The Capitalism Criticism : Cap Kritik 7 Week Seniors 2011 1/194 BBFJR Lab

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7 Week Seniors 2011 BBFJR Lab
**THE CAPITALISM CRITICISM**
DML, Ian, Harry, Jay, Amanda, Rothenbaum, Clayton
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1NC
Space exploration is merely an outlet for the state to expand its capitalist grip infinite wars will be fought over new resources also their advantages are made up and/or inevitable in capitalism Dickens 9 Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex
(Peter, The Cosmos as Capitalisms Outside, The Sociological Review, 57: 6682, dml)
The imminent conquest of outer space raises the question of outside and inside yet again. Capitalism now has the cosmos in its sights, an outside which can be privately or publicly owned, made into a commodity, an entity for which nations and private companies can compete. As such the cosmos is a possible site of armed hostilities. This means, contra Hardt and Negri, that there is an outside after all, one into which the competitive market can now expand indefinitely. A new kind of imperialism is therefore underway,
albeit not one attempting to conquer and exploit people outside since there are no consumers or labour power to exploit in other parts of the solar system. Ferrying wealthy tourists into the cosmos is a first and perhaps most spectacular part of this process of capital's cosmic expansion. Especially important in the longer term is making outer space into a source
of resources and materials. These will in due course be incorporated into production-processes, most of which will be still firmly lodged on earth. Access to outer space is, potentially at least, access to an infinite outside array of resources. These apparently have the distinct advantage of not being owned or used by any preexisting society and not requiring military force by an imperializing power gaining access to these resources. Bringing this outside zone into capitalism may at first seem beneficial to everyone. But this scenario is almost certainly not so trouble-free as may at first seem. On the one hand, the investment of capital into outer space would be a huge diversion from the investments needed to address many urgent inequalities and crises on Earth. On the other hand, this same access is in practice likely to be conducted by a range of competing imperial powers.
Hardt and Negri (2000) tell us that the history of imperializing wars is over. This may or may not be the case as regards imperialism on earth. But old-style imperialist, more particularly inter-imperialist, wars seem more likely than ever,
as growing and competing power-blocs (the USA and China are currently amongst the most likely protagonists) compete for resources on earth and outer space. Such, in rather general terms, is the prospect for a future, galactic, imperialism between competing powers. But what are the relations, processes and mechanisms underlying this new phenomenon? How should we understand the regional rivalries and ideologies involved and the likely implications of competing empires attempting to incorporate not only their share of resources on earth but on global
society's outside? Social crises, outer spatial fixes and galactic imperialism Explanatory primacy is given here to economic mechanisms driving this humanization of the universe. In the same way that they have driven imperializing societies in the past to expand their economic bases into their outsides, the social relations of capitalism and the processes of
capital-accumulation are driving the new kind of outer space imperialisms. Such is the starting-point of
this paper (See alsoDickens and Ormrod, 2007). It is a position based on the work of the contemporary Marxist geographer David Harvey (2003) and his notion of spatial fixes. Capitalism continually constructs what he calls outer transformations. In the context of the over-accumulation of capital in the primary circuit of industrial capital, fresh geographic zones are constantly
sought out which have not yet been fully invested in or, in the case of outer space, not yet been invested in at all. Outer spatial fixes are investments in outer space intended to solve capitalism's many crises. At
one level they may be simply described as crises of economic profitability. But economic can cover a wide array of issues such as crises of resource-availability and potential social and political upheavals resulting from resource-shortages. Furthermore, there
is certainly no guarantee that these investments will actually fix these underlying economic, political and social crises. The fix may well be of a temporary, sticking-plaster, variety. Cap causes endless genocide and spurs violent resistance that kills millions in the name of resource expansion. Jalata 11 Professor of Sociology & Global Studies
(Asafa, January 24th 2011, Terrorism from Above and Below in the Age of Globalization, p.1-4) NAR
As capitalism developed in Western Europe, the need for raw materials, minerals such as gold and silver, markets, and free or cheap labor expanded due to the desire to minimize the cost of production and to increase the accumulation of capital or wealth. The treasures captured outside of Europe by undis-guised looting, enslavement, and murder, Karl Marx (1967: 753-754) writes, floated back to the mother-country and were there
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turned to capital. Most liberal and leftist scholars have failed to identify and explain the role of state-sponsored or state
terrorism that colonial officials, European companies, and ex-peditionary forces used during the expansion of the racialized capitalist world system to transfer the economic resources of the indigenous peoples to European colonial forces or settlers and their collaborators. The development of the nation-state and the capitalist world system occurred through
war making, violence and organized crime (Tilly, 1985: 170). We cannot clearly understand the essence and meaning
of global terrorism without comprehending the essence and characteristics of state terrorism since states were born and consolidated through vi-olence. Under the guises of free markets, civilization, and Chris-tianity, forces of European states
or state-sponsored companies committed acts of terrorism and genocide that were, more or less, ignored. In fact, the issue of terrorism only started to be addressed when, after World War I, colonized peoples in Africa and Asia began their liberation struggles against European co-lonial states. The terrorist attack on the life and liberty of American indigenous peoples by European colonial powers and their collaborators destroyed existing institutions and econo-mies and exposed the conquered peoples to poverty and fa-mineinduced holocausts (Davis, 2001). Discussing how the cultural destruction of indigenous peoples resulted in massive
deaths, Karl Polanyi (1944: 159-160) argues, The catastrophe of the native community is a direct result of the rapid and vio-lent disruption of the basic institutions of the victim. These institutions are disrupted by the very fact that a market econo-my is foisted upon an entirely differently organized community; labor and land are made into a commodity, which, again, is only a short formula for the liquidation of every cultural institution in an organic society. The capitalist world economy that in the 19th century was permanently eliminating famine from Western Europe was
simultaneously accelerating famine and famine-induced deaths in the rest of the world: Millions died, not outside the modern world system, but in the very process of being forcibly incor-porated into its economic and political structures. They died
in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism; indeed, many were mur-dered by the theological application of the sacred principles of [Adam] Smith (Davis, 2001: 9). Today, mainstream Eu-ro-American scholars gloss over such crimes and
refer to them as actions of discovery and civilization. State terrorism, genocide, and the destruction of indigenous institutions and the devastating consequences of famine have been closely inter-connected in the global capitalist world system. In addition, the international community rarely
holds accountable its members that engage in state terrorism and genocide. Kurt Jonassohn (1998: 24) recently noted that terrorist state leaders in develop-ing countries not only go unpunished, they are even rewarded. On the international scene they are accorded all the respect and courtesies due to government officials. They are treated in ac-cordance with diplomatic protocol in negotiations and are treated in the General Assembly of the United Nations. When they are finally ousted from their offices, they are offered asylum by countries that lack respect for international law, but have a great deal of respect for the ill-gotten wealth that such perpetra-tors bring with them. Despite the fact that some government elites claim that the state provides protection from domestic and external violence, governments organize and, wherever possible, monopolize the concentrated
means of violence. The distinction between legi-timate and illegitimate force makes no difference (Tilly, 1985: 171). Political violence has always been involved in producing and maintaining structures, institutions, and organi-zations of privileged hierarchy and domination in society. Those who have state power, which incorporates the power to define terrorism, deny their involvement in political violence or terrorism and confuse abstract theories about the state with reality. Based on an idealized relationship between the state and
society, philosophers and thinkers such as Hobbes, Hegel, Rousseau, and Plato have identified three functions of the state that would earn it legitimacy. According to state theories, the state protects and maintains internal peace and order in society; it organizes and protects national economic activities; it de-fends national sovereignty and national interests (Bushnell, et al., 1991: 6). In reality, most states violate most of these theo-retical principles by engaging in political repression and state terrorism
in order to defend the interests of a few powerful elites. Furthermore, the revolutionary theories of the state by
Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin (1971) remain a dream because states failed to introduce revolutionary social transformations that would eliminate oppression, repression, state terrorism, and the exploitation of people (Maguire, 1978). The occurrence of political repression, oppression, state ter-rorism, and dictatorship in the former Soviet Union, China and other former revolutionary countries demonstrate that the state has remained the site of violence despite its legitimating dis-course. As Charles Tilly (985: 1819) puts it, political violence is closely related to the art of statecraft, and most of the time, the state, like an unchained beast, ferociously [attacks] those who claim to be its master, its own citizens (Tilly, 1985: 7). Annamarie Oliverio (1998) criticizes scholars who produce definitions of terrorism on behalf of the state and promote outmoded concepts, analyses, and theories in state bureaucracy, the media, and in academia. The motivations of those who hold state power and
engage in state terrorism are to maintain the global economy, structures of politics, and hierarchies of cultures and peoples in order to extract economic resources. The main objective of those who engage in nonstate terrorism is mainly to politically respond to economic, political, and cultural inequalities. One common denominator of the theories of non-state terrorism is that it is mainly caused by grievances of one kind or another. These grievances involve national/religious/cultural oppression,
eco-nomic exploitation, political repression, massive human rights violations, attacks on life and liberty, state terrorism, and vari-ous forms of social injustices. Yet, whilst it is acknowledged that revolutions, social movements, and non-state terrorism generally involve grievances, all grievances do not result in revolutionary or social movements, nor do they all cause sub-versive
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terrorism. There must therefore be some intervening structural, conjunctural, and behavioral factors particularly that act to transform some grievances into non-state terrorism through some agencies of the aggrieved population. The combination of factors such as collective grievances, the continued oppressive and exploitative policies of state elites, the refusal of state actors to address longstanding grievances peacefully and fairly, the development of extreme ideologies in the form of religion or another ideology, and the emergence of leaders, ideologues, and cadres in aggrieved populations can facilitate the emergence of subversive terrorism. We cannot adequately grasp the essence and characteristics of modern terrorism
without understanding the larger cultural, social, economic, and political contexts in which it takes place. Since terrorism has been conceptualized, defined, and theorized by those who have contradictory interests and objectives and since the subject matter of terrorism is complex and elusive, there currently is a wide gap in establishing a common understanding of terrorism among scholars of terrorism studies. Most experts on the subject look at this issue from a narrow perspective by ignoring what I argue to be the reality: that terrorism is a social cancer for all human groups affected by it.
Alt vote negative to reject the flawed capitalist nature of the affirmative. The alternative is the only way out we need to analyze the flaws in the system to find the preconditions for movements away from capitalism and its inevitable collapse this is key to develop a real political strategy Carroll 10 *founding director of the Social Justice Studies Program at the University of Victoria
(William, Crisis, movements, counter-hegemony: in search of the new, Interface 2:2, 168-198, dml) In the most general terms and at the highest level of abstraction, the
question of counter-hegemony evokes the
dialectic of bringing the new into existence, against the sedimented practices and relations that, as Marx (1852) wrote, weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living. Yet it is from existing practices and relations that the new is fabricated, which is to say that the future is already contained as potential within the present. Fermenting in the process of the real itself is what Ernst Bloch called the concrete forward dream: anticipating
elements are a component of reality itself (1986:197). Counter-hegemony, as distinct from defensive forms of subaltern resistance, strives to shape those anticipating elements, so that they may become lasting features of social life. For counter-hegemony,
the challenge is to seek out in the present the preconditions for a post-capitalist future and to develop political strategy based on an analysis of those immanent possibilities (Ollman 2003). Gramsci captured this dialectic with the metaphor of welding the present to the future: How can the present be welded to the future, so that while satisfying the urgent necessities of the one we may work effectively to create and anticipate the other (1977: 65)? The new is no mere fashion, the latter being a preferred trope of modernity (Blumer 1969), closely integrated with consumer-capitalist accumulation strategies, and thus with reproducing the status quo. Often the new reworks the old, with radical effects. Viewed dialectically, the new preserves yet transforms extant reality, as in the incorporation of indigenous ways as alternatives to neoliberal practices that have grown decidedly old (cf. Bahn 2009). This dialectic between what already exists and what might be constructed out of that is integral to any project of purposeful socio-political change. Movements, as Melucci (1989) has emphasized, are laboratories for social invention. They are carriers of the new means and values, new practices, new relationships and
kinds of relationships that Williams (1977: 123) identified with cultural emergence; emergent publics that create possibilities for a more democratic way of life (Angus 2001). Movements succeed in creating change when political and
cultural opportunity structures open up (Tarrow 1998). But which movements, which practices and which alignments of movements and practices, in short which new combinations (Dyer-Witheford 2001) might already carry the new and under what contemporary conditions might they have efficacy? These are more concrete questions of counter-hegemony. Theorists of agency and structure note that, although social structures are sustained solely through the practices that reproduce them, such practices, precisely because they are structurally reproductive, do not produce much that is new; only transformative practices have that capacity (Bhaskar 1989; Fraser 1995). Indeed, a well-established hegemonic structure naturalizes social cleavages and contradictions, securing the active, agentic consent of subalterns to their subordination (De
Leon, Desai and Tual 2009: 216; Joseph 2002).
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**LINKS**
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Link Generic
Their explotative project is a band-aid solution for Earthly problems that simply serves to buttress capitalist structures Dickens 10 *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex
(Peter, The Humanization of the Cosmos To What End?, Monthly Review Vol 62, No 6, November 2010, dml) 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 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. Luxemburgs 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 Smiths characterization of capitals 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 processno part of the Earths 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. 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 capitalisms 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, capitalisms 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.
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Space development is simply an extension of the capitalistic drive to secure and appropriate external resources as appendages to a system dominated by the wealthy power-elite Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of
Cambridge and Visiting Professor of Sociology, University of Essex and **James, Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton (Cosmic Society: Towards a sociology of the universe, pg 59-60, IWren) The outer spatial fix, commodification and space law Neil Smith, a close collaborator of Harvey, has argued that: 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 Earths surface, the atmosphere, the
oceans, the geological substratum or the biological superstratum are immune from transformation by capital. (Smith 1984: 49, 56) Now, just over a decade later, we can envisage capital stalking the nearby cosmos in search of the
resources needed for production. The object is to make the universe into an appendage to the production process. Ownership and commodification are the ways in which this appendage are made. The circuits of capital pull progressively more materials into their midst. Commodifying outer space But this is part of a bigger pattern. One of capitalisms main attempts at crisis resolution has been via commodification and privatization on Earth. This is what Harvey
(2003) calls accumulation by dispossession. It extends and proliferates a process started, he argues, with primitive accumulation, when populations began to be removed from their means of subsistence, particularly the land. The process now continues
with the privatization and commodification of assets such as welfare provisions and services previously held and
operated by states. But gaining access to outer space assets is a rather different kind of accumulation, one not dispossessing anyone already using these resources. The Arctic and Antarctic are the closest Earthly equivalents to the nearest outer spatial assets, those on the Moon. Attempts are already under way to legally subdivide, own and control these regions as a first step towards their privatization and commodification as part of a process of humanization. Oil companies are drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge as their response to the energy crisis and political upheavals in the Middle East. The Antarctic is proving attractive to pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries searching for new compounds and genetic resources. These new types of
spatial fix are, however, encountering strong opposition from environmentalists and others (Antarctic and Southern Ocean
Coalition 2004; Tokar 1999). The Antarctic Treaty and the Law of the Sea Treaty were both used as models for the legal treaties governing outer space appropriation. But both such kinds of potential fix remain fair game for future capital
investment. Commodification and space law The contemporary development of space law (dividing outer space into items where property rights apply and over which contracts and individual juridical rights can be drawn up) is therefore an obvious harbinger of the forthcoming commodification of the nearby universe and the extension of the secondary and tertiary circuits into outer space. Since the 1980s, a number of books have examined the commercialization of outer space from a business or legal perspective. Law and property rights are, in critical realist terms, mechanisms operating in virtue of the necessary underlying relationships of capitalism. They help guarantee such relations, allowing them to be developed throughout the globe and outer space. They operate on the illusion that property rights are available to all citizens. In theory they are, but in reality they will be available only to the wealthy and to large corporations. Seen in this way, outer space law
is another instance of how a ruling class rules. They do so by apparently working to the same universal rules as subordinated classes, whilst choosing to overlook their social position. Hulstroj (2002) makes the important observation that the UN declaration that space should be free for exploration and use by all states assumed that space was an infinite resource and that there would be enough space for everybody. However, as he rightly says, space is not uniform in its usefulness. The geostationary orbit for satellites (an orbit that keeps satellites directly above the Earths equator) is already overcrowded, leaving no room for satellites launched by developing countries who might in future want to do so. Similarly, if they ever are commodified, nearby
resources on the Moon, near-Earth asteroids, etc. will be controlled by those already in possession of the capacity to do so. The principle of first come, first served has been endorsed by the
International Telecommunications Union, and Hulstroj notes that speed settles these disputes rather than value judgements (2002: 110).
Space control=capitalist Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
(Peter and James, Cosmic Society: Towards a Sociology of the Universe pg 179, dml)
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The main theme running through the later chapters of this book is that imperialism
is now entering into a new phase, and that the humanized cosmos is central to this transition. The global market is proving increasingly unable to contain the many contradictions of capitalism. Global society is in social, political, economic and environmental upheaval. The emergent form of cosmic society makes sense only when placed in this context of Earthly chaos. On the one hand, the most powerful classes of modern society are using the cosmos as a means of managing and controlling this chaos, attempting to fix it by military, economic and cultural means. But in the meantime, further crisis and risk are being generated. These fixes may be organized by dominant economic and military powers such as the US, but they are almost certainly making the world more dangerous. Meszaros, writing of the growth of armaments in the late twentieth century, wrote we have entered the most
dangerous phase of imperialism in all history (2001: 37). This danger is now being increased by its spread into outer space. On the one hand, as we have outlined in Chapters 4, 5 and 6, the cosmos is being increasingly used to regulate social
relations, culture and military adventures on Earth. It is being used to manage the third stage of imperialism, including the economic and military demands of competing geopolitical powers. But Chapters 7 and 8 suggest that the cosmos is also integral to an imminent fourth stage: capitalism being extended by the most powerful, again competing, elites and nations into outer space. The humanization of outer space is therefore being used to control or manage an earlier phase of imperialist expansion while ushering in a new one. Here
again, the universe is conceived as an object that those with political and economic power can utilize to retain and extend social power. The result is the further development of narcissism, even to the point of what Ernest Jones (1913) describes as the God complex, amongst those with access to the heavens. For other, subaltern, populations, the increasing use of the cosmos
for military and surveillance purposes increases their distance from it. At the same time, hegemonic messages are being asserted by this technology, technology which itself forms part of capitalisms hegemonic resolution to its own inherent crises. Capitalism is the root cause of territory expansionism in space. Holcombe 5 -DeVoe Moore Professor of Economics at Florida State University
(Randall G., COMMON PROPERTY IN ANARCHO-CAPITALISM,Spring 2005, JOURNAL OF LIBERTARIAN STUDIES 329,pg26, mises.org/journals/jls/19_2/19_2_1.pdf)
Similar questions arise about ownership in outer space, with an additional problematic issue that the original users have been governments. For example, when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon in
1969 and combined his labor with a section of the moons land area, gathering valuable moon rocks and undertaking other activities, was he acting as an individual homesteading that area of the moon, or was he acting as an
employee and an agent of the United States government, so that area of the moon would be government property? In anarcho-capitalism, presumably such celestial government property would revert to common ownership, as with roads and parks on Earth. Who owns the orbital paths that are now occupied by government satellites? Presumably, in a devolution to anarcho-capitalism, those orbits would be treated the same way as government-owned roads. A number of interesting questions present themselves once it is recognized that common property could exist in anarcho-capitalism.
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Link Aerospace
Keynes got it wrongaerospace industry funding doesnt boost the economy, it just sustains the expansion of capitalism and exploitative class relations. Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of
(Cosmic Society: Towards a sociology of the universe, pg 86-87, IWren) Capital, spatial fixes and government in absentia Governments Cambridge and Visiting Professor of Sociology, University of Essex and **James, Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
do not channel funds into the military merely as a form of industrial welfare they do so to ensure the geographic expansion of their capitalist economies. The new imperialism consisted, and still consists, of accumulation by dispossession. It was above all a reassertion of class power, with trade unions being marginalized, the creation
of flexible labour markets and financial capital having a key role in allocating funds on a global scale. Keynesianism was largely rejected as flows of capital were now injected into newly commodified and privatized public goods and services. Investments started to flow into the other parts of the capitalist economy that looked promising sources of accumulation. Structural Adjustment Programs were imposed by the International Monetary Fund on developing countries, opening up global markets and reducing state welfare spending. But new investments included, and still very much include, the Far East, particularly India and China. It is the
necessity of overseeing capitals geographic expansion and monitoring its social and political implications that gives space a revived significance over and above the demands of the military industrialspace complex. This is where we can usefully return to Lenins understanding of monopoly capitalism as
outlined in the previous chapter. Not only do regional monopolies represent a threat to global free trade, they represent a threat to peace. A militarized outer space becomes a medium through which some such monopolies can be
protected. But for global capitalism outer space is a medium through which regional monopolies can be regulated and, if necessary, destroyed. Lefebvre (1976) refers to the creation of super regions, which are
now expanding themselves into space.
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Link Asteroids/Helium-3
Resource mining is supa cap Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
(Peter and James, Cosmic Society: Towards a Sociology of the Universe pg 144-145, dml)
Outer space is now increasingly envisaged as providing inputs to the Earthly production process. It is, for example, seen as an unlimited source of metals for human use. Private companies have also been established working on the research and design for asteroidal and lunar mines. This is
discussed in a number of books elaborating the commercial potential of outer space (e.g. Lewis 1996; Zubrin 1999; Hudgins 2002). The expansion of industry into space has been referred to by Harry G. Stine (1975) as the third industrial revolution and by Krafft Ehricke (1972) as the benign industrial revolution (as there were supposedly no environmental issues associated with it). Asteroids are receiving special attention (Lewis 1996). The Moon might seem an obvious first target
for the acquisition and mining of resources, but asteroids are currently seen as a better bet thanks to their metallic density. They have three hundred times as much free metal as an equal mass taken from the
Moon. Metals found on the Moon are just the dispersed debris from asteroids. In the mid-1990s the market value of metals in the smallest known asteroid, known as 3554 Amun, was about $20 trillion. This included $8 trillion worth of iron and nickel, $6 trillion worth of cobalt, and about $6 trillion in platinum-group metals (ibid.). As and when it is possible to launch
thousands of people into orbit and build giant solar power satellites, Lewis argues, it should be possible to retrieve this and mine other asteroids to supply Earth with all the metals society will ever need. Extracting valuable helium-3 from the Moon is another possibility. One metric ton of helium-3
is worth $3 million, and one million tons could be obtained from the Moon. This has led Lawrence Joseph to question in a New York Times article whether the Moon could become the Persian Gulf of the twenty-first century (cited in Gagnon 2006). Needless to say, we
need to remain cautious in accepting these highly optimistic forecasts. Even the most enthusiastic pro-space activists see materials in space as useful only for building in space. The cost of returning materials to Earth would add so much to the cost of extracting them that this would never be financially viable.
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Link Astronauts/Desire to Space Travel

Astronauts become the new social elite Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
(Peter and James, Cosmic Society: Towards a Sociology of the Universe pg 162, dml) In the previous chapter, we outlined the form of cosmic narcissism present in the fantasies of pro-space activists about taking trips into Earth orbit. However, this narcissism is also manifest in grandiose fantasies about omnipotence
being exercised through the conquest and colonization of space. Previous research (Ormrod 2007) revealed
activists with fantasies about bouncing up and down on the Moon, playing a round of golf there, mining asteroids or creating their own small colonies on Mars. These particular human beings, far from being oppressed by or subjected to forces in the heavens, are now being
reconstituted as all-powerful individuals expressing a control over the external world, which might be likened to that experienced in the earliest years of childhood. The fantasy of life in a spacefaring civilization protects the narcissistic idea that the whole universe revolves around him/her and that the whole cosmos is there to be consumed. It is a universe that promises that the power and limitless freedom of the Western individual can be guaranteed. Reality of course dictates
that pursuit of such a relationship with the universe will necessarily result in conflict with others and between the different needs of the individual.
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Link Colonization/ISS
The humanizing mission of space is championed by the ISS Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
(Peter and James, Cosmic Society: Towards a Sociology of the Universe pg 148, dml) But it is little appreciated that the
colonization of outer space has already started with the International Space Station. Here are living quarters for human beings. And here experiments are being conducted on the effects of gravity loss on
human beings and other species. George W. Bushs Space Exploration Initiative includes plans for a permanent lunar base manned in six-month shifts. Other still less exotic forms of humanization are already well in place. We have already encountered
humanization in the form of militarization and, via satellites, the surveillance of society and broadcasting information and propaganda. It now seems clear that this process is to be extended, with outer space being envisaged as a source of energy and materials. In the longer term the terraforming of
nearby planets, making them into environments suitable for human beings, may be possible.
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Link Communications
Communication technologies are used to protect and further capitalist exploitation. Dickens 10 *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex
(Peter, The Humanization of the Cosmos To What End?, Monthly Review Vol 62, No 6, November 2010)NAR 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. Satellite-based 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.
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Link Frontier
The frontier mentality frames space as a place to be exploited Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
This imagined past has long been associated with making an essential American national character. Without such a frontier, American culture will, it is believed, stagnate. This oft-reinvented
tradition of a toughened individual forged by making a new frontier has its roots in Frederick Jackson Turners 1893 The Significance of the Frontier in American History (see Turner 1962). He argued that the challenges of the frontier fostered an individualist survivalism based on risk-taking and hostility towards centralized power. This in turn leads, he believed, to American democracy and the American entrepreneurial spirit. These are key values of the libertarian right. Modern space
advocates have adopted this understanding of the frontier, along with the imagery, character types and settings it evokes, in order to justify the colonization of space. Zubrin and Wagner cite Turner and argue that without a frontier from which to breathe life, the spirit that gave rise to the progressive humanistic culture that America has offered to the world for the past several centuries is fading (Zubrin and Wagner 1996: 297). There is, of course, a well-established counter-hegemonic critique of the frontier, in which the destruction caused by the American Western expansion is highlighted (Launius 2003: 345). Pro-space activists are frequently reflexive about the fact that the needs of capitalism drive the frontier but they simply do not apply critical apparatus to their thinking about the necessity and desirability of capitalist development. The frontier is a transposable myth and ideological rendering of the past, present and
future.
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Link Get Off the Rock

The rock isnt gonna die but only the elite will be able to get off it Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
(Peter and James, Cosmic Society: Towards a Sociology of the Universe pg 156-157, dml) On the other hand, some sociologists have started mirroring the arguments of pro-space advocates and are considering the development of space resources as a permanent resolution of the second contradiction, and working this into a fundamental critique of Marxs political economy (Thomas-Pellicer 2004). This raises some of the debates surrounding the second contradiction thesis. Like the proponents of capitalisms infinite expansion into an infinite outer space, the second contradiction thesis
can be seen as depending on a form of catastrophism: the idea that society and nature are doomed. But, first, it is not clear that this is an accurate account of the Left version of the second contradiction. OConnor
(1996) is the leading contemporary Marxist proponent of the second contradiction and he argues that it is most likely to be addressed by state intervention and limited state ownership of the means of production. But the picture of catastrophism, whether propounded by Left or Right, is quite misleading.
Whatever happens to the Earth and the cosmos there will still be some form of a nature there (Harvey 1996). Certainly some people, specifically the poor, may come off much worse than others as a result of such humanization. But this is a long way from saying that capitalism and nature will come to an end as a result of commodification and environmental degradation. As pro-space activists show, the pessimism of the second contradiction thesis can easily be adopted not just by socialists but by the promoters of capitalism who would use the possibility of the Earths demise as an excuse to continue privatizing the cosmos. One example is the revenue generated
by Earth-imaging satellites, used largely to monitor climatic and environmental change. Harris and Olby (2000) projected a market of $6.5 billion in 2007 for Earth observation data and services. Developing the rest of the cosmos entails what Enzensberger (1996) might call the next stage of the eco-industrial complex: providing economic opportunities for those in the business of rectifying the degradation caused by capitalism in the first instance. Humanizing nature on Earth or in the cosmos need be
neither a complete disaster nor a complete triumph. The priority for historical materialism is to consider the implications of outer space humanization for particular societies, particular sectors of the
population and particular species and ecological systems.
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Link Images
Photographs and surveillance do not represent an objective medium of communication, but rather an intrusion granted to the military by powerful corporations. This illusion of ownership culminates in paranoia and unilateral war waged by the military-industrial-complex. Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of
Cambridge and Visiting Professor of Sociology, University of Essex and **James, Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton (Cosmic Society: Towards a sociology of the universe, pg 93-94, IWren) There is now every sign that the
power of the militaryindustrialspace complex will continue to be enhanced. This entails not only further weaponization of outer space but its use for military surveillance. (For a historical account of Americas surveillance satellites, see Burrows 1988.) This is a process now very much caught up in the war on terror. As in the case of the internet, earlier military applications set the original pace for making technologies that use outer space in the exercise of power. During the Vietnam War,
infra-red sensors, which could penetrate clouds and storms, enabled individual soldiers to be detected walking around on the ground (Fleming 2001). Using outer space for military surveillance has taken a great leap forward in
recent years. Perhaps the most famous example was during the lead-up to the second Iraq war. In February 2003 Colin Powell (United States Secretary of State) presented US intelligence satellite images that purported to show evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. These images were part of an attempt to justify unilateral war against Iraq. It now seems likely, however, that these images dated from an earlier period before the installations were removed. Furthermore, at least according to some websites, the
satellite was out of action at the time and place the pictures were supposed to have been taken. The whole experience is reminiscent of Susan Sontags (2001) analysis of photography. On the one hand, photographs seem to offer a way of appropriating the objective reality of the world and understanding it. But photographs, a medium that has largely replaced print as a
form of communication in modern society, are, in Sontags word, treacherous. A photograph may look very much like a neutral, finished, representation of an objective reality. But photographs are aggressive, intrusions on selected aspects of the world. Ownership of an objective reality via observing a photograph is more apparent than real. Yet this does not stop the powerful from using it as a means towards their particular ends. Surveillance rapidly increases levels of paranoia, with the media and the internet active in promoting all kinds of conspiracy. Military planners are said by Newsweek,
for example, to be working on new devices able to peer through the skull and see the brain at work (cited in Fleming 2001). We talk more about the effects of surveillance from space in the next chapter. At the same time, the provision of these
resources for war is being infiltrated by capital. Colin Powells famous 2003 pictures shown to the UN, for example, were provided by a private sector company called MapQuest.com. Surveillance previously conducted by military and other state authorities are now, in large part at least, being conducted by the private sector. Important elements of Harveys tertiary circuit are therefore being transferred to the primary circuit in which commodities, in this case public or state means of exercising authority and control, are being made, sold and profited from. Such, again, are ways of saving capitalism from its declining rates of profit. Mean and Wilsdon report that: During the Afghanistan war in
2001 the Pentagon signed an exclusive deal with Space Imaging, a US company that sells photographs from its Ikonos satellite. At a resolution of one metre, these were the best available pictures on the commercial market. For the duration of the war, at a cost of over $2million a month, the Pentagon paid Space Imaging for control of all high-quality images of Afghanistan [. . .] This blanket control also meant that humanitarian groups were denied access to information that could have helped them locate the large number of refugees created by the war. (Mean and Wilsdon 2004: 312)
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Link Information
Expansion of information services under the guise of national security leads to biopolitical domination over populations and war between nation states. Rajiva 6 Masters in Economics, Doctoral work in international relations and political philosophy
(Lila, The New Centennial Review 6.1 (2006) 133-169, Prometheus The Emergence of the Police State in America ) NAR The centrality of information networks, both in their afferent (intelligence-gathering) and efferent (intelligencedisseminating) aspects, underscores the importance of the spiritualthe mental, moral, and psychological elementsin the polity the Prometheans imagine. For this reason, espionage and propaganda have become central, and both operate
in a manner essentially invisible to the public. Afferent The expansion of afferent functions recently has been stupendous. Ultimately, it is not from the framework of the so-called War on Terror but from this expansion that continued in Iraq even thought it was already well-known by early 2004 that the prisons there were peopled by petty criminals and innocent bystanders? (International Committee of the Red Cross 2004). Step by step, the logic of the spy state unfolds: Admiral Poindexter's controversial Total Information Awareness program was
we have to understand Abu Ghraib. It demonstrates that what drives espionage and interrogation in Iraq is not some extreme ticking bomb contingency but the state's own inexorable drive to totality. Otherwise, why have interrogations and torture
the most comprehensive surveillance project ever conceived until, in reaction to public outrage, Congress canceled funding (Manjoo 2003). This was followed in some states by the floating of the crime-fighting computer database known as MATRIX (Robinson 2004). The most crucial point of these spy programs is [End Page 137] that access to some of this data
may be given to the CIA, which ordinarily is not supposed to spy on citizens. Some officials even suspect
that terrorists will not be the only subjects. That suspicion became concrete on December 10, 2004, when Congress approved an intelligence reform package with little-noticed changes, such as provisions to loosen standards for FBI surveillance warrants and to allow the detention of suspects without bail. These were originally part of an extension of the controversial PATRIOT Act, which, leaked to the media and dubbed PATRIOT II, was never introduced as a bill (PATRIOT Act II 2004). Now reintroduced as standalone legislation, the new provisions speed the journey to secret arrests, warrant-less surveillance, and indefinite detentions, the first harbingers of a police state. The National Intelligence Reform Act of 2004 lays the foundation for a de facto national identification card and links hundreds of federal, state, and local as well as commercial databases including critical infrastructure like telecommunications and computers. Thus, it enables simultaneous surveillance of everything from credit
reports to insurance claims (ACLU 2004). According to the Intelligence Resource Program, in 2004 the United States was
spending more than $40 billion on intelligence, a 50 percent increase over 1998, more than the GDP of several nations, about double in real terms what was spent on intelligence at the height of the Cold War, and more than what is spent today on NASA ($16 billion) or Homeland Security ($31 billion) (Tracing the Rise n.d.).3 "Ironically, at the same time that the administration has been making it harder and harder for the public to learn what government agencies are up to, the government and its private sector
partners have been quietly building more and more databases to learn and store more information about the American people, " says Senator Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont (Senate Passes Feingold-Leahy
2004). There is a real and grim parallel between the gray future of perpetually monitored American citizens and the luckless present of the inhabitants of Fallujah, subjected to the retinal scans, ID badges, and militarized work gangs of the imperial state (Jamail 2004).4 The afferent network extends to the new American frontier in outer space. In 2001, a panel that included Donald Rumsfeld, before he was [End Page 138] Secretary of Defense, described
America as frighteningly vulnerable to space attacks and concluded that the United States was "an attractive candidate for a space Pearl Harbor" (Stoullig 2001).5 Today, satellites are already involved in force enhancement, while in the Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kosovo wars, dozens were spying, mapping, providing coordinates of targets, warning of attacks, disseminating intelligence, and intercepting messages at all times of day and in all weather over the entire globe in keeping with the motto of the National Reconnaissance Office that "we own the night" (Short n.d.; Military Space Programs n.d.). When such sleepless watch is being kept, national defense recedes as a plausible motive, and surveillance becomes an end in itself through which the corporate state jealously seeks to provoke rather than deter
enemies.
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Link Mars
The colonization of Mars is an expansion of capitalism their discourse of colonization being necessary is misguided and justifies intervention Collis and Graham 9 *Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication in the Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland
University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia AND **Director of the Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation and Professor in Culture and Communication at QUT (Christy and Phil, Political geographies of Mars: A history of Martian management, MANAGEMENT & ORGANIZATIONAL HISTORY Vol 4(3): 247261, dml)
Colonialism has a specific meaning here: rather than a vague pejorative portmanteau used to house a myriad of power relations, it refers to the creation of distant land as the property of a metropolitan state, generally for the economic benefit of the colonizer. 1 As such, colonialism incorporates expansionist capitalism. Martian colonialism does not begin with the launch of the first exploration ships or at the moment the first rocket touches down on Mars. It begins with ideas, epistemologies, expectations, discourses, and pronouncements, an organizing of the world in a legal, logical, and managerial framework that demands colonization. Martian colonialism is therefore not science fiction fantasy: it has begun in earnest, with many millions of dollars already invested in its success. There are political, strategic, marketing, and operational plans at work. In his
2004 announcement of the USAs new space policy, George W. Bush (2004) stated that Mars would be the next body on which the USAs human presence would be felt. Bushs Martian vision was not a new development in the USA. Since the 1986 US National Commission on Spaces declaration of its aim to settle on Mars and the Moon, Space colonialism has featured on US Space policy agendas. 2 The European Space Agency, similarly, is investing heavily in robotic probes that will scour the Martian surface for optimal colonization sites (BBC 2006). China and Russia announced in March 2007 that they would send a joint mission to Mars by 2009. And in schools around the world, children design Martian colonies as part of their homework, with teachers being trained in how best to bring Mars into the classroom (Middle 2006), and companies offering schools ready-made Martian exploration simulation programs (Space Explorers 2007). We use the term spatiality to refer to the composite nature of
any geographical space: it works as a shorthand for the combination of physical, imagined, and epistemological spaces that together comprise a single place. We attend to Martian spatiality for two key reasons. The first motivation driving this study is a straightforward concern with spatial accountancy: what kind of a space is Mars at this moment? What kind of a place is Mars before the work of its physical colonization begins? Can Mars be legally owned, and if so, by whom and through which processes? And are any of the numerous lessons learned from European colonialisms of the past relevant to Mars? And is the future of Mars necessarily colonial? The second motivation is a curiosity about the ways in which geographies are produced as artefacts of systemic trends in political economic terms. Mars presents a unique case for postcolonial spatial analysis: it is precolonial, a space at the threshold of a significant spatial change. It represents an opportunity for postcolonial studies to refocus on the present and future tense, and on colonialisms other than those of the European past. Framing Mars through terms of colonization and resources guarantees capitalist exploitation Collis and Graham 9 *Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication in the Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland
In order to understand the politics of Martian spatiality, it is also necessary to briefly contextualize them within capitalism. The trajectory of western political economies has unquestionably been towards the monetization and commodification of everything imaginable. Behind this drive has been, first, the propertied classes of Europe and, latterly, a more universalized managerial class. What was to be owned, claimed, and commodified under capitalism was prefigured in the enclosures movement that began in the late
14th century. The shape of future capitalist commodification strategies became further evident in moves by early traders to gather up and concentrate the efforts of Europes traditional craft workers in a piecework system that de-localized the character of work (Weber 1930). Rather than being seen or experienced as an expression of accumulated history, tradition, and local knowledge, labour became oriented towards the future realization of a price, whether on the part of traders (as profits) or workers (as wages).
The dominant tense of work thereby moved from past to future, from actual to potential, from a network of mutual obligations to motives of future personal gain (Graham 2001). By the late 20th century,
the full expression of this movement came in the form of a massive debt bubble. Seen at its most abstract and general level, the
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current global financial crisis is nothing less than the commodification of future human life and energies. Thus the
arc of capitalist commodification can be seen to stretch from heritage, culture, and tradition broadly speaking, the Past to the commodification of all future social relation s (Graham 2002).We see this as an inherent and inevitable function of contemporary managerial discourse, which today begins all approaches to reality with a strategic plan: a technical device for defining, shaping, and controlling future environmental and factoral contingencies based on expectations of profit and personal gain, all of which is to be achieved through increased control and efficiencies. Here is
NASA on the matter of management: On April 24, 2002, the NASA Administrator directed the Agency to support the Presidents Freedom to Manage Initiative with the principal goal of removing barriers to more efficient management, with the expectations of improved accountability and performance. To support this government-wide initiative and achieve management excellence, the Administrator established a new policy. NASA Policy Directive 1280.1, NASA Management Systems Policy, provides for management systems rigor and discipline, while accommodating and providing flexibility to, the full range of mission risk managed at HQ and Centers. (NASA 2009a) NASA has situated itself firmly within strategic management discourse. As NASA is one of the primary agencies conducting missions to the planet, Mars has also become an object of strategic planning,
managerial control, and capitalist commodification processes. Mars can therefore be seen in discourse as a synecdoche of capitalist value relations a distant and seemingly small part of the system in which the pattern and trajectory of the whole can be seen. This becomes most clear when the politics of Martian exploration, ownership, and control are investigated. In what follows, we attend to debates around the meaning of Mars as an artifact of managerial discourses of control and exploitation; a systemic expression of colonialist capitalist commodification processes; and an exemplar of historical trends in political economy. National governments, Space agencies and societies, and private companies are investing intense energy in Marss exploration and future colonization. It is an important object of contemporary political economy. Our approach is grounded in cultural geography set within a postcolonial framework. It therefore focuses on Martian spatiality as a political object. Political here does not refer solely to geopolitics, although geopolitics is included in its meaning; we use political to describe motivated relationships between organizations, territories, species, and ideas. We concentrate on two important aspects of discourse about Mars that encapsulate the political and the economic, and in which we can see the synechdocal aspects of Martian colonization in respect of capitalisms historical development: (1) the debate about whether Mars is legally terra nullius or terra communis (politico-legal concerns) and (2) the debate about whether Mars should be terraformed to accommodate human occupation or preserved to respect the innate value of an alien planet (economic and environmental concerns). Like Dickens
and Ormonds (2007) exploration of capitalisms expansion into Space, and Parkers (2009) analysis of Space capitalism, we agree that it is nave to imagine that Apollo and the rest have been free from such earthly
entanglements (Parker 2009); and, with McDonald, that what is at stake politically and geopolitically in the contemporary struggle over outer space is too serious to pass without critical comment
(MacDonald 2007, 593).
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Link Mars Terraforming

Yall are cap Collis and Graham 9 *Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication in the Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland
University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia AND **Director of the Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation and Professor in Culture and Communication at QUT (Christy and Phil, Political geographies of Mars: A history of Martian management, MANAGEMENT & ORGANIZATIONAL HISTORY Vol 4(3): 247261, dml) Clearly, ideological
orientation underpins debates about legal spatiality: at stake is the question of whether or not planets should be the possession of states and or corporations, and whether planetary resource extraction should benefit few or many. It similarly informs another important dimension of Martian spatiality, which is whether or not to terraform Mars. Karl Sagan published the first scientific
study advocating terraforming in 1961, but the terraforming debate began in earnest in 1990 when NASA published the proceedings of a major terraforming workshop (see Committee on Human Exploration of Space 1990). In 1990, Robert Haynes coined the term ecopoiesis to describe the possibility of modifying terrestrial biota for implantation on Mars (Haynes 1990): this process would first involve manipulation of the Martian environment in order to render it habitable (Fogg 1995). Manipulation in the case of chilly Mars entails the heating and thickening of the atmosphere, and the freeing up of some of the planets currently frozen water supplies. Chief among the various proposed methods for Martian ecopoiesis are the focusing of giant mirrors on Marss surface, and the detonation of nuclear explosives on the planet to release subsurface water (Fogg 1995; Shayler et al. 2005). The next step in
the process is terraforming: this is the more ambitions plan of creating an uncontained planetary biosphere emulating all the functions of the biosphere of earth (Fogg 1995, 90). As Paul York (2005) writes, considering Martian terraforming means working out the relationship between humans and Martian space. Two distinct versions of Martian spatiality emerge from the terraforming debate. Terraformers position Mars as instrumental, thus falling squarely within the positive side of utilitarian ethics (an intellectual pet of the 19th-century propertied classes): Zubrin, the founder of the assertively pro-terraforming Mars Society, argues that as an entirely lifeless space, Mars is a resource for humans to use and colonize (Zubrin 1996a). Zubrins (1996a) spatiality is committedly anthropocentric and utilitarian: in his vision, Mars is a dead space of no intrinsic value, mutely awaiting its activation by human terraformers.
Zubrin is far from alone in championing this version of Martian spatiality. As the debate about whether Mars should be legally terra communis or terra nullius demonstrates, Marss political spatiality is currently dominated by
anthropocentrism, the position, as Pyne (2003) writes, which holds that as long as life or other cultures are not present, there is no ethical or political crisis [in terraforming] except whatever we choose to impose on ourselves. As in the schism between NASA and the Mars Society the former advocating
gradual colonization led by scientists, and the latter arguing for large-scale private colonization as quickly as possible (Lambright and VanNijnatten 2003) the spatiality of Mars as a passive resource for human use and possession
remains largely unchallenged. The argument is primarily an environmental one: terraformers argue that terrestrial
overcrowding and resource depletion mean that a failure to colonize Mars would eventually result in the decline of humanity. Is keeping a lifeless planet lifeless more important than allowing for the continuation of human life, they ask? Fogg (2000, 210) states that terraforming is natural because humans are essentially expansionist. McKay (1990) similarly biologizes Martian colonialism, arguing that humans are the natural pollinators of the universe whose instinctive task it is to fertilize the galaxy. From a terraforming perspective, then, Martian space is inert and dead, a tablua rasa dumbly awaiting human animation. The
preservationist version of Martian spatiality arises in response to terraforming. This preservationist view sees Martian space as intrinsically valuable rather than valuable only as a resource for humans. Lee (1994) argues that current environmental management frameworks must be expanded beyond the
biocentric so that they encompass abiotic or inanimate environments such as Mars. At present, this perspective remains a muted one in western thinking, despite the establishment of National conservation parks in places such as Death Valley, Uluru, Antarctica, and Alaska under similar premises. Cockell and Horneck (2004) propose a series of Martian Planetary Parks that preserve key areas of Martian space in their current form. They argue that Martian space is valuable on several fronts: intrinsically,
as beautiful; utilitarian, in that it may contain material of future scientific benefit; and historical, as a place that is marked by early visits to the planet. Parks should be created, they insist, to protect and preserve
key Martian sites deserts, volcanoes, and icecaps from any human intervention. To preservationists, Martian space is autonomously valuable, beautiful, and interesting: this position demands very limited human impact on, or alteration of, the planet.
Two divergent spatialities terraforming and preservationist now hover over Martian space, each seeking a toehold in policy and in practice. Mars political spatiality is thus far from settled. Its current dimensions are being shaped in the corporate and policy domains and will therefore
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enclosure, expropriation, and privatisation.
be shaped in the image of past and present political economic trends where new spaces are concerned:
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Link Militaristic Rhetoric

Reject the militaristic language of the aff furthers imperialism Farnsworth 7- Lt. Colonel at US army war college
(Jeffrey, SPACEPOWER: A STRATEGIC ASSESSMENT AND WAY FORWARD, 3/30/07, http://www.dtic.mil/cgibin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA469671) Taken together, these considerations pose a moral challenge in adhering to the just cause, right intent, proportionality and legitimacy considerations of the Just War tradition.70 Just as the specter of space weapons and Soviet space domination sparked the space race and the strong U.S. response in the Cold War, the same or worse reaction against U.S. space hegemony should be expected. Pursuit of unilateral U.S. space superiority would likely exacerbate perceptions of American
imperialism, could permanently fracture important international relationships, and result in undesirable if not irreparable consequences. Further, the U.S. constitutional formula that separates and balances power to protect liberty and tranquility from tyranny, suggests that space dominance by any nation is antithetical to fundamental national beliefs and values.71 Proper space strategy objectives must be congruent with these notions of peaceful international
coexistence under the rule of law, balance and separation of power, and reflect the preference for collective security arrangements to protect common space interests while adhering to the Just War tradition. Thus, while the new space policy does not advocate space superiority as an objective, its inculcation of defense policy and doctrine language, which does, is problematic.72 DoD policy and doctrine advocating U.S. space control, space superiority, and force application should be expected, but these notions are advocated without a full theoretical foundation to rationalize the need for and consequences of space preeminence. This is not to say that objectives to establish some form of a controlled and stable space operating environment or the capacity to protect and defend space interests are not needed. It is to say that adopting current language from defense policy and doctrine into space strategy is probably
not acceptable. Different paradigms are needed to formulate more appropriate objectives and temper cultural tendencies
toward unilateralist space dominance objectives.
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Link Military Funding

Military elites ensure that funding is siphoned off to sustain the monitoring of civilian populations and the growth of the military-industrial complex Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at
the University of Cambridge and Visiting Professor of Sociology, University of Essex and **James, Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
(Cosmic Society: Towards a sociology of the universe, pg 58, IWren)
Surplus capital, combined with taxes on consumers, is channelled into other tertiary circuit elements. These include social expenditures, such as welfare and military expenditure, in which immediate prospects of profitability for capitalism may again not be clear, though they contribute to ensuring the reproduction of the social system. Most importantly for our subject, they are directed by military and industrial elites into expenditures that, as we later discuss, make increasing use of outer space. Similarly, and in parallel with other forms of military spending, they are being channelled into surveillance: monitoring subaltern populations deemed socially or militarily problematic. Investments of this kind can be also be made in somewhat less sinister directions. These include the channelling
of capital into satellites designed to monitor weather conditions or to assist refugees in their attempt to make a better life. Military expenditures, originally siphoned off from the primary circuit, have now been made highly profitable, especially for the industries of developed countries. Indeed, the American economy now deeply depends on military spending, leading some to use the term warfare state (Edgerton 2005). The close working relations between the economy and the military are
sometimes known as the military industrial complex. The military clearly requires the materials made by private defence contractors whereas the contractors are highly dependent on military spending as a steady revenue stream. Indeed, the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space has
displayed posters campaigning to end aerospace corporation welfare: contracts given to major weapons and space manufacturers to keep them in business. Governments are again making investments siphoned off from the primary circuit in the form of taxes and ploughed into further primary circuits which, it is hoped, will become profitable. These existing and proposed outer
spatial fixes all rely intrinsically on two processes: the increasing commodification and privatization of the commons, and the increasing compression of time and space by new technology. We now discuss each of these processes in turn.
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Link Moon
Moon activity in space beyond exploration is controlling and imperialist, forwarding the cycle of domination and exploitation Dinerman 7- author and journalist
(Taylor, Independent space colonization: questions and implications, 1/15/07, http://www.thespacereview.com/article/784/1)
The term space colonization has been declared off-limits in polite society. The c-word is supposed to invoke all the terrible aspects of old-fashioned imperialism, particularly European imperialism. One notes that neither the
Japanese nor the Turks nor the Russians feel particularly guilty about their now-defunct empires. Even in Europe, the epicenter of the guilt trip questions are now being asked, there was a major debate in France last year over whether the positive aspects of colonialism should be taught in schools. If colonization is a dirty word, then so are conquest, exploitation, settlement, and industrialization. If fact, anything that goes beyond simple exploration is problematic. The Outer
Space Treaty has theoretically forbidden any nation from claiming sovereignty over any celestial body. Within a couple of decades we will see if this approach can pass the reality test. Once one or more bases are established on the Moon, nations will find themselves exerting control over parts of that body which, in practical terms, will amount to sovereignty. Within a moonbase, even one occupied by only a couple of
astronauts, the government that sent them there will regulate their lives in more or less the same way a government regulates the lives of the crew of a warship. The ship itself is considered the sovereign territory of the state that owns it while the waters through which it passes may be international or belong to another sovereign state that is obliged to respect the right of innocent passage The ships crew lacks anything like the ability to function as free citizens and to buy sell and trade in a free marketplace. One question that advocates for space colonization have to consider is: how
can the transition from a quasi-military lifestyle to a civilian one be handled? The experience that many
communities in the US have had when a nearby military base closed down might be relevant. Another source of experience might be the transitions from martial law to civilian law that have taken place over the years, including the one that happened in Hawaii at the end of the Second World War. None of these have involved any change in sovereignty. Post World War Two decolonization involved such a change. Yet, if
the provision in the Outer Space Treaty (OST) regarding their extended responsibility of launching states for whatever they put into space means anything, it mean that states will have to exercise control over the inhabitants of a colony no matter how long ago their ancestors left Earth.
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Their appeal to the neoconservative mainstream should be rejected it is all propaganda that leads to violence. Rajiva 6 Masters in Economics, Doctoral work in international relations and political philosophy
(Lila, The New Centennial Review 6.1 (2006) 133-169, Prometheus The Emergence of the Police State in America ) NAR The similarity of the social agenda and Weltanschauung of the neo-conservatives to liberalism should thus not be surprising; although the neo-conservatives strongly support American military strength and corporate interests, they originated on the left as social democrats and, in a few cases, even Trotskyites, who only moved to the right on foreign policy in response to the Vietnam War (Raimondo 1993). When they did, they carried over their revolutionary roots in the cadres and networks through which they operated. The neo-conservatives see themselves as a revolutionary vanguard, only in the services of
Link Neocon Think Tanks
capital rather than labor; and institutions supposedly serving the national interest have come to be dominated by their private and transnational networks of business, family, and ideology.[End Page 147] Take, for instance, Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the think tank that in a notorious paper in 2000 proposed American world domination. It is run by the editor of the neo-conservative Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol.
Kristol is the son of Irving Kristol, the godfather of neo-conservatism and his wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb, a neo-conservative historian at Chicago University. The Weekly Standard, like Fox Television and the New York Post, is
owned by the stridently pro-war newspaper magnate Rupert Murdoch. Norman Podhoretz, former editor of the neo-conservative Commentary, is the father-in-law of Elliott Abrams, who was convicted in
the Iran-Contra affair. Podhoretz is also the director of Near Eastern affairs at the National Security Council, and his wife, Midge Decter, is a veteran of the old anti-Communist group, Committee on the Present Danger. So are Wolfowitz and Feith. Both were also
part of Team B, the intelligence advisory group responsible for grossly exaggerating the Soviet threat in the 1970s and 1980s in order to get massive budget appropriations for defense. Richard Perle, a
prominent hawk, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and on the board of Hollinger International, a right-wing media conglomerate that includes the Jerusalem Post, for which Decter writes, and the Daily Telegraph. Hollinger's board also includes the columnist George Will. Hollinger itself is run by Conrad Black, the chairman of the editorial board of Podhoretz's National Interest, which Black partly subsidizes through the Nixon Center. Also at PNAC is Francis Fukuyama, author of the most influential book of democratic triumphalism, The End of History. Krauthammer, a Post columnist, is a friend of Wolfowitz. This network of
neo-conservative idealogues in the press and in policy team up incessantly to write their vehement tracts, sacrificing their professional integrity to support their bias (M. Lind 2004). Members of the PNAC now control the commanding heights of policymaking. In the Bush first term,
Wolfowitz was deputy defense secretary, second at the Pentagon; John Bolton was undersecretary of state for arms control and international security; Eliot Cohen was a member of Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board and the NSC; Libby was Cheney's chief of staff; Dov Zakheim, undersecretary of defense under Reagan, was defense comptroller until his resignation; Stephen Cambone was undersecretary for intelligence and also influential in [End Page 148] pro-nuclear circles. Especially powerful are two organizations, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and the
Center for Strategic Policy (CSP), whose members have come to occupy innumerable influential government posts from where they press the same agenda as their ideological fellow travelers in the think tanks and media outlets. The hard-line position they advocate rests on national missile defense, abrogation of arms control treaties, and
preemption. It also goes hand in hand with unquestioning support for the Israeli right. Government has been effectively captured by such private lobbyists as JINSA and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and such think tanks as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which are driven by transnational business interests rather than strictly national interests (Vest 2002). Typical of the revolutionary style of functioning, many of these proIsraeli lobbies
work in the top-down manner of business lobbies, rather than in the grassroots fashion of other ethnic constituencies. For instance, AIPAC makes use of a kind of top-down "astroturf" lobbying, in which front groups for business lobby government or other organizations through mass mailings that imitate the activism of genuine citizen groups (Lind 2002). The interlocking system orchestrates media reports and opinions to frame issues in particular ways so that certain themes appear in tandem, are repeated until they have the required effect, and then vanish simultaneously. Consider the manner in
which the prison abuse story broke, not in December 2002, when the Post first published a revelatory piece on torture in Afghanistan (Priest and Gellman 2002), not in October 2003, when AP ran a story about torture at Abu Ghraib itself (Hanley 2003), but only in May 2004 after the corporate mediaCBStook it up on the heels of an expose by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. Even then, in spite of a flood of reports, certain stories, such as the one on child abuse,
have remained stubbornly hidden while others, such as the formulation of the torture memos, have received sustained coverage. The tone is set and the issues framed, the bias lying as much in what it omitted as what it stated. With the clout of the lobbying, media, and policy networks behind them, neoconservatives have replaced career civil servants with political [End Page 149] appointees and nullified
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the traditional checks and balances between branches of government. They
have unified all intelligence-gathering and propaganda functions under defense (Eland 2004) and have then usurped those functions through personal networks, thus effectively overturning any constraints placed by law against a consolidation of power within the executive branch. Congressional oversight of intelligence, mandated since
Nixon, is often bypassed (Editorial 2005), but an independent intelligence agency, nonetheless, is supposed to be part of the checks against an imperial and secretive executive. Now those checks have vanished entirely, leaving the executive unrestrained. Whoever has the ear of the president has nearly limitless power to overthrow law, precedent, and the expertise of career civil servants. That was precisely what happened when lawyers from the Judge Advocate General's office were marginalized in 2003 by Pentagon appointees determined to implement policies that involved military dogs, extreme sensory deprivation, and psychological torture, policies that shredded the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Justice (Silverstein 2004).
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Link The Overview Effect

Whites Overview Effect is a product of selfish empowerment and capitalism Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
(Peter and James, Cosmic Society: Towards a Sociology of the Universe pg 134, dml) On the other hand, White
seems more than well aware of the ways in which visiting outer space provides a sense of empowerment. Although rejecting the idea that space travel is inherently a spiritual experience, he acknowledges the power of the myth of the heavens as the dwelling place of God, and refers to the demi-god status of astronauts and cosmonauts based on their ability to travel to the heavens. Arguably they have been made the new intermediaries in the Great Chain of Being. White talks about the trip being like a death and rebirth, marking a
transition of the self. His desire to write the book came from his own feelings when flying over Washington DC and thinking how preposterous it was that the tiny beings down there were making decisions for him. It was like ants making laws for humans! (White 1987: 3). Clearly he envisages the overview effect as aggrandizing the self, this clearly being
more a part of Space Adventures advertising campaign than is humility (see Box 5.1). White most definitely sees space travel as a positive thing for the self and for society, but in order to understand what is going on we need to reconcile these two very different elements.
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Link Privatization
Like actually how capitalist can you get Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
Private corporations have always been used to make and maintain space activities funded by the US government, but there is a trend towards increasing private sector participation, especially
through new competition schemes. This process is part of a much more general trend that has been experienced by almost all societies since the 1980s. Now, as we have seen, it is being extended to the military and to surveillance.
Previously state-run activities are being contracted out to the private sector. But, furthermore, space activities are now being envisaged as profitable in themselves, and so space activity is now becoming increasingly commercialized as well as privatized. This is another stage of Luxemburgs restless search for further profits or of what Harvey (2003) calls accumulation by dispossession. Using outer space as a source of raw materials is one suggestion under very active consideration. Harnessing the Suns rays with solar panels in space and beaming the energy to electricity grids via Earth-bound receivers is another kind of outer spatial fix under discussion, though it is not seen as profitable within the next twenty years. In the more distant future humanization will further encroach on its outside, making planets into zones appropriated for the further expansion of capitalism.
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Link Satellites
Satellites are the lifeblood of modern capitalism. Dickens, 10 *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex
[Peter Dickens, professor at the University of Brighton and Cambridge; The Humanization of the Cosmos to What End?; published in the Monthly Review, Vol. 26, Issue 6; November 2010; http://monthlyreview.org/2010/11/01/thehumanization-of-the-cosmos-to-what-end ] Jay 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. Satellite-based 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. Using space.
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
Satellites are the best opportunity for capitalist actors to gain control Dickens 10 *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex
(Peter, The Humanization of the Cosmos To What End?, Monthly Review Vol 62, No 6, November 2010, dml) The issue is now being highlighted by an argument over the geostationary orbit (GEO). This is the 30 km-wide strip 35,786 km above the equator, one in which satellites can orbit at the same speed as the ground below them. With only three satellites
in the GEO, a media conglomerate, a communications company, or a government surveillance agency can cover the whole world. No wonder it has been called spaces most valuable real estate.15 This raises the urgent question, one still not adequately resolved, of who actually owns this area of outer space. Is it
owned by the equatorial countries such as Colombia, Indonesia, and Kenya under this strip? Or is it jointly owned and managed by all states? But even manufactured risks may be minimal in scope, compared with another risk
stemming from cosmic colonization. This is outright war. Armed conflict has long been a common feature of past colonialisms; between colonizing nations as well as between the colonizers and aboriginal peoples. Satellites are already a means by which territories and investments on Earth are monitored and protected by governments operating on behalf of their economic interests. But the prospect of galactic colonialisms raises the distinct possibility of hostilities in space. Galactic wars may therefore be the product of galactic colonialism. Such a scenario was prefigured by the Star Trek science fiction television series in which
the main role of The Federation is the protection of capitalist mining colonies.24
Satellites are the means by which western culture imposes cultural imperialism on global scale and monitors falsely constructed deviant populations to sustain dominant, authoritarian power relations Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of
Cambridge and Visiting Professor of Sociology, University of Essex and **James, Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton (Cosmic Society: Towards a sociology of the universe, pg 68-69, IWren)
There are two quite distinct ways in which the humanization of outer space is implicated in the maintenance of hegemony. The first is that space technology has become central to the process of promoting dominant cultural forms
throughout the global society. Satellites serve as a medium for the transmission of hegemonic worldviews, a form of electronic cultural imperialism, and for the surveillance of the population.
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As explored in Chapter 4, satellites
help communicate hegemonic worldviews to living rooms around the world. As Mowlana has argued with specific reference to satellites: The Western-fuelled system of communications, capitalism, consumerism and continuous change contains seeds of a new form of conquest. This now surging e-sphere of information, communications, and capitalism seems to be seeking to conquer the culture and diverse human capacities of the world. (Mowlana 2004: 300) This e-sphere is certainly not imposed on audiences, who voluntarily wire themselves into it, but Mowlanas argument is that, despite the illusion of consumer choice, it is one way in which capitalism is able to spread an increasingly global culture. Hegemonic settlements made in the postwar period have been socially and spatially uneven. In the British case a series of moral panics was created by politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and sections of the media. The focus was on supposedly lawless and hedonistic groups of young people breaking the boundaries of respectable society and hence wrecking the entire social order (Hall et al. 1978). Authoritarian populism has been retained in
the twenty-first century. Its forms are again unevenly developed but in most advanced Western societies it is a combination of appeals to old values such as religion, nation, home and duty with the neo-liberal values of possessive individualism. Moral panics over youth have been supplemented by panics over immigrants, Muslims and, latterly, terrorists. But dominant blocs and alliances can remain dominant only if subordinated classes actually adopt and internalize such values themselves. Subordinates therefore not only must be reconstituted but must reconstitute themselves as atomized individuals whose pressing priorities, like those in the dominant bloc, include consumerism, the acquisition of property and a dedication to hard work. Closely allied with these
panics has been the increased surveillance of deviant populations, and even deviant states. Subaltern groups are under pressure to accept as inevitable new forms of authoritarianism, and this is despite the massively increased social inequalities stemming from the neo-liberal experiment. Satellite technology is again central to this hegemonic project of surveillance, as discussed in Chapter 4. Restoring class hegemony is a difficult and ongoing enterprise. It needs constant
renegotiation and has no guarantee of success.
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Link Satellites/Space Debris

Cleaning up space debris is a capitalist fix for a capitalist problem the mindset they uphold recreates their impacts Dickens 10 *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex
(Peter, The Humanization of the Cosmos To What End?, Monthly Review Vol 62, No 6, November 2010, dml) But even if it were desirable, the success of a galactic colonialism is by no means guaranteed. This is because the
very venture of space colonization brings new risks. The fifteenth-century Renaissance and the Enlightenment placed great faith in science as a means of bringing progress. Now such progress is regularly challenged. Furthermore, much scientific intervention today stems from the crises stemming from earlier intervention, or what some social scientists have called manufactured risk.19 This kind of risk, for which no one agency or individual is usually culpable, is readily recognizable in space-humanization progress. Note, for example, that there are now around fourteen thousand tracked objects circling around the earth, known as space debris or space junk. Improved tracking systems will increase the number of smaller, observable tracked objects to around thirty thousand, many of these causing potential damage. Even whole satellites may collide. Such collisions are estimated at millions or even billions to one. But on February 10,
2009, such a collision actually happened. A defunct Russian satellite crashed into an American commercial satellite, generating thousands of pieces of orbiting debris.20 Space junk poses a serious threat to the whole enterprise of space
colonization, and plans are now afoot to launch even more satellites, designed to drag older satellites out of orbit in order to avoid collisions.21
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Link Science Fiction

Science fiction is both the product of and the sustainment for hegemonic, capitalist power relations by normalizing dystopian futures and depicting economic tension as inevitable Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of
Cambridge and Visiting Professor of Sociology, University of Essex and **James, Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton (Cosmic Society: Towards a sociology of the universe, pg 69-71, IWren) Some commentators
on science fiction have also argued that the stories told there about human exploration and settlement of space are distinctly hegemonic. Yet it should also be noted that there are
those who emphasize the way in which science fiction explores the conflicts of Western society, and highlights the problems with imperialism and capitalism. Some science fiction clearly goes even further with narratives that attack the legitimacy of contemporary social relations through telling dystopian stories about how a human future in space might look. Kim Stanley Robinsons (1993, 1994, 1996) trilogy of books on a Martian mining colony explore the ethics of exporting capitalism to the rest of the cosmos, for example. In the trilogy, groups of Martian settlers break away from the capitalist mining operations to establish their own social order based on socialist, environmentalist and even nudist principles. As such, there is probably some truth to DeWitt Douglas Kilgores assessment of the scope of science fiction and science writing about space (what he calls astrofuturism): Astrofuturist speculation on space-based exploration, exploitation, and colonization is capacious enough to contain imperialist, capitalist ambitions and utopian, socialist hopes. [. . .] This [speculative] impulse has produced a strand of futurist thought that seeks an eternal extension of contemporary political and economic arrangements, albeit stripped of unpleasant resonances and rendered innocent. However, astrofuturism also carries within it an idealism, a liberal or utopian commitment that seeks alternatives and solutions to these problems and conflicts characterizing contemporary American life. It can imagine space frontiers predicated on experimental arrangements and the production of relationships uncommon or unknown in the old world. (Kilgore 2003: 1, 4) However, it is hard to deny that science fiction, and especially popular science fiction, is often supportive of
existing social practices. The futures imagined by most science fiction writers reflect a hegemonic worldview simply through their demonstrated inability to imagine anything other than an extension of contemporary social relations. This is a point made eloquently by Sardar and Cubbitt: Science fiction shows us not the plasticity but the paucity of the human imagination that has become quagmired in the scientist industrial technological, cultural-socio-psycho babble of a single civilizational paradigm. Science fiction is the fiction of mortgaged futures. (Sardar and Cubbitt 2002: 1) Sardar and Cubbitt,
like Kilgore, retreat from this altogether critical position to discuss the ways in which science fiction can play out the conundrums of civilization. However, some writers influenced by the critical theory of the Frankfurt School have been much more
outspoken against the duping effect that science fiction has on an audience that is encouraged to accept social relations as inevitable through witnessing them projected in time and space. Goulding (1985) has argued that science fiction shows like Star Trek preserve a halo of free choice within rigid rules and structured inequalities. The Federation to which the Enterprise belongs promulgates male authority (preserved through the notion of the chain of command), capitalism (through military and diplomatic protection of mining colonies), possessive individualism and the Darwinian ethic of the survival of the fittest. As Goulding argues, the narratives of the show are stories about the
crew of the Enterprise teaching the various space colonies which they visit to be American. In one episode, he reports, the crew are disturbed upon visiting a planet on which people worked the minimum amount of time possible and spent all their free time high on drugs. This obvious transgression against the protestant ethic had to be redressed by the Enterprise crew. Our imagination as
regards possible human futures in space is the product of hegemonic relations. Not only is the imagined spacefaring civilization one that continues to operate on neo-liberal principles, but, more importantly, alternative Earthly solutions to our social and environmental problems are ignored entirely in favour of exporting them to space. Whether or not the readers of science fiction have the
ability to critically dissect the messages of the shows they watch and the books they read has been hotly debated. Gouldings position has been attacked by writers like Jenkins (Jenkins 1992; Tulloch and Jenkins 1995), who has argued that the science fiction audience is highly creative and reflexive. If this is so, there is clearly some hope that critical science fiction writing and the critical reading of science fiction can contribute to the exploration of alterative futures to the extension of global capitalism into space, but this requires engagement in praxis.
Science fiction as resistance failsits appropriated by capital to project social issues far into the future, glossing over war and crises to fragment contemporary resistance.
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Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of
Cambridge and Visiting Professor of Sociology, University of Essex and **James, Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton (Cosmic Society: Towards a sociology of the universe, pg 96-97, IWren) Fear of Soviet domination of space was also reflected in contemporary science fiction films. Science
fiction studies is a
massive field, and one that has much to contribute to a sociology of the universe. However, unfortunately, here we can only offer a few examples. One relevant to our present discussion is the 1951 Robert Wise movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still. This had a flying saucer landing in Washington DC and its captain ordering world leaders to abandon the nuclear arms race or face annihilation from aliens (McCurdy 1997). This is just one instance of public suspicion and paranoia
being reflected and amplified by the producers of popular movies. In 1938, for example, Orson Welles caused
widespread panic with his radio version of the 1898 H. G. Wells classic novel The War of the Worlds, an account of an alien invasion from Mars. The programme was broadcast at precisely the time when America was jittery about the threat of fascism and Nazi Germany. The alien races in Star Trek have been read as representations of a number of threats to the US from cultural others, for example, the Borg as communists
as well as Asians (Wertheim 2002), or the Klingons as Vietnamese (Goulding 1985). In our own time Steven Spielbergs 2005 version of War of the Worlds deliberately played on fears stemming from the attacks on 11 September 2001. The ideological dimensions of wars being
conducted in space are most obviously discussed, however, in relation to the Star Wars series of films. George Lucas, the films director, is an anti-war propagandist and the films can be read as a commentary on the greed, aggressiveness, hatred and fear underlying war (Lancashire 2002). Still more acutely, it is an attack on greedy corporations whose interests are served by war. The natural parallel with American society is made clearer in the second-made trilogy (which are actually prequels to the first trilogy), in which we witness the formation of the Empire. Here Lucas is deliberately critical of American society, represented by the Republic, which turns its back on democracy to become the Empire. Separatists work a deal with corporations (the Trade Federation) to destroy the Republic, bringing profits beyond your wildest imagination. The Republic, motivated by fear, is manipulated by greedy and ambitious rulers into investing in the development of immense military power. In the later films the empire will be defeated by distinctly American rebels seeking freedom. This is how Lucas presents the cycle of empire (Lancashire 2002). A war far, far away However, despite what is potentially a powerful critique of a contemporary American society gone
wrong, the Star Wars films can also be interpreted in a less subversive light. Hegemony works not by suppressing the truth it is not propaganda in that sense but by dissipating resistance to the social order (Lee Harvey (1990) uses the terms positive and negative ideology to make this distinction). In this case, it is not impossible to imagine a film offering a critical commentary on society that actually contributes to hegemony. One way in which films might do this is by projecting contemporary political issues far away from todays material reality. In the case of Star Wars it all takes place in a distant future and a galaxy far, far away. They also shore up the notion of a pure war by using laser weapons, faster-thanlight travel and other technological developments that remove the picture of war away from its brutal realities. The images of the movies abstract away from particular capitalist interests or particular parts of the political class. All its moral messages are worthwhile, but not here and not just yet. It offers hope that good will win out at some point in the future through the fantastic powers of an extraordinary group of activists, allowing a contemporary weakening of resistance. Furthermore, the Star Wars films are entrenched in an American movie culture intimately bound to capital. Even if the message of the plot contains the potential for critical thought, then the franchises marketing operations subsume it in another Disneyized consumption spectacle (to use
a term from Bryman 2004). Star Wars merchandise was worth billions of dollars to Lucas, as consumers bought into the Star Wars brand. This is a great example of the one-dimensionality of capitalism identified by Herbert Marcuse (1991). Capitalism is
capable of making even our most revolutionary impulses part of its own system of social power.
Of course, no single movie is going to exert ideological hegemony on its own. And it will not do so indefinitely. Still less will it halt an anti-war movement in its tracks. But the widespread and constant projection of such messages and images
must have its effect. Furthermore, such messages are always up for revision. Continuing concessions and possible solutions are made without clarifying, and undermining, the fundamental social and economic institutions and processes involved.
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Link Space Militarization

The militarization of space is the new strategy for colonial domination Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
(Peter and James, Cosmic Society: Towards a Sociology of the Universe pg 88-89, dml) Harvey can also help us understand how the
militarization of space helps establish new empires on Earth via imperialism at a distance or at arms length. This entails attempting to control and subject societies deemed to be weaker. The new kinds of space-based war and surveillance which have emerged since the Second World War are a central part of the attempt by American governments, combining with key sectors of the economy, to make fixes in absentia, by remote control. As Foster argues, it does have something in common with earlier forms of imperialism. War is the handmaiden of property relations and economic imperialism: The primary goals of US imperialism have always been to open up investment opportunities to US corporations and to allow such corporations to gain preferential access to crucial natural resources. Inasmuch as such expansion promotes US hegemony it tends to increase the international competitiveness of US firms and the profits they enjoy. At the same time US imperialism promotes the interests of the other core states and of capitalism as a whole insofar as these are in accord with US requirements. (Foster 2006: 145) But, seen in the context of Gramscis analysis of power, increasing militarization is itself a sign of weakness. Resorting to warfare is an indication that domination by consent has broken down. It is recognition that the values of individualism, parliamentary democracy and markets will not necessarily be widely shared. The militarization and weaponization of outer space is recognition that global hegemony based on a Western model can no longer be assumed. If the values of Western cultures and ways of life come under question they must be enforced. But the success of such military and economic governance at arms length is also by no means guaranteed. The societies and peoples deemed weaker do not necessarily see themselves in
that way and are likely to fight back. Accumulation by dispossession continues to generate its own antagonisms and social movements. We return to this point in summary.
Forget hegmilitarization and weaponization of space is only a precursor to the exploitation and imperialist appropriation of the entire cosmos Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of
Cambridge and Visiting Professor of Sociology, University of Essex and **James, Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton (Cosmic Society: Towards a sociology of the universe, pg 94-95, IWren)
The United States government is by far the dominant military force in outer space. And its aim in militarizing outer space is to achieve what the US Joint Chiefs of Staff call full-spectrum domination, one in which the US government actively enforces a monopoly over outer space as well as air, land and sea. The purpose of this monopoly is not simply to control the use of force on Earth, but also to secure economic interests actually in space, present and future. As we go on to argue in Chapter 4, satellites have become so crucial to the functioning of the world economy that there has been increasing tension amongst the cosmic superpowers over their vulnerability to attack, either from Earth-based weapons or from weapons mounted on other satellites. Star wars systems are conceived in part to protect space assets from perceived threats. If more people are going to be encouraged to invest in space technology, they will need guarantees from their governments that their investments will be protected. The US has historically been anxious about other nations attempting to control Earth orbit, and for that
reason an American Space Station was proposed, one that would ensure that access to space was vetoed by American interests. Fortunately, the US decided, perhaps historically rather surprisingly, that in the post-Cold War climate cooperation with other countries in the project would be more beneficial than a unilateral solution, and so the American Space Station became the International Space Station. In 1989 a congressional study, Military Space Forces: The Next 50 Years (Collins 1989), argued along similar lines that whoever held the Moon would control access to space. This echoed an older 1959 study, and appears to be a possible motive for the recent initiative to establish an inhabited Moon base by 2024. With a system of property rights
already being drawn up for space resources, a military presence in space to ensure these rights is becoming an increasing priority. Historically, as many pro-space advocates point out, colonization has been
Cap Kritik 35/194
established through the military. Pro-space activists have generally been divided over the issue of weapons in space
(Michaud 1986). There are those who are against it per se, but even fewer see it as a positive use of space. There are, however, some who see it as a necessary evil in order to protect space assets and operations, and as a possible step in the eventual settlement of space. Harveys analysis of the new form of imperialism is again useful in understanding these military developments. It
is unlike that typically pursued until the late nineteenth century. It does not entail one society invading another with a view to permanently occupying that society and using its resources. Rather, it entails societies (and particularly the US with its enormous fusion of capital and political power) privatizing and commodifying resources previously owned by the public sector or held in common in other ways. This process is developing within the advanced societies, such as the US. But, even more important, it is a strategy that is being spread throughout the cosmos.
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Link Space Property

Attempts to develop space lead to leadership claims that expand the totalitarian capitalist regime Monibot 2k- won the UN 500 award for outstanding environmental achievement, bestselling author and columnist for the guardian, fellowship/professorship holder at oxford, east London, and other colleges
(George, Comment & Analysis: This is a war of all worlds: Fuss about the human genome just hides the brutality of global capitalism.(Guardian Leader Pages), 6/20/00, Lexis) Terrifying as the impending capture of the essence of humanity is, it is far from unprecedented. The attempt to grab the genome is just one of many symptoms of a far graver disease. We are entering an age of totalitarian capitalism, a political and economic system which,
by seizing absolute control of fundamental resources, destitutes everyone it excludes.On Saturday I met a campaigner from Kerala, in southern India, who told me that, to the tribal people he works with,
the ownership of land is as inconceivable as the ownership of air would be in the northern hemisphere. I told him the bad news. In several American cities, blocks of air, which (once legally transferred to a suitable site) allow their owners to build skyscrapers, change hands for tens of millions of dollars. There have been a number of legal disputes over the ownership of clouds, as firms battle for the right to make them drop their rain where they want it. Companies are now claiming they own asteroids and
landing spaces on the moon. None of these presumptions is any more absurd than the claim to possess exclusive control over part of our own planet. But, as property rights proliferate, almost everything which once belonged to all of us is being seized.
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Link Space Resources

Expansion into space to sustain Capitalism is a short term solution that causes global wars. Dickens 10 Visiting Professor of Sociology
(Peter, UK, November 2010, Monthly Review, Volume 62, Issue 6, The Humanization of the CosmosTo What End?)NAR In the early twentieth century, Rosa Luxemburg argued that an outside 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. Luxemburgs 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 Smiths characterization of capitals 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 processno part of the Earths 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. 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 capitalisms 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, capitalisms 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.
Attempting to resolve terrestrial resource needs through space is unethical and fuels capitalism
Anker 5- PhD in history of science from Harvard, research fellow at the Center for Development and the Environment at University of Oslo, Norway.
(Peder, The Ecological colonization of space, April 2005, JSTOR)
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Space colonization caused hardly any controversy until 1975, when royalties from the counterculture sourcebook, The Whole Earth Catalog, were used to finance space-colonization research. In the debate that followed, the overwhelming majority
thought space colonies could provide well-functioning environments for astronauts seeking to push human evolutionary expansion into new territories, while also saving a Noahs Ark of earthly species from industrial destruction and possible atomic apocalypse on Earth. To supporters, space colonies came to represent rational, orderly, and wise management, in contrast to the irrational, disorderly, and ill-managed Earth. Some of them built Biosphere 2 in Arizona to prepare for colonization of Mars and to create a model for how life on Earth should be organized. The skeptical minority argued that space colonization was unrealizable or unethical, yet nevertheless adopted terminology, technology, and methodology from space research in their efforts to reshape the social and ecological matrix onboard Spaceship Earth. The use of colonial terminology was deliberate and in line with the imperial tradition from which ecology
as a science emerged. According to Stewart Brand, a leading defender of space colonization, the term space colony (instead of space settlement) was unproblematic since no Space natives [were] being colonized.2 Yet, as this article argues, when
space colonies became the model for Spaceship Earth, all human beings became Space natives colonized by ecological reasoning: Social, political, moral, and historical space were invaded by ecological science aimed at reordering ill-treated human environments according to the managerial ideals of the astronauts life in the space colony. The colonialist agenda of space research invites the use of postcolonial
theory. Though hardly novel in other areas of historical research, postcolonial analysis has yet to be applied to the history of ecology. The connection between ecological colonization of outer and earthly space has largely been ignored.3 The few historical analyses of space ecology that do exist have hardly paid attention to its importance to ecologists understanding of Earth.4 Scholars have rightly emphasized the significance of modeling closed ecosystems, but have not placed this methodology in the context of ecological colonization of space.5 This article holds that advocates of the Martian ecological perspective sought to
create on Earth what one proponent described as a neo-biological civilization at the expense of the humanist legacy, which holds that every human being has intrinsic and unique capacities, dignity, and worth.6 Capitalism needs an outside to obtain resources from in order to survive space will become that outside Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
Capitalism is necessarily an expanding and crisis-making type of society. But capital, in order to continue reproducing and expanding, necessarily encounters limits, resistances and barriers of different kinds. Indeed, it could be said that it requires limits, since these are the basis for capitals dynamism, its constant restructuring and
reorganization. As Marx himself put it, The tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself. Every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome (1973: 408). As discussed in Chapter 3, todays main power
blocs (the United States, the European Union and in due course other societies such as China and India) are beginning to scramble for outer space in much the same way as the European societies competed for African territory in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The establishment of property rights is central, as indeed it
was when the African continent was subdivided by rival powers. As Rosa Luxemburg, one of Harveys antecedents, argued in developing her theory of imperialism, capital needs an outside beyond its boundaries, off which it feeds (Luxemburg 1968; Hardt and Negri 2000). This outside takes two main forms. First, capitalism
expands by making other kinds of society in its own image; making feudal or aboriginal societies, for example, into capitalist forms. But zones outside capitalism can also be used as just a source of materials. This is where outer space is becoming significant. In the same way that gold and diamonds were taken from Peru and South Africa or sugar cane was taken from Jamaica and Java in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forms of imperialism, so can the materials of the Arctic or of the Moon and Mars be incorporated into capitalist production processes. Assuming that the cost of reaching the Moon and the nearby planets is sufficiently low, this makes the Moon and nearby planets an attractive prospect for the further expansion of capital. But, in line with Marx, Luxemburg also went on to argue that by incorporating a non-capitalist society in either way, capital creates yet another barrier. The very commodities it needs (whether it be labour power or just materials) are now brought within its ambit. As regards materials, it will in due course use them up or make them prohibitively expensive to extract. This means that capital must find yet another source to satisfy its demand for infinite expansion. Regions such as the
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Arctic or outer space are good examples. So,
7 Week Seniors 2011 BBFJR Lab as soon as the Moon is exhausted, capital will be seeking more
resources on Mars, and so on. Space is seen solely as an area of resources for capitalism Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
Outer space is now increasingly envisaged as providing inputs to the Earthly production process. It is, for example, seen as an unlimited source of metals for human use. Private companies have also been established working on the research and design for asteroidal and lunar mines. This is
discussed in a number of books elaborating the commercial potential of outer space (e.g. Lewis 1996; Zubrin 1999; Hudgins 2002). The expansion of industry into space has been referred to by Harry G. Stine (1975) as the third industrial revolution and by Krafft Ehricke (1972) as the benign industrial revolution (as there were supposedly no environmental issues associated with it). Asteroids are receiving special attention (Lewis 1996). The Moon might seem an obvious first target
for the acquisition and mining of resources, but asteroids are currently seen as a better bet thanks to their metallic density. They have three hundred times as much free metal as an equal mass taken from the
Moon. Metals found on the Moon are just the dispersed debris from asteroids. In the mid-1990s the market value of metals in the smallest known asteroid, known as 3554 Amun, was about $20 trillion. This included $8 trillion worth of iron and nickel, $6 trillion worth of cobalt, and about $6 trillion in platinum-group metals (ibid.). As and when it is possible to launch
thousands of people into orbit and build giant solar power satellites, Lewis argues, it should be possible to retrieve this and mine other asteroids to supply Earth with all the metals society will ever need. Extracting valuable helium-3 from the Moon is another possibility. One metric ton of helium-3
is worth $3 million, and one million tons could be obtained from the Moon. This has led Lawrence Joseph to question in a New York Times article whether the Moon could become the Persian Gulf of the twenty-first century (cited in Gagnon 2006). Needless to say, we
need to remain cautious in accepting these highly optimistic forecasts. Even the most enthusiastic pro-space activists see materials in space as useful only for building in space. The cost of returning materials to Earth would add so much to the cost of extracting them that this would never be financially viable. Research is also being conducted, however, into the production of fuel for further humanization from space materials
(Zubrin and Wagner 1996). NASA has recently given the chemical engineer Jonathan Whitlow a grant of nearly $50,000 to develop computer models that could lead to the production of propellant from the lunar regolith or rock mantle (SPX 2004). The issue
of ownership of means of production is again vitally important here. United Nations legislation and the
most optimistic proponents of space exploitation assume that space resources are infinite and there will be enough for everyone to own plenty of space. Considering the immensity of space as a whole, this is of course true. But it is overlooked that the nearer
parts of space are those which are most profitable and viable to exploit. In reality, the part of space that is not yet owned and exploited will always become further and further from the Earth, and as this happens investors will need to be increasingly wealthy to afford to exploit it. The attempt to colonize and exploit space is the new front of capitalism Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
The humanization of outer space is at an early stage and attempts by social scientists to predict the future have almost always ended in failure. On the other hand, there are some important straws in the wind, indications of how societys relations with the cosmos are changing. To an increasing extent capital is setting the pace, displacing governments and using outer space for commercial purposes. It may well be used, for example, as a means of harvesting energy for the Earth. It is also increasingly envisaged as a source of materials for investment in new circuits of capital. In the more distant future, investments may be made in outer space colonies.
Science fiction and forward-looking space scientists give some indication of the nature of these developments. This chapter is in part speculative, but there is also a sense in which the proposals for humanizing the universe are in themselves interesting illustrations of the way in which humanity imagines its future. Science fiction shows, for example, outer space being used as a refuge from disasters, or alien life confirming the superiority of Western democracy. But a number of sociological theories offer better
insights into the future humanization of the cosmos. The Risk Society is being made cosmic, with projects supposedly beneficial to society actually generating considerable potential for disaster. Some
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authors borrowing from Marx might
interpret the colonization of outer space as an attempted resolution of the second contradiction of capitalism, with capital despoiling the natural environment to such an extent that it searches for new materials off-planet. The spread of society into an external nature far beyond the Earth also raises ethical issues which already form part of a wider debate. What right does humanity have to model the cosmos in its own image? Finally, this chapter raises the possibility of a cosmic consciousness taking the form of an individualism which envisages the whole of the cosmos as within its reach. Signs of this subjectivity are already in evidence and we predict that, unless tempered, it will become a central feature of a cosmic society. The drive to accumulate space resources is an extension of the capitalistic project of seizing areas and sucking them dry Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at
(Cosmic Society: Towards a sociology of the universe, pg 54-55, IWren) Importantly for Harvey and other Marxist geographers, these
fixes commonly take on a spatial nature. They involve the geographic expansion of the circuits of capital as new territories, raw materials, workforces and markets are drawn into the capitalist system. For purposes of exposition, Harvey (2007)
initially assumes a single and closed region in which production and realization of surplus values take place. But, he argues, the frontiers of the region can be rolled back or relief gained by exports of money capital, commodities or productive capacities of fresh labour powers from other regions (ibid.: 427). The tendency towards overaccumulation within the original region remains unchecked, but devaluation is avoided by successive and ever grander outer transformations. This process can
presumably continue until all external possibilities are exhausted or because other regions resist being treated as mere convenient appendages (ibid.: 427). But even Earthly spatial fixes may now be proving relatively exhausted, unprofitable or containing people resisting their appendage status. We therefore argue that Earthly fixes may be expanded to incorporate even more outer transformations. This time the fixes are in the cosmos. We therefore term them outer spatial fixes. Clearly there is no question of importing labour power from outer space to help out a failing region on Earth but, as we will discuss in Chapter 6, the raw materials of outer space are increasingly envisaged as a means of developing Earthly production processes. And, as discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, outer space is being used to manage flows of capital and information and to regulate social relations (including the social relations of production) on Earth. Once made, however, a spatial fix is likely to be destroyed or devalued in order to make way for a new spatial fix, one offering new possibilities for capital accumulation. Spatial fixes are only ever provisional and therefore offer only short-term resolutions to the contradictions inherent in capitalism. Whether these fixes are (at least
temporarily) effective depends on whether they are seen as profitable or, in the case of state and social expenditures, whether they fulfil their purpose of, for example, reproducing labour power or successfully managing social relations. We cannot
overexaggerate the fact that success for Earthly or cosmic spatial fixes is by no means guaranteed. The two further circuits of capital are involved in the making of these new outer spatial fixes.
Mineral mining in space drives capitalist agendas forward. Diamandis 10, M.D. at Harvard Medical School, Honorary Doctorate at International Space University, Chairman and CEO of X Prize Foundation, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Space Adventures
(Peter, Space: The Final Frontier of Profit? Wall Street Journal, February 13, 2010, http://online.wsj.com/)
Government agencies have dominated space exploration for three decades. But in a new plan unveiled in President Barack Obama's 2011 budget earlier this month, a new player has taken center stage: American capitalism and entrepreneurship. The plan lays the foundation for the future Google, Cisco and Apple of space to be born, drive job creation and open the cosmos for the rest of us. Two fundamental realities now exist that
will drive space exploration forward. First, private capital is seeing space as a good investment, willing to fund individuals who are passionate about exploring space, for adventure as well as profit. What was once affordable only by nations can now be lucrative, public-private partnerships. Second, companies and investors are realizing that everything we hold of valuemetals,
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minerals, energy and real estateare in near-infinite quantities in space. As space transportation and operations become more affordable, what was once seen as a wasteland will become the next gold rush. Alaska serves as an excellent analogy. Once thought of as "Seward's Folly" (Secretary of State William Seward was criticized for overpaying the sum of $7.2 million to the Russians for the territory in
1867), Alaska has since become a billion-dollar economy. The same will hold true for space. For example, there are millions of asteroids of different sizes and composition flying throughout space. One category, known as S-type, is composed of iron, magnesium silicates and a variety of other metals, including cobalt and platinum. An average half-kilometer S-type asteroid is worth more than $20 trillion.
Their focus on resources out there ignores environmental degradation on Earth. Dickens 10 Visiting Professor of Sociology
(Peter, UK, November 2010, Monthly Review, Volume 62, Issue 6, The Humanization of the CosmosTo What End?)NAR In short, the Space Renaissance Initiative argues, society is undergoing massive social, environmental, and
population crises because it is thinking too small. The energy of the sun can, for example, be made into a source of clean power from outer space, which would solve societys energy shortages at a stroke. The Initiative argues that opening up the cosmos to humanitycolonizing the solar system, and opening up resources in the moon, Mars, and the asteroidscould be central to social and environmental salvation. The progress made by the private sector in developing technologies and efficiencies for space tourism means that commercial enterprise can now start planning to venture still further afield. The philosophical roots of the Space Initiative are no less than the sixteenth-century Italian Renaissance and the
Enlightenment. With the enlightened patronage of such families as the Medicis, an unprecedented new age of development took place: arts knew a wonderful age of innovation, culture took on some essential principles of classical Greek philosophy, and modern science was born, with men like Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and later Copernicus and Galileo leading the way. This movement led to the Age of Enlightenment and its most famous offspring: the American and French Revolutions. The manifesto also praises the writings of Descartes, Voltaire, and Jefferson. The belief of these philosophers in the enterprising individual, in freedom, in liberty, and in reason all mean that political power should be vested in the common person and not in states, kings, and nobility. The Space Renaissance Initiative believes in these concepts, seeing them as the basis of a new, progressive, liberating, humanization of the cosmos. But there are surely major problems here. For example, any claim that the Medici family (and similar families such as the Borgias) helped overthrow feudalism is far-fetched. The Medicis were bankers and merchants who made their money at the center of an emerging global mercantilist capitalism, one based in Northern Italy. They used this money to enhance their position within their feudal societies. Members of the Medicis even made themselves into popes, thus further enhancing their wealth and that of their many illegitimate offspring. Another of the Medicis was made the Queen of France. The language used by intellectual elites of the day was Latin. This appealed to scholars across Europe but not to the great mass of individuals living in Florence, Milan, or Venice.6 The Medicis and individuals such as Leonardo are often celebrated as examples of The Renaissance Universal Man, one capable of spanning every kind of human practice such as art, music, and politics. This Man is perhaps best symbolized by Leonardos famous image of a male human being, stretched over the circle of the cosmos, his head in the heavens and his bowels located in earthly regions. But this Renaissance Manor Womancan also be seen as prefiguring the self-centered, narcissistic individualism of our own day, one seeing the whole of the cosmos at his or her command. This kind of modern human
identity has since been enhanced by consumer-based capitalism and, given the problems it creates both for
ourselves and our environment, there seems rather little reason to celebrate or restore it. 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 Initiatives 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. A simplistic and idealistic view of history,
technology, and human agency therefore underpins the starting point of the Space Renaissance Initiative. Humanization in this shapeone now finding favor in official government circlesraises all kinds of highly problematic issues for society and the environment. What would an alternative, more critical, perspective on humanizing the cosmos tell us?
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Link SPS
SPS is a band-aid solution for internal contradictions of capitalism and would be monopolized by the elite Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
The idea of using satellites for harnessing solar power was introduced by Glazer (1968), and became central to Gerard ONeills space colony plans discussed below. But we need again to remain cautious. The main criticism is the expense of the electricity they would produce. There are serious questions about its profitability,
at least in the short to medium term (Macauley 2000). Those who do not write off the idea completely believe that it will become profitable and viable and may actually happen fairly soon, though requiring some form of privatepublic partnership or World Bank funding (Collins 2000; Kassing 2000; Woodell 2000). But this will only be at the point when the unit cost of
electricity produced by Earthly power sources rises above the unit cost of satellite solar power. According to many estimates this will not be until reserves on Earth are much more depleted. Only then will this particular outer spatial fix become profitable. If it were ever to happen, the energy produced would be extremely expensive and, because of the massive investment it would require, would very likely be monopolized. However, it can be argued that it will simply never be viable because it is cheaper to produce renewable energy on
Earth than it would be in space. One commentator (Launius 2003) outlines the argument that equivalent electricity could be produced by covering a section of the Sahara in solar panels, and it would be a great deal cheaper, safer and easier to maintain (Collins (2000) disagrees). To Launius, outer space collectors of solar power look like an excuse for a space
programme rather than a legitimate solution to energy problems. So it is advisable to again be cautious
about much of the highly optimistic publicity surrounding the use of solar power for Earthly needs. A study of representatives of the energy industry and of industry concluded that, for the next quarter of a century at least, conventional electricity generation in both developed and developing countries will be more than adequate to deal with demand (Macauley 2000).
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Link Space Tourism

Space tourism is a narcissistic exercise that reinforces class divisions Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
Space tourism is a rapidly growing field of economic activity. It is another part of societys outer spatial fix, one in which surplus profits are being ploughed into outer space. Now that virtually all space on Earth has been humanized and thoroughly populated, outer space is being made by elite groups into the new exotic destination of choice. But this is only part of the picture. The humanization of outer space also uses and reinforces an ancient and powerful worldview, concerning societys relations with the cosmos. It relies on the idea that outer space is an apparently pure and serene other place offering a profound sense of awe, wonder and renewed identity to the space tourist. Travelling there supposedly brings the same kinds of rewards, in the form of a new self, as does travelling to a holy site during a pilgrimage. Tourism in outer space will be the newest way in which social elites forge their identities. This hegemonic view of the cosmos and societys relation to it is a product of a new dominant social bloc, one incorporating pro-space activists, the aerospace industry, the tourism industry and governments. Tourism makes space into a commodity Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
(Peter and James, Cosmic Society: Towards a Sociology of the Universe pg 129, dml) Whichever kind of tourism is consumed and participated in, the chances are that it will
help make and reinforce a particular kind of social identity. As a number of sociologists have argued, people do not simply consume holidays and images of holidays offered by brochures. They actively use this commodity, and its images, to literally make their selves (Britton 1991; Crang 2006; Crouch 2006). Another form of circuit is therefore involved here, one in which consumers are using purchased commodities to develop their aesthetic and cultural identities. It is well recognized that capitalism caters to the narcissistic personality type prevalent in late modernity by offering consumer goods that claim to replace a widespread loss of identity. Consumption addresses the alienated qualities of modern social life and claims to be their solution: it promises the
very things the narcissist desires attractiveness, beauty and personal popularity through the consumption of the right kinds of goods and services. Hence all of us, in modern social conditions, live as though surrounded by mirrors; in these we search for the appearance of an unblemished, socially valued self. (Giddens 1991: 172) Giddens is almost certainly wrong to suggest that literally all of us are narcissists searching for a sense of self. Rather, he is pointing to a certain tendency, one which particularly afflicts some classes of consumer. But the producers of commodities are recognizing these tendencies amongst the consumers and are producing new forms of aestheticized or cultural tourism (Lury 1996; Ateljevic and Doorne 2006; Oakes and Minca 2006). Space tourism forms part of this process, trips into space being presented by the space tourism industry as an ultimate
aesthetic and spiritual experience, and space tourists confirming that they have made new persons out of themselves as a result of their experience.
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Link Surveillance (Biopower)

Satellites are the new Panopticon they exercise biopolitical control over the population Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
Foucaults account is useful when we turn to one of the main ways in which the socialization of outer space is being deployed today. There is a direct parallel between Benthams panopticon and this new orbital or planetary panopticon (Whitaker 2000). Both involve a watchstation up on high that
observes deviant populations, and in neither case do the monitored have any knowledge of whether or not they are being watched. About 200 of the Earths 2,500 satellites can be seen exercising biopower and capillary authority via
satellite. Satellites capable of monitoring and transmitting pieces of information around the globe are a step towards making a global panopticon. If Foucault is right, the outcome is a cowed and self-policing population. A system of geosynchronous satellites is arguably the modern-day equivalent of a punishing God
or supreme power in the sky feared by societies throughout human history. As we shortly discuss, however, this picture needs some modification. Surveillance is becoming especially important in contemporary society. Not only does
it involve the observation of populations, but increasingly it is implicated in the transmission of information about people around the globe. The planetary panopticon monitors and transmits highly personal
information. Data on consumers purchases, for example, is used not only for stock-control purposes but also to make profiles of individuals as consumers. This data can be used to target consumers, to bring to their attention new products via advertising or promotion over the internet. But personalized surveillance goes even further than this. Closed-circuit television monitors the activities of individuals. Telephone conversations can also be quite easily monitored, even though the sheer amount of information generated by all these technologies is difficult to cope with. Car number plates can be photographed and matched to centralized records to track individuals or to charge them for the use of certain streets.
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Link Terraforming
Terraforming is not neutral only the elite can take advantage of it and the expendable are expended to make it possible Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
(Peter and James, Cosmic Society: Towards a Sociology of the Universe pg 151, dml) Yet environmental risks are not the only ones associated with planetary engineering. It brings another possible set of risks, this time of a social and political kind. Lovelocks proposal for terraforming is entirely unforthcoming about the kind of society that would live and work on a terraformed planet. What social relations are involved for the making of its harmonious,
slowly evolving, terraformed environment? Respect for environments and ecological systems may be an inherently good thing, but it is always worth recalling the kind of society transforming nature. Environmental sustainability does not always imply social justice. We may well ask who might actually dwell and work in terraformed zones and who might actually benefit. The most likely scenario is that it will be groups of highly qualified and highly paid scientists who will benefit most from the project, as well as those corporations which might supply genetically engineered bacteria or orbital mirrors to heat the planet. Indeed, some are even winning research grants now to study such things. On the other hand, it could well be expendable and exploitable people who will work in zones of growing environmental risk once it is under way. Yet of course, should the environment ever prove truly stable and lush with vegetation (as utopian space art would have us believe) then one can only assume it will be the most privileged members of society who escape the chaos of Earth to achieve a new freedom in the Heavens.
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Link Weapons
You cause cap Duvall and Havercroft 8 *professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota AND **professor of Political
Science at the University of Oklahoma (Raymond and Jonathan, Taking sovereignty out of this world: Space weapons and empire of the future, Review of International Studies (2008) 34: 755-775, dml) 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 enforcementthat 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 fictionfor 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 beganthat modes of political killing have important effectswould be an understatement!
Claims that space weaponization are inevitable are self-fulfilling, building on assumptions of human nature that disseminated hegemonically Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of
Cambridge and Visiting Professor of Sociology, University of Essex and **James, Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton (Cosmic Society: Towards a sociology of the universe, pg 99, IWren) As with other questions, it should be noted that there were a number of respondents who chose to comment on the likelihood and practicality of placing weapons in space, rather than expressing a clear view for or against. Four people said that on technical grounds Earth-based weapons would be better. A few mentioned that the weapons could be used to blast an asteroid on course for Earth or debris floating in space rather than referring to their military potential. Nine people said they believed that the placing of weapons in space was inevitable, and one woman said she thought it was what the American space programme was leading up to. Another was not critical about this, expressing the view occasionally heard in pro-space circles that a military interest is necessary to get funding for a space programme at all [J3248]. What is particularly disturbing is that several respondents seemed to
believe that the weaponization of space was inevitable given human nature. Such weaponization has been naturalized as common sense. One management consultant said it was inevitable given that humans by nature are fearful and aggressive animals. Another middle-aged man, a town planner, remarked that
Given mans persistent ingenuity and determination to find new ways of killing and maiming people, I would be astonished if this didnt happen eventually, and its possibly happening already [C3006]. The disturbing part is that these people,
who were both critical of the idea themselves, accepted it as inevitable. This is the subtle, persuasive power of hegemony in practice. Even in crisis conditions of contestation, consent is won. There is a dialectic in place here as well, as the very idea of placing weapons in space feeds into a concept of human nature as aggressive and fearful, a concept which in turn weakens resistance to such an inevitable project were it to proceed.
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**IMPACTS**
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Impact Biopower
Capitalism relies on biopower, and creates domination over people with the ability to destroy entire populations. Internationalist Persepective, 2k
[Internationalist Perspective; Capitalism and Genocide, Issue 36, Spring 2000; http://www.reocities.com/wageslavex/capandgen.html] For Anders, the first industrial revolution introduced the machine with its own source of power as a means of production, while the second industrial revolution saw the extension of commodity production to the whole of society, and the subordination of man to the machine. According to Anders, the third industrial revolution, in the epoch of which humanity now lives, has made
humans obsolete, preparing the way for their replacement by machines, and the end of history (Endzeit). For Anders, the Holocaust marked the first attempt at the systematic extermination of a whole group of people by industrial means, opening the way for the extension of the process of extermination to virtually the whole of the human species; a stage which he designates as "post-civilized
cannibalism" [postzivilisatorischen Kannibalismus], in which the world is "overmanned", and in which Hiroshima marks the point at which "humanity as a whole is eliminatable"[ttbar]. Anders's philosophy of technology is unabashedly pessimistic, leaving virtually no room for Marxist hope (communist revolution). Nonetheless, his vision of a totally reified world, and technology as the subject of history, culminating in an Endzeit, corresponds to one side of the dialectic of socialism or barbarism which presides over the present epoch. Moreover, Anders's concept of an overmanned world can be fruitfully linked to the immanent tendency of the law of value to generate an ever higher organic composition of capital, culminating in the present stage of automation, robotics, computers, and information technology, on the bases of which ever larger masses of living labor are ejected from the process of production, and, indeed, from the cycle of accumulation as a whole, ceasing to be -- even potentially -- a productive force, a source of exchange-value, in order to become an insuperable burden for capital, a dead weight, which, so long as it lives and breathes, threatens its profitability. This "obsolescence of man" can at the level of total capital thereby create the necessity for mass murder; inserting the industrial extermination of whole groups of people into the very logic of capital: genocide as the apotheosis of instrumental reason! Reason transmogrified into the nihilistic engine of destruction which shapes the late capitalist world. Michel Foucault's concept of bio-power can also be refunctioned to explicitly link it to the basic
tendencies of the development of capitalism, in which case it provides a point of intersection between the triumph of the real domination of capital economically, and the political and ideological transformation of capitalist rule, while at the same time making it possible to grasp those features of capital which propel it in the direction of genocide. The extension of the law of value into every sphere of human existence, the culminating point of the real domination of capital, is marked by the subordination of the biological realm itself to the logic of capital. This stage corresponds to what Foucault designates as bio-politics, which encapsulates both the "statification of the biological", and the "birth of state racism". Bio-politics entails the positive power to administer, manage, and regulate the intimate details of the life -- and death -- of whole populations in the form of technologies of domination: "In concrete terms ... this power over life evolved in two basic forms ... they constituted ... two poles of development
linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations. One of these poles ... centered on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls, all this was ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the human body. The second ... focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of
interventions and regulatory controls: a bio-politics of the population." Such a bio-politics represents the subjugation of biological life in its diverse human forms to the imperatives of the law of value. It allows capital to mobilize all the human resources of the nation in the service of its expansion and aggrandizement, economic and military. The other side of bio-politics, of this power over life, for Foucault, is what he terms "thanatopolitics," entailing an awesome power to inflict mass death, both on the population of one's enemy, and on one's own population: "the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual's continued existence. .... If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers ... it is because power is situated at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population." Nuclear, chemical, and biological, weapons make it possible to wield this power to condemn whole populations to death. Bio-politics, for Foucault, also necessarily entails racism, by which he means making a cut in the biological continuum of human life, designating the very existence of a determinate group as a danger to the population, to its health and well-being, and even to its very life. Such a group, I would argue, then, becomes a biological (in
the case of Nazism) or class enemy (in the case of Stalinism, though the latter also claimed that biological and hereditary
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characteristics were linked to one's class origins). And
the danger represented by such an enemy race can necessitate its elimination through physical removal (ethnic cleansing) or extermination (genocide). The Foucauldian concept of bio-politics allows us to see how, on the basis of technologies of domination, it is possible to subject biological life itself to a formidable degree of control, and to be able to inflict mass death on populations or races designated as a biological threat. Moreover, by linking this concept to the real domination of capital, we are able to see how the value-form invades even the biological realm in the phase of the real domination of capital. However, while bio-power entails the horrific
possibility of genocide, it is Foucault's ruminations on the binary division of a population into a "pure community" and its Other, which allows us to better grasp its necessity. Such a perspective, however, intersects with the transformations at the level of the political and ideological moment of capital, and it is to these, and what I see as vital contributions to their theorization by Antonio Gramsci and Ernst Bloch, that I now want to turn in an effort to better elucidate the factors that propel capital in the direction of mass death and genocide. What is at issue here is not Gramsci's politics, his political practice, his interventions in the debates on strategy and tactics within the Italian Communist Party, where he followed the counter-revolutionary line of the Stalinist Comintern, but rather his theorization of the political and ideological moment of capital, and in particular his concept of the "integral state", his understanding of the state as incorporating both political and civil society, his concept of hegemony, and his understanding of ideology as inscribed in practices and materialized in institutions, which exploded the crude base-superstructure model of orthodox Marxism and its vision of ideology as simply false consciousness, all of which have enriched Marxist theory, and which revolutionaries ignore at their peril.
The illusion of biopower is just an abstraction of the fundamental basis of social relations, which is labor. Hardt & Negri 2k Professors at the European Graduate School
(Professors, Michael & Antonio. Empire http://textz.gnutenberg.net/text.php?id=1034709069754)
The danger of the discourse of general intellect is that it risks remaining entirely on the plane of thought, as if the new powers of labor were only intellectual and not also corporeal (Section 3.4).
As we saw earlier, new forces and new positions of affective labor characterize labor power as much as intellectual labor does. Biopower names these productive capacities of life that are equally intellectual and corporeal. The powers of production are in fact today entirely biopolitical: in other words, they run
throughout and constitute directly not only production but also the entire realm of reproduction. Biopower becomes an agent of production when the entire context of reproduction is subsumed under capitalist rule, that is, when reproduction and the vital relationships that constitute it themselves become directly productive. Biopower is another name for the real subsumption of society under capital, and both are synonymous with the globalized productive order. Production fills the surfaces of empire: is a machine that is full of life, an intelligent life
that by expressing itself in production and reproduction as well as in circulation (of labor, affects, and languages) stamps society with a new collective meaning and recognizes virtue and civilization in cooperation.
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Impact Democracy
Capitalism and democracy are on opposite ends of the spectrumdemocracy tries to ensure that people are collective, while capitalism takes away this collective identity. Reich 07Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy, Former US
Secretary of Labor (Robert B., How Capitalism is Killing Democracy, Foreign Policy Journal, September/October 2007, http://www.thechicagocouncil.org/UserFiles/File/Events/FY08%20Events/11_November %2007%20Events/111407%20Reich%20Article.pdf)//AW
Conventional wisdom holds that where either capitalism
or democracy flourishes, the other must soon follow. Yet today, their fortunes are beginning to diverge. Capitalism, long sold as the yin to democracys yang, is thriving, while democracy is struggling to keep up. China, poised to become the worlds third largest capitalist nation this year after the United States and Japan, has embraced market freedom, but not political freedom. Many economically successful nationsfrom Russia to Mexicoare democracies in name only. They are encumbered by the same problems that have hobbled American
democracy in recent years, allowing corporations and elites buoyed by runaway economic success to undermine the governments capacity to respond to citizens concerns. Of course, democracy means much more than the process of free and
fair elections. It is a system for accomplishing what can only be achieved by citizens joining together to further the common good. But though free markets have brought unprecedented prosperity to many, they have been accompanied by widening inequalities of income and wealth, heightened job insecurity, and environmental hazards such as global warming. Democracy is designed to allow citizens to address these very issues in constructive ways. And yet a sense of political powerlessness is on the rise among citizens in Europe, Japan, and the United States, even as consumers and investors feel more empowered. In short, no democratic nation is effectively coping with capitalisms negative side effects. This fact is not, however, a failing of capitalism. As these two forces have spread around the world, we have blurred their responsibilities, to the detriment of our democratic duties. Capitalisms role is to increase the economic pie, nothing more. And while capitalism has become remarkably responsive to what people want as individual consumers, democracies have struggled to perform their own basic functions: to articulate and act upon the common good, and to help societies achieve both growth and equity. Democracy, at its best, enables citizens to debate collectively how the slices of the pie should be divided and to determine which rules apply to private goods and which to public goods. Today, those tasks are increasingly being left to the market. What is desperately needed is a clear delineation of the boundary between global capitalism and democracy between the economic game, on the one hand, and how its rules are set, on the other. If the purpose of capitalism is to allow corporations to play the market as aggressively as possible, the challenge for citizens is to stop these economic entities from being the authors of the rules by which we live. Capitalism corrupts and erodes democracy. Reich 07Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy, Former US
Secretary of Labor (Robert B., How Capitalism is Killing Democracy, Foreign Policy Journal, September/October 2007, http://www.thechicagocouncil.org/UserFiles/File/Events/FY08%20Events/11_November %2007%20Events/111407%20Reich%20Article.pdf)//AW
Why has capitalism succeeded while democracy has steadily weakened? Democracy has become enfeebled largely because companies, in intensifying competition for global consumers and investors, have invested ever greater sums in lobbying, public relations, and even bribes and kickbacks, seeking laws that give them a competitive advantage over their rivals. The result is an
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arms race for political influence that is drowning out the voices of average citizens. In the United States, for example, the fights that preoccupy Congress, those that consume weeks or months of congressional staff time, are typically contests between competing companies or industries. While corporations are increasingly writing their own rules, they are also being entrusted with a kind of social responsibility or morality. Politicians praise companies for acting responsibly or condemn them for not doing so. Yet the purpose of capitalism is to get great deals for consumers and investors. Corporate executives are not authorized by anyoneleast of all by their investors to balance profits against the public good. Nor do they have any expertise in making such moral calculations. Democracy is supposed to represent the public in drawing such lines. And the message that companies are moral beings with social responsibilities diverts public attention from the task of establishing such laws and rules in the first place. It is much the same with what passes for corporate charity. Under todays intensely competitive form of global capitalism, companies donate money to good causes only to the extent the donation has public-relations value, thereby boosting the bottom line. But shareholders do not invest in firms expecting the money to be used for charitable purposes. They invest to earn high returns. Shareholders who wish to be charitable would, presumably, make donations to charities of their own choosing in amounts they decide for themselves. The larger danger is that these conspicuous displays of corporate beneficence hoodwink the public into believing corporations have charitable impulses that can be relied on in a pinch. By pretending that the economic success corporations enjoy saddles them with particular social duties only serves to distract the public from democracys responsibility to set the rules of the game and thereby protect the common good. The only way for the citizens in us to trump the consumers in us is through laws and rules that make our purchases and investments social choices as well as personal ones. A change in labor laws making it easier for employees to organize and negotiate better terms, for example, might increase the price of products and services. My inner consumer wont like that very much, but the citizen in me might think it a fair price to pay. A small transfer tax on sales of stock, to slow the movement of capital ever so slightly, might give communities a bit more time to adapt to changing circumstances. The return on my retirement fund might go down by a small fraction, but the citizen in me thinks it worth the price. Extended unemployment insurance combined with wage insurance and job training could ease the pain for workers caught in the downdrafts of globalization. Let us be clear: The purpose of democracy is to accomplish ends we cannot achieve as individuals. But democracy cannot fulfill this role when companies use politics to advance or maintain their competitive standing, or when they appear to take on social responsibilities that they have no real capacity or authority to fulfill. That leaves societies unable to address the tradeoffs between economic growth and social problems such as job insecurity, widening inequality, and climate change. As a result, consumer and investor interests almost invariably trump common concerns. The vast majority of us are global consumers and, at least indirectly, global investors. In these roles we should strive for the best deals possible. That is how we participate in the global market economy. But those private benefits usually have social costs. And for those of us living in democracies, it is imperative to remember that we are also citizens who have it in our power to reduce these social costs, making the true price of the goods and services we purchase as low as possible. We can accomplish this larger feat only if we take our roles as citizens seriously. The first step, which is often the hardest, is to get our thinking straight. Extinction Montague co-director Environmental Research Foundation 98 [Peter Montague, and publisher of Rachaels Environment and Health News, 14 October 1998 http://www.greenleft.org.au/1998/337/20135]
The environmental movement is treading water and slowly drowning. There is abundant evidence that our efforts -and they have been formidable, even heroic -- have largely failed. After 30 years of exceedingly hard work and
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tremendous sacrifice, we have failed to stem the tide of environmental deterioration. Make no mistake: our efforts
have had a beneficial effect. Things would be much worse today if our work of the past 30 years had never occurred. However, the question is, Have our efforts been adequate? Have we succeeded? Have we even come close to stemming the tide of destruction? Has our vision been commensurate with the scale and scope of the problems we set out to solve? To those questions, if we are honest with ourselves, we must answer No. What, then, are we to do? This article is intended to provoke thought and debate, and certainly is not offered as the last word on anything
Openness. Open, democratic decision-making will be an essential component of any successful strategy. After the Berlin wall fell, we got a glimpse of what had happened to the environment and the people under the Soviet dictatorship. The Soviets had some of the world's strictest environmental laws on the books, but without the ability for citizens to participate in decisions, or blow the whistle on egregious violations, those laws meant nothing. For the same reason that science cannot find reliable answers without open peer review, bureaucracies (whether public or private) cannot achieve
beneficial results without active citizen participation in decisions and strong protection for whistle-blowers. Errors remain uncorrected, narrow perspectives and selfish motives are rewarded, and the general welfare will not usually be promoted. The fundamental importance of democratic decision-making means that our strategies must not focus on legislative battles. Clearly, we must contend for the full power of government to be harnessed toward achieving our goals, but this is quite different from focusing our efforts on lobbying campaigns to convince legislators to do the right thing from time to time. Lobbying can mobilise people for the short
term, but mobilising is not the same as organising. During the past 30 years, the environmental movement has had some notable successes mobilising people, but few successes building longterm organisations that people can live their lives around and within (the way many families in the '30s, '40s and '50s lived their lives around and within their unions' struggles). The focus of our strategies must be on building organisations that involve people and, in that process, finding new allies. The power to govern would naturally flow from those efforts. This question of democracy is not trivial. It is deep. And it deeply divides the environmental movement, or rather movements. Many members of the mainstream environmental movement tend to view ordinary people as the enemy (for example, they love to say, We have met the enemy and he is us.). They fundamentally don't trust people to make good decisions, so they prefer to leave ordinary people out of the equation. Instead, they scheme with lawyers and experts behind closed doors, then announce their solution. Then they lobby Congress in hopes that Congress will impose this latest solution on us all. Naturally, such people don't develop a big following, and their solutions -- even when Congress has been willing to impose them -- have often proven to be expensive, burdensome
open democratic decision-making is essential to survival. Only by informing people, and trusting their decisions, can we survive as a human society. Our technologies are now too complex and too powerful to be left solely in the hands of a few experts. If they are allowed to make decisions behind closed doors, small groups of experts can make fatal errors. One thinks of the old Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) justifying above-ground nuclear weapons testing. In the early 1950s, their atomic fallout was showering the population with strontium-90, a highly radioactive element that masquerades as calcium when it is taken into the body. Once in the body, strontium-90 moves into the bones, where it irradiates the bone marrow, causing cancer. The AEC's best and brightest studied this problem in detail and
and ultimately unsuccessful. Experts. In the modern era, argued in secret memos that the only way strontium-90 could get into humans would be through cattle grazing on contaminated grass. They calculated the strontium-90 intake of the cows, and the amount that would end up in the cows' bones. On that basis, the AEC reported to Congress in 1953, The only potential hazard to human beings would be the ingestion of bone splinters which might be intermingled with muscle tissue in butchering and cutting of the meat. An insignificant amount would enter the body in this fashion. Thus, they concluded, strontium-90 was not endangering people. The following year, Congress declassified many of the AEC's deliberations. As soon as these memos became public, scientists and citizens began asking, What about the
Secrecy in government and corporate decision-making continues to threaten the well-being of everyone on the planet as new technologies are deployed at an accelerating pace after inadequate consideration of their effects. Open, democratic decision-making is no longer a luxury. In the modern world, it is a necessity for human survival.
cows' milk? The AEC scientists had no response. They had neglected to ask whether strontium-90, mimicking calcium, would contaminate cows' milk, which of course it did.
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Impact Discrimination
Capitalism rigs the game - simply allowing minorities or women to succeed within capitalism ensures reproduction of the harms. Marsh 95- Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University
(James, Critique Action and Liberation, p 282-3)
Next, we
must consider the question concerning the relationship among racism, sexism, and classism. A tendency now exists in leftist circles to talk about racism, sexism, and class domination as distinct, coequal forms of domination. Such a tendency is understandable in the light of the economism and reductionism of much of the Marxist left, but is finally not justified. Three different
models are possible here, a vulgar Marxist model that denies any autonomy at all. to the sexual or racial domains, the three-sector model mentioned above, and a sophisticated Marxist model that asserts the dominance of class exploitation but allows relative autonomy on lived and ideological levels to the other two spheres. The sophisticated Marxist approach, in my opinion, is the best account. It allows some diversity, specificity, and autonomy between and among spheres. The sophisticated Marxist model thus retains the strengths of the other two while avoiding and overcoming their onesidedness. Why is class domination
ultimately more fundamental and important and overriding? It is more universal, extending not only over the United States and Western Europe but also over the Third World in Africa, Asia, and South America; not only over women and African-Americans but also most men and whites. Class struggle is the most antagonistic of conflicts-fundamental cooperation is emerging between the sexes and races but not between labor and capital. Racism and sexism in the West and North we are approaching rejecting in principle but not capital. The reign of capitalism up to this point has been nonnegotiable in the West. Capitalism defines the modern in a way that sexism and racism do not. Indeed, sexism and racism are holdovers from prior epochs and, as such, subordinate moments in the capitalistic mode of production. Also, an asymmetry exists between racism and sexism, on the one hand, and capitalism on the other. Progress in overcoming racism and sexism occurs up to the point where that overcoming infringes upon fundamental capitalistic social relations. The fate of Martin Luther King's civil rights movement when it came North and began to be more openly economic in its orientation is one example; the fate of women professionals asking for salaries equal to men in a context of economic retrenchment is another. Capitalism will transform sexual and racial relations to achieve its goals, but the reverse is generally not true. Capital twists racism and sexism to its own ends, using the former to fragment the working class and the latter, of which American foreign policy in Vietnam and Nixon's machismo on
the Watergate tapes is a dramatic example, to legitimize a tough-minded, quantitative, technocratic, one-dimensional domination. Also, if Habermas is correct, late capitalism has more or less immunized the monopoly sphere of the economy from serious conflict. The result is that conflict has been displaced to other spheres more or less peripheral to this central
monopoly sphere. Racism and sexism, then, to an extent are indirectly displaced forms of class domination and colonization, like the contradiction between symbolic interaction and purposive rational action. As such displaced forms, and in their own right as well, they are important and must be fought, but they are not equal in importance to class domination. Racism and sexism serve capital as ideology. If this fact is not recognized, then at a certain point the revolutionary elan of the civil rights and feminist movements is negated. We make the mistake of thinking that an AfricanAmerican person is fully liberated if he becomes an NFL quarterback and a woman if she becomes an executive on Wall Street. Both movements at that point have simply degenerated into demands for equal participation in the rat race. Another way of putting the same point is to say that capitalism is a process of self-expanding value oriented to the production of surplus value. As such, capitalism, to the extent that it fully comes into its own, will relate racism and sexism to itself and incorporate them in various ways. Racism and sexism are like other holdovers from precapitalist epochs, like rent or interest, which come in fairly late in Marx's analysis in volume 3 of Capital. Capital, because of its thirst for surplus value, has an infinity to it and tends to overcome limits and incorporate them into itself, twisting them to its own ends. In this respect, racism and sexism, without downplaying their tremendous moral evil and the enormous suffering they inflict in their contemporary manifestations, are no different from rent and interest. One does not get at what is specific and essential in
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capitalist modernity by talking about rent or interest or racism or sexism as such, but by understanding these phenomena as related to and incorporated into this process of capitalist valorization. As a glance at and reflection on the streets of Los Angeles after the 1992 riots shows (see below), capitalized racism is not the same as pre-capitalist racism. As reflection on
the use of women in advertisements to sell products indicates, capitalized sexism is not the same as pre-capitalist sexism. D-rule
Barndt, Pastor and Co-director of Crossroads 91 Ministry working to dismantle racism (Joseph, Dismantling Racism: The Continuing Challenge to White America 155-6,)
To study racism is to study walls. We have looked at barriers and fences, restraints and limitations, ghettos and prisons. The prison of racism confines us all, people of color and white people alike. It shackles the victimizer as well as the victim. The walls forcibly keep people of color and white people separate from each other; in our separate prisons we are all prevented from achieving the human potential that God intends for us. The limitations imposed on people of color by poverty, subservience, and powerlessness are cruel, inhuman, and unjust;
the effects of uncontrolled power, privilege, and greed, which are the marks of our white prison, will inevitably destroy us as well. But we have also seen that the walls of racism can be dismantled. We are not condemned to an inexorable fate, but are offered the vision and the possibility of freedom . Brick by brick, stone by stone, the prison of individual, institutional, and cultural racism can be destroyed. You and I are urgently called to join the efforts of those who know it is time to tear down, once and for all, the walls of racism. The danger point of self-destruction seems to be drawing ever more near . The results of centuries of national and worldwide conquest and colonialism, of military buildups and violent aggression, of overconsumption and environmental destruction may be reaching a point of no return . A small and predominantly white minority of the global population derives its power and privilege from the sufferings of the vast majority of peoples of color. For the sake of the world and ourselves, we dare not allow it to continue.
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Impact Disease
Alt solves disease bettercapitalism prevents effective disease solvencypoor members of society cant get access to technology and are left with limited resources
Biehl, 07- National Institute of Mental Health postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University (Joo, Anthropological Quarterly, Pharmaceuticalization: AIDS Treatment and Global Health Politics, p. 1099-1100, Project Muse) As Susan Reynolds Whyte and colleagues note in the context of ARV access in Uganda, "in principle, affordable treatment will change the meaning of AIDS (and of life!). But the process is a rough and
inequitable one. As drugs for AIDS become more common, they expose the nature of healthcare its dynamism, its unevenness, and the order in its disorder."46 With drugs available and structural violence ongoing, politically motivated and deceiving discourses have surfaced to rationalize in a perverse fashion the survival dilemmas the most vulnerable now face in the absence of improved living conditionspoor HIV-positive mothers in sub-Saharan Africa, for
example, who used medicines to prevent vertical transmission are now left "to choose" to breastfeed their newborns (as the least lethal option) because lack of clean water makes formula feeding a riskier practice.
Pre-modern and modern ways to access resources and convert risk into life possibilities routinely overlap to redistribute technology and care unequally. Capitalism makes disease spread inevitable profit motive cripples health sector and community response data proves Levins 2K
(Richard Levins is a professor of biology at Harvard University. He has achieved international recognition for his work over many years in the field of epidemiology; is capitalism a disease?, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1132/is_4_52/ai_65805749/pg_15/?tag=content;col1)
A radical critique of medicine has to deal with the things that make people sick and the kind and quality of healthcare people get. A
Marxist approach to health would attempt to integrate the insights of ecosystem health, environmental justice, the social determination of health, "healthcare for all," and alternative medicine. One aspect of my approach to the issues of healthcare comes from my background as an ecologist. I looked at variability in health across geographic locations, occupational groups, age groups, or other socially defined categories. Just how variable, I asked, is the outcome in healthcare in different states in the United States, different counties in Kansas, different provinces in Cuba, different health districts in a Brazilian state, or in a Canadian province? Very interesting patterns emerged from that work. My colleagues and I examined the rate of infant mortality in each of these regions, both as an average and how, in each place, the rates varied, reflecting the quality of healthcare , among other factors, from the best to the worst. What we saw was that infant mortality rates in United States were more or less comparable to Cuba, that Kansas had a rate a little higher than the U.S. average, while Rio Grande do Sur in Brazil had a more typical, and much higher, third-world infant mortality rate. That Cuba scored so high was not very surprising. / However, when we viewed the same data from the perspective of the range from the best to the worst rates of infant mortality, that is, the variability within given populations, an effective measure of fairness,
much more was revealed. The numbers for counties in Kansas showed the greatest variation, while the numbers that compared U.S. states showed somewhat less difference. The difference across health districts of Rio Grande was even less, and the least variation was in Cuba. Similar things happen when we look at all causes of death. Once again, we observed average rates as well as the disparity; we divided the variation, the difference between best and worst, by the average. For
Kansas the range divided by the average is .85, but in Cuba it was .34. We saw that the cancer rates in Kansas and in Cuba are comparable, but the variability is higher in Kansas than in Cuba. When we
hand Brazil,
examined Canadian data, we found that Saskatchewan was somewhere between Kansas and Cuba. / The reason we chose these places is that on the one
Canada, and Kansas all have capitalist economies in which investment decisions are based on maximizing profit rather than any social imperative meant to equalize economic circumstance. Saskatchewan and Rio Grande do Sur along with Cuba have national health systems that provide fairly uniform coverage over a given geographic area. The Canadian and Brazilian regions have the advantage of a better and more just healthcare system but, unlike Cuba, they have the disadvantages of capitalism, giving them an
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intermediate location in the variability of health outcomes. / This method can also be applied when comparing different
diseases. One question we want to answer is whether variability will be greater across states and other large geographic regions, or across small areas like counties. There are good reasons why it might go either way. For example, weather could impact the data in large areas like states. But weather is not the only variable; others may vary greatly over smaller geographic units, only to be lost in the averages we develop for large areas. When we are able to look at smaller areas, for example, like different neighborhoods within the city of Wichita, Kansas, we find a threefold variation in infant mortality. We also notice that unemployment in Kansas averages 9 or 10 percent in most Kansas counties but is 30 percent in northeast Wichita. Why? Because neighborhoods are not simply random pieces of environment. They're structured. Wherever there is a rich neighborhood, you need a poor neighborhood, like northeast Wichita, to serve it. And so whenever we can get data across neighborhoods, we see very large variations in social conditions and, as a consequence, in the quality and quantity of healthcare--clearly unnecessary from the point of view of any limitation in our medical knowledge or resources. / Another interesting case can be found in Mexico, where a study was conducted of several villages, ranking them according to how marginalized they were from Mexican life. Examined were such variables as whether there was running water or what proportion of the people spoke Spanish. The research showed that the more marginal communities had worse health outcomes. But, unexpectedly, the data also showed that there was tremendous difference among the outcomes in poor villages that you didn't get among the villages that were integrated into the Mexican economy. / It is an as-yet-unrecognized ecological principle in public health that when a community or an individual organism is stressed for any reason (low income, a very severe climate, for example), it will be extremely sensitive to other disparities. So, if people have very low income, changing seasonal temperatures become very important. For example, in late autumn and early winter, emergency rooms have a lot of people coming in with burns from kerosene stoves, ovens, and other dangerous means used to compensate for inadequate heat in their houses. For such people, a small difference in temperature can have a big effect on their health--one that doesn't affect the more affluent. The same is true in relation to food. When people are unemployed, or if the prices go up, they cut back on food and other kinds of expenditures with an immediate impact on nutrition. If you are a superb shopper, and if you clip all the coupons and scrutinize the supermarket ads, you might just get by on the Department of Agriculture poverty level basket; the people who dream up these baskets assume you are a wiz at finding bargains. But suppose you are not so good, or that you read the ads but cannot get away for two hours for comparison shopping. Or that you live in a neighborhood where the local supermarket was not as profitable as the national chain that owned it thought it should be, and is gone, and with it your opportunity to get quality food. Or suppose that you would love to eat organic food for lunch but what you have is a half-hour break to go down to the vending machines. Under those circumstances, individual differences in where you work, how much energy you have, whether you can have a babysitter available or not, can have a big impact on your health. / The illusion of Choice / Poor health tends to cluster in poor communities. Conservatives will say, "well, obviously poverty is not good for you, but after all, not all kids turn out badly. I made it, why can't you? Some people have become CEOs of corporations who came out of that neighborhood." What they miss is the notion of increased vulnerability. The apparently trivial difference in experience can have a vast effect on the health of someone who is marginal. Suppose a pupil is a bit nearsighted but, because she is tall, is seated at the back of the classroom. The teacher is overworked and does not notice that the student cannot see the blackboard. She fidgets; she gets into a fight with the kid at the next desk. Suddenly she has become someone with a "learning problem" and is transferred to a vocational course even though she might have been great poet. In a more affluent community, where the classes are smaller and teachers pay attention, this kid would simply end up with glasses. Individual differences can come from anything, f rom personal experiences growing up, even from genetics. But even when genetics is responsible for a given human characteristic, it is only responsible within a particular context. For instance, in a factory emitting toxic fumes, people will develop cancer at a higher rate; those most likely to develop the cancer have livers that are not able to effectively process a particular chemical as well. This is a genetic variable and thus a genetic disease but it occurs only with exposure to those fumes. The cancer is not a result of genetics alone; it is also caused by the environment. / Trivial biological differences can become the focus around which important life outcomes are located; the most obvious is pigmentation. The difference in melanin between Americans of African and European origin is, from the point of view of genetics and physiology, trivial. It is simply the way in which a pigment is deposited in the skin. Yet this difference can cost you ten years of life. So is this a lethal gene? Is this a gene for a higher spread of pigmentation-one that also makes you more vulnerable to arrest? A standard geneticist would look at family histories and determine that if your uncle was arrested, there would be a higher probability of you being arrested as well. Conclusion: the cause of criminality is genetic. Following the rules of genetics in this mechanistic way, he or she will have proved that crime is hereditary. This makes as much sense as the notion that black people get more tuberculosis because they have bad genes. Genetics is not an alternative explanation of social conditions; it a component of an investigation of causal factors. There is an intimate interdependence among biological, genetic, environmental, and social factors. / Behavior
is one of the areas where public health workers want to intervene, arguing that much that differentiates health outcomes in poor neighborhoods from rich ones can be associated with behavior, such as smoking, exercise, and diet. Conservatives, finally forced to concede that there are big differences in health outcomes between rich and poor, now say, "yes, this is because
the poor make unwise decisions. The appropriate remedy is education. We know that kids do better if their mothers have had more schooling, so what we need are education programs to teach people to make the best of their situation." In fact, some health education programs are valuable. Safety orientation within factories does help people cope with unsafe conditions. But let us take a closer look at this question of choice. The Centers for Disease Control, and others who deal with these issues, say only some things can be chosen, while others are imposed by the environment. They would have us distinguish between disadvantages imposed o n us, that may be unfair and/or can be eliminated, from those that were freely chosen and for which we can only blame ourselves. A Marxist confronted with choices among mutually exclusive categories like choice versus environment, heredity versus experience, biological versus social, knows that the categories themselves must be challenged. Choice also implies the lack of choice. Choices are always made from a set of alternatives that are presented to you by somebody else. We know this from elections and from shopping. We choose food, but only from the products a company has chosen to make available to us. The choice is distinguished by the lack of choice, that is, unchoice. The same is true with respect to the opportunity to exercise choice. There are always preconditions to the exercise of choice. If the conditions of life are very poor or oppressive, some of the things that are unwise choices under other circumstances become the lesser evil. / Public health people, like nearly everyone else, worry a great deal about teen pregnancies, which generally are not a good idea. Teen mothers are not experienced; they may have difficulty taking care of their babies; and the babies are more likely to be underweight. Nevertheless, it turns out that the health of a baby born to an African-American teenager is on the average better than the health of a baby born to an African-American woman in her twenties. Why? The environment of racism erodes health to such an extent that it makes a certain amount of sense to have your babies early if you're going to have them. This is something that is not obvious when you simply say, "teen pregnancy is a danger to people." We need to look at teen pregnancy in a much broader social context before we can think about making it simply a public health issue. / Smoking is another example. Smoking increases inversely with the degree of freedom one has at work. People who have few choices in life at least can make the choice to smoke. It is one of the few legitimate ways in some jobs to take a break and step outside. So there are people who choose: "yes," they say, "it might give me cancer in twenty years, but it sure keeps me alive today." The unhealthy choices people make are not irrational choices. We have to see them as constrained rationality, making the best of a bad situation. Most of the apparently unwise decisions people make have a relative rationality to them when their circumstance is taken into account, so it is unlikely their behavior will change simply by lecturing to them. You have to change the context within which choice is made. / Yet another dimension of choice is found in the way we perceive time. When making a choice about health, we assume that something we do now will have an impact later on. That may seem obvious, but it is not the experience of everyone. Most people, in fact, do not experience the kind or quality of freedom that gives them control over their own lives, that would allow them to say, "I will quit smoking now so that I won't get cancer in twenty years." Not everyone can organize their lives along an orderly annual time scale. In the inner city of San Juan, in Puerto Rico, the life pattern is such that one can work unloading a ship for twenty-three hours a day for two days, then sleep for three days, then unexpectedly work in a restaurant for another two days because his or her cousin has to go to a funeral in the mountains. Time does not have the same structure when you can't make solid plans now for what is going to happen to you later. / On the other hand, the lives of, say, academics are notable for the way time is organized. Students can and do choose courses of study that, in two or three years, will prepare them for a career. On a shorter time scale, a professor may conveniently order his or her teaching schedule around patterns of Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, or Tuesday and Thursday. Physicians decide when to see patients, when to be in the library, when to go to
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seminars. So some people can actually structure their lives in such a way that we can actually make predictions. Not absolute predictions, obviously. Things can come up; we can be hit by a car. But, basically, the more control you have over your life and your experience of life, the more it makes sense to make the kind of decisions that public health experts recommend, the more the possibility, then, of exercising choice. So the answer to those who talk about decision-making and choice is to tell them, first of all, to expand the range of choices. Secondly, they need to provi de the tools for making those choices. Third, of course, people need to control their own lives, so that they can exercise all their faculties to make meaningful choices. In taking each of these steps, we directly challenge the false dichotomies that rule thinking about public health and constrain it within predetermined societal boundaries. / What Can Be Done? / At a recent meeting I attended, a paper was distributed that posed the following dilemma: Why, living in a democracy, where all citizens have the vote, do we permit policies that create inequalities that have such a negative impact on our health? How do we explain this? We have schemes to improve agriculture but they increase hunger. We create hospitals and they become the centers for the propagation of new diseases. We invest in engineering projects to control floods and they increase flood damage. What has gone wrong? One answer might be that we are just not smart enough. Or the problems are just too complicated, or we are selfish, or we have some defect. Or, after having failed to eliminate hunger, improve people's health, and do away with inequalities, and failed, perhaps we need to face facts and conclude that it just cannot be done. Or perhaps we're just the kind of species that is incapable of living a cooperative life in a sensible relation to nature. / We should reject any of these unduly pessimistic conclusions. The history of struggle is long and not without achievements. But struggle
is also difficult. For example, it is easy to depend on the illusion of democracy and a beneficent government to solve our problems. But when we look at the policies that emerge from those institutions of democracy, we see that those ostensibly aimed at improving the people's lives are nearly always hobbled by some hidden side condition. For instance, I am sure that on the whole, President Clinton would rather have people covered by health
insurance than not. But that is subject to the side condition that insurance industry profitability must be protected. He probably would like medicines to be cheaper, but only if the pharmaceutical industry continues to make high profits. Abroad, the United States would like peasants to have land, but only if not expropriated from plantation owners. The
basic reason that programs fail is not incompetence, ignorance, or stupidity, but because they are constrained by the interests of the powerful. Sometimes we discover that part of a program is carded out successfully, and part not. An enterprise zone might be established in an inner city that actually brings in investment, but there is no impact on poverty because the assumption that benefits would trickle down was an illusion. A reasonable return on investment was the goal of the developers. When that was achieved, nothing else mattered. / A good way to see how these hidden constraints, these systemic barriers, operate is in the delivery of health services elsewhere. Healthcare in the United States exists against background of this country's unrestrained capitalism. We have described at length both the prospects and problems of that system. But, in Europe, social democrats historically have taken
a different approach--one that acknowledges inequality as an obstacle. They have treated unemployment, for example, as a social problem rather than an inevitable byproduct of a vigorous market. A town council will address it by financing a center for the unemployed, with counselors to advise them of their right to unemployment insurance and other benefit programs. The center may even organize a support group where people can deal with their feelings about not being able to bring home an income to the family. Local governments can address other social concerns. In London, there is a program to break down the isolation of young mothers, where they can meet one another, share experiences, and provide support. Of course, none of these measures affects profitability or challenges the market. So the council cannot create employment. Even the most farsighted programs initiated by European social democratic governments do not challenge the capitalist order in any way. What they do is to try to make things more equitable--for instance, through progressive income taxes or generous unemployment insurance. In Sweden, transport workers demanded improved food to reduce heart disease among truck drivers. They organized to improve the quality of food in the roadside canteens and collaborated with restaurant owners and canteen owners and food was improved. In other places, unions have negotiated collective agreements to change shift work, hours of work, and working conditions. The unions recognized that health concerns were but another aspect of class relations. / In some cases improving on-the-job health is relatively cost-free. No employer will object to putting up a sign reminding workers to wear their hard hats on the construction site. But it begins to get a little tricky when you talk about the reorganization of work or the expenditure of money. If the expenditure of money comes from taxes, through
government programs to improve health, we can expect the business class to object. And if, after each new expenditure, they perceive some interference with their competitive position, their opposition may take some political form, for example, the repeal of some aspect of health and safety regulation. When an expenditure has to come from the individual employer, perhaps byway of a union demand, they will be even more resistant. They will say that it is bad for competition and threaten to close down and move somewhere else. If the union's demands deal with the
organization of work itself, management will see workers impinging on the very core of class prerogative. In that situation, only a powerful and wellorganized labor movement will be able to impose changes. / When health policy is looked at from the point of view of which issues involve a direct confrontation of fundamental, ruling-class interest, which ones involve simply relative benefits to a class, and which are relatively neutral, we can predict which kinds of measures are possible. This highlights the lie in the notion that society is trying to improve health for everybody. We need to see healthcare in a more complex way. Health
is part of the wage goods of a society, part of the value of labor power, and therefore a regular object of contention in class struggle. But health is also a consumer good, particularly for the affluent, who can buy improvements in health
for themselves. Rather than improve water quality, they buy bottled water; rather than improve air quality, they employ oxygen tanks in their living rooms. Health is also a commodity invested in by the health industries, including, hospitals, HMOs, and pharmaceutical companies. They sell healthcare to as large a market as can afford to pay for it; they even push it on people who do not need it. Like
any aggressive business, the health industries engage in public relations--the winning of hearts and minds. Some of the clinics that were established in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War and earlier, during the Malayan insurrection,
were for this purpose. Doctors, at great sacrifice, would go into the jungle and set up clinics and work very hard under very difficult conditions for low pay, seeing
themselves either as bringing benefits to people who needed it or, more consciously, as trying to prevent communism. it was yet another reincarnation of the White Man's Burden that
justified nineteenth-century imperialism. /If good health depends on one's capacity to carry out those activities that are necessary and appropriate according to one's station in life, it matters how that station is determined. Those who can determine for themselves what constitutes necessary and desirable activities are clearly different from the people who have that determination made for them. This distinction is clear when an employer negotiates health insurance for his or her employees; for the employer, the cost of the benefits package will always come before what employees may
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think they need. So knowledge and ignorance are determined, as in all scientific research, by who owns the research industry, who
health is always a point of contention in class struggle. So is medical and scientific research; commands the production of knowledge production. There is class struggle in the debates around what kind of research ought to be done. Increasingly, research in the health field is dominated by the pharmaceutical and electronic industries. / There are intellectual concerns about how to analyze data, about how to think about disease, about how widely we need to look at the epidemiological, historical, and social questions they raise; there are also issues of health service and health policy. But they are all part of one integral system that has to be our battleground in the future. We have to take up health as a pervasive issue as we do with problems of the environment; they are aspects of class struggle, not an alternative to it. Disease causes extinction Stienbruer 98 Senior fellow at the Brookings institute
(John D. Steinbruner, Biological Weapons: A Plague Upon All Houses, FOREIGN POLICY n. 109, Winter 1997/1998, pp. 85-96, ASP.) It is a considerable comfort and undoubtedly a key to our survival that, so far, the main lines of defense against this threat have not depended on explicit policies or organized efforts. In the long course of evolution, the human body has developed physical barriers and a biochemical immune system whose sophistication and effectiveness exceed anything we could design or as yet even fully understand. But evolution is a sword that cuts both ways: New diseases emerge, while old diseases mutate and
adapt. Throughout history, there have been epidemics during which human immunity has broken down on an epic scale. An
infectious agent believed to have been the plague bacterium killed an estimated 20 million people over a four-year period in the fourteenth century, including nearly one-quarter of Western Europe's population at the time. Since its recognized appearance in 1981, some 20 variations of the HIV virus have infected an estimated 29.4 million worldwide, with 1.5 million people
currently dying of AIDS each year. Malaria, tuberculosis, and cholera - once thought to be under control - are now making a comeback. As we enter the twenty-first century, changing conditions have enhanced the potential for widespread contagion. The rapid growth rate of the total world population, the
unprecedented freedom of movement across international borders, and scientific advances that expand the capability for the deliberate manipulation of pathogens are all cause for worry that the problem might be greater in the future than it has ever been in the past. The threat of infectious pathogens is not just an issue of public health, but a fundamental
security problem for the species as a whole.
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Impact Environment
Partial reform only pacifies the masses. Total replacement of capitalism is the only way to resolve the root of environmental crises. Paul Sweezy, Founding Editor, Monthly Review; renowned Marxist economist, 2004, Capitalism and the Environment,
http://www.monthlyreview.org/1004pms3.htm
Such is the inner nature, the essential drive of the economic system that has generated the present environmental crisis. Naturally it does not operate without opposition. Efforts have always been made to curb its
excesses, not only by its victims but also in extreme cases by its more far-sighted leaders. Marx, in Capital, wrote feelingly about nineteenth-century movements for factory legislation and the ten-hours bill, describing the latter as a great victory for the political economy of the working class. And during the present century conservation movements have emerged in all the leading capitalist countries and have succeeded in imposing certain limits on the more destructive depredations of uncontrolled capital. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that without constraints of this kind arising within the system, capitalism by now would have destroyed both its environment and itself. Not surprisingly, such constraints, while sometimes interfering with the
operations of individual capitalists, never go so far as to threaten the system as a whole. Long before that point is reached, the capitalist class, including the state which it controls, mobilizes its defenses to repulse environmental-protection measures perceived as dangerously extreme. Thus despite the
development of a growing environmental consciousness and the movements to which it has given rise in the last century, the environmental crisis continues to deepen. There is nothing in the record or on the horizon that could lead us to believe the situation will significantly change in the foreseeable future. If this conclusion is acceptedand it is hard to see how anyone who has studied the history of our time can refuse, at the very least, to take it seriouslyit follows that what has to be done to resolve
the environmental crisis, hence also to insure that humanity has a future, is to replace capitalism with a social order based on an economy devoted not to maximizing private profit and accumulating ever more capital but rather to meeting real human needs and restoring the environment to a sustainably healthy condition. This, in a nutshell, is the meaning of revolutionary change today.
Lesser measures of reform, no matter how desirable in themselves, could at best slow down the fatal process of decline and fall that is already so far advanced. Is the position taken here in effect a restatement of the traditional Marxist case for a socialist revolution? Yes, but with one crucial proviso: The socialism to be achieved must be conceived, as Marx and Engels always conceived it, as the quintessential negation of capitalismnot as a society that eliminates the most objectionable features of capitalism such as gross inequality of income, mass unemployment, cyclical depressions, financial panics, and so on. It is capitalism itself, with its in-built attitude toward human beings and nature alike as means to an alien end that must be rooted out and replaced. Humanity,
having learned to perform miracles of production, must at last learn to use its miraculous powers not to degrade itself and destroy its home but to make the world a better place to live in for itself and its progeny for millennia to come. The affirmative declares war on the planet. Magic bullet reform sustains capitalism in its entirety, replicating the root causes of ecological damage. John Foster, Professor of Sociology, University of Oregon; Editor, Monthly Review, 2007, A New War on
the Planet?, http://www.indypendent.org/2007/06/09/a-new-war-on-the-planet/)
It is characteristic of the magic-bullet solutions that now pervade the media that they promise to defend our current way of life while remaining virtually cost free. Despite the fact that economists have long insisted that there is no such thing as a free lunch, we are now being told on every side even by Gore that where global warming is concerned there is a free lunch after all. We can have our cars, our industrial waste, our endlessly expanding commodity economy and climate stability too. Even the IPCC, in its policy proposals, tells us that
climate change can be stopped on the cheap if only the magic of technology and markets is applied. The goal is clearly to save the planet but only if capitalism can be fully preserved at the same time. Hence, the most prominent proposals are
shaped by the fact that they are designed to fit within the capitalist box. There can be no disruption of existing class or power relations. All proposed solutions must be compatible with the treadmill of production. Even progressive thinkers such as George Monbiot in his new book Heat: How to Stop the
Planet Burning have gotten into the act. Monbiot pointedly tells us that the rich countries can solve the global warming problem without becoming Third World states or shaking up middle-class life or indeed interfering with the distribution of riches at all. Politics is carefully excluded from his analysis, which instead focuses on such things as more buses, better insulated homes, virtual work, virtual shopping and improved cement. Corporations,
we are led to believe, are part of the solution, not part of the problem. Less progressive, more technocratic thinkers look for substitutes for hydrocarbons, such as biofuels or even nuclear power, or they talk of floating
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white plastic islands in the oceans (a geoengineering solution to replace the lost reflectivity due to melting ice). The dominant answers to global warming thus amount to what might be thought of as a new declaration of war on nature. If nature has struck back at capitalisms degradation of the environment in the form of climate change, the answer is to unleash a more powerful array of technological and market innovations so that the system can continue to expand as before. As
Hannah Arendt, one of the leading political philosophers of the 20th century, explained: Under modern [capitalist] conditions not destruction but conservation spells ruin. Hence, capitalism, faced by natural obstacles, sees no alternative
to a new assault on nature, employing new, high-tech armaments. The ecological irrationality of this response is evident in the tendency to dissociate global warming from the global environmental crisis as a whole, which includes such problems as species extinction, destruction of the oceans, tropical deforestation, desertification, toxic wastes, etc. It is then possible, from this narrow
perspective, to promote biofuels as a partial solution to global warming without acknowledging that this will accelerate world hunger. Or it is thought pragmatic to dump iron filings in the ocean (the so-called Geritol solution to global warming) in order to grow phytoplankton and increase the carbon absorbing capacity of the ocean without connecting this at all to the current oceanic catastrophe. The fact that the biosphere is one interconnected whole is downplayed in favor of mere economic expediency. What all of this suggests is that a real solution to the planetary environmental crisis cannot be accomplished
simply through new technologies or through turning nature into a market. It is necessary to go to the root of the problem by addressing the social relations of production. We must recognize that todays ecological problems are related to a system of global inequality that demands ecological destruction as a necessary condition of its existence. New social and democratic solutions need to
be developed and rooted in human community and sustainability, embodying principles of conservation that are essential to life. But this means stepping outside the capitalist box and making peace with the planet and with other human beings.
Capitalism destroys the environment three warrants. Joel Kovel, professor of social studies at Bard, 2002 The Enemy of Nature, p. 51-52 Capitals responsibility for the ecological crisis can be shown empirically, by tracking down ecosystemic breakdowns to the actions of corporations and/ or governmental agencies under the influence of capitals force field. Or it can be deduced from the combined tendencies to degrade conditions of production (the Second Contradiction), on the one hand, and, on the other, the cancerous imperative to expand. Although the Second Contradiction may be offset in individual circumstances by recycling, pollution
control, the trading of credits and the like, the imperative to expand continually erodes the edges of ecologies along an everlengthening perimeter, overcoming or displacing recuperative efforts and accelerating a cascade of destabilization. On occasion, the force of capital expansion can be seen directly as when President George W Bush abruptly reversed his pledge to trim emissions of CO2 in March 2001, the day after the stock market went into free-fall and in the context of a gathering crisis of accumulation. More broadly, it operates through a host of intermediaries embedded within the gigantic machine for accumulation that is capitalist society. We need to take a closer look at how this society works on the ground. Too much is at stake to close the argument with a demonstration of abstract laws. Capital is no automatic mechanism, and the laws it obeys, being mediated by consciousness, are no more than tendencies. When we say capital does this or that, we mean that certain human actions are carried out under the auspices of capital. We need to learn, then, as much as we can about just what these actions are and how they can be changed. Capital originates with the exploitation of labour, and takes shape as this is subjected to the peculiar forces of money Its nucleus is the abstraction of human transformative power into labour-power for sale on the market. The nascent capitalist economy was fostered by the feudal state, then took over that state (often through revolution), centring it about capital accumulation. With this, the capitalist mode of production was installed as such after which capital began to convert society into its image and created the conditions for the ecological crisis. The giant corporations we rightly identify as ecological destroyers are
not the whole of capital, but only its prime economic instruments. Capital acts through the corporation, therefore, but also across society and within the human spirit. Broadly speaking, this has taken place in three dimensions existentially, temporally and institutionally In other words, people increasingly live their lives under the terms of capital; as they do so, the temporal pace of their life accelerates; finally, they live in a world where institutions are in place to secure this across an ever-expanding terrain: the world of globalization. In this way a society, and a whole way of being, are created hostile to the integrity of ecosystems. Extinction Young, PhD coastal marine ecology, 10 [Ruth, Biodiversity: what it is and why its important, February 9th, http://www.talkingnature.com/2010/02/biodiversity/biodiversity-what-and-why/, italics in original]
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Different species within ecosystems fill particular roles, they all have a function, they all have a niche. They interact with each other and the physical environment to provide ecosystem services that are vital for our survival. For example plant species convert carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and energy from the sun into useful things such as food, medicines and timber. Pollination carried out by insects such as bees enables the production of of our food crops. Diverse mangrove and coral reef ecosystems provide a wide variety of habitats that are essential for many fishery species. To make it simpler for
economists to comprehend the magnitude of services offered by biodiversity, a team of researchers estimated their value it amounted to $US33 trillion per year. By protecting biodiversity we maintain ecosystem services Certain
species play a keystone role in maintaining ecosystem services. Similar to the removal of a keystone from an arch, the removal of these species can result in the collapse of an ecosystem and the subsequent removal of ecosystem services. The most well known example of this occurred during the 19th century when sea otters were almost
hunted to extinction by fur traders along the west coast of the USA. This led to a population explosion in the sea otters main source of prey, sea urchins. Because the urchins graze on kelp their booming population decimated the underwater kelp forests. This loss of habitat led to declines in local fish populations. Sea otters are a keystone species once hunted for their fur (Image: Mike Baird) Eventually a treaty protecting sea otters allowed the numbers of otters to increase which inturn controlled the urchin population, leading to the recovery of the kelp forests and fish stocks. In other cases, ecosystem services are maintained by entire functional groups, such as apex predators (See Jeremy Hances post at Mongabay). During the last 35 years, over fishing of large shark species along the US Atlantic coast has led to a population explosion of skates and rays. These skates and rays eat bay scallops and their out of control population has led to the closure of a century long scallop fishery. These are just two examples demonstrating how biodiversity can maintain the services that ecosystems provide for us, such as fisheries. One could argue that to
maintain ecosystem services we dont need to protect biodiversity but rather, we only need to protect the species and functional groups that fill the kexystone roles. However, there are a couple of problems with this idea. First of all, for most ecosystems we dont know which species are the keystones! Ecosystems are so complex that we are still discovering which species play vital roles in maintaining them. In some cases its groups of species not just one species that are vital for the ecosystem. Second, even if we did complete the enormous task of identifying and protecting all keystone species, what back-up plan would we have if an unforseen event (e.g. pollution or disease) led to the demise of these keystone species? Would there be another species to save the day and take over this role? Classifying some species as keystone implies that the others are not important. This may lead to the nonkeystone species being considered ecologically worthless and subsequently over-exploited. Sometimes we may not even know which species are likely to fill the keystone roles. An example of this was discovered on Australias Great Barrier
Reef. This research examined what would happen to a coral reef if it were over-fished. The over-fishing was simulated by fencing
off coral bommies thereby excluding and removing fish from them for three years. By the end of the experiment, the reefs had changed from a coral to an algae dominated ecosystem the coral became overgrown with algae. When the time came to remove the fences the researchers expected herbivorous species of fish like the parrot fish (Scarus spp.) to eat the algae and enable the reef to switch back to a coral dominated ecosystem. But, surprisingly, the shift back to coral was driven by a supposed unimportant species the bat fish (Platax pinnatus). The bat fish was previously thought to feed on invertebrates small crabs and shrimp, but when offered a big patch of algae it turned into a hungry herbivore a cow of the sea grazing the algae in no time. So a fish previously thought to be unimportant is actually a keystone species in the recovery of coral reefs overgrown by algae! Who knows how
many other species are out there with unknown ecosystem roles! In some cases its easy to see who the
keystone species are but in many ecosystems seemingly unimportant or redundant species are also capable of changing niches and maintaining ecosystems. The more biodiverse an ecosystem is, the more likely these species will be
present and the more resilient an ecosystem is to future impacts. Presently were only scratching the surface of understanding the full importance of biodiversity and how it helps maintain ecosystem function. The scope of this task is immense. In the meantime, a wise insurance policy for maintaining ecosystem services would be to conserve biodiversity. In doing so, we increase the chance of maintaining our ecosystem services in the event of future impacts such as disease, invasive species and of course, climate change. This is the international year of biodiversity a time to recognize that biodiversity makes our survival on this planet possible and that our protection of biodiversity maintains this service.
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Impact Ethics
Capitalism destroys ethical concerns.
Morgareidge 98Associate Professor of Philosophy at Lewis and Clark College (Clayton, Why Capitalism is Evil, Radio Active Philosophy, Lewis and Clark Educational Papers, http://legacy.lclark.edu/~clayton/commentaries/evil.html)//AW
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 Levins 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
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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 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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Impact Ethics (Mining)

Respect for space resources is an ethical priority mining space is the equivalent of raping nature Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
(Peter and James, Cosmic Society: Towards a Sociology of the Universe pg 174, dml) The other common sentiment was that using
space resources in a similar way to that in which Earthly resources had been abused was unethical. Amongst those taking an ethical stance were men and women who likened the mining of asteroids to rape [B3010, C3167], using outer space merely as an object for the fulfilment of human desires. As one middle-aged single parent says, it seems like violation for companies to use other planets and asteroids for resources to maintain lifestyles on Earth [C41]. She goes on to
say that the prospect horrifies her and she believes that man [sic] has such potential for destruction and likes to leave behind such a mess. Leaving debris and litter is a major concern for several respondents. Clearly these people do not take a Baconian stance towards the universe. Implicit or explicit in many of these arguments is the idea that it is particularly important that
outer space, in contrast to Earth, is left uncontaminated by human activity. Im torn between feeling that we
shouldnt interfere with space and yet I am curious to know about it. It would lose its magic for me if I thought people were living out there and I get infuriated when I hear about the fact that weve already left debris floating around. I would hate to think that one day there might be a hotel on the Moon. [H1705] This kind of sentiment may well be anchored in the residual
feeling that space is a realm of purity and godliness (this has certainly been mirrored in recent debates about leaving at least some parts of space as pristine sites (Williamson 2003; Spennemann 2004)).
One respondent predicted that religious groups would join environmentalists in opposing mining in space.
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Impact Genocide
Celebrating the capitalist mindset is literally reinforcing the slavery and genocide of founding American ideas. Lindsay 10Youth and Student Answer Coalition Member
(Peta, Columbus Day: US Capitalism Built on Slavery, Genocide, Red Ant Liberation Army News, October 11, 2010, http://redantliberationarmy.wordpress.com/2010/10/11/columbus-day-u-s-capitalismbuilt-on-slavery-genocide/)//AW
The slave trade provided the European and U.S. ruling classes with centuries of free labor. In the
1600s, the Spanish began using African slaves in gold and silver mines. Most European colonies used the plantation system to produce sugar, cotton, tobacco, indigo, rice and other crops for export to the European market. This process provided Europe with enough material wealth to spur the rapid advances in technological development and production known as the Industrial Revolution. Even today some
U.S. companies can trace their success to profits made from slavery. A 2002 lawsuit against AETNA insurance, CSX and Fleet Boston sought reparations for African Americans from these companies based on their participation in the slave system. AETNA made its money insuring slaves as the property of their masters. CSX is the present permutation of a company that used slave labor to lay railroad tracks. Fleet Boston is a bank that was founded by a slave trader. The lawsuit is important because it raises the African American communitys just demand for reparations and at tacks the greedy profiteers of slavery. It insists that African Americans be compensated for
centuries of forced labor and discrimination. These historical conditions created the economic disparity faced by African Americans in the U.S. today. It is not only specific companies that owe reparations;
the U.S. government must pay as well. Slave labor built the White House. The so-called founding fathers of America owned slaves. For nearly 100 years, the U.S. government and their capitalist partners reaped massive profits dripping with the blood of African slaves. Genocide and slavery in the name of capitalist accumulation was practiced in the Americas and the rest of the colonized world. Karl Marx wrote in Capital: The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skinned, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. Columbus and those like him are heroes to the capitalists. They understand that the cruelty and exploitation that marked the colonization of the Americas benefited them. The capitalists unyielding search for profits and superprofits leaves them neither conscience nor morality. Although legal chattel slavery no longer exists in the Americas, capitalist exploitation of poor and oppressed people continues to this day. This is the legacy of Christopher Columbus. For
that reason, the masses of people who suffer exploitation have no reason to celebrate on Columbus Day.
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Impact Genocide (Surveillance)

Surveillance creates obedience and dependence on the state. Borland, 7
[John Borland, staff writer; Maybe Survelliance is Bad, After All; published in Wired 8/8/2007; http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/08/maybe-surveilla/ ] Jay Privacy advocates have a problem. People who want to increase the amount of surveillance in society, whether its wire-tapping, closed-circuit cameras, or data mining, have an easy argument. There are terrorists and criminals out there, and these tools can help stop violence and crime, they say. Philosopher Sandro Gaycken, a PhD student at Germanys Institut fr Wissenschafts- und Technikforschung in Bielefeld, wants to give pro-privacy forces stronger arguments to counter these concerns. Speaking today at the Chaos Communication Camp, he conceded that activists justifications for their concerns often fail to resonate with the broad public. Many anti-surveillance arguments are based on vaguely emotional concerns, or appeals to abstract values, as opposed to the hard facts of suicide bombers or commuters killed on the subway. In response, Gaycken argued that there are well-established
psychological consequences to being watched, observed consistently in studies. People change, tailoring their behavior to fit what they believe the observer wants (or in some cases actively rebelling against those wishes). Now imagine a society where everyone knows they are or may be watched as they walk through the streets, or while surfing online. That as in societies like Hitlers Germany or Soviet Russia will have tangible and widespread psychological consequences, reinforcing conformity, and literally crippling the ability to make autonomous and ethical decisions, he argued. An analogy might be the well-studied population of children with overprotective mothers, the philosopher said. Studies show that such children tend to be indecisive, dependent on others, have little "ethical competence," and often live suppressed and unhappy lives. As or more
disturbing may be the political implications of having a surveillance infrastructure in place. Many philosophers reject the notion that given technologies are inherently politically neutral, Gaycken said. Surveillance, for example, can be used to support democratic values of freedom, equality, and state neutrality but its tendency to create a watched and a watching class
lends itself better to totalitarianism. In a country such as Germany, which has seen democracy slide into the Nazi state,
such a warning resonates strongly. "Surveillance stabilizes totalitarianism, and destabilizes democracy," Gaycken warned.
Surveillance destroys liberating thought and creates genocide against the Other. Kato, 93 professor of political science at Hawaii
[Masahide Kato, professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii; Nuclear Globalism: Traversing Rockets, Satellites, and Nuclear War via the Strategic Gaze; published in Alternatives, Vol. 18, pages 339-360, in 1993; http://www.scribd.com/doc/4996747/Nuclear-Globalism ] Jay The pursuit of rectitude in the field of ariel photography has been none other than a constant battle against the three demential existence of forms and volumes that allow more than a single point of view. With the vantage point of hyperaltitude from outer space, "the three-dimensional forms are reduced to texture line and color." Rendering the totality of Earth a two-
dimensional serves no purpose other than for technostrategic interpretation of the earth as data and maps., thereby disqualifying "other points of view (i.e. spatiolocality). In this way which the back-up of technoscientific reason, the "absolute" point of the strategic gaze manifests uncontestable control as far as the surface of the earth is concerned. Flattening the surface of the earth has also brought about a radical change in the regime of temporality. As the words of the aerial photographer quoted earlier reveal, the notion of rectitude also depends on the construction of the single privileged moment. The image of every part of the earth is now displaced onto that "absolute" moment. In other words the "absolute" point of the strategic gaze produces a homogenous temporal field (i.e., an atemporal field, or to use the common vocabulary, real time) in which "juxtaposition of every locality, all matter" becomes viable. The so-called "real-time" is therefore the very temporality of the strategic gaze, that is, the absolute temporality that presides over other forms of constructing time (i.e.
chronolocality).
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Impact Hunger
Neoliberalism undermines local agriculture, leading to widespread hunger-ethiopia proves Magdoff 4 Professor in Plant and Soil Science at the University of Vermont Fred, A Precarious Existence: The Fate of Billions? MONTHLY REVIEW v. 55 n. 9, February 2004. Available from the World
Wide Web at: www.monthlyreview.org/0204magdoff.htm
The effects of the transition to free markets, free trade, and decreased government support for food production have been even more damaging to Ethiopia. The government, heeding aid organizations that advised a free market approach with decreased government interference, decided that after they had stimulated agricultural production they needed to reduce the states assistance for agriculture. Better seeds and easier access to fertilizers were made available to farmers and production Farmers responded in a completely logical way to record low prices in 2001. They reduced the amount of land they planted the following year. This decrease in planted area, together with unfavorable weather in 2002, created conditions for widespread hunger and even starvation in 2003. Poverty induced by capitalism is the root cause of hunger Magdoff 4 Professor in Plant and Soil Science at the University of Vermont Fred, A Precarious Existence: The Fate of Billions? MONTHLY REVIEW v. 55 n. 9, February 2004. Available from the World
Wide Web at: www.monthlyreview.org/0204magdoff.htm
increased. As prices received by farmers fell dramatically in response to a glut on the market, there were few storage facilities to allow farmers to store grains and wait for prices to rise. Funds were not available for those wishing to build grain storage structures.
The coexistence of surplus food and hunger also occurs in the third world. India is one of the success stories of the green revolution, where a combination of improved varieties and a number of agronomic techniques led to much greater national food production. However, India now has excess food at the same time that it has widespread hunger. A newspaper headline tells it all, Poor in India Starve as Surplus Wheat Rots (New York Times, December 12, 2002). This surplus food rots, is eaten by rats, or is exported at low prices while people in India go hungry. In general, people are chronically hungry because they
are poor and dont have enough money to buy food. It is as simple as that! Under capitalism, food is just another commoditylike a pair of shoes, a television, or an automobile. People have no more legal right to food than they have to any other commodity.
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Impact Laundry List

Globalization reinforces gender norms, maintains a constant level of poverty, and devastates the environment. Arku & Arku 11 *Scholar in Department of Educational Policy Studies, **Faculty of Development Studies Globalisation, which puts emphasis on market efficiency and profit maximisation does not only
(Cynthia & Frank, Journal of Peace, Gender and Development Studies Vol. 1(2) pp. 028-033, March 2011, Development Constructs and Gender Relations: Assessing Rural Gender Relations within the Context of Dependency Theory and Globalisation) NAR
recognise developing countries as a ripe field to harvest profits, but also a reservoir of labour force whereby women are actively recruited, as if women have always been underused. Maguire (1984) argued that the emphasis on efficiency reflects an economic recognition of the fact that 50% of the human resources (women) available for development were being wasted. Looking at the bright side, promoting TNCs can create jobs for men and women, however, women who find jobs in such
corporations are underpaid (McMichael, 2004). Also, women are viewed to be more reliable than men in routine assembly
work. It is not surprising that patriarchal settings like Asia, Central America and the Middle Eastern regions compete for foreign trade and encourage women to enter the workforce (McMichael, 2004). For example, about 85% of workforce of the
Maquiladoras trans-national export processing corporation in Mexico are young women because women are said to be docile, work long hours and get paid below minimum wages and their wages are lower than mens (Vogel, 2004). Involving women as contributors of cheap labour, working long hours, lacking union rights, not only has implications for womens incomes, but also increase their workloads. Increased workload for women could prevent them from participating in the decisions-making processes that affect their own development (Prokorpy,2004). Globalisation in the name of efficiency requiring nations to
implement macro-economic policies such as privatization, unregulated markets, reduction in public expenditure and increasing exports and growth rates in particularly Latin America and Africa (World Bank and IMF, 2005) bring many difficulties to
humanity. Rural people are the worse sufferers of these policies because of their already fragile state. Severe social expenditure cuts, for example in food subsidies and health care have worsened living conditions of rural people in developing countries, and more particularly, women. Since women are societys
primary care-givers by ensuring that the family is fed, stays healthy, is educated and so on (Kerr, 1998: 7). This responsibility becomes burdensome when as a coping strategy men migrate to urban areas looking for non-existent jobs, leaving the weak behind (i.e., women, aged and children) to care for themselves. Maguire (1984) argued that the emphasis on efficiency reflects an economic recognition of the fact that 50% of the human resources (women) available for development were being wasted. Also, women are viewed to be more docile, agile and reliable than men in routine assembly work. It is not surprising that patriarchal settings like Asia, Central America and the Middle Eastern regions compete for foreign trade and encourage women to enter the workforce (McMichael, 2004). The natural environment also continues to suffer Globalisation with its profit motive is
leading to overexploitation of resources including land, forest water and minerals. Usually, most of resource-rich locations are rural areas where people depend mainly on agriculture for food supplies and incomes. Over-grazing on these pasturelands more than the land can handle by huge flocks of animals will reduce the viability of the land to support food and animal production and ultimately reduce incomes of these rural people. And it is women who bear the brunt of such exploitative acts (Kerr, 1998). It is evident from the preceding that the promised outcome of globalisation - employment and
improved living conditions - are not being realised especially in the developing countries. And with the adverse impacts of globalisation on poor societies, workable interventions are a must. It is in this regard that current globalcountermovement and debates such as: fundamentalism, environmentalism, feminism, cosmopolitan activism and food sovereignty are taking place. Many marginalized communities are responding to the rising global inequalities by developing their own adaptive strategies, both material and cultural. Development agencies such as the World Bank have noticed the ills of globalisation and are starting to channel resources to NGOs that are involved with grassroots endeavours like micro-credit distribution and afforestation in rural communities. Some say this is just a way of stabilizing communities that are being marginalized from the global market place (Sumner, 2005; McMichael, 2004). The theory of globalisation is obviously an economic tool for growth, without
a human face. Social movements have emerged around the globe as a result of the ills of globalisation. It is about time men and
women in rural communities of developing countries make their voices count in the fight against the dim side of globalisation in securing a better life for today and the future.
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Impact Militarism
Capitalism necessarily turns to space militarization as a guarantor of its expansion via dispossession of foreign landsthis culminates in a new form of imperialism controlling both earth and space. Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of
Cambridge and Visiting Professor of Sociology, University of Essex and **James, Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton (Cosmic Society: Towards a sociology of the universe, pg 77-79, IWren) In this chapter we turn our attention to trying to theorize the broader social significance of the increased use of outer space for military purposes. We argue that understanding contemporary warfare also means turning to the
material processes underling imperialism and accumulation by dispossession. These processes are social and economic, but they are also concerned with politics. Guarantees are required to ensure that capital investments are to be worthwhile. This in turn requires systems of property rights and protection of the kind that can only be supplied by government. Protection can take many forms, but the bottom line is military force. This in turn depends on the militarization of outer space, which has a central role in establishing and maintaining the new form of imperialism, both on Earth and in space. This is attempted by war at a distance, which in principle does not entail the costly and politically unattractive idea of sending troops to foreign countries. This type of war relies on satellites and their capacity for enabling instantaneous response to perceived enemies. But, as recent events have shown, success for this new type of
imperialism and its military handmaiden is in practice by no means guaranteed.
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Impact Poverty
Capitalism relies on a system of poverty to strengthen itself Negri 2 Italian Marxist sociologist, scholar, revolutionary philosopher and teacher
(Antonio, A Video Conversation with Antonio Negri, Florian Schneider and Thomas Atzert (October 2002, http://www.generationonline.org/t/glossary.htm) NAR We really need a capacity to mobilise poverty. The
real subjectivation of the multitude does not make one think of organisational forms that have more or less democratic centralism, more or less centripetal webs towards organisation. The problem is all in the content not in the form. What we must managed to develop is the feeling that poverty is a subject, a power, a capacity to renew the world. It is only when we manage to put into motion this concept of poverty as power that we can also understand what organisasion is. Poverty is indignation against wealth but also the enormous capacity to produce wealth. Poverty is something that is put to the margin of this world of capitalist production but it's also something that runs through it internally and thoroughly. Poverty is not simply the poor miserable polulations who are at the bottom of the third world, poverty is something that is at the centre of our metropolis. Poverty is not something that is outside of the working class or of the normal structure of production. It is something that is inside, that has become more internal to it through the precariat, through the exclusion from the productive function. Rather than strike we should use the word exodus. Strike is the moment of rupture, but here (exodus) it is the moment of rupture but it is also that of a social construction of community. This is what is now in present in consciousness at a very advanced level. We have to interpret this because this strike in the common becomes a fact of a different civilisation. Here there is a whole other issue regarding the
anthropology of struggles and behaviours today, of seeing how far for instance in relation to the traditional Fordist worker today the mode of feeling and seeing both work and communal activity has changed, and how it is on this new terrain of anthropological modification and transformation that a new mode of struggle must be conceived. It is a great problem that obviously can only be resolved by practice. The privileged places for this practice are fundamentally the metropolises. It is there that we must try to verify, experiment, take the initiative but especially represent and present things, it would be very interesting on this terrain for instance to make documentaries and movies, to create a physical image of the development of these struggles. In a theatre too
Capitalism is the root cause of economic inequality. Bhandari Professor of Rhetoric at University of California Berkeley
(Rakesh, Poverty and Capitalism by Barbara Harriss-White, April 11th 2006, http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/OPE/archive/0604/0025.html) NAR Conclusion: The Poor Are Always With Us? Although
it creates wealth, by itself capitalist growth is not a solution to poverty. On the contrary, there are many ways in which it causes poverty - even though that poverty may be exported to sites from which it is not visible, and bequeathed to generations, which do not yet exist and might well not come into being. The relative weights of the
mechanisms through which poverty is created will differ among countries occupying different positions in the world's division of labour. The failure of capitalism to address its poverty-creating processes not only generates a
continual material and political struggle but also threatens the ecosystem in which capitalism is embedded. Two linked alternatives must be considered. The most urgent necessity to counter the poverty caused through environmental change by the dynamic of capital is a new model of industrialisation based upon renewable energy, on the contraction of standards of social consumption in polluting regions and on convergence in less polluting regions.14 This would require - if not new systems of no purchase on the scale of the problem. Of course, by itself, a new process of development (or "model") seeking to regulate, minimise and equalise the impact of capitalism on the environment still would not avoid the other forms of poverty created by capitalism without a second set of redistributive interventions. From the era of the genesis of industrial capitalism to the present-day,
collective property rights - at the very least entirely new forms of regulation and governance and new levels of enforcement at the global and national levels. Current market-mediated pollution targets and compensation schemes have
the most effective proximate response to unavoidable poverty-creating processes and institutions of capitalism has been perfectly well known. From, Thomas Paine in the 18th century to the International Labour Office in the current era, arguments have been made for "comprehensive systems of social security based on universal entitlements and funded by redistributive taxation", with the state identified as being the only agency able to energise such a convection system.15 Some societies have succeeded in realising
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the welfare state, after the shocks of an era of major economic depression and world war and in the face of a socialist alternative.
But both the welfare state and the income guarantee are ideas deeply out of fashion with the international funding, aid and "development" agencies responsible for tackling the MDGs under neo-liberalism; and the material constituency which is damaged by current arrangements and which has an interest in a universal entitlement is comprehensively prevented from developing the countervailing power to claim it.16 Calls for poor people to empower themselves and support for some of them to organise, while necessary, are not sufficient. Such practices are not equal to the ways in which poverty is embedded in the institutions and processes of the capitalist mode of production. It is the strength of the contestation to regulate capitalism that will decide the levels and causes of poverty. Cap is the root cause of poverty Batra 7 Rishees dad, professor of economics at SMU
(Ravi, The Downfall of Capitalism and Communism: A New Study of History pg 1-2, dml) Most experts blame the problem on our planets population explosion. However, poverty is not just a Third World cancer; it also
afflicts a large swath of people in the First World, including the advanced economies of North America, Europe, Australia and Japan. In fact, the richest country, the United States, now resembles a banana republic, with its poverty ranks swelling by a million every year. This book argues that the main cause of poverty, anywhere and everywhere, is official corruption, which breeds economic policies that enrich the ruling elite and exacerbate income and wealth disparities. The poverty tumor is not the result of paltry growth in output, but of the growing monopoly power of big business, which in turn reflects government malfeasance. Global output
has grown twice as fast as the global population since 1980, yet poverty stalks the world with increasing vehemence
Extinction Gilligan professor of Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School 96 [James, , Director of the Center for the Study of Violence, and a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the National Campaign Against Youth Violence, Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and its Causes, p 191-196]
The deadliest form of violence is poverty. You cannot work for one day with the violent people who fill our prisons and mental hospitals
for the criminally insane without being forcible and constantly reminded of the extreme poverty and discrimination that characterizes their lives. Hearing about their lives, and about their families and friends, you are forced to recognize the truth in Gandhis observation that the deadliest form of violence is poverty. Not a day goes by without realizing that trying to understand them and their violent behavior in purely individual terms is impossible and wrong-headed. Any theory of violence, especially a psychological theory, that evolves from the experience of men in maximum security prisons and hospitals for the criminally insane must begin with the recognition that these institutions are only microcosms. They are not where the major violence in our society takes place, and the perpetrators who fill them are far from being the main causes of most violent deaths. Any approach to a theory of violence needs to begin with a look at the structural violence in this country. Focusing merely on those relatively few men who commit what we define as murder could distract us from examining and learning from those structural causes of violent death that are far more significant from a numerical or public health, or human, standpoint. By structural violence I mean the increased rates of death, and disability suffered by those who occupy the bottom rungs of society, as contrasted with the relatively lower death rates experienced by those who are above them. Those excess deaths (or at least a demonstrably large proportion of them) are a function of class structure; and that structure is itself a product of societys collective human choices, concerning how to distribute the collective wealth of the society. These are not acts of God. I am contrasting structural with behavioral violence, by which I mean the non-natural deaths and injuries that are caused by specific behavioral actions of individuals against individuals, such as the deaths we attribute to homicide, suicide, soldiers in warfare, capital punishment, and so on. Structural violence differs from behavioral violence in at least three
. *The lethal effects of structural violence operate continuously, rather than sporadically, whereas murders, suicides, executions, wars, and other forms of behavioral violence occur one at a time. *Structural
major respects violence operates more or less independently of individual acts; independent of individuals and groups (politicians, political parties, voters) whose decisions may nevertheless
Structural violence is normally invisible, because it may appear to have had other (natural or violent) causes. The finding that structural violence causes far more deaths than behavioral violence does is not limited to this country. Kohler and Alcock attempted to arrive at the number of excess deaths caused by socioeconomic
have lethal consequences for others. * inequities on a worldwide basis. Sweden was their model of the nation that had come closes to eliminating structural violence. It had the least inequity in income and living standards, and the lowest discrepancies in death rates and life expectancy; and the highest overall life expectancy in the world. When they compared the life expectancies of those living in the other socioeconomic systems against Sweden, they found that
18 million deaths a year could be attributed to the structural violence to which the citizens of all the other nations were being subjected. During the past decade, the discrepancies between the rich and poor nations have increased dramatically and alarmingly. The 14 to 18 million deaths a year caused by structural violence compare with about 100,000 deaths per year from armed conflict. Comparing this frequency of deaths from structural violence to the frequency of those caused by major military and political violence, such as World War II
(an estimated 49 million military and civilian deaths, including those by genocideor about eight million per year, 1939-1945), the Indonesian massacre of 1965-66 (perhaps
even a hypothetical nuclear exchange between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. (232 million), it was clear that even war cannot begin to compare with structural violence, which continues year after year. In other words, every fifteen years, on the average, as
575,000) deaths), the Vietnam war (possibly two million, 1954-1973), and
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many people die because of relative poverty as would be killed by the Nazi genocide of the Jews over a sixyear period. This is, in effect, the equivalent of an ongoing, unending, in fact accelerating, thermonuclear war, or genocide, perpetrated on the weak and poor every year of every decade, throughout the world. Structural violence is also the main cause of behavioral violence on a socially and epidemiologically significant scale (from homicide and suicide to war and genocide). The question as to which of the two forms of violencestructural or behavioralis more important, dangerous, or lethal is moot, for they are inextricably related to each other, as cause to effect.
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Impact Repressed Society

The culmination of this hegemonic drive towards technology and surveillance is a repressed, subservient society dominated by the power-elite Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of
Cambridge and Visiting Professor of Sociology, University of Essex and **James, Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton (Cosmic Society: Towards a sociology of the universe, pg 77, IWren) If this is the universe as experienced by pro-space activists, then a contrary Chapter 1, is
development, which we began to outline in the return to a fearful and estranged relationship with the universe, again experienced as a frightening subject controlling Earthly affairs from on high. It is a twenty-first-century version of the Platonic and mediaeval universes in which humans are made into repressed objects and thereby brought to heel. This is a relationship experienced by those not in control of the universe: those on the margins of Western society. Commodification, militarization and surveillance by the socially powerful are again making the universe into an entity dominating human society, as are contemporary cosmological theories divorced from most peoples understanding. Once more, socially and politically powerful people (some even claiming to be on a mission from God) are attempting to make the cosmos into a means by which they can control society on Earth. The combination of these two trends is a Wizard of Oz effect, in which power is maintained by those with technological domination over the universe. But this is hidden by a mask of mysticism, which keeps the public in a position of fear and subservience. These developments are explored further over the next two chapters.
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Impact Terrorism
Capitalism is root cause terrorism Paupp 2001 - is a Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Policy Analyst
(A Matter of National Priorities: National Missile Defense (NMD) and Theatre Missile Defense (TMD) as Violations of International Law and a Threat to Human SurvivalOctober 2001, http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/2001/10/00_paupp_nmd-tmd.htm) In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center and Pentagon terrorist attacks, Rumsfeld stated that "it is the asymmetric threats that are a risk, and they include terrorism, they include ballistic missiles, they include cyber-attacks" [EXHIBIT 19]. Despite the attempted linkage of disparate and unrelated threats to U.S. national security, the Rumsfeld analysis cannot stand the test of critical analysis. In the final analysis, terrorist attacks are a symptom rather than a cause of the
underlying global maladies of our age. Terrorist attacks are, in large measure, an expression of the powerless position of persons and groups who come from exclusionary states at the periphery of the international capitalist system. Behind the frustration of generations, there is a history of colonialism, imperialism, and great power rivalry. Where widespread poverty and deprivation is the rule, rather than the exception, there is little empirical support for the proposition that a truly "defensive" NMD system could prevent such attacks even if a truly "defensive" system existed [EXHIBIT 21]. Where poverty and deprivation have reigned supreme, there is no basis for alleging the possibility of a missile attack. The real source of U.S. support for investment in and the proposed deployment of a NMD system is largely a domestic concern, more closely associated with peacetime military spending than with the actual world situation. On this matter, Robert Higgs has argued: "if an effective NMD system is ever successfully produced-a big "if"-it will
certainly have cost far more than the presently projected amount. Unfortunately, that vast expenditure will have availed little or nothing in the provision of genuine national security, for an enemy can always choose to play a different game, foiling the best -laid NMD plans by firing a nuclear-armed cruise missile from a ship lying off New York, or by delivering a chemical or biological weapon of mass death tucked into a shipment of cocaine bound for Los Angeles, or by any number of other means immune to the missile defense system".
Terrorism is a backlash to the states monopoly on violence. Jalata 11 - Professor of Sociology & Global Studies (Asafa, January 24th 2011, Terrorism from Above and Below in
the Age of Globalization, p.1-4) NAR Yet, there are scholars who acknowledge that state
terrorism begets non-state terrorism: When terrorism is theoretically examined as a form of social control, fundamental controlling apparatuses of the state may be viewed as terroristic. Organiza-tions, groups, and individuals who legitimate the use of vi-olence to achieve their goals may be viewed as products, ex-tensions, or models of the essential structure of a state when its purpose is to regulate behavior via various forms of repression, domination, and terror (Oliverio, 1998: 7). Furthermore, as Eqbal Ahmad (1998: 5) argues, state terror very often breeds collective terror. Although several representative definitions of terrorism converge on the notion that terrorism is the deliberate use of violence in order to influence some audience (or audiences) [authors emphasis], the definitions diverge on
several issues such as which agencies engage in terrorism and who exactly the targets of terrorism are (Goodwin, 2006: 2028).
Some ig-nore the issue of state terrorism altogether while others seek to denounce a focus on state terrorism as skewed, biased, ideological and out of touch with real political events
(Stohl and Lopez, 1984: 3). Those who study terrorism do not ade-quately explain why certain human elements, groups, organizations or states seek to impose control over other human beings through violence, nor do they include in their definitions the specific characteristics of the varied forms of terrorism. Commentators and scholars such as Samih K. Farsoun and Naseer H. Aruri (2006), who are sympathetic towards libera-tion fronts such as the Palestinian Liberation Organization or other oppositional organizations, have not denounced their terrorist activities, preferring to endorse the idea that one mans terrorist is another mans
freedom fighter. Brian M. Jenkins (1981: 6-7) challenges this notion on the grounds that it implies that there can be no objective definition of terrorism and that there are no universal standards of conduct in peace or war. On the other hand, scholars and politicians such as Ben-jamin Netanyahu (1995) have disregarded the alternate prin-ciple that one mans terrorist is everyones terrorist. Neta-nyahu never recognizes that the Israeli state engages in terror-ism against
Palestinians. Those who take these extreme posi-tions ignore the crimes committed against humanity. I argue that any balanced definition of and theory about terrorism must consider all attacks by both state and non-state actors as attacks on the life and liberty of noncombatant civilians as terrorist. To illustrate my point, let me briefly introduce such terrorist epi-sodes.
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Impact Total war

Capitalism maintains cycles of constant threat construction and war to pacify the populace. Rajiva 6 Masters in Economics, Doctoral work in international relations and political philosophy
(Lila, The New Centennial Review 6.1 (2006) 133-169, Prometheus The Emergence of the Police State in America ) NAR
And here, the truth is out. Nonlethal weaponry is not meant to replace but to enhance conventional weapons.9 It seems very likely that psychotronic weapons were conceived not merely to supplement
but also to act as a convenient cover for conventional torture or war. Even if that was not the original intention, that is exactly how they have been employed so far, both in domestic and foreign settings. While the desire to reduce civilian casualties and minimize pain may be admirable in theory, any hypothetical advantages of sublethal techniques are outweighed by their real disadvantagestheir invisibility to and greater acceptability by the public. Precisely because of their supposed harmlessness, they are almost certain to be used with greater and greater frequency against ordinary citizens engaged in any kind of resistance to the government, even the most
nonviolent. Just as the spy network uses terrorism as the pretext to spy upon the general population, law and orderwhich may eventually mean no more than enthusiasm for the neo-liberal orderbecome the excuse to turn mind control techniques against the population. In the gray zones of borders, occupations, prisons, work camps, and protests, the corporate state maintains a low-grade and perpetual quasi-war at all times and in all places under its [End Page 145] dominion. In this quasi-
war, corporate merchandise and advertising act like psychotronic weapons by commercializing and inserting the imagery of war into the public imagination. This is attested to by a burgeoning
industry of action films, video games, and violent pornography that blurs the line between entertainment and news, simulation and reality. Kuma War, the video game series, for instance, models its action on real military operations in Iraq: the fight with the Mehdi army in the south and the hunt for Uday and Qusay Hussein (Loftus 2004). Such simulations, like violent porn, desensitize young males by promoting
a model of aggressive masculinity that feeds recruitment in the warfare state while also preparing a larger public to accept state violence as virtuous, necessary, and inevitable.
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Impact V2L
No value to life in capitalism. Sancho, 11 chair of the Annual World Conferences on the Science of Duality
[Louis Sancho; Fukyshima: Dying for Japan Inc.; published 3/29/2011; http://www.cerntruth.com/?p=257 ] Jay I know you dont believe me. I know you think and believe the experts of the system. This is what you have learned. Those are your memes to keep you happy. And that is right. It is what it is expected of you. Especially if you are a Japanese living close to the death zone. Because the world you live in is NOT a world in which life has an infinite value. You live in the
Financial-Military-Industrial Complex (called in newspeak the Free market, the FMI system in complexity), a
perfectly organized system that we complexity theorists study scientifically as an evolving organic system, whose functions, equations, evolution and purpose is crystal clear to us though all this might be hidden to you. So if you want to keep happy, dont worry and dont read. Probably mankind is beyond salvation. And yet there is a certain beauty in knowing the truth, in being free at least in your mind, even if you are prisoner on the iron jail the FMI complex has built for all of us. Before II world war, the FMI complex was more obvious. The Matrix of fictions and marketing built today to appease the sheeple was not yet in place. Men had not been devolved into a short attention-span, visual neopaleolithic and ego-centric, anthropomorphic belief on our self-centered position in the Universe. But now the FMI system controls our information, so we believe what it tells us. There is no confabulation theory here, but emergence, a concept of systems sciences that discharges full responsibility in the individuals and yet creates the same effect. We humans have become completely dependent on machines organic systems of
metal, more complex than we are, to which we transfer our form and evolve to reach higher degrees of energy and information to exist and what is far worse, our beliefs have adapted to them subconsciously since the Bronze age in which we discovered the power of weapons. There was an age that has resurfaced from time to time in religions of love and social, ecological movements in which people were aware that metal, weapons that kill our body, gold that hypnotize our mind and today machines that make us increasingly obsolete were dual fruits of the tree of science, some good some bad, and by not distinguishing and pruning the bad fruits,
such as the nuclear industry, in a free market where all goes, in an economic ecosystem in which weapons could predate on man, we would become extinct. All this wisdom was lost and soon selfish egocentric tribes that relied on weapons to impose their power (Indo-Europeans) or money to hypnotize and slave people (cananeans), came on top of all societies. And for 5000 years they built a matrix of ideological, self-centered fictions which now are common-sense, the ultimate beliefs. Those are the ideologies that sustain the Financial-Military-Industrial complex in which we live. They justify all the wrong paths with the same self-centered, myopic, short-span, individualist egotism that corporations, nations, nuclear scientists, bankers you name it show in everyday behavior. Yet behind those selfish memes of metal imprinted in our mind, there is still a natural genetic, biological program of love for nature, natural food, clean air, social love the genetic program of human evolution. And so a great deal of newspeak takes place within the Financial-Military-Industrial Complex and the die-hard believers that worship with messianic zeal the evolution of weapons, machines and money as the future of mankind, to appease and convince people that the FMI system
cares for us, that corporations serve us, that nations are the supreme meaning of our existence. And this duality between a brain-washed mankind who adores the wrong memes and a newspeak of caring is specially present in Japan; a nation founded by iron-horse warriors coming from Korea, who became samurais and
emperors (but this cannot be said, Japanese are kept in a state of neoteny, with infantile myths and self-restrain, and worship their traditions, the jail of their mind; displaying an extreme aggressive-passive behavior to people who might offend their sensibilities) and imprinted the happy peasants of the sun-god with an absolute slavery to the master. This samurai today rules japan and its corporations that manufacture machines with a submissive population that likes more their robots than the foreigners, because it
has become lobotomized to a point in which so much restrain of otherwise natural feelings and inner emotions, makes them in external behavior closer to their robots than to human beings.
How this is possible is obvious: today the imprinting of our mind with the ideologies that make us love the FMI complex that is killing gaia starts at 3, when you are put in front of a TV. From then on, the nervous system of simultaneous indoctrination will imprint your brain with mass-media propaganda and the 3 ideologies that make of its 3 networks, the idols of mankind. The financial system has an ideology called capitalism that tells us money is NOT just a system of metal-information (evolved from gold, the most informative atom of the Universe into e-money, data in a computer), but the invisible hand of go(l)d, the meaning of it all, and its values must be respected. To explain you really the meaning of economics I would need an entire web-blog on complex economics which I have, so I will not insist on it. But the FMI complex is an evolving system independent of
man, which merely constructs it. So it has its own organization and goals. It has a global, digital brain called the world stock-market and a type of citizen called the corporation; but in system sciences I prefer to call it by its
biological function so we shall call corporations company-mothers of machines. 90% of the stock-market is dedicated to re=produce those machines, feed them with energy, provide them with information and within that scheme, we humans
have only 2 functions: to work=reproduce those machines and to test=consume them. Every time we work, we reproduce a machine or a part of it, every time we consume it we test it and vitalize it. unrelentlessly: Gaia->History->The Metal-Earth (FMI complex). And only if you are aware of that arrow of evolution we have
Because the FMI system is an evolving ecosystem of machines that is terraforming the Earth and substituting us, the super-organism of history as we substituted our fathers, the organism of life. That simple chain is the world you live in, evolving
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set in motion, and we back with the 3 ideologies of mechanism (machines are the future of man, not organic systems of metal that substitute and make obsolete human beings), capitalism (money is the language of god, not a language whose values are different from those of words and give zero value to life and maximal value to machines and weapons) and nationalism (the idea that we are different races according to a piece of cloth, called a flag, so we must not love each other and evolve together as members of the same species, but use weapons to come up on top), we can interpret the world as it is, including Fukushima.
Capitalism is inherently dehumanizing and converts people into only labor. Marsh 95 Professor at Fordham
[James Marsh, professor of philosophy at Fordham University; Critique Action and Liberation; page 277; published 1995] Ideally, nature, workers'
own bodies, and the world around them, should be the vehicle of their conscious self-expression. In estranging human beings from object and process, capitalism estranges them from their own consciousness. It turns consciousness into a means of individual life or mere physical existence. Rather than living to work the worker works in order to live, to keep body and soul
together. That which should be a means becomes an end, and that which should be the end becomes a means. Rather than nature being the environment in which human beings freely, consciously express themselves and realize themselves, nature is turned against them. Consciousness ceases to be an end and becomes a means to the realization of profit. Use value, the capacity of products for fulfilling real human needs, in capitalism becomes subordinate to the product's exchange value, the abstract labor time as measured in money. The consciousness of everyone, even the capitalist, is
alienated in the pursuit of profit. Money becomes an all-consuming god devouring everything in its path.
In this institutionalized reification in which things become more important than consciousness, what Marx calls the fetishism of commodities arises. Human beings forget that they are the source of value in their wealth and think
that it is the source of their value. Capitalism turns people into profits. They become nothing more than commodities to be bought, sold, and destroyed. Complete value for life disappears. Internationalist Persepective, 2k staff writer
[Issue 36, Capitalism and Genocide, Spring 2000, http://www.geocities.com/wageslavex/capandgen.html]
The phenomenon of reification, inherent in the commodity-form, and its tendential penetration into the whole of social existence, which Lukcs was one of the first to analyze, is a hallmark of the real domination of capital: "Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a `phantom objectivity', an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its
fundamental nature: the relation between people." Reification, the seeming transformation of social relations into relations between things, has as one of its outcomes what the German-Jewish thinker H.G.Adler designated as "the administered man" [Der verwaltete Mensch]. For Adler, when human beings are administered, they are treated as things, thereby clearing
the way for their removal or elimination by genocide. The outcome of such a process can be seen in the bureaucractic administration of the Final Solution, in which the organization of genocide was the responsibility of desk killers like Adolf Eichmann who could zealously administer a system of mass murder while displaying no particular hatred for his victims, no great ideological passion for his project, and no sense that those who went to the gas chambers were human beings and not things. The features of the desk killer, in the person of Eichmann, have been clearly delineated by Hannah Arendt. He is the high-level functionary in a vast bureaucratic organization who does his killing from behind a desk, from which he rationally plans and organizes mass murder; treating it as simply a technical task, no different than the problem of transporting scrap metal. The desk killer is the quintessential bureaucrat functioning according to the imperatives of the death-world. As a human type, the desk killer, that embodiment of the triumph of instrumental reason, has become a vital part of the state apparatus of late capitalism. Here, the Lukcsian concept of reification, the
Adlerian concept of the administered man, and the Arendtian portrait of the desk killer, can be joined to Martin Heidegger's concept of das Gestell, enframing, in which everything real, all beings, including humans, are treated as so much Bestand, standing-reserve or raw material, to be manipulated at will. This reduction of humans to a raw material is the antechamber to a world in which they can become so many waste products to be discarded or turned into ashes in the gas chambers of Auschwitz or at ground zero at Hiroshima.
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Impact War
Capitalism causes permanent war-drives, necessitating military aggression and war mobilization. Robinson 07Professor of Sociology, Global and International Studies, Latin American and Iberian Studies at the University
of California-Santa Barbara (William I., The Pitfalls of Realist Analysis of Global Capitalism: A Critique of Ellen Meiksins Woods Empire of Capital, Historical Materialism, 2007, http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/disciplines/politics/research/hmrg/activities/documents/Robinson.pdf)//AW
By the early twenty-rst century, global capitalism was in crisis. This crisis involves three interrelated dimensions. First it is a crisis of social polarization. The system cannot meet the needs of a majority of humanity, or even assure minimal social reproduction. Second is a structural crisis of over accumulation. The system cannot expand because the marginalization of a signicant portion of humanity from direct productive participation, the downward pressure on wages and popular consumption worldwide, and the polarization of income, have reduced the ability of the world market to absorb world output. The problem of surplus absorption makes state-driven military spending and the growth of military-industrial complexes an outlet for surplus and gives the current global order a frightening built-in war drive. Third is a crisis of HIMA legitimacy and
authority. The legitimacy of the system has increasingly been called into question by millions, perhaps even billions, of people around the world, and is facing an expanded counter-hegemonic challenge. Neoliberalism peacefully forced open new
areas for global capital in the 1980s and the 1990s. This was often accomplished through economic coercion alone, as Wood would likely agree, made possible by the structural power of the global economy over individual countries. But this structural power became less effective in the face of the three-pronged crisis mentioned above. Opportunities for both intensive and extensive expansion dried up as privatizations ran their course, as the former socialist countries became re-integrated into global capitalism, as the consumption of high-income sectors worldwide reached a ceiling, and so on. The space for peaceful expansion, both intensive and extensive, became ever more restricted. Military aggression has become in this context an instrument for prying open new sectors and regions, for the forcible restructuring of space in order to further accumulation. The train of neoliberalism became latched on to military intervention and the threat of coercive sanctions as a locomotive for pulling the moribund Washington consensus forward. The war on terrorism provides a seemingly endless military outlet for surplus capital, generates a colossal decit that justies the ever-deeper dismantling of the Keynesian welfare state and locks neoliberal austerity in place, and legitimates the creation of a police state to repress political dissent in the name of security. In the post 9/11 period, the military dimension appeared to exercise an over determining inuence in the reconguration of global politics. The Bush rgime militarized social and economic contradictions, launching a permanent war mobilization to try to stabilize the system through direct coercion. But was all this evidence for a new US bid for hegemony? A US campaign to compete with other
major states? To defend its own domestic capital? To maintain a critical balance and control major [state] competitors? I trust my reasons for rejecting such an argument have been made clear in this critical article.
Capitalism makes a constant state of war inevitabledisarmament and cooperation is impossible in a capitalist-centric world. Seligman 99Editor of the Socialist Action Magazine
(Carole, Capitalism and War, Socialist Action, October 1999, http://www.socialistaction.org/news/199910/war.html)//AW
The weapons
producers are a key part of the U.S. ruling class. They play a direct role in determining U.S. foreign and domestic policy, including in the Balkans. Six huge companies dominate the arms market in the U.S. and much of the world. They are Lockheed-Martin, Northrop Grumman, Textron, Raytheon, Boeing, and McDonnell-Douglas. These are the producers of the weapons of mass destruction, the jets, the Cruise missiles, the tanks, and the depleted uranium bullets, rockets, and mortars that
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pierce the tanks. Remember the $64 billion that the U.S. has budgeted for the F-22 fighter jets at $200 million each? The original justification for producing this new generation of fighter planes was made during the Cold War against the so-called Evil Empire. Now, without that rationale, phony as it was, the new justification is that the U.S. is selling F-15s, F-16s (made by Lockheed) and F-18s (made by Boeing) to the new NATO allies, so the U.S. must produce a newer model capable of shooting down the ones they are selling now. Air Force officials are already proposing overseas sales of the F-22, so, the cry will go up for the next generation of terrorist weapons of mass destruction. This is the mechanism of the war economy in which we live. Lenin said that "disarmament is obviously utopian under capitalism." This is even more true now than when he said it, because the arms-makers have assumed ever greater power and wealth. Over half
of the U.S. arms exports (many sold to governments who shoot down their own peoples or workers and peasants of neighboring countries) are paid for with our taxes. The arms manufacturers are so "patriotic" that in five out of the last
six wars where the U.S. has sent troops into conflict-Panama, Iraq and Kuwait, Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia, American forces faced adversaries that had previously received U.S. weapons, military technology, or training. [Journalist Alan Nairn testified the last week of September 1999, before a Congressional
sub-committee in Washington, D.C., about seeing loads of spent ammunition casings on the streets of Dili, capital of East Timor. He could read the name of the U.S. manufacturer on them. This ammunition had been supplied to the Indonesian military, and then to the militias, by the United States.] During World War II, many of the wealthiest war profiteers, the very
companies with controlling power in American society, joined in cartels with Nazi-run German industry, making agreements to limit the production and acquisition of vital war material (such as magnesium, tungsten carbide, and tetracene, for example.) This and many other forms of cooperation between the American and German biggest industries before, during, and after the war, was exposed by socialists and other honest people during the war. Profit-making was the engine that drove all the major countries, except the Soviet Union, in fighting World War II-not saving the Jews and other persecuted peoples of the world! Albanian Kosovars will be learning this bitter lesson under occupation, that the NATO forces were not bombing them to save them, but to secure Yugoslavia-which, though moving towards capitalism, is still not a capitalist country-as a field for capitalist exploitation Capitalism leads to a new world order of criminal enterprise, resulting in violent wars. Vulliamy 11British writer and journalist for the Observer and the Guardian, specializing in Boarder
Wars (Ed, Juarez is All of our Futures, The Guardian, p.27, June 21, 2011, LexusNexus)//AW
Interestingly,
in a highly politicised society there is no rightwing or Mussolinian "law and order" mass movement against the cartels, or any significant leftwing or union opposition. The grassroots
movement against the postpolitical cartel warriors, the National Movement for Peace, is famously led by the poet Javier Sicilia, who organised a week-long peace march after the murder of his son in the spring. This very male war is opposed by women, in the workplaces and barrios, and in the home. But this is not just a war between narco-cartels. Juarez has
imploded into a state of criminal anarchy - the cartels, acting like any corporation, have outsourced violence to gangs affiliated or unaffiliated with them, who compete for tenders with corrupt police officers. The army plays its own mercurial role. "Cartel war" does not explain the story my friend, and Juarez journalist, Sandra Rodriguez told me over dinner last month: about two children who killed their parents "because", they explained to her, "they could". The culture of impunity, she said, "goes from boys like that right to the top - the whole city is a criminal enterprise". Not by coincidence, Juarez is also a model for the capitalist economy. Recruits for the drug war come from the vast, sprawling maquiladora - bonded assembly plants where, for rock-bottom wages, workers make the goods that fill America's supermarket shelves or become America's automobiles, imported duty-free. Now, the corporations can do it cheaper in Asia, casually shedding their Mexican workers, and Juarez has become a teeming recruitment pool for the cartels and killers. It is a city that follows religiously the philosophy of a free market. "It's a city based on markets and on trash," says Julian Cardona, a photographer who has chronicled the implosion.
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"Killing and drug addiction are activities in the economy, and the economy is based on what happens when you treat people like trash." Very much, then, a war for the 21st century. Cardona told me how many times he had been asked for his view on the Javier Sicilia peace march: "I replied: 'How can you march against the market?'" Mexico's war does not only belong to the postpolitical, postmoral world. It belongs to the world of belligerent hyper-materialism, in which the only ideology left - which the leaders of "legitimate" politics, business and banking preach by example - is greed. A very brave man called Mario Trevino lives in the city of Reynosa, which is in the grip of the Gulf cartel. He said of the killers and cartels: "They are revolting people who do what they do because they cannot be seen to wear the same label Tshirt as they wore last year, they must wear another brand, and more expensive." It can't be that banal, I objected, but he pleaded with me not to underestimate these considerations. The thing that really makes Mexico's war a different war, and of our time, is that it is about, in the end, nothing. It certainly belongs to the cacophony of the era of digital communication. The killers post their atrocities on YouTube with relish, commanding a vast viewing public; they are busy across thickets of internet hot-sites and the narco-blogosphere. Journalists find it hard that while even people as crazy as Osama bin Laden will talk to the media - they feel they have a message to get across - the narco-cartels have no interest in talking at all. They control the message, they are democratic the postmodern way. People often ask: why the savagery of Mexico's war? It is infamous for such inventive perversions as sewing one victim's flayed face to a soccer ball or hanging decapitated corpses from bridges by the ankles; and innovative torture, such as dipping people into vats of acid so that their limbs evaporate while doctors keep the victim conscious. I answer tentatively that I think there is a correlation between the causelessness of Mexico's war and the savagery. The cruelty is in and of the nihilism, the greed for violence reflects the greed for brands, and becomes a brand in itself. People also ask: what can be done? There is endless debate over military tactics, US aid to Mexico, the war on drugs, and whether narcotics should be decriminalised. I answer: these are largely of tangential importance; what can the authorities do? Simple: Go After the Money. But they won't. Narco-cartels are not pastiches of global corporations, nor are they errant bastards of the global economy - they are pioneers of it. They point, in their business logic and modus operandi, to how the legal economy will arrange itself next. The Mexican cartels epitomised the North
American free trade agreement long before it was dreamed up, and they thrive upon it. Mexico's carnage is that of the age of effective global government by multinational banks - banks that, according to Antonio Maria Costa, the former head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, have been for years kept afloat by laundering drug and criminal profits. Cartel bosses and street gangbangers cannot go around in trucks full of cash. They have to bank it - and politicians could throttle this river of money, as they have with actions against terrorist funding. But they choose not to, for obvious reasons: the good burgers of capitalism and
their political quislings depend on this money, while bleating about the evils of drugs cooked in the ghetto and snorted up the noses of the rich. So Mexico's war is how the future will look, because it belongs not in the 19th century with wars of empire, or the 20th with wars of ideology, race and religion - but utterly in a present to which the global economy is committed, and to a zeitgeist of frenzied materialism we adamantly refuse to temper: it is the inevitable war of capitalism gone mad. Twelve years ago Cardona and the writer Charles Bowden curated a book called Juarez: The Laboratory of Our Future. They could not have known how prescient their title was. In a recent book, Murder City, Bowden puts it another way: "Juarez is not a breakdown of the social order. Juarez is the new order." Capitalism causes cycles of wars that bring itself down Batra 7 Rishees dad, professor of economics at SMU
(Ravi, The Downfall of Capitalism and Communism: A New Study of History pg 50, dml)
Warfare is a perennial human activity, but its financing has varied somewhat over time, and these
variations have generated regular economic cycles. For example, the 1973 Arab-Israeli battles were short lived and didnt involve the United States militarily. Yet in the aftermath the United States responded by printing oodles of money,
and in the process generated the highest peaks of the money and inflation cycles. Thus it is not warfare that has been following a regular pattern, but the U.S. government response to it. What
accounts for the three-decade periodicity of these cycles? It is hard to explain why certain events can occur with such regularity.
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The answer must lie in the relative stability of the mental and psychological processes of the people involved in these events. It is human nature alone that can possibly generate rhythmic patterns. It is usually observed that each generation is active for about thirty years. Whenever a crisis occurs, the easiest way out for the government is to print money. Thus every generation succumbs to the temptation of
pump priming to solve its problems, and inevitably encounters inflation. Then it learns its lesson, curbs money growth and hence the spiral of prices. But the hard-earned lessons of the past are forgotten, because the old generation has been displaced even as new problems occur.
Every generation apparently finds a way to make the same mistake. This way there are three-decade cycles of money growth and inflation.
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Impact Warming
Attempts at reform only render us unable to deal with the crisis of warming capitalism proposes only half-way solutions that preserve the capitalist system but guarantee ecological destruction down the line. Foster 07 professor of sociology @ University of Oregon
(John Bellamy, A New War on the Planet?, 8/06/07, http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/foster080607.html) During the last year the global warming debate has reached a turning point. Due to the media hype surrounding Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth, followed by a new assessment by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the climate skeptics have suffered a major defeat. Suddenly the media and the public are awakening
to what the scientific consensus has been saying for two decades on human-induced climate change and the dangers it poses to the future of life on earth. Proposed solutions to global warming are popping up everywhere, from the current biofuels panacea to geoengineering solutions such as pumping sulfur particles into the stratosphere to shade the earth from the sun to claims that a market in carbon
dioxide emissions is the invisible hand that will save the world. "Let's quit the debate about whether greenhouse gases are caused by mankind or by natural causes," President Bush said in a hastily organized retreat. "Let's just focus on technologies that deal with the issue." It is characteristic of the magic-bullet solutions that now pervade the media that they
promise to defend our current way of life while remaining virtually cost free. Despite the fact that economists have long insisted that there is no such thing as a free lunch, we are now being told on every side -- even by Gore -- that where global warming is concerned there is a free lunch after all. We can have our cars, our industrial waste, our endlessly expanding commodity economy, and climate stability too. Even the IPCC, in its policy proposals, tells us that climate change can be stopped on the cheap -- if only the magic of technology and markets is applied. The goal is clearly to save the planet -- but only if capitalism can be fully preserved at the same time. Hence, the most prominent proposals are shaped by the fact that they are designed to fit within the capitalist box. There can be no disruption of existing class or power relations. All proposed solutions must be compatible with the treadmill of production.
Even progressive thinkers such as George Monbiot in his new book Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning have gotten into the act. Monbiot pointedly tells us that the rich countries can solve the global warming problem without becoming "Third World" states or shaking up "middle-class" life -- or indeed interfering with the distribution of riches at all. Politics is carefully excluded from his analysis, which instead focuses on such things as more buses, better insulated homes, virtual work, virtual shopping and improved cement. Corporations, we are led to believe, are part of the solution, not part of the problem. Less
progressive, more technocratic thinkers look for substitutes for hydrocarbons, such as biofuels or even nuclear power, or they talk of floating white plastic islands in the oceans (a geoengineering solution to replace the lost reflectivity due to melting ice). The dominant answers to global warming thus amount to what might be thought of as a new declaration of war on nature. If nature has "struck back" at capitalism's degradation of the environment in the form of climate change, the answer is to unleash a more powerful array of technological and market innovations so that the system can continue to expand as before. As Hannah Arendt, one of the leading political philosophers of the 20th century, explained: "Under modern [capitalist] conditions not destruction but conservation spells ruin." Hence, capitalism, faced by natural obstacles, sees no alternative to a new assault on nature, employing new, high-tech armaments. The ecological irrationality of this response is evident in the tendency to dissociate global warming from the global environmental crisis as a whole, which includes such problems as species extinction, destruction of the oceans, tropical deforestation, desertification, toxic wastes, etc. It is then possible, from this narrow perspective, to promote biofuels as a partial solution to global warming -- without
acknowledging that this will accelerate world hunger. Or it is thought pragmatic to dump iron filings in the ocean (the so-called Geritol solution to global warming) in order to grow phytoplankton and increase the carbon absorbing capacity of the ocean -without connecting this at all to the current oceanic catastrophe. The fact that the biosphere is one interconnected whole is downplayed in favor of mere economic expediency. What all of this suggests is that a real solution to the
planetary environmental crisis cannot be accomplished simply through new technologies or through turning nature into a market. It is necessary to go to the root of the problem by addressing the social relations of production. We must recognize that today's ecological problems are related to a system of global inequality that demands ecological destruction as a necessary condition of its existence. New social and democratic solutions need to be developed, rooted in human community and
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sustainability, embodying principles of conservation that are essential to life. But this
means stepping outside the capitalist box and making peace with the planet -- and with other human beings. The capitalist drive towards profits is the root cause of global warming. Foster 01 (John Bellamy, Professor of Sociology at University of Oregon, Ecology Against Capitalism Statistical Data Included)
Capitalist economies are geared first and foremost to the growth of profits, and hence to economic growth at virtually any cost--including the exploitation and misery of the vast majority of the world's population. This rush to grow generally means rapid absorption of energy and materials and the dumping of more and more wastes into the environment--hence widening
environmental degradation. Just as significant as capitalism's emphasis on unending expansion is its short-term time horizon in determining investments. In evaluating any investment prospect, owners of capital figure on getting their investment back in a calculable period (usually quite short) and profits forever after. It is true that a longer-term perspective is commonly adopted by investors in mines, oil wells, and other natural resources. In these areas the dominant motives are obviously to
secure a supply of materials for the manufacture of a final product, and to obtain a rate of return that over the long run is exceptionally high. But even in these cases the time horizon rarely exceeds ten to fifteen years-a far cry from the fifty to one hundred year (or even more) perspective needed to protect the biosphere. With respect to those environmental conditions that bear most directly on human society, economic development needs to be planned so as to include such factors as water resources and their distribution, availability of clean water, rationing and conservation of non-renewable resources, disposal of wastes, and effects on population and the environment associated with the specific locations chosen for industrial projects. These all represent issues of sustainability, i.e., raising
questions of intergenerational environmental equity, and cannot be incorporated within the short-term time horizon of nonphilanthropic capital, which needs to recoup its investment in the foreseeable future, plus secure a flow of profits to warrant the risk and to do better than alternative investment opportunities. Big investors need to pay attention to the stock market, which is a source of capital for expansion and a facilitator of mergers and acquisitions. Corporations are expected to maintain the value of their stockholder's equity and to provide regular dividends. A significant part of the wealth of top corporate executives depends on the growth in the stock market prices of the stock options they hold. Moreover, the huge bonuses received by top corporate executives are influenced not only by the growth in profits but often as well by the rise in the prices of company stock. A long-run point of view is completely irrelevant in the fluctuating stock market. The perspective in stock market "valuation" is the rate of profit gains or losses in recent years or prospects for next year's profits. Even the much-trumpeted flood of money going into the New Economy with future prospects in mind, able momentarily to overlook company losses, has already had its comeuppance. Speculative investors looking to reap rich rewards via the stock market or venture capital may have some patience for a year or so, but patience evaporates very quickly if the companies invested in keep having losses. Besides investing their own surplus funds, corporations also borrow via long-term bonds. For this, they have to make enough money to pay interest and to set aside a sinking fund for future repayment of bonds. The short-term time horizon endemic to capitalist investment decisions thus becomes a critical factor in determining its overall environmental effects. Controlling emissions of some of the worst pollutants (usually through end-of-pipe methods) can have a positive and almost immediate effect on people's lives. However, the real protection of the environment requires a view of the needs of generations to come. A good deal of environmental long-term policy for promoting sustainable development has to do with the third world. This is exactly the place where capital, based in the rich
countries, requires the fastest return on its investments, often demanding that it get its initial investment back in a year or two. The time horizon that governs investment decisions in these as in other cases is not a
question of "good" capitalists who are willing to give up profits for the sake of society and future generations-or "bad" capitalists who are not-but simply of how the system works. Even those industries that typically look ahead must sooner or
later satisfy the demands of investors, bondholders, and banks. The foregoing defects in capitalism's relation to the environment are evident today in all areas of what we now commonly call "the environmental crisis," which encompasses problems as diverse as: global warming, destruction of the ozone layer, removal of tropical forests, elimination of coral reefs, overfishing, extinction of species, loss of genetic diversity, the increasing toxicity of our environment and our food, desertification, shrinking water supplies, lack of clean water, and radioactive contamination-to name just a few. The list is very long and rapidly getting longer, and the spatial scales on which these problems manifest themselves are increasing. In order to understand how the conflict between ecology and capitalism actually plays out at a concrete level related to specific ecological problems, it is useful to look at what many today consider to be the most pressing global ecological issue: that of global warming, associated with the
"greenhouse effect" engendered when carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases" are emitted, trapping heat within the atmosphere. There is now a worldwide scientific consensus that to fail to stop the present global
warming trend will be to invite ecological and social catastrophe on a planetary scale over the
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course of the present century. But little has been achieved thus far to address this problem, which mainly has to do with the emission of fossil fuels. Capitalism is unable to reverse course working within its coordinates makes the fight to reduce carbon emissions unwinnable. Foster 01 (John Bellamy, Professor of Sociology at University of Oregon, Ecology Against Capitalism,
October 2001, http://monthlyreview.org/1001jbf.htm)
All of the hopedfor carbon capture and sequestration technologies are designed to get around the emissions problem, allowing the carbonbased economy to continue as before unchanged. None of these technologies are remotely practical at present and may never be. Research ideas
currently receiving government and corporate funding, discussed in Discover magazine (August 2001), involve the search for something on the order of a giant absorbent strip, coated with any of the many chemicals that react with carbon dioxide, that could pull the gas from the air as it passes by, coupled with fleets of ships pulling twomilelong pipes that will pump chilled, pressurized carbon dioxide deep into the oceans. In other words, proposals are under consideration that involve a scale of operation that might well dwarf the star wars defense system, both in magnitude and sheer folly. All of them raise major environmental
considerations of their own. The fact that such research is being funded and given serious consideration demonstrates that, for the advanced capitalist economies, emission reductions as a solution to global warming are much less desirable than scifi technological solutions that will allow us simply to reroute such waste. The solution being proposed via sequestration technology is to dump the excess greenhouse gas emission reductions on a level far more aggressive than what was envisioned by the Kyoto Protocol are now needed to address global warming. The IPCC Working Group I concluded in its
2001 report that there is new and strong evidence that most of the warming observed over the last fifty years is attributable to human activities. In place of the IPCCs earlier estimate of an increase in temperature by 1.03.5 C (1.86.3 F) in this century, they now estimate an increase of 1.56.0 C (2.710.8 F). If this increase (even in the middle range) comes true, the earths environment will be so radically changed that cataclysmic results will undoubtedly manifest themselves worldwide. These will
carbon dioxide elsewherein the oceans instead of the atmosphere. The use of the ocean as the final destination for the wastes of the human economy was an issue that already concerned Rachel Carson in the 1950s and 60s. From any rational perspective,
surely include increased desertification in arid regions and heavier rainfall and risks of floods in other regions; serious damage to crops in the tropics and eventually in temperate areas as well; rising sea levels (due to the melting of glaciers) that will submerge islands and delta regions; damage to ecosystems; and loss of both species and genetic diversity. On top of all of this, there will be increased risks to human health. As always the most exploited areas of the world and their inhabitants will prove most vulnerable. Yet, no matter how urgent it is for life on the planet as a whole that greenhouse gas buildup in the atmosphere be stopped, the failure of the Kyoto Protocol significantly to address this problem suggests that capitalism is unable to reverse coursethat is, to move from a structure of industry and accumulation that has proven to be in the long run (and in many respects in the short run as well) environmentally disastrous. When set against the get
richquick imperatives of capital accumulation, the biosphere scarcely weighs in the balance. The emphasis on profits to be obtained from fossil fuel consumption and from a form of development geared to the autoindustrial complex largely overrides longerterm issues associated with global warmingeven if this threatens, within just a few generations, the planet itself.
Extinction Cummins and Allen 10 (Ronnie, Intl. Dir. Organic Consumers Association, and Will, Policy Advisor Organic Consumers
Association, Climate Catastrophe: Surviving the 21st Century, 2-14)
The hour is late. Leading climate scientists such as James Hansen are literally shouting at the top of their lungs that the
world needs to reduce emissions by 20-40% as soon as possible, and 80-90% by the year 2050, if we are to avoid climate chaos, crop failures, endless wars, melting of the polar icecaps, and a disastrous rise in ocean levels. Either we radically reduce CO2 and carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e, which includes all GHGs, not
As scientists warned at Copenhagen, business temperatures means
just CO2) pollutants (currently at 390 parts per million and rising 2 ppm per year) to 350 ppm, including agriculture-derived methane and nitrous oxide pollution, or else survival for the present and future generations is in jeopardy.
as usual and a corresponding 7-8.6 degree Fahrenheit rise in global that the carrying capacity of the Earth in 2100 will be reduced to one billion people. Under this hellish scenario, billions will die of thirst, cold, heat, disease, war, and starvation.
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Impact Errthang (Biopower)

Biopolitics is the root of racism and genocide their mindset is the same one that created Auschwitz Evans 10 Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Studies @ Univ. of Leeds
(Brad Evans, Foucaults Legacy: Security, War, and Violence in the 21st Century, Security Dialogue August 23, 2010 vol. 41 no. 4 413-433, dml)
Having established that the principal task set for biopolitical practitioners is to sort and adjudicate between the species, modern
societies reveal a distinct biopolitical aporia (an irresolvable political dilemma) in the sense that making life live selecting out those ways of life that are fittest by design inevitably writes into that very script those lives that are retarded, backward, degenerate, wasteful and ultimately dangerous to the social order (Bauman, 1991). Racism thus appears here to be a thoroughly modern phenomenon (Deleuze & Guattari, 2002). This takes us to the heart of our concern with biopolitical rationalities. When life itself becomes the principal referent for political struggles, power necessarily concerns itself with those biological threats to human existence (Palladino, 2008). That is to say, since life becomes the author of its own (un)making, the biopolitical assay of life necessarily portrays a commitment to the supremacy of certain species types: a race that is portrayed as the one true race, the race that holds power and is
entitled to define the norm, and against those who deviate from that norm, against those who pose a threat to the biological heritage (Foucault, 2003: 61). Evidently, what is at stake here is no mere sovereign affair. Epiphenomenal tensions aside, racial
problems occupy a permanent presence within the political order (Foucault, 2003: 62). Biopolitically speaking, then, since it is precisely through the internalization of threat the constitution of the threat that is now from the dangerous Others that exist within that societies reproduce at the level of life the ontological commitment to secure the subject, since everybody is now possibly dangerous and nobody can be exempt, for political modernity to function one always has to be capable of killing in order to go on living: Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in
the name of life necessity; massacres have become vital. . . . The principle underlying the tactics of battle that one has to become capable of killing in order to go on living has become the principle that defines the strategy of states (Foucault, 1990: 137). When Foucault refers to killing, he is not simply referring to the vicious act of taking another life: When I say killing, I obviously do not mean simply murder as such, but also every
form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection and so on (Foucault, 2003: 256). Racism makes this process of elimination possible, for it is only through the discourse and practice of racial (dis)qualification that one is capable of introducing a break in the domain of life that is under powers control: the break between what must live and what must die (Foucault, 2003: 255). While killing does not need to be physically murderous, that is not to suggest that we should lose sight of the very real forms of political violence that do take place in the name of species improvement. As Deleuze (1999: 76) duly noted, when notions of security are invoked in order to preserve the destiny of a species, when the defence of society gives sanction to very real acts of violence that are justified in terms of species necessity, that is when the capacity to legitimate murderous political actions in all our names and for all our sakes becomes altogether more rational, calculated, utilitarian, hence altogether more frightening: When a diagram of power abandons the model of sovereignty in favour of a disciplinary model, when it becomes the bio-power or bio-politics of populations, controlling and administering life, it is indeed life that emerges as the new object of power. At that point law increasingly renounces that symbol of sovereign privilege, the right to put someone to death, but allows itself to produce all the more hecatombs and genocides: not by returning to the old law of killing, but on the contrary in the name of race, precious space, conditions of life and the survival of a population that believes itself to be better than its enemy, which it now treats not as the juridical enemy of the old sovereign but as a toxic or infectious agent, a sort of biological danger. Auschwitz arguably represents the most grotesque, shameful and hence meaningful example of necessary killing the violence that is sanctioned in the name of species necessity (see Agamben, 1995, 2005). Indeed, for Agamben, since one of the most essential characteristics of modern biopolitics is to constantly redefine the threshold in life that distinguishes and separates what is inside from what is outside, it is within those sites that eliminate radically the people that are excluded that the
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biopolitical racial imperative is exposed in its most brutal form (Agamben, 1995: 171). The camp can therefore be seen to be the defining paradigm of the modern insomuch as it is a space in which power confronts nothing other than pure biological life without any mediation (Agamben, 1995: 179).
While lacking Agambens intellectual sophistry, such a Schmittean-inspired approach to violence that is, sovereignty as the ability to declare a state of juridical exception has certainly gained widespread academic currency in recent times. The field of international relations, for instance, has been awash with works that have tried to theorize the exceptional times in which we live (see, in particular, Devetak, 2007; Kaldor, 2007). While some of the tactics deployed in the Global War on Terror have undoubtedly lent credibility to these approaches, in terms of understanding violence they are limited. Violence is only rendered
problematic here when it is associated with some act of unmitigated geopolitical excess (e.g. the invasion of Iraq, Guantnamo Bay, use of torture, and so forth). This is unfortunate. Precluding any critical evaluation of the contemporary forms of violence that take place within the remit of humanitarian discourses and practices, there is a categorical failure to address how necessary violence continues to be an essential feature of the liberal encounter. Hence, with post-interventionary forms of violence no longer appearing to be any cause for concern, the nature of the racial imperative that underwrites the violence of contemporary liberal occupations is removed from the analytical arena.
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K Turns Case
Even if they win space is good in theory, it will fail and lead to war Dickens 10 *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex
(Peter, The Humanization of the Cosmos To What End?, Monthly Review Vol 62, No 6, November 2010, dml) But even if it were desirable, the success of a galactic colonialism is by no means guaranteed. This is because the very venture of space colonization brings new risks. The fifteenth-century Renaissance and the Enlightenment placed great faith in science as a means of bringing progress. Now such progress is regularly challenged. Furthermore, much
scientific intervention today stems from the crises stemming from earlier intervention, or what some
social scientists have called manufactured risk.19 This kind of risk, for which no one agency or individual is usually culpable, is readily recognizable in space-humanization progress. Note, for example, that there are now around fourteen thousand tracked objects circling around the earth, known as space debris or space junk. Improved tracking systems will increase the number of smaller, observable tracked objects to around thirty thousand, many of these causing potential damage. Even whole satellites may collide. Such collisions are estimated at millions or even billions to one. But on February 10, 2009, such a collision actually happened. A defunct Russian satellite crashed into an American commercial satellite, generating thousands of pieces of orbiting debris.20 Space junk poses a serious threat to the whole enterprise of space colonization, and plans
are now afoot to launch even more satellites, designed to drag older satellites out of orbit in order to avoid collisions.21 Space colonization brings a number of other manufactured risks. The farther space vehicles penetrate the solar system, the more likely it is that they will be powered by nuclear, rather than solar, energy. It is not widely appreciated, for example, that the 1997 Cassini Mission to Saturns moons (via Jupiter and Venus) was powered by plutonium. One estimate is that if something had gone wrong while Cassini was still circling the earth, some thirty to forty million deaths could have occurred.22 No plans were in place for such an eventuality.
Yet, as early as 1964, a plutonium-powered generator fell to earth, having failed to achieve orbit. Dr. John Gofman, professor of medical physics at the University of California, Berkeley, then argued that there was probably a direct link between that crash and an increase of lung cancer on Earth. Both President Obama and the Russian authorities are now arguing for generating electricity with plutonium in space, and building nuclear-propelled rockets for missions to Mars.23 Some of the wilder plans for space
colonization also entail major risk. These include proposals for planetary engineering, whereby the climates of other
planets would be changed in such a way as to support life. Dyes, artificial dust clouds, genetically engineered bacteria, and the redirecting of sunlight by satellite mirrors are all being advanced as means of terraforming, or making parts of the cosmos more like earth. This and the Cassini example further demonstrate the nature of manufactured risk. Science and technology, far from creating Renaissance or Enlightenment-style optimism and certainty, are creating new problems that are unforeseen and extremely difficult to cope with. But even manufactured risks may be minimal in scope, compared with another risk stemming from cosmic colonization. This is outright
war. Armed conflict has long been a common feature of past colonialisms; between colonizing nations as well as between the colonizers and aboriginal peoples. Satellites are already a
means by which territories and investments on Earth are monitored and protected by governments operating on behalf of their economic interests. But the prospect of galactic colonialisms raises the distinct possibility of hostilities
in space. Galactic wars may therefore be the product of galactic colonialism. Such a scenario was
prefigured by the Star Trekscience fiction television series in which the main role of The Federation is the protection of capitalist mining colonies.24 It is a discomforting fact that both China and the United States are now actively developing their own versions of full spectrum dominance. China demonstrated its capabilities in January 2007 by shooting down one of its own defunct satellites. In February 2008, the U.S. Navy demonstrated a similar capability, destroying a faulty U.S. satellite with a sea-based missile. An
arms race in outer space has already started. The plan is a band-aid solution for the problems of cap Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
(Peter and James, Cosmic Society: Towards a Sociology of the Universe pg 158, dml) This brings us back to our conceptual starting points: Harveys notion of spatial fixes as solutions to capitals continuing crises of accumulation, and Gramscis notion of hegemony, or rule by consent. Current and future forms of outer space
humanization are, under current political and social arrangements, no more and no less than attempts at saving capitalism. But success is not guaranteed. Whether cosmic socio-spatial fixes are profitable or necessary will depend not only on environmental degradation or social crisis on Earth but on making the resources of outer space into a series of successful primary circuits of capital. Such a project could well be made a future hegemonic project, one led by a dominant social and economic bloc. Such fixes would offer another promise of staving off capitalisms tendency towards crisis formation, suitably packaged as a
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boon to the Earths population. At the same time, it
is far from clear when and how such fixes will be seriously attempted, what forms they would take and how successful they would be. Needless to say, there is no clear indication that they will resolve the crises of unemployment, poverty and environmental degradation on Earth. If the risk society thesis is taken seriously, there is every possibility that such interventions may make matters even worse. But how is the development of space made a common sense enterprise?
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K Turns Case Satellites

The use of satellites in capitalism guarantees the continuation of war and ethnic conflict Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
(Peter and James, Cosmic Society: Towards a Sociology of the Universe pg 113-114, dml) Harvey uses the term spatial
fix to refer to the flows of capital into new areas for investment. But he also uses the term ironically, knowing that it could never be a permanent fix in terms of guaranteed or continuing capital accumulation. Still less could it bring a stable cultural and political fix. Returning for the moment to the economic level, the fix represented by the several thousand satellites surrounding the Earth is unstable for a number of reasons. It is not finally fixed because of capitals own fluctuating commitment to a particular technology. This includes telecommunications via satellite. Twenty years ago satellites were a central part of the
global communications network as they bridged continents and allowed ubiquitous coverage of the globe. Fibreoptics has since been further developed and used as a means to transmit signals. This capital switch has, as we have seen, resulted in satellites no longer being the only favoured medium for telecommunications transmission. In truth, capitals switch away from satellites is only partial, and there are social and political reasons for this. Satellites do remain the favoured medium in circumstances
that are hostile to significant military or social interests. They are used, for example, to bring communications access to South America, Africa, the Far East and zones where civil wars continue to threaten
landlines. In parts of Africa subject to civil war, sub-sea cables bring communications to the main seaport or capital city while satellites are still used to make the networks over the remainder of the country. Similarly, British banks with global operations use satellite links to their automated teller machines, allowing branches to communicate with their headquarters where landlines can be readily accessed or interfered with.
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**ALTS**
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Alternate 1NC Alt

Global Colonialism has created the hierarchies and basis for all forms of violence structural or otherwise in the modern world. Our alternative is to shift our geo and body politics to a point of view outside Eurocentrism. Grosfoguel 11 - Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies, University of Cal. Berkley
(Ramon, 2011, TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1(1), Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality) NAR
Globalization studies, political-economy paradigms and world-system analysis, with only a few exceptions, have not derived the epistemological and theoretical implications of the epistemic critique coming from subaltern locations in the colonial divide and expressed in academia through ethnic studies and woman studies. They still continue to produce knowledge from the Western man point zero god-eye view. This has led to important problems in the way we conceptualize global capitalism and the world-system. These concepts are in need of decolonization and this can only be achieved with a decolonial epistemology that overtly assumes a decolonial geopolitics and body-politics of knowledge as points of departure to a radical critique. The following examples can illustrate this point. If we analyze the European colonial expansion from a Eurocentric point of view, what we get is a picture in which the origins of
the so-called capitalist worldsystem are primarily produced by the inter-imperial competition among European Empires. The primary motive for this expansion was to find shorter routes to the East, which let accidentally to the so-called discovery and, eventual, Spanish and Portuguese colonization of the Americas. From this point of view, the capitalist worldsystem
would be primarily an economic system that determine the behavior of the major social actors by the economic logic of making profits as manifested in the extraction of surplus value and the ceaseless accumulation of capital at a worldscale. Moreover, the concept of capitalism implied in this perspective privileges economic relations over other social relations. Accordingly, the transformation
in the relations of production produces a new class structure typical of capitalism as opposed to other social systems and other forms of domination. Class analysis and economic structural transformations are privileged over other
power relations. Without denying the importance of the endless accumulation of capital at a world scale and the existence of a particular class structure in global capitalism, I raise the following epistemic question: How would the world-system look like if we moved the locus of enunciation from the European man to an Indigenous women in the Americas, to, say, Rigoberta Mench in Guatemala or Domitila Barrios de Chungara in Bolivia? I do not pretend to speak for or represent the perspective of these indigenous women. What I attempt to do is to shift the location from which these paradigms are thinking. The first implication of shifting our geopolitics of knowledge is that what arrived in the Americas in the late fifteenth century was not only an economic system of
capital and labor for the production of commodities to be sold for a profit in the world market. This was a crucial part of, but was not the sole element in, the entangled package. What arrived in the Americas was a broader and wider entangled power structure that an economic reductionist perspective of the world-system is unable to account for. From the structural location of an indigenous woman in the Americas, what arrived was a more complex world-system than what political-economy paradigms and worldsystem analysis portrait.
A European/capitalist/military/Christian/patriarchal/white/heterosexual/male arrived in the Americas and established simultaneously in time and space several entangled global hierarchies that for purposes of clarity in this exposition I will list below as if they were separate from each other: 1) a particular global class formation where a diversity of forms of labor (slavery, semi-serfdom, wage labor, petty-commodity production, etc.) are going to coexist and be organized by capital as a source of production of surplus value through
the selling of commodities for a profit in the world market; 2) an international division of labor of core and periphery where capital organized labor in the periphery around coerced and authoritarian forms (Wallerstein 1974); 3) an inter-state system of
politico-military organizations controlled by European males and institutionalized in colonial administrations (Wallerstein 1979); 4) a global racial/ethnic hierarchy that privileges European people over nonEuropean people (Quijano 1993; 2000); 5) a global gender hierarchy that privileges males over females and European Judeo-Christian patriarchy over other forms of gender relations (Spivak 1988; Enloe 1990); 6) a sexual hierarchy that privileges heterosexuals over homosexuals and lesbians (it is
important to remember that most indigenous peoples in the Americas did not consider sexuality among males a pathological behavior and had no homophobic ideology); 7) a spiritual hierarchy that privileges Christians over non-Christian/non-Western spiritualities institutionalized in the globalization of the Christian (Catholic and later, Protestant) church; 8) an epistemic
hierarchy that privileges Western knowledge and cosmology over non-Western knowledge and
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cosmologies, and institutionalized in the global university system (Mignolo 1995, 2000; Quijano 1991); 9) a linguistic hierarchy between European languages and non-European languages that privileges communication and knowledge/theoretical production in the former and subalternize the latter as sole producers of folklore or culture but not of knowledge/theory (Mignolo 2000); 10) an
aesthetic hierarchy of high art vs. nave or primitive art where the West is considered superior high art and the nonWest is considered as producers of inferior expressions of art institutionalized in Museums, Art Galleries and global art markets; 11) a pedagogical hierarchy where the Cartesian western forms of pedagogy are considered superior over non-Westerm concepts and practices of pedagogy; 12) a media/informational hierarchy where the West has the control over the means of global media production and information technology while the non-West do not have the means to make their points of view enter the global media networks; 13) an age hierarchy where the Western conception of productive life (ages between 15 and 65 years old) making
disposable people above 65 years old are considered superior over non-Western forms of age
classification, where the older the person, the more authority and respect he/she receives from the community; 14) an
ecological hierarchy where the Western conceptions of nature (as an object that is a means towards an end) with its destruction of life (human and nonhuman) is privileged and considered superior over nonWestern conceptions of the ecology such as Pachamama, Tawhid, or Tao (ecology or cosmos as subject that is an end
in itself), which considers in its rationality the reproduction of life; 15) a spatial hierarchy that privileges the urban over the rural with the consequent destruction of rural communities, peasants and agrarian production at the worldscale. It is not an accident that the conceptualization of the world-system from decolonial perspectives of the South will question
its traditional conceptualizations produced by thinkers from the North. Following Peruvian Sociologist Anbal Quijano
(1991; 1998; 2000), we could conceptualize the present world-system as a historical-structural heterogeneous totality with a specific power matrix that he calls a colonial power matrix (patrn de poder colonial). This matrix affects all dimensions of
social existence such as sexuality, authority, subjectivity and labor (Quijano 2000). The sixteenth century
initiates a new global colonial power matrix that by the late nineteenth century came to cover the whole planet. Taking a step further from Quijano, I conceptualize the coloniality of power as an entanglement or, to use U.S. Third World Feminist concept, intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989; Fregoso 2003) of multiple and heterogeneous global hierarchies (heterarchies) of sexual, political, epistemic, economic, spiritual, linguistic and racial forms of domination and exploitation where the racial/ethnic hierarchy of the European/non-European divide transversally reconfigures all of the other global power structures. What is new in the coloniality of power perspective is how the idea of race and racism becomes the organizing principle that structures all of the multiple hierarchies of the world-system (Quijano 1993). For example, the different forms of labor that are articulated to capitalist accumulation at a world-scale are assigned according to this racial hierarchy; coercive (or cheap) labor is done by non-European people in the periphery and free wage labor in the core. The global gender hierarchy is also affected by race: contrary to preEuropean patriarchies where all women were inferior to all men, in the new colonial power matrix some women (of European origin) have a higher status and access to resources than some men (of non-European origin). The idea of race organizes the worlds population into a hierarchical order of superior and inferior people that becomes an organizing principle of the international division of labor and of the global patriarchal system. Contrary to the Eurocentric perspective, race, gender, sexuality, spirituality, and epistemology are not additive elements to the economic and political structures of the capitalist world-system, but an integral, entangled and constitutive part of the broad entangled package called the European modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal worldsystem (Grosfoguel 2002). European Judeo-Christian patriarchy and European notions of sexuality, epistemology and spirituality were globalized and exported to the rest of the world through the colonial expansion as the hegemonic criteria to racialize, classify and pathologize the rest of the worlds population in a hierarchy of superior and inferior races. This conceptualization has
enormous implications that I can only briefly mention here: 1) The old Eurocentric idea that societies develop at the level of the nation-state in terms of a linear evolution of modes of production from pre-capitalist to capitalist is overcome. We are all encompassed within a capitalist world-system that articulates different forms of labor according to the racial classification of the worlds population (Quijano 2000; Grosfoguel 2002). 2) The old Marxist paradigm of infrastructure and superstructure is replaced by a historical-heterogeneous structure (Quijano 2000), or a heterarchy (Kontopoulos 1993), that is, an entangled articulation of multiple hierarchies, in which subjectivity and the social imaginary is not derivative but constitutive of the structures of the world-system (Grosfoguel 2002). In this conceptualization, race and racism are not superstructural or instrumental to an overarching logic of capitalist accumulation; they are constitutive of capitalist accumulation at a world-scale. The colonial power matrix is an organizing
principle involving exploitation and domination exercized in multiple dimensions of social life, from economic, sexual, or gender relations, to political organizations, structures of knowledge, state institutions, and households (Quijano 2000). 3) The old division between culture and political-economy as expressed in postcolonial studies and political-economy approaches is overcome (Grosfoguel 2002). Post-colonial studies conceptualize the capitalist world-system as being constituted primarily by culture, while political-economy places the primary determination on economic relations. In the coloniality of power approach, what comes first, culture or the economy,, is a false dilemma, a chicken-egg dilemma that obscure s the complexity of the capitalist world-system (Grosfoguel 2002). 4) Coloniality is not equivalent to colonialism. It is not derivative from, or antecedent to, modernity. Coloniality and modernity constitute two sides of a single coin. The same way as the European industrial revolution was achieved on the shoulders of the coerced forms of labor in the periphery, the new identities, rights, laws, and institutions of modernity such as nation-states, citizenship and democracy were formed in a process of colonial interaction with, and domination/exploitation of, nonWestern people. 5) To call the present world-system capitalist is, to say the least, misleading. Given the hegemonic Eurocentric common sense, the moment we use the word capitalism, people immediately think that we are talking about the economy. However, capitalism is only one of the multiple entangled constellations of colonial power matrix
Cap Kritik 93/194
of what I called, at the risk of sounding ridiculous, Capitalist/Patriarchal Western-centric/Christian-centric Modern/Colonial WorldSystem. Capitalism is an important constellation of power, but not the sole one. Given its entanglement with other power relations, destroying the capitalist aspects of the world-system would not be enough to destroy the present worldsystem. To
transform this world-system it is crucial to destroy the historicalstructural heterogenous totality called the colonial power matrix of the worldsystem with its multiple forms of power hierarchies. Above, I outlined a total of 15 global power hierarchies, but I am sure there are more that escaped my
conceptualization. 6) Accordingly, to move beyond this system the struggle cannot be just anticapitalist but an anti-systemic decolonial liberation. Anti-systemic decolonization and liberation cannot be reduced to only one
dimension of social life such as the economic system (capitalism) like it happened with the twentieth century Marxist left. It requires a broader transformation of the sexual, gender, spiritual, epistemic, economic, political, linguistic, aesthetic, pedagogical and racial hierarchies of the modern/colonial western-centric Christian-centric capitalist/patriarchal world-system.
The coloniality of power perspective challenges us to think about social change and social transformation in a nonreductionist way. 7) The complex multiplicity of power hierarchies at the global scale in the present world-system
we inhabit is not just a social or an economic system, but a civilization that has conquered the world trying to colonially impose the ways of thinking, acting and living to the rest of the peoples in the world. Anti-systemic decolonial struggles against the fifteen power hierarchies of the world-system are at the same time a civilization struggle for a new humanism (Fanon 1967) and a new civilization (indigenous conception of
transformation in different parts of the world).
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Alt extensions Carroll

Reject their complicity with capitalism only unconditional rejection of consumerism can initiate revolts against capitalism that can become truly global Carroll 10 *founding director of the Social Justice Studies Program at the University of Victoria
(William, Crisis, movements, counter-hegemony: in search of the new, Interface 2:2, 168-198, dml) Our point of departure was a meditation on the new, and the problem of welding present to future. Counter-hegemony, however, requires
more than a cataloguing of what is new; welding the present to the future has an indelibly programmatic aspect, registered in such notions as war of position and historical bloc. As an instrument of
alternative but
transformative politics, the programmatic imagination marks a direction and defines the next steps in taking up that trajectory (Unger 2009:xxi). Marking a direction sketches the contours of a counter-hegemonic project a possible
it is the choice of next steps that enables motion. In this respect, the possible that counts is not the fanciful horizon of possibilities but the adjacent possible: what is accessible with the materials at hand, deployed in the pursuit of movement in the desired direction (Unger 2009:xxi; emphasis added). The emergent themes and practices discussed above help mark a direction: toward a post-capitalist way of life that is broadly eco-socialist, that subordinates the state to an empowered civil society structured around practices of participatory democracy, dialogical communicative relations, and autonomous governance of the commons, both physical and informational; that combines, within an ethicopolitical framework, the autonomy of individuals with an abiding appreciation of the intersecting relations that implicate us in each others lives. This direction implies a process of democratic globalization that reaches beyond the Westphalian
division of humanity into (potentially) warring factions and well beyond the current state of the world. The elements of the new I have sketched also illuminate the next steps, toward the adjacent possible. Transnational networks and campaigns, new media and new communicative struggles, initiatives to reclaim the commons, and quotidian practices of becoming aware and acting coherently all mark a cathartic shift from protest to generative politics, to production of sustainable agriculture, of communications and culture, of collective property, of new social relations and subjectivities. For such generative politics to take root a synergistic relation between political parties and civil society must be forged in order to ensure that the necessary institutional spaces are created and the capacity for civil society participation is developed (M. Williams 2008:156). As for the national and transnational, what
seems adjacently possible is an institutionalization of multilevel contestation, combining rhizomic networks and traditional trees, reaching from the local to the global, and including as allies
progressive state actors, in virtuous circles that strengthen both movements and initiatives by state leaders at the global level (Evans 2008). These politics must be substantially rooted in local and national contexts: local self-
empowerment is a requirement of democratic mobilization, and winning state power is indispensable to transformation at a global level. Counter-hegemonic globalization is sustained by the transnational cultural infrastructures and activist networks that shape global civil society, but also by arborescent
formations such as new democratic left parties in Europe (Rao 2009 Solty 2008), the intergovernmental organizations developing within the Bolivarian process and what may be an emerging Fifth International inclusive of parties and movements. The
movement of movements will walk on both legs, creating new relations, practices and subjectivities both on the cultural terrain of civil society and within/against the state, globally and in national and local contexts or else it will stumble. These developments portend a global left, a counterhegemonic historical bloc organized around a project of sustainable human development and participatory democracy, whose constituents recognize in the intersections of power and oppression an emancipatory collective interest. This project faces great challenges, when placed in the context of
the ecological race against time and the continuing hegemony of consumer capitalism. Indeed, in North America, where the marketplace society and postmodern fragmentation discussed earlier are most entrenched where the lefts marginality contributes to a doxic condition of dreamlessness, as Bloch put it 10 it is unlikely that transformative politics will gain
traction until consumerism as a way of life that contains its own selfreproducing end values is rejected by (or becomes unviable for) great numbers of people. In practising sustainable consumption in the North, the autonomist politics of the Larzac plateau is exemplary.11 To break from the hegemony of marketplacesociety is to endeavour in the here and now to create in the interstices of the system a new social metabolism rooted in egalitarianism, community, and a sustainable relation to the earth (Magdoff and Foster 2010). Globally,
pressure for change may arise most urgently from a growingenvironmental proletariat (Foster 2010: 15) in areas of failing habitability, and leadership in counter-hegemonic globalization can be expected to emanate from the South. Yet achieving
the global contraction in greenhouse gas emissions and convergence in emissions per capita necessary to avert the worst ecological scenarios will require a strong ethico-political solidarity of North with South quite
Cap Kritik 95/194

nevertheless, steps
the reverse of what was on display at COP15 in Copenhagen in December 2009, and presently a distant possibility. It
is, taken in that direction that, cumulatively, might open an exit hatch from capitalism. Such a global transition would require that ecological and social revolutions in the South be accompanied by, or inspire, universal revolts against imperialism, the destruction of the planet, and the treadmill of accumulation
(Foster 2010: 15). What is particularly new in this organic crisis is the entwinement of human survival with democratic socialist construction, the twin exigencies of our time.
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Alt solves case

Space exploration is inevitable, its just a question of how we approach it the aff causes cap but the alt causes genuine society Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
(Peter and James, Cosmic Society: Towards a Sociology of the Universe pg 176, dml) It seems clear that society
will be made increasingly cosmic. A powerful coalition of financiers, industrialists, states and pro-space activists is beginning to make outer space into an extension of Earthly society. This process seems destined to be made into a hegemonic project, a form of common sense with investments into an infinite outer space supposedly bringing great benefits to the whole of society. Tragically, however, such a project also seems likely to make outer space in the image of the Earth itself, with all its power relations and consequent social injustices. A risk society, this time on a cosmic scale, will be created. Under current social and political arrangements, the socially, economically and politically powerful will continue to make themselves even more potent via the humanization of the cosmos. If a cosmic society is to genuinely benefit the dispossessed it will have to be organized around radically different priorities. An alternative hegemonic project will have to be made. The alt solves space better technological expansion is held back by commercial profit. Paleck 9 Former Iowa Democratic nominee for the House of Representatives (Mike, Capitalism Versus Science,8/12/09, http://www.marxist.com/capitalism-versus-science.htm)
The ultimate proof of capitalisms hindrance of science and technology comes not from capitalism, but from the alternative. While the Soviet Union under Stalin was far from the ideal socialist society (something which we have explained extensively elsewhere), its history gives us valuable insight into the potential of a nationalized planned economy. In 1917 the Bolsheviks took control of a backwards, semi-feudal, third world country that had been ruined by the First World War. In a matter of decades, it was transformed into a leading super-power. The USSR would go on to be the first to put a satellite into orbit, the
first to put a man in space, and the first to build a permanently manned outpost in space. Soviet scientists pushed the frontiers of knowledge, particularly in the areas of Mathematics, Astronomy, Nuclear Physics, Space Exploration and Chemistry. Many Soviet era scientists have been awarded Nobel prizes in various fields. These successes are particularly stunning, when one considers the state the country was in when capitalism was overthrown. How were such advancements possible? How did the Soviet Union go from
having a population that was 90% illiterate, to having more scientists, doctors and engineers per capita than any other country on Earth in just a few decades? The superiority of the nationalized planned economy and the break from the madness of capitalism is the only explanation. The first step in this process was simply the recognition that science was a priority. Under capitalism,
the ability of private companies to develop science and technology is limited by a narrow view of what is profitable. Companies do not plan to advance technology, they plan to build a marketable product and will only do what is necessary to bring that product to market. The Soviets immediately recognized the importance of the overall development of science and technology and linked it to the development of the country as a whole. This broad view allowed them to put substantial resources into all areas of study. Another vital component of their success was the massive expansion of education. By abolishing private schools and providing free education at all levels, individuals in the population were able to meet their potential. A citizen could continue their studies as long as they were capable. By contrast, even many advanced capitalist countries have been unable to eliminate illiteracy today, let alone open up university education to all who are able. Under capitalism, massive financial barriers are placed in front of students, which prevent large portions of the population from reaching their potential. When half of the worlds population is forced to live on less than two dollars a day, we can only
conclude that massive reserves of human talent are being wasted. The soviet government immediately tore down all the barriers on science that strangle innovation within the capitalist system. Patents, trade secrets, and private industry were
eliminated. This allowed for more collaborative research across fields and a free flow of information between institutions. Religious prejudices that had long held back rational study were pushed aside. One only has to look at the ban on stem-cell research under the Bush regime
Cap Kritik 97/194 to see the negative effects religious bigotry can have on science.
But it wasnt all good news under Stalinism. Just as the bureaucracy hindered the development of the economy, it also hindered certain areas of study. While the many barriers of capitalism were broken down, in some cases new ones were erected as the direction of scientific study was subjugated to the needs and desires of the bureaucracy. In the most extreme cases, certain fields of study were outlawed entirely and leading scientists were arrested and sent to labour camps in Siberia. One of the most outrageous cases was Stalins contempt for chromosomal genetics. The study of genetics was banned and several prominent geneticists, including Agol, Levit and Nadson were executed. Nikolai Vavilov, one of the Soviet Unions great geneticists was sent to a labour camp, where he died in 1943. This ban wasnt overturned until the mid 1960s. These crimes were not crimes of socialism, but of Stalinism. Under a democratically planned economy, there would be no reason for such atrocities. Today, it is the task of those interested in science and socialism to learn the lessons of history. Science is being held back by private interests and industry. A lack of resources for education and research keep doors closed to young aspiring minds. Religious interference locks science in a cage and declares important fields of study off-limits. The chains of the free-
market prevent meaningful research from being done. Private companies refuse to let new technologies out of their back rooms. Private collectors hold unique and important specimens for their own personal amusement. Potential cures for deadly diseases are tossed aside to clear the way for research into the latest drug to cure erectile dysfunction. This is madness. Capitalism does not drive innovation, but hinders it at every step. Humanity today is being held back by an economic system designed to enslave the majority for the benefit of a minority. Every aspect of human
development is hindered by the erroneously-named free-market. With the development of computers, the internet and new technologies, humanity stands at the doorstep of a bright future of scientific advancement and prosperity. We are learning more and more about every aspect of our existence. What was once impossible, is now tangible. What was once a mystery, is now understood. What was once veiled, is now in plain sight. The advancement of scientific knowledge will one day put even the farthest reaches of the universe at our fingertips. The only thing that stands in our way is capitalism.
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Alt Critique
Merely the act of critique alone points out the flaws in space capitalism Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
(Peter and James, Cosmic Society: Towards a Sociology of the Universe pg 189, dml) In this book we
have aimed to go even further towards revealing the worm in the apple of space humanization: outlining the capital processes which underpin it and in the process stripping away some of the hegemonic assumptions that serve to obscure them. This is what Roy Bhaskar (1986) refers to as an explanatory critique: the deliberate undermining of the false beliefs created by society based on social power and coercion. An explanatory critique exposes the causal mechanisms and elements that underlie the complexity of the social life and of the universe. Moreover, it exposes the ways in which these mechanisms are used by the powerful as a means of enhancing their authority over the rest of society. The science of outer space is now being deployed to humanize the cosmos in ways that not only reproduce the social order, but extend this order indefinitely into the cosmos. But an explanatory critique hopefully also shows that there is nothing inevitable about this process. Social and political alliances can be, and are being, forged against this particular form of humanization. New types of common sense can be constructed. Contemporary forms of subjectivity which are alienated from the cosmos and dreaming about being part of it are not inevitable. They are the product of recent times and can certainly undergo change in a more socially progressive direction.
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Alt Floating PIC

Alt doesnt preclude the plan but its a prerequisite to solving the link Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
Alternatively, rather than being founded on the interests of capital, and individualist fantasies, the humanization of outer space could emphasize collective responsibilities on Earth and try to ensure that any gains made through space exploration were spread throughout to improve the lot of the dispossessed on Earth (as was the original aim of the United Nations Moon Agreement). To quote Etzioni, As we move deeper into space we should be facing Earth and allow our deprived world to set the pace (1964: 198). In theory, so long as funds are not diverted from more socially necessary projects, this is not incompatible with scientific exploration of outer space aimed at simply discovering how the universe is structured. Earth imaging technology available freely to all can be used to track refugee populations, or chart changes in the environment caused by global warming. So long as it is not motivated by fear and panic, space for peace could also include diverting risk stemming from Earth-bound asteroids: a plan under active development
by NASA and the European Space Agency (Gray 2007).
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Alt Movements/Link K aff

Class struggles must come first any other issue cant solve the root cause of their struggles Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
Marxist theories are generally found wanting in the era of the new social movements. These struggles are widely seen as composed of heterogeneous actors who do not represent a particular social stratum with identifiable interests. As Scott writes: At least in the conventional Marxist analysis, social movements which define themselves without reference to class are a category puzzle, neither fish nor fowl. They have some of the characteristics ascribed to real that is, class movements (for example mass mobilization) but they appeal to illusory collective identities such as nation, gender, locality or even, most disturbing of all, to abstractions such as the public or
humanity . (Scott 1995: 3) Here Scott is describing the problem traditional Marxists have had in explaining the constituency of new social movements. Often, as he notes, this has meant explaining away new social movement identities
as forms of false consciousness. In addition, new social movements initially appear unconcerned with material politics at all, turning their attention to issues such as peace, the environment and sexuality. This has been heralded by some theorists as a radical new era of post-material (Inglehart 1981) or post-emancipatory (Giddens 1991) politics. Mirroring the psychologist Maslows (1971) hierarchy of needs, these theorists believed that when human material needs were satisfied they would turn their attention to higher cultural goals. The supposed separation from material politics by the new movements has inspired postMarxist developments in social movement theory. The diversity of peoples material positions is emphasized
here, even to the extent of denying links between political identity and the material world. In this respect, two of the most influential political writers on global politics in recent years have been Laclau and Mouffe (2001). Influenced by Michel Foucault and poststructuralist thought, these authors oppose any notion of general or universal propositions such as the working class or class struggle being the principal generator of social change. Laclau and Mouffe agree that Gramsci offered major insights into the role of ideology and common sense as a means of holding society together. But they are addressing themselves to the question of how
counter-hegemony can be formed at a time when the ruling class seems to be on the wane. They agree that forms of consciousness and identity nowadays no longer stem primarily from the factory or the sphere of production. Like many other writers on contemporary social protest, Laclau and Mouffe urge us to only look around to observe what they call the new antagonisms. The unsatisfactory term new social movements groups together a series of highly diverse struggles: urban, ecological, anti-authoritarian, anti-institutional, feminist, racist, ethnic, regional or that of sexual minorities. The common denominator of all of them would be their differentiation from workers struggles, considered as class struggles. (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 159)
Whereas Laclau and Mouffe respond to the emergence of new social movements by removing material struggles from their analysis, other theorists have attempted to retain an emphasis on fundamental antagonisms at the heart of the social order, albeit with a less direct connection to class interests. Habermas argued a quarter of a century ago that new social movement conflicts are
carried on between those involved in production, and with interests in maintaining it in its current state, and those who are not and who are therefore more sensitive to the self-destructive consequences of the growth in complexity, or who are more seriously affected by them. The bond that unifies these heterogenous groups is the critique of growth (1981: 33). The new social movements are constituted by groups often removed not just from industrial production but from its values and priorities. As a number of authors other than Habermas argue, this latter group deliberately and consistently challenges modern concepts of progress, prosperity, economic growth and scientific rationality (see also, for example,
Beck 1992).
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Alt Multitude
Endorsing the multitude would help break down capitalism Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
(Peter and James, Cosmic Society: Towards a Sociology of the Universe pg 181-182, dml) On the one hand, a
global elite still represents the interests of financial and corporate capital and, power throughout the whole of global society. But resistance is now coming from what Hardt and Negri call the multitude. This is conceived by these authors as a great mass of people subordinated to global capital and global power, especially those who have suffered from capital investment, privatization and commodification disrupting their lives. The multitude is the new counter-hegemonic force that will overthrow the existing social order. Hardt
working with political leaders, exercises and Negri argue that, despite its many deprivations, the diversity of the multitude is its very strength. Organizing themselves like capital itself, particularly via electronic networks and channels of information flows, the multitude is coming to
represent a powerful counter-force resisting and eventually overcoming capitalist imperialism. It is a force that the dominant social bloc must overcome if it is to remain intact. The multitude in this picture is therefore envisaged as the modern version of the international proletariat which Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg and many others earlier believed was capable of creating its own hegemonic worldview and overthrowing the social order. Like Laclau and Mouffe, Hardt and Negri argue that resistance is no longer forged in the factory. It is the product of
the new social and technological era.
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Alt Organic Intellectuals

Embracing the organic intellectual is key to catalyze class struggles Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
(Peter and James, Cosmic Society: Towards a Sociology of the Universe pg 186-187, dml) A third set of intellectuals in Gramscis scheme is that attached to the
resisters themselves. These are the intellectuals organic to the subordinated or subaltern classes. They are again the people using their abilities and knowledge towards emancipating oppressed people. In Gramscis time and to an extent in our day they
would include people attached to the labour movement and to trade unions. They are also people with high levels of cultural capital such as teachers and workers in the public sector. These are the main intellectuals of the present day,
cultural leaders, creating new trends in consumption, often including more ascetic tastes and resistances to consumerism (Savage et al. 1992). Here the prospects for resistance and the making of new kinds of coalition between dominant and subordinate groups are more promising. They are more likely to endorse projects not wholly devoted to further capital accumulation. They have a
vested interest in their elite status, but subordinate orders, themselves low on economic capital, may find useful alliances with them.
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Alt SPACE COMMUNISM

ALT TEXT PUT COMMUNISM IN SPACE Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
Alternatively, and much more ambitiously, humanization cosmists by spreading a
could attempt to emulate the early twentieth-century Russian socialist or communist society throughout the whole of nearby outer space. This is a highly human-centred project and, as such, can be criticized for simply imposing humanitys priorities, albeit communist priorities, on the cosmos as a whole. But any project is going to be human or anthropocentric. Is a cosmos reproducing and expanding a socialist or communist society necessarily a problem? Perhaps the significance of the utopian cosmists is that they prefigured the possibility of alternative types of space humanization.
Cap Kritik 104/194
**ANSWERS TO**
Cap Kritik 105/194
AT No space cap war

Even if theres no harms right now domination and war will happen Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
(Peter and James, Cosmic Society: Towards a Sociology of the Universe pg 179-180, dml) But this new form of imperialism is not quite accumulation by dispossession in the classic sense outlined by Harvey and, before him, Luxemburg and Lenin. At the moment, at least, cosmic imperialism is not directly dispossessing
anybody of anything. There are no people or societies out there protesting or rising up against this latest stage of domination and capital accumulation. But, of course, as and when elements of nearby outer space are legally subdivided and exploited by different private or state interests, this precludes public and private investments in probably more worthwhile projects on Earth. Furthermore, such imperialism also opens up the possibility of wars between those powers gaining access to the Moon or other nearby parts of the cosmos. This form of imperialism and capital expansion may seem particularly attractive to ruling elites, given the contradictions and increasingly evident social and environmental crises of Earthly society. But the fact remains that this fourth stage of imperialism may in the long term simply reproduce Earthly conflicts, Earthly sociopolitical coalitions and environmental degradation into the cosmos.
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AT Space grants freedom

Freedom is bad! Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
These arguments about freedom are ultimately intricately related to the need of pro-space activists to re-experience total power centred around the self. Again, not only does the language of freedom sustain neo-liberal capitalism, with its emphasis on the individual and delight at the survival of the fittest, but it also legitimizes the wants of its subjects.
Cap Kritik 107/194
AT Biology=exploration
This is capitalist and wrong and evil and dumb Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
Sociobiological arguments often reflect broadly accepted, even hegemonic, common sense perceptions about human nature and human behaviour. Much of the foundation for the argument that it is in humanitys nature to explore comes from grossly selective extrapolations
from historical evidence. Columbus, the Pilgrim Fathers, Lewis and Clarke and Neil Armstrong are all examples of idols worshipped by the Western culture of exploration and imperialism. The familiarity of these tales precludes the telling of
alternative stories. To pro-space activists growing up in contemporary America, the history of the world is largely understood as the history of exploration. It is easy to see how to these people exploration would appear to be human nature. It has characterized the whole of human history. The argument that curiosity and exploration are an adaptive survival trait for the human species is well-rehearsed, and has been discussed by Dawkins himself (1998). Some prospace activists frame their discussion of human nature directly in relation to Dawkins sociobiological arguments, many of which have become popular reading in the movement. It is believed that, when
resources become scarce, some or all humans are pre-programmed to explore their surroundings for more resources. In this way human society is not limited to one ecological niche but can expand and grow to other niches. For many pro-space
activists, outer space represents the next ecological niche for mankind. To explore and develop space for them is to act according to human nature, this being a positive attribute. Conversely, to fight the exploration and development of space is to fight against human nature. For some time now there have been extensive criticisms of sociobiology (see, for example, Sahlins 1972; Lewontin 1993). Sociologists and social anthropologists tend not be persuaded by this discipline because it disregards the importance of agency, meaning, culture and contingency in human social life. Society, including psychic structure, is reduced to the biological level (Pinker 1997; Rose and Rose 2000). An intense focus on genes means that the interaction between organisms as a whole, their relations to their environment and their development during their lifetimes goes largely missing from the sociobiology enterprise (Dickens 2000). On the other hand, sociobiology forces sociology to
recognize the biological foundations of human behaviour and development. Indeed, in line with our critical realist standpoint as outlined in Chapter 1, biology should be seen as offering important insights into the causal powers
underlying the growth and development of humans and other species. But these combine with other causal powers operating within society to generate biological development and forms of subjectivity. Biology is clearly important but it is overlaid or over-determined by social relations and social processes of many kinds (Dickens 2000). One of the key points about a critical realism is that it points to the way in which certain kinds of science are used to ideological and political ends. Gene-based biology used to justify further space exploration and the increasing humanization of the universe is an excellent case in point.
Cap Kritik 108/194
AT Realism
Realism isnt the root cause of war realist discourse is Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
(Peter and James, Cosmic Society: Towards a Sociology of the Universe pg 172-173, dml) This argument exemplifies two points. First, the discourses of social movements can change over time. An emphasis on the importance of space for peace on Earth has really come to prominence post 9/11. Second, it shows how seemingly universal and apolitical values (for example peace) are articulated by a movement with
other concepts and priorities central to the discourse. Social relations have again gone largely missing. The argument rests on an assertion that wars are the product of people competing for limited resources and that humans will inevitably fight for survival under such circumstances. Humans, like
other animals, will fight to survive, especially when cornered. These arguments stem from human ethology, one of the precursors to sociobiology and also unpopular with sociologists (Ardrey 1967; Lorenz 1966). Framing the problem in this way leads
to a prognosis in which opening up outer space combined with individual freedom, more space and increased resources will lead to social harmony. Perhaps needless to say, this is another argument unpopular with sociologists and political scientists. A more critical analyst would examine the way that this argument diverts attention from the real, underlying causes of war. These, as we have tried to argue in Chapter 2, revolve around power and private property. Expansion into outer space is as likely to undermine peace as to bring it about. Finally, we should note that many of the values held by pro-space activists are precisely those now informing Earthly accumulation by dispossession. At the time of writing, nonWestern societies are being invaded in the cause of freedom, individualism, economic growth and, most paradoxically of all, peace.
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AT Cap Resilient
Organic intellectuals are capable of resisting the decentralized and normalizing efforts of hegemonic, capitalist views toward space propagated by the media and military Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of
Cambridge and Visiting Professor of Sociology, University of Essex and **James, Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton (Cosmic Society: Towards a sociology of the universe, pg 72, IWren)
Resistances to military enterprises and to what Harvey calls accumulation by dispossession may well be multiple, however. Social movements like the Global Network could mount such ethical opposition to the humanization of space that investment might, for a while at least, be halted. They have been outspoken
against the militarization of space, but also against the use of nuclear power in space, and have flagged up issues including the creation of space debris and the socio-environmental consequences of opening up space to capital. There is evidence that this movement is gaining in numbers and becoming increasingly militant. The links they have built with other organizations associated with the political left, such as the Yorkshire CND in England, demonstrate the awareness that activists have that
issues about outer space are the result and continuation of the dynamic of a global neo-liberal capitalist economy. As mentioned above, third world governments have also contested, albeit to date unsuccessfully, the
monopoly that the Western world is developing over outer space. The United Nations role in dictating the shape of the humanization of space looks to become increasingly central, though it remains to be seen whether the US influence will continue to dominate proceedings in an era in which blocs of power in other countries such as China and India emerge as major stakeholders in outer space. There is always the danger, however, that these resistances will be blown out of the
water by those social alliances attempting to retain power. Culture and the media have a key role to play in dulling or awakening popular consciousness about these issues. As we have already argued, there is a danger that space technology itself disseminates a hegemonic worldview that legitimizes as inevitable the endless expansion of imperial capitalism into space. Organic intellectuals within popular culture and activist organizations will certainly have a key role to play if this is to be resisted. 7
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AT Cap Sustainable
Transition is inevitable the underpinnings of capitalism are collapsing Wallerstein 11 *senior research scholar at Yale
(Immanuel, The Global Economy Wont Recover, Now or Ever, January-February 2011, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/01/02/unconventional_wisdom?page=0,9, dml)
Virtually everyone everywhere-economists, politicians, pundits -- agrees that the world has been in some kind of economic trouble since at least 2008. And virtually everyone seems to believe that in the next few years the world will somehow "recover" from these difficulties. After all, upturns always occur after downturns. The remedies recommended vary considerably, but the idea that the system shall continue in its essential features is a deeply rooted faith. But it is wrong. All systems have lives. When their processes move too far from equilibrium, they fluctuate chaotically and bifurcate. Our existing system, what I call a capitalist worldeconomy, has been in existence for some 500 years and has for at least a century encompassed the entire globe. It has functioned remarkably well. But like all systems, it has moved steadily further and further from equilibrium. For a while now, it has moved too far from equilibrium, such that it is today in structural crisis. The problem is that the basic costs of all production have risen remarkably. There are the personnel expenses of all kinds -- for unskilled workers, for cadres, for top-level management. There are the costs incurred as producers pass on the costs of their production to the rest of us -- for detoxification, for renewal of resources, for infrastructure. And the democratization of the world has led to demands for more and more education, more and more health provisions, and more and more guarantees of lifetime income. To meet these demands, there has been a significant increase in
taxation of all kinds. Together, these costs have risen beyond the point that permits serious capital accumulation. Why not then simply raise prices? Because there are limits beyond which one cannot push their
level. It is called the elasticity of demand. The result is a growing profit squeeze, which is reaching a point where the game is not worth the candle. What we are witnessing as a result is chaotic fluctuations of all kinds -- economic, political, sociocultural. These fluctuations cannot easily be controlled by public policy. The result is ever greater uncertainty about all kinds of short-term decision-making, as well as frantic realignments of every variety. Doubt feeds on itself as we search for ways out of the menacing uncertainty posed by terrorism, climate change, pandemics, and nuclear proliferation. The only sure thing is that the present system cannot continue. The fundamental political struggle is over what kind of system will replace capitalism, not whether it should survive. The choice is between a new system that replicates some of the present system's essential features of hierarchy and polarization and one that is relatively democratic and egalitarian. The extraordinary expansion of the world-economy in the postwar years (more or less 1945 to 1970) has been followed by a long period of economic stagnation in which the basic source of gain has been rank speculation sustained by successive indebtednesses. The latest financial crisis didn't bring down
this system; it merely exposed it as hollow. Our recent "difficulties" are merely the next-to-last bubble in a process of boom and bust the world-system has been undergoing since around 1970. The last bubble will be state indebtednesses, including in the so-called emerging economies, leading to bankruptcies. Most people do not recognize -- or refuse to recognize -- these realities. It is wrenching to accept that the historical system in which
we are living is in structural crisis and will not survive. Meanwhile, the system proceeds by its accepted rules. We meet at G20 sessions and seek a futile consensus. We speculate on the markets. We "develop" our economies in whatever way we can. All this activity simply accentuates the structural crisis. The real action, the struggle over what new system will be created, is elsewhere.
Cap unsustainable in the long termpropping it up in the short term leads to military repression, environmental degradation, poverty, and lower living standards Harvey 10 - David, Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York (CUNY), Director of The Center for Place, Culture and Politics, PhD in geography from Cambridge
(Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition, Talk given at the World Social Forum 2010, http://globalization.gc.cuny.edu/wpcontent/uploads/2011/04/OrganizingtheAnti.pdf, IWren) The historical geography of capitalist development is at a key inflexion point in which the geographical configurations of power are rapidly shifting at the very moment when the temporal dynamic is facing very serious constraints. Three percent
compound growth (generally considered the minimum satisfactory growth rate for a healthy capitalist economy) is becoming less and less feasible to sustain without resort to all manner of fictions (such as those that have characterized asset markets and financial affairs over the last two decades). There are good reasons to
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believe that there is no alternative to a new global order of governance that will eventually have to manage the transition to a zero growth economy. If that is to be done in an equitable way, then there is no alternative to socialism or communism. Since the late 1990s, the World Social Forum became
the center for articulating the theme another world is possible. It must now take up the task of defining how another socialism or communism is possible and how the transition to these alternatives are to be accomplished. The current crisis offers a window of opportunity to
reflect on what might be involved. The current crisis originated in the steps taken to resolve the crisis of the 1970s. These steps included: (a) the successful assault upon organized labor and its political institutions while mobilizing global labor surpluses, instituting labor-saving technological changes and heightening competition. The result has been global wage repressions (a declining share of wages in total GDP almost everywhere) and the creation of an even vaster disposable labor reserve living under marginal conditions. (b) undermining previous structures of monopoly power and displacing the previous stage of (nation state) monopoly capitalism by opening up capitalism to far fiercer international competition. Intensifying global competition translated into lower non-financial corporate profits. Uneven geographical development and inter-territorial competition became key features in capitalist development, opening the way towards the beginnings of a hegemonic shift of power particularly but not exclusively towards East Asia. (c) utilizing and empowering the most fluid and highly mobile form of capital money capital to reallocate capital resources globally (eventually through electronic markets) thus sparking deindustrialization in traditional core regions and new forms of (ultra-oppressive) industrialization and natural resource and agricultural raw material extractions in emergent markets. The corollary was to enhance the profitability of financial corporations and to find new ways to globalize and supposedly absorb risks through the creation of fictitious capital markets. (d) At the other end of the social scale, this meant heightened reliance on accumulation by dispossession as a means to augment capitalist class power. The new rounds of primitive accumulation against indigenous and peasant populations were augmented by asset losses of the lower classes in the core economies (as witnessed by the sub-prime housing market in the US which foisted a huge asset loss particularly upon African American populations). (e) The augmentation of otherwise sagging effective demand by pushing the debt economy (governmental, corporate and household) to its limits (particularly in the USA and the UK but also in many other countries from Latvia to Dubai). (f) Compensating for anemic rates of return in production by the construction of whole series of asset market bubbles, all of which had a Ponzi character, culminating in the property bubble that burst in 2007-8. These asset bubbles drew upon finance capital and were facilitated by extensive financial innovations such as derivatives and collateralized debt obligations. The political forces that coalesced and mobilized behind these transitions had a distinctive class character and clothed themselves in the vestments of a distinctive ideology called neoliberal. The ideology rested upon the idea that free markets, free trade, personal initiative and entrepreneurialism were the best guarantors of individual liberty and freedom and that the nanny state should be dismantled for the benefit of all. But the practice entailed that the state must stand behind the integrity of financial institutions, thus introducing (beginning with the Mexican and developing countries debt crisis of 1982) moral hazard big time into the financial system. The state (local and national) also became increasingly committed to providing a good business climate to attract investments in a highly competitive environment. The interests of the people were secondary to the interests of capital and in the event of a conflict between them, the interests of the people had to be sacrificed (as became standard practice in IMF structural adjustments programs from the early 1980s onwards). The system that has been created amounts to a veritable form of communism for the capitalist class. These conditions varied considerably, of course, depending upon what part of the world one inhabited, the class relations prevailing there, the political and cultural traditions and how the balance of political-economic power was shifting. So how can the left negotiate the dynamics of this crisis? At times of crisis, the irrationality of capitalism becomes plain for all to see. Surplus capital and surplus labor exist side-by side with seemingly no way to put them back together in the midst of immense human suffering and unmet needs. In midsummer of 2009, one third of the capital equipment in the United States stood idle, while some 17 per cent of the workforce were either
unemployed, enforced part-timers or discouraged workers. What could be more irrational than that! Can capitalism survive the present trauma? Yes. But at what cost? This question masks another. Can the capitalist class reproduce its power in
the face of the raft of economic, social, political and geopolitical and environmental difficulties? Again, the answer is a resounding yes. But the mass of the people will have to surrender the fruits of their labour to those in power, to surrender many of their rights and their hard-won asset values (in everything from housing to pension rights), and to suffer environmental degradations galore to say nothing of serial reductions in their living standards which means starvation for many of those already struggling to survive at rock bottom. Class inequalities will increase (as we already see happening). All of that may require more than a little political repression, police violence and militarized state control to stifle unrest. Since
much of this is unpredictable and since the spaces of the global economy are so variable, then uncertainties as to outcomes are heightened at times of crisis. All manner of localized possibilities arise for either nascent capitalists in some new space to seize opportunities to challenge older class and territorial hegemonies (as when Silicon Valley replaced Detroit from the mid-1970s onwards in the United States) or for radical movements to challenge the reproduction of an already destabilized class power. To say that the capitalist class and capitalism can survive is not to say that they are predestined to do so nor does it say that their future character is given. Crises are moments of paradox and possibilities. So what will happen this time around? If we are to get
back to three percent growth, then this means finding new and profitable global investment opportunities for $1.6 trillion in 2010 rising to closer to $3 trillion by 2030. This contrasts with the $0.15 trillion new
investment needed in 1950 and the $0.42 trillion needed in 1973 (the dollar figures are inflation adjusted). Real problems of finding adequate outlets for surplus capital began to emerge after 1980, even with the opening up of China and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. The difficulties were in part resolved by creation of fictitious markets where speculation in
asset values could take off unhindered. Where will all this investment go now? Leaving aside the undisputable constraints in the relation to nature (with global warming of paramount importance), the other potential barriers of effective demand in the market place, of technologies and of geographical/ geopolitical distributions are likely to be profound, even supposing, which is unlikely, that no serious active oppositions to continuous capital accumulation and further consolidation of class power materialize. What spaces are left in the global economy for new spatial fixes for capital surplus absorption? China and the ex-Soviet bloc have already been integrated. South and SouthEast Asia is filling up fast. Africa is not yet fully integrated but there is nowhere else with the capacity to absorb all this surplus capital. What new lines of production can be opened up to absorb growth? There may be no effective long-run capitalist solutions (apart from reversion to fictitious capital manipulations) to this crisis of capitalism. At some point quantitative changes lead to qualitative shifts and we need to take seriously the idea that we may be at exactly such an inflexion point in the history of capitalism.
Questioning the future of capitalism itself as an adequate social system ought, therefore, to be in the forefront of current debate.
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Capitalism has an inherent contradiction between economic growth and environmental capacity collapse is inevitable. Castro 4 - Instructor of sociology at Clark College
(Clark, Sustainable Development: Mainstream and Critical Perspectives, Organization Environment 2004; 17; 195, http://zonecours.hec.ca/documents/A2010-1-2411184.SustainableDevelopment%28castro%29.pdf) NAR
There are many contradictions in the capitalist system, but two of them will concern us here. There is the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production, which manifests itself as the contradiction between production and the realization of value and surplus value. As a result of this contradiction, the capitalist system faces periodical crisis. There is another contradiction that OConnor (1996), one of the most prominent ecological Marxists,10 has called the second contradiction. According to OConnor, capitalism has a contradiction between the production relations and the conditions of production. The conditions of production are the external physical conditions (forests, soil, air, and water quality), labor power (which includes training and degree of socialization), and the communal conditions (which include space and social environment). As is clear from this list, the conditions of production are not produced by capital but by nature and society. (In mainstream approaches of sustainable development, science and technology can produce some of these conditions, and there is a degree of substitutability between nature and human-made capital.) Capital uses and destroys these conditions of production, provoking the struggle of social movements to force capital to internalize this destruction. In OConnors account, as in most Marxist accounts, it is the social movements that force the state to intervene in the market in ways that do not directly benefit capital (a fact that is conveniently forgotten in mainstream approaches). In the case of the environmental crisis, the capitalist state intervenes partly in response to such movement pressure and partly to save capital from undermining its own capacity for capital accumulation. Marx (1981) himself argued that capitalism was not environmentally sustainable:
But the way that the cultivation of particular crops depends on fluctuations in market prices and the constant changes in cultivation with these price fluctuations the entire spirit of capitalist production, which is oriented towards the most immediate monetary profitstands in contradiction to agriculture, which has to concern itself with the whole gamut of permanent conditions of life required by the chain of human generations. (p. 754) This contradiction between capitalism and environmental sustainability expressed so clearly by Marx in the quote above is the central tenet of environmental Marxism. But of course, the dominant
ideology of the capitalist system sees the same contradiction. All American administrations, with the exception perhaps of the Clinton administration, which presided at the height of the sustainable development ideology and whose environmental record is uneven, have understood that environmental conservation and capital accumulation are contradictory goals. The leaders of the world have not been able to fulfill the agreements signed 10 years ago at the Earth Summit for this reason as well. As Foster (2003) said, How can it be that the Rio Earth Summit, which ten years ago was thought to mark a decisive change in the human relation to the environment, has come to be seen as such a colossal failure? The answer is that it was undermined by global capital both from within and without. (p. 3) Capital accumulation is the most important feature of the capitalist system, and because it is in contradiction with environmental sustainability, for many people, friend and foe alike, it seems impossible to achieve sustainability and economic growth at the same time. One of the ways
Marx theorized that capitalism brings about environmental destruction is by creating a metabolic rift in the relations between humans and nature. With the introduction of trade to distant places and the concentration of population in cities,
capital moves energy and matter from one place to another, taking them away from the places they had evolved, sending them to other places, and creating this metabolic rift (Foster, 1999, 2000). Had they stayed in their own ecosystem, at least, matter could have been recycled. The energy requirement for this distant trade is greater than that required by the local communities. Applying this concept to the soil, Marx (1981)
said that the social metabolism is prescribed by the natural laws of life itself, and that capitalism squanders the vitality of the soil, which is carried by trade far beyond the bounds of a single country (p. 949). This metabolic rift may have existed and exists in other noncapitalist societies, but capitalism has universal tendencies and makes this rift universal. The scale of ecological destruction is larger under capitalism than under previous modes of production. Under this assumption, sustainable development
based on long distance trade will not be environmentally sustainable. Capitalism is unsustainable, even when based on market levels. Iwai 8 Phd in Economics
(Katsuhito, December 08, 2008, Global Financial Crisis Shows Inherent Instability of Capitalism, http://www.tokyofoundation.org/en/articles/2008/global-financial-crisis-shows-inherent-instability-of-capitalism) NAR
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Why is capitalism
unstable? Because it is fundamentally based on speculation. Consider carmakers, for example. They build automobiles not for themselves but in the expectation that others will buy them to ride in. There is an element of speculation in this process. Milton Friedman and his followers
in mainstream economics, however, claim that speculation leads to stability. Those investors who buy high and sell low, they argue, are irrational and will promptly fall by the wayside. Only the rational investors who buy low and sell high will survive; this will cause markets to be stable. What they assert may apply to an idyllic market where investors mediate between producers and consumers. But, the activity in financial markets, including markets for stocks, bonds, foreign
currency and their derivatives, is of entirely different nature. It is professional investors and investment funds that dominate the markets and compete with each other. They buy and sell based
not on their forecasts of long-term demand/supply conditions but on their observations of each others movements and readings of each others intentions. When a price is expected to rise or fall, it is not irrational to buy or sell more and move the price further up or down, leading to speculative bubbles and panics. The more fundamental reason I believe that
capitalism as a whole is speculative and inherently unstable is that the money on which it is based is itself speculative. Money has made the economy much more efficient by making it possible to conduct transactions without the trouble of exchanging on a barter basis. But money has no intrinsic value. People are willing to hold it only because they expect other people to accept it in exchange for something else, with the people who accept it expecting that yet other people will accept it in turn. To hold money is, in other words, the purest form of speculation, and trust in it is based on circular, bootstrap logic: Everybody uses money as money merely because everybody believes everybody else uses it as money. In
this light, we can see that money has two faces: It brings greater efficiency, but at the same time it has the potential of causing great instability. In a capitalist economy supported by money, it is impossible for efficiency and stability to coexist as claimed by the neoclassical economists. This bootstrap logic of money also underlies the present financial crisis. The subprime loans that set off the crisis are extremely risky loans to people with low creditworthiness. Because the risk of default on such loans is so high, a single subprime loan by itself is unattractive as a financial product. But bundling many such loans together and securitizing them made the risks seem diluted, and as a result of further bundling with numerous other financial instruments into big packages that were then dispersed around the globe, the risks became invisible from the surface. As the financial products created in this way were traded more and more steadily among numerous parties, they began to be considered readily convertible to cash and other safe assets. They came to be seen as being like the money in which people place supreme trust. Here again we see the workings of bootstrap logic: Everybody trusted the products as safe merely because
everybody believed everybody else trusted them as safe. But when the subprime loans whose risks were concealed therein went bad, trust in all financial products toppled like a row of dominoes. This is the essence of the current financial crisis. A major difference between this and the Asian
currency crisis and other financial crises that preceded it is that the value of the US dollar, the key currency of the international monetary system, may be severely shaken. The instability of money as a purely speculative constructa
problem that has been concealed up to nowmay come to the surface henceforth in the form of the crisis in the key currency. I do not have space to discuss this problem here, however. Cap collapse inevitable laundry list The Herald 9
(Don Ferguson, 2009, "Capitalism itself is the cause of the worldwide economic crisis", Lexis) YOUR editorial ("What banks owe us: fairness and honesty", The Herald, April 4) reflects the current misconception that finance capital, and casino banking, are the cause and not merely one effect of the present crisis of capitalism. While holding no brief for the likes of Sir Fred Goodwin, it is self-serving and erroneous to ignore the fact that the failed policies of political and
economic leaders have their foundation in the very operation of capitalism itself. To avoid a critique of the capitalist system, elites and their apologists blame its leaders and financial experts for their "incompetence", "greed" and individual defects. Thus, rather than examine the
causes and consequences of the generation of enormous, unemployable surplus capital and profit, "failure of leadership" is blamed.
Rather than critique the power and influence of the capitalist class over the state, it is "wilful ignorance of what markets need" that is the problem. Rather than study real class relations - the capitalist classes' assault on workers as "costs of production" - it is the abstract "market" populated by imaginary "rational" capitalists that is cited. Nor is there any understanding of how soaring profits, expanding markets,
cheap credit, cowed labour and undue influence over state instruments have wrought the inevitable crisis of capital well known to students of Karl Marx, and faithfully manifest in the present situation. The moral and intellectual failures of the
capitalist class and its political apologists are not mere personal defects. The awful and unbearable truth for capitalism's cheerleaders is that the crash of the western financial system is merely a symptom of the more profound collapse of capitalism currently under way, the one described clearly in the classic formulation of Marx more
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than 150 years ago. Your conclusion that "the lesson is that what has been lacking is confidence. That can be restored by a new banking order in which fair - and transparent - remuneration is an essential component" is, I believe, wrong. Loss of
confidence is an effect; its cause is the failure of the specific mechanisms of profit creation, leading to crisis. That cannot be repaired within the present paradigm. As we move towards the end of the beginning, in the
words of one arch-apologist: "You ain't seen nothin' yet." Dr John O'Dowd, 3 Downfield Gardens, Bothwell. REGARDLESS of the outcome of the present economic crisis, it is clear the system that created it will not be allowed to return. The excesses of the
past will be moderated and capitalism will change to fit the new circumstances. This is an opportune time to modify our political system as it has run out of control, much in the way of the economic system. The link is more than coincidental. Democracy has lost much, if not all, of its fundamental connection with the public, along with its moral authority to govern in our name
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AT Growth Good
Infinite growth will inevitably destroy itself not focusing on expansion will allow more stable labor sources. Simms 10 Policy director at new economics foundation
(Andrew, Growth is good isn't it?,1/25/10, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2010/jan/25/uk-growthenergy-resources-boundaries)
To avoid collapse the economy has to operate within thresholds that do not critically undermine the things that we depend on on a daily basis. They're often interconnected, like a sufficiently stable climate, productive farmland, fresh water and a healthy diversity of plants and animals. On climate change, a new piece of research by the New Economics Foundation
thinktank looks at which rates of global economic growth are compatible with prevention of a dangerous level of warming. It shows that, even with the most optimistic likely uptake of low-carbon energy, it is seemingly impossible to reconcile a growing global economy with a good likelihood of limiting global temperature rise to 2C, the agreed political objective of the European Union, and widely considered the maximum rise
to which humanity can adapt without serious difficulty. In this context, Adair Turner, chair of the Financial Services Authority and the Committee on Climate Change, refers to the pursuit of growth for its own sake as a "false god". Other work by Professor Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at Manchester University concludes that: "Economic growth in the OECD cannot be reconciled with a 2C, 3C or even 4C characterisation of dangerous climate change." The problem is that
growth drowns out the gains from increased efficiency and technological innovation. The New Economics Foundation study looks at by how much growth would need to be delinked from fossil fuels the so-called carbon intensity of the economy to reach the mark of climate safety suggested by Nasa climate scientist James Hansen. Having improved steadily in the late last century, "carbon
intensity" changes flatlined over the last decade and even worsened in some years. Against this trend, to avoid dangerous climate change the fall in carbon intensity would need to improve by more than two hundredfold. The economic doctrine of growth collides headlong with the laws of physics and thermodynamics. Only so much energy efficiency can be squeezed from a system. The other problem is the counter-intuitive rebound effect spotted by William Stanley Jevons in 1865 when he wrote, "It is a confusion of
ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth." Increased efficiency tends to lower costs and perversely drives up overall resource use. Writing in the science journal Nature last year, a multidisciplinary group of scientists identified nine
key safe-use planetary resource boundaries, three of which had already been transgressed (climate change, biodiversity and the nitrogen cycle to do with farming). We are on the cusp of several others. So, this week, if you find yourself
cheering a return to growth, you may be inadvertently celebrating our acceleration toward an ecological cliff edge and an opportunity missed to find a new, better direction. For example, the economist Herman Daly points out that full employment could be easier to achieve in an economy not addicted to growth because it would reverse "the historical trend of replacing labour with machines and inanimate energy". Both the desirability and possibility of never ending growth goes
unquestioned in mainstream economics. It's odd, because the world would be a very strange place if the same was applied in nature. For example, from birth until around six weeks old, a hamster doubles its weight each week. If, it didn't stop and continued doubling each week, on its first birthday, you would be looking after a very hungry nine billion-tonne pet hamster. There is of course one thing in nature that grows uncontrollably. It's called cancer and tends to kill its host. So when those growth figures come out, let's hope the government scans the results for what they really mean.
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AT Growth/Cap kt Freedom
Nope! Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
The pro-space movement often links growth with freedom. But it does not recognize that freedom is actually experienced by only some members of humanity as a result of growth. Historically, growth and expansion has often had devastating effects on the freedoms of many groups of people, but pro-space activists seem blind to this possibility.
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AT Space cap good

Capitalist ideologies will moot resource gains in space aff cant claim root cause claims. Dolman and Cooper 11 Professor of Comparative Military Studies at the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies at the Air University,** Director of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, Chief Negotiator at the Geneva Defense and Space Talks
(Everett C., Henry F., Increasing the Military Uses of Space, 2011, http://www.ndu.edu/press/space-Ch19.html) Still, in most academic and policy debates, the realist view has been set aside (at least rhetorically) as states jockey for international space leadership. Those who even question the blanket prohibitions on weapons or market forces in
space exploration are ostracized. To actually advocate weaponization in space brings full condemnation. Accordingly, the debate has not been whether space should be weaponized, but how best to prevent the weaponization of space; not whether space should be developed commercially, but how to ensure the spoils of space are nonappropriable and distributed fairly to all. There has been little room for the view that state interest persists as the prime motivator in international relations, or that state-based capitalist exploitation of outer space would more efficiently reap and distribute any riches found there. It is for these reasons, we insist here and in several other venues, that space exploration and exploitation have been artificially stunted from what might have been.2 Hence, a timely injection of realist
thought may be precisely what is needed to jolt space exploration from its post-Apollo sluggishness. Our intent here, then, is to add the third point of a theoretical triangle in an arena where it had been missing, so as to center the debate on a true midpoint of beliefs, and not along the radical axis of two of the three world-views.
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AT Perm
Permutation gets coopted the panoptic nature of space control shuts out possibilities for resistance Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
(Peter and James, Cosmic Society: Towards a Sociology of the Universe pg 121, dml) Finally, panopticism
is also being extended to the monitoring of more exceptional threats to the social order. Resistance by trade unions may have been weakened or sidelined by the programme of accumulation by dispossession but new, very diverse, kinds of struggle are now a regular feature of contemporary society. Resistance to privatization and commodification, including programmes by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, is widespread, covering countries as far apart as India, Africa and Latin America. The rapidly growing antiglobalization movement, one with its own counter-hegemonic values and which regularly turns up at meetings of the World Trade Organization, requires regular, global surveillance. All these developments require monitoring and, if necessary, stopping by state authorities in many parts of the world. Even leading activists in the Global Network have been subjected to surveillance in recent years. Resistance takes two forms global and local the alt is a local solution that must be kept separate from the global form of the plan in order to avoid cooption Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
(Peter and James, Cosmic Society: Towards a Sociology of the Universe pg 183-184, dml) Perhaps surprisingly for such a universal movement, the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space is a good example of how new social movements operate on local and global levels (Eschle and Stammers 2004).
Struggles and coalitions are typically organized at both the regional and the global scales. Furthermore, these two scales interact, with local struggles informing those at the global scale and vice versa. Resistance at the global level tends to have what Eschel and Stammers call an instrumental form. The interests of the movement are pursued by any possible means and particularly via rational, more scientific argument. Certainly the movement to keep space for peace has engaged with international political arguments about the legality and desirability of legislation relating to outer space militarization. Resistance at the local level, however, is typically of a more expressive or emotional kind; with people articulating who they are, what they care about and why they are challenging the institutions of power. As Eyerman
and Jamison (1998) argue, music can have an important role in this (Box C.1). Institutions for global surveillance and defence such as the Echelon surveillance system and the so-called star wars US missile defence system depend on interceptor missiles and tracking devices located in different regions throughout the globe. Resistance to such developments can again,
therefore, have a strong regional or local basis. Members of the Yorkshire CND have been conducting weekly
protests (see Yorkshire CND 2007). A programme of local events constitute the Global Networks annual Keep Space for Peace week. As Castells (2000a) describes, the new social movements are made via loose-knit global and local
networks, with the internet having a central role to play in making the links between the different scales. There is most definitely an affective bridge between GN activists on a global as well as a local scale. Psychoanalytic theory
could certainly provide additional insights into the workings of this expressive dimension of movement activity, though the ways in which the unconscious is implicated must be the subject of further research.
If we win a link it means the perm fails have to start with a critical standpoint Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
Sociologists should not construct themselves as detached intellectuals, but should make their political commitments clear. Their concerns should be with revealing the suffering that results from social processes that serve the interests of those in power. There is a distinct danger that some fledgling projects to explore the relationship between society and the universe, such as the field of
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astrosociology being developed by Jim Pass (2004), do
little but reproduce hegemonic common sense about the benefits of space exploration and development (Ormrod 2005). Although astrosociology may draw public attention to under-researched issues, it will offer nothing if it does not do so critically. Development and exploration of space is an uncritically capitalistic project that seeks quick fixes to structural problems, necessarily precluding the exploration of alternative possibilities. Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of
Cambridge and Visiting Professor of Sociology, University of Essex and **James, Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton (Cosmic Society: Towards a sociology of the universe, pg 77-78, IWren) Taken together, our two theoretical starting points lead us to argue first that the
humanization of outer space is a product of economic and social crisis and second that such humanization is a means of reasserting hegemonic authority. Capitalism expands into outer space as a result of its inherent contradictions, capital being drawn from the primary circuit and invested in more speculative projects that extend the system in time and space through the secondary and tertiary circuits. Property rights are central to this process as capitalism attempts a series of outer spatial fixes. That this should happen is generally considered common Outer spatial fixes are part of a hegemonic solution to the worlds problems. Rather than try to figure alternative social relationships, the extension of the current socio-economic system into space is supported uncritically. Space technology itself plays a central role in disseminating a hegemonic Western culture in which a possessive individualism is promoted; something that prevents those alternative social relationships from forming. There is, however, always hope for resistance, and for the moment it is to organic
intellectuals within the Global Network and similar organizations that we must look for critical new visions of our relationship with the universe.
Their policies will always be tainted by militaristic global capitalism killing value to life. Rajiva 6 Masters in Economics, Doctoral work in international relations and political philosophy
(Lila, The New Centennial Review 6.1 (2006) 133-169, Prometheus The Emergence of the Police State in America ) NAR Indeed, to act with impunity, the state prefers a control that leaves no marks, that operates through
fear, that appears to its citizens as invisible satellite eyes in outer space, as robot sensors, as scanners that probe mechanically, as spy software that reads keystroke to keystroke the random fluctuations of inner space. Through fear, control remains anonymous and invisible. Invisible, it becomes inevitable, virtuous, and complete.
In this fascination with collapsing the boundaries of spirit and body, with dynamism and flux, with probing the outermost and the innermost, the Promethean betrays itself as romantic in its aesthetic, despite its rhetoric of reason and law. Entrepreneurship
presents itself less as a necessity of capitalism than as a spiritual ideal of initiative and strife. The ethos of business and military blend into each other in the doctrine of perpetual war. A war not merely to fatten defense budgets but to deplete the civilian, for to the Prometheans, populations present themselves as recalcitrant flesh to be disciplined and spiritualized through strife. Under the rhetoric of democracy and egalitarianism, hierarchy is the reality, a hierarchy in which business elites, technocrats, and their ideologues control the masses with the wand of propaganda (Laughland 2003). Thus, the concept of space becomes central to the Promethean ideology. It is articulated through the ethos of competition and the survival of the fittest, the maintenance of distance between the elites and the masses. Space is the unifying concept in the expansion of the state territorially into the heavens and internally into the psyche. It is also behind the definition of everything outside the state as a lack needing to be remedied or filled, as failed states, regressed cultures, as gaps in order. Into these gaps, whether in the heavens or on earth, the state inserts its rationality through the stealthy monitoring of a robotic technology, which represents the elimination of the human. In so expressing rationality without
the inconvenience of undisciplined flesh, the Promethean state articulates the demigod. Sensing its own robot impunity and limitless expansiveness, it arrives at that dangerous [End Page 161] solipsism, reflected in such statements as, "We create our own
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reality." In a world thus fashioned and driven from within, external constraints become not merely ineffective but irrelevant. Perm cant solve plan isnt compatible with the alt. Beebe 99 Professor at NYU School of Law
Spatialis,1999,www.bartonbeebe.com/documents/n-beebe.pdf)
Leon Lipson was reportedly fond of saying that space is a place, not a topic.131 Lipsons remark may be understood as part of his attempt to reign in some of the especially fantastic ideations that characterized early space law. Yet outer space was more than just a geographical concept in the 1960s. The recent spatial turn in critical thinking132 in the law and elsewhere should help us to appreciate that outer space was also a thoroughly politicized and socially constructed realm. As the Soviet and
(Barton, Laws Empire and the Final Frontier: Legalizing the Future in the Early Corpus Juris
American culture industries of the time knew all too well, space functioned primarily as a metaphor for the future, and for the scientific worldviewbe it capitalist or communistthat would dominate that future. Ludwig Teller attested to this construction of space in the New York Law Forum:Space is no longer an ordinary word of the English language. It has taken on a secondary meaning identified with the science and technology of astronautics and expressive of the awesome responsibilities which missiles and satellites and flight beyond the earths atmosphere and into the mysterious reaches of outer regions have imposed upon us. Who controls space controls the world.133Indeed, space was a topic. To the extent that it was a metaphor for the scientific future, outer space was also a metaphor for the profound challenges that this future presented to the status of legal knowledge. By the unparalleled force of its technological spectacles, space exploration helped establish science as a center of political and normative authority. At the same time, it opened up a new geography, the geography of the future, that seemed intelligible
only to scientific knowledge. This put the legal estate on the defensive, and challenged the traditional prerogatives of laws empire itself. The scientific frontier in outer space promoted in the popular imagination on Earth an alternative language of command, a new standard of authority and competence, and a new force for the construction of the future. As the Sputnik crisis suggests, space exploration was local, as much for the scientific culture in orbit as for the legal culture on the ground.
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AT Framework
The affirmatives knowledge is not value-neutral, its production is contingent on a specific separation of labor that privileges a small scientific and military elite, and its employment actively sustains capital Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of
Cambridge and Visiting Professor of Sociology, University of Essex and **James, Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton (Cosmic Society: Towards a sociology of the universe, pg 31-32, IWren) It should be noted that, contrary to Lerners (1991) argument, Alfred SohnRethel (1975) and Frankel (2003) have argued that this
more scientific mode of relating to the universe merely intensified rather than alleviated the alienation of the masses from the universe. Sohn-Rethels argument is that abstract, one might say objective, knowledge first arose as part of the exchange relationship in what he calls societies of appropriation or capitalist societies based on a high division of labour. The person producing a
commodity is, as Marx described, alienated from the exchange process, in which s/he comes to see his/her product in terms of an abstract exchange value, which operates independently of the needs and uses which the seller or buyer has in mind. This purely
abstract system of thought represented in the form of money (a crude approximation of the underlying principle) leads to abstract, scientific, thought. Postone (1996) has argued similarly that abstraction in general is
central to capitalist societies. The development of capital in two distinct epochs has led to corresponding developments in epistemology, according to Sohn-Rethel. First, the introduction of coinage in Ancient Greece led to Greek philosophy and mathematics. Second, the development of modern capitalism led to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scientific revolutions. He goes on to argue, and this forms a major focus of his and Lerners thesis, that the abstract form of scientific
knowledge was instrumental in legitimizing the division of mental and manual labour in modern capitalism. The argument is that the existence of this abstract system justifies the existence of an elite of scientists capable of studying the system untainted by the practical knowledge of the worker.
Davidson (1985) is also extremely critical of the development of objective scientific approaches to the universe that distance knowledge from peoples everyday experience of the universe. The latter, Davidson argues, remains Earth-centred (as in Tycho Brahes model). The result of de-centring Earth through science, for Davidson, is the creation of a cold mechanical world (ibid.: 4). There are important differences between Sohn-Rethels account and Lerners. For Lerner, Galileo, like the empiricists Copernicus and Brahe before him, represents a break from the truly abstract philosophy of Plato. It is a break alleviating a lot of the problems of the division of labour by relying on artisan and serf knowledge available to all. However, Sohn-Rethel sees Galileo as representing a distinct break from his predecessors in instituting a new form of abstracted knowledge that severely heightens the mental/manual division of labour. He points to parallels between Galileos law of inertial motion and the abstraction of the commodity exchange. Lerner does not draw out a full criticism of the relationship between capital and cosmology that replaced it. Contrary to what Lerner implies during most of the book, colonial capitalism based initially on practical knowledge of navigation (now
satellites, and possibly future capitalist exploitation of space resources) has not been an age of equality or celebration of the knowledge of the manual worker. This epoch has had its own cosmic elite of not only scientists but also engineers, and the military and the governments and corporations that control them. The scientific cosmological elite of today is still maintained by others labour. They are given the freedom to abandon the constraints of the ordinary world (Ferguson 1990: 1). Methodology must come first in order to solve cap Tumino 1 *Professor of English at Pittsburgh
(Stephen, What is Orthodox Marxism and Why it Matters Now More than Ever, Red Critique, p. online)
Any effective political theory will have to do at least two things: it will have to offer an integrated understanding of social practices and, based on such an interrelated knowledge, offer a guideline for praxis. My main argument here is that among all contesting social theories now, only Orthodox Marxism has been able to produce
an integrated knowledge of the existing social totality and provide lines of praxis that will lead to building a society free from necessity. But first I must clarify what I mean by Orthodox Marxism. Like all other modes and forms of political theory, the very theoretical identity of Orthodox Marxism is itself contestednot just from non-and anti-Marxists who question the very "real" (by which they mean the "practical" as under free-market criteria) existence of any kind of Marxism now but, perhaps more tellingly, from within the Marxist tradition itself. I will, therefore, first say what I regard to be the distinguishing marks of Orthodox Marxism and then outline a short polemical map of contestation over Orthodox Marxism within the Marxist theories now. I will end by arguing for its effectivity in bringing about a new society based not on human rights but on freedom from necessity. I will argue that
to know contemporary societyand to be able to act on such knowledgeone has to first of all know what makes the existing social totality. I will argue that the dominant social totality is based on inequality
not just inequality of power but inequality of economic access (which then determines access to health care, education, housing, diet,
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transportation, . . . ). This
systematic inequality cannot be explained by gender, race, sexuality, disability, ethnicity, or nationality. These are all secondary contradictions and are all determined by the fundamental contradiction of capitalism which is inscribed in the relation of capital and labor. All modes of Marxism now explain social inequalities primarily on the basis of these secondary contradictions and in doing soand this is my main argumentlegitimate capitalism. Why? Because such arguments authorize capitalism without gender, race, discrimination and thus accept economic inequality as an integral part of human societies. They accept a sunny capitalisma capitalism beyond capitalism. Such a society, based on cultural equality but economic inequality, has always been the not-sohidden agenda of the bourgeois leftwhether it has been called "new left," "postmarxism," or "radical democracy." This
is, by the way, the main reason for its popularity in the culture industryfrom the academy (Jameson, Harvey, Haraway, Butler,. . . ) to daily politics (Michael Harrington, Ralph Nader, Jesse Jackson,. . . ) to. . . . For all, capitalism is here to stay and the best that can be done is to make its cruelties more tolerable, more humane. This humanization (not eradication) of capitalism is the sole goal of ALL contemporary lefts (marxism, feminism, anti-racism, queeries, . . . ). Such an understanding of social inequality is
based on the fundamental understanding that the source of wealth is human knowledge and not human labor. That is, wealth is produced by the human mind and is thus free from the actual objective conditions that shape
the historical relations of labor and capital. Only Orthodox Marxism recognizes the historicity of labor and its primacy as the source of all human wealth. In this paper I argue that any emancipatory theory has to be founded on recognition of the priority of Marx's labor theory of value and not repeat the technological determinism of corporate theory ("knowledge work") that masquerades as social theory.
Debate is the critical site of contestation against capitalism Carroll 10 *founding director of the Social Justice Studies Program at the University of Victoria
(William, Crisis, movements, counter-hegemony: in search of the new, Interface 2:2, 168-198, dml) Mediatization and the struggle to democratize communication Many
of the issues at stake in the politics surrounding the form and content of communications media comprise a special instance of the struggle to reclaim the commons. The world of the early 21st century is densely networked by virtue of an unprecedented apparatus of communications, which has opened new possibilities both for bourgeois hegemony and for oppositional politics. Media now comprise a vast field of cultural struggle. In a media-saturated world, capitalist organization of communication creates a multifaceted democratic deficit, evident for instance in the failure of mainstream media to create a democratic public sphere, the
centralization of power in media corporations, inequality in media access, homogenization of media content, the undermining of communities through commodification, and the corporate enclosure of knowledge. Media activism can be read as a critical response that takes different forms depending on location in the media field. Media democrats struggle to limit
corporate power and commercial logic, to democratize media workplaces and labour processes, to develop alternative
media, and to foster more literate and critical readers of media texts. When we look at media activism on the ground we find many of the rudiments of counter-hegemonic politics. Activists see the struggle to democratize communication as a
multi-frontal war of position that needs to be waged in conjunction with other movements. Communicative democracy comprises a social vision in which the voices of citizens and communities carry into a vibrant and diverse public sphere. In pursuing this social vision on several fronts
including those of state, corporate media and lifeworld, media democrats build a new nexus among movements, a place where strategies might converge across issue areas and movement identities (Hackett and Carroll, 2006; Downing 2001 ). As a political emergent, media activism underlines the importance to counterhegemony of reclaiming or creating
the means and forms of communication necessary for subaltern groups to find their voices and to organize, both locally and translocally. The formation of organic intellectuals is substantially caught up in this struggle to break the dominant classs monopoly within the intellectual field
(Thomas 2009: 418-19). Here, the new includes a mediatized politics of everyday life, as in proliferation of alternative media (often via the internet; Atton 2009) and the diffusion of culture jamming and other practices of media literacy, yet
also a politics, focused upon state and capital, that presses for limits upon corporate power and for an opening of access to the means of communication (Hackett and Carroll 2006). The politics of media democratization is necessarily multi-frontal and intersectional. All progressive-democratic movements have an stake in these struggles; the extent to which movements take up democratic communication as a general interest is a measure their catharsis from fractured subalternities (with their characteristic foci
upon single issues and narrow constituencies) to an ethicopolitical collective will. The question of autonomy Autonomy from old-left parties and unions, and from overweening regulatory states, was cited by NSM theorists of the 1970s and 1980s as a criterial attribute of the emergent movements of late modernity. In Jean Cohens (1985) classic, and rather Americanized treatment, these
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movements were viewed as practitioners of a self-limiting identity politics that rejected largescale projects. This stylization was never unproblematic as an empirical account, and several decades
later, in the wake of neoliberalisms global triumph and in the midst of its global crisis, the appeal of self-limiting politics is embarrassingly limited. Yet autonomy remains a lasting legacy of the so-called NSMs. Autonomy informs aspects of contemporary counter-hegemonic politics at the level of everyday life, as shown in Gwyn Williamss (2008) ethnography of alterglobalization activism in the Larzac plateau of southern France. Famous since their dismantling of a McDonalds restaurant in 1999 and for the slogan, the world is not a commodity, these activists resist the hegemony of global market society by
cultivating themselves as autonomous political subjects and organizing a movement considered to be an autonomous counter-power (G. William 2008: 63). This has meant not only maintaining independence from political parties and functioning in a bottom-up or horizontal manner but cultivating in themselves and others an autonomy that partly frees them from neoliberal ideology and the power of consumer society. Here, prefiguration is grounded in a moral imperative to become
aware and to act coherently (2008:72) by living the ideals to which one aspires.5 Becoming aware is both an ongoing aspect of autonomous self-development and a movement-building praxis instantiated in a range of pedagogical activities forums, information evenings and media actions designed to provoke public debate and to persuade people join the cause (G. Williams 2008:72-3). Although activists can never be fully autonomous from the forms of power to which
they are subject, the struggle for autonomy is a crucial element in challenging hegemony and in bringing into existence what Gramsci (1971: 327) called a new conception of the world which manifests itself
in action. 6 As a sensibility that holds both visionary and strategic implications, autonomy has roots not only in NSM theory, but in historical materialism. Harry Cleaver, who introduced the notion of autonomist Marxism into English-language academia in the 1970s (Cleaver 2001; Wright 2008:113), predicated it on an agency-centred analysis of the working class, defining autonomy as
the ability of workers to define their own interests and to struggle for them to go beyond mere reaction to exploitation, or to self defined leadership and to take the offensive in ways that shape the class struggle and define the future (Cleaver 1993). The key question is how autonomy and other emergent features of activism might figure in a counter-hegemonic historical bloc. Mark Purcell,
drawing on Laclau and Mouffe (1985), suggests that relations between elements of such a formation be conceptualized in terms of equivalence, a concept that evokes relations of simultaneous interdependence and autonomy, obligation and freedom, unity and multiplicity, sameness and difference (2009: 301). The movements and interests that comprise the bloc do
not dissolve completely into it, but they move together and lean into one another. Analysis of discourse must precede analysis of policy its key to understand both how policies are formulated and how to accurately respond to them without error replication discourse necessarily shapes the ways policies are viewed and thought of meaning they are tied to what they said in the 1AC Adams 11 *Lecturer in Education and Program Director, Centre for Educational Studies, Univ. of Hull
(Paul, From ritual to mindfulness: policy and pedagogic positioning, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, January 2011, 32: 1, 57-69, dml)
With such concerns, and many others in mind, it has become fashionable to describe policy in terms of discourse. Whilst by no means an agreed field (cf. Bacchi, 2000) policy as discourse does provide grounds for further consideration
of
the interplay between policy creation and response. As a challenge to the view that policy, as a manifestation of
knowledge, arises either in the individual or in the natural world, we can consider the work of Kenneth Gergen (1995) and his proposal that all knowing arises in the social processes of language use and meaning-making. Here, rather than construe policy as the accurate expression of dispassionate, unbiased observations, such
a view shifts our relationship with policy from a means by which the individual might comprehend the significance of the policy statement in terms of truth to an understanding that the language used within the policy statements itself actively constructs the world to which it pertains. Put another way, Gergens view invites us to consider policy as having a performative function and that that presented is neither a true representation of reality nor an accurate reflection of intent. Accordingly, policy can no longer be simply said to be understood and applied. Alternatively, this perspective construes policy as a representation of the interplay between the policy text (the material embodiment of the policy document and associated forms), discursive practices involved in the production, distribution and consumption of policy, and wider social practices which delineate, for example professional and, indeed, other roles and associated activities. This view acknowledges the parts played by history and culture in determining specific ways of viewing the world whilst illuminating how understanding is dependent upon prevailing social and economic arguments (after Burr, 2003). Policy, then, should not be seen as an accurate portrayal of some
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pre-existing status but is, rather, a social construction given legitimacy through the permission it gives to speak. Policy as discourse is, therefore, an interplay between conceptual schema attached to specific historical, institutional and cultural contexts . . . [and] . . . the differential power of some actors (Bacchi, 2000, p. 52) to act. With this in mind, it is clear that professional actions undertaken in relation to policy appear, not as objective responses to positions of truth, but rather as subjective realisations borne out of cultural, historical, economic and social specificity. Policy as discourse attends to both the uses and effects of policy insomuch as it considers the influences pertaining to the creation of the policy text, the mechanisms by which this is imported into the professional lifeworld and the prevailing social conditions which form the very language used to describe the policy itself, as well as associated
roles and identities; in short, policy as social construction. This view is not new; much has been written from this perspective. On this matter, Bacchi notes the tendency of this perspective to: Concentrate on the ability of some groups rather than others to make discourse, and on some groups rather than others as effected or constituted in discourse. To put the point briefly, those who are
deemed to hold power are portrayed as the ones making discourse, whereas those who are seen as lacking power are described as constituted in discourse. (2000, p. 52) This redistribution of voice constitutes certain voices as meaningful or authoritative (Ball, 2006, p. 49). This social construction of policy requires an appreciation that the processes of problematisation and argumentation are the lifeblood of policy existence. The lenses offered by history, culture and economics through which problems to be solved are identified determine not only the mechanisms by which reality might be understood but also the very problems themselves. Further, it is through the process of argumentation that certain solutions are presented as viable alternatives. Crucially, as Hastings (1998, p.
194) notes, this highlights the instrumentality of the process of problem construction not only to successful policy making, but also to sustaining systems of belief about the nature of social reality. Problem construction is, then, as much a way of
knowing and a way of acting strategically as a form of description (Edelman, 1988, p. 36). In this regard, policy as discourse establishes a number of key principles. First, it articulates a view that problems do not exist as pre-human issues to be addressed but rather that they are the products of political reasoning located in economic, social, cultural and historical ways of viewing the world. Second, that these lenses also provide the means by which solutions, that is to say the pronouncements captured as policy imperatives, might be constructed. Third, and most importantly, policy as discourse, through its recognition of cultural, historical, economic and social specificity, constrains the scope of both policy construction and policy response (Ball, 2006). Put briefly, discourse presents a variety of representations from which action might be chosen:
Discourses are about what can be said, and thought, but also about who can speak, when, where and with what authority. Discourses embody the meaning and use of propositions and words. Thus certain possibilities for thought are constructed. (Ball, 2006, p. 48) This world-to-person fit describes the subject position, determined by the availability of dominant discourses. Interpretational options are thus taken to be both pre-existing and available to the subject. In such a view, human
agency occurs through the deployment of the subjects exercise of choice from the discourses available. In short, through the act of locating oneself within a frame of predetermined potentialities, the subject is said to exercise agentic action.
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AT Framework Epistemology First

Epistemology firstthe space industry is sustained only by the knowledge and the intellectuals complicit in propagating and normalizing the hegemonic worldview that seizing space is a natural extension of resolving capital crises Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of
Cambridge and Visiting Professor of Sociology, University of Essex and **James, Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton (Cosmic Society: Towards a sociology of the universe, pg 69, IWren)
The second way in which space is involved in hegemonic struggles is that space development and settlement are widely supported as solutions to the economic and environmental contradictions of capitalism. It has been seen as common sense that man (sic) should continue to explore and humanize the universe. But an intellectual who, to use Gramscis word, is organic to those resisting such common sense
will demonstrate the ways in which it is actually being done. It entails capital accumulation, the maintenance of class relations, the growth of a militarized industry, the withdrawal of funds from education and welfare, increased social inequalities, increased levels of nationalism and so on. Bruce Gagnon and leading members of the Global Network could be seen as organic intellectuals in this sense. Nobody has forced a particular view of common sense but it best serves the interests of
dominant social orders. It is promoted and engaged in by intellectuals who are organic to the space industry and the social movement that supports it. It also tends to be promoted by what Gramsci called traditional intellectuals who claim to be politically unattached but who, perhaps unwittingly, perpetuate the social order. Reject their truth claims without escaping their Eurocentric paradigm everything they say is suspect. Grosfoguel 11 - Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies, University of Cal. Berkley (Ramon, 2011, TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the LusoHispanic World, 1(1), Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality) NAR
The first point to discuss is the contribution of racial/ethnic and feminist subaltern perspectives to epistemological questions. The
hegemonic Eurocentric paradigms that have informed western philosophy and sciences in the modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system (Grosfoguel 2005; 2006b) for the last 500 hundred years assume a universalistic, neutral, objective point of view. Chicana and black feminist scholars (Moraga and Anzalda 1983; Collins 1990) as well as Third World scholars inside and outside the United States (Dussel 1977) reminded us that we always speak from a particular location in the power structures. Nobody escapes the class, sexual, gender, spiritual, linguistic, geographical, and racial hierarchies of the modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system. As feminist scholar Donna Haraway (1988) states, our
knowledges are always situated. Black feminist scholars called this perspective afro-centric epistemology (Collins 1990) (which is not equivalent to the afrocentrist perspective) while Latin American Philosopher of Liberation Enrique Dussel called it geopolitics of knowledge (Dussel 1977) and, following Fanon (1967) and Anzalda (1987), I will use the term bodypolitics of knowledge. This is not only a question about social values in knowledge production or the fact that our knowledge is always partial. The main point here is the locus of enunciation, that is, the geo-political and body-political location of the subject that speaks. In Western philosophy and sciences the subject that speaks is always hidden, concealed, erased from the analysis. The ego-politics of
knowledge of Western philosophy has always privilege the myth of a non-situated Ego. Ethnic/racial/gender/sexual epistemic location and the subject that speaks are always decoupled. By delinking ethnic/racial/gender/sexual epistemic location from the subject that speaks, Western philosophy and sciences are able to produce a myth about a Truthful universal knowledge that covers up, that is, conceals who is speaking as well as the geo-political and body-political epistemic location in the structures of colonial power/knowledge from which the subject speaks. It is important here to distinguish the epistemic location from the social location. The fact that one is socially located in the oppressed side of power relations does not automatically mean that he/she is epistemically thinking from a subaltern epistemic location. Precisely, the success of the modern/colonial
worldsystem consists in making subjects that are socially located in the oppressed side of the colonial difference, to think epistemically like the ones on the dominant positions. Subaltern epistemic perspectives are knowledge coming
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from below that produces a critical perspective of hegemonic knowledge in the power relations involved. I am not claiming an epistemic populism where knowledge produced from below is automatically an epistemic subaltern knowledge. What I am claiming is that all knowledges are epistemically located in the dominant or the subaltern side of the power relations and that this is related to the geo- and body-politics of knowledge. The disembodied and unlocated neutrality and objectivity of the ego-politics of knowledge is a Western myth. Failing to question the epistemology of the aff leads to extinction. Bonta 9 - Associate Professor of Geography
(Mark, The Multitude and its Doppelgnger: An Exploration of Global Smooth Space, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 2009, 8 (2), 245-277.) NAR
We are fortunate, in a sense, to have emerged since 9-11 into a dichotomized geopolitical discourse, at least on the part of the US, where we can understand the desired goal of Empire for a group of operators,
popularly referred to as Neocons, who have had innumerable successes, after a fashion, as part of the Global War on Terror. Their network of thinktanksprime among them the Project for a New American Century and the American Enterprise Institutehave
made available online numerous policy statements and grand plans, most notably
Rebuilding Americas Defenses: Strategy, forces, and resources for a new century (Project for a New American Century, 2000). In
this grand project, there is much reinvention of Cold War nemeses, and a renewed focus on Pax Americana, Henry Luces imperial peace to be enforced, eventually, by what the Pentagon has called Full Spectrum Dominance (Shelton, 2000; henceforth FSD). Complementing the thinktanks online literature is the US Defense
Departments wealth of reports and plans at Defense Link; the US Air Force also provides numerous online reports relevant to the FSD vision (see US Air Force, 2003); the Federation of American Scientists website includes one of the most intriguing of these visions, Air Force 2025 (US Air Force, 1996)just the terms embedded in the chapter titles give some idea of this particular future: Worldwide Information Control System, Global Battlespace Dominance, Brilliant Warrior, Peacespace Dominance, Start-Tek [sic]-Exploiting the Final Frontier-Counterspace Operations, Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather. We should certainly remain unsure whether these are also the desired goals of non-American Empire and of the global market. Mindful of totalizing conspiracy theory, we should emphasize the contrasts between the relative mindlessness of
capital flows and the clearly conspiratorial pouvoir of the Neocons militarism (not underestimating the hidden hand of the market, however!). Nevertheless, the success and the sheer publicity of the latters synarchical constructive chaos is an anchoring point among the cognitive dissonances of Empires subjects a bold plan that gives us some idea of the black hole of macro-fascism that is inspired, one suspects, by more than profit and the bottom line. We could say, preliminarily, that FSD is the threat of the constitution of a Deleuzean Full Body, an end-state of global organization (as opposed to the Body without Organs). We need to examine the evidence for this to be able to state that the multitude has not infrequently been duped (recently, for example, in the color-coded revolutions in the Ukraine, Georgia, and elsewhere). We will also see that the achievement of FSD appears to necessitate clashes with deep alternate centers of pouvoir such as China and Russia, and thus the black hole, or perhaps wormhole, of global thermonuclear conflict, rather than Pax Americana, could be the result (for the threats posed by China and Russia, see Project for a New American Century,
2000 and PNAC sections on East Asia and NATO/Europe). While examining the precursors below, it is worth remembering that the (white mans) burden of civilization for the West is centuries old, and dreams of world conquest (e.g. magus John Dees angelicallysuggested role for Elizabethan England: French, 1987) are nothing new. What is new, perhaps, is the possibility of
attainment of global striation at a higher level of perfection through smooth dominance over submarine space, ocean space, land space, airspace, outer space, and cyber space, as FSD would have
it.
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AT Framework (Mars Affs)

In the context of Mars colonization your language is not neutral the way they frame the plan is inextricably tied to plan action, they have to defend their reps Collis and Graham 9 *Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication in the Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland
University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia AND **Director of the Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation and Professor in Culture and Communication at QUT (Christy and Phil, Political geographies of Mars: A history of Martian management, MANAGEMENT & ORGANIZATIONAL HISTORY Vol 4(3): 247261, dml) The European imperial explorers who began excursions five centuries ago shifted expeditions to the new world from the domain of speculation to that of physical and political practice. Similarly, Mars has moved out of science fiction and onto national
budgets and the agendas of international legal bodies. Vigorous scientific, technical, and political energy is being channelled into the possibility of transforming Marss physical geography, yet, as Linda Billings (2006) asserts, policy makers in Space-faring nations in particular have given scant attention to the political spatialities of the planet (2006). 7 It is these spatialities that are currently in flux, and not Marss physical terrain. We have the opportunity to explore Mars, as Fox (2006, 225) writes, as not just a matter of what we can do, but also what we should do. And it is political spatialities that will ultimately underpin any future activities on the planet. In his quasifictional study of Martian colonization, Kim Stanley Robinson (1994, 367) points up the
importance of attending to these Martian spatialities now: noosphere preceded biosphere the layer of thought first enwrapping the silent planet from afar, inhabiting it with stories and plans and dreams.
Political spatialities, along with fictional representations and media constructions, constitute Marss current cultural geography, its areology. The task of this article has been to provide an analysis of its uneven
terrain in the context of western political economic trajectories. The task of the larger project of which this article is an early part, however, is only barely initiated. What comes next is an application of lessons learned from terrestrial
colonialism of the past to Martian spatiality in its current, precolonial stage. It is clear that we should
seek some ethical guidelines in advance before we repeat our sorry history elsewhere, write McArthur and Boran (2004, 149). Two specific questions emerge from this article, questions that are not yet answered: should Mars be regarded as a terra communis, a terra nullius, or a space of intrinsic value? Second, should Mars be claimable space, and if so, how can it be
transformed into a possession, and by whom? Martian colonization is beginning: it is time, before we begin to build, to attend to it critically.
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AT Batra Unqualified
Rishees dad is a genius FW Weekly 08
(Fort Worth Weekly, written by Kendall Anderson, a Minneapolis-based journalist who has written for Fort Worth Weekly and The Dallas Morning News., Prophet of Boom (and Bust): Now will they listen to Ravi Batra?, http://archive.fwweekly.com/content.asp?article=7369, IWren)
The worst economic cycle in more than half a century has everyone from struggling homeowners to former Federal Reserve chairmen shaking their heads in disbelief. Jobs are disappearing, retail sales are in the toilet, bankruptcies of
major companies are a daily occurrence, and an unprecedented, massive government bailout has failed thus far to unfreeze the credit system that is the lifeblood of U.S. capitalism. Even the iconic architect of the current economic system himself, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, told a Congressional panel several months ago that his deregulation and debt-is-OK approach was mistaken. But what exactly is causing the current worldwide financial meltdown, Greenspan said, hes still trying to figure out. In Dallas, Ravi Batra is also shaking his head but for different reasons. The veteran Southern Methodist
University economics professor saw this storm approaching years ago and has written several books, including a couple of best-sellers, about what the country should have been doing to handle it. He wrote Greenspans Fraud in 2005. And in his 2006 book, The New Golden Age The Coming Revolution Against Political Corruption and Economic Chaos, he predicted an
economic depression and the rise of a charismatic leader who might help dig the country out of that hole. In fact, the 65-year-old Indian-born academic has an amazing record of economic and social forecasting going back several decades, from the rise of Islam, which he predicted in the 1960s, to the mergers booms and soaring stock prices of the 90s, and the stock market crash of 2000. In the futurist field, where a 65 to 70 percent accuracy rate is acceptable, he has a nearly 90 percent record of being right. Ravi is a phenomenon the best predictive record of any economist, past or present and he does it all by reference to recorded, empirical facts, not paradigm [or] ideology, said Prof. Rajani Kannepalli Kanth, a visiting scholar at Harvard University who
specializes in political economy and social anthropology.
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**AFF STUFF**
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Aff Gibson-Graham
Youre doing it wrongrepresentations of capitalism as hegemonically dominant preclude the realization of actual social change. Changing this view is a pre-requisite to the alt. Gibson-Graham 06 J.K., pen name shared by feminist economic geographers Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson
(The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, pg 2-5, IWren) The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) problematizes "capitalism" as an economic and social descriptor.4 Scrutinizing what might be seen as throwaway uses of the term - passing references, for example, to the capitalist system or to global capitalism - as well as systematic and deliberate attempts to represent capitalism as a central and organizing feature of modern social experience, the book selectively traces the discursive origins of a widespread understanding: that capitalism
is the hegemonic, or even the only, present form of economy and that it will continue to be so in the proximate future. It follows from this prevalent though not ubiquitous view that noncapitalist economic sites, if they exist at all, must inhabit the social margins; and, as a corollary, that deliberate attempts to develop noncapitalist economic practices and institutions must take place in the social interstices, in the realm of experiment, or in a visionary space of revolutionary social replacement. Representations of capitalism are a potent constituent of the anticapitalist imagination, providing images of what is to be resisted and changed as well as intimations of the strategies, techniques, and possibilities of changing it. For this reason, depictions of "capitalist hegemony" deserve a particularly skeptical reading. For in the vicinity of these representations, the very idea of a noncapitalist economy takes the shape of an unlikelihood or even an impossibility. It becomes difficult to entertain a vision of the prevalence and vitality of noncapitalist economic forms, or of daily or partial replacements of capitalism by noncapitalist economic practices, or of capitalist retreats and reversals. In this sense, "capitalist hegemony" operates not only as a constituent of, but also as a brake upon, the anticapitalist imagination.5 What difference might it make to release that brake and allow an anticapitalist economic imaginary to develop unrestricted?6 If we were to dissolve the image that looms in the economic foreground, what shadowy economic forms might come forward? In these questions we can discursive artifact we call "capitalist hegemony" is a complex effect of a wide variety of discursive and nondiscursive conditions.7 In this book we focus on the practices and preoccupations of discourse, tracing some of the different, even incompatible, representations of capitalism that can be collated within this fictive summary
identify the broad outlines of our project: to discover or create a world of economic difference, and to populate that world with exotic creatures that become, upon inspection, quite local and familiar (not to mention familiar beings that are not what they seem). The
representati n. These depictions have their origins in the diverse traditions of Marxism, classical and contemporary political economy, academic social science, modern historiography, popular economic and social thought, western philosophy and metaphysics, indeed, in an endless array of texts, traditions and infrastructures of meaning. In the chapters that follow, only a few of these are examined for the ways in which they have sustained a vision of capitalism as the dominant form of
economy, or have contributed to the possibility or durability of such a vision. But the point should emerge none the less clearly: the virtually unquestioned dominance of capitalism can be seen as a complex product of a variety of discursive commitments, including but not limited to organicist social conceptions, heroic
historical narratives, evolutionary scenarios of social development, and essentialist, phallocentric, or binary patterns of thinking. It is through these discursive figurings and alignments that capitalism is constituted as large, powerful, persistent, active, expansive, progressive, dynamic, transformative; embracing, penetrating, disciplining, colonizing, constraining; systemic, self-reproducing, rational, lawful, self-rectifying; organized and organizing, centered and centering; originating, creative, protean; victorious and ascendant; selfidentical, self-expressive, full, definite, real, positive, and capable of conferring identity and meaning.8 The argument revisited: it is the way capitalism has been "thought" that has made it so difficult for people to
imagine its supersession.9 It is therefore the ways in which capitalism is known that we wish to delegitimize and displace.
The process is one of unearthing, of bringing to light images and habits of understanding that constitute "hegemonic capitalism" at the intersection of a set of representations. This we see as a first step toward theorizing capitalism without representing dominance as a natural and inevitable feature of its being. At the same time, we hope to foster conditions under which the economy might become less subject to definitional closure. If it were possible to inhabit a heterogeneous and open-ended
economic space whose identity was not fixed or singular (the space potentially to be vacated by a capitalism that is necessarily and naturally hegemonic) then a vision of noncapitalist economic practices as existing and widespread might be able to be born; and in the context of such a vision, a new anticapitalist
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perhaps but one worth pursuing.
politics might emerge, a noncapitalist politics of class (whatever that may mean) might take root and flourish. A long shot Representing capitalism as a bounded, monistic entity precludes noncapital alternatives and furthers hegemonic, capitalocentric modes of thought Gibson-Graham 06 J.K., pen name shared by feminist economic geographers Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson
(The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, pg 43-45, IWren) What interests me most here is the question of why the economism of which capitalism is the bearer is so difficult to moderate or excise. And what may account for the economic monism or hegemonism that accompanies most
representations of capitalist society and development? Here a partial answer may be found in the metaphysics of identity that Althusser sought to undermine. Operating under an "imperative of unity" (Hazel 1994: 4) western conceptions of identity entail both the unity of an object with itself (its selfresemblance) and its one-to one relation with the sign by which it is known: one word with one meaning, corresponding to one thing. To such an essentialist reading of identity "capitalism" designates an underlying commonality in the objects to which it refers. Thus we are not surprised to encounter a capitalism that is essentially the same in different times and places (despite the fact that sameness as the precondition of meaning is exactly what various structuralist and poststructuralist traditions have sought to undermine.) By virtue of their identification as capitalist settings, different societies become the sites of a resemblance or a replication. Complex processes of social development - commodification, industrialization, proletarianization, internationalization - become legible as the signatures of capitalism rather than as unique and decentered determinations. When capitalism exists as a sameness, noncapitalism can only be subordinated or rendered invisible (like traditional or domestic economic forms). Noncapitalism is to capitalism as woman to man: an insufficiency until and unless it is released from the binary metaphysics of identity (where A is a unified self-identical being that excludes what it is not).34 If capitalism/man can be understood as multiple and specific; if it is not a unity but a heterogeneity,
not a sameness but a difference; if it is always becoming what it is not; if it incorporates difference within its decentered being; then noncapitalism/woman is released from its singular and subordinate status. There is no singularity of Form to constitute noncapitalism/woman as a simple negation or as the recessive ground against which the positive figure of capitalism/man is defined. To conceptualize capitalism/man as multiple and different is thus a
condition of theorizing noncapitalism/woman as a set of specific, definite forms of being. It is easy
to appreciate the strategic effectiveness of reading the texts of capitalism deconstructively, discovering the surplus and contradictory meanings of the term, the places where capitalism is inhabited and constituted by noncapitalism, where it escapes the logic of sameness
and is unable to maintain its ostensible self-identity (see chapter 10). But overdetermination can be used as an additional anti-essentialist theoretical strategy to complement and supplement the strategy of deconstruction. Taken together these strategies have the potential to undermine capitalism's discursive "hegemony" and to reconceptualize its role in social determination. Representations of society and economy cannot themselves be centered on a decentered and formless entity that is itself always different from itself, and that obtains its shifting and contradictory identity from the always changing exteriors that overdetermine it. Just as postmodernism obtains its power from modernism (its power to undermine and destabilize, to oppose and contradict),35 so can an overdeterminist approach realize its power and strategic capacity by virtue of its oppositional relation to the preeminent modes of understanding both language categories and identity/being. To the extent that we conceptualize entities as autonomous, bounded, and discrete (constituted by the exclusion of their outsides), and as the unique referents that give each sign a stable and singular meaning, to that extent does the strategy of thinking overdetermination have the power to destabilize theoretical discourse and reposition the concepts within it.36 Through the lens of overdetermination, identities (like capitalism) can become visible as entirely constituted by their "external" conditions. With an overdeterminist strategy we may empty capitalism of its universal attributes and evacuate the essential and invariant logics that allow it to hegemonize
the economic and social terrain. Overdetermination enables us to read the causality that is capitalism as coexisting with an infinity of other determinants, none of which can definitively be said to be less or more significant, while repositioning capitalism itself as an effect. That the capitalist economy often escapes reconceptualization and so continues to function
as an organizing moment, and an origin of meaning and causation in social theory, cannot be understood as a simple theoretical omission. It is also a reassertion of the hegemonic conceptions of language and determination that overdetermination is uniquely positioned to contradict. It is a testimony to the power of overdetermination
that it has allowed certain post-Althusserian theorists to envision an "economy" that is not singular, centered, ordered or selfconstituting, and that therefore is not capitalism's exclusive domain.37 But it testifies to the resilience of the
dominant conceptual context (it should perhaps be called a mode of thought) in which the objects of thought
exist independently of thought and of each other that an autonomous economy still exists and operates in social representation. One can say that representations of the capitalist economy as an independent entity informed by logics and exclusive of its exteriors have
allowed capitalism to hegemonize both the economic and the social field. One can also say, however, that overdetermination is a discursive strategy that can potentially empty, fragment,
decenter and open the economy, liberating discourses of economy and society from capitalism's embrace. But that process, far from being over or even well on its way, has hardly begun.
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Aff Gibson-Graham Link Cap as Subject

Their representation of capitalism as a subject that acts on the social field denies the true situational and external factors that create capitalism in individual contexts. Until its retheorized as the object of social relations it will always recreate itself dominantly in social discoursethat turns their advocacy Gibson-Graham 06 J.K., pen name shared by feminist economic geographers Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson
(The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, pg 38-39, IWren) This representation
of capitalism in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is notable not only for the extraordinary transformative capacity with which capitalism is endowed - it is given sole responsibility for a thoroughgoing historical transformation - but also for the familiarity and unremarkability of the depiction. In a diverse array of texts and traditions, capitalism is rendered as the "subject" of history, an agent that makes history but is not correspondingly "made." If it is affected and shaped by its social contexts, it is not equivalently "subjected." Instead it claims the terrain of the social as the arena of its self-realization.26 While undoing the closed and singular social totality, and unfixing society from its
economic base, Laclau and Mouffe leave the economy theoretically untouched. It remains positive and homogeneous, inhabited by a set of logics that increasingly define the character of the social landscape (Diskin and Sandier 1993). As the inadvertent result
of their theoretical silence, the economy has a fixed (if atheoretically specified) identity and capitalism itself has a fixed and transparent (or generic) meaning. Its definition and operations are independent of articulatory practices and discursive fixings; it can therefore be seen as "an abstraction with concrete effects" (in Laclau and Mouffe's wonderful critical phrase) rather than as a discursive moment that is relationally defined. In the rendition of
recent economic and social history quoted above, for example, capitalism inhabits the present as a concrete embodiment of its abstract description. Its internal imperatives of growth and expansion are manifest in history as its
external form. No "exteriors" (discourses in which it has other meanings) operate to subvert its unity and self-resemblance. The immutable logics at the core of its being are independent of its social contexts (they always operate and are not fully susceptible to being abridged). This gives capitalism, and by extension the economy, a disproportionate effectivity. Unlike other social practices and processes in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, capitalism both has and is an essence. It is a cause without being to the same extent an effect. In this sense it exists outside overdetermination.27 Laclau and Mouffe's capitalism is the protagonist of a unified narrative of development that
sets the political stage. But the capitalism they describe, and the heroic role they assign to it, is a remnant or borrowing (from other parts of the Marxian tradition) rather than a product of their own theoretical elaborations. For various reasons, including the "retreat" from economism inspired by Althusser, it is now the case that post-Marxist and cultural theorists often avoid
constituting the economy as a theoretical object (perhaps theoretical avoidance is anti-economism's highest form.) By itself, this is not a fatal "omission" or a necessary source of theoretical deformations, since it would be impossible to problematize every social dimension and practice. But the "failure" to theorize the economy is inevitably associated with certain problematic effects. The language of social instances that divides society into economy, polity, and culture (or some other such partition) continues to function as the general conceptual frame within which particular social discourses are inscribed. Unless the economy is explicitly written out, or until it is deconstructively or positively rewritten, it will write itself into every text of social theory, in familiar and powerful ways. When it is not overtly theorized, it defines itself as capitalism because it lacks another name.28
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Aff Perm
Critique alone fails integration of actual solutions key Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
Explanatory critique can only go so far. Philosophy and sociology are only tools for uncovering how reality is structured and for freeing up the discussion of feasible alternatives. It will take much hard work and politics on a mass scale to forge new social alliances, counter-hegemonic ideologies and space projects that benefit oppressed populations. The ultimate aim of this must be a relationship with the universe that
does not further empower the already powerful.
The alt alone is coopted you need a multitude of standpoints means the perm solves Carroll 10 *founding director of the Social Justice Studies Program at the University of Victoria
(William, Crisis, movements, counter-hegemony: in search of the new, Interface 2:2, 168-198, dml)
Just as hegemony has been increasingly organized on a transnational basis through the globalization
of Americanism, the construction of global governance institutions, the emergence of a transnational capitalist class and so on (Soederberg 2006; Carroll 2010) counter-hegemony has also taken on transnational features that go
beyond the classic organization of left parties into internationals. What Sousa Santos (2006) terms the rise of a global left is evident in specific movementbased campaigns, such as the successful international effort in 1998
to defeat the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI); in initiatives such as the World Social Forum, to contest the terrain of global civil society; and in the growth of transnational movement organizations and of a democratic globalization network, counterpoised to neoliberalisms transnational historical bloc, that address issues of North-South solidarity and coordination (Smith 2008:24). As I have suggested elsewhere (Carroll 2007), an incipient war of position is at work here a bloc of
oppositional forces to neoliberal globalization encompassing a wide range of movements and identities and that is global in nature, transcending traditional national boundaries (Butko 2006: 101). These
moments of resistance and transborder activism do not yet combine to form a coherent historical bloc around a counter-hegemonic project. Rather, as Marie-Jose Massicotte suggests, we are witnessing the emergence and re-making of
political imaginaries, which often lead to valuable localized actions as well as greater transborder solidarity
(2009: 424). Indeed, Gramscis adage that while the line of development is international, the origin point is national, still has currency. Much of the energy of anti-capitalist politics is centred within what Raymond Williams (1989) called militant particularisms localized struggles that, left to themselves are easily dominated by the power of capital to coordinate accumulation across universal but fragmented space (Harvey 1996: 32). Catharsis, in this context, takes on a spatial character. The scaling up of militant particularisms requires alliances across
interrelated scales to unite a diverse range of social groupings and thereby spatialize a Gramscian war of
position to the global scale (Karriem 2009: 324). Such alliances, however, must be grounded in local conditions and aspirations. Eli Friedmans (2009) case study of two affiliated movement organizations in Hong Kong and mainland China, respectively, illustrates the limits of transnational activism that radiates from advanced capitalism to exert external pressure on behalf of subalterns in the global South. Friedman recounts how a campaign by the Hong Kong-based group of Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior to empower Chinese mainland workers producing goods for Hong Kong Disneyland failed due to the lack of local mobilization by workers themselves. Yet the same group, through its support for its ally, the mainland-based migrant workers association, has helped facilitate self-organization on the shop floor. In the former case, well-intentioned practices of solidarity reproduced a paternalism that failed to inspire local collective action; in the latter, workers taking direct action on their own behalf, with external support, led to psychological empowerment and movement mobilization (Friedman 2009: 212). As a rule, the
more such solidarity work involves grassroots initiatives and participation, the greater is the likelihood that workers from different countries will learn from each other, enabling transnational counter-hegemony to gain a foothold (Rahmon and Langford 2010: 63). Perm solvesonly combining both hard science and social insight can reveal the link between the two. Reducing everything to social constructionism is counterproductive.
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Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at
(Cosmic Society: Towards a sociology of the universe, pg 41, IWren) The physical and natural sciences have often historically denied that their attempts to know the realities with which they are concerned are in any way dependent on the social world. The ideal of science is of an objective discipline that
is value-free and guided by its own criteria of progress. The social influences on the theories and methods of science are therefore ignored. Likewise, in the social sciences in the last few decades there has often been a suggestion that our understandings of the physical and natural worlds are mere social constructions, a product of the society in which they were created, thus privileging the kind of knowledge held by the social sciences over that of other disciplines. But as Bruno Latour says, whilst explaining the importance of material reality, it is hard to reduce the entire cosmos to a grand narrative, the physics of subatomic particles to a text, subway systems to rhetorical devices, all social structures to discourse (Latour 1993: 64). We maintain that, in order to understand the dialectic between social and physical worlds, an ontology is necessary that explains how insights from both the social and physical sciences can be combined. We recognize that causal mechanisms operate on a number of different levels within the universe, and argue that the job of the social scientist is to work with the knowledge produced by physicists and the like, combining that with sociological understanding. The result of this should be a theory that reduces the universe to neither the merely physical nor the purely social. These points are related to the fundamental tenets of
critical realism as outlined by Roy Bhaskar and others (Bhaskar 1986, 1997, 1998; Archer et al. 1998) (see Box 1.1). Unfortunately, the ongoing attempt by scientists to construct a theory of everything runs counter to this kind of ontology.
Autonomous anti-capital movements failonly combining social mobilization with political action can unite large populations and create a political driving force
Callinicos and Nineham 07 - *Alex Callinicos, Director of the Centre for European Studies at Kings College London,
Editor of International Socialism AND ** Chris Nineham, founding member of the UK Stop the War Coalition, former drummer for the indie pop band The June Brides, helped mobilize thousands in protests in Genoa (At an impasse? Anti-capitalism and the social forums today, 2 July 07, in the International Journal of Socialism, http://www.isj.org.uk/?id=337, IWren)
This understanding has to involve an open break with the ideology of autonomous social movements. Too often the left has taken its stand within the framework of that ideology, whether for tactical reasons or from principled agreement. But a break is required by an honest appreciation of the interplay between political parties and social movements. The truth is that cooperation between the two actually strengthens both. However much retrospect is coloured by Bertinottis
subsequent right turn, the high points of the European movement at Genoa and Florence were informed by this cooperation, involving not merely Rifondazione but also smaller parties of the radical left such as the LCR and the Socialist Workers Party as well as more radical elements of Italys centre-left Left Democrats. The same is true at a global level. The peak so far reached by the WSF took place, not at any of the Porto Alegre Forums, but in Mumbai in January 2004, infused as it was by both a strong anti-imperialist consciousness and the movements of Indias vast poor. But the two key organisations of the Indian leftthe Communist Party (Marxist) and the Communist Party of Indiaalongside various Maoist organisations, played a critical role both in making the forum possible and in restraining themselves from trying to dominate the forum or competing too openly among themselves. An honest reappraisal of the relationship between parties and movements would allow the social forums to play to their strengths. The two most successful forumsFlorence and Mumbaiwere ones where opposition to the war on terror was a dominant theme. Saying this does not mean returning to the tedious and sterile argument either the war or the social question. Opposition to both neoliberalism and war are constitutive themes of
the anti-capitalist movement. But recognition of both the principled significance and the mobilising power of anti-imperialism needs to be built into how the social forums operate. This
was proved by the success of last years polycentric WSF in Caracas, Venezuela. It was taken for granted among the tens of thousands of mainly Latin American activists assembled there that the US poses a real and present threat to the gains being made by movements in Bolivia, Venezuela and Ecuador. President Hugo Chvez echoed many others when he spoke there of the importance of the movement against the Iraq war in weakening the USs ability to act in what it regards traditionally as its own backyard. Yet the Caracas forum also showed up the limitations of the WSF process. It should have been possible, for example, to launch a very high
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profile, high powered campaign from the forum calling on all the movements round the world to pledge defence of the gains of the Chavista experience so far. Many present were suggesting it. But because of the autonomist principles so jealously guarded by the WSF leadership, no such centralised initiative was taken. In breaking out of this impasse, it will be necessary to define precisely what the radical left is within the movement. This is no simple matter. The big Indian Communist parties, despite the very positive role they played in the Mumbai WSF, participate in neoliberal coalitions at the all-India and state levels: the Left Front government in West Bengal has violently clashed with workers and peasants in recent months. The sorry record of Rifondazione has already been discussed. A much more principled organisation, the LCR, has kept aloof from the anti-capitalist movement as an organisation, because of its acceptance of a version of the ideology of autonomous social movements (although individual LCR members such as Christophe Aguiton, Pierre Rousset and Sophie Zafari have played important roles in the movement at global and/or European levels). Documents of the left within the movement tend to espouse versions of radical reformism. The Bamako Appeals first plank is, For a multipolar world founded on peace, LAW and negotiation.26 Amins pronouncements are sometimes redolent of nostalgia for the high tide of Third World nationalism between the 1950s and 1970s: The reconstruction of a front of the countries and peoples of the South is one of the fundamental conditions for the emergence of another world not based on imperialist domination.27 Another important figure on the left of the movement, Walden Bello of Focus on the Global South, shows a similar approach in his calls for deglobalisation.28 Such formulations do not sufficiently address the reality that confronting imperialism as a system will require global social transformation based on the collective power and organisation of the oppressed and exploited in the North as well as the South. None of this should prevent cooperation among
different forces on the left seeking to give the anti-capitalist movement a more coherent and strategically focused direction. Such cooperation is essential. But it needs to be accompanied by open debate about the nature of the enemy that we are confronted with and of the alternatives that we should be seeking.29 Striking the right balance between disagreement and cooperation once again requires a break with the ideology of autonomous social movements. This ideology conceives social movements as a neutral space somehow beyond politics. But fighting neoliberalism and war is necessarily a highly political affair, and nowhere is free of the antagonisms of wider capitalist society. The development of the movements necessarily generates political disagreements that cannot be kept separate from party organisations. The emergence of new anti-capitalist political formations that are at least partly the product of
movements of resistancePortugals Left Bloc, the Left Party in Germany, Respect in Britainshows the extent to which activists recognise the need for a political voice as part of the development of opposition to neoliberalism and war. We believe that the
concept of the united front, developed by the revolutionary Marxist tradition, provides a better guide to building democratic, dynamic movements than does the model that has prevailed so far. A united
front involves the coming together of different forces around a common but limited platform of action. Precisely because they are different, these forces will have disagreements about political programme; they may also differ over how to pursue the common actions that have brought them together. But so long as they come together round limited and relatively specific aims, such alliances can be politically inclusive and maximise the chances of practical campaigning agreement. Because they are focused round action, they can be a testing ground for different tactics and strategies. This is the way to break movements away from
abstract position taking or sectarian point scoring, so providing a framework in which political debate and practical organising can fruitfully interplay. Constructing such united fronts is not easy: it requires initiative and clear leadership on the one hand, and openness and humility on the other. But at a time when the anger against neoliberalism is growing everywhere and so many people are reassessing their political loyalties, it seems to us that the anti-capitalist left needs urgently to try such methods if it is to reach out and connect with its potential audience. There is unlikely to be agreement between the different tendencies in the movement in the short or medium term over general political alternatives. But we can reach constructive agreement on the many issuesopposition to neoliberalism and warthat unite a large spectrum of forces. It is precisely this kind of unity in action that many people are looking for in the current situation. Through the experience of such campaigning, new political coalitions can emerge. Moreover, the left
within the movement, whether revolutionary or reformist, should working together in order to fight to give the movement a more strategic and focused direction.
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Aff Perm Reformism Good

Reformism from with-in solves Dixon 1 Activist and founding member of Direct Action Network
Summer, Chris, Reflections on Privilege, Reformism, and Activism, Online
we need revolutionary strategy that links diverse, everyday struggles and demands to long-term radical objectives, without sacrificing either. Of course, this isn't to say that every so-called 'progressive' ballot initiative or organizing campaign is necessarily radical or strategic. Reforms are not all created equal. But some can fundamentally shake systems of power, leading to enlarged gains and greater space for further advances. Andre Gorz, in his seminal book Strategy for Labor, refers to these as "non-reformist" or "structural" reforms. He
To bolster his critique of 'reformism,' for instance, he critically cites one of the examples in my essay: demanding authentic contends, "a struggle for non-reformist reforms--for anti-capitalist reforms--is one which does not base its validity and its right to exist on capitalist needs, criteria, and rationales. A non-reformist reform is determined not in terms of what can be, but what should be."
Look to history for examples: the end of slavery, the eight-hour workday, desegregation. All were born from long, hard struggles, and none were endpoints. Yet they all struck at the foundations of power (in these cases, the state, white supremacy, and capitalism), and in the process, they created new prospects for revolutionary change. Now consider contemporary struggles: amnesty for undocumented immigrants, socialized health care, expansive environmental protections, indigenous sovereignty. These and many more are arguably non-reformist reforms as well. None will single-handedly dismantle capitalism or other systems of power, but each has the potential to escalate struggles and sharpen social contradictions. And we shouldn't misinterpret these efforts as simply meliorative incrementalism, making 'adjustments' to a fundamentally flawed system. Anti-reformism dooms any movement away from capitalism Burrows 1 author and publisher from the SMAC lecture series New Colonist
Paul, http://www.newcolonist.com/altcap.html
I think that if we want to build a popular movement, and create an alternative to capitalism, we need to start by asking such questions, and by articulating them in a language thats real. (Not many
people are interested in the subtleties of the dialectical relationship between base and superstructure. Get real!) From an organizing perspective alone, we need to recognize that the language we use, the mannerisms, style, and tone we adopt, is at least as important as the substance of our message. We need to have a little humility
we need to be a little less attached to our conclusions, a little more questioning of our assumptions, a little less quick with our judgements and dismissals. Instead of saying everyone else isnt revolutionary enough (while we sit on our ass waiting for the Revolution; pure but alone), we need to look in the bloody mirror. We need to ask ourselves What are we really doing to create a welcoming movement, a culture of resistance; what are we really doing to foster solidarity; when was the last time I reached out to someone who didnt already share my politics; when was the last time I actually had an impact on someone? Instead of saying those young anarchists dont know how to build institutions
(and then calling them reformist or parochial or bourgeois when they do), the Old Left needs to recognize that all the same criticisms apply equally to themselves. In addition to saying talk minus action equals zero, younger activists need to simultaneously pay more attention to history, theory, and the experiences of veteran activists. Talk minus action is zero, but its also true that action minus well-thought-out ideas and principles can be less than zero. It can be damaging to individual people, and it can hinder the growth of a radical movement. Ultimately, we need to be less concerned about the alleged failings and ignorance of others, and more concerned about our own political relevance. The entire Left, progressive, activist community (young and old, socialist or not) needs to build or expand upon its own institutions, and more importantly, the alternatives we create must embody the values we profess to hold.
Instead of saying Anything short of complete Revolution is reformist (and then going home to watch TV), we need to recognize that no revolution begins with the overthrow of the State. The dismantling or seizure of the State is usually a reflection of a deep revolution already occurring at the grassroots,
community and workplace level. The Spanish Revolution of 1936-39 didnt just happen because the Spanish were more radical or committed than we are. It was the culmination of almost 70 years of organizing, making mistakes, building a popular base. Pre-existing structures and worker organizations made possible a workers takeover of much of the Spanish economy (especially in Catalonia). Participation in radical unions, factory committees, and collectives for decades, enabled Spanish workers to develop knowledge of their enterprises, a sense of their own competence, and gave them direct experience with collective organizational principles. The struggle of the Spanish anarchists and communists offers many lessonsnot the least of which is that revolution is a long-term agenda. Younger activists especially need to take this seriously, because they tend to
Unrealistic expectations are a fast road to burnout and despair. At the same time, however, observing that the state-capitalist system is powerful, and believing that revolution is a long-term agenda,
think that militancy alone (regardless of popular support) will bring about a fast demise of capitalism.
is not an excuse to stuff our nests, or avoid direct action. As Gramsci pointed out we need to maintain an optimism of will, even if we have a pessimism of mind. In other words, we need to strike a balance between hope and realitysomething that is absolutely necessary, if our efforts are to be sustained beyond youthful idealism into the rest of our lives. We need to think hard about the meaning of solidarity. Solidarity is NOT about supporting those who share your precise politics. Its about supporting those who struggle against injusticeeven if their assumptions, methods, politics, and goals differ from our own. Any anarchist who says they wont support Cuban solidarity efforts, or could care less about the U.S. embargo, because the Cuban revolution is Statist and authoritarian, is in my opinion, full of shit. (But this doesnt imply that we should turn a blind eye to human rights violations in Cuba, just because theyre relatively non-existent compared to the rest of Latin America (or Canada for that matter). It doesnt imply that we should refrain from criticism of Cubas economic system from a socialist and working-class perspective, simply because were worried about the declining number of post-capitalist experiments to support.)
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Aff Link Turn

Link Turn: Exploring space leads to the building of a global economy and the eventual destruction of capitalism. Yeung 98Professor of Economic Geography at the National University of Singapore
(Henry Wai-chung, Capital, State and Space: Contesting the Borderless World, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Blackwell Publishing, Vol. 23, No. 3, JSTOR)//AW
The late twentieth century has witnessed extensive globalization of economic activities, typically through cross-border investments and trade spearheaded by transnational banks and transnational corporations (TNCs). Dunning (1993, 129) observes
that one of the most distinctive features of the world economy of the early 1990s is the ease with which the kinds of assets and intermediate products that determine a nation's prosperity and growth are able to move across national boundaries. As a vehicle for housing and controlling the organization and location of these resources and competencies, MNEs [multinational enterprises] remain in a class of their own. The global economy today has become more functionally integrated and interdependent than ever (Perraton et al 1997; Dicken 1998; cf Hirst and Thompson 1996). It is defined as an economy in which there is close economic interdependence among and between the leading nations in trade, investment, and cooperative commercial relationships, and in which there are relatively few artificial restrictions on the cross-border movement of people, assets, goods or services. (Dunning 1995, 135)1 Because of this increasing integration and interdependence of national economies at a global scale, it is now fashionable among business gurus, international economists and liberal politicians to assert that the world is 'borderless' (Ohmae 1990; 1995a; 1995b; Julius 1990; Reich 1991; O'Brien 1992; Horsman and Marshall 1994; Levy 1995).2 In such a 'borderless' world, they claim, the fortunes of individuals, firms, industries and even nation states are so intertwined with ongoing events in the global economy that it becomes almost impossible to define the nation state without reference to the broader economy (Baylis and Smith 1997; Brown 1997; Dunning 1997). To them, the nation state ceases to be a political institution capable of exerting influences on the activities of capital, which has also become increasingly 'placeless'. The convergent effects of globalization and cross-border organizational learning have rapidly outpaced the divergent effects of cultures, national institutions and social systems (Mueller 1994). Because of this increasing convergence of production, circulation and consumption over space, the geopolitics of capitalism have become irrelevant in an allegedly 'borderless' world. The end result is the demise of geography and national boundaries, which no longer make a difference in the 'borderless' world.3 Such 'borderless world' and 'end of geography' theses may seem inevitably valid in today's globalizing world. Amidst such 'globalization fervour', however, it is worthwhile to pause for a moment and re-examine critically the analytical constructs in these theses. Although the neoliberal 'end-state' view of globalization has
been critically refuted in recent literature (Boyer and Drache 1996; Hirst and Thompson 1996; Mittelman 1996a; Sassen 1996a; Cox 1997; Scott 1997; Dicken 1998; Weiss 1998; Olds et al forthcoming; Keller et al forthcoming), relatively little has been said about the underlying logic(s) and tendencies of globalization as an ongoing process. Instead, much counterglobalization literature has focused on providing evidence to show that the world is not yet globalized. While not denying some of the broader empirical global trends identified by Ohmae4 and other ultraglobalists, this paper aims to analyze the underlying logic(s) of globalization and to show that globalization tendencies neither result in a 'borderless' world nor lead to the end of geography. Globalization is
conceptualized as a complex process of interrelated tendencies (Dicken et al 1997). Though it invades local contexts of action, globalization does not destroy them; instead, new forms of local resistance and local expression emerge, reinforcing the interconnectedness of the Henry Waichung Yeung local and the global, and the multiplicity and hybridization of social life at every spatial scale (Amin 1997; Cox 1997). Globalization can therefore be seen as a dialectical process of homogenization and differentiation, constituted by the relativization of scale. The end-state of globalization is often perceived as an economically, socially and culturally homogenized world; however, the dialectical response to this has been the affirmation of difference, which is equally present as, if lacking the material force of, the apparently dominant homogenizing tendencies (Cox 1996). These tendencies towards homogenization and differentiation reflect continuous tensions between capital and the state in the (re)production of space. Such tensions, however,
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are not materialized at the polar scale of the global and the local, much to the disappointment of global-local dialecticians. Rather, they transcend the global-local scale and are problematized by the relativization of scale, when what appears to be a local phenomenon can simultaneously be a regional or global event elsewhere. There seems to be a continuous transformation of global flows and local embedding through the relativization of scale.5
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Aff Biopower Good

Biopolitics is necessary to solve capitalism. Hackitectura Workshop, 11
[The Hackitectura Workshop in Athens, led by Pablo de Soto and Jose Perez de Lama; On Biopower and Biopolitics; published 1/28/2011; http://mappingthecommons.wordpress.com/2011/01/28/on-biopower-and-biopolitics/ ] Jay (1)We use biopower [in the sense defined by Foucault, and later detailed by Deleuze, Hardt and Negri] to describe the
form of power in contemporary networked society. Biopower, as any kind of power, has to be understood as a strategy and as a relation; it is deployed through technics or technologies. Biopower is not aimed at prohibiting and punishing, but it rather deals with the production of the real; it aims to produce the totality of social life. (2) The main aim of biopower, being part of capitalism, is not to repress people, but to make populations productive. (3) We can better understand the technologies of contemporary biopower by comparing them to the technologies of [bio]power in the industrial society. The
diagram of power technologies in the industral society is the panopticon. It was deployed in the so called insitutions of enclosement, such as factories, schools, offices and homes, where bodies and minds were disciplined in space and time. The Greek term biomechania describes effectively the biopolitical dimension of industrial society. Technologies of biopower in the age of networks are different from those of the industrial era. They are often described by the term society of control, coined by writer William Burroughs and commented upon by Gilles Deleuze [1990]. (4) Society of control technologies aim to make people
productive, as we already mentioned, but they do so, not through the tayloristic organization of time and space, but rather
through the modulation of subjectivities and behaviors in the open, fluid fields of networks. In the networked society, people become productive when they are able to operate autonomously, flexibly and creatively. Control functions through the modulation of these conditions. (5) Production of subjectivity, technological and social protocols, laws and norms, and governance are three of the main families of power technologies in the society of control. (6) Biopolitics would describe on one end the technologies of power that relate to biopower. Biopolitical production would refer to the production of forms of life, as in the sense addressed by the Greek term biomechania. However, biopolitical production is used, too [by Hardt, Negri, Lazzarato and others], to
describe the kind of politics and political actions that oppose capitalist biopower. In this sense, biopolitical production would describe the production of forms of life [technical, social, subjective ecologies] alternative to, and confrontational with capitalism Democracy limits the effects of biopower ensures it cant cause violence. Dickinson 4 professor at UCincinnati
[Edward Dickenson, professor at the University of Cincinnati; Biopolitics, Facism, Democracy, Central European History; published in Central European History, Vol. 37, No. 1 2004]
Why was Europes twentieth century, in addition to being the age of biopolitics and totalitarianism, also the age of biopolitics and democracy? How should we theorize this relationship? I would like to offer five propositions as food for thought. First, again, the concept of the essential legitimacy and social value of individual needs, and hence the imperative of individual rights as the political mechanism for getting them met, has historically been a cornerstone of some strategies of social management. To borrow a phrase from Detlev Peukert, this does not mean that democracy was the absolutely inevitable
outcome of the development of biopolitics; but it does mean that it was one among other possible outcomes of the crisis of modern civilization. Second, I would argue that there is also a causal fit between cultures of expertise, or
scientism, and democracy. Of course, scientism subverted the real, historical ideological underpinnings of authoritarian polities in Europe in the nineteenth century. It also in a sense replaced them. Democratic citizens have the freedom to ask why; and in a democratic system there is therefore a bias toward pragmatic, objective or naturalized answers since values are often regarded as matters of opinion, with which any citizen has a right to differ. Scientific fact is democracys substitute for revealed truth, expertise its
substitute for authority. The age of democracy is the age of professionalization, of technocracy; there is a deeper connection between the two, this is not merely a matter of historical coincidence. Third, the vulnerability of explicitly moral values in
democratic societies creates a problem of legitimation. Of course there are moral values that all democratic societies must in some degree uphold (individual autonomy and freedom, human dignity, fairness, the rule of law), and those values are part of their strength. But as peoples states, democratic social and political orders are also implicitly and often explicitly expected to do something positive and tangible to enhance the well-being of their citizens. One of those things, of course, is simply to provide a rising standard of living; and the visible and astonishing success of that project has been crucial to all Western democracies since 1945. Another is the provision of a rising standard of
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health; and here again, the democratic welfare state has delivered the goods in concrete, measurable, and extraordinary ways. In this sense, it may not be so simpleminded, after all, to insist on considering the fact that modern biopolitics has worked phenomenally well. Fourth, it was precisely the democratizing dynamic of modern societies that made the question of the quality of the mass of the population seem and not only in the eyes of the dominant classes increasingly important. Again, in the course of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries the expected level of the average citizens active participation in European political, social, cultural, and economic life rose steadily, as did the expected level of her effective influence in all these spheres. This made it a matter of increasing importance whether the average person was more or less educated and informed, more or less moral and self-disciplined, more or less healthy and physically capable, more or less socially competent. And modern social reform biopolitics defined very broadlyseemed
to offer the possibility of creating the human foundation for a society ordered by autonomous participation, rather than by obedience. This too was part of the Machbarkeitswahn of modernity; but this was potentially a democratic Wahn, not only an authoritarian one. Fifth, historically there has been a clear connection between the concept of political citizenship and the idea of moral autonomy. The political subject (or citizen as opposed to the political subject,who is an object of state action) is also a moral subject. The citizens capacity for moral reasoning is the legitimating postulate of all democratic politics. The regulation of sexual and reproductive life has long been understood in European societies to be among the most fundamental issues of morality. There is, therefore, a connection between political citizenship on the one hand, and the sexual and reproductive autonomy implied in the individual control that is a central element of the modern biopolitical complex, on the other. Biopower enables the modern methods of survival we have now. Dickinson 4 professor at UCincinnati
[Edward Dickenson, professor at the University of Cincinnati; Biopolitics, Facism, Democracy, Central European History; published in Central European History, Vol. 37, No. 1 2004]
This understanding of the democratic and totalitarian potentials of biopolitics at the level of the state needs to be underpinned by a reassessment of how biopolitical discourse operates in society at large, at the prepolitical level. I would like to try to offer here the beginnings of a reconceptualization of biopolitical modernity, one that focuses less on the machinations of technocrats and experts, and more on the different ways that biopolitical thinking circulated within German society more broadly. It
is striking, then, that the new model of German modernity is even more relentlessly negative than the old Sonderweg model. In that older model, premodern elites were constantly triumphing over the democratic opposition. But at least there was an opposition, and in the long run, time was on the side of that opposition, which in fact embodied the historical movement of modern-ization. In the
new model, there is virtually a biopolitical consensus. 92 And that consenus is almost always fundamentally a nasty, oppressive thing, one that partakes in crucial ways of the essential quality of National Socialism. Everywhere biopolitics is intrusive, technocratic, top-down, constraining, limiting. Biopolitics is almost never conceived of or at least discussed in any detail as creating possibilities for people, as expanding the range of their choices, as empowering them, or indeed as doing anything positive for them at all. Of course, at the most simple-minded level, it seems to me that an assessment of the potentials of modernity that ignores the ways in which biopolitics has made life tangibly better is somehow deeply flawed. To give just one example, infant mortality in Germany in 1900 was just over 20 percent; or, in other words, one in five children died before reaching the age of one year. By 1913 it was 15 percent, and by 1929 (when average real purchasing power was not significantly higher than it 1913) it was only 9.7 percent. 93 The expansion of infant health programs an enormously ambitious, bureaucratic, medicalizing, and sometimes intrusive, social engineering project had a great deal to do with that change. It would be bizarre to write a history of biopolitical modernity that ruled out an appreciation for how absolutely wonderful and astonishing this achievement and any number of things like it really was. There was a reason for the Machbarkeitswahn of the early twentieth century: many marvelous things were in fact becoming machbar. In that sense, it is not really accurate to call it a Wahn (delusion, craziness) at all; nor is it accurate to focus only on the inevitable frustration of deleusions of power. Even in the late 1920s, many social engineers could and did look with reat satisfaction on the changes they genuinely had the power to accomplish.
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Aff Satellites Good

Even if there are problems with satellites they help the disempowered Dickens 10 *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex
(Peter, The Humanization of the Cosmos To What End?, Monthly Review Vol 62, No 6, November 2010, dml) Most obviously, the technology allowing a human presence in the cosmos would be focused mainly on earthly society. There
are many serious crises down here on Earth that have urgent priority when considering the humanization of
outer space. First, there is the obvious fact of social inequalities and resources. Is $2 billion and upwards to help the private sector find new forms of space vehicles really a priority for public funding, especially at a time when relative social inequalities and environmental conditions are rapidly worsening? The military-industrial complex might well benefit, but it hardly represents society as a whole. This is not to say, however, that public spending on space should be stopped. Rather, it
should be addressed toward ameliorating the many crises that face global society. Satellites, for example, have helped open up phone and Internet communications for marginalized people, especially those not yet connected by cable. Satellites, including satellites manufactured by capitalist companies, can also be useful for monitoring climate change and other forms of environmental crisis such as deforestation and imminent hurricanes. They have proved useful in coordinating humanitarian efforts after natural
disasters. Satellites have even been commissioned by the United Nations to track the progress of refugees in Africa and elsewhere
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Aff Competition Inevitable

Realism and the self-help theory are rooted in human nature anarchic worlds from the dawn of time to today created an impetus for realist thought. Thayer 2004 Thayer has been a Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of
Government at Harvard University and has taught at Dartmouth College and the University of Minnesota (Bradley, Darwin and International Relations: On the Evolutionary Origins of War and Ethnic Conflict, 2004, pg. 75-76) The central issue here is what causes states to behave as offensive realists predict. Mearsheimer advances a powerful argument that anarchy is the fundamental cause of such behavior. The fact that there is no world government compels the
leaders of states to take steps to ensure their security, such as striving to have a powerful military, aggressing when forced to do so, and forging and maintaining alliances. This is what neorealists call a self-help system: leaders of states arc forced to take these steps because nothing else can guarantee their security in the anarchic world of international relations. I argue that evolutionary theory also offers a fundamental cause for offensive realist behavior. Evolutionary theory explains why individuals are motivated to act as offensive realism expects, whether an individual is a captain of industry or a conquistador. My argument is that anarchy is even more important than most scholars of international relations recognize. The human environment of evolutionary adaptation was anarchic; our ancestors lived in a state of nature in which resources were poor and dangers from other humans and the environment were greatso
great that it is truly remarkable that a mammal standing three feet highwithout claws or strong teeth, not particularly strong or swiftsurvived and evolved to become what we consider human. Humans endured because natural selection gave them the right behaviors to last in those conditions. This environment produced the behaviors examined here: egoism,
domination, and the in-group/out-group distinction. These specific traits arc sufficient to explain why leaders will behave, in the proper circumstances, as offensive realists expect them to behave. That is, even if they must hurt other humans or risk injury to themselves, they will strive to maximize their power, defined as either control over others (for example, through wealth or leadership) or control over
ecological circumstances (such as meeting their own and their family's or tribes need for food, shelter, or other resources).
Even if individuals arent biologically selfish- groups inevitably trend toward selfishness and self-interest Waller 1- Professor and Chair of psychology at Whitworth College
(James, Perpetrators of Genocide: An Explanatory Model of Extraordinary Human Evil, 2001/02, http://guweb2.gonzaga.edu/againsthate/Journal1/waller.pdf) Reinhold Niebuhr, who taught for many years at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, was another vocal proponent of individual regression in groups. In his provocatively titled Moral Man and Immoral Society, first published in 1932, Niebuhr argued that there is a basic difference between the morality of individuals and the morality of collectives, whether races, classes or nations.9 What is this basic difference? In short,
although individuals are capable of goodness and morality, groups are inherently selfish and uncaring. There is, Niebuhr argued, a clear distinction between the character of people acting in large social groups as opposed to their character as individual people. The proportion of reason to impulse becomes increasingly negative, he writes, when we proceed from the life of individuals to that of social groups, among whom a common mind and purpose is always more or less inchoate and transitory and who depend therefore upon a common impulse to bind them together.10 The voluminous psychological literature on group dynamics certainly affirms that groups can develop characteristics that create a potential for extraordinary evil. Moral constraints are less powerful in groups than in individuals. There is a diffusion of responsibility within groups that can make evildoing a relatively simple matter. In addition, groups have a power to repress dissent and, thus, encourage the abandonment of the individual self. As Israel Charny writes: It is a human being who operates through the mechanisms of group behavior to do what he does to fellow human beings, but it is the mechanism of group experience that potentiates, legitimates, operationalizes, and narcotizes the emergence of mans various and often unsavory selves.11 Humans are biologically selfish- empirically proven Thayer 2004 Thayer has been a Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of
Government at Harvard University and has taught at Dartmouth College and the University of Minnesota (Bradley, Darwin and International Relations: On the Evolutionary Origins of War and Ethnic Conflict, 2004, pg. 70-71)
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Evolutionary theory offers two sufficient explanations for the trait of egoism. The first is a classic Darwinian argument: Darwin
argued that an individual organism is concerned for its own survival in an environment where resources are scarce. It has to ensure that its physiological needsfor food, shelter, and so on are satisfied so that it can continue to survive. The concern for survival in a hostile environment also requires that in a time of
danger or great stress an individual organism usually places its life, its survival, above that of other members of the social group, the pack, herd, or tribe." For these reasons, egoistic behavior contributes to fitness. The selfish gene theory of evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins pro vides the second sufficient explanation for egoism. As I discussed in chapter 1, Dawkins focuses his
analysis on the gene, not the organism. Beginning with chemicals in a primordial "soup," different types of molecules started forming, and in time efficient copy makers emerged.54 They made mistakes,
however, and these contributed to fitness, such as the formation of a thin membrane that held the contents of the molecule together to become a primitive cell. Over time, these "survival machines" became more sophisticated due to
evolution. Some cells became specialized, creating organs and ultimately animal bodies. But again, as I stressed in the previous chapter, there is no intentionality in this process. Genes did not want to create or inhabit people, but the process continued nonetheless. The fundamental point here is that "selfishness" of the gene increases its fitness, and so the behavior spreads. The gene creates an
instinctual or genetic basis for egoism because it is concerned only with satisfying its wants, principally reproduction and food consumption. The organism evolved largely to satisfy the wants of the gene, and in a similar manner egoism evolves through a population. Egoism thus becomes a trait or adaptation in animals, such as humans, that aids survival. Evolutionary theorists now recognize, as a result of William Hamilton's idea of inclusive fitness, that egoism is more complex than Darwin envisioned. Hamilton recognized that individuals are egoistic, but less so in their behavior toward genetic relatives, in parent-offspring and sibling relationships. This is because close relatives share at least fifty percent of their genotypeone-half for siblings and parents, onequarter for aunts, uncles, and grandparents, and one-eighth for cousins. As the great evolutionary theorist J.B.S. Haldane wrote in 1955, the gene that inclines a man to jump into a river to save a drowning child, and thus to take a one-in-ten chance of dying, could flourish as long as the child were his offspring or sibling." The gene could also spread, albeit more slowly, if the child were a first cousin, since the cousin shares an average of one-eighth of his genes. Indeed, Haldane captured this point well when he wrote that he would give his life to save two of his brothers (each sharing half of his genotype) or eight of his cousins (each sharing one-eighth of his genotype). As a result of the ideas of Darwin, Dawkins, and Hamilton, evolutionary theory provides an explanation for what is commonly known, that individuals favor those who are close genetic relatives. Consequently, complex social behavior
among unrelated individuals can be seen as the interaction of selfish individuals, and most evolutionary theorists expect no tendency toward solidarity, cooperation, or altruism beyond what is in the interests of the animals. Similarly, realists and, as we will see below, rational choice theorists also do not expect individuals or states to show this type of behavior beyond their own self-interest. Thus, evolutionary theory can explain egoism and suggests why cooperation between unrelated individuals is very often difficult and remarkably unlike the behavior one
encounters within the family.
Humans are inherently selfish- research proves Thayer 2004 Thayer has been a Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of
Government at Harvard University and has taught at Dartmouth College and the University of Minnesota (Bradley, Darwin and International Relations: On the Evolutionary Origins of War and Ethnic Conflict, 2004)
One result of the evolution of our mental architecture is the ability to indoctrinate humans. As E.O. Wilson writes: "human
beings are absurdly easy to indoctrinatethey seek it."72 Three factors cause this ease of indoctrination. First, survival in an anarchic and dangerous world dictates membership in a group and produces a fear of ostracism from it. Second, an acceptance of or conformity to a particular status quo lowers the risk of conflict in a dominance hierarchy. Third, conformity helps keep groups together!' If group conformity becomes too weak, the group could fall apart and then die out because of predation from its or another species.74 Thus, for most primates, belonging to the group is betterit increases chances of survival than existing alone, even if belonging requires subordination. These understandings have great consequences for
the study of politics. Irendus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Albert Somit and Steven Peterson, E.O. Wilson, and psychologist Donald Campbell, among others, suggest that humans readily give allegiance or submit to the state, or to ideologies like liberalism or communism, or to religion, because
evolution has produced a need to belong to a dominance hierarchy!' An overview of human history provides context: much of it is a record of threats of force or wars to gain territory and
resources.76 Political institutions, whether monarchies or aristocracies, and leaders such as Julius Caesar, Louis XIV, or Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid, typify dominance hierarchiesas do the modern state and its many institutions, such as government bureaucracies and the military.77
Biology makes us inherently self-interested-disproves all other theories.
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Spegele 96- Associate Professor of Politics at Monash University (Robert D, Political realism in international theory p. 161, JSTOR) As alternative, Alexander advances the idea that 'at some early point in our history the actual function of human groups - the significance for their individual members - was protection from the predatory effects of other groups'.28 Early life was, on this view, a brand of warfare, a hunt in which people were treated as prey - deceived, ensnared and forcibly run to ground just as in a chase. To protect themselves, individuals would have joined groups which, despite their costs, were worth it in the biological sense of enabling them to enhance their reproductive success. Alexander calls this 'the Balance-of-Power hypothesis', and it is easy to see why a term from the
lexicon of international relations is appropriate in accounting for the rise of large states. For suppose we have three non-kin related societies A, B and C. And suppose two societies A and B are in competition with one another for food, shelter and other resources necessary to survival and differential reproduction. Then if, say, A makes an alliance with C in order to conquer B and
succeeds, it will have significantly expanded its relative resource base. Those societies in the past which learned how to engage successfully in balance of power politics would have been naturally selected for and have expanded from smaller groups to larger groups. The guiding thought here, in any event, provides biological content to Martin Wight's incisive observation: 'The idea of balance arises naturally in considering any relationship between competing human units, groups or institutions .. 29
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Aff Link turn Deep Eco Affs

Deep ecology resists privatization that allows for space control Dickens and Ormrod 7 - *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex AND **Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton
The other perspectives McKay forwards hinge around intrinsic worth being attached to non-human nature. As in Naesss (1989) deep ecology, this can mean attaching value to human and non-human life for its own sake. Or it can mean a cosmocentric ethic in which value is extended to inanimate objects like dead planets and asteroids. At first glance McKay notes that the former position would seem to advocate planetary engineering on the basis that we have a duty to maximize Marss biological potential, even though this would be at odds with the deep ecological principle of non-interference. The latter position would appear to reject planetary engineering as life has no precedence over non-life (1990: 192). The rocks of Mars would have a right to remain unchanged. Yet, as McKay notes, both positions raise important dilemmas. The deep ecology-type position does not demand that life be spread to Mars. How is populating Mars to be weighed against human lives that could be saved on Earth with the money involved in reaching the planet? What if spreading life to Mars destroys what little life may be there already? Similarly, were we to take the cosmocentric ethic seriously, would we not be morally obliged to try to prevent asteroid collisions in space? And what if the survival of life on Earth really did depend on changing the climate on other planets? Surely upholding the rights of lifeless planets is absurd? Ultimately, as Val Plumwood (2001) recognizes in relation to Earthly environmental ethics, we cannot identify cosmic need in a disinterested, asocial way. The universe has no value except that ascribed to it by society, for values are social constructs. Tarnas (2006) disagrees strongly with this position, arguing that it only leads to further human self-aggrandizement and a continuing denial of humanitys spiritual links with the cosmos. An anthropocentric standpoint is, however, inescapable. It does not necessarily entail a view that humans are masters of the universe. Crucially, if the universe is treated with care and respect rather than as a resource to be exploited, there is every hope that the benefits of space exploration and development may be made available to everyone. These values are, in the end, socially and politically made. The values are all inevitably human. And more often than not they are an expression of power relations. This is abundantly clear when we consider the legal rights being demanded by those attempting to own part of the Moon or Mars. Individuals and institutions are straightforwardly attempting to
protect their investments. These values are contested by social movements such as the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, which, as its name implies, is perfectly clear where its priorities lie. Like this movement, we should
return to the Earthly world of political economy if we are to get a more accurate picture of what lies behind the privatization and colonization of outer space. This is not to say that the humanization of outer space is an inherently bad thing. It depends on which interests are doing the humanizing. Perhaps there are some lessons here from Earth to outer space. Privatizing outer space would only enhance the power of the already powerful.
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Aff Alt Fails Mars

A postcolonialist analysis of Mars fails its different from historical conditions Collis and Graham 9 *Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication in the Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland
Postcolonial spatial theory is an analytical lens through which to view Martian spatiality in its historical character: it allows for a useful view on the cultural construction of the planet, the discursive production of its spatiality, and the ways in which established power groups work to prefigure the planet as an object of capitalist commodification and strategic managerialism. Yet frustratingly, despite the proliferation of postcolonial analyses of past colonial spatialities, when it comes to new colonialisms, there is a curious critical silence. To generalize, postcolonialism tends to figure imperialism and colonialism and their associated spatialities as historical European phenomena from whose ruins nations such as Australia, Indonesia, and Canada have emerged. As Ferro (1997, viii) argues, postcolonialism is inherently Eurocentric because it focuses almost entirely on European empires, European epistemologies, and European spaces of the
past. Or as Dodds (2006, 60) points out in his discussion of the difficulty of accommodating contemporary Antarctic colonialisms within existing postcolonial theoretical frameworks, post-colonial studies are too preoccupied with a linear
account of liberation in certain countries. For example, despite the fact that Australia has laid contentious claim to
42 per cent of Antarctica since 1933 a claim solely based on acts of imperial exploration and flagraising, and ongoing colonization the voluminous field of Australian postcolonial studies has refused or failed to acknowledge this situation. A survey of leading postcolonial journals demonstrates this refusal: of the hundreds of articles in these publications, not one deals with Antarctica, and not one addresses Space. 3 And while there are clear similarities between past and present colonialisms,
the planned colonization, exploration, and spatial production of Mars are decidedly unlike British practices of the last few centuries. But this does not automatically eliminate Mars from the field of colonial
spatiality.
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Aff AT Patriarchy
Spread of capitalism is key to womens equality Norberg 3 Fellow at Timbro and CATO
Johan Norberg, In Defense of Global Capitalism, pg. 23
Growing prosperity gives women more opportunity to become independent and provide for themselves. Experience from Africa and elsewhere shows that women are often leading entrepreneurs for various kinds of small-scale production and exchange in the informal sector, which suggests that, absent discrimination and regulation by the government, the market is their oyster. And indeed, the worldwide spread of freer conditions of service and freer markets has made it increasingly difficult for women to be kept out. Women today constitute 42 percent of the world's work force, compared with 36 percent 20 years ago. Capitalism doesn't care whether the best producer is a man or a woman. On the contrary, discrimination is expensive because it involves the rejection of certain people's goods and labor. All studies have shown that respect for women's rights and their ability to exert influence in the home are closely bound up with their ability to find employment outside the home and earn an independent income.
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Aff AT Invisible Committee

They have it backwards, revolutions arent a threat to global empire, they sustain it. Bonta 9 - Associate Professor of Geography (Mark, The Multitude and its Doppelgnger: An Exploration of Global Smooth Space, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 2009, 8 (2), 245-277.) NAR In the postmodern era (1945-present), two spectral networksInternational Communism and International Terrorism (Sageman, 2004)have had life breathed into them and have served, in concert with the Evil Empire and certain rogue states, to instill microfascisms in many a democraticand freedom-loving body in the USA, while in realpolitik advancing the spread and penetrations of Empire. The grand International Communist Conspiracy, with roots in the late 1800s, was the earlier of the two, and it served its purpose well all the way up to the end of the 1980s. To keep the Reds at bay, the secret state infiltrated the Left as successfully as the Right (Quigley, 1966), coming to saturate the media, academe, and public relations (Saunders, 2000), though often passing itself off as inept, inefficient, and even relatively powerless. During this time, subversive revolutionary movements both domestic and foreign were not necessarily decapitated as often as they were made safe, channelled into more productive operations; or, if need be, as described above, swung in the other direction, steered and tricked into spectacular false flag operations that gave excuses for jailtime, invasion, toppling of regimes, or at least sanctions or discrediting. Authoritarian/communist/police states with eyes everywhere became necessities not only because of
internal paranoia and the nature of totalitarian State power but also because of the myriad sabotages practiced by the free world the experience of Gladio (Blum, 2004) is extremely instructive here, and the case of Castros Cuba comes to mind as well. Terrible questions are suggested, such as if some political prisoners really are plotting to violently overthrow the regime, then should the regime, to prove its commitment to democracy, let them go? The newer menace of international Islamic
terrorism is built on the premise of a network that arose out of two secretive groups Wahabism, based in Saudi Arabia, and the Muslim Brotherhood, engendered in Egyptthat coalesced in the 1980s
through resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Emboldened by the withdrawal of the USSR, the foreign mujahedin returned to their countries and were rebuffed, if not detained and tortured, by the regimes in power, who did the bidding of the US. Thence, led by Osama bin Laden, they turned on the West (Esposito, 2002; Scheuer, 2003; Sageman, 2004). But
the very existence of a selfnamed and cohesive Al Qaeda network, which was named at the behest of FBI agent John ONeill (Frontline, 2002), has been questioned, most notably and effectively in the BBC documentary Power of Nightmares (Curtis, 2005), which argues that International Terrorism is the ultimate bugaboo narrative that serves to bolster the power of governments that no longer provide us with comfort and positive achievement (capitalism does that) and so have refashioned themselves as our protectors from nightmares. Al Qaeda has, nevertheless, taken on a monstrous existence, just as the International Communist Conspiracy did in the days of McCarthyperpetrating devastating crimes such as 9-11-2001 and 3-11-2003 and 7-7-2005 (intriguingly, the only person to ever be convicted of 9-11 plotting was released in early 2006 in Germanythe US government was unwilling to provide prosecutors with requested evidence: Agence France-Presse, 2006). Ahmed (2006) provides a solid argument for Al Qaeda as intricately interwoven with what we are calling Empire. The evidence for the perpetrators behind 9-11, as well as other terror events, points back to Empires networks (conservatively put, rogue elements of X), and particularly,
as gagged whistleblower Sibel Edmonds has it (www.justacitizen.org; see Rose, 2005, and other literature on her case), to networks of far-right mercenaries (which of course Osama bin Laden always was in any case) duping other cells of mercenary-terrorists connected not to rogue states like Iraq, Iran, and North Korea but to major Western powers and allied states, to NGOs and drug trafficking, money-laundering, influence-peddling, and other P2/IranContra/BCCI/Gladio-type operations. Needless to say,
massive funds are poured into the USs black budget and its open budget to better fight this terrorist menace, possibly by infiltrating its cells and pushing its operatives to carry out acts they might not otherwise choose to, horrendous crimes that give Empire an excuse to further its agenda (Hess, 2002).
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Aff AT Epistemology
Prefer our evidence their evidence is futile intellectual pride Saunders 7
Peter, Adjunct Professor at the Australian Graduate School of Management, Why Capitalism is Good for the Soul, http://www.cis.org.au/POLICY/summer%2007-08/saunders_summer07.html Andrew Norton notes that disaffected intellectuals since Rousseau have been attacking capitalism for
its failure to meet true human needs.(26) The claim is unfounded, so what is it about capitalism that so upsets them?Joseph Schumpeter offered part of the answer. He observed that capitalism has brought into being an educated class that has no responsibility for practical affairs, and that this class can only make a mark by criticising the system that feeds them.(27) Intellectuals attack capitalism because that is how they sell books and build careers. More recently, Robert Nozick has noted that intellectuals spend their childhoods excelling at school, where they occupy the top positions in the hierarchy, only to find later in life that their market value is much lower than they believe they are worth. Seeing
mere traders enjoying higher pay than them is unbearable, and it generates irreconcilable disaffection with the market system.(28) But the best explanation for the intellectuals distaste for capitalism was offered by Friedrich Hayek in The Fatal Conceit.(29) Hayek understood that capitalism
offends intellectual pride, while socialism flatters it. Humans like to believe they can design better systems than those that tradition or evolution have bequeathed. We distrust evolved systems, like markets, which seem to work without intelligent direction according to laws and dynamics that no one fully understands. Nobody planned the global capitalist system, nobody runs it, and nobody really comprehends it. This particularly offends intellectuals, for capitalism renders them redundant. It gets on perfectly well without them. It does not need them to make it run, to coordinate it, or to redesign it. The intellectual critics of capitalism believe they know what is good for us, but millions of people interacting in the marketplace keep rebuffing them. This, ultimately, is why they believe capitalism is bad for the soul: it fulfils human needs without first seeking their moral approval. Their attempt to blame corporate exploitation on capitalism is misinformed and continues false teachings that result in corporate bureaucrats. Vance 5 adjunct instructor in accounting at Pensacola Junior College, Mises
Laurence M. Vance, http://mises.org/story/1887
The all-too familiar circle of the government regulating an industry, creating a "crisis," and then intervening even more to solve the crisis, thus making things worse, is no where more apparent than DiLorenzo's examples from the energy industry. The book concludes with a look at "the never-ending war on capitalism" by government intervention, regulations, agencies, and bureaucrats. DiLorenzo also includes university professors, politicians, and lawyers in his indictment. "American universities devote an inordinate amount of time and resources to teach potential business leaders not how to be capitalists but how to be corporate bureaucrats." Politicians "view businesses as cash cows to be plundered for the benefit of their own political careers." "Lawyers now have incentives to spend their lives digging up cases and evidence against corporations because some consumers stupidly misused their products." DiLorenzo also briefly reviews three anticapitalist but best-selling books: Eric
Schlosser's Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, and Michael Moore's Stupid White Men and Downsize This! He finds that the capitalism attacked in these books
is not capitalism at all, it is socialism, mercantilism, interventionism, and assorted anticapitalist myths. Although these "reviews" are an added bonus to the book, they would be even better if they were lengthened and made into
a series of appendices.
Their authors scapegoat capitalism hold them to a high standard of causal evidence Norberg 3 Fellow at Timbro and CATO
Johan Norberg, In Defense of Global Capitalism, pg. 290-291
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All change arouses suspicion and anxiety, sometimes justifiably so; even positive changes can have troublesome consequences in the short term. Decisionmakers are unwilling to shoulder responsibility for failures and problems. It is
preferable to be able to blame someone else. Globalization makes an excellent scapegoat. It contains all the anonymous forces that have served this purpose throughout history: other countries, other races and ethnic groups, the uncaring market. Globalization does not speak up for itself when politicians blame it for overturning economies, increasing poverty, and enriching a tiny minority, or
when entrepreneurs say that globalization, rather than their own decisions, is forcing them to pollute the environment, cut jobs, or raise their own salaries. And globalization doesn't usually get any credit when good things happen
when the environment improves, the economy runs at high speed and poverty diminishes. Then there are plenty of people willing to accept full responsibility for the course of events. Globalization does not defend itself. So if the trend toward greater globalization is to continue, an ideological defense will be needed for freedom from borders and controls.
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**WEST GOOD**
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Imperialism Good
Spreading American values is good allowing for a plurality of cultures causes genocide Rothkopf 97 *adjunct professor of international affairs at Columbia
(David, In Praise of Cultural Imperialism?, Foreign Policy no. 107 (Summer 1997) pg 38-53, JSTOR, dml)
Culture is not static; it grows out of a systematically encouraged reverence for selected customs and
habits. Indeed, Webster's Third New International Dictionary defines culture as the "total pattern of human behavior and its products embodied in speech, action, and artifacts and dependent upon man's capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations." Language, religion, political and legal systems, and social customs are the legacies of victors and marketers and reflect the judgment of the marketplace of ideas throughout popular history. They might also rightly be seen as living artifacts, bits and pieces carried forward through the years on currents of indoctrination, popular acceptance, and unthinking adherence to old ways. Culture is used by the organizers of society politicians, theologians, academics, and families to impose and ensure order, the rudiments of which change over time as need dictates. It is
less often acknowledged as the means of justifying inhumanity and warfare. Nonetheless, even a casual examination of the history of conflict explains well why Samuel Huntington, in his The Clash of Civilizations, expects conflict along cultural fault lines, which is precisely where conflict so often erupts. Even worse is that cultural differences are often sanctified by their links to the mystical roots of culture, be they spiritual or historical. Consequently, a threat to one's culture becomes a threat to one's God or one's ancestors and, therefore, to one's core identity. This inflammatory formula has been used to justify many of humanity's worst acts. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWS-FoXbjVI Rothkopf 97 *adjunct professor of international affairs at Columbia
Many observers
contend that it is distasteful to use the opportunities created by the global information revolution to promote American culture over others, but that kind of relativism is as dangerous as it is wrong. American culture is fundamentally different from indigenous cultures in so many other locales. American culture is an amalgam of influences and approaches from around the world. It is melded-consciously in many cases into a social medium that allows individual freedoms and cultures to thrive. Recognizing this, Americans should not shy away from doing that which is so clearly in their economic, political, and security interests and so clearly in the interests of the world at large. The United States should not hesitate to promote its values. In an effort to be polite or politic, Americans should not deny the fact that of all the nations in the history of the world, theirs is the most just, the most tolerant, the most willing to constantly reassess and improve itself, and the best model for the future. At the same time, Americans should not fall under the spell of those like Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew and
Malaysia's Mahathir bin-Mohamad, who argue that there is "an Asian way," one that non-Asians should not judge and that should be allowed to dictate the course of events for all those operating in that corner of the world. This argument amounts to selfinterested political rhetoric. Good and evil, better and worse coexist in this world. There are absolutes,
and there are political, economic, and moral costs associated with failing to recognize this fact. Repression is not defensible whether the tradition from which it springs is Confucian, Judeo-Christian, or Zoroastrian. The repressed individual still suffers, as does society, and there are consequences for the global community. Real costs accrue in terms of constrained human creativity, delayed market development, the diversion of assets to
enforce repression, the failure of repressive societies to adapt well to the rapidly changing global environment, and the dislocations, struggles, and instability that result from these and other factors. Americans should promote their vision for the
world, because failing to do so or taking a "live and let live" stance is ceding the process to the not always-beneficial actions of others. Using the tools of the Information Age to do so is perhaps the most peaceful
and powerful means of advancing American interest. If Americans now live in a world in which ideas can be effectively exported and media delivery systems are powerful, they must recognize that the nature of those ideas and the control of those systems are matters with which they should be deeply concerned. Is it a threat to U.S. interests, to regional peace, to American markets, and
to the United States's ability to lead if foreign leaders adopt models that promote separatism and the cultural fault lines that threaten stability? It certainly is. Relativism is a veil behind which those who shun scrutiny can hide. Whether Americans accept all the arguments of Huntington or not, they must recognize that the greater the cultural value gaps in the world, the more likely it is that conflict
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will ensue. The critical prerequisite for gaining the optimum benefits of global integration is to understand which cultural
attributes can and should be tolerated-and, indeed, promoted-and which are the fissures that will become fault lines.
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Imperialism Good Satellites

Oppressive governments are trying to limit out satellite access we should increase it to spread the awesomeness of capitalism Rothkopf 97 *adjunct professor of international affairs at Columbia
France and Canada have both passed laws to prohibit the satellite dissemination of foreign meaning American-content across their borders and into the homes of their citizens. Not surprisingly} in many other countries - fundamentalist Iran communist China, and the closely managed society of Singapore-central governments have aggressively sought to restrict the software and programming that reach their citizens Their explicit objective is to keep out American and other alien political views, mores, and, as it is called in some parts of the Middle East, "news pollution." In these countries, the control of new media that give previously closed or controlled societies virtually unlimited access to the outside world is a high priority. Singapore has sought to filter out certain things that are available over
the Internet essentially processing all information to eliminate pornography. China has set up a "Central Leading Group" under the State Planning Commission and the direct supervision of a vice premier to establish a similar system that will exclude more than just what might be considered obscene. These governments are the heirs of King Canute, the infamous monarch who set his throne at the sea's edge and commanded the waves to go backward. The Soviet Union fell in part because a closed society
cannot compete in the Information Age. These countries will fare no better. They need look no further than their own elites to know this. In China, while satellite dishes are technically against the law, approximately one in five citizens of Beijing has access to television programming via a dish, and
almost half of the people of Guangzhou have access to satellite-delivered programming. Singapore, the leading entrepot of Southeast Asia, is a hub in a global network of business centers in which the lives of the elites are virtually identical. Business leaders in Buenos Aires, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, Istanbul, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Moscow, New Delhi, New York, Paris, Rome, Santiago, Seoul, Singapore, Tel Aviv, and Tokyo all read the same newspapers, wear the same suits, drive the same cars, eat the same food, fly the same airlines, stay in the same hotels, and listen to the same music. While the people of their countries
remain divided by culture, they have realized that to compete in the global marketplace they must conform to the culture of that marketplace. The global marketplace is being institutionalized through the creation of a series of multilateral entities that establish common rules for international commerce. If capital is to flow freely, disclosure rules must be the same, settlement procedures consistent, and redress transparent. If goods are also
to move unimpeded, tariff laws must be consistent, customs standards harmonized, and product safety and labeling standards brought into line. And if people are to move easily from deal to deal, air transport agreements need to be established, immigration controls standardized, and commercial laws harmonized. In many ways, business is the primary engine driving
globalization, but it would be a mistake conclude that the implications of globalization will be limited primarily to the commercial arena. In politics, for example, as international organizations arise to
coordinate policy among many nations on global issues such as trade, the environment, health, development, and crisis management, a community of international bureaucrats is emerging. These players are as
comfortable operating in the international environment as they would be at home, and the organizations that they represent in effect establish glob al standards and expectationsfacilitating the progress of globalization. The community of nations increasingly accepts that such supranational entities are demanded by the exigencies of the times; with that acceptance also comes a recognition that the principal symbol of national identity namely sovereignty-must be partially ceded to those entities. The United States in particular seems to have problems with this trend. For example, the
United States was involved in creat ing the World Trade Organization and now undermines its effectiveness by arbitrarily withdrawing from its efforts to blunt the effects of the Helms-Burton act. Still, the recognition that sometimes
there are inter ests greater than national interests is a crucial step on the path to a more peaceful, prosperous world. Cap is awesome and key to make sure we dont fall behind in the world Rothkopf 97 *adjunct professor of international affairs at Columbia
Some find the idea that Americans would systematically seek to pro mote their culture to be unattractive. They are concerned that it implies a sense of superiority on Americans' part or that it
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makes an uncomfortable value judgment. But the
realpolitik of the Information Age is that setting technological standards, defining software standards, producing the most popular information products, and leading in the related development of the global trade in services are as essential to the well-being of any would-be leader as once were the resources needed to support empire or industry.
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Cap Resilient
Capitalism is too adaptive to be overcome Serwetman 97 JD Suffolk Law
Will, http://www.ninjalawyer.com/writing/marx.html
Marx utilizes the Hegelian dialectic in his attempt to prove that capitalism will inevitably collapse from the crisis of overproduction and the class conflict caused by enmiseration and alienation. Capitalism, he felt, would inevitably be replaced by socialism. Marx died waiting for this revolution to come about, and it never has. Even the Russian and Chinese revolutions cannot be viewed as results of capitalism collapsing, nor can they be
seen as socialist states because they retain post-revolution ary class structures and are not radical democracies. While Rosa Luxemberg wrote that while the capitalism will inevitably consume itself and that socialism is a possible option
, I go so far as to question the Marxist logic that capitalism is doomed to collapse. The capitalist that Marx evokes in his work is only a caricature of the behavior of capitalists and does not reflect reality as history has shown it to be. Successful capitalists are smart enough to plan for long-term profits in addition to the short-term. Like anyone else, they will make mistakes and learn from them. There is a Darwinian process to capitalism, and those unable to account for factors beyond their short-term profits will be replaced by those who can. How many buffalo-fur coat business es do we see? Despite the various crises of the past century, capitalism thrives and shows no major signs of strain. Despite Marx's predictions, capitalism is perfectly capable of inventing new markets to replace saturated ones. If stereo manufacturers can no longer find a market for their goods, they close down and invest their money in a new industry, such as cable television or computers. The crisis of overproduction will never happen because capitalism is flexible and will sacrifice it's short t rm goals to achieve its long term ones. Marx also never took into account the effect government regulation and welfare would have on the capitalist system. Any business naturally desires monopolies over its markets, but when that is achieved, the consequences are disastrous. The final stage of capitalism, in which trusts and monopolies prevent the economy from running naturally and efficiently, has been prevented by legislation and unionization. None of the problems Marx predicted are unavoidable as long as we do not sink to the level of sharks.
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Cap Inevitable
Resistance to capital is futile and dangerous natural hierarchies of power are inevitable and sustain peace Wilkinson 5 Academic Coordinator of the Social Change Project and the Global Prosperity Initiative
at The Mercatus Center at George Mason University
Will, Capitalism and Human Nature, Cato Policy Report Vol. XXVII No. 1
Emory professor of economics and law Paul Rubin usefully distinguishes between "productive" and "allocative" hierarchies. Productive hierarchies are those that organize cooperative efforts to achieve otherwise unattainable mutually advantageous gains. Business organizations are a prime example. Allocative hierarchies, on the other hand, exist mainly to transfer resources to the top. Aristocracies and dictatorships are extreme examples. Although the nation-state can perform productive functions, there is the constant risk that it becomes dominated by allocative hierarchies. Rubin warns that our natural wariness of zero-sum allocative hierarchies, which helps us to guard against the concentration of power in too few hands, is often directed at modern positive-sum productive hierarchies, like corporations, thereby threatening the viability of enterprises that tend to make everyone better off. There is no way to stop dominance-seeking behavior. We may hope only to channel it to non-harmful uses. A free society therefore requires that positions of dominance and status be widely available in a multitude of productive hierarchies, and that opportunities for greater status and dominance through predation are limited by the constant vigilance of "the people"the ultimate reverse dominance hierarchy. A flourishing civil society permits almost everyone to be the leader of something, whether the local Star Trek fan club or the city council, thereby somewhat satisfying the human taste for hierarchical status, but to no one's serious detriment. Capitalisms products (property, exchange, etc.) arent mere legislative creations they are intrinsic to human nature
-recognizing inevitability prevents escalating wars
Wilkinson 5 Academic Coordinator of the Social Change Project and the Global Prosperity Initiative
at The Mercatus Center at George Mason University
Will, Capitalism and Human Nature, Cato Policy Report Vol. XXVII No. 1
Property Rights are Natural The problem of distributing scarce resources can be handled in part by implicitly coercive
allocative hierarchies. An alternative solution to the problem of distribution is the recognition and enforcement of property rights.
Property rights are prefigured in nature by the way animals mark out territories for their exclusive use in foraging, hunting, and mating. Recognition of such rudimentary claims to control and exclude minimizes costly conflict, which by itself provides a strong evolutionary reason to look for innate tendencies to recognize and respect norms of property. New scientific research provides even stronger evidence for the existence of such property "instincts." For example, recent experimental work by Oliver Goodenough, a legal theorist, and Christine Prehn, a neuroscientist, suggests that the human mind evolved specialized modules for making judgments about moral transgressions, and transgressions against property in particular. Evolutionary psychology can help us to understand that property rights are not created simply by strokes of the legislator's pen. Mutually Beneficial Exchange is Natural Trade and mutually beneficial exchange are human universals, as is the division of labor. In their groundbreaking paper, "Cognitive Adaptations for Social Exchange," Cosmides and Tooby point out that, contrary to widespread belief, hunter-gatherer life is not "a kind of retro-utopia" of "indiscriminate, egalitarian cooperation and sharing." The archeological and ethnographic evidence shows that hunter-gatherers were involved in numerous forms of trade and exchange. Some forms of hunter-gatherer trading can involve quite complex specialization and the interaction of supply and demand. Most impressive, Cosmides and Tooby have shown through a series of experiments that human beings are able easily to solve complex logical puzzles involving reciprocity, the accounting of costs and benefits, and the detection of people who have cheated on agreements. However, we are unable to solve formally identical puzzles that do not deal with questions of social exchange. That, they argue, points to the
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existence of "functionally specialized, content-dependent cognitive adaptations for social exchange." In other words, the human mind is "built" to trade. Natural survival instince makes capitalism unovercomable and desirable sex edited Serwetman 97 JD Suffolk Law
Will, http://www.ninjalawyer.com/writing/marx.html
Karl Marx's work laid the foundation for the theories that redefined the left in the nineteenth century. He analyzed capitalism and concluded that while it was productive, the forces that drove it would lead to its inevitable collapse and replacement wi th communism. While Marx gave the world a great deal to think about and has influenced billions, his theories are inherently flawed. Some of the details have been addressed by modern Communists and Socialists, but the basic underlying assumptions of his work, when subjected to scrutiny, seem to conflict with reality. These assumptions lead me to question his conclusions regarding the forces that drive history, the self-consuming nature of capitalist society, and the viability of a communist society. Marx's first set of
assumptions regards the nature of [hu]man[s]. He bases his materialist conception of human nature on that of B.
Ludwig Fuerbach. Both men believed that a [hu]man[s are] is a product of his society. Every individual's beliefs, attitudes, and ideas a re absorbed at an early age by exposure to those of the world around him. This argument makes some sense but it
ignores two things: the infinite and contradictory variety of experiences any society will produce and the evidence that [h]man's behavior will always be guided by certain instincts. Jeffery Dahmer
and Martin Luther King were products of the same society. At some age, humans acquire the ability to learn and make their own decisions. At this point, we are free and can develop any way we choose. In a single day, a human being has bi llions of experiences, and he will learn from many of them. Man not only chooses which experiences to learn from, but what he learns. Which experiences influences us most and the degree of their influence is dependent upon our choices. Those choices are the only thing that separates the Dahmers and Martin Luther Kings of the world. However far into the childhood or the womb you take back our chain of experiences, there must be a starting point. That starting point is our subconscious and our base instincts. Man is a product of evolution. When Marx argued that there is no single nature of man because we're simply products of our society, he seemed to be overlooking the forces that made man what he is today. All living organisms possess a survival
instinct, without which life could not exist. Humans are no exception; without a survival instinct there
would be nothing to prevent us from starving ourselves out of negligence, hurling ourselves off of cliffs, or committing suicide when we're upset, any of whi ch would make the continuation of our species impossible. When we face danger or discomfort, human beings respond at a very basic level. Fear and desire are perfectly natural to us. We are separated from
other living things, though, by our ability to reason. Nietzsche's most sensible argument was that conscious
thought coupled with our survival instinct generates what he called a "will to power." "Will to power" is the application of conscious thought to our survival instinct. It allows us to formulate strategies for survival and act upon them. No theory of human
nature is plausible unless it has definitive survival value, and it cannot be inhe rent to man unless it's in our
genes. If it's not known to be in our DNA, we can't prove that it exists in all men. Survival instinct and conscious thought can be proven, so the existence of a will to power is hard to ignore. Even Marx acknowledges the human will in "Alienated Labor," although it plays no role in his theory. It is possible that there are other elements of human nature, not accounted for by the will to power, that we have not yet found in our DNA. Looking at human history, we can empirically observe a sense of compassion in men that helps us build the great societies that we have. By compassion, I refer to our general distaste for watching other human beings suffer--those that enjoy suffering cannot function in society, and so do not reproduce as often. Natural selection weeds out people who cannot live wit h others. Marx believed that man could acquire compassion and genuine concern for his comrades simply by making it important in post-capitalist society. This would not only take generations to instill in society, but it there is no reason to believe tha t any given individual would embrace it. Because Marx's materialist view on humanity does not
acknowledge our nature, his ideal reflects the same mistakes. If human nature can be changed, as he feels it can simply by changing our society that we live in, why should we live with the inequities of capitalism? The problem is that his assumptions are backed by no credible arguments. If one accepts the materialist conception of the world at face value, then most of what Marx wrote will be consistent.
If one disagrees with the way Marx sees manki nd, however, and takes a more Nietzschean view, the Marxist ideal is a prescription for disaster. Due to our naturally distrustful, greedy, and ambitious natures, which precede
capitalism, humans will not motivate themselves to do anything unless there is a reward. Their survival instinct won't let them. Competition isn't just good for men--it's necessary. If there were no do more than just sit there and exist. Our will to power drives us to accumulate food, money, and control in order to
competition for the things we need, we would just take them and copulate and nothing else. While the species might survive, it would not progress, and we can live better. Competing for resources forces us to establish our identities and maximize our chances of survival and reproduction. As long as our nature remains unchangeable, We will never be able to adjust to life in a Marxist society. Marx's economic theory is flawed as well, since it ignores the role of
individuals and looks only at groups. The genius of a few individuals is all that has kept mankind raised from the life in
nature that Hobbes called "brutish, nasty and short." The individuals responsible for these achievements were generally not
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rewarded until the advent of capitalism and is industrial revolution, which has increased our rates of progress exponentially. If these few contributors weren't punished for their differences , they spent their lives working humbly under the "patronage" of feudal lords. Capitalism encourages individuals to make their contributions and spread them throughout the world, raising all of mankind higher and higher from our natural, animal-lik e existence.
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Cap Sustainable
Capitalism is progressive, self-correcting, and wealth-generating ensures sustainability Goklany 7 Julian Simon Fellow at the Political Economy Research Center
Indur, Now For the Good News, http://www.reason.com/news/show/119252.html Environmentalists and globalization
foes are united in their fear that greater population and consumption of energy, materials, and chemicals accompanying economic growth, technological change and free tradethe mainstays of globalizationdegrade human and environmental well-being. Indeed, the 20th century saw the United States population multiply by four, income by seven, carbon dioxide emissions by nine, use of materials by 27, and use of chemicals by more than 100. Yet life expectancy increased from 47 years to 77 years. Onset of major disease such as cancer, heart, and respiratory disease has been postponed between eight and eleven years in the past
century. Heart disease and cancer rates have been in rapid decline over the last two decades, and total cancer deaths have actually declined the last two years, despite increases in population. Among the very
These improvements havent been restricted to the United States. Its a global phenomenon. Worldwide, life expectancy has more than doubled,
young, infant mortality has declined from 100 deaths per 1,000 births in 1913 to just seven per 1,000 today. from 31 years in 1900 to 67 years today. Indias and Chinas infant mortalities exceeded 190 per 1,000 births in the early 1950s; today they are 62 and 26, respectively. In the developing world, the proportion of the population suffering from chronic hunger declined from 37 percent to 17 percent between 1970 and 2001 despite a 83 percent increase in population. Globally average annual incomes in real dollars have tripled
poverty has halved since 1981, from 40 percent to 20 labor in low income countries declined from 30 percent to 18 percent between 1960 and 2003. Equally important, the world is more literate and better educated than ever. People are freer politically, economically, and socially to pursue their well-being as they see fit. More people choose their own rulers, and have freedom of expression. They are more likely to live under rule of law, and less likely to be arbitrarily deprived of life, limb, and property. Social and professional mobility have also never been greater. Its easier than ever for people across the world to transcend the bonds of caste, place, gender, and other accidents of birth. People today
since 1950. Consequently, the proportion of the planet's developing-world population living in absolute
percent. Child
work fewer hours and have more money and better health to enjoy their leisure time than their ancestors. Mans environmental record is more complex. The early stages of development can indeed cause some environmental
deterioration as societies pursue first-order problems affecting human well-being. These include hunger, malnutrition,
illiteracy, and lack of education, basic public health services, safe water, sanitation, mobility, and ready sources of energy. Because greater wealth alleviates these problems while providing basic creature comforts, individuals and societies initially focus on economic development, often neglecting other aspects of environmental quality. In
time, however, they recognize that environmental deterioration reduces their quality of life. Accordingly, they put more of their recently acquired wealth and human capital into developing and implementing cleaner technologies. This brings about an environmental transition via the twin forces of economic development and technological progress, which begin to provide solutions to environmental problems instead of creating those problems. All of which is why we today find that the richest countries are also the cleanest. And while many developing countries
have yet to get past the green ceiling, they are nevertheless ahead of where todays developed countries used to be when they were equally wealthy. The point of transition from "industrial period" to "environmental conscious" continues to fall. For example, the US introduced unleaded gasoline only after its GDP per capita exceeded $16,000. India and China did the same before they reached $3,000 per capita. This progress is a testament to the power of globalization and the transfer of ideas
and knowledge (that lead is harmful, for example). It's also testament to the importance of trade in transferring technology from developed to developing countriesin this case, the technology needed to
remove lead from gasoline. This hints at the answer to the question of why some parts of the world have been left behind while the rest of the world has thrived. Why have improvements in well-being stalled in areas such as Sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab world? The proximate cause of improvements in well-being is a cycle of progress composed of the
mutually reinforcing forces of economic development and technological progress. But that cycle itself is propelled
by a web of essential institutions, particularly property rights, free markets, and rule of law. Other important institutions would include science- and technology-based problem-solving founded on skepticism and
free and open societies prosper. Isolation, intolerance, and hostility to the free exchange of knowledge, technology, people, and goods breed stagnation or regression.
experimentation; receptiveness to new technologies and ideas; and freer trade in goods, servicesmost importantly in knowledge and ideas. In short,
Capitalism can modify into a mixed economy ensures its sustainability Noble 3 chair of the department of Political Science and director of the international studies program at the California State
University Charles, Why Capitalism Needs the Left, http://www.logosjournal.com/noble.htm
Cap Kritik 164/194

In combination,
free market and capitalism have also helped usher in and sustain fundamental political changes, widening the scope both of personal freedom and political democracy. Because of this system, more people get to choose where to work, what to consume, and what to make than ever before, while ancient inequalities of rank and status are overturned. The spread of market capitalism has also laid the foundation for the expansion of democratic decisionmarket capitalism is not a
making. With the establishment of private property and free exchange, political movements demanding other freedoms, including wider access to government, have proliferated. To be sure, capitalism cannot guarantee personal liberty or political democracy. It has produced it share of dictatorships too. But, to date, no society has been able to establish and maintain political democracy without first establishing and securing a market capitalist system. The large corporations that stand at the heart of contemporary capitalism have proven indispensable in this transformation. They are the essential intermediaries in the modern economy, linking financial capital, expertise, technology, managerial skill, labor and leadership. They are spreading everywhere in the world not only because they are powerful, but also because they work. But
machine that can run on its own. It , limits, and above all else stewardship. Partly because the system feeds off of people's darker instincts, partly because it is a machine, and therefore indifferent to human values, and partly because there is no central planner to assure that everything works out in the end, there must be some conscious effort to bring order to this chaos, however creative it might be. Left to its own devices, unfettered capitalism produces great inequities, great suffering, and great instability. In fact, these in-built tendencies are enough to destroy the system itself. Karl Marx figured this out in the mid-19th century and built his revolutionary system on the
needs rules
Marx underestimated our ability to use politics to impose limits on the economic system itself. At one time, and still in other places, even conservatives knew this to be true, and offered themselves up as responsible social stewards. Whether out of a sense of noblesse oblige or enlightened self interest, they volunteered to lead a collective effort to reform the system so that capitalism could survive and continue to serve human interests. From the 1930s through the 1970s, American corporate leaders and a fair number of Republicans seemed to understand this too. They made their piece with "big" government, seeing in the New Deal and even the Great Society a way to forge both social peace and political stability through the creation of a "mixed" economy.
expectation that these dark forces would prevail. But
Cap Kritik 165/194
Space Cap Sustainable

Space makes cap more sustainable. Autino et. al., 11 Chairman of the Greater Earth Initiative
[Adriano Autino, member of the International Astronautic Federation and Chairman of the Greater Earth Initiative; Patrick Collins; Alberto Cavallo; Michael Martin-Smith; Charles Radley; authors for the Space Renaissance Initiative; Call for a World Space Renaissance Forum; accessed 6/21/2011; http://www.spacerenaissance.org/papers/CALL_FOR_SR_FORUM.pdf ] Jay
The global economy is entering a deep crisis, the worst since 1929. This is the second act of the "Crisis of
Closed-World Ideologies", which has been developing throughout the XX Century. In 1989, the fall of the Berlin wall was the Crisis of Collectivist Ideology. The recent massive failure of the financial system is the Crisis of Neo-Liberal
Ideology. Both these ideologies failed because they are based upon a closed-world, terro-centric philosophy. There are now almost 7 billion humans making massive demands on planet Earth: we urgently need to open the frontier, and move to a wider vision of our world, so as to access geo-lunar system resources and energy. In short, we need a new "Open World Philosophy". The alternative would be the implosion and collapse of our civilization. The most promising event of the current time, the emerging
countries' industrial revolution, will very soon have to face the dramatic insufficiency of the energy and other resources of the Earth. Because of this they are destined to fail if they remain locked within our planetary boundaries. There are some encouraging signs, pointing the way out of such confinement: in 2004, Scaled Composites proved that low-cost space travel is feasible - as it has been for 50 years. And both China and India have the Moon in their sights: they seem to understand clearly that space offers an alternative to a darkening future. This is because it is now evident that any closed-world strategy will result in
tragedy, as the 1930s depression ended with World War II. Today, since the energy and resources of planet Earth are not enough, it is far too likely that this crisis will end with a terrible holocaust, if we do not reach outside our world to obtain new resources and energy. Consequently if
G20 discussions are to solve the economic crisis, they must include plans for geolunar system industrialization, as the only sustainable direction for development, since this will make non-terrestrial resources and energy available. If governments are to give out financial aid, it should not be to obsolete industrial segments! Help should be given to the most promising industrial revolution of our age: the ignition of the space economy, which can only be based on low-cost space travel. This means, initially, rapidly developing low-cost space travel, industrialization of the Moon, space solar power supply, and accessing extra-terrestrial resources from asteroids and cometoids! There need be no depression if we aim high! If we want our civilization to continue, and to reach a higher ethical level, a new Renaissance is necessary and urgent - a Space Renaissance, the industrial and cultural revolution of our age! Stock exchanges are burning billions each week, but what are they burning? Only bits of information in bank accounts. Real
wealth is not money, but technologies and the potential for work: with 7 billion intelligences, Humanity has
never been so rich! The above is clearly evident to all astronautic humanists, but not to our political leaders!
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2AC Cap Good Frontline

Of course capitalism has its problems however, its short-sighted to reject the free market without a specific and viable solution Norberg 3 Fellow at Timbro and CATO
Capitalism is not a perfect system, and it is not good for everyone all the time. Critics of globalization are good at pointing out individual harmsa factory that has closed down, a wage that has been reduced. Such things do happen, but by concentrating solely on individual instances, one may miss the larger reality of how a political or economic system generally works and what fantastic values it confers on the great majority compared with other alternatives. Problems are found in every political and economic system, but rejecting all systems is not an option. Hunting down negative examples of what can happen in a market economy is easy enough. By that method water or fire can be proved to be bad things, because some people drown and some get burned to death, but this isn't the full picture. A myopic focus on capitalism's imperfections ignores the freedom and independence that it confers on people who have never experienced anything but oppression. It also disregards the calm and steady progress that is the basic rule of a society with a market economy. There is nothing wrong with identifying problems and mishaps in a predominantly successful system if one does so with the constructive intent of rectifying or alleviating them. But someone who condemns the system as such is obligated to answer this question: What political and economic system could manage things better? Never before in human history has prosperity grown so rapidly and poverty declined so heavily. Is there any evidence, either in history or in the world around us, to suggest that another system could do as well? Alternatives to Capitalism end in war and genocide Rummel 4 prof. emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii
Rudolph, The Killing Machine that is Marxism, Online
Of all religions, secular and otherwise, that of Marxism has been by far the bloodiest bloodier than
the Catholic Inquisition, the various Catholic crusades, and the Thirty Years War between Catholics and Protestants. In practice,
Marxism has meant bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal prison camps and murderous forced labor, fatal deportations, man-made famines, extrajudicial executions and fraudulent show trials, outright mass murder and genocide. In total, Marxist regimes murdered nearly 110 million people from 1917 to 1987. For perspective on this incredible toll, note that all domestic and foreign wars during the 20th century killed around 35 million. That is, when Marxists control states, Marxism is more deadly then all the wars of the 20th century, including World Wars I and II, and the Korean and Vietnam Wars. And what did Marxism, this greatest of human social experiments, achieve for its poor citizens, at this most bloody cost in lives? Nothing positive. It left in its wake an economic, environmental, social and cultural disaster. The Khmer Rouge (Cambodian communists) who ruled Cambodia for four years provide insight into why Marxists believed it necessary and moral to massacre so many of their fellow humans. Their Marxism was married to absolute power. They believed without a shred of doubt that they knew the truth, that they would bring about the greatest human welfare and happiness, and that to realize this utopia, they had to mercilessly tear down the old feudal or capitalist order and Buddhist culture, and then totally rebuild a communist society. Nothing could be allowed to stand in the way of this achievement. Government the Communist Party was above any law. All other institutions,
religions, cultural norms, traditions and sentiments were expendable. The Marxists saw the construction of this utopia as a war on poverty, exploitation, imperialism and inequality and, as in a real war, noncombatants would unfortunately get caught in the battle. There would be necessary enemy casualties: the clergy, bourgeoisie, capitalists, "wreckers," intellectuals, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, tyrants, the rich and landlords. As in a war, millions might die, but these deaths would be justified by the end, as in the defeat of Hitler in World War II. To the ruling Marxists, the goal of a communist utopia
was enough to justify all the deaths. The irony is that in practice, even after decades of total
Cap Kritik 167/194
control, Marxism did not improve the lot of the average person, but usually made living conditions worse than before the revolution. It is not by chance that the world's greatest famines have happened within the Soviet Union (about 5 million dead from 1921-23 and 7 million from 1932-3, including 2 million outside Ukraine) and communist China (about 30 million dead from 1959-61). Overall, in the last century almost 55
million people died in various Marxist famines and associated epidemics a little over 10 million of them were intentionally starved to death, and the rest died as an unintended result of Marxist collectivization and agricultural policies. What is astonishing is that
this "currency" of death by Marxism is not thousands or even hundreds of thousands, but millions of deaths. This is almost incomprehensible it is as though the whole population of the American New England and Middle Atlantic States, or California and Texas, had been wiped out. And that around 35 million people escaped Marxist countries as refugees was an unequaled vote against Marxist utopian pretensions. Its equivalent would be everyone fleeing California, emptying it of all
human beings. There is a supremely important lesson for human life and welfare to be learned from this horrendous sacrifice to one ideology: No one can be trusted with unlimited power. The more power a government has to impose the
beliefs of an ideological or religious elite, or decree the whims of a dictator, the more likely human lives and welfare will be sacrificed. As a government's power is more unrestrained, as its power reaches into all corners of culture and society, the more likely it is to kill its own citizens.
Cap Kritik 168/194
Cap Good War

Capitalism prevents conflict through information Gartzke 7- PhD- associate professor of political science at UC San Diego
(Erik, The Capitalist Peace, 1/5/07, http://dss.ucsd.edu/~egartzke/publications/gartzke_ajps_07.pdf)
While policy differences or resource competition can generate conflict, they need not produce contests if states can resolve differences diplomatically. Liberal theory emphasizes the pacifying effect of cross-border economic linkages. Markets are arguably most relevant as mechanisms for revealing information, however, rather than for adding to the risks or costs of fighting (Gartzke and Li 2003; Gartzke, Li, and Boehmer 2001). Competition creates incentives to bluff, to exaggerate capabilities or resolve. Anarchy makes it difficult for states to compel honest answers from one another except through the threat or imposition of harm. Contests inform by being costly, forcing actors to choose between bearing the burden of competition and backing down. Of course, one can signal by
burning money, expending valuable resources autonomously, but such acts create a relative as well as absolute loss. Tactics that impart costs only as a byproduct of imposing costs on an opponent can produce relative gains, while tactics such as burning money only harm the initiator. States with economies integrated into global markets face autonomous investors
with incentives to reallocate capital away from risk. A leaders threats against another state become costly when threats spark market repercussions. Participants learn from watching the reactions of leaders to the differential incentives of economic cost and political reward. Two economically integrated states can more often avoid military violence, since market integration combines mechanisms for revelation and coercion. An economically integrated target can be coerced by the threat of losing valuable exchange, but a
nonintegrated initiator cannot make its threats credible or informative. Conversely, a globalized initiator can signal but has little incentive to hamper its own markets when a nonintegrated target does not suffer (Gartzke 2006b).
Studies prove- capitalism prevents war Gartzke 7- PhD- associate professor of political science at UC San Diego
(Erik, The Capitalist Peace, 1/5/07, http://dss.ucsd.edu/~egartzke/publications/gartzke_ajps_07.pdf) How many wars occur between capitalist countries? It is not obvious how to condense the bundle of factors discussed above into a single variable. Still, IMFFIN.OPEN. (LOW) is probably the best candidate for such a test. Let
me arbitrarily define capitalist dyads as those where the lower IMF FIN. OPEN score is at least six. This is the closest ordinal value on the scale to a value at least two standard deviations above the mean (3.006+2(1.627)=6.26). It also produces a subsample of capitalist dyads that is about 6.9% of the available sample of observations, not much different from that for democratic dyads (R = 0.1491 for the two dummy variables). Interestingly, there are no wars in the capitalist dyads either, though the smaller sample of
cases for which data on financial openness are available means that only about a quarter of the wars are accounted for in the sample (54 wars,_2=4.0, Pr=0.045).To extend this very crude test a bit further, I add zeros to round out missing
observations so that the capitalist and democracy samples are the same size and all 222 wars appear in the sample. When I do this, the capitalist dyads again contain no wars and the relationship is highly significant (0.1%). Thus, both democracies and capitalist dyads appear never to fight wars.
Still, determining more about these relationships, and their relative impact on war, requires that we move beyond cross tabs.
The expansion of capitalism makes war less likely Griswold 5- Director of the Cato institute center for trade policy studies
(Daniel, Peace on earth? Try free trade among men, 12/28/05, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=5344) First, trade
and globalization have reinforced the trend toward democracy, and democracies don't pick fights with each other. Freedom to trade nurtures democracy by expanding the middle class in globalizing countries
and equipping people with tools of communication such as cell phones, satellite TV, and the Internet. With trade comes more travel, more contact with people in other countries, and more exposure to new ideas. Thanks in part to globalization, almost
two thirds of the world's countries today are democracies -- a record high. Second, as national economies become more integrated with each other, those nations have more to lose should war break out. War in a globalized world not only means human casualties and bigger government, but also ruptured trade and
investment ties that impose lasting damage on the economy. In short, globalization has dramatically raised the economic cost of war. Third, globalization allows nations to acquire wealth through production and trade rather than
Cap Kritik 169/194
conquest of territory and resources. Increasingly, wealth is measured in terms of intellectual property, financial assets, and human capital. Those are assets that cannot be seized by armies. If people need resources outside their national borders, say oil or timber or farm products, they can acquire them peacefully by trading away what they can produce best at home. Of course, free trade and globalization do not guarantee peace. Hot-blooded nationalism and ideological fervor can overwhelm cold economic calculations. But deep trade and investment ties among nations make war less attractive. Trade wars in the 1930s deepened the economic depression, exacerbated global
tensions, and helped to usher in a world war. Out of the ashes of that experience, the United States urged Germany, France, and other Western European nations to form a common market that has become the European Union. In large part because of their intertwined economies, a general war in Europe is now unthinkable.
Capitalism prevents war and disincentivises conflict- precludes the impacts of the kritik Bandow 5- Former assistant to president Regan, Senior fellow @ the Cato institute
(Doug, Spreading Capitalism is good for Peace, 11/10/05, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=5193/) But Gartzke argues that "the 'democratic peace' is a mirage created by the overlap between economic
and political freedom." That is, democracies typically have freer economies than do authoritarian states.
Thus, while "democracy is desirable for many reasons," he notes in a chapter in the latest volume of Economic Freedom in the World, created by the Fraser Institute, "representative governments are unlikely to contribute directly to
international peace." Capitalism is by far the more important factor. The shift from statist mercantilism to high-tech capitalism has transformed the economics behind war. Markets generate economic opportunities that make war less desirable. Territorial aggrandizement no longer provides the best path to riches. Free-flowing capital markets and other aspects of globalization simultaneously draw nations together and raise the economic price of military conflict. Moreover, sanctions, which interfere with economic prosperity, provides a coercive step short of war to achieve foreign policy ends. The spread of capitalism alone solves wars and conflicts Bandow 5- Former assistant to president Regan, Senior fellow @ the Cato institute
(Doug, Spreading Capitalism is good for Peace, 11/10/05, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=5193/) Positive economic trends are not enough to prevent war, but then, neither is democracy. It long has been obvious that democracies are willing to fight, just usually not each other. Contends Gartzke, "liberal political systems, in and of themselves, have no impact on whether states fight." In particular, poorer democracies perform like non-democracies. He explains: "Democracy does not have a measurable impact, while nations with very low levels of economic freedom are 14 times more prone to conflict than those with very high levels." Gartzke considers other variables, including alliance memberships, nuclear deterrence, and regional differences. Although the causes of conflict vary, the relationship between economic liberty and peace remains. His conclusion hasn't gone unchallenged. Author R.J. Rummel, an avid proponent of the democratic peace theory, challenges Gartzke's methodology and worries that it "may well lead intelligent and policy-wise analysts and commentators to draw the wrong conclusions about the importance of democratization." Gartzke responds in detail, noting that he relied on the same data as most democratic peace theorists. If it is true that democratic states don't go to war, then it also is true that "states with advanced free market economies never go to war with each other, either." The point is not that democracy is valueless. Free political systems naturally entail free elections and are more likely to protect other forms of liberty - civil and economic, for instance. However, democracy alone doesn't yield peace. To believe is does is
dangerous: There's no panacea for creating a conflict-free world. That doesn't mean that nothing can be done. But promoting open international markets - that is, spreading capitalism - is the best means to encourage peace as well as prosperity. Capitalism prevents conflict escalation- empirically proven Gartzke 7- PhD- associate professor of political science at UC San Diego
(Erik, The Capitalist Peace, 1/5/07, http://dss.ucsd.edu/~egartzke/publications/gartzke_ajps_07.pdf)
Conflict is inherent in the allocation of resources among two or more parties, but need not result in violence if the stakes are literally not worth fighting over or when bargains preempt fighting. Imagine two countries attempting to divide up a bundle of goods (resources, territory). Comparison of available allocations is zero-sum; any shift from one allocation to another benefits one country only at the expense of the other country. In this framework, a mutual preference for peace requires that the value of winning be small relative to the cost of fighting (Morrow 1989; Powell 1999). Peace advocates have long championed factors thought to make war
prohibitively expensive. Cobden, for example, claimed optimistically that Should war break out between two great nations I have no
Cap Kritik 170/194
doubt that the immense consumption of material and the rapid destruction of property would have the effect of very soon bringing the combatants to reason or exhausting their resources ([1867] 1903, 355). Yet, if war is a process where competitors inflict costs on one another, making war more expensive will affect who wins, or how long fighting lasts, but not whether a contest occurs (Levy andMorgan 1984). War costs are also endogenous; if fighting is prohibitive, countries will make themselves a nice little war.30 Increasing the cost of fighting, or alternately increasing the benefits of peaceeven when possible shape what
each actor will accept in lieu of fighting, but do not tell us which bargains are forged before warfare, and which after. Even the prospect of nuclear annihilation did not deter disputes during the cold war (Schelling 1960). If, on the other hand, the value of resources in dispute is small or varies with
ownership, then states can be disinclined to fight. Nations have historically used force to acquire land and resources, and subdue foreign populations. War or treaties that shifted control of territory changed the balance of resources, and power. Sovereigns, and to a lesser extent citizens, prospered as the state extended its domain. Development can alter these incentives if
modern production processes de-emphasize land, minerals, and rooted labor in favor of intellectual and financial capital (Brooks 1999, 2005; Rosecrance 1996). If the rents from conquest decline, even as occupation costs increase, then states can prefer to buy goods rather than steal them.31 As the U.S. invasion of Iraq illustrates, occupying a reluctant foreign power is extremely labor intensive. If soldiers are expensive, then nations can be better off outsourcing occupation to local leaders and obtaining needed goods through trade.32
Cap Kritik 171/194
Cap Good Freedom

Capitalism promotes democracy, freedom, and civil society- empirically proven Griswold 4- associate director of Cato's Center for Trade Policy Studies
(Dan, Trading Tyranny for Freedom: How open markets till the soil for democracy, 1/6/04, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3630)
Political scientists have long noted the connection between economic development, political reform, and democracy. Increased trade and economic integration promote civil and political freedoms directly by opening a society to new technology, communications, and democratic ideas. Economic liberalization provides a counterweight to governmental power and creates space for civil society. And by promoting faster growth, trade promotes political freedom indirectly by creating an economically independent and political aware middle class. Capitalism empirically leads to increased freedom and democracy Griswold 4- associate director of Cato's Center for Trade Policy Studies
(Dan, Trading Tyranny for Freedom: How open markets till the soil for democracy, 1/6/04, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3630)
The reality of the world today broadly reflects those theoretical links between trade, free markets, and political and civil freedom. As trade and globalization have spread to more and more countries in the last 30 years, so too have democracy and political and civil freedoms. In particular, the most economically open countries today are more than three times as likely to enjoy full political and civil freedoms as those that are relatively closed. Those that are closed are nine times more likely to completely suppress civil and political freedoms as those that are open. Nations that have followed a path of trade reform in recent decades by progressively opening themselves to the global economy are significantly more likely to have expanded their citizens' political and civil freedoms.
Protecting freedom is key to prevent dehumanization Mertus 6-Associate Professor of International Relations at American University, and Helsing, Deputy
Director for Education at the United States Institute of Peace, (Julie and Jeffrey W., Introduction: Exploring the Intersection between Human Rights, pg. 3-4)
The notion that deprivation of human rights contributes to protracted social conflict draws from the theory of basic human needs. Human needs theory is closely identified with the seminal work of John Burton, who theorized in Deviance, Terrorism and War: The Process of Solving Unsolved Social and Political Problems that unsatisfied human needs are the root cause of many of the most violent conflicts. Human rights abuses, like unmet human needs, threaten the security of individuals and social groups and, in so doing, create cycles of dehumanization based on fear. Politicians and militaries can use that fear to stoke their campaigns and further their agendas. Such was the case in Rwanda in 1994, as Tutsis in exile violated the rights of Hutu leaders even as Hutus in power dehumanized and slaughtered Tutsis at home. Not only do human rights abuses lead to the onset of conflict, but also, as Louis Kreisberg notes, inhumane treatment deepens the antagonism and the desire to continue
the struggle and even to seek revenge. The callous and indiscriminate use of violence, intended to intimidate and suppress the enemy, is frequently counterproductive, prolonging a struggle and making an enduring peace more difficult to attain. Some ideologies use dehumanizing imagery to exclude
enemy groups, describing other peoples as animals, vermin, or evil incarnate and thereby setting the stage for future human rights abuses. Leaders who emphasize ends over means are not likely to hesitate before violating human rights in pursuit of their goals. Memoirs can likewise evoke violent responses, since old resentments and distrust can keep tensions higher between groups or countries. For example, Rwandas history of social tensions, widespread killings, and long-standing human rights abuses fueled the genocidal massacres of the 1990s.
Dehumanization leads to Genocide and multiple wars Maiese, 03

( Michelle. "Dehumanization." July 2003 24 May 2008 http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/dehumanization/) Parties may come to believe that destruction of the other side is necessary, and pursue an overwhelming victory that will cause one's opponent to simply disappear. This sort of into-the-sea framing can cause
Cap Kritik 172/194
lasting damage to relationships between the conflicting parties, making it more difficult to solve their underlying problems and leading to the loss of more innocent lives. Indeed, dehumanization often paves the way for human rights violations, war crimes, and genocide. For example, in WWII, the dehumanization of the Jews ultimately led to the destruction of millions of people.[9] Similar atrocities have occurred in Rwanda, Cambodia, and the former Yugoslavia. It is thought that the psychological
process of dehumanization might be mitigated or reversed through humanization efforts, the development of empathy, the establishment of personal relationships between conflicting parties, and the pursuit of common goals.
Protecting rights is a priori it cannot be sacrificed for anything Petro 74 -- professor of law at Wake Forest
(Sylvester Petro, Spring 1974, Toledo Law Review, p. 480)
However, one may still insist on echoing Ernest Hemingway "I believe in only one thing: liberty." And it is always well to bear in mind David Hume's observation: "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." Thus, it is unacceptable to say
that the invasion of one aspect of freedom is of no import because there have been invasions of so many other aspects. That road leads to chaos, tyranny, despotism, and the end of all human aspiration. Ask Solzhenstyn, Ask Milovan Djilas. In sum, if one believes in freedom as a supreme value and proper ordering principle for any society aiming to maximize spiritual and material welfare, then every invasion of freedom must be emphatically identified and resisted with undying spirit.
Democracy prevents WMD proliferation Halperin 5 - Senior Vice President of the Center for American Progress and Director of the Open Society Policy Center, (Morton Halperin et al, 2005, The Democracy Advantage, p. 99)
in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The lack of openness, independent scrutiny, and adherence to established international regulations in closed political systems allow them greater leeway in pursuing programs to acquire them. The countries that have been the most active proliferators of materials for chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programsNorth Korea, Iran, Pakistan, Belarus, Libya, Syria, and Sudanare all run by dictators. Russia is also on the list. Although not classified as an autocracy, Russia has a long way to go in esA similar pattern is at work
33
tablishing democratic institutions that can assure transparency in government behavior and hold government officials accountable for their actions.
Proliferation risks global nuclear war and extinction
Krieger 9 - Pres. Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and Councilor World Future Council
(David, Still Loving the Bomb After All These Years, 9-4, https://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/2009/09/04_krieger_newsweek_response.php?krieger) Jonathan Teppermans article in the September 7, 2009 issue of Newsweek, Why Obama Should Learn to Love the Bomb,
provides a novel but frivolous argument that nuclear weapons may not, in fact, make the world more dangerous. Rather, in Teppermans world, The bomb may actually make us safer. Tepperman shares this world with Kenneth Waltz, a University of California professor emeritus of political science, who Tepperman describes as the leading nuclear optimist. Waltz expresses his optimism in this way: Weve now had 64 years of experience since
Hiroshima. Its striking and against all historical precedent that for that substantial period, there has not been any war among nuclear states. Actually, there were a number of proxy wars between nuclear weapons states, such
as those in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan, and some near disasters, the most notable being the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Waltzs logic is akin to observing a man falling from a high rise building, and noting that he had already fallen for 64 floors without anything bad happening to him, and concluding that so far it looked so good that others should try it. Dangerous logic! Tepperman builds upon Waltzs logic, and concludes that all states are rational, even though
their leaders may have a lot of bad qualities, including being stupid, petty, venal, even evil. He asks us to trust that rationality will always prevail when there is a risk of nuclear retaliation, because these weapons make the costs of war obvious, inevitable, and unacceptable. Actually, he is asking us to do more than trust in the rationality of leaders; he is
asking us to gamble the future on this proposition.
The iron logic of deterrence and mutually assured destruction is so compelling, Tepperman argues, its led to whats known as the nuclear peace. But if this is a peace worthy of the name, which it isnt, it certainly is not one on which to risk the future of civilization. One irrational leader with
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control over a nuclear arsenal could start a nuclear conflagration, resulting in a global Hiroshima. Tepperman celebrates the iron logic of deterrence, but deterrence is a theory that is far from rooted
in iron logic. It is a theory based upon threats that must be effectively communicated and believed. Leaders of Country A with nuclear weapons must communicate to other countries (B, C, etc.) the conditions under which A will retaliate with nuclear weapons. The leaders of the other countries must understand and believe the threat from Country A will, in fact, be carried out. The
longer that nuclear weapons are not used, the more other countries may come to believe that they can challenge Country A with impunity from nuclear retaliation. The more that Country A bullies other countries, the greater the incentive for these countries to develop their own nuclear arsenals. Deterrence is unstable and therefore precarious. Most of the countries in the world reject
the argument, made most prominently by Kenneth Waltz, that the spread of nuclear weapons makes the world safer. These countries joined together in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, but they never agreed to maintain indefinitely a system of nuclear apartheid in which some states possess nuclear weapons and others are prohibited from doing so. The principal bargain of the NPT requires the five NPT nuclear weapons states (US, Russia, UK, France and China) to engage in good faith negotiations for nuclear disarmament, and the International Court of Justice interpreted this to mean complete nuclear disarmament in all its aspects. Tepperman seems to be arguing that seeking to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons is bad policy, and that nuclear weapons, because of their threat, make efforts at non-proliferation unnecessary and even unwise. If some additional states, including Iran, developed nuclear arsenals, he concludes that wouldnt be so bad given the way that bombs tend to mellow behavior. Those who oppose Teppermans favorable disposition toward the bomb, he refers to as nuclear pessimists. These would be the people, and I would certainly be one of them, who see
nuclear weapons as presenting an urgent danger to our security, our species and our future. Tepperman finds that when viewed from his nuclear optimist perspective, nuclear weapons start to seem a lot less frightening. Nuclear peace, he tells us, rests on a scary bargain: you accept a small chance that something extremely bad will happen in exchange for a much bigger chance that something very bad conventional war wont happen. But the extremely bad thing he asks us to accept is the end of the human species. Yes, that would be serious. He also doesnt make the case that in a world without nuclear weapons, the prospects of conventional war would increase dramatically. After all, it is only an unproven supposition that nuclear weapons have prevented wars, or would do so in the future. We have certainly come far too close to the precipice of catastrophic nuclear war. As
an ultimate celebration of the faulty logic of deterrence, Tepperman calls for providing any nuclear weapons state with a survivable second strike option. Thus, he not only favors nuclear weapons, but finds the security of these weapons to trump human security. Presumably he would have President Obama providing new and secure nuclear weapons to North Korea, Pakistan and any other nuclear weapons states that come along so that they will feel secure enough not to use their weapons in a first-strike attack. Do
we really want to bet the human future that Kim Jong-Il and his successors are more rational than Mr. Tepperman? Democracy acts as a backstop against all of their impacts no democratically elected leader will allow policy disasters
McGinnis and Somin 7 Professor of Law @ NU and Georgetown Respectively
(John and Ilya, Should International Law Be Part of Our Law?, Stanford Law Review, Questia) Finally, democratic accountability also plays a crucial role in preventing major
public policy disasters, since elected leaders know that a highly visible catastrophic failure is likely to lead to punishment at the polls. For example, it is striking that no democratic nation, no matter how poor, has ever had a mass famine within its borders, (96) whereas such events are common in authoritarian and totalitarian states. (97) More generally, democracy serves as a check on self-dealing by political elites and helps ensure, at least to some extent, that leaders enact policies that serve the interests of their people.
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Cap Good Alt=Coercion

Strong state economics ensures totalitarianism and unlimited government coercion Hospers 7 Professor Emeritus of Philosophy @ USC
John, Libertarianism: A Political Philosophy for Tomorrow, Published Originally in 1971, pg. 249-250
In a free-enterprise society, people who disagree with the government, even those who disagree with the whole system, can still find employment. They can in fact usually earn their living by attacking the existing state of affairs. In a socialist society, people who disagree with the government can easily be disposed of. In both
systems there will always be people who disagree; but with socialism the political leader has the power to shut up the opposition. In Russia what happens is that an economic demand is "created" for a worker in the salt-mines of Siberia. Only in a free-
enterprise economy can the individual be in a position where his income is independent of the government. In a centrally planned economy, the worker must ultimately lose his freedom to choose
his own line of work. For, if no one wants to go to a certain area for a certain type of job and the government determines the wages, the government must force him to go there. It must control the worker along with the work. When we discuss "freedom to choose one's job" we mean freedom in its primary sense, as absence of coercion, not as the power to do something. Someone who wants to be a college professor and isn't, is not necessarily unfree. If nobody is willing to buy his services because he is ignorant, he may call himself "not free to become a professor" but the fact is simply thatothers choose not to avail themselves of his services. He may not get the job he wants, but he is still free because he is uncoecced. But in a socialist system all such choices would be
coerced, because of the power of unlimited government. Perhaps the most foolish thing that Marx ever said was that under socialism the state would eventually wither away. For " ... it is above all under socialism. where the state owns all the means of production, does all the planning and assigns and controls all the jobs, that the state is and must be closest to omnipotence .... It is precisely under a socialist state that the least liberty can exist. Under complete socialism, in fact, liberty for the individual is simply impossible. "4 In a free-enterprise economy, of course, all this is different. There, if someone plans to
start a business. and his plan is unwise or short-sighted. he goes bankrupt. No one forces him to start the business, and no one will stop him. Nor can he coerce employees into working for him: he cannot command their services by edict. but only by paying them at least as much as the going wage for the type of work in question. The worker voluntarily chooses to work for him. and consumers voluntarily choose to buy his product (if they don't. he goes broke). The manufacturer of the product cannot coerce the consumer. In a free economy, the consumer determines the economic fate of the manufacturer (and with him. his employees). This provides the manufacturer, of course. with a natural motive for providing the best possible product at the lowest possible price, so that his product will outvote that of his competitors in the economic plebiscite of the consumers.
PETRO 74 Petro, 1974 Prof. Law @ NYU
[Sylvester, Toledo Law Review, Spring, p. 480, http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200304/0783.html] However, one may still insist, echoing Ernest Hemingway - "I believe in only one thing: liberty." And it is always well to bear in mind David Hume's observation: "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." Thus, it is unacceptable
to say that the invasion of one aspect of freedom is of no importance because there have been invasions of so many other aspects. That road leads to chaos, tyranny, despotism, and the end of all human aspiration. Ask Solzhenitsyn. Ask Milovan Dijas. In sum, if one believed in freedom as a supreme value and the proper ordering principle for any society aiming to maximize spiritual and material welfare, then every invasion of freedom must be emphatically identified and resisted with undying spirit.
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Space Cap Good Space Tourism

Cap expansion in space causes space tourism Livingston 2K adjunct professor in the Graduate School of Business at Golden Gate University
(David, $pace: The Final Financial Frontier, http://www.spacefuture.com/archive/space_the_final_financial_frontier.shtml, dml) In all three surveys the venture capitalists expressed concerns about commercializing outer space. Their concerns centered around the high cost of getting into space, high insurance expenses, long development times, restrictive government policies, high risks of funding with the requirement for equally high returns, market uncertainties, inexperienced space company management, and complex legal issues. All those who completed the survey recognized that commercial opportunities are possible in outer space.
The most likely commercial opportunities cited have remained constant over the years and include launch services, communications, microgravity projects, infrastructure, remote sensing, space tourism, and extraterrestrial resources. The most frequent follow-up comment was that because of the various risks associated with commercial space ventures, these opportunities may encounter problems in financing and implementation. Space tourism is key to the overview effect solves all violence Livingston 2 adjunct professor in the Graduate School of Business at Golden Gate University
(David, Space Tourism After Dennis Tito, http://www.spacefuture.com/archive/space_tourism_after_dennis_tito.shtml, dml) The horrific events of September 11, 2001, and what may still come, actually help make the case for humans in space. As mentioned earlier, individuals in space experience the well-documented effect known as the overview effect, a term coined by Frank White, author of the Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution, Second Edition, published in 1998. This publication describes
the transformational experience that commonly follows observation of Earth from space-Earth free of borders and conflicts. When astronauts return to Earth, they all typically share the same transformational experience. A growing, successful space-tourism industry could bring perhaps millions to space who would, in turn, share this experience with others. This could have a powerful positive impact on our world. Space tourism is as important as ever, perhaps even more so than it was prior to September 11. Its importance goes beyond its potential economic value as a new industry when it can facilitate a new view of our world, bringing its people together and forming partnerships from former enemies as space remains outside the framework of human violence, hostilities, and war. It also solves every impact ever Collins and Autino 09*PhD, Economic Environment Research Lab, Environmental Policy Dept. **Space Future Representative and Editor
(Patrick and Adriano, What the Growth of a Space Tourism Industry Could Contribute to Employment, Economic Growth, Environmental Protection, Education, Culture and World, Space Future, 2009, http://www.spacefuture.com/archive/what_the_growth_of_a_space_tourism_industry_could_contribute_to_employment_econ omic_growth_environmental_protection_education _culture_and_world_peace.shtml)//AW
Investment in low-cost orbital access and other space infrastructure will facilitate the establishment of settlements on the Moon, Mars, asteroids and in man-made space structures. In the first phase, development of new regulatory infrastructure in various Earth orbits, including property/usufruct rights, real estate, mortgage financing and insurance, traffic management, pilotage, policing and other services will enable the population living in Earth orbits to grow very large. Such activities aimed at making near-Earth space habitable are the logical extension of humans' historical spread over the surface of the Earth. As trade spreads through near-Earth space, settlements are likely to follow, of which the inhabitants will add to the wealth of different cultures which humans have created in the many different environments in which they live. Success of such extra-terrestrial settlements will have the additional benefit of reducing the danger of human extinction due to planet-wide or cosmic accidents [27]. These horrors include both man-made disasters such as nuclear war, plagues or growing pollution, and natural
Cap Kritik 176/194
disasters such as super-volcanoes or asteroid impact.It is hard to think of any objective that is more important than preserving peace. Weapons developed in recent decades are so destructive, and have such horrific, long-term sideeffects that their use should be discouraged as strongly as possible by the international community. Hence, reducing the incentive to use these weapons by rapidly developing the ability to use space-based resources on a large scale is surely equally important [11,16]. The achievement of this depends on low space travel costs which, at the present time, appear to be achievable only through the development of a vigorous space tourism industry. 8. Summary As discussed above, if space travel services had started during the 1950s, the space industry would be enormously more developed than it is today. Hence the failure to develop passenger space travel has seriously distorted the path taken by humans' technological and economic development since WW2, away from the path which would have been followed if capitalism and democracy operated as intended. Technological know-how which could have been used to supply
services which are known to be very popular with a large proportion of the population has not been used for that purpose, while waste and suffering due to the unemployment and environmental damage caused by the resulting lack of new industrial opportunities have increased.
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Space Cap Good World Peace

Space globalization key to move away from cold war mentality and achieve space peace Dudley-Rowley and Gangale 6 *CEO and Founding Researcher, OPS-Alaska, AIAA member AND **Executive Director, OPS-Alaska, AIAA Member
(Marilyn and Thomas, Sustainability Public Policy Challenges of Long-Duration Space Exploration, http://www.astrosociology.org/Library/PDF/DudleyGangale_PublicPolicy.pdf, dml)
The context of the reshaping world order is re-organizing the space exploration endeavor and empowering those who risk to explore. When Americans hear Chinese and Indian space authorities claim they will send humans to the Moon or launch space stations, they tend to hear with the ears of the Cold War world .
They see still-highly agrarian economies with their Cold War Era eyes. As with the latent functions of the Space Race of the Cold War that produced the post Cold War transformation, the latent functions of the negotiation of this new world
order will open the Cosmos to China, India, and others with whom they collaborate. For, these societies are quantum-leaping into a state of advanced industrialization on a world stage where capitalism is globalizing, where the world system of societies is interdependent, and where they can wheel and deal and buy any resource to get them where they want to go. Their large populations, rather than hold them back, drive them forward. A key feature of the post Cold War world that makes their progress possible is an interdependence among the world system of societies that requires a level of international cooperation, working in a collective way toward large-scale mutual goals, which we have seen only a few
times before in history.
Cap Kritik 178/194
Space Cap Good Overpop

Expanding Capitalism to space solves population growth Zey 98- Executive director of the expansionary institute, Professor of Management at Montclair State University in Upper
Montclair, NJ (Michael G., Seizing the Future: The Dawn of the Macroindustrial Era. Second Edition., 1998, Pg. 90 ) Zero population growth proponents consistently fret that a rampant population increase will eventually
lead to global overcrowding. Although this does not appear to be an immediate danger, they contend, eventually the species will have to confront the possibility that we will simply run out of room for comfortable habitation. The exploration and colonization of other spheres potentially offers limitless possibilities for the numerical growth of the human species. Ironically, as the species begins to migrate and
establish settlements, the complaint may arise that we simply have too few people to populate these new worlds and staff the jobs in interstellar cities.
Extinction Otten 1
Edward Otten, Professor of Emergency Medicine and Pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati, 2000-2001, http://www.ecology.org/biod/population/human_pop1.html The exponential growth of the human population, making humans the dominant species on the planet, is
having a grave impact on biodiversity. This destruction of species by humans will eventually lead to a destruction of the human species through natural selection. While human beings have had an effect for the last 50,000 years, it has only been since the industrial revolution that the impact has been global rather than regional. This global impact is taking place through five primary processes: over harvesting, alien species introduction, pollution, habitat fragmentation, and outright habit destruction. And global wars
Ehrlich and Ehrlich 6

Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich, faculty at Stanford University, 9-30-2006, New Scientist Much of today's population growth is occurring in rural regions in the developing world, sparking
tension both within and between nations as increasing numbers of young people migrate to cities and to wealthier countries looking for
a better life. In the US, where large numbers of illegal immigrants enter the country in search of work, opinions on immigration are already sharply divided. Western European nations have tended to accept limited immigration from developing countries as a way to augment their workforce. Here too illegal immigration is increasingly a problem, as thousands of people flee overcrowded labour markets in poor African and Asian countries in search of jobs. In many developing countries, numbers of young working-age people are rising by up to 3 per cent per year. Dissatisfaction is inevitable where populations of mostly young people face high unemployment, poverty, poor healthcare, limited education, inequity and repressive government. Revolutions and political unrest most often occur in developing nations with growing populations. Unemployed, disaffected young men provide
both public support and cannon fodder for terrorism. The majority of terrorists behind 9/11 and attacks in
Europe, for instance, have been young adult men. This is also the demographic group responsible for most crime globally. Expanding populations also create rising demands for food, energy and materials. The strain this puts on ecosystems and resources in developing countries is compounded by demands from industrialised nations keen to exploit everything from timber and tropical fruits to metals and petroleum. Shortages of fresh water are increasingly
common, jeopardising food production among many other problems. Rising oil prices may now be
signalling the end of cheap energy, which also poses a threat to successful development. At the same time, mounting evidence of global warming makes reducing fossil-fuel use imperative. If the 5 billion-plus people in developing nations
matched the consumption patterns of the 1.2 billion in the industrialized world, at least two more Earths would be needed to support everyone. Politicians and the public seem utterly oblivious to what will be
required to maintain crucial ecosystem services and an adequate food supply in the face of rapid climate change and an accelerated loss of biodiversity. The future looks grim, unless patterns of consumption change - with rich nations causing less environmental damage and poor ones consuming more, but adopting the newest, cleanest and most efficient technologies for energy use and production of goods and services. It seems likely that by 2050 nuclear, biological and chemical weapons of mass
destruction will be in the hands of most nations and many subnational groups. Imagine a well-armed world, still split between rich and poor, with unevenly distributed resources and a ravaged environment. Unless we act now, future generations will not have to imagine. Capitalism solves overpopulation
Cap Kritik 179/194 Norton 4 Professor of Business at Wheaton College

Seth, You Have to Admit Its Getting Better, pg. 159-160
The relationship is a powerful one. Fertility rates are more than twice as high in countries with low levels of economic freedom and rule of law compared with countries that have high levels of those measures. Formal analysis of the data indicates that these differences are not merely random." The link between these institutions and fertility partly reflects the impact of economic growth-by encouraging economic growth, these institutions indirectly affect fertility. But there also is evidence that these growth-enhancing institutions affect fertility for other reasons. Many developing countries have poorly specified or poorly enforced property rights. When fuel wood and fodder are not owned and formal laws of possession do not govern their harvest and use, people do not hear the full cost of their consumption. They have an incentive to appropriate resources at the fastest rate possible, often leading to excessive harvest. This condition is generally labeled the "tragedy of the commons." What better way to capture open-access resources than to have as many gatherers as possible? Higher fertility is a way to do this.Theodore Panayotou (1994, 151) observes that "most contributions by children consist
of capturing and appropriating open-access natural resources such as water, fodder, pastures, fish, fuel wood, and other forest products, and clearing open-access land for cultivation,"This, he continues, makes "the number of children the decisive instrument in the hands of the household: The household's share of open-access property depends on the number of
hands it employs to convert open- access resources into private property."Yet this could "become devastating for the resource, the community, and eventually the individual household."
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Space Cap Good Overview Effect

Space exploration allows for universal peace. Dark the Third 6 Associate Professor in Political Science
(Taylor, September 19th 2006, RECLAIMING THE FUTURE: SPACE ADVOCACY AND THE IDEA OF PROGRESS, http://taylordark.com/T.%20Dark%20--%20NASA%20conference%20paper.pdf) Others have argued that the diffusion
of human beings off the planetary surface will open up new opportunities for social experimentation, opportunities that were last seen, they suggest, in the original settlement of the New World and the American frontier. On Earth it is difficult for . . . people to form new nations or regions for themselves, science author T.A. Heppenheimer observed. But in space it will become easy for ethnic or religious groups, and for many others as well, to set up their own colonies . . . Those who wish to found
experimental communities, to try new social forms and practices, will have the opportunity to strike out into the wilderness and establish their ideals in cities in space. In a burst of multicultural enthusiasm, Heppenheimer even suggests that we may see
the return of the Cherokee or Arapaho nation not necessarily with a revival of the culture of prairie, horse, and buffalo, but in the founding of self-governing communities which reflect the Arapaho or Cherokee customs . . . 25 Carl Sagan also sees more cultural diversity as humanity establishes new civilizations on different planets and other celestial bodies: Each society would tend to be proud
of the virtues of its world, its planetary engineering, its social conventions, its hereditary predispositions. Necessarily, cultural differences would be cherished and exaggerated. This diversity would serve as a tool of survival.26 Zubrin likewise claims that Mars colonization will promote cultural diversity in a world where it is increasingly threatened by proximity and overcrowding. Space migration will also enlarge the pool of positive images of the future available to
humanity images that space advocates consider essential to motivate and guide purposeful activity. Many space advocates complain that optimistic images of the future have been displaced in recent decades by far more
negative views. Sagan writes: Where are dreams that motivate and inspire? Where are the visions of hopeful futures, of technology as a tool for human betterment and not a gun on a hair trigger pointed at our heads? A rare exception to the spread of gloomy visions, according to Sagan, was the space program of the 1960s: Apollo conveyed a confidence, energy, and
breadth of vision that did capture the imagination of the world . . . It inspired an optimism about technology,
an enthusiasm for the future . . . With Apollo, the United States touched greatness.27 With a renewed commitment to space, the psychological and cultural health of America and humanity in general would surely improve. Space advocates also foresee
a new era of peace and mutual understanding arising as a result of space travel. Sagan writes that the
unexpected final gift of Apollo was the inescapable recognition of the unity and fragility of the Earth. Sagan continues: Im struck again by the irony that spaceflight conceived in the cauldron of nationalist rivalries and hatreds brings with it a stunning transnational vision. You spend even a little time contemplating the Earth from orbit and the most deeply ingrained nationalisms begin to erode. They seem the squabbles of mites on a plum.28 Another space enthusiast, Frank White, argues for the existence of what he calls an overview effect in which humans who are launched into space achieve a veritable breakthrough in human consciousness. Those living in space will be able to see how everything is related, that what appears
to be the world to people on Earth is merely a small planet in space, and what appears to be the present is merely a limited viewpoint to one looking from a higher level. People who live in space will take for granted philosophical insights that have taken those on Earth thousands of years to formulate. They will start at a place we have labored to attain over several millennia. Space dwellers will become aware that we are one; we are all in this together; war and strife solve nothing. White also
suggests that the multiplier effect means that sending a limited number of people into space can lead to a broad-based social transformation. The experiences of the few become new information for the many, serving as fuel
for
social evolution.29 The overview effect solves all war. Livingston 2 M.D. in Business
(David, The Ethical Commercialization of Outer Space, http://www.davidlivingston.com/publications/The_Ethical_Commercialization_of_Outer_Space.pdf) Most astronauts claim to view Earth differently after having been in space. Often their commentaries show a world that is united in space, but unfortunately absent on Earth. When the Saudi-Arabian Prince Sultan Bin Salman al-Saud went into orbit in June 1985 he said, "I think the minute I saw the view for the first time was really one of the
most memorable moments in my entire life."8 When asked by the interviewer how it changed his understanding of God, the Sultan said, "It really strengthens your convictions. To me, it's an opportunity to prove that there is no conflict being a Muslim, or any other religion. Looking at it from here, the troubles all over
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the world, and not just the Middle East, look very strange as you see the boundaries and border lines disappearing."9 U.S. Congressman Bill Nelson, who went to space in January 1986, said upon his return: "If the superpower leaders could be given the opportunity to see the Earth from the perspective from which I saw itperhaps at a summit meeting in space in the context of the next centurythey might realize that we're all in this with a common denominator. It would have a positive effect on their future decisions concerning war and peace.10 Such space-based perspectives and their spillover effects on those of us unable to experience space firsthand may ultimately have a greater influence on our commercial space business practices than anything we do or say on Earth. Robert Bigelow of Bigelow Aerospace of Las Vegas was
recently interviewed about his announcement to invest $500 million of his own money over the next several years to build a space cruise liner for Earth to moon tourism. Bigelow understands the limitations of our perceptions and the way we do things, especially since we have technology that enables us to do so much. When asked during his interview if his cruise liner would have defenses onboard in case of a meeting with a hostile ET, Bigelow replied: I'm not so sure exactly who the Klingons are. I think the jury is still out on whether or not its the human race. I think we have a huge divergence between our paths of improvement on spiritual maturity, while at the same time this century we compare that against the path of our technological advancements. You have to
have some harmony. I think in order to be a member of a species that is a space-faring species that other species shouldn't fear, I think you have some type of meeting where your technological maturity is met to some degree with spiritual maturity.11
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Space Cap Good Overview Effect Extensions

Capitalism in space creates a borderless world in which people can free themselves from geographical constraints. Yeung 98Professor of Economic Geography at the National University of Singapore
(Henry Wai-chung, Capital, State and Space: Contesting the Borderless World, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Blackwell Publishing, Vol. 23, No. 3, JSTOR)//AW
Second, a proper theorization of the spatial dynamics of globalization should address the fundamental relationship between capital and space. In the radical literature, four dimensions of spatial practice by capital are suggested (Gottdiener 1987; Harvey 1989; Lefebvre 1991; Swyngedouw 1992; Yeung 1998a): accessibility and distanciation; appropriation and use of space; domination and control of space; and (re)production of space. Space therefore remains integral to the (re)production of capital and capital accumulation. This is particularly true during the internationalization of capital, when space is seemingly commanded and 'consumed' by capital (represented by TNCs) for further
accumulation. This 'consumption' of space by capital is manifested in the spheres of circulation (transport and communication) and production (factors of production). Harvey (1985, 145) notes that, [b]y increasing the range of possible
substitutions within a given production process, capitalists can increasingly free themselves from particular geographical constraints. When this 'consumption' of space by capital is completed, Obama's end-state of a 'borderless' world is achieved, in which capital becomes 'state- less' and 'placeless'.
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Space Cap Good Economic Innovation

Expanding Capitalism to space will foster economic innovation Zey 98- Executive director of the expansionary institute, Professor of Management at Montclair State University in Upper
Montclair, NJ (Michael G., Seizing the Future: The Dawn of the Macroindustrial Era. Second Edition., 1998, Pg. 89)
Various products for consumer and industrial application are spun off from the research and development activities of the space program. For instance, the new superlightweight materials now used in wheelchair construction are a derivative of NASAs advanced material research. The communications industry as we know it could not exist without the species achievements in space satellite technology. Every space
environment makes possible the growing of crystals that may help in the fight against acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and other deadly diseases. More importantly, there is every reason to believe that the Moon and probably
Mars will themselves become sources of energy and material that will serve humanity on Earth. Economic innovation is key to maintaining US hegemony. Reuveny and Thompson 4- *Professor of Public and Environmental Affairs and **Professor of Political Science (Rafael and William, Both at Indiana University, Growth, Trade, and Systemic Leadership, p. 77)
The results establish that the United States has exhibited positive economic and political inertia as historical values exert significant effects on their own contemporary values. Domestic economic innovation is a prerequisite to
attaining world economic and political leadership. Importantly, military mobilization increases leading sector
growth rates and shares, a finding that supports the Modelski and Thompson (1996) twin peak idea and one that speaks against the generic war/postwar economic contraction assertion that some analysts have posited over the years. World economic
leadership is a prerequisite to attaining political leadership in the form of global reach capabilities. Building global reach capabilities constrains economic innovation in the short run but contributes to its expansion in a longer run. Heg collapse causes global nuclear war Thayer 6- Professor of Defense and Strategic Studies @ Missouri State University, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota, Duluth
(Bradley A., In Defense of Primacy, National Interest; Nov/Dec2006 Issue 86, p. 32-37, Lexis)
THROUGHOUT HISTORY, peace and stability have been great benefits of an era where there was a dominant power--Rome, Britain or the United States today. Scholars and statesmen have long recognized the irenic effect of power on the anarchic world of international politics. Everything we think of when we consider the current international order--free trade, a robust monetary regime, increasing respect for human rights, growing democratization--is directly linked to U.S. power. Retrenchment proponents seem to think collapse. The Dark Ages followed Rome's collapse. Hitler succeeded the order established at Versailles. Without U.S. power, the liberal order created by the United States will end just as assuredly. As country and western great Ral Donner
that the current system can be maintained without the current amount of U.S. power behind it. In that they are dead wrong and need to be reminded of one of history's most significant lessons: Appalling things happen when international orders
sang: "You don't know what you've got (until you lose it)." Consequently, it is important to note what those good things are. In addition to ensuring the security of the United States and its allies, American primacy within the international system causes many positive outcomes for Washington and the world. The first has been a more peaceful world. During the Cold War, U.S. leadership reduced friction among many states that were historical antagonists , most notably France and West Germany. Today, American
primacy helps keep a number of complicated relationships aligned --between Greece and Turkey, Israel and
Egypt, South Korea and Japan, India and Pakistan, Indonesia and Australia. This is not to say it fulfills Woodrow Wilson's vision of ending all war. Wars still occur where Washington's interests are not seriously threatened, such as in Darfur, but a Pax
Americana does reduce war's likelihood, particularly war's worst form: great power wars.
Cap Kritik 184/194
Space Cap Good Disease

Expanding capitalism into space solves disease Zey 98- Executive director of the expansionary institute, Professor of Management at Montclair State University in Upper
Montclair, NJ (Michael G., Seizing the Future: The Dawn of the Macroindustrial Era. Second Edition., 1998, Pg. 89)
Various products for consumer and industrial application are spun off from the research and development activities of the space program. For instance, the new superlightweight materials now used in
wheelchair construction are a derivative of NASAs advanced material research. The communications industry as we know it could not exist without the species achievements in space satellite technology. Every space environment makes possible
the growing of crystals that may help in the fight against acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and other deadly diseases. More importantly, there is every reason to believe that the Moon and probably Mars will themselves
become sources of energy and material that will serve humanity on Earth.
Disease causes extinction Stienbruer 98 Senior fellow at the Brookings institute

(John D. Steinbruner, Biological Weapons: A Plague Upon All Houses, FOREIGN POLICY n. 109, Winter 1997/1998, pp. 85-96, ASP.) It is a considerable comfort and undoubtedly a key to our survival that, so far, the main lines of defense against this threat have not depended on explicit policies or organized efforts. In the long course of evolution, the human body has developed physical barriers and a biochemical immune system whose sophistication and effectiveness exceed anything we could design or as yet even fully understand. But evolution is a sword that cuts both ways: New diseases emerge, while old diseases mutate and
adapt. Throughout history, there have been epidemics during which human immunity has broken down on an epic scale. An
infectious agent believed to have been the plague bacterium killed an estimated 20 million people over a four-year period in the fourteenth century, including nearly one-quarter of Western Europe's population at the time. Since its recognized appearance in 1981, some 20 variations of the HIV virus have infected an estimated 29.4 million worldwide, with 1.5 million people
currently dying of AIDS each year. Malaria, tuberculosis, and cholera - once thought to be under control - are now making a comeback. As we enter the twenty-first century, changing conditions have enhanced the potential for widespread contagion. The rapid growth rate of the total world population, the
unprecedented freedom of movement across international borders, and scientific advances that expand the capability for the deliberate manipulation of pathogens are all cause for worry that the problem might be greater in the future than it has ever been in the past. The threat of infectious pathogens is not just an issue of public health, but a fundamental
security problem for the species as a whole.
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Cap Good AT Disease

Capitalism solves disease free trade and IPR encourage tech transfer that lowers cost of solutions Goklany 4 Julian Simon Fellow at the Political Economy Research Center
Indur, You have to Admit Its Getting Better, pg. 76 Notably, improvements
in well-being have not yet run their full course. Substantial additional improvements in infant mortulitv and life expectancy are possible in developing countries if they become wealthier and if existing-but-underusedsafe_water, sanitation, and agricultural technologies are more widely
spread (Lomhorg 200 I, 334-,~) 1, How- ever, once the easy and relatively cheap improvements in health and life expectancy have been captured, solutions to remuining pro hi ems (such as AIDS and the diseases of affluence), being expensive, might be increasingly unaffordable, whether one lives in <J developed or developing country. Further improvements in human
well-being will depend largely on the development of human and capital resources and encouraging the development and deployment of new risk-reduction technologies. Thus, it is critical to focus on strengthening the domestic and international institutions that will boost technological change and economic development, which include free markets, freer trade, individual property rights, the rule of law, and transparent government and bureau- cractes. Capitalism is not the cause of misplaced disease research rather, economic growth purported by capitalism is key to preventing disease Norberg 3 Fellow at Timbro and CATO
One common objection to the market economy is that it causes people and enterprises to produce for profit, not for needs. This means, for example, pharmaceutical companies devoting huge resources to research and medicines to do with obesity, baldness, and depression, things that westerners can afford to worry about and pay for, whereas only a fraction is devoted to attempting to cure tropical diseases afflicting the poorest of the world's inhabitants, such as malaria and tuberculosis. This criticism is understandable. The unfairness exists, but capitalism is not to blame for it. Without capitalism and the lure of profit, we shouldn't imagine that everyone would have obtained cures for their illnesses. In fact, far fewer would do so than is now the case. If wealthy people in the West demand help for their problems, their resources can be used to research and eventually solve those problems, which are not necessarily trivial to the people afflicted with them. Capitalism gives companies economic incentives to help us by developing medicines and vaccines. That westerners spend money this way does not make things worse for anyone. This is not money that would otherwise have gone to researching tropical diseasesthe pharmaceutical companies simply would not have had these resources otherwise. And, as free trade and the market economy promote greater prosperity in poorer countries, their needs and desires will play a larger role in dictating the purposes of research and production. Empirically, excess profit is used for philanthropy Norberg 3 Fellow at Timbro and CATO
Johan Norberg, In Defense of Global Capitalism, pg. 187 It is not a problem for the Third World that more and more diseases have been made curable in the Western world. On the contrary, that is something that has proved to be a benefit, and not just because a wealthier world can devote more resources to helping the poor. In many fields, the Third World can inexpensively share in the research financed by wealthy
Western customers, sometimes paying nothing for it. The Merck Corporation gave free medicine to a project to combat onchocerciasis (river blindness) in 11 African states. As a result those states have now rid themselves almost completely of a parasite that formerly affected something like a million people, blinding thousands every year. 22 The Monsanto Corporation allows researchers and companies free use of their technique for developing golden rice, a strain of rice enriched with
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iron and beta carotene (pro-vitamin A), which could save a million people annually in the Third World who are dying of vitamin A deficiency diseases. A number of pharmaceutical companies are lowering the prices of inhibitors for HIV/AIDS in poor countries by up to 95 percent, on condition that the patents are preserved so that they can maintain full prices in wealthier countries.
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Cap Good AT Environment

Capitalism empirically shields the environment eight reasons wealth, democracy, tech development, trade, market adjusting to scarcity, regulation of externalities, easy compliance, private property Norberg 3 Fellow at Timbro and CATO
Johan Norberg, In Defense of Global Capitalism, pg. 225-237
All over the world, economic progress and growth are moving hand in hand with intensified environmental protection. Four researchers who studied these connections found a very strong, positive association between our [environmental] indicators and the level of economic development. A country that is very poor is too preoccupied with lifting itself out of poverty to bother about the environment at all. Countries usually begin protecting their natural resources when they can afford to do so. When they grow richer, they start to regulate effluent emissions, and when they have still more resources they also begin regulating air quality. 19 A number of factors cause environment
protection to increase with wealth and development. Environmental quality is unlikely to be a top priority for people who barely know where their next meal is coming from. Abating misery and subduing the pangs of hunger takes precedence over conservation. When
our standard of living rises we start attaching importance to the environment and obtaining resources to improve it. Such was the case earlier in western Europe, and so it is in the developing countries today. Progress of this kind, however, requires that people live in democracies where they are able and allowed to mobilize opinion; otherwise, their preferences will have no impact. Environmental destruction is worst in dictatorships. But it is the fact of prosperity no less than a sense of responsibility that makes environmental protection easier in a wealthy society. A wealthier country can afford to tackle environmental problems; it can develop environmentally friendly technologieswastewater and exhaust emission control, for example and begin to rectify past mistakes. Global environmental development resembles not so much a race for the bottom as a race to the top, what we might call a California effect. The state of California's Clean Air Acts, first introduced in the 1970s and tightened since, were stringent emissions regulations that made rigorous demands on car manufacturers. Many prophets of doom predicted that firms and factories would move to other states, and California would soon be obliged to repeal its regulations. But instead the opposite happened: other states gradually tightened up their environmental stipulations. Because car companies
easily comply with the exacting requirements of other states, whereupon those states again ratcheted up their requirements.
needed the wealthy California market, manufacturers all over the United States were forced to develop new techniques for reducing emissions. Having done so, they could more
Anti-globalists usually claim that the profit motive and free trade together cause businesses to entrap politicians in a race for the bottom. The California effect implies the opposite: free trade enables politicians to pull profit-hungry corporations along with them in a race to the top. This phenomenon occurs because compliance with environmental rules accounts for a very small proportion of most companies' expenditures. What firms are primarily after is a good business environmenta liberal economy and a skilled workforce not a bad natural environment. A review of research in this field shows that there are no clear indications of national environmental rules leading to a diminution of exports or to fewer companies locating in the countries that pass the rules. 20 This finding undermines both the arguments put forward by companies against environmental regulations and those advanced by environmentalists maintaining that globalization has to be restrained for environmental reasons. Incipient signs of the California effect's race to the top are present all over the world, because globalization has caused different countries to absorb new techniques more rapidly, and the new techniques are generally far gentler on the environment. Researchers have investigated steel manufacturing in 50 different countries and concluded that countries with more open economies took the lead in introducing cleaner technology. Production in those countries generated almost 20 percent less emissions than the same production in closed countries. This process is being driven by multinational corporations because they have a lot to gain from uniform
production with uniform technology. Because they are restructured more rapidly, they have more modern machinery. And they prefer assimilating the latest, most environmentally friendly technology immediately to retrofitting it, at great expense, when environmental regulations are tightened up.
Brazil, Mexico, and Chinathe three biggest recipients of foreign investmenthave followed a very clear pattern: the more investments they get, the better control they gain over air pollution. The worst forms of air pollution
have diminished in their cities during the period of globalization. When Western companies start up in developing countries, their production is considerably more environment-friendly than the native production, and they are more willing to comply with environmental legislation, not least because they have brand images and reputations to protect. Only 30 percent of Indonesian companies comply with the country's environmental regulations, whereas no fewer than 80 percent of the multinationals do so. One out of every 10 foreign companies maintained a standard clearly superior to that of the regulations. This development would go faster if economies were more open and, in particular, if the governments of the world were to phase out the incomprehensible tariffs on environmentally friendly technology. 21 Sometimes one hears it said that, for environmental reasons, the poor countries of the South must not be allowed to grow as affluent as our countries in the North. For example, in a compilation of essays on
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Environmentally Significant Consumption published by the National Academy of Sciences, we
find anthropologist Richard Wilk fretting that: If everyone develops a desire for the Western high-consumption lifestyle, the relentless growth in consumption, energy use, waste, and emissions may be disastrous. 22 But studies show this to be colossal misapprehension. On the contrary, it is in the developing countries that we find the gravest, most harmful
industrial emissions. Tying people down to that level of development means condemning millions to premature death every year.
environmental problems. In our affluent part of the world, more and more people are mindful of environmental problems such as endangered green areas. Every day in the developing countries, more than 6,000 people die from air pollution when using wood, dung, and agricultural waste in their homes as heating and cooking fuel. UNDP estimates that no fewer than 2.2 million people die every year from polluted indoor air. This result is already disastrous and far more destructive than atmospheric pollution and
It is not true that pollution in the modern sense increases with growth. Instead, pollution follows an inverted Ucurve. When growth in a very poor country gathers speed and the chimneys begin belching smoke, the environment suffers. But when prosperity has risen high enough, the environmental indicators show an improvement instead: emissions are reduced, and air and water show progressively lower
concentrations of pollutants. The cities with the worst problems are not Stockholm, New York, and Zrich, but rather Beijing, Mexico City, and New Delhi. In addition to the factors already mentioned, this is also due to the economic structure changing from raw-material-intensive to knowledge-intensive production. In a modern economy, heavy, dirty industry is to a great extent superseded by service enterprises. Banks, consulting firms, and information technology corporations do not have the same environmental impact as old factories. According to one survey of available environmental data, the turning point generally comes before a country's per capita GDP has reached $8,000. At $10,000, the researchers found a positive connection between increased growth and better air and water quality. 23 That is roughly the level of prosperity of Argentina, South Korea, or Slovenia. In the United States, per capita GDP is about $36,300. Here as well, the environment has consistently improved since the 1970s, quite contrary to the picture one gets from the media. In the 1970s there was constant reference to smog in American cities, and rightly so: the air was judged to be unhealthy for 100300 days a year. Today it is unhealthy for fewer than 10 days a year, with the exception of Los Angeles. There, the figure is roughly 80 days, but even that represents a 50 percent reduction in 10 years. 24 The same trend is noticeable in the rest of the affluent worldfor example, in Tokyo, where, a few decades ago, doomsayers believed that oxygen masks would in the future have to be worn all around the city because of the bad air. Apart from its other positive effects on the developing countries, such as ameliorating hunger and sparing people the
prosperity beyond a certain critical point can improve the environment. What is more, this turning point is now occurring progressively earlier in the developing countries, because they can learn from more affluent countries' mistakes and use their superior technology. For example, air quality in the enormous cities of China, which are the most heavily polluted in the world, has steadied since the mid-1980s and in several cases has slowly improved. This improvement has coincided with uniquely rapid growth. Some years ago, the Danish statistician
horror of watching their children die,
and Greenpeace member Bjrn Lomborg, with about 10 of his students, compiled statistics and facts about the world's environmental problems. To his astonishment, he found that what he himself had regarded as self-evident, the steady deterioration of the global environment, did not agree at all with official empirical data. He found instead that air pollution is diminishing, refuse problems are diminishing, resources are not running out, more people are eating their fill, and people are living longer. Lomborg gathered publicly available data from as many fields as he could find and published them in the book The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World. The picture that emerges there is an important corrective to the general prophesies of doom that can so easily be imbibed from newspaper headlines. Lomborg shows that air pollution and
emissions have been declining in the developed world during recent decades. Heavy metal emissions have been
heavily reduced; nitrogen oxides have diminished by almost 30 percent and sulfur emissions by about 80 percent. Pollution and emission problems are still growing in the poor developing countries, but at every level of growth annual particle density has diminished by 2 percent in only 14 years. In the developed world, phosphorus emissions into the seas have declined drastically, and E. coli bacteria concentrations in coastal waters have plummeted, enabling closed swimming areas to reopen. Lomborg shows that,
instead of large-scale deforestation, the world's forest acreage increased from 40.24 million to 43.04 million square kilometers between 1950 and 1994. He finds that there has never been any large-scale tree death caused by
acid rain. The oft-quoted, but erroneous statement about 40,000 species going extinct every year is traced by Lomborg to its sourcea 20-year-old estimate that has been circulating in environmentalist circles ever since. Lomborg thinks it is closer to 1,500 species a year, and possibly a bit more than that.
The documented cases of extinction during the past 400 years total just over a thousand species, of which about 95 percent are insects, bacteria, and viruses. As for the problem of garbage, the next hundred years worth of Danish refuse could be accommodated in a 33-meter-deep pit with an area of three square kilometers, even without recycling. In addition, Lomborg illustrates how increased prosperity and improved technology can solve the problems that lie ahead of us. All the fresh water consumed in the world today could be produced by a single desalination plant, powered by solar cells and occupying 0.4 percent of the Sahara Desert. It is a mistake, then, to believe that growth automatically ruins the environment. And claims that we would need this or that number of planets for the whole world to attain a Western standard of consumption those ecological footprint calculationsare equally untruthful. Such a claim is usually made by environmentalists, and it
prosperous Stone Age man were to say that, if everyone attained his level of consumption, there would not be enough stone, salt, and furs to go around.
is concerned, not so much with emissions and pollution, as with resources running out if everyone were to live as we do in the affluent world. Clearly, certain of the raw materials we use today, in presentday quantities, would not suffice for the whole world if everyone consumed the same things. But that information is just about as interesting as if a
Raw material consumption is not static. With more and more people achieving a high level of prosperity, we start looking for ways of using other raw materials. Humanity is constantly improving technology so as to get at raw materials that were previously inaccessible, and we are attaining a level of prosperity that makes this possible. New innovations make it possible for old raw materials to be put to better use and for garbage to be turned into new raw materials. A century There is a simple market mechanism that averts shortages. If a certain raw material comes to be in short supply, its price goes up. This makes everyone more interested in economizing on that resource, in finding more of it, in reusing it, and in trying to find substitutes for it. The trend over the last few decades of falling raw material prices is clear. Metals have never been as cheap as they are today. Prices are falling,
chips.
and a half ago, oil was just something black and sticky that people preferred not to step in and definitely did not want to find beneath their land. But our interest in finding better energy sources led to methods being devised for using oil, and today it is one of our prime resources. Sand has never been all that exciting or precious, but today it is a vital raw material in the most powerful technology of our age, the computer. In the form of siliconwhich makes up a quarter of the earth's crust it is a key component in computer
which suggests that demand does not exceed supply. In relation to wages, that is, in terms of how long we must work to earn the price of a raw material, natural resources today are half as expensive as they were 50 years ago and one-fifth as expensive as they were a hundred years ago. In 1900 the price of electricity was eight times higher, the price of
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coal seven times higher, and the price of oil five times higher than today. 25
The risk of shortage is declining all the time, because new finds and more efficient use keep augmenting the available reserves. In a world where technology never stops developing, static calculations are uninteresting, and wrong. By simple Technological advance can outstrip the depletion of resources
mathematics, Lomborg establishes that if we have a raw material with a hundred years' use remaining, a 1 percent annual increase in demand, and a 2 percent increase in recycling and/or efficiency, that resource will never be exhausted. If shortages do occur, then with the right technology most substances can be recycled. One-third of the world's steel production, for example, is being reused already. . Not many years ago, everyone was convinced of the impossibility of the whole Chinese population having telephones, because that would require several hundred million telephone operators. But the supply of manpower did not run out; technology developed instead. Then it was declared that nationwide telephony for China was physically impossible because all the world's copper wouldn't suffice for installing heavy gauge telephone lines all over the country. Before that had time to become a problem, fiber optics and satellites began to supersede copper wire. The price of copper, a commodity that people believed would run out, has fallen continuously and is now only about a tenth of what it was 200 years ago. People in most ages have worried about important raw materials becoming exhausted. But on the few occasions when this has happened, it has generally affected isolated, poor places, not open, affluent ones. To claim that people in Africa, who are dying by the thousand every day from supremely real shortages, must not be
The environmental question will not resolve itself. Proper rules are needed for the protection of water, soil, and air from destruction. Systems of emissions fees are needed to give polluters an interest in not damaging the environment for others. Many environmental issues also require international regulations and agreements, which confront us with entirely new challenges. Carbon dioxide emissions, for example, tend to increase rather than diminish when a country grows more affluent. When talking about the market and the environment, it is important to realize that efforts in this quarter will be facilitated by a freer, growing economy capable of using the best solutions, from both a natural and a human viewpoint. In order to meet those challenges, it is better to have resources and advanced science than not to have them. Very often, environmental improvements are due to the very capitalism so often blamed for the problems. The introduction of private property creates owners with long-term interests. Landowners must see to it that there is good soil or forest there tomorrow as well, because otherwise they will have
allowed to become as prosperous as we in the West because we can find theoretical risks of shortages occurring is both stupid and unjust. no income later on, whether they continue using the land or intend to sell it. If the property is collective or government-owned, no one has any such long-term interest. On the contrary, everyone then has an interest in using up the resources quickly before someone else does. It was because they were common lands that the rain forests of the Amazon began to be rapidly exploited in the 1960s and 1970s and are still being rapidly exploited today. Only about a 10th of forests are recognized by the governments as privately owned, even though in practice Indians possess and inhabit large parts of them. It is the absence of definite fishing rights that causes (heavily subsidized) fishing fleets to try to vacuum the oceans of fish before someone else does.
No wonder, then, that the most large-scale destruction of environment in history has occurred in the communist dictatorships, where all ownership was collective. A few years ago, a satellite image was taken of the borders of the Sahara, where the desert was spreading. Everywhere, the land was parched yellow, after nomads had overexploited the common lands and then moved on. But in the midst of this desert environment could be seen a small patch of green. This proved to be an area of privately owned land where the owners of the farm prevented overexploitation and engaged in cattle farming that was profitable in the long term. 26 Trade and freight are sometimes criticized for
the general effect it has on growth.
destroying the environment, but the problem can be rectified with more efficient transport and purification techniques, as well as emissions fees to make the cost of pollution visible through pricing. The biggest environmental problems are associated with production and consumption, and there trade can make a positive contribution, even aside from
Trade leads to a country's resources being used as efficiently as possible. Goods are produced in the places where production entails least expense and least wear and tear on the environment. That is why the amount of raw materials needed to make a given product keeps diminishing as productive efficiency improves. With
modern production processes, 97 percent less metal is needed for a soft drink can than 30 years ago, partly because of the use of lighter aluminum. A car today contains only half as much metal as a car of 30 years ago. Therefore, it is better for production to take place where the technology exists, instead of each country trying to have production of its own, with all the consumption of resources that would entail. It is more environmentally friendly for a cold northern country to import meat from temperate countries than to waste resources on concentrated feed and the construction and heating of cattle pens for the purpose of native meat production.
Private property is key to environmental protection government has zero incentive to protect public lands Stroup and Shaw 9 *Prof. of Economics @ Montana State University AND **Senior Associate at the Political Economy Research Center
To understand why, it
Richard and Jane, An Environment Without Property Rights, http://www.independent.org/publications/article.asp?id=196
is helpful to look at the reasons why private property rights protect the environment. There are several:3 1. Owners have incentives to use resources productively and to conserve where possible. Owners can obtain financial rewards from using resources productively and they have a strong incentive to reduce costs by conserving on their use of each resource. In the pursuit of profits, business firms have a strongincentive to implement new resourcesaving technologies.Such incentives were absent in the Eastern bloc under socialism. Consider the Trabant, the peoples car produced in East Germany between 1959 and 1989.4
(Production stopped shortly after the Berlin Wall came down.) The Trabant provided basic transportation and was easy to fix. But it was slow (top speed 66 mph), noisy, it had no discernible handling, it spewed a plume of oil and gray exhaust smoke, and it didnt have a gas gauge. The exhaust was so noxious that West Germans were not allowed to own Trabants. When the magazine Car and Driver brought one to the United States, the EPA refused to let it be driven on public streets.The Trabant was so bad partly because its design was basically the same as it had been when the car was first manufactured in 1959. The latest model, the 601, had been introduced in 1964, and was essentially unchanged 25 years later.Manufacturers could not reap a profit from making a better car, so they had no incentive to adopt new, cleaner technology that would give better performance. Indeed, because factories were government-owned, there was little incentive to produce any cars at all in East Germany. So few automobiles were available that
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people waited an average of 13 years to get their Trabant
.2. Private ownership of property provides an incentive for good care that is lacking under government control. If a resource is well cared for, it will be more valuable and add more to the personal wealth of its owner. If the owner allows the resource to deteriorate or be harmed by pollution, he or she personally bears the cost of that negligence in the form of a decline in the value of the resource.Throughout the Soviet Union under Communism, resources were routinely wasted. In fact, the emphasis was on using up resources,
not on producing themfor a good reason. Central planners often measured the use of inputs to determine whether a factory or other entity was carrying out the central plan. For example, Ann-Mari Satre Ahlander reports that despite the low per capita production of agricultural crops, the use of fertilizers and herbicides was high.5 That is because using them was a sign that work was being done, even though excessive use of these chemicals could have harmful effects. A story is told about a part of Estonia where the underground water is flammable because vast quantities of aviation fuel were dumped into the ground and they seeped into the water. The fuel was assigned to a nearby Soviet military station to be used for flying practice missions. To make sure that the pilots had flown the required number of hours, the military superiors monitored the amount of fuel the pilots used. When the pilots did not want to fly the required hours, they falsified their reports. To evade detection, they got rid of the fuel by dumping it onto the
3. A resource owner has legal rights against anyone who would harm the resource. The private owner of a resource has more than just the incentive to preserve the value of that resource. Private property rights also provide the owner with legal rights against anyone (usually including a government agency) who invadesphysically or by pollutionand harms the resource. The private owner of a forest or a farm will not sit idly by if someone is cutting down trees without permission or invading the property with hazardous pollutants, and lawsuits can be used to protect those rights. A private owner could probably have stopped the dumping of aviation fuel on the Estonian farmland
ground.6
mentioned above.But in the Eastern bloc, such protection was absent. Peter J. Hill reports that in Bulgaria heavy metals in irrigation water lowered crop yields on Bulgarian farms. The industrial sources of the metals were known, but the farmers had no recourse. Without a system of redress through the courts, says Hill, the farmers had no actionable claim against those causing the problems.7
4. Property rights provide long-term incentives for maximizing the value of a resource, even for owners whose personal outlook is short-term. If using a tract of land for the construction of a toxic waste dump reduces its future productivity, its value falls today, reducing the owners wealth. That happens because lands current worth reflects the net present value of its future servicesthe revenue from production or services received directly from the land, minus the costs required to generate the revenues (and both discounted to present value terms).Lake Baikal is the largest and
deepest freshwater lake on Earth. Once known for its purity, it is now heavily polluted because Soviet planners decided to build paper mills at its edge and failed to reduce the emission of pollutants into the water. According to one source, the effluent is discharged directly into the lake and has created a polluted area 23 miles wide.8 Clearly,the value of the lake and its surrounding land has been seriously diminished by pollution.In a society of private ownership, the owner of lake property
would envision a place that would attract tourists and homebuyers. Such an owner would have a strong incentive to maintain the value of this property by preventing its deterioration. But government planners had no incentive to protect it.
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Cap Good AT Corruption

No risk of offense strong-state systems will be bought off by the same corporations that are allowed to control the system in capitalism* Norberg 3 Fellow at Timbro and CATO
-We still get offense because resources devoted to buying off bureaucrats are inefficiently wasted and wont produce innovations or products
Such rules
are also harmful in another way. When regulation raises barriers to necessary activity, a large portion of a firm's timetime that could otherwise be devoted to production ends up being spent either complying with or circumventing the rules. If this proves too burdensome, people join the informal economy instead, thereby depriving themselves of legal protection for their business dealings. Many firms will use their resources resources that could otherwise have been used for investment to coax politicians into adapting the rules to their needs. Many will be tempted to take shortcuts, and bureaucrats will oblige in return for generous bribes, especially in poor countries where salaries are low and regulatory systems more or less chaotic. The easiest way of corrupting a nation through and through is to demand that citizens get bureaucratic permission for production, for imports, for exports, for investments. As the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu declared more than two and a half millennia ago, The more laws are promulgated, the more numerous thieves and bandits become. If the goal is to have impartial rules and incorruptible officials, there is no better means than substantial deregulation. Amartya Sen argues that the struggle against corruption would be a perfectly good reason for developing countries to deregulate their economies even if no other economic benefits would accrue from doing so. 2 Only capitalism ensures a fair shot for all strong-state will be hindered by corruption Norberg 3 Fellow at Timbro and CATO
That economic freedom is not an enemy of equality comes as a surprise to everyone who has been told that capitalism is the ideology of the rich and the privileged. In fact, this is precisely backward. The free market is the antithesis of societies of privilege. In a market economy, the only way of holding on to a good economic position is by improving your production and offering people good products or services. It is in the regulated economies, with their distribution of privileges and monopolies to favored groups, that privilege can become entrenched. Those who have the right contacts can afford to pay bribes. Those who have the time and knowledge to plow through bulky volumes of regulations can start up business enterprises and engage in trade. The poor never have a chance, not even of starting small businesses like bakeries or corner shops. In a capitalistic society, all people with ideas and willpower are at liberty to try their luck, even if they are not the favorites of the rulers.
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Cap Good AT Ethics/Morals

Capitalism is comparatively the most ethical system sparks democracy and opportunity Wilson 95 Professor of Public Policy @ Pepperdine
James, Capitalism and morality Public Interest, No. 121, Fall However one judges that debate, it is striking that in 1970 - at a time when socialism still had many defenders, when certain American economists (and the CIA!) were suggesting that the Soviet economy was growing faster than the American, when books were being written explaining how Fidel Castro could achieve by the use of moral incentives" what other nations achieved by employing material ones-kristol and Bell saw that the great test of capitalism would not be economic but
moral. Time has proved them right. Except for a handful of American professors, everyone here and abroad now recognizes that capitalism produces greater material abundance for more people than any other economic system ever invented. The evidence is not in dispute. A series of natural experiments were conducted on a scale that every social scientist must envy. Several nations-china, Germany, Korea, and Vietnam - were sawed in two, and capitalism was installed in one part and "socialism" in the other. In every case, the capitalist part out-produced, by a vast margin, the non-capitalist one. Moreover, it has become clear during the last half century that democratic regimes only flourish in capitalist societies. Not every nation with something approximating capitalism is
democratic, but every nation that is democratic is, to some significant degree, capitalist. (By "capitalist," I mean that production is chiefly organized on the basis of privately owned enterprises, and exchange takes place primarily through voluntary markets.) If capitalism is an economic success and the necessary (but not sufficient) precondition for democracy, it only remains vulnerable on cultural and moral grounds. That is, of course, why today's radical intellectuals have embraced the more extreme forms of multiculturalism and postmodernism. These doctrines are an attack on the
hegemony of bourgeois society and the legitimacy of bourgeois values. The attack takes various forms - denying the existence of any foundation for morality, asserting the incommensurability of cultural forms, rejecting the possibility of textual meaning, or elevating the claims of non-western (or non-white or non-Anglo) traditions. By whatever route it travels, contemporary radicalism ends with a rejection of the moral claims of capitalism. Because morality is meaningless, because capitalism is mere power, or because markets and corporations destroy culture, capitalism is arbitrary, oppressive, or corrupting. Most
critics of capitalism, of course, are not radicals. Liberal critics recognize, as postmodernists pretend not to, that, if you are going to offer a moral criticism of capitalism, you had better believe that moral judgments are possible and can be made persuasive. To liberals, the failure of capitalism lies in its production of unjustifiable inequalities of wealth and its reckless destruction of the natural environment. Capitalism may produce material abundance, the argument goes, but at too high a price in human suffering and social injustice. I do not deny that capitalism has costs; every human activity has them. (It was a defender of capitalism, after all, who reminded us that there is no such thing as a free lunch.) For people worried about inequality or environmental degradation, the question is not whether capitalism has consequences but whether its
consequences are better or worse than those of some feasible economic alternative. (I stress "feasible"
because I tire of hearing critics compare capitalist reality to socialist - or communitarian or cooperative - ideals. When ideals are converted into reality, they tend not to look so ideal.) And, in evaluating consequences, one must reckon up not simply the costs but the costs set against the benefits. In addition, one must count as benefits the tendency of an economic system
to produce beliefs and actions that support a prudent concern for mitigating the unreasonable costs of the system. Capitalism and public policy By these tests, practical alternatives to capitalism do not seem very appealing. Inequality is a feature of every modern society, Adam Smith expected that it would be
a particular feature of what we call capitalism. Indeed, he began The Wealth of Nations by setting forth a puzzle that he hoped to solve. It was this. in "the savage nations of hunters and fishers" (what we later learned to call euphemistically "native cultures" or "less-developed nations"), everyone works and almost everyone acquires the essentials of human sustenance, but they tend to be "so miserably poor" that they are reduced, on occasion, to killing babies and abandoning the elderly and the infirm. Among prosperous nations, by contrast, many people do not work at all and many more live lives of great luxury, yet the general level of prosperity is so high that even the poorest people are better off than the richest person in a primitive society. His book was an effort to explain why "the system of natural liberty" would produce both prosperity and inequality and to defend as tolerable the inequality that was the inevitable (and perhaps necessary) corollary of prosperity. Smith certainly succeeded in the first task but was less successful in the second, at least to judge by the number of people who believe that inequality can be eliminated without sacrificing prosperity. Many nations have claimed to eliminate market-based inequalities, but they have done so only by creating non-market inequalities - a Soviet nomenklatura, a ruling military elite, an elaborate black market, or a set of non-cash perks. Between unconstrained market inequality and the lesser inequality achieved by some redistribution, there is much to discuss and decide, and so the welfare-state debate proceeds. Participants in this debate sometimes forget that the only societies in which such a debate can have much meaning are those that have produced wealth that can be redistributed and that have acquired a government that will do so democratically in short, capitalist societies. Similarly with respect to the environment: Only rich (that is, capitalist) nations can afford
Cap Kritik 193/194
to worry much about the environment, and only democratic (that is, capitalist) nations have governments that will listen to environmentalists. As with inequality, environmental policies in capitalist systems will vary greatly - from the inconsequential through the prudent to the loony - but they will scarcely exist in non-capitalist ones. If anyone doubted this, they were surely convinced when the Iron Curtain was torn down in 1989, giving the West its first real look at what had been hidden behind the Berlin Wall. Eastern Europe had been turned into a vast toxic waste dump. Vaclav Havel explained why: A government that commands the economy will inevitably command the polity; given a commanding position, a government will distort or destroy the former and corrupt or oppress the latter. To compel people engaged in production and exchange to internalize all of the costs of production and exchange without destroying production and exchange, one must be able to make proposals to
people who do not want to hear such proposals, induce action among people who do not want to act, and monitor performance by people who do not like monitors, and do all of this only to the extent that the gains in human welfare are purchased at acceptable costs. No regime will make this result certain, but only democratic capitalist regimes make it at all possible. Capitalism creates what are often called "post-material values" that lead some private parties to make environment-protecting proposals. Capitalism, because it requires private property, sustains a distinction between the
public and the private sphere and thereby provides a protected place for people to stand who wish to make controversial proposals. And capitalism permits (but does not require) the emergence of democratic institutions that can (but may not) respond to such proposals. Or to put it simply. environmental action arises out of the demands of journalists, professors, foundation executives, and private-sector activists who, for the most part, would not exist in a non-capitalist regime. Capitalism and the good life Many readers may accept the view that capitalism permits, or possibly even facilitates, the making
of desirable public policies but reject the idea that this is because there is anything moral about it. At best, it is amoral, a tool for the achievement of human wants that is neither good nor bad. At worst, it is an immoral system that glorifies greed but, by happy accident, occasionally makes possible popular government and pays the bills of some publicinterest lobbies that can get on with the business of doing good. Hardly anyone regards it as moral. People with these views can find much support in The Wealth of Nations. They will recall the famous passage in which Smith points out that it is from the "interest," not the "benevolence," of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner. An "invisible hand" leads him to promote the public good, though this is "no part of his intention." Should they study the book more carefully, they will come across passages predicting the degradation of the human spirit that is likely to occur from the division of labor, the incessant seeking after monopoly benefits and political privilege that will follow from the expansion of manufacturing, and the "low profligacy and vice" that will attend upon the growth of large cities. The average worker employed in repetitive tasks will become "stupid and ignorant," the successful merchant living in a big city will become personally licentious and politically advantaged. Karl Marx, a close student of Smith's writings, had these passages in mind (and, indeed, referred to them) when he drew his picture of the alienation man would suffer as a consequence of private property
had confused the consequences of modernization (that is, of industrialization and urbanization) with the consequences of capitalism. The division of labor can be furthered and large industrial enterprises created by statist regimes as well as by free ones; people will flock to cities to seek opportunities conferred by socialist as well as capitalist economies; a profligate and self-serving elite will spring up to seize the benefits supplied by aristocratic or socialist or authoritarian or free-market systems.
and capitalism. But Marx (and, in some careless passages, even Smith) had made an error. They
Show people the road to wealth, status, or power, and they will rush down that road, many will do some rather unattractive things along the way. Among the feasible systems of political economy, capitalism offers the best
possibility for checking some, but not all, of these tendencies toward degradation and depravity.
When Smith suggested that the increased division of labor would turn most workers into unhappy copies of Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, he thought that only public education could provide a remedy. Because he wrote long before the advent of modern technology, he can be forgiven for not having foreseen the tendency of free markets to substitute capital for labor in ways that relieve many workers of precisely those mindlessly repetitive tasks that Smith supposed would destroy the human spirit. Urbanization
is the result of modernity - that is, of the weakening of village ties, the advent of large-scale enterprise, the rise of mass markets, and an improvement in transportation - and modernity may have non-capitalist as well as capitalist sources. Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Moscow have long been among the dozen largest cities in the world, but,
until quite recently (and still quite uncertainly), none of these was located in a nation that could be fairly described as capitalist. They were state-dominated economies, either socialist or mercantilist, and Smith would have had no use for any of them. And, being non-capitalist, most of these states were barely democratic (the USSR not at all). Lacking either a truly private sector
or a truly democratic regime, reformist and meliorist tendencies designed to counteract the adverse consequences of massive urbanization were not much in evidence. Americans who rightly think
that high rates of crime are characteristic of big cities, but wrongly suppose that this is especially true of capitalist cities, need to spend some time in Moscow, Rio, and Mexico City. Capitalism creates privilege; socialism creates privilege;
mercantilism creates privilege; primitivism creates privilege. Men and women everywhere will seek advantage, grasp power, and create hierarchies. But to the extent that a society is capitalist, it is more likely than its alternatives to sustain challenges to privilege. These arise from economic rivals,
privately financed voluntary associations, and democratically elected power-holders; they operate through market competition, government regulation, legal action, and moral suasion. But they operate clumsily and imperfectly, and, in the routine aspects of ordinary morality, they may not operate well enough.
Cap Kritik 194/194
Cap Good AT V2L

Capitalism best ensures value to life dont endorse sexist language Tracinski 8 editor of the Intellectual Activist
Robert, The Moral and the Practical, http://www.moraldefense.com/Philosophy/Essays/The_Moral_and_the_Practical.htm Stated in more fundamental terms, capitalism is practical because it relies on the inexhaustible motive-power of self-interest.
Under capitalism, people are driven by loyalty to their own goals and by the ambition to improve their lives. They are driven by the idea that one's own life is an irreplaceable value not to be sacrificed or wasted. But this is also a crucial moral principle: the principle that each man is an end in himself, not a mere cog in the collective machine to be exploited for the ends of others.
Most of today's intellectuals reflexively condemn self-interest; yet this is the same quality enshrined by our nation's founders when they proclaimed the individual's right to "the pursuit of happiness." It is only capitalism that
recognizes this right. The fundamental characteristics that make capitalism practicalits respect for the freedom of the mind and for the sanctity of the individualare also profound moral ideals. This is the answer to the dilemma of the moral vs. the practical. The answer is that capitalism is a system of virtuethe
virtues of rational thought, productive work, and pride in the value of one's own person. The reward for these virtuesand for the political system that protects and encourages themis an ever-increasing wealth and prosperity.

The Capitalism Criticism : Cap Kritik 7 Week Seniors 2011 1/194 BBFJR Lab

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7 Week Seniors 2011 BBFJR Lab