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1		-First, Framework. Recognizing that the epistemology of capitalism manipulates our understanding of policy is a pre-condition to evaluating the resolution. Marsh 95,
2		-Marsh 95- Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, PhD from Northwestern University (James, Critique Action and Liberation, p 331-2)
3		-Is it reasonable, therefore, even to talk about the possibility of a socialism that transcends this capitalistic system? Here at the very beginning of our discussion it is crucial to be clear about what "reason" is. If being reasonable means operating according to a scientistic, positivistic idea of reason such that any talk of transcending the current situation is irrational, then, of course, democratic socialism is not a rational possibility. However, such a conception of reason is highly questionable. Reason, as I have argued elsewhere and in this book, is dialectical and phenomenological, uniting within itself fact and possibility, "is" and "ought," subject and object. Reason is constitutive, not simply acquisitive or instrumental, and as such constitutes goals and values and reflectively chooses itself as an end in itself in a community of ends. Reason is relational, communal, processive, on the move from lower viewpoints to higher viewpoints and in this sense related creatively to a world developing through a process of emergent probability. According to the conception of reason, one attempting to fix human possibility by saying "this far and no further" is inhibiting human development and is profoundly irrational. Moreover, through a dialectical phenomenological critique made earlier in this book we have discovered late capitalism and state socialism to be profoundly irrational systemically and morally. They are irrational systemically insofar as both systems are susceptible to various kinds of crises, economic, rational, legitimating, or motivational, and both systems systematically repress democratic participation. Both systems exercise a domination, economic or political, that inhibits the free, rational unfolding of human potentiality in all of its fullness. In both systems is a tendency to ignore or repress the subjectivity of human beings and turn them into objects; in both systems is domination of nature and a resulting ecology problem. In such a context, it would be profoundly irrational not to try to think of alternatives to the status quo. In the face of systemic domination, fidelity to the life of reason calls on reason to become revolutionary in its approach to the world. A merely bourgeois or Stalinist rationality is an incomplete, truncated rationality. Moreover, if our model of a dynamic, progressive, developing world system on the move is correct, then such qualitative shifts from one epoch to another should have occurred in the past. One can imagine the Novaks or Kissingers or Friedmans of this world arguing in past centuries that political monarchy is the best human beings can do or that racism is inevitable or that a feudal relationship of lord to serf is the ultimate and best fate of human beings. Yet history has moved on, and there is no reason to think that such movement has stopped with capitalism or state socialism. The irrational, oppressive character of these structures indicates that we should move on; the progressive character of human beings in the world indicates that we can move on. Recent events in eastern Europe only confirm such a judgment.
4		-
5		-The role of the ballot and judge as an educator is to reject arguments based on asymmetrical power relations—because pedagogical contexts are inherently political, we have a unique opportunity to promote real change. Trifonas 03,
6		-PETER PERICLES TRIFONAS. PEDAGOGIES OF DIFFERENCE: RETHINKING EDUCATION FOR SOCIAL CHANGE/ RoutledgeFalmer. New York, London. 2003. Questia.
7		-If we superimpose my formulation of “power as relation” on the discussion concerning race, gender, class, and ability as relations, we then begin to see how we may work with social differences simultaneously. When I assert that sexism, racism, and classism are relations of domination and subordination, I imply that they are relations of power. In an educational context, the exercise of power is accomplished in interactions (i.e., in a social organization), manifesting itself as acts of exclusion, marginalization, silencing, and so forth. Thus, paying attention to how power operates along axes of gender, race, class, and ability (that is, recognizing that social differences are not given, but are accomplished in and through educational settings) is a step toward educational equity. What does the above discussion mean in the educational context? It means that in the interactions of teachers with students in the classroom, or in other contexts, attention needs to be directed toward how dominant and subordinate relations (be they based on race, gender, class, or ability) permeate these contexts and intersect in complicated ways to produce inequality and marginalization. The frequently used and well-meaning phrase, “I treat everyone the same, ” often used by teachers and administrators to indicate their lack of bias in a diverse educational setting, in fact masks unequal power relations. Similarly, educational policies that assume that people are the same or equal may serve to entrench existing inequality precisely because people enter into the educational process with different and unequal experiences. These attempts, well meaning though they may be, tend to render inequality invisible, and thus work against equity in education. In her exploration of white privilege in higher education in the United States, Frances Rains (1998), an aboriginal-Japanese American woman, states emphatically that these benign acts are disempowering for the minority person because they erase his or her racial identity. The denial of racism in this case is in fact a form of racism. Thus, in moving toward equity in education that allows us to address multiple and intersecting axes of difference and inequality, I recommend that we try to think and act “against the grain” in developing educational policies and handling various kinds of pedagogical situations. 5 To work against the grain is to recognize that education is not neutral; it is contested. Mohanty puts it as such: … Education represents both a struggle for meaning and a struggle over power relations. It is a central terrain where power and politics operate out of the lived culture of individuals and groups situated in asymmetrical social and political positions. (Mohanty 1990:184) We need to develop a critical awareness of the power dynamics operative in institutional relations-and of the fact that people participate in institutions as unequal subjects. Working against the grain is to take a proactive approach to understanding and acting upon institutional relations, whether in the classroom, in other interactions with students, or in policy development. Rather than overlooking the embeddedness of gender, race, class, ability, and other forms of inequality that shape our interactions, working against the grain makes explicit the political nature of education and how power operates to privilege, silence, and marginalize individuals who are differently located in the educational process. In her exploration of feminist pedagogy, Linda Briskin (1990) makes a clear distinction between nonsexist and antisexist education critical to our understanding here. She asserts that nonsexism is an approach that attempts to neutralize sexual inequality by pretending that gender can be made irrelevant in the classroom. Thus, for instance, merely asserting that male and female students should have equal time to speak-and indeed giving them equal time-cannot adequately rectify the endemic problem of sexism in the classroom. One of Briskin's students reported that in her political science tutorials that when the male students spoke, everyone paid attention. When a female student spoke, however, the class acted as if no one was speaking (13). Neutrality is an attempt to conceal the unequal distribution of power. An against the grain approach would acknowledge explicitly that we are all gendered, racialized, and differently constructed subjects who do not participate in interactional relations as equals. This goes beyond formulating sexism, racism, abilism, and class privilege in individualist terms and treating them as if they were personal attitudes. Terry Wolverton (1983) discovered the difference between nonracism and antiracism in her consciousness-raising attempt: I had confused the act of trying to appear not to be racist with actively working to eliminate racism. Trying to appear not racist had made me deny my racism, and therefore exclude the possibility of change. (191) Being against the grain means seeing inequality as systemic and interpersonal (rather than individual), and combatting oppression as a collective responsibility, not just as a personal attribute (so that somehow a person can cleanse herself or himself of sexism, racism, abilism, or class bias). It is to pay attention to oppression as an interactional property that can be altered (see Manners 1998). Roger Simon (1993) suggests, in his development of a philosophical basis for teaching against the grain, which shares many commonalities in how I think about an integrative approach to equity in education, that teaching against the grain is fundamentally a moral practice. By this he does not mean that teachers simply fulfill the mandate and guidelines of school authorities. He believes that teachers must expose the partial and imperfect nature of existing knowledge, which is constructed on the basis of asymmetrical power relations (for instance, who has the power to speak and whose voices are suppressed?). It is the responsibility of the teacher or educator to show how dominant forms of knowledge and ways of knowing constrict human capacities. In exposing the power relations integral to the knowledge construction process, the educator, by extension, must treat teaching and learning as a mutual and collaborative act between teachers and students. What may this ideal look like in practice? Marilyn Cochran-Smith (1991) also explores the notion of teaching against the grain in her research on how teachers and students worked together in a preservice program in the Philadelphia area. Borrowing from Gramsci's formulation that action is everyone's responsibility, she asserts that teaching is fundamentally a political activity. In practical terms, she outlines what it may mean to teach against the grain in an actual teaching and learning situation. Her succinct articulation is worth quoting at length: To teach against the grain, teachers have to understand and work both within and around the culture of teaching and the politics of schooling at their particular schools and within their larger school system and communities. They cannot simply announce better ways of doing things, as outsiders are likely to do. They have to teach differently without judging the ways other teach or dismissing the ideas others espouse…. They are not at liberty to publicly announce brilliant but excoriating critiques of their colleagues and the bureaucracies in which they labor. Their ultimate commitment is to the school lives and futures of the children with whom they live and work. Without condescension or defensiveness, they have to work with parents and other teachers on different ways of seeing and measuring development, connecting and dividing knowledge, and knowing about teaching and schooling. They have to be astute observers of individual learners with the ability to pose and explore questions that transcend cultural attribution, institutional habit, and the alleged certainty of outside experts. They have to see beyond and through the conventional labels and practices that sustain the status quo by raising unanswerable and often uncomfortable questions. Perhaps most importantly, teachers who work against the grain must name and wrestle with their own doubts, must fend off the fatigue of reform and depend on the strength of their individual and collaborative convictions that their work ultimately makes a difference in the fabric of social responsibility. (Cochran-Smith 1991:284-85) For me, to be against the grain is therefore to recognize that the routinized courses of action and interactions in all educational contexts are imbued with unequal distribution of power that produce and reinforce various forms of marginalization and exclusion. Thus, a commitment to redress these power relations (i.e., equity in education) involves interventions and actions that may appear “counter-intuitive.” 6 Undoing inequality and achieving equity in education is a risky and uncomfortable act because we need to disrupt the ways things are “normally” done. This involves a serious (and frequently threatening) effort to interrogate our privilege as well as our powerlessness. It obliges us to examine our own privilege relative though it may be, to move out of our internalized positions as victims, to take control over our lives, and to take responsibilities for change. It requires us to question what we take for granted, and a commitment to a vision of society built on reflection, reform, mutuality, and respect in theory and in practice. Teaching and learning against the grain is not easy, comfortable, or safe. It is protracted, difficult, uncomfortable, painful, and risky. It involves struggles with our colleagues, our students, as well as struggles within ourselves against our internalized beliefs and normalized behaviors. In other words, it is a lifelong challenge. However, as Simon (1993) puts it, teaching against the grain is also a project of hope. We engage in it with the knowledge and conviction that we are in a long-term collaborative project with like-minded people whose goal is to make the world a better place for us and for our children.
8		-Second, Links. The energy debate has been subsumed into a single-issue form of politics—it’s a palliative that forces us into ignoring the class struggle at the heart of energy politics—the Kritik turns case; sustainable energy change can only occur with the alternative. Huber ‘13
9		-Huber 13 Matt “What do we mean by “Energy Policy”? Life, Capitalism, and the Broader Field of Energy Politics” State of Nature May 4th 2013 http://www.stateofnature.org/?p=7138
10		-In the 1970s we saw the rise of a peculiar concept: “energy policy.” Since that volatile decade it has become conventional wisdom that we need a new, transformative policy with regard to energy production and consumption. In the United States, for example, every President since Richard Nixon has promised a policy change toward “energy independence.” Depending on political affiliation, this energy transformation would be achieved by either investing in “alternative” energy or ramping up production of conventional fossil fuel – drill, baby, drill! – by removing ‘burdensome’ environmental regulation. More broadly, “energy” is thought of as a specific and contained “sector” of the economy – in the U.S., the domain of the Secretary of Energy; the concern of engineers and scientists with expertise in energy technology; the field of investment for countless ‘cleantech’ startup companies and, of course, the entrenched industries of fossil fuel based accumulation. Emerging out of this contained “energy sector” is a whole host of political forms of contestation. There are the wonkish, energy technocrats who want to harness the power of the profit motive to embed clean energy within a greener form of capitalism – Amory Lovins and friends being the most notable example. 1 There are the movements around environmental justice focused on the often devastating impact of the energy extraction and processing – from the Niger Delta to the Tar Sands to Mountain Top Coal Removal. 2 There is the burgeoning climate movement with its focus on the fossil fuel industry as “public enemy number one”. 3 In many ways, “energy” (and perhaps its conjoined issue of “climate”) has become just another topic in the world of “single issue” politics focused on a set of fixed and contained “causes” whether it be, immigration, abortion, prisons, or environment. The problem with this contained view of “energy policy”, “energy politics” and the “energy sector”, is it belies the way energy (not to mention any other single issue or cause) is embedded within capitalist society as a whole. Most profoundly, energy cannot really be contained in any “sector”, but is ubiquitous within everyday practices of social reproduction. In his attempt to diffuse the controversy over Marx’s “base-superstructure” metaphor, Freidrich Engels laid out the “mission” of historical materialism as such: “According to the materialist conception, the determining factor in history is, in the last resort, the production and reproduction of immediate life.” 4 Engels’s description harkens back to the original formulations in The German Ideology which posited “the real-life process” and the social relations that make life possible as the foundation of a historical materialist analysis. 5 From this perspective, energy is not simply a “sector” or a “policy domain” but the material foundation of life itself (no matter what the historical circumstances). From the calories expending in gathering and hunting, to the sweat and toil of slave labor; from the coal, soot, and smoke of the coal-fired steam engine, to the decentralized geographies made possible through electricity and oil-based transport, every “mode of production” harnesses energy in particular ways. And, the historically specific modes of energy extraction and delivery often reproduce sociopolitical relations of power and domination. Indeed, the development of the coal fired steam engine was just as much an attempt to limit the working class power of manual laborers as it was about “efficiency”. 6 The expansion of oil-based suburbanization in the postwar United States laid the basis for the right wing’s mobilization of an often suburban form of neoliberal populism based on a an ideology of privatism opposed to government, taxes, and indeed, toward urban city life itself. 7 In history, political economy, and social theory, we are only starting to take seriously the role of energy in larger social and political shifts. 8 These insights force us to re-conceptualize what we mean by “energy policy.” In the rest of this essay, I will argue that the most profound era of energy policy change in the last century was not the 1970s – or not today as some might hope – but rather, an era where “energy” was not seen as a problematic field in need of intervention, but rather as the basis for a new era of modernity and the technical mastery of nature – the 1930s. Energy for Life In 1933, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office, he confronted two major forces – a dramatic collapse of capitalism (both in terms of conventional economic indicators and in terms of cultural legitimacy) and a mass revolt of workers and the unemployed over layoffs, wage-cuts, and exploding poverty throughout the country. In response, the New Deal was forged within a broader cultural politics of “life” in the historical materialist sense. In his 1932 campaign, Roosevelt claimed, “every man has a right to life; and this means that he has also a right to make a comfortable living.” 9 The politics of the 1930s saw the rise of a new concept: “The American way of life.” Although the phrase was used before, the phrase “the American way” was more common. As figure 1 indicates the specific phrase “American way of life” spiked in the 1930s and into the postwar era – only to fall in usage with the breakdown of the postwar “class accord” between capital and labor in the 1970s. Figure 1 – “The American Way of Life” Frequency of phrase by percentage of ‘mentions’ in the scanned Google book catalog. The American Way of Life Source: Google’s Ngram viewer FDR couched his many economic reforms precisely in the terms of creating the conditions for a specifically “American way of life.” Precisely because employers, banks, and other private capital would not do it on their own, the state laid the material conditions for a “standard of living” based on single-family home ownership, automobility, and, most importantly, working class power embedded in unions. There was the Wagner Act which institutionalized the legal right of unions to organize and collectively bargain with their employers. Impossible if left to the paternalism of capital, this ensured wage increases with productivity gains. Workers could now afford new standards of consumption. There were the Federal Housing Administration and the Home Owners Loan Corporation which made low and fixed interest 30-year mortgages a possibility for mainly white male blue collar workers and their families (and eventually returning veterans from WWII). On their own, private banks were previously only willing to lend 50 of the value of a home for as little as 5-year mortgage terms. 10 There was the “Works Progress Administration” which put millions to work (again when private capital would not) building the material infrastructure of automobility (e.g., 600,000 miles of roads and 75,266 bridges). 11 It should be emphasized that these reforms were forged out of struggle – strikes and mass militant action by unions, the unemployed councils, and other advocates for working rights. Moreover, these struggles were based on their own forms of exclusion. The production of “the American way of life” was a specifically white, male union identity. For example, the Wagner Act was passed by ignoring the concerns voiced by the NAACP over the racist legacies of union power – and migrant farm workers were simply excluded from the labor law entirely. Although he certainly promoted and passed “energy-specific” reforms (e.g., Rural Electrification), FDR never framed the New Deal as a new American “energy policy.” Yet, most of the reforms discussed above – labor law, housing policy, public investment in infrastructure, etc. – had profound effects on the ways in which people lived, and, in turn, used and consumed energy. While cars, suburban homes, and electrified households, were available to the upper classes as early as the 1920s, the New Deal extended this “way of life” to millions of workers; laying the basis for the postwar explosion of suburbanization and the historical “lock-in” of energy-intensive lifestyles. From Policy to Politics So, is there any way we can reverse this already existing sprawled geography of mass energy consumption? How could “policy” guide us? Take the example of our “oil addiction” which, although it is often conflated with electricity and energy in general, is mainly used as transportation fuel. Oil has powered a specific form of automobility that has defined the spatial layout of the sprawled American “Megalopolis”. 12 We tend to think of the solution to our oil addiction as purely a material problem of technology and urban spatial form. The “energy policy” consensus is that all we need to do is to design “smarter” and more “compact” cities based upon “new urbanist” walkable communities, public transit, bicycles and (only when absolutely necessary) electrified automobiles. Yet, this narrow “policy” lens again ignores the ways in which oil is deeply entrenched in a broader “politics of life.” Our consumption of oil is not just material – it is not just about the functional need to travel from point A to point B. The combustion of energy-dense gasoline often accompanies cultural ideas about freedom, mobility and deeply entangled normative geographies of home, work, family, and leisure. Indeed, although many historians have recognized the role of suburban populism in the rightward movement of American politics 13 – based on hostility toward taxes and government – they often don’t recognize the role of oil (and energy) in powering a privatized command over and experience of space. Oil is the liquid fossil fuel, and its very materiality is conducive to decentralization. It is cheaper to transport than any other form of energy, as it naturally flows through networks of pipelines, refineries, and tankers. The ubiquity of gasoline stations – and thus the ubiquity of fuel in the sprawled metropolitan areas of the United States – is made possible through the flowing liquidity of oil itself. Out of this liquid geography emerges a whole set of practices of social reproduction – driving, yard work, household maintenance, entertainment – that are effectively privatized. Into the postwar era, there was slowly but surely a mass cultural “forgetting” of the immense public investments that make these apparently privatized spaces possible (e.g., roads, mortgage insurance, public labor law, water and electricity provision). A consequence of this forgetting was the emergence of what I call a vision of “entrepreneurial life” where one’s individualized “life” is seen as a product of privatized choices, work ethic, and competitive tenacity. Entrepreneurial life is a vision of life threatened by “public” or “collectivist” interventions. 14 This vision of life has infiltrated our politics at large. This is why our attempts to craft a new “energy policy” often end up reproducing the same privatized logics of neoliberal hegemony: individualized “green” consumption; market based emission trading; price-incentives for new technology development. Indeed, as Andrew Ross provocatively argues, “sustainability” in places like metropolitan Phoenix simply reproduces pre-existing inequalities – a form of “eco-apartheid” wherein the rich carve out isolated spaces of “green living” while the poor are forced to live amongst the still all too common toxic byproducts of modern industrial life. 15 Moreover, it can be argued that the quarantining of “energy” or “environment” as its own separate “issue” – or field of policy intervention – is itself a historical product of the neoliberal celebration of fragmentation and “niche” markets. 16 Thus, the project to change our “energy policy” must first confront broader struggles over life, labor, and social inequality before our energy system could be changed in any sane, just and sustainable way. Indeed, at the core is the need to assert collective and democratic control over our energy system itself (it is now, of course, ruled by private capital with only one goal in mind: profit). It also must fundamentally be about offering an alternative vision of life; an alternative vision of freedom which, in the context of our oil-powered privatism, is simply equated with the right to be left alone from the invasive tentacles of “Big Government.” Like the New Deal, we need to begin to reimagine life and freedom as only possible through collective political struggle.
11		-Nuclear power is not intrinsically harmful or dangerous. The ruling class’s control over the technology makes those harms possible. They choose to build the plants near minority populations or to cut corners during their construction. Turns case—freeing technology from the limitations of capitalism solves the aff. SLP ‘81
12		-SLP 81 “Socialism and Nuclear Power” A Socialist Labor Party Statement 1981 http://www.slp.org/res_state_htm/soc_nuc_power.html
13		-Socialists can bring many important insights to the questions and concerns raised by nuclear technology. However, two aspects of the socialist perspective on the nuclear power issue are primary. One is the socialist understanding that in a profit-motivated capitalist economy, nuclear power, like all other technology, will inevitably be developed and applied in an unsafe and environmentally destructive manner. The other is the realization that only in a socialist society democratically controlled by workers will it be possible to rationally assess how—or if—nuclear power can be safely harnessed. Certainly, no solution to the current nuclear danger can be found by taking the problem out of the social context in which it exists. The primary problem with any technology under capitalism—even nuclear technology, which admittedly poses special problems—is not that it is inherently safe or unsafe, but rather that it is controlled by a ruling-class minority which manipulates technology to serve its narrow economic interests. Accordingly, amidst the growing concern over the nuclear dangers posed both by commercial power plants and by the obscene proliferation of nuclear weapons, the task of Marxists is to consistently emphasize the need to free all technology from the fetters of capitalist productive relations. On the one hand, Marxists clearly favor technological progress and the general expansion of society's productive forces. Accordingly, Socialists do not see the answer to the problems posed by nuclear technology in a technological retrogression of capitalist society. For one thing, it is utopian to suggest that society can or will return to a lower level of material development. Moreover, workers' interests directionally lie in furthering, rather than circumscribing, economic progress. Socialists thus seek to transform society into one based on new social relationships that will allow the worker-majority to become the master of technology, rather than vice versa. On the other hand, this Marxist tenet does not mean that Socialists blindly support nuclear technology. All technological innovation is not progress, and a socialist society may well decide that the hazards of nuclear technology render it no more useful than red dye #2. Nor should Socialists foster the illusion that the hazards of nuclear power will miraculously disappear with the advent of socialism. Socialist revolution will clearly sound the death knell of the profit-motive and the militarism which have generated the nuclear threat. But socialism is no panacea. Socialists cannot alter the half-life of plutonium nor render living organisms immune to radiation. At the same time, Socialists do not preclude the possibility that nuclear power may be safely harnessed in the future. What can be said is that the future of nuclear power in a socialist society will be a matter of rationally applying scientific know-how rather than a question hinging on the rate of profit. Clearly, the socialist perspective has thus far failed to impress itself on the antinuclear movement. This movement continues to be dominated by antitechnology currents, apolitical opponents of nuclear technology, and capitalist politicians and other liberal reformers. Responsibility for this situation lies, in part, with groups on the left which have failed to bring to the antinuclear movement the Marxist clarity it needs. Typifying this failure are the U.S. Communist Party (CP) and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Complicating the CP's views on nuclear power is the fact that its masters in Moscow, like their ruling-class counterparts in Washington, are committed to both nuclear weapons and atomic power plants. The CP has yet to find a satisfactory way of reconciling its opportunistic desire to capitalize on the antinuclear movement and its inability to oppose the reckless nuclear proliferation being directed from the Kremlin. Taking a page out of the CP's book of opportunism, the SWP is taking up the call to shut the nukes down now, all the while seeing little need to establish the capitalist cause of the nuclear danger or to advance a socialist solution. As if black lung were the socialist answer to radiation poisoning, the SWP says the answer to the nuclear hazard is to mine more coal. The SWP asserts, of course, that mining of more coal must be done safely, but a safe mine is as much a pipe dream under capitalism as the accident-proof reactors that supposedly existed on Three Mile Island. That a nuclear danger exists now is clear. But Socialists cannot expediently set aside the realization that the solution to this danger is to free nuclear technology from the limitations and distortions imposed by capitalism. To capitalism falls the task of justifying its technological horrors on the basis of picking the lesser evil. To socialism falls the task of turning technology from the horror it currently is to the benefactor of an emancipated working class.
14		-
15		-State regulations fail identify the our system failures combating the ecological crisis—all policy focused approaches operate within the logic of capitalism and serve its interests. Liodakis ‘01
16		-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
17		-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 non-polluting technologies, and an overall restructuring towards a `green capitalism'. This restructuring of capital encompasses `eco-regulation', which mainly consists of an attempt to formulate `ecologically 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 `irreconcilable 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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19		-Third, Impact. Capitalism causes extinction—multiple ways. Webb 04,
20		-Webb, 04 (Sam Webb, National Chairman, Communist Party USA. “War, Capitalism, and George W. Bush.” 4-20-04. http://www.pww.org/article/view/ 4967/1/207/O/)
21		-Capitalism was never a warm, cuddly, stable social system. It came into the world dripping with blood from every pore, as Marx described it, laying waste to old forms of production and ways of life in favor of new, more efficient manufacturing. Since then it has combined nearly uninterrupted transformation of the instruments of production with immense wealth for a few and unrelieved exploitation, insecurity, misery, and racial and gender inequality for the many, along with periodic wars, and a vast zone of countries imprisoned in a seemingly inescapable web of abject poverty. Yet as bad as that record is, its most destructive effects on our world could still be ahead. Why do I say that? Because capitalism, with its imperatives of capital accumulation, profit maximization and competition, is the cause of new global problems that threaten the prospects and lives of billions of people worldwide, and, more importantly, it is also a formidable barrier to humankind’s ability to solve these problems. Foremost among these, in addition to ecological degradation, economic crises, population pressures, and endemic diseases, is the threat of nuclear mass annihilation.
22		-
23		-Fourth, the alternative is the rise of an environmental working class that breaks down hegemonic structures and capitalism. Foster ‘13
24		-Foster 13 – John Bellamy Foster, Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon, Editor of the Monthly Review, holds a Ph.D. from York University, 2013 (“The Epochal Crisis,” Monthly Review, Volume 65, Issue 05 (October), Accessed on 7/18/2014 from http://monthlyreview.org/2013/10/01/epochal-crisis)
25		-It is an indication of the sheer enormity of the historical challenge confronting humanity in our time that the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, sometimes now called the Second Great Depression, is overshadowed by the larger threat of planetary catastrophe, raising the question of the long-term survival of innumerable species—including our own.1 An urgent necessity for the world today is therefore to develop an understanding of the interconnections between the deepening impasse of the capitalist economy and the rapidly accelerating ecological threat—itself a by-product of capitalist development.¶ I shall use the term “epochal crisis” here to refer to the convergence of economic and ecological contradictions in such a way that the material conditions of society as a whole are undermined, posing the question of a historical transition to a new mode of production. This can be distinguished from the ordinary developmental crises that punctuate the history of capitalism. Such an epochal crisis, as Jason Moore has argued, characterized the transition from feudalism to capitalism from the late medieval period to the seventeenth century—a crisis of an entire historical epoch that was equally ecological, economic, and social in its manifestations, stretching from recurrent famine, the Black Death, and soil exhaustion to peasant revolts and the escalation of warfare.2 An even more momentous epochal crisis than the one that produced the transition from feudalism to capitalism, I will argue, is occurring today, arising from the unlimited expansion of a capitalist system geared to a process of abstract wealth creation.¶ Contrary to economic myth, the system of capitalist production and exchange does not take the form of simple commodity production, or the circuit C-M-C, in which a commodity (C), representing a definite, qualitative use value is exchanged for money (M), which is then exchanged for a another commodity (C), representing a different use value—to be simply consumed in the end. Rather, in line with what Marx termed the “general formula of capital,” or M-C-M′, money (M) is exchanged for labor power and commodities with which to produce a new commodity (C), to be sold for more money (M′ = M + Δm or surplus value). Hence, it is not use value, fulfilling concrete, qualitative needs, that constitutes the aim of capitalist production, but rather exchange value, generating profit for the capitalist. The abstract, purely quantitative nature of this process, moreover, means that there is no end to the incentive of seeking more money or surplus value, since M′ leads in the next circuit of production to a drive to obtain M′′, followed by the drive to obtain M′′′ in the circuit after that, in an unending sequence of accumulation and expansion.¶ Characteristic of monopoly capitalism is a further warping of this process through the displacement of natural-material use value by specifically capitalist use value—the only real “use” of which is to enhance exchange value for the capitalist. Thus wasteful and destructive commodities increasingly dominate production, from military hardware to superficial car model-changes, to excessive packaging. Here Marx’s general formula for capital, as it pertains to production itself, has metamorphosed into M-CK-M′, where CK stands for specifically capitalist use value.3¶ At the more stratospheric level represented by contemporary finance, the general formula for capital, or M-C-M′, is being increasingly supplanted by the circuit of speculative capital, M-M′, in which the production of use values disappears altogether and money simply begets more money.4 What economists call “the real economy” or the realm of commodity production associated with GDP is thus being subordinated in the irrational logic of today’s phase of monopoly-finance capital to a process of wealth generation organized around financial-asset appreciation and dependent on an unending series of financial bubbles. Financial capital more and more rules the roost, largely disconnected from the real economy of commodity production and use value.¶ Behind the worldwide veil of capitalist value relations, hundreds of millions, even billions, of people are poor and destitute, often lacking the most basic prerequisites of material existence—adequate food, water, clothing, housing, employment, healthcare, and a non-toxic environment—due to the failures and contradictions of accumulation. Meanwhile, what ecologists call “real wealth,” i.e., the product of nature itself, is being extracted from the environment on an ever-increasing scale devoid of any concern for either the rationality of production or the sustainability of natural systems, thereby robbing both present and future generations. Since unequal exchange relations with respect to both nature and labor prevail within the international economy this robbery falls disproportionately on poorer nations, a portion of whose natural use values (and economic surplus) is systematically siphoned off to enrich nations at the apex of the global imperialist pyramid.5¶ Everywhere the narrow rationality of monopoly-finance capital is coming into conflict with real-material relations, undermining real production and real wealth—indeed the entire realm of use value, human well being, and life itself—generating a growing socio-ecological malaise that is spreading in all directions at once. “Capitalist economic rationality,” Samir Amin writes in his Three Essays on Marx’s Value Theory (2013), has been transformed in the twenty-first century into “social irrationality on the scale of the human race” and the earth as a whole.6 To understand the full significance of this it is essential to explore in much greater detail both the economic and ecological dimensions of capitalism’s epochal crisis.¶ The Economic Dimensions¶ The economic dimensions of the epochal crisis can be described in terms of three mutually reinforcing trends: monopolization, stagnation, and financialization—combined, at the world level, with the global labor arbitrage. The late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century saw the emergence of the monopoly stage of capitalism, arising out of the concentration and centralization of capital. The typical firm is now a quasi-monopoly or oligopoly with considerable monopoly power with respect to price, output, and investment. Industries within the manufacturing sector of the economy are highly concentrated, dominated by a few giant firms benefitting from substantial monopoly rents. The same is true in the sphere of finance where the big four U.S. banks own almost half the country’s total banking assets. In 2007, at the outset of the Great Financial Crisis, the 200 largest U.S. corporations accounted for over 30 percent of all gross profits in the economy (up from 13 percent in 1950), while the world’s 500 largest firms were taking in about 35–40 percent of all global revenue (up from less than 20 percent in 1960). What is often described as increasing international competition is in reality the intensified global rivalry of monopolistic firms engaged in a mixture of price collusion and various forms of non-price competition.7¶ These giant, globe-straddling corporations enjoy widening profit margins, generating increasing problems of inequality and surplus capital absorption, and slowing down the overall rate of accumulation, particularly at the core of the capitalist world economy. Stagnation rather than rapid growth is therefore the normal state of the monopoly capitalist economy, partially counteracted at times by specific historical factors (such as wars, epoch-making innovations, the sales effort, and financialization).8¶ What Paul Sweezy referred to as “the financialization of the capital accumulation process” has been the main means in which monopoly capital in recent decades has adapted to this deepening economic stagnation.9 Faced with the difficulty of profitably absorbing the enormous potential economic surplus at their disposal, big corporations and wealthy investors increasingly poured their surplus capital into the financial sphere in order to secure high speculative returns. Financial institutions responded to this additional demand for their products by supplying an endless array of new, exotic speculative opportunities (junk bonds, derivatives, options, hedge funds, etc.) leading to an explosion of credit/debt. Even commodity producing corporations such as General Electric and General Motors set up financial divisions to try to capture some of the profits to be made in finance. The result was a series of financial bubbles lifting the economy but at the cost of the greater fragility of the entire system. Eventually, this new financial superstructure took on a life of its own, dominating over production, with decision-making migrating more and more from corporate boardrooms to financial markets.10¶ The whole logic of the system under the current phase of monopoly-finance capital is therefore one in which the accumulation of capital in the traditional sense, i.e., centered on real capital formation, is being subordinated to an increasingly abstract process of wealth generation through the promotion of financial-asset appreciation. M-C-M′ has given way to M-M′—a possibility that Marx raised and Keynes feared.11¶ At the international level the system is governed by the global labor arbitrage, whereby giant, multinational firms seek out the lowest unit labor costs worldwide, shifting the greater part of industrial production to export zones in the global South and spurring the growth of a handful of export-dependent emerging economies. Imperialist relations are intensified worldwide through an accelerated process of unequal economic exchange (where the difference in the wages is greater than the difference in the productivities) and a general system of imperial rent.12 Not surprisingly under these conditions, the average annual per capita GDP of developing countries (excluding China) was a mere 6.1 percent of that of the G7 countries (the United States, Japan, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Canada) in 1970–1989, dropping to 5.6 percent in 1990–2006 (just prior to the Great Financial Crisis).13¶ The Ecological Dimensions¶ The ecological dimensions of the epochal crisis are best understood in terms of Marx’s analysis of the metabolism of nature and society—extended to take into account the relations of monopoly capitalism.14 In Marx’s conception, production existed as a social process within “the universal metabolism of nature.” Material use values were appropriated from “the natural world” and transformed by production into social use values to fit “human needs.” This constituted “the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between nature and man, and as such is a natural condition of human life.”¶ Marx viewed what he called “extractive industry”—“the fish caught in water…or the wood felled in the primeval forest, or the ore brought up out of the pit”—in terms of natural use values (real wealth) provided by nature independent of human labor. He wrote in Capital: “The earth, on the one hand, labour on the other…are material elements of any process of production,” related to the universal metabolic process of nature, and thus not reducible to “social forms.”15 This conception of elemental natural conditions to which society must conform led him to develop his critique of the “irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism” associated with capitalism’s transgression of “the natural laws of life itself.”16 So universal was this rift in the metabolism between nature and society under industrial capitalism—reflected in the robbing of the soil of its nutrients shipped to the city in the form of food and fiber with the resulting pollution of urban centers—that it extended to international trade, with some countries in effect robbing others of their soil within a general process of ecological imperialism.17¶ How is this analysis of the metabolism of nature and society developed by Marx to be applied to today’s epochal crisis? There is now an extensive body of work utilizing Marx’s concept of metabolic rift to analyze today’s ecological problems.18 However, the other, more commodity-related, part of the analysis of the nature-society metabolism, concerned specifically with the role of use-value production, has barely been addressed in an ecological context. A crucial question is how the changing use-value structure of the economy has contributed to planetary ecological degradation. Marx himself provided us with few direct clues in this area. Although he pointed to the existence of specifically capitalist use values (such as the lock designed by the locksmith who thus benefitted from the criminality promoted by the system) as well as to what he referred to as “use values” that occupy “a higher rank in the system of needs” (hence a hierarchy of social needs), he did not systematically analyze such phenomena related to the historical development of use values, since they were relatively unimportant in the competitive capitalism of his day.19¶ The answer to the question of the ecological implications of the changing use-value structure of the capitalist economy must therefore be sought in the historical shift from competitive to monopoly capitalism—extending beyond Marx’s time. Thorstein Veblen provided the main outlines of such an analysis at the outset of the twentieth century in his 1923 book, Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times. Veblen argued that the production of waste—which he had defined in The Theory of the Leisure Class as expenditure that “does not serve human life or human-well being as a whole”—had become integral to the new corporate economy as a means of enhancing sales and profits in face of limited demand. Such unproductive expenditures had penetrated so deeply into the entire structure of production, he suggested, that “the distinction between workmanship and salesmanship has progressively been blurred…until it will doubtless hold true now that the shop-cost of many articles produced for the market is mainly chargeable to the production of saleable appearances, ordinarily meretricious.”20¶ Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy expanded upon this argument in 1966 in Monopoly Capital. Building on both Marx and Veblen, they dealt extensively with the growth of economic waste as a means of surplus absorption—in such varied forms as military spending, the sales effort, and FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate). The sales effort, they insisted, had grown so prodigiously under monopoly capitalism that the use-value structure of the economy could no longer be viewed as a rational expression of production costs. What they called “the interpenetration effect” thus stood for this intermixing of sales costs and production costs with the result that an ever-larger proportion of what were considered costs of production were in fact forms of waste imposed by the system, i.e., specifically capitalist use values (CK). Product obsolescence was intentionally built into consumer durables, while consumer goods were structurally designed overall at enormous expense to promote extreme, acquisitive forms of buying behavior. With waste associated with marketing penetrating into the deep structure of production under the regime of the giant corporation, the buyer had no choice but to pay for such unproductive costs—included in the price of even the most necessary wage goods as a condition of their availability. All of this was deemed “rational” and “efficient” by a monopoly-capitalist economy continually beset by problems of saturated markets, slow growth, and unemployment/underemployment.21¶ The essential problem, then, in the critique of monopoly capitalism, as Baran explained in a letter to Sweezy on December 19, 1961, was to account for the economic “output imputable to misused input—and by ‘misused’ I mean here exploited in the Marxian sense, wasted in our sense i.e., “not conducive to and not required for the health, happiness and development of man”, unemployed in the Keynesian sense.” Viewed “critically and negatively,” this meant: “no air conditioned nightmares like Chase Manhattan buildings, no motorized monsters to the tune of 60 million, no rape of the country by superhighways and billboards.” There was no feasible way, of course, of calculating all of the misused input and the resulting economic (and ecological) waste. But the enormity, even predominance, of this general phenomenon was not to be denied. The sheer magnitude of such unproductive expenditures stood in a negative way for the potential of a more rational, more sustainable society to satisfy real human needs. What Peter Custers, building on Baran and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital in his Questioning Globalized Militarism (2006), has termed “negative use values” are clearly visible today in the U.S. trillion-dollar-a-year war machine, but also in the products—all too often toxic—that are the basis of everyday consumption.22¶ All of this relates to what Juliet Schor has called “the materiality paradox.”23 This is the notion that what we produce and what we consume is, at present, determined less by the product’s material use value than by the symbolic worth that is placed on it in terms of social status and the fulfillment of psychological needs—as inculcated by modern marketing. From this standpoint, as Raymond Williams declared, the problem is not that we are “too materialist” but that we are “not materialist enough.” A high-consumption, throwaway society in which the world of commodities has been transformed by advertising into a “magic kingdom” devoted to the pursuit of symbolic needs will inevitably be destructive of its environmental surroundings.24¶ The wider ecological irrationality of modern production includes the extraordinary misuse of natural inputs, notably energy resources. As Barry Commoner argued in 1976, in a talk entitled “Oil, Energy, and Capitalism,” the “social use values” of the modern capitalist economy were produced in an energy-intensive and thermodynamically inefficient manner, merely in order to save on labor cost—since capitalism, as Marx had rightly pointed out, was geared to the displacement of labor in order to hold down wages. For example, handbags, Commoner explained, were increasingly made out of plastic instead of leather, despite the far greater energy input required in the case of the former, merely because this served to reduce labor cost (due to the substitution of fossil-fuel energy for labor input), providing wider profit margins. The socially irrational nature of this structure of production was evident in the generation of a larger reserve army of the unemployed side-by-side with enormously enhanced ecological degradation.25¶ From a global perspective it is important to recognize that the periphery of the world capitalist system is subject to most (if not all) of the economic and ecological contradictions of monopoly capitalism described above, while also being subject to those specific inequities imposed by imperialism. The pillage of the global South has never depended simply on unequal economic exchange but has also relied throughout on unequal ecological exchange. Here it is significant that Howard T. Odum, one of the foremost systems ecologists of the twentieth century, was also the leading analyst of the process of unequal ecological exchange. Crucial to Odum’s approach, which was derived partly from Marx, was the conception of what he called “real wealth” in the form of embodied energy (emergy) incorporated in a natural or social product.26 On this basis Odum was able to demonstrate that exchanges of goods produced in the periphery of the world economy typically encompassed more embodied energy taken from the free environment (outside of monetary relations) than the goods of countries producing in the center of the world economy, creating a net loss of embodied energy or real wealth for the peripheral countries in any international market exchange of goods.¶ “Free trade,’” Odum wrote, “is an ideal based on the assumption of equitable exchange…. But free trade made developed countries rich, with high standards of living, leaving less developed countries devastated.” The underlying reason for this is that goods produced in the periphery generally contained more “free gifts” of nature (not included in the labor-based value accounting of the capitalist economy) than was the case for goods produced in center countries. For example, Odum calculated that in the 1980s and ‘90s Ecuador was exporting as much as ten times more embodied energy than it was importing through the normal mechanism of “free trade.” In contrast the United States under the same system of free trade exported only half as much embodied energy as it imported (and countries such as the Netherlands, Germany, and Japan only a quarter as much). Trade between the global North and the global South, he argued, thus took the form of “imperial capitalism,” in which rich nations gained at the expense of poor.27 This inequality is further exacerbated by the migration of polluting industries from the global North to the global South—so as to concentrate the toxic effects of production in the latter and the benefits, in the form of economic surplus monopolized by multinational corporations, in the former.¶ An Epochal Revolution¶ In the foregoing analysis I have argued that the epochal crisis of our time emanates from a dangerous and disruptive intersection of economic and ecological contradictions traceable to the growing distortion, displacement, and degradation of natural-material use values. This is tied not only to the accumulation process directly, but also to the acceleration of environmental throughput that it entails, and the accompanying rift in the biogeochemical processes of the planet.¶ In Marx’s hopeful vision, “mankind…inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation.” Today the material potential exists—both economically and ecologically—to overcome the epochal crisis of our times. This potential is manifested in the exploitation, waste, idle capacity, displacement of use values, and rapacious destruction of real wealth that characterizes the present system. The gigantic misuse of human and natural resources that constitutes the modern capitalist economy means that we already have the potential many times over to redirect production and consumption to meet human needs and to practice conservation on a global level, creating a society of ecological sustainability and substantive equality.¶ Accomplishing this though means breaking with capitalism’s expansionist drive, which is now destroying the earth as a “safe operating space for humanity,” through the crossing of critical planetary boundaries. This is manifested in such planetary rifts as: climate change, ocean acidification, destruction of the ozone layer, species extinction, the disruption of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, loss of freshwater, loss of land cover, aerosol loading, and chemical pollution.28¶ For capitalism time is money and the future of humanity and the earth is therefore systematically discounted within the cash nexus. Monopoly capital alters the use-value structure of the economy itself, generating specifically capitalist use values that are frequently negative in character, in order to accelerate commodity circulation, the level of environmental throughput, and overall production—with the sole object of generating more wealth for the wealthy in the present.29 Après moi, le déluge! is thus the spirit of capitalism, particularly in its present phase of monopoly-finance capital.30 It follows that the current epochal crisis requires a no less epochal transition from one mode of production to another, reminiscent of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, but on a far bigger scale. Indeed, what is needed, to quote István Mészáros, is the kind of “global epochal…structural change advocated by Marx.”31¶ How will the necessary revolutionary transition come about? I am convinced that objective forces today are progressively erasing previous distinctions between workplace exploitation and environmental degradation—as capitalism universally undermines all real-material conditions of production. This dramatic change is occurring more rapidly in the global South than the global North. As a result we are seeing in places as diverse as China, India, Egypt, Turkey, South Africa, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, and even parts of North America (for example in the larger movement growing up around Canada’s indigenous-led Idle No More) the emergence of what could be called an “environmental working class” arising out of wider alliances of oppressed groups around degraded material conditions. This broadening of working-class struggles into environmental struggles and the forging of diverse community alliances should not surprise us, since the early struggles of the working class in Europe were directed as much at the toxicity of the industrial centers in which workers were compelled to live as at the exploitation within the factories.32 The extensive privatization engineered by what Naomi Klein has aptly designated as “disaster capitalism” is producing in response a new ecological sociability, embracing a vision of human production in its most fundamental sense as the metabolism of nature and society.33¶ Central to the epochal crisis, as we have seen, is the misuse of natural-material use values, both within production narrowly conceived, and also within what Marx called “the metabolic interaction of nature and society,” or human production in its widest, most dialectical sense. All material relations, whether economic, cultural-communal, or environmental, are affected. We are therefore approaching a historical moment—a product of the vast creative destructiveness of capitalism in our age—when these various material conditions will no longer be as disconnected as they have been for most of the past century. Although all sorts of conflicts remain within working communities around labor, environmental, and cultural issues—with the powers that be doing their best to disunite workers in line with the age-old principle of divide and conquer—the objective conditions are nonetheless emerging that are creating the potential for a larger material alliance against the system. This will likely take the form of a co-revolutionary struggle, in the sense suggested by David Harvey, embodying an alliance of gender, race, class, indigenous, and environmental movements.34¶ All of this depends of course on the rise to prominence of an environmental working class (and ecological peasantry) capable of initiating a broad, counter-hegemonic struggle for the fulfillment of human needs in line with the fundamental biogeochemical processes of the planet—a world of substantive equality and ecological sustainability. There is no doubt that this is an objective necessity and that it will increasingly become a subjective one as well. Yet, there is no certainty as to the future of humanity. The very continuation of the human species along with most of the other “higher” forms of life is now in doubt. The future and even survival of humanity thus rests as never before on the revolutionary struggle of humanity itself.

EntryDate

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1		-2016-10-07 23:41:25.0

Opponent

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1		-Harrison Wang

ParentRound

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1		-11

Round

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1		-2

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1		-Harker Malyugina Neg

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1		-Cap with alt

Tournament

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1		-RR