West coast debate
Ideology Link – Transportation
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- Transportation infrastructure is a tool of capitalist exploitation
- Emphasis on cars feeds capitalism – they’re a tool of the rich
- Ideology Link – Law
- Relying on the rule of law makes capitalism stronger than ever.
- Failure to focus on the economy props up capitalism
Ideology Link – TransportationHistory proves the extension of government into transportation infrastructure is used to further militaristic capitalismJ.F. Garcia III, PhD, 2012, “The Capitalist Economies,” http://personal.ashland.edu/~jgarcia/cap.htm We have never seen a pure version of the system anywhere in history, nor are we likely to. Probably the closest to pure market capitalism ever seen were the U.S. and British economies in the middle to late 19th century. They represented the culmination of a historical line of development that, originating in the murky mists of time, formed a coherent system in the 1200's in northern Italy and Flanders with the invention of modern accounting and mass urbanization, and transformed itself into a dominating structure with the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain in the late 18th century. But even at its apogee in the 19th century, governments intervened in many ways, from trade protectionism to subsidizing. The building of transportation infrastructure to maintaining military forces. Those economies exhibited both the virtues and difficulties of unfettered market capitalism. They experienced enormous technological advances and growth as they underwent the Industrial Revolution. Even those critics of market capitalism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, recognized the enormous ability of the system to "revolutionize the means of production" in ways unprecedented in world history. Transportation infrastructure is a tool of capitalist exploitationDeath By Car, 4-5-2012, “The Dave Beck Project,” http://www.deathbycar.info/tag/eisenhower/ Mainstream dogma paints cars-first transportation in the United States as a product of pristine popular democracy. It is a huge lie, an attempt to divert attention from actual history. One very interesting aspect of the actual history is the connection between sponsored right-wing labor unions and the imposition of cars-first infrastructure. Take the case of Dave Beck, the President of the Teamsters union who preceded the infamous Jimmy Hoffa. When Eisenhower asked his old buddy Lucius Clay to head a Presidential Commission to organize automotive-industrial capitalists to ram through the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, Clay appointed five cronies to what quickly became known as the Clay Committee. Emphasis on cars feeds capitalism – they’re a tool of the richDeath By Car, 5-29-2012, “More on Class and Cars,” http://www.deathbycar.info One of the many Big Lies that sustain corporate capitalism in the United States is the long-running falsehood that cars are essentially egalitarian. Cars-first transportation “unites us across class, racial, ethnic, and religious lines as few other aspects of our society can,” is how Rutgers University transportation engineer James A. Dunn formulates this standard claim. As DbC has noted before, the facts are immensely against this familiar incantation, not only (and most importantly) on the business-income side of the matter, but also in the realm of actual automobile usage. Today, we pause to note one important aspect of the stratification of reality on the usage side — the telling divergence between interest rates on loans for buying new and used cars. Automotive News reports on Experian’s latest findings about trends in car loans between the first quarters of 2011 and 2012. In that time: Interest rates fell, on average, by 0.27 percentage points to 4.56 percent for new cars and by 0.06 points to 9.02 percent for used cars. So, used car loan rates are about double, and decline less easily than, rates on new car loans. Such numbers, of course, reflect the fact that, for the rich, cars are power toys purchased with cash; for the working comfortable, they are luxuries purchased with easy credit; and for the real social middle, they are hand-me-downs bought from extreme usurers. The poor, as always, scrounge for scraps. Ideology Link – LawReliance on the law guarantees the rapid spread of capitalism.Internationalist Perspective, Spring 2000, “Capitalism and Genocide”, #36, Accessed 4/29/09, http://www.geocities.com/wageslavex/capandgen.html The real domination of capital is characterized by the penetration of the law of value into every segment of social existence. As Georg Lukács put it in his History and Class Consciousness, this means that the commodity ceases to be "one form among many regulating the metabolism of human society," to become its "universal structuring principle." From its original locus at the point of production, in the capitalist factory, which is the hallmark of the formal domination of capital, the law of value has systematically spread its tentacles to incorporate not just the production of commodities, but their circulation and consumption. Moreover, the law of value also penetrates and then comes to preside over the spheres of the political and ideological, including science and technology themselves. This latter occurs not just through the transformation of the fruits of technology and science into commodities, not just through the transformation of technological and scientific research itself (and the institutions in which it takes place) into commodities, but also, and especially, through what Lukács designates as the infiltration of thought itself by the purely technical, the very quantification of rationality, the instrumentalization of reason; and, I would argue, the reduction of all beings (including human beings) to mere objects of manipulation and control. As Lukács could clearly see even in the age of Taylorism, "this rational mechanisation extends right into the worker's `soul'." In short, it affects not only his outward behavior, but her very internal, psychological, makeup. Relying on the rule of law makes capitalism stronger than ever.Slavoj Zizek, Senior Researcher University of Ljubljana, October 1997, New Left Review, Accessed 4/29/09, http://newleftreview.org/?getpdf=NLR22102 Nonetheless, the post-Nation-State logic of capital remains the Real which lurks in the background, while all three main leftist reactions to the process of globalization—liberal multiculturalism; the attempt to embrace populism by way of discerning, beneath its fundamentalist appearance, the resistance against ‘instrumental reason’; the attempt to keep open the space of the political—seem inappropriate. Although the last approach is based on the correct insight about the complicity between multiculturalism and fundamentalism, it avoids the crucial question: how are we to reinvent political space in today’s conditions of globalization? The politicization of the series of particular struggles which leaves intact the global process of capital is clearly not sufficient. What this means is that one should reject the opposition which, within the frame of late capitalist liberal democracy, imposes itself as the main axis of ideological struggle: the tension between ‘open’ post-ideological universalist liberal tolerance and the particularist ‘new fundamentalisms’. Against the liberal centre which presents itself as neutral and post-ideological, relying on the rule of the Law, one should reassert the old leftist motif of the necessity to suspend the neutral space of Law. Failure to focus on the economy props up capitalismSlavoj Zizek, famous philosopher, 1999, The Ticklish Subject, p. 356 Of course, one should fully acknowledge the tremendous liberating impact of the postmodern politicization of domains which were hitherto considered apolitical (feminism, gay and politics, ecology, ethnic and other so-called minority issues): the fact that these issues not only became perceived as inherently political but also gave birth to new forms of political subjectivization thoroughly reshaped our entire political and cultural landscape. So the point is not to play down this tremendous advance in favour of the return to some new version of so-called economic essentialism; the point is, rather, that the depoliticization of the economy generates the populist Right with its Moral Majority ideology, which today is the main obstacle to the realization of the very (feminist, ecological. . .) demands on which postmodern forms of political subjectiv¬ization focus. In short, I am pleading for a 'return to the primacy of the economy' not to the detriment of the issues raised by postmodern forms of politicization, but precisely in order to create the conditions for the more effective realization of feminist, ecological, and so on, demands. Directory: file -> fetch fetch -> 11 th Lit Semester 1 Final Study Guide!!! fetch -> Industrial Revolution Inventors fetch -> Analysis for Galveston Hurricane of 1900 fetch -> The Illuminators (Team 2) 1900 Galveston Hurricane Cycle a team Assignment fetch -> Team csi-utb ruth Reyes Jose Ferrer fetch -> Galveston Hurricane of 1900 Cycle a-teacher as a Problem Solver fetch -> Is Climate Change Starting a New Dust Bowl? Cycle A fetch -> What makes a storm a hurricane fetch -> The 1950s were the "Happy Days" because it was a time of economic prosperity, technology development, new entertainment, new fashion and family growth. The 1950s was a great time fetch -> Sputnik and The Dawn of the Space Age Download 1.5 Mb. 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