Neoliberalism K—UMich 2013 neg 1NCs 1NC: Generic
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- Capitalism dehumanizes children and the proletariat as a whole—encourages an ideology of violence
- Neoliberalism does irreversible harm to children and future generations—will cause massive poverty and suffering
I: ChildrenNeoliberalism destroys societal values and structure and forces children into labor and traffickingDe La Barra, Chilean political activist, international consultant and former UNICEF Latin America Public Policy Advisor 07-- (Ximena, “THE DUAL DEBT OF NEOLIBERALISM”, Imperialism, Neoliberalism and Social Struggles in Latin America”, 9/1/09, edited by Dello Bueno and Lara, Brill Online)//AS A social and macro-economic system which so highly values individualism, competitiveness, and aggressiveness is progressively destroying the micro-economic setting of families and contradicting their traditional values of affection, solidarity and belongingness. The structure and capacity of the family as a basic socio-economic unit has become progressively weakened, likewise degrading the primary environment for protecting and promoting the rights and well-being of children. The worsening of local economic conditions increases the pressure on young people to begin working at an early age. Children are attracted to the labour market given the poverty of their family. They make desirable labourersbecause they are easy to exploit. This way, while the neoliberal development model creates unemployed or underemployed adults, it likewise yields alarming figures for child labour, child abandonment, school dropouts, and frustrated children and adolescents. As this poverty cycle snowballs, the personal and social aspirations of the poor become ever more impossible to fulfil. The International LabourOrganisation (ILO) has reported an estimated 246 million child labourers worldwide, 180 million who are employed in the worst and most dangerous forms of child labour, 73 million of whom are under the age of 10. No country is immune from this trend as evidenced by the fact that 2.5 million of the above work in the most developed countries, with another 2.5 million found in transitional economies of the former Soviet republics. In addition, an estimated 8.4 million children are trapped in slavery, human trafficking, family debt servitude, sexual exploitation and other illicit activities. It is estimated that 1.2 million children are victims of child trafficking, forced to cross national border or lured into situations of sexual or commercial exploitation.3 Capitalism dehumanizes children and the proletariat as a whole—encourages an ideology of violenceKapur, Professor of Cinema at Southern Illinois Univeristy, feminist/Marxist analyst of media 06 (Jyotsna, “Rehearsals for war: Capitalism and the transformation of children into consumers”, Socialism and Democracy 20:2, 5/8/06, Taylor and Francis)//AS Of course, it is a travesty that festivals of birth should be turned into celebrations of death, children's play into lessons in war, and war sold as a style. However, if we learn anything from Marx it is that the ruling ideas of the ruling class are always unstable and so have to be reasserted over and over againThe presence of military iconography in youth culture today is one such contested space, an open display of the unbearable contradictions of capital, which sows the seeds of its own destruction in every new ground that it breaks. Ever since they were discovered as a niche market in the post-war US economic boom, children have been socialized as consumers, a process that deepened radically in the last two decades of the 20th century.3 The demand that they now turn into soldiers entails an entirely new orientation: from thinking of themselves as atomized indi- viduals who pursue their ovm self-enhancement, they are now being asked to willingly sacrifice themselves for a cause bigger than them- selves. The Bush regime has tried to curtail resistance by simply denying there is any contradiction between the self-sacrifice and the self-enhancement. As Bush explains it, doing your patriotic duty today means that you must do both: shop at home and fight overseas in order to protect "our way of life and freedoms," which is to shop some more. In other words, you must shop till you, quite literally, drop!The question anyone who has read Marx or lived on the wrong side of the tracks asks is, who does the shopping and who does the drop- ping, or, even more pointedly, whose children do what? The import- ance of children to the socialist movement can be understood from the very meaning of the word proletariat, which, Terry Eagleton reminds us, was derived from the word proles, meaning children. Prolicide refers to the act of killing one's children. The proletariat then is the class too poor to serve the state by property who serves it instead by producing children as labor-power. It is quite commonplace for those who are opposed to the US-led war against Iraq and Afghanistan to blame the consumerism of the people of the US, particularly their “addiction” to oil, for the war. This position shifts the blame from a system to the people, making no distinctions between those who own and manage the system and those who are exploited by it. It turns consumerism into a curable pathology rather than the understandable outcome of social, economic, and political policy that needs to be transformed. A lesson that we can learn from the current transformation of children from consumers into soldiers is that war and consumerism are both structural outcomes of capital.5 In other words, consumers do not need war – but capitalism needs both consumers and war. Then, what needs to be changed becomes clear. Neoliberalism does irreversible harm to children and future generations—will cause massive poverty and sufferingDe La Barra, Chilean political activist, international consultant and former UNICEF Latin America Public Policy Advisor 07-- (Ximena, “THE DUAL DEBT OF NEOLIBERALISM”, Imperialism, Neoliberalism and Social Struggles in Latin America”, 9/1/09, edited by Dello Bueno and Lara, Brill Online)//AS The social development of children and adolescents is a particularly urgent aspect of the larger picture. For them, there exists no second opportunity.Their biological and intellectual development cannot wait until their family manages to escape poverty or until the promised benefits from economic growth manage to trickle down. The harm due to malnutrition, poor health, and inadequate treatment during infancy is often irreversible and destined to be transmitted across generations. The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is very clear in assigning responsibility for the development of children and adolescents to the families and the state. Additionally, the state is assigned the duty of creating the necessary conditions for families to comply with their responsibilities. Nevertheless, states have not created those conditions. They have failed to eradicate unemployment and to create safety nets. By transferring coordination of basic service delivery for children to the market via privatisation policies, impoverished families lose access. Simultaneous public investments in children and in the creation of stable formal employment for adults, with dignified salaries and social benefits that cover not just workers but also their families, have now become the indispensable priority for genuine development. Download 1.47 Mb. Share with your friends:
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