and the new systems of mass repression. Some populations in these cities (and also in abandoned countryside) are at risk of genocide, such as those in Gaza, zones in Somalia and Congo, and swaths of Iraq and Syria. 6) There is a disjuncture between a globalizing economy and a nation-state-based system of political authority .

Transnational state apparatuses are incipient and do not wield enough power and authority to organize and stabilize the system, much less to impose regulations on runaway transnational capital. In the wake of the 2008 financial collapse, for instance, the governments of the G-8 and G-20 were unable to impose

transnational regulation on the global financial system, despite a series of emergency summits to discuss such regulation. Elites historically have attempted to resolve the problems of over-accumulation by state policies that can regulate the anarchy of the market. However, in recent decades, transnational capital has broken free from the constraints imposed by the nation-state. The more "enlightened" elite representatives of the transnational capitalist class are now clamoring for transnational mechanisms of regulation that would allow the global ruling class to reign in the anarchy of the system in the interests of saving global capitalism from itself and from radical challenges from below. At the same time, the division of the world into some 200 competing nation-states is not the most propitious of circumstances for the global working class. Victories in popular struggles from below in any one country or region can (and often do) become diverted and even undone by the structural power of transnational capital and the direct political and military domination that this structural power affords the dominant groups. In Greece, for instance, the leftist Syriza party came to power in 2015 on the heels of militant worker

struggles and a mass uprising. But the party abandoned its radical program as a result of the enormous pressure exerted on it from the

European Central Bank and private international creditors. The Systemic Critique of Global Capitalism A growing number of transnational elites themselves now recognize that any resolution to the global crisis must involve redistribution downward of income. However, in the viewpoint of those from below, a neo-Keynesian redistribution within the prevailing corporate power structure is not enough. What is required is a redistribution of power downward and transformation toward a system in which social need trumps private profit. A global rebellion against the transnational capitalist class has spread since the financial collapse of 2008. Wherever one looks, there is popular, grassroots and leftist struggle, and the rise of new cultures of resistance : the Arab Spring ; the resurgence of leftist

politics in Greece, Spain and elsewhere in Europe; the tenacious resistance of Mexican social movements following the Ayotzinapa massacre of 2014; the favela uprising in Brazil against the government's World Cup and Olympic expulsion policies; the student strikes in Chile; the remarkable

surge in the Chinese workers' movement; the shack dwellers and other poor people's campaigns in South Africa; Occupy Wall Street, the immigrant rights movement, Black Lives Matter, fast food workers' struggle and the

mobilization around the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign in the United States. This global revolt is spread unevenly and faces many challenges. A number of these struggles, moreover, have suffered setbacks, such as the Greek working-class

movement and, tragically, the Arab Spring. What type of a transformation is viable, and how do we achieve it? How we interpret the global crisis is itself a matter of vital importance as politics polarize worldwide between a neofascist and a popular response. The systemic critique of global capitalism must strive to influence, from this vantage point, the discourse and practice of movements for a more just distribution of wealth and power. Our survival may depend on it.

Neoliberalism is unsustainable – it has produced resource wars, climate change, and structural violence – only accelerating beyond neoliberalism can resolve its impacts

Milne 15 (Seumus Milne, Guardian columnist and associate editor, executive director of strategy and communications, “The Davos oligarchs are right to fear the world they’ve made,” 22 January 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/22/davos-oligarchs-fear-inequality-global-elite-resist)

The scale of the crisis has been laid out for them by the charity Oxfam. Just 80 individuals now have the same net wealth as 3.5 billion people – half the entire global population. Last year, the best-off 1% owned 48% of the world’s

wealth, up from 44% five years ago. On current trends, the richest 1% will have pocketed more than the other 99% put together next year. The 0.1% have been doing even better, quadrupling their share of US income since the

1980s.¶ This is a wealth grab on a grotesque scale. For 30 years, under the rule of what Mark Carney, the Bank of England

governor, calls “market fundamentalism”, inequality in income and wealth has ballooned, both between and within the large majority of countries. In Africa, the absolute number living on less than $2 a day has doubled since 1981 as the rollcall of billionaires has swelled.¶ In most of the world, labour’s share of national income has fallen continuously and wages have stagnated under this regime of privatisation, deregulation and low taxes on the rich. At the same time finance has sucked wealth from the public realm into the hands of a small minority, even as it has laid waste the rest of the economy. Now the

evidence has piled up that not only is such appropriation of wealth a moral and social outrage, but it is fuelling social and climate conflict , wars , mass migration and political corruption , stunting health and life chances , increasing poverty , and widening gender and ethnic divides .¶ Escalating inequality has also been a crucial factor in the economic crisis of the past seven years, squeezing demand and fuelling the credit boom. We don’t just know that from the research of the French economist Thomas Piketty or the British authors of the social study

The Spirit Level. After years of promoting Washington orthodoxy, even the western-dominated OECD and IMF argue that the

widening income and wealth gap has been key to the slow growth of the past two neoliberal decades. The British economy would have been almost 10% larger if inequality hadn’t mushroomed. Now the richest are using austerity to help themselves to an even larger share of the cake.¶ The big exception

to the tide of inequality in recent years has been Latin America. Progressive governments across the region turned their back on a disastrous economic model, took back resources from corporate control and slashed inequality. The numbers living on less than $2 a day have fallen from 108 million to 53 million in little over a decade. China, which also rejected much of the neoliberal catechism, has seen sharply rising inequality at home but also lifted more people out of poverty than the rest of the world combined, offsetting the growing global income gap.¶ These two cases underline that increasing inequality and poverty are very far from inevitable. They’re the result of political and economic decisions. The thinking person’s Davos oligarch realises that allowing things to carry on as they are is dangerous. So some want a more “inclusive capitalism” – including more progressive taxes – to save the system from itself.¶ But it certainly won’t come about as a

result of Swiss mountain musings or anxious Guildhall lunches. Whatever the feelings of some corporate barons, vested corporate and elite interests – including the organisations they run and the political structures they have colonised – have shown they will fight even modest reforms tooth and nail. To get the idea, you only have to listen to the squeals of protest, including from some in his own party, at Ed Miliband’s plans to tax homes worth over £2m to fund the health service, or the demand from the one-time reformist Fabian Society that the Labour leader be more pro-business (for which read pro-corporate), or

the wall of congressional resistance to Barack Obama’s mild redistributive taxation proposals.¶ Perhaps a section of the worried elite might be prepared to pay a bit more tax. What they won’t accept is any change in the balance of social power – which is why, in one country after another, they resist any attempt to strengthen trade unions, even

though weaker unions have been a crucial factor in the rise of inequality in the industrialised world.¶ It’s only through a challenge to the entrenched interests that have dined off a dysfunctional economic order that the tide of inequality will be reversed. The anti-austerity Syriza party, favourite to win the Greek elections this

weekend, is attempting to do just that – as the Latin American left has succeeded in doing over the past decade and a half. Even to get to that point demands stronger social and political movements to break down or bypass the blockage in a colonised political mainstream. Crocodile tears about inequality are

a symptom of a fearful elite. But change will only come from unrelenting social pressure and political challenge.

Neoliberal social organization ensures extinction from resource wars, climate change, and structural violence—turns all their impactsWilliams & Srnicek, 13

(Alex, PhD student at the University of East London, presently at work on a thesis entitled 'Hegemony and Complexity', Nick, PhD candidate in International Relations at the London School of Economics, Co-authors of the forthcoming Folk Politics, 14 May 2013, http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/)

At the beginning of the second decade of the Twenty-First Century, global civilization faces a new breed of cataclysm. These coming apocalypses ridicule the norms and organisational structures of the politics which were forged in the

birth of the nation-state, the rise of capitalism, and a Twentieth Century of unprecedented wars. 2. Most significant is the break down of the planetary climatic system . In time, this threatens the continued existence of the present global human population. Though this is the most critical of the threats which face humanity, a series of

lesser but potentially equally destabilising problems exist along side and intersect with it. Terminal resource depletion, especially in water and energy reserves, offers the prospect of mass starvation, collapsing economic paradigms, and new hot and cold wars. Continued financial crisis has led governments to embrace the paralyzing death spiral policies of austerity, privatisation of social welfare services, mass unemployment, and stagnating wages.

Increasing automation in production processes including ‘intellectual labour’ is evidence of the secular crisis of capitalism, soon to render it incapable of maintaining current standards of living for even the former middle classes of the global north. 3. In contrast to these ever-accelerating catastrophes, today’s politics is beset by an inability to generate the new ideas and modes of organisation necessary to transform our societies to confront and resolve the coming annihilations. While crisis gathers force and speed,

politics withers and retreats. In this paralysis of the political imaginary, the future has been cancelled. 4. Since 1979, the hegemonic global political ideology has been neoliberalism, found in some variant throughout the leading economic powers. In spite of the deep structural challenges the new global problems present to it, most immediately the credit, finan-

cial, and fiscal crises since 2007   –   8, neoliberal programmes have only evolved in the sense of deepening.

This continuation of the neoliberal project, or neoliberalism 2.0, has begun to apply another round of structural adjustments, most significantly in the form of encouraging new and aggressive incursions by the private sector

into what remains of social democratic institutions and services. This is in spite of the immediately negative eco-

nomic and social effects of such policies, and the longer term fundamental barriers posed by the new global crises.

Neoliberalism psychologically manipulates its subjects to become better consumers, eroding value of life Tadiar, Professor of Women’s Studies, ’12 (Neferti; 10/27/12; Barnard College, UC Irvine Lecture,

“Life-Times of Disposability in Global Neoliberalism: China and the Philippines,” https://uchri.org/events/life-times-of-disposability-in-global-neoliberalism-china-and-the-philippines/)

“Recent scholarly works have described the perceived shift from liberalism to neoliberalism concomitant with globalization in terms of a shift in the logic of constitution of forms of personhood and governmentality from one constructed around rights and property to another constructed around risk and security. Beyond political and economic practice and rationality, this

identified shift in global hegemony is seen to produce and issue out of changed structures of lived subjectivity and feeling, social experience and imagination. In this paper I explore the question of disposability and temporal aesthetics in global neoliberalism as exemplified in the cinematic work of Jia Zhang-Ke and Brillante Mendoza, and therefore in the regional context shared by China and the Philippines. I look at the practices of attention of these

filmmakers and the specific forms of rendering what I call “life-times” of disposability, life-producing practices of social experience of surplus populations that are at once the consequence and means of new forms of value-production in the financialized global economy. I consider the aesthetic forms of these works of Asian cinema and the broader economy in which they participate to think about the uneven dynamics of and differentiated political possibilities within the dominant cultural logic of global neoliberalism.”

Neoliberalism has empirically lead to inequality and higher violence ratesSmith 12 (Candace, Candace Smith is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Oklahoma. She completed her M.A. in Sociology from OU in May 2012. In her thesis, she used data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN) to examine the impact of witnessing violence on juveniles’ fear of violence as well as the ability of neighborhood collective efficacy to moderate this relationship. Her areas of interest include criminology, victimology, and culture. At this time, Candace is a graduate teaching assistant. She is also currently interning at a not-for-profit organization dedicated to providing legal services to the abused, neglected, and deprived children of Oklahoma County. ,“Neoliberalism and Inequality: A Recipe for Interpersonal Violence?”, The Society Pages: Sociology Lens, https://thesocietypages.org/sociologylens/2012/11/06/neoliberalism-and-inequality-a-recipe-for-interpersonal-violence/, 6 November 2012)

In an attempt to demonstrate the relationships among neoliberalism, inequality, and violence, consider the case of Brazil. In the early 1990s, this country increasingly embraced the ideas of neoliberalism . Import tariffs were lessened, most non-tariff barriers were abolished, privatization was increased, and investments were liberalized (Amann and Baer

2002). Yet, despite these pro-capitalist changes and drastic improvements in inflation rates , Amann and Baer contend that Brazil’s neoliberal regime did not improve income inequality , a problem

which has haunted the country for decades. In fact, the gap between the richest 10 percent of income groups and the poorest 40 percent of income groups has continued to increase since the

introduction of neoliberal policies. Amann and Baer blame part of this widening gap on the reduction of employment opportunities in the industrial sector that occurred as a result of policies that favored privatization, technological advances, and,

consequently, mass layoffs. As could probably be expected, urban violence rose dramatically in places like Rio de

Janeiro and Sao Paulo during this time period. Similarly, Gawryszewski and Costa (2005) found that homicide rates were highest in the areas of Sao Paulo with the highest rates of socioeconomic disparities . In response to such problems, Amann and Baer conclude that Brazil needs the state to reemerge as a promoter of equality.

As neoliberalization drives up inequality, the middle and lower classes are increasingly losing their political power—the impact is an age of extremism where the all-powerful 1% controls the disenfranchised 99%Monbiot 16 (George, George Monbiot is the author of the bestselling books The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order and Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain, as well as the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed and No Man's Land. His latest book is Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding (being published in paperback as Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life), “Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems”, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot, 15 April 2016)

A nother paradox of neoliberalism is that universal competition relies up on universal quantification and comparison . The result is that workers, job-seekers and public services of every kind are subject to a pettifogging, s tifling regime of assessment and monitoring, designed to identify the winners and punish the losers . The doctrine that Von Mises proposed would free us from the bureaucratic nightmare of central planning has instead created one. Neoliberalism was not conceived as a self-serving racket,

but it rapidly became one. Economic growth has been markedly slower in the neoliberal era (since 1980

in Britain and the US) than it was in the preceding decades; but not for the very rich. Inequality in the distribution of both income and wealth, after 60 years of decline, rose rapidly in this era , due to the smashing of trade unions, tax reductions, rising rents, privatisation and deregulation. The privatisation or

marketisation of public services such as energy, water, trains, health, education, roads and prisons has enabled corporations to set up tollbooths in front of essential assets and charge rent , either to citizens or to government, for their use. Rent is another term for unearned income. When you pay an inflated price for a train ticket, only part of the fare compensates the operators for the money they spend on

fuel, wages, rolling stock and other outlays. The rest reflects the fact that they have you over a barrel. Those who own and run the UK’s privatised or semi-privatised services make stupendous fortunes by investing little and charging much. In Russia and India, oligarchs acquired state assets through firesales. In Mexico, Carlos Slim was granted control of almost all landline

and mobile phone services and soon became the world’s richest man. Financialisation, as Andrew Sayer notes in Why We

Can’t Afford the Rich, has had a similar impact . “Like rent,” he argues, “interest is ... unearned income that accrues without any effort”. As the poor become poorer and the rich become richer, the rich acquire increasing control over another crucial asset: money . Interest payments , overwhelmingly,

are a transfer of money from the poor to the rich. As property prices and the withdrawal of state funding load people

with debt (think of the switch from student grants to student loans), the banks and their executives clean up. Sayer argues that the past four decades have been characterised by a transfer of wealth not only from the poor to the rich, but within the ranks of the wealthy: from those who make their money by producing new goods or services to those who make their

money by controlling existing assets and harvesting rent, interest or capital gains. Earned income has been supplanted by unearned income . Neoliberal policies are everywhere beset by market failures. Not only are the banks too big to fail, but so are the corporations now charged with delivering public services . As Tony Judt pointed out in Ill Fares the Land, Hayek forgot that vital national services cannot be allowed to collapse, which means that competition cannot run its course. Business takes the profits, the state keeps the risk . The greater the failure, the more extreme the ideology becomes. Governments use neoliberal crises as both excuse and opportunity to cut taxes, privatise remaining public services, rip holes in the social safety net, deregulate corporations and re-

regulate citizens. The self-hating state now sinks its teeth into every organ of the public sector.

Perhaps the most dangerous impact of neoliberalism is not the economic crises it has caused, but the political crisis. As the domain of the state is reduced, our ability to change the course of our lives through voting also contracts. Instead, neoliberal theory asserts, people can exercise choice through spending. But some have more to spend than others: in the great consumer or shareholder democracy, votes are not equally distributed. The result is a disempowerment of the poor and middle. As

parties of the right and former left adopt similar neoliberal policies, disempowerment turns to disenfranchisement. Large numbers of people have been shed from politics. Chris Hedges remarks that “fascist movements build their base not from the politically active but the politically inactive, the ‘losers’ who feel, often correctly, they have no voice or role to play in the political

establishment”. When political debate no longer speaks to us, people become responsive instead to slogans, symbols and sensation. To the admirers of Trump, for example, facts and arguments appear irrelevant.

AlternativeVote neative to refuse capitalism – a hollowing out of capital’s influence is a necessary pre-requisite to changeHerod 04

(James, Columbia University Graduate and Political Activist, Getting Free, http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/GetFre/06.htm)It is time to try to describe, at first abstractly and later concretely, a strategy for destroying capitalism. This strategy, at its most basic, calls for pulling time, energy, and resources out of capitalist civilization and putting them into building a new civilization. The image

then is one of emptying out capitalist structures, hollowing them out, by draining wealth, power, and meaning out of them until there is nothing left but shells.¶ This is definitely an aggressive strategy. It requires great militancy, and constitutes an attack on the existing order. The strategy clearly recognizes that capitalism is the enemy and must be destroyed, but it is not a frontal attack aimed at overthrowing the system, but an inside attack aimed at gutting it, while

simultaneously replacing it with something better, something we want.¶ Thus capitalist structures (corporations, governments, banks, schools, etc.) are not seized so much as simply abandoned. Capitalist relations are not fought so much as they are simply rejected. We stop participating in activities that support (finance, condone) the capitalist world and start participating in activities that build a new world while simultaneously undermining the old. We create a new pattern of social relations alongside capitalist relations and then we continually

build and strengthen our new pattern while doing every thing we can to weaken capitalist relations. In this way our new democratic, non-hierarchical, non-commodified

relations can eventually overwhelm the capitalist relations and force them out of existence .¶ This is how it has to be done. This is a plausible, realistic strategy. To think that we could create a whole new world of decent social arrangements overnight, in the midst of a crisis, during a

so-called revolution, or during the collapse of capitalism, is foolhardy. Our new social world must grow within the old, and in opposition to

it, until it is strong enough to dismantle and abolish capitalist relations. Such a revolution will never happen automatically, blindly, determinably, because of the inexorable, materialist laws of history. It will happen, and only happen, because we want it to, and because we know what we’re doing and know how we want to live, and know what obstacles have to be overcome before we can live that way, and know how to distinguish between our social patterns and theirs.¶ But we must not think that the capitalist world can simply be ignored, in a live and let live attitude, while we try to build new lives elsewhere. (There is no elsewhere.) There is at least

one thing, wage-slavery, that we can’t simply stop participating in (but even here there are ways we can chip away at it). Capitalism must be explicitly refused and replaced by something else. This constitutes War, but it is not a war in the traditional sense of armies and tanks, but a war fought on a daily basis, on the level of everyday life, by millions of people. It is a war nevertheless because the accumulators of capital will use coercion, brutality, and murder, as they have always done in the past, to try to block any rejection of the system. They have always had to force compliance; they will not hesitate to continue doing so. Nevertheless, there are many concrete ways that individuals, groups, and neighborhoods can gut capitalism, which I will enumerate shortly.¶ We must always keep in mind how we became slaves; then we can see more clearly how we can cease being slaves. We were forced into wage-slavery because the ruling class slowly, systematically, and brutally destroyed our ability to live autonomously. By driving us off the land, changing the property laws, destroying community rights, destroying our tools, imposing taxes, destroying our local markets, and so forth, we were forced onto the labor market in order to survive, our only remaining option being to sell, for a wage, our ability to work.¶ It’s quite clear then how we can overthrow slavery. We must reverse this process. We must begin to reacquire the ability to live without working for a wage or buying the products made by wage-slaves (that is, we must get free from the labor

market and the way of living based on it), and embed ourselves instead in cooperative labor and cooperatively produced goods.¶ Another clarification is needed. This strategy does not call for reforming capitalism, for changing capitalism into something else. It calls for replacing capitalism, totally, with a new civilization. This is an important distinction, because capitalism has proved impervious to reforms, as a system. We can sometimes in some places win certain concessions from it (usually only temporary ones) and win some (usually short-lived) improvements in our lives as its victims, but we cannot reform it piecemeal, as a system.¶ Thus our strategy of gutting and eventually destroying capitalism requires at a minimum a totalizing image, an awareness that we are attacking an entire way of life and replacing it with another, and not merely reforming one way of life into something else.¶ Many people may not be accustomed to thinking about entire systems and social orders, but everyone knows what a lifestyle is, or a way of life, and that is the way we should approach it.¶ The thing is this: in order for capitalism to be destroyed millions and millions of people must be dissatisfied with their way of life. They must want something else and see certain existing things as obstacles to getting what they want. It is not useful to think of this as a new ideology. It is not merely a belief-system that is needed, like a religion, or like Marxism, or Anarchism. Rather it is a new prevailing vision, a dominant desire, an overriding need. What must exist is a pressing desire to live a certain way, and not to live another way. If this pressing desire were a desire to live free, to be autonomous, to live in democratically controlled communities, to participate in the

self-regulating activities of a mature people, then capitalism could be destroyed. Otherwise we are doomed to perpetual slavery

and possibly even to extinction.

The perm fails – schools are already being converted into neoliberal factories. The politics of the affirmative is one that attempts to save an institution of neoliberalism.Giroux, 12Henry Giroux (born September 18, 1943) is an American and Canadian scholar and cultural critic. One of the founding theorists of critical pedagogyin the United States, he is best known for his pioneering work in public pedagogy, cultural studies, youth

studies, higher education, media studies, and critical theory. In 2002 Routledge named Giroux as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period.

Public schooling is increasingly harnessed to the needs of corporations and the warfare state. One consequence is that many public schools, especially those occupied by poor minority youth, have become the new factories

for dumbing down the curricula and turning teachers into what amounts to machine parts. At the same time, such schools have become increasingly militarized and provide a direct route for many youth into the prison-industrial complex or what is called the   school-to-prison pipeline . [10] What is buried under the educational rhetoric of hedge-fund and casino capitalism reform is the ideal of offering public schools students a civic education that provides the capacities, knowledge and skills that enable students to speak, write and act from a position of agency and empowerment. Privatization, commodification, militarization and deregulation are the new guiding categories through which schools, teachers, pedagogy and students are defined. The current assault on public education is not new but it is more vile and

more powerful than in the past. Crucial to any viable reform movement is the need to understand the historical context in which public education has been transformed into an adjunct of corporate power as well as the ways in which the current right-wing reform operates within a broader play of power, ideology and other social forces that bear down in anti-democratic ways on the purpose of schooling and the practice of teaching itself. Making power invisible is important, but only a first step in understanding how it works and how it might be challenged. But recognizing such a challenge is not the same thing as overcoming it. Part of this task necessitates that educators anchor their own work in classrooms, however diverse, in projects that engage the promise of an unrealized democracy against its existing, often repressive forms. And this is only a first step.

The permutation only works to maintain current systems of global capitalMagdoff, 10 (

Fred, professor emeritus of plant and soil science @ University of Vermont, John B., poli sci PhD @ York University, sociology prof @ University of Oregon, editor of Monthly Review, “What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism”, March 2010, Accessed 6/26/16, Monthly Review 61.10, p. 5-7

We strongly agree with many environmentalists who have concluded that continuing “business as usual” is the path to global disaster. Many people have determined that, in order to limit the ecological footprint of human beings on the earth, we need to have an economy—particularly in the rich countries— that doesn’t grow , so as to be able to stop and possibly reverse the increase in pollutants released, as well as to conserve non-renewable resources and more rationally use renewable resources . Some

environmentalists are concerned that, if world output keeps expanding and everyone in developing countries seeks to attain the standard of living of the wealthy capitalist states, not only will pollution continue to increase beyond what the earth system can absorb , but we will also run out of the limited non-renewable resources on the globe. The Limits to Growth by Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, Dennis Meadows, and William Behrens, published in 1972 and updated in 2004 as Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update, is an example of concern with this issue.19 It is

clear that there are biospheric limits, and that the planet cannot support the close to 7 billion people already alive (nor, of course, the 9 billion projected for mid-century) at what is known as a Western, “middle class” standard of living. The Worldwatch Institute has recently estimated that a world which used biocapacity

per capita at the level of the contemporary United States could only support 1.4 billion people.20 The primary problem is an ancient one and

lies not with those who do not have enough for a decent standard of living, but rather with those for whom enough does not exist. As Epicurus said: “Nothing is enough to someone for whom enough is little.”21 A global social system organized on the basis of “enough is little” is bound eventually to destroy all around it and itself as well. Many people are aware of the need for social justice when solving this problem, especially because so many of the poor are living under dangerously precarious conditions, have been especially hard hit by environmental disaster and degradation, and promise to be the main victims if current trends are allowed to continue. It is clear that approximately half of humanity—over three billion people, living in deep poverty and subsisting on less than $2.50 a day—need to have access to the requirements for a basic human existence such as decent housing, a secure food supply, clean water,

and medical care. We wholeheartedly agree with all of these concerns.22 Some environmentalists feel that it is possible to solve most of our problems by tinkering with our economic system, introducing greater energy efficiency and substituting “green” energy sources for fossil fuels—or coming up with technologies to ameliorate the problems (such as using carbon capture from power plants and injecting it deep into the earth). There is a movement toward “green” practices to use as marketing tools or to keep up with other companies claiming to use such practices. Nevertheless, within the environmental movement, there are some for whom it is clear that mere technical adjustments in the current productive system will not be enough to solve the dramatic and potentially catastrophic problems we face. Curtis White begins his 2009 article in Orion, entitled “The Barbaric Heart: Capitalism and the Crisis of Nature,” with: “There is a fundamental question that environmentalists are not very good at asking, let alone answering: ‘Why is this, the destruction of the natural world, happening?’”23 It is impossible to

find real and lasting solutions until we are able satisfactorily to answer this seemingly simple question. It is our contention that most of the critical environmental problems we have are either caused, or made much worse, by the workings of our economic system. Even such issues as population growth and technology are best viewed in terms of their relation to the socioeconomic organization of society. Environmental problems are not a result of human ignorance or innate greed. They do not arise because managers of individual large corporations or developers are morally deficient.

Instead, we must look to the fundamental workings of the economic (and political/social) system for explanations. It is precisely the fact that ecological destruction is built into the inner nature and logic of our present system of production that makes it so difficult to solve . In addition, we shall argue that “solutions” proposed for environmental devastation, which would allow the current system of production and distribution to proceed unabated, are not real solutions . In fact, such “solutions” will make things worse because they give the false impression that the problems are on their way to being overcome when the reality is quite different. The overwhelming environmental problems facing the world and its people will not be effectively dealt with until we institute another way for humans to interact with nature—altering the way we make decisions on what and how much to produce. Our most necessary, most rational goals require that we take into account fulfilling basic human needs, and creating just and sustainable conditions on behalf of present and future generations (which also means being concerned about the preservation of other species).

FrameworkThe role of the ballot is to endorse the team that best critiques capital’s influence on education - Interrogating underlying assumptions is key to prevent error-replication and challenging oppressive structures.Patrick, 13 [Fiona Patrick – Lecturer @ University of Glasgow in Higher Education, Educational Management, “Neoliberalism, the Knowledge Economy, and the Learner: Challenging the Inevitability of the Commodified Self as an Outcome of Education” http://www.hindawi.com/journals/isrn/2013/108705/)

In order to reclaim education from neoliberalism, one place to begin might be to focus on education as the development of the self, not in accordance with economic imperatives but in accordance with

wellbeing and individual flourishing as core aims of education. If education is considered as a transformation of the self of the learner, we may ask what are the processes of teaching and learning that will support individual intellectual, psychological, emotional, and social flourishing? Only in asking this kind of question we might be able to understand how agency can be encouraged in practice—partly as resistance to neoliberalism, but more with the aim of individual wellbeing at its heart. For this is where the real shame of neoliberalism lies: in terms of educational aims, the needs of the individual as a human being have been subjugated to the needs of capital and the economy. Rather than the shaping of learners’ selves in accordance with “what are perceived to be current economic imperatives,” schools, colleges, and universities should support practices that enable individuals to develop in ways that are consonant with “their sense of their own existence” [46, page 358]. The ways in which teachers in all education sectors can support these practices is open to debate, but

debate needs to be there if neoliberal educational practices are to be rethought . One site of this debate

should be in universities generally, and in teacher education institutes specifically. Through engagement with debate on what the aims of education should be—rather than acceptance of a set of curriculum assumptions about these aims—teachers might be encouraged to consider deeply and critically what education is for in terms of individual children and young people. Educators should be encouraged to realise that they have a choice of whether or not to accept neoliberal education practices at the classroom level. Curricula may be set, examinations and tests may dominate, but teachers’ individual pedagogic choices and classroom cultures need not be beholden to neoliberalist ideology even

though this doctrine continues to shape wider education policy. There is much that can be done to encourage pupils and students to think, to be critical, and to imagine possible selves. It is the sense of education enabling the development of human selves that holds possibilities for engendering humane approaches to education and learning in schools, colleges, and universities. We can place human development at the heart of learning through the humanities, and perhaps we should pause to remember why the humanities were and are so called, even if it has become unfashionable to champion liberal education

rather than more radical approaches such as critical pedagogy. But we can place human development at the core of all curricular areas. It is time to reclaim teaching across the disciplines, and this reclamation can be done at the level of the individual educator. While the agency of individual students needs to be valued and reasserted, so too does the agency of teachers. They are teachers who can make pedagogic choices that will benefit their students by enabling the development of individual capabilities with a view to enhancing individual agency and wellbeing. Perhaps it is not just the self of the learner that has to be reclaimed, but the self of the teacher.

We must remain skeptical of the affirmative’s truth claims – systems of neoliberalism mediate society’s interaction with information to obscure crises of capital. Klein, 14 (Naomi; Canadian author, award-wining freelance journalist, activist, and environmental researcher, Penguin House, “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate,” https://archive.org/stream/pdfy-Skb-ch_k7psDm90Q/Naomi%20Klein%20-%20This%20Changes%20Everything_djvu.txt)

More impressive, though left unspoken, are all the news stories that were never published and never aired. The years leading up to the gathering had seen a precipitous collapse of media coverage of climate change, despite a rise in extreme weather: in 2007, the three major U.S. networks— CBS, NBC, and ABC— ran 147 stories on climate change; in 2011 the networks ran just fourteen stories on the subject. That too is the denier strategy at work, because the goal was never just to spread doubt but also to spread fear — to send a clear message that saying anything at all about climate change was a surefire way to find your inbox and comment threads jammed with a toxic strain of vitriol. 11 The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank devoted to "promoting free- market solutions," has been holding these confabs

since 2008, sometimes twice a year. And at the time of the gathering, the strategy appeared to be working. In his address, Morano — whose claim to fame is having broken the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth story that helped sink John Kerry's

2004 presidential bid — led the audience through a series of victory laps. Climate legislation in the U.S. Senate: dead! The U.N. summit on climate change in Copenhagen: failure! The climate movement: suicidal! He even

projected on a screen a couple of quotes from climate activists beating up on themselves (as progressives do so well) and exhorted the audience to "celebrate!" The only things missing were balloons and confetti descending from the rafters. When public opinion on the big social and political issues changes, the trends tend to be relatively gradual. Abrupt shifts, when they come, are usually precipitated by dramatic events. Which is why pollsters were so surprised by what had happened to perceptions about climate change in just four years. A 2007 Harris poll found that 71 percent of Americans believed that the continued burning of fossil fuels would alter the climate. By 2009 the figure had dropped to 51 percent. In June 201 1 the number was down to 44 percent — well under half the population. Similar trends have been tracked in the U.K. and Australia. Scott Keeter, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center for People & the Press, described the statistics in the United States as "among the largest shifts over a short period of time seen in recent public opinion history."

The only workable framework is one that attempts an escape from neoliberalism – we have been culturally primed to accept systems and structures of neoliberalismKlein, Awarded Author & Freelance Journalist, ’14 (Naomi; Canadian author, award-wining freelance journalist, activist, and environmental researcher, Penguin House, “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate,” https://archive.org/stream/pdfy-Skb-ch_k7psDm90Q/Naomi%20Klein%20-%20This%20Changes%20Everything_djvu.txt)

Yale law professor Dan Kahan, the lead author on this study, attributes the tight correlation between "worldview" and acceptance of climate science to "cultural cognition," the process by which all of us — regardless of political leanings — filter new information in ways that will protect our "preferred vision of the good

society." If new information seems to confirm that vision, we welcome it and integrate it easily. If it poses a threat to our belief system, then our brain immediately gets to work producing intellectual antibodies designed to repel the unwelcome invasion.^ As Kahan explained in Nature, "People find it disconcerting to believe that behavior that they find noble is nevertheless detrimental to society, and behavior that they find base is beneficial to it. Because accepting such a claim could drive a wedge between them and their peers, they

have a strong emotional predisposition to reject it." In other words, it is always easier to deny reality than to allow our worldview to be shattered, a fact that was as true of die-hard Stalinists at the height of the purges as it is of libertarian

climate change deniers today. Furthermore, leftists are equally capable of denying inconvenient scientific evidence. If conservatives are inherent system justifiers, and therefore bridle before facts that call the dominant economic system into question, then most leftists are inherent system questioners, and therefore prone to skepticism about facts that come from corporations and government. This can lapse into the kind of fact resistance we see among those who are convinced that multinational drug companies have covered up the link

between childhood vaccines and autism. No matter what evidence is marshaled to disprove their theories , it doesn't matter to these crusaders — it's just the system covering up for itself. This

kind of defensive reasoning helps explain the rise of emotional intensity that surrounds the climate issue today. As recently as 2007, climate change was something most everyone acknowledged was happening — they just didn't seem to care very much. (When Americans are asked to rank their political concerns in order of priority, climate change still consistently comes in last.)

Affirmative

FrameworkPrioritizing policy deliberation is vital to effective action and decision-making Bunker, 11 (James; 7/15/11; Masters at the Department of Communication of U-Utah; Dissertation, “THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF DELIBERATIVE CRITICISM: RHETORIC, DIGITAL ARCHIVES, NEW MEDIA, AND PUBLIC POLICY DELIBERATION” http://www.jamescbunker.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/JamesCBunkerDissertationFinal-7-15-20111.pdf)

The study and analysis of public policy is an integral part of political criticism within rhetorical studies. Public policy as an academic endeavor broadly construed concerns itself with the end result of political policy, the decision-making process, and the analysis of governmental decisions. Due to its emphasis on deliberation, rhetorical critics interested in deliberative democracy have increasingly turned their attention to public policy because of its focus on matters of political importance. Fontana Benedetto, Cary Nederman, and Gary Remer referred to this as deliberative democracy’s rhetorical turn.48 The significance of this turn from a discursive standpoint is that it recognized “the centrality of rhetoric to the processes of deliberative democracy” a claim that rhetoricians interested in public policy are well aware of.49 A 2010 special issue in Rhetoric and Public Affairs explored the theoretical implications of the rhetorical

turn for public policy studies. Specifically, these scholars focused on the relationship between rhetoric and public policy, the place of rhetoric in the policy domain, and the rhetorical study of policy. Contributors were asked to respond to

two questions: (1) What is the role of rhetoric in policymaking; and (2) How should rhetorical scholars approach public policy? Several themes emerged that warrant discussion due to their relationship to political criticism, as well

as the development of a deliberative criticism theory. These critics articulated the importance of studying public policy from a rhetorical perspective, the role of debate, the critic’s role in this process, and several theoretical and methodological concerns that need to be addressed within future rhetorical approaches to public policy studies. 50 One benefit of a rhetorical approach to public policy is that it connects the critic’s expertise with the public’s desire to receive quality information. Trevor Parry-

Giles believed that the rhetorical analysis of public policy provided the public with both a more advanced “deliberative arsenal” but also “frees citizens from the burden of extensive public-policy knowledge and expertise.”51 The public, from this perspective, has the advantage of receiving critically evaluated policy decisions without having to labor through elaborate technocratic arguments common to think-tanks and scholars of public policy. Rhetorical criticism of public policy discourse therefore not only provides a public service, it also provides the foundation for critics to communicate their expertise on important political topics to improve the quality of deliberation. The study of public policy requires critics to become familiar with and readdress the traditional topics of war and peace. Political topics or topoi are the resting place of the texts that critics choose to access, define, and analyze. Therefore, their familiarity is crucial to public policy studies from a rhetorical perspective. G. Thomas Goodnight summarized Aristotle’s topics, outlined their implications, and showed where to find them in public policy discourse.52 Accessible in historical documents and collective memory, topoi are embedded in the practices of expert

advisors, elected officials, and publics. Advocates work to (1) justify policy from a politically supportable standpoint; (2) assess material limitations to intelligence, planning, tactics, and strategy, (3) compare the present range of threats, duties, and opportunities as similar to those past or emergent and novel, and (4) find the means of public translation of doctrinal, technical, historic, and strategic discourses internal to think-tanks, public institutions, and other specialized communities.53 Goodnight recognized that for the critics to understand the rhetorical implications of policy, they must first

locate where political debate takes place, the actors and advocates involved, and the strategies employed to justify them. Debate is the forum for public policy analysis and it often takes place within elite policymaking circles, both

in historical and contemporary form. It is within these arenas that critics find topics for the study and analysis of public policy. Accordingly, Goodnight focused on rhetorically analyzing the 2002 Congressional debate over Iraq, which he read as an intertextual extension of administration rhetoric that highlighted fear appeals over pragmatic policy

questions.54 Exploration of public policy debate from a rhetorical perspective is not new but the argumentative turn offers substantial benefits for public comprehension of public policy.

Criticism is important, but only effective when adopted under cost-benefit policy Bunker, 11 (James; 7/15/11; Masters at the Department of Communication of U-Utah; Dissertation, “THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF DELIBERATIVE CRITICISM: RHETORIC, DIGITAL ARCHIVES, NEW MEDIA, AND PUBLIC POLICY DELIBERATION” http://www.jamescbunker.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/JamesCBunkerDissertationFinal-7-15-20111.pdf)

The ability for critics to engage in politically motivated criticism is the result of a paradigm shift in rhetorical studies. Starting in the 1970s, critics questioned the legitimacy of confining rhetorical critique to traditional approaches like Neo- Aristotelianism. Debates emerged in the field that explored both the objective nature of criticism, as well as what constituted proper rhetorical criticism . This section explores those debates and their significance for critics interested in political criticism. It also places those debates in context and discusses how they provided the foundation for the ideological turn in rhetorical studies and politically active types of criticism. The ideological turn’s historical foundation rests in the Forbes Hill/Kathryn Kohrs Campbell debate (1972) over the analysis of Nixon’s Vietnam address of 1969 and extended to include the appropriateness of modes for rhetorical criticism.4 Nixon’s speech raised three theoretical questions important for the emergence of ideological criticism and thus provided the foundation for expanding

rhetoric’s focus beyond Neo- Aristotelian approaches. First, could critics appreciate the way in which a rhetor adapted his message to a target audience, while at the same time ignoring other audiences? Second, is the critic warranted in excluding moral judgments about the speaker or excluding issues that raise the question of morality when producing criticism? Finally, were critics warranted in not addressing the truth of a discourse or set of discourses as an aspect of

critique? Forbes Hill, in his defense of Neo-Aristotelianism, replied yes to all three questions, believing that critics should focus on the means by which a rhetor developed a text and not concern themselves with its ends or results. Kathryn Kohrs

Campbell argued the opposite, that rhetoric needed to: expand its notion of audience past target audiences; broaden rhetorical analysis to encompass other perspectives beyond Neo-Aristotelianism; and include issues of morality and truth within the legitimate scope of the rhetorical critic . The Hill/Campbell debate represented the changing nature of rhetorical studies, and complemented the argument for the plurality of methods advocated by Edwin Black and others at the time.5 The theoretical issues raised by Hill and Campbell were expanded upon

by other rhetoricians, forever changing the role of the critic and politicizing the act of criticism. Debates over objectivity, for

instance, opened up new doors for politically motivated forms of criticism and reconceptualized the role of the critic in rhetorical studies. Philip Wander and Steven Jenkins challenged the idea that critique, as historically conceived by rhetoricians, was objective.6 The two critics challenged Neo- Aristotelian textual orthodoxy and raised questions about what constituted good criticism; issues that scholars would expand upon a decade later. The significance of their argument for political criticism is that, like Campbell, they challenged the validity of value neutral criticism. Wander and Jenkins advocated that criticism should expand past confining limitations of texts as conceived by Neo-Aristotelians and believed that the “ultimate test of criticism is not whether it is true or false, but whether it is adequate or inadequate, useful or useless,

misleading or helpful for you or us.”7 In other words, the primary driver of criticism was whether it provided a practical benefit and whether it had the opportunity to both educate and inform its audience. In this sense, they argued, criticism is political and “at its best, is informed talk about matters of importance.”8 Critically informed talk about the pressing political issues of the day represented a paradigm shift from the belief that criticism could be value neutral. It signified not only that critics were political, but that it was also within their scope to engage and comment on public policy.

PermPerm – do both. A combination of micro and macro political action is key to sustainable resistance. Marsh 95

[James L., Professor of Philosophy, Fordham University, “Critique, Action, and Liberation”, p. 282-283]

What seems to be called for and to be more likely with the greater possibility and actuality' of economic and rationality' crisis is a union of workers and citizens groups, economic and cultural movements, purposive rational-action and symbolic interaction, macro- and micropolitics. Links with workers can remind citizen groups of the relationship of their own goals and movements to economic class domination and help supply a unity' to these various groups. On the other hand, movements centered around quality' of life remind workers that mere economic reforms and revolution are not enough either,

transformation of quality' of life is essential. Moreover, movements centered on the problems of racism, sexism, and the devastation of the environment remind us of a legitimate specificity, plurality', and irreducibility within social movements. Even though racism, sexism, heterosexism. and environmental pollution are ultimately related to capitalism, they are not reducible to capitalist class domination. A legitimate differance exists among social movements that must be respected. In contrast to postmodernists. I would insist on a legitimate unity' or identity' that should be articulated, an identity-in-difference. Such a politics disavows either a one-sided unity' present in some traditional

Marxism or a one-sided pluralism present in liberal or postmodern theories. Such a politics would be aesthetic as well as political, cultural as well as

economic, micro as well as macro, but in contrast to many postmodern theories the aesthetic and cultural are linked to the critical and reflective. Rationality' is not simply or primarily instrumental or scientific as some traditional Marxism would have it or simply libidinal and aesthetic as some post-modem theory would have it. but a unity' of political, aesthetic, and scientific. Thus the aesthetic politics of Act-Up. an organization of AIDS activists, breaking into Dan Rather's newscast on CBS during the Gulf War has its legitimate place as do marches protesting the war or worker resistance on the shop floor. The symbolic protest of a Dan Berrigan at the King of Prussia nuclear facility

in Pennsylvania has its place as well as political organizing in the Bronx around the issues of health care, housing, and food. Many legitimate struggles, kinds of

struggle, and sites of struggle exist, none of which is reducible to the other, but which are or can be linked to one another in different alliances against a common enemy, a racist, sexist, heterosexist capitalism. Linking and alliance are not the same as subsumption and reduction, a common mistake. Such struggles have a common enemy, are subject to common norms of right, morality', and justice, and have a common goal of liberation taking the form of full economic, cultural, and political democracy. In contrast to a politics of assimilation that denies differences or a politics of rigid identity' that

becomes separatist, my recommended politics is one of inclusion and alliance. Such a politics flows from the argument of the whole book. On a phenomenological level, cognitional-transcendental structure and the validity' claims of the ideal speech situation are shared by everyone equally, white or African-American, capitalist or laborer, woman or man. heterosexual or homosexual. No person or group of persons is privileged in the ideal speech situation, and each has an equal right to express her needs and desires and claims. Ethically the principles of right, morality, and justice forbid classism. racism, sexism, and heterosexism. Hermeneutically. these forms of domination are distinct but related and are not reducible to one another. Critically, the task of social theory is to criticize these forms of domination with the aim of overcoming them. Finally, on the level of praxis itself, each kind of group subject to its own distinct kind of exploitation can give rise to its own legitimate kind of social movement. It is true that on a hermeneutic-explanatory level class domination is more fundamental and definitive of our social situation than other kinds, but even here one form is not reducible to the other. Also, it is mistaken to infer from such privileging to a privileging on other levels. Ethically, for example, it is not clear that exploitation of labor by capital is worse than that exerted by white over Latino or Indian, heterosexual over homosexual, or man over woman. Here, we note again the advantage of methodologically distinguishing different stages, aspects, and levels in critical theory. Even if I privilege class domination over other forms on a hermeneutic-explanatory level, it may be that social movements arising from racism, sexism, and heterosexism have to be privileged at times in the late capitalist context. Which of these social movements takes the lead depends very much on different local, regional, and national situations. In addition to other kinds of indeterminacy and ambiguity, social theory has to own up to a certain indeterminacy on the level of praxis.

Absolute refusal is unsustainable – the perm makes change a process, not a demand. Gibson-Graham 96

(Katharine, human geography@ Australian National University, Julie, geography@U of Massachusetts, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), p. 245)

One of our goals as Marxists has been to produce a knowledge of capitalism. Yet as “that which is known,” Capitalism has become the intimate enemy. We have uncloaked the ideologically-clothed, obscure monster, but we have installed a naked and visible monster in its place. In return for our labors of creation, the monster has robbed us of all force. We hear – and find it easy to believe – that the left is in disarray. Part of what produces the disarray of the left is the vision of what the left is arrayed against.

When capitalism is represented as a unified system coextensive with the nation or even the world, when it is

portrayed as crowding out all other economic forms, when it is allowed to define entire societies, it becomes something that can only be defeated and replaced by a mass collective movement (or by a process of systemic dissolution

that such a movement might assist). The revolutionary task of replacing capitalism now seems outmoded and

unrealistic, yet we do not seem to have an alternative conception of class transformation to take its place. The old political economic “systems” and “structures” that call forth a vision of revolution as systemic replacement still seem to be dominant in the Marxist political imagination. The New World Order is often represented as political fragmentation founded upon economic unification. In this vision the economy appears as the last stronghold of unity and singularity in a world of diversity and plurality. But why can’t the economy be fragmented too? If we theorized it as fragmented in the United States, we could being to see a huge state sector (incorporating a variety of forms of appropriation of surplus labor), a very large sector of self-employed and family-based producers (most noncapitalist), a huge household sector (again, quite various in terms of forms of exploitation, with some households moving towards communal or collective appropriation and others operating in a traditional mode in which one adult appropriates surplus labor from another). None of these things is easy to see. If capitalism takes up the available social space, there’s no room for

anything else. If capitalism cannot coexist, there’s no possibility of anything else. If capitalism functions as

a unity, it cannot be partially or locally replaced. My intent is to help create the discursive conception under which socialist or other noncapitalist construction becomes “realistic” present activity rather than a ludicrous

or utopian goal. To achieve this I must smash Capitalism and see it in a thousand pieces. I must make its unity a fantasy, visible as a denial of diversity and change.

Neoliberalism is redeemable – the radical shift of the alternative is not necessaryShepard and Leitner 9 [Eric, Helga, “Quo vadis neoliberalism? The remaking of global capitalist governance after the Washington Consensus”, http://www.sciencedirect.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/science/article/pii/S0016718509001225, Science Direct]

Many uncertainties remain about the coherence and nature of a post-Washington ‘consensus’, notwithstanding widespread circulation of the term. Whereas the Washington Consensus dominated for some 15 years, the post-Washington ‘consensus’ has not settled in the

same way and is already under challenge—by those very thinkers whose ideas were drawn on to justify it. Such a further shift cannot be traced to a specific moment of crisis and contestation paralleling the events of the late 1990s—although the global finance crisis of 2008 may, in retrospect, come to be constructed as such a catalytic moment. Nevertheless, these challenges, emerging during the first decade of the 21st century, are routinely motivated by reference to failures of neoliberal globalization (particularly what is now widely accepted as increasing income inequality at the global and sub-national scales, in most countries), the success of state-organized economic growth in China (no longer represented as simply market-led), the dissolution of the Doha ‘development’ round of WTO trade negotiations, and ongoing dissatisfaction with and contestation of neoliberal globalization (as in the World Social Forums now metastasizing across the global South, or Hardt and Negri’s notion of

the global multitude, cf. Fisher and Ponniah, 2003, Drainville, 2005, Hardt and Negri, 2000 and Hardt and Negri, 2004). This discursive framework, mobilized by the ‘new’ development economists, recognizes that costs and failures have accompanied neoliberal globalization, and acknowledges and worries about persistent contestations. It is argued that the former must be redressed, in order to undermine the material basis for contestations, allowing the benefits of capitalist globalization to be realized (Stiglitz, 2006). “If the tension is not managed intelligently and creatively, the danger is that the domestic consensus in favor of open markets will erode to the point where a generalized resurgence of protectionism becomes a serious possibility” (Rodrik, 1997, p. 6). To this end, it is argued, certain tenets of neoliberalism will have to be abandoned.

Neoliberal institutions can be used against themselves—absolute refusal makes violence inevitableFerguson, 10 (James, Susan S. and William H. Hindle Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and Professor in the Department of Anthropology @ Stanford, “The Uses of Neoliberalism”, 1/10, Accessed 6/23/16, Antipode Vol. 41 No. S1, p. 180-183)

Why should relying on this sort of mechanism be inherently right-wing, or suspect in the eyes of progressives? The answer is, of course, not far to find: markets serve only those with purchasing power. Market-based solutions are thus likely to be true “solutions” only for the better-off, whose needs are so

effectively catered to by markets. But the food aid example shows a way of redirecting markets toward the poor ,

by intervening not to restrict the market, but to boost purchasing power. I have become convinced that (at least in

the case of food aid) this is probably good public policy . Is it also neoliberal? Perhaps that is not the right question. Perhaps we should rather ask: are there specific sorts of social policy that might draw on characteristic neoliberal “moves” (like using markets to deliver services) that would also be genuinely progressive? That seems like a question worth asking, even if we are at this point not fully ready to answer it. Let me be clear that none of the examples discussed here are (in my view) unequivocally good (or unequivocally bad, for that matter). Instead, they leave us feeling uneasy, unsure of our moorings. They leave us less with strong opinions than with the sense that we need to think about them a bit more. They do not permit the simple denunciations (Aha! Neoliberalism!) that have become so familiar a part of the politics of the “anti-”, even as they clearly require us to turn a thoughtfully

critical and skeptical eye toward their dangers and ambiguities. I also want to emphasize as clearly as possible that none of these examples is a matter of “leaving it to the market”. All require major non-market interventions (either by states or by

state-like entities such as foundations or international agencies), and all are premised on the principle that public policy must play a major redistributive role. But they are interventions that create a situation where markets can arguably serve progressive ends, in ways that may require us to revise some of our prejudices that automatically associate market mechanisms with the interests of the well-to-do. The Point is to

Change It! If we are seeking , as this special issue of Antipode aspires to do, to link our critical analyses to the world of grounded political struggle—not only to interpret the world in various ways, but also to change it—then there is much to be said for focusing, as I have here, on mundane, real-world debates around policy and politics, even if doing so inevitably puts us on the compromised and reformist terrain of the possible, rather than the seductive high ground of revolutionary ideals and utopian desires. But I would also

insist that there is more at stake in the examples I have discussed here than simply a slightly better way to ameliorate the miseries of the chronically poor, or a technically superior method for relieving the suffering of famine victims. My point in discussing the South African BIG campaign, for instance, is not really to argue for its implementation. There is much in the campaign that is appealing, to be sure. But one can just as easily identify a series of worries that would bring the whole proposal into doubt. Does not, for instance, the decoupling of the question of assistance from the issue of labor, and the associated valorization of the “informal”, help provide a kind of alibi for the failures of the South African regime to pursue policies that would do more to create jobs? Would not the creation of a basic income benefit tied to national citizenship simply exacerbate the vicious xenophobia that already divides the South African poor, in a context where many of the poorest are not citizens, and would thus not be eligible for the BIG? Perhaps even more fundamentally, is the idea of basic income really capable of commanding the mass support that alone could make it a central pillar of a new approach to distribution? The record to date gives powerful reasons to doubt it. So far, the technocrats’ dreams of relieving poverty through efficient cash transfers have attracted little support from actual poor people, who seem to find that vision a bit pale and washed out, compared with the vivid (if vague) populist promises of jobs and personalistic

social inclusion long offered by the ANC patronage machine, and lately personified by Jacob Zuma (Ferguson forthcoming). My real interest in the policy proposals discussed here, in fact, has little to do with the narrow policy questions to which they seek to provide answers. For what is most significant, for my purposes, is not whether or not these

are good policies, but the way that they illustrate a process through which specific governmental devices and modes of reasoning that we have become used to associating with a very particular (and conservative) political agenda (“neoliberalism”) may be in the process of being peeled away from that agenda, and put to very different uses . Any progressive who takes seriously the challenge I pointed to at the start of this essay, the challenge of developing new progressive arts of government, ought to find this turn of events of considerable interest. As Steven Collier (2005) has recently

pointed out, it is important to question the assumption that there is, or must be, a neat or automatic fit between a hegemonic “neoliberal” political-economic project (however that might be characterized), on the

one hand, and specific “neoliberal” techniques, on the other. Close attention to particular techniques (such as the use of quantitative calculation, free choice, and price driven by supply and demand) in particular settings (in Collier’s case, fiscal and

budgetary reform in post-Soviet Russia) shows that the relationship between the technical and the political-economic “is much more polymorphous and unstable than is assumed in much critical geographical work”,

and that neoliberal technical mechanisms are in fact “ deployed in relation to diverse political projects and social norms” (2005:2). As I suggested in referencing the role of statistics and techniques for pooling risk in the creation of

social democratic welfare states, social technologies need not have any essential or eternal loyalty to the political formations within which they were first developed . Insurance rationality at the end of the nineteenth century had no essential vocation to provide security and solidarity to the working class; it was turned to that purpose (in some substantial measure) because it was available, in the

right place at the right time, to be appropriated for that use. Specific ways of solving or posing governmental problems, specific institutional and intellectual mechanisms, can be combined in an almost infinite variety of ways, to accomplish different social ends. With social, as with

any other sort of technology, it is not the machines or the mechanisms that decide what they will be used to do.

Foucault (2008:94) concluded his discussion of socialist governmentality by insisting that the answers to the Left’s governmental problems

require not yet another search through our sacred texts, but a process of conceptual and institutional innovation. “[I]f there is a really socialist governmentality, then it is not hidden within socialism and its texts. It cannot be deduced from

them. It must be invented”. But invention in the domain of governmental technique is rarely something worked up out of whole cloth. More often, it involves a kind of bricolage (Le ́vi- Strauss 1966), a piecing together of something new out of scavenged parts originally intended for some other purpose. As we pursue such a process of improvisatory invention, we might begin by making an inventory of the parts available for such tinkering,

keeping all the while an open mind about how different mechanisms might be put to work, and what kinds of purposes they might serve. If we can go beyond seeing in “neoliberalism” an evil essence or an automatic unity, and instead learn to see a field of specific governmental techniques, we may be surprised to find that some of them can be repurposed, and put to work in the service of political projects very different from those usually associated with that word. If so, we may find that the cabinet of governmental arts available to us is a bit less bare than first appeared, and that some rather useful little mechanisms may be nearer to hand than we thought.

ImpactsGlobalization is the only tool that can effectively protect a globalized society. Any other system fails to effectively respond to international crises, which means that neoliberalism is key to solve all conflictGoldin, 15 (Ian; 8/23/15; Director of the Oxford Martin School, Professor of Globalization and Development at the University of Oxford; Project Syndicate, “Global Solutions for Globalization’s Problems," https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/globalization-and-managing-systemic-risk-by-ian-goldin-2014-11)

OXFORD – The last few decades of globalization and innovation have resulted in the most rapid progress that the world has ever known. Poverty has been reduced. Life expectancy has increased. Wealth has been created at a scale that our ancestors could not have imagined. But the news is not all good. In fact, the achievements brought about by globalization are now under threat. The world has simultaneously benefited from globalization and failed to manage the inherent complications resulting from the increased integration of our societies, our economies, and the infrastructure of modern life. As a result, we have become dangerously exposed to systemic risks that transcend borders.

These threats spill across national boundaries and cross the traditional divides between industries and organizations. An integrated financial system propagates economic crises. International air travel spreads pandemics. Interconnected computers provide rich hunting grounds for cybercriminals. Middle Eastern jihadis use the Internet to recruit young Europeans. Living standards rise –

and greenhouse-gas emissions follow, accelerating climate change. As a byproduct of globalization, crises that once burned locally and then quickly flamed out now risk sparking international conflagrations. A pandemic, flood, or

cyber attack in the City of London or Wall Street could send the entire world into a financial tailspin. If the progress that globalization has delivered is to be sustained, countries must accept shared responsibility for managing the risks that it has engendered . National governments – whether powerful, like the United

States and China, or weak, like Iraq and Liberia – are unable to address these cascading and complex challenges on their own. Only a small fraction of the risks arising from globalization require a truly global response. But, by definition, these risks transcend the nation-state; thus, coordinated action is required to address them effectively. The nature of the response needs to be tailored to the threat. In the case of pandemics, the key is to support countries where outbreaks occur and help those most at risk of infection. Widespread dangers, such as climate change or a new financial crisis, can require the

cooperation of dozens of countries and a broad range of institutions. In nearly every case, an international effort is needed. An important characteristic of the risks of a globalized world is that they often become more serious over time. As a result, the speed at which they are identified, along with the effectiveness of the response, can determine whether an isolated event becomes a global threat. One need only look at the rise of the Islamic State, the outbreak of Ebola, the fight against climate change, or the financial contagion of 2008 to see what happens when a danger remains

unidentified for too long or a coordinated response is missing or mismanaged. And yet, just as the need for robust regional and international institutions is at its greatest, support for them is waning. A growing number of citizens in Europe, North America, and the Middle East blame globalization for unemployment, rising inequality, pandemics, and terrorism. Because of these risks, they

regard increased integration, openness, and innovation as more of a threat than an opportunity. This creates a vicious circle. The

concerns of the electorate are reflected in rapidly growing support for political parties that advocate increased protectionism, reductions in immigration, and greater national control over the marketplace. As a result, governments across Europe, North America, Asia, and Oceania are becoming more parochial in their concerns, starving international agencies and regional organizations

of the funding, credibility, and leadership capabilities needed to mount a proper response to the challenges of globalization. In the short term, countries may be able to duck their global responsibilities, but the threat posed by events beyond their borders cannot be kept at bay forever. Unaddressed, the endemic dangers of a globalized world will continue to grow. In confronting dangers such as the Islamic State, Ebola, financial crisis, climate change, or rising inequality, short-term political expediency must be overcome – or the entire world will come to regret it.

Neoliberalism is critical for peaceful relations – globalized trade increases prosperity for citizens of all participating nationsBoudreaux, 15 (Donald J. [not Trump], PhD in econ @ Auburn, econ prof @ George Mason University, “The Benefits of Free Trade: Addressing Key Myths”, originally published 11/1/13, updated 4/20/15, Accessed 6/27/16, Mercatus Center—Economic Perspectives, http://mercatus.org/sites/default/files/Benefits-Free-Trade-EP.pdf, p. 1-2)

Free trade increases prosperity for Americans—and the citizens of all participating nations —by allowing consumers to buy more, better-quality products at lower costs. It drives economic growth , enhanced efficiency , increased innovation , and the greater fairness that accompanies a rules-based system. These benefits increase as overall trade—exports and imports—increases. • Free trade

increases access to higher-quality, lower-priced goods. Cheaper imports, particularly from countries such as China and Mexico, have eased inflationary pressure in the United States.1 Prices are held down by more than 2 percent for every 1 percent share in the market by

imports from low-income countries like China. • Free trade means more growth. At least half of US imports are not consumer goods;

they are inputs for US-based producers, according to economists from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Freeing trade reduces imported-input costs, thus reducing businesses’ production costs and promoting economic growth. • Free trade improves efficiency and innovation. Over time, free trade works with other market processes to shift workers and resources to more productive uses, allowing more efficient industries to thrive. The result is higher wages , investment in such things as infrastructure, and a more dynamic economy that continues to create new jobs and opportunities .2 • Free trade drives competitiveness . Free trade does require American businesses and workers to adapt to the shifting demands of the worldwide marketplace. But these adjustments are critical to remaining competitive, and competition is what fuels long-term growth. • Free trade promotes fairness . When everyone follows the same rules-based system, there is less opportunity for cronyism , or the

ability of participating nations to skew trade advantages toward favored parties. In the absence of such a system, bigger and better-connected industries can more easily acquire unfair advantages, such as tax and regulatory loopholes, which shield them from competition.

AlternativeAlternatives to capitalism are less sustainable and create poverty and violenceAligica 3(Paul, 4/21, fellow at the Mercatus Center, Hudson Insitute, “The Great Transition and the Social Limits to Growth: Herman Kahn on Social Change and Global Economic Development”, April 21, http://www.hudson.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=publication_details&id=2827)

Stopping things would mean if not to engage in an experiment to change the human nature, at least in an equally difficult experiment in altering powerful cultural forces: "We firmly believe that despite the arguments put forward by people who would like to 'stop the earth and get off,' it is simply impractical

to do so. Propensity to change may not be inherent in human nature, but it is firmly embedded in most contemporary cultures. People have almost everywhere become curious, future oriented, and dissatisfied with their conditions. They want more material goods and covet higher status and greater control of nature. Despite much propaganda to the contrary, they believe in progress and future" (Kahn, 1976, 164). As regarding the critics of

growth that stressed the issue of the gap between rich and poor countries and the issue of redistribution, Kahn noted that what most people

everywhere want was visible, rapid improvement in their economic status and living standards, and not a closing of the gap (Kahn, 1976, 165). The people from poor countries have as a basic goal the transition from poor to middle class. The other implications of social change are secondary for them. Thus a crucial factor to be taken into account is that while the zero-growth advocates and their followers may be satisfied to stop at the present

point, most others are not. Any serious attempt to frustrate these expectations or desires of that majority is likely to fail

and/or create disastrous counter reactions. Kahn was convinced that "any concerted attempt to stop or even slow 'progress' appreciably (that is, to be satisfied with the moment) is catastrophe-prone". At the minimum, "it would probably

require the creation of extraordinarily repressive governments or movements-and probably a repressive international system" (Kahn, 1976, 165; 1979, 140-153). The pressures of overpopulation, national security challenges and poverty as well as the revolution of rising expectations could be solved only in a continuing growth environment. Kahn rejected the idea that continuous growth would generate political repression and absolute

poverty. On the contrary, it is the limits-to-growth position "which creates low morale, destroys assurance, undermines the legitimacy of governments everywhere, erodes personal and group commitment to constructive activities and encourages obstructiveness to reasonable policies and

hopes". Hence this position "increases enormously the costs of creating the resources needed for expansion, makes more likely misleading debate and misformulation of the issues, and make less likely constructive and creative lives". Ultimately "it is precisely this position the one that increases the potential for the kinds of disasters which most at its advocates are trying to avoid" (Kahn, 1976, 210; 1984).

Criticizing neoliberalism as a hegemonic structure fails – it disempowers movements and discourages activism – embrace political shiftsGriffith, 14 (Jon; 8/13/14; professor of social science, University of East London; The Guardian, “The Neoliberalism Myth Disempowers Us,” http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/aug/13/neoliberalism-myth-disempowers-us)

When I was growing up, “consumerism” was the bogey. Later, it was “individualism”. Now it’s “neoliberalism” (George Monbiot, 6 August). But these ideas mask the truth : if I move my mortgage or my

savings from one bank to another to get a fractionally improved rate of interest, then I, too, am screwing the economy, and, ultimately, the planet; and, uncomfortably for Guardian readers, it’s the hundreds of millions of people like us,

worldwide, who do most of the damage – not the super-rich. We’re not neoliberals, nor selfish, nor acquisitive, just ordinary people, doing our best to eat, live, and pay the salary of whoever sold us the cover we took out, so

we don’t have to pay a week’s wages to get the boiler fixed. Widespread belief in the neoliberalism myth , like

others before it, leads to widespread disempowerment: the larger and vaguer the abstraction, the less able we feel (and are) to take effective action. We can change our habits, influence others and reform institutions (radically as well as incrementally), whether alone or jointly, in response to specific wrongs, abuses and injustices, but the idea of neoliberalism does not help. And Monbiot himself acknowledges

a further problem: if the neoliberal condition actually exists nowhere – and not even its alleged advocates believe in

it, or want it – then it cannot be the enemy we have so collusively and easily settled on. He is right about the pervasive bureaucratic juggernaut, but neoliberalism does not explain it: we need a better theory.

Revolution fails – prefer concrete political actions Han, 14 (Byung-chul; 9/12/14; professor at the Universität der Künste Berlin; World Crunch, http://www.worldcrunch.com/opinion-analysis/why-revolution-is-impossible-on-the-seductive-power-of-neoliberalism/byung-chul-han-leadership-work-imf-crisis-economics/c7s16949/)

When a debate took place in Berlin last year between two opponents of capitalism, Antonio Negri and myself, Negri took the position that global resistance to “Empire” was a possibility. He presented himself as a communist revolutionary and called me a skeptical professor. Negri apparently believes a "multitude" — the interconnected protest and

revolutionary mass — can bring down the neoliberal leadership system. I felt that the position of communist revolutionary was naive and removed from reality, and I tried to explain why, today, revolution is no longer possible. Why is our neoliberal system of global leadership so stable? Why is there so little resistance to it? Why is everyone led so easily into the void? Why is revolution no longer possible today despite an ever-growing chasm between rich

and poor? To explain, we need greater understanding about how power and leadership function today. Anyone trying to install a new leadership system has to eliminate resistance. And that includes the neoliberal governance system.

To bring about a new system of leadership, you need established power often achieved through violence. But

this established power is not the same as the stabilizing power inside a system. It is well known that Margaret Thatcher, a

precursor of neoliberalism, considered unions as "inner enemies" and fought them forcefully. Installing a neoliberal agenda via aggressive intervention will not, however, yield the necessary kind of stabilizing power needed to keep a system in place. That power in the disciplinary and industrial society was repressive. Factory workers were brutally exploited by factory owners, and the violent exploitation

of workers led to protest and resistance. A revolution that would bring down the existing production system was possible then. In this repressive system, both the repression and the repressors were identifiable. There was a concrete enemy to address resistance to. Better than repression The neoliberal leadership system is structured entirely differently. Here the power needed to keep the system going is not repressive — it is seductive, alluring. It is no longer as clear-cut as it is under a disciplinary regime. There is no concrete “them,” no enemy, repressing freedom and against whom rebellion would be possible. Never has our society been as rich as it is today. And some people in it are richer than others. French economist Thomas Piketty warns that the disparities could become as drastic as they were in

feudal times. Neoliberalism turns the exploited worker into a free entrepreneur — the entrepreneur of himself.

Everyone is now a self-exploiting worker in his own business. Everyone is master and servant in one. Class warfare has changed into a running inner battle with the self. Failing today means blaming oneself and feeling ashamed.

People see themselves as the problem, not society. Any disciplinary system that expends a great deal

of force to repress people is inefficient. Considerably more efficient is a system of power that ensures that people voluntarily align with the system. The particular efficiency here is that it doesn’t work based on

forbidding and withholding, but through pleasing and fulfilling. Instead of making people obedient it aims to make them dependent. Uber arrives in Paris (UBER/FB) Neoliberalism’s logic of efficiency also applies to policing. In the 1980s, there were many protests against population censuses; even school kids protested against it. From today’s standpoint, the easy availability of information about our educational and career backgrounds is a given, but there was a

time now long gone when people believed that the state was trying to wrest information from citizens. Today we give up information of our own accord, perceiving this as freedom. And it is precisely that perception that makes protest impossible. Unlike the days when we protested population censuses, we do not protest this monitoring. What does one protest against? Oneself? American concept artist Jenny Holzer expresses this paradoxical situation with a "truism:" "Protect me from what I want." It is crucial to distinguish between the kind of power that activates and the kind of power that maintains. The

latter today takes on a smart, friendly form that makes it opaque and unassailable. The exploited subject is unaware of his own oppression. He imagines he is free. This leadership technique neutralizes resistance most effectively. Leadership that oppresses freedom and attacks it is not stable. The neoliberal regime is as stable as it is, immunized against resistance, because it makes use of freedom instead of suppressing it. Suppressing freedom leads quickly to resistance, whereas exploiting freedom does not. A Korean case The Asian financial crisis of 1997 left South Korea shocked and paralyzed. Then along came the International Monetary Fund to give the Koreans credit. Initially, the government had to battle against protests to press through a neoliberal agenda. This repressive power is the kind of power that mostly relies on violence and it is not the kind of power that can maintain a neoliberal regime passing itself off as freedom. To Naomi Klein, the state of shock societies find themselves in after financial crises such as those in South Korea or Greece is an opportunity for a radical

reprogramming of society. Today there is hardly any resistance in South Korea. Instead, conformity and consensus are paired with depression and burn-out. The country now has the highest suicide rate in the world. One turns violence against one's self instead of trying to change society. Aggression aimed outward, which would result in revolution, becomes self-aggression. There is no cooperative, interconnected multitude to rise up in global protest and revolution. Rather, the solitude of the isolated, individual self-entrepreneur is what marks present-day production. In the past, businesses were in competition with each other, but within individual

companies solidarity was possible. Today, everyone is in competition with everyone else, even within companies.

This absolute competition increases productivity enormously, but it destroys solidarity and the sense of public spirit. Revolution is not possible among exhausted, depressive, and isolated individuals. Along for the

ride (UBER/FB) One cannot explain neoliberalism in Marxist terms. It doesn’t even have the connotation of

“alienation” from work. People today throw themselves into work euphorically until they burn out. Burn-out and revolution cancel each other out. So it is a mistake to believe that the multitude is throwing over a parasitic Empire in favor of a communist society. Where do things stand with communism?

Buzzwords everywhere include “sharing” and “community.” The sharing economy is supposed to replace an economy of ownership and property. "Sharing is Caring" runs the maxim of “circlers" in Dave Eggers’s novel The Circle but that should really read “Caring is Killing.” Even ridesharing service Uber, which turns us all into prospective taxi drivers,

espouses the idea of community. Capitalist circle But it is a mistake to believe, as Jeremy Rifkin suggests in his book The

Zero Marginal Cost Society that the sharing economy means the end of capitalism and rings in a global,

community-oriented society in which sharing is more valued than owning. On the contrary. Bottom line, the sharing economy leads to a complete commercialization of life. The change from ownership to “access” celebrated by

Jeremy Rifkin doesn’t free us from capitalism. Anyone without money doesn’t have access to sharing. Even in the age of access, people without money remain shut out. Airbnb, the community marketplace that turns homes into hotels,

even saves on hospitality. The ideology of community or collaborative commons leads to total capitalization of the community. Aimless friendship is no longer possible. In a society of reciprocal evaluation,

friendliness is also commercialized. One is friendly to get a better ranking online. The harsh logic of capitalism prevails in the so-called sharing economy, where, paradoxically, nobody is actually giving anything away voluntarily. Capitalism comes full circle when it sells communism as the next piece of merchandise. Yes, communism as merchandise spells the end of revolution.