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... ... @@ -1,6 +1,0 @@ 1 -Rejecting oppression must be prioritized – everyday instances of oppression is the largest proximate cause of psychological and physical warfare against the excluded. 2 -Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois ‘4: (Nancy and Philippe, Prof of Anthropology @ Cal-Berkeley; Prof of Anthropology @ UPenn, Introduction: Making Sense of Violence, in Violence in War and Peace, pg. 19-22) 3 -This large and at first sight “messy” Part VII is central to this anthology’s thesis. It encompasses everything from the routinized, bureaucratized, and utterly banal violence of children dying of hunger and maternal despair in Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33) to elderly African Americans dying of heat stroke in Mayor Daly’s version of US apartheid in Chicago’s South Side (Klinenberg, Chapter 38) to the racialized class hatred expressed by British Victorians in their olfactory disgust of the “smelly” working classes (Orwell, Chapter 36). In these readings violence is located in the symbolic and social structures that overdetermine and allow the criminalized drug addictions, interpersonal bloodshed, and racially patterned incarcerations that characterize the US “inner city” to be normalized (Bourgois, Chapter 37 and Wacquant, Chapter 39 Violence also takes the form of class, racial, political self-hatred and adolescent self-destruction (Quesada, Chapter 35), as well as of useless (i.e. preventable), rawly embodied physical suffering, and death (Farmer, Chapter 34). Absolutely central to our approach is a blurring of categories and distinctions between wartime and peacetime violence. Close attention to the “little” violences produced in the structures, habituses, and mentalites of everyday life shifts our attention to pathologies of class, race, and gender inequalities. More important, it interrupts the voyeuristic tendencies of “violence studies” that risk publicly humiliating the powerless who are often forced into complicity with social and individual pathologies of power because suffering is often a solvent of human integrity and dignity. Thus, in this anthology we are positing a violence continuum comprised of a multitude of “small wars and invisible genocides” (see also Scheper- Hughes 1996; 1997; 2000b) conducted in the normative social spaces of public schools, clinics, emergency rooms, hospital wards, nursing homes, courtrooms, public registry offices, prisons, detention centers, and public morgues. The violence continuum also refers to the ease with which humans are capable of reducing the socially vulnerable into expendable nonpersons and assuming the license - even the duty - to kill, maim, or soul-murder. We realize that in referring to a violence and a genocide continuum we are flying in the face of a tradition of genocide studies that argues for the absolute uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust and for vigilance with respect to restricted purist use of the term genocide itself (see Kuper 1985; Chaulk 1999; Fein 1990; Chorbajian 1999). But we hold an opposing and alternative view that, to the contrary, it is absolutely necessary to make just such existential leaps in purposefully linking violent acts in normal times to those of abnormal times. Hence the title of our volume: Violence in War and in Peace. If (as we concede) there is a moral risk in overextending the concept of “genocide” into spaces and corners of everyday life where we might not ordinarily think to find it (and there is), an even greater risk lies in failing to sensitize ourselves, in misrecognizing protogenocidal practices and sentiments daily enacted as normative behavior by “ordinary” good-enough citizens. Peacetime crimes, such as prison construction sold as economic development to impoverished communities in the mountains and deserts of California, or the evolution of the criminal industrial complex into the latest peculiar institution for managing race relations in the United States (Waquant, Chapter 39), constitute the “small wars and invisible genocides” to which we refer. This applies to African American and Latino youth mortality statistics in Oakland, California, Baltimore, Washington DC, and New York City. These are “invisible” genocides not because they are secreted away or hidden from view, but quite the opposite. As Wittgenstein observed, the things that are hardest to perceive are those which are right before our eyes and therefore taken for granted. In this regard, Bourdieu’s partial and unfinished theory of violence (see Chapters 32 and 42) as well as his concept of misrecognition is crucial to our task. By including the normative everyday forms of violence hidden in the minutiae of “normal” social practices - in the architecture of homes, in gender relations, in communal work, in the exchange of gifts, and so forth - Bourdieu forces us to reconsider the broader meanings and status of violence, especially the links between the violence of everyday life and explicit political terror and state repression, Similarly, Basaglia’s notion of “peacetime crimes” - crimini di pace - imagines a direct relationship between wartime and peacetime violence. Peacetime crimes suggests the possibility that war crimes are merely ordinary, everyday crimes of public consent applied systematic- ally and dramatically in the extreme context of war. Consider the parallel uses of rape during peacetime and wartime, or the family resemblances between the legalized violence of US immigration and naturalization border raids on “illegal aliens” versus the US government- engineered genocide in 1938, known as the Cherokee “Trail of Tears.” Peacetime crimes suggests that everyday forms of state violence make a certain kind of domestic peace possible. Internal “stability” is purchased with the currency of peacetime crimes, many of which take the form of professionally applied “strangle-holds.” Everyday forms of state violence during peacetime make a certain kind of domestic “peace” possible. It is an easy-to-identify peacetime crime that is usually maintained as a public secret by the government and by a scared or apathetic populace. Most subtly, but no less politically or structurally, the phenomenal growth in the United States of a new military, postindustrial prison industrial complex has taken place in the absence of broad-based opposition, let alone collective acts of civil disobedience. The public consensus is based primarily on a new mobilization of an old fear of the mob, the mugger, the rapist, the Black man, the undeserving poor. How many public executions of mentally deficient prisoners in the United States are needed to make life feel more secure for the affluent? What can it possibly mean when incarceration becomes the “normative” socializing experience for ethnic minority youth in a society, i.e., over 33 percent of young African American men (Prison Watch 2002). In the end it is essential that we recognize the existence of a genocidal capacity among otherwise good-enough humans and that we need to exercise a defensive hyper vigilance to the less dramatic, permitted, and even rewarded everyday acts of violence that render participation in genocidal acts and policies possible (under adverse political or economic conditions), perhaps more easily than we would like to recognize. Under the violence continuum we include, therefore, all expressions of radical social exclusion, dehumanization, depersonalization, pseudo speciation, and reification which normalize atrocious behavior and violence toward others. A constant self-mobilization for alarm, a state of constant hyper arousal is, perhaps, a reasonable response to Benjamin’s view of late modern history as a chronic “state of emergency” (Taussig, Chapter 31). We are trying to recover here the classic anagogic thinking that enabled Erving Goffman, Jules Henry, C. Wright Mills, and Franco Basaglia among other mid-twentieth-century radically critical thinkers, to perceive the symbolic and structural relations, i.e., between inmates and patients, between concentration camps, prisons, mental hospitals, nursing homes, and other “total institutions.” Making that decisive move to recognize the continuum of violence allows us to see the capacity and the willingness - if not enthusiasm - of ordinary people, the practical technicians of the social consensus, to enforce genocidal-like crimes against categories of rubbish people. There is no primary impulse out of which mass violence and genocide are born, it is ingrained in the common sense of everyday social life. The mad, the differently abled, the mentally vulnerable have often fallen into this category of the unworthy living, as have the very old and infirm, the sick-poor, and, of course, the despised racial, religious, sexual, and ethnic groups of the moment. Erik Erikson referred to “pseudo- speciation” as the human tendency to classify some individuals or social groups as less than fully human - a prerequisite to genocide and one that is carefully honed during the unremarkable peacetimes that precede the sudden, “seemingly unintelligible” outbreaks of mass violence. Collective denial and misrecognition are prerequisites for mass violence and genocide. But so are formal bureaucratic structures and professional roles. The practical technicians of everyday violence in the backlands of Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33), for example, include the clinic doctors who prescribe powerful tranquilizers to fretful and frightfully hungry babies, the Catholic priests who celebrate the death of “angel-babies,” and the municipal bureaucrats who dispense free baby coffins but no food to hungry families. Everyday violence encompasses the implicit, legitimate, and routinized forms of violence inherent in particular social, economic, and political formations. It is close to what Bourdieu (1977, 1996) means by “symbolic violence,” the violence that is often “nus-recognized” for something else, usually something good. Everyday violence is similar to what Taussig (1989) calls “terror as usual.” All these terms are meant to reveal a public secret - the hidden links between violence in war and violence in peace, and between war crimes and “peace-time crimes.” Bourdieu (1977) finds domination and violence in the least likely places - in courtship and marriage, in the exchange of gifts, in systems of classification, in style, art, and culinary taste- the various uses of culture. Violence, Bourdieu insists, is everywhere in social practice. It is misrecognized because its very everydayness and its familiarity render it invisible. Lacan identifies “rneconnaissance” as the prerequisite of the social. The exploitation of bachelor sons, robbing them of autonomy, independence, and progeny, within the structures of family farming in the European countryside that Bourdieu escaped is a case in point (Bourdieu, Chapter 42; see also Scheper-Hughes, 2000b; Favret-Saada, 1989). Following Gramsci, Foucault, Sartre, Arendt, and other modern theorists of power-vio- lence, Bourdieu treats direct aggression and physical violence as a crude, uneconomical mode of domination; it is less efficient and, according to Arendt (1969), it is certainly less legitimate. While power and symbolic domination are not to be equated with violence - and Arendt argues persuasively that violence is to be understood as a failure of power - violence, as we are presenting it here, is more than simply the expression of illegitimate physical force against a person or group of persons. Rather, we need to understand violence as encompassing all forms of “controlling processes” (Nader 1997b) that assault basic human freedoms and individual or collective survival. Our task is to recognize these gray zones of violence which are, by definition, not obvious. Once again, the point of bringing into the discourses on genocide everyday, normative experiences of reification, depersonalization, institutional confinement, and acceptable death is to help answer the question: What makes mass violence and genocide possible? In this volume we are suggesting that mass violence is part of a continuum, and that it is socially incremental and often experienced by perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders - and even by victims themselves - as expected, routine, even justified. The preparations for mass killing can be found in social sentiments and institutions from the family, to schools, churches, hospitals, and the military. They harbor the early “warning signs” (Charney 1991), the “priming” (as Hinton, ed., 2002 calls it), or the “genocidal continuum” (as we call it) that push social consensus toward devaluing certain forms of human life and lifeways from the refusal of social support and humane care to vulnerable “social parasites” (the nursing home elderly, “welfare queens,” undocumented immigrants, drug addicts) to the militarization of everyday life (super-maximum-security prisons, capital punishment; the technologies of heightened personal security, including the house gun and gated communities; and reversed feelings of victimization). 4 -Theory absent real solutions is as useless as action divorced from theory. 5 -Giroux ‘14: Henry A. Giroux American scholar and cultural critic. One of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy in the United States, he is best known for his pioneering work in public pedagogy, “Neoliberalism’s War on Democracy”, Truthout, 26 Apr 2014 BE 6 -In this instance, understanding must be linked to the practice of social responsibility and the willingness to fashion a politics that addresses real problems and enacts concrete solutions. As Heather Gautney points out, ¶ We need to start thinking seriously about what kind of political system we really want. And we need to start pressing for things that our politicians did NOT discuss at the conventions. Real solutions—like universal education, debt forgiveness, wealth redistribution, and participatory political structures—that would empower us to decide together what’s best. Not who’s best.75¶ Critical thinking divorced from action is often as sterile as action divorced from critical theory. Given the urgency of the historical moment, we need a politics and a public pedagogy that make knowledge meaningful in order to make it critical and transformative. Or, as Stuart Hall argues, we need to produce modes of analysis and knowledge in which "people can invest something of themselves . . . something that they recognize is of them or speaks to their condition."76 A notion of higher education as a democratic public sphere is crucial to this project, especially at a time in which the apostles of neoliberalism and other forms of political and religious fundamentalism are ushering in a new age of conformity, cruelty, and disposability. But as public intellectuals, academics can do more. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,9 +1,0 @@ 1 -Lack of regulation leads to ad hoc restrictions that chill speech – creates hostile environment 2 -Juhan ‘12: S. Cagle Juhan (Judicial Law Clerk, Western District of Virginia; JD University of Virginia School of Law). “Free Speech, Hate Speech, and the Hostile Speech Environ- ment.” Virginia Law Review. November 2012. http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/23333530.pdf 3 -Iota Xi Chapter of Sigma Chi Fraternity v. George Mason University) 70 illustrates the problem with a discretionary system: government bureaucrats serve as roving commissioners, picking and choosing which speech to regulate, often on the grounds that cer-tain groups object to it.‘The danger is threefold. First, the absence of a written policy leaves a vacuum. By their very nature, decisions made on a case-by-case basis lack debated, agreed-upon, and disseminated principles that can guide action.’ Thus, one cannot ex ante abide by guidelines that are unknowable until after one speaks. The result is the commonly cited “chilling effect”: speakers will say less, even if their speech would be constitutionally pro-tected, because they cannot be assured that they will not be punished for it.‘ Second, informal, standardless decision-making processes about what speech should be allowed are viewed with particular skepticism in First Amend- ment doctrine because they both contribute to the chilling effect and enhance the risk of discriminatory or arbi-trary regulation.’ Ad hoc judgments allow universities to sanc- tion speech because they disapprove of it, which is precisely the out-come that the First Amendment was designed to prevent.‘The third and related concern is that administrators are easily captured by campus constituencies that mobilize against hateful or mer:ely unpopular speech.’ The Iota Xi case offers a clear example of this problem. Students objecting to the fraternity’s speech con-vinced an administrator that the speech created a hostile educa-tional environment and conflicted with the university’s mission; administrators subsequently imposed sanctions, despite not having done so in an initial meeting with the fraternity that occurred the same day as the one with the offended students. ‘The risk of “captured” administrators is especially high when hate speech is at issue.’ Hate speech frequently targets minorities or historically disfavored groups. These constituencies, in addition to understandably disagreeing with hate speech that disparages them, are some of the most vocal proponents and defenders of the equal- ity, diversity, and tolerance norms that have gained incredible purchase in the realm of higher education.‘Accusations or percep-tions that a university or its administrators are not sympathetic enough to these norms or to the groups invoking them can have ad- verse consequences for a university’s prestige and an administra- tor’s career.’ Therefore, there are strong personal and institutional incentives to err on the side of equal- ity, diversity, and tolerance ideals and against constitutionally protected speech.‘One observer has aptly termed ad hoc decision-making proc-esses “implicit speech codes.” ’ Ultimately, however, whether ex-plicit or implicit, speech codes increase (1) the chilling effect on speech, (2) the danger of viewpoint discrimination, and (3) the op-portunity for constituencies to suppress opponents by capturing administrators.’ 4 -Hostile campuses lead to lower graduation rates, perpetuating exclusion and hate speech– empirically proven. 5 -Perry ‘15: Andre M. Perry, 11-11-2015, "Campus racism makes minority students likelier to drop out of college. Mizzou students had to act.," https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/11/11/campus-racism-makes-minority-students-likelier-to-drop-out-of-college/?tid=a_inl 6 -By now you know the story: Three days ago, University of Missouri footballers offered administrators an ultimatum: University system President Tim Wolfe had to go or the team wouldn’t play. Monday morning, Wolfe resigned. Credit players and protesters, led by hunger-striking grad student Jonathan Butler, for drawing attention to Wolfe’s failure to address campus racism. But beyond applauding the activism of students, it’s important to understand what’s at stake at Missouri and other campuses — like Yale University, where students at the Silliman residential college have taken on their live-in faculty advisers over competing views about the impact of racially insensitive Halloween costumes — is college survival itself: In hostile environments, students of color graduate at lower rates, jeopardizing not only their academic careers but also future success. In one sense, given the controversies at Mizzou — where a hostile campus climate serves as a mechanism by which students of color remain outsiders — the students didn’t have a choice. It would be illogical, and self-defeating, if they didn’t use the power they had at their disposal. Campus racial climate has been linked to academic success. And research has long shown that academic preparedness is only one of many factors that determine why students do or don’t graduate. The psychological attitudes between and among groups, as well as intergroup relations on campuses, influences how well students of color perform and whether they stay on track toward graduation. Graduation rates lag when schools don’t provide an environment that fosters the scholastic pursuits of minority students, particularly black men. Researcher Sylvia Hurtado explains that “Just as a campus that embraces diversity provides substantial positive benefits, a hostile or discriminatory climate has substantial negative consequences.” Her research found that “Students who reported negative or hostile encounters with members of other racial groups scored lower on the majority of outcomes.” A study of students at the University of Washington found that black students there were the only campus group to suffer a clear statistical GPA disadvantage from a nasty campus climate: “Results indicate that campus climate is significantly related to academic achievement of African American students, as represented by GPA, accounting for about 11 percent of the variance.” That means black students facing adverse conditions are likelier to leave college early — and would, presumably, be likelier to stay in what they felt to be a safe space. In “Interactional Diversity and the Role of a Supportive Racial Climate” the University of Maryland’s Leah Kendra Cox found much the same thing: “In unhealthy climates, students — both majority and minority — are less likely to thrive academically or socially.” She found that a supportive racial climate had more impact than any other factor on the strength of diversity on campus. Perhaps not coincidentally, a Gallup survey last month illustrated that students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, or HBCUs — where the climate, by design, nurtures students of color — were far more likely to “strongly agree that their colleges prepared them for life after graduation (55) than black graduates of other institutions (29).” In that context, consider the reports of what’s taken place in the Mizzou community. In September, Missouri Students Association President Payton Head, who is black, took to Facebook to report being called the n-word by a driver in a passing car as he walked down a street near campus. In early October, the Legion of Black Collegians tweeted that intoxicated white students had shouted the n-word at them during a campus protest. Later that month, tensions flared when someone smeared feces in the form a swastika in a campus bathroom — creating the kind of climate that alienates and marginalizes minority students, who have just as much right to pursue their education on the Missouri campus, free from harassment, as anyone else. Students still remember the 2010 incident in which two Missouri students were suspended for dropping cotton balls in front of the campus’ Black Culture Center. Wolfe’s inaction, in the face of repeated demands to better address students’ frustration with the charged campus environment, precipitated his ouster. Though he later apologized, many cite his failure to engage with students — remaining cloistered in his car — when approached by the campus group ConcernedStudent1950 at a homecoming parade, as one of the last straws that ended his administration. And while commentators like Rush Limbaugh say Wolfe resigned for “committing the crime of being a white male,” their argument, beyond the hyperbole, is the wrong way to evaluate the relationship of the university to its students. Wolfe’s job was to use the resources at his disposal to build a campus community where all students feel they can pursue their academic careers in an environment where they’re respected and taken seriously. But as Butler told The Post: When you localize it to the hunger strike it really is about the environment that is on campus. We have reactionary, negligent individuals on all levels at the university level on our campus and at the university system level, and so their job descriptions explicitly say that they’re supposed to provide a safe and inclusive environment for all students … but when we have issues of sexual assault, when we have issues of racism, when we have issues of homophobia, the campus climate continues to deteriorate because we don’t have strong leadership, willing to actually make change. So, for me, I’m fighting for a better tomorrow. As much as the experiences on campus have not been that great for me — I had people call me the n-word, I had someone write the n-word on the a door in my residence hall — for me it really is about a call for justice. I’m fighting for the black community on campus, because justice is worth fighting for. And justice is worth starving for. So is education. The U.S. Department of Education found markedly lower graduation rates for blacks and Latino men (33.2 percent and 44.8 percent, respectively, graduate from college within six years) compared with their white and Asian peers (57.1 percent and 64.2 percent, respectively). These disparities have been depressingly constant in recent years. One factor contributing to these disparities is that universities frequently place a premium on meeting the (short-term) needs of black athletes in revenue generating sports while paying lip service to the needs of other students of color. From the disciplines faculty teach in to the traditions they uphold, predominantly white institutions haven’t fully dealt with the changing demographics of collegians. For many students, especially first-generation collegians, these institutions often place the burden on students to adapt to an unwelcoming environment. But the Missouri case illustrates the imperative for colleges to transform what they are and who they serve if they are to fulfill their mission of addressing societal problems, training the workforce and educating the public. And black student-athletes, who are overrepresented in the major-revenue sports — football and basketball — may be uniquely empowered to move university leaders who, in the case of the University of Missouri, at least, didn’t demonstrate they were otherwise compelled by the data. If colleges can prioritize the needs of students of color in their athletic programs, they also can prioritize the development of scientists, historians and teachers of color. In order to do this, postsecondary institutions must change at a structural level. One approach would be to transition their merit-based scholarships into need- or place-based scholarships. First-generation collegians should have access to living-learning communities in which dormitories provide wrap-around supports. Colleges must attract and retain black and brown faculty at much higher levels. Faculty must embrace their role as counselors, not just instructors or researchers. Academic support for first-generation collegians shouldn’t be treated as remediation. Finally, faculty and administrators should be held accountable for graduation rates. Success isn’t just on students’ shoulders. 7 -Hate speech creates academic and discursive exclusion, kills minority education, turns case. 8 -Garrett ‘2: Deanna M. Garrett, Deanna M. Garrett graduated from the University of Virginia in 1997 with a bachelor's degree in Religious Studies and a minor in Biology. She is a second-year HESA student and a Graduate Assistant in the Department of Residential Life, “Silenced Voices: Hate Speech Codes on Campus”, University of Vermont, 07/29/2002, https://www.uvm.edu/~vtconn/?Page=v20/garrett.html 9 -Advocates of hate speech codes contend that the inclusion of racist, sexist, and homophobic speech serves only to silence others’ voices. "Such speech not only interferes with equal educational opportunities, but also deters the exercise of other freedoms, including those secured by the First Amendment" (Strossen, 1994, p. 193). Faced with hate speech, many individuals are silenced or forced to flee, rather than engaging in dialogue (Lawrence, 1993). In higher education, dialogue is key to learning and gaining new knowledge. Students engage in dialogue with one another, challenge each other, and propose new ideas. However, racist speech does not invite this exchange but seeks to silence non-dominant individuals. Post (1994) outlines three ways in which minority groups are silenced by hateful speech: (1) Victim groups are silenced because their perspectives are systematically excluded from the dominant discourse; (2) victim groups are silenced because the pervasive stigma of racism systematically undermines and devalues their speech; and (3) victim groups are silenced because the visceral "fear, rage, and shock" of racist speech systematically preempts response. (p. 143) - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,9 +1,0 @@ 1 -The term "prison industrial complex" is dangerously misleading – rather than a means of 'industry', prisons are an expensive tool of maintaining social control. 2 -MIM(Prisons) ’12: (MIM stands for Maoist International Movement, and the (prisons) part refers to the fact that it's written by current and former prisoners. Website description: 'MIM(Prisons) is a cell of revolutionaries serving the oppressed masses inside U.$. prisons, guided by the communist ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism' (this is obviously amazing) "The Myth of the 'Prison Industrial Complex'," July 2012 ~https://www.prisoncensorship.info/article/the-myth-of-the-prison-industrial-complex/~~) 3 -Many people are caught up in the line that millions are enslaved in this country, and that the main motivating factor behind the prison boom of recent decades is to put prisoners to work to make money for corporations or the government. MIM(Prisons) has clearly shown that U.S. prisons are not primarily (or even significantly) used to exploit labor, and that they are a great cost financially to the imperialists, not a source of profit.(1) "Indeed, at peak use around 2002, fewer than 5,000 inmates were employed by private firms, amounting to one-quarter of one per cent of the carceral population. As for the roughly 8 of convicts who toil for state and federal industries under lock, they are 'employed' at a loss to correctional authorities in spite of massive subsidies, guaranteed sales to a captive market of public administrations, and exceedingly low wages (averaging well under a dollar an hour)."(2) Instead, we argue that there is a system of population control (including all the elements of the international definition of genocide) that utilizes methods of torture on mostly New Afrikan and Latino men, with a hugely disproportionate representation of First Nation men as well, across this country on a daily basis. As the new prison movement grows and gains attention in the mainstream, it is of utmost importance that we maintain the focus on this truth and not let the white nationalists define what is ultimately a struggle of the oppressed nations. To analyze why the term "prison industrial complex" ("PIC") is inaccurate and misleading, let's look at some common slogans of the social democrats, who dominate the white nationalist left. First let's address the slogan "Welfare not Warfare." This slogan is a false dichotomy, where the sloganeer lacks an understanding of imperialism and militarism. It is no coincidence that the biggest "welfare states" in the world today are imperialist countries. Imperialism brings home more profits by going to war to steal resources, discipline labor, and force economic policies and business contracts on other nations. And militarism is the cultural and political product of that fact. The "military industrial complex" was created when private industry teamed up with the U.$. government to meet their mutual interests as imperialists. Industry got the contracts from the government, with guaranteed profits built in, and the government got the weapons they needed to keep money flowing into the United $tates by oppressing other nations. This concentration of wealth produces the high wages and advanced infrastructure that the Amerikan people benefit from, not to mention the tax money that is made available for welfare programs. So it is ignorant for activists to claim that they are being impoverished by the imperialists' wars as is implied by the false dichotomy of welfare vs. warfare. Another slogan of the social democrats which speaks to why they are so eager to condemn the "PIC" is "Schools not Jails." This slogan highlights that there is only so much tax money in a state available to fund either schools, jails, or something else. There is a limited amount of money because extracting more taxes would increase class conflict between the state and the labor aristocracy. This battle is real, and it is a battle between different public service unions of the labor aristocracy. The "Schools not Jails" slogan is the rallying cry of one side of that battle among the labor aristocrats. Unlike militarism, there is not an imperialist profit interest behind favoring jails over schools. This is precisely why the concept of a "PIC" is a fantasy. While the U.$. economy would likely collapse without the spending that goes into weapons-related industries, Loïc Wacquant points out that the soft drink industry in the United $tates is almost twice as big as prison industries, and prison industries are a mere 0.5 of the gross domestic product.(2) Compared to the military industrial complex, which is 10 of U.$. GDP, the prison system is obviously not a "complex" combining state and private interests that cannot be dismantled without dire consequences to imperialism.(3) And of course, even those pushing the "PIC" line must admit that over 95 of prisons in this country are publicly owned and run.(4) Federal agencies using the prison system to control social elements that they see as a threat to imperialism is the motivating factor for the injustice system, not an imperialist drive for profits. Yet the system is largely decentralized and built on the interests of the majority of Amerikans at the local level, and not just the labor unions and small businesses that benefit directly from spending on prisons. We would likely not have the imprisonment rates that we have today without pressure from the so-called "middle class." 4 -It suggests analogy with the 'military industrial complex', which obscures the decentralized character of imprisonment – this directly limits activist imagination. 5 -Wacquant ‘10: (Loic, Professor of Sociology and Research Associate at the Earl Warren Legal Institute, University of California, Berkeley, where he is also affiliated with the Program in Medical Anthropology and the Center for Urban Ethnography, and Researcher at the 'Centre de sociologie européenne' in Paris, member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, a MacArthur Prize Fellow, has won numerous grants including the Fletcher Foundation Fellowship and the Lewis Coser Award of the American Sociological Association, also gets cited by Wilderson, Rodriguez, and Sexton a lot, "Prisoner reentry as myth and ceremony," Dialect Anthropol (2010) 34:605–620 ~DOI 10.1007/s10624-010-9215-5~) 6 -1.1. PIC is based on a loose analogy with MIC, the ‘‘Military Industrial Complex’’ alleged to have driven the expansion of America’s warfare economy during the Cold War era (e.g., Gilmore 2009). Aside from the dubious analytic validity of a notion coined by a speechwriter for a despondent President Eisenhower on the occasion of his farewell address,2 the claim that PIC parallels MIC in handling security on the home front for the benefit of corporations founders on the fact that there is no justice equivalent for the Pentagon. Whereas the federal Department of Defense is a single decision-making center that manages a single budget and implements military policy through hierarchical command, there exists no bureaucratic lever to direct crime control and submit it uniformly to private interests. Legal punishment in America is meted out through a highly decentralized, disjointed, and multilayered patchwork of agencies. The police, courts, and corrections are separate government institutions, subjected to disparate political, funding, and bureaucratic imperatives, that are poorly coordinated and whose relations are riven with tension and conflicts (Neubauer 2005: 6–7)—to say nothing of probation, parole, halfway houses, drug treatment facilities, and assorted outfits entrusted with handling convicts after their release. In addition to being weakly connected to each other, each of the three components of the penal chain is deeply fragmented across geographic space and political scale. Over 18,000 local and state law-enforcement agencies decide their policing strategies at ground level; some 2,341 distinct prosecutors’ offices set their judicial priorities; thousands of counties run their own jail while the fifty states and the federal government each run their separate prison system (and release programs) with little regard for what other administrative units are doing. Moreover, because they are located at the back-end of the penal chain, prisons depend for their key operational inputs on measures and processes set in motion by the police and the courts, over whom they have virtually no influence. The incipient ‘‘federalization of crime’’ (Waisman 1994), which provides a measure of coordination, has been largely undermined by the diversification of prosecution and corrections philosophies across jurisdictions after the abandonment of indeterminate sentencing (Tonry 2000). In organizational and political terms, then, the government function of punishment is decentralized, fragmented, and horizontal, that is, the polar opposite of the military. The connection between MIC and PIC is purely rhetorical; it pertains to metaphor and not to analogy. Even if some malevolent alliance of politicians, corporate owners, and correctional officials wished to harness carceral institutions to the pecuniary aims of ‘‘multinational globalization’’ and foster ‘‘a project in racialization and macro injustice’’ (Brewer and Heitzeg 2008: 625), they would lack the bureaucratic means to do so. Rather than explaining it, PIC precludes posing the crucial question of how and why a de facto national policy of penal expansion has emerged out of the organizational hodge-podge formed by criminal justice institutions. 7 -Reject the aff – better analytical grammar is crucial to radical politics. 8 -MIM(Prisons) ’12: (MIM stands for Maoist International Movement, and the (prisons) part refers to the fact that it's written by current and former prisoners. Website description: 'MIM(Prisons) is a cell of revolutionaries serving the oppressed masses inside U.$. prisons, guided by the communist ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism' (this is obviously amazing) "The Myth of the 'Prison Industrial Complex'," July 2012 ~https://www.prisoncensorship.info/article/the-myth-of-the-prison-industrial-complex/~~) 9 -This unfortunate term has been popularized in the Amerikan left by a number of pseudo-Marxist theorists who are behind some of the popular prison activist groups on the outside. By explicitly rejecting this term, we are drawing a clear line between us and the organizations these activists are behind, many of whom we've worked with in one way or another. For the most part, the organizations themselves do not claim any Marxist influence or even a particular class analysis, but the leaders of these groups are very aware of where they disagree with MIM Thought. It is important that the masses are aware of this disagreement as well. It is for these reasons that MIM(Prisons) passed the following policy at our 2012 congress: The term "Prison Industrial Complex (PIC)" will not generally be used in Under Lock and Key because the term conflicts with MIM(Prisons)'s line on the economic and national make up of the U.$. prison system. It will only be printed in a context where the meaning of the term is stated by the author, and either criticized by them or by us. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,4 +1,0 @@ 1 -CP Text: The United States Federal Government should withdraw the entirety of the armed forces. 2 -The military sustains imperialism and militarism – abolishing it solves the aff while avoiding all the disads and turns to the aff. 3 -Shupak ‘15: Greg Shupak writes in “Abolish the Military: On Veterans Day, we should honor those killed and injured in past US wars by stopping future ones.” Jacobin Magazine. Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. The print magazine is released quarterly and reaches over 20,000 subscribers, in addition to a web audience of 1,000,000 a month. Greg Shupak teaches media studies at the University of Guelph in Canada. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/11/veterans-day-american-military-iraq-war-libya-vietnam/; AB 4 -Lisa Simpson had the right idea. In a 2002 episode of The Simpsons, the elementary school student tries to impress two college kids by putting a sticker on her bike that says “US Out of Everywhere.” It is a slogan that should be ubiquitous on the Left. With the string of disastrous military interventions across the world in recent years, it’s even more apparent that US crimes aren’t isolated — there’s an underlying structure that produces them. Tackling that underlying structure, though daunting, also fosters opportunities for unity. Because of the sheer destructiveness of US militarism, and its vital role in maintaining global capitalism, a reinvigorated antiwar movement could bring together leftists with a broad range of concerns. So on Veterans Day, here’s how US militarism stands in the way of a just world — and why the Left should come together to bring it to its knees. 1. US imperialism breeds racism. For starters, the main victims of the US military have been people of color. Just since World War II, there are the millions slaughtered in Korea and Indochina, the over one million killed in Iraq, and the tens of thousands in Afghanistan — all of which have then been affixed with dehumanizing labels to rationalize the murdering sprees. The bigotry doesn’t stay overseas. Using racist language to legitimize attacking Arabs or Southeast Asians contributes to the dissemination of racism against minorities in the United States. There’s also the long-running presence of Klansmen and Neo-Nazis in the American forces and the tacit acceptance of their presence by officials. As Reuters’ Daniel Trotta reported in 2012, white supremacist groups encourage their followers who join the Army and Marine Corps to acquire the skills to overthrow the “Zionist Occupation Government” that they think is running America and to prepare for the race war that they see as imminent. Former service members such as Wade Page and James Burmeister have carried out racist murders on US soil, and a 2008 report commissioned by the Justice Department found that half of all right-wing extremists in the United States had military experience. 2. The military is anti-feminist. US military actions also need to be thought of as exercises in mass violence against women. Millions of women in the Global South have been killed, maimed, assaulted, or traumatized by the United States military. In just one horrifying example, a set of documents declassified in 2006 shows recurrent attacks on ordinary Vietnamese — families in their homes, farmers in rice paddies, teenagers out fishing. Hundreds of soldiers, in interviews with investigators and letters to commanders, described a violent minority who murdered, raped and tortured with impunity. Abuses were not confined to a few rogue units . . . They were uncovered in every Army division that operated in Vietnam. Similarly, activist and scholar Kozue Akibayashi notes that in Okinawa, Japan a “problem caused by the US military presence is sexual or gender-based violence by US soldiers,” including “hundreds of cases of sexual assaults against women and children of all ages.” The same problem exists in Colombia where, according to an April 2015 report, US military soldiers and contractors sexually abused at least fifty-four children between 2003 and 2007 — and were never held accountable because American military personnel are protected by diplomatic immunity agreements between the two countries. Still more women around the world have been widowed and left to raise children, or have been burdened by physically or mentally scarred spouses and family members. Sexual assault is also widespread within the military’s own ranks. The Journal of International Affairs recently reported that, “according to the US government, in 2012, there were 26,000 sexual assaults in the US military.” But “only 3,374 were reported” because a “culture of impunity” prevails. In the US military, it is overwhelmingly women who are subject to sexual violence. A 2010 examination of veterans of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and of Operation Iraqi Freedom found that “of 125,729 veterans who received Veterans Health Administration primary care or mental health services, 15.1 percent of the women and 0.7 percent of the men reported military sexual trauma when screened” — though these are likely conservative estimates because sexual violence tends to be underreported. Many male soldiers, moreover, return from the trauma of war to abuse their families. Veterans are responsible for nearly 21 percent of domestic violence in the United States, and these instances are statistically more likely to result in death than those perpetrated by non-veterans. Their ability to function is also compromised, which often forces their wives to provide for the family and take on a greater share of household tasks. 3. US militarism is bad for American workers and for the planet. US imperialism should be a major concern for labor organizers if for no other reason than that it’s the US poor and working class whose lives, bodies, and minds are usually put on the line by and for capitalists. Yet there are further ways in which the US war machine harms American workers. Extraordinary amounts of resources that could be used to improve people’s lives in the US and elsewhere are instead diverted to the military. In 2013, the total US military expenditure was $640 billion, over $400 billion more than second-place China. During the Cold War, overly optimistic liberals and social democrats looked forward to a “peace dividend” that the American population could enjoy in the event of a permanent thaw in relations with the Soviet Union or its dissolution. Their mistake was to assume that the existence of the USSR was the main reason for the US’s obscenely large military budget. However, the US military doesn’t consume the volume of resources it does because of external threats, but because it is a co-dependent of American capitalism. The US military is itself a site of accumulation and a force for the protection and expansion of American capital’s interests worldwide. At times, organized labor has supported weapons manufacturing on the grounds that it provides Americans with a source of employment that cannot easily be outsourced. It is better, however, to understand the demilitarization of US society as an opportunity for workers. Productive capacities could be shifted from bomb-making to the creation of socially necessary goods. Rather than building instruments of death and environmental degradation, resources could be used to construct the infrastructure needed to save the planet and provide badly needed social services. America’s wars also defoliate, pollute bodies of water, corrupt soil, destroy ecosystems, and kill huge numbers of animals. The Iraq War alone “added more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than 60 percent of the world’s nations,” scholar Bruce Johansen reports. An antiwar movement that advocates redirecting resources from the military toward serving human and ecological needs can be a site at which organized labor and environmentalists forge alliances. 4. The US military is global capitalism’s police. Some ostensibly concerned with class politics contend that the military provides workers’ families with decent jobs and opportunities for personal advancement. But this is incredibly myopic. Building movements that confront capital is far more effective at improving the lot of the working class. And challenging capitalism necessitates challenging US imperialism. Capitalism needs certain political conditions in order to operate, such as stable, enforceable property rights across national borders. Yet, as Perry Anderson points out, international legal regimes for ensuring these are weak, and “the general task of coordination” of the capitalist system “can be satisfactorily resolved only by the existence of a superordinate power, capable of imposing discipline on the system as a whole.” That superordinate power is the United States, and its military is global capitalism’s police force. As Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin argue, in managing global capitalism, the American state rules through other states, and turning them all into “effective” states for global capitalism is no easy matter. It is the attempt by the American state to address these problems, especially vis-à-vis what it calls “rogue states” in the third world, that leads American imperialism today to present itself in an increasingly unconcealed manner. To be sure, the military is not the only way that the US oversees global capitalism. But because US imperialism is an essential feature of contemporary global capitalism, any blow to one is a blow to the other. Anticapitalists of all stripes are doomed to failure if they do not treat building a new antiwar movement as a foremost concern. 5. The military is no humanitarian force. In the post-Cold War era, few matters have caused as much friction on the Euro-Atlantic left as the question of whether American military might should be used in the name of human rights across the world. Despite its horrific record, some progressives persist in believing that the US military can be used to liberate women, build democracy, and protect human rights. NATO’s 2011 intervention in Libya is just another example of the misguided tendency to view the United States military as the armed wing of Amnesty International. In Slouching Towards Sirte, Maximilian Forte writes of the US’s frustration at Qaddafi’s attempt to obstruct the building of Africa Command (AFRICOM) bases in Africa, which the US had hoped would help it extract resources throughout Africa. In 2008, American Vice Admiral Robert Moeller said that one of AFRICOM’s aims was to ensure “the free flow of resources from Africa to the global market,” and in 2010 he said that one of AFRICOM’s purposes is “to promote American interests.” Similarly, Horace Campbell’s examination of Wikileaks cables finds that in 2007–08, Western oil companies such as the American firm Occidental were “compelled to sign new deals with Libya’s National Oil Company, on significantly less favorable terms than they had previously enjoyed.” A January 2010 cable shows that oil companies and the American government were frightened by the Qaddafi government’s “rhetoric in early 2009 involving the possible nationalization of the oil sector.” There is no doubt that Qaddafi’s government violated human rights, but the professed humanitarian concerns were only a pretext for American involvement. We must resist the misconception that the American armed forces can play a neutral role on the world stage to protect victims of rights violations or to end tyranny. The US military’s purpose is to pursue and protect the interests of the American ruling class. As Doug Stokes explains, since the end of World War II American foreign policy has been focused on “the maintenance and defense of an economically open international system conducive to capital penetration and circulation” — and a global strategy to halt any social or political force that challenges, even mildly, this system. We’ve seen this in in the US military assaults on Cuba, Vietnam, and Grenada, to say nothing of the innumerable covert or proxy attacks carried out against left-leaning forces around the world for nearly a century. The US maintains eight hundred military bases outside of its borders — an example of the kind of geopolitical posturing that allows for US political and economic hegemony across the globe. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Middle East, where the United States is able to safeguard its commercial interests and enhance its economic opportunities by threatening to quash any social disturbance that may disrupt the flow of oil or the circulation of petrodollars. Even partially weakening the US war machine would afford the socialist initiatives outside the US — particularly those in the Global South — the room to flourish. And if the Left can peel back the humanitarian veneer of American intervention, it will be harder for imperialism to sell its wars to the domestic population. As distant as it may seem, we can construct real bonds of internationalism rooted in solidarity. Immobilizing the US war machine would be immensely beneficial to virtually every cause with which leftists are concerned. A reinvigorated anti-imperialist, antiwar movement is thus an ideal site for leftists with disparate priorities to converge in ways that can strengthen us all. We overlook this opportunity at our own peril. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,20 +1,0 @@ 1 -Capitalism is the root cause of identity and race division—it’s rooted in underlying structures of power found in capitalist modes of production and their ideological elements—that means discussion of class is a prerequisite to solvency. 2 -McLauren et al ‘3:: V. and Peter McLaren, “The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of ‘Race’ and ‘Difference’”, UCLA, 2003, http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren20and20valerie.pdf 3 -However, it is still important to move beyond the discursive and cultural realms. It is necessary to understand the history of such cultural developments and their connection to class analysis. It is necessary to grasp the 'totalizing... power and function of capital' (153). In this sense, '"culture" is not the "other" of class but rather constitute part of a more comprehensive theorization of class relations' (153). Difference arises from social contradictions themselves stemming from domination and oppression in particular contexts. In this sense, separating class from culture is a misleading abstraction. What is needed is to understand why particular differences become important in particular circumstances. In some circumstances, culture is treated as if it were separate and autonomous, hence analyses can take that for granted as an abstract this is an example of the classic Marxian critique of the methods of political economy and abstract philosophy. A politics of difference often means little more than a demand for inclusion 'into the metropolitan salons of bourgeois representation' (154). This is nothing more than a demand for access to the cultural market place, and did assumes that difference is based on some essential cultural qualities and not constructed. Excessive attention to difference simply 'averts our gaze from relations of production' (154). Celebrations of difference can also 'mesh quite nicely with contemporary corporate interests precisely because they revere lifestyle' (154). The dangers of such uncritical celebrations life in their advocates' inability to distinguish between good and bad differences ~-~- why not celebrate different fascist parties for example? Class differences are not celebrated either. An empty liberal pluralism seems to inform the discussion. However, categories of difference can be ideological. In particular, different kinds of identity are 'central to the exploitative production/reproduction dialectic of capital' (155), especially those differences stressing race and gender. It is clear that 'people of colour' find themselves in the most exploited groups: as with women, these groups 'provide capital with its superexploited labour pools ~-~- a phenomenon that is on the rise all over the world' (156). The concept of superexploitation presumably refers to the need to exploit people even more than would be required on the basis of the production of surplus value alone? It is a way of generating super profits, characteristic of monopoly capital? There may also be a political issue ~-~- that some groups need to be exploited even more than would be required to make them conform to capitalist economic forms? I am most familiar with this argument when it is applied to women ~-~- women need to be superexploited in order to produce free domestic labour as well as paid wage labour. I'm not sure I grasped the point in connection with 'race': it may be necessary to superexploit black people in order to pursue a specific strategy of 'neo-colonialism'?. Class is not just another dimension of difference. It is necessarily related to capitalism, not just a 'subject position', but the source of value itself lots to discuss here of course. It is universal, and the only one which will require revolutionary change to abolish it. Other categories have their importance ~-~- gender is perhaps the most long-standing form of oppression, while racial identity can be the most immediate existentially, as in brutally racist societies ~-~- but class relations are fundamental to the whole capitalist system, including the state. It is also one of the more recent and therefore most open to doubt ~-~- 'a world without class is preeminently imaginable ~-~- indeed, such was the human world for the great majority of our species' time on earth' (quoting Kovel, page 157). For marxists, ending class is a prior necessity to ending all other forms of oppression. Recent marxist analysis has focused on the relations between class and other forms of division. All social constructs gain their force from the reproduction of capitalism. These social forms 'constitute the ways in which oppression is lived/experienced within a class-based system' (158), and they help to reproduce it. Class is thus central to exploitative relations of all kinds. Personal experiences, and the categories they generate, are valid, but should not be seen as completely self-explanatory. They must be transcended and traced back to a social and historical context. Many recent perspectives fail to explain how particular kinds of different have emerged ~-~- in particular, '"race" is not an adequate explanatory category on its own' (159), and focusing on it can obscure 'the actual structure of power and privilege' (159). 'Race' is not a scientific category anyway, although it persists in popular discourses and even in 'mainstream social sciences' (160). Gilroy is right to renounce it, even though it may weaken historical movements for liberation based on 'race struggles' (160). Instead, race needs to be seen as a construct rooted in underlying structures of power, especially those found in capitalist modes of production and their ideological elements. In this way, specific forms of racism will become more apparent. Race cannot be subsumed into class, but racism is only explicable with the development of capitalism ~-~- for example, 'Capitalism once relied on slave labour and needed an ideological legitimation' (161). Contemporary race-relations are still best understood as arising from the dynamics of capitalism, and challenging racism must therefore involve challenging capitalism. This would be much more threatening than a politics based on difference alone. Class differences have sharpened, deepened and become fundamental in recent years: it makes even more sense to see capitalism as 'an overarching totality... more universal, more ruthless and more deadly' (163) The connections can also be seen if we realise that 'the vast majority of the working class consists of women and people of colour' (quoting Foster, page 162). It does not make sense to ignore the class dimension in their experiences and struggles. Indeed, 'a good deal of post-marxist critique is subtly racist (not to mention essentialist) in so far as it implies that "people of colour" could not possibly be concerned with issues beyond those related to their racial, ethnic, cultural "difference"' (163). It also assumes that 'working class' means 'white'. Radicals may be posturing based on discourses of difference which simply reflect academic politics and a disinterest in economic exploitation outside. As Marx said about the young Hegelians, their battle seems to be about phrases and counterphrases, reflecting their own class positions, while capitalism itself remains uncriticised. Really radical positions have been marginalised by the academic left who celebrate differences while capitalism increasingly imposes a universality. Marxism should be revived if 'the triumph of globalised capitalism and its political bedfellow, neo-liberalism' are to be challenged (165). Inequalities of wealth and power exceed those in Marx's day. Exploitation and oppression need to be understood in modern context, applying marxism rather than rejecting it, and proceeding on both theoretical and a more politically engaged basis. It is common experience of exploitation rather than apparent differences that needs investigation. Of course, the struggles of black people against racism must not be ignored, but it should be traced to class relations. Notions of class may seem outdated, but those found in post-marxist analyses are even more so ~-~- '"experience of multiple oppressions no longer requires multiple theories of oppression because corporations multiply oppress (Starr, 2000)' (167). A common enemy is emerging on a global basis, as seen in globalised protest movements. A new socialist struggle is required. 4 -The determinism of capital causes life instrumentalism — it is this logic that mobilizes and allows for the oppressions they isolate. 5 -Dyer-Witherford ‘99: Professor of Library and Info. Sciences @ the Univ. of Western Ontarion, Nick. Cyber Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism. 6 -For capitalism, the use of machines as organs of “will over nature” is an imperative. The great insight of the Frankfurt School—an insight subsequently improved and amplified by feminists and ecologists—was that capital’s dual project of dominating both humanity and nature was intimately tied to the cultivation of “instrumental reason” that systematically objectifies, reduces, quantifies and fragments the world for the purposes of technological control. Business’s systemic need to cheapen labor, cut the costs of raw materials, and expand consumer markets gives it an inherent bias toward the piling-up of technological power. This priority—enshrined in phrases such as “progress,” “efficiency,” “productivity,” “modernization,” and “growth”—assumes an automatism that is used to override any objection or alternative, regardless of the environmental and social consequences. Today, we witness global vistas of toxification, deforestation, desertification, dying oceans, disappearing ozone layers, and disintegrating immune systems, all interacting in ways that perhaps threaten the very existence of humanity and are undeniably inflicting social collapse, disease, and immiseration across the planet. The degree to which this project of mastery has backfired is all too obvious. 7 -AND, cap causes extinction and endless structural violence – it is a try or die for the alt. 8 -Farbod ‘15: (Faramarz Farbod , PhD Candidate @ Rutgers, Prof @ Moravian College, Monthly Review, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2015/farbod020615.html, 6-2) 9 -Global capitalism is the 800-pound gorilla. The twin ecological and economic crises, militarism, the rise of the surveillance state, and a dysfunctional political system can all be traced to its normal operations. We need a transformative politics from below that can challenge the fundamentals of capitalism instead of today's politics that is content to treat its symptoms. The problems we face are linked to each other and to the way a capitalist society operates. We must make an effort to understand its real character. The fundamental question of our time is whether we can go beyond a system that is ravaging the Earth and secure a future with dignity for life and respect for the planet. What has capitalism done to us lately? The best science tells us that this is a do-or-die moment. We are now in the midst of the 6th mass extinction in the planetary history with 150 to 200 species going extinct every day, a pace 1,000 times greater than the 'natural' extinction rate.1 The Earth has been warming rapidly since the 1970s with the 10 warmest years on record all occurring since 1998.2 The planet has already warmed by 0.85 degree Celsius since the industrial revolution 150 years ago. An increase of 2° Celsius is the limit of what the planet can take before major catastrophic consequences. Limiting global warming to 2°C requires reducing global emissions by 6 per year. However, global carbon emissions from fossil fuels increased by about 1.5 times between 1990 and 2008.3 Capitalism has also led to explosive social inequalities The global economic landscape is littered with rising concentration of wealth, debt, distress, and immiseration caused by the austerity-pushing elites. Take the US. The richest 20 persons have as much wealth as the bottom 150 million.4 Since 1973, the hourly wages of workers have lagged behind worker productivity rates by more than 800.5 It now takes the average family 47 years to make what a hedge fund manager makes in one hour.6 Just about a quarter of children under the age of 5 live in poverty.7 A majority of public school students are low-income.8 85 of workers feel stress on the job.9 Soon the only thing left of the American Dream will be a culture of hustling to survive. Take the global society. The world's billionaires control $7 trillion, a sum 77 times the debt owed by Greece to the European banks.10 The richest 80 possess more than the combined wealth of the bottom 50 of the global population (3.5 billion people).11 By 2016 the richest 1 will own a greater share of the global wealth than the rest of us combined.12 The top 200 global corporations wield twice the economic power of the bottom 80 of the global population.13 Instead of a global society capitalism is creating a global apartheid. What's the nature of the beast? Firstly, the "egotistical calculation" of commerce wins the day every time. Capital seeks maximum profitability as a matter of first priority. Evermore "accumulation of capital" is the system's bill of health; it is slowdowns or reversals that usher in crises and set off panic. Cancer-like hunger for endless growth is in the system's DNA and is what has set it on a tragic collision course with Nature, a finite category. Secondly, capitalism treats human labor as a cost. It therefore opposes labor capturing a fair share of the total economic value that it creates. Since labor stands for the majority and capital for a tiny minority, it follows that classism and class warfare are built into its DNA, which explains why the "middle class" is shrinking and its gains are never secure. Thirdly, private interests determine massive investments and make key decisions at the point of production guided by maximization of profits. That's why in the US the truck freight replaced the railroad freight, chemicals were used extensively in agriculture, public transport was gutted in favor of private cars, and big cars replaced small ones. What should political action aim for today? The political class has no good ideas about how to address the crises. One may even wonder whether it has a serious understanding of the system, or at least of ways to ameliorate its consequences. The range of solutions offered tends to be of a technical, legislative, or regulatory nature, promising at best temporary management of the deepening crises. The trajectory of the system, at any rate, precludes a return to its post-WWII regulatory phase. It's left to us as a society to think about what the real character of the system is, where we are going, and how we are going to deal with the trajectory of the system ~-~- and act accordingly. The critical task ahead is to build a transformative politics capable of steering the system away from its destructive path. Given the system's DNA, such a politics from below must include efforts to challenge the system's fundamentals, namely, its private mode of decision-making about investments and about what and how to produce. Furthermore, it behooves us to heed the late environmentalist Barry Commoner's insistence on the efficacy of a strategy of prevention over a failed one of control or capture of pollutants. At a lecture in 1991, Commoner remarked: "Environmental pollution is an incurable disease; it can only be prevented"; and he proceeded to refer to "a law," namely: "if you don't put a pollutant in the environment it won't be there." What is nearly certain now is that without democratic control of wealth and social governance of the means of production, we will all be condemned to the labor of Sisyphus. Only we won't have to suffer for all eternity, as the degradation of life-enhancing natural and social systems will soon reach a point of no return. 10 -This debate is about competing methodologies – the question of the ballot is whose ethical orientation best catalyzes political organization against Capitalism. Vote negative to accept the Communist Hypothesis, which is a recognition of socialism’s necessity and a historical analysis of cap. This is, in other words, a genealogical investigation and a representations alt. 11 -Walker 14: (Gavin, Assistant Professor of History and East Asian Studies at McGill University, “The Reinvention of Communism: Politics, History, Globality,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 113:4, Fall 2014) 12 -S in c e the turn of the twenty-first century, the term communism has returned to the theoretical and historical agenda with a striking force and a surprising novelty. 1 In a wide range of fields of knowledge, the questions of the actuality and the history of the world communist movement, the theoretical tendencies of communist thought, and the current political possibilities of new developments of communism have been revisited and addressed anew. In the social movements that have sprung up in nations around the world—from Spain to Greece to Quebec, throughout Latin America, Asia, Africa, and beyond—-the word communism has again acquired a critical force, not a force of nostalgia or simple retrospection, but a new and creative force. We can only be struck by the degree to which it now seems that communism, far from the dead end of the twentieth century it was long assumed to be, may be something profoundly of the twenty-first century, an idea and field of concepts whose time has come. When Antonio Negri emphasizes that the communists today are “alone and potent,” he alerts us to a crucial point that I want to highlight, from two divergent directions, in the following essay. Rather than see the contemporary communist moment simply as a “return,” implying a transposition of the same forces, forms, and contents, this moment indicates instead an open field for the reinvention of communism. The earlier modality of twentieth-century communism, linked above all to the existence and continuity established by the Soviet Union, no longer exists. No longer is there a national form or federated space that would serve as a “bulwark” of the communist project. In this sense, the communists today are alone. Yet Negri insists that the communists are alone and potent. This potency is derived, not as in the previous arrangement, from a site of institutional force that could be treated as a model of explanation, but from this fact of being alone, untethered, unguaranteed, not beholden to a specific historical telos. In this sense, the communists today are potent because they are alone. What does this new political solitude mean for the concepts and contents of communism in our contemporary moment? Two distinct trends emerge in this development of communism in our global present. One is the great historic movement that has transferred the center of gravity of a reinvented communist politics to the exterior of the West, taken in the broadest sense. This globality of communism is in essence a fulfillment of a promise rather than a historical accident, the fulfillment of a politics that from the outset sought a new theoretical and political destiny beyond the horizon of the national and local. The second is the striking link between this return—and reinvention—of communism and its site of return, one of which is without doubt the field of “critical theory.” What makes this site peculiar is that it too, like the political potential of communism itself, has been in a long retreat since the 1980s in the fields of knowledge production around the world. Theory’s originary impulse toward the politicization of knowledge, the immanent critique of the university, and its globality, the fact that theory has long provided a common language beyond the regime of national language, has been the target of an intense revanchist attack by institutional neoliberalism, conservative politics, and positivist knowledge work. But new experiences have emerged in recent years to produce a situation in which these two developments—one linked to the practical social movements and reinventions of political organization and the other linked to the crystallization of a new trend in theory—are experiencing complex and volatile articulations and points of contact. What we are seeing today is perhaps the first emergence of a new direction and politicization of theory itself, the first stirrings of a communist critical theory. P o litics: P e rs is te n c e a n d S cissio n One distinguishing feature of the current discussions of the “communist hypothesis” (Badiou), the “actuality of communism” (Bosteels), and “the communist horizon” (Dean) is a renewal of an insistence on the primacy of politics over the mere presupposition of a politics derived from the structural analysis of global capitalism’s current tendencies, level of technical composition, and scale of development of the productive forces. These thinkers maintain a conception of politics that upholds its rarity, its intermittent or hazardous quality. Rather than accept the given character of politics, in which it would become a figure of ubiquity or immanence (the banal argument that “everything is political”), the rethinking of the question of communism has also insisted on a divergent genealogy of what is and what is not political. Rather than a constantly presupposed undercurrent, this figure of politics would instead be, for instance, in Alain Badiou (2001), the rare event that grounds a political sequence and convokes a subject through a fidelity, or in Jacques Ranciere’s (1999) terms, the egalitarian proposal that suspends the representations possible in the dominant order (“the police”).2 This concept of politics is, above all, linked to new attempts to think the place of the subject of politics, and it is this point that provides an entry into the critical dimensions of this “communist hypothesis” within the theoretical field. The rethinking of communism today has distinguished itself as a trend in insisting on antagonism, contradiction, the subject, politics, and organization; it refuses gestures of diffusion, multiplicity as such, focusing on the dialectical conditions of the possible rather than the immanent conditions of the impossible. There is here a reaction to the monopoly held by a very specific register—the Derridean register of defeat and withdrawal, the Deleuzian register of immanence and multiplicity—within the broadly left trends of thought and knowledge production. Metapolitically speaking, we can observe within the works associated with this “communist hypothesis” a rebirth of simple, seemingly “obvious” concepts: truth, justice, fidelity, struggle, honor, courage, and so forth, concepts largely derided in the postdeconstruction trends of thought and relegated to the realm of the “popular,” avoided as vulgarities too “earnest” for the field of so-called theory. Instead, detachment, irony, withdrawal, defeat, finitude, the impossibility of presence, the impossibility of naming, the impossibility of an affirmative creation, and the impossibility of an interventionist politics proper often constitute the typical terms of theoretical work. There is thus in the recent communist current a refusal to accept this by-now rigid division of labor, one that has decisive consequences for both politics and critical theory itself. What lies behind this new vocabulary and new set of gestures? Above all, it is the insistence on a link between the internal dynamics of theory and the external situation, in particular, on the question of organization. Let us consider a few short texts that might be taken as a “pre-history” of this notion, a polemical period of Badiou’s work that expresses the essence of the overall problem: how to develop and conceptualize a theory of politics that is not simply a reflection or proof of a structural or given feature of the situation in which we find ourselves, a theory of politics that is not beholden to concepts of historical necessity. Behind this thesis lies a resistance to the notion that politics is involved in a flattening of phenomena, a fear of antagonism, the preference for holism over division, the emphasis on consensus, on “friendship,” against contestation. In 1977 Badiou launched a frontal attack against Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s work for its implied political pitfalls. This attack on their “fascism of the potato” is excessive, dogmatic, beyond the demands of the political conjuncture (going so far as to identify them as “prefascist ideologues”). But it also contains an extremely important point for the paradox of organization within politics, perhaps the key kernel of the new trend inaugurated in theoretical work by the hypothesis of communism. In this text, Badiou (2012:199-200) reacts against Deleuze and Guattari’s celebration of multiplicity, appeals to escape, to flight, to becoming-multiple, becomingschizophrenic, becoming-minor, and so forth,3 by intersecting this theoretical work with the concrete terms of the political situation: We have seen this in May ’68: If you have the mass revolt, but not the proletarian antagonism, you obtain the victory of the bourgeois antagonism (of bourgeois politics). If you have ideas that are just, but not Marxism, you obtain the return to power of the bourgeois reformists of the Parti Socialiste. If you have the objective forces, but neither the programme nor the party, you obtain the revenge of Pompidou’s parliamentarianism, you obtain the return to the scene of the PCF and the unions. Badiou argues that Deleuze and Guattari fail to carry through the very ideas that found their major theoretical concepts. They support the mass revolt, but lack the antagonism between “friends” and “enemies” of the people; they have “just ideas”—freedom, the overturning of injustice, the defense of the workers, the poor, the targets of a vicious imperialism in and out of the metropole—but no structural features link the situation of domination with an affirmative politics of inversion; they include the objective forces of the masses in social motion, but lack direction, a concrete framework within which the mass movement can orient itself. Badiou argues that these elements finally invert into their opposites: the victory of bourgeois politics, reformism, parliamentarism, and so forth. But what is behind this charge, this accusation? Two elements subtend this polemic whose compositional elements are returning today to the theoretical scene through the return to the communist hypothesis, namely, persistence and scission. Badiou charges Deleuze and Guattari with the production of a theoretical system that is itself in a constant process of diverting, redirecting, and moving sideways to avoid “capture.” Such a politics cannot sustain the forces it unleashes; it can initiate moments of dissensus within the dominant order, but it cannot persist in a full overturning of their foundations or proceed from this moment of dissensus to a new hegemony over the situation. Such a mode of thought poses questions, identifies structural injustices, and marks points of rupture, but it nevertheless chooses, at the final moment, to refuse to uphold a strong division, a strong break, an insistence on one side over another, one line over another. Badiou (2012:199-200) puts this point in a dense and powerful formulation: “To think the multiple outside the two, outside scission, amounts to practicing in exteriority the dictatorship of the One.” If you think the multiple, you can expose the One to its internal disunity, the false impression of substantiality. But merely pointing to the multiple character of a social and political situation is not in itself a bridge to a politics. Remarking on the multivocal character of what appears as a unity is in no way a critique, much less an intervention, within this situation. Instead, the multivocal reality of the unitary image can always be recuperated precisely in the service of the One. In a circumstance of social struggle, it is never enough to point to the heterogeneous composition of all positions—“the police are also drawn from the lower stratum of society,” “their pensions are also being cut back by the state,” “within the ranks of the workers are some with terrible ideas,” “the activists are not as upstanding as they say they are,” and so on—and thereby to end in the original abstentionist position: “It’s all so complicated, it’s not just one thing and another.” This type of analysis, which always underscores the hybridity and mutual complicity of political scenarios, itself participates in the naive fantasy of imagining that exposing this multiplicity allows one out of the practice of partisanship. In such an optic, you can go on multiplying the options, always finding yet another option, always finding a “third way,” always insisting on escape from the binary, escape from the pressure of limited choices, always demanding an evacuation of responsibility, of having to uphold the consequences of a choice. To force a cut in the situation is to assert that the One is forever split, that there is a two-line struggle in every social and political scenario, that politics proper consists in this scission itself: the formation of an antagonism where previously there was only a semblance of unity. This is why Badiou emphasizes the Two—when you choose to say, “I don’t want either side, they’re all bad, we don’t have to make a choice, we don’t have to have just one thing,” what is installed in theory and in practice is not a splitting or splintering of the One into its infinitely heterogeneous elements (the thesis of multiplicity) but a withdrawal that allows the One to remain intact. This is precisely what Badiou calls, in the above formulation, “practicing in exteriority the dictatorship of the One.” By choosing flight or escape, the status quo (i.e., the One) reasserts itself, this time stronger than before, bolstered by the experience of finding in its own image of multiplicity a renewed unity. What remains a true politics is the courage to choose, to insist on the Two, to not fear division, separation, scission. To accept the responsibility of the choice, to accept that there is no way to opt out—that the act of a supposed withdrawal is in fact a refusal to countenance real movement, real overturning of the situation, a break that has to be sustained—is to accept the responsibility to uphold the choice despite the fact that there is no going back. What does this argument contain for the current rethinking of communism? Above all, it holds that politics is contained not in overturning the system of social binaries, or in finding a “third way,” or in escapism, defeatism, or abstention. A common thread today, in all the thinkers reinventing the term communism, is a long and arduous struggle for hegemony in the world of thought, a world devoted to concepts of the “death of the subject,” the refusal of binaries, the emphasis on incessant multiplicity, and so forth. This struggle for a new politics recognizes the dead end of these “philosophies of defeat,” in Bruno Bosteels’s terms. It recognizes that a new communist development will come, not from the endless work of withdrawal and negation as such, but from the affirmative and interventionist declaration that politics is possible and the status quo can be permanently fractured. And this fracture produces the need for a persistence, the ability to carry through the full consequences of the initial break. 13 -Cap is an inertial system—any vestige left remaining by the perm will inevitably spin back up. Like a many-headed hydra, it will regenerate with every attempt that attacks the instruments as opposed to the system itself – the perm fails. 14 -Kovel ‘2: Joel, The Enemy of Nature, Zed Books, p. 142-3 15 -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 16 -AND the role of the judge is to be a critical analyst testing whether the underlying assumptions of the AFF are valid. This is a question of the whether the AFF scholarship is good – not the passage of the plan. 17 -The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater who best pushes radical politics to challenge the state’s power. The judge as a critical educator has an obligation to question state sovereign-hood for any hope of sustainable change in institutional society. 18 -Newman ‘11: (Saul, associate professor in the Department of Government in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, DC, “Postanarchism: a politics of anti-politics” (October 2011), Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 16 no. 3) 19 -At the same time, this aporetic moment of tension central to classical anarchism generates new and productive articulations of politics and ethics. The disjunction between politics and anti-politics is what might be called an ‘inclusive’ disjunction: a compound in which one proposition is true only if its opposing proposition is also true. Politics, at least in a radical, emancipatory sense, has only a consistent identity if an anti-political, indeed utopian, dimension is also present—otherwise it remains caught within existing political frameworks and imaginaries. Conversely, anti-politics only makes sense if it takes seriously the tasks of politics—building, constructing, organizing, fighting, making collective decisions and so on—where questions of power and exclusion inevitably emerge. However, this proximity to power does not invalidate anarchism; rather, it leads to a greater sensitivity to the dangers of power and the need to invent, as mentioned before, new micro-political practices of freedom through which power is subjected to an ongoing ethical interrogation. Where the political pole imposes certain limits, the anti-political pole, by contrast, invokes an outside, a movement beyond limits. It is the signification of the infinite, of the limitless horizon of possibilities. This is both the moment of utopia and, in a different sense, the moment of ethics. Anarchism has an important utopian dimension, even if the classical anarchists themselves claimed not to be utopians but materialists and rationalists. Indeed, some utopian element—whether acknowledged or not—is an essential part of any form of radical politics; to oppose the current order, one inevitably invokes an alternative, utopian imagination. However, we should try to formulate a different approach to utopianism here: the importance of imagining an alternative to the current order is not to lay down a precise programme for the future, but rather to provide a point of exteriority as a way of interrogating the limits of this order. As Miguel Abensour puts it: ‘Is it not proper to utopia to propose a new way of proceeding to a displacement of what is and what seems to go without saying in the crushing name of “reality”?’37 We are crushed under the weight of the current order, which tells us that this is our reality, that what we have now is all there is and all there ever will be. Utopia provides an escape from this stifling reality by imagining an alternative to it; it opens up different possibilities, new ‘lines of flight’. Here, we should think about utopia in terms of action in the immediate sense, of creating alternatives within the present, at localized points, rather than waiting for the revolution. Utopia is something that emerges in political struggles themselves.38 Ethics also implies an outside to the existing order, but in a different sense. Ethics, as I understand it here, involves the opening up of the existing political identities, practices, institutions and discourses to an Other which is beyond their terms. Ethics is more than the application of moral and rational norms. It is rather the continual disturbance of the sovereignty of these norms, and the identities and institutions that draw their legitimacy from them, in the name of something that exceeds their grasp. Importantly, then, ethics is what disturbs politics from the outside. This might be understood in the Levinasian sense of ‘anarchy’: ‘Anarchy cannot be sovereign like an arche. It can only disturb the State—but in a radical way, making possible moments of negation without any affirmation.’39 The point is, however, that politics cannot do without anti-politics, and vice versa. The two must go together. There must always be an anti-political outside, a utopian moment of rupture and excess that disturbs the limits of politics. The ethical moment cannot be eclipsed by the political dimension; nor can it be separated from it, as someone like Carl Schmitt maintained.40 If there is to be a concept of the political, it can only be thought through a certain constitutive tension with ethics. At the same time, anti-politics needs to be politically articulated; it needs to be put into action through actual struggles and engagements with different forms of domination. There must be some way of politically measuring the anti-political imaginery, through victories, defeats, and strategic gains and reversals. So while anti-politics points to a transcendence of the current order, it cannot be an escape from it; it must involve an encounter with its limits, and this is where politics comes in. The transcendence of power involves an active engagement with power, not an avoidance of it; the realization of freedom requires an ongoing elaboration of new practices of freedom within the context of power relations. 20 -AND, the knowledge claims of the AC are the starting points for the debate – our framework provides a more reasonable neg burden. When a student turns in an F paper, no teacher has an obligation to write an entirely new paper to show it was bad – pointing out major academic deficiencies would justify failing the paper – the ballot asks who did the better debating, so if their diagnosis of the issue is wrong, you must drop them. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,16 +1,0 @@ 1 -Extinction is inevitable—the will to survival embodied by the aff strips value from life and freezes becoming, which outweighs on magnitude — vote neg to comport our ethics towards the world-to-come—this can include endorsing their extinction discourse while still doing the plan—it’s a mutually exclusive strategy of joyous ethics that doesn’t affirm all death but undercuts the metaphysical justifications for all modes of oppression 2 -Mitchell ‘16: Wilfrid Laurier University (Audra, “Is IR going extinct?,” European Journal of International Relations 1–23, dml) 3 -Perhaps most profoundly, taking extinction seriously would involve relinquishing the fetishism of survival as it relates to dominant conceptions of the human rather than simply adapting these conceptions to new sources and registers of threat.6 In other words, it would be necessary to dispense with the imperative to ensure at all costs the survival of currently existing norms and modes of human life. However, why should emancipation from this imperative be desirable? Simply put, the imperative to preserve dominant, existing modes of human life monopolizes human energy, dominates frameworks of value and imposes stasis on extant life forms. This imperative imposes a kind of death (in the Heideggerian sense) on life forms: it prevents them from unfolding into their indeterminate, virtual possibilities, entrapping them in the mode of rigid metaphysical categories. The severing of possibilities of becoming can already be intuited within the biopolitical discourses of extinction discussed earlier. These discourses simultaneously frame the survival of ‘humanity-as-it-is’ as the dominant principle of being and highest value, while presenting it as imminently and irreversibly threatened (see Evans and Reid, 2014). Within this stark opposition, the political possibilities of becoming are precluded by the imperative to survive ‘as we are’ at all costs. What if, instead, it were possible to refuse the demand to survive — without embracing an extinction-wish or desiring the elimination of any species? In the context of IR, this would entail resisting the powerful discourses of biopolitical discipline, catastrophism, resilience and mitigation discussed earlier and becoming open to the possibilities of extinction, in two senses: in the sense that extinction may occur; and in the sense of the new modes of ethico-political action and forms of life it might enable. Being open to the possibility of extinction does not involve relinquishing all claims to continued existence or the desire to pursue them. Instead, by removing the imperative to secure the indefinite survival of dominant forms of life at all costs, it might free these energies to develop modes of being-otherwise. As Colebrook (2014a: 58) puts it: As long as we calculate the future as one of sustaining, maintaining, adapting and rendering ourselves viable … there would be no future for us other than an eventual, barely lived petering out. If, however, we entertained the erasure of the human … then there might be a future. (Colebrook, 2014a: 58) What visions, logics and inputs might IR contribute to this new future, and how might it be transformed as a result? Cosmopolitics and the possibilities of extinction Extinction is not only about endings; it can also be understood as a force that engenders ethico-political creativity in and with the conditions of finitude (Mitchell, 2016). Viewing (mass) extinction in this way consists of ‘a confrontation with perishing, finitude, and fragility but one that fills us with at least as much wonder as dread, more political energy than resignation, and takes seriously that apocalypses are not ends but irreversible transitions’ (Grove, 2015). This, in turn, involves reframing nihilism not as an apolitical collapse into apathy and submission to visions of the inevitable, but rather as a ‘speculative opportunity’ that opens up new futures (Brassier, 2007: xi). In other words, rather than promoting (only) a ‘will to nothingness’, let alone a malevolent extinction-wish, engaging with the possibilities of non-being can make it possible to embrace the indeterminacy of the universe and its creative forces. I shall now argue that it demands and enables a politics attuned to the biological, geological and cosmological forces of the universe: a cosmopolitics. According to Isabelle Stengers (2005), ‘cosmopolitics’ is politics rooted in the acknowledgement of the multiple, diverse and constantly transforming beings that constitute the cosmos. It hinges on the belief that all beings make interventions that shape, disrupt and transform political processes. Importantly, participation in these processes does not require representation in terms of human interests or even the ability to act or speak in a human-oriented sense. Indeed, Stengers (2005: 996) asserts that ‘the political arena is peopled with shadows of that which does not have, cannot have or does not want to have a political voice’. A range of beings — whether they are considered human and nonhuman, living and non-living, organic and inorganic — can intervene in politics by ‘forcing thought’ through their effects, properties, presence or absence. For instance, water can make its force felt politically by destroying human habitations and ecosystems in the form of floods, by withdrawing and creating droughts, or by sustaining and nurturing multiple life forms. For Stengers, these issues are not made political by humans: to the extent that they have an effect in the world, they are always-already political. According to Stengers, the interventions of multiple beings help to slow down processes of universalization central to traditional modes of cosmopolitanism. Indeed, the presence of other beings with conflicting interests and needs makes universalization, and political decisionmaking, ‘as difficult as possible’ (Stengers, 2005: 1003). Cosmopolitics is conflictual and agonistic: the insurgence of awkward subjects and the obstructions, disruptions and disjunctures they create can nurture pluralism and generate creative politics. Crucially, cosmopolitics is not simply an intensification or variant of cosmopolitanism. Whereas cosmopolitanism stresses the suffix -politan, cosmopolitics shifts emphasis to the prefix cosmo-, that is, it takes the cosmos, rather than human communities, as the basis and locus of political action. Cosmopolitanism, as Colebrook contends, is based on the extrapolation and expansion of a polity that, while it may be expanded to include other beings, is centrifugal to the figure of humanity. In other words, the cosmos of cosmopolitanism ‘is always an extension of the composed polity, an abstraction or idealization of man englobed in his world of human others’ (Colebrook, 2014a: 110). Even the most radical contemporary reframings of cosmopolitanism, in contrast, involve stretching the scope of the human-dominated polity to include all humans and (certain) nonhumans (see Linklater, 2011). Anthony Burke (2013, 2015) has attempted to radically rethink cosmopolitanism in terms of the intermeshing of complex processes, material conditions and (human and nonhuman) actors across planetary space-time. However, I want to argue that this project is better understood in the context of cosmopolitics, insofar as it seeks to render the cosmos the ontological basis of politics. I want to argue that a modified form of cosmopolitics — one attuned to the inhuman — is demanded by, and can ground meaningful responses to, (mass) extinction. Specifically, Stengers’s cosmopolitics acknowledges the role of the weak, marginalized and ‘shadowy’ subjects; it focuses largely on presence, that is, on the positive beings that interrupt human activities. In order to respond to mass extinction, cosmopolitics must place more focus on absence, negation and non-being. Colebrook hints at this in her call to ‘destroy cosmopolitanism for the sake of the cosmos’ (Colebrook, 2014a: 96) She claims that arguing that: if the crises of the twenty-first century were to prompt us to think at all it may be in a cosmic and inhuman mode, asking … what the elements of this earth are, what force they bear, how we are composed in relation to those forces. (Colebrook, 2014a: 114) If we consider (mass) extinction as one of these forces, a different kind of cosmopolitics emerges — one that responds to extinction and considerably adds to the conceptual mass of IR. This mode of cosmopolitics makes it possible to generate new forms of solidarity based not on the fear of collective annihilation, but rather on a sense of shared vulnerability that is the condition of earthly coexistence. For Rosi Braidotti (2013), such solidarities emerge from the defamiliarization of dominant norms of ‘humanity’, which, she argues, is best achieved by thinking as if ‘humanity’ were already extinct. This, she contends, compels humans to ‘think critically about who we are and what we are actually in the process of becoming’ (Braidotti, 2013: 49–50). From this perspective, attention to the inhuman, and to the possible extinction of humans, can produce an ‘enlarged sense of inter-connection between self and others, including the non-human or “earth” others’ (Braidotti, 2013: 49–50). The same processes of defamiliarization, Colebrook (2014a: 58) suggests, would make possible a radical new form of feminism that, in embracing ‘a thought of life beyond the human’, would place neither man nor woman at its centre (Colebrook, 2014b: 16). By unsettling the foundations of ‘humanity’ itself, she contends, thinking the inhuman makes it possible to transcend boundaries such as gender and race that essentialize characteristics as ‘essentially’ human. This would have profound importance for feminist, queer and decolonial international politics: it would undercut the metaphysical foundations of sources of exclusion and oppression against which they struggle. In short, contemplating the extinction of ‘the human’ makes it possible to imagine alternative, future life forms that bear resemblances to, but are not restricted by, existing norms of ‘humanity’. Moreover, a cosmopolitics attuned to the inhuman could profoundly transform global ethics by grounding it not in a politics of ressentiment, but rather one of gratitude. The geographer Nigel Clark (2011) argues that humans should embrace the finite, deeply contingent and potentially meaningless (in a transcendent, metaphysical sense) existence furnished by an indifferent Earth. Specifically, he claims that human existence is contingent upon conditions created by previous (largely extinct) life forms and by inhuman forces, both contemporary and temporally distant. From this perspective, existence is a gift given to humans (among others) but it is not given-for-us in the correlationist sense. Instead, humans are indebted to a chain of interlocking forces that are ultimately indifferent to their existence. Clark argues that humans should embrace this gift with the knowledge that it can, and eventually will, be withdrawn. This means accepting and honouring it without treating it as an entitlement or devaluing it on account of its finitude. His account contrasts sharply with the discourses of catastrophe, resilience and biopolitics discussed earlier, which devalue any mode of life that cannot be indefinitely sustained through human intervention. Clark finds an ethico-political alternative to these logics in an ethos of gratitude and reciprocation. For Clark, the latter is epitomized by the actions of the government of Kiribati — the small island state perhaps most imminently threatened by rising sea levels — in creating one of the world’s largest marine parks in 2006 (the Phoenix Islands Protected Area). In so doing, Clark contends, this community expressed unconditional gratitude for the gift of existence rather than resentment of its endangerment. Moreover, by seeking to protect and preserve the watery medium that threatens to destroy it, Kiribatians embodied a mode of meaningful response to disaster that was not constrained to sustaining survival-as-we-know-it. Moreover, a cosmopolitics attuned to extinction and to the inhuman would foster a new mode of future-oriented politics based not on the continuity of the present, but rather on the creative possibilities of discontinuity and unpredictable difference. For Evans and Reid (2014: 164), biopolitical responses to extinction reflect a ‘cult of mourning’ for the coming death of existing species life that ‘manages to turn the wondrous phenomenon of the emergence of new forms of life … into a problematic of security and threat’. Indeed, in popular literature on extinction, there is a marked tone of mourning and fear about what might ‘replace’ humans as Earth’s dominant species, and the readers’ focus is trained on monstrous figures such as robots, microbes or giant rats (see Zalasiewicz, 2008). In contrast, cosmopolitics attuned to extinction and the inhuman would be open to the new forms of being that might emerge from, or even in place of, humans. For instance, it might involve overcoming fear and revulsion of the hybrid or mutant creatures that are emerging, at least in part from human scientific interventions, treating them with love and care instead of abjection (see Haraway, 2011; Latour, 2012). Crucially, it would also involve embracing the defamiliarized modalities of currently existing humanity discussed earlier. This includes beings so transformed through technological and evolutionary change as to be almost unrecognizable to ‘us’ (currently existing humans), and the ‘defamiliarized’ beings no longer essentialized in terms of race, sex or gender. The cosmopolitics I am outlining here would embrace these beings-to-come instead of fearing and resenting them. This amounts to a kind of futural gratitude that mirrors the Kiribatian marine park — an ethics of comportment towards the unknowable other that might displace ‘us’. However, how can currently existing humans adopt such an ethics? Emmanuel Levinas (1998: 50) terms this mode of ethics ‘being-forbeyond-my-death’, that is, being ‘for a time that would be without me … in order to be for that which is after me’. Although Levinas is referring to human individuals and their comportment towards future generations of humans, this principle can be translated across species boundaries and to a collective register. It profoundly shifts the emphasis of human action — instead of attempting to secure existing conditions, it encourages ‘action for a world to come’, and responsiveness to the ethical demands of the (remote, unknowable) Other (Levinas, 1998: 51). Clark, writing in a Levinasian vein, agrees that embracing future life forms is not passive. Instead, it requires the ability to see ‘the intolerability of the world as it is presently imagined and demands the seemingly impossible; the creation of a new one’ (Clark, 2011: 195). Crucially, this ethos is not a replacement for security or the pursuit of indefinite survival, but rather a qualitatively different kind of politics. It cannot guarantee the survival of humanity-as-it-is — the goal to which all existing strategies and responses to extinction are oriented. It entails an ‘eschatology without hope for oneself’ (Levinas, 1998: 51): welcoming new worlds makes, and demands, no promises. While this ethos engenders cautious hope for undetermined futures, it cannot be made conditional on the survival of existing forms of life. Instead, it must be pursued ‘for the hell of it and for love of the world’ (Braidotti, 2010: 17). This shifts the logic of responsiveness to extinction from one of mastery and control to one of gratitude and hopeful, creative experimentation. As Clark (2011: 217, paraphrasing Allan Stoekl) puts it: we might have a better chance of prising the planet out of its downward ecological spiral accidentally, not as the goal of a grand, visionary project but as the unintended consequence of more joyous and generous living right here and now. In other words, adopting an attitude of hospitality and generosity towards other beings might help to open up a future of long-term flourishing for humans and other beings. However, as Clark argues, this kind of action needs to have the character of Derridean hospitality, that is, it needs to be undertaken without conditionality, or, in this case, the demand for security. Adopting this ethico-political orientation does not involve capitulation to extinction, and even less an extinction-wish. Instead, it widens the range of human responsiveness far beyond the spectrum of pre-emptive trauma, loss and tragedy, and a future of rapidly diminishing life lived in survival mode. 4 -Their appeal to catastrophe is nothing but an emotive training ground to fit the catastrophe within familiar modes of politics and lull the population into fear-laden productivity. Our frantic attempts to resolve such problems merely institutionalize the most horrendous homicidal violence and push us to the brink of war. The only political task left is that of the philosopher who interrupts the absorption of the resonance of fear that greases the wheels of modern power. 5 -Scranton ‘15: Jeremy Scranton, acclaimed journalist, activist and author, PhD in English from Princeton, currently teaching at Notre Dame, New York Times contributor, Iraq War veteran, Learning To Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of Civilization, City Lights Books, 2015, online 6 -“When it comes to global warming, differing visions of the human future are already hardening into conflict. Coal and oil companies and their government proxies have made their willingness to use military force to defend themselves and advance their interests spectacularly obvious. The labor wars of the 19th and 20th centuries show this clearly. The brutal decades-long war waged by the Nigerian government against its own people, undertaken with the outright support of Shell and Chevron, is another example, well documented in books such as A Year and a Day and Genocide in Nigeria by Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was executed for his activism. You’ve heard the call: We have to do something. We need to fight. We need to identify the enemy and go after them. Some respond, march, and chant. Some look away, deny what’s happening, and search out escape routes into imaginary tomorrows: a life off the grid, space colonies, immortality in paradise, explicit denial, or consumer satiety in a wireless, robot-staffed, 3D-printed techno-utopia. Meanwhile, the rich take shelter in their fortresses, trusting to their air conditioning, private schools, and well-paid guards. Fight. Flight. Flight. Fight. The threat of death activates our deepest animal drives. The aggression and fear that arise in response to perceived threats are some of the most intense emotions we ever experience. For human society to function at all, these instinctive reactions have to be carefully managed and channeled. Outbreaks of panic and hate are dangerous, but lower levels of aggression and fear help keep a population controllable and productive. Restrained aggression keeps people suspicious of collective action and working hard to overcome their fellows, while constant, generalized anxiety keeps people servile, unwilling to take risks, and yearning for comfort from whatever quarter, whether the dulling sameness of herd thought or the dumb security of consumer goods. Since at least September 11, 2001, people in the United States have been subject to an unprecedented terror campaign—not from Al Qaeda, but from the United States government. National domestic policy transformed “security” into constant fear, threatening its citizens at every turn: first with alarms of explosions and anthrax, then with prison, austerity-produced structural unemployment, and harassment, and finally with torture, SWAT tanks, snipers, drones, and total surveillance. Owing to the racial logic of US politics, in which white/black is the definitive semiotic distinction structuring American society, most of the government’s violence against its own citizens is directed against those with darker skin, but in subtler ways its terror campaign targets every single person who flies coach, watches the news, or uses the Internet. Fear comes to us every day in our encounters with increasingly militarized police and our humiliating interactions at metal detectors and ” “body-scan machines. Fear comes to us in the absence of job security, in our want of appeal when confronted by institutionalized inequality, and in our mistrust of corrupt institutions. Fear comes to us in widespread surveillance, in the form of a homeless woman or a hospitalized friend without adequate financial support, and in the constant nagging worry that we’re not working hard enough, not happy enough, never going to “make it.” Fear comes to us in weather porn, unpredictable shifts in formerly stable climate dynamics, and massive storms. More than in any other way, fear comes to us in images and messages, as social media vibrations, products of cultural technologies that we have interpolated into our lives. Going about our daily business, we receive constant messages of apprehension and danger, ubiquitous warnings, insistent needling jabs to the deep lizard brain. Somebody died. Something blew up. Something might blow up. Somebody attacked somebody. Somebody killed somebody. Guns. Crime. Immigrants. Terrorists. Arabs. Mexicans. White supremacists. Killer cops. Demonic thugs. Rape. ” “Murder. Global warming. Ebola. ISIS. Death. Death. Death. Sociologist Tom Pyszczynski writes: “People will do almost anything to avoid being afraid. When, despite the best efforts, fear and anxiety do break through, people go to incredible lengths to shut them down.”88 Sometimes when these vibrations shake us, we discharge them by passing them on, retweeting the story, reposting the video, hoping that others will validate our reaction, thus assuaging our fear by assuring ourselves that collective attention has been alerted to the threat. Other times we react with aversion, working to dampen the vibrations by searching out positive reinforcements, pleasurable images and videos, something funny, something—anything—to ease the fear. We buy something. We eat food. We pop a pill. We fuck. In either passing on the vibration or reacting against it, we let the fear short circuit our own autonomous desires, diverting us from our goals and loading ever more emotional static into our daily cognitive processing. We become increasingly distracted from our ambitions and increasingly susceptible to such distraction. And whether we retransmit or react, we reinforce channels of thought, perception, behavior, and emotion that, over time, come to shape our habits and our personality. As we train ourselves to resonate fear and aggression, we reinforce patterns of thought and feeling that shape a society that breeds the same. Fight-or-flight is compelling because it serves essential evolutionary purposes. It increases alertness and adrenaline flow, and generally works to keep the human animal alive. As we proceed into the Anthropocene, though, capitalism’s cultural machinery for balancing fear and aggression against desire and pleasure is grinding and sputtering sparks. What cultural theorist Lauren Berlant has identified as the “cruel optimism” of a system sustained by hopes that can never be fulfilled mixes dangerously with an atmosphere of beleaguered anxiety, increasing frustration with working-class and middle-class economic stagnation, and a pervasive sadistic voyeurism that grows by what it feeds on.89 While America’s fraying social infrastructure holds together, our fear and aggression can be channeled into labor, consumption, and economic competition, with professional sports, hyperviolent television, and occasional protests to let off steam. Once the social fabric begins to tear, though, we risk unleashing not only rioting, rebellion, and civil war, but homicidal politics the likes of which should make our blood run cold.” “Consider: Once among the most modern, Westernized nations in the Middle East, with a robust, highly educated middle class, Iraq has been blighted for decades by imperialist aggression, criminal gangs, interference in its domestic politics, economic liberalization, and sectarian feuding. Today it is being torn apart between a corrupt petrocracy, a breakaway Kurdish enclave, and a self-declared Islamic fundamentalist caliphate, while a civil war in neighboring Syria spills across its borders. These conflicts have likely been caused in part and exacerbated by the worst drought the Middle East has seen in modern history. Since 2006, Syria has been suffering ” “crippling water shortages that have, in some areas, caused 75 percent crop failure and wiped out 85 percent of livestock, left more than 800,000 Syrians without a livelihood, and sent hundreds of thousands of impoverished young men streaming into Syria’s cities.90 This drought is part of long-term warming and drying trends that are transforming the Middle East.91 Not just water but oil, too, is elemental to these conflicts. Iraq sits on the fifth-largest proven oil reserves in the world. Meanwhile, the Islamic State has been able to survive only because it has taken control of most of Syria’s oil and gas production. We tend to think of climate change and violent religious fundamentalism as isolated phenomena, but as Retired Navy Rear Admiral David Titley argues, “you can draw a very credible climate connection to this disaster we call ISIS right now.”92 A few hundred miles away, Israeli soldiers spent the summer of 2014 killing Palestinians in Gaza. Israel has also been suffering drought, while Gaza has been in the midst of a critical water crisis exacerbated by Israel’s military ” “aggression. The International Committee for the Red Cross reported that during summer 2014, Israeli bombers targeted Palestinian wells and water infrastructure.93 It’s not water and oil this time, but water and gas: some observers argue that Israel’s “Operation Protective Edge” was intended to establish firmer control over the massive Leviathan natural gas field, discovered off the coast of Gaza in the eastern Mediterranean in 2010.94 Meanwhile, thousands of miles to the north, Russian-backed separatists fought fascist paramilitary forces defending the elected government of Ukraine, which was also suffering drought.95 Russia’s role as an oil and gas exporter in the region and the natural gas pipelines running through Ukraine from Russia to Europe cannot but be key issues in the conflict. Elsewhere, droughts in 2014 sent refugees from Guatemala and Honduras north to the US border, devastated crops in California and Australia, and threatened millions of lives in Eritrea, Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Uganda, Afghanistan, India, Morocco, Pakistan, and parts of China. Across the world, massive protests and riots have swept Bosnia and Herzegovina, Venezuela, Brazil, Turkey, Egypt, and Thailand, while conflicts rage on in Colombia, Libya, the Central African Republic, Sudan, Nigeria, Yemen, and India. And while the world burns, the United States has been playing chicken with Russia over control of Eastern Europe and the melting Arctic, and with China over control of Southeast Asia and the South China Sea, threatening global war on a scale not seen in seventy years. This is our present and future: droughts and hurricanes, refugees and border guards, war for oil, water, gas, and food. We experience this world of strife today in one of two modes: either it is our environment, and we are in it, or it comes to us as images, social excitation, retransmitted fear. People are fighting and dying in ruined cities all over the planet. Neighbors are killing each other. Old women are bleeding to death in bombed rubble and children are being murdered, probably as you read this sentence. To live in that world is horrific. Constant danger strains every nerve. The only things that matter are survival, killing the enemy, ” “reputation, and having a safe place to sleep. The experience of being human narrows to a cutting edge. I remember living in that world many years ago in occupied Baghdad. Today that world seems impossibly distant, yet every day it presses in on me in a never-ending stream of words, images, appeals, and reports. I see videos. I read stories. I see pictures of this or that suffering or injustice and I am moved. To act, perhaps, but more accurately to emote. To react. To feel. To perform. We do not usually ask where these feelings come from or who they serve, but we all know that the cultural technologies transmitting these affective vibrations are not neutral: news outlets shape information to fit their owners’ prejudices, while Facebook, Twitter, and Google shape our perceptions through hidden algorithms. The specialization and demographic targeting of contemporary media tend to narrow the channels of perception to the point that we receive only those images and vibrations which already harmonize with our own prejudices, our own pre-existing desires, thus intensifying our particular emotional reac” “tions along an increasingly limited band, impelling us to discharge our emotions within the same field of ready listeners, for which we are rewarded with “Likes” and “Favorites.” Our consciousness is shaped daily through feedback systems where some post or headline provokes a feeling and we discharge that feeling by provoking it in others. Social media like Facebook crowdsource catharsis, creating self-contained wave pools of aggression and fear, pity and terror, stagnant flows that go nowhere and do nothing. Pictures of children killed by bombs or police, or pictures of the devastation left in the wake of a tropical storm may move me to sadness and horror. Retransmitting such images will pass along that sadness and horror. My act of transmission will mark me as someone who has feelings about these things and who condemns them. I can rationalize my retransmission by saying that I am “raising awareness” or trying to influence public policy: I want my fellow citizens to be as horrified as I am, so they’ll think like I do, or so they’ll vote for a representative who works to prevent such horrors from happening, or maybe so that if ” “enough of us all think the same way and feel the same way, the organs and institutions of power will be forced to hear us and align themselves along our vibrations, the way a honeybee colony will pick a site for a new hive through the dance of its advance guard scouts. These are perfectly reasonable human assumptions, because that is how physical human collectives function. Anyone who has been in a crowd, a basketball team, a nightclub, a choir, or a protest knows how bodies resonate together. But politics is the energetic distribution of bodies in systems, and we live in a system of carbon-fueled capitalism that we shouldn’t expect to work in physical human ways for several reasons, especially when it comes to responding to the threat of global warming. First, our political and social media technologies are not neutral, but have been developed to serve particular interests, most notably targeted advertising, concentration of wealth, and ideological control, and the vibrations that seem to resonate most strongly along these channels are envy, adulation, outrage, fear, hatred, and mindless pleasure. Second, the more we pass on or react to social vibrations, the more we strengthen our habits of channeling and the less we practice autonomous reflection or independent critical thought. With every protest chant, retweet, and Facebook post, we become stronger resonators and weaker thinkers. Third, however intense our social vibrations grow, they remain locked within machinery that offers no political leverage: they do not translate into political action, because they do not connect to the flows of power. Finally, while the typical collective human response to threat is to identify an enemy, pick sides, and mobilize to fight, global warming offers no apprehensible foe. That hasn’t stopped people from trying to find one. The Flood Wall Street protesters say the enemy is American corporations. Tanzania’s Jakaya Kikwete and Nauru’s Baron Waqa say the problem is the United States and Great Britain. Shell Oil and the Environmental Defense Fund seem to think that it’s intractable UN bureaucracy that’s holding us up. Barack Obama has implied that it’s China. Tea Party Republicans prod us to ever more intense levels of manic despair? One way we might begin to answer these questions is by considering the problem of global warming in terms of Peter Sloterdijk’s idea of the philosopher as an interrupter: We live constantly in collective fields of excitation; this cannot be changed so long as we are social beings. The input of stress inevitably enters me; thoughts are not free, each of us can divine them. They come from the newspaper and wind up returning to the newspaper. My sovereignty, if it exists, can only appear by my letting the integrated impulsion die in me or, should this fail, by my retransmitting it in a totally metamorphosed, verified, filtered, or recoded form. It serves nothing to contest it: I am free only to the extent that I interrupt escalations and that I am able to immunize myself against infections of opinion. Precisely this continues to be the philosopher’s mission in society, if I may express myself in such pathetic terms. His mission is to show that a subject can be an interrupter, not merely a channel that allows thematic epidemics and waves of excitation to flow through it. The classics express this with the term ‘pondering.’ With this concept, ethics and energetics enter into contact: as a bearer of a philosophical function, I have neither the right nor the desire to be either a conductor in a stress-semantic chain or the automaton of an ethical imperative.97 Sloterdijk compares the conception of political function as collective vibration to a philosophical function of interruption. As opposed to disruption, which shocks a system and breaks wholes into pieces, interruption suspends continuous processes. It’s not smashing, but sitting with. Not blockage, but reflection. Sloterdijk sees the role of the philosopher in the human swarm as that of an aberrant anti-drone slow-dancing to its own rhythm, neither attuned to the collective beat nor operating mechanically, dogmatically, deontologically, but ” “continually self-immunizing against the waves of social energy we live in and amongst by perpetually interrupting its own connection to collective life. So long as one allows oneself to be “a conductor in a stress-semantic chain,” one is strengthening channels of retransmission regardless of content, thickening the reflexive connective tissues of mass society, making all of us more susceptible to such viral phenomena as nationalism, scapegoating, panic, and war fever. Interrupting the flows of social production is anarchic and counterproductive, like all good philosophy: if it works, it helps us stop and see our world in new ways. If it fails, as it often and even usually does, the interrupter is integrated, driven mad, ignored, or destroyed. What Sloterdijk helps us see is that responding autonomously to social excitation means not reacting to it, not passing it on, but interrupting it, then either letting the excitation die or transforming it completely. Responding freely to constant images of fear and violence, responding freely to the perpetual media circuits of pleasure and terror, responding freely to the ongoing ” “alarms of war, environmental catastrophe, and global destruction demands a reorientation of feeling so that every new impulse is held at a distance until it fades or can be changed. While life beats its red rhythms and human swarms dance to the compulsion of strife, the interrupter practices dying.” 7 -AND the aff causes endless structural violence with their death bad rhetoric. The invocation of “survival” as the basis of the plan makes all atrocities possible and removes the value of survival itself – in an attempt to save our world, they have destroyed it. Vote neg on impact. 8 -Callahan ‘73: Daniel Callahan, Fellow at the Institute of Society and Ethics, 1973, The Tyranny of Survival, Pages 91-93) 9 -The value of survival could not be so readily abused were it not for its evocative power. But abused it has been. In the name of survival, all manner of social and political evils have been committed against the rights of individuals, including the right to life. The purported threat of Communist domination has for over two decades fueled the drive of militarists for ever-larger defense budgets, no matter what the cost to other social needs. During World War II, native Japanese-Americans were herded, without due process of law, to detention camps. This policy was later upheld by the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States (1944) in the general context that a threat to national security can justify acts otherwise blatantly unjustifiable. The survival of the Aryan race was one of the official legitimations of Nazism. Under the banner of survival, the government of South Africa imposes a ruthless apartheid, heedless of the most elementary human rights. The Vietnamese war has seen one of the greatest of the many absurdities tolerated in the name of survival: the destruction of villages in order to save them. But it is not only in a political setting that survival has been evoked as a final and unarguable value. The main rationale B. F. Skinner offers in Beyond Freedom and Dignity for the controlled and conditioned society is the need for survival. For Jacques Monod, in Chance and Necessity, survival requires that we overthrow almost every known religious, ethical and political system. In genetics, the survival of the gene pool has been put forward as sufficient grounds for a forceful prohibition of bearers of offensive genetic traits from marrying and bearing children. Some have even suggested that we do the cause of survival no good by our misguided medical efforts to find means by which those suffering from such common genetically based diseases as diabetes can live a normal life, and thus procreate even more diabetics. In the field of population and environment, one can do no better than to cite Paul Ehrlich, whose works have shown a high dedication to survival, and in its holy name a willingness to contemplate governmentally enforced abortions and a denial of food to surviving populations of nations which have not enacted population-control policies. For all these reasons it is possible to counterpoise over against the need for survival a "tyranny of survival." There seems to be no imaginable evil which some group is not willing to inflict on another for sake of survival, no rights, liberties or dignities which it is not ready to suppress. It is easy, of course, to recognize the danger when survival is falsely and manipulatively invoked. Dictators never talk about their aggressions, but only about the need to defend the fatherland to save it from destruction at the hands of its enemies. But my point goes deeper than that. It is directed even at a legitimate concern for survival, when that concern is allowed to reach an intensity which would ignore, suppress or destroy other fundamental human rights and values. The potential tyranny survival as value is that it is capable, if not treated sanely, of wiping out all other values. Survival can become an obsession and a disease, provoking a destructive singlemindedness that will stop at nothing. We come here to the fundamental moral dilemma. If, both biologically and psychologically, the need for survival is basic to man, and if survival is the precondition for any and all human achievements, and if no other rights make much sense without the premise of a right to life—then how will it be possible to honor and act upon the need for survival without, in the process, destroying everything in human beings which makes them worthy of survival. To put it more strongly, if the price of survival is human degradation, then there is no moral reason why an effort should be made to ensure that survival. It would be the Pyrrhic victory to end all Pyrrhic victories. 10 -The alternative is to vote negative as a method of rejecting the aff’s survivalist justification and freeing ourselves from the fear of death. Death is a neutral mechanism of nature - this is an independent avenue that necessitates the alternative. 11 -Epicurus 311 BCE: Letter to Meneocues, translated by Professor Robert Drew Hicks, http://classics.mit.edu/Epicurus/menoec.html, BRACKETED FOR GENDERED LANGUAGE 12 -Accustom yourself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply awareness, and death is the privation of all awareness; therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life an unlimited time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For life has no terror; for those who thoroughly apprehend that there are no terrors for them in ceasing to live. Foolish, therefore, is the person who says that he fears death, not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect. Whatever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer. But in the world, at one time people shun death as the greatest of all evils, and at another time choose it as a respite from the evils in life. The wise person does not deprecate life nor do does they he fear the cessation of life. The thought of life is no offense to them him, nor is the cessation of life regarded as an evil. And even as people choose of food not merely and simply the larger portion, but the more pleasant, so the wise seek to enjoy the time which is most pleasant and not merely that which is longest. And he who admonishes the young to live well and the old to make a good end speaks foolishly, not merely because of the desirability of life, but because the same exercise at once teaches to live well and to die well. Much worse is he who says that it were good not to be born, but when once one is born to pass with all speed through the gates of Hades. For if he truly believes this, why does he not depart from life? It were easy for him to do so, if once he were firmly convinced. If he speaks only in mockery, his words are foolishness, for those who hear believe him not. 13 -AND discourse shapes reality – the way we come to our conclusions define the way we orient ourselves towards all problems in society. Since the discourse of the aff is independently bad, it is an independent reason to reject the aff, regardless of what benefits renewables or anything else supposedly good the aff advocates for. Discourse spills over to all decision-making in society, the 1AC plan is only relevant to this one hyper-specific policy, thus neg discourse is key. 14 -Doty ‘97: Roxanne Lynn Doty, assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Arizona State University, Imperial Encounters, 1997, p. 169-171 15 -This study begins with the premise that representation is an inherent and important aspect of global political life and therefore a critical and legitimate area of inquiry. International relations are inextricably bound up with discursive practices-that put into circulation representations that are taken as "truth." The goal-of-analyzing these practices is not to reveal essential truths that have been obscured, but rather to examine bow certain representations underlie the production of knowledge and, identities and how these representations make various courses of action possible. AS Said (1979: 21) notes, Mere is no such thing as a delivered presence, but there is a re-presence, or representation. Such an assertion does not deny the existence of the material world, but rather suggests that material objects and subjects are constituted as such within discourse. SO, for example, when U.S. troops march into Grenada, this is certainly "real: though the march of troops across a piece of geographic space is in itself singularly uninteresting and socially irrelevant outside of the representations that produce meaning. It is only when "American" is attached to the troops and "Grenada” to the geographic space that meaning is created. What the physical behavior itself is, though, is still far from certain until discursive practices constitute it as an "invasion; a 'show of force," "training exercise, “a "rescue, “and SO on. What is "really" going on in such a situation is inextricably linked to the discourse within which it is located. To attempt a neat separation between discursive and nondiscursive practices, understanding the former as purely linguistic, assumes a series of Dichotomies – thought/reality appearance essence, mind matter, word/world, subjective/objective - that a critical genealogy calls into Question. Against this, the perspective taken here affirms the material and performative character of discourse. 'In suggesting that global politics, and specifically the aspect that has to do with relations between the North and the South, is linked to representational practices 1 am suggesting that the issues and concerns that constitute these relations occur within a 'reality' whose content has for the most part been defined by the representational practices of the ‘first world'. Focusing on discursive practices enables one to examine how the processes that produce "truth" and "knowledge" work and how they are articulated with the exercise of political, military, and economic power. 16 -The plan was already proposed in the context of the advantages and discourse of the 1AC meaning that any hypothetical implementation would be influenced by that rhetoric – it cannot be undone… this means no access to a perm. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@ 1 +2016-11-14 05:05:18.0 - Judge
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@ 1 +Arjun Tambe - Opponent
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@ 1 +Lake Highland - Round
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@ 1 +1 - RoundReport
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,3 @@ 1 +Structural Violence AC 2 +Neoliberalism K 3 +Warming DA - Tournament
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,1 @@ 1 +Greenhill