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KRITIKS
*** CAPITALISM KRITIK *** ...................................................................................................................................2
CAPITALISM KRITIK NEG........................................................................................................................................2
1NC Cap K ....................................................................................................................................................................3
Block Tricks – Capitalism Unsustainable ......................................................................................................................5
Block Tricks – Ethical Obligation .................................................................................................................................6
Block Tricks – Root Cause – War .................................................................................................................................7
Block Tricks – Root Cause – Environment ...................................................................................................................8
Block Tricks – Root Cause – Economy .........................................................................................................................9
Link – Space ................................................................................................................................................................ 10
Link – Satellites ........................................................................................................................................................... 12
Link – Economic Growth ............................................................................................................................................ 13
Link – Space Dominance ............................................................................................................................................. 14
Impact – War ............................................................................................................................................................... 15
Impact – Environment ................................................................................................................................................. 16
Impact – Environment – AT: Space Exploration/Development Solves ....................................................................... 19
Impact – Ethics ............................................................................................................................................................ 20
Alternative – Reject Capitalism ................................................................................................................................... 22
AT: Permutation .......................................................................................................................................................... 23
AT: No Alt to Capitalism ............................................................................................................................................ 25
AT: No Alt to the State ................................................................................................................................................ 26
AT: Extinction Outweighs ........................................................................................................................................... 27
AT: Capitalism Key to the Economy ........................................................................................................................... 28
AT: Capitalism Key to Freedom.................................................................................................................................. 29
CAPITALISM KRITIK AFF ANSWERS .................................................................................................................. 30
Alt Doesn’t Solve – Rejecting the State ...................................................................................................................... 31
Alt Doesn’t Solve – Revolution ................................................................................................................................... 33
*** SECURITY KRITIK *** ..................................................................................................................................... 34
SECURITY KRITIK NEG .......................................................................................................................................... 34
Link – Space ................................................................................................................................................................ 35
Link – Asteroids .......................................................................................................................................................... 36
Impact – Space Militarization ...................................................................................................................................... 38
Alternative – Asteroids ................................................................................................................................................ 39
AT: Technical Expertise Good .................................................................................................................................... 41
AT: Threats Real ......................................................................................................................................................... 42
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*** CAPITALISM KRITIK ***
CAPITALISM KRITIK NEG
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1NC Cap K
The desire to go into outer space manifests a doomed attempt to “fix” the world’s problems, expanding the
reach of global capitalism and setting the stage for mass violence.
Dickens 10
(Peter, Professor of Sociology – University of Brighton and Cambridge, UK, “The Humanization of the Cosmos –
To What End?”, Monthly Review, 62(6), November, 6-6, http://monthlyreview.org/archives/2010/volume-62-issue06-november-2010)
Since Luxemburg wrote, an increasing number of political economists have argued that the importance of a
capitalist “outside” is not so much that of creating a new pool of customers or of finding new resources.10 Rather,
an outside is needed as a zone into which surplus capital can be invested. Economic and social crisis stems less from
the problem of finding new consumers, and more from that of finding, making, and exploiting zones of profitability
for surplus capital. Developing “outsides” in this way is also a product of recurring crises, particularly those of
declining economic profitability. These crises are followed by attempted “fixes” in distinct geographic regions. The
word “fix” is used here both literally and figuratively. On the one hand, capital is being physically invested in new
regions. On the other hand, the attempt is to fix capitalism’s crises. Regarding the latter, however, there are, of
course, no absolute guarantees that such fixes will really correct an essentially unstable social and economic
system. At best, they are short-term solutions. The kind of theory mentioned above also has clear implications for
the humanization of the cosmos. Projects for the colonization of outer space should be seen as the attempt to make
new types of “spatial fix,” again in response to economic, social, and environmental crises on earth. Outer space will
be “globalized,” i.e., appended to Earth, with new parts of the cosmos being invested in by competing nations and
companies. Military power will inevitably be made an integral part of this process, governments protecting the zones
for which they are responsible. Some influential commentators argue that the current problem for capitalism is that
there is now no “outside.”11 Capitalism is everywhere. Similarly, resistance to capitalism is either everywhere or
nowhere. But, as suggested above, the humanization of the cosmos seriously questions these assertions. New
“spatial fixes” are due to be opened up in the cosmos, capitalism’s emergent outside. At first, these will include
artificial fixes such as satellites, space stations, and space hotels. But during the next twenty years or so, existing
outsides, such as the moon and Mars, will begin attracting investments. The stage would then be set for wars in outer
space between nations and companies attempting to make their own cosmic “fixes.”
The unchecked expansion of US driven global capitalism causes nuclear war and environmental catastrophe.
Foster 5
(John Bellamy, Editor of Monthly Review and Professor of Sociology at University of Oregon, Monthly Review,
“Naked Imperialism”, 9-1, http://monthlyreview.org/2005/09/01/naked-imperialism)
From the longer view offered by a historical-materialist critique of capitalism, the direction that would be taken by
U.S. imperialism following the fall of the Soviet Union was never in doubt. Capitalism by its very logic is a globally
expansive system. The contradiction between its transnational economic aspirations and the fact that politically it
remains rooted in particular nation states is insurmountable for the system. Yet, ill-fated attempts by individual
states to overcome this contradiction are just as much a part of its fundamental logic. In present world
circumstances, when one capitalist state has a virtual monopoly of the means of destruction, the temptation for that
state to attempt to seize full-spectrum dominance and to transform itself into the de facto global state governing the
world economy is irresistible. As the noted Marxian philosopher István Mészáros observed in Socialism or
Barbarism? (2001)—written, significantly, before George W. Bush became president: “[W]hat is at stake today is
not the control of a particular part of the planet—no matter how large—putting at a disadvantage but still tolerating
the independent actions of some rivals, but the control of its totality by one hegemonic economic and military
superpower, with all means—even the most extreme authoritarian and, if needed, violent military ones—at its
disposal.” The unprecedented dangers of this new global disorder are revealed in the twin cataclysms to which the
world is heading at present: nuclear proliferation and hence increased chances of the outbreak of nuclear war, and
planetary ecological destruction. These are symbolized by the Bush administration’s refusal to sign the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to limit nuclear weapons development and by its failure to sign the Kyoto Protocol
as a first step in controlling global warming. As former U.S. Secretary of Defense (in the Kennedy and Johnson
administrations) Robert McNamara stated in an article entitled “Apocalypse Soon” in the May–June 2005 issue of
Foreign Policy: “The United States has never endorsed the policy of ‘no first use,’ not during my seven years as
secretary or since. We have been and remain prepared to initiate the use of nuclear weapons—by the decision of one
person, the president—against either a nuclear or nonnuclear enemy whenever we believe it is in our interest to do
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so.” The nation with the greatest conventional military force and the willingness to use it unilaterally to enlarge its
global power is also the nation with the greatest nuclear force and the readiness to use it whenever it sees fit—
setting the whole world on edge. The nation that contributes more to carbon dioxide emissions leading to global
warming than any other (representing approximately a quarter of the world’s total) has become the greatest obstacle
to addressing global warming and the world’s growing environmental problems—raising the possibility of the
collapse of civilization itself if present trends continue. The United States is seeking to exercise sovereign authority
over the planet during a time of widening global crisis: economic stagnation, increasing polarization between the
global rich and the global poor, weakening U.S. economic hegemony, growing nuclear threats, and deepening
ecological decline. The result is a heightening of international instability. Other potential forces are emerging in the
world, such as the European Community and China, that could eventually challenge U.S. power, regionally and even
globally. Third world revolutions, far from ceasing, are beginning to gain momentum again, symbolized by
Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution under Hugo Chávez. U.S. attempts to tighten its imperial grip on the Middle East
and its oil have had to cope with a fierce, seemingly unstoppable, Iraqi resistance, generating conditions of imperial
overstretch. With the United States brandishing its nuclear arsenal and refusing to support international agreements
on the control of such weapons, nuclear proliferation is continuing. New nations, such as North Korea, are entering
or can be expected soon to enter the “nuclear club.” Terrorist blowback from imperialist wars in the third world is
now a well-recognized reality, generating rising fear of further terrorist attacks in New York, London, and
elsewhere. Such vast and overlapping historical contradictions, rooted in the combined and uneven development of
the global capitalist economy along with the U.S. drive for planetary domination, foreshadow what is potentially the
most dangerous period in the history of imperialism. The course on which U.S and world capitalism is now
headed points to global barbarism—or worse. Yet it is important to remember that nothing in the development of
human history is inevitable. There still remains an alternative path—the global struggle for a humane, egalitarian,
democratic, and sustainable society. The classic name for such a society is “socialism.” Such a renewed struggle for
a world of substantive human equality must begin by addressing the system’s weakest link and at the same time the
world’s most pressing needs—by organizing a global resistance movement against the new naked imperialism.
Vote Neg to reject the dictates of global capitalism. Only refusing to obey subverts exploitation.
Holloway 05
(John, Professor in the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades of the Benemérita Universidad
Autónoma,“Can We Change The World Without Taking Power?”, 5-4, http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=98)
I don’t know the answer. Perhaps we can change the world without taking power. Perhaps we cannot. The starting
point—for all of us, I think—is uncertainty, not knowing, a common search for a way forward. Because it becomes
more and more clear that capitalism is a catastrophe for humanity. A radical change in the organisation of society,
that is, revolution, is more urgent than ever. And this revolution can only be world revolution if it is to be effective.
But it is unlikely that world revolution can be achieved in one single blow. This means that the only way in which
we can conceive of revolution is as interstitial revolution, as a revolution that takes place in the interstices of
capitalism, a revolution that occupies spaces in the world while capitalism still exists. The question is how we
conceive of these interstices, whether we think of them as states or in other ways. In thinking about this, we have to
start from where we are, from the many rebellions and insubordinations that have brought us to Porto Alegre. The
world is full of such rebellions, of people saying NO to capitalism: NO, we shall not live our lives according to the
dictates of capitalism, we shall do what we consider necessary or desirable and not what capital tells us to do.
Sometimes we just see capitalism as an all-encompassing system of domination and forget that such rebellions exist
everywhere. At times they are so small that even those involved do not perceive them as refusals, but often they are
collective projects searching for an alternative way forward and sometimes they are as big as the Lacandon Jungle or
the Argentinazo of three years ago or the revolt in Bolivia just over a year ago. All of these insubordinations are
characterised by a drive towards self-determination, an impulse that says, ‘No, you will not tell us what to do, we
shall decide for ourselves what we must do.’ These refusals can be seen as fissures, as cracks in the system of
capitalist domination. Capitalism is not (in the first place) an economic system, but a system of command.
Capitalists, through money, command us, telling us what to do. To refuse to obey is to break the command of
capital. The question for us, then, is how do we multiply and expand these refusals, these cracks in the texture of
domination?
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Block Tricks – Capitalism Unsustainable
Capitalism is unsustainable.
Newman 6
(Robert, author and political activist and speaker Third World First, “Capitalism or a habitable planet – you can’t
have both”, 2-2, http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=955)
There is no meaningful response to climate change without massive social change. A cap on this and a quota on the
other won't do it. Tinker at the edges as we may, we cannot sustain earth's life-support systems within the present
economic system. Capitalism is not sustainable by its very nature. It is predicated on infinitely expanding markets,
faster consumption and bigger production in a finite planet. And yet this ideological model remains the central
organising principle of our lives, and as long as it continues to be so it will automatically undo (with its invisible
hand) every single green initiative anybody cares to come up with. Much discussion of energy, with never a word
about power, leads to the fallacy of a low-impact, green capitalism somehow put at the service of environmentalism.
In reality, power concentrates around wealth. Private ownership of trade and industry means that the decisive
political force in the world is private power. The corporation will outflank every puny law and regulation that seeks
to constrain its profitability. It therefore stands in the way of the functioning democracy needed to tackle climate
change. Only by breaking up corporate power and bringing it under social control will we be able to overcome the
global environmental crisis.
Capitalism’s mode of production isn’t sustainable: India and Pakistan prove
International Review 4
(current predecessor of Communist League of Marx and Engels, “India And Pakistan: Capitalism's Lethal Folly”,
28-11, http://en.internationalism.org/ir/110_indopak.html)
The threat of nuclear war between India and Pakistan on the one hand, and the rise of the far right on the other, are
both part of the same reality. They are both expressions of the impasse that the capitalist mode of production has
reached. They demonstrate that capitalism has no future to offer humanity, and, in different forms, they illustrate the
present phase of capitalism's decomposition: a social rot that menaces society's very existence. This decomposition
is the result of a historic process where neither of society's antagonistic classes - the bourgeoisie and the proletariat has been able to impose its own response to capitalism's insoluble crisis. The bourgeoisie has been unable to drag
humanity into a third world war because the proletariat of the central countries has not been prepared to sacrifice its
own interests on the altar of the national interest. But neither has the proletariat been capable of asserting its own
revolutionary perspective, and imposing itself as the only social force able to offer an alternative to the dead end of
the capitalist economy. While they have been able to prevent the outbreak of World War III, the workers' struggles
have thus failed to halt the bloody madness of capitalism. Witness the murderous chaos spreading day by day
through the system's periphery, which has accelerated ever since the collapse of the Eastern bloc. The endless
escalation of war in the Middle East, and now the menace of nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan, reveal
clearly the apocalyptic future that capitalism offers us.
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Block Tricks – Ethical Obligation
You have an ethical obligation to reject capitalism – its violence is concealed and naturalized by everyday
politics.
Zizek and Daly 4
(Slavoj, professor of philosophy at the Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana, and Glyn, Conversations with Zizek, pg
14-16)
There is a further potential danger. This concerns especially orthodox trends in politically correct multiculturalism
and their distortion of a certain type of alliance politics that seeks to establish chains of equivalence between a
widening set of differential struggles around gender, culture, lifestyles and so on. While there is nothing wrong in
principle with establishing such forms of solidarity, the problem arises where this type of politics begins to assume,
in a common-sense way, a basic leveling of the political terrain where all groups are taken to suffer equally ('we are
all victims of the state/global capitalism/repressive forces'). In other words, there is a danger that equivalential
politics becomes so distorted that it becomes a way of disguising the position of those who are truly abject: those
who suffer endemic poverty, destitution and repressive violence in our world system. In this way, the abject can
become doubly victimized: first by a global capitalist order that actively excludes them; and second, by an aseptic
politically correct 'inclusivism' that renders them invisible inside its postmodern forest; its tyranny of differences.
For Zizek it is imperative that we cut through this Gordian knot of postmodern protocol and recognize that our
ethico-political responsibility to confront the constitutive violence of today's global capitalism and its obscene
naturalization/anonymization of the millions who are subjugated by it throughout the world. Against the
standardized positions of postmodern culture - with all its pieties concerning 'multiculturalist' etiquiette - Zizek is
arguing for a politics that might be called 'radically incorrect' in the sense that it breaks with these types of positions
and focuses on the very organizing principles of today's social realitiy: the principles of global liberal capitalism.
This requires some care and subtlety. For far too long, Marxism has been bedevilled by an almost fetishistic
economism that has tended toward political morbidity. With the likes of Hilferding and Gramsci, and more recently
Laclau and Mouffe, crucial theoretical advances have been made that enable the transcendence of all forms of
economism. In this new context, however, Zizek argues that the problem that presents itself is almost that of the
opposite fetish. That is to say, the prohibitive anxieties surrounding the taboo of economism can function as a way
of not engaging with economic reality as a way of implicitly accepting the latter as a basic horizon of existence. In
an ironic Freudian-Lacanian twist, the fear of economism can end up reinforcing a de facto economic necessity in
respect of contemporary capitalism (i.e. the initial prohibition conjures up the very thing it fears). This is not to
endorse any kind of retrograde return to economism. Zizeks point is rather that in rejecting economism we should
not lose sight of the systemic power of capital in shaping the lives and destinies of humanity and our very sense of
the possible. In particular we should not overlook Marx's central insight that in order to create a universal global
system the forces of capitalism seek to conceal the politico-discursive violence of its construction through a kind of
gentrification of that system. What is persistently denied by neo-liberals such as Rorty (1989) and Fukuyama (1992)
is that the gentrification of global liberal capitalism is one whose 'universalism' fundamentally reproduces and
depends upon a disavowed violence that excludes vast sectors of the world's population. In this way, neo-liberal
ideology attempts to naturalize capitalism by presenting its outcomes of winning and losing as if they were simply a
matter of chance and sound judgement in a neutral marketplace. Capitalism does indeed create a space for a certain
diversity, at least for the central capitalist regions, but it is neither neutral nor ideal and its price in terms of social
exclusion is exorbitant. That is to say, the human cost in terms of inherent global poverty and degraded 'life-chances'
cannot be calculated within the existing economic rationale and, in consequence, social exclusion remains mystified
and nameless (viz. the patronizing reference to the 'developing world'). And Zizeks point is that this mystification is
magnified through capitalism's profound capacity to ingest its own excesses and negativity: to redirect (or misdirect)
social antagonisms and to absorb them within a culture of differential affirmation. Instead of Bolshevism, the
tendency today is towards a kind of political boutiquism that is readily sustained by postmodern forms of
consumerism and lifestyle.
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Block Tricks – Root Cause – War
Capitalism is the root cause of war.
Carchedi 6
(Guglielmo, Senior Researcher in the Department of Economics and Econometrics at the University of Amsterdam,
Rethinking Marxism, Volume 18, Number 1, January, “The Fallacies of Keynesian Policies,” p. 77-78, ebsco)
If neither civilian nor military Keynesian policies can jump-start the economy, the alternative is war. The use of
weapons in time of war is a specific, powerful method of destruction of excess capital in its commodity form, of
value that cannot be realized in times of peace. Their main contribution to an upturn is not through employment and
the extra production of surplus value (which are modest because of their high value composition) but through the
destruction of surplus capital: the more commodity capital is destroyed (both as weapons and as the other
commodities that are destroyed by those weapons), the more commodity capital can be subsequently created. At the
same time, this expanded reproduction is spurred by the higher rates of exploitation, and thus of profit, induced by
wars. Wars make possible the cancellation of the debt contracted with Labor (e.g., inflation destroys the value of
money and thus of state bonds) and the extraction of extra surplus value (the laborers, either forced or instigated by
patriotism, accept lower wages, higher intensity of labor, longer working days, etc.). Wars thus create the conditions
for an economic upturn. Capitalism needs weapons and thus wars. If capitalism needs wars, wars need enemies. The
imperialist nations display great ingenuity in finding, or creating, new enemies. Before the fall of the USSR, the
pretext for the arms industry was International Communism. After the Fall, International Communism has been
replaced by Arab Fundamentalism and International Terrorism. As the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq show, the
substitution is now complete. The attacks of September 11, 2001, were a golden opportunity for the arms industry
and U.S. imperialism. This shows that political and ideological factors are of paramount importance for the modes
and timing of the conflagration, but they themselves are determined by economic factors. The notion that wars are
caused by extraeconomic factors is simply wrong. The Western world has exported (created) countless wars in
many dominated countries and has engaged in military Keynesian policies for the above-mentioned reasons.
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Block Tricks – Root Cause – Environment
Capitalism is the root cause of environmental degradation.
Bello 8
(Walden, professor of sociology and public administration at the University of the Philippines , “Will Capitalism
Survive Climate Change?”, April, http://www.robnewman.com/will.html)
Also, it is increasingly evident that the trade-off for more crop land being devoted to biofuel production is less land
to grow food and greater food insecurity globally. It is rapidly becoming clear that the dominant paradigm of
economic growth is one of the most significant obstacles to a serious global effort to deal with climate change. But
this destabilizing, fundamentalist growth-consumption paradigm is itself more effect rather than cause. The central
problem, it is becoming increasingly clear, is a mode of production whose main dynamic is the transformation of
living nature into dead commodities, creating tremendous waste in the process. The driver of this process is
consumption--or more appropriately overconsumption--and the motivation is profit or capital accumulation:
capitalism, in short. It has been the generalization of this mode of production in the North and its spread from the
North to the South over the last 300 years that has caused the accelerated burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil and
rapid deforestation, two of the key man-made processes behind global warming. The South's Dilemma: One way of
viewing global warning is to see it as a key manifestation of the latest stage of a wrenching historical process: the
privatisation of the global commons by capital. The climate crisis must thus be seen as the expropriation by the
advanced capitalist societies of the ecological space of less developed or marginalized societies. This leads us to the
dilemma of the South: before the full extent of the ecological destabilization brought about by capitalism, it was
expected that the South would simply follow the ''stages of growth'' of the North. Now it is impossible to do so
without bringing about ecological Armageddon. Already, China is on track to overtake the US as the biggest
emitter of greenhouse gases, and yet the elite of China as well as those of India and other rapidly developing
countries are intent on reproducing the American-type overconsumption-driven capitalism. Thus, for the South, the
implications of an effective global response to global warming include not just the inclusion of some countries in a
regime of mandatory reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, although this is critical: in the current round of climate
negotiations, for instance, China, can no longer opt out of a mandatory regime on the grounds that it is a developing
country.
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Block Tricks – Root Cause – Economy
Capitalism structurally guarantees repeated economic crises.
Foster 8
(John Bellamy, author of Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature and an editor of Monthly Review. Interview by
Renfry Clarke from GLW, http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/39387)
We talk typically about economic growth, and to talk about economic growth is oftentimes to talk in very abstract
terms. What we have to understand is that the real substance of it in a capitalist system is the accumulation of
capital. That's why economic growth is necessary; it has nothing to do with wealth of nations per se or the
promotion of human welfare. It has to do with the expansion of capital, the accumulation of capital in ever larger
amounts, and the growth of profit. In order to have profits, you really have to "expand the pie" of the economy. If
you don't expand the pie you can't get profits. The only way you can get profits in a pie that's not growing is to
change the share, which has been done in recent years. But, basically, profit comes from growth. Anytime the
economy doesn't grow, you have a crisis under capitalism because the accumulation of capital, profits, aren't being
generated. When the world economy doesn't grow by at least 2.5%, they call that a world recession. It's considered
to be a world crisis of capitalism, and this is built into the system.
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Link – Space
The drive to explore and develop space manifests global capitalism’s drive for unending expansion.
Dickens 10
(Peter, Professor of Sociology – University of Brighton and Cambridge, UK, “The Humanization of the Cosmos –
To What End?”, Monthly Review, 62(6), November, 6-6, http://monthlyreview.org/archives/2010/volume-62-issue06-november-2010)
Instead of indulging in over-optimistic and fantastic visions, we should take a longer, harder, and more critical look
at what is happening and what is likely to happen. We can then begin taking a more measured view of space
humanization, and start developing more progressive alternatives. At this point, we must return to the deeper,
underlying processes which are at the heart of the capitalist economy and society, and which are generating this
demand for expansion into outer space. Although the humanization of the cosmos is clearly a new and exotic
development, the social relationships and mechanisms underlying space-humanization are very familiar. In the early
twentieth century, Rosa Luxemburg argued that an “outside” [area] to capitalism is important for two main reasons.
First, it is needed as a means of creating massive numbers of new customers who would buy the goods made in the
capitalist countries.7 As outlined earlier, space technology has extended and deepened this process, allowing an
increasing number of people to become integral to the further expansion of global capitalism. Luxemburg’s second
reason for imperial expansion is the search for cheap supplies of labor and raw materials. Clearly, space fiction
fantasies about aliens aside, expansion into the cosmos offers no benefits to capital in the form of fresh sources of
labor power.8 But expansion into the cosmos does offer prospects for exploiting new materials such as those in
asteroids, the moon, and perhaps other cosmic entities such as Mars. Neil Smith’s characterization of capital’s
relations to nature is useful at this point. The reproduction of material life is wholly dependent on the production and
reproduction of surplus value. To this end, capital stalks the Earth in search of material resources; nature becomes a
universal means of production in the sense that it not only provides the subjects, objects and instruments of
production, but is also in its totality an appendage to the production process…no part of the Earth’s surface, the
atmosphere, the oceans, the geological substratum or the biological superstratum are immune from transformation
by capital.9 Capital is now also “stalking” outer space in the search for new resources and raw materials. Nature on
a cosmic scale now seems likely to be incorporated into production processes, these being located mainly on earth.
Space development is a strategy of capitalist accumulation.
Macdonald 7
(Fraser, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography – University of Melbourne, “Anti-Astropolitik – Outer Space And
The Orbit Of Geography,” 603-604, EBSCO)
Many of these space-enabled developments have, unaccountably, been neglected by the mainstream of geography.
For instance, Barney Warf makes the comment that ‘to date, satellites remain a black hole in the geographical
literature on communications’ (Warf, 2006: 2). Yet these technologies underwrite an array of potentially new
subjectivities, modes of thinking and ways of being whose amorphous shape has recently been given outline by
Thrift in a series of original and perceptive essays (Thrift, 2004a; 2004b; 2005a). He draws our attention to
assemblages of software, hardware, new forms of address and locatability, new kinds of background calculation and
processing, that constitute more active and recursive every-day environments. The background ‘hum’ of
computation that makes western life possible, he argues, has been for the most part inaudible to social researchers.
Of particular interest to Thrift is the tendency towards ‘making different parts of the world locatable and
transposable within a global architecture of address’ (Thrift, 2004a: 588), which is, of course, the ultimate
achievement of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), of which GPS is the current market leader. On the
back of the absolute space of GPS – and its ancillary cartographic achievements (Pickles, 2004) – have emerged
other (relational) spatial imaginaries and new perceptual capacities, whereby the ability to determine one’s location
and that of other people and things is increasingly a matter of human precognition (Thrift, 2005a: 472). Dissolving
any neat distinction between ‘nature’ and ‘technology’, this new faculty of techno-intelligence can support quite
different modes of sensory experience. Thrift offers the term ‘a-whereness’ to describe these new spatial modalities
that are formed when what used to be called ‘technology’ has moved ‘so decisively into the interstices of the active
percipience of everyday life’ (Thrift, 2005a: 472; see also Massey and Thrift, 2003: 291). For all its clunky punnage,
‘a-whereness’ nevertheless gives a name to a set of highly contingent forms of subjectivity that are worth
anticipating, even if, by Thrift’s own admission, they remain necessarily speculative. Reading this body of work can
induce a certain vertigo, confronting potentially precipitous shifts in human sociality. The same sensation is also
induced by engagement with Paul Virilio (2005). But, unlike Virilio, Thrift casts off any sense of foreboding (Thrift,
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2005b) and instead embraces the construction of ‘new qualities’ (‘conventions, techniques, forms, genres, con- cepts
and even ... senses’), which in turn open up new ethicopolitical possibilities (Thrift, 2004a: 583). It is important not
to jettison this openness lightly. Even so, I remain circumspect about the social relations that underwrite these
emergent qualities, and I am puzzled by Thrift’s disregard of the (geo)political contexts within which these new
technologies have come to prominence. A critical geography should, I think, be alert to the ways in which state and
corporate power are immanent within these technologies, actively strategizing new possibilities for capital
accumulation and military neoliberalism. To the extent that we can sensibly talk about ‘a-whereness’ it is surely a
function of a new turn in capitalism, which has arguably expanded beyond the frame (but not the reach) of Marx and
Engels when they wrote that: the need for a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over
the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.
(Marx and Engels, 1998: 39) The current struggle for orbital supremacy, as the next section will make clear, is an
extension of these relations into space in order to consolidate them back on Earth. Indeed, outer space may become,
to use David Harvey’s term, a ‘spatio-temporal fix’ that can respond to crises of over-accumulation (Harvey, 2003:
43). While this might seem like shorthand for the sort of Marxist critique that Thrift rejects (Amin and Thrift, 2005),
it is an analysis that is also shared by the advocates of American Astropolitik, who describe space as the means by
which ‘capitalism will never reach wealth saturation’ (Dolman, 2002: 175). The production of (outer) space should,
I think, be understood in this wider context.
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Link – Satellites
Satellites are a tool of capitalist exploitation.
Dickens 10
(Peter, Professor of Sociology – University of Brighton and Cambridge, UK, “The Humanization of the Cosmos –
To What End?”, Monthly Review, 62(6), November, 6-6, http://monthlyreview.org/2010/11/01/the-humanizationof-the-cosmos-to-what-end)
Yet among these plans and proposals, it is easy to forget that outer space is already being increasingly humanized. It
has now been made an integral part of the way global capitalist society is organized and extended. Satellites, for
example, are extremely important elements of contemporary communications systems. These have enabled an
increasing number of people to become part of the labor market. Teleworking is the best known example. Satellitebased communications have also facilitated new forms of consumption such as teleshopping. Without satellite-based
communications, the global economy in its present form would grind to a halt. Satellites have also been made
central to modern warfare. Combined with pilotless Predator drones, they are now being used to observe and attack
Taliban and Al-Qaida operatives in Afghanistan and elsewhere. This action is done by remote control from Creech
Air Force Base at Indian Springs, Nevada. The 1980s Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars” program, aimed to
intercept incoming missiles while facilitating devastating attacks on supposed enemies. A version of the program is
still being developed, with the citizens of the Czech Republic and Poland now under pressure to accept parts of a
U.S.-designed “missile defense shield.” This is part of a wider strategy of “Full Spectrum Dominance,” which has
for some time been official U.S. Defense Policy.4 Using surveillance and military equipment located in outer space
is now seen as the prime means of protecting U.S. economic and military assets both on Earth and in outer space.
Less dangerously, but still very expensively, a full-scale space-tourism industry has for some time been under active
development. Dennis Tito, a multi-millionaire, made the first tourist trip into outer space in 2001. Richard Branson’s
Virgin Galactic has now sold over three hundred seats at $200,000 apiece to its first tourists in outer space. The
program is due to start in 2011, with spaceports for this novel form of travel now being built in Alaska, California,
Florida, New Mexico, Virginia, Wisconsin, the United Arab Emirates, and Esrange in Sweden. Excursions circling
the moon, likely to cost the galactic visitors around $100,000,000, are now under development.
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Link – Economic Growth
Uncritically accepting the imperative for economic growth perpetuates global inequity. Reject the false
dichotomy of growth versus no growth.
Mészáros 11
(István, Professor Emeritus – University of Sussex, “The Only Viable Economy”, 6-17,
http://monthlyreview.org/2007/04/01/the-only-viable-economy)
Thus, there can be no alternative to decreeing the pernicious dogma of no alternative in bourgeois thought. But it is
totally absurd for socialists to adopt the position of endless (and by its nature uncontrollable) capital expansion. For
the corollary idealization of—again characteristically unqualified—“consumption” ignores the elementary truth that
from capital’s uncritical self-expansionary vantage point there can be no difference between destruction and
consumption. One is as good as the other for the required purpose. This is so because the commercial transaction in
the capital relation—even of the most destructive kind, embodied in the ware of the military/industrial complex and
the use to which it is put in its inhuman wars—successfully completes the cycle of capital’s enlarged selfreproduction, so as to be able to open a new cycle. This is the only thing that really matters to capital, no matter
how unsustainable might be the consequences. Consequently, when socialists internalize the imperative of capital
expansion as the necessary ground of the advocated growth, they do not simply accept an isolated tenet but a whole
“package deal.” Knowingly or not, they accept at the same time all of the false alternatives—like “growth or nogrowth”—that can be derived from the uncritical advocacy of necessary capital expansion. The false alternative of
no growth must be rejected by us not only because its adoption would perpetuate the most gruesome misery and
inequality now dominating the world, with struggle and destructiveness inseparable from it. The radical negation
of that approach can only be a necessary point of departure. The inherently positive dimension of our vision
involves the fundamental redefinition of wealth itself as known to us. Under capital’s social metabolic order we are
confronted by the alienating rule of wealth over society, directly affecting every aspect of life, from the narrowly
economic to the cultural and spiritual domains. Consequently, we cannot get out of capital’s vicious circle, with all
of its ultimately destructive determinations and false alternatives, without fully turning around that vital relationship.
Namely, without making society—the society of freely associated individuals—rule over wealth, redefining at the
same time also their relation to time and to the kind of use to which the products of human labor are put. As Marx
had written already in one of his early works: In a future society, in which class antagonism will have ceased, in
which there will no longer be any classes, use will no longer be determined by the minimum time of production; but
the time of production devoted to an article will be determined by the degree of its social utility.
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Link – Space Dominance
US space dominance is a tool for the violent expansion of global capitalism.
Duvall & Havercroft 6
(Raymond, Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota, & Jonathan, Postdoctoral Fellow in
Political Science at The University of British Columbia, “Taking Sovereignty Out of This World: Space Weapons
and Empire of the Future,” October, http://www.ligi.ubc.ca/sites/liu/files/Publications/Havercroft_paper.pdf)
Each of the three forms of space weaponization has important constitutive effects on modern sovereignty, and, in
turn, productive effects on political subjectivities. Exclusive missile defense constitutes a “hard shell” of sovereignty
for one state, while erasing the sovereign political subject status of other states. Space control reinforces that
exclusive constitution of sovereignty and its potentiality for fostering unilateral decision. It also constitutes the
‘‘space-controlling’’ state, the U.S., as sovereign for a particular global social order, a global capitalism, and as a
state populated by an exceptional people, ““Americans.”” Space weaponization in the form of capacities for direct
force application obliterate the meaning of territorial boundaries for defense and for distinguishing an inside from an
outside with respect to the scope of policing and law enforcement——that is authorized locus for deciding the
exception. States, other than the exceptional “American” state, are reduced to empty shells of sovereignty, sustained,
if at all, by convenient fiction——for example, as useful administrative apparatuses for the governing of locals. And
their “citizens” are produced as “bare life” subject to the willingness of the global sovereign to let them live.
Together, these three sets of effects constitute what we believe can appropriately be identified as late-modern
empire, the political subjects of which are a global sovereign, an exceptional “nation” linked to that sovereign, a
global social order normalized in terms of capitalist social relations, and “bare life” for individuals and groups
globally to participate in that social order. If our argument is even half correct, the claim with which this paper
began——that modes of political killing have important effects——would be an understatement!
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Impact – War
Capitalism causes nuclear Armageddon
Webb 4
(Sam, National Chairman, Communist Party USA, “War, capitalism, and George W. Bush”, 3/19,
http://www.peoplesworld.org/war-capitalism-and-george-w-bush/)
Why do I say that? Because capitalism, with its imperatives of capital accumulation, profit maximization and
competition, is the cause of new global problems that threaten the prospects and lives of billions of people
worldwide, and, more importantly, it is also a formidable barrier to humankind’s ability to solve these problems.
Foremost among these, in addition to ecological degradation, economic crises, population pressures, and
endemic diseases, is the threat of nuclear mass annihilation. With the end of the Cold War, most of us thought
that the threat of nuclear war would fade and with it the stockpiles of nuclear weapons. But those hopes were
dashed. Rather than easing, the nuclear threat is more palpable in some ways and caches of nuclear weapons are
growing. And our own government possesses the biggest stockpiles by far. Much like previous administrations, the
Bush administration has continued to develop more powerful nuclear weapons, but with a twist: it insists on its
singular right to employ nuclear weapons preemptively in a range of military situations. This is a major departure
from earlier U.S. policy – the stated policy of all previous administrations was that nuclear weapons are weapons of
last resort to be used only in circumstances in which our nation is under severe attack. Meanwhile, today’s White
House bullies demonize, impose sanctions, and make or threaten war on states that are considering developing a
nuclear aweapons capability. Bush tells us that this policy of arming ourselves while disarming others should cause
no anxiety because, he says, his administration desires only peace and has no imperial ambitions. Not surprisingly,
people greet his rhetorical assurances skeptically, especially as it becomes more and more obvious that his
administration’s political objective is not world peace, but world domination, cunningly couched in the language of
“fighting terrorism.” It is well that millions of peace-minded people distrust Bush’s rhetoric. The hyper-aggressive
gang in the Oval Office and Pentagon and the absolutely lethal nature of modern weapons of mass destruction make
for a highly unstable and explosive situation that could cascade out of control. War has a logic of its own. But
skepticism alone is not enough. It has to be combined with a sustained mobilization of the world community – the
other superpower in this unipolar world – if the hand of the warmakers in the White House and Pentagon is to be
stayed. A heavy responsibility rests on the American people. For we have the opportunity to defeat Bush and his
counterparts in Congress in the November elections. Such a defeat will be a body blow to the policies of preemption,
regime change, and saber rattling, and a people’s mandate for peace, disarmament, cooperation, and mutual security.
The world will become a safer place. In the longer run, however, it is necessary to replace the system of capitalism.
With its expansionary logic to accumulate capital globally and its competitive rivalries, capitalism has an undeniable
structural tendency to militarism and war. This doesn’t mean that nuclear war is inevitable. But it does suggest that
nuclear war is a latent, ever-present possibility in a world in which global capital is king. Whether that occurs
depends in large measure on the outcome of political struggle within and between classes and social movements at
the national and international level.
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Impact – Environment
Capitalism makes environmental catastrophe and extinction inevitable.
Brooks 6
(Mick, editor of the Socialist Appeal, “Capitalism and the Environment”, 21-8, http://www.marxist.com/capitalismenvironment-ecology-marxism210806.htm)
Global warming and other environmental issues are always in the news. The Green Party in the UK claims to be
neither right wing nor left wing as, they say, environmental issues transcend the traditional issues of class and the
division between rich and poor that define conventional political discussions and divisions. This is poppycock. The
environmental problems, and the potential environmental catastrophe, we face are creations of the capitalist system.
Global warming – the ‘population time bomb’ – nuclear energy – pollution – environmental issues are always in the
news. There is even a party – the Green Party – that claims to put the environment at the centre of its concerns. The
Green Party claims to be neither right wing nor left wing as, they say, environmental issues transcend the traditional
issues of class and the division between rich and poor that define conventional political discussions and divisions.
This is poppycock. Environmental issues are vitally important to us inhabitants of the planet earth. But the
environmental problems, and the potential environmental catastrophe, we face are creations of the capitalist
system. Anyone who has read a standard account of the problem of global warming, for instance, will realise that it
is possible, apparently through carelessness, to wipe out human life on earth. Hold on, and take a deep breath!
Don’t capitalists also live on the planet? Is it in their interests that human life, including not just their profits but
even their very existence, should be extinguished? Of course it’s not in their interests. But things that happen under
capitalism don’t just reflect the interests of the individual capitalist. Events follow the logic of the system. This is
how Marxism explains environmental degradation, “As individual capitalists are engaged in production and
exchange for the sake of immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results must first be taken into
account…What cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down the forests on the slopes of the mountains and
obtained from the ashes sufficient fertiliser for one generation of highly profitable coffee trees – what cared they that
heavy tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of soil, leaving behind only bare rock!
In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the
immediate, most tangible result, and then surprise is expressed that the more remote effects of actions directed to
this end turn out to be quite different, are mostly quite opposite in character.” (Engels – Part played by labour in the
transition from ape to man).
Capitalism’s causing a global ecological crisis.
Freund 10
(Peter, Professor of Sociology at Montclair State University, NJ, “Capitalism, Time-Space, Environment, and
Human Well-Being: Envisioning Ecosocialist Temporality and Spatiality”, Capitalism, Nature, and Socialism,
21(2) , p112-113, ebsco)
Capitalism has saturated time-space, colonizing it. The speeding up of daily life is paralleled by the acceleration of
the degradation and appropriation of the environment. The commodification of nature has accelerated along with the
privatization of the commons. With the spread of global capitalism, the scale and speed of such appropriation and
degradation have increased. Thus as China is integrated into the global capitalist economy, it will increasingly be
under pressure to accelerate the production of export products, in turn, exacerbating deforestation, soil erosion,
and water shortages.7 Global capitalism is driving widening ‘‘metabolic-biospheric rifts’’ in the commons (space).
These include temporal rifts between energy and resource consumption and their renewability, as well as rifts
between the rate of waste production and the capacity of ecosystems to cope with it.8 Thus carbon and other
emissions tend to be created at a ‘‘rate faster than natural systems can absorb them, contributing to the creation of a
global ecological crisis.’’9 There are also spatial rifts, such as the increasing separations of natural habitats. Spatial
rifts are expressed in city/rural and North/South splits, and within built environments as ‘‘antimonies between nature
and culture, divisions into ‘‘residential,’’ ‘‘commercial,’’ ‘‘light industrial,’’ ‘‘historic preservation,’’ and ‘‘natural
restoration’’ spaces.10 Temporal-spatial rifts produce what James O’Connor has called the ‘‘second contradiction’’
of capitalism*a contradiction between the capitalist mode of production and the conditions of production, or more
generally, the ‘‘conditions of existence.’’
Capitalism necessitates rapid environmental degradation.
Liodakis 1
(George, Professor of Political Economy at the Technical University of Crete, Capital & Class, “The People-Nature
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Relation and the Historical Significance of the Labour Theory of Value”, Spring,
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3780/is_200104/ai_n8940388/pg_2/?tag=mantle_skin;content, Page 2)
Analysing the environmental impact of capitalist production, Marx stressed that the growing productivity of labour
implies the processing of an increasing amount of raw material into commodities, and hence an increasing depletion
of natural resources (1967 III: 108). Although it is a controversial issue among Marxists, it can be argued that usevalue is not merely a precondition of exchange value and that the demand aspect plays a definite role in the
valorisation of capital and the pattern of development, with potentially considerable environmental implications (see
Rubin, 1972; Rosdolsky, 1977: ch.3; Burkett, 1996b). It is crucial here that social needs are considerably
manipulated and plasmatically expanded to serve the accumulation of capital. More significantly, however, insofar
as exchange value is the dominant goal of capitalist production, the profitdriven and unlimited growth of capitalist
production will permanently lead to a depletion of natural resources, and hence to a degradation of the environment.
Marx also pointed out that, economies of scale lead to a tendency for large industrial units (1967 1: 626), while
external economies encourage the spatial concentration of industrial production, and hence of the labour force (1967
I: 350-9,III: 79-85). This scale and spatial concentration of industry and the boundless growth of production imply a
rapid environmental degradation. Referring to capitalist agriculture, Marx notes that, exploitation and
squandering of the vitality of the soil ... takes the place of conscious rational cultivation of the soil as eternal
communal property, an inalienable condition for the existence and reproduction of a chain of successive generations
of the human race' (1967 III: 812). He moreover stresses that `all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil ... is a
progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility' and that the squandered vitality of the soil `is carried by
commerce far beyond the borders of a particular state' (1967 I: 506, III: 813). Capitalism, according to Marx, `sap[2]
the original sources of all wealth-- the soil and the labourer'(1967 1:507) and leads to an increasing antithesis
between town and country (1967 I: 505). Burkett (1996a) has also sufficiently demonstrated the environmental
implications of the unlimited growth of capital.
Global warming inevitable under capitalism
Herod 10
(James, Author on multiple books on capitalism, “Capitalism, Global Warming, and the Climate Justice Movement”,
http://www.jamesherod.info/?sec=paper&id=62&print=y&PHPSESSID=cc3817ba07bd8cdc8f762b396fb319f1)
Can global warming be stopped on the local level? No it can not. Tens of thousands of towns and cities could do
everything in their power to reduce their carbon footprints and it would not make much difference as long as the
great engines of capitalist industry, agriculture, transportation, government, and military are still running. Capitalists
have caused global warming.(3) It is true that initially, and for a long time thereafter, capitalists didn't know that
they were doing this, but they could damn well see that they were destroying the environment, and they didn't care,
and still don't, any more than they cared about the millions of people they were killing, and still are. Capitalists are
not going to stop global warming. They are still, and always will be, bickering and jockeying and fighting amongst
themselves for position, power, markets, resources, and profits. That's what they mostly do at these conferences.
(Plus, thousands of corporate lobbyists descended on Copenhagen, flushed with cash, to add to the chaotic drama.)
The basic premises of capitalism guarantee environmental degradation.
Liodakis 1
(George, Professor of Political Economy at the Technical University of Crete, Capital & Class, “The People-Nature
Relation and the Historical Significance of the Labour Theory of Value”, Spring,
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3780/is_200104/ai_n8940388/pg_2/?tag=mantle_skin;content, Page 2)
Capitalism may have contributed to the overcoming of traditional and mythical perceptions of nature, but the
alienation of people, starting from the development of the institution of private property and implying the
dispossession of the means of production and the natural conditions of subsistence from the majority of direct
producers, namely the disruption of the people-nature unity, reaches its apogee with the development of capitalism
(see Marx, 1967 I: 714, 716). Thus, a new metaphysic of nature as an external factor is created. This serves the
ideological rationalisation of private property, and also has crucial implications for the exploitation of nature and the
degradation of the environment. As Engels has stressed, the domination of the direct interests of the ruling class in
capitalism systematically leads to a serious impact on the environment (Marx and Engels, 1974: 364-68). Here it
may be expedient to point out the basic premises of capitalism which lend themselves to the systematic degradation
and destruction of the environment: (a) The specific character of the society-nature relation, which derives from the
specific character of the capitalist mode of production and the particular role of the institution of private property in
land and natural resources. (b) The competitive character of capitalist production, aiming at exchange-values rather
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than use-values meeting the needs of the direct producers, and its purpose in accumulating surplus value (see Smith,
1984: 35; Burkett, 1996a). (c) The historically specific form of labour as value and the specific character of
capitalist valorisation, which largely ignores the contribution of nature, as analysed in the next section, and is solely
based on exploitation of wage labour. (d) The negative externalities (externalisation of part of the production cost by
private capital) which are increased through the intensification of competition.
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Impact – Environment – AT: Space Exploration/Development Solves
Extending capitalism’s reach to space guarantees devastating exploitation of the environment.
Dickens 10
(Peter, Professor of Sociology – University of Brighton and Cambridge, UK, “The Humanization of the Cosmos –
To What End?”, Monthly Review, 62(6), November, 6-6, http://monthlyreview.org/2010/11/01/the-humanizationof-the-cosmos-to-what-end)
The general point is that the vision of the Space Renaissance Initiative, with its prime focus on the power of the
supposedly autonomous and inventive individual, systematically omits questions of social, economic, and military
power. Similarly, the Initiative’s focus on the apparently universal benefits of space humanization ignores some
obvious questions. What will ploughing large amounts of capital into outer space colonization really do for stopping
the exploitation of people and resources back here on earth? The “solution” seems to be simultaneously exacerbating
social problems while jetting away from them. Consumer-led industrial capitalism necessarily creates huge social
divisions and increasing degradation of the environment. Why should a galactic capitalism do otherwise? The Space
Renaissance Initiative argues that space-humanization is necessarily a good thing for the environment by
introducing new space-based technologies such as massive arrays of solar panels. But such “solutions” are again
imaginary. Cheap electricity is most likely to increase levels of production and consumption back on earth.
Environmental degradation will be exacerbated rather than diminished by this technological fix.
Capitalism can’t be sustainable.
Mészáros 11
(István, Professor Emeritus – University of Sussex, “The Only Viable Economy”, 6-17,
http://monthlyreview.org/2007/04/01/the-only-viable-economy)
That is where the incorrigible divorce of capitalistic growth from human need and use—indeed its potentially most
devastating and destructive counter-position to human need—betrays itself. Once the fetishisitic mystifications and
arbitrary postulates at the root of the categorically decreed false identity of growth and productivity are peeled away,
it becomes abundantly clear that the kind of growth postulated and at the same time automatically exempted from
all critical scrutiny is in no way inherently connected with sustainable objectives corresponding to human need.
The only connection that must be asserted and defended at all cost in capital’s social metabolic universe is the false
identity of—aprioristically presupposed—capital expansion and circularly corresponding (but in truth likewise
aprioristically presupposed) “growth,” whatever might be the consequences imposed on nature and humankind by
even the most destructive type of growth. For capital’s real concern can only be its own ever enlarged expansion,
even if that brings with it the destruction of humanity. In this vision even the most lethal cancerous growth must
preserve its conceptual primacy over (against) human need and use, if human need by any chance happens to be
mentioned at all. And when the apologists of the capital system are willing to consider The Limits to Growth, as the
“Club of Rome” did in its vastly propagandized capital-apologetic venture in the early 1970s, the aim inevitably
remains the eternalization of the existing grave inequalities by fictitiously (and quixotically) freezing global
capitalist production at a totally untenable level, blaming primarily “population growth” (as customary in bourgeois
political economy ever since Malthus) for the existing problems. Compared to such callous hypocritical “remedial
intent,” rhetorically pretending to be concerned with nothing less than “the Predicament of Mankind,” Mill’s earlier
quoted paternalistic preaching, with its genuine advocacy of somewhat more equitable distribution than what he was
familiar with, was the paradigm of radical enlightenment.
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Impact – Ethics
Capitalism is ethically bankrupt.
Morgareidge 98
(Clayton, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Lewis and Clark College, “Why Capitalism is Evil,” Radio Active
Philosophy, http://legacy.lclark.edu/~clayton/commentaries/evil.html)
In recent commentaries for the Old Mole I have been trying to make capitalism look bad -- as bad as it really is. I
have argued that capitalism is war, and that those of us who do not own capital suffer from it just as do civilian
populations caught between opposing armies, or as foot soldiers conscripted into armies fighting for interests that
are not our own. I've tried to show that capitalism is the violent negation of democracy, for it is the interests of those
who own capital that determine how we live: their jobs, products, services, manufactured culture, and propaganda
shape our lives and our minds. Today I'd like to point to the ways in which capital undermines the foundation of
moral life. Well, what is the foundation of moral life? What makes it possible for human beings to recognize that
they have responsibilities to each other and to their communities? For example: What could possibly make anyone
willing to pay living wages to workers in Indonesia or Haiti if you can get them to work for less? The 18th Century
philosopher David Hume asks, What reason can anyone give me to not to prefer the annihilation of all mankind to a
scratch on my finger? Hume is one of many philosophers who argue that no such reason can be given. This means
that the foundation of ethics lies not in reason, but rather in our passions or our hearts. For Hume it is part of our
nature that we feel sympathy for each other, and this sympathy counters our narrow self-interest. Other philosophers
have taken similar positions. Josiah Royce an American philosopher of the last century argued that you do not really
understand another person if you do not understand her aspirations, fears, and needs. But to understand someone's
feelings is, in part, to share them. And you cannot share an aspiration or a need without wanting to see it fulfilled,
nor can you share a fear without hoping that it will not come to pass. So the mere recognition of what other human
beings are involves us in wanting to see them live and prosper. The French-Jewish philosopher Emmanual Levinás
whose major work appeared in 1961 claims that ethics arises in the experience of the face of the other. The human
face reveals its capacity for suffering, a suffering we are capable of either inflicting or opposing. So to look into the
face of another human being is to see the commandment, Thou shalt not kill. Another American philosopher, Nel
Noddings, in her 1984 book Caring, argues that the ethical commitment arises out of the caring response that most
of us feel towards those who, like children, are in need. Most parents encourage this caring response in their
children, with the result that we grow up with an interest in cultivating our own capacity to care for others. Now
none of these philosophers are naive: none of them thinks that sympathy, love, or caring determines all, or even
most, human behavior. The 20th century proves otherwise. What they do offer, though, is the hope that human
beings have the capacity to want the best for each other. So now we must ask, What forces are at work in our world
to block or cripple the ethical response? This question, of course, brings me back to capitalism. But before I go
there, I want to acknowledge that capitalism is not the only thing that blocks our ability to care. Exploitation and
cruelty were around long before the economic system of capitalism came to be, and the temptation to use and abuse
others will probably survive in any future society that might supersede capitalism. Nevertheless, I want to claim, the
putting the world at the disposal of those with capital has done more damage to the ethical life than any thing else.
To put it in religious terms, capital is the devil. To show why this is the case, let me turn to capital's greatest critic,
Karl Marx. Under capitalism, Marx writes, everything in nature and everything that human beings are and can do
becomes an object: a resource for, or an obstacle, to the expansion of production, the development of technology,
the growth of markets, and the circulation of money. For those who manage and live from capital, nothing has value
of its own. Mountain streams, clean air, human lives -- all mean nothing in themselves, but are valuable only if they
can be used to turn a profit.[1] If capital looks at (not into) the human face, it sees there only eyes through which
brand names and advertising can enter and mouths that can demand and consume food, drink, and tobacco products.
If human faces express needs, then either products can be manufactured to meet, or seem to meet, those needs, or
else, if the needs are incompatible with the growth of capital, then the faces expressing them must be unrepresented
or silenced. Obviously what capitalist enterprises do have consequences for the well being of human beings and the
planet we live on. Capital profits from the production of food, shelter, and all the necessities of life. The production
of all these things uses human lives in the shape of labor, as well as the resources of the earth. If we care about life,
if we see our obligations in each others faces, then we have to want all the things capital does to be governed by that
care, to be directed by the ethical concern for life. But feeding people is not the aim of the food industry, or shelter
the purpose of the housing industry. In medicine, making profits is becoming a more important goal than caring for
sick people. As capitalist enterprises these activities aim single-mindedly at the accumulation of capital, and such
purposes as caring for the sick or feeding the hungry becomes a mere means to an end, an instrument of corporate
growth. Therefore ethics, the overriding commitment to meeting human need, is left out of deliberations about what
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the heavyweight institutions of our society are going to do. Moral convictions are expressed in churches, in living
rooms, in letters to the editor, sometimes even by politicians and widely read commentators, but almost always with
an attitude of resignation to the inevitable. People no longer say, "You can't stop progress," but only because they
have learned not to call economic growth progress. They still think they can't stop it. And they are right -- as long as
the production of all our needs and the organization of our labor is carried out under private ownership. Only a
minority ("idealists") can take seriously a way of thinking that counts for nothing in real world decision making.
Only when the end of capitalism is on the table will ethics have a seat at the table.
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Alternative – Reject Capitalism
Only rejecting capitalism creates the possibility for alternative social formations.
Herod 4
(James, “The Strategy described abstractly”, Getting Free,
http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/GetFre/06.htm)
It is time to try to describe, at first abstractly and later concretely, a strategy for destroying capitalism. This strategy,
at its most basic, calls for pulling time, energy, and resources out of capitalist civilization and putting them into
building a new civilization. The image then is one of emptying out capitalist structures, hollowing them out, by
draining wealth, power, and meaning out of them until there is nothing left but shells. This is definitely an
aggressive strategy. It requires great militancy, and constitutes an attack on the existing order. The strategy clearly
recognizes that capitalism is the enemy and must be destroyed, but it is not a frontal attack aimed at overthrowing
the system, but an inside attack aimed at gutting it, while simultaneously replacing it with something better,
something we want. Thus capitalist structures (corporations, governments, banks, schools, etc.) are not seized so
much as simply abandoned. Capitalist relations are not fought so much as they are simply rejected. We stop
participating in activities that support (finance, condone) the capitalist world and start participating in activities that
build a new world while simultaneously undermining the old. We create a new pattern of social relations alongside
capitalist relations and then we continually build and strengthen our new pattern while doing every thing we can to
weaken capitalist relations. In this way our new democratic, non-hierarchical, non-commodified relations can
eventually overwhelm the capitalist relations and force them out of existence. This is how it has to be done. This is
a plausible, realistic strategy. To think that we could create a whole new world of decent social arrangements
overnight, in the midst of a crisis, during a so-called revolution, or during the collapse of capitalism, is foolhardy.
Our new social world must grow within the old, and in opposition to it, until it is strong enough to dismantle and
abolish capitalist relations. Such a revolution will never happen automatically, blindly, determinably, because of the
inexorable, materialist laws of history. It will happen, and only happen, because we want it to, and because we know
what we�re doing and know how we want to live, and know what obstacles have to be overcome before we can live
that way, and know how to distinguish between our social patterns and theirs.
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AT: Permutation
Doesn’t solve – focusing on the state re-entrenches global capitalism.
Holloway 5
(John, Professor in the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades ,“Can We Change The World Without Taking
Power?”, 5-4, http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=98)
The principal argument against the first conception is that it leads us in the wrong direction. The state is not a thing,
it is not a neutral object: it is a form of social relations, a form of organisation, a way of doing things which has been
developed over several centuries for the purpose of maintaining or developing the rule of capital. If we focus our
struggles on the state, or if we take the state as our principal point of reference, we have to understand that the state
pulls us in a certain direction. Above all, it seeks to impose upon us a separation of our struggles from society, to
convert our struggle into a struggle on behalf of, in the name of. It separates leaders from the masses, the
representatives from the represented; it draws us into a different way of talking, a different way of thinking. It pulls
us into a process of reconciliation with reality, and that reality is the reality of capitalism, a form of social
organisation that is based on exploitation and injustice, on killing and destruction. It also draws us into a spatial
definition of how we do things, a spatial definition which makes a clear distinction between the state’s territory and
the world outside, and a clear distinction between citizens and foreigners. It draws us into a spatial definition of
struggle that has no hope of matching the global movement of capital. There is one key concept in the history of the
state-centred left, and that concept is betrayal. Time and time again the leaders have betrayed the movement, and not
necessarily because they are bad people, but just because the state as a form of organisation separates the leaders
from the movement and draws them into a process of reconciliation with capital. Betrayal is already given in the
state as an organisational form. Can we resist this? Yes, of course we can, and it is something that happens all the
time. We can refuse to let the state identify leaders or permanent representatives of the movement, we can refuse to
let delegates negotiate in secret with the representatives of the state. But this means understanding that our forms of
organisation are very different from those of the state, that there is no symmetry between them. The state is an
organisation on behalf of, what we want is the organisation of self-determination, a form of organisation that allows
us to articulate what we want, what we decide, what we consider necessary or desirable. What we want, in other
words, is a form of organisation that does not have the state as its principal point of reference.
Only total rejection solves – attempts at reform merely reinforce capitalist exploitation.
Herod 4
(James, “The Strategy described abstractly”, Getting Free,
http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/GetFre/06.htm)
But we must not think that the capitalist world can simply be ignored, in a live and let live attitude, while we try to
build new lives elsewhere. (There is no elsewhere.) There is at least one thing, wage-slavery, that we can�t simply
stop participating in (but even here there are ways we can chip away at it). Capitalism must be explicitly refused
and replaced by something else. This constitutes War, but it is not a war in the traditional sense of armies and tanks,
but a war fought on a daily basis, on the level of everyday life, by millions of people. It is a war nevertheless
because the accumulators of capital will use coercion, brutality, and murder, as they have always done in the past, to
try to block any rejection of the system. They have always had to force compliance; they will not hesitate to
continue doing so. Nevertheless, there are many concrete ways that individuals, groups, and neighborhoods can gut
capitalism, which I will enumerate shortly. We must always keep in mind how we became slaves; then we can see
more clearly how we can cease being slaves. We were forced into wage-slavery because the ruling class slowly,
systematically, and brutally destroyed our ability to live autonomously. By driving us off the land, changing the
property laws, destroying community rights, destroying our tools, imposing taxes, destroying our local markets, and
so forth, we were forced onto the labor market in order to survive, our only remaining option being to sell, for a
wage, our ability to work. It�s quite clear then how we can overthrow slavery. We must reverse this process. We
must begin to reacquire the ability to live without working for a wage or buying the products made by wage-slaves
(that is, we must get free from the labor market and the way of living based on it), and embed ourselves instead in
cooperative labor and cooperatively produced goods. Another clarification is needed. This strategy does not call for
reforming capitalism, for changing capitalism into something else. It calls for replacing capitalism, totally, with a
new civilization. This is an important distinction, because capitalism has proved impervious to reforms, as a
system. We can sometimes in some places win certain concessions from it (usually only temporary ones) and win
some (usually short-lived) improvements in our lives as its victims, but we cannot reform it piecemeal, as a system.
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Attempts at reform undermine the broader critique of capitalism.
Mészáros 11
(István, Professor Emeritus – University of Sussex, “The Only Viable Economy”, 6-17,
http://monthlyreview.org/2007/04/01/the-only-viable-economy)
The incompatibilities of the two systems become amply clear when we consider their relationship to the question of
limit itself. The only sustainable growth positively promoted under the alternative social metabolic control is based
on the conscious acceptance of the limits whose violation would imperil the realization of the chosen—and humanly
valid—reproductive objectives. Hence wastefulness and destructiveness (as clearly identified limiting concepts) are
absolutely excluded by the consciously accepted systemic determinations themselves, adopted by the social
individuals as their vital orienting principles. By contrast, the capital system is characterized, and fatefully driven,
by the—conscious or unconscious—rejection of all limits, including its own systemic limits. Even the latter are
arbitrarily and dangerously treated as if they were nothing more than always superable contingent obstacles. Hence
anything goes in this social reproductive system, including the possibility—and by the time we have reached our
own historical epoch also the overwhelming grave probability—of total destruction. Naturally, this mutually
exclusive relationship to the question of limits prevails also the other way round. Thus, there can be no “partial
correctives” borrowed from the capital system when creating and strengthening the alternative social metabolic
order. The partial—not to mention general—incompatibilities of the two systems arise from the radical
incompatibility of their value dimension. As mentioned above, this is why the particular value determinations and
relations of the alternative order could not be transferred into capital’s social metabolic framework for the purpose
of improving it, as postulated by some utterly unreal reformist design, wedded to the vacuous methodology of “little
by little.” For even the smallest partial relations of the alternative system are deeply embedded in the general value
determinations of an overall framework of human needs whose inviolable elementary axiom is the radical exclusion
of waste and destruction, in accord with its innermost nature.
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AT: No Alt to Capitalism
Even if we can’t immediately replace capitalism altogether, you should vote for a radical departure from
capitalism to create space for transformation.
Foster 8
(John Bellamy, author of Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature and an editor of Monthly Review. Interview by
Renfrey Clarke from GLW, http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/39387)
I do think that under capitalist system, if the logic of capital is predominant — that our society has as its primary
motivation the accumulation of capital and profits at the expense of nearly everything else — the chances of the
world getting our of this alive are very, very dim. But it's within the power of humanity to pull us away from the
logic of capital. @question = This invites the question of a social system which is something quite different. We
won't get there all at once, but every radical thrust away from it gives us more of a chance, so we need to prioritise
human needs and decrease human waste. We have to prioritise human access to water, food and those basic things
that human beings really need. And we have to move away from those goods and processes and commodities that
exist only so that corporations can make a profit. Eventually, we have to politically transform our system and
transform our production. The reason we have to transform production is because that is the human relation to
nature, its metabolism with nature. The only way we can deal with the ecological problem is to change the way in
which we relate to nature through our production, and that is precisely what the existing system won't allow us to
address. So that's where the real problem is buried.
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AT: No Alt to the State
We don’t refuse to engage the state, instead we try to stop it from influencing us
Holloway 5
(John, Professor in the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades ,“Can We Change The World Without Taking
Power?”, 5-4, http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=98)
The questioner who spoke of us turning our backs on the state—I am not saying we should ignore the state. It would
be lovely if we could. In a way that is what the Zapatistas are doing now. They are turning their backs on the state.
But that is not something that most of us can do. I am an employee of the state. It is not about pretending the state
does not exist. It is about understanding the state as a specific form of social relations which pushes us in certain
directions, and trying to think about how we can struggle against those forms of social relations and push in a
different direction, so that our relation is in and beyond and against the state. It would be lovely if we could pretend
that the state does not exist. Unfortunately we can’t. But we certainly don’t have to fall into the state as a central
reference point in terms of logic or of power or space. The question of Venezuela is very important for all the Latin
Americans here. I liked the way the question was presented. It was not as it is sometimes put in terms of ‘Venezuela
shows we must take power.’ It was in terms of Venezuela shows there has to be a combination of the two
approaches—the state-oriented approach and the non-state-oriented approach. This is what characterises the World
Social Forum, this combination, a cooperation, between these two different approaches. But in that we have to see
there is always a tension, a contradiction, between on the one hand saying, ‘We ourselves shall decide how society
will develop’ and on the other hand saying, ‘The state will decide for you or show you how to decide for
yourselves.’ It will be very important to see how that tension plays itself out in Venezuela. On the question of
fissures. We often feel helpless because capitalism weighs so heavily on us. But when we say No we start off with
an appreciation of our own strength. When we rebel we are in fact tearing a little hole in capitalism. It is very
contradictory. By rebelling we are already saying no to the command of capital. We are creating temporary spaces.
Within that crack, that fissure, it is important that we fight for other social relations that don’t point towards the
state, but that they point towards the sort of society we want to create. At the core of these fissures is the drive to
self-determination. And then it is a question of working out what does this mean, and how to be organised for selfdetermination. It means being against and beyond the society that exists. Of expanding the fissures, how to push
these fissures forward structurally.
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AT: Extinction Outweighs
Privileging self-preservation within capitalism makes extinction inevitable.
Cook 6
(Deborah, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Windsor, July, Rethinking Marxism, Vol 18, No 3, “Staying
Alive: Adorno and Habermas on Self-Preservation under Late Capitalism,” p. 438-439, ebsco)
In the passage in Negative Dialectics where he warns against self-preservation gone wild, Adorno states that it is
‘‘only as reflection upon . . . self-preservation that reason would be above nature’’ (1973, 289). To rise above nature,
then, reason must become ‘‘cognizant of its own natural essence’’ (1998b, 138). To be more fully rational, we must
reflect on what Horkheimer and Adorno once called our underground history (1972, 231). In other words, we must
recognize that our behavior is motivated and shaped by instincts, including the instinct for self-preservation (Adorno
1998a, 153). In his lectures on Kant, Adorno makes similar remarks when he summarizes his solution to the problem
of self-preservation gone wild. To remedy this problem, nature must first become conscious of itself (Adorno 2000,
104). Adopting the Freudian goal of making the unconscious conscious, Adorno also insists that this critical selfunderstanding be accompanied by radical social, political, and economic changes that would bring to a halt the selfimmolating domination of nature. This is why mindfulness of nature is necessary but not sufficient to remedy
unbridled self-preservation. In the final analysis, society must be fundamentally transformed in order rationally to
accommodate instincts that now run wild owing to our forgetfulness of nature in ourselves. By insisting on
mindfulness of nature in the self, Adorno champions a form of rationality that would tame self-preservation, but in
contrast to Habermas, he thinks that the taming of self-preservation is a normative task rather than an accomplished
fact. Because self-preservation remains irrational, we now encounter serious environmental problems like those
connected with global warming and the green-house effect, the depletion of natural resources, and the death of more
than one hundred regions in our oceans. Owing to self-preservation gone wild, we have colonized and destabilized
large parts of the world, adversely affecting the lives of millions, when we have not simply enslaved or murdered
their inhabitants outright. Famine and disease are often the result of ravaging the land in the name of survival
imperatives. Wars are waged in the name of self-preservation: with his now notoriously invisible weapons of mass
destruction, Saddam Hussein was said to represent a serious threat to the lives of citizens in the West. The war
against terrorism, waged in the name of self-preservation, has seriously undermined human rights and civil liberties;
it has also been used to justify the murder, rape, and torture of thousands. As it now stands, the owners of the means
of production ensure our survival through profits that, at best, only trickle down to the poorest members of society.
Taken in charge by the capitalist economy, self-preservation now dictates that profits increase exponentially to the
detriment of social programs like welfare and health care. In addition, self-preservation has gone wild because our
instincts and needs are now firmly harnessed to commodified offers of satisfaction that deflect and distort them.
Having surrendered the task of self-preservation to the economic and political systems, we remain in thrall to
untamed survival instincts that could well end up destroying not just the entire species, but all life on the planet.
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AT: Capitalism Key to the Economy
Non-capitalist economies are more productive and create more wealth than capitalism.
Phelps 9
(Edmund S, Director, Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University, "Refounding Capitalism",
Capitalism and Society, 4(3), Article 2, pg 4, http://www.bepress.com.proxyremote.galib.uga.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=cas)
Regarding wealth, it may be that the challenge of making money, perhaps getting rich, in one’s young or middle
years is absorbing and fun: as Friedrich Nietzsche and Frank Knight suggested, trying to make a fortune is like
participating in a sport. Yet social observers are right to question whether people find significant satisfaction from
increased relative wealth beyond a certain point.6 After you have won the game, what point is there in winning by a
bigger point spread? Many entrepreneurs speak of the wealth received as a by-product of what they sought to do or
achieve rather than as the goal. In any case, an increase in some people’s relative wealth means a decrease in some
others’ relative wealth. There is no reason for the government of a society to promote that sort of sport. The value of
nationwide advances in wealth may be on more solid ground. It is better to have more wealth in a city or nation
where most others have more wealth too: possibilities of a richer and more rewarding life result. The fault in this
view is that the relatively capitalist countries are not distinguished by high levels of wealth. The somewhat more
socialist economies and more corporatist economies of Western Europe reach wealth levels exceeding the levels in
the capitalist economies. The reasons are familiar. One of the major drivers of wealth, the propensity to save, is
higher in Luxembourg, Switzerland, Belgium, France and Germany than in the U.S., the U.K. and Canada – despite
the high security offered by the continental welfare system. The other driver of private wealth, namely, the level of
productivity, is also equal if not greater in the former group of countries than in the latter group. A proposed
explanation is that while the capitalist exemplars may be at or close to the “technical frontier,” thanks to their “lead”
in cutting-edge innovation, they “waste” much of their output potential in false steps, in the costly processes of
marketing, and in over-investment caused by the winner-take-all competition of costly R&D projects.7 Furthermore,
the top-down techno-nationalist projects that some relatively corporatist nations have substituted for discoveries
bubbling up naturally from the business sector may do well on that score thanks to the resources saved by avoiding
“wasteful competition” for new products involving parallel development work and marketing efforts. One has to
conclude that “generation of wealth” is not special to capitalism. Corporatist economies are quite good at that.
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AT: Capitalism Key to Freedom
Capitalism destroys autonomy and freedom – makes us wage slaves
Freund 10
(Peter, Professor of Sociology at Montclair State University, NJ, “Capitalism, Time-Space, Environment, and
Human Well-Being: Envisioning Ecosocialist Temporality and Spatiality”, Capitalism, Nature, and Socialism,
21(2) , p112-113, ebsco)
Capitalism appropriates time and requires one’s full participation in capitalism’s division of labor and system of
consumption, reducing the sphere of autonomy and one’s ability to engage in relatively unalienated and sustainable
‘‘non-economic’’ and economic activities. Furthermore, as O’Connor points out, work time has not declined with
increased productivity. In fact, since the late 1970s, it has increased at the expense of leisure, relaxation, and free
time unbound by wage labor. According to Marx, the working day must be shortened in order to move from the
‘‘realm of necessity’’ to the ‘‘realm of freedom.’’ Gorz also argued that work time*that is, waged labor*ultimately
must be greatly reduced. By decreasing time spent in the sphere of heteronomous work, the sphere of autonomy can
expand. The heteronomous sphere involves production that is beyond the control of individuals and is the result of
the large-scale socialization of production with its complex and interdependent division of labor. Given highly
developed forces of production, much less of this activity would be required to meet basic consumption needs in a
socially and environmentally sustainable fashion.
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CAPITALISM KRITIK AFF ANSWERS
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Alt Doesn’t Solve – Rejecting the State
Alt doesn't solve – refusing to engage the state is counterproductive:
Callinicos 5
(Alex, Trotskyist political theorist and Director of the Centre for European Studies at King's College London, “Can
we change the world without taking power?”, 5-4, http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=98)
Whatever our differences, John and I stand for changing the world through a process of self-emancipation, where
there aren’t leaders who tell people what to do but rather people who collectively liberate themselves. I admire the
honesty, clarity and consistency of John’s work, which is evident in his presentation today. But I also have to be
honest and say that I find the ideal of changing the world without taking power ultimately self-refuting. I agree with
John about uncertainty. There are lots of things we cannot know. But one thing I am certain about. That is that it is
impossible to change the world without addressing and solving the question of political power. I absolutely
sympathise with one of the impulses behind the slogan ‘Change the world without taking power’. Among a lot of the
traditions on the left worldwide there has been what has been called ‘socialism from above’. Whether it is a
Communist party with Stalinist traditions or a social democratic party like the Workers Party in Brazil today, it
involves the idea that the party changes things for you and everyone else remains passive. The political tradition I
stand in is a very different one. It is that of socialism from below summed up in Marx’s definition of socialism as the
self-emancipation of the working class. Socialism is about the oppressed and exploited of the world effectively
liberating themselves. My fundamental difference with John is that I believe this process of self-emancipation
requires us to confront and overthrow the existing state and replacing it with a radically different form of state
power. John invites us essentially to turn our backs on the state. He says that we should carry out what he calls an
‘interstitial’ revolution. It’s been summed up by other thinkers sharing the same ideas as John as life despite
capitalism. We should all try and cultivate our autonomous gardens despite the horrors of capitalism. The trouble is
that the state won’t leave us alone and that is because capitalism itself, the system that different states sustain, won’t
leave us alone. Capitalism today is invading the gardens of the world to carve them up and turn them into branches
of agribusiness or suburban speculation and won’t leave us alone. We cannot ignore the state, because the state is the
most concentrated single form of capitalist power. This means strategically we have to be against the state, to pursue
the revolution against the state. Does this mean we ignore the existing state and do not ever put demands on the
capitalist state? No. The existing capitalist states try to legitimise themselves to win the consent of those they
oppress and exploit. This means that if we organise effectively, we can force reforms out of capitalism. Also, if we
ignore the state, that means we will be indifferent to struggles over privatisation. For example, at the minute George
Bush wants to privatise the pensions system in the US. Do we say we don’t care about that because the social
security system in the US is organised by the state? I think, no. Finally, many workers these days are employed by
the state. Part of the process of privatisation means those employees of private companies replace these workers.
Often that means the service to the public is worse and the conditions and wages of those employed by those
companies get worse.
Local and decentralized strategies of rejecting capitalism fail – institutional engagement is key to solve.
Callinicos 5
(Alex, Trotskyist political theorist and Director of the Centre for European Studies at King's College London, “Can
we change the world without taking power?”, 5-4, http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=98)
The important thing about these forms of organisation, whatever the intentions that led to their formation, is that
they have the capacity to challenge and break the existing state and institute new forms of power. We are not saying,
as John was suggesting, ‘Wait for the revolution.’ But any struggles that begin to build towards self-organisation are
pointing the way towards the way a future non-capitalist, socialist, society can be organised. The problem is that for
any movement towards self-organisation to succeed in breaking the power of capital, there has to be a moment of
concentration and centralisation. You can’t deal with the concentrated power of capital—the state and the
multinational corporations—without the movements themselves becoming focused to confront the power of those
corporations directly. John will say, ‘When you talk about centralisation and concentration, you are returning to the
old ways of organising, you are beginning to organise in a way that reproduces the centralised and hierarchical
structures of the existing state.’ I agree it isn’t easy. John was very honest and talked about the difficulties with his
strategic conception, and I agree there are difficulties with the approach I am defending. Combining centralisation
with self-organisation is not easy. But without a degree of centralisation we will be defeated. If we simply have
fragmented and decentralised and localised activity, all cultivating our autonomous gardens, capital can isolate us
and destroy or incorporate us piece by piece. And we cannot address problems like climate change unless we have
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the capacity to coordinate and, to a degree, to centralise for global change. We cannot reduce CO2 emissions to the
necessary level without global coordination. We will not achieve the world we want to see if we simply rely on the
fragment and the local. This is related to the question of parties. John is critical of the party as a form of
organisation. He says it reproduces the hierarchical structures of the existing state. But if we look at our movement,
there are parties within the movement—that is, there are ideologically organised currents which have in their
different ways a total strategic view of the transformation of society. In that sense of party, John and the people who
think like him are as much a party within the different movements as are the Workers Party and the PSOL in
Brazil,1 or the Socialist Workers Party in Britain. 1: The new left wing party formed by those expelled from the
Workers Party. People who organise such a current can say they are not a party, but it is a form of self-deception.
Recognising the role parties can play in the movements can lead to a more honest and open articulation of different
strategies and visions for change. Parties can contribute to the development of a movement that is both selforganised and sufficiently coherent to take on the task of social transformation, of revolution. My ideal in this
respect is the one articulated by the great Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci. He talked about the dialectical
interaction between the moment of centralisation represented by the parties and the self-organised impulse from the
movement which is the fundamental driving force of revolution. To sum up: First of all we cannot avoid the
question of the state and political power. It is a delusion to believe we can avoid it. The critical question is who takes
power and how. If it is simply a question of a party taking control of the existing state by whatever means, then it is
absolutely true that will be a change that simply reproduces the existing relations of domination. But the conception
of a self-organised working class seizing power to institute new forms of political organisation and state
organisation along with all the other oppressed and exploited groups changes the question.
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Alt Doesn’t Solve – Revolution
Revolutions cause mass violence, ultimately leaving existing institutions untouched.
Binder 91
(Guyora, Professor of Law, S.U.N.Y. at Buffalo, “What’s Left?”, Texas Law Review, Lexis)
As an answer to the question "how can one seize state power?," popular mobilization is unexceptionable. But how
does it look as an answer to the question "what does a utopian society look like?" The claim that revolutionary
mobilization is a school for civic virtue now looks like an unconvincing dodge. It implies that citizens will be
sufficiently improved by the process of revolution that they need not worry about what institutions the revolution
will bring into being. The very process of revolution will purge society of the selfish corruption that engendered the
need for revolution in the first place. Such expectations court disaster. Lacking any legitimate institutional
framework, a revolutionary society is easily tempted to base the legitimacy of its social choices on the character of
its people. This explains the intense anxiety about corruption that characterizes revolutionary societies: any flagging
of virtue threatens the legitimacy of the entire society. When we identify revolutionary struggle as the vehicle for
purifying character, anyone lacking in revolutionary commitment becomes a source of the feared impurity. But if
the new order is indistinguishable from the old, how can we be sure of anyone's revolutionary commitment?
Fearing impurity in ourselves, we need endless opportunities to display our revolutionary commitment. And this
means we need ever more struggle against ever more enemies, which we can only generate by setting ever higher
our standards of purity. n120 In short, without a positive program for institutionalizing character reform, revolution
degenerates into a self-consuming cycle of internecine purges. n121 And, as [*2010] revolution becomes
increasingly oriented towards the purgation of enemies, it ceases to be conceived as the construction of a new human
nature. Instead, revolution becomes revenge against an old order that has so incurably perverted human nature that
it resists radical transformation.
Revolutions don’t bring about radical change.
Binder 91
(Guyora, Professor of Law, S.U.N.Y. at Buffalo, “What’s Left?”, Texas Law Review, Lexis)
Revolutionary organization may take many forms, but none are [*2011] very conducive to the achievement of
radical aims. The mass movements that characterize successful insurrections are neither sufficiently intimate nor
sufficiently stable to sustain identity. Toppling only those governments incapable of solving preexisting problems,
successful revolutionary movements inherit crises requiring an authoritarian response. Thus, Hannah Arendt argues
that social revolutions quickly subordinate democracy to the more pressing problem of organizing and coercing the
redistribution of resources. n124 Theda Skocpol argues that successful social revolutions are generally facilitated by
foreign military or economic threats to which they must respond. n125 No matter how ideologically opposed to
programmatic thinking and institutional embodiment a revolutionary movement may be, events will supply a
program and engender institutions. As a result, revolutionary success generally depends upon the erection of a
hierarchical bureaucracy, not participatory democracy. The revolutionary regime achieves legitimacy by more
effectively mobilizing people and resources to achieve the goals of the old regime, rather than by involving more
people in the definition of societal goals. To the extent that radicals find our own society already too impersonal,
too instrumental, too bureaucratic, and too managed, the path of revolution will not lead in the direction of radical
change.
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*** SECURITY KRITIK ***
SECURITY KRITIK NEG
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Link – Space
Space exploration is thoroughly militarized – critical perspectives are key to reign in the most violent aspects
of power politics.
Macdonald 7
(Fraser, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography – University of Melbourne, Anti-Astropolitik – Outer Space And The
Orbit Of Geography, 610-611, EBSCO, Online)
Stephen Graham, following Eyal Weizmann, has argued that geopolitics is a flat discourse (Weizmann, 2002;
Graham, 2004: 12). It attends to the cartographic horizontality of terrain rather than a verticality that cuts through
the urban landscape from the advantage of orbital supremacy. Just as, for Graham, a critical geopolitics must
urgently consider this new axis in order to challenge the practices and assumptions of urbicide, so too – I would
argue – it must lift its gaze to the politics of the overhead. Our interest in the vertical plane must extend beyond
terrestrial perspectives; we must come to terms with the everyday realities of space exploration and domination as
urgent subjects of critical geographical inquiry. A pre-requisite for this agenda is to overcome our sense of the
absurdity and oddity of space, an ambivalence that has not served human geography well. The most obvious entry
point is to think systematically about some of the more concrete expressions of outer space in the making of Earthly
geographies. For instance, many of the high-profile critical commentaries on the recent war in Iraq, even those
written from geographical perspectives, have been slow to address the orbital aspects of military supremacy (see, for
instance, Harvey, 2003; Gregory, 2004; Retort, 2005). Suffice to say that, in war as in peace, space matters on the
ground, if indeed the terrestrial and the celestial can be sensibly individuated in this way. There is also, I think,
scope for a wider agenda on the translation of particular Earthly historical geographies into space, just as there was a
translation of early occidental geographies onto imperial spaces. When Donald Rumsfeld talks of a ‘Space Pearl
Harbor’, there is plainly a particular set of historicogeographical imaginaries at work that give precedence, in this
case, to American experience. Rumsfeld has not been slow to invoke Pearl Harbor, most famously in the aftermath
of 11 September 2001; notably, in all these examples – Hawaii in 1941; New York in 2001; and the contemporary
space race – there lurks the suggestion of a threat from the East.9 All of this is a reminder that the colonization of
space, rather than being a decisive and transcendent break from the past, is merely an extension of long-standing
regimes of power. As Peter Redfield succinctly observed, to move into space is ‘a form of return’: it represents ‘a
passage forward through the very pasts we might think we are leaving behind’ (Redfield, 2002: 814). This line of
argument supports the idea that space is part and parcel of the Earth’s geography (Cosgrove, 2004: 222). We can
conceive of the human geography of space as being, in the words of Doreen Massey, ‘the sum of relations,
connections, embodiments and practices’ (Massey, 2005: 8). She goes on to say that ‘these things are utterly
everyday and grounded, at the same time as they may, when linked together, go around the world’. To this we might
add that they go around and beyond the world. The ‘space’ of space is both terrestrial and extraterrestrial: it is the
relation of the Earth to its firmament. Lisa Parks and Ursula Biemann have described our relationship with orbits as
being ‘about uplinking and downlinking, [the] translation [of] signals, making exchanges with others and
positioning the self’ (Parks and Biemann, 2003). It is precisely this relational conception of space that might
helpfully animate a revised geographical understanding of the Outer Earth. As has already been made clear, this sort
of project is by no means new. Just as astropolitics situates itself within a Mackinderian geographical tradition, so a
critical geography of outer space can draw on geography’s early-modern cosmographical origins, as well as on more
recent emancipatory perspectives that might interrogate the workings of race, class, gender and imperialism. Space
is already being produced in and through Earthly regimes of power in ways that undoubtedly threaten social justice
and democracy. A critical geography of space, then, is not some far-fetched or indulgent distraction from the ‘real
world’; rather, as critical geographers we need to think about the contest for outer space as being constitutive of
numerous familiar operations, not only in respect of international relations and the conduct of war, but also to the
basic infrastructural maintenance of the state and to the lives of its citizenry.
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Link – Asteroids
Attempting to protect the earth from asteroids manifests a desire to control and manage radically
unpredictable biophysical systems. This project is doomed to failure – existence is fundamentally conditioned
by unpredictability and alterity.
Clark 5
(Nigel, lecturer in Geography at the Open University (UK), Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 22(5), “Ex-orbitant
Globality,” p. 177, ebsco)
More important than pinning down the direct role of meteor impact or other external influences on the biophysical
processes of our planet, however, may be the more general acknowledgement that abrupt or discontinuous
transformation is something we should expect: the recognition ‘that from time to time there will be large
avalanches of changes which sweep through the system’ (Smolin, 1997: 151). I have been drawing attention to the
possible implication of earth processes in a wider systemicity that takes in extra-terrestrial factors because this
makes the point most dramatically that human agency need not always play a significant part in the dynamics of the
biophysical world. Taking account of events at the scale of the cosmos, galaxy or solar system that potentially
impact on our planet, even if their precise role remains contentious, raises questions about the extent to which
‘nature’ can be said to have ‘ended’ or been fully incorporated in the human social realm. Such a vision of our
planet, as a system which is at least partially open to its cosmic environment, seems consistent with the general tenor
of the study of dynamical systems which social theorists of a complex globality are drawing upon. Yet at the same
time, I have suggested, it challenges the notion of the interiorization or loss of otherness of nature that is
characteristic of theories of an immanent global complexity. What makes the forces and events of a generative
cosmos excessive, however, is not just their advent in a domain beyond the earth. If there is a sense in which these
processes can be seen as other to the human, it derives less from a simple spatial outsideness and more from the
manner of their becoming – from their openness to futurity. In a dynamic and self-organizing state, this openendedness is most pronounced at the point of bifurcation: the critical or singular moment when a system has the
potential of entering one of two or more available states (De Landa, 2002: 38; Deleuze, 1994 [1968]: 189). In this
region, even the smallest fluctuation in the environment of the system may prove pivotal in deciding which direction
change will take. And, because of the randomness of these instabilities or irregularities, it is impossible to determine
the outcome in advance. As Nicolis and Prigogine put it: ‘[c]hance alone will decide which of these solutions will be
realized’ (1989: 14). As it passes through successive bifurcations, each complex system acquires its own individual
and singular history, as in the case of the pond with its unique refraction of ripples. But while some of the multitude
of fluctuations that impact on ecological and other earth systems issue from beyond the planet, as we have seen,
much of the concatenation of forces influencing changes of state will also be terrestrial (see Scheffer et al., 2001).
Whether their scale is quantum or tectonic, the subtle and not so subtle interplay of forces ensures that the outcome
of a transformation in any of the earth’s complex biophysical systems contains an irreducible element of
unpredictability. In the words of Manuel De Landa: . . . nonlinear models . . . as well as nonlinear causes and their
complex capacities to affect and be affected, define a world capable of surprising us through the emergence of
unexpected novelty, a world where there will always be something else to explain and which will therefore remain
forever prob- lematic. (2002: 155) For Deleuze, the excessiveness of the world – its persistent otherness – resides
not in the shape or extent of the forms we see around us, but precisely in this capacity for the generation of
something other than what currently exists. (1994 [1968]: 218–221; see also Ansell Pearson, 1997: 4). Likewise,
drawing similarly on systems theory, Derrida makes the claim that it is ‘the singularity that is always other’ (1992:
25). By this logic, the loss of a discernible otherness to nature makes little sense as long as material forces of
differentiation and inventiveness persist. Even if it were to be imagined that the surface of the earth had been
overwhelmingly compromised by human agency, singularities or bifurcations would still have the potential to give
rise to new forms that would be other to the known and familiar. Just as there are inventive and differentiating forces
at work that confer a unique history on an ecosystem, so too there are critical turning points in the dynamics of a
population of living beings, or in a single life. Viewed as a complex system, the organism itself is forged by a
passage through successive bifuractions. Whereas philosophers or social scientists have often assumed that only
differential forces or stimuli proper to the systemic level of the socio-cultural should be credited with shaping human
lives, Deleuze has sought to show that, as embodied and thinking beings, we too are open to the full range of
fluctuations in our environment. In Difference and Repetition, he writes of a ‘turning and wounding gravitation
capable of directly affecting the organism’ and of ‘vibrations, rotations, whirlings, gravitations, dances or leaps
which directly touch the mind’ (1994 [1968]: 219, 8). This capacity to be affected – in an immediate way – by the
forces of the surrounding world, is what gives bodies their ability for transformation, to become other than what they
are (Deleuze, 1992 [1968]: 224–9). And, as we have seen, Deleuze’s version of immanence is one that eschews any
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ultimate drawing of limits – our bodies, any bodies, are both imperilled and enabled by an alterity that is always exorbitant. In the Deleuzian universe, as James Williams reminds us, ‘the potentialities of any given actuality are the
cosmos as a whole’ (1997: 236).
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Impact – Space Militarization
The drive to explore and develop space is driven by an agenda of space militartization.
Macdonald 7
(Fraser, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography – University of Melbourne, Anti-Astropolitik – Outer Space And The
Orbit Of Geography, 600-601, EBSCO, Online)
The historic relationship between knowing a space and exerting political and strategic dominion over it is entirely
familiar to geographers. Just as the geographical knowledge of Empire enabled its military subjugation,
colonization, and ultimately its ecological despoliation, this same pattern is being repeated in the twenty-firstcentury ‘frontier’.4 It is also worth remembering that the geographies of imperialism are made not given. In what
follows, I want to examine how the geographies of outer space are being produced in and through contemporary
social life on Earth. Such an account inevitably throws up some concerns about the politics and socialities of the
new space age. Against this background, I set my argument on a trajectory which is intermittently guided by two key
writers on technology with very different sensibilities. It is my intention to hold a line between the dark anticipations
of Paul Virilio and the resplendent optimism of Nigel Thrift. This discursive flight may well veer off course; such
are the contingencies of navigating space. III Militarization, surveillance and the politics of ‘a-whereness’ The most
striking aspect of the sociality of outer space is the extent to which it is, and always has been, thoroughly militarized.
The 1967 UN Outer Space Treaty banned nuclear weapons in space, on the moon or on other celestial bodies, and contained a directive to use
outer space ‘for peaceful purposes’. But its attempt to prohibit the ‘weaponizing’ of space was always interpreted in the loosest possible manner.
The signatories to the OST in Washington, London and Moscow were in no doubt that space exploration was primarily about military strategy;
that the ability to send a rocket into space was conspicuous evidence of the ability to dispatch a nuclear device to the other side of the world.
This association remains strong, as the concern over Iran’s space programme (with its Shahab family of medium
range missiles and satellite launch vehicles) makes clear. Several commentators in strategic affairs have noted the
expanding geography of war from the two dimensions of land and sea to the air warfare of the twentieth century and
more recently to the new strategic challenges of outer space and cyber-space (see, for instance, Gray, 2005: 154).
These latter dimensions are not separate from the battle-‘field’ but rather they fully support the traditional military
objectives of killing people and destroying infrastructure. Space itself may hold few human targets but the capture or
disruption of satellites could have far-reaching consequences for life on the ground. Strictly speaking, we have not
yet seen warfare in space, or even from space, but the advent of such a conflict does appear closer.
In post-Cold-War unipolar times the strategic rationale for the United States to maintain the prohibition against
weaponizing space is diminishing (Lambakis, 2003), even if the rest of the world wishes it otherwise. In 2000, a UN
General Assembly resolution on the ‘Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space’ was adopted by a majority of
163–0 with 3 abstentions: the United States, Israel and the Federated States of Micronesia (United Nations, 2000).
Less than two months later, a US Government committee chaired by Donald Rumsfeld 5 issued a report warning
that the ‘relative dependence of the US on space makes its space systems potentially attractive targets’; the United
States thus faced the danger, it argued, of a ‘Space Pearl Harbor’ (Rumsfeld, 2001: viii). As space warfare was,
according to the report, a ‘virtual certainty’, the United States must ‘ensure continuing superiority’ (Rumsfeld,
2001: viii). This argument was qualified by obligatory gestures towards ‘the peaceful use of outer space’ but the
report left little doubt about the direction of American space policy. Any difficult questions about the further
militarization (and even weaponization) of space could be easily avoided under the guise of developing ‘dual-use’
(military/civilian) technology and emphasizing the role of military applications in ‘peacekeeping’ operations. Through
such rhetoric, NATO’s satellite-guided bombing of a Serbian TV station on 23 April 1999 could have been readily accommodated under the OST
injunction to use outer space for ‘peaceful purposes’ (Cervino et al., 2003). Since that time new theatres of operation have been opened up in
Afghanistan and Iraq, for further trials of space-enabled warfare that aimed to provide aerial omniscience for the precision delivery of ‘shock and
awe’. What Benjamin Lambeth has called the ‘accomplishment’ of air and space power has since been called into question by the all too apparent
limitations of satellite intelligence in the tasks of identifying Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction or in stemming the growing number of Allied
dead and wounded from modestly armed urban insurgents (Lambeth, 1999; Graham, 2004; Gregory, 2004: 205). For all its limitations, even this
imagery has been shielded from independent scrutiny by the military monopolization of commercial satellite outputs (Livingstone and Robinson,
2003). Yet, far from undermining Allied confidence in satellite imagery or in a ‘cosmic’ view of war (Kaplan, 2006), it is precisely these abstract
photocartographies of violence – detached from their visceral and bloodied ‘accomplishments’ – that have licensed, say, the destruction of
Fallujah (Gregory, 2004: 162; Graham, 2005b). There remains, of course, a great deal more that can be said about the politics of these aerial
perspectives than can be discussed here (see, for instance, Gregory, 2004; Kaplan, 2006).
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Alternative – Asteroids
Attempting to contain an outside necessitates exclusion – only embracing openness to cosmic alterity creates
the possibility for non-exclusionary forms of justice and responsibility.
Clark 5
(Nigel, lecturer in Geography at the Open University (UK), Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 22(5), “Ex-orbitant
Globality,” p. 180-182, ebsco)
However, the point Spivak makes in relation to global environmental justice, and Derrida makes in regard to justice
or responsibility in general, is its condition of ‘impossibility’ (Derrida, 1995: 24; Spivak, 1999: 382). For all we may
desire the symmetry of justice, its impartial arbitrations, well-computed restitutions and universal applicability, in
the real world there will always be some intrusion that ripples the surface of reasoned judgement. What intrudes, in
the language that both Derrida and Deleuze share with the field of complexity studies, is the ‘singularity’: the critical
point at which symmetry is broken and uniqueness asserts itself. What happens, or what might always take place, is
‘an irruption that punctures the horizon, interrupting any performative organisation, any convention, or any context
that can be or could be dominated by a conventionality’ (Derrida, 2001: 245). Justice – or all forms of organized
responsibility – may be compelled not to exclude anything or anyone, but in doing so it always constitutes an
outside. And it is that outside, leaking or bursting back in, that will sooner or later upset the dreams of a more evenhanded and regulated existence (Derrida, 1992: 24; Grosz, 1998: 199–201). While social theories of complex
globality may be attentive to the logic of excess pertaining to human agency and its workings of the boundaries
between polities or nation-states, I have been arguing, there is a premature foreclosure on the implications of ‘otherworldly’ difference. The marginalization of earth-transforming forces that are other-than-human, the disavowal of
fluctuations and instabilities that are not of our own making, in this sense, creates the conditions for further
excessive outbreaks. The irruption that literally punctures the horizon of our planet – the impingement of a
dynamic and unpredictable cosmos on earth processes – offers an extreme case of a remainder that cannot
conceivably be contained, an asymmetry which is abyssal. And such excess is not simply an input that can be
represented, accounted for or anticipated, for this would constitute an inclusion. Recalling Briggs and Peat’s
formulation of ‘fluctuations ... beyond any hope of measurement on earth’, we need to keep in mind the element of
incalculability inherent in extra-terrestrial forces, and hence their resistance to complete or ultimate disentanglement
from terrestrial processes. The question of what belongs wholly to our planet, and what is incoming from beyond its
perimeters, in this regard, will always retain a degree of undecidability. But the recalcitrance of the other-thanhuman, and the undecidability that attends it, is more than simply an extra-terrestrial phenomenon. There are other
forces, partly or largely earth-bound, whose passage or non-passage through the appropriating circle of human
influence will likely remain opaque to us, whose role in inducing transformations of the earth will continue to carry
a remainder of incalculability. The problematizing of the self-identity of the globe by and through this ‘ex-orbitance’
has implications for all decisions about environmental change, it is destined to haunt all questions of cause and
effect applied to variable earth processes. To deal fairly with environmental change, inevitably, is to apportion
responsibility. And to apportion responsibility is to attempt to retrace a path through successive singularities – back
through critical points whose decisive influences may be fluctuations that are minute, random and may not even
issue from this planet. Measurement, calculation, reasoned judgement, in this context, present themselves as tasks
that are utterly necessary, but, at the same time, ultimately ‘impossible’ (see Derrida, 1992: 16). We should not shy
away from the fact that this excess of an already excessive global complexity will prove deeply problematic for
projects addressing environmental problems and other issues of trans-boundary endangerment. But, as Derrida,
Emmanuel Levinas and others have suggested, the excess that haunts every event of political, ethical or legal
decision-making also provides an opportunity. Recognizing that singularities will forever exceed principles of
calculation, accepting that there will always be asymmetries that draw us ‘beyond the straight line of justice’, opens
the way to a responsibility that is itself ex-orbitant (Levinas, 1969: 245; see also Derrida, 1992: 19). Following
Levinas, Derrida speaks of the possibility of a justice, hospitality or generosity that is itself excessive: a response to
the needs of others that is not underpinned by measure or calculation, and in this way affirms the singularity of the
other, or the otherness that is always singular (1992: 25). Under conditions where the immeasurability and
limitlessness of our responsibility presents itself, as Levinas would have it, we glimpse ‘[t]he shimmer of infinity’ in
the face of the other (1969: 207). A feeling for the openness of individual and collective lives ‘in the last analysis’ to
the unpredictability of the cosmos, I have been intimating, might bring a new impetus to this sense of obligation
without reserve. In this regard, the study of complex dynamical systems reminds us that all but the simplest events
are haunted by undecidability, which has implications for all organized responses to the eventfulness of our world.
Pushed beyond their terrestrial application through successive levels to the scale of the universe in its entirety,
theories of complexity and non-linearity drive home the extent to which nature escapes the measure of the human.
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And in this way, a vision of the ex-orbitance of our planetary condition might be made to resonate with the
excessiveness that is an inescapable aspect of all ethical and political life. Though, needless to say, any form of
responsibility or justice without reserve would be no less ‘impossible’ than its impartial, equilibrated and equally
desirable counterpart.
40
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AT: Technical Expertise Good
Critical approaches to outer space are key to counteract unchecked militarism – scientific and technical
expertise shouldn’t be a prerequisite.
Macdonald 7
(Fraser, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography – University of Melbourne, Anti-Astropolitik – Outer Space And The
Orbit Of Geography, 592-593, EBSCO, Online)
Let me acknowledge from the outset that this is a slightly odd paper. It deals with what may seem like a superficial
doubling of the word ‘space’: as both the primary analytic of contemporary human geography and as the popular
term for the expanse in which solar and stellar systems are located. To put it succinctly, this paper attempts to apply
the insights of the former to pressing ‘geo’- political questions about the latter; it is my intention, in other words, to
develop an agenda for a critical geography of outer space. Given how adept geographers have become in thinking
philosophically about space, one might expect this to be a relatively modest undertaking. We conceive of space as
being produced through social action (Lefebvre, 1991); space as relational (Massey, 2005); space as a site where
justice can be addressed (Dikeç, 2005). Our analyses of space have been among the most significant advances for
the discipline, attracting interest from across the humanities and social sciences. But surely I am not the only
geographer who, on trying to explain to the uninitiated that our discipline is no longer about maps, has resorted to
‘space’ as my analytical trump card, only to be met with a quizzical look and a finger pointing upwards: ‘what? you
mean ... space?’. This, I have concluded, is not such a bad question. If this undertaking sounds esoteric, then I hope
to demonstrate that it is a lacuna in contemporary geographical scholarship that should be addressed with some
urgency. Given that outer-Earth has been a sphere of human endeavour for well over 50 years, a critical geography
of space is long overdue. Our presence in, and reliance on, space has become one of the enabling conditions for our
current mode of everyday life in the west. Yet it lies, for the most part, outside the orbit of geography. I do not want
to put at risk a great deal of our abstract thinking about space as an analytic (elegantly manifest, for instance, in
Doreen Massey’s For space) by setting up the cosmos as some great ‘out there’ (Massey, 2005). It is precisely
contemporary human geography’s relational understanding of space that makes it a good disciplinary launch pad for
considering the meaning and politics of space exploration. Lest anyone think that what follows are the musings of a
sci-fi fantasist, let me make clear that I am not really a fan of the genre. My interests are more down-to-earth: I write
as a historical geographer who has come to think about outer space through researching test sites for cold-war
rocketry (see MacDonald, 2006a). The fact that this paper is written from a modest technical and scientific
understanding does not, I hope, constrain the discussion of outer space as a sphere of the social. This essay is borne
out of a conviction that what is at stake – politically and geopolitically – in the contemporary struggle over outer
space is too serious to pass without critical comment. As the future conquest of space represents a potentially
unprecedented opportunity to enact politicomilitary control on Earth, most plausibly by the world’s only superpower, such an awesome concentration of state power demands scrutiny.
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AT: Threats Real
Can’t trust security projects – they’re pretexts for exclusionary violence.
Neocleous 9
(Mark, Professor of Politics and History at Brunel University, Studies in Social Justice, Volume 3, Issue 1, “The
Fascist Moment: Security, Exclusion, Extermination,” p. 31)
In terms of social groups, Guenter Lewy (2000, pp. 70–77) has shown that the persecution against the Roma was
conducted under a range of security measures. The notion easily spread that Roma were not merely “plague” or
“nuisance,” the traditional ways of distancing them, but were also in fact working for foreign intelligence services.
This was the reason given to explain why Roma liked to live in border areas. Thus on January 31, 1940, the High
Command of the Armed forces requested from Himmler an order prohibiting on the grounds of “defence” Roma
from living in the border zone. On April 27, 1940, Heydrich issued a decree on “Resettlement of Gypsies” which
gave orders to begin transporting 2,500 Roma away from the western and north-western border zones and to the
General Government. These requests and orders were gradually realized through 1940, during which period the
security theme became prevalent. Lewy comments that the idea that the expulsion was based in the main on concern
about military security is less than credible, for if it was then why did it take so long? And why limit the number to
2,500? Why send them to the General Government, which was also a border zone and where they could do as much
damage? And why were foreign Roma excluded? These are fair questions, but they only make sense if one takes the
security project at face value. But no security project should ever be taken at face value. Security always functions
as an underlying rationale for some political project: an exclusion here, an extermination there; a partial solution
here, a final solution there. Moreover, security could play this foundational role precisely because of the way it
obliterates any distinction between inside and outside, domestic and foreign. The internal enemy needed to be
exterminated because it was in fact integral to the external enemy—international communism. The external security
project which identified the Soviet state as the key enemy could thus slide into an internal security project aimed at
the supposed agents of the Soviet state, namely the Jewish Bolshevik conspiracy.