West coast debate
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- Capitalism can only result in unending war
- Capitalism makes genocidal violence inevitable.
- Impact – Genocide
- Capitalism creates a system that rewards genocidal violence.
- Capitalism creates a world unending violence
Impact – WarCapitalism leads to war and extinctionIstvan Mezaros, Professor at the University of Sussex, April 2000, Socialism or Barbarism, p. 37-38 The military dimension of all this must be taken very seriously. It is no exaggeration to say-in view of the formerly quite unimaginable destructive power of armaments accumulated in the second half of the twentieth century-that we have entered the most dangerous phase of imperialism in all history. For what is at stake today is not the control of a particular part of the planet-no matter how large-putting at a disadvantage but still tolerating the independent actions of some rivals, but the control of its totality by one hegemonic economic and military superpower, with all means-even the most extreme authoritarian and, if needed, violent military ones -at its disposal. This is what the ultimate rationality of globally developed capital requires, in its vain attempt to bring under control its irreconcilable antagonisms. The trouble is, though, that such rationality-which can be written without inverted commas, since it genuinely corresponds to the logic of capital at the present historical stage of global development-is at the same time the most extreme form of irrationality in history, including the Nazi conception of world domination, as far as the conditions required for the survival of humanity are concerned. When Jonas Salk refused to patent his discovery, the polio vaccine, insisting that it would be like wanting "to patent the sun," he could not imagine that the time would come when capital would attempt to do just that, trying to patent not only the sun but also the air, even if that had to be coupled with dismissing any concern about the mortal dangers which such aspirations and actions carried with them for human survival. For the ultimate logic of capital in its processes of decision making can only be of a categorically authoritarian "top-down" variety, from the microcosms of small economic enterprises to the highest levels of political and military decisionmaking. But how can one enforce the patents taken out on the sun and the air? There are two prohibitive obstacles in this regard, even if capital-in its drive to demolish its own untranscendable limits- must refuse to acknowledge them. The first is that the plurality of capitals cannot be eliminated, no matter how inexorable and brutal the monopolistic trend of development manifest in the system. And the second, that the corresponding plurality of social labor cannot be eliminated, so as to turn the total labor force of humankind, with all its national and sectional varieties and divisions, into the mindless "obedient servant" of the hegemonically dominant section of capital. For labor in its insurmountable plurality can never abdicate its right of access to the air and the sun; and even less can it survive for capital's continued benefit-an absolute must for this mode of controlling social metabolic reproduction-without the sun and the air. Capitalism can only result in unending warSamir Amin, director of the Third World Forum in Senegal, 2004, The Liberal Virus, pg. 23-4 In fact, the global expansion of capitalism, because it is polar¬izing, always implies the political intervention of the dominant powers, that is, the states of the system’s center, in the societies of the dominated periphery. This expansion cannot occur by the’ force of economic laws alone; it is necessary to complement that with political support (and military, if necessary) from states in the service of dominant capital. In this sense, the expansion is always entirely imperialist even in the meaning that Negri gives to the term (“the projection of national power beyond its fron¬tiers,” on condition of specifying that this power belongs to cap¬ital). In this sense, the contemporary intervention of the United States is no less imperialist than were the colonial conquests of the nineteenth century Washington’s objective in Iraq, for exam¬ple, (and tomorrow elsewhere) is to put in place a dictatorship in the service of American capital (and not a “democracy”), enabling the pillage of the country’s natural resources, and noth¬ing more. The globalized “liberal” economic order requires per¬manent war—military interventions endlessly succeeding one another—as the only means to submit the peoples of the periph¬ery to its demands. Capitalism makes genocidal violence inevitable.Internationalist Perspective, Spring 2000, “Capitalism and Genocide”, #36, Accessed 4/29/09, http://www.geocities.com/wageslavex/capandgen.html The immanent tendencies of the capitalist mode of production which propel it towards a catastrophic economic crisis, also drive it towards mass murder and genocide. In that sense, the death-world, and the prospect of an Endzeit cannot be separated from the continued existence of humanity's subordination to the law of value. Reification, the overmanned world, bio-politics, state racism, the constitution of a pure community directed against alterity, each of them features of the economic and ideological topography of the real domination of capital, create the possibility and the need for genocide. We should have no doubt that the survival of capitalism into this new millenium will entail more and more frequent recourse to mass murder. Impact – GenocideCapitalism is responsible for genocide and violence.Internationalist Perspective, Spring 2000, “Capitalism and Genocide”, #36, Accessed 4/29/09, http://www.geocities.com/wageslavex/capandgen.html Marxism is in need of a theory of mass death and genocide as immanent tendencies of capital, a way of comprehending the link (still obsure) between the death-world symbolized by the smokestacks of Auschwitz or the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima and the unfolding of the logic of a mode of production based on the capitalist law of value. I want to argue that we can best grasp the link between capitalism and genocide by focusing on two dialectically inter-related strands in the social fabric of late capitalism: first, are a series of phenomena linked to the actual unfolding of the law of value, and more specifically to the completion of the transition from the formal to the real domination of capital; second, are a series of phenomena linked to the political and ideological (this latter understood in a non-reductionist sense, as having a material existence) moments of the rule of capital, specifically to the forms of capitalist hegemony. It is through an analysis of the coalescence of vital elements of these two strands in the development of capital, that I hope to expose the bases for the death-world and genocide as integral features of capitalism in the present epoch. Capitalism creates a system that rewards genocidal violence.Joel Kovel, Professor at Bard, 2002, The Enemy of Nature, P. 141 Capital produces egoic relations, which reproduce capital. The isolated selves of the capitalist order can choose to become personifications of capital, or may have the role thrust upon them. In either case, they embark upon a pattern of non-recognition mandated by the fact that the almighty dollar interposes itself between all elements of experience: all things in the world, all other persons, and between the self and its world: nothing really exists except in and through monetization. This set-up provides an ideal culture medium for the bacillus of competition and ruthless self-maximization. Because money is all that ‘counts’, a peculiar heartlessness characterizes capitalists, a tough-minded and cold abstraction that will sacrifice species, whole continents (viz. Africa) or inconvenient sub-sets of the population (viz. black urban males) who add too little to the great march of surplus value or may be seen as standing in its way The presence of value screens out genuine fellow-feeling or compassion, replacing it with the calculus of profit-expansion. Never has a holocaust been carried out so impersonally. When the Nazis killed their victims, the crimes were accom¬panied by a racist drumbeat; for global capital, the losses are regrettable necessities. Capitalism creates a world unending violenceInternationalist Perspective, Spring 2000, “Capitalism and Genocide”, #36, Accessed 4/29/09, http://www.geocities.com/wageslavex/capandgen.html The other side of bio-politics, of this power over life, for Foucault, is what he terms "thanatopolitics," entailing an awesome power to inflict mass death, both on the population of one's enemy, and on one's own population: "the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual's continued existence. .... If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers ... it is because power is situated at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population." Nuclear, chemical, and biological, weapons make it possible to wield this power to condemn whole populations to death. Bio-politics, for Foucault, also necessarily entails racism, by which he means making a cut in the biological continuum of human life, designating the very existence of a determinate group as a danger to the population, to its health and well-being, and even to its very life. Such a group, I would argue, then, becomes a biological (in the case of Nazism) or class enemy (in the case of Stalinism, though the latter also claimed that biological and hereditary characteristics were linked to one's class origins). And the danger represented by such an enemy race can necessitate its elimination through physical removal (ethnic cleansing) or extermination (genocide). 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