Neoliberalism K—UMich 2013 neg 1NCs 1NC: Generic
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AT: Hardt and Negri AltHardt and Negri agree with the expansion of the neoliberal agendaNavarro,M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Public Policy, Sociology, and Policy Studies at Johns Hopkins University, 2007 (Vicente, “NEOLIBERALISM AS A CLASS IDEOLOGY; OR, THE POLITICAL CAUSES OF THE GROWTH OF INEQUALITIES,” International Journal of Health Services, Vol. 37.1, pp48-49)//SG This celebration of the process of globalization is also evident among some sectors of the left. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, in their widely cited Empire (1), celebrate the great creativity of what they consider to be a new era of capitalism. This new era, they claim, breaks with obsolete state structures and establishes a new international order, which they define as an imperialist order. They further postulate that this new imperialist order is maintained without any state dominating or being hegemonic in that order. Thus, they write (1, p. 39): We want to emphasize that the establishment of empire is a positive step towards the elimination of nostalgic activities based on previous power structures; we reject all political strategies that want to take us back to past situations such as the resurrection of the nation-state in order to protect the population from global capital. We believe that the new imperialist order is better than the previous system in the same way that Marx believed that capitalism was a mode of production and a type of society superior to the mode that it replaced.This point of view held by Marx was based on a healthy despisement of the parochial localism and rigid hierarchies that preceded the capitalist society, as well as on the recognition of the enormous potential for liberation that capitalism had. Globalization(i.e., the internationalization of economic activity according to neoliberal tenets) becomes, in Hardt and Negri’s position, an international system that is stimulating a worldwide activity that operates without any state or states leading or organizing it. Such an admiring and flattering view of globalization and neoliberalism explains the positive reviews that Empire has received from Emily Eakin, a book reviewer for the New York Times, and other mainstream critics, not known for sympathetic reviews of books that claim to derive their theoretical position from Marxism. Actually, Eakin describes Empire as the theoretical framework that the world needs to understand its reality. AT: Zapatistas AltEngaging in the Zapatista movement fails to alter neoliberalism and serves to re-entrench it.Stahler-Sholk2007 – Professor of Political Science at Eastern Michigan University (Richard, “Resisting Neoliberal Homogenization: The Zapatista Autonomy Movement”, Latin American Perspectives March 2007 vol. 34 no. 2 48-63, March 2007, http://lap.sagepub.com/content/34/2/48.short)//CS The Zapatista autonomy movement in Chiapas, Mexico, is a significant example of rising social-movement resistance to neoliberalism. The neoliberal project in Latin America since the 1980s has led to a retrenchment of the state, opening new space for social movements to contest power from below. In Mexico, the weakening of corporatist and clientelist mechanisms once controlled by the party-state allowed groups like the Zapatistas to assert rights based on both collective (ethnic) identity and Mexican national citizenship.An examination of the Zapatista autonomy movement since 1994 suggests several dilemmas: (1) A territorially based model of autonomy as administrative decentralization would not fundamentally alter existing political hierarchies or the role of the state as broker for global capital. (2) Autonomy conceived as mere disengagement would leave autonomous communities cut off from resources and unprotected from the forces of the global market. (3) Autonomy defined as simply cultural pluralism falls into the neoliberal “multiculturalism trap” of atomizing communities, substituting formal “equality” for the power to establish collective identities and demand substantive rights.The Zapatistas have maneuvered around counterinsurgency and co-optation through a flexible, community-based model of autonomy, shifting in 2003 to a model of regional Juntas de BuenGobierno with rotating representatives to integrate the resistance. The experiment holds lessons for other social movements in Latin America struggling to preserve grassroots decision making in opposition to the logic of global capital. AT: General AltSocial movements operate outside conventional politics and fetishize autonomy presenting three dilemmas.Stahler-Sholk, Vanden, Kuecker,Professor of Political Science at Eastern Michigan University, Ph.D. Department of Government and International Affairs at the College of Arts and Sciences, University of South Florida, associate professor of history at DePauw University ,2008 (Richard, Harry, Glen David, Latin American Social Movements in the Twenty-First Century: Resistance, Power, and Democracy, pages 114-115, 2008, http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/gia_facpub/60/)//CS Social movements by definition operate outside conventional politics, and "new" social movements are distinguished by their emphasis on autonomy, participatory process, and solidarity around perceived collective identities. The neoliberal project implies atomization and loss of control to global market forces, posing dilemmas for movements seeking to reassert communityidentity and grassroots empowerment. On one hand, the "fetishism of autonomy"(Hellman, 1992)-eschewing affiliation or engagement with any political structure for fear that it might absorb the newly asserted identity-can be a dead end. On the other hand, negotiating a share of power with existing political institutions runs the risk of replicating dominant hierarchies(servingglobal capital)and distancing the "autonomous" representatives from their social bases. Movements in Mexico and elsewhere experiment and debate overhow best to conceive of autonomy (Diaz-Polanco and Sanchez, 2002).Zapatismo as a social movement consists of various layers, including the political-military structure (insurgents and militia) of the Ejêrcito Zapatista de LiberacionNacional (Zapatista National Liberation Army-EZLN) that wentpublic in 1994; the "networks"of national and international supporters; andthe "support-base" indigenous communities in the "conflict zones" (easternjungle, border, northern zone, and central highlands) of Chiapas. I will focuson the support-base communities to consider the sustainability of the movement, highlightingthree dilemmas: (1) the limits of territorially based autonomy, (2) autonomy and curtailment of resource allocations, and (3) the neoliberal "multiculturalism trap." Examination of progressive social movements against capitalism reveals that they are no more than small adjustments to capitalism.Burawoy,former president of the American Sociological Association and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, 2010(Michael, “From Polanyi to Pollyanna: The False Optimism of Global Labor Studies,” Global Labour Journal, Volume I, Issue II, pages 302-303, May 31, 2010, http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1040&context=globallabour&sei-redir=1&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fscholar.google.com%2Fscholar%3Fstart%3D10%26q%3Dcapitalism%2Benvironmental%2Bdegradation%2Blatin%2Bamerica%26hl%3Den%26as_sdt%3D0%2C23%26as_ylo%3D2008%26as_yhi%3D2013#search=%22capitalism%20environmental%20degradation%20latin%20america%22 )//CS Disturbed by the uneven benefits of capitalist accumulation that he had previously championed, Evans turned his attention to the forces that might challenge capitalist inequities. He explores Polanyi’s second dimension – the so-called double movement, the countermovement to market expansion.3 Herehe insists that a counter-movement must go beyond local and national levels to reach a global scale– a scale of resistance unanticipated by Polanyi –to produce what he calls ‘counter-hegemonic globalization’. He, therefore, searches for ‘progressive’ social movements with the potential to transcend national boundaries– environmental movements, women’s movements and above all labor movements– but it is not clear in what way these movements are counter-hegemonic, that is to say, in what way they represent an alternative ‘hegemony’, nor what it is that they actually ‘counter’, nor that they effectively build transnational solidarity. Evans brings back the state to promote economic development but lets it fly out of the window when it comes to organizing struggles – struggles the state confines to the national arena. The result is a ‘counter-hegemonic’ globalization which clutches at straws.There’s simply no there there. Far from counter-hegemonic,his movements seem to be organized on the terrain and within the limits of capitalist hegemony. There is no sign that their ‘small transformations’, or better their small perturbations, are more than an adjustment to capitalism.Important though they are in their 303 own right, they are neither temporally cumulative nor politically (and geographically) connected, except perhaps momentarily when they assemble at the World Social Forum. Their activities may win the concessions, but they are concessions that forestall rather than prefigure any ‘great transformation’. Even if steps are taken to shift away from neoliberalism, old antagonisms still remain making anti-neoliberalism unsuccessful.Albo 2006 – Professor of Political Science at York University (Gregory, “The Unexpected Revolution: Venezuela Confronts Neoliberalism”, Socialist Project, January 2006, http://socialistproject.ca/theory/venezuela_praksis.pdf)//CS In the year and half since the referendum, President Chavez has not shied away from this prospect politically, ideologically or, as we shall see below, in terms of extending anti-neoliberal, and socializing, reforms.The political forces behind the Bolivarian Revolution were, for instance, substantially bolstered by the fall 2004 of the virtual sweep of state governorships and city mayors by Chavista candidates, leaving the Opposition with limited institutional political capacity. These developments, moreover, gave Chavez the space to sharpen the ideological character of the Revolution. After similar statements in Caracas, Chavez declared before a boisterous crowd at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in January 2005 that neoliberalism would only deepen the problems of Latin America and that the road that the Bolivarian Revolution would take would be socialist. “It is impossible, within the framework of the capitalist system, to solve the grave problems of poverty of the majority of the world's population," Chavez declared. “We must transcend capitalism. But we cannot resort to state capitalism, which would be the same perversion of the Soviet Union. We must reclaim socialism as a thesis, a project, and a path, but a new type of socialism, a humanist one which puts humans and not machines or the state ahead of everything.” 5 As with the December 2004 encounter in Caracas of major intellectuals and political figures of the Left, international in scope but especially Latin American, it was clear that a new socialist political pole of reference was being formed between Cuba and Venezuela.6This was a challenge to the Centre-Left governments in Brazil, Argentina and Chile to break from their ‘third way’ accommodation to neoliberalism. The new political departure also now was the context and agenda against which developments internal to Venezuela now would increasingly be judged.But even if progress on building more egalitarian and socialized institutions against neoliberalism were now the agenda to be monitored in Venezuela,this is not to say that the old antagonisms had been banished to the scrap-heap of history. Indeed, the internal social conflict – with external actors such as the right-wing Columbian state and the North American imperialist powers never very distant from oppositional strategizing – has continued.In December 2005, for example, the Oppositional parties launched a boycott of elections for the National Assembly, despite accommodations in the voting procedures that have been monitored and approved by international election monitors from the OAS and others, in an attempt to discredit the democratic process and deflect attention away from their own impotence at the ballot box. This leaves the Venezuelan Assembly a virtual ‘one-party system’ and presages a new stage of conflict through 2006, with both domestic and international social forces, over the alleged democratic legitimacy and ‘authoritarianism’ – created by the Opposition’s own decision to withdraw participation – of the Chavez regime Transform FirstViewing the environment as susceptible to exploitation by neoliberalism assumes a distorted perspective in which states are incapable of solving environmental issues and a transforming capitalism, instead of its complete eradication, has been left untried.Gudynas, director of the Latin American Center on Social Ecology, 2009 (Eduardo, “Climate change and capitalism’s ecological fix in Latin America,”Critical Currents no. 6, pages 39-40, November 2009, http://www.gudynas.com/publicaciones/GudynasClimateChangeCapitalismFix09.pdf)//CS In the framework of the commodification of nature, the environment is broken up into commodities to be inserted into productiveprocesses. As a consequence, the components of ecosystems – its fauna and flora, or even their genes, ecological cycles, etc. – are converted into commodities that are subject to trade lawsand can have owners and an economic value. Countries like Brazil and Argentina, for example, are among the most energetic advocates of the incorporation of environmental goods and services into the WTO regime. Other actors operate in the same way. Among the so-called conservation BINGOs (big international NGOs), for example, marketbased mechanisms such as carbon trading are seen as key in responding to the challenge of climate change – extending all the way to extreme cases such as Conservation International’s proposal regarding the Amazon, whereby protected areas should self-financethemselves by way of the sale of environmental services and goods, or carbon capture, inglobal markets (Killeen 2007). This is an extremely pessimistic position, which assumes incapable states and the forsaking of any idea of transforming global capitalism, and accepts the destruction of the greater part of the rainforest, while all that is hoped for is to salvage the odd protected area by including it in the very commercial networks that cause environmental destruction.Along the same lines, the recent ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean) report on international trade, insofar as it even acknowledges the importance of climate change, also calls for resistance to green forms of trade protectionism. More importantly, this proposaldemonstrates other aspects of this distortion, since national or local environmentalproblems vanish from the agenda. Environmental impacts that range from the loss ofbiodiversity to urban contamination are not adequately considered; the actions to confront them are emptied of meaning; environmental institutions are even more fragile; and there are multiple problems withenforcement. Much is said about environmental questions, but from a distorted perspective, while a parallel weakening of national and local environmental governance in South America takes 1War deaths are from the Correlates of War database (Singer and Small, 1994). Refugees (across international boundaries) are from U.S. Committee for Refugees (1980-1996). For discussion of these data, see Auvinen and Nafziger (1999, pp. 267-90). 2Regression models include ordinary least squares (OLS), generalized least squares (GLS or Prais-Winsten), two-stage least squares, fixed and random effects, tobit, and probit models. See Auvinen and Nafziger (2001, on-line) for the results of a few of these regressions. 3A weakening or decaying state is one experiencing a decline in the basic functions of the state, such as possessing authority and legitimacy, making laws, preserving order, and providing basic social services. A complete breakdown in these functions indicates a failing or collapsing state (Holsti 2000, pp. 246-50; Zartman 1995, pp. 1-7). Download 1.47 Mb. Share with your friends:
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