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SMS Debynasty 2011 Mason Owen
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LINK DEVELOPMENT (Foster 07) .................................................................................................................................................... 5 LINK DEVELOPMENT (Trainer 89)................................................................................................................................................. 7 LINK DEVELOPMENT (Trainer 96)................................................................................................................................................. 8
***Gender Links***..................................................................................................................................... 9
LINK Feminism (Gordon 96) ........................................................................................................................................................... 10 Link-Feminism (Henessy 94) ................................................................................................................................................................ 11 Link Gender (Low 95) ........................................................................................................................................................................ 12 Link: Gender (Cotter 02) Protection ...................................................................................................................................................... 13 Link: Gender (Cotter 02) Liberation...................................................................................................................................................... 14 Link Feminism: AT Turn ................................................................................................................................................................... 15
***Human Rights Links***....................................................................................................................... 16

LINK Human Rights (Locklard 02).................................................................................................................................................... 17 Link: Human Rights (Kennedy 02) ....................................................................................................................................................... 18 Link: Human Rights (Kennedy 02) ....................................................................................................................................................... 19 Link: Human Rights (Dallmyar 02) ....................................................................................................................................................... 20 Link-Human Rights (West 00) .............................................................................................................................................................. 21 Link Human Rights (Panitch and Gindin 04) ..................................................................................................................................... 22
***Democracy/Promo Links*** ................................................................................................................ 23

LINK DEMOCRACY (Dean 05) ....................................................................................................................................................... 24 LINK DEMOCRACY (Moore 96).................................................................................................................................................... 25 Link Democracy (Glassman 04) ......................................................................................................................................................... 26 Link Democracy (Wilkie 09) .............................................................................................................................................................. 27 Link Democracy (Almond 91) .......................................................................................................................................................... 28 Link Democracy (Wallerstein 01) ...................................................................................................................................................... 29 Link Democracy (Kellner 00)............................................................................................................................................................. 30 Link-Democracy Promotion (Moore 96 & Foster/Clark 04) ................................................................................................................ 32 Link Democracy Promotion (Narizny 06) ............................................................................................................................................. 33
***State/Heg links*** ................................................................................................................................ 34

Links State (Kovel 02) ....................................................................................................................................................................... 35 Link The State (Mezaros 95 & Sanbonmatsu 09)) ............................................................................................................................ 36 LINK The State (Meszaros 95) ......................................................................................................................................................... 37 LinkState / Epistemology .................................................................................................................................................................. 38 Link State/Heg ................................................................................................................................................................................... 39 Link-Soft Power .................................................................................................................................................................................... 40 Link Hegemony (Glassman 04) .......................................................................................................................................................... 41 Link Hegemony (Mezaros 07) ............................................................................................................................................................ 42 Link Hegemony (Mezaros 07) ............................................................................................................................................................ 43 LinkHegemony (Cox 95) ................................................................................................................................................................. 44 Link Hegemony (Sakellaropoulos 08) ................................................................................................................................................ 45
***Class/ID Links*** ................................................................................................................................. 46

Link - Class ........................................................................................................................................................................................... 47 Link Identity Politics (Jessop & Ling Sum 01)................................................................................................................................... 48
Dude your plan is sooooooo capitalist
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Link Identity Politics (Wexler 08) ...................................................................................................................................................... 49 Link: Identity Politics (Cloud 03) .......................................................................................................................................................... 50 Link: Identity Politics (Hennesy 00)...................................................................................................................................................... 51 Link: Identity Politics (Laclau 00)......................................................................................................................................................... 52
***Collapse (Anti) links*** ....................................................................................................................... 53

Link: Anti-Sovereignty.......................................................................................................................................................................... 54 Link: Anti-Capitalism ........................................................................................................................................................................... 55 Link: Anti-Capitalism ........................................................................................................................................................................... 56 Link-State Collapse ........................................................................................................................................................................... 57 Link: Anti-Imperialism.......................................................................................................................................................................... 58
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Link: Revolution ................................................................................................................................................................................... 60 Link K Aff: AT Turn .......................................................................................................................................................................... 61 Link K Affs ........................................................................................................................................................................................ 62
***Environment Links and stuff*** ......................................................................................................... 63

Link Environmental sustainability...................................................................................................................................................... 64 Link Environmental justice (Sweezy 89) .......................................................................................................................................... 65 Link Environmental justice (Liu 01 & Newell 05) ............................................................................................................................. 66 Link - Environmental justice Alt solves (3) ........................................................................................................................................ 67 LinkRenewable Energy ..................................................................................................................................................................... 68 Links Green Tech ............................................................................................................................................................................... 69 LinkEnvironment (Foster 01) ............................................................................................................................................................ 70 LinkEnvironment (Kovel 02) ............................................................................................................................................................ 71 Warming Link ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 72
***Reform links*** .................................................................................................................................... 74

Link Reform (Mezaros 06) ................................................................................................................................................................. 75 Link Reform (OShea 05)................................................................................................................................................................... 76 Link Reform (OShea 05)................................................................................................................................................................... 77 LinkReform (Zizek 01)...................................................................................................................................................................... 78 LinkReform (Foster 07)..................................................................................................................................................................... 79 LinkReform (Liodakis 01) ................................................................................................................................................................. 80 LinkReform (Liodakis 01) ................................................................................................................................................................. 81
***Other Links*** ..................................................................................................................................... 82

Link Military ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 83 Link Economy Advantage .................................................................................................................................................................. 84 Link Courts (Zinn 05)......................................................................................................................................................................... 85 Link Courts (Mezaros 06) .................................................................................................................................................................. 87 Link Allies.......................................................................................................................................................................................... 88 Link General Adv ............................................................................................................................................................................... 89 LinkRace ........................................................................................................................................................................................... 90 Link--Conflict Prevention ..................................................................................................................................................................... 91 Link-Economic Collapse ....................................................................................................................................................................... 92 LINK DEPENDENCY ....................................................................................................................................................................... 93
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LINK POST-COLONIALISM ........................................................................................................................................................... 94 LINK OVERPOP ............................................................................................................................................................................... 95 LINK MILITARY SPENDING ......................................................................................................................................................... 96 Link Exceptionalism........................................................................................................................................................................... 97 Link Law ............................................................................................................................................................................................ 98 LinkJews 99
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***Dev Links***
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LINK DEVELOPMENT (Foster 07)

HOTNESS Foster, 2007
John Bellamy Foster, Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon, Monthly Review, May 2007 The Imperialist World System http://www.monthlyreview.org/0507jbf.htm The sad truth is that, despite some limited successes, fifty years after the publication of Barans landmark Political Economy of Growth the overall center-periphery gap within the world economy has not narrowed but has widened. As World Bank economist Branko Milanovic has explained: the hierarchy of the [world] regions [has] stayed about the same since the time of Adam Smith, but income differences among them [have] widened. Looked at from a two century standpoint, the rich capitalist countries have been able to pull ahead of the rest, and in only a few exceptional cases have non-Western countries been able to catch up. In 1820 the richest and poorest countries were separated by a per capita GDP differential of at most 3:1 (2:1 in Paul Bairochs estimate), by 1992 this had risen to 72:1. The most notable fact of world development over the last quarter-century, as Milanovic puts it, has been the reinforcement of the position of the West as the club of the rich. While the hope of non-Western countries catching up has effectively been dashed over this same period. The only countries to rise from
underdevelopment to rich or near-rich status, judged in terms of per capita income, between 1960 and the end of the century were South Korea and Taiwan, and the two city-states, Hong Kong and Singapore. If in the golden age of monopoly capitalism the gap in per capita income between the richest and poorest regions of the world fell from 15:1 to 13:1, by the end of the twentieth century the gap had widened again to 19:1. The period since the 1960s has seen a vast purge of most non-Western
European, North American, and rich Oceanic (WENAO) countries from the position of contenders to riches, creating a downwardly mobile world. This has been accompanied by a vast swelling of the fourth world: those countries that under present conditions have no real hope for development.16 There can be no doubt that this widening gap between center and periphery is a product of the dynamics of the imperialist world system as a whole. In accounting for this Amin has referred to five monopolies retained by the center even in the context of a limited globalization of production: (1) technological monopoly, (2) monopolistic control of worldwide financial markets, (3) monopolistic access to the planets natural resources, (4) media and communication monopolies, and (5) monopolies over weapons of mass destruction and other advanced means of destruction. Added to this is the power exercised by the states in the advanced capitalist world both directly and indirectly through the intermediary triad of the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO. Capitalist globalization has further eroded the possibility of autocentric nationstate development, creating increased dependence of underdeveloped countries on the world market and even more so on world finance, which is dominated by the vested nations. As in Barans day, most third world economies are heavily dependent on the export of primary commodities. In Latin America such primary commodities account for the majority of exports for nearly all countries. The disarticulation of peripheral economies has thus continued into the present.17 The laws of motion of capitalism emanate primarily from the center of the system, around which the satellites orbit. In the 1970s the growth rates of both the advanced capitalist economies and of the world economy as whole slowed, producing a leaden age, replacing the golden age that had preceded it.18 As Baran and Paul Sweezy argued in Monopoly Capital, the advanced capitalist economy had a tendency toward stagnation staved off only by means of military spending, the sales effort, and the growth of finance
(together with such contingent historical factors as the high level of consumer liquidity after the Second World War, the need to rebuild the European and Japanese economies, and the second wave of automobilization in the United States). The various stimulating factors, however, waned by the early 1970s and the per capita annual growth rate in the advanced capitalist nations dropped precipitously from 3.7 percent in 195073 to 2 percent in 197398. The reemergence of stagnation, marked by a shortage
of profitable outlets for the massive investment-seeking surplus, fed the financialization of the advanced capitalist and world economies. Lacking investment opportunities in the real economy, money capital sought out speculative, financial outlets.19 The shift in gravity of capitalism toward accumulation of financial assets and speculation in the 1980s and 90s became the central phenomenon in the growth of neoliberal globalization, requiring an even more intensive system of world exploitation and enormously complicating the developmental problems of third world countries. Underdeveloped nations were forced to restructure their economies toward greater inequality, which did not however produce the promised growth. The goal of the neoliberal regime, it soon became clear, was not to generate development so much as to create emerging market economies that would enhance the accumulation of assets within global centers. The result has been acceleration of the flow of economic surplus from poor to rich countries. As reported in the New York Times (March 25, 2007), According
to the United Nations, in 2006 the net transfer of capital from poorer countries to rich ones was $784 billion, up from $229 billion in

2002....Even
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the poorest countries, like those in sub-Saharan Africa, are now money exporters to the rich countries.20
The onset of stagnation also coincided with the decline of U.S. hegemony as the United States lost some of its previous productive edge and was no longer in a position to dominate world manufacturing. In response to this challenge and taking advantage of the geopolitical vacuum left by the demise of the Soviet Union, Washington has sought to restore and expand its power by military means, intervening more aggressively in the third world and in areas formerly within or on the borders of the Soviet sphere of influence. Although as recently as 2000 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri described the Vietnam War in their book Empire as the last imperialist war, this is clearly refuted today with the U.S. war machine engaged in Afghanistan and
Iraq and expanding its operations in all three continents of the periphery. A key motivation in the current aggressive U.S. grand strategy is to gain control over vital strategic resources (particularly petroleum) in an age of growing resource scarcity.21 Of You the Tale Is Not Told The consequence of all of this has been renewed revolt in the third world. Attempts by the imperialist war machine to control Iraq have generated fierce resistance from nationalist and religious forces. Latin America is now the site of serious attempts to define alternative socialist paths, particularly in Venezuela and Bolivia, and in a resurgent Cuban socialism. South Africa has seen an upsurge of popular resistance to what is viewed as economic and ecological (if no longer political) apartheid. In Nepal a peasant revolution aimed
at democratization and popular control offers new hope to a people caught in a condition that combines semi-feudal rule and imperialist economic, political, and military penetration. The global justice (antiglobalization) movement has continued
to
grow worldwide. Everywhere the regime of neoliberal capitalism is under attack.
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Free markets inevitably co-opt attempts at Third World development cause inequality in resource distribution Trainer, 89 (Ted Trainer, lecturer, New South Wales University. Developed to Death. p. 63)
There is now a global market system which incorporates many national and local markets, right down to the
neighbourhood and household level. Fundamental to an understanding of what is wrong about Third World development is the fact that markets have a powerful, indeed typically overwhelming, tendency to make the wrong development and distribution decisions. This assertion clashes head on with the
conventional economist's conviction that the market is the most desirable mechanism for making economic decisions. It also clashes with marxist theory, because marxists regard market relations as merely superficial aspects of our economy. They insist that the essential nature of capitalism and its faults must be understood in terms of the 'relations of prod uction", rather than the capitalist market mechanisms of exchange and consumption (see Chapter 8). The three major ways in which global market forces condemn most of the Third World to inappropriate development are as follows: Market forces allow the relatively rich few to
take most or all of the available resources. The one quarter of the world's people who live in the developed countries, East and West, consume approximately four-fifths of the resources produced for sale. Their per capita resource consumption is approximately seventeen times that of the poorest half of the world's people. The USA uses 440 timesas much of the world's energy as Bangladesh, and its per capita consumption is 600 times that of Ethiopia. While at least a hundred million Cokes are consumed daily, according to UNICEF more than 40,000 children die every day because they are deprived of resources. Lack of access to clean water probably takes ten million lives each year. Hundreds of millions arc in need of fuel to
sterilise dangerous drinking water but must do without it, while people in rich countries can drive ski boats, because we can offer more money for the fuel. These grotesque maldistributions of the world's resource wealth come about
primarily because rich countries can outbid poor countries. What might have been the development history of Bangladesh or Tanzania had world resource wealth been distributed equally or according to need, rather than according to market forces? Market forces have predominantly developed the wrong industries in the Third World. A great deal of development has taken place; the trouble is that it has not been development of the most needed industries. It has been mostly the development of industries to provide crops and consumer goods for the small rich local elites or for export to the rich countries.
What most needs developing in a typical Third World country? More cheap housing, clean water supplies, mobile rural health clinics, and simple tools. But the sorts of things mostly being developed are Hilton Hotels, international airports, TV assembly factories and coffee plantations because investing in these enterprises promises far greater profits. Much of the Third World's productive capacity has become geared to the demand of the developed countries. This is most evident in the case of export crops. Over 20 million hectares produce tea, coffee and cocoa for export. In some countries (such as the Philippines) half the best land grows crops to export to the rich countries. These are again direct consequences of allowing the highest bid to determine the uses to which the Third World's productive capacity is put. The core problem is not the lack of development; it is the inappropriateness of
development. The problem is not stagnation; in fact there is far too much development -of the wrong things. Nor is the basic problem loss of surplus. There is quite enough capital in the Third World to establish necessary appropriate industries and infrastructures, those which would enable the poor majority to produce for themselves the things they need for low but reasonable living standards. That capital is presently being used by foreign investors to produce highly inappropriate goods . There
are decisions which the market can make effectively, and we could allow market forces to handle them in a satisfactory economy. If someone thinks it would be a good idea to produce jam in a smaller container than is currently on sale, for example, then the market might be the simplest and most efficient way of determining whether or not that is a good idea. There are millions of decisions to do with adjusting supply and demand that might best be Ieli to market forces. The point of the foregoing argument is that there are very definite limits to the sorts of decision it is sensible to leave to the market .
When there is significant inequality in purchasing power it is disastrous to let markets decide what is to be produced and who is to get scarce resources. In a sane and humane world these and many other decisions would be made in a rational and deliberate way through some mechanism whereby society as a whole could consider the issue and plan appropriate distribution and investment policies. (Of course the process ought to be highly
participatory and democratic; leaving social planning to state bureaucrats is not the answer.) I am not claiming that it is only a free and competitive market which determines what happens in development. Corporations, governments and other agencies often have the power to influence or set market conditions or to overrule them altogether. But this is only to say that the richest and most powerful participants in the global economy often have even more capacity to take or develop what they want than would arise solely from their ability to make the highest bid in a free and competitive market.
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LINK DEVELOPMENT (Trainer 96)

SURPLUS HAS LEFT LITTLE OPPORTUNITY FOR NEW INVESTMENT OUTLETS DEVELOPMENT CAN ONLY LEAD TO DEPENDENCY ON MORE DEVELOPMENT Trainer, 96
(Ted, University of New South Wales, Towards a Sustainable Economy, Jon Carpenter Oxford Publishing, pages 108-109) The paradox of surplus: the more development we have, the more we must have The problem of surplus, of finding profitable investment outlets for all the ever-increasing capital and productive capacity, is becoming more difficult all the time. Hence the paradox that the more development we have, the more capital accumulates, and therefore the more development and production and consumption there must be in order to enable the ever-accumulating volume of capital to be invested. Not only can we never reach the point in this economy where we are sufficiently developed, but the rate of development must constantly increase. Two figures drive the point home. In general, productivity (output per
hour of work) increases at about 2 per cent p.a., meaning that each 35 years we could cut the work week by half while producing as much as we were at the beginning. (Indeed a number of OECD countries could have cut from a five-day work week to about a oneday week in the last 25 years while maintaining their output at the same 1970 level.) In this economy we must therefore double the annual amount we consume per person every 35 years just to prevent unemployment from rising and to avoid a reduction in the productive outlets available to soak up investable capital. Second, according to the US Bureau of Mines, the amount of capital per person available for investment in the US will increase at 3.6 percent p.a., i.e. will double in 20 year intervals.' This indicates that
unless Americans double the volume of goods and services they produce and consume every 20 years their economy will be in serious difficulties. In a world where billions are deprived, where the US already uses up far more than its fair share of productive resources and most of the problems are due to overproduction and overconsumption, it would be difficult to imagine anything more absurd than an economy in which the more development there has been the more there must be. Hence the ceaseless and increasing pressure to find more investment outlets, to log more rainforest, to build more tourist hotels, to convert more subsistence farmland to export plantations.
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***Gender Links***
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LINK Feminism (Gordon 96)

FIRST WORLD FEMINISM SYSTEM OF RIGHTS ONLY STRENGTHENS INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM Gordon 96
(April A. Gordon, Transforming Capitalism and Patriarchy: Gender and Development in Africa. Publisher: Lynne Rienner. Place of Publication: Boulder, CO. Publication Year: 1996. http://www.questia.com/read/96895144# Page Number: pg 80) One reason liberal feminism in the West fails to address such oppressions as imperialism, classism, and racism is that this would require feminists to acknowledge that their own privileges are tied to the oppression of poor, nonwhite, and Third World women ( A. Russo 1991:299-307). Indeed, liberal feminism is
compatible with liberal capitalism and what some view as the paternalistic, women in development (WID) economic strategy in the Third World, which will be discussed in Chapter 4. Liberal feminism's emphasis on legal reforms and equal rights is not only the most acceptable version of feminism to the First World, it has also gained the most support among Third World feminist politicians, jurists, and academics.It was liberal feminism that inspired the UN Decade for Women, which won support
from male-dominated governments all over the world.The reasons for this support are obvious. Liberal feminism's reformism is more politically acceptable because it leaves unchallenged the underlying structural causes of gender inequality and its relationship to other systems of oppression such as the inequitable world economic order and internal systems of ocial and political inequality (see Stamp 1989; Cagatay et al. 1986; Barrow 1985; Steady 1985). Apfel-Marglin and Simon ( 1994: 35 36 ) criticize the entire ideological underpinnings of the development of women feminist project, which, they claim, descends from Victorian colonial feminism. WID posits the white Western independent woman integrated into a commodified world as the norm.Rather than questioning the development process, WID identifies the barriers (i.e., tradition and social constraints) to women's access to the market. WID sees women as oppressed victims of societies in need of transformation to liberate women.If Third World women's self-perception is not one of an autonomous, independent self, but one embedded in kinship and other social bonds, such perceptions are invalidated. "Cognitive authority" belongs to the experts who know what women need to be "developed." Not surprisingly, the modern, developed individual/self with rights (to its own labor with the rights to sell it), equality, and autonomy is a reality created by and functional for industrial capitalism.
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Link-Feminism (Henessy 94)

Challenging Patriarchy Enables and Fosters Capitalism Henessy 94 (Rosemary, Professor of English @ SUNY Albany, Queer Theory, Left Politics, Fall 1994, Rethinking Marxism,
Vol 7, 3, 90-2) Because "patriarchy" has become such a contested termin some sense eyes tooin feminist and left analysis these days, before proceeding further I want to pause to explain how I am using this concept and why. As I understand it; patriarchy refers to the structuring of social lifelabor, state, and consciousness, such that social resources and value accrue to men as a group at the expense of, women as a group. Patriarchy is a historically variant form of social
organization that has been necessary to most socioeconomic systems in the world and is fundamental to capitalism. Capitalist patriarchal formations help to secure an exploitative system of social differences by way of ideologies of gender that naturalize and reproduce the asymmetrical social divisions that help to sustain, manage, and maximize the appropriation of surplus labor through a variety of complex arrangements. Patriarchy is historical and so not essentially given, fixed, permanent, or universal; in other words, it is an organization of human life that is
made by people and, therefore, essentially precarious or subject to change. Because patriarchy, like capitalism, is historical, it is continually being re-formed as the requirements of human (re)production in their varied and uneven formations shift and change.4 While patriarchal gender hierarchies are continually being naturalized by ideology as the way things are or should be, this "natural" order of things has historically
Particularly as a result of patriarchy's contradictory relation to bourgeois individualism and representative democracy, feminist opposition has been most successful in industrialized democratic states. As I am using it here, patriarchy is one of a series of struggle concepts in postmodern and materialist social theoryothers are notions of totality, materialism, and hegemony. While my discussion of patriarchy will touch on some of these other issues, this is not the place for me to detail very fully the political implications of each. Most of the disputes over the usefulness of patriarchy as an organizing concept have arisen from poststructuralist or postmodern feminism. A more detailed accounting of these debates would need to address their
been undermined when feminist struggles have revealed the arbitrariness of its divisions of labor and accompanying subjectivities.
historical relationship to the crisis of the subject in western culture and in second-wave feminism specifically and to the widespread "postideological feminism" that has come to dominate U.S. culture in the course of the last decade. Typically postmodern
feminist critiques of the concept of patriarchy charge that it is necessarily universalizing, explanatory (causal), and over-general. But often these charges rest on misreadings of its use in the tradition of materialist feminism.
Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, for example, understand patriarchy as an organizing concept that relies on the "very large social theories" large historical narratives," or "large theoretical tools" they criticize for identifying the causes and constitutive features of sexism (Fraser and Nicholson 1990, 34). In their essay, "Social Criticism without Philosophy," a piece that has been repeatedly cited as a succinct articulation of postmodern feminism, Fraser and Nicholson argue that "very large social theories" are problematic because "they tacitly presuppose some commonly held but unwarranted and essentialist assumptions about human beings and the conditions for social life" (Fraser and Nicholson 1990, 27). While I would agree that a historical feminist analyses that explain all sexism as manifestations of the patriarchy are not very useful, postmodern feminist critiques like Fraser and Nicholson's tend to confuse the universalizing of totalizing theories with materialist analyses of patriarchy as a social totality. Totalizing theories rely on the logic of expressive causality whereby the parts of a society are each seen to emanate from one universal cause. In explaining social life as an ensemble of social practices, historical materialism explicitly contests this totalizing approach. At the same time, however, historical materialists insist that it is politically necessary to recognize that some social relations, while always being historically and differentially inflected, have the status of "social totalities" in that they have persistently (though never absolutely or in any monocausal way) organized people's lives across social formations and specific situations. Among these are capital's extraction of surplus labor, imperialism's tactics of eminent domain and white supremacy, and patriarchal gender hierarchies.
One of the primary aims of Fraser and Nicholson's criticism of patriarchy is to dismiss systemic analysis of social totalities in favor of analysis limited to specific and local contexts. However, this rejection is premised on a misreading of systemic analysis. One of the symptomatic indicators of this misreading is evident in the repeated references to "very large" theories in their essay. "Very large" is hardly an adequate descriptor of a systemic analysis that extends its concepts from a high level of abstraction to a conjunctural, historically specific one. By applying this phrase to several different feminist theories, Fraser and Nicholson collapse cultural feminism's more universalist
conception of patriarchy into materialist feminism's dialectical approach to social totalities. We see this explicitly in the way Fraser and Nicholson's very brief summary and criticism of the work of materialist feminists (Ann Ferguson, Nancy Folbre, Nancy Hartsock, and Catherine Mackinnon) is sandwiched between and equated with conclusions drawn from their much more detailed readings of Nancy Chodorow's and Carol Gilligan's conceptions of mothering, women, and men as unitary and crosscultural categories. Claiming that these materialist feminists use concepts "whose historical origins need not be investigated" (Fraser and Nicholson 1990, 31), Fraser and Nicholson argue that feminist theory needs to stop looking for the causes of sexism and turn instead to "more concrete inquiry with more limited aims" (Fraser and Nicholson 1990, 32). What is effaced in this assessment, however, is that much materialist feminism is distinguished from the work of cultural feminists like Chodorow and Gillis precisely by its effort to historicize and
This misreading of materialist feminism also overlooks postmodern, materialst feminist work from the last decadethe early books and essays of
investigate social hierarchies even a insists on the persistent causal force of social totalities like patriarchy and capitalism.
Michelle Barrat (1980) and Rosalind Coward (1983), as well as those by Maria Mies (1986) Chandra Mohanty (1988), Mary Poovey (1988), Dorothy Smith (1987), Gaya Spivak (1987), Sylvia Walby (1990), and othersthat has begun to develop mo complex and specific understandings of the ways patriarchal formations situate women differently across multiple axes of social domination and exploitations This work begins with the premise that the reproduction of social life takes place historically through inter- and overdetermined spheres of productiondivisions labor, state power, and consciousnessand that patriarchal structures
operate differentially and unevenly across all of them. While acknowledging that patriarchy and capitalism continue to organize social life across the globe, materialist feminism also insists that critical analysis addresses the historically specific ways in which such organization occurs. Materialist feminist critique need not and history fealty has not always eschewed attention to the specific cultural articulations of social totalities, even though such critique is continually misread in the most reductive fashion as refusing nuanced cultural analysis or reducing social production to the economy. At the same time that the materialist feminist tradition I learn discussing has vociferously critiqued the equation of social life with culture, it also acknowledges that densely accumulated, cultural practices are part of a complex ensemble of social relations that includes divisions of labor, law, and the state.
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Link Gender (Low 95)

Focusing of sexuality re-entrenches capitalism. Lowe, editor of Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 95
Donald M. Lowe. Ed. Of positions: east asia cultures critique. 1995 The Body in Late Capitalist USA. Bourgeois sexuality presupposed the public/private, ouler/inner oppositions. It rested on the structural separation between production and the relatively as-yet-uncommodified social reproduction in industrial capitalism.
With the acceleration and expansion of production/consumption and the commodification of social reproduction in late-capitalism we now have a very different sexuality. It cannot be too much emphasized that, with technological advances, sexual pleasure for the first time ever is wholly disconnected from natal reproduction for the population as a whole. This is the obverse side of natal reproduction without sex. (Blank 1990, pp a-8) Separated from social reproduction sexuality thus becomes a sign to energize, in effect to sexualize, late- capitalist consumption.
Discourses of sexuality promote capitalism. Lowe, editor of Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 95
Donald M. Lowe. Ed. Of positions: east asia cultures critique. 1995 The Body in Late Capitalist USA.
The new discourse and semiotics of sexual pleasure took off in late capitalism because, with such commodities as the oral contraceptive pill (introduced in 1960), and then the IUD, we can, for the first time ever, have sex without worrying about natal reproduction. The obverse side of this is natal reproduction
without sex, i.e., in vitro fertilization, artificial insemination, and ovum transfers. Freed from social reproduction, the new sexuality came to be exploited for the sake of late-capitalist consumption. This is what distinguishes the new sexuality of late capitalism from the bourgeois sexual regulations of industrial capitalism studied by Foucault. It publicizes the promise of sexual pleasure, contradicting the repressive. disciplinary sexuality. The new
sexuality is not only discursive and semiotic, but also consumptuary. Quite aptly, the successful sex
manual, Alex Comfort's The Joy of Sex (1972), was subtitled "A Cordon Bleu Guide to love-making," and its contents were organized into "Starters" "Main Courses," and Sauces & Pickles." New commodities are packaged and
produced
specifically for the new sexuality. Pat Califia has said, S/M is not about pain, but about power." (quoted in Ehrenreich, Hess, and Jacobs 1986, p. 130) But sadomasochism 353 ritual of dominance and submission, a theater of fantasy, requires such paraphernalia as handcuffs, straps, whips, leathers, etc. Thus, Ehrenreich, Hess, and Jacobs report that S1M theater, previously the practice of a few, is now available to even the midwestern housewife through mail-order catalogues. From a strictly capitalist viewpoint, it is the ideal sexual practice .... S/M owes
Besides the direct consumption of sexual implements. late-capitalist production/consumption is able to tap the reservoir of sexual fantasy which the new semiotics of sexuality stimulate. A Lou Harris study reports that
its entrance into the sexual mainstream to its paraphernalia: The symbols arid gear precede the actual practice into the homes and imaginations of millions. (p. ia-s) sixty-five thousand sexual references a year arc broadcast during the prime afternoon and evening hours on television alone. "'That's an average of 27 an hour. . including 9 kisses, hugs, 10 sexual innuendos and between i and a references each to sexual intercourse and to deviant or discouraged sexual practices.'" Thus a typical American viewer sees nearly fourteen thousand instances of sexual material during the popular time slots each year. (New York Times, January 27, 1988) I propose that the technologies of the look and the relay of juxtaposed images and signs (cf., supra, chapter a. sec. Li) are at the center of this semiotics of sexuality. The two techniques, together with the design and production of commodities as packages of changing product characteristics, contribute to the construction of and accumulation of exchange value. The look in the modern West is sexual It is an aspect of the primacy of sight in the modern Western hierarchy of sensing. (Lowc toz) This primacy of sight is culturally arid historically specific not universal. Nor does sex have to be visual in orientation, since seeing is the most distancing of the five human senses. Specific to the modern West is the look constituted as the male gaze-visually subjugating and territorializing the female body. Underneath this look are all the binary oppositions in bourgeois culture which construct the power of male over female. Twcntieth-centurv visuality is very much a masculinist one. Photography, cinematography, and television are the technologies of the look, working to enhance the visualization of sexuality. But technologies are not neutral. Their applications depend on the assumptions and purposes of the addressers Photography, cinematography, and television do not simply extend the male gaze. With their different techniques of shots, montage, and narrativity, they repackage and transform the hegemony of the mate gaze in late capitalism.
sexual lifestyle as a signifier for late capitalist production
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Link: Gender (Cotter 02) Protection

THE PROBLEMS OF GENDER VIOLENCE AND OPPRESSION ARE, AT ROOT, PRODUCTS OF CAPITALS OVERARCHING CONTRADICTIONS. TURNING TO THE STATE AS A MEANS OF PROTECTING WOMENS CIVIL RIGHTS MERELY ABSTRACTS AND DESTROYS CONSCIOUSNESS OF VIOLENCES CONNECTION TO CAPITAL Cotter in 2 [Jennifer, nqa, War and Domestic Violence, Red Critique, Sept. 2002]
The dominant discoursesfrom the Bush Administration and the corporate press, to the cultural "left" and transnational feminismrepresent the root issue of freedom for women from economic inequality, social injustice, and violence to rest on matters of the "state" and whether women's relationship to it should be viewed from the standpoint of "national security" or "civil rights". Contemporary feminism has itself been consumed by these issues and feminists have become deeply divided over whether the state should be understood as a sight of "recuperation" or "resistance" for women. As evidenced in such books as Cynthia Daniels' Feminists Negotiate the State: The Politics of Domestic Violence, domestic violence in contemporary feminism is largely considered to be an issue of "state power" grounded in "protection" of individuals by the state from the conditions that enable domestic violence versus "civil citizenship" defined as "the right to bodily integrity" and a
The "core issues" for contemporary feminism have thus been: whether the "state" should intervene on behalf of women to protect them from domestic violence or whether this further "victimizes" women by denying them their civil rights to "individual" freedom from "state regulation". Another symptom of this
woman's right to choose (Daniels 3). logic is the current reduction, in contemporary feminism, of global violence against women to a question of the "veil" and whether, as right-wing advocates and liberal feminists alike argue, the United States has an "obligation" to free the women of Afghanistan and the Islamic diaspora from the veil or whether, as transnational feminists have argued, this denies the "resistant agency" of the women who wear the veil. What feminism has largely turned toward as a way out of this impasse is the eclectic position that Daniels offers: that is, that women must "negotiate" between "state power" and "civil citizenship" to resolve the problem of domestic violence. In short, the "state" must be read simultaneously as a site of "recuperation" and "resistant agency".
However, this eclectic approach to violence against women is founded upon an increasingly problematic understanding of "rights" and the "state" which abstracts them from private ownership of the means of production. By explaining the "root problem" of violence against women,
from war to domestic violence, as a matter of "state power" and not "exploitation" in private property relations, these theories serve as a most effective ally of transnational capitalism. They quietly support the existing social relations of production by seeking "solutions" in the social relations of reproduction, to the class contradictions that stem from private property in production. Moreover, by putting forward "civil citizenship" as the basis of "agency" for women against the limits of the "state", contemporary feminists suppress the need for social citizenship founded on collective ownership and control of the means of production. What an analysis of both approaches reveals, however, is that "war", "domestic
violence", and their relation to each other are not, at root, a matter of "rights" and "reproduction" but of class and labor, and as such they are the effect of the social relations of production.
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Link: Gender (Cotter 02) Liberation

YOUR REPRESENTATIONS OF THE LAW AS A NEUTRAL ARBITER AND THE IDEA THAT VIOLENCE EMANATES FROM A LACK OF EQUAL PROTECTION OR THE MASCULINE CULTURE ARE DAMNINGTHIS CORPORATE FEMINISM MOBILIZES A GLOBAL PROJECT TO CEMENT IMPERIALIST CAPITALISM IN THE NAME OF LIBERATING WOMEN, REPRODUCING FAR MORE INSIDIOUS INSTANTIATIONS OF VIOLENCE Cotter in 2 [Jennifer, nqa, War and Domestic Violence, Red Critique, Sept. 2002]
For liberal feminists, who argue that the state should (and can) be a "neutral arbiter" of contradictions in civil society, inequality for women is a product of attitudes of inequality and a resulting unequal application of laws and rights to protect women. For instance, from the standpoint of "Liberal" feminists such as the "Feminist Majority", the domestic homicides of women at Fort Bragg, and the high levels of domestic violence in the military, are read as primarily a problem with a "masculine culture" in the military, which they contend results in inadequate psychological debriefing for soldiers returning from combat into civilian life and
the fear on the part of soldiers to admit that they have a "problem". As a response to the Fort Bragg murders and the persistence of domestic violence in the military, liberal feminism therefore supports such measures as equal application of the Domestic Violence Offenders Gun Ban for military and police personnel, Fort Bragg's new mandatory 48-72 hour spouse separation policy after domestic violence has been reported, and Senate Amendment 4447 to the final version of the Defense Appropriations Bill introduced by Sens. Paul Wellstone (D-MN), Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) to allocate $10 million to domestic violence programs on military bases.
This "liberal" position is not, in short, opposed to but rather takes as its fundamental presupposition the right-wing position of "U.S. national security", which presents the imperialist wars in Central Asia and the Middle East as a necessary means to liberate the women of the world from violence, currently articulated as freedom from the "veil". Feminist Majority leader Eleanor Smeal has argued that
"we must finish what we started in Afghanistan", which, she points out, involves expanding "peacekeeping" troops beyond the capital (Feminist Daily News Wire, 9/26/2002). This position is also evident in the corporate feminism of such celebrities as Oprah Winfrey who, in an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show dedicated to an examination of the Fort Bragg murders, argued that the military, in order to "defend democracy", must be trained in a highly undemocratic and authoritarian environment that is conducive to the promotion of domestic violence at home. This, in turn, is considered to be all the more reason to provide increased state spending on behavioral health services in the military for soldiers and their families: so that they are more effective in their task of fighting the current wars (The Oprah Winfrey Show, October 2002).
However, these measures actually reveal the class interests of liberalthat is "corporate" feminism, which caters to the economic interests of upper-middle class women in imperialist nations. These women largely support imperialist war in Central Asia and the Middle East because it is helping to put in place economic conditions for U.S. capital (such as an oil pipeline running
to extract a larger portion of surplus-labor from the international proletariat, of which these women can then vie for a greater portion. It is no surprise that massive public attention was given to the "need" to allocate greater resources to the military to "help" it combat the problem of domestic violence at the same time that Congress was passing the largest Defense Appropriations Bill in history (now signed into law as of October 23, 2002), which allocates $354.8 billion for national security programs
through Central Asia) administered by the Department of Defense. The hollowness of these measures as a means for ending domestic violence and inequality for women is made even more obvious by the fact that the Defense Appropriations Bill also requires shifting billions of dollars away from social security, health benefits, as well as social and economic resources to improve conditions of life for women in society at large
. At the same time the Bush Administration has
been bombing the citizens of Afghanistan in the name of "women", it has cut social resources for working class women and proposed welfare reforms that emphasize marriage over employment as a solution to the impoverishment of working class mothers in the U.S. As a consequence, women will have fewer resources at their disposal to leave abusive marriages and will be economically compelled to tolerate them. Moreover, as a New York Times report indicates, the current
administration has either eliminated women's agencies of the Labor Department, military, and social services or demonstrated negligence toward renewing charters and leadership of these agencies, thus stalling the work they are set up to do and undermining years of work to put these conditions in place ("Cloudy Future for U.S. Women's agencies", December 19, 2001). The actions of the current administration, moreover, follow on the tails of a widening gap in income between men and women since 1995 ("Male-Female Salary Gap Growing, Study Says", The Washington Post, January 24, 2002). This demonstrates the deterioration of what little resources are reserved for women under capitalism to improve their social and economic conditions of life, when these resources are no longer necessary to maintain profitable conditions of production.
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Link Feminism: AT Turn

Feminist movements fail to solve the primary contraction of capitalism. Lowe, editor of Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 95
Donald M. Lowe. Ed. Of positions: east asia cultures critique. 1995 The Body in Late Capitalist USA. The 1950s reinforced traditional gender attribution. But in the 1960s, middle-class women, trained to fill dichotomous gender roles, found themselves in new positions of production and social reproduction, and yet they were still expected to maintain their internalized gender attributes The second feminist movement responded to the resulting
contradiction between traditional gender construction and the changing position of women in production consumption and social reproduction. Equal-rights feminism and radical feminism were
two such responses. Equal-rights feminism derives from a liberal tradition stretching all the way back to Mary Wollstonecraft, and is concerned with the problem of gender discrimination in the public sphere.
it promotes such reforms as affirmative action, special protection for women in the workplace, reproduction rights, and welfare. More recently, equal-rights feminists are arguing for equal pay for comparable work, However, the discourse of equal rights clots not directly confront the problems between traditional gender roles and new positions in production and social reproduction, which many women face- Equal-rights feminism, in upholding the ideal of equality does not challenge gender construction outside the public sphere. In that sense, it is a customary liberal response to a new problem.
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***Human Rights Links***
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LINK Human Rights (Locklard 02)

Capitalism will always favor its profit than its human rights Locklard 02 English department in Fall 2002. He obtained his Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley. Joe, The Anti-Capitalist Reader, Editor Joel Schalit pg 145)
Rights of capital have long prevailed over human rights. This ideology lies intrinsic within capitalism, which establishes itself upon the guardianship of property and processes of accumulation.
That protective "riding shotgun" duty is the primary function of contemporary Western legal systems. Classic liberal human rights theory was born and continues to live a dependent existence in the shadow of capital's relation to labor, affordable to those classes with means to pay for the privilege. Poor and disenfranchised people have regarded hum-an rights advocacy with
due skepticism, fully aware that a disadvantage in resources means probable inability to assert such rights when confronted by state authority. Normative human rights discourse, the language of global capitalism, continues to emphasize non-economic rights despite their intrinsic dependence on economic capacity. Indeed, the very normatively and acceptability of this discourse derives from its inability to alter established economic hierarchies. This partial and incomplete antieconomism has informed mainstream human rights discussions for generations. A holistic concept of human rights integrates economic and labor rights, emphasizing their dominant centrality rather than leaving them as a supplement to the discussion. Process of the multitude, or er are advancing to the rear. A d and it allowed us to begin I war. very Deleuzian engines. Ong behind, because there was 1 expresses itself by way of this Iderstood and mastered, could ment. The most serious error to the national electorate, that 'political representation, which n. We must not therefore corn-ill the more since we risk get-mental concept is this: At the saruation of power like ours, it the other, particularly rapport rt with the other who thinks. Destroy. Contrary to what they rorism, but the multitude. This e capitalist attempt to present r is -a big hoax ... for them, altitudes. Without a radical recognition of labor, economic conditions, and egalitarian concepts of equal protection and due process, then the corpus of human rights remains incomplete. Absent such recognition of their necessary foundation within economic justice, liberal human rightsfree speech, free movement, free associationcan become little more than market commodities. That commodification establishes human rights as only one more nation-product, more available and warranted in upper-tier global economies than in poorer economies where market discipline keeps citizens on shorter leashes. Under the terms of such
Under liberal constitutionalism, human rights are a trickle-down product that works as well as the rest of trickledown economics.
commodification regimes, richer countries produce and consume more human rights and poorer countries have fewer available rights distributed to fewer citizens.
Human rights are determined by the states economical status Locklard Fall 2002.
Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley in 2000. (Joe, The Anti-Capitalist Reader, Editor Joel Schalit pg 146) From the perspective of First World political orthodoxies in the United States and the EU, human rights become the promise of prosperity achieved. That these rights include a challenge to the prerogatives of transnational capital is unacceptable and economically self-defeating. From the perspective of Second World economies (China, Singapore, Gulf states), human rights are the subject of intense public management in order to achieve economic success. Antiliberal state bureaucrats conceive of limited human rights as necessary only for the instrumentalization of their economic plans, and regard the excess production of such rights as a positive social danger and source of instability. It is under such rights-repressive governments that the Internet, now necessary to ensure economic growth but
simultaneously a threatening field of free expression, provokes such inventive censorship. And across vast swaths of the globe, illiteracy inhibits and poverty prohibits realization of U.S.style human rights, as limited as these may seem to many Americans. Whether in the conditioned submission of Indian dalits or the enforced silence of indigenous Guatemalans, the global poor know from bitter experience that human rights are a luxury item.
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Link: Human Rights (Kennedy 02)

REPRESENTING HUMAN RIGHTS AS A UNIVERSAL ETHICS OUTSIDE OF POLITICS UNCRITICALLY STRENGHTHENS AND LEGITIMIZES THE STATE AND ITS ROLE IN PERPETUATING MATERIAL INEQUITY AROUND THE WORLD KENNEDY (Prof. Law, Harvard Law School) 2002
[David, The International Human Rights Movement: Part of the Problem?, Harvard Human Rights Journal, Spring, p. ln]
Narrow in many ways. People have made many different claims about the narrowness of human rights. Here are some: the human rights movement foregrounds harms done explicitly by governments to individuals or groups--leaving largely unaddressed and more legitimate by contrast harms brought about by governments indirectly or by private parties. Even when addressing
private harms, human rights focuses attention on public remedies--explicit rights formalized and implemented by the state. One criticizes the
. Human rights implicitly legitimates ills and delegitimates remedies in the domain of private law and nonstate action. Insulating the economy. Putting these narrowings together often means defining problems and solutions in ways not likely to change the economy. Human rights foregrounds problems of participation and procedure, at the expense of distribution, implicitly legitimating the existing distributions of wealth, status and power in societies once rights have been legislated, formal participation in government achieved, and institutional remedies for violations provided. However useful saying "that's my right" is in extracting things from the state, it is not good for extracting things from the economy, unless you are a property holder. Indeed, a practice of rights claims against the state may actively weaken the capacity of people to challenge economic arrangements. Whether progressive efforts to challenge economic arrangements are weakened by the overwhelming strength of the "right to property" in the human rights vocabulary, or by the channeling of emancipatory energy and imagination into the modes of institutional and rhetorical interaction that are described as "public," the imbalance between civil/political and social/economic rights is neither an accident of politics nor a matter that could be remedied by more intensive commitment. It is structural, to the philosophy of human rights, to the conditions of political possibility that make human rights an emancipatory strategy in the first place, to the institutional [*110] character of the movement, or to the ideology of its participants and supporters. Foregrounding form. The strong attachment of the human rights movement to the legal formalization of rights and the establishment of legal machinery for their implementation makes the achievement of these forms an end in itself. Elites in a political system--international, national--which has adopted the rules and set up the institutions
state and seeks public law remedies, but leaves unattended or enhanced the powers and felt entitlements of private actors will often themselves have the impression and insist persuasively to others that they have addressed the problem of violations with an elaborate, internationally respected and "state of the art" response. This is analogous to the way in which holding elections can come to substitute for popular engagement in the political process. These are the traditional problems of form: form can hamper peaceful adjustment and necessary change, can be over or underinclusive. Is the right to vote a floor--or can it become a ceiling? The human rights movement ties its own hands on progressive development. Backgrounding the background. The effects of a wide array of laws that do not explicitly condone violations but
. As a result, these background laws--which may well be more important in generating the harm than an absence of rights and remedies for victims--are left with clean hands. Moreover, to maintain the claim to universality and neutrality, the human rights movement practices a systematic lack of attention to background sociological and political conditions that will determine the meaning a right has in particular contexts, rendering the evenhanded pursuit of "rights" vulnerable to all sorts of distorted, and distinctly non-neutral outcomes. Even very broad social movements of emancipation--for women, for minorities of various sorts, for the poor--have their vision blinkered by the promise of recognition in the vocabulary and institutional apparatus of human rights. They will be led away from the economy and toward the state, away from political/social conditions and toward the forms of legal recognition. It has been claimed, for example, that promoting a neutral right to religious
nevertheless affect the incidence of violation in a society are left unattended expression in Africa without acknowledging the unequal background cultural, economic and political authority of traditional religions and imported evangelical sects will dramatically affect the distribution of religious practice. Even if we limit our thinking to the laws that influence the distribution of wealth, status, and power between men and women, the number of those laws that explicitly address "women's issues," still
. However much the human rights movement reaches out to address other background considerations affecting the incidence of human rights abuse, such "background" norms remain, well, background.
less "women's rights," would form an extremely small and relatively unimportant percentage
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Link: Human Rights (Kennedy 02)

THE REPRESENTATION OF RIGHTS DRAWS FROM THE PARTICULAR LIBERALIST TRADITION OF ECONOMY OVER POLITICSTO SPEAK OF HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS FROM OUR SOCIAL LOCATION PRESUPPOSES THE SANCTITY OF PROPERTY AND THE PRIVATE REALM OF THE INDIVIDUAL KENNEDY (Prof. Law, Harvard Law School) 2002 [David, The International Human Rights Movement: Part of the Problem?, Harvard Human Rights Journal, Spring, p. ln]
In particular,
critics have linked the human rights project to liberal Western ideas about the relationships among law, politics, and economics. Western enlightenment ideas that make the human rights movement part of the problem rather than the solution include the following: the economy preexists politics, politics pre-exists law, the private pre-exists the public, just as the animal pre-exists the human, faith pre-exists reason, or the feudal pre-exists the modern. In each case, the second term is fragile, artificial, a human creation and achievement, and a domain of choice, while the first term identifies a sturdy and natural base, a domain outside human control. Human rights encourages people to seek emancipation in the vocabularies of reason rather than faith, in public rather than private life, in law rather than politics, in politics rather than economics. In each case, the human rights vocabulary overemphasizes the difference between what it takes as the (natural) base and as the (artificial) domain of emancipation, and underestimates the plasticity of what it treats as the base. Moreover, human rights is too quick to conclude that emancipation means progress
forward from the natural passions of politics into the civilized reason of law. The urgent need to develop a more vigorous human politics is sidelined by the effort to throw thin but plausible nets of legal articulation across the globe. Work to develop law comes to be seen as an emancipatory end in itself, leaving the human rights movement too ready to articulate problems in political terms and solutions in legal terms. Precisely the reverse would be more useful. The posture of human rights as an emancipatory political project that extends and operates within a domain above or outside politics--a political project repackaged as a form of knowledge--delegitimates other political voices and makes less visible the local, cultural, and political dimensions of the human rights movement itself. As liberal Western intellectuals, we think of the move to rights as an escape from the unfreedom of social conditions into the freedom of citizenship, but we repeatedly forget that there is also a loss. A loss of the experience of belonging, of the habit of willing in conditions of indeterminacy, innovating collectively in the absence of knowledge, unchanneled by an available list of rights. This may represent a loss of either the presence of experience itself, experience not yet channeled and returned to the individual as the universal experience of a right holder, or of the capacity to deploy other vocabularies that are
The Western/liberal character of human rights exacts particular costs when it intersects with the highly structured and unequal relations between the modern West and everyone else. Whatever the limits of modernization in the West, the form of modernization promoted by the human rights movement in third world societies is too often based only on a [*116] fantasy about the modern/liberal/capitalist west. The insistence on more formal and absolute conceptions of property rights in transitional societies than are known in the developed West is a classic example of this problem--using the authority of the human rights movement to narrow the range of socioeconomic choices available in developing societies in the name of "rights" that do not exist in this unregulated or compromised form in any developed western democracy.
more imaginative, open, and oriented to future possibility. The West and the rest.
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Link: Human Rights (Dallmyar 02)

BLINDLY ASSERTING THE UNIVERSAL GOODNESS OF RIGHTS IS A TACIT ACCEPTANCE OF THE CRUSHING INEQUALITIES OF MATERIAL INEQUALITY DALLMYAR (Dept. Govt and Intl Studies @ Notre Dame) 2002 [Fred, Asian Values and Global Human Rights, Philosophy East & West, v52n2] The name of Las Casas evokes again the message of good news. Basically,
human rights are meant to be good news for the underprivileged, the downtrodden, and the dispossessed. As one can show, this has historically been the function of human rightsfrom the assertion of baronial rights against
kings in the Magna Carta to the proclamation of citizen rights against feudal absolutism in the French Revolution to the demand for social and economic rights in the era of industrial capitalism. Thus, rights were always meant to be a protective shield of the weak against the mighty
however, detached from their historical and social contexts, rights (taken abstractly) have a double-edged status: they can also serve as weapons of aggression and domination in the hands of the powerful. The baronial rights against the king can turn into privileges asserted against peasants and serfs; the revolutionary rights of citizenship can deteriorate into weapons of exclusion wielded against foreigners and strangers. In our own time, the property rights claimed by a few immensely wealthy individuals or corporations can serve as instruments to keep the vast masses of humankind in misery and in (economic as well as political) subjugation. Here is an illustration of the complex and deeply conflictual relation between West and non- West and between North and South in our present world.3 Generally speaking, rights-claims should always give rise to questions like the following. Whose rights (or liberties) are asserted, against whom, and in what concrete context? Do rights-claims advance the cause of justice, equity, and human wellbeing, or are they obstacles on this road? Basically, these questions boil down to the simple query: Are rights rightly
claimed, or what is the rightness of rights (a query that is etymologically inscribed in the connection between ius and iustitia and in the
). What these considerations indicate is that rights are in a certain sense contextual which does not necessarily vitiate their universality. In order to ward off governmental manipulation, rights are often claimed to be universal and absolute although this, correct in this usage, is otherwise equivocal: property rights, for instance, may very well be a universal claim; but this leaves untouched questions of the amount of property and the rightness of its exercise. In Hegelian language, rights may well be rational ideas, but their enactment stands in the world and, as such, calls for situated judgment regarding justice and equity. To counter claims of universality most often advanced by Western intellectuals indebted to the Enlightenment
subjective and objective senses of the German Recht legacy critics frequently assert the purely ethnocentric character of rights-talk and hence its function as a mere tool of Western global hegemony. Most prominent among the critics of Western-style universality today are the proponents of so-called Asian values and Islamic values
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Link-Human Rights (West 00)

The Promotion of Human Rights Props Up Capitalism West 2k (Robin, Law Professor @ Georgetown, Quinnapac Law Review, Is the Rule of Law Cosmopolitan? pg. 259)
This traditional account for the rule of precedent, of legal justice and the rule of law, is not simply non-cosmopolitan, it is anticosmopolitan. The very point of precedent, and of law, so understood, is to forge a cultural or national identity separate and distinct from undifferentiated humanity, it iso to create and maintain bonds of civic obligation distinctively grounded in particularistic tradition rather than in universal essence. We treat likes alike-masters like masters, servants like servants, one
promise backed by consideration like another promise backed by consideration-because by doing so we create, affirm and differentiate particular and shared identities, and by doing so, we create, affirm and differentiate our culture from all others. We do all of this, in part, through law. Law should
be valued, then, not only and not primarily because I handily insures order, safety, a less brutal, longer and possibly freer life for all, but precisely because it wards off the danger of a creeping cosmopolitan universalism-a universalism that threatens our national identity, and hence our human and cultural identity, profoundly. To generalize the point , if the virtue expressed by the rule
of law is our respect for universally shared human traits, which is then identified exclusively with our capacity for willful choice, then the cosmopolitanism that the rule of law so understood implies, will be one which runs rough shod not only over particular cultural traditions, but also over legal regimes, either domestic or international, responsive to and protective of other needs or traits or aspirations of the species. In short order, it will be a cosmopolitanism that respects and serves the interests of commerce, capital and markets, and one that is neglectful of or hostile to not only particular cultural traditions, but non-commercial universal needs and aspirations as well.
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Link Human Rights (Panitch and Gindin 04)

Fixing human rights is a mask for US reconstruction and rebuilding to set up states that pay their obligations Panitch and Gindin 04 (Leo and Sam, Leo is the Canada Research Chair in Comparative Political Economy and a
Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science at York University in Toronto. Panitch is also the author of Global Capitalism and American Empire. Sam is the Packer chair in Social Justice, Department of Political Science at York University in Toronto, http://attacberlin.de/fileadmin/Sommerakademie/Panitch.Gindin_Global_Capitalism.pdf)
The articulation of the new informal American empire with military intervention was expressed by Theodore Roosevelt in 1904 in terms of the exercise of international police power, in the absence of other means of international control, to the end of establishing regimes that know how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters and to ensure that each such regime keeps order and pays its obligations: [A] nation desirous both of securing respect for itself and of doing good to others [Teddy Roosevelt declared, in language that has now been made very familiar again] must have a force adequate for the work which it feels is allotted to it as its part of the general world duty A great free people owes to itself and to all mankind not to sink into helplessness before the powers of evil.[42] The American genius for presenting its informal empire in terms of the framework of universal rights reached its apogee under Woodrow Wilson. It also reached the apogee of hypocrisy, especially at the Paris Peace Conference, where Keynes concluded Wilson was the greatest fraud on earth.[43] Indeed, it was not only the US Congresss isolationist tendencies, but the incapacity of the American presidential, treasury and military apparatuses, that explained the failure of the United States to take responsibility for leading European reconstruction after World War One. The administrative and regulatory expansion of the American state under the impact of corporate liberalism in the
Progressive era,[44] and the spread of American direct investment through the 1920s (highlighted by General Motors purchase of Opel immediately before the Great Depression, completing the virtual division of the German auto industry between GM and Ford)[45] were significant developments. Yet it was only during the New Deal that the US state really began to develop the modern planning capacities that would, once they were redeployed in World War II, transform and vastly extend Americas informal imperialism.[46]
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***Democracy/Promo Links***
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LINK DEMOCRACY (Dean 05)

Democracy is the form our attachment to capital takes within their politics any move to stop violence ends up reinforcing capital Jodi Dean, 2005
Professor of Political Theory, General Baller, Zizek against democracy http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2005/02/excerpt_from_zi.html
In this article, I take up Slavoj Zizeks critical interrogation of democracy. I specify and defend Zizeks position as an alternative left politics, indeed, as that position most attuned to the loss of the political today. Whereas liberal and pragmatic approaches to politics and political theory accept the diminishment of political aspirations as realistic accommodation to the complexities of late capitalist societies as well as preferable to the dangers of totalitarianism accompanying Marxist and revolutionary theories, Zizeks psychoanalytic philosophy confronts directly the trap involved in acquiescence to a diminished political field, that is to say,
within the ideological matrix of liberal democracy, any move against nationalism, fundamentalist, or ethnic violence ends up reinforcing Capital and guaranteeing democracys failure. Arguing that formal democracy is irrevocably and necessarily stained by a particular content that conditions and limits its universalizability, he challenges his readers to relinquish our attachment to democracy: if we know that the procedures and institutions of constitutional democracies privilege the wealthy and exclude the poor, if we know that efforts toward inclusion remain tied to national boundaries, thereby disenfranchising yet again those impacted by certain national decisions and policies, and if we know that the expansion and intensification of networked communications that was supposed to enhance democratic participation serves primarily to integrate and consolidate communicative capitalism, why do we present our political hopes as aspirations to democracy, rather than something else? Why in the face of democracys obvious inability to represent justice in the social field that has emerged in the incompatibility between the globalized economy and welfare states to displace the political, do critical left political and cultural theorists continue to emphasize a set of arrangements that can be filled in, substantialized, by fundamentalisms, nationalisms, populisms, and conservatisms diametrically opposed to progressive visions of social and economic equality? The answer is that democracy is the form our attachment to Capital takes. Faithful to democracy, we eschew the demanding task of politicizing the economy and envisioning a different political order.
to a political field constituted through the exclusion of the economy:
Democracy blocks any political action it binds our thinking and renders change unthinkable Jodi Dean, 2005,
Professor of Political Theory, General Baller. .Zizek against democracy jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/ files/zizek_against_democracy_new_version.doc
The second way to read democratic fundamentalism is in terms of this hegemony, this basic framework so apparently immune to contestation and renegotiation. Democracy today is not the living breathing, activity of politics. The apparent suspension of social hierarchy in elections is the form of its opposite: its a disavowal of the antagonisms rupturing the social. In this way, democratic fundamentalism attempts to ensure that nothing will happen. It precludes politics, if by politics we have in mind actions that can produce major change. This second sense of democratic fundamentalism thus refers to the way democracy conditions and binds our thinkinganything that is not
democratic is necessarily horrible, totalitarian, unacceptable to any rational person.

In sum, democratic universality appears in Zizeks early thinking as a necessary fiction, as an impossible universality that opens up because of an excess, obstacle, or stain that impedes it. In the wake of the demise of socialism and expansion and intensification of capital and racist fundamentalisms, Zizek finds that this opening no longer exists, that its been closed off. As I detail below, the
empty place of democracy now appears as a politically hopeless insofar as Capital, that other system that relies on disruption, crisis, and excess, displaces the excess necessary for democracy. Zizek writes,
Insofar as we play the democratic game of leaving the place of power empty, of accepting the gap between this place and our occupying it (which is the very gap of castration), are wedemocratsall not . . . faithful to castration? Continued service
to democracy today functions as our disavowal of the foreclosure of the political under global capital. Instead of a political practice structured around changewhat one might expect from electionswe have instead a democratic fundamentalism that renders change unthinkable.
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LINK DEMOCRACY (Moore 96)

Democracy serves as the vehicle for capitalism via propaganda and corruption. MOORE 96 (Richard PhD Political Scientist, 1996 The Fateful Dance Capitalism and Democracy) <http://quaylargo.com/rkm/ND/sep96FatefulDance.shtml>
Propaganda permits popular opinion to be managed, hence controlling the democratic process at its roots, where candidates and issues are debated. Corruption permits politicians and government officials to be controlled, which undermines the democratic process at its head, where decisions are made and action is taken . The corporation is the ultimate money-multiplying machine:
a legally sanctioned entity whose only guiding value is greed, and whose only purpose is to generate wealth -- not for its managers or workers, but for its (limited liability) owners. Thus modern "democracies" have served as the vehicles supporting the growth of capitalism. Controlled via propaganda and corruption, the nation state has been harnessed to expand investment opportunities, while the corporation has evolved to exploit those opportunities. Western nations have been the fortresses of the corporate elite, and imperialism has been the means of expanding investment opportunities abroad. Warfare has been the "jockeying for imperial turf" among the nation-fortresses, on behalf of their resident capitalists. It is a tribute to the
power of propaganda (including the "educational" system) that most of us think of these modern wars as having had other causes. But competition among growing powers for finite territory cannot go on forever. By the end of World War Two the inevitable finally happened -- one nation achieved military and economic dominance of the globe. By skillfully playing off one power against another, and bringing to bear its own industrial might at just the right moments, the United States managed to emerge from the conflagration perceived as the "Savior of Democracy", with its economy and infrastructure intact, in control of the seas, and in a position to reshape the world according to its own designs.
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Link Democracy (Glassman 04)

The US uses democracy as a disguise for furthering capitalism through expansion Jim Glassman, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Transnation hegemony and US labor foreign policy: towards a Gramscian international labor geography, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2004, volume 22, pages 573-593
While the specific content of American foreign policy at any given moment may reflect agency more than structure, foreign policy itself has provided an important domestic ideological coherence and underpinned a sense of national identity for an increasingly diverse population (Hunt 1987). National identity and foreign policy exist in a mutuallyconstitutive, dialectical relationship in which in American, at least - the discursive privileging of democracy occupies a central place (Smith 1994), something which helps to account for the powerful continuities in American foreign policy from the Truman policy of containment to the Bush
doctrine of pre-emption. Although the means by which American goals are achieved are contingently determined, and the other in opposition to which an American identity is defined may be very different, key elements of Americas sense of itself and the role of its foreign policy display remarkable continuity. Making the world a better place by defending and, where possible,
exporting democratic ideals and liberal capitalism have been the recurring leitmotifs of American foreign policy. However, the current generations of neocon thinkers differ from earlier Wilsonian idealists because their promotion of
democracy is not for the sake of democracy and human rights in and of themselves. Rather, democracy promotion is meant to bolster Americas security and to further world preeminence (Wolfson 2004: 46). This creates a potential contradiction and
tension in American foreign policy, because there is a presumption about the superiority of Americas domestic values and political practices, and a concomitant assumption about and need for its foreign policy and its power to be legitimate (Nau 2002). It is precisely this domestically-legitimated aspect of American power that is being eroded by current policy: Americas image of itself as a champion of freedom and democracy, and the powerful tradition of anti-imperialism in American foreign policy (Smith 1994: 143), is profoundly undercut by the current conflict in Iraq, the rising tide of anti-Americanism world-wide, and the alienation of formerly stalwart democratic allies. This is arguably the most distinctive and
misconceived aspect of contemporary American policy: not only is the war in Iraq, like the war in Vietnam before it, likely to prove divisive in America itself, but it will undermine Americas claims to legitimately lead the post-Cold War world and embody its putative moral order. As a number of scholars have observed (Smith 2000; Ikenberry 2001a), American values
and the very structures of the US economy and polity seem uniquely in accord with long-run transformations in the international system, structural changes that ought to confirm the centrality and legitimacy of American power. And yet it is precisely these aspects of American primacy that are presently being eroded by
the influence of that tight coterie of advisors and ideologues that have come to be known as the neocons. Despite their rapid and recent rise to prominence under Bush II, as with Americas overall foreign policy tradition, there are surprising continuities and contradictions hidden beneath the neocon label. Mark Beeson, University of Queensland, The Rise of the Neocons and the Evolution o f American Foreign Policy, pg 1-18
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Democracy promotion is used to spread global capitalism. Wilkie, member of Red Theory Collective, 09
Rob Wilkie. Member of Red Theory Collective, 2009. http://www.redcritique.org/FallWinter2008/supplychaindemocracyandcircuitsofimperialism.htm The Red Critique.
In the substitution of the discourse of "culture" and "values" for class relations what is placed outside the boundaries of "real" discourse by both the left and the right is any theory of globalization as imperialism, in which the primary goal of capital expansion is explained as a necessary effect of the material conditions for the further accumulation of capital. This is what has made "globalization" such an effective concept for global capitalit substitutes for economic imperialism a world of spiritual conflicts and cultural bargains. In this context, while a number on the right are calling for reconsideration of "imperialism" as a way of spreading "democracy ," many
on the left have simply abandoned the theory of imperialism and argue that "the term imperialism may no longer be adequate to address the present situation [which] is less coherent and less purposeful than imperialism" (Pieterse 77). Or, as Hardt and Negri put it more succinctly, "imperialism is over" (Empire xiv). To draw connections between the global expansion of capitalism and rising inequality is to be too reductive and trapped in the metanarrative of the past (Waters 186). Instead, the world is described as "multidimensional" (Steger 14), "without borders and spatial boundaries" (Waters 5), and "a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order, which cannot be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models" (Appadurai 221). What is at stake for both the right and the left in deploying
the rhetoric of cultural difference as a substitute for class divisions is obscuring the economic realities of imperialism in order to maintain the illusion of the possibility of capitalism without exploitation that works at the level of ideology to divide the global working class against one another and bind them to the capitalist system.
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Democracy is key to the sustainability of capitalism-welfare masks the true evil of the system and quells dissent. Almond, prof emeritus Stanford, 1991
Gabriel Almond, former professor at Stanford and Yale, formerly in Office of War Information, since deceased, 9/2001, http://www.jstor.org/stable/420091 My fourth theme, democracy as fostering and sustaining capitalism, is not as straightforward as the first three. Historically there can be little doubt that as the suffrage was extended in the last century, and as mass political parties developed, democratic development impinged significantly on capitalist institutions and practices. Since successful capitalism requires risk-taking entrepreneurs with access to investment capital, the democratic propensity for redistributive and regulative policy tends to reduce the incentives and the resources available for risk-taking and creativity. Thus it can be argued that propensities inevitably resulting from democratic politics, as Friedman,
reduce productivity, and hence welfare. But precisely the opposite argument can be made on the basis of the historical experience of literally all of the advanced capitalist democracies in existence. All of them without exception are now welfare states with some form and degree of social insurance, health and welfare nets, and regulatory frameworks designed to mitigate the harmful impacts and shortfalls of capitalism. Indeed, the welfare state is
Olson and many others argue, tend to accepted all across the political spectrum. Controversy takes place around the edges. One might make the argument that
had capitalism not been modified in this welfare direction, it is doubtful that it would have survived. This history of the interplay between democracy and capitalism is clearly laid out in a major study
involving European and American scholars, entitled The Development. This history of the interplay between democracy and capitalism is clearly laid out in a major study involving European and American scholars, entitled The Development of Welfare States in Western Europe and America and America (Flora and Heidenheimer 1981). The book lays out the relationship between the development and spread of capitalist industry, democratization in the sense of an expanding suffrage and the emergence of trade unions and left-wing political parties, and the gradual introduction of the institutions and practices of the welfare state. The early adoption of the institutions of the welfare state in Bismarck Germany, Sweden, and Great Britain were all associated with the rise of trade unions and socialist parties in those countries. The
decisions made by the upper and middle class leaders and political movements to introduce welfare measures such as accident, old age, and unemployment insurance, were strategic decisions. They were increasingly confronted by trade union movements with the capacity of bringing industrial production to a halt, and by political parties with growing parliamentary representation favoring fundamental modifications in, or the abolition of capitalism. As the calculations of the upper and middle class leaders led them to conclude that the costs of suppression exceeded the costs of concession, the various parts of the welfare state began to be put in place-accident, sickness, unemployment insurance, old age insurance, and the link. The problem of maintaining the loyalty of the working classes through two world wars resulted in additional concessions to working class demands: the filling out of the social security system, free public education to higher levels, family allowances, housing benefits, and the like. Social
conditions, historical factors, political processes and decisions produced different versions of the welfare state. In the United States, manhood suffrage came quite early, the later bargaining process emphasized free land and free education to the secondary level, an equality of opportunity version of the welfare state. The Disraeli bargain in Britain resulted in relatively early manhood suffrage and the full attainment of parliamentary government, while the Lloyd George bargain on the eve of World War I brought the beginnings of a welfare system to Britain. The Bismarck bargain in Germany produced an early welfare state, a postponement of electoral equality and parliamentary government. While there were all of these differences in historical encounters with democratization and welfarization, the important outcome was that little more than a century after the process began all of the advanced capitalist democracies had similar versions of the welfare state, smaller in scale in the case of the United States and Japan, more substantial in Britain and the continental European countries. We can consequently make out a strong case for the argument that democracy has been supportive of capitalism in this strategic sense.
Without this welfare adaptation it is doubtful
that capitalism would have survived, or rather, its survival, unwelfarized, would have required a substantial
repressive apparatus. The choice then would seem to have been between democratic welfare capitalism, and repressive undemocratic capitalism. I am inclined to believe that capitalism as such thrives more with the
democratic welfare adaptation than with the repressive one. It is in that sense that we can argue that there is a clear positive impact of democracy on capitalism.
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Democracy reform is pressed upon third world countries to mask capital expansion and create markets-this takes out any reason democracy is good Wallerstein, research scholar at Yale, 2001
Immanuel Wallerstein, research scholar at Yale College, 3/16/2001, Democracy, Capitalism, and Transformation http://66.102.1.104/scholar?q=cache:xMRfjwZh3GwJ:scholar.google.com/+democracy%2Bcapitalism&hl=en The new rhetoric would not have worked if there were not some empirical bases to these claims. What were they? To appreciate this, we have to reflect on the fundamental difference between a capitalist and a pre-capitalist system in terms of social stratification. In a pre- capitalist structure, the upper stratum holds power because it controls the means of violence. It thereby lays claim to a disproportionate share of the wealth. Those who acquire wealth otherwise than by military appropriation, say via the market, are not defined as part of the upper stratum and therefore live in the eternal fear of confiscation. They seek to avoid this fate by buying their way into the aristocracy, which took time, sometimes as much as four generations to complete. The capitalist world-economy is just as deeply stratified as the pre-
capitalist systems, but the relations of the strata are different. The upper stratum holds its rank not because of its past military prowess but because of its past economic prowess. Those who are not at the
top but have skills, those we are calling the cadres or middle strata of the system, are not living in fear of confiscation. On the contrary, they are in effect being constantly solicited and appeased by the upper strata, who need their assistance to maintain the political equilibrium of the overall world-system, that is, to hold in check the dangerous classes. The
extension of the suffrage, the benefits of the welfare state, the recognition of particularist identities, is all part of the program of appeasing these cadres, of securing their loyalty to the overall system, and most of all of obtaining their assistance in maintaining in their place the majority of the world's population. Let us think of the capitalist world-system as socially a tripartite system divided (symbolically) into 1% at the top, 19% who are cadres, and 80% at the bottom. Then let us add the spatial element to which we have already referred. Within the bounds of the singular system that is the capitalist world-economy, the 19% are not spread out evenly among all the political units, but rather concentrated in a few of them. If we make these two assumptions - a tripartite stratification system, with geographical lumpiness - then it seems obvious that the slogan of "democracy" has had enormous meaning for the 19%, since it implies a real improvement in their political, economic, and social situation. But we can also see that it has had very little meaning for the 80%, since they have received very little of the presumed benefits, whether political, or economic, or social. And the fact that a small group of countries has more wealth, and a
more liberal state, and multiparty systems that function more or less - in short, the fact that a few countries are civilized - is not the cause but precisely the consequence of the deep inequalities in the world-system as a whole. And this is why the rhetoric rings true in some parts of the world- system and seems so hollow in other parts, the larger parts. So,
democracy unrealized? Of course. One doesn't even need to demonstrate, which can be done, that democracy, however defined, is constrained and limping even in the so-called liberal states. It is enough to note that it is not functioning to any significant degree at all in most of the world. When a Western leader preaches the virtues of democracy to a Third World state, and they do this quite regularly, he is either being willfully blind to the realities of the world-system or cynical or asserting his country's moral superiority. I am in no way defending or justifying the dictatorships of the world.
Repression is not a virtue anywhere, not to speak of mass slaughters. It is simply to note that these phenomena are neither accidental, nor the result of the fact that certain countries have uncivilized cultures, nor certainly the result of the insufficient openness of such countries to the flows of capital. Two-thirds of the world do not have liberal
states because of the structure of the capitalist world-economy which makes it impossible for them to have such political regimes.
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The public sphere is dominated by capitalist interests-this makes it impossible to get social good from it, turning the advantage Kellner, prof philosophy UCLA, 2000
Douglas Kellner, Philosophy Chair at UCLA, Habermas, the Public Sphere, and Democracy: An Interview With Douglas Kellner, http://www.davidtinapple.com/comaff/Habermas_Public_Sphere_Democracy.pdf. Habermas added historical grounding to the Institute theory, arguing that a "refeudalization" of the public sphere began
occurring in the late 19th century. The transformation involved private interests assuming direct political functions, as powerful corporations came to control and manipulate the media and state . On the other hand, the state began to play a more fundamental role in the private realm and everyday life, thus eroding the difference between state and civil society, between the public and private sphere. As the public sphere declined, citizens became consumers, dedicating themselves more to passive consumption and private concerns than to issues of the common good and democratic participation. While in the bourgeois public sphere, public opinion, on Habermas's analysis, was formed by political debate and consensus, in the debased public sphere of welfare state capitalism , public opinion is administered by political, economic, and media elites which manage public opinion as part of systems management and social control. Thus, while in an earlier stage of bourgeois development, public opinion was formed in open political debate concerning interests of common concern that attempted to forge a consensus in regard to general interests, in the contemporary stage of capitalism, public opinion was formed by dominant elites and thus represented for the most part their particular private interests. No longer is rational consensus among individuals and groups in the interests of articulation of common goods the norm. Instead, struggle among groups to advance their own private interests characterizes the scene of contemporary politics.
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Link-Democracy Promotion (Hanieh 06)

Democracy promotion is a guise for spreading capitalism---these neoliberal motives result in disempowerment of locals and dismantling of public health Hanieh 6 (Adam, PhD student in Political Science at York University, Relay Magazine / In the Name of Democracy; Relay
Roundtable/Democracy Promotion and Neoliberalism in Iraq http://inthenameofdemocracy.org/en/node/62 ) The spread of democracy is frequently advanced by the US and British governments as a key justification for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. As with other regions of the world, however, US-led democracy promotion is intimately
connected with the spread of neoliberalism. As an explicit feature of democratization, the economic policies of the Iraqi Baathist regime have been rewritten under the tutelage of the US, EU and international financial institutions. The aim of these new policies is to institutionalise a separation of economic decision-making from sovereign political structures.
As a part of this process, the US government has outsourced the development of Iraqi neoliberalism to a private company, Bearing Point. Over the last decade, Bearing Point has been centrally involved in the development of neoliberal economic policies in regions earmarked for democracy promotion. Following its first foray into El Salvador during the early 1990s, Bearing Point began work in the former Yugoslavia in 1999. Its work included the creation of a ministry of finance in Kosovo, and the development of privatization guidelines across the region. USAID writes that in July 2003 it began a program to build the capacity of the Iraqi Government to manage the transition from a command economy to that of one that is market-driven. The aim of this program is to carry out the reforms necessary to help Iraq establish a policy-enabling environment that fosters private sector led growth. USAID awarded Bearing Point two contracts worth over US$180 million to implement these measures. Bearing Points contract with USAID required it to reform, revise, extract or otherwise advise on changes to the policies, laws and regulations that impact the economy the contractor will provide macroeconomic reform advice, with a focus on tax, fiscal, exchange rate, monetary policy and banking reform. Contractor will recommend changes to policies, laws and regulations that impede private sector development, trade and investment. In a remarkably frank outline of US plans for the Iraqi economy, Bearing Point was required to assess state owned enterprises (SOEs) in Iraq in terms of their potential market value for sale as ongoing concerns [the] contractor will also evaluate and recommend the potential for liquidation or dissolution of specific firms or industries, as necessary. Based on contractor recommendations (and approved by USAID), the contractor will implement a privatization plan, focusing first if approved on strategic investors and on creating and supporting an institution responsible for privatization. If changes to legislation are required, contractor will assist legislative reform specifically to allow for the privatization of state-owned industries and firms and/or establishing a privatization entity. The contractor will implement USAID approved recommendations to begin supporting the privatization of strategic industries and appropriate privatization of public utilities, including potentially food distribution and agro-processing industries. Decentralization and Local Governance
US-style democratization emphasizes de-centralization, devolution and local governance. While these phrases may sound liberating given the track record of centralized, undemocratic regimes in the area, in reality they hide atomization and massive disempowerment. When a countrys resources are passed into the hands of large international companies through a supposedly democratic mandate, no amount of neighborhood consultations can determine how those resources are utilized. Local governance in a context of centrally driven neoliberal austerity will most likely mean a dismantling of public health, education and the introduction of fees for those least able to pay. Instead of building popular strength across a country, devolution of power in this context deliberately sets up different regions, groups, and individuals against each other forced to compete for scarce resources. Fragmentation inevitably follows neoliberal democratization.
In the place of state control,
U.S. democracy promotion and capitalisms spread are inextricably tied Hanieh 6 (Adam PhD student in Political Science at York University, Relay Magazine / In the Name of Democracy; Relay
Roundtable/Democracy Promotion and Neoliberalism in Iraq http://inthenameofdemocracy.org/en/node/62 )
As Bush himself puts it, the cornerstones of US democracy promotion efforts in the Middle East are free elections and free markets. The drive for democratization is inseparable from the implementation of neoliberalism. By making state control synonymous with bad governance, democratization serves to legitimate privatization, the dismantling of state sectors, and all of the miseries that inevitably follow in the wake of neoliberalism. All of these policies require ideological sustenance and support. A plethora of democracy promotion NGOs, think-tanks and private companies are funded by US institutions such as the NED in order to make sure that those who think the right way come to power - and the rest of the population is sufficiently confused as to not get in the way.
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Link-Democracy Promotion (Moore 96 & Foster/Clark 04)

Modern democracies are a vehicle for spreading capitalism Moore 96 (Richard, Political Scientist, The Fateful Dance of Capitalism and Democracy Cyberjournal.org)
Thus modern democracies have served as the vehicles supporting the growth of capitalism. Controlled via propaganda and corruption, the nation state has been harnessed to expand investment opportunities, while the corporation has evolved to exploit those opportunities.
Democracy Promotion Is A Guise for US Imperialism Foster and Clark 04 (Foster, John Bellamy and Clark, Brett 12/04 Monthly Review: Empire Of
Barbarism)
Ferguson, who believes that the British Empire of old should be emulated-albeit in a form worthy of the twenty-first century-argues in his latest book Colossus and his earlier Empire that the world needs an empire. Many nations would be better off dominated by the United States than having full independence. The United States, he claims, is a guns and butter empire-one that
represents not just the rule of force but the advance of the principles of liberal empire and liberal bounty, thus yielding a more democratic and prosperous world order. It is no mere coincidence that Ferguson, one of the most influential establishment historians today, explicitly calls for an updating of the old White Man's Burden (to be replaced by a new ideology of functional empire) while whitewashing one of the
most barbaric wars of modern imperialism: the Philippine-American War at the beginning of the twentieth century-the very same imperial war that Kipling had urged on the United States in his poem The White Man's Burden (Colossus, pp. 48-52, 267, 301-02; Empire, pp. 369-70). Ferguson's guns and butter empire is now a transparent objective of U.S. policy. With the fall of the
Soviet Union, as Istvan Miszaros explained in Socialism or Barbarism, the United States began to assume the role of the state of the capital system as such, subsuming under itself by all means at its disposal all rival powers (p. 29). With its immense military power and its willingness to use force, the United States is now leading the world into what Miszaros has called the potentially deadliest phase of imperialism. In attempting to prevent revolution (or indeed any way out for populations in the periphery), the United States is seeking to transcend the only certain law of the universe: change. In the process, it has given birth to dictators, supported terrorists, and threatened the world with violent destruction. In the Middle East the United States has nurtured a regressive, fundamentalist political Islam (useful in the CIA-directed war against the Soviets in Afghanistan and in closing off all progressive options in the Middle East) that insofar as it turns back and bites the hand that fed it-the United States and its allies-is branded as a new barbarism. The Gates of Hell Are Open
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Link Democracy Promotion (Narizny 06)

Capitalism Is The Main Motive for US Democracy Promotion Narizny 06 (Kevin, Democracy, Capitalism and Hegemony, Committee on IR @ U Chicago, December 2)
Another problem with the security motive is its limited domain . If democratic peace is a dyadic phenomenon, as most scholars argue, then only democratic states will benefit from democracy promotion . According to the least restrictive coding criteria in the Kantian literature, Britain did not become democratic until 1832 (Doyle 1983a). Thus, Kantian theories cannot address either the origins of the Glorious Revolution or its impact on Englands colonies in America. In both cases, which I discuss below, the critical factor in the advance of democratic institutions was the interests of capitalist s, not a proto-Kantian urge to lay the foundations for a democratic peace. After more than two decades of research, the idea of a democratic peace is still fiercely contested, and skeptics have exposed serious weaknesses in its causal mechanisms (e.g., Layne 1994; Rosato 2003). If there is reason to doubt that it explains why democracies do not fight each other, there is even greater reason to doubt that it explains why democratic hegemons engage in democracy promotion. None of this disproves the Kantian view; however, it does suggest that economic interest is the strongest of the three potential motives for inducing democratization. At minimum, the link between capitalism and democracy is sufficiently credible to consider it a significant factor in the politics of regime change. Thus, for the remainder of this essay, I set aside the question of competing theoretical microfoundations and focus on the empirical impact of hegemony on democratization.
Democracy Promotion Is Used To Create A Favorable Environment for the Expansion of Capitalism Narizny 06 (Kevin, Democracy, Capitalism and Hegemony, Committee on IR @ U Chicago,
December 2) Though further research is needed, the central findings of this study are unequivocal. Over the past three centuries, Great Britain and the United States have consistently sought to install a particular set of political institutions and socioeconomic elites in other countries. To create a favorable environment for the expansion of capitalism, as well as to improve their security and advance their ideals, they implanted, cultivated, and protected democratic institutions throughout the world. The international system, as it now stands, is the product of their persistent efforts to reshape it in their image. The process has taken over 300 years, and it is not yet complete; however, it will likely continue so long as there remains a capitalist, democratic great power at the top of the international hierarchy.
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***State/Heg links***
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Links State (Kovel 02)

The state structurally imposes capitalist forms of social relations to ensure the perpetual maintenance of capitals domination Joel Kovel, Professor of Social Studies at Bard College, The Enemy of Nature, 2002, p. 124-25
The state is what steps forward to manage this conflict so that the ruling class gets its way without causing society to fly apart. It is the states province to deal with class contradiction as it works itself out in numberless ways to build its armies and use them in conquest (thereby reinforcing patriarchal and violent values), to codify property to set forth laws to punish those who would trangress property relations and to regulate contracts between individuals who play by the rules, to
institutionalize police, courts and prisons to back up those laws, or to certify what is proper and right in the education of the young, or the marriage of the sexes, or establish the religions that justify Gods ways to mere man , or to institutionalize science and education in sum, to regulate and enforce the class structure, and to channel the flux of history in the direction of the elites. The state institutionalizes patriarchy as well as class, and hence maintains the societal ground for the gendered bifurcation of nature. Furthermore, inasmuch as the modern state is also a nationstate, it employs the attachment of a people to its land as a source of legitimation, and thus incorporates the history of nature into myths of wholeness and integrity. All aspects of the domination of nature are in fact woven into the fabric by means of which the state holds society together, from which it follows that to give coherence to this narrative and make a difference in it, we have to attend to the state and its ultimate dependance upon maintaining the class structure. All of this is to play a basic role in the unfolding of contemporary ecological struggles, as we discuss in the next section.
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Link The State (Mezaros 95 & Sanbonmatsu 09))

Reforming capital through the state its role to capital is to secure labour Meszaros, Professor at University of Sussex, England, 95
Istvan Meszaros, 1995, Professor at University of Sussex, England, Beyond Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition In truth, however, the modern state belongs to the materiality of the capital system, embodying the
necessity cohesive dimension of its expansion-oriented and surplus-labour-extracting structural imperative. This is what characterizes all known forms of the state articulated within the framework of capitals social metabolic order. And precisely because the economic reproductive units of the system are incorrigibly centrifugal in character-which happens to be for a long time in history an integral part of the unparalleled dynamism of capital, even if at a certain stage of development it becomes most problematical and potentially destructive,-the cohesive dimension of the overall social metabolism must be constituted as a separate totalizing political command structure . Indeed, as a proof of the substantive materiality of the modern state, we find that in its capacity as the totalizing political command structure of capital it is no less concerned with securing the conditions of surplus-labour extraction than the direct economic reproductive units themselves, though, naturally, it has to bring its contribution to the successful outcome in its own way. None the less, the structuring principle of the modern state, in all its forms-including the postcapitalist varieties-is its vital role in securing and safeguarding the overall conditions of surplus-labour extraction.
Cap is rooted in structural power discrepancies favoring the wealthy elite Sanbonmatsu, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, 09
(John Sanbonmatsu, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, May/June 2009, Tikkun Why Capitalism Shouldnt Be Saved http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?vid=2&hid=104&sid=1131528e-c63b-4785-8caa66c8c156fe8a%40sessionmgr10&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=aph&AN=39753533) CAPITALISM'S ANTAGONISM TOWARD POPULAR RULE IS STRUCTURAL IT IS BUILT INTO THE
By nature, if not by design, capitalism is a system in which a small minority of individuals controls the wealth, labor, production, political power, and cultural expression of the whole of society. Under capitalism, the demos is permitted to exert only the mildest, most indirect of influences on the direction of state and society. All of the truly important decisions the ones that concern what kinds of technologies and commodities get produced, what kinds of laws will be passed, and which wars should be fought (or whether any should be fought at all) are effectively left in the hands of a small clique whose members are drawn from the ranks of what C. Wright Mills famously called "the power elite." No matter how many finance reform laws are passed in Congress, the enactment of new laws alone will never be sufficient to neutralize the tremendous discrepancy in power between the wealthy few and the ordinary many. Secretly, we all know this.
political DNA of capitalism itself
None among us is so naive as to believe that an ordinary plumber, teacher, or transit worker commands the same respect or influence on Capitol Hill, or in the Bundestag or the Knesset, as the chief executive officer of Siemens or Bechtel. And while we may profess to be "shocked" upon learning that this or that politician (or presidential appointee) engaged in corrupt activities at the publics expense, in truth we are seldom surprised at all. Plato warned 2,500 years ago that "in proportion as riches and rich men are honored in the State, virtue and the virtuous are dishonored," an observation that holds as true today as it did then. The rich will always be with us . That phrase, rather than the more familiar one from Matthew 26, is the one that haunts us deep inside, the one we truly heed. The rich may not be like you and me, as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it, but that doesn't keep us from identifying with them, or from feeling strangely grateful for remaining forever at their mercy. The steel worker is grateful "to have any job at all." The waitress smiles at having received a tip. The university president is so relieved that her fawning attentions to a wealthy patron have paid off that she doesn't mind naming the new science building after him. Like hostages taken prisoner by anonymous masked figures, we thus come to identify with our own kidnappers. Thus, when a coalition of progressive unions and grassroots organizations took out a full-page advertisement in the Times in March 2009, calling for a rally to protest drastic cuts in New York's health and public services, the group's sole demand was for "a modest increase for the top 5 percent of taxpayers." As if worried that even this demand might seem too forward, the group added:
Capitalism is the Stockholm Syndrome made into a universal condition of humanity.
All of us because the wealthy will also suffer when their garbage isn't picked up, or the police respond slowly to a break-in because of cuts in public safety. Even the grassroots Left (the New York coalition included locals of such groups as the SEIU, the UAW, Acorn, and the Working Families Party) has grown so accustomed to seeing the power structure as inevitable and natural that it believes its only practical recourse lies in begging more crumbs from the tables of the wealthy.
"After three decades of tax cuts, it's the fair way to avoid harsh cuts that will hurt all of us."
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LINK The State (Meszaros 95)

State intervention on behalf of capitalism increases structural dependency on the government and ultimately causes the collapse of the entire system turns the case Meszaros, 95 (Istvan Meszaros, Hungarian Marxist philosopher and Professor Emeritus at U. Sussex. Beyond
Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition. p. 887) The issue is, however, far more fundamental than even the most spectacular of failures could adequately indicate. For it concerns the structure of present-day capitalist production as a whole, and not simply one of its branches. Nor could one reasonably expect the state to solve the problem, no matter how much public money is poured down the drain in the course of its revealing rescue-operations. Indeed, it was the tendency of increasing state interventions in economic matters in the service of
capital expansion which led to the present state of affairs in the first place. The result of such interventions was not only the cancerous growth of the non-productive branches of industry within the total framework of capital production but - equally important - also the grave distortion of the whole structure of capitalist cost-accounting under the impact of contracts carried out with the ideological justification that they were 'vital to the national interest'. And since present-day capitalism
constitutes a closely interlocking system, the devastating results of this structural distortion come to the fore in numerous fields and branches of industry, and not only in those which are directly involved in the execution of defence contracts. The well known facts that original cost-estimates as a rule madly 'escalate', and that the committees set up by governments in order to 'scrutinize' them fail to produce results (that is, results other than the white-washing of past operations coupled with generous justifications of future outlays), find their explanation in the immanent necessities of this changed structure of capitalist production and accountancy, with the gravest implications for the future. Thus, the power of state intervention in the economy -not so long ago still widely
believed to be the wonder-drug of all conceivable ills and troubles of the 'modern industrial society' is strictly confined to accelerating the maturation of these contradictions. The larger the doses administered to the convalescing patient, the greater his dependency on the wonder-drug, i.e., the graver the symptoms described above as the structural distortion of the whole system of capitalist cost-accounting: symptoms which menacingly foreshadow the ultimate paralysis and breakdown of the mechanisms of capital production and expansion. And the fact that what is supposed to be the remedy turns out to be a contributory cause of further crisis, clearly demonstrates that we are not concerned here with some 'passing dysfunction' but with a fundamental, dynamic contradiction of the whole structure of capital production at its historic phase of decline and ultimate disintegration.
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LinkState / Epistemology
The state acts to control and enforce relations created by capitalism - and destroys the sense of individualism Jim Glassman, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Transnation hegemony and US labor foreign policy: towards a Gramscian international labor geography, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2004, volume 22, pages 573-593
Whilst previously neglected, it is clear that Antonio Gramsci advanced a conception of the state within a broader Marxist approach to political economy that he referred to as 'Critical Economy'.8 For Gramsci, a 'Critical Economy' approach was distinguished from the 'Classical Economy' of Adam Smith and David Ricardo in that it did not seek to construct abstract hypotheses based on generalised, historically indeterminate conditions of a generic 'homo oeconomicus' (Gramsci 1995, 166167). The whole conception of 'Critical Economy' was historicist in the sense that categories were always situated within historical circumstances and assessed within the particular context from which they derived, rather than assuming a universal 'homo oeconomicus' (ibid., 171173, 176179). Moreover, the importance of a theory of value was
acknowledged to the extent that: one must take as one's starting point the labour of all working people to arrive at definitions both of their role in economic production and of the abstract, scientific concept of value and surplus value, as well as ... the role of all capitalistsconsidered as an ensemble (ibid., 168, emphasis added). This distancing from liberal ideology was then continued in Gramsci's direct reflections on the state. According to Gramsci, the conception of the state developed by dominant classes within capitalist social relations derived from a separation of politics and economics. 'The state', as represented by the intellectual class supportive of dominant social forces, 'is conceived as a thing in itself, as a rational absolute' (Gramsci 1992, 229). Additionally, in those situations when individuals view a collective entity such as the state to be extraneous to them, then the relation is a reified or fetishistic one. It is fetishistic when individuals consider the state as a thing and expect it to act and, are led to think that in actual fact there exists above them a phantom entity, the abstraction of the collective organism, a species of autonomous divinity that thinks, not with the head of a specific being, yet nevertheless thinks, that moves, not with the real legs of a person, yet still moves (Gramsci 1995, 15).
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Link State/Heg
The state uses its power over classes to express capitalism. Jim Glassman, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Transnation hegemony and US labor foreign policy: towards a Gramscian international labor geography, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2004, volume 22,
pages 573-593 In contrast, a 'Critical Economy' approach understands the state not simply as an institution limited to the 'government of the functionaries' or the 'top political leaders and personalities with direct governmental responsibilities'. The tendency to solely concentrate on such featurescommon in much mainstream debate in IRwas pejoratively referred to as 'statolatry': it entailed viewing the state as a perpetual entity limited to actions within political society (Gramsci 1971, 178, 268). Instead, the state
presents itself in a different way, beyond the political society of public figures and top leaders, so that 'the state is the entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its dominance, but manages to win the active consent of those over whom it rules' (ibid., 244, emphasis added). This different aspect of the state is referred to as civil society. The realms of political and civil society within modern states were inseparable so that, taken together, they combine to produce a notion of the integral state (ibid., 12, cf. Gramsci 1994b, 67). Within this extended or integral conception of the state there is a fusion between political and civil society within which ruling classes organise the political and cultural struggle for hegemony, to the extent that distinctions between them become 'merely methodological' (Gramsci 1971, 160, 258, 271). The state was thus understood not just as the apparatus of government operating within the 'public' sphere (government, political parties, military) but also as part of the 'private' sphere of civil society (church, media, education) through which hegemony functions (ibid., 261). Accordingly, civil society 'operates without "sanctions" or compulsory "obligations" but nevertheless exerts a collective pressure and obtains objective results in the form of an evolution of customs, ways of thinking and acting, morality etc.' (Gramsci 1971, 242). In these circumstances 'one cannot speak of the power of the state but only of the camouflaging of power' (Gramsci 1995, 217). Once again, the notion
of integral state was developed in opposition to the separation of powers embedded in a liberal conception of politics, hence a rejection of the notion of the state as a 'nightwatchman', only intervening in the course of safeguarding public order, because 'laissezfaire too is a form of state "regulation", introduced and maintained by legislative and coercive means' (Gramsci 1971, 160, 245246, 260263). The state is not therefore agnostic and the ensemble of classes that constitute it have a formative activity in civil society to the extent that the bourgeoisie governs itself through banks and 'great capitalist consortia' reflecting the combined and unified interests of a particular class. As a result, Gramsci maintained, 'the bourgeois class no longer governs its vital interests through
parliament'. Instead, government, or political society in the narrow sense, would rest on coalitions of class interests with such institutions reduced to police activity and the maintenance of social order within an attenuated form of democracy (Gramsci 1977, 167172, 174175).9 Thus it can be argued that the state in this conception is understood as a social relation. The state is not unquestioningly taken as a distinct institutional category or thing in itself, but conceived as a form of social relations through which capitalism is expressed. It is a view that reappraises different modes of cultural struggle within 'a critique of capitalist civilisation' that goes beyond a 'theory of the state-as-force' (ibid., 1013; Gramsci 1995, 343346, 357). It does so by introducing the 'theoretical-practical principle of hegemony' that takes on an 'epistemological significance'. This means that the struggle over hegemony revolves around shaping intersubjective forms of consciousness in civil society'the trench-systems of modern warfare' which have to be targeted 'even before the rise to power'rather than focusing on gaining control of the coercive state apparatus (Gramsci
1971, 59, 235, 365). It is through state-civil society relations, then, that particular social classes may establish hegemony over contending social forces. By constituting an 'historical bloc', that represents more than just a political alliance
but indicates the integration of a variety of different class interests, hegemony may be propagated throughout society, 'bringing about not only a unison of economic and political aims, but also intellectual and moral unity ... on a "universal" plane' (ibid., 181182). The granting of concessions beyond the 'economiccorporate' level, within a 'compromise equilibrium', connotes this struggle for hegemony (ibid., 161). Hegemony is attained by a fundamental social class but it is presented as 'the motor force of a universal expansion, of a development of all the "national" energies' to become identified with the interests of subordinate social classes (ibid., 182). An unstable equilibrium of compromises, characteristic of the struggle for hegemony within 'the life of the state', also entails relating the economic realm to that of the political and cultural spheres more broadly. This is essential as ' "civil society" has become a very complex structure and one which is resistant to the catastrophic "incursions" of the immediate economic element (crises, depressions,
etc.)' (ibid., 235). As indicated earlier, the social function of the intellectual, 'whether in the field of production, or in that of culture, or in that of political administration' (ibid., 97), becomes pivotal in overcoming the impact of such crises.
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Link-Soft Power
American Soft Power Is Used To Spread Capitalism Globally Nye 01 (Joeseph S, dean of the Kennedy School of Government @ Harvard, America Represents Global Capitalism." The
Boston Globe)
Some Americans may be tempted to believe that we could reduce these hatreds and our vulnerability if we would withdraw our troops, curtail our alliances, and follow a more isolationist foreign policy. But they would be mistaken. Fundamentalist groups would still resent the power of the American economy and culture. American corporations and citizens represent global capitalism, which is still anathema to them. It would make no sense to give such groups free rein in their regions while at the same time abandoning our allies. Moreover, American popular culture has a global reach regardless of what we do. Some critics even see globalization as Americanization. While such views are too simplistic, there is no escaping the influence of Hollywood, Harvard, and CNN. In general, our culture has a positive effect and contributes to our attractive or ''''soft'''' power just as our military and economic might contribute to our ''''hard'''' power. American movies and television programs express freedom, individualism, and change (as well as sex and violence ). American higher education attracts half a million students from around the world every year. Unlike the classical empires of Rome and Britain where the culture extended only as far as the armies, American culture extends much further. Generally, the global reach of American culture helps to enhance our ''soft'' power. But not for everyone. Individualism and liberties are attractive to many people, but repulsive to some fundamentalists. One of the suspected hijacker-pilots is reported to have said he did not like the United States because it is ''''too lax. I can go anywhere I want to and they can''t stop me.''''
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Link Hegemony (Glassman 04)

Hegemony is used to exercises domination over a lower class Jim Glassman, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Transnation hegemony and US labor foreign policy: towards a Gramscian international labor geography, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space , 2004, volume 22, pages
573-593 The utility of the concept of world hegemony notwithstanding, however, I wish to try to recapture some of the specificity of Gramsci's analysis of class relations, while ìnter nationalizing' this analysis .
I distinguish the specific version of internationalized hegemony that I thus analyze from world hegemony by simply calling it `transnational hegemony'. Transnational hegemony reconceptualizes Gramsci's understanding of class relati ons outside the `territorial trap' of the national political economy .
Gramsci, as all commentators note, locates the concept of hegemony in relationship to the dialectic between coercion and consent. A ruling class may use coercion to
insure its ascendancy, in which case we would speak of it as exercising domination, but it may also rule with a certain amount of consent on the part of subordinate classes. To the extent that consent is important to maintaining existing social relations, so that coercion becomes less overt and more infrequent, the situation is one of hegemony (Gramsci, 1971, pages 12, 57 ^ 58, 80).(3) In
Gramsci's account the reasons why it is possible to have some degree of worker consent to capitalist leadership are varied but revolve fundamentally around the fact that basic economic antagonisms do not automatically or inevitably manifest as trans- formative political struggles (Boggs, 1984, page 157; Gramsci, 1971, pages 161, 184 ^ 185). In short ,
Gramsci's account of social power is not reductionist or economistic and recognizes that, although material processes of production form a basis for such power, the political, cultural, and ideological aspects of social relations have their own dialectically interrelated but nonreducible aspects. The project of exercising class power inevitably involves struggle along all of these dimensions simultaneously (Gill and Law, 1993, page 94; Rupert, 1995, page 29). The ability of capitalists to rule with the consent of those they exploit or, as Gramsci puts it, their ability to lead is thus a matter of the interrelated development of their economic, political, cultural, and ideological power. That is, hegemony hinges neither solely on political ^ economic dominance nor solely on cultural and ideological persuasiveness. The power to exploit and to dominate politically hinges in part on the ability to persuade; and the ability to persuade depends in part on the ability to exploit and to dominate politically in a way that
allows some prospects for real material gains on the part of those who are subordinate, even if repressive force is always available to ensure compliance. In the analysis of AFL-CIO foreign policy that follows, I rely on this basic concept of hegemony, while reconstructing it as an internationalized class process in which the leadership of
capitalists is exercised albeit in uneven fashion on a transnational basis.
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Link Hegemony (Mezaros 07)

US hegemony is a tool to sustain capitalist growth through endless genocidal wars Meszaros, prof @ U. Sussex, 07
(Professor Emeritus(Istvan Meszaros, Hungarian Marxist philosopher and Professor Emeritus at U. Sussex. The Only Viable Economy, Monthly Review, http://www.monthlyreview.org/0407meszaros.htm) The quixotic advocacy of freezing production at the level attained in the early 1970s was trying to camouflage, with vacuous pseudo-scientific model-mongering pioneered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the ruthlessly enforced actual power relations of U.S. dominated postwar imperialism. That variety of imperialism was, of course, very different from its earlier form known to Lenin. For in Lenin's lifetime at least half a dozen significant imperialist powers were competing for the rewards of their real and/or hoped for conquests. And even in the 1930s Hitler was still willing
In our time, by contrast, we have to face up to the reality -- and the lethal dangers -- arising from global hegemonic imperialism, with the United States as its overwhelmingly dominant power .7 In contrast to even Hitler, the United States as the single hegemon is quite unwilling to share global domination with any rival. And that is not simply on account of political/military contingencies. The problems are much deeper. They assert themselves through the ever-aggravating contradictions of the capital system's deepening structural crisis. U.S. dominated global hegemonic imperialism is an -- ultimately futile -- attempt to devise a solution to that crisis through the most brutal and violent rule over the rest of the world, enforced with or without the help of slavishly "willing allies," now through a succession of genocidal wars. Ever since the 1970s the United States has been sinking ever deeper into catastrophic indebtedness. The fantasy solution publicly proclaimed by several U.S. presidents was "to grow out of it." And the result: the diametrical opposite, in the form of astronomical and still growing indebtedness. Accordingly, the United States must grab to itself, by any means at its disposal, including the most violent military aggression, whenever required for this purpose, everything it can, through the transfer of the fruits of capitalist growth -- thanks to the global socioeconomic and political/military domination of the United States -- from everywhere in the world. Could then any
to share the fruits of violently redefined imperialism with Japan and Mussolini's Italy. sane person imagine, no matter how well armored by his or her callous contempt for "the shibboleth of equality," that U.S. dominated global hegemonic imperialism would take seriously even for a moment the panacea of "no growth"? Only the worst kind of bad faith could suggest such ideas, no matter how pretentiously packaged in the hypocritical concern over "the Predicament of Mankind." For a variety of reasons there can be no question about the
importance of growth both in the present and in the future. But to say so must go with a proper examination of the concept of growth not only as we know it up to the present, but also as we can envisage its sustainability in the future. Our siding with the need for growth cannot be in favor of unqualified growth. The tendentiously avoided real question is: what kind of growth is both feasible today, in contrast to dangerously wasteful and even crippling capitalist growth visible all around us? For growth must be also positively sustainable in the future on a long-term basis.
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Link Hegemony (Mezaros 07)

The only solution to capitalist hegemony is socialist hegemony- where our relationship to production is qualitatively different. Only way for sustainable growth Meszaros, prof @ U. Sussex, 07
(Professor Emeritus(Istvan Meszaros, Hungarian Marxist philosopher and Professor Emeritus at U. Sussex. The Only Viable Economy, Monthly Review, http://www.monthlyreview.org/0407meszaros.htm) The nightmare of the "stationary state" remains a nightmare even if one tries to alleviate it, as John Stuart Mill proposed, through the illusory remedy of "better distribution" taken in isolation. There can be no such thing
as "better distribution" without a radical restructuring of the production process itself. The socialist hegemonic alternative to the rule of capital requires fundamentally overcoming the truncated dialectic in the vital interrelationship of production, distribution, and consumption. For without that, the socialist aim of turning work into "life's prime want" is inconceivable. To
quote Marx: In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life's prime want ; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!15 These are the overall targets of socialist transformation, providing the compass of the journey and simultaneously also the measure of the achievements
Within such a vision of the hegemonic alternative to capital's social reproductive order there can be no room at all for anything like "the stationary state," nor for any of the false alternatives associated with or derived from it." The all-round development of the individuals," consciously exercising the full resources of their disposable time, within the framework of the new social metabolic control oriented toward the production of "co-operative wealth," is meant to provide the basis of a qualitatively different accountancy: the necessary socialist accountancy, defined by human need and diametrically opposed to fetishistic quantification and to the concomitant unavoidable waste. This is why the vital importance of growth of a sustainable kind can be recognized and successfully managed in the alternative social metabolic framework. Such an alternative order of social metabolic control would be one where the antithesis between mental and physical labor -- always vital for maintaining the absolute domination over labor by capital as the usurper of the role of the controlling historical subject -must vanish for good. Consequently, consciously pursued productivity itself can be elevated to a qualitatively higher level, without any danger of uncontrollable waste, bringing forth genuine -- and
accomplished (or failed to be accomplished) on the way. not narrowly profit-oriented material -- wealth of which the "rich social individuals" (Marx), as autonomous historical subjects (and rich precisely in that sense) are fully in control.
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LinkHegemony (Cox 95)

Hegemony creates a false universality based on material dominance and falsely conflates this dominance with the natural course of history to create a coherent vision of world order Cox '95 - emeritus prof. of pol. sci. @ York Univ. (Robert W., "Critical Political Economy," in "International Political Economy:
Understanding Global Disorder," Ed. by Bjorn Hette, p.43-44,
The question of consumption models is closely linked to the question of hegemony. In the terms I have used, an indicator of hegemony would be a preponderant ontology that tends to absorb or subordinate all others. One intersubjective understanding of the world excludes all others and appears to be universal. It is often said that although United States economic power in the world has experienced a relative decline, the American way of life has never been a more powerful model. An American-derived 'business civilization', to use Susan Strange's term, characterizes the globalizing elites; and American pop culture has projected an image of the good life that is a universal object of emulation a universalized model of consumption. This constitutes a serious obstacle to the rethinking of social practices so as to be more compatible with the biosphere. A counterchallenge to the universalizing of American pop culture is the affirmation of other cultural identities. The most evident, and the most explicitly negating of American culture, is in Islam; but other cultures are also affirming alternative world-views. The hegemonies of the past and present have universalized from one national culture or one tradition of civilization. A post-hegemonic world order would no longer be the global reach of one particular form of civilization. It would contain a plurality of visions of world order.
In order to avoid such an order lapsing into mutual incomprehension and conflict, it would be necessary to move beyond a position of pure relativism in order to achieve a kind of supra-intersubjectivity that would provide a bridge across the distinct and separate subjectivities of the different coexisting civilizations.
These various traditions of civilization are not monolithic and fixed. They develop dialectically like any historical structure. Change may come both from internal contradictions for example, gendered power relations and social inequities can be sources of conflict and mutation in all cultures. Change can also come from borrowings and reactions to the practices of other cultures in a world that is becoming ever more closely knit. Selective adaptation rather than homogenization would characterize change in post-hegemonic pluralism.
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Link Hegemony (Sakellaropoulos 08)

The emphasis on hegemony is an effort to boost economic competitiveness and form a global police force to put down anyone who challenges the internationalization of capital the US Marine becomes the foot soldier in the aggression of global capital Sakellaropoulos 08 (Spyros, Assistant Professor in the Social Policy Department of the Panteion University, specializing in
the subject State and Political Theory, American Foreign Policy as Modern Imperialism: From Armed Humanitarianism to Preemptive War, http://web.ebscohost.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=2&hid=12&sid=2a83c715-08ec-4e2aa643-194b21de665e%40sessionmgr11)
This definition of hegemony also helps us better understand the contradictions of U. S. foreign policy. These cannot be described as simple problems of domination, in the form of insubordination of the other capitalist countries. They arise whenever the power blocs in the other capitalist countries think that the United States is not offering a collective solution in the collective capitalist interest, for example in the form of their fear that American aggression may have short- or long-term
destabilizing results. But this also works the other way around: It is rather simplistic to describe post-9/11 American policy as just a unilateralist policy for world domination for the sake of American capitalism alone. It also has a certain
quality of a new hegemonic project, which would combine Clintons vision of globalization as the spread of free markets and western-style democracy all over the globe with greater emphasis on disciplinary practices, both economicfinancial and political, as a way to counter rising labor and social unrest after 1995 and to cope with the possibility of a major depression. And contrary to an equally simplistic image of Europe as the expression of a different global strategy, one should see that right from the beginning the new U. S. strategy had great appeal. The so called New Europe of neoliberal economics, extremely low wages, flat taxes, zero tolerance policing, anti-immigrant measures, harsh anti-terrorist laws and neoAtlantic foreign policy saw in G. W. Bushs declarations a much better way to crack down on popular demands and rising social militancy and to boost economic competitiveness than vague social democratic notions of sharing the benefits of the New Economy and globalization. In view of the above, current American foreign policy can be described as hegemonic in two ways: First, it offers a possible arrangement of international affairs and problems based on the use of force, military export of the market economy and Western democratic institutions, and the crackdown on any movement that challenges the internationalization of capital and international police interventions on a global scale. Second, it also offers a domestic hegemonic project that combines even greater market and trade liberalization with authoritarian statism, police repression and social conservatism. In a way these two aspects coincide: Aggressive military interventionism serves not only as a foreign policy tool, but also as a powerful ideological representation of capitals power the U. S. Marine as an allegory for the aggression of global capital.
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***Class/ID Links***
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Link - Class
Regardless of attempts to discuss symbolic differences, as long as material differences exist we will be trapped in a cycle of oppression Julia Wood and Robert Cox are Professor in the Department of Speech Communication, University of North Carolina Chapel
Hill, and the Associate Professor in the Department of Speech Communication, University ofof North Carolina Chapel Hill, Rethinkin critical voice: Material and situated konoledge, Western Journal of Communication, pg 278 -287, Spring
1993
Yet, totalizing communication as the symbolic entails certain costs. Our enchantment with
claims of radical contingency and symbolicity may lead us to ignore sedimented realities of structures of power and the material weight of oppressive practices within them . By this we mean that, despite conceptual acrobatics and a penchant for abstraction that shields academics from wholly innocent encounters with the concrete world, we all nonetheless live embodied lives, constrained, informed and framed by material circumstances such as living and working environments, food, and medical careor the lacks thereof. Consider, for instance: Men complain about supervisors who demand
too much work, while a majority of their female colleagues suffer some form of sexual harassment on the job. Middle-class homeowners bemoan a tax revaluation of their property, while black residents in eastern, rural North Carolina can't smell their air or drink from their wells because of pollutants from corporate hog farmsDual career couples worry about finding reliable daycare for an expected child, while minority women are twice as likely as Caucasians to deliver underweight babies whose chances for life and health are compromised from the start. This special issue appears against a backdrop of turmoil, inequities, and gross perversions that mock America's claim to be the land of equal opportunity. Given obscene discrepancies in the quality of life, we are unwilling to join Condit and Rushing in diminishing emphasis on division. While, as Condit argues, even the so-called privileged may be "unhappy beasts" whose viewpoints we should
. We cannot be equally receptive to all points of view, empathic with all people as long as the perspectives of some sustain and sometimes facilitate silencing, abusing, exploiting, and limiting others. To do so would be analogous to buying into the argumentusually heard from white men who patronizingly and fatuously claim to be "sympathetic" to feminismthat the real priority should be humanism in which we focus on equality and respect for all people rather than inequities disproportionately visited upon women. Some have listened too often, accommodated too much, been heard
try to understand, it is also trueand we think it is a more significant truththat some people are oppressed in ways that demand greater hearing, response, and change than others
too seldom, and been misrepresented too egregiously to warrant impartial empathy and equivalent openness to all perspectives. As long as women are brutalized at a rate that would lead to a declaration of war were any other population involved, gays and lesbians are denied legal rights and public legitimacy routinely accorded to committed heterosexuals, children are molested and killed, animals are tortured to perfect perfumes and produce veal, the earth is violated to fatten humans' portfoliosas long as these practices persist and, with them, an ideology that esteems domination, so must efforts to distinguish between those who are privileged and those who are oppressed. Admittedly, there can be
disagreements on how to define privilege and oppression, but the fact that some people benefit inequitably and often at the expense of others seems to us a reality that cannot be denied and should not be beclouded by definitional quibbles.
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Link Identity Politics (Jessop & Ling Sum 01)

The US them dichotomies of the 1AC are constructed due the use of material resoucrces Bob Jessop, Ngai Ling Sum, Pre-disciplinary and Post-disciplinary Prespectives, Political Economy, pg 89-101, 2001
The cultural turn is best interpreted broadly and pluralistically. It covers approaches in terms of
discourse, ideology, identity, narrativity, argumentation, rhetoric, historicity, reflexivity, hermeneutics, interpretation, semiotics and de- construction. It is important to note here that discourse analysis and its cognates involve a generic
. They are therefor e as relevant to the investigation of the economic and political orders as they are to work on so-called ideological or cultural phenomena . One key feature of the cultural turn is its discursive account of power . This involves the claim that the interests at stake in relations of power are significantly shaped by the discursive constitution of identities, modes of calculation, strategies and tactics and not just by the so-called objective position of specific agents in a given conjuncture (as if they existed outside of discourse) ; and also that the primary institutional mechanisms in and through which power is exercised, whether directly or indirectly , themselves involve a variable mix of discursive and material resources . Another key feature, influence d both by Gramscian and Foucauldian analyses, is its emphasis on the social construction of knowledge and truth regimes. Both themes can be applied to political economy itself . Thus cultural political economy can be said to involve a critical, self-reflexive approach to the definition and methods of political economy and to the inevitable contextuality and historicity of its claims to knowledge . It rejects any universalistic , positivist account of reality, denies the
methodology as well as the substantive fields of enquiry to which they have largely been applied subject object duality , allows for the co-constitution of subjects and objects and eschews reductionist approaches to the discipline . However, in taking the cultural turn, political economy should continue to emphasise
the materiality of social relations and the constraints involved in processes that also operate behind the backs of the relevant agents. It can thereby escape the sociological imperialism of pure social constructionism and the voluntarist vacuity of certain lines of discourse analysis , which seem to imply that one can will anything into existence in and through an appropriately articulated discourse . Cultural political economy should recognise the emergent extradiscursive features of social relations and their impact on capacities for action and transformation .
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Link Identity Politics (Wexler 08)

Focus on identity politics legitimizes capital by removing superstructural contradictions while leaving the primary contradiction in place. Wexler, prof @ California State Northride, 08
Steven Wexler prof. English at Cal State Northride. 2008. (Im) Material Labor in the Digital http://cust.educ.ubc.ca/workplace/issue15/html/wexler.html As I argued at 2007s MLA, to suggest that rhetoric masks class relations and surplus value is not the same thing as Age
knowledge economy rhetorics (e.g., information society) shift our attention from class to nationalism, racism, genderism, and more recently posthumanism. Stephen Tumino has stated convincingly that to explain social inequality in these identarian terms is to legitimate capitalism since capitalism is cleansed of its superstructural contradictions while the primary contradiction between owners and workers endures. We then accept economic inequality as an integral part of human societies . Tumino is
saying rhetoric is the cause. I am interested in the way that
responding to new Marxisms that augment class to a matrix of floating, discursive power struggles. These Marxisms speak of hybridity, information, difference, and multitude but rarely the labor theory of value, even though such relations are aspects and outcomes of exploitable labor. Consider, for example, the weight given to open articulation in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffes postmodern radicalism, a radicalism that turns its back on Marxist teleology and base/superstructure naturalism: If the worker is no longer a proletarian but also a citizen, consumer, and participant in a plurality of positions within the countrys cultural and institutional apparatus [. . .] then the relations between them become an open articulation which offers no a priori
The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life (Contribution 20). And no one to my mind levels the formers privilege and paradox like David Harvey. I would like to quote him at length: The rhetoric of postmodernism is dangerous for it avoids confronting realities of political economy and the circumstances of global power. The silliness of Lyotards radical proposal that opening up data banks to everyone as a prologue to radical reform (as if we would all have equal power to use that opportunity) is instructive, because it indicates how even the most resolute of postmodernists is faced in the end with either making some universalizing gesture (like Lyotards appeal to some pristine concept of justice) or lapsing, like Derrida, into total political silence. (117)5 So while there is work beyond wage laborand nationality, race, and gender could be kinds of workthere are only owners and workers, and this contradiction remains the principal source of value
guarantee that it will adopt a given form (36). This ontology stands in stark contrast to Marxs:
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Link: Identity Politics (Cloud 03)

IDENTITY POLITICS IS WORSE THAN USELESSTHROUGH REINSCRIBING DIFFERENCE, IT FRAGMENTS A UNIVERSAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND PREVENTS US FROM EVERY CHALLENGING THE BASIC ANTAGONISM OF CAPITALIST SOCIETY WHICH IS THE EXPLOITATION OF THE MANY FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE FEW CLOUD (Prof. Comm at UT) 2003
[Dana, Marxism and Oppression, Talk for Regional Socialist Conference, April 19, 2003, p. online]
That title demonstrates the major flaw of identity politics, namely, that it encourages people to target the wrong enemies. If oppression is thought to be a matter of maligned identities rather than historical and systematic efforts to divide and conquer, then Black people will see their fight as being against white people; women against men; gay people against straight people; immigrants against the native born; and so on. This logic actually replicates the ideologies of the capitalist system and does the bosses work for them. As the Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass
noted about the beneficiaries of slavery, The slaveholders by encouraging the enmity of the poor, laboring white man against the Blacks, succeeded in making the said white man almost as much a slave as the Black himself. Both are plundered and by the same plunderers. They divided both to conquer each. Identity politics cooperates with that division. It obscures the fact that white straight men can fight oppression, and can be convinced that their long-term interests are not served by perpetuating racism, sexism, or homophobia. Identity politics hides the fact that whenever capitalists can
threaten to replace one group of workers with another, poorly paid group of workers, neither group benefits. And it obscures the fact that the majority of the worlds population is at the mercy of a tiny elite at the top of society, a few percent of the worlds population that controls most of the worlds wealth and power. Every specially oppressed group is divided by class, and elite members of those groups dont necessarily share interests in common with working class members of the same group. However, class also can bring together the vast majority of oppressed people around the world in a common fight. We are going to have to get together to challenge
that system and make a world based on different priorities, one that does not require division and scapegoating to enable a few people to profit at the expense of the many.n The politics of identity cannot point the way towards building the kind of movement which can actually end oppression. Among existing organizations founded on the basis of identity politics, the tendency has been toward fragmentation and disintegration rather than growth and effectiveness. The tactics of identity politics are often limited to people with the resources to
commit cultural actions and shocking displays. The lifestyle emphasis of identity politics guarantees that movements will remain fragmented, middle class in nature, an therefore unable to confront the basic antagonism of capitalist society.
51 Cap K Links
Link: Identity Politics (Hennesy 00)

IDENTITY POLITICS ENTRENCHES CAPITALISM ON TWO FRONTS FIRST IT IS A DIVIDE-AND-RULE STRATEGY USED BY GLOBAL CAPITAL TO PREVENT LABOR FROM OVERTAKING AND SECOND IT PERPETUATES LOCALISM AS A METHOD OF KNOWLEDGE, DESTROYING THE POLITICAL UNIVERSALISM OF CLASS, RENDERING THE SYSTEMS OF OPPRESSION INVISIBLE** HENNESSY (Prof @ SUNY Albany) 2000 [Rosemary, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism, Routledge]
Although late capitalism has magnified the homogenization of social relations and cultural forms, it is also characterized by unprecedented fragmentation of the production process into subnational localities. Since the end of World War II, and to an intensified degree since the 1970s, production has become increasingly flexible as capital seeks out those spaces for production that offer the cheapest labor source and the least political interference. This has meant that production is no longer centered entirely in a single site, and it no longer takes place primarily on the assembly line. Instead, production relies on heightened mobility, and on time and space compression making use of profit-enhancing strategies like small batch, just-intime production, and outsourcing, with the manufacture and assembly of component parts sometimes spread over continents or diffused into private homework. Late capitalism is also more intensely transnational in
the sense that a network of industrial and service formations rather than a single nation serves as its center, and the transnational corporation is now the prime determiner of capital transmission. These changes in production have
challenged and recast the post World War II division of geopolitics into first, second, and third worlds. The second world of the Soviet bloc has virtually disappeared; parts of the undeveloped third world are full and competitive participants in transnational capital exchange and are saturated with first-world corporations and commodities, while parts of the first world harbor relations of production and ways of life that are
. Flexible production has made organized resistance by labor more difficult and the terms for those who do not participate efficiently in late capitalist production more arrogant and absolute: nonplayers are simply moved out of capitals pathways (Dirlik 32). Culturally this interplay between global homogenization and subnational fragmentation has registered in new forms of consciousness and transnational identity multiculturalism for one, and more gender-flexible sexual identities for another that coexist with or are being articulated into the prevailing values and norms of Europe and the United States (Dirlik 28 31).
indistinguishable from conditions in many third-world countries
Late capitalisms new economic, political, and cultural structures have also intensified the relationship between global and local situations. Global transnational corporations rely on localities of many sorts as sites for capital accumulation through production, marketing, and knowledgemaking. Global-localism has become both the paradigm of
production and an explicit new strategy by which the corporation infiltrates various localities without forfeiting its global aims (Dirlik 34). From corporate headquarters, CEOs orchestrate the incorporation of particular localities into the demands of global capital at the same time that the corporation is domesticated into the local society. Thus it is in the interests of global capitalism to celebrate and enhance awareness of local communities, cultures, and forms of identification. But this cannot be done in a way that makes evident their exploitation, that is, in a way that makes visible the real material relationship between the global and the local (Dirlik 35). Against capitalisms penetration of local communities, many local groups indigenous peoples movements, ethnic and womens organizations, lesbian, gay, and transgender rights movements have presented themselves as potential sites for liberation struggles. Undoubtedly, these struggles have indeed accomplished changes that have enhanced the quality of life for countless people. But the celebration of the local as a self-defined space for the affirmation of cultural identity and the formation of political resistance often also play into late capitalisms opportunistic use of localizing not just as an arrangement of production but also as a structure of knowing. The turn to the local has also been the characteristic talisman of a postmodern culture and politics that has repudiated the totalizing narratives of modernity. The claims of indigenous and ethnic groups, of women, and of lesbian and gay people have been an important part of postmodern challenges to the adequacy of cultural narratives among them enlightened humanism and Eurocentric scholarship that do not address the histories of subaltern peoples. However, insofar as their counter-narratives put forward an alternative that de-links the interests of particular social groups from the larger collective that they are part of, they tend to promote political projects that keep the structures of capitalism invisible.
52 Cap K Links
Link: Identity Politics (Laclau 00)

THEIR ATTEMPT TO TACK ONE MORE GROUP ON THE END OF THE CHAIN OF CLASS IS A REGRESSIVE SIGNIFIER Laclau 2000 (Ernesto, Prof of Political Theory Univ. of Essex, Contingency, Hegemony. Universality; p. 27)
The first tries to retain the category, while making it compatible with the proliferation of identities liked to the new social movements. The usual practice here is to transform class into one more link in an enumerative chain. Thus we frequently find that when one is arguing about new identities and their specific demands, we find enumerations of the type: race, gender, ethnicity, etc. and classand the and is usually stressed by an intonation of the voice, as if to say: Dont forget the old chap. This satisfies the speaker because she thinks she has found the square circle between the need to assert new identities and a certain ultimate Marxism that she does not want to abandon entirely. What the speaker does not realize is that what she has enounced is something which is radically incompatible with the Marxist theory of classes. The Marxist notion of class cannot be incorporated into an enumerative chain of identity because it is supposed to be the articulating core around which all identity is constituted. What do classes mean when this articulating function is lost, and they become part of a chain embracing a plurality of identities? Differences of wealth? Professional categories? Group belonging in terms of differential geographical areas? It is indeterminate the term class, by becoming part of an enumerative chain, has lost its articulating role without acquiring any new precise meaning. We are dealing with something approaching the status of a floating signifier.
53 Cap K Links
***Collapse (Anti) links***
54 Cap K Links
Link: Anti-Sovereignty
Rejection of states, the IR system, and diplomacy obscure the role of sovereignty as a socially and historically situated forceno epistemologically relevant analysis can exist absent an historically materialist approach Halliday 94 [Fred, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, A Necessary Encounter:
Historical Materialism and International Relations in Rethinking International Relations (Basingstoke: Macmillan), 47-73]
What these broad concepts of the 'mode of production' and the 'social formation' did entail was that analysis of any area of human acitivity had to be seen in this socio-economic context, and not in abstraction from it. There is therefore no state, no belief, no conflict, no power in general, or independent of this context. By extension, there is no 'international system', or any component activity, be this war or diplomacy, abstracted from the mode of production . Indeed, International Relations is the study of the relations not between states but between social formations. When this insight is applied to the issues of international relations, a definite shift of focus becomes visible. Thus the state is no longer seen as an embodiment of national interest or judicial neutrality, but rather of the interests of a specific society or social formation, defined by its socio-economic structure. How far classes control the state, or are separated from it, has been one of the main issues of dispute within the field. Sovereignty equally becomes not a -60- generic legal concept but the sovereignty of specific social forces. Its history is that of forms of social power and attendant legitimisation within a formation. Security is removed from the distinct theoretical sphere in which it has been placed and becomes the security of specific social groups and for specific socioeconomic reasons. The history of the system is also seen in another light: the
modern inter-state system emerged in a context of the spread of capitalism across the globe, and the subjugation of pre-capitalist societies. This socio-economic system has underpinned both the character of individual states and of
their relations with each other: no analysis of international relations is possible without reference to capitalism, the social formations it generated and the world system they comprise . 27 The second central
theme, embodied in the very term for the paradigm itself, is that of history, and historical determination. In the first instance, Marx argued that history influenced present behaviour. In the phrase he used on one occasion: 'the tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare upon the minds of the living'. But it meant something more than this: Marx argued that the events or character of any society could only be seen in their historical context -- one had to ask how the object of study came about, what the influences, of past events were, and what the impact of the past in shaping the current situation might be. 28 Just as he argued that society had to be seen in its socio-economic context, so he believed that the conditions of generation and a recognition of their contingent location, were central to any analysis. To understand contemporary capitalist society, one had to see how it originated and what the problems and tendencies conditioned by the past were, how it limited what people thought of as being their options, and led them to be influenced, or wholly determined, by passions, illusions, identifications derived usually unwittingly from the past.
55 Cap K Links
Link: Anti-Capitalism
You re-create class divisionswithout mass consciousness shift aligned with political changed the right wing will fill in. McNally '96 - prof. of pol. sci. @ York Univ. (David, "Language, History, and Class Struggle," in "In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.36-38, RG)
The contradictory character of working class consciousness is a highly dynamic phenomenon. To begin with, there is no homogeneous consciousness within the working class. Among a single group of workers, some will veer towards near-total acceptance of the ideas of bosses, supervisors, heads of state, and so on, while others will tends towards an almost thorough-going opposition to such figures. Between these two positions one will find the majority of workers. But their consciousness will not be fixed. Great eventsmass strikes and demonstrations, union drives, and so oncoupled with the organized propagation of oppositional ideas can contribute to significant radicalizations; while defeats, setbacks, and the decline of oppositional discourse can have a deeply conservatizing effect. But whatever the existing state of affairs at any one point in time, Gramsci is clear that the contradictory nature of working class consciousness cannot be eliminated. It is an intrinsic feature of capitalist society that the ruling class tries to win ideological consent to its rule (and that such efforts are usually successful to a significant extent), and that the life experiences of workers, their resistance to exploitation and domination, generate practices which do not fit with the dominant ideas and which, in fact, entail an implicit worldview that challenges these ideas. Indeed, one of the crucial functions of a revolutionary socialist party for Gramsci is that it try to draw out and systematize the worldview which is implicit in such practices of resistance. This view enables Gramsci to approach the question of revolutionary politics in terms of the
contradictions which pervade the experience, activity, and language of oppressed members of society. Revolutionary politics begins, be argues, with the common sense of the working class. This common sense contains all these, largely implicit, oppositional attitudes. And since socialism, as Marx insisted, is the self-emancipation of the working class, revolutionary ideas cannot be some foreign discourse injected into the working class movement. On the contrary, the
connection between revolutionary ideas and the working class must be organic; it is the task of Marxists to show that socialism is the logical and consistent outgrowth of practices of working class resistance. The revolutionary party must thus be a living part of the working class movement; it must share their experiences and speak their language. At the same time, it must also be the force that generalizes experiences of opposition into an increasingly systematic program, the force which challenges the traditional and dominant ideas inherited by workers (patriotism, sexism, racism, etc.) by showing how they conflict with the interests and aspirations implicit in resistance to exploitation and oppression. Contrary to certain idealist renderings of Gramsci which have made the rounds in recent years, he is insistent that the building of such a mass counter-hegemonic movement does not take place on a strictly cultural plane or as some rarefied intellectual process of ideological dissent. Counter-hegemonies, he argues, are created through political struggle, movements in which economic resistance and ideological combat go hand in hand. For the oppressed, in other words, "critical understanding of self takes place therefore through a struggle of political hegemonies'" (p. 333). And "political parties," he insists, operate as the "historical laboratory" of counter-hegemonic worldviews; they are "the crucibles where the unification of theory and practice, understood as a real historical process, takes place" (p. 335).
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Link: Anti-Capitalism
You ignore the largest lynchpin of capitalismstate institutions are the benchmark for modern late capitalismone must start there to solve. Van Apeldoorn 2004 [Bastiann, prof of political science at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Theorizing the transnational: a
historical materialist approach, Journal of International Relations and Development, 2004, 7, (142176), It is from this perspective that we may also understand the development of transnational relations into relations of capitalist production. The world market itself generated transnational commercial and financial networks enabling the formation of transnational social forces. However, it was only when, expanding from the
English state-society complex outwards, capitalism transformed the world market into a capitalist market based on the imperative of continuous expansion and deepening that capitalist social relations started to develop across the boundaries of the newly established territorial units called states. It was therefore only on the basis of this capitalist world market and the internationalization drive of capital it induced that a process of transnational (capitalist) class formation could develop (class relations and hence class formation presupposing production relations). The coming into
existence of a transnational bourgeoisie went beyond earlier transnational structures of socialization inasmuch as it created a transnational space for the exercise and reproduction of capitalist class rule.Such a transnational space first arose in the 18th century in the form of what Van der Pijl (1998: especially chapter 3) has called the Lockean heartland, formed through the expansion of the British state-society complex to include parts of North America and other regions through settler colonies, and in its commercial and political expansion confronting (sometimes resulting in war) so-called Hobbesian contender states. It is thus that through this
expansion we can witness though via many crisis and fits and starts a gradual widening of the area of state-society complexes subject to the imposition of capitalist discipline and a concomitant (deepening) commodification of social relations. It was with the industrial revolution that this expansionary dynamic of
capitalism set in for good.Thi s development reached a new climax when in the 19th century under the Pax Britannica the internationalization of capital deepened and the liberal internationalist fraction of a Anglo-Saxon bourgeoisie became more and more cosmopolitan in outlook.
Questioning economics without attention to the relationship between structures and actors in the political economy fails Cox '95 - emeritus prof. of pol. sci. @ York Univ. (Robert W., "Critical Political Economy," in "International Political Economy:
Understanding Global Disorder," Ed. by Bjorn Hette, p.32-36, RG) The next question is: change in what? What is political economy? I suggest that political
economy is different from both political science and economics as they are commonly understood. We sometimes hear international political economy defined as the politics of international economic relations. This suggests an amalgam or rapprochement of the two fields. Yet there is a methodological difference between political science and economics, on the one hand, and political economy , as I would like to define it, on the other. Political science and economics are actor-oriented studies. They take off from some rather fixed assumptions about the framework or parameters within which actions take place the institutional framework of politics, or the concept of the market. Within these parameters, they can often give quite precise answers to specific questions. Political scientists can analyse
political processes within existing structures and possibly give useful advice to politicians about how to gain or retain office or what policy options are feasible in terms of public support. Economists use the relationships derived from the rather
abstract concept of a market to predict outcomes under different conditions. Both provide examples of the application of problem-solving theory. Political economy, by contrast, is concerned with the historically constituted frameworks or structures within which political and economic activity takes place. It stands back from the apparent fixity of the present to ask how the existing structures came into being and how they may be changing, or how they may be induced to change. In this sense, political economy is critical theory. Historical structures There is, of course, no absolute distinction between actors and structures. It is not a question of sacrificing the one or the other. Structures are formed by collective human activity over time. Structures, in turn, mould the thoughts and actions of individuals. Historical change is to be thought of as the reciprocal relationship of structures and actors . There is a difference, however, between
thinking of this actorstructure relationship as a process configuring structural change, and thinking of actions as confined within fixed, given structures in the manner of problem-solving theory.
57 Cap K Links
Link-State Collapse
Labeling Something A State Collapse Justifies US Imperialist Intervention Biel 03 (Robert, Professor @ University College, London 'Imperialism & International Governance: The Case of US Policy
towards Africa, Review of African Political Economy, 30:95, 77 -88, InformaWorld)
On the one hand, the state collapse idea had become deeply embedded within African studies, under various guises (Dunn, 2001:46); on the other hand, it can be argued that the theme also strikes a resonance with some of the embedded discourses of US foreign policy more generally, in particular the twin themes of disorder and vacuums which are taken to justify US involvement. Thus it is quite predictable that the theme would recur in the context of the Clinton rethink. Superficially, the latter appears as a post-cold war initiative, so it is understandable that the problem would be presented under such a form, namely that with the disappearance of the Great Power calculus that precluded a full-blown political vacuum, Africa has been vulnerable to the phenomenon of state collapse (Gordon et al. 1998:86). But in a deeper sense, it fits into the problematic of imperialist governance, within which the cold war was only an episode. It was state collapse in Somalia which provided the focus: as this case shows, economic marginalisation is not necessarily translated into political marginality. In fact the opposite correlation might hold true if, in the absence of relatively coherent capitalist industrial development, the less privileged regions lose their ability to sustain viable national/state machinery. In this case the North would no longer be able to sit back and rely on governance through subordinate nation-states.
58 Cap K Links
Link: Anti-Imperialism
Youre K of IR maintains biopolitics and control by ignoring their causes socioeconomics. Class is the THE TRUTH. Halliday 94 [Fred, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, A Necessary Encounter: Historical Materialism and International Relations in Rethinking International Relations (Basingstoke: Macmillan), 47-73]
If realism can detach itself from its cousins -- social Darwinism, racism and Machtpolitik -so can an interpretive Marxism be distinguished from its instrumental companion . Such a
distinction involves above all an examination of what Marx and Engels themselves wrote, and of the work of independent Marxists who, throughout the Leninist and orthodox communist domination of the subject, sought to provide an alternative interpretation to that of the dogmatists. 1 Just as in sociology, history and other social sciences this independent, broadly 'Western', Marxist current has been able to establish a recognised and analytically fruitful body of work, so there exists the potential for it to do so in the realm of IR. It is this claim which the following chapter seeks to explore, with regard to a potential interaction of International Relations and the Marxist tradition. Despite many decades of potential interaction, the establishment of a relationship between historical materialism and the discipline of international relations is still at an initial stage. At various stages in the history of the discipline, there have been surveys of the implications of Marxism for International Relations in which already constituted points of contact have been identified. 2 Since the 1970s a number of writers have advocated further theoretical work, be it the elaboration of a general Marxist approach to International Relations, or the development of domains in which the International Relations discipline, as presently constituted, can strengthen its analytic endeavours by drawing on specific elements within historical materialism. 3 In an innovative and judicious study, Andrew Linklater has examined the implications for IR of 'critical' Marxism, while stressing the constraints which the international system imposes on any emancipatory project. 4 However, in contrast to such other areas of the social sciences as -48- sociology, economics or history, historical materialism has never occupied a secure place within International Relations; there are many who seek to limit its application, be this explicitly, as was the case with those who denied its relevance, such as Martin Wight and Hans Morgenthau, or implicitly, by relegating it to a minor place, or by presenting it in a selective interpretation, such that its pertinence is constricted. 5 This is achieved above all by blocking out the main theoretical questions of Marxism. The fact that IR is almost wholly silent on what
for Marxism is the central category of modern social analysis, namely capitalism, is itself indicative. Equally, as discussed in Chapter 8, the degree to which the Cold War embodied not just competing strategic interests, but different socio-economic ones, has been ignored in most IR literature. The sources of this failure lie on both sides of the relationship. International Relations as a
discipline has arisen primarily within British and American universities, and as a theoretical derivative of other disciplines in the social sciences. Neither institutional context, nor theoretical influence, have been ones in which Marxism has had a prominent or generally recognised place. On the other hand, historical materialism has not itself developed
the theoretical focus needed for a comprehensive and generally intelligible contribution to International Relations. Much of what was produced in the name of Marxism, by communist regimes or those
following them, was vulgar polemic, a repetition of certain standard, formulaic, readings of Marxism itself and concentrated around a justification of political interests. The confining of Marxist discussion of the international to the question of 'imperialism', and a one-sided and banal interpretation of the phenomenon at that, was as much the responsibility of those espousing Marxism as of those opposed to it . 6 Those who, within the independent currents of historical materialism, have sought to elaborate a Marxist approach to International Relations have laboured under the theoretical difficulties that confront those who seek to analyse politics, and ideological factors, within the confines of specific states themselves.
59 Cap K Links
***K Aff Links***
60 Cap K Links
Link: Revolution
Their aff cant access the revolution the revolution is not a simple moment in time their Utopian alternative fails to examine cultural and political history and thus doesnt achieve true social change Jameson '96 - head of the Lit. program @ Duke (Fredric, "Five theses on actually existing Marxism," April, 1996,
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1132/is_n11_v47/ai_18205164/?tag=content;col1, RG)
But such arguments in their turn presuppose the taking of a position on what is surely the central concept in any Marxian "unity-of-theory-and-practice," namely Revolution itself This is the case because it is the untenability of that concept that is the principal exhibit in the post- or antiMarxian arsenal. The defense of this concept, however, requires a number of preliminary preparations: in particular, we need to abandon to iconology everything that suggests that revolution is a punctual moment rather than an elaborate and complex process. For example, many of our most cherished iconic images of the various historical revolutions, such as the taking of the Winter Palace and the Tennis Court Oath, need to be set aside. Social revolution is not a moment in time, but it can be affirmed in terms of the necessity of change in what is a synchronic system, in which everything holds together and is interrelated with everything else. Such a system then demands a kind of absolute systemic change, rather than piecemeal 'reform," which turns out to be what is in the pejorative sense "Utopian," that is, illusory, not feasible. That is to say that the system demands the ideological vision of a radical social alternative to the existing social order, something which can no longer be taken for granted or inherited, under the state of current discursive struggle, but which demands reinvention. Religious fundamentalism (whether Islamic, Christian, or Hindu), that claims to offer a radical alternative to consumerism and "the American way of life," only comes into significant being when the traditional Left alternatives, and in particular the great revolutionary traditions of Marxism and communism, have suddenly seemed unavailable.
61 Cap K Links
Link K Aff: AT Turn

The affs attempts to reformulate politics fail to address the root cause of capitalism. Zizek 99 (Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject pp 343-44)
today's post-political age of the 'end of ideology' is thus the radical 'depoliticization of the sphere of the economy: the way the economy functions (the need to cut social welfare, etc.) is accepted as a simple insight into the objective state of things . However, as long as this fundamental depoliticization of the economic sphere is accepted , all the talk about active citizenship,
The big news of about public discussion leading to responsible collective decisions, and so on, will remain limited to the 'cultural' issues of religious, sexual, ethnic and other way-of-life differences, without actually encroaching upon the level at which longterm decisions that affect us all are made. In short, the only way effectively to bring about a society in which risky longterm decisions would ensue from public debate involving all concerned is some kind of radical limitation of Capital's freedom, the subordination of the process of production to social control - the radical repoliticization of the economy'. That is to say: if the problem with today's post-politics ('administration of social affairs') is that it
increasingly undermines the possibility of a proper political act, this undermining is directly due to the depoliticization of economics, to the common acceptance of Capital and market mechanisms as neutral tools/ procedures to be exploited. We can now see why today's post-politics cannot attain the properly political dimension of universality: because it silently precludes the sphere of economy from politicization. The domain of global capitalist market relations is the Other Scene of the so-called
repoliticization of civil society advocated by the partisans of 'identity politics' and other postmodern forms of politicization: all the talk about new forms of politics bursting out all over, focused on particular issues (gay rights, ecology, ethnic minorities ... ), all this incessant activity of fluid, shifting identities, of
building multiple ad hoc coalitions, and so on, has something inauthentic about it, and ultimately resembles the obsessional neurotic who talks all the time and is otherwise frantically active precisely in order to ensure that something - what really matters - will not be disturbed, that it will remain immobilized.35 So, instead of celebrating the new freedoms and responsibilities brought about by the 'second modernity', it is much more crucial to focus on what remains the same in this global fluidity and reflexivity, on what serves as the very motor of this fluidity: the inexorable logic of Capital. The spectral presence of Capital is the figure of the big Other which not only remains operative when all the traditional embodiments of the symbolic big Other disintegrate, but even directly causes this disintegration: far from being confronted with the abyss of their freedom - that is, laden with the burden of responsibility that cannot be alleviated by the helping hand of Tradition or Nature - today's subject is perhaps more than ever caught in an inexorable compulsion that effectively runs his life.
62 Cap K Links
Link K Affs
Capitalism structures our daily life and what actions we can take. This forecloses our ability to think outside the system. Even advocacies that seem radical will be coopted back into the system Zizek 08
(Slavoj Zizek prof phil/sociology/psyche @ European grad institute and the debate communitys own Britney Spears, censorsip today: Violence or Ecology as a new Opium for the masses 2008 http://www.lacan.com/zizecology1.htm)
In spite of the infinite adaptability of capitalism which, in the case of an acute ecological catastrophe or crisis, can easily turn ecology into a new field of capitalist investment and competition, the very nature of the risk involved fundamentally precludes a market solution - why? Capitalism only works in precise social conditions: it implies the trust into the objectivized/"reified" mechanism of the market's "invisible hand" which, as a kind of Cunning of Reason, guarantees that the competition of individual egotisms works for the common good. However, we are in the midst of a radical change. Till now, historical Substance played its role as the medium and foundation of all subjective interventions: whatever social and political subjects did, it was mediated and ultimately dominated, overdetermined, by the historical Substance . What looms on the horizon today is the unheard-of possibility that a subjective intervention will intervene directly into the historical Substance, catastrophically disturbing its run by way of triggering an ecological catastrophe, a fateful biogenetic mutation, a nuclear or similar military-social catastrophe, etc. No longer can we rely on the safeguarding role of the limited scope of our acts: it no longer holds that, whatever we do, history will go on. For the first time in human history, the act of a single socio-political agent effectively
can alter and even interrupt the global historical process, so that, ironically, it is only today that we can say that the historical process should effectively be conceived "not only as Substance, but also as Subject." This is why, when confronted with singular catastrophic prospects (say, a political group which intends to attack its enemy with nuclear or biological weapons), we no longer can rely on the standard logic of the "Cunning of
Reason" which, precisely, presupposes the primacy of the historical Substance over acting subjects: we no longer can adopt the stance of "let the enemy who threatens us deploy its potentials and thereby self-destruct himself" - the price for letting the historical Reason do its work is too
high since, in the meantime, we may all perish together with the enemy. Recall a frightening detail from the Cuban missile crisis: only later did we learn how close to nuclear war we were during a naval skirmish between an American destroyer and a Soviet B-59 submarine off Cuba on October 27 1962. The destroyer dropped depth charges near the submarine to try to force it to surface, not knowing it had a nuclear-tipped torpedo. Vadim Orlov, a member of the submarine crew, told the conference in Havana that the submarine was authorized to fire it if three officers agreed. The officers began a fierce, shouting debate over whether to sink the ship. Two of them said yes and the other said no. "A guy named Arkhipov saved the world," was a bitter comment of a historian on this accident.
63 Cap K Links
***Environment Links and stuff***
64 Cap K Links
Link Environmental sustainability

Capitalism relies on ideologies that contradict sustainable practices. Its impossible to address problems of the environment within capitalism Li, professor of economics at University of Utah, 08
(Minqi Li teaches economics at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Climate Change, Limits to Growth, and the Imperative for Socialism, Monthly Review, July-August 2008. http://monthlyreview.org/080721li.php) However, the laws of motion of capitalism will keep operating so long as the capitalist system remains intact, independent of the individual wills and against the best wishes of the uppermiddle-class environmentalists. Sooner or later, those truly conscientious environmentalists will have to choose between the commitment to ecological sustainability and the commitment to an exploitative and oppressive social system. Furthermore, with the deepening of the
global ecological crisis and the crisis of global capitalism in general, it may soon become increasingly difficult for the capitalist system to accommodate the material privileges of the upper middle class while simultaneously meeting the requirements of production for profit and accumulation. As I discussed earlier, there are many technical
obstacles to the de-carbonization of the worlds energy system.
Brown and Lovins have greatly exaggerated the potentials of technical change. But even if many of the
proposed highly efficient energy technologies using renewables become available right away, their application will be delayed by the inherent obstacles to technological diffusion in the capitalist system. In an economic system based on production for profit, a new technology is intellectual property. People or countries that cannot afford to pay are denied access. Even today hundreds of millions of people in the world have no access to electricity. How many decades would it take before they start to have access to solar-powered electric cars? Moreover, unlike consumer novelties such as cell phones or lap tops, which can be readily manufactured by the existing industrial system, the de-carbonization of the worlds energy system requires fundamental transformation of the worlds economic infrastructure . This basically
means that the pace of de-carbonization, even under the most ideal conditions, cannot really be faster than the rate of depreciation of long-lasting fixed assets. Considering that many buildings and other long-lasting structures will stand for half a century or even longer, the assumed rates of de-carbonization presented in tables 1 and 2 must be seen as extremely optimistic. From a purely technical point of view,
the most simple and straightforward solution to the crisis of climate change is immediately to stop all economic growth and start to downsize world material consumption in an orderly manner until the greenhouse gases emissions fall to reasonable levels. This can obviously be accomplished with the existing technology. If all the current and
potentially available de-carbonization technologies are introduced to all parts of the world as rapidly as possible, the world should still have the material production capacity to meet the basic needs of the entire worlds population even with a much smaller world economy (scenarios 1 to 3 in table 2 would roughly correspond to a return to the 1960s material living standards). However, under a capitalist system, so long as the means of production and
surplus value are owned by the capitalists, there are both incentives and pressures for the capitalists to use a substantial portion of the surplus value for capital accumulation. Unless surplus value is placed under social control, there is no way for capital accumulation (and therefore economic growth) not to take place. Moreover, given the enormous inequality in income and wealth distribution under capitalism, how could a global capitalist economy manage an orderly downsizing while meeting the basic needs of billions of people? Economic growth is indispensable for capitalism to alleviate its inherent social contradictions .
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Link Environmental justice (Sweezy 89)

Attempts at environmental justice cannot possibly threaten the capitalist system, and these policies always come up short resulting in ecological devastation. Capitalists will backlash against the plan and reify capital Sweezy, founder of the Monthly Review, 89
(Paul Sweezy is founder of the monthly review/economist, Capitalism and the Environment 1989 http://www.monthlyreview.org/1004pms3.htm) Since there is no way to increase the capacity of the environment to bear the burdens placed on it, it follows that the adjustment must come entirely from the other side of the equation. And since the disequilibrium has already reached dangerous proportions, it also follows that what is essential for success is a reversal, not merely a slowing down, of the underlying trends of the last few centuries. We have seen that at the heart of these trends is an economic system driven by the energy and inventiveness of entitiesindividuals, partnerships, in the last hundred years corporationsout to advance their own economic interests with little thought and less concern for the effects on either society as a whole or the natural environment which it draws on for
the essentials of its existence. Already a century and a half ago Marx and Engels, in a memorable passage from the Communist Manifesto, paid a remarkable tribute to the energy and achievements of the then young capitalist mode of production: The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of natures forces to mans machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the groundwhat earlier century had even a presentiment that such forces slumbered in the lap of social labor? Actually, when this was written in 1847 the rule of the bourgeoisie extended to only a small part of the earths surface, and the new sciences and technologies harnessing the forces of nature to human purposes were still in their infancy. Since then capitalism has spread to
become a truly global system, and the development and application of science and technology to industry and agriculture have progressed beyond anyones wildest dreams a hundred and fifty years ago. Despite all the dramatic changes, however, the system remains in essence what it was at its birth, a
juggernaut driven by the concentrated energy of individuals and small groups single-mindedly pursuing their own interests, checked only by their mutual competition, and controlled in the short run by the impersonal forces of the market and in the longer run, when the market fails, by devastating crises. Implicit in the very concept of this
system are interlocked and enormously powerful drives to both creation and destruction . On the plus side, the creative drive relates to what humankind can get out of nature for its own uses; on the negative side, the destructive drive bears most heavily on natures capacity to respond to the demands placed on it.* Sooner or later, of course, these two drives are contradictory and incompatible. And since, as argued above, the adjustment must come from the side of the demands imposed on nature rather than from the side of natures capacity to respond to these demands , we have to ask whether there is anything about capitalism as it has developed over recent
66 Cap K Links
Link Environmental justice (Liu 01 & Newell 05)

Enacting policies that increase environmental justice necessitate the marriage of positivism and capitalism. This alliance re-entrenches poverty and causes war and environmental degradation Liu, Maryland dept. of Planning, 01
(Feng Liu, Environmental justice analysis, http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=89mIV7thbbkC&oi=fnd&pg=PT4&dq=%22Liu%22+ %22Environmental+justice+analysis:+theories,+methods,+and+...%22+&ots=UbujH5dvry&sig=4bJ_k Cw00dldTTZF3OJhO2TcEdo) Bryant (l995) called for adoption of participatory research as an alternative problemsolving method for addressing environmental justice. He challenged positivism, which has dominated scientific inquiry for more than a century. Acknowledging that the union of positivism and capitalism has brought us modern prosperity and a high quality of life, he also attributed to this alliance poverty, war, environmental destruction, and a close call with nuclear destruction. For environmental justice analysis, "positivism or traditional research is adversarial and contradictory; it often leaves laypeople confused about the certainty and solutions regarding exposure to environmental toxins" (Bryant l998).
Reading politics in terms of inter-social and economic divisions exposes the nature of capitalism within the polarization of the under-classes Newell, Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation, University of Warwick, 05
(Peter Newell, Race, Class and the Global Politics of Environmental Inequality, Global Environmental Politics 5.3, 2005, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/global_environmental_politics/v005/5.3newell.html) It is increasingly unhelpful to view global environmental politics, either in terms of the ecological change processes which it seeks to manage (issue-based analysis) or the institutions that are constructed (regime analysis) in terms of generic categories of North and South, as Marian Miller's work made clear. When the focus moves from reading politics from geography in this way to focus on intra and transnational social and economic
divisions, looking for example at "Souths in the North" and "Norths in the South,"1 we have an entry point for assessing the importance of race and class to inequality in global environmental politics. This shift obliges us to relate inequalities within societies to economic injustices between them. From an historical materialist perspective, as Wood argues, the class polarizations of capitalism that have been associated with the North-South divide increasingly also produce "the impoverishment of so-called 'under-classes' within advanced capitalist countries."2 Indeed, working class communities are regarded as convenient
depositories of the social and environmental hazards of industrial activity because those communities, as [End Page 70] Bullard and Wright suggest, have a "third world view of developmentthat is, any development is better than no development at all."3
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Link - Environmental justice Alt solves (3)

Capitalism is the root cause of the social and environmental problems fought by the environmental justice movement Pellow, Professor of Ethnic Studies, and Director of California Cultures in Comparative Perspective UCSD, and Brulle, Professor of Sociology and Environmental Science at Drexel University, 05
(David N. Pellow and Robert J. Brulle, Power, Justice, and the Environment: Toward Critical Environmental Justice Studies, MIT Press, 2005, http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chapters/0262661934chap1.pdf)
The first step toward understanding the origins of and prospects for the environmental justice struggle is to situate the EJ movement within a larger social dynamic of the social production of inequality and environmental degradation. We agree with Ulrich Beck that environmental problems are fundamentally based in how human society is organized (1986: 81). Thus, exploitation of the environment and exploitation of human populations are linked. In order to
understand and develop meaningful measures to mitigate ecological degradation, this analysis begins with the development of a theoretical perspective on the social processes by which these problems originate. A well-developed literature
locates the origin of environmental problems in the political economy of advanced capitalist economies (Schnaiberg 1980; Schnaiberg and Gould 1994; OConnor 1973, 1984, 1987). This perspective maintains that the capitalist economy forms a treadmill of production that continues to create ecological problems through a self-reinforcing mechanism of ever more production and consumption. The logic of the treadmill of production is an ever-growing need for capital investment in order to generate goods for sale on the market. From the environment, it requires growing inputs of energy and material.
When resources are constrained, the treadmill of production searches for alternative sources rather than conserving resources and restructuring production. The tread-mill operates in this way to maintain a positive rate of return on investments. In theory, the state is responsible for reconciling disparities between the treadmill and societys social needs. In practice the state has often acted to accelerate the treadmill in the hope of avoiding political conflict (Schnaiberg 1980: 418). The ecological result of this process is that the use of natural resources continues to increase, regardless of the consequences on the sustainability of the ecosystem. The social result is that inequalities increase and
working-class populations receive less and less material benefit from their labor. Thus, both ecological disorganization and race and class inequalities are inherent by-products of the social order.
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LinkRenewable Energy
The question is not whether the renewable tech they advocate is good or not in a vacuumthe issue is whether it is operating in the service of capitalism. Mainstream environmentalism has no hope of fundamentally challenging the system. Trainer, 07 (Ted Trainer, Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Work at the University of New South Wales. "Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society" p. 7-8)
As Chapter 10 will make clear, the Green Movement in general is deeply flawed. It is for the most part, only light green. Most environmental gurus and agencies never go beyond seeking reforms within consumer-capitalist society. They do not consider the possibility that environmental and other major global problems cannot be solved without radical change to a very different kind of society. Chapter 10 explains why a sustainable and just society cannot be a consumer society, it cannot be driven by market forces, it must have relatively little international trade and no economic growth at all, it must be made up mostly of small local economies, and its driving values cannot be competition and acquisitiveness. Whether or not we are likely to achieve such a transition is not crucial here (... and I am quite pessimistic about achieving it). The point is that when our "limits to growth" situation is understood, a sustainable and just society cannot be conceived in any other terms. Discussion of these themes is of the utmost importance, but few if any green agencies ever even mention them. 8 Chapter 1 The "tech-fix optimists", who are to be found in plague proportions in the renewable energy field, are open to the same criticism. If the position underlying this book is valid, then despite the indisputably desirable technologies all these people are developing, they are working for the devil. If it is the case that a sustainable and just world cannot be achieved without transition from consumer society to a Simpler Way of some kind, then this transition is being thwarted by those who reinforce the faith that technical advances will eliminate any need to even think about such a transition.
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Links Green Tech

Green technology cannot hope to solve nor slow the impending eco-catastrophe unless it is disassociated with capitalism Joel Kovel, Professor of Social Studies at Bard College, The Enemy of Nature, 2002
So long, therefore, as growth is the alpha and omega of the economy, we will be eternally chasing our tails in an ever-widening circle of accumulation. Meanwhile, the industrial system remains utterly dependent on fossil fuels inputs that are radically non-renewable. I say radically to underscore the fact that the whole of capitalist society runs on high-energy chemical bonds laid down by living beings and concentrated over hundreds of millions of years. Thus we rob the past. The only substitute for this needed concentration is the utterly unacceptable alternative of nuclear power, with its indisposable wastes. Other modalities, principally the vaunted solar alternative, are simply too diffuse and too expensive to concentrate to serve the needs of contemporary society much less one that continues to grow according to the plan of the capitalist elites. It is too easily forgotten that in using solar power, one is starting with what nature had long ago concentrated into the low-entropy fuels we get at the petrol station. It is lifes gift of low entropy that is essential to the industrial system and that cannot he replaced except at ruinously high expenditures of energy. Electric cars may he non-polluting, but the generation of electricity is not nor should we forget that even before the vast increase in electrical generation required to propel our motor vehicle fleet, there is tremendous pressure to expand the electrical generation grid, now breaking down in places such as California. Again, hydrogen fuel cells offer a nonpolluting energy supply of great promise but how are we to obtain the hydrogen except by splitting methane or water molecules, once more requiring prodigious amounts of electricity?0 In their haste to excoriate the admittedly gruesome energy schemes of the Bush administration, environmental liberals often overlook the fact that the president is simply being candid in stating that what he asks for is what capitalism demands. It scarcely bears saying that all measures of increasing the renewability and efficiency and decreasing the pollution of energy sources that is, all soft-energy paths are to be endorsed, and for the same reason one endorses recycling. What cannot be supported is the illusion that
these measures of themselves can do more than retard the slide toward ecocatastrophe a fall that may become precipitous once the inevitable occurs and fossil fuels become uneconomical to extract, that is effectively run out, as expected within the next halfcentury 12 Only a basic change in patterns of production and use can allow ecologically appropriate technologies to have their beneficial effect. But this means a basic change in need patterns and in the whole way life is lived, which means an entirely different foundation for society. To the extent to which expectation of technological fixes blinds us to this, technology may be said to stand in the way of resolving the ecological crisis.
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LinkEnvironment (Foster 01)

Current solutions to ecological disaster are tied to vested capitalist interests who will maintain capitals dominance while stifling any meaningful resistance. Foster 01 (John Bellamy, Professor of Sociology at University of Oregon, Ecology Against Capitalism - Statistical Data
Included) JXu
"The modern world," Rachel Carson observed in 1963, "worships the gods of speed and quantity, and of the quick and easy profit, and out of this idolatry monstrous evils have arisen." The reduction of nature to factory-like forms of organization in the interest of rapid economic returns, she argued, lies behind our worst ecological problems (Lost Woods, pp. 194-95). Such realities are, however, denied by the vested interests who continue to argue that it is possible to continue as before only on a larger scale, with economics (narrowly conceived) rather than ecology having the last word on the environment in which we live. The depth of the ecological and social crisis of contemporary civilization, the need for a radical reorganization of production in order to create a more sustainable and just world, is invariably downplayed by the ruling elements of society, who regularly portray those convinced of the necessity of meaningful ecological and social change as so many "Cassandras" who are blind to the real improvements in the quality of life that everywhere surround us. Industry too fosters such an attitude of complacency, while at the same time assiduously advertising itself as socially responsible and environmentally benign. Science, which all too often is prey to corporate influence, is frequently turned against its own
precepts and used to defend the indefensible--for example, through risk management analysis. It was in defiance of such distortions within the reigning ideology, reaching down into science itself, that Rachel Carson felt compelled to ask, in her 1962 Women's National Press Club speech: Is industry becoming a screen through which facts must be filtered, so that the hard, uncomfortable truths are kept back and only the harmless morsels allowed to filter through? I know that many thoughtful scientists are deeply disturbed that their organizations are becoming fronts for industry. More than one scientist has raised a disturbing question--whether a spirit of lysenkoism may be developing in America today--the philosophy that perverted and destroyed the science of genetics in Russia and even infiltrated all of that nation's agricultural sciences. But here the tailoring, the screening of basic truth, is done, not to suit a party line, but to accommodate to the short-term gain, to serve the gods of profit and production (Lost Woods, p. 210). We are constantly invited by those dutifully serving "the gods of profit and
production" to turn our attention elsewhere, to downgrade our concerns, and to view the very economic system that has caused the present global degradation of the environment as the solution to the problems it has generated. Hence, to write realistically about the conflict between ecology and capitalism requires, at the present time, a form of intellectual resistance--a ruthless critique of the existing mode of production and the ideology used to support its environmental depredations. We are faced with a stark choice: either reject "the gods of profit" as holding out the solution to our ecological problems, and look instead to a more harmonious coevolution of nature and human society, as an essential element in building a more just and egalitarian social order-or face the natural consequences, an ecological and social crisis that will rapidly spin out of control, with irreversible and devastating consequences for human beings and f or those numerous other species with which we are linked.
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LinkEnvironment (Kovel 02)

Capitalism converts nature into commodities of exchange value which makes ecological destruction inevitable. Pollution control only feeds into this system of profitability calculation. Kovel 02 (Joel, Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies at Bard College, The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End
of the World? pg 39-40) JXu
The combination makes an ever-growing ecological crisis an iron necessity so long as capital rules, no matter what measures are taken to tidy up one corner or another. We need to examine why we talk of capital as though it has a life of its own, which rapidly surpasses its rational function and consumes ecosystems in
order to grow cancerously. Capital is not in itself a living organism, needless to say. It is rather a kind of relationship like that set UI) by a cancer-causing virus that invades living human beings, forces them to violate ecological integrity, sets up self-replicating
It is humans living as capital, people who become capitals personfica1ions, who destroy ecosystems. The Faustian bargain that gave rise to this way of being arose through the discovery that fabulous wealth could be achieved by making money first of all, and things through the making of money. Those who do not know yet that capitalist production is for profit and not use can learn it right away from watching Wall Street discipline corporations that fail to measure up to standards of profitability Capitalists celebrate the restless dynamism that these standards enforce, with its drive for innovation,
structures and polarizes the giant force field. efficiency and new markets. They fail to recognize because a kind of failure of recognition is built into their being that what looks like resourcefulness and resilience from one side becomes on the other an addiction and a treadmill to oblivion. Commodities appeared at the dawn of economic activity, and commodity production became generalized with the advent of capital. The germ of capital is inserted into each commodity, and can be released only through exchange, and with this, the conversion of what is desirable into money. To employ a formalism employed by Marx, which we shall find helpful to express our ideas as we proceed ,
every commodity is a conjunction of a use-value and an exchange-value.8 Use-value signifies the commoditys place in the ever-developing manifold of human needs and wants, while exchange-value represents its commodity-being, that is, its exchangeability, an abstraction that can he expressed only in quantitative terms, and as money. Broadly speaking, capital represents that regime in which exchange-value predominates over use-value in the production of commodities and the problem with capital is that, once
installed, this process becomes self-perpetuating and expanding. If production be for profit - that is, for the expansion of the money value invested in it then prices must be kept as high as possible and costs as low as possible. As prices will tend to be held down by the competition endemic to the system, in practice, cutting costs becomes a paramount concern of capitalists. But costs of what? Clearly, of what enters into the production of commodities. Much of this can be expressed in terms of other commodities for example, fuel, machinery, building materials, and so on, and, crucially, the labour-power sold by workers for wages at the heart of the capitalist system. However, if the same analysis is done upon the latter, at some point we arrive at entities that are not produced as commodities, yet are treated as such in the great market that defines capitalism. These are the above-mentioned conditions of production, and they include publicly produced facilities, i.e., infrastructure, the workers themselves, and, last but certainly not least, nature - even if this nature already expresses, as it almost always does, the hand of prior human activity. The process is a manifestation of the ascendancy of exchange-value over use-value, and entails a twofold degradation. In the first
However, nature, as we shall examine further in Part II, simply does not work in this way, No matter what capitals ideologues say, the actual laws of nature never include monetization; they exist, rather, in the context of ecosystems whose internal relations are violated by conversion to the money- form. Thus the ceaseless rendering into commodities, with its monetization and exchange, breaks down the specificity and intricacy of ecosystems. lb this is added the devaluation, or basic lack of caring, which attends what is left over and unprofitable. Here arise the so-called externalities that become the repositories of pollution. To the extent to which the capital relation,
place, we have the commodification of nature, which includes human beings, and their bodies.
with its unrelenting competitive drive to realize profit, prevails, it is a certainty that the conditions of production at some point or other will be degraded, which is to say that natural ecosystems will be destabilized and broken apart. As James OConnor has demonstrated in his pioneering studies of this phenomenon, this degradation will have a contradictory effect on profitability itself (the Second Contradiction of Capital), either directly, by so fouling the natural ground of production that it breaks down, or indirectly, as in the case that regulatory measures, being forced to pay for the health care of workers, and so on, re-internalizes the costs that had been expelled into the environment.
in a case such as Bhopal, numerous insults of this kind interacted and became the matrix of a ghastly accident. For Bhopal, degradation was concentrated in one setting, while the ecological crisis as a whole may be regarded as its occurrence in a less concentrated but vastly more extended field, so that the disaster is now played out more slowly and on a planetary scale. it will surely be rejoined to this that a great many countervailing techniques are continually introduced to blunt or even profit from the degradation of conditions of production - for example. pollution-control devices, making commodities of pollutants. and so on. To some degree these are bound to be
effective. Indeed, if the overall system were in equilibrium. then the effects of the Second Contradiction could be contained, and we would not be able to extrapolate from it to the ecological crisis. Bu t
this brings us to the other great problem with capital, namely, that confinement of any sort is anathema to it.
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Warming Link
Global warming is good for business corporations inculcate a fear of warming that drives consumers to demand modern green developments which feed profits. Kovel 02 (Joel, Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies at Bard College, The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? pg 47-48) JXu
With respect to global warming, arguably the supreme instance of the ecological crisis, we now find a gathering realization of just how deadly the prospects are. But the chaotic world-system keeps the response lagging far behind the pace of events. Consider only the frequency and impact of violent storms. These are
the equivalent, on the climatic level, of methylisocyanate, on the physiological level, tearing through a body. Each represents the intrusion of wild energy uncontainable by ecosystemic buffering. with chaotic and devastating results. In the last few years, we have seen Hurricane Mitch, which laid waste to Honduras and Nicaragua, along with other devastating storms, all leading to deaths in the tens of thousands, which struck China, India, Mozambique and Venezuela. In the latter instance, the killer became rain-induced landslides sweeping down on shanty-towns on the lee side of a mountain next to Caracas, burying or sweeping out to sea some 20,000 poor folk who would never have been living there in a just or sane society.
Each of these catastrophes, observe, is of the scale of a Bhopal, yet none is considered an event for which the industrial system is to be held responsible, because there is no accident to focus on, no Union Carbide to blame, only the dispersal of an
uncountable number of ecosystemic insults, and the unpredictable yet inevitable reckoning. We know with great precision what MIC does and how it got to where it could wreak havoc at Bhopal, whereas the evidence of storms is subject to much uncertainty But there is something called the precautionary principle, according to which society is obliged to err on the side of caution where significant evidence exists of an ecologically disruptive relationship without a final proof (which, given the nature of such events, may never transpire). It is clear that sufficient evidence exists as to the presence of greater quantities of trapped solar energy and the mounting frequency of devastating storms.6 After all, what are storms but the coming down of energy beyond the capacity of the atmosphere to bind? Yet in proportion to the menace, the world-systems response is as negligent as was Carbides at Bhopal.7 The
explanation lies within the logic of accumulation. It is not just the obvious fact that any serious grappling with greenhouse gas production will spell trouble for profit in the short and medium run that comprises the horizon of capitals vision. No, there is another motive right here in the present. And that is a realization that global warming, here and now, is good for business. In France, for example,
the terrible storms of 1999 not only turned out to have little macro-economic impact; they are said to be, according to Denis Kessler, president of the French Insurance Companies Federation, a rather good thing for GDP. This is because the damages caused by such events for a highly developed country are relatively low no shanty-towns in France, plenty of emergency equipment, and so on- and exceeded in monetary value by the funds spent on repairs, which tends to renovate damaged
It looks as though the worlds economic decision-makers have decided to do nothing about climate change on the basis that if no change happens, we shall take advantage of a form of growth that continues to intensify the greenhouse effect; and if it does happen, we shall be able to protect ourselves from it and it may even have a favourable effect on the global economy8 The we here refers not to humanity as a whole, but to the
property in a more modern manner. As the author of the article, Herv Kempf, comments : inhabitants of the developed nations to be more exact, their privileged classes. As for the others, well, let them eat mud. Like the untold numbers of birds and other animals wasted by these storms, the fate of the poor is irrelevant to the great march of accumulation, and so becomes a non-issue. Thus Kempf comments:
Venezuelas flood victims counted for little
economically in so far as the countrys oil Output remained unaffected. Consequently their fate, like that of billions of others, is discounted. Such thinking is both a manifestation of the ever-widening gap between the worlds rich and poor, and a cause of that gaps widening. It is also a prime example of the kind of reasoning specific to capital, which employs purely quantitative indices such as gross domestic product (GDP) because they are convenient indices of accumulation. Scarcely a critic of the ecological crisis has refrained from commenting upon the stupid brutality of this number , which reduces
the living and the dead alike to the common denominator of what can be extracted from their commodification. It is necessary though, to see thinking in terms of GDP as no mere error, but the actual logic of the reigning power; and all cries for revising it to reflect human and ecological judgements are simply risible so long as that power remains in place. But it still is an error, and a huge, futurethreatening one. In the reduction of the world to value, and the economy to GDP there occurs both an abstraction and a narrowing.
All things seen through the lens of capital become commodities whose concrete sensuous ecological links are now merely quantities. Hence they drift apart and are separated. The bourgeois calculator of global warming reduces the subject to a series of storms and their effect on profits.
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Link Solving Climate Change

The affs rhetoric of climate change catastrophe is an attempt to mask the root cause of ecological castastrophe economic inequality. Failure to deal with capitalism makes the impact inevitable.
Heidi Bachram, Fellowship, Transnational Institute; Director, Environmental Justice Program, TNI, 2004, Climate Fraud and Carbon Colonialism, search google scholar, click view all sources In the best case scenario that emissions trading is strictly regulated, it is still unlikely to achieve even the woefully inadequate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions enshrined in the Kyoto Protocol. This would be true even if the US joined the rest of the major polluting countries in ratifying the Protocol. Yet should a foolproof monitoring system be put in place, the whole system would lose its appeal of being cheap and unchallenging for corporations, and so any attempt to introduce such methods will be strongly opposed. Furthermore, the neo-liberal trends in international trade make it unlikely that emissions markets will ever be tightly regulated. The strategy and tactics of emissions trading have been adorned with the rationale of neo-liberal ideology; they have become so institutionalized in international forums that regulatory initiatives are unlikely to be proposed from within their circles. Yet even if emissions trading were adequately regulated, the reality is that the trading in pollution best serves the needs of those with the most to lose from resolving the climate crisis. As climate change exposes fundamental flaws in the
current world order, only the most challenging responses will have any prospect of success. Transnational fossil fuel corporations and the governments of industrialized countries will not concede power willingly. That is why emissions trading is being used to distract attention away from the changes that are urgently needed. In this way corporations and government are able to build the illusion of taking action on climate change while reinforcing current unequal power structures. Emissions trading therefore becomes an
instrument by means of which the current world order, built and founded on a history of colonialism, wields a new kind of carbon colonialism. As with the colonialism of old, this new colonizing force justifies its interference through moral
rhetoric. As the colonizers seek to resolve climate change, they conveniently forget the true source of the problem. With the looming climate crisis and the desperate need for action, the resulting course recommended by corporations and government is not analyzed critically. The debate is transformed, shifting the blame onto the poor masses of the global South. Lost in this discourse is the reality that the worlds richest minorities are the culprits who have over-consumed the planet to the brink of ecological disaster. Instead of reducing in the rich countries, a carbon dump is created in the poor countries. Thus
rich countries can continue in their unequal over-consumption of the worlds resources. The poor countries are so poor that they will accept crumbs. They know that and they are taking advantage of it. Sajida Khan, community organizer campaigning against an emissions trading project in Durban, South Africa. On almost every level of emissions trading, colonial and imperialistic dimensions exist. There may be new labels for these phenomena, such as environmental injustice, but the fundamental issues are the same. The dynamics of emissions trading, whereby powerful actors benefit at the expense of disempowered communities in both North and South, is a modern incarnation of a dark colonial past. European colonialism extracted natural resources as well as people from the colonized world. In the 20th century, international financial institutions took on the role of economic colonizer in the form of Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) for the Third World. Now an ecological crisis created by the old colonizers is being reinvented as another market opportunity. This new market brings with it all the built-in inequities that other commodity markets thrive upon. From the pumping of pollution into communities of color in Los Angeles to the land grabbing for carbon sinks in South America, emissions trading continues this age-old colonial tradition.
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***Reform links***
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Link Reform (Mezaros 06)

Reforms are derailed and clawed back Meszaros, 06 (Istvan, Structural Crisis of Politics, Monthly Review, September, Proquest, Accessed 7-11-09, PAK)
I would like to begin with a brief survey of the very disquietingindeed, I should say, of worldwide threateningdevelop-ments in the field of politics and the law. In this respect I wish to
under-line that it was no less than twenty-three years ago that I became personally acquainted in Paraiba, Brazil with the painful circumstances of explosive food riots. Twenty years later, at the time of President Lulas electoral campaign, I read that he had announced that the most impor-tant part of his future strategy was his determination to put an end in the country to the grave social evil of famine. The two intervening decades from the time of those dramatic food riots in Paraiba were obvi-ously not sufficient to solve this chronic problem. And even today, I am told, the improvements are still very modest in Brazil. Moreover, the somber statistics of the United Nations constantly underline that the same problem persists, with devastating consequences, in many parts of the world. This is so despite the fact that the productive powers at the disposal of humankind today could relegate forever to the past the now totally unforgivable social failure of famine and malnutrition.
It might be tempting to attribute these difficulties, as frequently hap-pens in traditional political discourse, to more or less easily corrigible political contingencies, postulating thereby the remedy through changes in personnel at the next suitable and strictly orderly electoral opportu-nity. But that would be a customary evasion and not a plausible expla-nation. For the stubborn persistence of the problems at stake, with all of their painful human consequences, point to much more deeply rooted connections. They indicate some apparently uncontrollable force of iner-tia which seems to be able to turn, with depressing frequency, even the good intentions of promising political manifestos into the paving stones of the road to hell, in Dantes immortal words. In other words, the challenge is to face up to the underlying causes and structural deter-minations which tend to derail by the force of inertia many political programs devised for corrective intervention. To derail them even when it is originally admitted by the authors of such programs that the existing state of affairs is unsustainable.
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Link Reform (OShea 05)

Attempting to reform capitalism from within only serves to stabilize its contradictions efforts at social reform only diffuse revolutionary momentum and are inevitably co-opted by the capitalist state. O'Shea, Editor of The Socialist Alternative, 2005
(Louise , Understanding Marxism: Reform or Revolution?, Socialist Alternative, Volume: 91, http://www.sa.org.au/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=648&Itemid=106, Accessed: 7-9-9 JMP)
Luxemburg published a response to Bernstein in 1899 entitled Social Reform or Revolution. She mercilessly ridiculed the idea that capitalism could be reformed out of existence, likening the prospect to "chang[ing] the sea of capitalist bitterness into a sea of socialist sweetness by progressively pouring into it bottles of social-reformist lemonade". Her central argument was that to abandon the struggle for revolution in favour of reforms meant the abandonment of the struggle for socialism altogether. As Luxemburg put it, "whoever opts for the path of legal reform, in place of and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power, actually chooses not a calmer and slower road to the same aim, but a different aim altogether". Bernstein argued that trade unions and workers' cooperatives had the potential to transform capitalism into socialism. The main aim of trade unions, Luxemburg argued, was to "regulate capitalist exploitation within the market relations", by improving workers' wages and conditions, but not to overthrow the system of wage labour altogether. So a struggle limited by the unions would only result in a society characterised by more equitable distribution of wealth between workers and bosses. Revolution opens the prospect of a society without class divisions of any sort. The same logic applied to the capitalist state. As Engels outlined in 1898, the state is a product of irreconcilable class divisions, the means by which "the most powerful, economically dominant class" goes about "holding down and exploiting the oppressed class". As such, its main function is to maintain capitalist order, not challenge it.
This point was brutally demonstrated in Germany during the revolution of 1918. Inspired by the Russian Revolution and enraged by the slaughter of the First World War, German workers rose up, forcing the Kaiser to flee. The remnants of the old regime turned to the SPD, by then controlled by the reformists, to form a government that could head off further revolutionary change. Luxemburg had led a split from the SPD the previous December to form an explicitly revolutionary organisation. Now her former comrades savagely crushed the revolution. SPD Minister Noske personally oversaw the hunting down and murder of Luxemburg and her collaborator, Karl Liebknecht, also a former SPD leader, in January 1919. The events in Germany clearly indicate that far from socialists being able to impose their interests
on the capitalist state, the state instead forces them to conform to the needs of maintaining capitalist order and the bosses' profits - which puts them on the wrong side of the barricades in the struggle for socialism. And if reformers go too far against the interests of capital, Luxemburg was also clear about the consequences. She described how "as soon as democracy shows the tendency to negate its class character and become transformed into an instrument of the people, the democratic forms are sacrificed by the bourgeoisie and its state representatives."
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Link Reform (OShea 05)

Democratic social reform fails only fundamentally restructuring the material basis of capitalist society through revolutionary working class activity can establish economic justice. O'Shea, Editor of The Socialist Alternative, 2005
(Louise , Understanding Marxism: Reform or Revolution?, Socialist Alternative, Volume: 91, http://www.sa.org.au/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=648&Itemid=106, Accessed: 7-9-9 JMP)
As Marx identified in The German Ideology as early as 1846, "both for the production on a mass scale of ... communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only
because the ruling class cannot be overthrown any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew."
By "muck of ages", Marx meant the myriad of ideas and prejudices that capitalism relies on to maintain the smooth running of a system in which the mass of people have no direct control over the wealth generated by
their collective labour. The subservience to authority, sense of social disconnection and atomisation that are part and parcel of life under capitalism, as well as the divisive ideas of sexism, racism, homophobia and nationalism that are tirelessly fostered by our rulers, can only be thoroughly destroyed through smashing the material basis on which they depend, and the reorganisation of society in the collective interest of the working class.
Struggle is central to this process. Luxemburg described how struggle could challenge long-held assumptions during her observations of the 1905 Russian revolution in The Mass Strike: "The proletarian mass, counted by millions, quite suddenly and sharply came to realise how intolerable was that social and economic existence which they had patiently endured for decades in chains of capitalism." Quoting from a newspaper at the time, Luxemburg writes of "embraces, cries of delight and of enthusiasm, songs of freedom, merry laughter, humour and joy were all seen and heard in the crowd of many thousands of persons which surged through the town from morning till evening. The mood was exalted; one could almost believe that a new, better life was emerging on Earth." The year long miners' strike in Britain in 1984-5 saw similar connections made between workers who in other circumstances may have regarded each other with suspicion, as a wide range of groups rallied in solidarity with the miners. As a Welsh strike leader said, "Now 140,000 miners know that there are other causes and other problems. We know about Blacks, and gays and nuclear
Change which is carried out on behalf of workers, whether through parliamentary reforms or acts of heroism, can never have the transforming impact on the mass of people that conscious, collective direct action can. But it is not just ideas that have to change. The way society is organised has to be radically recast. In workers' revolutions, the very dynamic of the struggle is towards a new way of ordering society. A general strike pushes workers to think about how to provide the necessities of life - under their control.
disarmament. And we will never be the same."
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LinkReform (Zizek 01)

Reform articulated within capitalism only reinforces the capitalist economy. Zizek 01 (Slavoj, professor of philosophy at the Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana, REPEATING LENIN,
http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm) JXu
However, the outcome of this crisis of the private property of the means of production is by no means guaranteed - it is HERE that one should take into account the ultimate paradox of the Stalinist society: against the capitalism which is the class society, but in principle egalitarian, without direct hierarchical divisions, the "mature" Stalinism is a classless society articulated in precisely defined hierarchical groups (top nomenklatura, technical intelligence, army...). What this means is that, already for Stalinism, the
classic Marxist notion of the class struggle is no longer adequate to describe its hierarchy and domination: in the Soviet Union from the late 20s onwards, the key social division was not defined by property, but by the direct access to power mechanisms and to the privileged material and cultural conditions of life (food, accommodation, healthcare, freedom of travel, education). And, perhaps, the ultimate irony of history will be that, in the same way Lenin's vision of the "central bank Socialism" can be properly read only retroactively, from today's World Wide Web, the Soviet Union provided the first model of the developed "post-property" society, of the true "late capitalism" in which the ruling class will be defined by the direct access to the (informational, administrative) means of social power and control and to other material and social privileges: the point will no longer be to own companies, but directly to run them, to have the right to use a private jet, to have access to top health care, etc. - privileges which will be acquired not by property, but by other (educational, managerial, etc.) mechanisms. Today, we already can discern the signs of a kind of
general unease - recall the series of events usually listed under the name of "Seattle." The 10 years honeymoon of the triumphant global capitalism is over, the long-overdue "seven years itch" is here witness the panicky reactions of the big media, which - from the Time magazine to CNN - all of a sudden started to warn about the Marxists manipulating the crowd of the "honest" protesters. The problem is now the strictly Leninist one - how to ACTUALIZE the media's accusations: how to invent the organizational structure which will confer on this unrest the FORM of the universal political demand. Otherwise, the momentum will be lost, and what will remain is the marginal disturbance, perhaps organized as a new Greenpeace, with certain efficiency, but also strictly limited goals, marketing strategy, etc. In other words, the key "Leninist" lesson today is: politics without the organizational FORM of the party is politics without politics, so the answer to those who want just the (quite adequately named) "New SOCIAL Movements" is the same as the answer of the Jacobins to the Girondin compromisers: "You want revolution without a revolution!" Today's blockade is that there are two ways open for the socio-political engagement: either play the game of the system, engage in the "long march through the institutions," or get active in new social movements, from feminism through ecology to anti-racism. And, again, the limit of these movements is that they are not POLITICAL in the sense of the Universal Singular: they are "one issue movements" which lack the dimension of the universality, i.e. they do not relate to the social TOTALITY. Here, Lenin's reproach to liberals is crucial: they only EXPLOIT the working classes' discontent to strengthen their position vis-a-vis the conservatives, instead of identifying with it to the end .52 Is this also not the case with today's Left
liberals? They like to evoke racism, ecology, workers' grievances, etc., to score points over the conservatives WITHOUT ENDANGERING THE SYSTEM. Recall how, in Seattle, Bill Clinton himself deftly referred to the protesters on the streets outside, reminding the gathered leaders inside the guarded palaces that they should listen to the message of the demonstrators (the message which, of course, Clinton interpreted, depriving it of its subversive sting attributed to the dangerous extremists introducing chaos and violence into the majority of peaceful protesters). It's the same with all New Social Movements, up to the Zapatistas in Chiapas: the systemic politics is always ready to "listen
to their demands," depriving them of their proper political sting. The system is by definition ecumenical, open, tolerant, ready to "listen" to all - even if one insist on one's
demands, they are deprived of their universal political sting by the very form of negotiation. The true Third Way we have to look for is this third way between the institutionalized parliamentary politics and the new social movements. The ultimate answer to the reproach that the radical Left proposals are utopian should thus be that, today, the true utopia is the belief that the present liberal-democratic capitalist consensus could go on indefinitely, without radical changes. We are thus back at the old '68 motto "Soyons realistes, demandons l'impossible!": in order to be truly a "realist," one must consider breaking out of the constraints of what appears "possible" (or, as we usually out it, "feasible").
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LinkReform (Foster 07)

The affirmatives reform serves to maintain our current capitalist lifestyles at the detriment of the environment technological solutions only increase the scale of capital and worsen environmental destruction. Foster 07 (John Bellamy, Professor of Sociology at University of Oregon, The Ecology of Destruction, Feb 2007, http://www.monthlyreview.org/0207jbf.htm) JXu
Most climate scientists, including Lovelock and Hansen, follow the IPCC in basing their main projections of global warming on a socioecnomic scenario described as business as usual. The dire trends indicated are predicated on our fundamental economic and technological developments and our basic relation to nature remaining the same. The question we need to ask then is what actually is business as usual? What can be changed and how fast? With time running out the implication is that it is necessary to alter business as usual in radical ways in order to stave off or lessen catastrophe. Yet, the dominant solutionsthose associated with the dominant ideology, i.e., the ideology of the dominant classemphasize minimal changes in business as usual that will somehow get us off the hook. After being directed to the growing planetary threats of global warming and species extinction we are told that the answer is better gas mileage and better emissions standards, the introduction of hydrogenpowered cars, the capture and sequestration of carbon dioxide emitted in the atmosphere, improved conservation, and voluntary cutbacks in consumption. Environmental political scientists specialize in the construction of new environmental policy regimes, embodying state and market regulations. Environmental economists talk of tradable pollution permits and the incorporation of all environmental factors into the market to ensure their efficient use. Some environmental sociologists (my own field) speak of ecological modernization: a whole panoply of green taxes, green regulations, and new green technologies, even the greening of capitalism itself. Futurists describe a new technological world in which the weight of nations on the earth is miraculously lifted as a result of digital dematerialization of the economy. In all of these views, however, there is one constant: the fundamental character of business as usual is hardly changed at all. Indeed, what all such analyses intentionally avoid is the fact that business as usual in our society in any fundamental sense means the capitalist economyan economy run on the logic of profit and accumulation. Moreover, there is little acknowledgement or even appreciation of the fact that the Hobbesian war of all against all that characterizes capitalism requires for its fulfillment a universal war on nature. In this sense new technology cannot solve the problem since it is inevitably used to further the class war and to increase the scale of the economy, and thus the degradation of the environment. Whenever production dies down or social resistance imposes barriers on the expansion of capital the answer is always to find new ways to exploit/degrade nature more intensively. To quote Pontecorvos Burn!, that is the logic of profit....One builds to make money and to go on making it or to make more sometimes it is necessary to destroy.
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LinkReform (Liodakis 01)

Working within the capitalist system fails to understand capitalisms role in environmental destruction. The affirmatives ecological restructuring only creates more degradation. Liodakis 01 (George, Professor of Social Science at Technical University of Crete, The people-nature relation and the historical
significance of the Labour Theory of Value, Capital and Class, Spring 2001, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3780/is_200104/ai_n8940388) JXu
The overall attempt to respond to the exacerbated ecological crisis, from the side of capital, entails extensive recycling, economising on natural resources, the development of new materials and nonpolluting technologies, and an overall restructuring towards a `green capitalism'. This restructuring of capital encompasses èco-regulation', which mainly consists of an attempt to formulate ècologically adjusted prices'. These attempts and regulations, however, are usually proved ineffective insofar as they operate within the system's logic, focus narrowly on the sphere of market exchange, and fail to understand that all relevant phenomena (competition, externalities, etc.) are deeply embedded in capitalist production itself. They also face great difficulties in internalising production cost, enhanced by the competitive
contradiction of capital and the contradictory character of state regulation (see Liodakis, 2000). As Marx has stressed, '[a] 11 thought of a common, allembracing and farsighted control' of the production and consumption of raw materials under capitalism is no more than a `pious wish', flatly ìrreconcilable with the laws of capitalist production' (1967 III: 118-20). It should be noted though, that
capitalism's only absolute limit is extinction of the human race (i.e., of exploitable labour power), and that the restructuring of capitalism can potentially ameliorate or postpone the crisis, ensuring thus, for a certain time span, the reproduction of the system (see Goodman and Redclift, 1991: 254). Given the law of
conservation of matter and energy, however, there are more proximate, both quantitative and qualitative, limits which put the sustainability of capitalism under question (see J. O'Connor, 1988; Benton, 1989; M. O'Connor, 1994; Foster, 1995b, 1997). All attempts at ecological restructuring basically concern the restructuring of property relations, through the market, the rearrangement of competitive conditions, and the rationalisation of capitalist accumulation, without essentially affecting the impact of capitalist rationality and private property on nature. The key thing for capitalism, however, is not the juridical form of private property, but rather the social separation of labour power from natural conditions and the use of the latter as conditions of capital accumulation. Independently of any restructuring of capital and property relations, or of any limited attempt at a valuation of nature, as long as the property of capital as a whole on nature is maintained, the squandering of nature and environmental destruction cannot be prevented. In other words,
it is impossible to ensure the sustainability of capitalism and, within its limits, an essential reconciliation of people with nature. On the contrary, the currently proposed further commoditisation of nature and privatisation of natural resources (see Dasgupta, 1990; Chichilnisky, 1994), will most likely lead to an aggravation of the problem (see Liodakis, 1995,2000).
Capitalist restructuring implies a certain modification of the law of value and not a qualitative conversion or a radical upsetting of the law itself. This modification derives specifically from the increasing internationalisation of production, the changes in state regulation, the increasing externalities and the ecological restructuring towards internalising these externalities, as well as from the continuous concentration of capital, which implies a greater divergence of prices from commodity values in branches with a pronounced monopolistic character. In other words, this modification concerns the specific manner in which the law of value operates under contemporary conditions. Insofar as natural resources are taken as a `free gift of nature , competition leads
to a permanent tendency to increase constant capital, as a crystallisation of alienated labour and natural resources through the labour process, and consequently to a rising organic composition of capital. This tendency, which also serves the needs of capital in increasing the productive power of labour and disciplining it in the context of the production process, creates a crisis-generating pressure through the falling tendency of the rate of profit. This pressure tends toward an increasing externalisation of production cost and, combined with an over-utilisation of natural resources, leads to destructive consequences for the environment. Quantitative changes will be permanently converted into qualitative changes resulting
in a degradation of the environment. On the other hand, the qualitative changes deriving from the real subsumption and capitalisation of nature (see M. O'Connor, 1993; 1994), the increasing socialisation (interdependence) of production on a global level and the competitive race for the increase of relative surplus value, will render further quantitative changes necessary, taking the form of technological modernisation and of an increase in the organic composition of capital, and thus reinforcing the above mentioned tendency.
The overaccumulation crisis of capital tends, as the crisis unfolding since the mid '70s shows, to a serious environmental degradation, following a dialectical process from the part to the whole, the latter being the global economy and the planetary ecosystem.
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LinkReform (Liodakis 01)

Capitalism views nature as a gift of natural resources, necessitating exploitation. Attempts at environmental reform ignore the need for a new struggle to challenge the capitalist system. Liodakis 01 (George, Professor of Social Science at Technical University of Crete, The people-nature relation and the
historical significance of the Labour Theory of Value, Capital and Class, Spring 2001, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3780/is_200104/ai_n8940388) JXu If our interpretation of Marx's labour theory of value is correct, it becomes clear that an ecological revision or correction of this theory, contrary to what is often argued, is not necessary, at least in its specific historical context. As I have shown, the problem is not
the Marxian approach to value and the people-nature relation, but the character of capitalism, which on the one hand, considering the natural forces as 'a gift to capital, leads to the squandering of natural resources and the degradation of the environment, while value, on the other hand, as the historically
specific and dominant reflection of economic calculation in capitalism, is objectively determined by the quantity of necessary 'abstract' labour, disregarding the substantial contribution of nature in production. it has also been shown that the abolition of private property in the means of production and of the law of value in communism implies a dialectical reconciliation of people with nature at a higher level. As economic scarcity cannot be totally eliminated, the ecological compatibility of communism requires, apart from the necessary minimisation of labour-time, an independent accounting for natural resources. Environmental degradation has
often been attributed, in the context of the current environmentalism, to the character of technology and of the dominant ethical values. A plea is also made for an alternative (ecological) technology and new ecological ethics. This approach, however, captures only part of the reality and indeed only the surface of phenomena, while in fact neither technology nor ethics can be considered independent from the dominant capitalist relations of production. On the other hand, if the experience of environmental destruction should
stimulate further development of Marxist theory, this should be in the direction of a more specific qualitative and class analysis of the productive forces, of science and technology. As accumulated experience shows, the character of these factors is not necessarily emancipatory, and their quantitative growth alone will not automatically lead to the communistic `realm of freedom'. What is
more specifically required, from within the contemporary capitalist context, is a conscious struggle for their reorientation, aiming at the meeting of social needs and the protection of the environment, and grounded on a logic tending to supersede the narrow class rationality of capitalist production.
There is here, therefore, a great field for collaboration, mutual interaction and common struggle between Marxism and the ecological movement (see also M. O'Connor, 1994; Foster, 1995a; Kovel, 1995; Burkett, 1996a). Although the reconciliation of people with their natural environment constitutes a major strategic political issue, implying the supersession of the capitalist relations of production, the interaction of Marxism, as a science and movement for social emancipation, with the ecological movement constitutes an urgent task, which should aim at the gradual change of the terms of production and of the character of
the productive forces, of science and technology. With today's social and environmental data, the movement for the protection of the environment is particularly expedient and must necessarily become a component of the broader struggle of the working class for its full emancipation and complete liberation.
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***Other Links***
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Link Military
The military is a vital instrument in the sustenance of capitalism Peoples Liberation Party, 8 (Bosses Will Need More Soldiers for Imperialists Wars, The Communist, summer 2008, page 45, SR).
The armed forces are as essential to the bosses as their factories. Soldiers produce nothing themselves, but under capitalism, they are necessary to the ruling class to mine surplus value. Without the millions of workers handed rifles, the bosses could not defend their interest overseas, extract the raw materials to feed their factories, or secure their ability to exploit the working class at home. The only reason the military exists is to help provide for the bosses the framework within which the produced surplus value is guaranteed to come to them. It is a tool of the bosses, used to preserve their system. Any slogan to change its use-without overthrowing the system- such as Out of Iraq and into Darfur- will only help this weapon be used to exploit other workers. The military is the trump card for the ruling class. It is used to secure their interest when coercion fails. All their negotiations, both with the workers and other rulers are held under the shadow of their army. They tell the workers You dont have to sign the contract, but try to strike and see what happens. At the same time, the fatal flaw in their set-up is that they must rely on the same workers they exploit to fill the ranks of their armies, and die in their wars.
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Link Economy Advantage

Capitalism causes inevitable crashes and conflicteconomic meltdown would result in new controls on international capital, which is good. Mead, Henry Kissinger Senior Fellow for US Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, 97 (Walter Russel, Roller-Coaster Capitalism: Creative Destruction at Work, Foreign Affairs, January/February, http://www.foreignaffairs.org/19970101fareviewessay3746/walter-russell-mead/rollercoaster-capitalism-creative-destruction-at-work.html, Accessed 7-11-09, PAK)
The more creative capitalism becomes -- the faster productivity rises, the more new technology transforms the way we work -- the more destructive it becomes. The firms and factories that do not adapt will die; the skills of workers and existing plant and equipment rapidly become obsolete; whole nations and regions based on the industries and technologies of past decades lose their competitive edge and sink into decline. Observers more conventional than Greider acknowledge this, claiming only that the winners will outnumber the losers in the end. Greider agrees in principle, but he says that the happy ending may be more delayed, and the road to resolution of the dilemma may require more destructive detours, than the conventionally optimistic view can foresee. Again, he draws a comparison with the earlier history of the twentieth century. The productivity increases and technological advances of the 1920s did eventually lead to the great economic expansion and unprecedented mass affluence of the quarter-century from 1950 to 1975, but the road from the 1920s led through the Great Depression of the 1930s and the war of the 1940s before the crowds of winners were able to cash in their chips. It is, of course, impossible to tell if Greider is right. Perhaps the world is in a new financial bubble and today's upward redistribution of income is the harbinger of a vast financial and ultimately political meltdown. If so, many of the oracles of contemporary economic and political wisdom will be metaphorically if not literally hung from the lampposts as popular opinion turns ruthlessly against the ideas, institutions, and leaders of the preceding period. Herbert Hoover was not a popular man during the depression, and Richard Whitney, president of the New York Stock Exchange in 1929, ended up in jail for embezzlement. The best- selling books of the 1930s were, at least figuratively, bound in the skins of the optimists of the 1920s "new era." If anything remotely like this happens, some of the solutions that Greider proposes will be tried. New forms of regulation will attempt to control international capital movements and reduce the risks inherent in today's relatively open trade and investment regimes. Vast public investment projects will attempt to replace the tapped-out power of individual consumers to buy, reviving markets and growth and reducing unemployment by the creation of new demand through public spending.
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Link Courts (Zinn 05)

Their focus on the court is myopic the court and constitution are infinitely flexible, and always used to further interests of capital. The constitution gives us no rights, justice arises only when we organize outside of the law Zinn, 05 (Howard, Its not up to the Court, The Progressive, November, http://www.progressive.org/mag_zinn1105, accessed 7-11-09, GAL)
There is enormous hypocrisy surrounding the pious veneration of the Constitution and "the rule of law." The Constitution, like the Bible, is infinitely flexible and is used to serve the political needs of the moment. When the country was in economic crisis and turmoil in the Thirties and capitalism needed to be saved from the anger of the poor and hungry and unemployed, the Supreme Court was willing to stretch to infinity the constitutional right of Congress to regulate interstate commerce. It decided that the national government, desperate to regulate farm production, could tell a family farmer what to grow on his tiny piece of land. When the Constitution gets in the way of a war, it is ignored. When the Supreme Court was faced, during
Vietnam, with a suit by soldiers refusing to go, claiming that there had been no declaration of war by Congress, as the Constitution required, the soldiers could not get four Supreme Court justices to agree to even hear the case. When,
during World War I, Congress ignored the First Amendment's right to free speech by passing legislation to prohibit criticism of the war, the imprisonment of dissenters under this law was upheld unanimously by the Supreme Court, which included two presumably liberal and learned justices: Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis. It would be naive to depend on the Supreme Court to defend the rights of poor people, women, people of color, dissenters of all kinds. Those rights only come alive when citizens organize, protest, demonstrate, strike, boycott, rebel, and violate the law in order to uphold justice. The distinction between law and justice is ignored by all those Senators--Democrats and Republicans--who solemnly invoke as their highest concern "the rule of law." The law can be just; it can be unjust. It does not deserve to inherit the ultimate authority of the divine right of the king. The Constitution gave no rights to working people: no right to work less than twelve hours a day, no right to a living wage, no right to safe working conditions. Workers had to organize, go on strike, defy the law, the courts, the police, create a great movement which won the eight-hour day, and caused such commotion that Congress was forced to pass a minimum wage law, and Social Security, and unemployment insurance. The Brown decision on school desegregation did not come from a sudden realization of the Supreme Court that this is what the Fourteenth Amendment called for. After all, it was the same Fourteenth Amendment that had been cited in the Plessy case upholding racial segregation. It was
the initiative of brave families in the South--along with the fear by the government, obsessed with the Cold War, that it was losing the hearts and minds of colored people all over the world--that brought a sudden enlightenment to the Court. The Supreme Court in 1883 had interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment so that nongovernmental institutions hotels, restaurants, etc.-could bar black people. But after the sit-ins and arrests of thousands of black people in
the South in the early Sixties, the right to public accommodations was quietly given constitutional sanction in 1964 by the Court. It now interpreted the interstate commerce clause, whose wording had
not changed since 1787, to mean that places of public accommodation could be regulated by Congressional action and be prohibited from discriminating. Soon this would include barbershops, and I suggest it takes an ingenious interpretation to include barbershops in interstate commerce.
The right of a woman to an abortion did not depend on the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. It was won before that decision, all over the country, by grassroots agitation that forced states to recognize the right. If the American people, who by a great majority favor that right, insist on it, act on it, no Supreme Court decision can take it away. The rights of working people, of women, of black people have not depended on decisions of the courts. Like the other branches of the political system, the courts have recognized these rights only after citizens have engaged in direct action powerful enough to win these rights for themselves.
This is not to say that we should ignore the courts or the electoral campaigns. It can be useful to get one person rather than another on the Supreme Court, or in the Presidency, or in Congress. The courts, win or lose, can be used to dramatize issues. On St. Patrick's Day, 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, four anti-war activists poured their own blood around the vestibule of a military recruiting center near Ithaca, New York, and were arrested. Charged in state court with criminal mischief and trespassing (charges well suited to the American invaders of a certain Mideastern country), the St. Patrick's Four spoke their hearts to the jury.
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Peter DeMott, a Vietnam veteran, described the brutality of war. Danny Burns explained why invading Iraq would violate the U.N. Charter, a treaty signed by the United States. Clare Grady spoke of her moral obligations as a Christian. Teresa Grady spoke to the jury as a mother, telling them that women and children were the chief victims of war, and that she cared about the children of Iraq. Nine of the twelve jurors voted to acquit them, and the judge declared a hung jury. (When the federal government retried them on felony conspiracy charges, a jury in September acquitted them of those and convicted them on lesser charges.)
, knowing the nature of the political and judicial system of this country, its inherent bias against the poor, against people of color, against dissidents, we cannot become dependent on the courts, or on our political leadership. Our culture--the media, the educational system--tries to crowd out of our political consciousness everything except who will be elected President and who will be on the Supreme Court, as if these are the most important decisions we make. They are not. They deflect us from the most important job citizens have, which is to bring democracy alive by organizing, protesting, engaging in acts of civil disobedience that shake up the system. That is why Cindy Sheehan's dramatic stand in Crawford, Texas, leading to 1,600 anti-war vigils around the country, involving 100,000 people, is more crucial to the future of
Still American democracy than the mock hearings on Justice Roberts or the ones to come on Judge Alito. That is why the St. Patrick's Four need to be supported and emulated. That is why the GIs refusing to return to Iraq, the families of soldiers calling for withdrawal from the war, are so important. That is why the huge peace march in Washington on September 24 bodes well. Let us not be disconsolate over the increasing control of the court system by the right wing.
The courts have never been on the side of justice, only moving a few degrees one way or the other, unless pushed by the people. Those words engraved in the marble of the Supreme Court, "Equal Justice Before the Law," have always been a sham. No Supreme Court, liberal or conservative, will stop the war in Iraq, or redistribute the wealth of this country, or establish free medical care for every human being. Such fundamental change will depend, the experience of the past suggests, on the actions of an aroused citizenry, demanding that the promise of the Declaration of Independence--an equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--be fulfilled.
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Link Courts (Mezaros 06)

The constitution is blatantly and openly disregarded with no consequence when the interests of capital dictate it tinkering with the law cant solve the structural causes of the aff harms Meszaros, 06 (Istvan, Structural Crisis of Politics, Monthly Review, September, Proquest, Accessed 7-11-09, PAK)
In the meantime so many grave problems are crying out for genuine solutions which could be well within our reach. Some of them have been with us for several decades, imposing terrible suffering and sacrifices on millions of people. Colombia is an oustanding example. For forty years the forces of oppressioninternal and external,
U.S. dominatedtried to suffocate the struggle of the Colombian people, without success. Attempts to reach a negotiated settlementwith the participation of all social groups, without exception, in
16
order to reconcile the Colombian family, in the words of Manuel Marulanda Vlez, the leader of FARCEPhave been systematically frustrated. As Vlez wrote in an open letter addressed recently to a presidential candidate: No government, liberal or conservative, produced an effective political solution to the social and armed conflict. The negotiations were used for the purpose of changing nothing, so that everything should remain the same. All of the political schemes of the governments were using the Constitution and the laws as a barrier, to make sure that everything continues the way
17
as we had it before.
when the dominant social interests dictate it, constitutionali-ty and the rules of democratic consensus are used in Colombia (and elsewhere) as cynical devices for evading and forever postponing the solution of even the most burning issues, no matter how immense might be the scale of suffering imposed, as a result, on the people. And by the same token, in a different social context but under the same kind of deeply embedded structural determinations, even the most blatant and openly admitted violations of established constitutionality are disre-garded, despite the periodic ritual lip service paid to the necessity to respect the constitutional requirements. In this sense, when the Congressional committee investigating the Irangate Contra Affairs had concluded that the Reagan administration was responsible for sub-verting the Law and undermining the Constitution, absolutely nothing happened to condemn, let alone to remove, the guilty president. And in yet another type of caseas we have seen in the ruling LDP govern-ments determination to subvert the Japanese Constitutionwhen the original constitutional clauses appear to be obstacles to embarking on perilous new military adventures, the dominant social and political interests of the country impose a new legal framework whose principal function is to liquidate the once proclaimed democratic safeguards and turn what was formerly decreed unlawful into arbitrarily institutional-ized constitutional lawfulness. Nor should we forget what has been happening in a most adverse,
Thus,
and in its trend dangerously authoritari-an, sense to British and United States constitutionality during the last few years. As I indicated at the beginning, we cannot attribute the chronic prob-lems of our social interchanges
to more or less easily corrigible political contingencies. So much is at stake, and we have historically rather lim-ited time at our disposal in order to redress, in a socially sustainable way, the all too obvious grievances of the structurally subordinated social classes. The question of why?concerning substantive matters, and not simply the contingent personal failures, even when they happen to be serious, as the frequently highlighted instances of widespread political corruption arecannot be avoided indefinitely. It is necessary to investigate the social causes and deep-seated structural determina-tions at the roots of the disturbing negative trends in politics and the law, in order to be able to explain their stubborn persistence and worsening at the present time. This question of why is what I wish to pursue now.
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Allies are a way of US power projection of capitalism Gowan 04 (Peter, Peter Gowan is Professor of International Relations at London Metropolitan University, Triumphing toward
International Disaster: The Impasse in American Grand Strategy, Critical Asian Studies, http://www.socialistresistance.co.uk/Triumphing%20toward%20International%20Disaster.pdf or http://www.bcasnet.org/articlesandresources/article14_1.htm)
Another way of thinking about this primacy system would be to think of it as a type of empire, organized on three axes: first, the geopolitical alliance system under U.S. primacy, turning the other advanced capitalist centers into quasi-protectorates; second, the internal regime frameworks of the quasi-protectorates they would not be allowed to go socialist or to produce regimes on the right seeking to switch alliances to the USSR; and third, an axis involving economics and economic regimes, assuring an expansive and leading position for American capitalism, as the quote from Samuel Huntington indicated above. We will examine this third axis in more detail below. The alliance systems can be seen as the heart of the empire structure and since the alliances were formalized in treaties, it would be wrong to characterize this imperial structure as informal. But it is also wrong to see empire as resting simply on such treaties plus some sort of coercive imposition by Washington. It rested rather on Washingtons ability to shape the environment of the protectorates to ensure that they did cleave to Washingtons leadership. The crucial part of the environment that was so shaped was the Soviet Bloc
itself: by pressing it militarily, the United States made it a military threat to its protectorates (especially the nonnuclear ones). But another part of the way that Washington shaped the environment to ensure dependency on the part of its allies was through its willingness to project its power also into the South. Using bases within its protectorates, the United States then took upon itself to protect the key zones for raw materials (including energy) and markets in the South of its allies . As they
grew and expanded outwards, they thus became increasingly dependent on this other aspect of U.S. power projection. (18) This aspect of Washingtons commitment, of course, landed it in serious problems both in Vietnam and in other parts of the South, such as Iran, during the cold war.
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The affirmatives promotion of international law/market economy/liberal democracy are all attempts to secure the internationalization of capital Sakellaropoulos 08 (Spyros, Assistant Professor in the Social Policy Department of the Panteion University, specializing in
the subject State and Political Theory, American Foreign Policy as Modern Imperialism: From Armed Humanitarianism to Preemptive War, http://web.ebscohost.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=2&hid=12&sid=2a83c715-08ec-4e2aa643-194b21de665e%40sessionmgr11)
American neoconservative thinkers have the virtue of not retorting to cosmopolitan rhetoric, when talking about U. S. foreign policy. They insist that there is no alternative to American leadership. Many states have benefited from the world order created by U. S. power, and if the United States failed, the rest of the world would be in a much worse situation (Kagan, 1998). Especially after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, many scholars argued for the necessity of a benevolent hegemony, which will have as its first objective the
preservation and enhancement of U. S. predominance by strengthening its security, supporting its friends, advancing its interests and standing up for its principles around the world (Kristol and Kagan, 1996). Proponents of the Benevolent Hegemon Thesis discredit European criticisms of American policy; Europeans, it is said, are free to live in peace because there are Americans who safeguard this peace (Kagan, 2002). For this benevolent hegemony to be consolidated,
U. S. supremacy is necessary, together with the order it secures. The U. S. strategy appears in this view as an aggressive effort to safeguard capitalist social relations on a global scale; to make sure that all the institutional arrangements necessary for the internationalization of capital are in place all over the world, and that there are no obstacles to capital accumulation. While U. S. strategy supports American firms and investments overseas, it also promotes a global collective capitalist interest. It defends U. S. hegemony in the imperialist chain as the most powerful capitalist state and the only state capable of safeguarding the long-term interest of all the major capitalist states, and in this way to make sure that there will be no contestation of U. S. predominance. It is on the basis of this effort to represent the global collective capitalist interest, and not sheer
arrogance, that the national security strategy is very clear: the United States will not hesitate to attack anyone (even a present ally) who opposes its dominant position. The United States thus seeks to prevent the emergence of
challengers, at either the global or regional levels, by promoting international law, market economy and liberal democracy (Posen and Ross, 199697, 34). From now on the USA must act as the sole
superpower by promoting its military dominance, including unilateral military action and pre-emptive use of force (Hoffmann, 2003).
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RACE AND CLASS ARE DIALECTICALLY CONJOINED IN THE REPRODUCTION OF CAPITALIST RELATIONSCAPITALISM RACIALIZES SUBJECTS TO ENTRENCH COMPETITION AND DESTROY UNIVERSAL CONSCIOUSNESS AS WELL AS SUSTAINS WHITE RACISM SAN JUAN (Fulbright Lecturer @ Univ. of Leuven, Belgium) 2003
[E., Marxism and the Race/Class Problematic: A Re-Articulation, p. online: http://clogic.eserver.org/2003/sanjuan.html]
Race and class are dialectically conjoined in the reproduction of capitalist relations of exploitation and domination. 30. We might take a passage from Marx as a source of guidelines for developing a historical-materialist theory of racism which is not empiricist but dialectical in
aiming for theorizing conceptual concreteness as a multiplicity of historically informed and configured determinations. This passage comes from a letter dated 9 April 1870 to Meyer and Vogt in which Marx explains why the Irish struggle for autonomy was of crucial significance for the British proletariat: . . . Every industrial and commercial center in England possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he feels himself a member of the ruling nation and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his country against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the 'poor whites' to the 'niggers' in the former slave states of the USA. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker at once the accomplice and stupid tool of the English rule in Ireland. This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class,
Marx sketches three parameters for the sustained viability of racism in modern capitalist society. First, the economic competition among workers is dictated by the distribution of labor power in the labor-market via differential wage rates. The distinction between skilled and unskilled labor is contextualized in differing national origins, languages and traditions of workers, which can be manipulated into racial antagonisms. Second, the appeal of racist ideology to white workers ,
despite its organization. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it (quoted in Callinicos 1993). Here
with their identification as members of the "ruling nation" affording--in W.E.B. DuBois's words--"public and psychological wage" or
. Like religion, white-supremacist nationalism provides the illusory resolution to the real contradictions of life for the working majority of citizens. Third, the ruling class reinforces and maintains these racial divisions for the sake of capital accumulation within the framework of its ideological/political hegemony in the metropolis and worldwide . 31. Racism and nationalism are thus modalities in which class struggles articulate themselves at strategic points in history . No doubt
compensation social conflicts in recent times have involved not only classes but also national, ethnic, and religious groups, as well as feminist, ecological,
). The concept of "internal colonialism" (popular in the seventies) that subjugates national minorities, as well as the principle of self-determination for oppressed or "submerged" nations espoused by Lenin, exemplify dialectical attempts to historicize the collective agency for socialist transformation . Within the framework of the global division of labor between
antinuclear social movements (Bottomore 1983
metropolitan center and colonized periphery, a Marxist program of national liberation is meant to take into account the extraction of surplus value from colonized peoples through unequal exchange as well as through direct colonial exploitation in "Free Trade Zones," illegal traffic in prostitution, mail-order brides, and contractual domestics (at present, the Philippines provides the bulk of the latter,
National oppression has a concrete reality not entirely reducible to class exploitation but incomprehensible apart from it; that is, it cannot be adequately understood without the domination of the racialized peoples in the dependent formations by the colonizing/imperialist power, with the imperial nation-state acting as the exploiting class, as it were (see San Juan 1998; 2002). 32. Racism arose with the creation and expansion of the capitalist world economy (Wolf 1982; Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991). Solidarities conceived as racial or ethnic groups acquire meaning and value in terms of their place within the social organization of production and reproduction of the ideologicalpolitical order; ideologies of racism as collective social evaluation of solidarities arise to reinforce structural constraints which preserve the exploited and oppressed position of these "racial" solidarities. Such patterns of economic and political segmentation mutate in response to the impact of changing economic and political relationships (Geshwender and
about ten million persons and growing). Levine 1994). Overall, there is no denying the fact that national-liberation movements and indigenous groups fighting for sovereignty, together with heterogeneous alliances and coalitions, cannot be fully understood without a critical analysis of the production of surplus value and its expropriation by the propertied class--that is, capital accumulation. As John Rex noted, different ethnic groups are placed in relations of cooperation, symbiosis or conflict by the fact that as groups they have different economic and political functions.Within this changing class order of [colonial societies], the language of racial difference frequently becomes the means whereby men allocate each other to different social and economic positions. What the type of analysis used here suggests is that the exploitation of clearly marked groups in a variety of different ways is integral to capitalism and that ethnic groups unite and act together because they have been subjected to distinct and differentiated
Hence race relations and race conflict are necessarily structured by the larger totality of the political economy of a given society, as well as by modifications in the structure of the world economy. Corporate profit-making via class exploitation on an international/globalized scale, at bottom, still remains the logic of the world system of finance capitalism based on historically changing structures and retooled practices of domination and subordination.
types of exploitation. Race relations and racial conflict are necessarily structured by political and economic factors of a more generalized sort (1983, 403-05, 407).
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Conflict Intervention Is Used by the US to further its own economic and geopolitical interests Power 01 (Marucs, 'Patrimonialism & petro-diamond capitalism: peace, geopolitics & the economics of war in Angola'),
Review of African Political Economy, 28:90, 489 502, December 01, Informaworld)
This complex geography of international complicity also links UNITA to various US administrations
in a number of interesting ways (see Wright, this issue). When Herman Cohen, former US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs in the first Bush administration (1989-1993), recently published his 'practitioner's memoir' (Cohen, 2000:xii), he described many 'typical African states' in terms of their 'tendency toward extreme harshness and murder to maintain power' (Ibid.:198). As with many other readings of African politics, Cohen fails to see or understand the historical or geographical construction of the 'weak state politics' he examines (Jackson, 2001). In an account that is almost surreal, Cohen inadvertently hints at the complex interplay of economic and geopolitical interests that have come together in the Angolan war. Describing US efforts to heal a rift between Jonas Savimbi and Mobutu Sese Seko, in order to strengthen UNITA's negotiating position in relation to the MPLA, Cohen (Ibid.:97) recalls how: Mobutu received us on the terrace under a brilliant Riviera sky... After ordering aperitifs, Mobutu ... said [to Savimbi:] 'In front of our American friend Cohen, I pledge to you that I will support you to the end'. He offered his hand and Savimbi took it. That was that. We then adjourned to the sivimming pool terrace for the birthday party, with 250 guests and a jazz orchestra flown specially from Kinshasa for the occasion. The result of this Riviera reconciliation was the resumption of arms flows to UNITA from the United States via the territory of Zaire. In an ironically-entitled conclusion ('Superpower in Africa: Mediator or Meddler?'), Cohen lists some of the lessons he 'learnt' from his involvement in Bush's 'aggressive policy of diplomatic intervention in African conflicts': 'starting early is better than starting late'; 'talk to everyone'; and 'beware of signature obsession' (Ibid.: 222). Cohen's book implicitly confirms that conflict management in Africa by superpowers is always subservient to their own perceived national interests and strategic geopolitical goals Qackson, 2001). Peacekeeping and
conflict management are represented as neutral and impartial enterprises but successive US administrations have preferred conflict management to conflict resolution in Angola, thus undermining claims to neutrality on the part of mediators and peacekeepers. The disappearance of cold war patronage has not made the geopolitical context of the Angolan war irrelevant: the 'Orphan of the Cold War' (Anstee, 1996) is now twenty-six years old and Angola remains, in a very real way, subject to the legacies of Cold War history. As Messiant (2001:291) has put it, '[t]he conditions of war ... have served to entrench various distinctive features of the Angolan state, some old and some rather new'.
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Rhetoric of economic collapse snowballs into a politics of crisis in which capitalism is the only hope for survival Zizek 97 (Slavoj, Multiculturalism, or, the cultural logic of multinational capitalism, New Left Review # 224 p. 34-35)
The Logic of Capital. So, back to the recent Labour victory, one can see how it not only involved a hegemonic reappropriation of a series of motifs which were usually inscribed into the Conservative fieldfamily values, law and order, individual responsibility; the Labour ideological offensive also separated these motifs from the obscene phantasmatic subtext which sustained them in the Conservative fieldin which toughness on crime and individual responsibility subtly referred to brutal egotism, to the disdain for victims, and other basic instincts. The problem, however, is that the New Labour strategy involved its own message between the lines: we fully accept the logic of Capital, we will not mess about with it. Today,
financial crisis is a permanent state of things the reference to which legitimizes the demands to cut social spending, health care, support of culture and scientific research, in short, the dismantling of the welfare state. Is, however, this permanent crisis really an objective feature of our socio-economic life? Is it not rather one of the effects of the shift of balance in the class struggle towards Capital, resulting from the growing role of new technologies as well as from the direct internationalization of Capital and the co-dependent diminished role of the Nation-State which was further able to impose certain minimal requirements and limitations to exploitation ? In other words, the crisis is an objective fact if and
only if one accepts in advance as an unquestionable premise the inherent logic of Capitalas more and more left-wing or liberal parties have done. We are thus witnessing the uncanny spectacle of social-democratic parties which came
to power with the between-the-lines message to Capital we will do the necessary job for you in an even more efficient and painless way than the conservatives. The problem, of course, is that, in todays global socio-political circumstances, it is practically impossible effectively to call into question the logic of Capital: even a modest social-democratic attempt to redistribute wealth beyond the limit acceptable to the Capital effectively leads to economic crisis, inflation, a fall in revenues and so on. Nevertheless, one should always bear in mind how the connection between cause (rising social expenditure) and effect (economic crisis) is not a direct objective causal one: it is always-already embedded in a situation of social antagonism and struggle. The fact that, if one does not obey the limits set by Capital, a crisis
really follows, in no way proves that the necessity of these limits is an objective necessity of economic life. It should rather be conceived as a proof of the privileged position Capital holds in the economic and political struggle, as in the situation where a stronger partner threatens that if you do X, you will be punished by Y, and then, upon your doing X, Y effectively ensues.
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Capitalism causes dependency on foreign aid, foreign investment, foreign trade, and foreign military creating a never ending cycle of dependency Ankie M. Hoogvelt, 2001. (Globalization and the postcolonial world : the new political economy of development, p.38-39)
The essence of the dependency theory is the contention that as a result of penetration by colonial capital a distorted structure of economy and society had been created in the colonial countries which would reproduce overall economic stagnation and extreme pauperization of the masses for all time.
A distorted structure of economy implied two things: 1. The subordination of the economy to the structure of advanced capitalist countries. This had involved a re-organization of the economy in such a way that it only produced primary goods for the industrial West, and the prevention (under colonialism) of local industrialization. Moreover, the production structure was limited in scope and diversity. As late as 1970, about ten years after the last move to formal independence, a UN report observed that at that time almost 90 per cent of the export earnings of the developing countries derived from primary products; that almost one-half of these countries earned more than 50 per cent of their export receipts from a single primary commodity; and that as many as three-quarters of them earned more than 60 per cent from three primary products.'6
2. External orientation, which meant an extreme dependency on overseas markets, both for capital and technology sourcing and for production outlets. External dependency was often exacerbated by extreme concentration of the dependency upon few rather than many metropolitan countries (in the main as a result of continuing linkages with the colonial mother country). There were a number of empirical indicators, which were said to reflect such external concentration: trade partner concentration; aid donor concentration; export product specialization and military trade partner concentration.
Empirically proven-When development fails in a country the U.S. occupies to secure its self-interest-th is allows a reciprocal cycle of exploitation and dependency Ankie M. Hoogvelt. 2001.
(Globalization and the postcolonial world : the new political economy of development, p. 34-35) Of course, when indirect tactics of 'informal' imperialism failed, the US on many occasions resorted to direct and military intervention to secure a stable investment climate and keep the lifelines of resources and markets open to the 'free world'. Between 1945 and 1970, the US in fact intervened militarily in Greece, Korea, Lebanon, Dominican Republic, Grenada and, of course, Vietnam. It was further involved in the destabilisation of regimes in Turkey, Iran, Guatemala, Cambodia, South Korea, Lebanon, Laos, Cuba, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Chile, Ghana, Zaire and Mali. Since the dominant features of neo-colonialism resource bondage, technological dependency and subjection to informal imperialism were features commonly shared by the new nations of Africa and Asia, and by the 'semi-colonies' of Latin America, the neocolonial period was also the period which fostered and defined the solidarity of all of the Third World in its political and ideological stance against the First World-dominated world order. Modernisation Theory. In the same way that the colonial period had thrown up its own theories of imperialism, of the apologetic and of the critical variety, so too did the neo-colonial period encourage the development of a body of knowledge historically specific to its own time. On the one hand there were the 'modernisation theories' which uncritically accepted the structure of the relationships between rich and poor countries that had evolved during the preceding epochs of capitalist expansion. They wrote a kind of 'How to develop' manual for
less-developed countries. On the other hand, there were the dependency theories which critiqued the modernisation theories and, by bringing the structure of unequal relationships between rich and poor countries back into the picture, demonstrated that modernisation theories served to mask the continuing imperialist nature of those relationships.
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Zizek, 2002
Slavoj Zizek, Professor of Sociology at the Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana University, Revolution at the Gates, 2002 pg. 171-172
Let us take one of the hottest topics in today's "radical" American academia: postcolonial studies. The problem of postcolonialism is undoubtedly crucial; however, postcolonial studies tend to translate it into the multiculturalist problematic
of the colonized minorities' "right to narrate" their victimizing experience, of the power mechanisms which repress "otherness", so that, at the end of the day, we learn that the root of postcolonial exploitation is our intolerance towards the Other, and, furthermore, that this intolerance itself is rooted in our intolerance towards the "Stranger in Ourselves", in our inability to confront what we have repressed in and of ourselves the politico-economic struggle is thus imperceptibly transformed into a pseudo-psychoanalytic drama of the subject unable to confront its inner traumas.... (Why pseudopsychoanalytic? Because the true lesson of psychoanalysis is not that the external events which fascinate and/or disturb us are just projections of our inner repressed impulses. The unbearable fact of life is that there really are disturbing events out there: there are other human beings who experience intense sexual enjoyment while we are half-impotent; there are people submitted to terrifying torture.... Again, the ultimate truth of psychoanalysis is not that of discovering our true Self, but that of the traumatic encounter with an unbearable Real.) The true corruption of American academia is not primarily financial, it is not only that universities are able to buy many European critical intellectuals (myself included up to a point), but conceptual: notions of "European" critical
theory are imperceptibly translated into the benign universe of Cultural Studies chic. At a certain point, this chic becomes indistinguishable from the famous Citibank commercial in which scenes of East Asian, European, Black and American children playing is accompanied by the voice-over: "People who were once divided by a continent ... are now united by an economy" at this concluding highpoint, of course, the children are replaced by the Citibank logo.9 The great majority of today's "radical" academics silently count on the long-term stability of the American capitalist model, with a secure tenured position as their ultimate professional goal (a surprising number of them even play the stock market). If there is one thing they are genuinely afraid of, it is a radical shattering of the (relatively) safe life-environment of the "symbolic classes" in developed Western societies. Their excessive Politically Correct zeal when they are dealing with sexism, racism, Third World sweatshops, and so on, is thus ultimately a defence against their own innermost identification, a kind of compulsive ritual whose hidden logic is: "Let's talk as much as possible about the necessity of a radical change, to make sure that nothing will really change!"
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Governments use talk of ecological strains, particularly overpopulation, to mask the harms of capitalism Meszaros, 95 (Istvan Meszaros, Hungarian Marxist philosopher and Professor Emeritus at U. Sussex. Beyond Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition. p. 875)
"The God that failed" in the image of technological omnipotence is now revarnished and shown around again under the umbrella of universal 'ecological concern'. Ten years ago ecology could be safely ignored or dismissed as totally
irrelevant. Today it must be grotesquely misrepresented and one-sidedly exaggerated so that people sufficiently impressed by the cataclysmic tone of ecological sermons - can be successfully diverted from burning social and political problems. Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans (especially Latin Americans) should not multiply at pleasure - not even at God's pleasure, if they are Roman Catholics - for lack of restraint might result in 'intolerable ecological strains'. That is, in plain words, it might even endanger the prevailing social relation of forces, the rule of capital. Similarly, people should forget all about the astronomical expenditure on armaments and accept sizeable cuts in their standard of living, in order to meet the costs of 'environmental rehabilitation': chat is, in plain words, the costs of keeping the established system of expanding waste-production well-oiled.
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Military spending plays a central role in capitalism Callinicos Professor of European Studies 2003 (Alex, An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto)
Dissolution of the military-industrial complex: The fall in global military expenditure after the end of the Cold War proved to be a blip. In 1999 arms spending rose for the first time since 1988. George W. Bush's war demonstrations January 2002 budget proposed to increase defence spending by $120 billion in the following five years.6 Claude Serfati itemizes some of the main features of the broader process of 'armed globalization' of which these statistics are a symptom: 'the transformation of the conditions of
arms production and the central role that finance capital plays there, the increasing integration of civil and military technologies, the multiplication of types of weapon of mass destruction (chemical and bacteriological), but also their easier proliferation. The militarization of the planet at the dawn of the twenty-first century presents redoubtable dangers.'' These dangers are by no means confined to the activities of the advanced
capitalist states. One consequence of the war in Afghanistan was to stoke up tensions between South Asia's two nuclear powers, India and Pakistan. But the Financial Times noted: `While the international community calls for restraint on the IndoPakistan border, governments led by the UK and the US are jockeying as never before for a bigger slice of India's growing arms budget.' Among the visitors to New Delhi attracted by the $5 billion India spends annually on military hardware were the British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, and the US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers." Military expenditures generated by
geopolitical competition at the global and regional level threaten appalling destruction; it also represents a huge diversion of resources from socially worthwhile uses. Responding to this set of problems
would once again require a programme in its own right embracing the dissolution of NATO, universal nuclear disarmament, drastic cuts in arms budgets, the more general demilitarization of the globe, and public support for the conversion of military industries to civilian purposes.
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The ideology of exceptionalism is justifications for war we feel that our economic power should be a model for others Jim Glassman, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Transnation hegemony and US labor foreign policy: towards a Gramscian international labor geography, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2004, volume 22, pages 573-593
Americas unique historical development, especially the distinctive social traditions and conditions that emerged from its revolutionary origins, have underpinned the idea of American exceptionalism. While
outsiders may regard the American attachment toliberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism and laissez faire - which Lipset claims embody the American creed - with varying degrees of admiration, incredulity or bafflement, we should not underestimate how
powerful a force such ideas have been in defining a sense of national identity and, by extension, American foreign policy. Indeed, unless we recognise how important the moral dimension of both Americas domestic life and its foreign policy remain, we shall not be able to understand why the characterisation of the Bush regimes post-September 11 policy stance as a war against evil resonated so powerfully with so many Americans. As Lipset (1996: 20) points out: To endorse a war and call on people to kill others and
die for the country, Americans must define their role in a conflict as being on Gods side against Satan-for morality against evil, not, in its self-perception, to defend national interests. Gramscians, critical theorists and the temperamentally sceptical may regard the legitimating discourse that emerged around the war on terror with a good deal of suspicion, but in a country where well over 90 per cent of the population profess a belief in God, it is difficult to overestimate the continuing importance of religion generally and Christianity in particular as a source of identity, belief and political mobilisation. Indeed, so powerful does religion remain in American life that some observers question whether the US is a secular state at all (Gray 1998). Unsurprisingly, therefore, this
sense of exceptionalism, and the belief that the US is a unique country with a possibly God-given historical mission, has shaped US foreign policy and given rise to the idea that America and American values must provide a beacon for the world (McDougall 1997). Crucially, however, this is a vision that needs to be actively exported: assumptions about the presumed superiority, universality and desirability of American values, in combination with a growing economic, political and strategic power to impose such a morally-informed model on other countries, meant that Americas increasing engagement with the world would be overlaid with distinctive American norms on the one hand, and inescapable structural dominance on the other. Consequently, the key question has always been about how, rather than if, such an engagement would occur. As Lake (1999) points out, the central story of American foreign policy in the twentieth century when America became hegemonic was not about a conflict between isolationists and internationalists, but between unilateralists and multilateralists. The experience of the catastrophic, unilateralist inter- war period, and the contrast with the decisive role the US played in creating the postwar order appeared to have permanently resolved this tension in favour of the multilateralists. Recent events serve as a reminder that policy is not structurally determined
or inescapably path-dependent, but a susceptible to reconstruction by those with an alternative vision, ideology or grand strategy. In other words, what Susan Strange (1994) described as Americas structural power in the international system may inevitably make it the
dominant power of the era, but this does not determine either the content of its foreign policy or the precise nature of its engagement with the world.
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Law is an avenue by which the rich are always placed above the poor. Parenti, received his Ph.D. in political science from Yale University, 84
Michael Parenti, he was awarded a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition serves on the advisory boards of Independent Progressive Politics Network, Education Without Borders, and the Jasenovic Foundation as a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C, The law in its majestic equality, Anatole France once observed, prohibits rich and poor alike from stealing bread and
something of a farce, a fiction that allows us to speak of the rights of all divorced from the class conditions that often place the rich above the law and the poor below it. In the absence of certain substantive conditions, formal rights are of little value to millions who lack the time, money and opportunity to make a reality of their rights. Take the right of every citizen to be heard. In its majestic equality, the law allows both the rich and
begging in the streets. And in so doing the law becomes the poor to raise high their political voices: both are free to hire the best-placed lobbyists and Washington lawyers to pressure public officeholders; both are free to shape public opinion by owning a newspaper or television station; and both rich and poor have the right to engage in multimillion-dollar election campaigns in order to pick the right persons
equality is something of a fiction as we shall see in the pages ahead. Of what good are the rules for those millions who are
for office or win office themselves. But again, this formal political
excluded from the game?
Under capitalism, law is a means of manipulation and control Quinney, prof. of sociology at Northern Illinois U and founder of critical criminology , and Shelden, prof. of criminal justice at UNLV, 01
(Richard Quinney, Randall G. Shelden, Critique of legal order, 2001, http://books.google.com/books?id=yGGj8V9ABMAC&pg=PA192&lpg=PA192&dq=%22capitalist+legal %22&source=bl&ots=okjdakaLnR&sig=sbVW8X4IIxKgLfk84_Kq6KdrJeE&hl=en&ei=6tBpSsCLHI2cM OawnNAM&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=10) As students of law and crime, and as socialists, our task is to consider the alternative to the capitalist legal order. Further study of the American legal system must be devoted to the contradictions of the existing legal order. At this advanced stage of capitalist development, law is little more than a rigid and repressive means of manipulation and control. We must make others aware of the current meaning of law and crime control in capitalist society. The
objective is to move beyond the existing legal order. And this means ultimately that we are engaged in a socialist revolution.
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LinkJews
The Jews are the epitome of Capitalisms lust for money. Their Worship of the Jewish god of money dissolves the world into war.
Marx 44(Karl, The Guy who invinted Communism, On the Jewish Question, 1844 accessed April 13, 2011
@http://www.world-culture.info/the-jewish-basis-of-capitalism:
is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may existThe chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the trader, and above all of the financierThe Jew determines the fate of the whole Empire by his financial power. The Jew decides the fate of EuropeThe god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the world. Money is the real god of the Jew . His god is only an illusory bill of exchangeLet us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Capitalism. What is his worldly God? MoneyThe monotheism of the Jew is in reality the polytheism of the many needs, a polytheism which makes even the toilet an object of divine law . Practical need, egoism, is the principle of civil society; the god of practical need and self-interest is moneyJudaism could not develop further as a
"Money religion, could not develop further theoretically, because the world outlook of practical need is essentially limited and is completed in a few strokesJudaism could not create a new world; it
could only draw the new creations and conditions of the world into the sphere of its activity, because practical need is passive and does not expand at will The view of nature attained under the domination of capitalism and money is a real contempt for, and practical debasement of, nature; in the Jewish religion, nature exists, it is true, but it exists only in imagination An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for capitalism would make the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would be dissipated like a thin haze in the real, vital air of society Jewish capitalism dissolves the human world into a world of atomistic individuals who are inimically opposed to one another Emancipation from capitalism and money consequently from
practical, real Judaism would be the self-emancipation of our time In the final analysis, mans emancipation is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism"

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SMS Debynasty 2011 Mason Owen

***Dev Links*** ........................................................................................................................................... 4

***Human Rights Links***....................................................................................................................... 16

***Democracy/Promo Links*** ................................................................................................................ 23

***State/Heg links*** ................................................................................................................................ 34

***Class/ID Links*** ................................................................................................................................. 46

Dude your plan is sooooooo capitalist

SMS Debynasty 2011 Mason Owen

***Collapse (Anti) links*** ....................................................................................................................... 53

***K Aff Links*** ...................................................................................................................................... 59

***Environment Links and stuff*** ......................................................................................................... 63

***Reform links*** .................................................................................................................................... 74

***Other Links*** ..................................................................................................................................... 82

Dude your plan is sooooooo capitalist

SMS Debynasty 2011 Mason Owen

Dude your plan is sooooooo capitalist

SMS Debynasty 2011 Mason Owen

Dude your plan is sooooooo capitalist

SMS Debynasty 2011 Mason Owen

LINK DEVELOPMENT (Foster 07)

Dude your plan is sooooooo capitalist

SMS Debynasty 2011 Mason Owen

grow worldwide. Everywhere the regime of neoliberal capitalism is under attack.

Dude your plan is sooooooo capitalist

SMS Debynasty 2011 Mason Owen

LINK DEVELOPMENT (Trainer 89)

Dude your plan is sooooooo capitalist

SMS Debynasty 2011 Mason Owen

LINK DEVELOPMENT (Trainer 96)

Dude your plan is sooooooo capitalist

SMS Debynasty 2011 Mason Owen

Dude your plan is sooooooo capitalist

SMS Debynasty 2011 Mason Owen

LINK Feminism (Gordon 96)

Dude your plan is sooooooo capitalist

SMS Debynasty 2011 Mason Owen

Link-Feminism (Henessy 94)

Dude your plan is sooooooo capitalist

SMS Debynasty 2011 Mason Owen

Link Gender (Low 95)

sexual lifestyle as a signifier for late capitalist production

Dude your plan is sooooooo capitalist

SMS Debynasty 2011 Mason Owen

Link: Gender (Cotter 02) Protection

Dude your plan is sooooooo capitalist

SMS Debynasty 2011 Mason Owen

Link: Gender (Cotter 02) Liberation

. At the same time the Bush Administration has

Dude your plan is sooooooo capitalist

SMS Debynasty 2011 Mason Owen

Link Feminism: AT Turn

Dude your plan is sooooooo capitalist

SMS Debynasty 2011 Mason Owen

***Human Rights Links***

Dude your plan is sooooooo capitalist

SMS Debynasty 2011 Mason Owen

LINK Human Rights (Locklard 02)

Dude your plan is sooooooo capitalist

SMS Debynasty 2011 Mason Owen

Link: Human Rights (Kennedy 02)

Dude your plan is sooooooo capitalist

SMS Debynasty 2011 Mason Owen

Link: Human Rights (Kennedy 02)

Dev Links ........................................................................................................................................... 4

Human Rights Links....................................................................................................................... 16

Democracy/Promo Links ................................................................................................................ 23

State/Heg links ................................................................................................................................ 34

Class/ID Links ................................................................................................................................. 46

Collapse (Anti) links ....................................................................................................................... 53

K Aff Links ...................................................................................................................................... 59

Environment Links and stuff ......................................................................................................... 63

Reform links .................................................................................................................................... 74

Other Links ..................................................................................................................................... 82

Human Rights Links