| ... |
... |
@@ -1,18
+1,0 @@ |
| 1 |
|
-Policy such as the aff that use the state to target homelessness prop us neoliberalism. |
| 2 |
|
-Craig Willse 10 (assistant professor of cultural studies at George Mason University). "Neo-liberal biopolitics and the invention of chronic homelessness." Economy and Society 39.2 (2010): 155-184. |
| 3 |
|
-Those populations targeted as ‘chronically homeless’ would appear, then, to fit within programmes of state racism twice over: both as populations considered social and economic drains and also as populations marked as racially inferior. But, rather than directly killed or abandoned, we have what appears to be the opposite, as those designated chronically homeless are moved into housing programmes understood to protect and secure their health and wellbeing. How can this be? Is it the end of state racism? The earlier discussion suggests another understanding of chronic homelessness initiatives, and points to some of the historical limitations of Foucault’s analysis. Foucault’s description of biopower and state racism describes the emergence of the modern state form and its organization as the social welfare state. In such a formation, the modern nation-state seeks to line up a national population with a national economy; the Keynesian welfare state did exactly this. In the contemporary neo-liberal context, social programmes become industries that serve the economy directly, not necessarily through investing in a labouring population, but through the production of service and knowledge industries. In such a situation, illness and unproductivity may not need to be reduced or eliminated, as they would be in the social welfare state. Rather, illness and waste, and populations organized as such, become fertile sites for economic investment, as they multiply opportunities for developing and extending governance mechanisms, making economic life possible. The reproduction of housing insecurity and deprivation attests to the continuation of social abandonment through withdrawal and disinvestment. However, the invention of chronic homelessness suggests something in addition, as those nearest to death and most subject to the subordinating and dehumanizing effects of institutional racism become the privileged targets of federal policy and funding (at least for the time being). But, rather than a reversal of abandonment, the invention of chronic homelessness indicates how abandonment takes place within an economy and in service to the economy. If chronic homelessness programmes enable rather than challenge neo-liberal housing insecurity and deprivation at structural levels, it is not so clear that these programmes are ‘life-saving’, even if they do prolong or save some individual lives. Rather, the invention of chronic homelessness reminds us that the deaths of biopower are not instantaneous or complete, and that, in being slow to die and continuing to bear costs, populations marked by and for death demand of neo-liberal apparatuses a biopolitical investment. Thus, we might want to amend Foucault’s view of illness and death as the negation and loss of power, allowing us to question his assertion that ‘death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it’ (Foucault, 1990 1976, p. 138). The invention of chronic homelessness emerges in a context of neo-liberal economic restructuring of relationships between life, health, illness and death that moves past Foucault’s formulation of a zero-sum game in which those marked as ill or unproductive would be treated only as negation or loss. State racism in the neo-liberal context is a process of calculation and distribution, in addition to deprivation. Technical programmes such as chronic homelessness initiatives, and the economic investment they entail, should not be mistaken for political and social rescue of abandoned populations. These programmes emerge to manage costs and to transform illness and death into productive parts of post-industrial economies. Neo-liberal forms of state racism facilitate the continued reproduction of housing insecurity and deprivation as forms of racial subordination, even while organizing those ‘losses’ into productive economic enterprises. |
| 4 |
|
-Cities are sponges of capital—they absorb surplus value to further push off the inevitable crisis that is capitalism. |
| 5 |
|
-Kafui Attoh 11 (Macalester College and his PhD in Geography from Syracuse University, MA in urban studies). "What kind of right is the right to the city?." Progress in human geography 35.5 (2011): 669-685. RC |
| 6 |
|
-David Harvey (2008) situates the concept of the right to the city within a broader and more sweeping analysis of urbanization. The rise and transformation of cities, Harvey argues, must be seen as central to the reproduction of capitalist society.23 Cities, he argues, play an active role ‘in absorbing surpluses’ (Harvey, 2008: 25; see also Harvey, 1982) and staving off crises of overproduction and/or under consumption. Cities are crucial in satisfying capitalism’s perpetual ‘need to find profitable terrains for ... surplus production and absorption’ (Harvey, 2008: 24). If cities are indeed sites in which surpluses are absorbed, distributed, and produced, then, for Harvey, to have a right to the city has a very particular meaning.24 |
| 7 |
|
-Capitalism needs to expend surplus to be survive. Capitalism seeks to maximize profit, inevitably creating surplus value. Spending that surplus is used to justify further exploitation in name of creating more surplus, ad infinitum. |
| 8 |
|
-David Harvey 12 (Distinguished Professor of anthropology and geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He received his PhD in geography from the University of Cambridge in 1961). “Rebel cities: From the right to the city to the urban revolution”. Verso Books, 2012. RC |
| 9 |
|
-To claim the right to the city in the sense I mean it here is to claim some kind of shaping power over the processes of urbanization, over the ways in which our cities are made and remade, and to do so in a fundamental and radical way. From their very inception, cities have arisen through the geographical and social concentration of a surplus product. Urbanization has always been, therefore, a class phenomenon of some sort, since surpluses have been extracted from somewhere and from somebody, while control over the use of the surplus typically lies in the hands of a few (such as a religious oligarchy, or a warrior poet with imperial ambitions). This general situation persists under capitalism, of course, but in this case there is a rather different dynamic at work. Capitalism rests, as Marx tells us, upon the perpetual search for surplus value (profit). But to produce surplus value capitalists have to produce a surplus product. This means that capitalism is perpetually producing the surplus product that urbanization requires. The reverse relation also holds. Capitalism needs urbanization to absorb the surplus products it perpetually produces. In this way an inner connection emerges between the development of capitalism and urbanization. Hardly surprisingly, therefore, the logistical curves of growth of capitalist output over time are broadly paralleled by the logistical curves of urbanization of the world's population. |
| 10 |
|
-The alternative is complete rejection of the capitalist system; mere reform is insufficient because it ensures the system will regenerate itself stronger from the pieces left. |
| 11 |
|
-Joel Kovel 07, Professor of Social Studies at Bard, The Enemy of Nature, 2007, p 142-3 |
| 12 |
|
-The value-term that subsumes everything into the spell of capital sets going a kind of wheel of accumulation, from production to consumption and back, spinning ever more rapidly as the inertial mass of capital grows, and generating its force field as a spinning magnet generates an electrical field. This phenomenon has important implications for the reformability of the system. Because capital is so spectral, and succeeds so well in ideologically mystifying its real nature, attention is constantly deflected from the actual source of eco-destabilization to the instruments by which that source acts. The real problem, however, is the whole mass of globally accumulated capital, along with the speed of its circulation and the class structures sustaining this. That is what generates the force field, in proportion to its own scale; and it is this force field, acting across the numberless points of insertion that constitute the ecosphere, that creates ever larger agglomerations of capital, sets the ecological crisis going, and keeps it from being resolved. For one fact may be taken as certain — that to resolve the ecological crisis as a whole, as against tidying up one corner or another, is radically incompatible with the existence of gigantic pools of capital, the force field these induce, the criminal underworld with which they connect, and, by extension, the elites who comprise the transnational bourgeoisie. And by not resolving the crisis as a whole, we open ourselves to the spectre of another mythical creature, the many-headed hydra, that regenerated itself the more its individual tentacles were chopped away. To realize this is to recognize that there is no compromising with capital, no schema of reformism that will clean up its act by making it act more greenly or efficiently We shall explore the practical implications of this thesis in Part III, and here need simply to restate the conclusion in blunt terms: green capital, or non-polluting capital, is preferable to the immediately ecodestructive breed on its immediate terms. But this is the lesser point, and diminishes with its very success. For green capital (or ‘socially/ecologically responsible investing’) exists, by its very capital-nature, essentially to create more value, and this leaches away from the concretely green location to join the great pool, and follows its force field into zones of greater concentration, expanded profitability — and greater ecodestruction. |
| 13 |
|
-Also, the alternative solves better than the aff: as long as capitalism persists, exploitation is inevitable and piecemeal reforms such as the right to housing will be inevitably rolled back. The alt is a pre-requisite to actually solving for the harms the aff identifies. |
| 14 |
|
-Richard Wolff 06 (Emeritus Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst). “Anti-Slavery and Anti-Capitalism”. 15 December 2006. http://www.rdwolff.com/content/anti-slavery-and-anti-capitalism |
| 15 |
|
-Thus, no surprise attaches to the fact, these days, that one widespread kind of social criticism concentrates on softening capitalism’s negative impacts on workers and the larger society. It seeks to raise workers’ wages and benefits and to make governments limit capitalists’ rapaciousness and the social costs of their competition. In the US, this is what “liberals” do: from the minimalist oppositions within the Democratic Party to the demands of social democrats and many “radicals” for major wage increases, major government interventions, and so on. What always frustrates liberals and radicals is the difficulty of achieving these improved workers’ conditions and the insecurity and temporariness of whatever improvements they do achieve. Today they bemoan yet another roll-back of improvements, namely those won under FDR’s New Deal, Kennedy’s New Frontier, and so on. Marxism is that other kind of opposition that demands the abolition of capitalism as a system. Since Marxists find capitalist exploitation to be as immoral and inhumane as slavery, they might logically seek a further amendment to the US Constitution that abolishes it as well. A Marxist program would seek to replace capitalist production by a non-wage system, one where the workers will not only produce surpluses but also be their own boards of directors. The “associated workers” would, as Marx suggested, appropriate their own surpluses and distribute them. The wage-payer versus wage-recipient division of people inside production would vanish. Every worker’s job description would entail not only his/her technical responsibilities to produce a specific output but also her/his responsibilities as part of the collective that appropriates and distributes the surplus. Monday to Thursday, each worker in each enterprise makes commodities, and every Friday, each worker functions as a member of that enterprise’s board of directors. The stakes here are less obtaining higher wages than abolishing the wage system.The point of such a Marxist program is to overcome the conflicts, wastes, and inequalities (economic, political, and cultural) that flow from the existence of capitalist exploitation whether or not wages are raised. The point is likewise to stress the incompatibility of any genuine democracy with the wage system and its usual social effects (and again whether wages are higher or lower). Of course, in the struggle between such a Marxist perspective and its various critics, the latter will depict the programmatic advocacy of an end to the wage system as impracticable, utopian, or deluded. Those persuaded by neoclassical economics will simply dismiss or ignore not only the Marxist criticism of the wage system but Marxism altogether. For them, the wage system is not only eternal and necessary, but also fair and “efficient.” For them, since there “is” no surplus, they need not read or learn Marxist theory and criticism, let alone debate it. So Marxist theory is and its proponents can and are largely excluded from public discourse in the media, the schools, and politics. For liberals suspicious of neoclassical economics – or “neoliberalism” as it is now more often called - the Marxian program sketched above would be seen as utopian fantasy at best. Yet, not the least irony of Bush’s America today is how his regime’s relentless removal or reduction of the past reforms (high wages, pensions, medical insurance, social security, state social programs, etc.) makes a liberal politics today seem painfully deluded to so many. The liberals seem hopelessly weak, unable to stop let alone reverse the Bush juggernaut. Worse still, what liberals they advocate are precisely the reforms now being dismantled and thus revealed as having been fundamentally insecure all along. The audience for capitalism’s critics and opponents is thus being primed to listen rather attentively to Marxist claims that an abolition of the wage system offers not only a better society but also a far better basis for securing those improvements in wages and working conditions that mass action can achieve. What is needed now are Marxists able and willing to articulate those claims to that audience, to persuade ever more of capitalism’s critics and opponents that abolition of exploitation and the wage system must be a component of their program for social change. |
| 16 |
|
-Affirming treats the symptom by just brushing over the real issue—they don’t solve anything. |
| 17 |
|
-James H. Carr 98 (Senior Vice President for Policy, Research, and Evaluation at the Fannie Mae Foundation), (1998) Comment on Chester Hartman's “The case for a right to housing”: The right to “poverty with a roof"—a response to hartman, Housing Policy Debate, 9:2, 247-257, |
| 18 |
|
-The reasons the housing affordability crisis persists, however, are much deeper than obstacles created by those who oppose specific programs or shifting political priorities. Access to decent and affordable housing is an outcome of a number of resource allocation processes, of which the housing market is perhaps the most superficial. The approach that would ensure the greatest and most cost effective allocation of decent, affordable housing is one that is free of discriminatory barriers to broader societal opportunities that ultimately shape access to the housing market. Included are such areas as education, transportation, and employment. Unless all households have equal opportunities to receive an education that prepares them for the labor market, people with similar aptitudes for a given occupation will have different abilities with which to compete for specific jobs. Because public education in the United States is funded primarily through local property taxes, and affluent households and employers have migrated in large numbers out of central cities and into the suburbs, central-city schools districts are often underfunded. At the same time, many of these districts have schools with deteriorating infrastructure and students with systemic social problems resulting from concentrated poverty. Understandably, central-city school districts face a particularly challenging task in providing quality education. Due in large part to the economic restructuring of U.S. cities, quality jobs requiring moderate education and skill levels have largely migrated to the suburbs. Meanwhile, minority populations have concentrated in central cities due partly to past and present discrimination in the housing market. This ‘‘spatial mismatch,’’ further complicated by the low priority U.S. metropolitan areas have given to public transit systems and the high costs of automobile ownership in central cities relative to other areas in the United States, results in many residents lacking access to quality jobs. |