West coast debate

State Development K

1NC State Development Kritik

Locating their affirmative in traditional political engagement with the state undermines revolutionary potential

Remember. The problem is not corruption or greed. The problem is the system. It forces you to be corrupt. Beware not only of the enemies, but also of false friends who are already working to dilute this process. In the same way you get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice cream without fat, they will try to make this into a harmless, moral protest. A decaffienated protest. But the reason we are here is that we have had enough of a world where, to recycle Coke cans, to give a couple of dollars for charity, or to buy a Starbucks cappuccino where 1% goes to third world starving children is enough to make us feel good. After outsourcing work and torture, after marriage agencies are now outsourcing our love life, we can see that for a long time, we allow our political engagement also to be outsourced. We want it back. We are not Communists if Communism means a system which collapsed in 1990. Remember that today those Communists are the most efficient, ruthless Capitalists. In China today, we have Capitalism which is even more dynamic than your American Capitalism, but doesn’t need democracy. Which means when you criticize Capitalism, don’t allow yourself to be blackmailed that you are against democracy. The marriage between democracy and Capitalism is over. The change is possible.

This ideology of state politics generates infinite wars and kills all value

Indeed, to act with impunity, the state prefers a control that leaves no marks, that operates through fear, that appears to its citizens as invisible satellite eyes in outer space, as robot sensors, as scanners that probe mechanically, as spy software that reads keystroke to keystroke the random fluctuations of inner space. Through fear, control remains anonymous and invisible. Invisible, it becomes inevitable, virtuous, and complete. In this fascination with collapsing the boundaries of spirit and body, with dynamism and flux, with probing the outermost and the innermost, the Promethean betrays itself as romantic in its aesthetic, despite its rhetoric of reason and law. Entrepreneurship presents itself less as a necessity of capitalism than as a spiritual ideal of initiative and strife. The ethos of business and military blend into each other in the doctrine of perpetual war. A war not merely to fatten defense budgets but to deplete the civilian, for to the Prometheans, populations present themselves as recalcitrant flesh to be disciplined and spiritualized through strife.

Alternative – rejecting state-based ideology opens up space for alternative systems

Link – State Solutions

Their engagement corrupts our alternatives capacity to shatter existing institutions

So we should see in this development also a challenge: it is not enough to reject the depoliticized expert rule as the most ruthless form of ideology; one should also begin to think seriously about what to propose instead of the predominant economic organization, to imagine and experiment with alternate forms of organization, to search for the germs of the New. Communism is not just or predominantly the carnival of the mass protest when the system is brought to a halt; Communism is also, above all, a new form of organization, discipline, hard work. The protesters should beware not only of enemies, but also of false friends who pretend to support them, but are already working hard to dilute the protest. In the same way we get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice-cream without fat, they will try to make the protests into a harmless moralistic gesture. In boxing, to "clinch" means to hold the opponent's body with one or both arms in order to prevent or hinder punches. Bill Clinton's reaction to the Wall Street protests is a perfect case of political clinching; Clinton thinks that the protests are "on balance … a positive thing", but he is worried about the nebulousness of the cause. Clinton suggested the protesters get behind President Obama's jobs plan, which he claimed would create "a couple million jobs in the next year and a half". What one should resist at this stage is precisely such a quick translation of the energy of the protest into a set of "concrete" pragmatic demands. Yes, the protests did create a vacuum – a vacuum in the field of hegemonic ideology, and time is needed to fill this vacuum in in a proper way, since it is a pregnant vacuum, an opening for the truly New. The reason protesters went out is that they had enough of the world where to recycle your Coke cans, to give a couple of dollars for charity, or to buy Starbucks cappuccino where 1% goes for the third world troubles is enough to make them feel good.

Perm supplements the system it does not disturb

The "worldless" character of capitalism is linked to this hegemonic role of scientific discourse in modernity, a feature clearly identified already by Hegel who wrote that, for us moderns, art and religion no longer obey absolute respect: we can admire them, but we no longer kneel down in front of them, our heart is not really with them —today, only science (conceptual knowledge) deserves this respect. "Postmodernity" as the "end of grand narratives" is one of the names for this predicament in which the multitude of local fictions thrives against the background of scientific discourse as the only remaining universality deprived of sense. Which is why the politics advocated by many a leftist today, that of countering the devastating world-dissolving effect of capitalist moder­ nization by inventing new fictions, imagining "new worlds" (like the Porto Alegre slogan "Another world is possible!"), is inadequate or, at least, profoundly ambiguous: it all depends on how these fictions relate to the underlying Real of capitalism — do they just supplement it with the imaginary multitude, as the postmodern "local narratives" do, or do they disturb its functioning? In other words, the task is to produce a symbolic fiction (a truth) that intervenes into the Real, that causes a change within it.29

State focused political change fails

Link – Experts

Reliance on expertise dilutes the revolutions potential

Let me tell you something horrible. We pretend to be leaderless. But then you look closely, and you see often a very tough hierarchic structure, and that we don't even want to admit it's hierarchy. So what I think we need a new figure of a leader who in a way admits that he is no leader. Marx said something wonderful, although wrong, about Abraham Lincoln. Marx said that in the United States, even a totally average person like Lincoln can become the leader. Marx was wrong here about Lincoln. So even an average person like Lincoln was able to do great historical acts. Maybe this is the order that we want. The leader is not anonymous but you don't need a genius to be your leader. Everyone can be [one]. And believe it or not, it can be done. Experts, they should know, but they shouldn't be given power. Power should be given precisely to the average people. If we abandon this principle, we abandon democracy.

Current forms of democracy are subjugated by expertise

The rheotoric of democracy cements social hierarchy causing massive oppression

AT: Perm

Starting points are key – their perspective deactivates radical politics

Sociologists should not construct themselves as detached intellectuals, but should make their political commitments clear. Their concerns should be with revealing the suffering that results from social processes that serve the interests of those in power. There is a distinct danger that some fledgling projects to explore the relationship between society and the universe, such as the field of ‘astrosociology’ being developed by Jim Pass (2004), do little but reproduce hegemonic common sense about the benefits of space exploration and development (Ormrod 2005). Although astrosociology may draw public attention to under-researched issues, it will offer nothing if it does not do so critically.

Focusing on half solutions destroys all revolutionary potential

Did you see a good Hollywood Marxist movie? John Carpenter's They Live, you know, where a guy finds some strange sunglasses, puts them on, and he sees the true message. For example, you have an advertisement for a Hawaii vacation, you put on the glasses, and what you see is, "Be stupid, enjoy, don't think". So whenever you read the official media, imagine yourself putting these glasses on. I remember seeing, recently, an ad to help starving children in Africa. It said, "For the price of a couple of cappuccinos, you can save this child's life." Let's put the glasses on. What you see is, "For the price of a couple of cappuccinos, we allow you not only no longer to feel guilty but even to feel as if you are really doing something about poverty without really doing anything". We have to get rid of pseudo activities. For example, organic food. It's good to buy, I buy it. But remember what the danger. Is it not true that many of us buy it because it makes you feel good? "Look, I'm doing something to help the mother earth. I'm part of a wonderful project of humanity". You know, it's an easy way out. Charity, for me is not the answer. You know, once I called Soros, George Soros, who I appreciate. As a person he's not bad. I call him chocolate laxative. You know you can buy a laxative which has the form of a chocolate. But chocolate is usually associated with constipation. So, first they take billions from you, then they give you half back, and they are the greatest humanitarians. Of course, we should take this kind of money. But what we should fight for is a society where this kind of charity will not be needed. So I know I didn't answer your question, maybe next time better luck.

This is a form of political clinching – destroys all progressive politics

Cap Bad – General

Cap causes every problem

Cap causes environmental destruction, economic collapse, diseases and nuke war

Yet as bad as that record is, its most destructive effects on our world could still be ahead. Why do I say that? Because capitalism, with its imperatives of capital accumulation, profit maximization and competition, is the cause of new global problems that threaten the prospects and lives of billions of people worldwide, and, more importantly, it is also a formidable barrier to humankind’s ability to solve these problems. Foremost among these, in addition to ecological degradation, economic crises, population pressures, and endemic diseases, is the threat of nuclear mass annihilation.

Cap causes regional wars

Cap Bad – War

Capitalism causes war – imperialism, diversionary wars, need for resources

Capitalism produces infinite wars

For the most part, though, these hybrid theories are misleading. The new conflicts of the twenty-first century – the "infinite wars," the "clashes of civilization," the "new crusades" – are fundamentally different from the "mass wars" and statist military conflicts that characterized capitalism from the nineteenth century until the end of the Cold War. The main difference lies not so much in the military nature of the conflicts, as in the broader role that war plays in capitalism.

Capitalist elites produce wars to sustain inflation

Faced with these predicaments, capitalists generally and dominant capitalists particularly began yearning for a little dose of "healthy" inflation both to avert debt deflation and to kick-start differential accumulation. As it turned out, the solution for their predicament – intended or otherwise – was a new ‘energy conflict’ in the Middle East (that is, a conflict related directly or indirectly to oil). Over the past thirty-five years, these conflicts have been the prime mover of oil prices, and oil prices have provided the spark for broad-based inflation. It was a turnkey mechanism for triggering inflation, and it was read to use. In this sense, military conflict has come to assume a new, roundabout role in the accumulation process. Until the 1950s and 1960s, the main impact of military conflict worked through large military budgets which directly boosted aggregate demand and overall profits, as well as the income of the leading military contractors. But with the re-globalization of ownership and the on-setting of détente, military budgets started to contract. Initially, they fell relatively, as a share of GDP, but since the late 1980s, they also began to drop absolutely, in constant dollar terms. Although these expenditures still nourish the military contractors, their direct effect on capital accumulation has diminished significantly. However, military conflict as such hasn’t lost its appeal; it still has a big impact on accumulation. The novelty is that the impact now works mostly indirectly, through inflation, relative prices and redistribution.

Cap Bad – Resource Wars

Cap causes resource wars and environmental collapse

There are key questions concerning both the use that an economic and social system makes of the natural resources of the planet and the philosophical conception of the relationships between human beings (and within society) on the one hand, and between humans and nature on the other. The response to these questions that a society has given in the past describes the rationality that governs its economic and social management. Historically, capitalism has mainly ignored these considerations. It established a strictly economic rationality with a short-term vision ('the depreciation of the future') and was based on the principle that natural resources are generally put at the free disposal of society and, what is more, in unlimited quantities. The only exception is when certain resources are privately appropriated, as the land or mining resources, but subordinating their utilisation to the exclusive requirements of the profitability for capital, which exploits the potential. The rationality of this system is therefore narrow and becomes socially irrational as soon as these resources become scarce, even exhausted, or when their usage, in the forms imposed by the economic profitability of capitalism.

Cap causes resource war

Cap causes war

Cap Bad – Environment

Capitalism destroys the environment

Cap causes over exploitation of resources

It is useful to remind ourselves that, although Marx situated capitalism’s crisis tendencies initially in the business cycle (specifically, in its downward phase), he recognized at the same time that those tendencies could manifest themselves under other forms—the first of these being the drive to global expansion.2 Such manifestations are not inherently cyclical; they are permanent trends. They can be sporadically offset, but for as long as capitalism prevails, they cannot be reversed. They encompass: (1) increased concentration of economic power; (2) increased polarization between rich and poor, both within and across national boundaries; (3) a permanent readiness for military engagement in support of these drives; and (4) of special concern to us here, the uninterrupted debasement or depletion of vital natural resources.

Capitalism makes environmental destruction and extinction inevitable

Behind this tragedy-cum-farce is a distorted accounting deeply rooted in the workings of the system that sees wealth entirely in terms of value generated through exchange. In such a system, only commodities for sale on the market really count. External nature — water, air, living species — outside this system of exchange is viewed as a “free gift.” Once such blinders have been put on, it is possible to speak, as the leading U.S. climate economist William Nordhaus has, of the relatively unhindered growth of the economy a century or so from now, under conditions of business as usual — despite the fact that leading climate scientists see following the identical path over the same time span as absolutely catastrophic both for human civilization and life on the planet as a whole.1

Cap Bad – Environment

Capitalism kills the environment

In the Oh shit era, the debate, McKibben says, is over. There is no longer any doubt that global warming represents a crisis of earth-shaking proportions. Yet, it is absolutely essential to understand that this is only one part of what we call the environmental crisis. The global ecological threat as a whole is made up of a large number of interrelated crises and problems that are confronting us simultaneously. In my 1994 book, The Vulnerable Planet, I started out with a brief litany of some of these, to which others might now be added:Overpopulation, destruction of the ozone layer, global warming, extinction of species, loss of genetic diversity, acid rain, nuclear contamination, tropical deforestation, the elimination of climax forests, wetland destruction, soil erosion, desertification, floods, famine, the despoliation of lakes, streams, and rivers, the drawing down and contamination of ground water, the pollution of coastal waters and estuaries, the destruction of coral reefs, oil spills, overfishing, expanding landfills, toxic wastes, the poisonous effects of insecticides and herbicides, exposure to hazards on the job, urban congestion, and the depletion of nonrenewable resources.11The poinst is that not just global warming but many of these other problems as well can each be seen as constituting a global ecological crisis. Today every major ecosystem on the earth is in decline. Issues of environmental justice are becoming more prominent and pressing everywhere we turn. Underlying this is the fact that the class/imperial war that defines capitalism as a world system, and that governs its system of accumulation, is a juggernaut that knows no limits. In this deadly conflict the natural world is seen as a mere instrument of world social domination. Hence, capital by its very logic imposes what is in effect a scorched earth strategy. The planetary ecological crisis is increasingly all-encompassing, a product of the destructive uncontrollability of a rapidly globalizing capitalist economy, which knows no law other than its own drive to exponential expansion.

Cap makes ecological destruction inevitable

In fact, a new historical period had emerged in the ten years since the Rio summit. Economically, the world had witnessed what Paul Sweezy in 1994 called “the triumph of financial capitalism” with the transformation of monopoly capital into what might be called global monopoly-finance capital.5 By the end of the twentieth century capitalism had evolved into a system that was if anything more geared to rapacious accumulation than ever before, relatively independent from its local and national roots. Global financial expansion was occurring on top of a world economy that was stagnating at the level of production, creating a more unstable and more viciously inegalitarian order, dominated by neoliberal economics and financial bubbles. Declining U.S. hegemony in the world system, coupled with the demise of the Soviet Union, induced repeated and increasingly naked U.S. attempts to restore its economic and political power by military means. Meanwhile, global warming and other crucial environmental problems had crossed critical thresholds. The question was no longer whether ecological and social catastrophes awaited but how great these would be. For those (including myself) in Johannesburg in 2002, watching the U.S. president prepare for war in the petroleum-rich Persian Gulf while the planet was heating up from the burning of fossil fuels, the whole world seemed on fire.

Cap Bad – Warming

Capitalism causes global warming

Iranian president accuses West of disrupting balance of nature by intensifying excessive consumption, creating false demands to gain profit Has the green revolution reached Tehran? Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused western capitalism of destroying the environment on Thursday. In a meeting with environment officials from the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO), Ahmadinejad said: “The main factor behind the destruction of the environment is the greed and the ceaseless avarice and insatiable hunger of the world's capitalists." Dismissing claims that human progress and promotion of lifestyle is to blame for the world's environmental crises, he added: “The world's capitalists, through intensifying excessive consumption and even the creation of false demands with the aim of maximum profits, disrupt the balance of nature." Iran, Turkey and Pakistan founded the ECO in 1985 and the organization now includes seven other states. The Iranian president expressed hope that the ECO could pressure the world's major sources of pollutions to change their policies. "The capitalist establishment and the world's major capitalists, the US in particular, only seek maximum profits and to further reduce the cost of their products, they built production lines that are not compatible with the environment," he said. Ahamdinejad further added that two or three countries account for half of the world's pollution.

Cap destroys the environment – causes extinction

It [capitalism] also leads to the rapid exhaustion of non-renewable resources, the accelerated destruction of biodiversity and the exacerbation of the threats that strongly affect the ecological balances that are essential for the reproduction of life on earth. Incontestable quantified data exist which demonstrate that capitalist civilization cannot continue its destructive expansion for long. Preserving the way of life of the United States alone would lead to pillaging all of the resources of the planet for its sole benefit. The energy crisis has already produced military aggression in the Middle East. “The American way of life is not negotiable,” the president of this country reminds us. In other words, the extermination of the “redskins,” who hinder U.S. expansion, will be continued.

Runaway warming will happen—not acting is gambling with our whole existence

Cap Bad – Genocide

Cap causes genocides

We have therefore reached the point when, to open up a new field for the expansion of capital (the modernisation of agricultural production), it is necessary to destroy - in human terms entire societies. Fifty million new efficient producers (200 million human beings with their families) on the one hand, three billion excluded people on the other. The creative aspect of the operation would be only a drop of water in the ocean of destruction it requires. I thus conclude that capitalism has entered into its phase of declining senility: the logic of the system is no longer able to ensure the simple survival of humanity. Capitalism is becoming barbaric and leads directly to genocide. It is more than ever necessary to replace it with another development logic which is more rational.

Genocide is the ultimate impact – it makes both life and death meaningless

Yet such atrocities, it may be argued, are already war crimes, if conducted during wartime, and they can otherwise or also be prosecuted as crimes against humanity. Why, then, add the specific crime of genocide? What, if anything, is not already captured by laws that prohibit such things as the rape, enslavement, torture, forced deportation, and the degradation of individuals? Is any ethically distinct harm done to members of the targeted group that would not have been done had they been targeted simply as individuals rather than because of their group membership? This is the question that I find central in arguing that genocide is not simply reducible to mass death, to any of the other war crimes, or to the crimes against humanity just enumerated. I believe the answer is affirmative: the harm is ethically distinct, although on the question of whether it is worse, I wish only to question the assumption that it is not. Specific to genocide is the harm inflicted on its victims' social vitality. It is not just that one's group membership is the occasion for harms that are definable independently of one's identity as a member of the group. When a group with its own cultural identity is destroyed, its survivors lose their cultural heritage and may even lose their intergenerational connections. To use Orlando Patterson's terminology, in that event, they may become "socially dead" and their descendants "natally alienated," no longer able to pass along and build upon the traditions, cultural developments (including languages), and projects of earlier generations (1982, 5-9). The harm of social death is not necessarily less extreme than that of physical death. Social death can even aggravate physical death by making it indecent, removing all respectful and caring ritual, social connections, and social contexts that are capable of making dying bearable and even of making one's death meaningful. In my view, the special evil of genocide lies in its infliction of not just physical death (when it does that) but social death, producing a consequent meaninglessness of one's life and even of its termination. This view, however, is controversial.

AT: Cap Good

There is no pure capitalism – the current system functions through state intervention

One of the good results of this crisis is that neo-liberalism, for reasonable people, is dead. We are becoming aware not only that it doesn’t work but that, let’s be clear, there never even was neoliberalism. Like, what neoliberalism? Already with Reagan, Bush, the state is growing stronger and stronger, intervening all the time. I really think it’s a total misperception that we live in some kind of a wild capitalist neoliberal universe. No. I think this is the first thing maybe that we should do. To note how we are already entering a new type of organized capitalism which is no longer liberal capitalism, and which more and more relies on strong state interventions.

Collapse Inevitable

Collapse is inevitable – finite planet

We seem to have reached an impasse. Capitalism as we know it appears to be coming apart. But as financial institutions stagger and crumble, there is no obvious alternative. Organized resistance appears scattered and incoherent; the global justice movement a shadow of its former self. There is good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism will no longer exist: for the simple reason that it’s impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet. Faced with the prospect, the knee-jerk reaction—even of “progressives”—is, often, fear, to cling to capitalism because they simply can’t imagine an alternative that wouldn’t be even worse. The first question we should be asking is: How did this happen? Is it normal for human beings to be unable to imagine what a better world would even be like? Hopelessness isn’t natural. It needs to be produced. If we really want to understand this situation, we have to begin by understanding that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a kind of giant machine that is designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures. At root is a veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, to flourish, to propose alternatives; that those who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under any circumstances, be perceived to win.

Collapse is inevitable – get behind the revolution

Collapse is coming

Collapse Inevitable

Price dynamics makes collapse inevitable

The problem is that the basic costs of all production have risen remarkably. There are the personnel expenses of all kinds -- for unskilled workers, for cadres, for top-level management. There are the costs incurred as producers pass on the costs of their production to the rest of us -- for detoxification, for renewal of resources, for infrastructure. And the democratization of the world has led to demands for more and more education, more and more health provisions, and more and more guarantees of lifetime income. To meet these demands, there has been a significant increase in taxation of all kinds. Together, these costs have risen beyond the point that permits serious capital accumulation. Why not then simply raise prices? Because there are limits beyond which one cannot push their level. It is called the elasticity of demand. The result is a growing profit squeeze, which is reaching a point where the game is not worth the candle. What we are witnessing as a result is chaotic fluctuations of all kinds -- economic, political, sociocultural. These fluctuations cannot easily be controlled by public policy. The result is ever greater uncertainty about all kinds of short-term decision-making, as well as frantic realignments of every variety. Doubt feeds on itself as we search for ways out of the menacing uncertainty posed by terrorism, climate change, pandemics, and nuclear proliferation. The only sure thing is that the present system cannot continue.

Not a question of if but what will replace capitalism

Prefer our evidence – their authors bury their heads in the sands

Alt Solvency

Refusal to outsource engagement creates revolutionary change

Radical demands alone cracks the system

The left is unified around the alts mechanism

Alt Solvency

Creating the foundation for the revolution is key

Just two things. On the one hand, at this point more important than asking is to think, to organize, to lay down the foundations for some kind of a network so that this will not just be a kind of magic explosion that disappears. And point two, the way to start to think about doing something is to select some very specific issues — the model should be the health-care bill — which in a way are very realistic.

New alternatives are opening up

In his distinct and colourful manner, he analyses the Arab Spring, the eurozone crisis, the "Occupy Wall Street" movement and the rise of China. Concerned about the future of the existing western democratic capitalism Zizek believes that the current "system has lost its self-evidence, its automatic legitimacy, and now the field is open." "I think today the world is asking for a real alternative. Would you like to live in a world where the only alternative is either anglo-saxon neoliberalism or Chinese-Singaporean capitalism with Asian values? I claim if we do nothing we will gradually approach a kind of a new type of authoritarian society. Here I see the world historical importance of what is happening today in China. Until now there was one good argument for capitalism: sooner or later it brought a demand for democracy...

Rejection opens up space – incorporating the state destroys change

in the question of fissures. We often feel helpless because capitalism weighs so heavily on us. But when we say No we start off with an appreciation of our own strength. When we rebel we are in fact tearing a little hole in capitalism. It is very contradictory. By rebelling we are already saying no to the command of capital. We are creating temporary spaces. Within that crack, that fissure, it is important that we fight for other social relations that don't point towards the state, but that they point towards the sort of society we want to create.

AT: Cede the Political

Maintaining a lack of goals is key to the revolution

What one should always bear in mind is that any debate here and now necessarily remains a debate on enemy's turf; time is needed to deploy the new content. All we say now can be taken from us – everything except our silence. This silence, this rejection of dialogue, of all forms of clinching, is our "terror", ominous and threatening as it should be.

The current political system is suicidal – stepping outside it is key

Current political agonism reproduces the affs harms

Americans have long been divided by the two-party system that pits us against each other over emotional issues, like gay rights, abortion. This is a divide-and-conquer strategy. If we don't let go of our differences, we'll keep butting our heads together while corporatism and the military industrial complex gut our democracy. Americans need to come together. I agree with what the lady said but I prefer to put it in a more combative way. The divisions that the lady mentioned, I agree with her, are false divisions. These false divisions are here to cover up the true divisions and where the true enemies are. We need even more […?]. So let's all come together, but to fight the real enemy. When I visit another country, I am not interested in their culture—this is for UNESCO and official representatives. I'm interested in their struggles. Solidarity is not "Oh my God, we are all parts of the same great humanity". Solidarity means we are part of the same struggle. [Break for mic check: two waves of crowd echo are being used for amplication at the moment]. You know, if I were to be CIA, I would have corrupted someone like you, to change it and censor it in a slightly different way [with each echo].