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1ncPlan whitewashes neoliberal governmentality Bucci 15 (Michael T Bucci is a retired public relations executive from New Jersey now residing in Maine. He has authored nine books on practical spirituality including “White Book: Cerithous”, “Rethinking Edward Snowden” http://cryptome.org/2015/05/rethinking-snowden.htm ) DAH

I think the conundrum of Edward Snowden is beginning to offer glimpses that somewhat validate an early and tentative hypothesis of mine. I supported his actions and even called him another "Thomas Paine" (of sorts), but I also suspected how his political philosophy was shaping an outcome altogether undemocratic and oligarchic.

Having voted for Ron Paul and now supporting Rand Paul, Snowden is promoting capitalistic/libertarian movements. Such movements, often wrapped in the flag of the "Republic" singing anthems to "Liberty", are enterprises - including those created around him (e.g., Greenwald) - that exploit anti-government sentiments while whitewashing, even omitting the dangers of neoliberalism in America as well as in the world. I share the concerns of many about the surveillance state and, in particular, those authors and analysts who correctly include mention of state-corporate partnerships, a collusion being concealed and/or whitewashed by those framing the cyber privacy debate for public consumption. Generally, the overarching role of the Silicon Valley Stasi has been kept to a bare minimum by "liberty"-seeking cyber technophiles, journalists and "owners" of data arguably meant for the public domain. Although journalist Glenn Greenwald's loyalties lie with libertarianism - a conflation of corporate neoliberalism, individualism, and independent wealth - I am not altogether certain of Mr. Edward Snowden's loyalties. He stated he voted for Ron Paul in 2012 and to the best of my knowledge has not adequately addressed the privatization and "lock-down" of his documents by libertarian billionaire Mr. Pierre Omidyar. Snowden had inferred they are for the American people. Did he think the American people are best served by private wardens

and censors or by for-profit enterprises that now control his documents? Did he approve? Nor am I convinced that Mr. Snowden is a lone "rogue" actor purged of cross-loyalties to intel and/or to a sector of the privatization movement now sweeping the country. My questions are speculative and do not intend to prematurely judge Mr. Snowden, his ethics or his efforts. According to The Intercept (May 21, 2015), "NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden on Thursday praised Sen. Rand Paul’s ten-and-a-half hour takeover of the Senate floor on Wednesday in protest of the Patriot Act.... [I]n a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” discussion [Snowden said] that Paul’s action “represents a sea change from a few years ago, when intrusive new surveillance laws were passed without any kind of meaningful opposition or debate.” Well and good for Rand Paul's presidential campaign and for promoting anti-government libertarianism, but it will take the votes a majority of Congress before a "sea change" is achieved - and that is an impossibility today.

My hypothesis is that Mr. Snowden, wittingly or unwittingly, is serving to facilitate the goals of neoliberal libertarianism and the corporate state, which together seek to become the government sans all agencies serving the common good as well the confiscation ("pennies on the dollar") of all property now considered "public". He is a Trojan Horse, if this be true. The generation under-30 barely voted last November, but will too many millennials follow Snowden into the polls in 2015 and put in the White House one of the most anti-social and autocratic Senators in Congress: Rand Paul?

Corporate surveillance is key to the existence of capitalism. Surveillance functions in the same way as the Panopticon to securitize, control, and exploit the state and consumers.Campbell & Carlson 02 – Campbell is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and Carlson is a research associate with the Project for Excellence in Journalism (John Edward, Matt, “Panopticon.com: Online Surveillance and the Commodification of Privacy,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, December, 2002, http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15506878jobem4604_6, accessed 7/15/15)//TN

These two seemingly distinct historical phenomena are predicated on a single technique: surveillance. The Panopticon and Internet ad servers each employ technologies of information gathering and aggregation in a methodic effort to appraise individuals and populations for various purposes of control.

In regard to Bentham’s Panopticon, the objective is to assess an individual’s likelihood for undesirable behavior, and to monitor, categorize, and rank so as to curb such behavior. In a broader perspective, the Panopticon was seen as a way of organizing social institutions to ensure a more orderly society by producing disciplined and “rational” (read predictable) citizens . With Internet ad servers, the goal is to provide marketers with the personal information necessary to determine if an individual constitutes an economically viable consumer. The enhanced consumer profiling offered by these third-party ad servers increases the effectiveness and efficiency of advertisers’ efforts, reducing the uncertainty faced by producers introducing their goods and services into the marketplace.∂ As the Panopticon and Internet ad servers demonstrate, surveillance as a technique and technology of control is a central dimension of the capitalist state, particularly under the social formation identified as “late capitalism” or “information capitalism” (Kling & Allen, 1996). Indeed, few institutions are better exemplars of surveillance than the capitalistic workplace, where Frederick Winslow Taylor’s introduction of “scientific management” into the factory is in many respects comparable to Bentham’s introduction of the panoptic model into penology. Not only has capital- ism utilized new information technologies to expand surveillance in the workplace (eg, monitoring of e-mails and phone calls, genetic screening, and closed-circuit video cameras), but increasingly the same technologies are also used to watch, record, and assess routine activities in the marketplace. As Lyons (2001) notes, “While companies continue to use surveillance technologies as tools to manage workers in the workplace, the last decades of the twentieth century also saw a massive expansion of efforts to use surveillance technologies to manage consumers“ (p. 64).∂ The roles of surveillance in both the workplace and marketplace are essentially parallel-the reduction of uncertainty (;.e., risk management). Under contemporary capitalism, surveillance is a key mechanism of social control, ensuring the “ratio- nality,” and therefore predictability, of consumers in the marketplace. The capitalist state depends on the gathering and processing of information to ensure both the greatest possible extraction of surplus value from production and consumption (in essence, efficiency), and the social and political stability nec- essary to expand its enterprise. This underlies Robins and Webster‘s (1999) contention that the history of capitalist industry “has been a matter of the deepening and extension of information gathering and surveillance to the com- bined end of planning and controlling the production process, and it is into this context that the new information and communication technologies are now inserting themselves” (p. 97).

It is not possible to solve any situation without solving them all - only a criticism which attacks the universality of capitalism can solve inevitable extinction

Zizek, ’89

(Slavoj, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies, The Sublime Object of Ideology, page 3-4)

It is upon the unity of these two features that the Marxist notion of the revolution, of the revolutionary situation, is founded: a situation of metaphorical condensation in which it finally becomes clear to the everyday

consciousness that it is not possible to solve any particular ques tion without solving them all - that

is, without solving the fundamental question which embodies the antagonistic character of the social totality. In a 'normal', pre-revolutionary state of things, everybody is fighting his own particular battles (workers are striking for better wages, feminists are fighting for the rights of women, democrats for political and social freedoms, ecologists against the exploitation of nature, participants in the peace movements against the danger of war, and so on). Marxists are using all their skill and adroimess of argument to convince the participants in these particular

struggles that the only real solution to their problem is to be found in the global revolution: as long as social relations are

dominated by Capital, there will always be sexism in relations between the sexes, there will always be a threat of global war, there will always be a danger that political and social freedoms will be suspended , nature itself will always remain an object of ruthless exploitation . . . . The global revolution will then abolish the basic social antagonism, enabling the formation of a transparent, rationally governed society .

Our alternative is to organize politics around unconditional resistance to capitalism - Individualism warrant

McLaren ‘06 (Peter, University of California, “Slavoj Žižek's Naked Politics: Opting for the Impossible, A Secondary Elaboration”, JAC, http://www.jacweb.org/Archived_volumes/Text_articles/V21_I3_McLaren.htm, jj)

Žižek challenges the relativism of the gender-race-class grid of reflexive positionality when he claims that class antagonism or struggle is not simply one in a series of social antagonisms—race, class, gender, and so on—but rather constitutes the part of this series that sustains the horizon of the series itself . In other words, class struggle is the specific antagonism that assigns rank to and modifies the particularities of the other antagonisms in the series. He notes that "the economy is at one and the same time the genus and one of its own species" (Totalitarianism 193). In what I consider to be his most

important work to date, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (coauthored with Judith Butler and Ernesto Laclau), Žižek militantly refuses to evacuate reference to historical structures of totality and universality and argues that class struggle itself enables the proliferation of new political subjectivities (albeit subjectivities that ironically relegate class struggle to a secondary role). As

Marx argued, class struggle structures "in advance" the very terrain of political antagonisms. Thus, according to Žižek, class struggle is not "the last horizon of meaning, the last signified of all social phenomena, but the formal generative matrix of the

different ideological horizons of understanding" ("Repeating" 16-17). In his terms, class struggle sets the ground for the empty place of universality, enabling it to be filled variously with contents of different sorts (ecology, feminism, anti-racism). He further argues that the split between the classes is even more radical today than during the times of industrial

class divisions. He takes the position that post-Marxists have done an excellent job in uncovering the fantasy of capital (vis-à-vis the endless deferral of pleasure) but have done little to uncover its reality. Those post-Marxists who are advocates of new social movements (such as Laclau and Mouffe) want revolution without revolution ; in contrast, Žižek calls for movements that relate to the larger totality of capitalist social relations and that challenge the very matter and antimatter

of capital's social universe. His strategic focus on capitalist exploitation (while often confusing and inconsistent) rather than on racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual identity is a salutary one: "The problem is not how our precious particular identity

should be kept safe from global capitalism. The problem is how to oppose global capitalism at an even more radical level; the problem is to oppose it universally, not on a particular level . This whole problematic is a false one"

(Olson and Worsham 281). What Žižek sets himself against is the particular experience or political argument. An experience or argument that cannot be universalized is "always and by definition a conservative political gesture: ultimately everyone can evoke his unique experience in order to justify his reprehensible acts" ("Repeating" 4-

5). Here he echoes Wood, who argues that capitalism is "not just another specific oppression alongside many others but an all-embracing compulsion that imposes itself on all our social relations" ("Identity" 29). He also echoes

critical educators such as Paulo Freire, who argues against the position that experiences of the oppressed speak for themselves. All experiences need to be interrogated for their ideological assumptions and effects, regardless of who articulates them or from where they are lived or spoken. They are to be read with, against, and upon the scientific concepts

produced by the revolutionary Marxist tradition. The critical pedagogical act of interro-gating experiences is not to pander to the autonomous subject or to individualistic practices but to see those experiences in relationship to the structure of social antagonisms and class struggle. History has not discharged the educator from the mission of grasping the "truth of the present" by interrogating all the existing structures of exploitation present within the capitalist system where, at the point of production, material relations characterize relations between people and social relations characterize relations between things. The critical educator

asks: How are individuals historically located in systematic structures of economic relations? How can these structures —these lawless laws of capital— be overcome and transformed through revolutionary praxis into acts of freely associated labor where the free development of each is the condi-tion for the free development of all?

Alt

Alt Solvency – Universalism Universal Resistance solves and is our only option --- reforms such as the plan only prop up neoliberalism Giroux 14 (Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. “Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State” http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoia-in-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state ) DAH

Dissent is crucial to any viable notion of democracy and provides a powerful counterforce to the dystopian imagination that has descended like a plague on American society; but dissent is not enough. In

a time of surging authoritarianism, it is crucial for everyone to find the courage to translate critique into the building of popular movements dedicated to making education central to any viable notion of politics.

This is a politics that does the difficult work of assembling critical formative cultures by developing alternative media, educational organizations, cultural apparatuses, infrastructures and new sites through which to address the range of injustices plaguing the United States and the forces that reproduce them. The rise of cultures of surveillance along with the defunding of public and higher education, the attack on the welfare state and the militarization of

everyday life can be addressed in ways that not only allow people to see how such issues are interrelated to casino capitalism and the racial-security state but also what it might mean to make such issues meaningful to make them critical and transformative. As Charlie Derber has written, "How to express possibilities and convey them

authentically and persuasively seems crucially important" if any viable notion of resistance is to take place.80 Nothing will change

unless the left and progressives take seriously the subjective underpinnings of oppression in the

United States . The power of the imagination, dissent, and the willingness to hold power accountable constitute a major threat to authoritarian regimes. Snowden's disclosures made clear that the authoritarian state is deeply fearful of those intellectuals, critics, journalists and others who dare to question authority, expose the crimes of corrupt politicians and question the carcinogenic nature of a corporate state that has hijacked democracy: This is most evident in the insults and patriotic gore heaped on Manning and Snowden. How else to explain, in light of Snowden's initial disclosures about the NSA, the concern on the part of government and intelligence agencies that his "disclosures have renewed a longstanding concern: that young Internet aficionados whose skills the agencies need for counterterrorism and cyber defense sometimes bring an anti-authority spirit that does not fit the security bureaucracy."81 Joel F. Brenner, a former inspector general of the NSA made it very clear that the real challenge Snowden revealed was to make sure that a generation of young people were not taught to think critically or question authority. As Brenner put it, young people who were brought into the national security apparatus were not only selling their brains but also their consciences. In other words, they have to "adjust to the culture" by endorsing a regime

of one that just happened to be engaging in a range of illegalities that threatened the foundations of democracy.82 What is clear is that the corporate-security state provides an honorable place for intellectuals who are willing to live in a culture of conformity. In this case as Arthur Koestler said some years ago, conformity becomes "a form of betrayal which can be carried out with a clear conscience."83 At the same time, it imposes its wrath on those who reject subordinating their consciences to the dictates of authoritarian rule. If the first task of resistance is to make dominant power clear by addressing critically and meaningfully the abuses perpetrated by the corporate surveillance state and how such transgressions affect the daily lives of people in different ways, the second step is to move from understanding and critique to the hard work of building popular movements that integrate rather than get stuck and fixated in single-issue politics. The left has been fragmented for too long, and the time has come to build national and international movements capable of dismantling the political, economic and

cultural architecture put in place by the new authoritarianism and its post-Orwellian surveillance industries. This is not a call to reject identity and special-issue politics as much as it is a call to build broad-based alliances and movements, especially among workers, labor unions, educators, youth groups, artists, intellectuals, students, the unemployed and others relegated, marginalized and harassed by the political and financial elite. At best, such groups should form a vigorous and broad-based third party for the defense of public goods and the establishment of a radical democracy. This is

not a call for a party based on traditional hierarchical structures but a party consisting of a set of alliances among different groups that would

democratically decide its tactics and strategies. Modern history is replete with such struggles, and the arch of that history has to be carried forward before it is too late. In a time of tyranny, thoughtful and organized resistance is not a choice; it is a necessity. In the struggle to dismantle the authoritarian state, reform is only partially acceptable. Surely, as Fred Branfman argues, rolling back the surveillance state can take the form of fighting: to end bulk collection of information; demand Congressional oversight; indict executive-branch officials when they commit perjury; give Congress the capacity to genuinely oversee executive agency; provide strong whistle-blower protection; and restructure the present system of classification.84 These are important reforms worth fighting for, but they do not go far enough. What is needed is a radical restructuring of our understanding of democracy and what it means to bring it into being. The words of Zygmunt Bauman are useful in understanding what is at stake in such a struggle. He writes: "Democracy expresses itself in continuous and relentless critique of institutions; democracy is an anarchic, disruptive element inside the political system; essential, as a force of dissent and change. One

can best recognize a democratic society by its constant complaints that it is not democratic enough."85 What cannot be emphasized enough is that only through collective struggles can change take place against modern-day authoritarianism. If the first order of authoritarianism is unchecked secrecy, the first moment of resistance to such an order is widespread critical awareness of state and corporate power and its threat to democracy, coupled with a desire for radical change rather than reformist corrections. Democracy involves a sharing of political

existence, an embrace of the commons and the demand for a future that cannot arrive quickly enough. In short, politics needs a jump start, because democracy is much too important to be left to the whims, secrecy and power of those who have turned the principles of self-government against themselves.

Alt Solvency

An anti-capitalist analysis restores collective resistance Giroux 14 (Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. “Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State” http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoia-in-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state ) DAH

The corporate-surveillance state collects troves of data, but the groups often targeted by traditional and new forms of digital surveillance are more often than not those who fall within the parameters of either being a threat to authority, reject the consumer culture or are simply considered disposable under the regime of neoliberal capitalism. The political, class and racial nature of suppression has a long history in the United States and cannot be ignored by whitewashing the issue of surveillance as a form of state violence by making an appeal to the necessity of safety and security. Totalitarian paranoia runs deep in American

society, and it now inhabits the highest levels of government.61 There is no excuse for intellectuals or any other member of the American public to address the existence, meaning and purpose of the surveillance-security state without placing it in the historical structure of the times. Or what might be called a historical conjuncture in which the

legacy of totalitarianism is once again reasserting itself in new forms. Historical memory is about more than recovering the past; it is also about

imputing history with a sense of responsibility, treating it with respect rather than with reverence. Historical memory should

always be insurgent, rubbing "taken-for-granted history against the grain so as to revitalize and rearticulate what one sees as desirable and necessary for an open, just and life sustaining" democracy and future.62 Historical memory is a crucial battleground for challenging a corporate-surveillance state that is motivated by the anti-democratic legal, economic and political interests. But if memory is to function as a witness to injustice and the practice of criticism and renewal , it must embrace the

pedagogical task of connecting the historical, personal and social . It is worth repeating that C.W. Mills was right in

arguing that those without power need to connect personal troubles with public issues and that is as much an educational endeavour and responsibility as it is a political and cultural task.63

Links

Link – Public Memory

The plan continues the erasure of public memory --- only the alt can solve Giroux 14 (Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. “Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State” http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoia-in-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state ) DAH

One of the most serious conditions that enable the expansion of the corporate-state surveillance apparatus is the erasure of public memory. The renowned anthropologist David Price rightly argues that historical memory is one

of the primary weapons to be used against the abuse of power and that is why "those who have power create a 'desert of organized forgetting.' "49 For Price, it is crucial to reclaim America's battered public memories as a political and pedagogical task as part of the broader struggle to regain lost privacy and civil liberties."50 Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, America has succumbed to a form of historical amnesia fed

by a culture of fear, militarization and precarity. Relegated to the dustbin of organized forgetting were the long-standing abuses carried out by America's intelligence agencies and the public's long-standing distrust of the FBI, government wiretaps and police actions that threatened privacy rights, civil liberties and those freedoms fundamental to a democracy. In the present historical moment, it is almost

impossible to imagine that wiretapping was once denounced by the FBI or that legislation was passed in the early part of the 20th century that criminalized and outlawed the federal use of wiretaps.51 Nor has much been written about the Church and Pike committees, which in the 1970s exposed a wave of illegal surveillance and disruption campaigns carried out by the FBI and local police forces, most of which were aimed at anti-war demonstrators, the leaders of the civil rights movement and

the Black Panthers. And while laws implementing judicial oversight for federal wiretaps were put in place, they were systematically dismantled under the Reagan, Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations. As Price points out, while there was a steady increase in federal wiretaps throughout the 1980s and 1990s, "in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the

American public hastily abandoned a century of fairly consistent opposition to govern wiretaps."52 As the historical memory of such abuses disappeared, repressive legislation such as the USA PATRIOT Act and growing support for a panoptical surveillance and "homeland" security state increased to the point of dissolving the line

between private and public, on the one hand, and tilting the balance between security and civil liberties largely in favor of a culture of fear and its underside, a managed emphasis on a one-dimensional notion of safety and security. The violence of organized forgetting has another component besides the prevalence of a culture of fear and hyper-nationalism that emerged after 9/11. Since the 1980s, the culture of neoliberalism with its emphasis on the self, privatization and consumerism largely has functioned to disparage any notion of the public good, social responsibility and collective action, if not politics itself. Historical memories

of collective struggles against government and corporate abuses have been deposited down the

memory hole , leaving largely unquestioned the growing inequalities in wealth and income, along with the increased militarization and financialization of American society. Even the history of authoritarian movements appears to have been forgotten as right-wing extremists in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Maine, Florida and other states attempt to suppress long-established voting rights, use big money to sway elections, destroy public and higher education as a public good, and substitute emotion and

hatred for reasoned arguments.53 Manufactured ignorance spreads through the dominant cultural apparatuses like a wildfire promoting the financialization of everything as a virtue and ethics as a liability . The flight from historical memory has been buttressed by a retreat into a politics of self-help and a culture of self-blame in which all problems are viewed as "evidence of personal shortcomings that, if left uncorrected, hold individuals back from attaining

stability and security."54 Within the crippling "affective and ideological spaces of neoliberalism," memory

recedes, social responsibility erodes, and individual outrage and collective resistance are muted .55

Under such circumstances, public issues collapse into private troubles and the language of the politics is

emptied so that it becomes impossible to connect the ravages that bear down on individuals to

broader systemic, structural and social considerations . Under such circumstances, historical memory offers

no buffer to the proliferation of a kind of mad violence and paranoid culture of media-induced fear

that turns every public space into a war zone. Consequently, it is not surprising that the American public barely blinks in the

face of a growing surveillance state. Nor is it surprising that intellectuals such as Sean Wilentz can claim that "the lack of fealty to the imperatives of the surveillance community as demonstrated by Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, and Julian Assange is an assault on the

modern liberal state itself."56 Indeed, what the new apologists for the surveillance state refuse to recognize is a history of abuse and criminal behavior by US intelligence apparatuses that were less concerned with implementing the law, arresting criminals and preventing terrorist acts than they were in suppressing dissent and punishing those groups marginalized by race and class.

Link- Fear Politics/Impact

The aff’s drive to prevent extinction recreates the violent logic of the surveillance state they seek to end. Giroux 14 (Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. “Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State” http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoia-in-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state ) DAH

The surveillance state with its immense data mining capabilities represents a historical rupture from

traditional notions of modernity with its emphasis on enlightenment, reason, and the social contract. The older modernity held up the ideals of justice, equality, freedom, and democracy, however flawed. The investment in public goods was seen as central to a social contract that implied that all citizens should have access to those provisions, resources,

institutions, and benefits that expanded their sense of agency and social responsibility. The new modernity and its expanding surveillance net subordinates human needs, public goods, and justice to the demands of commerce

and the accumulation of capital, at all costs . The contemporary citizen is primarily a consumer and

entrepreneur wedded to the belief that the most desirable features of human behavior are rooted in a "basic tendency towards competitive,

acquisitive and uniquely self-interested behavior which is the central fact of human social life."23 Modernity is now driven by the imperatives of a savage neoliberal political and economic system that embrace what Charles Derber and June

Sekera call a "public goods deficit" in which "budgetary priorities" are relentlessly pushed so as to hollow out the welfare state and drastically reduce social provisions as part of a larger neoliberal counter revolution to lower the taxes of the rich and mega-corporations while selling off public good to private interests.24 Debates about the meaning and purpose of the public and social good have been co-opted by a politics of fear, relegating notions

of the civic good, public sphere, and even the very word "public" to the status of a liability, if not a pathology.25 Fear has lost its

social connotations and no longer references fear of social deprivations such as poverty, homelessness,

lack of health care, and other fundamental conditions of agency. Fear is now personalized, reduced to

an atomized fear that revolves around crime, safety, apocalypse, and survival . In this instance, as the late

Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith once warned, modernity now privileges "a disgraceful combination of 'private opulence and public squalor.' "26 This is not surprising given the basic elements of neoliberal policy, which as Jeremy Gilbert indicates, include the: privatization of public assets, contraction and centralization of democratic institutions, deregulation of labor markets, reductions in progressive taxation, restrictions on labor organization, labor market deregulation, active encouragement of competitive and entrepreneurial modes of relation across the public and commercial sectors.27

Link – Privacy Privacy has been coopted by Neoliberal Ideology Giroux 14 (Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. “Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State” http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoia-in-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state ) DAH

The democratic ideal rooted in the right to privacy under the modernist state in which Orwell lived out his political imagination has been transformed and mutilated, almost beyond recognition. Just as Orwell's fable has morphed over time into a combination of "realistic novel," real-life documentary and a form of reality TV, privacy has been altered radically in an age of permanent, 'nonstop' global exchange

and circulation. So, too, and in the current period of historical amnesia, privacy has been redefined

through the material and ideological registers of a neoliberal order in which the right to privacy has succumbed to the seductions of a narcissistic culture and casino capitalism's unending necessity to turn every relationship into an act of commerce and to make all aspects of daily life visible and subject to data manipulation.5 In a world devoid of care, compassion and protection, privacy is no longer connected

and resuscitated through its connection to public life, the common good or a vulnerability born of

the recognition of the frailty of human life . In a world in which the worst excesses of capitalism are

unchecked, privacy is nurtured in a zone of historical amnesia , indifferent to its transformation and demise under a "broad set of panoptic practices."6 Consequently, culture loses its power as the bearer of public memory in a social order where a consumerist-driven ethic "makes impossible any shared recognition of common interests or goals" and furthers the collective indifference to the growth of the

surveillance state.7

Link - CourtsThe plan allows for the expansion of private surveillance --- their ruling only applies to the government Shah 13 (Anup Shah is the editor of GlobalIssues.org and has a degree in computer science, “Surveillance State: NSA Spying and more” http://www.globalissues.org/article/802/surveillance-state#Privatizationofsurveillancemeansevenlessaccountability ) DAH

Chris Pyle, a former military instructor exposed the CIA and Army’s monitoring of millions of Americans engaged in lawful political activity in the 1970s. His revelations ultimately leading to a series of laws aimed at curbing government abuses.

He was recently interviewed by the excellent Democracy Now! about the recent NSA revelations and echoed concerns raised by others; about lack of knowledge and oversight by Congress and that the secrecy is out of control.

But he also adds that privatization of surveillance (70% percent of the intelligence budget of the United States today goes to private contractors, Democracy Now! notes) is resulting in a lack of accountability and importantly a way for governments to shirk their legal responsibilities; “the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which protects us from unreasonable searches and seizures, only binds the government, doesn’t bind corporations. That’s a serious problem,” he notes.

A2 Link Turn - GeneralNo risk of a link turn --- the plan is a revolving door which ushers in corporate control over surveillance Canning 13 (Ernest A. Canning has been an active member of the California state bar since 1977. Mr. Canning has received both undergraduate and graduate degrees in political science as well as a juris doctor. He is also a Vietnam vet (4th Infantry, Central Highlands 1968). “What's the Real Target of Surveillance State: Terrorism or Democracy?” https://www.popularresistance.org/whats-the-real-target-of-surveillance-state-terrorism-or-democracy/ ) DAH

One intriguing feature in Snowden’s revelations is that he reportedly left his position at the CIA, where the average salary for a counterintelligence analyst is $75,000/year, to take a similar position with Booz Allen as an NSA analyst for $200,000/year. That point led Jeffrey Carr, author of Inside Cyber Warfare: Mapping the Cyber Underworld to Tweet on Sunday night: “For those of you wondering how a 29 yr old was earning $200K/yr, imagine what Booz Allen was billing him out for.” As revealed in the above-cited New York Times article,

“Booz Allen earned $1.3 billion, 23 percent of the company’s total revenue, from intelligence work during its most recent fiscal year.” It was hardly alone. According to Daniel Brian, the executive director of the Project on Government Oversight there are “a million private contractors” that have been “cleared to handle highly sensitive matters.” NYT goes on to report: Companies like Booz Allen, Lockheed Martin and the Computer Sciences Corporation also engage directly in gathering information and providing analysis and advice to government officials. Booz Allen employees work inside the facilities at the N.S.A. And it’s not just on U.S. soil and not just inside NSA. NextGov’s Aliya Sternstein reported on Monday that a full “One-third of the 1,000 personnel slated to handle cyber weapons for Marine Corps troops overseas will be contractors, according to the chief of the service’s cyber

command.” The problem entails not only greater expenditures of public monies for the profit-margins of private contractors, but a conflict-of-interest in which those who are profiting from the activity have a vested interest in seeing that perceptions of terrorist threats are omnipresent and unending so as to maximize the profits to be derived from an all-encompassing surveillance state. To seal the deal, by law, almost complete secrecy masks the profits derived from our insecurity. As with so many other “public-private partnerships” inside government agencies, the symbiotic relationship between private profits and government policies is embodied in the revolving door between the private contractors and the government agencies which funnel public monies to those contractors. The result: a revolving door that implicates a conflict-of-interest in so many of the “leak” protestations we have been hearing over the past week. Per The New York Times, James R. Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, who described the revelations made by Glenn Greenwald as “reprehensible” and as having put “the security of Americans” at risk, is a former Booz Allen executive. (Sidenote: He also appears to have been somewhat less than forthright in his various protestations and explanations of the surveillance programs in question, to date.) John M. McConnell, on the other hand, who had served as the Director of National Intelligence under George W. Bush is, himself, now an employee of Booz Allen. Round and round it goes, where it stops…well, apparently it never stops, so never mind.

A2 reform solves Status quo reforms will never be able to solve capitalist surveillancePrice 14 - Professor of anthropology and sociology at St. Martin's University (David H., “The New Surveillance Normal: NSA and Corporate Surveillance in the Age of Global Capitalism,” Monthly Review, July/August, 2014, http://search.proquest.com/docview/1543483298?pq-origsite=gscholar, accessed 7/15/15)//TN

We need a theory of surveillance that incorporates the political economy of the U.S. national security state and the corporate interests which it serves and protects. Such analysis needs an economic foundation and a view that looks beyond cultural categories separating commerce and state security systems designed to protect capital. The metadata, valuable private corporate data, and fruits of industrial espionage gathered under PRISM and other NSA programs all produce information of such a high value that it seems likely some of it will be used in a context of global capital. It matters little what legal restrictions are in place; in a global, high-tech, capitalist economy such information is invariably commodified. It is likely to be used to: facilitate industrial or corporate sabotage operations of the sort inflicted by the Stuxnet worm; steal either corporate secrets for NSA use, or foreign corporate secrets for U.S. corporate use; make investments by intelligence agencies financing their own operations; or secure personal financial gain by individuals working in the intelligence sector.∂ The rise of new invasive technologies coincides with the decline of ideological resistance to surveillance and the compilation of metadata. The speed of Americans' adoption of ideologies embracing previously unthinkable levels of corporate and state surveillance suggests a continued public acceptance of a new surveillance normal will continue to develop with little resistance. In a world where

the CIA can hack the computers of Senator Feinstein-a leader of the one of the three branches of government-with impunity or lack of public outcry, it is difficult to anticipate a deceleration in the pace at which NSA and CIA expand their surveillance reach. To live a well-adjusted life in contemporary U.S. society requires the development of rapid memory adjustments and shifting acceptance of corporate and state intrusions into what were once protective spheres of private life. Like all things in our society, we can expect these intrusions will themselves be increasingly stratified, as electronic privacy, or illegibility, will increasingly become a commodity available only to elites. Today, expensive technologies like GeeksPhone's Blackphone with enhanced PGP encryption, or Boeing's self-destructing Black Phone, afford special levels of privacy for those who can pay.∂ While the United States' current state of surveillance acceptance offers little immediate hope of a social movement limiting corporate or government spying, there are enough historical instances of post-crises limits being imposed on government surveillance to offer some hope. Following the Second World War, many European nations reconfigured long-distance billing systems to not record specific numbers called, instead only recording billing zones-because the Nazis used phone billing records as metadata useful for identifying members of resistance movements. Following the Arab Spring, Tunisia now reconfigures its Internet with a new info-packet system known as mesh networks that hinder governmental monitoring-though USAID support for this project naturally undermines trust in this system.27 Following the Church and Pike committees' congressional investigations of CIA and FBI wrongdoing in the 1970s, the Hughes-Ryan Act brought significant oversight and limits on these groups, limits which decayed over time and whose remaining restraints were undone with the USA PATRIOT Act. Some future crisis may well provide similar opportunities to regain now lost contours of

privacies.∂ Yet hope for immediate change remains limited. It will be difficult for social reform movements striving

to protect individual privacy to limit state and corporate surveillance. Today's surveillance complex aligned with an economic base enthralled with the prospects of metadata appears too strong for meaningful reforms without significant shifts in larger economic formations. Whatever inherent contradictions exist within the present surveillance system, and regardless of the objections of privacy advocates of the liberal left and libertarian right, meaningful restrictions appear presently unlikely with surveillance formations so closely tied to the current iteration of global capitalism.

A2 Link Turn - Privacy

Privacy doesn’t link turn --- a discussion of civil liberties is insufficient of address the surveillance apparatus and it’s relationship to the larger structure of capitalism Giroux 14 (Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. “Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State” http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoia-in-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state ) DAH

Orwell's 1984 looks subdued next to the current parameters, intrusions, technologies and disciplinary apparatuses wielded by the new corporate-government surveillance state. Surveillance has not only become more pervasive, intruding into the most private of spaces and activities in order to collect massive amounts of data, it also permeates and inhabits everyday activities so as to be taken-for-granted.

Surveillance is not simply pervasive, it has become normalized. Orwell could not have imagined either the intrusive

capabilities of the the new high-powered digital technologies of surveillance and display, nor could he have envisioned the growing web of political, cultural and economic partnerships between modes of government and corporate sovereignty capable of collecting almost every form of

communication in which human beings engage. What is new in the post-Orwellian world is not just the emergence of new and powerful technologies used by governments and corporations to spy on people and assess personal information as a way to either attract ready-made customers or to sell information to advertising agencies, but the emergence of a widespread culture of surveillance . Intelligence networks now inhabit the world

of Disney as well as the secret domains of the NSA and the FBI. I think the renowned intellectual historian Quentin Skinner is right in insisting

that surveillance is about more than the violation of privacy rights , however important. Under the surveillance state, the greatest threat one faces is not simply the violation of one's right to privacy, but the fact that the public is subject to the dictates of arbitrary power it no longer seems interested in

contesting . And it is precisely this existence of unchecked power and the wider culture of political indifference that puts at risk the broader

principles of liberty and freedom, which are fundamental to democracy itself. According to Skinner, who is worth quoting at length: The response of those who are worried about surveillance has so far been too much couched, it seems to me, in terms of the violation of the right to privacy. Of course it's true that my privacy has been violated if someone is reading my emails without my knowledge. But my point is that my liberty is also being violated, and not merely by the fact that someone is reading my emails but also by the fact that someone has the power to do so should they choose. We have to insist that this in itself takes away liberty because it leaves us at the mercy of arbitrary power. It's no use those who have possession of this power promising that they won't necessarily use it, or will use it only for the common good. What is offensive to liberty is the

very existence of such arbitrary power.14 The dangers of the surveillance state far exceed the attack on privacy or

warrant simply a discussion about balancing security against civil liberties. The latter argument fails

to address how the growth of the surveillance state is connected to the rise of the punishing state , the militarization of American society, secret prisons, state-sanctioned torture, a growing culture of violence, the criminalization of social problems, the depoliticization of public memory, and one of the largest prison systems in the world, all of which "are only the most concrete, condensed manifestations of a diffuse security regime in which we are all interned and enlisted."15 The authoritarian nature of the corporate-state surveillance apparatus and security system with its "urge to surveill, eavesdrop on, spy on, monitor, record, and save

every communication of any sort on the planet"16 can only be fully understood when its ubiquitous tentacles are connected to wider cultures of control and punishment, including security-patrolled corridors of public schools, the rise in

super-max prisons, the hyper-militarization of local police forces, the rise of the military-industrial-academic complex, and the increasing labeling of dissent as an act of terrorism in the United States.17

Impact

ViolenceCapital is the root cause of all of their impacts – you should denounce their simple relationship with violence because the system of capital produces the material reality which makes violence inevitableZizek, ’08 (Slavoj, senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia and a professor at the European Graduate School, Violence, p. 11-12)

There is an old joke about a husband who returns home earlier than usual from work and finds his wife in bed with another man. The surprised wife exclaims: “Why have you come back early?” The husband furiously snaps back: “What are you doing in bed with another man?” The wife

calmly replies: “I asked you a question first—don’t try to squeeze out of it by changing the topic!” The same goes for violence: the task is precisely to change the topic, to move from the desperate humanitarian SOS call to stop violence to the analysis of that other SOS, the complex interaction of the three modes of violence: subjective, objective, and symbolic. The lesson is thus that one should resist the fascination of subjective violence , of violence enacted by social agents, evil individuals, disciplined repressive apparatuses, fanatical crowds: subjective violence is just the most visible of the three. The notion of objective violence needs to be thoroughly historicised: it took on a new shape with capitalism . Marx described the mad, self-

enhancing circulation of capital, whose solipsistic path of parthenogenesis reaches its apogee in today’s meta-reflexive speculations on futures. It is far too simplistic to claim that the spectre of this self-engendering monster that pursues its path disregarding any human or environmental concern is an ideological abstraction and that behind this abstraction there are real people and natural objects on whose productive capacities and resources capital’s circulation is based and on which it

feeds like a gigantic parasite. The problem is that this “abstraction” is not only in our financial speculators’ misperception of

social reality, but that it is “real” in the precise sense of determining the structure of the material social processes: the fate of whole strata of the population and sometimes of whole countries can be decided by the “solipsistic” speculative dance of capital, which pursues its goal of profitability in blessed indifference to how its movement will affect social reality. So Marx’s point is not primarily to reduce this second dimension to the first one, that is, to demonstrate how the theological mad dance of commodities arises out of the antagonisms of “real

life.” Rather his point is that one cannot properly grasp the first (the social reality of material production and social interaction) without the second: it is the self-propelling metaphysical dance of capital that runs the show, that provides the key to real-life developments and catastrophes. Therein resides the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism , much more uncanny than any direct pre capitalist socio-ideological violence: this violence is no longer attributable to concrete individuals and their “evil” intentions, but is purely “objective,” systemic, anonymous. Here we encounter the Lacanian difference between reality and the Real: “reality” is the social reality of the actual people involved in interaction and in the productive processes, while the Real is the inexorable “abstract,” spectral logic of capital that determines what goes on in social reality. One can experience this gap in a palpable way when one visits a country where life is obviously in shambles. We see a lot of ecological decay and human misery. However, the economist’s report that one reads afterwards informs us that the country’s economic situation is “financially sound”— reality doesn’t matter, what matters is the situation of capital...

Turns JournalismThere is a monopoly on Internet surveillance by tech companies that give them immense political influence over government surveillance. This turns the journalism advantage – only ending corporate surveillance solvesFoster & McChesney 14 – Foster is a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon focusing on Marxist theory and editor of Monthly Review, McChesney is a professor in the department of communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (John Bellamy Foster, Robert W. McChesney, “Surveillance Capitalism: Monopoly-Finance Capital, the Military-Industrial Complex, and the Digital Age,” Monthly Review, July/August 2014, http://search.proquest.com/docview/1543483454?pq-origsite=gscholar, accessed 7/18/15)//TN

The dot-com bubble burst in 2000. But by that time a virtual Internet cartel had emerged, despite all the rhetoric of "friction-free capitalism" by Bill Gates and others.59 By the end of the decade the Internet had come to play a central role in capital accumulation, and the firms that ruled the Internet were almost all "monopolies," by the way economists use the term. This did not mean that these firms sold 100 percent of an industry's output, but rather that they sold a sufficient amount to control the price of the product and how much competition they would have. (Even John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil monopoly at its peak controlled just over 80 percent of the market.) By 2014, three of the four largest U.S. corporations in market valuation-Apple, Microsoft, and Google-were Internet monopolies. Twelve of the thirty most valuable U.S. corporations were media giants and/or Internet monopolies, including Verizon, Amazon, Disney, Comcast, Intel, Facebook, Qualcomm, and Oracle. These firms used network effects, technical standards, patent law, and good old-fashioned barriers-to-entry to lock in their market power, and they used their monopoly gushers to broaden their digital empires. With this economic power comes immense political power , such that these firms face no threat from regulators in Washington. To the contrary, the U.S. government is little short of a private army for the Internet giants as they pursue their global ambitions.60∂ The major means of wealth generation on the Internet and through proprietary platforms such as apps is the surveillance of the population, allowing for a handful of firms to reap the lion's share of the gains from the enormous sales effort in the U.S. economy. The digitalization of surveillance has radically changed the nature of advertising. The old system of advertisers purchasing ad space or time in media with the hope of getting the media user to notice the advertisement while she sought out news or entertainment is becoming passé. Advertisers no longer need to subsidize journalism or media content production to reach their target audiences. Instead, they can pinpoint their desired audience to a person and locate them wherever they are online (and often where they are in physical space) due to ubiquitous surveillance. The premise of the system is that there is no effective privacy. The consequences are that the commercial system of media content production, especially journalism, is in collapse , with nothing in the wings to replace it .

Cap RC of SVSurveillance is a central part of Capitalism- Campell and Carlson 10(John Edward Campbell & Matt Carlson (2002) Panopticon.com: Online Surveillance and the Commodification of Privacy, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 46:4, 586-606, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1207/s15506878jobem4604_6, 07 Jun 2010, John Edward Campell is a Professor in the Communication department at Temple University, Philadelphia, PA.)

As the Panopticon and Internet ad servers demonstrate, surveillance as a technique and technology of control is a central dimension of the capitalist state, particularly under the social formation identified as “late capitalism” or “information capitalism” (Kling & Allen, 1996). Indeed, few institutions are better exemplars of surveillance than the capitalistic workplace , where Frederick Winslow Taylor’s introduction of “scientific management” into the factory is in many respects comparable to Bentham’s introduction of the panoptic model into penology. Not

only has capital- ism utilized new information technologies to expand surveillance in the workplace (eg,

monitoring of e-mails and phone calls, genetic screening, and closed-circuit video cameras), but increasingly the same technologies are also used to watch, record, and assess routine activities in the marketplace. As Lyons (2001) notes, “While companies continue to use surveillance technologies as tools to manage workers in the workplace, the last decades of the twentieth century also saw a massive expansion of efforts to use surveillance technologies to manage consumers“ (p. 64).The roles of surveillance in both the workplace and marketplace are essentially parallel-the reduction of

uncertainty (;.e., risk management). Under contemporary capitalism, surveillance is a key mechanism of social control,

ensuring the “ratio- nality,‘’ and therefore predictability, of consumers in the marketplace. The capitalist state depends on the gathering and processing of information to ensure both the greatest possible extraction of surplus value from production and consumption (in essence, efficiency), and the social and political stability nec- essary to expand its enterprise . This underlies Robins and Webster‘s (1999) contention that the history of capitalist industry “has been a matter of the deepening and extension of information gathering and surveillance to the com- bined end of planning and controlling the production process, and it is into this context that the new information and communication technologies are now inserting themselves” (p. 97).

Web Surveillance !Contemporary web surveillance leads to exploitation by capitalism- Fuchs ‘10

(The Internet & Surveillance - Research Paper Series Edited by the Unified Theory of Information Research Group, Vienna, Austria (http://www.uti.at) ISSN 2219-603X Title: Critique of the Political Economy of Web 2.0 Surveillance Author: Christian Fuchs Research Paper Number #3 Date of Publication: October 1, 2010 Author Institution: Department of Informatics and Media Studies, Uppsala University, http://baan.tezu.ernet.in/dmass/CBCT/The-Internet-Surveillance-Research-Paper-Series-3-Christian-Fuchs-Critique-of-the-Political-Economy-of-Web-2.0-Surveillance.pdf, Christian Fuchs is a course leader on the University of Westminster's MA in Social Media. He teaches in the areas of social media & society, Internet & society, information society studies, media & society. He supervises PhD students in these fields and welcomes proposals from prospective doctoral students who especially want to critically study the Internet and social media in the context of the information society.)

Given these empirical results, it seems feasible to theorize the contemporary “web 2.0” not as a participatory system, but by employing more

negative, critical terms such as class, exploitation, and surplus value. Such an alternative theory of web 2.0 can here only be hinted at briefly (for a detailed discussion see Fuchs 2010). It is based on the approach of the critique of the political economy of media and informa- tion. Felicity Brown (2006) calls for a combination of the critical political economy of communication and surveillance studies. “The critical political economy of communi- cation has a particularly important role in analysing the mutually productive rela-

tionship between surveillance practices and the Internet. In particular, the intense monitoring of cyberspace by private corporations seeking information on consumer behaviour is worthy of critique” (Brown 2006, 10). Marx highlights exploitation as

the fundamental aspect of class in another passage where he says that “the driving motive and determining purpose of capitalist produc- tion” is “the greatest possible exploitation of labour-power by the capitalist” (Marx

1867, 449). He says that the proletariat is “a machine for the production of surplus- value”, capitalists are “a machine for the transformation of this surplus-value into surplus

capital” (Marx 1867, 742). Whereas Marx had in his time to limit the notion of the proletariat to wage labour, it is today possible to conceive the proletariat in a much broader sense as all those

who directly or indirectly produce surplus value and are thereby exploited by capital. This includes besides wage labour also housework- ers, the unemployed, the poor, migrants, retirees, students, precarious workers – and also the users of corporate web 2.0 platforms and other Internet sites and applica- tions. Hardt and Negri (2004) use the term multitude for this multidimensional prole- tariat of the 21st century.

Agency ! Capitalist society relies heavily on surveillance to control the people—Rotering 13NSA Surveillance and Capitalist Power, 11.5.13, NSA Surveillance and Capitalist Power, Frank Rotering is a Canadian economist based in Vancouver, and has written numerous books on the subject on the American economy., http://contractionism.org/2013/11/nsa-surveillance-and-capitalist-power-2/To grasp the deceptive nature of the standard interpretation it is necessary to understand how power is exercised in a capitalist society, and how surveillance fits into this picture. The key point regarding power is that the conventional

claim about popular sovereignty is false. In its day-to-day operations a capitalist society is ruled not by the populace through its

government, but by the capitalist class through its state. Contractionism calls this deception the democratic illusion. The two primary

methods used to exercise power are legitimacy and coercion. Legitimacy refers to voluntary support for capitalist rule. It derives from the system’s success in satisfying human desires and from the manipulation of public opinion. Coercion refers to the physical and

psychological measures used to neutralize those who threaten, or could potentially threaten, the ruling class. A critical problem for any ruling class is how to allocate its scarce resources to these two methods so as to its maximize social control. Assume, for example, that legitimacy could be strengthened by increasing the incomes of selected groups or by intensifying the propaganda delivered by the media. Which of these two techniques will be more effective under current conditions? Coercion is normally

applied selectively, so the most dangerous targets must be identified. Which individual and groups are these at the present time? The role of surveillance is to gather detailed information about the populace so that questions such as these can be reliably answered. Surveillance can

thus be defined as the collection of information about the populace by the state for the purpose of maximizing social control at the lowest possible cost. With this theoretical overview in place it is possible to critically evaluate the standard interpretation.

Blocks

A2: Perm

Group the perms:

Either they are severance or intrinsic because they change the aff and add sequencing - voting issue for competitive equity

-OR-

They don’t solve - if we win a 1% risk of a link you should prefer the alternative since capitalism turns and outweighs the case

Perm fails—focus on particular violent acts is a lure that causes ideological mystification and means we only address symptoms not the root cause of violenceŽižek ’8 (Slavoj, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, Big Ideas // Small Books, 2008, p. 3-8) [m leap]

Instead of confronting violence directly, the present book casts six sideways glances. There are reasons for looking at the problem of violence awry. My underlying premise is that there is something inherently mystifying in a direct confrontation with it: the overpowering horror of violent acts and empathy with the victims inexorably function as a lure which prevents us from thinking . A dispassionate conceptual development of the typology of violence must by definition ignore its traumatic impact. Yet there is a sense in which a cold analysis of violence somehow reproduces and participates in its horror. A distinction needs to be made, as well, between (factual) truth and truthfulness: what renders a report of a raped woman (or any other narrative of a trauma) truthful is its very factual unreliability, its confusion, its inconsistency. If the victim were able to report on her painful and humiliating experience in a clear manner, with all the data arranged in a consistent order, this very quality would make us suspicious of its truth. The problem here is part of the solution: the very factual deficiencies of the traumatised subject's report on her experience bear witness to the truthfulness of her report, since they signal that the reported content "contaminated" the manner of reporting it. The same holds, of course, for the so-called unreliability of the verbal reports of Holocaust survivors: the witness able to offer a clear narrative of his

camp experience would disqualify himself by virtue of that clarity.2 The only appropriate approach to my subject thus seems to be one which permits variations on violence kept at a distance out of respect towards its victims. Adorno's famous saying, it seems, needs correction: it is not poetry that is impossible after Auschwitz, but rather prose.3 Realistic prose fails, where the poetic evocation of the unbearable atmosphere of a camp succeeds. That is to say, when Adorno declares poetry impossible (or, rather, barbaric) after Auschwitz, this impossibility is an enabling impossibility: poetry is always, by definition, "about" something that cannot be addressed directly, only alluded to. One shouldn't be afraid to take this a step further and refer to the old saying that music comes in when words fail. There may well be some truth in the common wisdom that, in a kind of historical premonition, the music of Schoenberg articulated the anxieties and nightmares of Auschwitz before the event took place. In her memoirs, Anna Akhmatova describes what happened to her when, at the height of the Stalinist purges, she was waiting in the long queue in front of the Leningrad prison to learn about her arrested son Lev: One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a young woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had of course never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there), "Can you describe this?" And I said, "I can." Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.4 The key question, of course, is what kind of description is intended here? Surely it is not a realistic description of the situation, but what Wallace Stevens called "description without place," which is what is proper to art. This is not a description which locates its content in a historical space and time, but a description which creates, as the background of the phenomena it describes, an inexistent (virtual) space of its own, so that what appears in it is not an appearance sustained by the depth of reality behind it, but a decontextualised appearance, an appearance which fully coincides with real being. To quote Stevens again: "What it seems it is and in such seeming all things are." Such an artistic description "is not a sign for something that lies outside its form."5 Rather, it extracts from the confused reality its own inner form in the same way that Schoenberg "extracted" the inner form of totalitarian terror. He evoked the way this terror affects subjectivity. Does this recourse to artistic description imply that we are in danger of regressing to a contemplative

attitude that somehow betrays the urgency to "do something" about the depicted horrors? Let's think about the fake sense of urgency that pervades the left-liberal humanitarian discourse on violence : in it, abstraction and graphic (pseudo)concreteness coexist in the staging of the scene of violence – against women, blacks, the homeless, gays... "A woman is raped every six seconds in this country" and "In the time it takes you to read this paragraph, ten children will die

of hunger" are just two examples. Underlying all this is a hypocritical sentiment of moral outrage. Just this kind of pseudo-urgency was exploited by Starbucks a couple of years ago when, at store entrances, posters greeting customers pointed out that a portion of the chain's profits went into health-care for the children of Guatemala, the source of their coffee, the inference being that with every cup you drink, you save a child's life.

There is a fundamental anti-theoretical edge to these urgent injunctions . There is no time to reflect: we have to act now . Through this fake sense of urgency, the post-industrial rich, living in their secluded virtual world, not only do not deny or ignore the harsh reality outside their area – they actively refer to it all the time. As Bill Gates recently put it: "What do computers matter when millions are still unnecessarily dying

of dysentery?" Against this fake urgency, we might want to place Marx's wonderful letter to Engels of 1870, when, for a brief moment, it seemed that a European revolution was again at the gates. Marx's letter conveys his sheer panic: can't the revolutionaries wait for a

couple of years? He hasn't yet finished his Capital. A critical analysis of the present global constellation – one which offers no clear solution, no "practical" advice on what to do, and provides no light at the end of the tunnel , since one is well aware that this light might belong to a train crashing towards us – usually meets with reproach: "Do you mean we should do nothing? Just sit and wait?" One should gather the courage to answer: "YES, precisely that!" There are situations when the only truly "practical" thing to do is to resist the temptation to engage immediately and to "wait and see" by means of a patient, critical analysis. Engagement seems to exert its pressure on us from all directions. In a well-known passage from his Existentialism and Humanism, Sartre deployed the dilemma of a young man in France in 1942, torn between the duty to help his lone, ill mother and the duty to enter the Resistance and fight the Germans; Sartre's point is, of course, that there is no a priori answer to this dilemma. The young man needs to make a decision grounded only in his own abyssal freedom and assume full responsibility for it.6 An obscene third way out of the dilemma would have been to advise the young man to tell his mother that he will join the Resistance, and to tell his Resistance friends that he will take care of his mother, while, in reality, withdrawing to a secluded place and studying... There is more than cheap cynicism in this advice. It brings to mind a well-known Soviet joke about Lenin. Under socialism, Lenin's advice to young people, his answer to what they should do, was "Learn, learn, and learn." This was evoked at all times and displayed on all school walls. The joke goes: Marx, Engels, and Lenin are asked whether they would prefer to have a wife or a mistress. As expected, Marx, rather conservative in private matters, answers, "A wife!" while Engels, more of a bon vivant, opts for a mistress. To everyone's surprise, Lenin says, "I'd like to have both!" Why? Is there a hidden stripe of decadent jouisseur behind his austere revolutionary image? No-he explains: "So that I can tell my wife that I am going to my mistress, and my mistress that I have to be with my wife..." "And then, what do you do?" "I go to a solitary place to learn, learn, and learn!" Is this not exactly what Lenin did after the

catastrophe of 1914? He withdrew to a lonely place in Switzerland, where he "learned, learned, and learned," reading Hegel's logic. And this is what we should do today when we find ourselves bombarded with mediatic images of violence. We need to "learn, learn, and learn" what causes this violence.

Plan action short-circuits alt solvency - action necessarily precludes thinking

Zizek, ’09 (Slavoj, senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, professor at the European Graduate School, and total BAMF, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, p. 10-11, bgm)

At the height of the meltdown, Joseph Stiglitz wrote that, in spite of the growing consensus among economists

that any bail-out based on US Treasury Henry Paulson’s plan would not work, “it is impossible for politicians to do nothing in such a crisis. So we may have to pray that an agreement crafted with the toxic mix of special interests, misguided economics, and right-wing ideologies that produced the crisis can somehow produce a rescue plan that works—or whose failure doesn’t do too much damage.” He is correct, since markets are effectively based on beliefs (even beliefs about other people’s beliefs), so when the media worry about “how the markets will react” to the bail-out, it is a question not only about its real consequences, but about the belief of the markets in the plan’s efficacy. This is why the bail-out might

work even if it is economically wrong-headed. The pressure “to do something” here is like the superstitious compulsion to make some gesture when we are observing a process over which we have no real influence. Are not out acts often such gestures? The old saying, “Don’t just talk, do something!” is one of the most stupid things one can say, even measured by the low standards of common sense. Perhaps, rather, the problem

lately has been that we have been doing too much, such as intervening in nature, destroying the environment, and so forth… Perhaps it is time to step back, think and say the right thing. True, we often talk about

something instead of doing it; but sometimes we also do things in order to avoid talking and thinking about them. Such as throwing $700 billion at a problem instead of reflecting on how it arose in the first place.

<<<Insert Link Extension>>>

A2: Cap Good – Frontline

Be skeptical of the 1ac and their impact turns

Schiwy and Ennis, ’02 (Freya, PhD Candidate in Romance Studies at Duke, and Michael, PhD Candidate in Lit at Duke, Nepantla: Views from the South 3.1 project muse)

The essays gathered in this dossier respond to issues raised during the workshop “Knowledges and the Known: Capitalism and the

Geopolitics of Knowledge,” held at Duke University in November 2000. They address concerns about the possibilities for critical knowledge production at a moment when national state structures are reconfiguring into global institutions and when technologies (like gene prospecting) and epistemic regimes (like property rights and human rights) are installing the particular as a new universal , following the legacy of Enlightenment

philosophy and Western political theory. They ask how knowledge production is linked to location and subjectivity and what the importance of these critical perspectives can be when neoliberal capitalism increasingly instrumentalizes and commodifies knowledge, reinforcing the growing dependence of universities around the world on corporate money. It is precisely within this context that Oscar Guardiola-Rivera engages current critical theory from the perspective of coloniality. Although the essays by Catherine Walsh and Javier Sanjinés address contemporary indigenous uprisings in the Andes, these movements are not their object of study. Instead of being about knowledge production in the Andes, all three of these articles are efforts to think about epistemology from the Andes.

Cap’s unsustainable and causes extinction, but the alt solvesThis is not a meaningless question – the structures of capitalism are driving multiple large-scale processes that are increasingly out of the control of individuals living their lives. Global warming, multiple wars of accumulation, loss of land and income stratification: all of these are making life unlivable.

Parr ’13 (Adrian, Assoc. Prof. of Philosophy and Environmental Studies @ U. of Cincinnati, THE WRATH OF CAPITAL: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics, pp. 145-147)

A quick snapshot of the twenty-first century so far: an economic meltdown ; a frantic sell-off of public land to the energy business as President George W Bush exited the White House; a prolonged , costly, and unjustified war in Iraq ; the Greek economy in ruins; an escalation of global food prices; bee colonies in global extinction ; 925 million hungry reported in 2010; as of 2005, the world's five hundred richest individuals with a combined income greater than that of the poorest 416 million people, the richest 10 percent accounting for 54 percent of global income; a planet on the verge of boiling point; melting ice caps; increases in extreme weather conditions; and the list goes on and on and on.2 Sounds like a ticking time bomb, doesn't it? Well it is.

It is shameful to think that massive die-outs of future generations will put to pale comparison the 6 million murdered during the Holocaust ; the millions killed in two world wars ; the genocides in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Darfur ; the 1 million left homeless and the 316,000 killed by the 2010 earthquake in Haiti . The time has come to wake up to the warning signs.3

The real issue climate change poses is that we do not enjoy the luxury of incremental change anymore. We are in the last decade where we can do something about the situation. Paul Gilding, the

former head of Greenpeace International and a core faculty member of Cambridge University's Programme for Sustainability, explains that "two degrees of warming is an inadequate goal and a plan for failure;' adding that "returning to below one degree of warming . . . is the solution to the problem:'4 Once we move higher than 2°C of warming, which is what is projected to occur by 2050, positive feedback mechanisms will begin to kick in, and then we will be at the point of no return. We therefore need to start thinking very differently right now.

We do not see the crisis for what it is; we only see it as an isolated symptom that we need to make a few minor changes to deal with. This was the message that Venezuela's president Hugo Chavez delivered at the COP15 United Nations Climate Summit in Copenhagen on December 16, 2009, when he declared: "Let's talk about the cause. We should not avoid responsibilities, we should not avoid the depth of this problem. And I'll bring it up again, the cause of this disastrous panorama is the metabolic, destructive system of the capital and its model: capitalism . ”5

The structural conditions in which we operate are advanced capitalism. Given this fact, a few adjustments here and there to that system are not enough to solve the problems that climate change and environmental degradation pose.6 Adaptability, modifications, and displacement, as I have consistently shown throughout this book, constitute the very essence of capitalism. Capitalism adapts without doing away with the threat. Under capitalism, one deals with threat not by challenging it, but by buying favors from it, as in voluntary carbon-offset schemes. In the process, one gives up on one's autonomy and reverts to being a child. Voluntarily offsetting a bit of carbon here and there, eating vegan, or recycling our waste, although well intended, are not solutions to the problem, but a symptom of the free market's ineffectiveness. By casting a scathing look at the neoliberal options on display, I have tried to show how all these options are ineffective. We are not buying indulgences because we have a choice; choices abound, and yet they all lead us down one path and through the golden gates of capitalist heaven.

For these reasons, I have underscored everyone's implication in this structure – myself included. If anything, the book has been an act of outrage – outrage at the deceit and the double bind that the "choices" under capitalism present, for there is no choice when everything is expendable. There is nothing substantial about the future when all you can do is survive by facing the absence of your own future and by sharing strength, stamina, and courage with the people around you. All the rest is false hope.

In many respects, writing this book has been an anxious exercise because I am fully aware that reducing the issues of environmental degradation and climate change to the domain of analysis can stave off the institution of useful solutions. But in my defense I would also like to propose that each and every one of us has certain skills that can contribute to making the solutions that we introduce in response to climate change and environmental degradation more effective and more realistic . In light of that view, I close with the following proposition, which I mean in the most optimistic sense possible: our politics must start from the point that after 2050 it may all be over.

Cap’s unsustainable and causes extinction – Try or die

Magdoff and Foster, 2010

(Fred and John Belamy, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, “What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know about Capitalism”, Monthly Review, Volume 61, Issue 10) NG

The foregoing analysis, if correct, points to the fact that the ecological crisis cannot be solved within the logic of the present system . The various suggestions for doing so have no hope of success. The system of world capitalism is clearly unsustainable in: ( 1) its quest for never ending accumulation of capital leading to production that must continually expand to provide profits; (2) its ag riculture and food system that pollutes the environment and still does not allow universal access to a sufficient quantity and quality of food; (3) its rampant destruction of the environment ; (4) its continually recreating and enhancing of the stratification of wealth within and between countries; and (5) its search for tech nological magic bullets as a way of avoiding the growing social and ecological problems arising from its own operations.¶ The transition to an ecological—which we believe must also be a socialist—economy will be a steep ascent and will not occur overnight. This is not a question of “storming the Winter Palace.” Rather, it is a dynamic, multifaceted struggle for a new cultural compact and a new productive system . The struggle is

ultimately against the system of capital. It must begin , however, by opposing the logic of capital , endeavoring in the here and now to create in the interstices of the system a new social metabolism rooted in egalitarianism, community, and a sustainable relation to the earth . The basis for the creation of sustainable human development must arise from within the system dominated by capital, without being

part of it, just as the bourgeoisie itself arose in the “pores” of feudal society.54 Eventually, these initiatives can become powerful enough to constitute the basis of a revolutionary new movement and society

A2: Cap Solves War

Capitalism makes war inevitable --- reject their scholarship

Aris I. Trantidis, 2009, MPhil/PhD student, London School of Economics and Political Science, War, democracy and capitalism, http://www.psa.ac.uk/2009/pps/Trantidis.pdf, jj

Causal spuriousness, however, may run the other way around. It can be said that democracies foster open private market economies which in turn allow the development of economic ties between nations. It can be argued that the constructive effect of international trade and of economic interdependency rests on democratic governments pursuing policies of relatively open markets, as these have been perceived as maximising welfare. At the same time, they abstain from developing closer ties with those authoritarian regimes which democracies perceive as aggressive and threatening. Understandably there is less trade with autocratic countries which are not ‘free market’ and ‘open to trade’ economies.

Capitalist peace theory and democratic peace theory share the common position that both they both have been in disagreement with key realist assumptions. Robert Keohane (1983) summarises three assumptions, which form part of the ‘hard core’ of the realist approach: 1) states are the most important actors in the international system, 2) international relations can be analyzed as if states are unitary rational actors, and 3) states calculate their interests in terms of power, as an end in itself or as a necessary means to other ends. In the realist archetype, peace reflects a balance of power between nations or alliances, or result from the presence of a hegemonic power, whose power and resources enable it to impose its ‘peace’ on its own terms. Rosato has argued about post-World War II peace that ‘one potential explanation is that democratic peace is in fact an imperial peace based on American power. The democratic peace is essentially a postWorld War II phenomenon restricted to the Americas and Western Europe. The United States has been the dominant power in both these regions

since World War II and has placed an overriding emphasis on regional peace (2003:599). Capitalist peace theory has also been undermined by numerous historical observations prior to American hegemony of capitalist countries fighting bitter wars despite their trade links during the 19th century up to the second half of the 20th century .

The debate is far from closed .

The departure of democratic peace theory and capitalist peace theory from realism is that they both look inside the state for institutions, norms and actors which largely define foreign policy. They also explore links between domestic actors across nations on the basis of shared values, shared norms, and common interests. In this sense, they are both closer to methodological individualism.

According to methodological individualism groups become actors when organised and acting under shared perceptions of common interest. Actors are motivated for collective action upon calculation of expected costs and benefits.

Before taking state preferences as given, it is thus useful to trace the preferences of these groups and the ways they are shaping the domestic process of decisionmaking. Implicitly or explicitly democratic peace theory and capitalist peace theory point to two levels of analysis related to the formation of national preferences: processes embedded within states, and linkages between states as well as underlying transnational connections between social and economic groups across states.

Opposite to the capitalist peace theory stands the Marxist view of war. The assumption of Marxist arguments is that capitalist states represent the interests of the ruling class , the bourgeoisie, which wants to extend the exploitation of the labour class at home and abroad . According to conventional Marxist thought, war is the product of competition among capitalist states and their bourgeois elites for the expansion and intensification of exploitation of labour and material resources.

The concept of imperialism describes the alleged tendency of great powers to launch wars in order to territorially expand the exploitation of resources , human and material, beyond the boundaries of the nation state. To explain why war between democracies had been rarer post World War II, Marxist accounts have come close to the realist argument and put forward concepts such as ‘empire’, ‘hegemony’ and ‘dependency’ (Negri and Hardt, 2000). Next to the realist emphasis

on power, Marxist accounts have put emphasis on hierarchical relations linking the advanced economies with the rest of the world by means of economic power as much as by the use of force.

There are a number of challenges the four schools of thought have confronted.

C apitalist p eace t heory has been asked to address the fact that civil war and domestic war-like

conflicts are more frequent today, and occur among groups or regions closely tied in economic

exchange. For instance, elected leaderships in Yugoslavia fought a series of bitter wars by fuelling nationalism in their ethnic groups despite the fact that they had resided in ethnically mixed and economically interdependent constituencies. Democratic peace theory has to address why civil wars have often occurred between groups whose leaderships had enjoyed high degree of legitimacy, and were often elected. In particular, leaderships in ethnic civil war have been able to mobilise domestic groups into violent acts and conflict. On other occasions, ethnic and social divisions have been contained within the institutions in place, or have been tackled by peaceful institutional change establishing a modus vivendi that has secured peace and

stability. This is raising doubts on whether class or ethnic divisions trigger conflict irrespective of how the preferences of these groups have been shaped by the opportunity sets available to them.

Capitalist growth makes war inevitable

Trainer, ’07 [Ted, Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Work at the University of New South Wales, “Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain A Consumer Society”, p. 125-159]

If all nations go on trying to increase their wealth , production, consumption and "living standards" without limit in a world of limited resources , then we must expect increasing armed conflict . Rich-world affluent lifestyles require us to be heavily armed and aggressive, in order to guard the empire from which we draw more than our fair share of resources. Many people within the Peace Movement fail to grasp that

there is no possibility of a peaceful world while a few are taking far more than their fair share and the

rest aspire to live as the rich few do . If we want to remain affluent we should remain heavily armed,

so we can prevent others from taking "our" oil fields etc. (For a detailed argument see Trainer, 2002.)

A2: Transition Wars

Transition wars argument is liberal-democratic blackmailBe skeptical --- dismissing radical action like the alt by saying it will lead to transition wars and violence is a classic conservative tactic to shut down debate and lock in the status quo --- it creates a perverse politics where avoiding risk becomes the ultimate political goal --- even if the alt’s risky you should be willing to take a leap of faith and risk the impossible

Johnston 04Adrian, Volume 1.0, Adrian Johnston Dept of Philosophy, University of New Mexico, The Cynic's Fetish: Slavoj Zizek and the Dynamics of Belief

Žižek links liberal democracy’s employment of the threat of totalitarianism to a more fundamental rejection of the act itself qua intervention whose consequences cannot safely be anticipated. In Žižek’s view, contemporary democracy legitimates itself through a pathetic posture in which the avoidance of risk (i.e., of extreme

measures not covered by preexisting democratic consensuses, measures with no guarantee of status-quo-affirming success) is elevated to the status of the highest political good 123—“what the reference to democracy involves is the rejection of radical attempts to ‘step outside,’ to risk a radical break .”124 The refusal to risk a gesture of disruption because it might not turn out exactly the way one envisions it should is the surest bulwark against change:

The standard critique concerns the Act’s allegedly ‘absolute’ character of a radical break, which renders impossible any clear distinction between a properly ‘ethical’ act and, say, a Nazi monstrosity: is it not that an Act is always embedded in a specific socio-symbolic context? The answer to this reproach is clear: of course—an Act is always a specific intervention within a socio-symbolic context; the same gesture can be an Act or a ridiculous empty posture, depending on the context… In what, then, resides the misunderstanding? Why this critique? There is something else which disturbs the critics of the Lacanian notion of Act: true, an Act is always situated in a concrete context—this, however, does not mean that it

is fully determined by its context. An Act always involves a radical risk … it is a step into the open, with no guarantee

about the final outcome — why? Because an Act retroactively changes the very co-ordinates onto which it intervenes. This lack of guarantee is what the critics cannot tolerate; they want an Act without risk—not without empirical risks, but without the much more radical ‘transcendental risk’ that the Act will not only simply fail, but

radically misfire… those who oppose he ‘absolute Act’ effectively oppose the Act as such, they want an Act without the Act .125

Transition is peaceful

Lewis, ‘98 (Chris, June 2000. PhD American Studies Univ of Colorado Boulder. “The Paradox of Global Development and the Necessary Collapse of Global Industrial Civilization,” www.cross-x.com/archives/LewisParadox.pdf)

With the collapse of global industrial civilization, smaller, autonomous, local and regional civilizations, cultures , and polities will emerge. We can reduce the threat of mass death and genocide that will surely accompany this collapse by encouraging the creation and growth of sustainable, self-sufficient regional polities. John Cobb has already made a case for how this may work in the United States and how it is working in Kerala, India. After the collapse of global industrial civilization, First and Third World peoples won't have the material resources, biological capital, and energy and human resources to re-establish global industrial civilization . Forced by

economic necessity to become dependent on local resources and ecosystems for their survival, peoples throughout the world will

work to conserve and restore their environments. Those societies that destroy their local environments and economies, as modern people so often do, will themselves face collapse and ruin.

You have to crush a few chick peas to make hummus

Lewis, ’98 (Chris, Ph.D, American Studies professor at Colorado-Boulder, "The Paradox of Global Development and the Necessary Collapse of Modern Industrial Civilization," in The Coming Age of Scarcity: Preventing Mass Death and Genocide in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Michael N Dobkowski and Isidor Wallimann, p. 59-60)

In conclusion, the only solution to the growing political and economic chaos caused by the collapse of

global industrial civilization is to encourage the uncoupling of nations and regions from the global economy . Effort to integrate the underdeveloped countries with this global economy through sustainable development programs such as

Agenda 21 will only further undermine the global economy and industrial civilization. Unfortunately, millions will die in the wars and economic and political conflicts created by the accelerating collapse of global civilization. But we can be assured, on the basis of the past history of the collapse of regional civilizations such as the Mayan and the Roman empires, that, barring global nuclear war, human societies and civilizations will continue to exist and develop on a smaller, regional scale. Yes, such civilizations will be violent, corrupt, and often cruel, but, in the end, less so than our current global industrial civilization, which is abusing the entire planet and threatening the mass death and suffering of all its peoples and the living, biological fabric of life on earth . The paradox of global economic development is that although it creates massive wealth and power for modern elites, it also creates massive poverty and suffering for underdeveloped peoples and societies. The failure of global

development to end this suffering and destruction will bring about its collapse. This collapse will cause millions of people to suffer and die throughout the world, but it should , paradoxically, ensure the survival of future human societies . The collapse of global civilization is necessary for the future, long-term survival of human beings . Although this future seems hopeless and heartless, it is not. We can learn much from our present global crisis. What we learn will shape our future and the future of the complex, interconnected web of life on earth.

A2: Cap Solves Environment

Cap’s unsustainable and causes extinction because of physical demands on space, water, forests, and habitat---tech can’t solve because collapse of ecosystem services is irreversible

David Shearman 7, Emeritus professor of medicine at Adelaide University, Secretary of Doctors for the Environment Australia, and an Independent

Assessor on the IPCC; and Joseph Wayne Smith, lawyer and philosopher with a research interest in environmentalism, 2007, The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy, p. 153-156

Hundreds of scientists writing in Millennium Assessment and other scientific reports pronounce that humanity is in

peril from environmental damage. If liberal democracy is to survive it will need to offer leadership, resolve, and sacrifice to

address the problem. To date there is not a shred of evidence that these will be provided nor could they be delivered by those at the right

hand of American power. Some liberal democracies that recognize that global warming is a dire problem are trying but nevertheless failing to have an impact on greenhouse emissions. To arrest climate change, greenhouse reductions of 60 to 80 percent are required during the next few decades. By contrast the Kyoto Protocol prescribes reductions of only a few percent.

The magnitude of the problem seems overwhelming, and indeed it is. So much so, it is still denied by many because it cannot be resolved without cataclysmic changes to society. Refuge from necessary

change is being sought in tech nological advances that will allow fossil fuels to be used with impunity, but this

ignores the kernel of the issue. If all humanity had the ecological footprint of the average citizen of

Australia or the United States, at least another three planets would be needed to support the present

population of the world.2 The ecological services of the world cannot be saved under a regime of

attrition by growth economies that each year use more land, water, forests, natural resources,

and habitat. Tech nological advances cannot retrieve dead ecological services .

The measures required have been discussed and documented for several decades. None of them are revolutionary new ideas. We will discuss the main themes of a number of important issues such as the limits to growth, the separation of corporatism and governance, the control of the issue of credit (i.e., financial reform), legal reform, and the reclaiming of the commons. Each of these issues has been discussed in great depth in the literature, and a multitude of reform movements have been spawned. Unfortunately, given the multitude of these problems and the limited resources and vision of the reformers, each of the issues tends to be treated in isolation. From an ecological perspective, which is a vision seeking wholeness and integration, this is a mistake. These areas of reform are closely interrelated and must be tackled as a coherent whole to bring about change. Banking and financial reform is, for example, closely related to the issue of control and limitation of corporate power, because finance capital is the engine of corporate expansion. The issue of reclaiming the commons and protecting the natural environment from corporate plunder is also intimately connected to the issue of the regulation of corporate power. In turn this is a legal question, and in turn legal structures are highly influenced by political and economic factors. Finally, the issue of whether there are ecological limits to growth underlies all these issues. Only if an ecologically sustainable solution can be given to this totality of problems can we see the beginnings of a hope for reform of liberal democracy. And even then, there still remains a host of cultural and intellectual problems that will need to be solved. The prospects for reform are daunting, but let us now explore what in principle is needed.

THE LIMITS TO GR OWTH

Our loving marriage to economic growth has to be dissolved. The dollar value of all goods and services made in an economy in one year is expressed as the gross domestic product (GDP). It is a flawed measurement in that it does not measure the true economic and social advance of a society,3 but it is relevant to our discussion here for most of the activities it measures consume energy.

Each country aims for economic growth, for every economy needs this for its success in maintaining employment and for the perceived ever-expanding needs of its populace. Politicians salivate about economic growth, it is their testosterone boost. Most would be satisfied with 3 percent per annum and recognize that this means that the size of the economy is 3 percent greater than

the previous year. On this basis the size of the economy doubles every 23 years. In 43 years it has quadrupled. Now in

23 years let us suppose that energy needs will also double in order to run this economy. Therefore if greenhouse emissions are to remain at today’s level, then approximately half the energy requirements in 23 years’ time will have to be alternative energy. The burgeoning energy requirements of the developing countries have not yet been included in these considerations. To date, these countries have been reluctant to consider greenhouse reductions saying that they have a right to develop without hindrance, and in any case the developed countries are responsible for most of the present burden of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is not difficult to calculate therefore that

there is no future for civilization in the present cultural maladaptation to the growth economy .

Sustainable economic growth is an oxymoron . These arguments about doubling time apply to all

other environmental calculations. Other forms of pollution that arise from the consumer society will also increase proportionally to growth, the human and animal wastes, mercury, the persistent organic pollutants, and so on. And even if some of these are ameliorated, others will arise from the activities of

the burgeoning population. Science tells us that we have already exceeded the capacity of the earth to detoxify

these.

In advocating a no-growth economy it has been shown in many studies that beyond the basic

needs of health, nutrition, shelter, and cultural activity, which can be provided with much less income than

Westerners presently enjoy, there is little correlation between wealth and happiness or well-being. A no-

growth economy4 would supply the essentials for life and happiness. Human and economic activity fuelling the consumer market would be severely curtailed and the resources redeployed to truly sustainable enterprises, basic care and repair of the

environment, conservation of energy, and the manufacture of items and systems that support these needs. The standard of living as measured at present (again by flawed criteria) will fall, but there may be no alternative . The fundamental question is how can a transition be made under a liberal democracy that has consumerism and a free market as its lifeblood?

Collapse is inevitable and growth causes all of their impacts

Trainer, ’11 (Ted, Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Work at the University of New South Wales, “Why the world can't rely on renewable energy if we want to remain affluent,” http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=12070, bgm)

The point is, there isn’t one. If the question is how can we provide the energy to keep going the energy-intensive, growth and market driven societies we have in rich countries today, let alone to enable the

continuous and limitless pursuit of ever-increasing affluent living standards, then the answer is that it cannot be done. For

decades many of us have been trying to get the mainstream to grasp that this quest is suicidal .   We Australians now have a productive land footprint that is ten times as big as would be possible for all people in 2050. It is precisely the mania for affluence and ever-greater levels of production, consumption and GDP that is causing all the big global problems, most obviously resource depletion, Third World deprivation, the greenhouse problem, the destruction of the environment, and international conflict.   Such a society cannot be fixed. For instance you cannot reform a growth-based society so that it can have a zero growth economy, let alone one producing at a small fraction of present levels. Sustainability is not achievable without scrapping and replacing several of the fundamental structures of this society . For fifty years mainstream society has refused to face up to this case, and their delusion has been strongly reinforced by the unexamined faith that renewable energy can be substituted for carbon fuels and enable us all to go on pursuing affluence and growth.

A2: Space

The logic of growth will follow us to space – we will destroy our space ecosystems

Tort, ’05 (Julien, UNESCO, Working paper for the Ethical Working Group on Astrobiology and Planetary Protection of ESA (EWG) July 28, 2005“Exploration and Exploitation: Lessons Learnt from the Renaissance for Space Conquest” http://portal.unesco.org/shs/en/ev.php-URL_ID=6195&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=-465.html)

The scenario in which extraterrestrial room is used as a response to the degradation of the terrestrial environment also leads us to the second question that may be asked when considering the parallel between the conquest of the West and the exploration of space. While the possibility of colonizing celestial bodies may seem distant, it diverts attention from terrestrial issues in a very real way. The paradigm of the accumulation of Capital is profoundly bound to the pollution and the overexploitation of natural resources. Likening space exploration to the discovery of America may then be misleading and dangerous. There is –most probably— no new earth to be discovered through space conquest and it is, so far, unlikely that any relief can come from outer space for environmental pain. Furthermore, even if the possibility of human settlements on other celestial bodies was likely, would it still be right to neglect the terrestrial environment, with the idea that we can go and live elsewhere when we are done with this specific planet (again a scenario that science fiction likes: see for

example the end of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation)? In a way, the presentation of space as a new area for conquest and expansion tends to deny that the model of the limitless exploitation of natural resources is facing a crisis.

Nothing changes in space – profit motive makes resource exploitation inevitable and unquestioned under their framework

Tort, ’05 (Julien, UNESCO, Working paper for the Ethical Working Group on Astrobiology and Planetary Protection of ESA (EWG) July 28, 2005“Exploration and Exploitation: Lessons Learnt from the Renaissance for Space Conquest” http://portal.unesco.org/shs/en/ev.php-URL_ID=6195&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=-465.html)

The importance of the model of the first pioneers in the justification of space exploration should not be neglected, and it seems that claiming to justify space exploration only by its scientific benefits is contrary to the facts. In particular, serious studies about the economic interest of the exploitation of space resources could give an idea of what is really at stake in the exploration of the Moon and Mars. It is indeed necessary to have an idea of what could be expected in the absence of any regulation or guideline if we want to foster an exploration of outer space that would be beneficial to all [hu] mankind. If there is any interest –economic or political - in going to Mars and doing something there, then there will be competition between potential interested parties, and any ethical consideration of Mars exploration should take this aspect under consideration. In this perspective,

the possible discovery of non-intelligent life on Mars would raise the issue of the possible exploitation of Martian resources and even the issue of the possible exploitation of this lifeform. The consideration of space as a new resource should also be handled with care, for it tends to divert attention from the need to take care of our own planet and its limited resources. It should be recalled that Earth is our natural environment and that the idea that human beings will adapt in space or on another planet is at best hypothetical and in any case an optimistic assumption. More generally, the effect of space conquest on our relationship to our own planet should be taken into account in “space ethics”.

No colonization – reproduction and tech

Bloxham, ’11 (Andy Bloxham, more like Bloxham and eggs if you ask me, assistant editor for The Telegraph (UK), “Sex in space tough, says Nasa,” The Telegraph, 2/14, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/8322776/Sex-in-space-tough-says-Nasa.html, bgm)

Researchers at the agency's Ames Research Centre in California found that without effective shielding on

spacecraft, powerful proton particles would probably sterilise any female embryo conceived in deep space. They also concluded that male fertility was likely to be negatively affected, with the particles damaging the sperm count. Given that travel to distant planets is likely to take decades, centuries or longer, this could make any mission to colonise other environments a non-starter. The scientists noted that space shield technology is currently not sufficiently advanced to offer enough protection from this type of radiation. Dr Tore Straume, a radiation biophysicist at the centre, said: "The present shielding capabilities would probably preclude having a pregnancy transited to Mars."The DNA which manages the development of all the cells in the body is particularly susceptible to the kinds of radiation found in space. Studies on animals have shown that exposure to ionising radiation can kills egg cells in a female foetus as far on as the second or third trimester . Dr Straume added: "One would have to be very protective of those cells during gestation, during pregnancy, to make sure that the female didn't become sterile so they could continue the colony."

A2: Democracy

Capitalism makes democracy impossible – corporations are put before the people

Kovel, ’02 (Joel, Professor of Social Studies at Bard College, The Enemy of Nature, p. 74-76)

Global capitalism exists along a continuum extending from the good grey Alan Greenspan and his Federal Reserve Bank to the most vicious Russian mobster and Colombian drug lord. All are mandated by the great force field and under its spell. In a recent stunning article, the French commentator Christian de Brie describes ‘a coherent system closely linked to the expansion of modern capitalism and based on an association of three partners: governments, transnational corporations and mafias ... . [in which] financial crime is first and foremost a market, thriving and structured, ruled by supply and demand’. Each partner needs the other, even if the need must be vigorously denied. In short, an honest look at the system takes us light years from the glowing promises of neoliberalism. Contrary to the official imagery, the actual corporate culture breeds a swarm of pathogens: restrictive practices, cartels, abuse of dominant position, dumping, forced sales, insider dealing and speculation, takeovers and dismembering of competitors, fraudulent balance sheets, rigging of accounts and transfer prices, the use of offshore subsidiaries and shell companies to avoid and evade tax, embezzlement of public funds, bogus contracts, corruption and backhanders, unjust enrichment and abuse of corporate assets, surveillance and spying, blackmail and betrayal, disregard for regulations on employment rights and trade union freedoms, health and safety, social security, pollution and the environment. Not to mention what goes on in the world’s growing number of free zones, including those in Europe and in France, where the ordinary rule of law does not apply, especially in social, tax and financial matters. An incredible plunder, the full extent of which will never be known’ arises, conditioned on one side by state connivance, and on the other by seepage into the underworld. Throughout the planet, but especially in the South, ‘workers have to contend with thugs hired by the bosses, blackleg trade unions, strike-breakers, private police and death squads’. There is a hidden synergy, in sum, between the shady practices of corporate capital and the organized criminality of gangsterdom: banks and big business are keen to get their hands on the proceeds —laundered — of organised crime. Apart from the traditional activities of drugs, racketeering, kidnappings, gambling, procuring (women and children), smuggling (alcohol, tobacco, medicines), armed robbery, counterfeiting and bogus invoicing, tax evasion and misappropriation of public funds, new markets are also flourishing. These include smuggling illegal labour and refugees, computer piracy, trafficking in works of art and antiquities, in stolen cars and parts, in protected species and human organs, forgery trafficking in arms toxic waste and nuclear products, etc. Occasionally a sign of this appears in some scandal over campaign contributions, in the washing ashore of illegal immigrants from China, or of a submarine purchased by the Russian mafia from disaffected naval officers. There will never be a complete reckoning of the iceberg beneath this tip, although its magnitude can be estimated as an annual ‘gross criminal product’ of one trillion dollars.30 Setting aside the moral

implications, the presence of this vast shadowland signifies capitalism’s fundamental uncontrollability, and therefore its inability to overcome its crises of ecology and democracy . From this standpoint, the ecological crisis is the effect of globalization viewed from the standpoint of ecosystems, as great waves of capital batter against and erode ecological defences. Similarly, democracy, and not government, is the great victim of globalization. As global capital works its way, the popular will is increasingly disregarded in the effort to squeeze ever more capital out of the system. In the process, the instruments of global capital begin to take on political functions, breaking down local jurisdictions and constituting themselves as a kind of world governing body. But the regime lacks what normal states, even despotic ones, require, namely, some means of legitimation. In the post-aristocratic, post-theocratic world of modernity, democratic advances, even the pseudo-democracy that passes for normal these days, are the

necessary glue that holds societies together. Capital’s inability to furnish this as it moves toward its realization in the global society has made its operation increasingly look like a global coup d’etat. This is the great political contradiction of our time, and drives the present surge of resistance.

Capitalism encourages rule by economic elites, not democracy

Reich, ’07 (Robert B., former Harvard University professor, “How capitalism is killing democracy,” Foreign Policy, September-October, accessed online using General OneFile, 07-17-08)

Why has capitalism succeeded while democracy has steadily weakened? Democracy has become enfeebled largely because companies, in intensifying competition for global consumers and investors, have invested ever greater sums in lobbying, public relations, and even bribes and kickbacks , seeking laws that give them a competitive advantage over their rivals. The result is an arms race for political influence that is drowning out the voices of average citizens. In the United States, for example, the fights that preoccupy Congress, those that consume weeks or months of congressional staff time, are typically contests between competing companies or industries. While corporations are increasingly writing their own rules, they are also being entrusted with a kind of social responsibility or morality. Politicians praise companies for acting "responsibly" or condemn them for not doing so. Yet the purpose of capitalism is to get great deals for consumers and investors. Corporate executives are not authorized by anyone--least of all by their investors--to balance profits against the public good. Nor do they have any expertise in making such moral calculations. Democracy is supposed to represent the public in drawing such lines. And the message that companies are moral beings with social responsibilities diverts public attention from the task of establishing such laws and rules in the first place. It is much the same with what passes for corporate charity. Under today's intensely competitive form of global capitalism, companies donate money to good causes only to the extent the donation has public-relations value, thereby boosting the bottom line. But shareholders do not invest in firms expecting the money to be used for charitable purposes. They invest to earn high returns. Shareholders who wish to be charitable would, presumably, make donations to charities of their own choosing in amounts they decide for themselves. The larger danger is that these conspicuous displays of corporate beneficence hoodwink the public into believing corporations have

charitable impulses that can be relied on in a pinch. By pretending that the economic success corporations enjoy saddles them with particular social duties only serves to distract the public from democracy's responsibility to set the rules of the game and thereby protect the common good . The only way for the citizens in us to trump the consumers in us is through laws and rules that make our purchases and investments social choices as well as personal ones. A change in labor laws making it easier for employees to organize and negotiate better terms, for example, might increase the price of products and services. My inner consumer won't like that very much, but the citizen in me might think it a fair price to pay. A small transfer tax on sales of stock, to slow the movement of capital ever so slightly, might give communities a bit more time to adapt to changing circumstances. The return on my retirement fund might go down by a small fraction, but the citizen in me thinks it worth the price. Extended unemployment insurance combined with wage insurance and job training could ease the pain for workers caught in the downdrafts of globalization. Let us be clear: The purpose of democracy is to accomplish ends we cannot achieve as individuals. But democracy cannot fulfill this role when companies use politics to advance or maintain their competitive standing, or when they appear to take on social responsibilities that they have no real

capacity or authority to fulfill. That leaves societies unable to address the tradeoffs between economic growth and social problems such as job insecurity, widening inequality, and climate change. As a result, consumer and investor interests almost invariably trump common concerns.

A2: Disease

Cap makes global pandemics inevitable---causes extinction

Krepinevich 9 (Andrew, President of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and Distinguished Visiting Professor @ George Mason's School of Public Policy, Congressional Consultant on Military Affairs, PhD Harvard, "7 Deadly Scenarios," February)

Over the past several decades the world has experience a wave of globalization, far surpassing the great surge that swept over the globe in the years leading up to World War I. The growth of the world economy---facilitated by lower trade barriers, global supply chains, international financial networks, and global communication---has yielded many benefits, including increased wealth and great economic efficiencies. It has also yielded an unprecedented level of mobility---in the movement of capital, goods, and services, in people (including migration) , and last but not least, in disease. For nearly a century the world has been spared the specter of mass deaths induced by a killer disease. The last great global pandemic occurred at the end of World War I, when the misnamed Spanish influenza killed an estimated 20 million people---including nearly 700,000 Americans---before it ran its course. To a significant degree, the spread of influenza was aided and abetted by the world war, which saw the armed forces of many nations on the move from their home countries to other parts of the world. Even then, however, human mobility and trade were far more constrained than they are today, when every year millions of passengers pass through U.S. airports alone. There have been several canaries in humanity's mine shaft, warning of impending disaster. According to the scientific community, the world has been overdue for some form of pandemic. On occasions too numerous to count, members of the medical profession have stated that "it is not a matter of if such an event will occur, but when." As the World Health Organization met in Geneva in the summer of 2009, health officials were citing the "near-misses" the world had recently experienced with the AIDS virus, tuberculosis, and avian flu (commonly referred to as bird flu), and warned that, absent a major effort to improve the globe's public health system, humanity's good fortune could not---and would not---last. But the issue has to struggle to get on the global agenda. Here in America the 2008 presidential campaign (which began in early 2007) was dominated by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the broader problem of militant Islam, rising energy prices, a falling economy, and growing concerns about global warming. Neither public health concerns over a pandemic nor the country's illegal alien problem appeared prominently on the political radar screen. Call them the "stealth" issues---the ones that we failed to detect.

AFF

Perm – Reformism

PERM – do both - Reformism from with-in solves

Dixon 1 – Activist and founding member of Direct Action Network Summer, Chris, “Reflections on Privilege, Reformism, and Activism”, Online

To bolster his critique of 'reformism,' for instance, he critically cites one of the examples in my essay: demanding

authentic we need revolutionary strategy that links diverse, everyday struggles and demands to long-term radical objectives, without sacrificing either. Of course, this isn't to say that every so-called 'progressive' ballot initiative or organizing campaign is necessarily radical or strategic. Reforms are not all created equal. But some can fundamentally s hake systems of power, leading to enlarged gains and greater space for further advances. Andre Gorz, in his seminal book Strategy for Labor, refers to these as "non-reformist" or "structural" reforms. He contends, "a struggle for non-reformist reforms--for anti-capitalist reforms--is one which does not base its validity and its right to exist on capitalist needs, criteria, and

rationales. A non-reformist reform is determined not in terms of what can be, but what should be." Look to history for examples: the end of slavery, the eight-hour workday, desegregation. All were born from long, hard struggles , and none were endpoints. Yet they all struck at the foundations of power (in these cases, the state, white supremacy, and capitalism), and in the process, they created new prospects for revolutionary change. Now consider contemporary struggles: amnesty for undocumented immigrants, socialized health care, expansive environmental protections, indigenous sovereignty. These and many more are arguably non-reformist

reforms as well. None will single-handedly dismantle cap italism or other systems of power, but each has the potential to escalate struggles and sharpen social contradictions. And we shouldn't misinterpret these efforts as simply meliorative incrementalism, making 'adjustments' to a fundamentally flawed system.

Cap Inevitable

alt doesn’t solve - Capitalism is inevitable—reforms, not revolution, are the only option.

Wilson, 2000 – Editor and Publisher of Illinois Academe – 2000 (John K. Wilson, “How the Left can Win Arguments and Influence People” p. 15- 16)

Ca pitalism is far too ingrained in American life to eliminate . If you go into the most impoverished areas of America, you will find that the people who live there are not seeking government control over factories or even more social welfare programs; they're hoping, usually in vain, for a fair chance to share in the capitalist wealth. The poor do not pray for socialism-they strive to be a part of the capitalist system . They want jobs, they want to start businesses, and they want to make money and be successful. What's wrong with America is not capitalism as a system but capitalism as a religion. We worship the accumulation of wealth and treat the horrible inequality between rich and poor as if it were an act of God. Worst of all, we allow the government to exacerbate the financial divide by favoring the wealthy: go anywhere in America, and compare a rich suburb with a poor town-the city services, schools, parks, and practically everything else will be better financed in the place populated by rich people. The aim is not to overthrow capitalism but to overhaul it. Give it a social-justice tune-up , make it more efficient, get the economic engine to hit on all cylinders for everybody, and stop putting out so many environmentally hazardous substances. To some people, this goal means selling out leftist ideals for the sake of capitalism. But the right thrives on having an ineffective opposition. The Revolutionary Communist Party helps stabilize the "free market" capitalist system by making it seem as if the only alternative to free-market capitalism is a return to Stalinism. Prospective activists for change are instead channeled into pointless discussions about the revolutionary potential of the proletariat. Instead of working to persuade people to accept progressive ideas, the far left talks to itself (which may be a blessing, given the way it communicates) and tries to sell copies of the Socialist Worker to an uninterested public.

No Root Cause

No root cause

Larrivee 10— PF ECONOMICS AT MOUNT ST MARY’S UNIVERSITY – MASTERS FROM THE HARVARD KENNEDY SCHOOL AND PHD IN ECONOMICS FROM WISCONSIN, 10 [JOHN, A FRAMEWORK FOR THE MORAL ANALYSIS OF MARKETS, 10/1, http://www.teacheconomicfreedom.org/files/larrivee-paper-1.pdf]

The Second Focal Point: Moral, Social, and Cultural Issues of Capitalism Logical errors abound in

critical commentary on capitalism. Some critics observe a problem and conclude: “ I see X in our society. We have a capitalist economy. Therefore capitalism causes X.” They draw their conclusion by looking at a phenomenon as it appears only in one system. Others merely follow a host of popular theories according to which capitalism is

particularly bad. 6 The solution to such flawed reasoning is to be comprehensive, to look at the good and bad, in market and non-market systems. Thus the following section considers a number of issues—greed, selfishness and human relationships, honesty and truth, alienation and work satisfaction, moral decay, and religious participation—that have often been

associated with capitalism, but have also been problematic in other systems and usually in more extreme form. I conclude with some evidence for the view that markets foster (at least some) virtues rather than undermining them. My purpose is not to smear communism or to make the

simplistic argument that “capitalism isn’t so bad because other systems have problems too.” The critical point is that certain people thought various social ills resulted from capitalism, and on this basis they took action to establish alternative

economic systems to solve the problems they had identified. That they

failed to solve the problems , and in fact exacerbated them while also creating new

problems, implies that capitalism itself wasn’t the cause of the problems in the first place, at least not to the degree theorized.

Alt Causes Violence

Alt causes violence

Pinker ’11 (Steven, the Economist, The violent dangers of ideology; The Q&A: Steven Pinker, Proquest, jj)

You equate Marxist ideology with violence in the book. Do you think that capitalist values have contributed to the decline of violence? I think that communism was a major force for violence for more than 100 years, because it was built into its ideology that progress comes through class struggle, often violent . It led to the widespread belief that the only way to achieve justice was to hurry this dialectical process along, and allow the oppressed working classes to carry out their struggle against their bourgeois

oppressors. However much we might deplore the profit motive, or consumerist values, if everyone

just wants iPods we would probably be better off than if they wanted class revolution.

Link TurnThe plan reverses capitalist domination through surveillance Rotering ’13 (Frank Rotering is an independent economic and political thinker who lives near Vancouver, Canada.  He has no affiliation with any university or organization, and is therefore free to address the ecological crisis without institutional or intellectual restrictions.  “NSA Surveillance and Capitalist Power” Contrationism.org http://contractionism.org/2013/11/nsa-surveillance-and-capitalist-power-2/ 7-14-15)

In May, 2013 Edward Snowden, a contractor working with the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), leaked information about the agency’s surveillance programs

through Glenn Greenwald of the British newspaper The Guardian. Unfortunately, virtually all supporters of these disclosures have framed this story in a manner that reflects the ruling-class perspective. This article identifies the political falsehoods in this framing and presents the contractionary view of surveillance. My comments are based on the analysis of capitalist power in chapter three of Contractionary Revolution. Please consult this book for details on the ideas presented. From various articles and videos featuring the editors of cooperating newspapers[1] it appears that the following is the standard interpretation of the NSA disclosures among sympathetic observers: Terrorism is a serious threat to the United States; The US government justifiably conducts surveillance to counter this threat; The need for surveillance must be balanced against Constitutional rights, which protect personal privacy and allow for political protests and investigative journalism; The boundary between surveillance and rights must be chosen by the populace; Surveillance within this boundary must be carefully regulated to prevent the unauthorized use of collected data. Although this interpretation has some commendable aspects, its central feature is a political fiction that destroys the real meaning of the disclosures.

Briefly stated, surveillance is primarily about political power, not security threats. Any story that revolves around threats while ignoring power is both false and misleading . To grasp the deceptive nature of the standard interpretation

it is necessary to understand how power is exercised in a capitalist society, and how surveillance fits into this picture. The key point regarding power is that the conventional claim about popular sovereignty is false. In its day-to-day operations a capitalist society is ruled not by the populace through its government, but by the capitalist class through its state. Contractionism calls this deception the democratic illusion.

The two primary methods used to exercise power are legitimacy and coercion. Legitimacy refers to voluntary support for capitalist rule. It derives from the system’s success in satisfying human desires and from the manipulation of public opinion . Coercion refers to the physical and psychological measures used to neutralize those who threaten, or could potentially threaten, the ruling class . A critical problem for any ruling class is how to allocate its scarce resources to these two methods so as to its maximize social control. Assume, for example, that legitimacy could be strengthened by increasing the incomes of selected groups or by intensifying the propaganda

delivered by the media. Which of these two techniques will be more effective under current conditions? Coercion is normally applied selectively, so the most dangerous targets must be identified . Which individual and groups are these at the present time? The role of surveillance is to gather detailed information about the populace so that questions such as these can be reliably answered.

Surveillance can thus be defined as the collection of information about the populace by the state for the purpose of maximizing social control at the lowest possible cost. With this theoretical overview in place it is possible

to critically evaluate the standard interpretation. The initial assertion – that terrorism seriously threatens the US – is a fabrication. This claim

relies heavily on the events of 9/11, but numerous scientists, engineers, architects, and other analysts have decisively refuted the official story.[2] The 9/11 attacks were almost certainly a false-flag operation: a strike by internal actors that was blamed on external perpetrators. A

central purpose of this operation was to create a new enemy to replace the defunct communists, and a central purpose of this new enemy was to justify surveillance. To see this clearly, imagine that communism had not been replaced, and that the NSA disclosures had therefore occurred in the absence of a terrifying foe. How would the massive surveillance have been explained? With the terrorism

cover story in place, Snowden’s revelations could be ascribed to the over-zealous protection of national security. Without this story, the US ruling class would have been scrambling for an appropriate rationale, and could now be facing a serious challenge to its dominance. The puzzling question is why 9/11 occurred so late. The Soviet Union crumbled in the early 1990s, taking the communist threat with it. The US ruling class thus lacked a credible cover story, and was dangerously exposed, for almost a decade. Possibly it took that long for this class to formulate a workable alternative, or perhaps it judged that an immediate transition to the terrorist threat would arouse troublesome suspicions among the system’s

critics. The second assertion – that terrorism justifies government surveillance – is obviously false given the virtual absence of a terrorist threat . The deception here is more subtle: that it is the government and not the state that conducts surveillance. This highlights a grievous error in political analysis, one made by progressives and conservatives alike. To

explain, government refers to the people’s elected representatives, who formally establish laws and policies but lack political power. The state, on the other hand, refers to the administrative structures that regulate a society’s operations in the interests of its ruling class. As noted above, the state is where real power normally resides. In typical political discussions, government and state are conflated, either by referring to the state as “government agencies” or by assuming that the state faithfully obeys government dictates. The state, however, is largely independent of government, and will disregard, destabilize, or even overthrow the latter if it persistently thwarts the capitalist will. What makes this error truly egregious in the present context is that the state’s independent role has been repeatedly unmasked. Greenwald reminds us that almost

nobody in the US government was even aware of the NSA’s existence for its first twenty years.[3] Today the situation is largely unchanged. When US Representative Keith Ellison was asked by George Stephanopoulos what he knew about the NSA programs, he answered, “Almost nothing.”[4] Chris Huhne, a former cabinet minister in the UK, admitted recently that neither the cabinet nor the national security council was informed about the comprehensive surveillance being carried out by Britain’s NSA equivalent, the GCHQ.[5] The supremacy of state over government has been revealed so frequently that a constant media effort is required to keep the fig leaf in place. Thus a New York Times editorial about the NSA disclosures repeatedly ascribed

surveillance to the US government. One example, which includes the security canard for good measure: “The issue is not whether the government should vigorously pursue terrorists. The question is whether the security goals can be achieved by less-intrusive or sweeping means, without trampling on democratic freedoms and basic rights.”[6] Don’t be fooled by the authoritative source and liberal sentiments – this is propaganda . The last three assertions of the standard

interpretation, like the second, are based on the false premise of a serious terrorist threat . To meaningfully address them I must therefore broaden my scope beyond capitalist surveillance, which is justified on this basis. Specifically, consider what will happen when contractionists achieve their revolutionary goal in a country like Canada and replace the capitalist class as society’s ruling group. Will a contractionary Canada conduct surveillance on its citizens?

Yes, it will. Surveillance is not a capitalist invention, but an inescapable component of political power . In any society the ruling group has current or potential opponents who must be neutralized if power is to be maintained. To deny this is to deny the cold-blooded realities

of the ruler-ruled relationship. In the contractionary context, assertions #3 and #5 are valuable principles that will undoubtedly be adopted in some form: the need for surveillance will be balanced against fundamental rights, and the collected information will be stringently regulated to prevent unauthorized use. Assertion #4, however, is a logical impossibility. The populace, which is being

scrutinized, cannot choose the boundaries on this scrutiny. If this were permitted, the boundary could be set to zero surveillance, and power would dissolve. The actual challenge for the populace is to struggle agains t the boundaries set by the ruling group – that is, to expand the range of democratic rights through legal initiatives, protest rallies, and the like. It is also possible to utilize the fact that this assertion entails

a logical contradiction. Whenever such a choice is offered by the ruling group, we can be sure that power is being mystified, that the populace is being manipulated. This is true today with respect to capitalist surveillance, and it will be true tomorrow if contractionary rulers concoct a similar story. Glenn Greenwald consistently dismisses terrorism as the real reason for surveillance, which means that he rejects the standard interpretation. However, his analysis remains well within the scope of mainstream politics. He does not question the official 9/11 story, he fully accepts the government-state conflation, and he offers only a vague account of capitalist power. Contractionists should therefore treat his journalism with caution. He is unquestionably a hero for his role in the NSA disclosures, but he should be seen as a courageous fighter for democratic rights, not as a political analyst who can help us achieve revolutionary change. Skepticism is also warranted when apparently radical analysts speak to us through the capitalist media. Seumus Milne, for example, is a Guardian columnist whose commentary frequently skirts the limits of permissible thought. In one of his columns he exploited the fact that NSA surveillance evidently has two subsidiary aims: diplomatic advantage for the US state and commercial advantage for US corporations. Milne distanced himself from the standard interpretation by rejecting terrorism as the surveillance rationale. In identifying the true rationale, however, he cited the subsidiary aims but ignored the central purpose of social control. In his words: “… much of what NSA and GCHQ (virtually one organisation) are up to has nothing to do with terrorism or security at all, but … the exercise of naked state power to gain political and economic advantage.” This might be called high-grade propaganda. It placates advanced progressives who have seen through the terrorism/security subterfuge, but it neglects the role of surveillance in maintaining the prevailing order. My suggested motto for Milne and those like him: “To the political brink, but never beyond”. Let me

briefly address the significance of the disclosures and of the surveillance itself. The disclosures are important because they provide confirmation of widespread NSA surveillance and details on how it is being conducted. Opponents of intrusive surveillance are thus in a better position to defend democratic freedoms. The disclosures are also important because they have made the populace aware that they are being carefully monitored. To date this has not resulted in widespread outrage because capitalism’s control of the public mind is almost total and its legitimacy is therefore high. But things change, and contractionary movements will likely be able to use this expanded awareness in the future to shift legitimacy to themselves. The significance of the NSA surveillance itself is related to the fact that it is occurring as the biosphere is rapidly degrading and ecological collapse has become a frightening possibility. The aim of the contractionary movement is to initiate revolutions that will prevent this collapse. Pervasive surveillance by the NSA and similar agencies could retard or prevent these revolutions, and this is really what is at stake here. As with other aspects of capitalist social control, surveillance

must be aggressively resisted so that the expansionary present can be quickly transformed into the contractionary future. This momentous transition is humankind’s only chance to avoid an apocalyptic fate.

Curtailing surveillance causes a decline in the capitalist economy Zuboff ’15 (Shoshana Zuboff Professor (retired) Harvard Business School http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2594754 April 4th 2015, “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization” Social Science Research Network 6-14-15)

You have probably noticed it already. There is a strange logic at the heart of the modern tech industry. The goal of many new tech startups is not to produce products or services for which consumers are willing to pay. Instead, the goal is create a digital platform or hub that will capture information from as many users as possible — to grab as many ‘eyeballs’ as you can. This information can then be analysed, repackaged and monetised in various ways. The appetite for this information-capture and analysis seems to be insatiable, with ever increasing

volumes of information being extracted and analysed from an ever-expanding array of data-monitoring technologies. The famous Harvard business theorist Shoshana Zuboff refers to this phenomenon as surveillance capitalism and she believes that it has its own internal

‘logic’ that we need to carefully and critically assess. The word ‘logic’ is somewhat obscure in this context. To me, logic is the study of the rules of inference and argumentation. To Zuboff, it means something more like the structural requirements and underlying principles of a particular social institution — in this instance the

institutions of surveillance capitalism. But there’s no sense in getting hung up about the word. The important thing is to understand the phenomenon. And that’s what I want to do in this post. I want to analyse Zuboff’s characterisation and assessment of the logic of surveillance capitalism. That assessment is almost entirely negative in nature, occasionally hyperbolically so, but contains some genuinely provocative insights. This is marred by the fact that Zuboff’s writings are esoteric and not always enjoyable to read. This is largely due to her opaque use of language. I’m going to try to simplify and repackage what she has to say here. Zuboff identifies four key features in the logic of surveillance capitalism. In doing so, she explicitly follows the four key features identified by Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian. These four features are: (i) the drive toward more and more data extraction and analysis; (ii) the development of new contractual forms using computer-monitoring and automation; (iii) the desire to personalise and customise the services offered to users of digital platforms; and (iv) the use of the technological infrastructure to carry out continual experiments on its users and consumers. Each of these four features has important social repercussions. Let’s look at them in more depth. 1. Data Extraction and Analysis The first feature of surveillance capitalism

is probably the most obvious. It is the insatiable appetite for data extraction and analysis. This what many refer to under the rubric of ‘big data’ and what people worry

about when they worry about data protection and privacy. Zuboff says that there are two things you need to understand about this aspect of surveillance capitalism. First, you need to understand the sources of the data, i.e. what it is

that makes it fair to refer to this as the era of ‘big data’. There are several such sources, all of which feed into ever-increasing datasets, that are far beyond the ability of a human being to comprehend. The most obvious source of data is the data from computer- mediated transactions. The infrastructure of modern computing is such that every computer-mediated transaction is recorded and logged. This means that there is rich set of transaction-related data to be mined. In addition to this, there is the rise of the so-called internet of things, or internet of everything. This is the world being inaugurated by the

creation of smart devices that can be attached to every physical object in the world, and can be used to record and upload data from those objects. Think about the computers in cars, lawnmowers, thermostats, wristwatches, washing machines and so on. Each one of these devices represents an opportunity for more data to be fed to the institutions of surveillance capitalism. On top of that there are the large datasets kept by governments and other bureaucratic agencies that have been digitised and linked to the internet, and the vast array of private and personal surveillance equipment. Virtually

everything can now be used as a datasource for surveillance capitalism. What’s more, the ubiquity of data-monitoring is often deliberately hidden or

‘hidden in plain sight’. People simply do not realise how often, or how easy it is, for their personal data to be collected by the institutions of surveillance capitalism. Second, you need to understand the relationship between the data-extracting companies, like Google, and the users of their services.

The relationship is asymmetric and characterised by formal indifference and functional independence. Each of these features needs to be unpacked. The asymmetry in the relationship is obvious. The data is often extracted in the absence of any formal consent or dialogue. Indeed, companies like Google seem to have adopted an ‘extract first, ask later’ attitude. The full

extent of data extraction is often not revealed until there is some scandal or leak . This was certainly true of the personal data

about wi-fi networks extracted by Google’s Street View project. The formal indifference in the relationship concerns Google’s attitude toward the content of the data it extracts. Google isn’t particularly discriminating in what it

collects: it collects everything it can and finds out uses for it later. Finally, the functional independence arises from the economic use to which the extracted data is

put. Big data companies like Google typically do not rely on their users for money. Rather, they use the information extracted as a commodity they can sell to advertisers. The users are the product, not the customers. It is worth

dwelling on this functional independence for a moment. As Zuboff sees it, this feature of surveillance capitalism constitutes an interesting break from the model of the 20th century corporation. As set out in the work of economists like Berle and Means, the 20th century firm was characterised by a number of mutual

interdependencies between its employees, its shareholders and its customers. Zuboff uses the example of the car-manufacturing businesses that dominated American in the mid-20th century. These companies relied on large and stable networks of employees and consumers (often one and the same people) for their profitability and functionality. As a result, they worked hard to establish durable careers for their employees and long-term relationships with their

customers. It is not clear that surveillance companies like Google are doing the same thing. They do not rely on their primary users for profitability and often do not rely on human workers to manage their core services. Zuboff thinks that this is reflected in the fact that the leading tech companies are far more profitable than the car-manufacturers ever were, while employing far fewer people. For what it’s worth, I fear that Zuboff may be glorifying the reality of the 20th century firm, and ignoring the fact that many of Google’s customers (and

Facebook’s and Twitter’s) are also primary users. So there are some interdependencies at play. But it might be fair to say that the interdependencies have been severely attenuated by the infrastructure of surveillance capitalism. Companies really do require fewer employees, with less stable careers; and there is not the same one-to-one relationship between service users and customers. One final point about data extraction and analysis. There is an interesting contrast to be made between the type of market envisaged by Varian, and made possible by surveillance capitalism, and the market that was beloved by the libertarian free-marketeers of the 20th century. Hayek’s classic defence of the free market, and attack on the centrally-planned market, was premised on the notion that the information needed to make sensible economic decisions was too localised and diffuse. It could not be known by any single organisation or institution. In a sense, the totality of the market was unknowable. But surveillance capitalism casts this into doubt. The totality of the market may be knowable. The implications of this for the management of the economy could be quite interesting. 2. New Contractual Forms Whereas data extraction and analysis are obvious features of surveillance capitalism, the other three features are slightly less so. The first of these, and arguably the most interesting, is the

new forms of contractual monitoring and enforcement that are made possible by the infrastructures of surveillance capitalism. These infrastructures allow for real-time monitoring of contractual performance. They also allow for real-time enforcement. You will no longer need to go to court to enforce the terms of a contract or terminate a contract due to breach of terms. The

technology allows you to do that directly and immediately. Varian himself gives some startling examples (I’m here quoting Zuboff describing Varian’s ideas): New Contractual Monitoring and Enforcement: “If someone stops making monthly car payments, lenders can ‘instruct the vehicular monitoring system not to allow the car to be started and to signal the location where it can be picked up . ’ Insurance companies, he suggests, can rely on similar monitoring

systems to check if customers are driving safely and thus determine whether or not to maintain their insurance or pay claims.” (Zuboff 2015, 81) I can imagine similar scenarios. My health insurance company could use the

monitoring technology in my smartwatch to check to see whether I have been doing my 10,000 steps a day. If I have not, they could refuse to pay for my medical care. All sorts of social values could be embedded into these new

contractual forms. The threat of withdrawing key services or disabling products will be ever-present. Zuboff argues that if such a system of contractual monitoring and enforcement becomes the norm it will represent a radical restructuring of our current political and legal order. Indeed, she argues that it would represent an a-contractual form of social organisation. Contract, as conceived by the classic liberal writers, is a social institution built upon a

foundation of trust, solidarity and rule of law. We know that we cannot monitor and intervene in another person’s life whenever we wish, thus when we rely on them for goods and services, we trust that they will fulfil their promises. We have recourse to the law if they do not. But this recourse to the law is in explicit recognition of the absence of perfect control. Things are very different in Varian’s imagined world. With perpetual contractual monitoring and enforcement, there is no real need for social solidarity and trust . Nor is

there any real need for the residual coercive authority of the law. This is because there is the prospect of perfect control. The state need no longer be a central mediator and residual enforcer of promises. Indeed, there is no real need for

the act of promising anymore: you either conform and receive the good/service; or you don’t and have it withdrawn/disabled. Your promise to conform is irrelevant. This new contractual world has one other important social repercussion. According to Zuboff, under

the traditional contractual model there was a phenomenon of anticipatory conformity. People conformed to their contractual obligations, when they were otherwise unwilling to do so, because they wished to avoid the coercive sanction of the law . In other words,

t hey anticipate d an unpleasant outcome if they failed to conform . She believes that Varian’s model of contractual monitoring and enforcement will

give rise to a distinct phenomenon of automatic conformity. The reality of perpetual monitoring and immediate enforcement will cause people will instinctively and habitually conform. They will no longer choose to conform; they will do so automatically. The scope of human agency will be limited. This is all interesting and

provocative stuff. I certainly share some of Zuboff’s concerns about the type of monitoring and intervention being envisaged by the likes of Varian. And I agree that it could inaugurate a radical restructuring of the political-legal order. But it may not come to that. Just because the current technology enables this type of monitoring and intervention doesn’t necessarily mean that we will allow it do so. The existing political legal order still dominates and has a way of (eventually) applying its principles and protections to all areas of social life. And there is still some scope for human agency to shape the contents of those principles and protections. These combined forces may make it difficult for insurance companies to set-up the kind of contractual system Varian is imagining. That said, I recognise the countervailing social forces that desire that kind of system too. The desire to control and minimise risk being one of them.

There is a battle of ideas to be fought here. 3. Personalisation and Customisation of Services The third structural feature of surveillance capitalism is its move towards the customisation and personalisation of services. Google collects as much personal data as it can in order to tailor what kinds of searches and ads you see when you use its services . Other companies do the same.

Amazon tries to collect information about my book preferences; Netflix tries to collect information about my viewing habits. Both do so in an effort to customise the experience I have when I use their services, recommending

particular products to me on the basis of what they think I like. Zuboff thinks that there is something of a ‘Faustian pact’ at the heart of all this. People trade personal information for the benefits of the personal service. As a result, they have given up privacy for an economic good . Varian thinks

that there is nothing sinister or worrisome in this. He uses the analogy of the doctor-patient or lawyer-client relationships. In both cases, the users of services share highly personal information in exchange for the benefits of the personal service, and no one thinks there is anything wrong about this. Indeed, it is typically viewed as a social good. Giving people the option of trading privacy for these personalised services can improve the quality of their lives. But Zuboff resists this analogy. She argues that something like the doctor-patient relationship is characterised by mutual interdependencies (i.e. the doctor relies on the patient for a living; the patient relies on the doctor to stay alive) and are protected and grounded in the rule of law. The disclosures made by are limited, and subject to an explicit consensual dialogue between the service user and service provider. The relationship between Google and its users is not like this. The attempts at consensual dialogue are minimal (and routinely ignored). It is not characterised by mutual interdependencies; it often operates in a legal vacuum (extract first, ask questions later); and there are no intrinsic limits to the extent of the information being collected. In fact, the explicit goal of companies like Google is to collect so much personal information that they know us better than we know ourselves. The Faustian pact at the heart of all this is that users of these digital services are often unaware of what they have given up. As Zuboff (and others) put it: surveillance capitalism has given rise to a massive redistribution of privacy rights, from private citizens to surveillance companies like Google. Privacy rights are, in effect, decision rights: they confer an entitlement to choose where on the spectrum between complete privacy and total transparency people should lie. Surveillance capitalism has allowed large companies to exercise more and more control over these kinds of decisions. They collect the information and they decide what to do with it. That said, Zuboff thinks people may be waking up to the reality of this Faustian pact. In the aftermath of the Snowden leak, and other data-related scandals, people have become more sensitive to the loss of privacy. Legal regimes (particularly in Europe) seem to be resisting the redistribution of privacy rights. And some companies (like Apple in recent times) seem to be positioning themselves as pro-privacy. 4. Continual Experimentation The final feature of surveillance capitalism is perhaps the most novel. It is the fact that technological infrastructure allows for continual experimentation and intervention into the lives of its users. It is easy to test different digital services using control groups. This is due to the information collected from user profiles, geographical locations, and so on. There are some famous examples of this too. Facebook’s attempt to manipulate the moods of its users being the most widely-known and discussed. Varian argues that continual experimentation of this sort is necessary. Most methods of big data analytics do not allow companies to work out relationships of cause and effect. Instead, they only allow them to identify correlational patterns. Experimental intervention is needed in order to tease apart the causal relationships. This information is useful to companies in their effort to personalise, customise and generally improve the services they are offering. Zuboff gets a little bit mystical at this stage in her analysis. She argues that this sort of continual intervention and experimentation gives rise to reality mining. This is distinct from data-mining. With continual experimentation, all the objects, persons and events in the real world can be captured and altered by the technological infrastructure. Indeed, the distinction between the infrastructure and the external world starts to breakdown. As she puts it herself: Data about the behaviors of bodies, minds and things take their place in a universal real-time dynamic index of smart objects within an infinite global domain of wired things. This new phenomenon produces the possibility of modifying the behaviors of persons and things for profit and control. In the logic of surveillance capitalism there are no individuals, only the world-spanning organism and all the tiniest elements within it. (Zuboff 2015, 85) I’m not sure what Zuboff means by an ‘infinite domain of wired things’. But setting that aside, it seems to me that, in this quote, with its mention of the “world-spanning organism”, Zuboff is claiming that the apotheosis of surveillance capitalism is the construction of a Borg-like society, i.e. a single collective organism that consumes reality with its technological appendages. The possibility and desirability of such a society is something I discussed in an earlier post. 5. Conclusion To sum up, Zuboff thinks that there are four key structural features to surveillance capitalism. These four features constitute its internal logic. Each of the features has important social and political implications. The first feature is the trend toward ever-greater levels of data extraction and analysis. The goal of companies like Google is to extract as much data from you as possible and convert it into a commodity that can be bought and sold. This extractive relationship is asymmetrical and devoid of the mutual interdependencies that characterised 20th century corporations like General Motors. The second feature is the possibility of new forms of contractual monitoring and enforcement. The infrastructure of surveillance capitalism allows for contracts to be monitored and enforced in real-time, without the need for legal recourse. This would constitute a radical break with the classic liberal model of contractual relationship. There would be no need for trust, solidarity and rule of law. The third feature is the desire to personalise and customise digital services, based on the data being extracted from users. Though there may be some benefits to these personal services, the infrastructure that enables them has facilitated a considerable redistribution of privacy rights from ordinary citizens to surveillance capitalist firms like Google and Facebook. The fourth, and final feature, is the capacity for continual experimentation and intervention into the lives of the service users. This gives rise to what Zuboff calls reality-mining, which in its most extreme form will lead to the construction of a ‘world-spanning organism’.

Economic surveillance reduces consumers and workers to commodities made to be exploitedFuchs no date (Christian Fuchs holds the chair in media and communication studies at Uppsala University. His research fields are: social theory, critical theory, critical political economy of media, information, communication, technology; information society theory, information society research. He is editor of tripleC: Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society. ,“Political Economy and Surveillance Theory”, http://fuchs.uti.at/wp-content/MarxSurveillance.pdf)

Following Ogura’s (2006) and Gandy’s (1993) argument that a common characteristic of surveillance is the management of population based on capitalism and/or the nation state, we can distinguish between economic and political surveillance as the two major forms of surveillance. Surveillance by nation states and corporations aims at controlling the behaviour of individuals and groups , i.e. they should be forced to behave or not behave in certain ways because they know that their appearance, movements, location or ideas are or could be watched by surveillance systems (Fuchs, 2008: 267–277). In the case of political

surveillance, individuals are threatened by the potential exercise of organized violence (of the law ) if they behave in certain ways that are undesired , but watched by political actors (such as secret services or the police). In the case of economic surveillance, individuals are threatened by the violence of the market that wants to force them to buy or produce certain commodities and helps reproduce capitalist relations by gathering and using information on their economic behaviour . In such forms of surveillance, violence and heteronomy are the ultimo ratio. Marx neither described all forms of surveillance, nor all kinds of economic surveillance. He especially could not theorize consumer surveillance and the role of information technologies because these developments were not part of the times he lived in. As a result, ‘[c]ontemporary surveillance must be understood in the light of changed circumstances, especially the growing centrality of consumption and the adoption of information technologies’ (Lyon, 1994: 225). Nonetheless, Marx’s framework of political economy describes the cycle of capital accumulation and can be used to systematically locate forms of economic surveillance in the production and circulation process of commodities . The following table discusses the role of surveillance in the capital accumulation process. Six different forms of surveillance are suggested. Table 1 shows that surveillance is a central method of control and discipline in the capital accumulation process. Corporations systematically gather data about applicants, employees, the labour process, private property, consumers and competitors in order to minimize economic risks, discipline workers, increase productivity, circumvent theft, sabotage and protests, control consumers through advertising, and adapt to changing conditions of competition. The overall aim of multiple surveillance methods and technologies is the maximization of profit and the increased exploitation of labour in order to increase the amount of produced surplus value. Capital employs surveillance to control the production and circulation process, and control and discipline the workforce. Economic surveillance helps minimize the risk of making losses and maximize s opportunities for profit s. ‘ Businesses … do this by identifying individuals, who, by virtue of their profiles, ratings or comparative scores, should probably be ignored, avoided or treated with the utmost deference and respect ’ (Gandy, 2003: 30).

Domestic surveillance is used to benefit corporationsPrice 14 - Professor of anthropology and sociology at St. Martin's University (David H., “The New Surveillance Normal: NSA and Corporate Surveillance in the Age of Global Capitalism,” Monthly Review, July/August, 2014, http://search.proquest.com/docview/1543483298?pq-origsite=gscholar, accessed 7/15/15)//TN

The National Security Agency (NSA) document cache released by Edward Snowden reveals a need to re-theorize the role of state and corporate surveillance systems in an age of neoliberal global capitalism. While much remains unknowable to us, we now are in a world where private communications are legible in previously inconceivable ways, ideologies of surveillance are undergoing rapid transformations, and the commodification of metadata (and other surveillance intelligence) transforms privacy. In light of this, we need to consider how the NSA and corporate metadata mining converge to support the interests of capital.∂ This is an age of converging state and corporate surveillance. Like other features of the political economy, these shifts develop with apparent independence of institutional motivations, yet corporate and spy agencies' practices share common appetites for metadata. Snowden's revelations of the NSA's global surveillance programs raises the possibility that the state intelligence apparatus is used for industrial espionage in ways that could unite governmental intelligence and corporate interests-for which there appears to be historical precedent. The convergence of the interests, incentives, and methods of U.S.

intelligence agencies, and the corporate powers they serve, raise questions about the ways that the NSA and CIA fulfill their roles, which have been described by former CIA agent Philip Agee as: "the secret police of U.S. capitalism, plugging up leaks in the political dam night and day so that shareholders of U.S. companies operating in poor countries can continue enjoying the rip-off."1∂ There is a long history in the United States of overwhelming public opposition to new forms of electronic surveillance. Police, prosecutors, and spy agencies have recurrently used public crises-ranging from the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, wars, claimed threats of organized crime and terror attacks, to marshal expanded state surveillance powers.2 During the two decades preceding the 9/11 terror attacks, Congress periodically considered developing legislation establishing rights of privacy; but even in the pre-Internet age, corporate interests scoffed at the need for any such protections. Pre-2001 critiques of electronic-surveillance focused on privacy rights and threats to boundaries between individuals, corporations, and the state; what would later be known as metadata collection were then broadly understood as violating shared notions of privacy, and as exposing the scaffolding of a police state or a corporate panopticon inhabited by consumers living in a George Tooker painting.∂ The rapid shifts in U.S. attitudes favoring expanded domestic intelligence powers following 9/11 were significant. In the summer of 2001, distrust of the FBI and other surveillance agencies had reached one of its highest historical levels. Decades of longitudinal survey data collected by the Justice Department establish longstanding U.S. opposition to wiretaps; disapproval levels fluctuated between 70-80 percent during the thirty years preceding 2001.3 But a December 2001 New York Times poll suddenly found only 44 percent of respondents believed widespread governmental wiretaps "would violate American's rights."4∂ Public fears in the post-9/11 period reduced concerns of historical abuses by law enforcement and intelligence agencies; and the rapid adoption of the PATRIOT Act precluded public considerations of why the Pike and Church congressional committee findings had ever established limits on intelligence agencies' abilities to spy on Americans. Concurrent with post-9/11 surveillance expansions was the growth of the Internet's ability to track users, collecting metadata in ways that seductively helped socialize all to the normalcy of the loss of privacy.

Cap Sustainable

. Capitalism is self-correcting and sustainable – war and environmental destruction are not profitable and innovation solves their impacts

Kaletsky, ’11 (Anatole, editor-at-large of The Times of London, where he writes weekly columns on economics, politics, and international relationsand on the governing board of the New York-based Institute for New Economic

Theory (INET), a nonprofit created after the 2007-2009 crisis to promote and finance academic research in economics, Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis, p. 19-21, bgm)

Democratic capitalism is a system built for survival. It has adapted successfully to shocks of every kind , to upheavals in technology and economics, to political revolutions and world wars. Capitalism has been able to do this because, unlike communism or socialism or feudalism, it has an inner dynamic akin to a living thing. It can adapt and refine itself in response to the changing environment . And it will evolve into a new species of the same capitalist genus if that is what it takes to survive. In the panic of 2008—09, many politicians, businesses, and pundits forgot about the astonishing adaptability of the capitalist system. Predictions of global collapse were based on static views of the world that extrapolated a few months of admittedly terrifying financial chaos into the indefinite future. The self-correcting mechanisms that market economies and democratic societies have evolved over several centuries were either forgotten or assumed defunct. The language of biology has been applied to politics and economics, but rarely to the way they interact. Democratic capitalism ’s equivalent of the biological survival instinct is a built-in capacity for solving social problems and meeting material needs . This capacity stems from the principle of competition, which drives both democratic politics and capitalist markets. Because market forces generally reward the creation of wealth rather than its destruction , they direct the independent efforts and ambitions of millions of individuals toward satisfying material demands, even if these demands sometimes create unwelcome by-products. Because voters generally reward politicians for making their lives better and safer, rather than worse and more dangerous, democratic competition directs political institutions toward solving rather than aggravating society’s problems, even if these solutions sometimes create new problems of their own. Political competition is slower and less decisive than market competition, so its self-stabilizing qualities play out over decades or even generations, not months or years. But regardless of the difference in timescale, capitalism and democracy have one crucial feature in common: Both are mechanisms that encourage individuals to channel their creativity, efforts, and competitive spirit into finding solutions for material and social problems. And in the long run, these mechanisms work very well. If we consider democratic capitalism as a successful problem-solving machine, the implications of this view are very relevant to the 2007-09 economic crisis, but diametrically opposed to the conventional wisdom that prevailed in its aftermath. Governments all over the world were ridiculed for trying to resolve a crisis caused by too much borrowing by borrowing even more. Alan Greenspan was accused of trying to delay an inevitable "day of reckoning” by creating ever-bigger financial bubbles. Regulators were attacked for letting half-dead, “zombie” banks stagger on instead of putting them to death. But these charges missed the point of what the democratic capitalist system is designed to achieve. In a capitalist democracy whose raison d’etre is to devise new solutions to long-standing social and material demands, a problem postponed is effectively a problem solved.

To be more exact, a problem whose solution can be deferred long enough is a problem that is likely to be solved in ways that are hardly imaginable today. Once the self-healing nature of the capitalist system is recognized, the charge of “passing on our problems to our grand-children”—whether made about budget deficits by conservatives or about global warming by liberals—becomes morally unconvincing. Our grand-children will almost certainly be much richer than we are and will have more powerful technologies at their disposal. It is far from obvious, therefore, why we should make economic sacrifices on their behalf. Sounder morality, as well as economics, than the Victorians ever imagined is in the wistful refrain of the proverbially optimistic Mr. Micawber: "Something will turn up."

Cap resilient

Alt doesn’t solve- Capitalism is resilient – it’ll bounce back

Foster 9 (JD, Norman B. Ture Senior Fellow in the Economics of fiscal policy – Heritage Foundation, "Is Capitalism Dead? Maybe," 3-11, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101694302)

Capitalism is down. It may even be out. But it's far from dead. Capitalism is extremely resilient. Why? Because here, as in every

democratic-industrial country around the world, it has always had to struggle to survive against encroachments —

both benign and malevolent — of the state. At the moment, capitalism is losing ground most everywhere. But when the economic crisis passes, capitalism and the freedoms it engenders will recover again, if only because freedom beats its lack.

It is said that the trouble with socialism is socialism; the trouble with capitalism is capitalists. The socialist economic system, inherently contrary to individual liberties, tends to minimize prosperity because it inevitably allocates national resources inefficiently. On the other hand, a truly capitalist system engaged in an unfettered pursuit of

prosperity is prone to occasional and often painful excesses, bubbles and downturns like the one we are now experiencing globally. When capitalism slips, governments step in with regulations and buffers to try to moderate the excesses and minimize the broader consequences of individual errors. Sometimes these policies are enduringly helpful. Severe economic downturns inflict collateral damage on families and businesses otherwise innocent of material foolishness. Not only are the sufferings of these innocents harmful to society, but they are also downright expensive. A little wise government buffering can go a long way. The trick, of course, is the wisdom part. A good example of a wise government buffer is deposit insurance at commercial banks. Without it, depositors would have withdrawn their funds en masse, leading to a rapid collapse of the banking system. It happened in years gone by. But today, deposits have flowed into the banking system in search of safety, helping banks staunch their many severe wounds. Yet for every example of helpful government intervention, there are many more that do more harm than good. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac leap to mind. These congressional creatures helped create, then inflate the subprime market. When that balloon popped, it triggered a global economic meltdown. The current financial crisis clearly has capitalism on its back foot. Government ownership of the largest insurance company,

the major banks, and Fan and Fred are awesome incursions into private markets. But, as President Obama has underscored, these incursions are only temporary. In time, these institutions — even Fan and Fred — will be broken up and sold in parts. It will leave government

agents with stories to tell their grandkids, and taxpayers stuck with the losses. But the power of the state will again recede, and another new age of freedom and capitalism will arrive and thrive... until we repeat the cycle again sometime down the road.

Cap solves environment

Cap solves environmental destruction

Veer 12 (Pierre-Guy, Independent journalist writing for the Von Mises Institute, 5/2, “Cheer for the Environment, Cheer for Capitalism,” http://www.mises.ca/posts/blog/cheer-for-the-environment-cheer-for-capitalism/)

No Ownership, No Responsibility How can such a negligence have happen ed? It’s simple: no one was the legitimate owner of the resources (water, air, ground). When a property is state-owned – as was the case under communism – government has generally little incentive to sustainably exploit it . In communist Europe, governments wanted to industrialize their country in order, they hoped, to catch up with capitalist economies. Objectives were set, and they had to be met no matter what. This included the use of brown coal, high in sulfur and that creates heavy smoke when burned[4], and questionable farming methods, which depleted the soil. This lack of vision can also be seen in the public sector of

capitalist countries. In the US, the Department of Defense creates more dangerous waste than the top five chemical product companies put together. In fact, pollution is such that cleanup costs are

estimated at $20 billion. The same goes for agriculture, where Washington encourages overfarming or even farming not adapted for the environment it’s in[5]. Capitalism, the Green Solution In order to solve most of the pollution problems, there exists a simple solution : laissez-faire capitalism , i.e. make sure property rights and profitability can be applied. The latter helped Eastern Europe; when

communism fell, capitalism made the countries seek profitable – and not just cheap – ways to produce, which greatly reduced pollution[6]. As for the former, it proved its effectiveness, notably with the Love Canal[7]. Property rights are also thought of in order to protect some resources , be it fish [8] or endangered species[9]. Why such efficiency? Because an owner’s self-interest is directed towards the maximum profitability of his piece of land. By containing pollution – as Hooker Chemicals did with its canal – he keeps away from costly lawsuit for property violation. At the same time, badly managed pollution can diminish the value of the land , and therefore profits. Any entrepreneur with a long-term vision – and whose property is safe from arbitrary government decisions – thinks about all that in order to protect his investment. One isn’t foolish enough to sack one’s property! In conclusion, I have to mention that I agree with environmentalists that it is importance to preserve the environment in

order to protect mother nature and humans. However, I strongly disagree with their means, i.e. government intervention. Considering it very seldom has a long-term vision, it is the worst thing

that can happen. In fact, one could says that most environmental disasters are, directly or indirectly, caused by the State, mainly by a lack of clear property rights. Were they clearer, they would let each and everyone of us, out of self-interest, protect the environment in a better manner. That way, everyone’s a winner.

Cap Good – War

Cap solves war—capitalist peace theory

Harrison 11 (Mark, Department of Economics, University of Warwick, Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, Stanford University, “Capitalism at War”, Oct 19 http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/academic/harrison/papers/capitalism.pdf)

Capitalism’s Wars America is the world’s preeminent capitalist power. According to a poll of more than 21,000 citizens of 21 countries in the second half of 2008, people tend on average to evaluate U.S. foreign policy as inferior to that of their own country in the moral dimension. 4

While this survey does not disaggregate respondents by educational status, many apparently knowledgeable people also seem to believe that , in the modern world, most wars are caused by America ; this impression is based on my experience of presenting work

on the frequency of wars to academic seminars in several European countries. According to the evidence, however, these beliefs are mistaken. We are all aware of America’s wars, but they make only a small contribution to the total.

Counting all bilateral conflicts involving at least the show of force from 1870 to 2001, it turns out that the countries that originated them come from all parts of the global income distribution (Harrison and Wolf 2011).

Countries that are richer , measured by GDP per head , such as America do not tend to start more conflicts, although there is a tendency for countries with larger GDPs to do so. Ranking countries by the numbers of conflicts they initiated, the United States, with the largest economy, comes only in second place; third place belongs to China. In first place is Russia (the USSR between 1917 and 1991). What do capitalist institutions contribute to the empirical patterns in the data? Erik Gartzke (2007) has re-examined the hypothesis of the “democratic peace”

based on the possibility that, since capitalism and democracy are highly correlated across countries and time, both democracy and peace might be products of the same underlying cause, the spread of capitalist institutions. It is a problem that our historical datasets have measured the spread of capitalist property rights and economic freedoms over shorter time spans or on fewer dimensions than political variables. For the period from 1950 to 1992, Gartzke

uses a measure of external financial and trade liberalization as most likely to signal robust markets and a laissez faire policy. Countries that share this attribute of capitalism above a certain level, he finds, do not fight each other, so there is capitalist peace as well as democratic peace . Second, economic liberalization (of the less liberalized of

the pair of countries) is a more powerful predictor of bilateral peace than democratization, controlling for the level of economic development and measures of political affinity.

Studies prove that capitalism lessens the frequency and intensity of war

Griswold, ’05 (Daniel, director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at Cato, “Peace on earth? Try free trade among men”, http://www.freetrade.org/node/282)

As one little-noticed headline on an Associated Press story recently reported, "War declining worldwide, studies say."

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the number of armed conflicts around the world has been in decline for the past half century. In just the past 15 years, ongoing conflicts have dropped from 33 to 18, with all of them now civil conflicts within countries. As 2005 draws to an end, no two nations in the world are at war with each other. The death toll from war has also been falling. According to the AP story, "The number killed in battle has fallen to its lowest point in the post-World War II period, dipping below 20,000 a year by one measure. Peacemaking missions, meanwhile, are growing in number." Those estimates are down sharply from annual tolls ranging from 40,000 to 100,000 in the 1990s, and from a peak of 700,000 in 1951 during the Korean War. Many causes lie

behind the good news -- the end of the Cold War and the spread of democracy, among them -- but expanding trade and globalization appear to be play ing a major role . Far from stoking a "World on Fire," as one misguided American author

has argued, growing commercial ties between nations have had a dampening effect on armed conflict and war, for three main reasons. First, trade and globalization have reinforced the trend toward democracy, and democracies don't pick fights with each other. Freedom to trade nurtures democracy by expanding the middle class in globalizing countries and equipping people with tools of communication such as cell phones, satellite TV, and the Internet. With trade comes more travel, more contact with people in other countries, and more exposure to new ideas. Thanks in

part to globalization, almost two thirds of the world's countries today are democracies -- a record high. Second, as national economies become more integrated with each other, those nations have more to lose should war break out. War in a globalized world not only means human casualties and bigger government, but also ruptured trade and investment ties that impose lasting damage on the economy. In short, globalization has dramatically raised the

economic cost of war. Third, globalization allows nations to acquire wealth through production and trade rather than conquest of territory and resources. Increasingly, wealth is measured in terms of intellectual property, financial assets, and human capital.

Capitalism incentivizes peace—outweighs all other factors

Bandow, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, Nov 10, 2005

[Doug, Spreading Capitalism is Good for Peace, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=5193]

But World War I demonstrated that increased trade was not enough. The prospect of economic ruin did not prevent rampant nationalism, ethnic hatred, and security fears from trumping the power of markets. An even greater conflict followed a generation later.

Thankfully, World War II left war essentially unthinkable among leading industrialized - and democratic -

states. Support grew for the argument, going back to Immanual Kant, that republics are less warlike than other systems. Today's corollary is that creating democracies out of dictatorships will reduce conflict. This contention animated some support outside as well as inside the United

States for the invasion of Iraq. But Gartzke argues that " the 'democratic peace' is a mirage created by the overlap between economic and political freedom ." That is, democracies typically have freer economies than do authoritarian states. Thus, while "democracy is desirable for many reasons," he notes in a chapter in the latest volume of Economic

Freedom in the World, created by the Fraser Institute, "representative governments are unlikely to contribute directly to international peace." Capitalism is by far the more important factor . The shift from statist mercantilism to high-tech capitalism has transformed the economics behind war . Markets generate economic opportunities that make war less desirable . Territorial aggrandizement no longer provides the best path to riches. Free-flowing capital markets and other aspects of globalization simultaneously draw nations together and raise the economic price of military conflict . Moreover, sanctions , which interfere with economic prosperity, provides a coercive step short of war to achieve foreign policy ends . Positive economic trends are not enough to prevent war, but then, neither is democracy. It long has been obvious that democracies are willing to fight, just usually not each other. Contends Gartzke, "liberal political systems, in and of themselves, have no impact on whether states fight." In particular, poorer democracies perform like non-

democracies. He explains: "Democracy does not have a measurable impact, while nations with very low levels of economic freedom are 14 times more prone to conflict than those with very high levels." Gartzke considers other variables, including

alliance memberships, nuclear deterrence, and regional differences. Although the causes of conflict vary, the relationship between economic liberty and peace remains .

Transition Wars

Perry Anderson, Professor of Sociology at UCLA, Marxist Scholar, ’84

(In the tracks of historical materialism, p. 102-103)

That background also indicates, however, what is essentially missing from his work. How are we to get from where we are today to where he point us to tomorrow? There is no answer to this question in Nove. His halting discussion of “transition” tails away into apprehensive admonitions to moderation to the British Labor Party, and pleas for proper compensation to capitalist owners of major industries, if these are to be nationalized. Nowhere is there any sense of what a titanic political change would have to occur, with what fierceness of social struggle, for the economic model of socialism he advocates ever to materialize. Between the radicalism of the future end-state he envisages, and the conservatism of the present measures he is prepared to countenance, there is an unbridgeable abyss. How could private ownership of the means of production ever be abolished by policies less disrespectful of capital than those of Allende or a Benn, which he reproves? What has disappeared from the pages of The Economics of Feasible Socialism is virtually all attention to the historical dynamics of any serious conflict over the control of the means of production, as the record of the 20th century demonstrates them. If capital could visit such destruction on even so poor and small an outlying province of its empire in Vietnam, to prevent its loss, is it likely that it would suffer its extinction meekly in its own homeland? The lessons of the past sixty-five years or so are in this respect without ambiguity or exception , there is no case , from Russia to China , from Vietnam to Cuba , from Chile to Nicaragua , where the existence of capitalism has been challenged, and the furies of intervention, blockade and civil strife have not descended in response . Any viable transition to socialism in the West must seek to curtail that pattern: but to shrink from or to ignore it is to depart from the world of the possible altogether. In the same way, to construct an economic model of socialism in one advanced country is a legitimate exercise: but to extract it from any computable relationship with a surrounding, and necessarily opposing, capitalist environment—as this work does—is to locate it in thin air

Cap Good – Warming

Capitalism is key to solving global warming

Whitman, ’08 (Janet, February 19, pg. http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=317551)

Global warming may soon get a saviour more effective than Al Gore and his doomsday Power-Point

presentations: capitalism. The former U.S. vice-president, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year for his work on

climate change, is credited with bringing widespread attention to the issue. But the huge moneymaking opportunity in going green will be the big driver that leads to the reining in of the release of greenhouse gasses, experts

say. Money already is pouring into environmental initiatives and technologies in the United States. Experts expect investment in the area to explode over the next few years if, as anticipated, the government here imposes restrictions on the release of gases believed to be behind climate change. "Capitalism will drive this," said Vinod Khosla, founding chief executive of Sun Microsystems and a longtime venture capitalist. Mr. Khosla, speaking

on a panel at a recent investment summit on climate change at United Nations headquarters here, said getting consumers to curb their energy use has never worked -- unless they've had a financial incentive. "If we make it economic, it will happen," he said. The expected government-mandated cap on carbon emissions already is fueling

innovation. Venture capitalists, for instance, are investing in new technologies that would make cement -- a major producer of carbon emissions -- actually absorb carbon instead. Cement makers could practically give the product away and reap the financial reward from government carbon credits.

Warming leads to extinction

Tickell, ’08 [Oliver, “On a planet 4C hotter, all we can prepare for is extinction]

We need to get prepared for four degrees of global warming , Bob Watson told the Gurdian last week. At first sight

this looks like wise counsel from the climate science adviser to Defra. But the idea that we could adapt to a 4C rise is absurd and dangerous. Global warming on this scale would be a catastrophe that would mean , in the

immortal words that Chief Seattle probably never spoke, "the end of living and the beginning of survival" for humankind. Or perhaps the beginning of our extinction. The collapse of the polar ice caps would become inevitable , bringing long-term sea level rises of 70-80 metres. All the world's coastal plains would be lost, complete

with ports, cities, transport and industrial infrastructure, and much of the world's most productive farmland. The world's geography would be transformed much as it was at the end of the last ice age, when sea levels rose by about 120 metres

to create the Channel, the North Sea and Cardigan Bay out of dry land. Weather would become extreme and unpredictable, with more frequent and severe droughts, floods and hurricanes. The Earth's carrying capacity would be hugely reduced. Billions would undoubtedly die.