1nc 1

A. Interpretations
1. Military presence is only personnel and assets outside the
USbroader imperial ideology is distinct
Lieutenant Colonel Charles Greer, United States Army, February 19, 1991, The
Future of Forward Presence, http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?
AD=ADA234227&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf
To establish a conceptual framework for this paper, I developed the following definition of
forward presence within the context of national defense: the visible
employment of US military personnel and/or military materiel as a
deterrent outside of the continental United States ( OCONUS ) at any point
along the operational continuum short of involving major US conventional
forces in combat. My simplistic definition could be subject to endless scholarly debate. It includes
small unit combat operations of limited scope and duration and peacetime
contingency operations such as Desert Shield in Saudi Arabia, but it
excludes the subsequent combat operation designated Desert Storm . It
includes our military activities in Alaska and Hawaii. It excludes any diplomatic, economic,
social or psychological activities that do not have a military component .

2. A significant reduction is at least half anything short is a

confusing token gesture

Hayden, 11 - Senator Tom Hayden, the Nation Institute's Carey McWilliams Fellow,
has played an active role in American politics and history for over three decades
(Tom, The Nation, Obama's Decisions on Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan Will Determine
Re-Election Chances 4/26, http://www.thenation.com/article/160194/obamasdecisions-afghanistan-iraq-pakistan-will-determine-re-election-chances
Obama told the Associated Press last Friday that his coming July announcement of troop
withdrawals would be significant not a token gesture .
On Afghanistan,

Though the president offered no specific numbers, the phrasing was an important signal, delivered in White House
speak. According to Bob Woodwards book Obamas Wars, the internal debate between the White House and
Pentagon over Afghanistan has been intense. When the president announced in a December 2009 West Point
speech that he was sending 30-33,000 more American troops in a military surge to Afghanistan, it appeared that
the Pentagon and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had won the argument. But Obama slipped a hedge into the
West Point speech pledging that he would begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July 2011.
What did it mean to begin a transfer? When would it end? Would it be based on conditions on the ground, as
demanded by the military, or a firm deadline, which Obama expected would come from the Hill? Peace groups,
opposed to Obamas troop surge of 33,000, werent impressed by vague talk of simply beginning something that
had no end. The cynicism deepened when Obama announced in November 2010 that American combat operations
would end by 2014, and that counterterrorism capabilities would remain beyond that date.
Pentagon officials, including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Gen. David Petraeus, have publicly advocated
the most minimal version of an initial withdrawal. In a recent speech to NATO recently, Gates chastised the
Europeans for too much talk about exit and not enough about continuing the fight. He added that we will not
sacrifice the significant gains made to date, or the lives lost, for a political gesture. Woodwards book quoted
Petraeus saying I dont think you win this war. I think you keep fighting.
Obamas concern was being dragged into an unpopular, unaffordable quagmire by generals with competing
agendas. As Woodward quoted him, I cant lose all the Democratic Party.

But that is whats happened. Peace sentiment, expressed openly in the streets during the Bush years, became a
silent but expanding presence inside the Democratic Party as Obama escalated the war. Recent polls indicate that a
majority of Americans, including 86 percent of Democratic voters, favor speeding up the withdrawal of American
troops.
In February, the Barbara Lee, the sole Congressional opponent of the open-ended authorization to go to war a
decade ago, found herself in the mainstream of her party in opposing Afghanistan. Lee submitted a resolution to the
Democratic National Committee calling on Obama to announce a significant and substantial withdrawal by July,
a rapid pullout over the next two years and the transfer of the savings to job creation at home.
Since Obama is the leader of the DNC, all resolutions are vetted by the White House. At first, the Lee language was
rejected by the staffers who monitor the doings of the party. Then something happened. White House objections
disappeared. Centrist party leaders like Donna Brazille and Alice Germond signed on as co-authors of the Lee
resolution, which passed without dissent.
Was the White House sending a signal that a strong peace statement from the party would be useful political cover?
No one knows. Then came last weeks announcement by Obama echoing the DNC resolutions call for a swift,
sizeable and significant reduction.

what would those terms mean in raw numbers? At the low end of
significant, Obama could announce a withdrawal of 33,000 beginning in July and
carrying through 2012, enabling him to claim he ended the surge he promised his military. That
still would leave many Americans in confusion , wondering how a 2009 level of US
So

combat would mean a step towards peace.

A more robust definition of significant would be a decrease of 32,000 troops by

October of this year, followed by another decrease of 35,000 by July 2012,

a reduction of more than

half of Americas forces through the 2012 presidential campaign. These numbers are
proposed by national security experts at the Washington, DCbased Afghanistan Study Group.
The ASG estimates $60-80 billion in savings to American taxpayers per year.

3. US should means debate is only about the consequences of

the plan
Jon M Ericson 03, Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts California
Polytechnic U., et al., The Debaters Guide, Third Edition, p. 4
The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action In policy propositions, each topic contains certain key
elements, although they have slightly different functions from comparable elements of value-oriented propositions. 1. An
agent doing the acting ---The United States in The United States should adopt a
policy of free trade. Like the object of evaluation in a proposition of value, the agent is the subject of the
sentence. 2. The verb shouldthe first part of a verb phrase that urges action. 3. An action verb to follow
should in the should-verb combination. For example, should adopt here means to put a program or
policy into action through governmental means . 4. A specification of directions
or a limitation of the action desired. The phrase free trade, for example, gives direction and limits to the
topic, which would, for example, eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs, discussing diplomatic recognition, or discussing
interstate commerce. Propositions of policy deal with future action. Nothing has yet occurred.

The entire debate is

about whether something ought to occur . What you agree to do, then, when you accept the
affirmative side in such a debate is to offer sufficient and compelling reasons for an audience to perform the future action that you
propose.

B. Thats not themall reasons to vote aff are separate from

the question of significant troop reductions.
C. Topicality is a voting issuethree impacts

First, division of groundall neg ground is tied to troop

reductionspost facto topic change alters balance of prep,
which structurally favors the aff because they speak last and
use permskey to focused clash over a narrow point of
controversy.
That outweighsthe role of the ballot is to vote for whoever
does the better debating over the resolutional question. Only
our framework squares up with debates inherently
competitive format which centers on two sides disagreeing and
mandates a winner and loserthey moot the labor of the
negative performed by switching sides which is the only check
against group polarization and untested advocacy
Poscher, 16director at the Institute for Staatswissenschaft and Philosophy of
Law at the University of Freiburg (Ralf, Why We Argue About the Law: An Agonistic
Account of Legal Disagreement, Metaphilosophy of Law, Tomasz GizbertStudnicki/Adam Dyrda/Pawel Banas (eds.), Hart Publishing, forthcoming, dml)
Hegels dialectical thinking powerfully exploits

the idea of negation . It is a central

feature of spirit

and consciousness that they have the power to negate. The spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the
face and tarrying with it. This [] is the magical power that converts it into being.102 The tarrying with the

the labour of the negative 103. In a loose reference to this

Hegelian notion Gerald Postema points to yet another feature of disagreements as a
necessary ingredient of the process of practical reasoning. Only if our
negative is part of what Hegel calls

reasoning is exposed to contrary arguments can we test its merits . We

must go through the labor of the negative to have trust in our
deliberative processes.104
This also holds where we seem to be in agreement. Agreement without exposure to
disagreement can be deceptive in various ways. The first phenomenon Postema
draws attention to

is the group polarization

effect. When a group of likeminded people deliberates an

issue, informational and reputational cascades produce more extreme views in the process of their

The polarization and biases that are well documented for such
groups106 can be countered at least in some settings by the inclusion of dissenting
deliberations.105

voices . In these scenarios, disagreement can be a cure for dysfunctional

deliberative polarization and biases.107 A second deliberative dysfunction mitigated
by disagreement is superficial agreement , which can even be manipulatively used in the sense of a
presumptuous We108. Disagreement can help to police such distortions of deliberative processes
by challenging superficial agreements. Disagreements may thus signal that a deliberative
process is not contaminated with dysfunctional agreements stemming from polarization or superficiality.

Protecting our discourse against such contaminations is valuable even if

we do not come to terms . Each of the opposing positions will profit from
the catharsis it received by looking the negative in the face and
tarrying with it .

Even if the
probability of reaching a consensus with our opponents is very low from
These advantages of disagreement in collective deliberations are mirrored on the individual level.

the beginning , as might be the case in deeply entrenched conflicts, entering into an
exchange of arguments can still serve to test and improve our position .
We have to do the labor of the negative for ourselves . Even if we
cannot come up with a line of argument that coheres well with everybody
elses beliefs, attitudes and dispositions, we can still come up with a line of
argument that achieves this goal for our own personal beliefs , attitudes and
dispositions. To provide ourselves with the most coherent system of our own beliefs, attitudes and dispositions is
at least in important issues an aspect of personal integrity to borrow one of Dworkins favorite expressions for a
less aspirational idea.

In hard cases we must in some way lay out the argument for ourselves to
figure out what we believe to be the right answer. We might not know
what we believe ourselves in questions of abortion, the death penalty, torture, and stem cell
research, until we have developed a line of argument against the background
of our subjective beliefs, attitudes and dispositions . In these cases it might be
rational to discuss the issue with someone unlikely to share some of our
more fundamental convictions or who opposes the view towards which we
lean. This might even be the most helpful way of corroborating a view ,
because we know that our adversary is much more motivated to find a
potential flaw in our argument than someone with whom we know we are
in agreement. It might be more helpful to discuss a liberal position with Scalia than with Breyer if we want to
make sure that we have not overlooked some counterargument to our case.

It would be too narrow an understanding of our practice of legal

disagreement and argumentation if we restricted its purpose to
persuading an adversary in the case at hand and inferred from this
narrow understanding the irrationality of argumentation in hard cases, in
which we know beforehand that we will not be able to persuade. Rational argumentation is a much more complex

Argumentation with an adversary can have

purposes beyond persuading him: to test ones own convictions , to

practice in a more complex social framework.

engage our opponent in inferential commitments and to persuade third

parties are only some of these; to rally our troops or express our
convictions might be others. To make our peace with Kant we could say that there must be a hope
of coming to terms with someone though not necessarily with our opponent, but maybe only a third party or even
just ourselves and not necessarily only on the issue at hand, but maybe through inferential commitments in a
different arena.
f) The Advantage Over NonArgumentative Alternatives
It goes without saying that in real world legal disagreements, all of the reasons listed above usually play in concert
and will typically hold true to different degrees relative to different participants in the debate: There will be some
participants for whom our hope of coming to terms might still be justified and others for whom only some of the
other reasons hold and some for whom it is a mixture of all of the reasons in shifting degrees as our disagreements

the rationality of our

disagreements is of a secondary nature . The rational does not lie in the
evolve. It is also apparent that, with the exception of the first reason,

discovery of a single right answer to the topic of debate, since in hard cases there
are no single right answers. Instead, our disagreements are instrumental to rationales
which lie beyond the topic at hand, like the exploration of our

communalities or of our inferential commitments . Since these reasons

are of this secondary nature, they must stand up to alternative ways of
settling irreconcilable disagreements that have other secondary reasons in their favor like
swiftness of decision making or using fewer resources. Why does our legal practice require
lengthy arguments and discursive efforts even in appellate or supreme court cases of
irreconcilable legal disagreements? The closure has to come by some non
argumentative mean and courts have always relied on them. For the medieval courts of the Germanic
tradition it is bequeathed that judges had to fight it out literally if they disagreed on a question of law though the
king allowed them to pick surrogate fighters.109 It is understandable that the process of civilization has led us to
nonviolent non argumentative means to determine the law. But what was wrong with District Judge
Currin of Umatilla County in Oregon, who in his late days decided inconclusive traffic violations by publicly

flipping a coin?110 If we are counting heads at the end of our lengthy argumentative proceedings anyway,
why not decide hard cases by gut voting at the outset and spare
everybody the cost of developing elaborate arguments on questions,
where there is not fact of the matter to be discovered?

One reason lies in the mixed nature of our reasons in actual legal disagreements. The different second order
reasons can be held apart analytically, but not in real life cases. The hope of coming to terms will often play a role

the objectives
listed above could not be achieved by a nonargumentative procedure .
at least for some time relative to some participants in the debate. A second reason is that

Flipping a coin, throwing dice or

taking a gut vote would not help us to explore our

communalities or our inferential commitments nor help to scrutinize the

positions in play. A third reason is the overall rational aspiration of the law that Dworkin relates to in his
the law aspires to give a coherent account
of itself even if it is not the only right one required by equal respect
under conditions of normative disagreement.113 Combining legal
argumentation with the nonargumentative decision making procedure of
counting reasoned opinions serves the coherence aspiration of the law in at
least two ways: First, the labor of the negative reduces the chances that
constructions of the law that have major flaws or inconsistencies built into
the arguments supporting them will prevail. Second, since every position
must be a reasoned one within the given framework of the law, it must be
integrity account111. In a justificatory sense112

one that somehow fits into the overall structure of the law along
coherent lines . It thus protects against incoherent checkerboard
treatments 114 of hard cases. It is the combination of reasoned
disagreement and the nonrational decisionmaking mechanism of
counting reasoned opinions that provides for both in hard cases : a decision and
one of multiple possible coherent constructions of the law. Pure nonrational procedures like
flipping a coin would only provide for the decision part. Pure argumentative
procedures which are not geared towards a decision procedure would
undercut the incentive structure of our agonistic disagreements.115 In the face
of unresolvable disagreements endless debates would seem an idle enterprise. That the debates are
about winning or losing helps to keep the participants engaged . That
the decision depends on counting reasoned opinions guarantees that the
engagement focuses on rational argumentation . No plain nonargumentative procedure

would achieve this result.

If the judges were to flip a coin

at the end of the trial in hard cases,

there would be little incentive to engage in an exchange of arguments . It

is specifically the count of reasoned opinions which provides for rational
scrutiny in our legal disagreements and thus contributes to the rationales discussed above.
2. THE SEMANTICS OF AGONISTIC DISAGREEMENTS
The agonistic account does not presuppose a fact of the matter, it is not accompanied by an ontological

the
agonistic account of legal disagreement is not confronted with the metaphysical or epistemological
questions that plague onerightanswer theories in particular. However, it must still come up with a
semantics that explains in what sense we disagree about the same issue
commitment, and the question of how the fact of the matter could be known to us is not even raised. Thus

and are not just talking at cross purposes .

In a series of articles David Plunkett and Tim Sundell have reconstructed legal disagreements in semantic terms as
metalinguistic negotiations on the usage of a term that at the center of a hard case like cruel and unusual

Even though the different sides in the debate

define the term differently, they are not talking past each other , since
punishment in a deathpenalty case.116

they are engaged in a metalinguistic negotiation on the use of the same term . The
the term serves as a semantic anchor for a
disagreement on the substantive issues connected with the term because of its functional
metalinguistic negotiation on the use of

role in the law. The cruel and unusual punishmentclause thus serves to argue about the permissibility of the
death penalty. This account, however only provides a very superficial semantic commonality. But the commonality
between the participants of a legal disagreement go deeper than a discussion whether the term bank should in
future only to be used for financial institutions, which fulfills every criteria for semantic negotiations that Plunkett
and Sundell propose. Unlike in mere semantic negotiations, like the on the disambiguation of the term bank, there
is also some kind of identity of the substantive issues at stake in legal disagreements.
A promising route to capture this aspect of legal disagreements might be offered by recent semantic approaches that try to accommodate the externalist challenges of realist
semantics,117 which inspire onerightanswer theorists like Moore or David Brink. Neo descriptivist and twovalued semantics provide for the theoretical or interpretive element of
realist semantics without having to commit to the ontological positions of traditional externalism. In a sense they offer externalist semantics with no ontological strings attached.
The less controversial aspect of the externalist picture of meaning developed in neo descriptivist and twovalued semantics can be found in the deferential structure that our meaning
providing intentions often encompass.118 In the case of natural kinds, speakers defer to the expertise of chemists when they employ natural kind terms like gold or water. If a speaker
orders someone to buy $ 10,000 worth of gold as a safe investment, he might not know the exact atomic structure of the chemical element 79. In cases of doubt, though, he would insist
that he meant to buy only stuff that chemical experts or the markets for that matter qualify as gold. The deferential element in the speakers intentions provides for the specific
externalist element of the semantics.

In the case of the law, the meaningproviding intentions connected to the provisions of the law can be understood
to defer in a similar manner to the best overall theory or interpretation of the legal materials. Against the
background of such a semantic framework the conceptual unity of a linguistic practice is not ratified by the
existence of a single best answer, but by the unity of the interpretive effort that extends to legal materials and legal

The fulcrum of
disagreement that Dworkin sees in the existence of a single right answer121 does not lie in its
existence, but in the communality of the effort if only on the basis of an
practices that have sufficient overlap119 be it only in a historical perspective120.

overlapping common ground of legal materials , accepted practices ,

experiences and dispositions . As two athletes are engaged in the same
contest when they follow the same rules , share the same concept of
winning and losing and act in the same context, but follow very different
styles

of e.g. wrestling, boxing, swimming etc.

They are in the same contest, even if

there is no single best style in which to wrestle, box or swim. Each, however, is engaged
in developing the best style to win against their opponent, just as two
lawyers try to develop the best argument to convince a bench of judges.122
Within such a semantic framework even people with radically opposing
views about the application of an expression can still share a concept , in
that they are engaged in the same process of theorizing over roughly
the same legal materials and practices . Semantic frameworks along these
lines allow for adamant disagreements without abandoning the idea that

people are talking about the same concept . An agonistic account of legal
disagreement can build on such a semantic framework, which can explain in what sense
lawyers, judges and scholars engaged in agonistic disagreements are not talking
past each other . They are engaged in developing the best interpretation
of roughly the same legal materials, albeit against the background of
diverging beliefs, attitudes and dispositions that lead them to divergent
conclusions in hard cases. Despite the divergent conclusions, semantic unity is provided by
the largely overlapping legal materials that form the basis for their
disagreement. Such a semantic collapses only when we lack a sufficient
overlap in the materials. To use an example of Michael Moores: If we wanted to debate whether a
certain work of art was just, we share neither paradigms nor a tradition of applying the concept of justice to art
such as to engage in an intelligible controversy.

Second, deliberationmaintaining a role for the neg is key

open subjects create incentives for avoidancethat makes
deliberative testing versus a well-prepared opponent
impossible.
The impact outweighs---an ethos of democratic deliberation is
key to solve all social problems
Doug Schuler 8, Instructor @ Evergreen State College, CULTIVATING SOCIETYS
CIVIC INTELLIGENCE: PATTERNS FOR A NEW WORLD BRAIN, Information,
Communication & Society 4:2 2001 157181
In a recent issue of Wired Magazine, consummate computing pioneer Bill Joy (2000) unveiled a trio of apocalyptic scenarios that
he believes could be unleashed in the not-too-distant future. These unpleasantries, resulting from unrestrained, unprincipled and

big nightmares of the

twentieth century (such as environmental disasters , nuclear and bacteriological
unregulated genetic engineering, nano-technology and robotics (GNR), can be added to the list of

warfare

which

may yet plague us. Each of these technologies, according to Joy, could

abruptly unleash problems on so vast and unprecedented a scale that

any of humankinds responses would be completely overwhelmed . That such a
notable priest had so seriously challenged the central teachings of the technological (and economic) church was not missed by the
US media where the story was featured on the front page of the New York Times and other prominent newspapers. Ironically,
computers are at the forefront of the problems Joy describes; without them those catastrophes would be inconceivable. Computers
are, in fact, the only indispensable element in each of three problems. Joys scenarios centre on technological development
outstripping humankinds ability to control it. Our fail safe point may have been passed according to Joy. A variant on Malthusian

The
planets burgeoning population and its deteriorating environmental
predictions (much disparaged but impossible to disprove) may be finally bearing the bitter fruit that Malthus foresaw.

condition , coupled with humankinds propensity towards disagreement and strife,

its disregard for nature and its penchant for exploiting her innermost secrets may provide an ideal
set of preconditions for a sudden and profound technological ambush. Joy, of course, is not alone in his warnings.
Indeed, our era could be characterized as the age of such warnings. Many scientists have documented
the monumental changes that humankind is currently loosing upon the natural
environment. In another recent article scientists concluded that the human- originated changes currently being wrought on
the planet have attained the magnitude of a geologic force (Karl and Trenberth 1999). Nobody knows the consequences of ignoring
these changes. Yet it is a matter of obvious importance to the inhabitants human and otherwise of the earth. A cavalier

disregard may be catastrophic . Anticipating and possibly averting ecological

nightmares would probably require changes to our ways of thinking

and acting; changes which, depending on their scope and severity, are likely to be extremely difficult to enact. People are
and other

loath to change habits developed, cultivated, and rationalized over a lifetime. Humankind, similarly, is unlikely to modify cherished
habits to avert problems of the future based on contested evidence of new circumstances, especially ones that may not seem to
appropriate to their lives. Joys predictions border on the apocalyptic; in his mind

human extinction within a

generation is possible . Assuming that his predictions have even a germ of possibility, the obvious
question is what can be done to understand the situation, avert potential disasters
and develop a more sustainable relationship with our social and natural
environments. The equally important but less obvious issue is identifying the
underlying conditions that would help make even a partial resolution of
the problems become conceivable. This paper is an attempt at describing these conditions and how the
idea of a civic intelligence might play a useful role. THE WORLD BRAIN AND OTHER UTOPIAN VISIONS Joys concerns, and others
like his, were formerly found only in science fiction for it is in that genre that technological and social possibilities are most creatively
explored. For that reason I would like to invoke the memory of H.G. Wells, the English science fiction writer, historian, generalist and
visionary, who did not live to see the Internet or other recent technological achievements. Wells was not just a science fiction writer
who integrated technological scenarios with social issues and outcomes; he was also a historian who searched for broad historical
patterns: I dislike isolated events and disconnected details (Wells 1971). Wells was also deeply concerned about the human
condition and devoted considerable thought to the prospects of enlightened social amelioration. He discussed, for example, in the
1930s a number of collective problems that would become increasingly apparent in the following seventy or so years (including
environmental problems and weapons of mass destruction). Wells believed that there was a conspicuous ineffectiveness of modern
knowledge and . . . trained and studied thought in contemporary affairs. As a collective body, we are failing to address collective
problems in spite of immense individual talent and specialized knowledge. In his quest for possible antidotes, he dismisses all types
of ideologies and religions as unsuitable. He also rejected rule by some sort of elite, in which the man of science and the technician will play a dominating
part. Joy, of course, would be a member of such a group, even though that group is responsible to some degree as the perpetrator of the challenges that Joy
warns about. Wells places his faith in science and not men of science. Science, in his view, should enlighten and animate our
politics and determine the course of the world. To this end he asks, Is there any way of implementing knowledge for ready and
universal effect? His answer is a world encyclopedia which would provide an intellectual backbone for the human race,
aworldbrainthatwoulddojustwhatourscatteredanddisorientedintellectual organizations of today fall short of doing. It would hold the
world together mentally. Wells placed his faith in the establishment of a world encyclopedia, a single artefact packaged as a series
of bound volumes which would apparently be so accurate, that people would have little choice but to make the right collective
decisions based on diligent study. Unfortunately very few people could afford to purchase this set of volumes and fewer still would
read them in their entirety and absorb the knowledge therein. Nor is the existence of facts tantamount to the existence of objective
interpretations of the facts or obvious policies or courses of action based on those facts. Facts have meaning only when interpreted
and they have power only when they have consequences. Without saying so directly, Wells suggests that society becomes more
intelligent by making its citizenry more mindful of the facts. Perhaps the most ambitious project along these lines was the one
proposed by the German philosopher Leibniz. Leibniz was an advocate for artificial intelligence some 300 years before its official
inception. He conceived of an invention that would be a type of artificial patriarch, almost a god. He immodestly proclaimed in 1679
that his invention uses reason in its entirety and is, in addition, a judge of controversies, an interpreter of notions, a balance of
probabilities, a compass which will guide us over the ocean of experiences, an inventory of all things, a table of thoughts, a
microscope for scrutinizing present things, a telescope for predicting distant things, a general calculus, and innocent magic, a nonchimerical Cabal, a script which all will read in their own language; and even a language which one will be able to learn in a few
weeks, and which will soon be accepted amidst the world. The system had two extremely powerful components: a universal
represen- tation system; and a universal calculus for ratiocinating over the facts in the systems vast information stores. Leibniz
anticipates Joys concerns but, unlike Joy, appears to be an uncritical promoter at least of the particular manifestation that he
envisions. He presupposes that some type of ultra-rational system could actually be constructed and that it could and would be
used for decision making that was best for all; the idea that the system could be somehow subverted or misused was not
considered. History has indeed furnished us with a host of projects that would enlighten us in some near-mechanical fashion. These
include Bacons House of Solomon, Otlets Office of Documentation and Palais Mondial. Some years later, in 1888, the prominent
American pragmatist, John Dewey, also believed that what was wrong with society was a failure of intelligence and information.
Dewey, along with support from Franklin Ford, a financial journalist planned to offer his own version of a world brain in the form of a
weekly newspaper entitled Thought News. This ill-fated idea was universally panned and Dewey and Franklin failed to produce a

Schemes like those advanced by

visionaries above always fall short of their utopian objectives ; they usually fail to recognize

single issue of the Thought News. THE PROJECTS UNRAVEL BEFORE THEY BEGIN
the

one or more fundamental barriers that stand in the way.

Their projects are often disconnected

from social realities . Some of the projects, Wellss world encyclopedia, for example, would depend on the ability to
mobilize large numbers of people in the development of some single artefact. On top of that, there is little or no social or cultural
desire demonstrated for the product nor evidence that it would be used at all, much less with the utopian results envisioned by the

a grand idea, how ever obvious

to the perpetrator as a solution, must be coherently embedded in a
encyclopedias prime advocate. What many visionaries fail to notice is that

system of existing social forces, institutions and conceptualizations . While we

ultimately will discuss some ideas for a world brain that avoids the undoings of the other utopian projects, we will first examine two
additional arguments why establishing a world brain or other utopian scheme is difficult. THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF DEMOCRACY

The co-operation of the people is likely to be necessary for any required changes
in our techniques for addressing the problems that Joy and others have presented.

Co-operation that is willingly embraced through non-coercive means is more reliable and
more easily sustained. For those reasons, it appears that democracy in one form or another may be
necessary . In addition, the potential reach and malleability of the Internet and other new communication technologies
further suggest that it may be possible to devise applications, services and institutions within the evolving world communication

Communication, certainly, is key to

any effective democratic system. Projects along these lines, while reminiscent of Wellss world brain visions,
network that would support and strengthen these democratic approaches.

would need to be more aligned with the preconditions that support conceptual and technological innovation if they are to be used
and useful. Democracy, as nearly everybody knows, is highly awed in practice: the wrong people can become elected for the
wrong reasons and do the wrong things once in of ce. Candidates can be favoured for their tousled hair, their dimpled smile, their
lineage, the slogan du jour. Once in power, elected of cials may acquiesce to special interests (Greider 1993) or be undermined
through media-induced scandal (Castells 1998). Running for of ce (in the USA) is so costly that only the very rich have any chance
of getting elected (it was estimated that the New York state Senate race would probably cost over one hundred million dollars). The
role of the media, lobbyists, rich patrons, professional public relations campaigns and dirty tricks further frustrate any attempt to
understand or to participate meaningfully in the democratic process. The task of collective self-rule democracy has been called
an impossible task. Indeed, its impossibility can even be proved, in much the same way that engineers had proved that bee ight
is impossible. The task of democracy if its done remotely well (so the story goes) is so exacting, so all-encompassing, yet so
frustrating and ultimately unpredictable, that its been called an impossible enterprise. Lippman (1925), in particular, was sceptical
of the idea of an omnicompetent citizen who possesses sufficient knowledge to participate effectively in the political process.
Lippman notes that even though civic affairs was his professional avocation, he was unable to monitor the relevant data, initiatives
and ideas that he believed would minimally be necessary for him to sustain competence in this area. To be minimally competent in
the area that this paper addresses, for example, a person should be well acquainted with democratic theory, world systems,
communication technology, political economy, public policy, environmentalism and the state of the world, and many other topics.
Each of these areas is characterized by shifting opinions, initiatives and discourses, in
additiontoanoverabundanceofempirical,veriabledata(whoseinterpretations are then disputed). (Interestingly, as Wells points out,
our elected leaders themselves are far from omnicompetent. Their chief skills, campaigning and political manoeuvring, are, in large
part, responsible for their success, while their competency in other matters may be underdeveloped.)
Asimilarcriticismcan,ofcourse,bedirectedtowardsanyelitebody,however humanely and well disposed they are towards governing the
rest of the citizenry. But does Lippmans critique render democracy impossible or merely the idea of omnicompetence and its
purported indispensability. I would claim the latter. Reality is unfathomably complex and we are each incapable of knowing even

democracy is not optional;

We have no choice but to cultivate systems of governance
that can help us constructively engage with our collective concerns . Lippmans
one aspect in its totality. But, impossible or not, democracy or some approximation of
decisions have to be made.

critique is valuable, but not to support the conclusions for which it was originally marshalled. Lippman demonstrates the fallibility of
basing a system of governance on the idea of omnicompetency. Indeed, any system of governance should assume the impossibility
of omnicompetence and the inescapable reality of imperfect competence, while not allowing ourselves to be defeated by it. This
means, in software parlance, turning a bug into a feature. It may be, in fact, the impossibility of omnicompetence that makes

Harry
Bravermans Labor and Monopoly Capital (1998) demonstrated how the process of
dumbing down workers, primarily through severely reducing their on-the-job responsibility, exibility, and
autonomy (often called de-skilling) increases management control and, hence, profits to the
advantage of capital. Since the idea of civic intelligence will soon be discussed here, we may hypothesize brie y
about whether these ideas may also have some applicability outside the workplace .
Is it possible that the citizenry is being dumbed down in similar ways? And, if so, can
we run the processes in reverse to undo the damage? The key to Bravermans analysis
is the decomposition of broad workplace responsibilities by management into
discrete constituent parts, which are then used to force workers to perform within circumscribed ranges. This
process, often in the name of efficiency, dramatically lessens the scope and
democracy the only viable choice for a system of governance. DUMBING DOWN THE CITIZEN In the early 1970s

directionality of worker power . How could this process be replicated in realms outside of the workplace?
The first responsibility to be jettisoned (as outside their primary work responsibility) in the civic
sphere under such a redefinition would be the consideration of issues
relating to general social implications . Thus workers and labour unions should focus exclusively on
jobs and job security (and not, for instance, the social consequences of the jobs);

artists should explore and

express their individual feelings ; scientists and researchers should pursue what is fundable within a
narrow, specialized niche computer science, physics and other technical disciplines would expel implications of their subject
matters from the curriculum, while measuring success purely in terms of monetary return on investment. Citizens, of course, would
spend much of their non-working life shopping, buying items that will maximize their individual comfort and status while keeping the
economic machine running at maximum capacity.

This general process removes the politics

of labour , leisure and learning; indeed it naturally results in the de-skilling of the citizen. Economists are the

pioneers in this process by adapting and advocating the use of an

economic calculus as the sole determinant for all of our decisions . This is the
ultimate dumbing down; it reduces human aspirations and agency to that of a greedy
and unthinking automaton. The media de-skill the citizenry in several ways as well, according to a variety of
scholars. Castells (1997), for example, shows how the medias xation with political scandal encourages cynicism and political
disengagement on the part of the citizenry. The media often promotes the spectacle (Garber et al. 1993) at the expense of the
intellectually taxing. The ill effects of money on the media, politics and elections also further increase the distance between citizens
and public affairs (Schuler 2001). Furthermore, Robert Putnam shows convincingly that, at least in the USA, the virtually overnight
spread of commercial broadcast television was a primary culprit in the steady degradation of US civic life over the last several
decades (Putnam 1996). One can only wonder what effects this new electronic opiate of the masses will have as it continues its
spread on cultures outside the USA. The questions as to whether and to what extent citizen de-skilling has been orchestrated, and
by whom, will not be discussed in depth in this paper (although the transformation of the USA from a country of citizens to a country

civic
de-skilling is likely to dampen civic intelligence by influencing the content
of, and the conditions under, which issues are placed on the public agenda, and by
of consumers is certainly an appropriate and provocative topic to contemplate in this regard). It is sufcient to say that

trivializing and polarizing discussion and deliberation on important

public matters. Certainly each de-skilling step
introduceschangesinbothinstitutionalization,theprescribedprocessesthrough which actions are advanced and validated, and in
conceptualization of what everyday life entails; each step helps erect the ordinary and the extraordinary barriersto civic
intelligence. WHO OR WHAT WILL GOVERN? If the dire scenarios that Joy describes (or even the less dramatic, but no less
worrisome, environmental catastrophes that atmospheric and other scientists warn us about) have even a minuscule chance of

Since solutions to these problems are

likely to be protracted and multi-pronged, and involve large segments of the citizenry, a
correspondingly urgent need to analyse the preconditions underlying the
development and successful implementation of these solutions also
arises. What environments social and technological would be hospitable to the satisfactory resolving of these problems? If
occurring, an urgent need to consider ways to avert them arises.

we could imagine humankind finding better responses to our myriad problems, old and new, what circumstances and resources
need to be in place and what steps could be taken that would support these new responses?
and steps

we can call civic intelligence

These preconditions

or perhaps a world brain. What choices face us in the design of

this civic intelligence? What attributes could it have? One hypothetical expression of civic intelligence would be a massively
complex computer system which would make intelligent decisions on societys behalf. This option would be a twenty-rst century
manifestation of Leibnizs dream, a terrifying cybernetic Frankenstein-on-a-chip from the same
cupboardofnightmaresthatJoyopenedinhisWiredarticle.Thelimitationsofthis approach are manifold but are worth mentioning briey.
The impossibility of accurately, adequately and comprehensively representing infinitely complex situations with discrete computer
logic comes to mind, as do the problems surrounding the implementation of the decisions. Would police or other armed
organizations receive their instructions from such an intelligent system? The problem of the biases and assumptions of the
systems creators becoming embodied (forever?) in such a system is also a sobering and disturbing thought. Imagine an
International Monetary Fund (IMF) expert system free to impose
economicrestructuringonhaplessregionsaccordingtothearcanetheoremsof economists!
Otherapproacheswhichrelymoreheavilyonintelligenceofthenon-articial variety include having a small elite group making the
decisions, nobody making decisions (let the free market reign, for example), or a system in which citizens play a strong role.
Political scientist, Robert Dahl (1989), suggests that these three systems dictatorship, anarchy and democracy, as well as
polyarchy, a hybrid of the others constitute the entire list of possibilities. Wells suggested that scientists (at least in his day)
would sometimes yearn for a society that would apply their (eminently reasonable) principles and clamour for their leadership and
Lippman believed that an elite group should govern because of the impossibility of omnicompetence. What Lippman didnt acknowledge was that omnicompetence is impossible for small groups as well as for individuals. Americas best and brightest, for example,
engineered Americas tragic war with Vietnam. Regardless of the role of an elite, the non-elite citizenry will necessarily also have a
strong role to play. If an elite group, for example, devises solutions or sets of solutions theyd then have the thankless and
potentially impossible job of convincing (through rational appeal, propaganda or force) the rest of us to accept their jeremiads and
prescriptions. A democratic approach, on the other hand, would be to enlist the aid of the citizenry at the onset as part of the overall
project. The population or at least a large majority may need to buy in and adopt without coercion or deception ideas and
actions that would be unacceptable without suitable participation in the process (Pateman 1970) that developed those ideas and

A more radically democratic view (and the one that might ultimately be seen as the obvious
is that the often neglected, sometimes dumbed down citizenry might provide the
intelligence, creativity, energy and leadership that is needed to
recognize, formulate and reconcile the problems that we are faced with . As
actions.
choice)

we have seen governance shouldnt be entrusted to an omnicompetent elite or an infallible computer system; both are impossible to
achieve. Nor should governance blind luck through the fantasy that the status quo and/or the free market will miraculously solve
current problems and avert future ones through benign and unanticipated side effects. A democratic system of governance, then, is
the only viable alternative and civic intelligence that is strongly democratic in spite of the problems previously discussed shows
the greatest promise for an effectiveandequitablesystemofgovernance. This approach increases distribution of creativity and
attention while, at the same time, reducing concentration of power away from those people with vested interests in maximizing their
gain (often short-term) over the (often long-term) gain of the larger population. There is mounting evidence that this
democratization is occurring. As McKibben (2000) points out, the vast majority of Seattles anti-WTO protesters were demonstrating
on behalf of somebody else, an impossibility according to homo economicis. Keck and Sikkink (1998) report that advocacy networks

often involved individuals advocating policy changes that cannot be easily linked to a ratio- nalist understanding of their interests.

An effective and equitable system of governance would help promote the

creativity of the civic sector which is, as Castells (1997) and others remind us, responsible
for launching the major social movements of the last century , including
the environmental, civil rights and the womens movement. CIVIC INTELLIGENCE:
TOWARDS A WORLD BRAIN Civic intelligence, as I propose it, is relatively prosaic: it refers to the ability of humankind to use
information and communication in order to engage in collective problem solving. The term has nothing to do with the metaphysical
musings on global consciousness, hyperintelligence and the like, which are expected, by some, to emerge spontaneously at some
time in the not too distant future ushered in by global communication networks. Like the intelligence of an individual, civic
intelligence is a relative form that can be less or more effective and creative. Thus it can be developed incrementally through human
effort, not through sudden inexplicablerevolutionanticipatedbyfaithorspirituallonging.Civicintelligence extends the notion of social
capital (Putnam 2000) to include an agenda, an orientation towards action in addition to one of observation and study. By

Civic intelligence is a
form of collective intelligence . It is a premise of this chapter that this type of intelligence,
probably to a much higher degree than an individuals intelligence, can be
improved and made more effective . And how people create, share and act upon information is crucial to
transcending the individual, civic intelligence adds another level to the idea of intelligence.

that. Intelligence implies an orderly process for assessing situations, ranging over possible responses and determining and enacting
appropriate actions. It also implies looking into the future insofar as that is possible, and making decisions in the present that will
help make future situations advantageous at best, tractable at worst. Sometimes, of course, this will mean some postponing of
expected bene t. Another important element of intelligence is the ability to acknowledge
changingcircumstancesandtoadaptappropriately.Plansandothertemplatesfor action are indispensable; unfortunately they are not
infallible. Intelligence is the latent capability to interpret, respond and survive. Its reference point is human and the seat of
intelligence is the human brain. The human brain is, of course, a remarkable organ, one whose complexity is unmatched in natural
or human-made products. The brain stores information in the form of memory and in reflexive and habitual patterns of responses. It
takes in information about the environment in a variety of forms from low- level sensory data to highly symbolic and abstract
conceptual information. It integrates all of this information, helps to regulate all the systems and functions in the body and is largely
responsible for the bodys thoughts and actions. Although the brain (and the nervous system) is the organ where thought and
decision occurs in the human body, it is certainly not in charge of everything; it cant, for example, decide to deprive the left foot of
nutrients. This contrasts with social systems whicharemorerecongurable;atleastintheory.Thegovernment,forexample, can decide to
stop funding health care programmes or subsidies to weapon developers. It is also important, for communication in the human body
and for our analytic purposes, to realize that although the collection of systems that constitute the human body (or even the brain)

the relationships of its subsystems arent wholly co-operative;

there are conflicting needs and requests that cant all be met. Conflict
is an integrated whole,

and the need to resolve conflict is crucial in both individual and

collective intelligences .

Third, topic educationyou cant avoid the state in military

discussionsacknowledging that doesnt legitimize it, but
delving into its nuances produces the comparatively best
praxis for challenging militarism
Bryant, 12head of the underpants gnomes (Levi, War Machines and Military
Logistics: Some Cards on the Table,
https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/09/15/war-machines-and-militarylogistics-some-cards-on-the-table/, dml)

The following post arises out of discussions Ive been having with Alexander Galloway and Sara Ahmed on the
relationship between ontology and politics on facebook. I confess that Im thoroughly baffled by the question of

an ontology can be pervaded by

illicit ontological assumptions and that these should critiqued , but still maintain
what politics an ontology should entail. I readily recognize that

that

as a regulative ideal , our claims about what is and what is not should

not be based on our political and ethical preferences .

Indeed, I think that in the

past when weve attempted to ontologize our political commitments this has led to horror. For example, this seems
to be part of what took place in the Soviet Union. It seems that they believed that being ineluctably,
eschatologically, entailed a certain social condition and therefore felt that any treatment of others was justified on
these ground. I also readily recognize that no inquiry and discourse is motivated by some interest or purpose why
else would we do it and that therefore our ethical, eudaimonistic, and political aims function as teloi for our inquiry.

The doctor, for example, sets out to investigate the nature of the H1N1 virus for the sake of curing the sickness that
accompanies this virus. Yet this is very different than claiming that the doctors desire that the H1N1 virus not exist

no one would dream of suggesting that because

the doctor wants to know what causes the bird flu, the doctor is somehow
justifying the bird flu or claiming that it is a good thing. No, the doctor wants to understand the bird flu
precisely so he can prevent it. Ive thus been shocked to hear some say that if you
claim that nuclear bombs are , youre somehow claiming that nuclear
entails that it doesnt exist. Similarly,

bombs should be .

In his questions to Graham Harman over at An und Fur Sich, Alexander Galloway even

made a similar argument, suggesting that because Harman thinks corporations are real entities he must also think

there are norms

these norms dont

that they have a right to exist and that they are good things. I also recognize that

governing inquiry that we all adopt.

I merely think that

legislate what is and what is not .

Ive thus asked what people are asking for when they ask what politics does your ontology entail? or what is the politics upon which your ontology is based? This is a question that
makes no sense to me. Its like asking what politics is your chemistry based on? or what politics does your chemistry entail? I dont see how chemistry entails any politics. It just
says what different atomic elements do under certain circumstances. It doesnt say which combinations of atomic elements we should produce. And if chemists combine elements in
unethical and unjust ways, I fail to see how this changes the reality that elements can be combined in these ways. I can easily see Latours point that scientists investigated the
properties of certain elements like uranium for political reasons, but I fail to see how this changes the fact that uranium has these properties. I honestly just dont understand the nature
of the question thats being asked. So far no one has clarified this for me.
read on!
What I find perplexing about this is that all of you asking these questions seem to think that my claim that ontology and politics are distinct means I reject politics and ethics. As Ian
Bogost pointed out in the discussion on facebook, pointing out that a black person got shot in the face by a white police officer, that that really happened, is not mutually exclusive to
claiming that this act occurred because of racism and that it was unjust. Would we be talking about it at all though if it didnt exist? Shouldnt we have a discourse about what it is for
something to exist, what it is for something to happen, what types of things exist, etc, when discussing these matters?
Lets take Alexander Galloways political aims. I presume that he thinks there are many things wrong with our social world and that he wants to change them. This is a view I share.
Indeed, I share just about all his political commitments. Now I ask Alex this: if we want to change the social world, dont we need to know how its put together, how it functions, and
what causes societies to persist in their oppressive structure? These are all questions of social ontology: what is a society? What causes social relations to persist or endure in the way
they do? What types of beings compose a society? Is it just people? Are institutions real beings? Are nonhumans like natural resources, technologies, and infrastructure causal factors?
Or is it only ideologies that lead people to live under such intolerable conditions?

We need answers to these questions to intervene effectively. We can call them questions of
military logistics . We are, after all, constructing war machines to combat these intolerable conditions.
Military logistics asks two questions: first, it asks what things the opposing force, the
opposing war machine captured by the state apparatus, relies on in order to
deploy its war machine: supply lines , communications networks , people willing
to fight , propaganda or ideology , people believing in the cause , etc.
logistics maps all of these things. Second,

Military

military logistics asks how to best deploy its

own resources in fighting that state war machine. In what way should we
deploy our war machine to defeat war machines like racism, sexism,
capitalism, neoliberalism, etc? What are the things upon which these state based war machines are
based, what are the privileged nodes within these state based war machines that allows them to function? These

If we are to be
effective in producing change we better know what the supply lines are
nodes are the things upon which we want our nomadic war machines to intervene.

so that we might make them our target .

What

Ive heard in these discussions is a complete indifference to military logistics.

Its as if

people like to wave their hands and say this is horrible and

unjust! and believe that hand waving is a politically efficacious act .

youre right,

Yeah,

it is horrible but saying so doesnt go very far and changing it.

Its

also as if people are horrified when anyone discusses anything besides how horribly unjust everything is.

the next response is to say

youre justifying that system and saying its a-okay! This misses the
Confronted with an analysis why the social functions in the horrible way,

point that the entire point is to map the supply lines of the opposing
war machine so you can strategically intervene in them to destroy them
and create alternative forms of life . You see, we already took for granted
your analysis of how horrible things are. Youre preaching to the choir. We wanted to

get to work determining how to change that and believed for that we
needed good maps of the opposing state based war machine so we can
decide how to intervene .
your sole strategy seems to be
ideological critique or debunking . Your idea seems to be that if you just

We then look at your actual practices and see that

prove that other peoples beliefs are incoherent , theyll change and
things will be different . But weve noticed a couple things about your strategy: 1) there have
been a number of bang-on critiques of state based war machines,
without things changing too much , and 2) weve noticed that we might even
persuade others that labor under these ideologies that their position is
incoherent, yet they still adhere to it as if the grounds of their ideology
didnt matter much. This leads us to suspect that there are other causal factors that
undergird these social assemblages and cause them to endure is they do.
We thought to ourselves, there are two reasons that an ideological critique can be successful and still fail to
produce change: a) the problem can be one of distribution.

The critique is right but fails to

reach the people who need to hear it and even if they did receive the
message they couldnt receive it because its expressed in the foreign
language of academese which theyve never been substantially
exposed to (academics seem to enjoy only speaking to other academics even as they say their aim is to
change the world). Or b) there are other causal factors involved in why social
worlds take the form they do that are not of the discursive ,
propositional , or semiotic order . My view is that it is a combination of both.
I dont deny that ideology is one component of why societies take the form
they do and why people tolerate intolerable conditions. I merely deny that this is the only
causal factor. I dont reject your political aims , but merely wonder how
to get there .

Meanwhile,

you guys behave like a war machine that believes its sufficient to

debunk ing the ideological reasons that persuade

the opposing forces soldiers to fight this war on behalf of the state apparatus,
forgetting supply lines , that there are other soldiers behind them with
guns to their back, that they have obligations to their fellows, that they
have families to feed or debt to pay off, etc. When I point out these other
things its not to reject your political aims , but to say that perhaps these
drop pamphlets out of an airplane

are also good things to intervene in if we wish to change the world.

words,

In other

Im objecting to your tendency to use a hammer to solve all

problems and to see all things as a nail (discursive problems) , ignoring

the role that material nonhuman entities play in the form that social
assemblages take.

This is the basic idea behind what Ive called terraism. Terraism has three components: 1) Cartography or the
mapping of assemblages to understand why they take the form they take and why they endure. This includes the
mapping of both semiotic and material components of social assemblages. 2) Deconstruction Deconstruction is a
practice. It includes both traditional modes of discursive deconstruction (Derridean deconstruction, poststructuralist feminist critique, Foucaultian genealogy, Cultural Marxist critique, etc), but also far more literal
deconstruction in the sense of intervening in material or thingly orders upon which social assemblages are reliant.
It is not simply beliefs, signs, and ideologies that cause oppressive social orders to endure or persist, but also

material arrangements upon which people depend to live as they do. Part of changing a social order thus
necessarily involves intervening in those material networks to undermine their ability to maintain their relations or
feedback mechanisms that allow them to perpetuate certain dependencies for people. Finally, 3) there is

it requires the activist to be

something more than a critic , something more than someone who simply
Terraformation. Terraformation is the hardest thing of all, as

denounces how bad things are , someone more than someone who simply sneers, producing
instead other material and semiotic arrangements rendering new forms of
life and social relation possible. Terraformation consists in building alternative forms of life.
None of this , however, is possible without good mapping of the terrain so as
to know what to deconstruct and what resources are available for
building new worlds. Sure, I care about ontology for political reasons because I believe this
world sucks and is profoundly unjust . But rather than waving my hands and
cursing because of how unjust and horrible it is so as to feel superior to all
those about me who dont agree, rather than playing the part of the beautiful soul who refuses to get
his hands dirty, I think we need good maps so we can blow up the right bridges ,
power lines , and communications networks , and so we can engage in effective
terraformation.

Any alternative to focused switch-side debate over military

policy devolves into disengagement and moral quietude

Mellor, 13Ph.D. candidate, Political and Social Sciences, European University

Institute (Ewan, Why policy relevance is a moral necessity: Just war theory, impact,
and UAVs,
http://www.academia.edu/4175480/Why_policy_relevance_is_a_moral_necessity_Just
_war_theory_impact_and_UAVs, dml)
This section of the paper considers more generally the need for just war theorists to engage with
policy debate about the use of force, as well as to engage with the more fundamental moral and
philosophical principles of the just war tradition. It draws on John Kelsays conception of just war thinking as being a
social practice,35 as well as on Michael Walzers understanding of the role of the social critic in society.36 It argues

the just war tradition is a form of practical discourse which is concerned

with questions of how we should act . 37
that

Kelsay argues that:

criteria of jus ad bellum and jus in bello provide a framework for structured
participation in a public conversation about the use of military force . . . citizens who

[T]he

choose to speak in just war terms express commitments . . . [i]n the process of giving and asking for reasons for

seek to influence policy by persuading

others that their analysis provides a way to express and fulfil the desire that
military actions be both wise and just.38 He also argues that good just war thinking
involves continuous and complete deliberation , in the sense that one attends
to all the standard criteria at wars inception, at its end, and throughout the course
of the conflict.39
This is important as it highlights the need for just war scholars to engage with the
ongoing operations in war and the specific policies that are involved. The
question of whether a particular war is just or unjust , and the question of whether a particular
weapon (like drones) can be used in accordance with the jus in bello criteria, only cover a part of the
overall justice of the war . Without an engagement with the reality of war, in
going to war, those who argue in just war terms

terms of the policies used in waging it , it is impossible to engage with the

moral reality of war , 40 in terms of being able to discuss it and judge it in moral
terms.
Kelsays description of just war thinking as a social practice is similar to Walzers more general description of social

The just war theorist, as a social critic, must be involved with his or her own
society and its practices. In the same way that the social critics distance from his or
her society is measured in inches and not miles , 41 the just war theorist must be
close to and must understand the language through which war is constituted ,
interpreted and reinterpreted .42 It is only by understanding the values and
language that their own society purports to live by that the social critic can hold
up a mirror to that society to demonstrate its hypocrisy and to show the gap
that exists between its practice and its values.43 The tradition itself provides a set
of values and principles and, as argued by Cian ODriscoll, constitutes a language of
engagement to spur participation in public and political debate.44 This language is
part of our common heritage, the product of many centuries of arguing about war.45 These principles and
this language provide the terms through which people understand and come
criticism.

to interpret war , not in a deterministic way but by providing the

categories necessary for moral understanding and moral argument about the
legitimate and illegitimate uses of force. 46 By spurring and providing the basis for
political engagement the just war tradition ensures that the acts that occur within war are considered
according to just war criteria and allows policy-makers to be held to account on this basis.
Engaging with the reality of war requires recognising that war is , as Clausewitz stated, a
continuation of policy . War, according to Clausewitz, is subordinate to politics and to
political choices and these political choices can , and must , be judged and
critiqued .47 Engagement and political debate are morally necessary as the
alternative is disengagement and moral quietude , which is a sacrifice of the
obligations of citizenship.48 This engagement must bring just war theorists into
contact with the policy makers and will require work that is accessible and
relevant to policy makers , however

critical distance

this does not mean a sacrifice of

or an abdication of truth in the face of power . By

engaging in detail with the policies being pursued and their concordance or otherwise with
the principles of the just war tradition the policy-makers will be forced to account for their
decisions and justify them in just war language. In contrast to the view, suggested by
Kenneth Anderson, that the public cannot be made part of the debate and that [w]e
are necessarily committed into the hands of our political leadership ,49 it is incumbent
upon just war theorists to ensure that the public are informed and are capable of
holding their political leaders to account . To accept the idea that the political
leadership are stewards and that accountability will not benefit the public , on whose
behalf action is undertaken, but will only benefit al Qaeda,50 is a grotesque act of intellectual
irresponsibility . As Walzer has argued, it is precisely because it is our country that we are especially
obligated to criticise its policies. 51

1nc 2
epistemic resistance reflects the ideology of Occupy and sells
out radical change to the private sphere of individual
performance.
Marcus 2012 associate book editor at Dissent Magazine (Fall, David, The
Horizontalists, http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-horizontalists)

There is a much-recycled and certainly apocryphal tale told of an ethnographer

traveling in India. Journeying up and down the Ganges Delta, he encounters a
fisherman who claims to know the source of all truth. The world, the fisherman
explains, rests upon the back of an elephant.
But what does the elephant stand on? the ethnographer asks.
A turtle.
And the turtle?
Another turtle.
And it?
Ah, friend, smiles the fisherman, it is turtles all the way down.
As with most well-circulated apocrypha, it is a parable that lacks a clear
provenance, but has a clear moral: that despite our ever-dialectical minds,
we will never get to the bottom of things; that, in fact, there is nothing at
the bottom of things. What we define as society is nothing more than a set of locally
constructed practices and norms, and what we define as history is nothing more
than the passage of one set to the next. Although we might find the picture of our
universe as an infinite tower of tortoises rather ridiculous, as one reteller admitted,
it only raises the question, Why do we think we know better?
Since the early 1970s we have wonderedwith increasing anxietywhy and if we
know better. Social scientists, literary critics, philosophers, and jurists have all
begun to turn from their particular disciplines to the more general question of
interpretation. There has been an increasing uneasiness with universal
categories of thought; a whispered suspicion and then a commonly held belief
that the sumsocieties, histories, identitiesnever amounts to more than its parts.
New analytical frameworks have begun to emerge, sensitive to both the pluralities
and localities of life. What we need, as Clifford Geertz argued, are not enormous
ideas but ways of thinking that are responsive to particularities, to individualities,
oddities, discontinuities, contrasts, and singularities.
This growing anxiety over the precision of our interpretive powers has translated
into a variety of political as well as epistemological concerns. Many have become
uneasy with universal concepts of justice and equality. Simultaneous toand in part
because ofthe ascendance of human rights, freedom has increasingly
become understood as an individual entitlement instead of a collective
possibility. The once prevalent conviction that a handful of centripetal
values could bind society together has transformed into a deeply skeptical
attitude toward general statements of value. If it is, indeed, turtles all the
way down, then decisions can take place only on a local scale and on a
horizontal plane. There is no overarching platform from which to legislate;
only a local knowledge. As Michael Walzer argued in a 1985 lecture on social
criticism, We have to start from where we are, we can only ask, what is the right
thing for us to do?

This shift in scale has had a significant impact on the Left over the past twenty to
thirty years. Socialism, once the name of our desire, has all but disappeared;
new desires have emerged in its place: situationism, autonomism, localism,
communitarianism, environmentalism, anti-globalism. Often spatial in metaphor,
they have been more concerned with where and how politics happen rather
than at what pace and to what end. Often local in theory and in practice, they
have come to represent a shift in scale: from the large to the small, from
the vertical to the horizontal, and fromwhat Geertz has calledthe thin to
the thick.
Class, race, and genderthose classic left themesare, to be sure, still potent
categories. But they have often been imagined as spectrums rather than binaries,
varying shades rather than static lines of solidarity. Instead of society, there is
now talk of communities and actor networks; instead of radical

schemes to rework economic and political institutions, there is an

emphasis on localized campaigns and everyday practices. The
critique of capitalismonce heavily informed by intricate historical and social
theorieshas narrowed. The ruthless criticism of all, as Karl Marx once put it, has
turned away from exploitative world systems to the pathologies of an overregulated life. As post-Marxists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe declared in 1985,
Left-wing thought today stands at a crossroads. The evident truths of the past
the classical forms of analysis and political calculation, the nature of the forces in
conflict, the very meaning of the Lefts struggles and objectiveshave been
seriously challenged.From Budapest to Prague and the Polish coup dtat, from
Kabul to the sequels of Communist victory in Vietnam and Cambodia, a
question-mark has fallen more and more heavily over the whole way of
conceiving both socialism and the roads that should lead to it.
In many ways, the Left has just been keeping up with the times. Over the last
quarter-century, there has been a general fracturing of our social and economic
relations, a multiplication of, what one sociologist has called, partial societies
grouped by age, sex, ethnicity, and proximity. This has not necessarily been a bad
thing. Even as the old Leftthe vertical Leftfrequently bemoaned the growing
differentiation and individuation, these new categories did, in fact, open the door for
marginalized voices and communities. They created a space for more diversity,
tolerance, and inclusion. They signaled a turn toward the language of recognition: a
politics more sensitive to difference. But this turn was also not without its
disadvantages. Gone was the Lefts hope for an emerging class
consciousness, a movement of the people seeking greater realms of
freedom. Instead of challenging the top-down structures of late capitalism,
radicals now aspired to createwhat post-Marxists were frequently calling
spaces of freedom. If one of the explicit targets of the global justice
movement of the late 1990s was the exploitative trade policies of the World Trade
Organization, then its underlying critique was the alienating patterns of its
bureaucracy: the erosion of spaces for self-determination and expression.
The crisis of globalization was that it stripped individuals of their rights to
participate, to act as free agents in a society that was increasingly becoming
shaped by a set of global institutions. What most troubled leftists over the past
three or four decades was not the increasingly unequal distribution of goods and
services in capitalist societies but the increasingly unequal distribution of power. As

one frequently sighted placard from the 1999 Seattle protests read, No
globalization without participation!
Occupy Wall Street has come to represent the latest turn in this movement toward
local and more horizontal spaces of freedom. Occupation was, itself, a matter of
recovering local space: a way to repoliticize the square. And in a moment
characterized by foreclosure, it was also symbolically, and sometimes literally, an
attempt to reclaim lost homes and abandoned properties. But there was also a
deeper notion of space at work. Occupy Wall Street sought out not only new
political spaces but also new ways to relate to them. By resisting the topdown management of representative democracy as well as the bottom-up
ideals of labor movements, Occupiers hoped to create a new politics in
which decisions moved neither up nor down but horizontally. While embracing
the new reach of globalizationlinking arms and webcams with their encamped
comrades in Madrid, Tel Aviv, Cairo, and Santiagothey were also rejecting its
patterns of consolidation, its limits on personal freedom, its vertical and
bureaucratic structures of decision-making.
Time was also to be transformed. The general assemblies and general strikes
were efforts to reconstruct, and make more autonomous, our experience of time as
well as space. Seeking to escape from the Taylorist demands of productivity, the
assemblies insisted that decision-making was an endless process. Who we
are, what we do, what we want to be are categories of flexibility, and
consensus is as much about repairing this sense of open-endedness as it
is about agreeing on a particular set of demands. Life is a mystery, as one pop
star fashionista has insisted, and Occupiers wanted to keep it that way. Likewise,
general strikes were imagined as ways in which workers could take back time
regain those parts of life that had become routinized by work. Rather than attempts
to achieve large-scale reforms, general strikes were improvisations, escapes from
the daily calculations of production that demonstrated that we can still be happy,
creative, even productive individuals without jobs. As one unfurled banner along
New Yorks Broadway read during this springs May Day protests, Why work? Be
happy.
In many ways, the Occupy movement was a rebellion against the institutionalized
nature of twenty-first century capitalism and democracy. Equally skeptical of
corporate monopolies as it was of the technocratic tendencies of the state, it
was ultimately an insurgency against control, against the ways in which
organized power and capital deprived the individual of the time and space needed
to control his or her life. Just as the vertically inclined leftists of the twentieth
century leveraged the public corporationthe welfare stateagainst the
increasingly powerful number of private ones, so too were Occupy and, more
generally, the horizontalist Left to embrace the age of the market: at the center of
their politics was the anthropological man in both his formshomo faber and
homo ludenswho was capable of negotiating his interests outside the state. For
this reason, the movement did not fit neatly into right or left, conservative
or liberal, revolutionary or reformist categories. On the one hand, it was
sympathetic to the most classic of left aspirations: to dismantle governing
hierarchies. On the other, its language was imbued with a strident individualism:
a politics of anti-institutionalism and personal freedom that has most often been
affiliated with the Right.
Seeking an alternative to the bureaucratic tendencies of capitalism and socialism,
Occupiers were to frequently invoke the image of autonomy: of a world in which

Their
aspiration was a society based on organic, decentralized
circuits of exchange and deliberationon voluntary
associations, on local debate, on loose networks of affinity groups.
social and economic relations exist outside the institutions of the state.

If political and economic life had become abstracted in the age of globalization and
financialization, then Occupy activists wanted to re-politicize our everyday
choices. As David Graeber, one of Occupys chief theoretical architects, explained
two days after Zuccotti Park was occupied, The idea is essentially that the
system is not going to save us, so were going to have to save
ourselves.
Borrowing from the anarchist tradition, Graeber has called this work direct action:
the practice of circumventing, even on occasion subverting, hierarchies through
practical projects. Instead of attempting to pressure the government to institute
reforms or seize state power, direct actions seek to build a new society in the
shell of the old. By creating spaces in which individuals take control over their
lives, it is a strategy of acting and thinking as if one is already free. Marina
Sitrin, another prominent Occupier, has offered another name for this
politicshorizontalism: the use of direct democracy, the striving for
consensus and processes in which everyone is heard and new
relationships are created. It is a politics that not only refuses
institutionalization but also imagines a new subjectivity from which one can project
the future into the present.
Direct action and horizontal democracy are new names, of course, for old
ideas. They descendmost directlyfrom the ideas and tactics of the global
justice movement of the 1990s and 2000s. Direct Action Network was founded in
1999 to help coordinate the anti-WTO protests in Seattle; horizontalidad, as it
was called in Argentina, emerged as a way for often unemployed workers to
organize during the financial crisis of 2001. Both emerged out of the theories and
practices of a movement that was learning as it went along. The ad hoc working
groups, the all-night bull sessions, the daylong actions, the decentralized planning
were all as much by necessity as they were by design. They were not necessarily
intended at first. But what emerged out of anti-globalization was a new vision of
globalization. Local and horizontal in practice, direct action and democracy were to
become catchphrases for a movement that was attempting to resist the often
autocratic tendencies of a fast-globalizing capitalism.
But direct action and horizontal democracy also tap into a longer, if often
neglected, tradition on the left: the anarchism, syndicalism, and autonomist
Marxism that stretch from Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, and Rosa Luxemburg
to C.L.R. James, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Antonio Negri. If revolutionary
socialism was a theory about ideal possibilities, then anarchism and
autonomism often focused on the revolutionary practices themselves. The
way in which the revolution was organized was the primary act of revolution.
Autonomy, as the Greco-French Castoriadis told Le Monde in 1977, demands not
only the elimination of dominant groups and of the institutions embodying and
orchestrating that domination but also new modes of what he calls selfmanagement and organization.
With direct action and horizontal democracy, the Occupy movement not only
developed a set of new tactics but also a governing ideology, a theory of time and
space that runs counter to many of the practices of earlier leftist movements. Unlike

revolutionary socialism or evolutionary social democracyMarxs Esau and Jacob

Occupiers conceived of time as more cyclical than developmental, its understanding
of space more local and horizontal than structural and vertical. The revolution was
to come but only through everyday acts. It was to occur only throughwhat
Castoriadis obliquely referred to asthe self-institution of society.
The seemingly spontaneous movement that emerged after the first general
assemblies in Zuccotti Park was not, then, sui generis but an elaboration of a much
larger turn by the Left. As occupations spread across the country and as activists
begin to exchange organizational tactics, it was easy to forget that what was
happening was, in fact, a part of a much larger shift in the scale and plane of
Western politics: a turn toward more local and horizontal patterns of life, a growing
skepticism toward the institutions of the state, and an increasing desire to seek out
greater realms of personal freedom. And although its hibernation over the summer
has, perhaps, marked the end of the Occupy movement, OWS has also come to
represent an importantand perhaps more lastingbreak. In both its ideas and
tactics, it has given us a new set of desiresautonomy, radical democracy, direct
actionthat look well beyond the ideological and tactical tropes of socialism. Its
occupations and general assemblies, its flash mobs and street performances, its
loose network of activists all suggest a bold new set of possibilities for the Left: a
horizontalist ethos that believes that revolution will begin by transforming our
everyday lives.
It can be argued that horizontalism is, in many ways, a product of the

growing disaggregation and individuation of Western society; that

it is a kind of free-market leftism: a politics jury-rigged out
of the very culture it hopes to resist. For not only does it
emphasize the agency of the individual, but it draws one of its
central inspirations from a neoclassical image: that of the selfmanaging societythe polity that functions best when the state is
absent from everyday decisions.
But one can also find in its anti-institutionalism an attempt to speak in todays
language for yesterdays goals. If we must live in a society that neither trusts nor
feels compelled by collectivist visions, then horizontalism offers us a leftism that
attempts to be, at once, both individualist and egalitarian, anti-institutional and
democratic, open to the possibilities of self-management and yet also concerned
with the casualties born out of an age that has let capital manage itself for far too
long. Horizontalism has absorbed the crisis of knowledgewhat we often call
postmodernismand the crisis of collectivismwhat we often call
neoliberalism. But instead of seeking to return to some golden age before our
current moment of fracture, it seeksfor better and worseto find a way to make
leftist politics conform to our current age of anti-foundationalism and
institutionalism. As Graeber argued in the prescriptive last pages of his
anthropological epic, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Capitalism has transformed the
world in many ways that are clearly irreversible and we therefore need to give up
the false choice between state and market that [has] so monopolized political
ideology for the last centuries that it made it difficult to argue about anything else.
We need, in other words, to stop thinking like leftists.

But herein lies the problem. Not all possible forms of human
existence and social interaction, no matter how removed they are
from the institutions of power and capital, are good forms of social
organization. Although it is easy to look enthusiastically to those societies
ancient or modern, Western or non-Westernthat exist beyond the structures of the
state, they, too, have their own patterns of hierarchy, their own embittered lines of
inequality and injustice. More important, to select one form of social

organization over the other is always an act of exclusion.

Instituting and then protecting a particular way of life will always
require a normative commitment in which not every value system
is respectedin which, in other words, there is a moral hierarchy.
More problematically, by working outside structures of power one may circumvent
coercive systems but one does not necessarily subvert them. Localizing politics
stripping it of its larger institutional ambitionshas, to be sure, its advantages.
But without a larger structural vision, it does not go far enough. Bubbles of
freedom, as Graeber calls them, may create a larger variety of non-institutional
life. But they will always neglect other crucial avenues of freedom: in particular,
those social and economic rights that can only be protected from the top down. In
this way, the anti-institutionalism of horizontalism comes

dangerously close to that of the libertarian Right. The turn to

previous eras of social organization, the desire to locate and
confine politics to a particular regional space, the deep skepticism
toward all forms of institutional life not only mirror the aspirations
of libertarianism but help cloak those hierarchies spawned from
non-institutional forms of power and capital.
This is a particularly pointed irony for a political ideology that claims to be
opposed to the many injustices of a non-institutional marketin particular,
its unregulated financial schemes. Perhaps this is an irony deeply woven into the
theoretical quilt of autonomy: a vision that, as a result of its anti-institutionalism, is
drawn to all sites of individual liberationeven those that are to be found in the
marketplace. As Graeber concludes in Debt, Markets, when allowed to drift entirely
free from their violent origins, invariably begin to grow into something different, into
networks of honor, trust, and mutual connectedness, whereas the maintenance of
systems of coercion constantly do the opposite: turn the products of human
cooperation, creativity, devotion, love and trust back into numbers once again.
In many ways, this is the result of a set of political ideas that have lost touch with
their origins. The desire for autonomy was born out of the socialistif not also often
the Marxisttradition and there was always a guarded sympathy for the structures
needed to oppose organized systems of capital and power. Large-scale institutions
were, for thinkers such as Castoriadis, Negri, and C.L.R. James, still essential if every
cook was truly to govern. To only try to create spaces of freedom alongside
of the State meant, as Castoriadis was to argue later in his life, to back down
from the problem of politics. In fact, this was, he believed, the failure of 1968:
the inability to set up new, different institutions and recognize that there is no
such thing as a society without institutions.

This isand will bea problem for the horizontalist Left as it moves forward. As a
leftism ready-made for an age in which all sides of the political spectrum are
arrayed against the regulatory state, it is always in danger of becoming

absorbed into the very ideological apparatus it seeks to

dismantle. For it aspires to a decentralized and organic politics
that, in both principle and practice, shares a lot in common with
its central target. Both it and the free market are antiinstitutional. And the latter will remain so without larger vertical measures.
Structures, not only everyday practices, need to be reformed. The revolution
cannot happen only on the ground; it must also happen from above. A direct
democracy still needs its indirect structures, individual freedoms still need to
be measured by their collective consequences, and notions of social and
economic equality still need to stand next to the desire for greater
political participation. Deregulation is another regulatory regime, and to
replace it requires new regulations: institutions that will limit the excesses of
the market. As Castoriadis insisted in the years after 1968, the Lefts task is not only
to abolish old institutions but to discover new kinds of relationship between society
and its institutions.
Horizontalism has come to serve as an important break from the static strategies
and categories of analysis that have slowed an aging and vertically inclined Left.
OWS was to represent its fullest expression yet, though it has a much longer back
story and stillone hopesa promising future. But horizontalists such as Graeber
and Sitrin will struggle to establish spaces of freedom if they cannot formulate a
larger vision for a society. Their vision is notas several on the vertical left have
suggestedtoo utopian but not utopian enough: in seeking out local spaces

of freedom, they have confined their ambitions; they have, in fact,

come, at times, to mirror the very ideology they hope to resist. In
his famous retelling of the turtle parable, Clifford Geertz warned that in the search
of all-too-deep-lying turtles, we have to be careful to not lose touch with the hard
surfaces of lifewith the political, economic, stratificatory realities within which
men are everywhere contained. This is an ever-present temptation, and one that,
in our age of ever more stratification, we must resist.

The affs focus forecloses effective anti-capitalist politics

rejecting individualist fantasies is crucial to avert global
economic exploitation and environmental extinction
Dean 12 [Jodi, Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges,
The Communist Horizon, Verso: Brooklyn, NY, 2012, p. 12-19]
Some might object to my use of the second-person plural "we" and "us"what do you mean "we"? This objection is symptomatic of the
fragmentation that has pervaded the Left in Europe, the U K, and North America.
Reducing invocations of "we" and "us" to sociological statements requiting
a concrete, delineable, empirical referent, it erases the division necessary
for politics as if interest and will were only and automatically attributes of
a fixed social position. We-skepticism displaces the performative

component of the second-person plural as it treats collectivity with

suspicion and privileges a fantasy of individual singularity and
autonomy . I write "we" hoping to enhance a partisan sense of collectivity.
My break with conventions of w1iting that reinforce individualism by
admonishing attempts to think and speak as part of a larger collective
subject is deliberate . The boundaries to what can be thought as politics in certain segments of the
post-structuralist and anarchist Left only benefit capital. Some activists and theorists think
that micropolitical activities , whether practices of self-cultivation or
individual consumer choices, are more important loci of action than largescale organized movement-an assumption which adds to the difficulty of
building new types of organizations because it makes thinking in terms of
collectivity rarer, harder, and seemingly less "fresh." Similarly, some
activists and theorists treat aesthetic objects and creative works as
displaying a political potentiality missing from classes, parties, and
unions. This aesthetic focus disconnects politics from the organized
struggle of working people , making politics into what spectators see .
Artistic products, whether actual commodities or commodified experiences, thereby buttress
capital as they circulate political affects while displacing political
struggles from the streets to the galleries .

Spectators can pay (or donate) to feel

radical without having to get their hands dirty. The dominant class retains its position and the

The
celebration of momentary actions and singular happenings-the playful disruption ,
the temporarily controversial film or novel-works the same way. Some on the anarchist and post-structuralist Left
treat these flickers as the only proper instances of a contemporary left
politics. A pointless action involving the momentary expenditure of enormous effort-the artistic equivalent of
contradiction between this class and the rest of us doesn't make itself felt as such.

the 5k and 10k runs to fight cancer, that is to say, to increase awareness of cancer without actually doing much
else-the singular happening disconnects task from goal.

Any "sense" it makes, any meaning or

relevance it has, is up to the spectator (perhaps with a bit of guidance from curators and theorists).
Occupation contrasts sharply with the singular happening. Even as specific occupations emerge from below rather
than through a coordinated strategy, their common form-including its images, slogans, terms, and practices-links

The power of the return of communism stands or

falls on its capacity to inspire large-scale organized collective struggle
toward a goal. For over thirty years, the Left has eschewed such a goal , accepting
instead liberal notions that goals are strictly individual lifestyle choices or
social-democratic claims that history already solved basic problems of
distribution with the compromise of regulated markets and welfare states a solution the Right rejected and
capitalism destroyed. The Left failed to defend a vision of a better world , an egalitarian
world of common production by and for the collective people. Instead, it accommodated capital,
succumbing to the lures of individualism, consumerism, competition , and
privilege, and proceeding as if there really were no alternative to states
that rule in the interests of markets. Marx expressed the basic principle of
the alternative over a hundred years ago: from each according to ability, to each
them together in a mass struggle.

according to need . This principle contains the urgency of the struggle for
its own realization. We don't have to continue to live in the wake of left
failure, stuck in the repetitions of crises and spectacle. In light of the

planetary climate disaster and the ever-intensifying global class war as

states redistribute wealth to the rich in the name of austerity, the
absence of a common goal is the absence of a future (other than the ones imagined in
post-apocalyptic scenarios like Mad Max). The premise of communism is that collective
determination of collective conditions is possible, if we want it. To help incite this
desire, to add to its reawakening force and presence, I treat "communism" as a tag for six features of our current
setting: 1. A specific image of the Soviet Union and its collapse; 2 . A present, increasingly powerful force; 3 . The
sovereignty of the people; 4. The common and the commons; 5. The egalitarian and universalist desire that cuts
through the circuits and practices in which we are trapped; 6. The party. The first two features can be loosely
associated with the politics that configures itself via a history linked to the end of the Soviet Union as a state, as
refracted through the dominance of the US as a state. What matters here is less the historical narrative than the
expression of communism as the force of an absence. My discussion of these first two features highlights

how

the absence of communism shapes our contemporary setting. In the sequence

narrative as the triumph of capitalism and liberal democracy, the communist horizon makes
itself felt as a " signifying stress ." This is Eric L. Santner's term for a way that reality expresses
its nonidentity with itself. As Santner explains, the "social formation in which we find ourselves immersed" is
"fissured by lack" and "permeated by inconsistency and incompleteness."

The lack calls out to us.

Inconsistency and incompleteness make themselves felt. "What is registered," Santner explains, "are not so much

The frenetic activity of contemporary

communicative capitalism deflects us away from these gaps. New
entertainments, unshakeable burdens, and growing debt displace our
attention toward the immediate and the coming-up-next as they attempt
to drown out the forceful effects of the unrealized-the unrealized
potentials of unions and collective struggle, the unrealized claims for
equality distorted by a culture that celebrates the excesses of the very
rich, the unrealized achievements of collective solidarity in redressing
poverty and redistributing risks and rewards. The first two chapters thus treat the gaps,
forgotten deeds but forgotten failures to act. "7

fissures, and lack Santner theorizes as signifying stresses in terms of a missing communism that makes itself felt in
the setting configured by its alleged failure and defeat.

Our alternative is boring politicsits the only way to prevent

criticism from being an end in itself

Frank '12 Thomas, brilliant badass, author of What's the Matter with Kansas? and
editor of The Baffler "To the Precinct Station: How theory met practice and drove it
absolutely crazy" http://www.thebaffler.com/past/to_the_precinct_station
Occupy itself is pretty much gone. It was evicted from Zuccotti Park about two
months after it beganan utterly predictable outcome for which the group
seems to have made inadequate preparation. OWS couldnt bring itself to come up
with a real set of demands until after it got busted, when it finally agreed on a single
item. With the exception of some residual groups here and there populated by the
usual activist types, OWS has today pretty much fizzled out. The media storm that
once surrounded it has blown off to other quarters.
Pause for a moment and compare this record of accomplishment to that of Occupys
evil twin, the Tea Party movement, and the larger right-wing revival of which it is a
part. Well, under the urging of this trumped-up protest movement, the Republican
Party proceeded to win a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives; in the
state legislatures of the nation it took some six hundred seats from the
Democrats; as of this writing it is still purging Republican senators and

congressmen deemed insufficiently conservative and has even succeeded in

having one of its own named as the GOPs vice-presidential candidate .
* * *
The question that the books under consideration here seek to answer is: What is the
magic formula that made OWS so successful? But its exactly the wrong question.
What we need to be asking about Occupy Wall Street is: Why did this effort fail?
How did OWS blow all the promise of its early days? Why do even the most popular
efforts of the Left come to be mired in a gluey swamp of academic talk and
pointless antihierarchical posturing?
The action certainly started with a bang. When the occupation of Zuccotti Park
began, in September 2011, the OWS cause was overwhelmingly popular; indeed, as
Todd Gitlin points out, hating Wall Street may well have been the most popular leftwing cause since the thirties. Inequality had reached obscene levels, and it was no
longer the act of a radical to say so. The bank bailouts of the preceding years had
made it obvious that government was captured by organized money. Just about
everyone resented Wall Street in those days; just about everyone was happy to see
someone finally put our fury in those crooks overpaid faces. People flocked to the
OWS standard. Cash donations poured in; so did food and books. Celebrities made
appearances in Zuccotti, and the media began covering the proceedings with an
attentiveness it rarely gives to leftist actions.
But these accounts, with a few exceptions here and there, misread that
overwhelming approval of Occupys cause as an approval of the movements
mechanics: the camping out in the park, the way food was procured for an army of
protesters, the endless search for consensus, the showdowns with the cops, the
twinkles. These things, almost every writer separately assumes, are what the
Occupy phenomenon was really about. These are the details the public hungers to
know.
The building of a community in Zuccotti Park, for example, is a point of special
emphasis. Noam Chomskys thoughts epitomize the genre when he tells us that
one of the main achievements of the movement has been to create communities,
real functioning communities of mutual support, democratic interchange, et cetera.
The reason this is important, he continues, is because Americans tend to be very
isolated and neighborhoods are broken down, community structures have broken
down, people are kind of alone. How building such communities helps us to
tackle the power of high finance is left unexplained, as is Chomskys implication that
a city of eight million people, engaged in all the complexities of modern life, should
learn how humans are supposed to live together by studying an encampment of
college students.
The actual sins of Wall Street, by contrast, are much less visible. For example, when
you read Occupying Wall Street, the work of a team of writers who participated in
the protests, you first hear about the subject of predatory lending when a
sympathetic policeman mentions it in the course of a bust. The authors themselves
never bring it up.
And if you want to know how the people in Zuccotti intended to block the banks
agendahow they intended to stop predatory lending, for exampleyou have truly
come to the wrong place. Not because its hard to figure out how to stop predatory
lending, but because the way the Occupy campaign is depicted in these books, it
seems to have had no intention of doing anything except building communities in
public spaces and inspiring mankind with its noble refusal to have leaders.

Unfortunately, though, thats not enough. Building a democratic movement culture

is essential for movements on the left, but its also just a starting point. Occupy
never evolved beyond it. It did not call for a subtreasury system, like the Populists
did. It didnt lead a strike (a real one, that is), or a sit-in, or a blockade of a
recruitment center, or a takeover of the deans office. The IWW free-speech fights of
a century ago look positively Prussian by comparison.
With Occupy, the horizontal culture was everything. The process is the
message, as the protesters used to say and as most of the books considered here
largely concur. The aforementioned camping, the cooking, the general-assembling,
the filling of public places: thats what Occupy was all about. Beyond that there
seems to have been virtually no strategy to speak of, no agenda to transmit to the
world.
* * *
Whether or not to have demands, you might recall, was something that Occupy
protesters debated hotly among themselves in the days when Occupy actually
occupied something. Reading these books a year later, however, that debate seems
to have been consensed out of existence. Virtually none of the authors reviewed
here will say forthrightly that the failure to generate demands was a tactical
mistake. On the contrary: the quasi-official account of the episode (Occupying Wall
Street) laughs off demands as a fetish object of literal-minded media types who
stupidly crave hierarchy and chains of command. Chris Hedges tells us that
demands were something required only by the elites, and their mouthpieces in the
media. Enlightened people, meanwhile, are supposed to know better; demands
imply the legitimacy of the adversary, meaning the U.S. government and its friends,
the banks. Launching a protest with no formal demands is thought to be a great
accomplishment, a gesture of surpassing democratic virtue.
And here we come to the basic contradiction of the campaign. To protest Wall Street
in 2011 was to protest, obviously, the outrageous financial misbehavior that gave us
the Great Recession; it was to protest the political power of money, which gave us
the bailouts; it was to protest the runaway compensation practices that have turned
our societys productive labor into bonuses for the 1 percent. All three of these
catastrophes, however, were brought on by deregulation and tax-cutting by a
philosophy of liberation as anarchic in its rhetoric as Occupy was in
reality. Check your premises, Rand-fans: it was the bankers own uprising against
the hated state that wrecked the American way of life.
Nor does it require poststructuralism-leading-through-anarchism to understand how
to reverse these developments. You do it by rebuilding a powerful and
competent regulatory state. You do it by rebuilding the labor movement.
You do it with bureaucracy.
Occupiers often seemed aware of this. Recall what you heard so frequently from
protesters lips back in the days of September 2011: Restore the old GlassSteagall divide between investment and commercial banks, they insisted. Bring
back big government! Bring back safety! Bring back boredom!
But thats no way to fire the imagination of the world. So, how do you maintain
the carnival while secretly lusting for the CPAs? By indefinitely suspending
the obvious next step. By having no demands. Demands would have signaled
that humorless, doctrinaire adults were back in charge and that the fun was over.
This was an inspired way to play the situation in the beginning, and for a time it was
a great success. But it also put a clear expiration date on the protests. As long as
demands and the rest of the logocentric requirements were postponed, Occupy

could never graduate to the next level. It would remain captive to what Christopher
Lasch criticizedway back in 1973as the cult of participation, in which the
experience of protesting is what protesting is all about.

case
Ndlovu-Gatshenis approach is ahistorical, reductive and
backfires --- he nonetheless admits that gradual reform is
necessary which is utterly consistent with our T argument
Pool, 14 [Reviewed by Jeremy Pool (Monmouth College) Published on H-Diplo (April, 2014)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbac, https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=40477]
Similarly, when the entire world is said to be defined by coloniality, it can be
difficult to sort out what elements are actually related to colonialism.
Ndlovu-Gatshenis approach reduces African history in the early modern
and modern eras to a set of phases in Western exploita- tion. He defines
the modern world order as beginning with the Portuguese conquests of
the fifteenth century and the birth of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but
the period that followed was hardly one of undifferentiated African
subjugation. Most African peoples were able to resist conquest for the four
and a half centuries between the Portuguese voyages of exploration in the
fifteenth century and the colonial division of the continent in the 1880s.
While the trans-Atlantic slave trade was devas- tating for those individuals and
communities caught up in it or the violence that supplied it, and by most reck- onings constituted a net negative for Africas develop- ment,
it was not the product of imperial designs, but of negotiation and
competition between European and African powers. Ndlovu-Gatsheni
acknowledges that not all of Africas contemporary problems can be
attributed to neocolonial forces and that the authoritarianism, corruption, and incompetence of some African leaders has played its own
role. Moreover, he recognizes the creative efforts of various African states
and societies to engage with modernity in creative ways including
attempts at disrupting Euro-American hegemony (p. 41). Never- theless, he concludes,
quoting Bill Ashcroft, that global coloniality makes it impossible to disrupt
the idea of Africa inherited from the history of European imperial- ism ... because Power is as
much a part of our cultural life as the air we breathe (p. 43).[4] This perspective would seem to leave no
room for progress, for shades of grey, for meaningful appropriation and
redeployment, ei- ther within Euro-American abyssal thinking or within that of those African leaders and thinkers held to be the victims of
the colonization of consciousness.[5 The limitations of this all or nothing approach are on
display in the books second chapter, on pan-Africanism . This subject is potentially of great
interest to H-Diplo readers, but this essay unfortunately offers little if any new insight into
the history of pan-Africanism or efforts to form an African unity
government. Ndlovu-Gatsheni describes debates over pan-African unity as afflicted by the curse of the divisions and debates within the
origi- nal Organization of African Unity, particularly those be- tween Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah, who ad- vocated immediate moves toward

Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere who agreed on the

desirability of unification, but thought that a gradualist approach was
necessary to resolve dif- ferences between states and their visions for a
united Africa. Ndlovu-Gatsheni makes clear that his sympathies lie with Nkrumah and chides Nyerere for
continental political unification, and

not seeing the wisdom in Nkrumahs approach. The curse that Ndlovu- Gatsheni perceives in this debate, whose contours he sees haunting current efforts

In the chapters conclusion, he

acknowledges that this continued disagreement may be a sign that the
gradua- tion of nationalism into pan-Africanism is taking time to
materialize, dictating the necessity for caution and grad- ualism, which
seems a rather odd hedging of bets, given his insistence on the immediate
necessity of a Union Gov- ernment to allow the continent some measure of negoti- ating power with the West (p. 74).
to produce a Union Government for Africa, would seem to be political disagreement itself.

Ndlovu-Gatshenis perspective on development is similarly limited by an

emphasis on absolute categories and lack of material analysis or specific
case studies. There is much to criticize in development discourse or in sometimes disastrous programs embarked upon at the behest of the
Bretton Woods institutions, and Ndlovu- Gatsheni is very effective at taking down the pathologiz- ing discourse that animates many
explanations of why African nations have been generally unable to develop economically. He does not, however, examine what
de- velopment efforts might mean to people on the ground or their ability
to turn projects and government rhetoric to their own advantage, as, for
example, Jamie Monson shows in Africas Freedom Railway: How a Chinese
Devel- opment Project Changed Lives and Livelihoods in Tanzania (2009), a
study of the TAZARA railway project in Tan- zania. Ndlovu-Gatsheni holds
that development cannot ahistorically be reduced to mere real-life
problems, such as hunger and poverty without reference to colonialism and
neocolonialism, but must instead be addressed with regard to both invisible
global designs and the African national problem, where the former has negatively im- pinged on the latter since beginning of colonial
encoun- ters in the fifteenth century (p. 78). This leaves him in a defeatist position , where
successful development could only be carried out by a fully reconstructed
state, brought into harmony with (unspecified) African values and tra- ditions, which will only become possible after a full de- colonization of the state
and a thorough decolonization of African minds to enable them to imagine alternatives (p. 97)

Antiwar focus is comparatively better than the affirmatives

starting point antiwar activism does not preclude their
systemic analysis, it enhances it because it creates a social
network which is a better vehicle for change
Rojas, Associate Professor of Sociology @ Indiana University,
12
(Fabio, and Michael T. Heaney Assistant Professor of Organizational Studies and
Political Science University of Michigan, Antiwar Politics and Paths of Activist
Participation on the Left, http://wwwpersonal.umich.edu/~mheaney/Antiwar_Activist_Paths.pdf)
The results of Model (3) suggest support in the data for the hybridization hypothesis. Individuals whose first activist
event is antiwar are significantly likely to have an activist path that is similar to a
combined path. This result shows that getting ones start in activism through the antiwar
movement is predictive of creating an activist path that hybridizes antiwar
activism with involvement in other movements. Commencing activism through one of the top-five
other issues does not affect the likelihood of following a combined path. The control variable for year of first activism indicates that
those respondents that had their first experience with activism in the more distant path were more like to follow a combined path
than more recent recruits, reflecting the greater opportunities that they had to get involved than those whose first experience with
activism occurred more recently. Black respondents were significantly less likely than non-Blacks to follow a combined path. Finally,
respondents that considered activism core to their identities and those that self-identified with radical political ideologies were
significantly more likely than those without such identities to follow a combined path. We experimented with a variety of alternative
model specifications designed to evaluate the potential effects of initiation into activism from one of the other top-five issue areas
(civil rights, labor, immigration, womens rights, and education). Rather than combining these five issues into one independent
variable, as we report in Table 3, we estimated regressions that included these issues as separate independent variables, and in
combination with one another. However, these alternative specifications did not alter the conclusion that initial involvement in
antiwar activism is the only issue in this set that is predictive of the paths pursued by Social Forum participants. Finally, we wanted
to know whether the pattern that we observed in the antiwar movement was distinctive to the antiwar movement, or if it was
common in numerous other social movements. To answer this question, we repeated the sequence analysis five more times, once
for each of the other top-five issue areas in the data (civil rights, labor, immigration, womens rights, and education). For example,
we set up the ideal sequences all-civil rights, all-non-civil rights, and combined civil rights / non-civil rights, to see if combined

we did not
find that initiation to activism through these other leading issues stimulated the
same kind of combined activism that we detected in the antiwar movement. We
paths are predicted by having civil rights as an initial issue (and did the same for each other issue). However,

report the results of this analysis for one issue civil rights in Table 4, which is analogous to analysis reported in Table 3. As was
the case for the antiwar movement, the estimates for Model 4 reveal support for persistence hypothesis in these data: becoming
involved as a civil rights activist initially is predictive of maintaining this path. Model 5 provides no support for the transfer
hypothesis in the civil rights domain. In a critical difference from the antiwar movement, Model 6 shows no evidence that initial

involvement in activism through civil rights stimulates activists to pursue a combined activist path. Overall, Figure 1, Table 3, and

The antiwar movement is the most common entry point to

activism for Social Forum activists. Antiwar recruits do not abandon the antiwar movement
and migrate to new policy domains in larger numbers. Rather, they tend to combine
peace activism with other issues. However, this pattern is not observed for
participants in other movements. Even though the antiwar movement is prominent
within the field of progressive/left activism, there are no well-defined channels from
leading issues (such as education or immigration rights) into antiwar activism. Initiation into
activism through other major issue areas, such as civil rights, does not prompt the
same combined pattern observed in the antiwar movement. As noted earlier, many other
issues are not as episodic as wars. Education, immigration, women's rights, and
economic justice are all comparably constant issues, which suggests that the
desire for activists to cross-over into other domains is not particularly strong. The
Table 4 demonstrate a clear pattern.

nature of these domains does not prompt activists to cross-over into antiwar activism in a sustained way. Our study of activists
participating in the 2010 US Social Forum introduces a significant social fact: A plurality of leading, contemporary, progressive/left
activists had their first experience with activism in the antiwar movement. This finding does not only hold for activists who had their
first experience in the 1960s or the 2000s, which were peak periods of antiwar activism. Rather, the pattern persists for people who
got their start during relative low points for the peace movement, such as the 1970s and 1990s. People may come to have their first
experience with activism in the antiwar movement for a wide variety of reasons. The urgency of a pending war prompts many to
take to the streets for the first time. For others, serendipity may play a greater role: A peace demonstration may simply be the first
real opportunity that many people have to participate in activism. Thus, the antiwar movements heavy strategic reliance on street
demonstrations regardless of whether this tactic is effective in achieving political influence among policymakers provides an
introduction to social activism for many. Regardless of why antiwar activism is a first event for many people, it nonetheless often is

Antiwar activists then go on, over the course of their lives, to combine antiwar with
involvement in many other social causes . We show that the effect of participating in this
first event holds even after accounting for other demographic and political
explanations for involvement. The consequences of this pattern are profound. As activists carry the memory of their
that first event.

first involvement with them, it has the potential to shape the way that they participate in other issues through the tactics they

while antiwar activism rarely

prevents the onset of war (Marullo and Meyer 2004), it has the chance to shape the
practices of an entire field of social action by imprinting its participants. Our work
implement, the arguments they offer, and the frames they devise. Thus,

builds on a tradition of scholarship that demonstrates the important biographical consequences of mobilization (McAdam 1989;
Jasper 1999; Fischer and McInerney 2012). Just as people who join social movements in general are more likely than others to vote
or have heightened political participation during their lives (Demerath, Marwell, and Aiken 1971; Marwell, Demerath, and Aiken
1987), so too does participation in one particular movement have significance consequences for political involvement. For example,
individuals vary in the degree to which they personally identify with the label activist (Corrigall-Brown 2012: 105-22; Teske 1997).
Whether or not individuals think of themselves as activists is often something that they learn in the course of participation in
movements, rather than prior to their first activist experience (Gamson 1991; Gecas 2000). Thus, which movement individuals
participate with first may matter for whether or not they come to think of themselves as activists. Similarly, the order of
participation in movements may matter for the substantive ideas that individuals develop about politics. As Munson (2008)
documents, individuals often do not bring fully-formed ideologies with them to their first experiences with activism. Rather, they
learn and develop ideologies through their contacts with movements (Blee 2002; Polletta 2002). Our survey of Social Forum activists
provides a broadly representative sample of progressive/left activists who were mobilized in the United States at one particular point
in time, while at the same time including people who had their first experience with activism over many decades, from the 1940s to
the 2010s. We recognize that ability of activists to attend this convention depended on factors such as the costs of attending and
their resources to pay those costs. To incorporate these factors into our analysis, we include variables such as distance traveled and
income, and note that the sample includes people from around the United States and with varied levels of financial resources. By
design, our analysis is confined to individuals with at least a modest level of commitment to activism; enough of a commitment to
attend a conference addressing contemporary social issues. Thus, our conclusions are not reasonably generalizable to individuals
below this level of commitment. Although our data by no means provide a perfect random sample of progressive/left activists in the
United States, they do offer a very broad, cross-sectional view of those who were engaged in the early part of the twenty-first
century. Our analysis is limited to activists on the progressive/left side of the political spectrum. Ideologically, US Social Forum
participants are much more to the left than the typical American. Few respondents reported membership in the Republican Party
(1.04%) or a conservative ideology (1.85%). Thus, it remains an empirical question as to what extent similar patterns may or may
not exist among conservative activists. Is there an analogous gateway movement on the right side of the political spectrum?
Perhaps through involvement with the Republican Party or engagement with candidates for public office, such as Barry Goldwater
(R-AZ) electoral politics serves this function on the right (Smith 2007). Or, possibly, the nascent Tea Party offers a new structure to
systematically socialize conservative activists (Skocpol and Williamson 2012). An alternative hypothesis is that conservative
activism is more polycentric than progressive/left activism such that there is no single movement that serves as a gateway to a
large number of activists. Instead, multiple movements recruit approximately equal numbers of activists. Charles Tilly (1985)
famously argued that war-making facilitated state-building because wars allow states to expand their tax-collecting capacity, which
resulted in an expansion of the state itself. The US Social Forum data reveal that Tilly's observation can be further developed. In
modern America, wars increase social movement capacity because they touch many sectors of society and are highly emotional

antiwar politics are

often the starting point for many activist paths. The aggregate result is that other movements of
events. They disproportionately attract people who are interested in movement activism. Thus,

the Left are populated with activists who began as antiwar demonstrators. If the US Social Forum is an indicator of broader trends
among progressive/lefts, American wars have helped to define the Left. The lives of activists are now intertwined with antiwar

We do not argue non-peace issues are not important elements of the American Left.
Rather, war-making has resulted in a fundamental re-articulation of the relationship
between the different progressive/left social movements that are found in American
society. Early in the 20th century, activism was often dominated by "Old Left" issues, such as labor. In the mid-20th century, the
activism.

New and Old Left developed a complex relationship, which at times was competitive and at other times supportive (Gitlin 2003).
One strand of civil rights movement scholarship, for example, argues that the labor and civil rights movements were often in conflict
(Foner 1981; Quadagno 1992). Other scholars have claimed that the civil rights movement had a rejuvenating effect on labor unions
(Isaac and Christiansen 2002; Isaac, McDonald and Lukasik 2006). Taken together, this scholarship suggests that various social
movements co-existed on the same political stage. Major American wars and the post-WWII defense build-up have brought antiwar
activism to the forefront of activism. Major wars and other national security issues, such as the deployment of nuclear weapons in
the 1980s, created a consistent point of contention, which commanded substantial resources from activists. The persistent effort to
combat war has resulted in a situation where the peace movement is ubiquitous and highly connected to other movements. The

An antiwar movement sends its recruits to other movements, but

other movements do not reciprocate as often or as systematically. The configuration of
modern activism is not stable, though, and the centrality and distinctiveness of antiwar activism may
be the result of a highly contingent historical process. In the event that there was an
relationship is asymmetric.

extended period in which the United States did not participate in a major armed conflict, then it is possible that a form of activism
could emerge that concentrates more heavily on the distribution of wealth or challenging other forms of inequality, such as racial

As American armed forces demobilized in Iraq and Afghanistan, activists

returned in larger numbers to movements addressing economic inequality and
identity politics. The successful emergence of the Occupy Wall Street movement in Fall 2011 may be one sign of a shift
within progressive/left activism (Stetler 2011). Another sign of a shift within movement activists is
the increased attention given by activists to sustainability, food production, and the
environment (e.g., Weber, Heinze, and De Soucey 2008). As these movements mature and take
center stage, they may have to integrate participants whose approach to activism
was defined, to some degree, by the fight against war. The question for these
activists is how they will integrate diverse tactics and political frames. A clear
understanding of how their organizations and networks relate to peace
activism may help them to do so.
stratification.

Military presence is the result of explicit policy choices

changing laws is part of ending militaristic ideology
Lutz, International Studies Prof @ Brown University, 9
(Catherine, The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts,
21-22)
Why and how are the bases tolerated and sustained in a world of nation-states
where sovereignty and nationalism are still such important phenomena and when
abuses of local people and environments so regularly occur ? How are they accepted by the
U.S. public, whose own Declaration of Independence focused on the British offense of "Quartering large bodies of
armed troops among us" and "protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they

One of the most important explanations is

that the bases are naturalized or normalized, meaning that they are thought of as
unremarkable, inevitable, and legitimate. Bases are normalized through a commonly
circulating rhetoric that suggests their presence is natural and even gift-like rather than
the outcomes of policy choices made in keeping with the aim of pursuing a certain
imperial vision of U.S. self- interest. Militarism is an ideology that supports
such policies by suggesting that the world is naturally a dangerous place which
requires the control brought by armies (Johnson 2004). Bases, then, are presented as
simple safety devices against objective risks. Metaphorically, the military is spoken of as
"arm" of the state, as having "posture," " reach," "stance," and perhaps most tellingly, a "footprint." These body
images naturalize and suggest unity to what is in fact a very heterogeneous and
socially constructed entity. Everyone involved, however the true believers, the cynical
opportunists, the managers and the nationalists is participating in a complicated system of
should commit on the Inhabitants Of these States?"

beliefs about the bases and American power. By framing situations as requiring U.S. military access
(the world is dangerous, terrorism must be dealt with by means of the most powerful military tools available, etc.),
U.S. commentators suggest that the current military realignment and new base building in Korea, Guam, and

By focusing on existing bases as "facts on the ground" that new base

commentators suggest there is no alternative,
ignoring the many that critics have suggested . In these ways, discussion of
alternatives to the projection of U.S. military power around the world is
preempted.
elsewhere are inevitable.

planning must adapt to or augment, those