Neoliberalism K—UMich 2013 neg 1NCs 1NC: Generic

I: Illegal Immigration

Latin Americans are forced out of their homeland to become illegal immigrants so farmers can cut their labor costs

Gavin Smith (1999) called for an understanding of social institutions in terms of social reproduction, less in terms of things, more in terms of forces, which allow us to examine the relationship between individual suffering and the collective trauma of state-sponsored violence and neoliberal economic policies. In this case institutions like Homeland Security, the Border Patrol, and the ICE work as ‘‘bridgeheads of power’’ facilitating certain practices often by means of order, such as raids, detentions, and Operation Streamline. Again, for Antonio, the consequence is a shift in identity from an Indian nobody, to an illegal alien—somebody mired in legal and political proceedings intent on relegating him the status of nobody.By the mid-seventeenth century England had established what Foucault (1965) referred to as the ‘‘great confinement’’—workhouses for the sick, the insane, and the destitute, not with the intent of improving their fate, but as a mechanism to extract profit from their ‘‘free’’ labor. Later, prison labor was captured in the form of chain gangs as a popular mode of production and of discipline and punishment (Foucault 1977). A recent iteration of these processes is now notable in the agricultural fields of Arizona. As migrants are deported as a result of ICE raids at the workplace,leaving framers with a shortage of employees at harvest time, prison populations are the new workers filling that gap. They work for a pittance of what it costs for undocumented migrants. In Arizona, for instance,migrants are paid about US $40 per day for a 10- to 12-hour shift picking chilies, while prisoners are paid only US $20 per day. As migrants are increasingly being locked up not only in the ICE detention centers, but also a substantial number of them are in state and local prisons, one can only imagine that some of those prisoners working on the chain gangs are migrants, who, in a perverse Orwellian twist, have replaced themselves at a much lower wage, even as they await deportation from their ‘‘crime’’: their refusal to be disposed of.

I: Development

Capitalism is a regime of exploitation that makes it impossible for development in Third World countries.

Bell Lara, Professor of Sociology at the University of Havana and a Senior Researcher in the FLACSO-Cuba Program, 2006, (José, “Cuban Socialism in the Face of Globalization,” page 150, 2009, http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/content/9789047410881)//CS

International competition leads the TNCs to search for lower productioncosts, relocating various moments of the production process where they aremore profitable. The new technologies which are available permit the spatialdecentralisation of production and an elevated division and subdivision oflabour such that it becomes possible for a minimal skill level when appropriateto carry out specified parts of the production process. For the first time inhistory, the creation of a world market of production has been accompanied by a world labour market along with a world reserve army of workers (Finkel1995: 62). Nurtured by all of its systemic potential and intimately interrelated with the process of globalisation, the extraordinary scientific and technological revolution continues to unfold. There is no doubt that modern biotechnology and the creation of new materials and information technologies are central elements of the new scientific and technological revolution. Some authorsemphasise that its central link of articulation is constituted by informationtechnologies as manifested in distinct specialty areas such as microelectronics, optical electronics, robotics, informatics, telecommunications, and so on.The common element of all these developments is that they are stronglybased in the development of scientific knowledge: “the cycle of capital accumulation increasingly depends less upon the intensiveness of labour inputsand even the intensiveness of productive physical capital so as to concentrate itself in an accumulation based in knowledge-intensive production. Theconcentration and centralisation of technological knowledge is more intensive and far more monopolistic than other forms of capital, augmented bythe large gap between the North and South” (Gorostiaga 1991: 5). The weightof this knowledge component in production can be evaluated by observingthat in high tech branches such as microelectronics, the costs associated withthis factor represents around 70% of its total value. In older industries suchas automobile production, the percentage is closer to 40% of the final product’s total value (Marini 1996).These extraordinary developments are monopolised at the hegemonic centres of capital and do not become readily transferred to the underdeveloped world. Better put, productive processes become transferred but not the creation processes of scientific and cutting-edge technologies.In fact, the present scientific-technical revolution has a distinctive trade In fact, the present scientific-technical revolution has a distinctive trademark: the industrialisation of knowledge through permanent systems of innovation that permit enterprises and nations to compete. When innovation isthe rule rather than the exception, the human factor acquires a singular importance in the production process. Above all, the fraction of the labour force which is highly skilled plays a preponderant role in economic processes whose successful operation selectively requires a given technical level within its labour inputs. In recognition of this phenomenon, the factor of “human capital” is increasingly regarded as a leading sector in the dynamic areas of the world economy. Amidst these rapid technological changes and the changing organisation of work within global capitalist competition there can also be observed a growing worldwide rate of unemployment. This increase of unemploymentand the structural demand for ever greater flexibility in the labour market isa concurrent tendency of globalisation, something which makes work increasingly precarious for many and in the final analysis results in greater levels of poverty and inequality across the globe. Capitalism continues being a regime of exploitation, replete with multiple contradictions, which negates the possibility of dynamic development for the underdeveloped world. This is to repeat the earlier assertion that development and underdevelopment are two sides of the capitalist coin of expansion and world domination in its globalised phase, something it shares incommon with the preceding period. Taking this fact to heart would suggest that the possibility of genuine development is associated with a rupture of dependent capitalist relations, something that in a strict sense would signify an exit from the world system of capital.

Neoliberalism fuels codependency for Latin American countries and forces them to abandon any possibility of development.

Buono and Bell Lara, Professors of Sociology and Senior Researcher in the FLACSO-Cuba Program, 2007(Richard A. Delloand José, “Neoliberalism and Resistance in Latin America,” 2007, http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/content/9789047410881)//CS

The changes in the capitalist world system duringthe last two decades of the Twentieth Century notonly transformed the post-WW II international orderbut also fuelled a process of systemic re-structuration, giving rise to what today is referred to as globalisation. This complex process deepened the structurally conditioned dependency of the underdeveloped countries, particularly in Latin America, where external debt became converted into the articulating element of a consolidated mechanism of dependency. More sophisticated than earlier forms of neo-colonial domination, this evolving historical formation annuls any real possibility of development. It compels nationsto engage in the act of compliance with “legitimate”commitments associated with servicing a debt thathas no apparent relationship with a nation’s established development goals.The impossibility of repaying the foreign debt and the recurrent crises resulting from meeting debt service payments have produced processes of renegotiation that are in essence political-economic interventions. They are carried out through internationalfinancial institutions such that the economic policies of the indebted countries can be dictated to and thereby moulded into the purest possible forms of neoliberalism. In short, the external debt has constituted the preferred agent for the implantation of neoliberal policies across the whole of Latin America.But it must be understood that this was not entirely a process imposedfrom abroad. There were powerful “national” interests in Latin America thathelped give rise to these debts and their stakeholders have figured prominently among its principal beneficiaries. These are the transnational fractionsof the local bourgeoisie, i.e., groups organically linked to the economic reorientation towards export driven expansion. Along with financial groups, highlevel bureaucrats tied to international agencies, and other fractions, theyconstitute a consolidated elite of collaborators with the agents of globalisedcapital.

The internalization of neoliberalism ultimately restrains society and expands the spectrum of the exploited.

Buono and Bell Lara, Professors of Sociology and Senior Researcher in the FLACSO-Cuba Program, 2007(Richard A. Delloand José, “Neoliberalism and Resistance in Latin America,” 2007, http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/content/9789047410881)//CS

As a whole, this process can be comprehended as an internalisation of neoliberalism into the structures of our societies, or perhaps more graphically, a kind of straightjacket that restrains society and compels it to operate within specific structural limits. This application of the neoliberal programme engendered long term effects, not only because it has orchestrated a correlation of forces more favourable to capital, but also because its application has induced structural changes, reshaping the social class composition of the entire continent.If indeed the spectrum of the exploited has grown quantitatively, it hasalso experienced qualitative changes. These include the reduction of the industrial working class, an extraordinary growth of the informal sector, downward social mobility resulting from the impoverishment of broad sectors of the middle class, the decline of the public sector and state employment, an increasingly precarious structure of employment, and a substantial loss of purchasing power on the part of wage workers. The number of female headof households has grown and broad sectors of young people and students are living in frustrating situations with an uncertain future. Meanwhile, theadvance of agribusiness in the countryside has aggravated the problem of land distribution and rural poverty, further intensifying the migration of peasants to urban areas.

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