NECESSITY POLITICS LINKS

The visibility your aff gives to anti-capitalist labor is the politics of necessity

Beltrán, associate professor of political science at Haverford College, 09

(Cristina, Political Theory, Going Public Hannah Arendt, Immigrant Action, and the Space of Appearance
Volume 37 Number 5 October 2009 595-622)

Yet this dynamic— whereby efforts to honor the contributions of noncitizens lead to the conflation of
who they are with what they do—is the double bind of immigrant action. In making labor visible, immigrants
and their allies seek to invest it with political significance. Yet such visibility runs the risk of
simultaneously mobilizing the more problematic accounts of labor, those that emphasize necessity
over freedom. Such are the contradictions of all publics—including the immigrant counterpublic. As Warner
reminds us, because they are formed by their conflict with the dominant public, counterpublics are “damaged
forms of publicness, just as gender and sexuality are, in this culture, damaged forms of privacy.”95 Despite
their capacity for transformation and reevaluation, counterpublics are also always embedded in the larger
public. This reality means that we must not simply reject or celebrate labor— instead, this discourse
needs to be questioned, resisted, and renegotiated. Claiming rights by invoking labor clearly has a
certain logic. In the United States, for example, the discourse of labor is often mobilized for nationalist ends.
Judith Shklar, for example, reminds us that labor and the right to earn function as a central foundation of
American citizenship. According to Shklar, part of America’s exceptionalism has involved the right to earn
and the right to vote.96 Citing the Jacksonian belief in the dignity of work, Shklar argues that earning and
the value of labor are constitutive of American citizenship. In contrast to ancient associations between leisure
and citizenship, Americans have often expressed a wariness of the idle rich, emphasizing the link between
democracy and work. Given this history of conferring civic standing through a focus on suffrage and
employment, it is unsurprising that proimmigration advocates would seize on the idea of the undocumented
as hard-working economic contributors. However, as Shklar’s discussion of America also notes, the question
of race remains a “core dilemma” in America’s political history. The existence of chattel slavery both
complicated and racialized the model of the independent citizen-earner: while wage labor conferred
independence and autonomy, slavery “did more than any other institution to bring labor into contempt.”97
This sometimes led white workers to detest slavery “but hate the slave as well.”98
NO SOLVO

Seeing migrant mobility as a tool against capitalism is too easy. It simply inverts power relations

Bojadžijev AND Karakayalı 10

(Manuela, Professor at the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt University of Berlin; Serhat,
teaches at the University of Halle, e- flux 06/10)

It is too simplistic to merely turn the power relations on their head, as has sometimes happened in
contributions from the field of research on transnationalism. Perceiving migrant practices as a subversive
Other to nation-states, or even to capitalism, is not the answer. Rather than conceptualize every form of
migration that is not regulated by the state (especially undocumented migration) as a form of counter-power
to national state practices of territorialization, we are concerned with exploring migratory lines of flight as a
social movement in the intermediate zones, where migration slips out of the hands of regulative, codifying,
and stratifying policies. With lines of flight, here, we address that which literally seeks to escape capitalism:
migration as escape routes, migration as living labor. In contrast, the super-exploitation of migrant labor is
the opposite of this line of flight; it is its recuperation. The political option lies where this contradiction comes
into play.

ISM FOCUS. The left’s focus on ISM politics is draining its intellectual stockpile. And the fear of national
politics is another link

GITLIN, Prof of Journalism @ U Columbia, 06 (Todd, The Intellectuals and the Flag)

The antigovernment dogma of deregulation, privatization, and tax cuts exacerbates economic and social
troubles. A culture war against modernity—against secularism, feminism, and racial justice—flies in the face of the West’s distinctive contribution to the history
of civilization, namely, the rise of individual rights and reason. To elaborate on these claims is the work of other books. The reasons for the right-
wing ascendancy are many, among them—as I argued in letter 7 of Letters to a Young Activist (2003)—the
organizational discipline that the right cherishes and the left, at least until recently, tends to abhor. The left’s
institutions, in particular, unions, are weak. But my focus here is another reason for the right’s ascendancy:
the left’s intellectual disarmament. Some of the deficiency is institutional. Despite efforts to come from behind after the 2000
election, there remain decades’ worth of shortfall in the left’s cultural apparatus. In action-minded think tanks, talk radio and cable television, didactic newspapers,
subsidies for writers, and so on, the right has held most of the high cards.1 Left and liberal analyses and proposals do emerge from universities and research
centers, but their circulation is usually choked off for lack of focus, imagination, and steady access to mass media—except in the cheapened forms of punditry and
The right’s masterful apparatus for purveying its messages and organizing for power is not the only
agitprop.
reason why the left has suffered defeat after defeat in national politics since the 1960s. The left’s intellectual
stockpile has been badly depleted, and new ideas are more heralded than delivered. When the left has
thought big, it has been clearer about isms to oppose—mainly imperialism and racism—than about values and
policies to further. At that, it has often preferred the denunciatory mode to the analytical, mustering full-throated opposition rather than full-brained
exploration. While it is probably true that many more reform ideas are dreamt of than succeed in circulating through the brain-dead media, the liberal-left conveys
little sense of a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. While the right has rather successfully tarred liberals with the brush of “tax-and-spend,” those thus
the left’s expertise has been
tarred have often been unsure whether to reply “It’s not so” or “It is so, we’re proud to say.” A fair generalization is that
constricted in scope, showing little taste for principle and little capacity to imagine a reconstituted
nation. It has been conflicted and unsteady about values. It has tended to disdain any design for foreign policy other than “U.S. out,” which is no substitute for
a foreign policy—and inconsistent to boot when you consider that the left wants the United States to intervene, for example, to push Israel to end its occupation of
the West Bank.All this is to say that the left has been imprisoned in the closed world of outsider politics.
Instead of a vigorous quest for testable propositions that could actually culminate in reform, the academic
left in particular has nourished what has come to be called “theory”: a body of writing (one can scarcely say
its content consists of propositions) that is, in the main, distracting, vague, self-referential, and wrong-headed. “Theory” is
chiefly about itself: “thought to the second power,” as Fredric Jameson defined dialectical thinking in an early, dazzling American exemplar of the new theoretical
Even when “theory” tries to reconnect from language and mind to the larger social world, language
style.2
remains the preoccupation.
Your aff has it backwards. In the world of neoliberalism, we need the ideas of the nation and state to
counter transnational corporations. Your aff will create the conditions for the state’s withdrawal, leaving
decision-making authority up to corporations

Behdad, Dept Chair – Comparative Lit, University of California, Los Angeles, 05

(Ali, Portal Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies Vol. 2, No. 2 July)

What we encounter in the discourses of postnationalism and diaspora today is a similar ideological
ambivalence toward what constitutes national consciousness and belonging. Whether we read Said, Bhabha
or Appadurai, we notice the paired critique of nationalism and celebration of a more cosmopolitan, imagined
community—for Said, it is the calling for a Palestinian nation that haunts his celebration of exile as a
metaphor of ideal subjectivity; for Bhabha, it is the ‘scattering of the people that in other times and other
places, in the nations of others, becomes a time of gathering’ (Bhabha 1990a, 291); and for Appadurai it is
the delocalized transnation that is celebrated against the white nation. What are we to make of these
contradictory articulations of the nation form? How are we to go beyond the problematic binary of good
nationalism vs. bad nationalism implied in this critical debate?
A starting point to address these questions is to unpack the relation between state and nation and explore
their roles in the global flow of people, capital, and commodities that characterize our contemporary world.
What is striking about critiques of nation and nationalism by cultural and postcolonial theorists is the
absence of any substantial discussion of the state, especially problematic because the nation and state
are often linked—that is, in the nation-state—if not fully equated. Often reduced to a repressive
apparatus, the notion of state is considered passé in today’s Western academy, associated with an outdated
Marxist paradigm that limited its function to maintaining class domination. But I want to suggest a return to
this key term and question the extent to which the rhetoric of globalization has obscured the important role
states and governments play in transnational relations of power. Indeed, state apparatuses continue to
retain, if not exclusive, tremendous power over deployment of force as well as the authority to regulate how
transnational corporations invest their resources and engage in business transactions. We should ask,
therefore, what functions do states, as agencies of representation, perform in the broader system of
international regulation? Do global agencies and transnational corporations really undermine the sovereignty
of national governments? Have states become the local agents of corporate interests? Or, does the fact of
their being ultimately answerable to their citizens make them the local shields against global capitalism? Can
states re-create a sense of national identity in response to the political and economic constraints of
globalization? Or, do state apparatuses mobilize the idea of the nation to enable economic interests of
transnational corporations? I raise these questions both to underscore the problematic tendency among
postcolonial and cultural critics to overlook the function of states and their apparatuses in how global
networks and transnational relations are formed and to offer new areas of inquiry in unpacking and
understanding the impact of global interconnectedness. But the overlooking of the roles of nation and state
in recent theories of diaspora and postnationalism seems also problematic given the speed with which new
nations and nationalism are actually emerging today, the peculiar propensity for and the intensity of border
fortification in spite of the global flow of people and commodities across them, and the forging of new
partnerships between certain states and the global capital market. I want to suggest that while national
borders may no longer impede most of the international trade and other global economic transactions, they
do nonetheless matter greatly when it comes to human subjects whose movements are carefully regulated. I
have shown elsewhere that in the past twenty years the principle of governmentality in the United States has
actually been solidified, as demonstrated, for example, by the expansion of the prison industry and the
proliferation of the technologies of border control at the US-Mexico border (Behdad 1998). Similarly, the
integration of Europe in the form of a union has also meant tougher restrictions on the movement of people
from the Middle East, Africa, and most of Asia to Europe.
Moreover, in spite of the increase in global cultural contacts, nationalist sentiments persist throughout the
world and states continue to exert a great deal of power as to how a national community is globalized. On
the one hand, as R. Radhakrishnan points out:
neither the deracinating multi- or inter-national spread of capitalism nor the Marxist theoretical assimilation
of the national question within an internationalist communism has been able to do away with the urgencies
of the imagined communities of nationalism (Radhakrishnan 1992, 83).
Nationalism and state apparatuses remain powerful everywhere, in Iran and the United States, in Serbia as
well as France. And, without romanticizing the role of states and nationalism, one may add that in an era of
foot-loose capitalism, certain nationalist sentiments or state forms of sovereignty may in fact prove useful in
countering the lack of accountability on the part of giant transnational corporations.
Turn – border patrol. MORE FLEXIBLE FORMS OF LABOR CAUSES MORE SUPPORT FOR BORDER PATROL

McNevin, RMIT University, Melbourne, 09

(Anne, New Political Science, Volume 31, Number 2, June)

These anxieties reflect a fundamental tension that characterises states in which neoliberal ideology provides
the central rationality of governance. This is a tension between the neoliberal imperative to open borders to
global market forces, including a transnational labour market, and growing popular pressure for territorial
closure.9 The apparent contradiction in neoliberal policy frameworks (active pursuit of global markets for
“national” benefit on one hand, and declining state protection from market risks on the other) challenges the
very raison d’eˆtre of the state as the institutional safeguard of citizens’ interests. While irregular migrants
fulfil demand for more flexible forms of labour in neoliberal economies, native populations seek
reassurance that territorial borders remain meaningful guarantors of their privileged status vis-a`-vis
non-citizens. In this context, a commitment to border policing against irregular migrants (regardless of its
actual success) provides explicit recognition of the continued significance of borders and the priority and
possibility of protecting the community of citizens they contain. Border policing clearly contradicts the open-
borders approach taken in other policy areas and the rhetoric of inevitability that supports this approach. It
can thus be interpreted as an overwhelmingly performative practice. The lack of efficacy associated with US
border policing, for example, should be seen not only as a means of supplying cheap labour, but also in the
context of its parallel function as a performance of territorial sovereignty.10 Likewise, the panic induced over
asylum seekers in the Australian context works to distort the nature of the threat to territorial sovereignty
and, thus, the resolve of the state to address it.11 To prevent a border crossing in either of these settings is
to reinvigorate the notion of the border itself as ameaningful dividing point between inside and out.

You can’t solve local and state laws

Kretsedemas, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, 08

(Philip, American Quarterly, Volume 60, Number 3, September)

This essay reviews the recent expansion of immigration laws that have been enacted by local and state
governments to control unauthorized migration. Although these laws evoke a conventional, territorial paradigm of national sovereignty, I demonstrate that
they are actually leading toward a more complex form of sovereignty that tolerates wide variations in the way that immigration laws are enforced in different parts
of the United States. I also argue that it is a mistake to view these laws only through the lens of an immigration control agenda. Drawing on the writing of Aiwha
have been shaped by neoliberal governing strategies that create
Ong and Georgio Agamben, I observe that these laws
exceptions to prior legal precedent as well as fostering a looser connection between territoriality, rights and
legal status. My discussion explains how local enforcement laws have been shaped by these neoliberal
priorities, which are more oriented toward the selective policing of an expanding migrant workforce than
toward mass deportation of "illegals." As a result, immigration scholars and immigrant rights advocates should come to terms with the likelihood
that these priorities will become the dominant, driving force behind future trajectories of local enforcement and other forms of immigration enforcement.

Over the past several years, a growing number of local governments have enacted laws that require police,
other government workers, and even private citizens to verify the legal status of local residents.
Approximately 300 such laws have been enacted over the past four years and more than 180 of them,
spanning forty-three states, were enacted in 2007 alone.1 The primary aim of these laws (often referred to
as “illegal immigrant” or local enforcement laws) is to allow local authorities to apprehend unauthorized
migrants. Broadly described, the laws appeal to a territorial paradigm of national sovereignty that
equates the integrity of the nation with the ability to control its borders. From this perspective, the
unauthorized migrant is not just a potential “economic burden” or a “security risk,” but an affront to
conventional notions of citizenship, which equate political, social, and civil rights with the criterion of legal
residence. Hence local enforcement laws are often viewed by their supporters as efforts to restore the rights
and privileges of the citizenry by ensuring that unauthorized migrants are unable to vote in local elections,
access publicly funded services and resources, or compete for jobs that could be filled by citizens and other
legal residents.2
IMMIGRANT TALK LINKS

Your harm paints immigrants as mere dupes and victims of capitalism

The Frassanito Network 05 (at the European Social Forum, 4/5,

www.noborder.org/files/movements_of_migration.pdf)

The transformation of borders reflects the shift in political strategies towards the management of migration.
Nevertheless, it also mirrors the fact that neither physical nor legal barriers can stop people's movement.
Migrants are not just the collateral damage of global capitalism; they are active agents of free
movement who represent a subverting power in respect to the sovereignty of the nation states as well as the
new regimes of hyper-exploitation on a global level. The depiction of national and supernational borders as
instruments whose function is simply to stop unwanted migrants is misleading because it fails both to
understand migration as a social movement and to consider the struggles against borders. The main function
of global border regimes and migration control strategies is not only to keep people outside, but rather to
direct their actions and behaviour across space,leading to what can be described as a system of selective
inclusion through the illegalization of the migrants. Borders assign people to differentiated social, political
and legal spaces which extend inwards and outwards across national and supernational territories. Expulsions
and detention camps reserved to foreigners represent a differentiated system of justice aimed at
administrating the actions of foreigners outside of the guarantees of civil rights and general legal principles.
In the same way, legal mechanisms which limit the free circulation of people define a de facto differentiated
regime for migrant workers aimed at expropriating the inner value of peoples' mobility. In contrast to this
world's partition, migration itself is a contestation of the distribution of rights and privileges according to the
hierarchical allocation of social and political space. While the globalization of border regimes is a symptom of
the increasing difficulty with which to contain the violence of the commodification process of labour within
the framework of national borders, the everyday challenge to the borders by migrants at the same time
shows the weakness of this globalizing process. The demolishing of borders is not a political utopia. It is a
struggle that migrants fight every day when they conquer the "European fortress" - or any other regime built
upon the institution of borders - and when they fight for their social, political and civil rights.

The portrayal of weak subjects neglects the lives of immigrants and it paints them in need of the state to
save them

The Frassanito Network 05 (at the European Social Forum, 4/5,

www.noborder.org/files/movements_of_migration.pdf)

We therefore need to analyse and start from the conditions and strategies of migrant's mobility and labour
and to avoid conceiving them either as abstractions that are to be endowed with rights or as weak subjects
incapable of autonomously taking action. We do not believe that migrants, as in the case of precarious
workers in general, are a priori subjects connoted by a particular political persuasion and by nature destined
to subvert the order of labour. Migrants are a specific presence in the constellation of contemporary labour. And it is from this last point that we
must begin if we want to capture the contradictions and possibilities. Migrant labour means acknowledging that however shackled to labour, migrants anticipate a
number of general conditions that regard contemporary labour as a whole. Migrants are not nomadic subjects which satisfy the image of someone who is more or
less permanently present in western societies. They cross borders not to assert some abstract right of movement: in doing so they pay the price for the devaluation
of their labour capacity, but at the same time they connect labour conditions and forms of existence which exist in spite of borders and barriers. Migrant labour is
therefore directly implicated in contemporary social production. It can represent the possibility of overturning the usual way of thinking about and conducting
considering
political work with migrants, at the same time as allowing us to peruse the general forms which social production is assuming. We believe that
migrants a "a weak" subject, only on the basis of the condition of daily social and work privation, risks
neglecting the claim for freedom which is central to the decision to migrate and which also persists,
in spite of all the adverse conditions, on arrival. Moreover, viewing migrants merely as subjects deprived of
rights and citizenship means to still think that there is a condition of full enjoyment of those rights
that they must obtain. This route of integration carries the indelible mark of the national construction of
systems of rights, and it also involves the demand to be integrated into the national framework of the
recognition of labour. Secondly, it takes for certain that this recognition exists and that it provides a space
where labour can politically count. It is obviously a different matter when rights and citizenship act as the
arena of political communication between individuals who, in a common search for freedom, place into
question, first of all, their differences without ever letting themselves be homologated and enclosed within
legal and national boundaries.
Migrants are no longer simply victims of economics.

The Frassanito Network 05 (at the European Social Forum, 4/5,

www.noborder.org/files/movements_of_migration.pdf)

We are here bringing with us the experiences of the struggles of migration all over the world, from the
mobilization of the sans papiers in Europe to the Freedom Ride of Migrant Workers in the US last year, from
the "Justice for Janitors" campaign to the upsurge of Woomera, in Australia. In the last years, these
struggles have forged new political languages and practices.
The days are gone when it was
possible to talk of migrants as mere victims of global economic
devastation. Sure, this kind of political discourse, that was for example hegemonic in the first two
meetings of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, still survives within a left which is unable to overcome
the melancholic plea for a supposed "golden age" of a social State and tamed capitalism. It is possible that
many of the people attending the European Social Forum in London, even many of those who are critical
towards the official organization of the forum itself, still share this view. But, on the other hand, we have the
reality of the constant mobilization of migrants, of their challenge to the borders of Europe and to other
borders in the world, of their refusal to submit their mobility to the supposed "laws" of the labor market. We
have the reality of migration as a social movement which is not merely produced by the action of "objective"
forces, but which is also driven by a number of subjective needs, desires and behaviors. To say this, even to
speak of an autonomy of migration, doesn't mean to remove from the center of the political debate the
mechanisms of domination and exploitation which determine the migrants' life. Rather, it suggests a shift in
perspective that allows us to analyze (and to criticize, both theoretically and practically) those mechanisms
and to continuously confront them with a set of social practices that contain the possibility for their
overcoming. It is with this shift in perspective that we want to frame our discussion of the topics addressed
in this newspaper; namely racism and border regime, citizenship and camps. Our time is a "global" one not
only because of the strategies of neo-liberalism, financial capital, and capitalist corporations. It is global also
because the mobility of labor cannot be governed within the framework of national borders anymore. The
geopolitical architecture of the fordist age has been challenged by transnational migration on a global scale,
as the discipline of the fordist factory has been challenged by the refusal of work and the sabotage of the
working class in the "core" countries of capitalism. Detention centers and deportations are as much the
answers to this challenge, as the precariousness of labor and life is. But in the subjective side of labor
mobility, we can even say in its subjective flexibility, lies the main productive force of our age. There is no
possible subversive cooperation, no possible radical change without this productive force. This is our
standpoint. But we also add that there is no possible "progressive" reform without taking it into account.
AT: SQ = CAPITALISM

True, the status quo’s exploitation of cheap labor fuels the interests of capital but so does legalization, in a
different way. The management of illegality is a way for capitalism to create safety valves which keep it
alive

Barbagallo & Beuret 08

(Nicholas and Camille have recently migrated to Europe, live in East London and have worked on migration
and labour issues in Australia and the UK, Mute 2 #7, 2/12, http://www.metamute.org/en/Mute-Vol2-7-
Show-Invisibles-migration-data-work)

The amnesty produces ‘the people’ as much as it homogenises the migrant – it sets up a twin moment of
re/production, hinging on a notion of tolerance. Little wonder then that its corollary is a crude racism. The
other is made in the same moment as ‘the native’, producing both tolerance and racism (as if they were
really that distinct).

Of course, the racism produced by such moments also has a directly productive role with regards to capital.
Race is one of the key differentials in the wage and labour hierarchy. Amnesties generally serve as
momentary corrections to national labour markets, serving the needs of capital in a crude, safety valve
kind of way. Of course it is not that illegality does not also serve the needs of capital, but it does so in a
different fashion. In the economic instance, an amnesty serves to bring into the formal economy (for reasons
of taxation and management) those people working outside of it. To be sure there are markets and
economies that benefit significantly from illegality, but nonetheless this illegality needs to be constantly
managed and when it is not necessary, the illegal must be brought into the legal. This movement back and
forth, between legal and illegal is by no means a smooth space and while illegality benefits the interests of
certain sections of capital, it is also worth noting it is not always the view of the state managers of the
national economy that illegality is of benefit.

THE AFF IS JUST A WAY TO RESOLVE CAPITALIST CRISES

Sherman, Metropolis British Columbia – Canadian Metropolis Project, M.A. Queen’s Dept of Geography, 08
(Yolande Pottie, MORAL PANIC OVER MERIT-BASED IMMIGRATION POLICY: TALENT FOR CITIZENSHIP AND
THE AMERICAN DREAM, June)

If Hall et al. (1978) are correct and elites orchestrate moral panics to cover economic crises, what was the crisis in the capitalist system at the time of the study
migration cannot be separated from
period that necessitated panic around destruction of family structure? According to the Marxist perspective,
the capitalist project. Migrants provide an “industrial reserve army of labor” that depresses wages. It follows
that capitalists are pro-migration but that economic up- and downturns influence immigration quotas and
policy. What’s more, some argue that “immigrant labor enters the society at the lowest tier of the
socioeconomic ladder, thereby raising the native workers to a higher tier and lessening the intensity of the
class conflict” (Meyers 2000: 1249). Immigration is thus seen as mediating recession and ultimately
avoiding crises of capitalism (Meyers 2000: 1248).

STATE INCLUSION ALLOWS THE ORGANIZATION OF CAPITAL

Barbagallo & Beuret 08

(Nicholas and Camille have recently migrated to Europe, live in East London and have worked on migration
and labour issues in Australia and the UK, Mute 2 #7, 2/12, http://www.metamute.org/en/Mute-Vol2-7-
Show-Invisibles-migration-data-work)

The boundaries and borders must be crossed and threatened for the categories to have meaning. This shows
the deeper state-building significance of an amnesty – it is a state-led and managed moment of
controlling and organising the tension and threat in a productive way for both the state and capital. An
amnesty might represent a real and substantial gain for migrant communities and a limited number of
individuals, but at the cost of the re-inscription of life into the state and the legitimisation of the state's role
in managing the tension between, and circulation across, borders and boundaries.
The focus on immigrant agency has been redeployed to aid the concern for skilled workers

Bojadžijev AND Karakayalı 10

(Manuela, Professor at the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt University of Berlin; Serhat,
teaches at the University of Halle, e- flux 06/10)

Various effects followed from the deployment—by ourselves and others—of the concept of the autonomy of
migration. It unsettled several things that had until then been taken for granted within anti-racism debates;
a coherent “politics of autonomy,” however, did not emerge. The autonomy thesis was rebuffed where it was
interpreted phenomenologically, as an empirical description of processes of migration; as if we had presumed
migrants to be autonomous individuals who “did their thing” regardless of border controls and migration
policies. There was fear that the turn away from the misery of migration could prove a flawed
strategy; that the emphasis on the agency of migrants would play into the hands of those who had always
inferred homo economicus and the pursuit of self-interest in migrants. But this quickly becomes a fatal,
circular argument that rests on the precondition that migrants may only ever be regarded as the victims of
circumstance. The liberals set the precedent, and for the Left there only remains the option to play along or
lay the groundwork for the Right. Instead, one must ask how it could be possible to lay the foundation for a
broader movement in the concerns of migrants? Beyond basic pity and general human rights, what could be
brought into play as a common terrain?
 CREATIVITY / ART / CRITIQUE IS ABSORBED BY CAP

nomad capitalism means critique is easily assimilated to the point of dysfunction – no longer the institution
but instead the concept of the mobile reigns supreme over popular consumer consciousness
Diken 2 (Bulent, Department of Sociology, Lancaster Univ. “Justification and Immigration in the Network
Society – A New Ambivalence?” AMID Working Paper Series April 2002. PDF)

In the contemporary network society real geography is to a large extent cancelled by the deterritorialized
logic of flows.24 Power works according to the principle of mobility: the fast eat the slow.25 Ours is a
“nomad capitalism”;26 it justifies itself and advertises its products also with reference to the aesthetic
regime of inspiration: “Be Inspired”, as Siemens says in its adverts. Meanwhile, capitalists themselves boast
in new ways—“I am such a nomad, I am such a tramp”, says Anita Roddick, the owner of Body Shop.27 And
a new capitalist discourse based on metaphors of mobility is emerging in business organizations, promoting
the notion of a “constant adaptive movement” and flexible organizational forms that can “go with the
flow”.28 In short, as Bauman nicely formulates it, today “we are witnessing the revenge of nomadism over
the principle of territoriality and settlement”.29 We are today “condemned to nomadism, at the very moment
that we think we can make displacement the most effective means of subversion”.30
Aesthetic creativity, which is related to the idea of transgressing oneself, industrialist productivity, and the
market’s grandeur, willingness to take risks, are no longer exclusive worlds. The new “project-regime” is well
adjusted to the world of networks precisely because it is a transitory form.31 Those who do not have projects
or do not explore networks are threatened by exclusion. In the new connectionist world, the real threat is not
non-integration but exclusion from networks. In this reticular world, in which a pre-established habitus is not
desirable, one “should be physically and intellectually mobile” and be able to respond to the call of “a moving
world”: the new “grand person is mobile”.32
My point is that critique is not a peripheral activity. Rather, it contributes to capitalist innovations that
can assimilate critique, which in turn confronts critique with the danger of becoming dysfunctional.
Capitalism had received mainly two forms of critique until the 1970s: the social critique, from the Marxist
camp (based on the concept of “exploitation”), and the aesthetic critique, from the French philosophy (based
on the concept of “nomadism”). Yet, since the 1970s, capitalism seems to have found new forms of
legitimation in the artist critique, which resulted in a “transfer of competencies from leftist radicalism
toward management”.33 Consequently, the aesthetic critique seems to have dissolved into a post-Fordist
normative regime of justification, while the notion of creativity has been re-coded in terms of flexibility, and
while difference has been commercialized.

Even if all immigration fantasies disappeared, society would still be fascist

Diken 2 (Bulent, Department of Sociology, Lancaster Univ. “Justification and Immigration in the Network
Society – A New Ambivalence?” AMID Working Paper Series April 2002. PDF)

What is served by racism today is an ideological fantasy about a “society” that still exists. Its logic is this: if
“society” were not “threatened” or “destroyed” by the mobile immigrant, we would have a consistent, cosy,
and non-antagonistic – one is tempted to say “happily fascist” society. Is not this fantasy the kernel of the
whole immigration debate? I wonder what would be left in the immigration debate if this fantasy were taken
away. One is tempted to say: nothing! Though, if this fantasy is taken away, what is left is of course
a series of social problems. Yes, in the network society neither “society” nor the “migrant” exist, but
there exist a lot of social problems. Perhaps, we should “re-invent politics”, as Ulrich Beck says.41 We
should talk about the “common good”, not in terms of cultural identity but in terms of politics. For “people do
not need to be given their cultures, only their political rights”.42 Yet, the existing immigration debate is a-
political or, in a sense, “post-political”. The dominant form of politics today is Third Way “postpolitics”, a
disavowal of politics as such. Post-politics does not “repress” politics as such but rather “forecloses” it:
ideological conflicts are replaced by the collaboration of technocrats and multi-culturalists; what is foreclosed
is thus the political itself, which returns in the form of racism, ethnic violence, and so on.43
FOUCAULT / NECESSITY POLITICS LINKS

Hardt and Negri’s multitude is a recipe for labor oriented fascism

Scott Michaelsen, and Scott Shershow, 05 (Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University,
Professor of English at the University of California, Davis),“Why Work on Rights? Citizenship, Welfare and
Property in Empire and Beyond”, Theory & Event, Volume 8 Issue 4

Though Hardt and Negri's formula here is intended to rebalance the global social contract toward what they
call elsewhere the "democratic republic founded on labor" (Labor 55 ff.), they at the same time risk
reproducing the tradition outlined by Shklar and Rose in a new way. In other words, they project a citizen
oriented toward productive labor and the amassing of capital rather than toward bourgeois identity and its
constant companion, the work-ethic; but, in either case, judgments will have to made regarding who has met
the threshold of "creation" and therefore who is entitled to the "rewards". They also appear to completely
reaffirm the moral contract (the self-fashioning labor of the citizen in the form of a certain Work), since their
figure of citizenship involves a "man" who must be "squared," or multiplied with itself, and must be further
elevated through "love of the community," in order to reach the threshold of liberation. The exclusivity of
this formulation should be obvious: what happens to those beings who cannot achieve homohomo, or cannot
shoulder the burden of such massively productive, capital-generating labor? And, even more so, what will
happen to those who may refuse to seek such a threshold? (Here, perhaps, one should remember the old
Situationist slogan: "Never work.") Finally, what is to be done with those who, on entirely different grounds,
refuse the fusion of the multitude into what Hardt and Negri call its "singularity" in the name of difference or
particularity, however conceived? As Jacques Derrida has noted: "[C]ommunio is a word for military
formation and is a kissing cousin of the word 'munitions': to have a communio is to be fortified on all sides,
to build a 'common' (com) 'defense' (munis), as when a wall is put up around the city to keep the stranger or
the foreigner out. The self-protective closure of 'community,' then, would be just about the opposite of ...
preparation for the incoming of the other, 'open' and 'porous' to the other... A 'universal community'
excluding no one is a contradiction in terms; communities always have an inside and an outside" (Caputo
108). In other words, citizenship -- even an allegedly global or universal citizenship -- will always be an
exclusive formulation, open to judgment and determination of who is in and who is out. And Hardt and
Negri transparently reveal the hinge for such exclusion, given their dual thresholds of productive
achievement -- one keyed to productive labor, and the other to affective community. As Schuck and Smith
note, Locke, Rousseau, Hobbes, and the like are all aligned in producing a notion of citizenship which has the
"potential for discriminatory exclusion" (Schuck and Smith 11; see also 27), and Hardt and Negri merely
recapitulate and intensify this form, "squaring" it.
ANTI-CAPITALIST RESISTANCE NO SOLVO

COALITIONS AREN’T SUSTAINABLE

DUNN, Institute for Research on World-Systems, UC-Riverside, 05

(Christopher Chase, journal of world-systems research, xi, 2, december)

One of the big challenges is how the different kinds of progressive social movements can work together to
struggle against capitalist globalization. The issue of alliances is complicated by the fact that some of the
groups in opposition to capitalist globalization are reactionary rather than progressive. So the enemy of my
enemy is not always my friend. And even among the progressives there are major issues. Environmentalists
and labor groups have notorious differences. Core and peripheral workers may have diff erent interests
regarding issues such as global labor standards. And there are obvious contradictions between those who
want to democratize global governance and those who want to abolish it altogether in favor of maximum
local autonomy.

TRANSITION WARS

DUNN, Institute for Research on World-Systems, UC-Riverside, 05

(Christopher Chase, journal of world-systems research, xi, 2, december)

Here is an example of this sort of problem. Warren Wagar’s (1992) fi ctional scenario, A Short History of the
Future, tells the story of the next fi fty years under the title “Earth, Incorporated.” It is a story of further
expanding domination by huge capitalist corporations, continued technological development, ecological
degradation and the emergence of a capitalist proto-world-state, but not yet the dismantling of the military
structure of the interstate system. U.S. hegemony continues to decline. Immigration, slow economic growth,
growing inequalities and the emergence of greater class and racial divides in the U.S. eventually result in the
election of a Mexican-American woman as president. Heartland Republicans start a civil war, but the U.S.
army, now staff ed by a large majority of non-white personnel, quickly puts down the opposition. Th e U.S.
begins to support semiperipheral states that are resisting the hegemony of the global corporations and so the
world government (under the control of the “megacorps”) decides upon a nuclear first strike to take out the
leftist U.S. regime. Th us begins a three-year nuclear war that destroys most of the cities of the Northern
Hemisphere. In the aftermath the World Party is able to pull together a global socialist commonwealth. If
something like Wagar’s scenario is at all probable, the antisystemic movements need to work to prevent such
a catastrophe. It is ethically unacceptable to simply wait for global capitalism to destroy itself and then pick
up the pieces.

CAPITALISM WILL SURVIVE

Trainer, Senior Lecturer, School of Social Work, U of New South Wales (Australia), 2K [Ted, “Where Are We,
Where Do We Want to Be, How Do We Get There?”, Democracy & Nature, Vol. 6, No. 2]

A second line of argument derives from the extremely depressing history of achievement of left causes in
general. It could be argued that since the 1970s direct struggle against capitalism has brought little more
than catastrophic rout on all fronts, even taking into account the (temporary) blocking of the MAI and
the WTO Seattle conference. Capitalism has never been so triumphant and its drive for ever-greater scope
and power via the globalisation agenda is far from having reached is zenith. It is therefore distressing to
contemplate the continuing devotion of minuscule critical energies to the manifestly futile quest to defeat
capitalism.

EMPIRICALLY, ANTI-CAPITALIST RESISTANCE DRIVES CAPITALISM TO EXPAND

DUNN, Institute for Research on World-Systems, UC-Riverside, 05

(Christopher Chase, journal of world-systems research, xi, 2, december)

Local and regional protectionism is indeed an important component of the emerging resistance to corporate
globalization and neo-liberal policies (e.g., Amin 1997; Bello 2002). But one lesson we can derive from
earlier eff orts to confront and transform capitalism is that local resistance cannot, by itself, overcome
the strong forces of modern capitalism. What is needed is globalization from below. Global politics has
mainly been the politics of the powerful because they have had the resources to establish long-distance
connections and to structure global institutions. But waves of elite transnational integration have been
accompanied by upsurges of transnational linkages, strategies and institutions formed by workers, farmers
and popular challenges to the logic of capitalist accumulation. Globalization from below means the
transnationalization of antisystemic movements and the active participation of popular movements in global
politics and global citizenship. An analysis of earlier waves of the spiral of domination and resistance
demonstrates that ”socialism in one country” and other strategies of local protection have not been capable
of overcoming the negative aspects of capitalist development in the past, and they are even less
likely to succeed in the more densely integrated global system of the future. Strategies that mobilize people to
organize themselves locally must be complimented and coordinated with transnational strategies to democratize or replace
existing global institutions and to create new organizational structures that facilitate collective rationality for all the peoples
of the world. Globalization is producing a backlash much as it did in the nineteenth century and in the 1920s. Capitalist
globalization, especially the kind that has occurred since the 1970s, exposes many individuals to disruptive market forces
and increases inequalities within countries and internationally. Th e gap between the winners and the losers grows, and
the winners use more coercion and less consent in their eff orts to stay on top. Karl Polanyi’s (1944) notion of the double
movement by which marketization produces defensive reactions and new forms of regulation is conceptually similar to the
notion that expansive capitalism produces efforts to decommodify labor and communities, and that these then
drive capitalism to mobilize on a larger scale in order to overcome the constraints that political
resistance produces.

GLOBALIZATION FROM BELOW FAILS

BARLOW 03 (Maude, Labour/Le Travail, Spr'03 pg 265-269)

This is a useful and insightful book, a valuable primer to readers interested in the phenomenon of
globalization from below. Yet, one cannot but feel doubt about how their alternative program can be
realized. The authors maintain that social movements ''by linking from the nooks and crannies, developing a
common vision and program, and withdrawing their consent from existing institutions,... can impose norms
on states, classes, armies, and other power actors.'' (25) One can, however, question the viability of this
strategy. While the proponents of globalization recognize that political activity takes place on many levels
and across borders, no longer a matter of either/or but both/and, they reject the idea of participation in
electoral politics and the capture of state power, trusting that norms can somehow be imposed on the state.
While the authors are obviously correct in their assessment that there is no global state to be taken over, it
is the nation-state that charters corporations and acts on their behalf, negotiating with representatives
from other states within those institutions that states multilaterally have created such as the International
Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the WTO. Imposing norms may not be possible or enough and failure
to have a strategy to capture state power means abandoning the state to those in power
espousing neo-liberalism or those on the far right who still view the state as useful in combating the ills
and uncertainty of globalization from above as is now occurring in parts of Europe.

CAPITALISM LOVES GLOBALIZATION FROM BELOW

Gindin, Assistant to the President of the CAW, 02

(Sam, Canadian Dimension, No. 4, Vol. 36; 7/1, Pg. 18)

The global establishment, in spite of some initial nervousness, has come to understand that this movement
for a social economy, when it does not aim higher, is not a threat. It has consequently been rather
accommodating to it, describing it as the newly emerging "global civil society" and as "globalization from
below." Corporations, banks, private foundations, governments and regional institutions have been happy
and sometimes anxious to provide funding. And, in the absence of a political context, all have been happy to
incorporate the abstract language of "empowerment," "community democracy," and "capacities."
It is not just that the elites view this trend as being safe, but that they also see it as being functional to
globalization. With privatization and the erosion of social services, the attempt to provide decentralized
alternatives may -- inadvertently -- legitimate, or at least act to limit opposition to, the regressive
changes. In extreme but not uncommon cases, like the Quebec Solidarity Fund, with its tax breaks to create
worker-investors, government partnerships directly integrate social-economy institutions into the state.
Again, I want to be careful not to ignore differences within this movement. It is one thing, as in Porto
Allegre, where the movement includes many activists tied to a larger, politicized, anti-capitalist project. But
where this is not the case, the social-economy movement ironically suffers from the same limits it sees in the
social-democratic parties for which it has so much contempt. Not oriented to mobilizing against corporate
power, it becomes either peripheral to change or is incorporated into the system. Just as globalization can't
be changed by a retreat into the past, it can't be changed by a retreat to its margins. What Marx understood
so well when he criticized the Utopians of his time was that if you don't bring your dreams into the belly of
the beast, if you try to build around, rather than against, global power, you ultimately offer illusions rather
than hope. Globalization and social justice can't be made compatible by leaving globalization intact and
confining social justice to the world outside globalization's walls.
YOUR HARMS NOT TRUE

YOUR “CAP=WAR” IMPACTS DIVERT US FROM THE TRUE CAUSE, NEOCONSERVATISM

Chalmers, Pf Philosophy @ Australian National University, 05

(David, Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol 37, Issue 5, Pages 764-770)

If we consider war profiteering, we observe that the Bush hijo (I had to ask my Spanish daughter-in-law
what that meant, Professor McLaren!) White House is keen to make business a partner in the invasion and
occupation of Iraq. There is obvious empirical evidence here: the high-priced reconstruction contracts given
to the likes of Halliburton and Bechtel. Corporations such as those are shamelessly opportunistic in seizing
business created by US military action; this does not connect war and globalization! If we consider
Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore's over-reliance on the war-profiteering argument leads to a weak and
simplistic explanation of the causes of war, letting Hillary Clinton, Teddy Kennedy, and all other
Democrats off the hook. Is there an analogy here? One thing that can be said: the Internet and emails did
help oust Aznar in Spain. Manuel Castells has a point when he considers the potential for 'electronic
populism' in today's ecosocialist movements (vol. II—The Information Age). And so do the Zapatistas! I
digress. Yes, war profiteering happens. It is NOT the reason nations go to war. This is a distorted analysis. It
helps us keep our eyes on the Bush Administration. We forget the routine way corporate America makes
trillions off the misnamed Department of Defense—it doesn't matter who is in the White House—a Bush or a
Clinton. The problem here is that a focus on profiteering diverts us away from the neoconservative
rationale: they advocate (permanent) war as a means of reinforcing US hegemony in the Middle East and
beyond, surely slightly more important than short-term kickbacks to corporations? Unfortunately, Peter
McLaren's thesis of a 'military-capitalist' complex meets with my dissent. One other problem with the war
profiteering argument is that it assumes that the interests of businesses like Halliburton and US arms
contractors accurately reflect the interests of other multinational companies. This is not true. The White
House has served the interests of energy companies and arms manufacturers and contractors, but it has
upset the marketplace globally—and this is where US financial companies and consumer-based companies have to compete. The second argument
that McLaren makes to connect the war and globalization is that Bush has used the war on terror to promote a domestic neoliberal agenda, for instance tax cutting
for the rich, attacking unions in the name of national security, and working to criminalise dissent. There is a wealth of documentation evidencing the Right's attacks
on both anti-capitalist and globalization protestors as unpatriotic and sympathetic to global terrorists. The problem with this contention is that these actions can
also be seen as opportunism, rather than a product of any systematic relationship between war and globalization. It has to be acknowledged that even Republican
realists who opposed the invasion of Iraq generally favoured the discriminatory tax cuts and the Patriot Act. Even those former supporters of corporate
globalisation, the members of the Clinton administration, are presumably today opposed, admittedly in a very muted fashion, to Bush's domestic measures. There
is little reason to believe that war in Iraq was a necessary condition for the advance of Bush's domestic agenda, even though it did provide politically convenient
cover. A third key argument for a causal connection between war and globalization is one advocated by Naomi Klein in her classic, No Logo. After the invasion, the
US governing authority restructured Iraq's economy according to strict neoliberal precepts (capitalism with the gloves off!) The Economist called it a 'wish list for
foreign investors to dream of'. The forced privatisation of the Iraqi economy indubitably signals a direct link between war and neoliberalism. The question is
whether the invasion represented a new phase of globalization, characterised by 'free' markets being regulated by military power. In my view this is not the case:
the Iraqi war will not in any way be a prototype for the building of a new corporate ('democratic') order. At this juncture, I should like to return to the break in
globalization policy referred to earlier. There is empirical evidence to show that much of the global corporate elite would prefer Clinton's multilateral globalization to
Bush's imperialist actions. After the war effort was underway, corporations were worried. Many factions within global capital were furious at the Bush
Administration over its protectionist moves on steel and agricultural subsidies. US bullying has led to the collapse of trade negotiations in the likes of Cancun, Miami
The Bush
and Seattle. European corporations, always seen as important partners in the expansion of global power, are furious at being shut out of Iraq.
occupation of Iraq was an act that broke away from the multilateralist model of corporate globalization—seen
by many in the world as 'the unacceptable face of capitalism'—who said that?

ANTI-CAPITALIST RESISTANCE IS KNEE-JERK ECONOMISM

STOKES 09 Doug, International Relations Copyright © 2009 SAGE Publications

Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC, Vol 23(1): 85–92

On the fl ip side, however, it is also important that critical scholars do not succumb to a knee-jerk
economism that reduces the current WoT down to the mere economic interests of the American empire. As I
have argued elsewhere, there has been tendency for more critically aligned scholars, especially the more
materially inclined, to interpret the war on terror as little more than a resource grab for US corporations. This
instrumentalism, that essentially views the American state as little more than an instrument in the hands of
American business and corporate elites, leaves very little room for the separate and quite distinct political,
strategic and discursive aspects of US foreign policy.19 Similarly, terrorism scholars also need to be sensitive
to the local contexts and dynamics of political violence, as well as the quite distinct array of threats that the
liberal democracies themselves face.
Immigration is about politics not just capitalism

Sherman, Metropolis British Columbia – Canadian Metropolis Project, M.A. Queen’s Dept of Geography, 08
(Yolande Pottie, MORAL PANIC OVER MERIT-BASED IMMIGRATION POLICY: TALENT FOR CITIZENSHIP AND
THE AMERICAN DREAM, June)

Purcell and Nevins (2005) examine the history of policy changes concerning the U.S. border, culminating
with “Operation Gatekeeper” in the 1990s, using these to illustrate theories of the state and to argue that
this history cannot be reduced simply to a manifestation of “capitalist social relations” or capitalist
accumulation. Their analysis of border policy is cognizant of the myriad actors with different positions vis-à-
vis the state, looking particularly at “how state actors are motivated by the need to legitimize and reproduce
political-geographical relationships between the state and its citizenry” (Purcell and Nevins 2005: 216). In
other words, it is about politics too; the “state- citizen and national-local relationships” are “dialectical in
nature” (221).

Turn - reductionism

Sherman, Metropolis British Columbia – Canadian Metropolis Project, M.A. Queen’s Dept of Geography, 08
(Yolande Pottie, MORAL PANIC OVER MERIT-BASED IMMIGRATION POLICY: TALENT FOR CITIZENSHIP AND
THE AMERICAN DREAM, June)

State immigration policies are not “reducible” to “capitalist social relations” (Purcell and Nevins 2005).
Purcell and Nevins argue that the complex relationships between state actors and groups of citizens have an
important effect on the decisions state actors make, the institutional forms the state takes, and the policies it
enacts. In order to maintain political legitimacy and effective authority over its people, the state must
reproduce a politically stable relationship between state and citizen. While these expectations are tied to the
maintenance of capitalism in important ways, they are not reducible to that imperative. There are
significant elements of state-citizen relations that cannot be comprehended by tracing them back to
accumulation and capitalist social relations. (Purcell and Nevins 2005: 213) In other words, actors within the
state must constantly work to “legitimize and reproduce political-geographical relationships between the
state and its citizenry” (Purcell and Nevins 2005: 216) particularly within the context of the “thinning out of
places” linked to globalization. National immigration policy making must be seen within this realm of
competing influences at multiple scales; the failure of the U.S. Senate to pass the 2007 Immigration Reform
Bill is fundamentally related to these relationships and interests and cannot be reduced to simply the
manifestation of capitalist relations. In particular, “state-citizen and national-local relationships” are
“dialectical in nature” and the state must always work to buttress its legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens.
Thus, the actions of states can be attributed to this pressure to reproduce this relationship between “ruler
and ruled” and the “need to demonstrate to citizens that state actors are working to secure perceived citizen
interests” (Purcell and Nevins 2005: 216). Citizens often “expect the state to ensure territorial security,
provide a certain level of public services, protect their political rights, or preserve the cultural character of
the nation” (Purcell and Nevins 2005: 217). In this way, citizens’ political support is therefore conditioned by
a contingent, differentiated and changing set of expectations; the state must meet some combination of
those expectations sufficiently in order to maintain the overall political support of citizens. (Purcell and
Nevins, 2005: 217) Furthermore, “state actors also operate entrepreneurially by cultivating citizen
expectations and desires to more closely match those actors’ particular agendas” (Purcell and Nevins 2005:
217). As an example, the authors point to the Republican party’s attempt to encourage apprehension about
increased crime rates because the party is known for being tough on crime and “stronger on law and order”
(217). Where U.S. immigration reform is concerned, the picture is complex.