The Revolutionary Socialist Network, Workers
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2NC -- Ext: Security LinkSecurity links – valuing security only furthers capitalist societyRigakos 16 [George S. Rigakos, 2016, Security/Capital, Introduction: Security under Capitalism, Edinburgh University Press, SMarx, JTong] Over the last four decades a number of powerful social and eco nomic trends have begun to significantly impact both class politics and how we may theorize it. These socioeconomic trends have been exacerbated even further in the aftermath of the economic crisis of 2008–9, resulting in the re-mobilization of a wide array of popular movements crystallizing with Occupy and Syriza. Bourgeois insecurity has become more acute as evidenced by rising inequality 1 marching in lockstep with climbing public and private policing employment since at least the 1970s. 2 Increased inequality has also coincided with greater rates of exploitation; 3 significant decreases in union membership; 4 and the intensification of the everyday economic insecurity of workers, especially part-time and precarious workers, 5 who have taken on more and more debt 6 in order to maintain a standard of living comparable to previous generations. Emerging into popular consciousness at this time has also been the economic and social insularity of the 1 per cent 7 – an awareness that has produced a renewal of critique aimed at addressing how, in the wake of the Great Recession, there has been no clear political alternative to the retrenchment of neoliberalism through austerity and further global economic uncertainty.8 This generalized insecurity has taken place alongside the rhetorical rise of the “war on terror” layered over the top of an already existing “war on drugs” and a “war on crime” with their concomitant race, class, and gender implications. 9 War making as a form of peace-making or “war as peace” 10 has become an essential facilitator for the proliferation of a security– industrial complex inextricably bound up with capital accumulation 11 and Empire.12 Mass demonstrations against the ceremonial gathering of corporate and state elites during meetings of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) or the Group of Twenty (G20) have cast in stark relief the politics of the 99 per cent with that of the 1 per cent; have drawn visible, geographic boundaries 13 around the permissibility of dissent; 14 and have facilitated the occupation and colonization of urban space for the purpose of “extending the scope of productive labour” 15 and the circuit of capital accumulation.16 These processes, of course, have a very long history 17 tied to the formation of “police science” and the functional connection between wealth accumulation and the fabrication of a social order. 18 Police science gave rise to a form of prudential thinking and planning that foreshadowed an increasingly elaborate system of risk management and threat assessment. 19 Police science thus comprises the strategic field of bourgeois planning aimed at making populations “productive” through the enforcement of a wage-labor system. It supports, in short, the only war contemporary politics dares not recognize but that has served as the foundation for all projects of pacification: class war. Marx long ago warned about the embedded nature of “security” with its associated projects of bourgeois social ordering. In On the Jewish Question (first published in 1844) he wrote: “security is the supreme concept of bourgeois society. The concept of police.” 20 His words are particularly prophetic today in light of how deeply entrenched and entangled US corporate interests are with police power and surveillance. 21 The National Security Agency (NSA) leaks22 highlighted the reach of Empire and increasingly how tactics aimed at jihadist terrorists have been extended to domestic dissidents. 23 Of course, snooping on both domestic and foreign dissidents is certainly not new 24 but the colonization by risk 25 and security logics of almost all facets of social and political discourse 26 has significant ideological and material consequences. Radical scholars have certainly taken note of these developments but are also the first to point out that none of these trends is inherently new or necessarily a post-9/ 11 development. They argue instead that “the security apparatus that revved up in the days after the attack had been in the making for decades” 27 and should best be understood as part of the long duree28 of the logic of capitalism through pacification.29 To that end, analyses of pacification have included considerations of privacy; 30 the response to ‘Black Bloc’ tactics and anarchist social movements;31 the relentless surveillance and policing of the poor, 32 precarious migrant workers, 33 and welfare recipients; 34 the infiltration and cooption of aboriginal resistance; 35 the increasing control of pro tests as a form of insurgency;36 and even the military mobilization against resistance through air power 37 to name but a few. 38 A prevalent theme that binds these recent analyses 39 is their recur ring reference to the materialist basis of pacification 40 and the study of how “productive labor” is imagined and achieved by political economists, police intellectuals, and colonial planners who are, more often than not, one in the same. 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