Capitalism Bad Affirmative: ADI 08 Hooper/Boyle/Jennings There's Something About Capital (Aff) Pg. 1 of 30

ADI 08 Hooper/Boyle/Jennings
There’s Something About Capital (Aff) Pg. 1 of 30
Capitalism Bad Affirmative

HINGSTMAN 3.............................................................................................................................................................1
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SOLVENCY EXT: MULTITUDE.............................................................................................................................10
SOLVENCY EXT: USING THE STATE AGAINST ITSELF................................................................................11
SOLVENCY EXT: LETTER OF THE LAW............................................................................................................12
IMPACT EXT: ENVIRONMENT.............................................................................................................................13
IMPACT EXT: VALUE TO LIFE.............................................................................................................................18
IMPACT EXT: EXTINCTION..................................................................................................................................19
IMPACT EXT: STARVATION..................................................................................................................................21
A2: USE OF LAW BAD..............................................................................................................................................22
A2: USE OF LAW BAD..............................................................................................................................................25
A2: REALISM/AFF IS UTOPIAN............................................................................................................................27
A2: RADICAL/DEEP ECOLOGY............................................................................................................................29
HINGSTMAN 3
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CONTENTION ONE: THE WAY THINGS ARE
_____ AMERICAN CAPITALISM WAS BORN OUT OF THE AGRICULTURAL

TRADITION. IN SPITE OF ITS EARLY FREE MARKET AMBITIONS, HOWEVER,
CAP TODAY HAS BEEN RE-ARTICULATED INTO AN IDEOLOGY OF
CONTRADICTIONS AND TRANSGRESSION NECESSARY TO MAINTAIN ITS
DOMINANCE, GUARANTEEING LABOR EXPLOITATION, STARVATION, AND
ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION.
Wood, 1998
Co-editor of the Monthly Review) Ellen Meiskins. The Agrarian Origins
of Capitalism. Monthly Review, Vol. 50, July-August 1998
What, then, does all this tell us about the nature of capitalism? First, it reminds us that
capitalism is not a "natural" and inevitable consequence of human nature, or even of age-old
social practices like "truck, barter, and exchange." It is a late and localized product of very
specific historical conditions. The expansionary drive of capitalism, to the point of virtual
universality today, is not the consequence of its conformity to human nature or to some
transhistorical natural laws but the product of its own historically specific internal laws of
motion. And those laws of motion required vast social transformations and upheavals to set
them in train. It required a transformation in the human metabolism with nature, in the
provision of life's basic necessities.
The second point is that capitalism has from the beginning been a deeply contradictory
force. We need only consider the most obvious effects of English agrarian capitalism: on
the one hand, the conditions for material prosperity existed in early modern England as
nowhere else; yet on the other hand, those conditions were achieved at the cost of
widespread dispossession and intense exploitation. It hardly needs to be added that these
new conditions also established the foundation for new and more effective forms of
colonial expansion and imperialism, as well as new needs for such expansion, in search of
new markets and resources.
And then there are the corollaries of "improvement": on the one hand, productivity and the
ability to feed a vast population; on the other hand, the subordination of all other
considerations to the imperatives of profit. This means, among other things, that people
who could be fed are often left to starve. In fact, it means that there is in general a great
disparity between the productive capacities of capitalism and the quality of life it delivers.
The ethic of "improvement" in its original sense, in which production is inseparable from
profit, is also the ethic of exploitation, poverty, and homelessness.
The ethic of "improvement," of productivity for profit, is also, of course, the ethic of
irresponsible land use, mad cow disease, and environmental destruction. Capitalism was
born at the very core of human life, in the interaction with nature on which life itself
depends. The transformation of that interaction by agrarian capitalism revealed the
inherently destructive impulses of a system in which the very fundamentals of existence
are subjected to the requirements of profit. In other words, it revealed the essential secret
of capitalism.
The expansion of capitalist imperatives throughout the world has constantly reproduced
some of the effects that it had at the beginning within its country of origin. The process of
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dispossession, extinction of customary property rights, the imposition of market
imperatives, and environmental destruction has continued. That process has extended its
reach from the relations between exploiting and exploited classes to the relations between
imperialist and subordinate countries. More recently, the spread of market imperatives has
taken the form, for example, of compelling (with the help of international capitalist
agencies like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) farmers in the third
world to replace strategies of agricultural self-sufficiency with specialization in cash crops
for the global market. The dire effects of these changes will be explored elsewhere in this issue.
But if the destructive effects of capitalism have constantly reproduced themselves, its
positive effects have not been nearly as consistent. Once capitalism was established in one
country and once it began to impose its imperatives on the rest of Europe and ultimately
the whole world, its development in other places could never follow the same course it had
in its place of origin. The existence of one capitalist society thereafter transformed all
others, and the subsequent expansion of capitalist imperatives constantly changed the
conditions of economic development.
We have now reached the point where the destructive effects of capitalism are outstripping
its material gains. No third world country today, for example, can hope to achieve even the
contradictory development that England underwent. With the pressures of competition,
accumulation, and exploitation imposed by other more developed capitalist systems, the
attempt to achieve material prosperity according to capitalist principles is increasingly
likely to bring with it only the negative side of the capitalist contradiction, its dispossession
and destruction without its material benefits, at least for the vast majority.
There is also a more general lesson to be drawn from the experience of English agrarian
capitalism. Once market imperatives set the terms of social reproduction, all economic
actors - both appropriators and producers, even if they retain possession, or indeed outright
ownership, of the means of production - are subject to the demands of competition,
increasing productivity, capital accumulation, and the intense exploitation of labor.
For that matter, even the absence of a division between appropriators and producers is no
guarantee of immunity (and this, by the way, is why "market socialism" is a contradiction
in terms): once the market is established as an economic "discipline" or "regulator," once
economic actors become market dependent for the conditions of their own reproduction,
even workers who own the means of production, individually or collectively, will be
obliged to respond to the market's imperatives - to compete and accumulate, to let
"uncompetitive" enterprises and their workers go to the wall, and to exploit themselves.
The history of agrarian capitalism, and everything that followed from it, should make it
clear that wherever market imperatives regulate the economy and govern social
reproduction there will be no escape from exploitation.
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THUS, THE PLAN: THE UNITED STATES FEDERAL GOVERNMENT SHOULD
END ALL AGRICULTURAL SUPPORT.
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CONTENTION TWO: SOLVENCY, OR SOMETHING LIKE IT
_____ THE TYRANNY OF THE SYSTEM ISN’T INEVITABLE. BY VIRTUE OF ITS

INHERENT TRANSGRESSIONS IT IS POSSIBLE TO TOPPLE CAPITALISM NOT BY
A RADICAL ACT FROM THE OUTSIDE, BUT BY STICKING IT TO THE VERY
LETTER OF ITS OWN LAW. THE DEPENDENCE ON A SET OF UNWRITTEN AND
ANTITHETICAL RULES REVEALS THE OVERALL VULNERABILITY OF THE
SYSTEM, THUS MAKING INTERVENTION AT THE POINT OF CONTRADICTION
THE ULTIMATE ANTI-IDEOLOGY.
Zizek, 1998
Slavoj, Institute for Social Sciences at the University of Ljubljana, “Why does the Law
Need an Obscene Supplement?, Law and the Postmodern Mind
When, in the late eighteenth century, universal human rights were proclaimed, this
universality, of course, concealed the fact that they privilege white, men of property;
however, this limitation was not openly admitted, it was coded in apparently tautological
supplementary qualifications like "all humans have rights, insofar as they truly are. rational
and free," " which then implicitly excludes the mentally ill, "savages," criminals, children,
women.'. . So, if, in this situation, a poor black woman disregards this unwritten-implicit,
qualification and demands human rights, also for herself, she just takes the letter of the
discourse of rights "more literally than it was meant" (and thereby redefines its
universality, inscribing it into a different hegemonic chain). "Fantasy" designates precisely
this unwritten framework that tells us how are we to understand the letter of Law. The
lesson of this is that-sometimes, at least-the truly subversive thing is not to disregard the
explicit letter of Law on behalf of the underlying fantasies, but to stick to this letter against
the fantasy that sustains it. Is-at a certain level, at least-this not the outcome of the long
conversation between Josepf K. and the priest that follows the priest's narrative on the
Door of the Law in The Trial?-the uncanny effect of this conversation does not reside in
the fact that the reader is at a loss insofar as he lacks the unwritten interpretive code or
frame of reference that would enable him to discern the hidden Meaning, but, on the
contrary, in that the priest's interpretation of the parable on the Door of the Law disregards
all standard frames of unwritten rules and reads the text in an "absolutely literal" way. One
could also approach this deadlock via. Lacan's notion of the specifically symbolic mode of
deception: ideology "cheats precisely by letting us know that its propositions (say, on
universal human rights)' are not to be read a la lettre, but against the background of a set of
unwritten rules. Sometimes, at least, the most effective anti-ideological subversion of the
official discourse of human rights consists in reading it in an excessively "literal" way,
disregarding the set of underlying unwritten rules.
VI
The need for unwritten rules thus bears witness to, confirms, this vulnerability: the system
is compelled to allow for possibilities of choices that must never actually take place since
they would disintegrate the system, and the function of the unwritten rules is precisely to
prevent the actualization of these choices formally allowed by the system. One can see
how unwritten rules are correlative to, the obverse of, the empty symbolic gesture and/or
the forced choice: unwritten rules prevent the subject from effectively accepting what is
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offered in the empty gesture, from taking the choice literally and choosing the impossible,
that the choice of which destroys the system. In the Soviet Union of the 1930s and 1940s,
to take the most extreme example, it was not only prohibited to criticize Stalin, it was
perhaps even more prohibited to enounce publicly this prohibition, i.e., too state that one is
prohibited to criticize Stalin-the system needed to maintain the appearance that one is
allowed to criticize Stalin, i.e., that the absence of this criticism (and the fact that there is
no opposition party or movement, that the Party got 99.99% of the votes at elections)
simply demonstrates that Stalin is effectively the best and (almost) always right. In
Hegelese, this appearance qua appearance was essential.
This dialectical tension between the vulnerability and invulnerability of the System also
enables us to denounce the ultimate racist and/or sexist trick, that of "two birds in the bush
instead of a bird in hand": when women demand' simple equality, quasi-"feminists" often
pretend to offer them "much more" (the role of the warm and wise "conscience of society,"
elevated above the vulgar everyday competition and struggle for domination ...)-the only
proper answer to this offer, of course, is "No, thanks! Better is the enemy of the Good! We
do not want more, just equality!" Here, at least, the last lines in Now Voyager ("Why reach
for the moon, when we can have the stars?") are wrong. It is homologous with the native
American who wants to become integrated into the predominant "white" society, and a
politically correct progressive liberal endeavors to convince him that, he is thereby
renouncing his very unique prerogative, the authentic native culture and tradition-no
thanks, simple equality is enough, I also wouldn't mind my part of consumerist alienation!
... A modest demand of the excluded group for the full participation at the society's
universal rights is much more threatening for the system than the apparently much more
"radical" rejection of the predominant "social values" and the assertion of the superiority of
one's own culture. For a true feminist, Otto Weininger's assertion that, although women are
"ontologically false," lacking the proper ethical stature, they should be acknowledged the
same rights as men in public life, is infinitely more acceptable than the false elevation of
women that makes them "too good" for the banality of men's rights.
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_____ AND, BET YOU NEVER THOUGHT YOU’D HERE THIS IN A ZIZEK DEBATE,
BUT EMPIRICALLY PROVEN – STRICT ADHERENCE TO THE LETTER OF THE
LAW EXAGGERATES ITS OBSCENE DIMENSION THEREBY SUBVERTING THE
MEANING OF ITS REGULATION
Uebel, 2002
Michael, “Masochism in America”, American Literary History, pg. 397-398
Deployed in the name of either revolutionary or retrograde causes, masochism works by

calling into being the very Law—the limit or penance—that ostensibly blocks access to the
ideal by thwarting what Lacan once called the "will to jouissance." So from outside the
politico-libidinal matrix of master/slave, it looks [End Page 397] as if masochism involves
only the sacrifice of one's own enjoyment. However, from within, the masochist reveals the
truth of symbolic power: subordination to the exact letter of the Law, thereby exaggerating
its obscene dimension, subverts the very meaning of regulation. The potential political
value of this is significant, as Reik's example of the masochistic art of resistance reveals:
Austrian railroad workers, protesting low wages and long working hours, go on strike, but
rather than walk off the job, they carry it out with increased conscientiousness and
punctuality, following the railway board's myriad bureaucratic regulations to the letter. The
result is a total paralysis of train traffic, and with trains neither arriving nor departing, the
company elites are forced to capitulate (108; cf. 154-59). The workers, through radical
obedience to the law, are able to turn the misery of their working conditions into a
politically satisfying conclusion. Closing the gap between the law and its realization,
extreme submission has the precise effect of revealing the fantasmic support of the law in
its full inconsistency. 12 As a mode of dissidence, masochism depends on a strategy of
"passive resistance," evoking a constellation of other strategies for social change such as
the hunger strike, sit-ins, and related forms of nonviolent passive protest. When deployed
in these ways to expose the inconsistency of cultural protocols, masochism becomes fully
political, a strategy of resistance, wherein "the masochist is a revolutionist of self-
surrender" (Reik 156). Given masochism's primary function as defiant submissiveness
("victory through defeat" is Reik's famous formula), there are expedient reasons to
conceptualize it across the limits of the sexual or the erotic, into the social.
CONTENTION THREE: SO YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION?
_____ VIEWING DEBATE AS A BANAL GAME OF FIAT WARS PRECLUDES FOCUS

ON THE IMMINENT PRODUCTS OF OUR DISCOURSE, REDUCING POLITICS TO
PROCEDURE. SUCH ADVOCACY IS NOT ONLY SELF-DEFEATING, BUT IT
UNDERMINES THE POTENTIAL OF RECOGNIZING THE ACTUAL POLITICS
ENGAGED IN DEBATE
Van Oenen, 2006
Gijs, professor of ethics, legal philosophy and social philosophy in the Department of
Philosophy at Erasmus University, “A Machine That Would Go of Itself: Interpassivity
and its Impact on Political Life”, Theory and Event
The most important force driving the development towards interactive policy or politics,
the third 'mode' in my series, is that of emancipation. The emancipation movement started
in the sixties as a protest against traditional forms of authority in both the public and the
private sphere. Many (although not all) of the old structures of authority indeed gave way
to new ones that were more conscious of, and responsive to, the diverse composition of the
citizenry, taking note of the needs and preferences of women and minority groups. Citizens
were to be 'treated as equals.' But just as importantly, citizens were no longer satisfied with
the passive 'being treated'; they started to demand an active part in government and in
policy making. At first, this demand was fuelled to a relatively large extent by the quasi-
anarchist, activist progressivism of the protest movements of the sixties and seventies; later
on, however, the attitude of critical resistance to authority became ever more
translated into a liberal self-conception as citizen. That is to say, the critical
involvement with government became less focused on collective deliberation concerning
the common good than on the facilitation of individual preferences and conceptions of
the good.As a consequence of these developments, policy as a mode of governance became
interactive. Interactivity was both the problem and the solution to the twofold
development sketched above: the attempt of government to intervene in social life under
conditions of 'equal treatment' of all citizens on the one hand, and the desire of citizens to
actively interfere in government to pursue and safeguard their own interests on the other
hand. These developments effected a drastic change in the structure of political authority:
government and policy-making became 'horizontal'. This metaphor signifies of course
that the hierarchical relation between government and citizens is being replaced by one of
'equal standing' – conjunctive instead of subjunctive, we might say. But it also symbolizes
how the 'interest' in politics itself is changing. The 'locus' of involvement with politics
shifts from the 'product', or social praxis that it aims to realize, towards the earlier phases
of preparation, consultation and policy-formation. This shift implicit in the growth of
'interactivity' serves the interests of both parties involved in political life. In the official
rhetoric, interactivity strengthens the involvement of citizens in politics, by committing
them not only to the results of the political process but also to that process itself. In this
way they become 'co-producers of policy', dedicated citizens so to speak. In turn,
government is able to 'fine tune' its policies and in general stay in close contact with its
citizens, enabling it to reach its objectives in a more precise and secure way.
More realistically, citizens become interactive because they see this as a better option to
safeguard their (partial) interests than the traditional options of party membership or voting
behavior. They feel that interactivity will let their voice more forcefully be heard. Or even
more straightforwardly, their attitude towards politics in general is one of 'what is in it for
me?' In such a self-centered view,. politics appears primarily as an institution that may
facilitate one's own plans and preferences, rather than as a process of collective will
formation furthering socially desirable practices Government, in turn, sees interactivity as
an effective way of 'polling' views and interests, which are usually better accommodated in
an early stage of policy formation than in later stages, that may involve troublesome
renegotiations, or protracted litigation. But more importantly, the official view or 'ideology'
underwriting interactivity denies that a shift in political interest is taking place. It suggests
that the interest of both citizens and government in what politics 'produces' – some form of
collective good – is enhanced and supplemented by an increased interest in the process of
policy formation. Against this 'win-win' view, I want to suggest that the increase in
involvement in the political process, the sphere of policy formation, goes along with a
loss of involvement in the 'product' of the process. The point here is not merely that
people lack sufficient time or means to be involved in both process and result. Rather it
seems that people nowadays feel more attached to the process than to its eventual product.
Being actively involved in the process has acquired a sense and meaning of its own,
that may compete with, or actually override, the interest in what the process aimed to
realize. In other words, what the process now mainly realizes, its main 'product', is
involvement with itself.
SOLVENCY EXT: MULTITUDE

____ MULTITUDE SOLVES
Mulcahey, 2004
David, http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/912/, August 17
Who is this enemy? “His name,” Hardt and Negri write, riffing on a passage from the New
Testament, “is legion.” Leaving aside the better-known “evildoers,” the authors suggest the
banner of resistance to Empire will be carried by “the Multitude,” a heterogeneous and
heterodox force who share with the global poor a “double character of poverty and
possibility.” They are flexible, mobile and resourceful—think the Zapatistas, the Seattle
demonstrators, or even the Palestinian Intifada in its more grassroots manifestations.
Interestingly, this flexible nature we observe in both the RMA and the more effective
global insurgencies corresponds to changes in civilian labor markets. Hardt and Negri
argue that a new kind of work, “immaterial” labor, has come to the fore socially and
culturally. Any number of terms have already been coined to describe postindustrial labor,
and the authors’ own elaborations on the phenomenon are passably interesting. What is
crucial, though, is their observation that immaterial workers produce more than goods and
services—they produce “cooperation, communication, forms of life and social
relationships.” These immaterial things have “value,” Hardt and Negri argue, as much as
Marx’s commodities do, and as such are a source of political power.
How to assert this power? Hardt and Negri refuse to urge “What is to be done?” Their
objective, prudently, is to suggest that social revolution is still eminently possible, and that
even in this dark time the left has every reason to be optimistic.
Another world is possible, they argue. Power rests with the people. All that is needed is a
political project to make it happen.
SOLVENCY EXT: USING THE STATE AGAINST ITSELF

_____ USING THE STATE AGAINST ITSELF SOLVES BETTER THAN SO-CALLED
RADICAL ATTACKS FROM THE OUTSIDE
Edkins, 2003
Jenny, Professor of International Politics at the University of Wales, Trauma and the
Memory of Politics, pg. 216
At the point at which changes in the political ordering of the state are demanded, protests
move to the sites that are central to the current structure. The protests reclaim memory and
rewrite it as a form of resistance. The story is never finished: the scripting of memory by
those in power can always be challenged, and such challenges are found at moments and in
places where the very foundations of the imagined community have been laid out. They
play on, and demand a recognition of, the contingency of political community and its
structure as social fantasy. For the most part, these protests are insistently non-violent. As
such they have a particular effectiveness in their appeal against the structures of sovereign
power put into place by the treatment of life as bare life that was discussed in the previous
chapter. In a sense that I shall explore in this chapter, they assume, or take on, bare life.
The protesters, in refusing violent means, expose the violence of the state. This exposure is
particularly poignant and powerful when it takes place in the face of the memorials to state
violence.
SOLVENCY EXT: LETTER OF THE LAW

READING THE LETTER OF THE LAW ALLOWS FOR AN INDIVIDUAL TO USE
THE LAW AS A JUSTIFICATION OF OUR PATHOLOGICAL INTERESTS
UNDERMINES IT’S VERY DIGNITY.
Zizek, 2002
Slavoj, badass owner of a trophy wife, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Four Interventions in
the (Mis)use of a Notion, Verso, pg. 171-172
When we change legal norms in order to accommodate them to the ‘new demands of reality’
(say, when ‘liberal’ Catholics ‘realistically’ make a partial ‘concession to new times’ and allow
for contraception, if it takes place within marital intercourse), we deprive the law, a priori, of its
dignity, since we treat legal norms in a utilitarian way, as instruments that enable us to justify the
satisfaction of our ‘pathological’ interest (our well-being). This means that rigid legal formalism
(one should adhere unconditionally and in all circumstances to the letter of the law, whatever the
cost) and pragmatic utilitarian opportunism (legal norms are flexible; one should bend them in
accordance with the demands of life; they are not an end in themselves, but should serve
concrete living people and their needs) are two sides of the same coin, that they share a common
presupposition: they both exclude the notion of transgressing the norm as an ethical act,
accomplished for the sake of duty. Furthermore, it means that radical Evil is, at its most extreme,
not some barbaric violation of the norm, but the very obedience to the norm for ‘pathological’
reasons: much worse than simply transgressing the law is ‘to do the right thing for the wrong
reason,’ to obey the law because it is to my advantage. While direct transgression simply violates
the law, leaving its dignity untouched (and even reasserting it, in a negative way), ‘doing the
right thing for the wrong reason’ undermines the law’s dignity from within, not treating the law
as something to be respected, but degrading it into an instrument of our ‘pathological’ interests-
no longer an external transgression of the law, but its self-destruction, its suicide.
In other words, the traditional Kantian hierarchy of the forms of Evil should be reversed: the
worst thing that can happen is external legality, compliance with the law for pathological
reasons; then comes a simple violation of the law, disregard for the law; finally, there is the
exact symmetrical opposite of ‘doing the right (ethical) thing for the wrong (pathological)
reason, doing the ‘wrong’ thing for the right reason- that is to say, the violation of ethical
norms for no ‘pathological’ reasons, but just ‘for the sake of it’ (what Kant called ‘diabolic
Evil,’ although he denied its possibility)- such Evil is formally indistinguishable from the
Good.
IMPACT EXT: ENVIRONMENT

Capitalism is responsible for the current ecological crisis and
degradation of the environment.
Soron 2004, (PhD Assist. Prof. of Sociology @ Brock University in Ontario.)
Dennis. Ecology, Capitalism and the Socialization of Nature .Monthly Review,
Vol. 56, November 2004.
With respect to "industrialism," we need to remember that

capitalism was destructive of the environment on a global scale long
before the Industrial Revolution--so the problem can't simply be
attributed to the presence of industrial production methods. "Modernity"
is a category that is so over-arching that it is sometimes difficult to know
precisely what it means. Whatever it is, and we could certainly discuss
this topic for a long time, it isn't a useful way of describing a social
system. It might provide a way of describing a certain pattern of
historical development characteristic of the social system we have
today, but it doesn't really point us to anything concrete.
If modernity itself were somehow to blame for environmental
degradation, then the problem could be expected to exist only in
"modern" societies. I think that this is too simplistic a conclusion to
draw. My own view is that the ecological problem has existed for
millennia, but that to understand it in any particular historical period we
have to look concretely at the historical systems that are in place. I
think that capitalism has been enormously destructive of the
environment, but it is by no means the only social system that has been
this way. Soviet-style systems were destructive of the environment in
somewhat different ways for somewhat different reasons. Feudal and
other tributary societies of earlier millennia were also enormously
destructive of the environment. That said, the unprecedented
magnitude of today's global ecological crisis shows us that capitalism
really takes the cake.
When you start looking concretely at the forces that are generating this
crisis, it becomes clear that they are inseparable from the basic
dynamics of the global capitalist system itself. Today, as much as ever,
capitalism demands constant and rapid economic growth. Historically, it
has generally been assumed that capitalist economies could be
expected to enjoy an overall rate of growth of about 3 percent a year. At
this rate, the world economy would increase sixteen times in a century,
250 times in two centuries, and 4000 times in three centuries. This is
just an arithmetical game in a way, but it shows us that a system as
expansive as the one we have is inevitably going to cause problems in
the context of a limited biosphere. Indeed, the global economic system
is increasingly beginning to rival the biogeochemical processes of the
planet itself in terms of scale. Obviously, this situation casts doubt upon
the viability and effectiveness of environmental approaches which
simply take the imperative of capitalist growth for granted.

Capitalism is responsible for the deterioration and destruction of
the environment.
Sweezy 2004 (Founding editor of the Monthly Review, Marxist, economist,
Harvard Prof. ) Paul Capitalism and the Environment. Monthly Review, Vol. 56,
October 2004.
There is a vast literature on this subject, much of its of high quality, and
this is obviously not the place to try to describe or summarize it. For
present purposes, it is enough to point out that by far the largest part of
the problem has its origin in the functioning of the world's economy as it
has developed in the last three or four centuries. This of course has
been the period of the emergence of capitalism and of the bourgeois
and industrial revolutions, of coal and steam and railroads, of steel and
electricity and chemicals, of petroleum and the automobile, of
mechanized and chemicalized agriculture--and of the rapid expansion
and urbanization of the world's population in response to the massive
growth of the forces of production at the disposal of humankind. All of
these developments and others directly and indirectly related to them have involved
putting growing pressure on the earth's resources, introducing new methods and
substances into the processes of producing, using, and disposing of the worn-out
remains of the things people, groups, and societies require for their reproduction and
expansion. Perhaps there have been cases where these activities were planned and
carried out with a view to respecting and preserving the natural cycles which over the
ages have permitted living creatures, including human beings, to adjust to, and
achieve a rough equilibrium with, their environment. But if there have been such
cases, they have been so few and far between as to have left little if any trace in the
historic record. The new departures that have combined to revolutionize
the human economy have always originated with individuals or, relative
to the whole, small groups in the expectation of achieving specific
benefits for themselves. The indirect effects on the environment did not
concern them; or, if they thought about it at all, they took for granted
that whatever adverse effects their actions might have would be easily
absorbed or compensated for by nature's seemingly limitless resilience.
We now know that such ways of thinking about the processes in
question were and are delusory. Activities damaging to the environment
may be relatively harmless when introduced on a small scale; but when
they come into general use and spread from their points of origin to
permeate whole economies on a global scale, the problem is radically
transformed. This is precisely what has happened in case after case,
especially in the half century following the Second World War, and the
cumulative result is what has become generally perceived as the
environmental crisis.
The major elements of this crisis are well known and require no
elaboration here: the greenhouse effect stemming from the massive
combustion of fossil fuels, combined with the accelerating destruction of
carbon dioxide-absorbing tropical forests; acid rain which destroys lakes
and forests and other forms of vegetation, also caused by fossil-fuel
combustion; the weakening of the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere
that protects human beings and other forms of life from the sun's
potentially deadly ultraviolet rays; destruction of top soils and expansion
of deserts by predatory agricultural methods; fouling of land and surface
waters through industrial dumping and excessive use of chemical
fertilizers and pesticides; mounting pollution of the oceans once thought
to be an infinite repository of all kinds of wastes but now, in what has
become one of the most visible
aspects of the environmental crisis, seen to be fragile and vulnerable
like all the rest.
This list is of course far from complete and hardly more than hints at the
far-reaching and often subtle interconnections of the various
components of the environmental crisis. * But it is enough to indicate
the general nature of the crisis as a radical (and growing) disjunction
between on the one hand the demands placed on the environment by
the modern global economy, and on the other the capacity of the
natural forces embedded in the environment to meet these demands.
Capitalism will result in the destruction of the natural world unless

we adopt a system of sustainability
Sweezy 2004 (Founding editor of the Monthly Review, Marxist, economist,
Harvard Prof. ) Paul Capitalism and the Environment. Monthly Review, Vol. 56,
October 2004.
It is this obsession with capital accumulation that distinguishes

capitalism from the simple system for satisfying human needs it is
portrayed as in mainstream economic theory. And a system driven by
capital accumulation is one that never stands still, one that is forever
changing, adopting new and discarding old methods of production and
distribution, opening up new territories, subjecting to its purposes
societies too weak to protect themselves. Caught up in this process of
restless innovation and expansion, the system rides roughshod over
even its own beneficiaries if they get in its way or fall by the roadside.
As far as the natural environment is concerned, capitalism perceives it
not as something to be cherished and enjoyed but as a means to the
paramount ends of profit-making and still more capital accumulation.
Such is the inner nature, the essential drive of the economic system that
has generated the present environmental crisis. Naturally it does not
operate without opposition. Efforts have always been made to curb its
excesses, not only by its victims but also in extreme cases by its more
farsighted leaders. Marx, in Capital, wrote feelingly about nineteenth-
century movements for factory legislation and the ten-hours bill,
describing the latter as a great victory for the political economy of the
working class. And during the present century conservation movements
have emerged in all the leading capitalist countries and have succeeded
in imposing certain limits on the more destructive depredations of
uncontrolled capital. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that without
constraints of this kind arising within the system, capitalism by now
would have destroyed both its environment and itself.
Not surprisingly, such constraints, while sometimes interfering with the
operations of individual capitalists, never go so far as to threaten the
system as a whole. Long before that point is reached, the capitalist
class, including the state which it controls, mobilizes its defenses to
repulse environmental-protection measures perceived as dangerously
extreme. Thus despite the development of a growing environmental
consciousness and the movements to which it has given rise in the last
century, the environmental crisis continues to deepen. There is nothing
in the record or on the horizon that could lead us to believe the
situation will significantly change in the foreseeable future.
If this conclusion is accepted--and it is hard to see how anyone who has
studied the history of our time can refuse, at the very least, to take it
seriously--it follows that what has to be done to resolve the
environmental crisis, hence also to insure that humanity has a future, is
to replace capitalism with a social order based on an economy devoted
not to maximizing private profit and accumulating ever more capital but
rather to meeting real human needs and restoring the environment to a
sustainably healthy condition.
This, in a nutshell, is the meaning of revolutionary change today. Lesser
measures of reform, no matter how desirable in themselves, could at
best slow down the fatal process of decline and fall that is already so far
advanced.
Is the position taken here in effect a restatement of the traditional
Marxist case for a socialist revolution? Yes, but with one crucial proviso:
The socialism to be achieved must be conceived, as Marx and Engels
always conceived it, as the quintessential negation of capitalism--not as
a society that eliminates the most objectionable features of capitalism
such as gross inequality of income, mass unemployment, cyclical
depressions, financial panics, and so on. It is capitalism itself, with its in-
built attitude toward human beings and nature alike as means to an
alien end that must be rooted out and replaced. Humanity, having
learned to perform miracles of production, must at last learn to use its
miraculous powers not to degrade itself and destroy its home but to
make the world a better place to live in for itself and its progeny for
millennia to come.
IMPACT EXT: VALUE TO LIFE

Capitalism turn people and relations into mere commodities
transforming everything thats is meaningful about life into an
exchange value.
Biro 2006 (Prof of Political Science @ Acadia University, Nova Scotia)
Andrew Human Needs and the Crisis of the Subject Theory & Event - Volume
9, Issue 4, 2006
Instead, Jameson prefers to focus on the various ways in which "nature"

as a kind of textual signifier is deconstructed and then subsequently
reconstructed as a commodity. This is a process which is intimately
connected with capitalism's transformation of objects, processes, and
relations into exchange-values. As this extends out to encompass even
the "last vestiges" of the precapitalist world, the result is the creation of
a pervasive ideational atmosphere of exchangeability, which ultimately
erases the specificities or unique qualities that were thought to inhere in
"noncommodified or traditional" (in a word: naturalized) spaces and
relations.
This transformation is a change not only or not so much in the objects
themselves, as it is a change in their relationality: objects are made
commensurable with one another, a process that requires as its first
step the deconstruction of their putatively unique characters. Both
capitalism and modern science are implicated in this process through
their common positivist conceptions of the world, and both dialectical
and ecological perspectives begin by rejecting the very distinction
between an object and the relations that characterize it.9 Hence, the
expansion of capitalist relations (or commodification) results in a
disintegration of community – not only because modernization and a
fortiori globalization make travel and cross-cultural communication
increasingly easy and common, but also because the naturalization of
aspects of identity that had previously secured individuals to a
particular community (nationality, "race," gender, ethnicity, and so on),
is increasingly brought into question. Under capitalism (or modernity
more generally), "all that is solid melts into air."10 Thus Marx describes
the process of commodification – particular the commodification of
labour – as the "dissolution" of a whole series of feudal relations and
institutions.11 Capitalism's demand that traditional, naturalized,
patterns of work relations be thrown into question – the liberation of
peasants who had been bound to the land under feudalism, for example
– itself cannot be restricted to the sphere of work relations. The
"naturality" of various other traditional relations is also ineluctably
challenged.
IMPACT EXT: EXTINCTION

Capitalism makes extinction inevitable
Foster 2005 (editor of the Monthly Review, Prof of Sociology @ U of Oregon)
John Bellamy, Naked Imperialism. The Monthly Review, Vol. 57, Iss 4. 2005
From the longer view offered by a historical-materialist critique of

capitalism, the direction that would be taken by U.S. imperialism
following the fall of the Soviet Union was never in doubt. Capitalism by
its very logic is a globally expansive system. The contradiction between
its transnational economic aspirations and the fact that politically it
remains rooted in particular nation states is insurmountable for the
system. Yet, ill-fated attempts by individual states to overcome this
contradiction are just as much a part of its fundamental logic. In present
world circumstances, when one capitalist state has a virtual monopoly
of the means of destruction, the temptation for that state to attempt to
seize full-spectrum dominance and to transform itself into the de facto
global state governing the world economy is irresistible. As the noted
Marxian philosopher István Mészáros observed in Socialism or
Barbarism? (2001)—written, significantly, before George W. Bush
became president: “[W]hat is at stake today is not the control of a
particular part of the planet—no matter how large—putting at a
disadvantage but still tolerating the independent actions of some rivals,
but the control of its totality by one hegemonic economic and military
superpower, with all means—even the most extreme authoritarian and,
if needed, violent military ones—at its disposal.”
The unprecedented dangers of this new global disorder are revealed in

the twin cataclysms bon dioxide emissions leading to global warming
than any other (representing approximately a quarter of the world’s
total) has become the greatest obstacle to addressing global warming
and the world’s growing environmental problems—raising the possibility
of the collapse of civilization itself if present trends continue.
The United States is seeking to exercise sovereign authority over the

planet during a time of widening global crisis: economic stagnation,
increasing polarization between the global rich and the global poor,
weakening U.S. economic hegemony, growing nuclear threats, and
deepening ecological decline. The result is a heightening of international
instability. Other potential forces are emerging in the world, such as the
European Community and China, that could eventually challenge U.S.
power, regionally and even globally. Third world revolutions, far from
ceasing, are beginning to gain momentum again, symbolized by
Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution under Hugo Chávez. U.S. attempts to
tighten its imperial grip on the Middle East and its oil have had to cope
with a fierce, seemingly unstoppable, Iraqi resistance, generating
conditions of imperial overstretch. With the United States brandishing its
nuclear arsenal and refusing to support international agreements on the
control of such weapons, nuclear proliferation is continuing. New
nations, such as North Korea, are entering or can be expected soon to
enter the “nuclear club.” Terrorist blowback from imperialist wars in the
third world is now a well-recognized reality, generating rising fear of
further terrorist attacks in New York, London, and

elsewhere. Such vast and overlapping historical contradictions, rooted in
the combined and uneven development of the global capitalist economy
along with the U.S. drive for planetary domination, foreshadow what is
potentially the most dangerous period in the history of imperialism. The course on which U.S
and world capitalism is now headed points to global barbarism—or worse. Yet it is important
to remember that nothing in the development of human history is inevitable. There still
remains an alternative path—the global struggle for a humane, egalitarian, democratic, and
sustainable society. The classic name for such a society is “socialism.” Such a renewed
struggle for a world of substantive human equality must begin by addressing the system’s
weakest link and at the same time the world’s most pressing needs—by organizing a global
resistance movement against the new naked imperialism.
IMPACT EXT: STARVATION

STATUS QUO CAPITALISM IS THE ROOT CAUSE OF MILLIONS STARVING
GLOBALLY. PREFER OUR EVIDENCE, IT IS COMPARATIVE BETWEEN AN
IDEALIZED “FREE MARKET” CAPITALISM AND THE “ACTUALLY EXISTING”
GLOBAL CAPITALISM
Boyle, 2002
Peter, staff writer for the Green Left, 800 Million Can’t Afford Capitalism, The Green Left, June
26th, http://www.greenleft.org.au/2002/497/28022
The world has never produced so much food, there is no overall shortage and food has
seldom been so cheap — yet some 800 million people are hungry today. That's the stark
reality registered at the second World Food Summit held in Rome, June 10-13. At the first
World Food Summit in 1996 roughly the same number of people were starving and the
assembled government heads resolved to halve that number by 2015. No significant
progress has been made. Most rich countries did not even send their leaders to this year's
summit. US President George Bush had more important matters to attend to: announcing
his “Titanic war on terrorism” (so far more than US$450 billion pledged) and defending
his US$400 billion of new farm subsidies. “With deepest respect”, pleaded Australian
Prime Minister John Howard before the US Congress on June 12, US farm subsidies “will
damage Australian farmers”. They will, but not as much as they will hurt hundreds of
millions of poor people in the Third World. As Uganda's president Yoweri Museveni told
the World Food Summit: ”Let us stop beating around the bush, the main causes of food
shortages in the world are really three: wars, protectionism in agricultural products in
Europe, the USA, China, India and Japan, and protectionism in value-added products on
the part of the same countries.” By 2015, on current projections, world hunger will have
taken another 122 million lives. Just imagine what could be done with the US$850 billion
the US plans to spend over the next decade on war and farm subsidies. World hunger could
abolished, and along with it some of the real roots of “terrorism”. The problem is not one
of mistaken policies. The problem is capitalism. Not imaginary, idealised, “free market”
capitalism that we are urged to believe in, but “actually existing” global capitalism.
The rationality of this system can be gauged by the fact that it creates so much food that
nearly half of it is thrown away as waste in the world's richest countries, while in the
poorer countries 800 million people go hungry because they cannot afford to buy food.
Howard praised the Bush administration for its “world leadership” but guess what the US
delegation to the food summit had to say about world hunger? The solution, according to
the US delegation, was more trade liberalisation on the part of the Third World and greater
use of bio-technology (patented and sold by the global corporations). Never mind the fact
that this means poor countries are being forced to surrender their food security, to sell off
their emergency stocks and to dismantle the state marketing boards which traditionally
control prices. Never mind the fact that a few trading cartels will gain even greater
domination of the world food market. And never mind the fact that food production
techniques will become increasingly the private property of global corporations. Under
capitalism, world hunger is big business. The obscenely rich get even richer as they
continue to profit from the daily misery of hundreds of millions of people.
.
A2: USE OF LAW BAD

_____ WHOLESALE REJECTION OF THE LAW LEADS TO A POLITICS OF INFINITE
DESTRUCTION
Carlson, 1999
David Gray, Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law,
Deullism in Modern American Jurisprudence, Columbia Law Review,
November, Lexus Nexus
Should normative legal scholarship be abolished, as Professor Schlag suggests? Some of

Professor Schlag's points about legal scholarship are undoubtedly well taken. But it doesn't
follow that it should or even could be abolished. In truth, whether he admits it or not,
Professor Schlag himself does legal scholarship. He does not follow his own advice about
not doing it. Nor could he. If legal scholarship stands for participation in the realm of the
symbolic, then legal scholarship - i.e., culture - is the very medium that perpetuates self-
consciousness.
Schlag is very hard on law professors who give advice to judges. He mocks their work as
mere "pretend-law," n313 mere journalism. n314 "One need only pick up a judicial
opinion, a state statute, a federal regulation, or a law review article to experience an
overwhelming sense of dread and ennui." n315 Meanwhile, judges are not even paying
attention to legal scholarship n316 - which, experience teaches, is disappointingly true.
Vicarious participation in litigation or legislation can nevertheless be defended as a
participation in culture itself. Law professors can contribute to that culture by making
law more coherent, and in this sense their project is at least as worthy as any that
philosophy, history or astrophysics [*1951] could devise. Law has an objective structure
that exceeds mere subjectivity. This objective structure can be altered by hard work. An
altered legal world, however, is not the point. Evidence of consequential impact is
gratifying, but this is simply what mere egotism requires. It is in the work itself that the
value of legal scholarship can be found. Work is what reconciles the failure of the unhappy
consciousness to achieve justice. Work is, in Hegel's view,
desire held in check, fleetingness staved off... work forms and shapes the thing. The
negative relation to the object becomes its form and something permanent... This negative
middle term or the formative activity is at the same time the individuality or pure being-
for-self of consciousness which now... acquires an element of permanence. n317
Hegel, then, gives a spiritual turn to that worthy slogan "publish or perish." By working the
law, lawyers, judges, private citizens, and even academics can make it more permanent,
more resilient, more "existential," n318 but, more to the point, they make themselves
more resilient, more "existential." n319 Work on law can increase freedom - the positive
freedom that relieves the worker of "anxiety" - fear of disappearance into the Real. n320
When work is done, the legal universe swells and fills itself out - like an appetite that
"grows by what it feeds on." n321 But far more important, the self gains a place in the
world by the very work done. Work is the means of "subjective destitution" or "narcissistic
loss" n322 - the complete externalization of the subject and the surrender of the fantasy
support upon which the subject otherwise depends. In Lacanian terms, "subjective
destitution" is the wages of cure at the end of analysis. n323 Or, in Hegelian terms, cure is
"the ascesis that is necessary if consciousness is to reach genuine philosophic knowledge."
n324 In this state, we precisely lose the suspicion that law (i.e., the big Other) does not
exist. n325 In Hegel's inspirational words:
Each individual consciousness raises itself out of its allotted sphere, no longer finds its
essence and its work in this particular sphere, but grasps itself as the Notion of will, grasps
all spheres as [*1952] the essence of this will, and therefore can only realize itself in a
work which is a work of the whole. n326
I make no special claim that legal academic work is worthy of extra-special respect. It is a
craft, like any other. As such, it is at least worthy of its share of respect. If spirit unfolds
and manifests itself in the phenomenal world of culture, n327 why should it not also
manifest itself in the law reviews?
VI. Conclusion
I began by suggesting that Pierre Schlag assumes the position of a duellist. He thinks legal
academics are either fools or knaves. But he mistakes his opponent. The villain is language
itself. Language is what causes the split in the subject, and Professor Schlag has made the
classic error of assuming that legal academics are deliberately withholding l'objet petit a.
They hold surplus enjoyment and are to blame for the pain and the lack that always
accompanies the presence of the subject in the symbolic order.
If this psychoanalytic suggestion explains the angry tone of Schlag's work, it also explains
the basic errors into which he falls. When one considers this work as a whole, most of
these errors are obvious and patent. Indeed, most of these errors have been laid by Schlag
himself at the doorstep of others. But, in surrendering to feeling or, as perhaps Schlag
would put it, to context (i.e., the pre-theoretical state), Schlag cannot help but make these
very same errors. Some examples:
(1) Schlag's program, induced from his critiques, is that we should rely on feeling to tell us
what to do. Yet Schlag denounces in others any reliance on a pre-theoretical self. n328
(2) Schlag warns that, by definition, theory abstracts from context. n329 He warns that
assuming the right answer will arise from context unmediated by theory is "feeble." n330
Yet, he rigorously and repetitively denounces any departure from context, as if any such
attempt is a castration - a wrenching of the subject from the natural realm. He usually
implies that context alone can provide the right answer - that moral geniuses like
Sophocles or Earl Warren can find the answer by consulting context.
[*1953] (3) Schlag complains that common law judges are "vacuous fellows" when they
erase themselves so that law can speak. n331 Yet, Schlag, a natural lawyer, likewise erases
himself so that context can speak without distortion.
(4) Schlag warns that merely reversing the valences of polarities only reinstates what was
criticized. n332 Yet he does the same in his own work. In attacking the sovereignty of the
liberal self, he merely asserts the sovereignty of the romantic self. Neither,
psychoanalytically, is a valid vision. One polarity is substituted for another. n333
(5) Schlag scorns the postulation of ontological entities such as free will, but makes moral
arguments to his readers that depend entirely on such postulation.
(6) Schlag denounces normativity in others, but fails to see that he himself is normative
when he advises his readers to stop being normative. The pretense is that Schlag is an
invisible mediator between his reader and context. As such, Schlag, the anti-Kantian, is
more Kantian than Kant himself. Thus, context supposedly announces, "Stop doing
normative work." Yet context says nothing of the sort. It is Schlag's own normative theory
that calls for the work slowdown.
(7) Schlag urges an end to legal scholarship when he himself continues to do legal
scholarship. He may wish to deny that his work is scholarship, but his denial must be
overruled. We have before us a legal scholar, like any other.
The legal academy refuses to duel with Pierre Schlag. But why should it? It lives well
enough without defending itself from angry reproaches generated from abstract
romanticism. Shall legal academics give up their jobs and their vocation at the mere
invocation of deconstruction? Why should they, especially when Professor Schlag has not
given up the Byron White professorship at his own university?
The legal academy declines to duel, but this is not to say that postmodernism is a failure. It
is only a failure if we accept that its task is to destroy in its entirety the existing
hierarchy. This is not a valid task. If we destroyed the existing hierarchy, another
would spring up in its place, n334 and it too would have to be destroyed on the logic of
romanticism. Destruction is a bad infinity. It never ends because desire itself does not end.
A2: USE OF LAW BAD
_____ Turn/: Persistent rejection of the law necessitates rejecting the order of the world as
such. This psychotic politics leads to an unbreakable attachment to the law because we
enjoy destroying it so much. Voting affiramtive embraces a politics of constant insistence of
cultural and subjective transformation
Carlson, 1999
David Gray, Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law,
Deullism in Modern American Jurisprudence, Columbia Law Review,
November, Lexus Nexus
Schlag presents a dark vision of what he calls "the bureaucracy," which crushes us and
controls us. It operates on "a field of pain and death." n259 It deprives us of choice,
speech, n260 and custom. n261 As bureaucracy cannot abide great minds, legal education
must suppress greatness through mind numbing repetition. n262 In fact, legal thought is
the bureaucracy and cannot be distinguished from it. n263 If legal thought tried to buck the
bureaucracy, the bureaucracy would instantly crush it. n264
Schlag observes that judges have taken "oaths that require subordination of truth,
understanding, and insight, to the preservation of certain bureaucratic governmental
institutions and certain sacred texts." n265 Legal scholarship and lawyers generally n266
are the craven tools of bureaucracy, and those who practice law or scholarship simply serve
to justify and strengthen the bureaucracy. "If there were no discipline of American law, the
liberal state would have to invent it." n267 "Legal thinkers in effect serve as a kind of P.R.
firm for the bureaucratic state." n268 Legal scholarship has sold out to the bureaucracy:
Insofar as the expressions of the state in the form of [statutes, etc.] can be expected to
endure, so can the discipline that so helpfully organizes, rationalizes, and represents these
expressions as intelligent knowledge. As long as the discipline shows obeisance to the
authoritative legal forms, it enjoys the backing of the state... Disciplinary knowledge of
law can be true not because it is true, but because the state makes it true. n269
Scholarship produces a false "conflation between what [academics] celebrate as 'law' and
the ugly bureaucratic noise that grinds daily in the [*1946] [ ] courts...." n270 Scholarship
"becomes the mode of discourse by which bureaucratic institutions and practices re-present
themselves as subject to the rational ethical-moral control of autonomous individuals."
n271 "The United States Supreme Court and its academic groupies in the law schools have
succeeded in doing what many, only a few decades ago, would have thought impossible.
They have succeeded in making Kafka look naive." n272
Lacanian theory allows us to interpret the meaning of this anti-Masonic vision precisely.
Schlag's bureaucracy must be seen as a "paranoid construction according to which our
universe is the work of art of unknown creators." n273 In Schlag's view, the bureaucracy is
in control of law and language and uses it exclusively for its own purposes. The
bureaucracy is therefore the Other of the Other, "a hidden subject who pulls the strings of
the great Other (the symbolic order)." n274 The bureaucracy, in short, is the superego (i.e.,
absolute knowledge of the ego), n275 but rendered visible and projected outward. The
superego, the ego's stern master, condemns the ego and condemns what it does. Schlag has
transferred this function to the bureaucracy.
As is customary, n276 by describing Schlag's vision as a paranoid construction, I do not
mean to suggest that Professor Schlag is mentally ill or unable to function. Paranoid
construction is not in fact the illness. It is an attempt at healing what the illness is - the
conflation of the domains of the symbolic, imaginary, and real. n277 This conflation is
what Lacan calls "psychosis." Whereas the "normal" subject is split between the three
domains, the psychotic is not. He is unable to keep the domains separate. n278 The
symbolic domain of language begins to lose place to the real domain. The psychotic raves
incoherently, and things begin to talk to [*1947] him directly. n279 The psychotic,
"immersed in jouissance," n280 loses desire itself.
Paranoia is a strategy the subject adopts to ward off breakdown. The paranoid vision holds
together the symbolic order itself and thereby prevents the subject from slipping into the
psychotic state in which "the concrete 'I' loses its absolute power over the entire system of
its determinations." n281 This of course means - and here is the deep irony of paraonia -
that bureaucracy is the very savior of romantic metaphysics. If the romantic program were
ever fulfilled - if the bureaucracy were to fold up shop and let the natural side of the
subject have its way - subjectivity would soon be enveloped, smothered, and killed in the
night of psychosis. n282
Paranoid ambivalence toward bureaucracy (or whatever other fantasy may be substituted
for it) is very commonly observed. Most recently, conservatives "organized their
enjoyment" by opposing communism. n283 By confronting and resisting an all-
encompassing, sinister power, the subject confirms his existence as that which sees and
resists the power. n284 As long as communism existed, conservatism could be perceived.
When communism disappeared, conservatives felt "anxiety" n285 - a lack of purpose.
Although they publicly opposed communism, they secretly regretted its disappearance.
Within a short time, a new enemy was found to organize conservative jouissance - the
cultural left. (On the left, a similar story could be told about the organizing function of
racism and sexism, which, of course, have not yet disappeared.) These humble examples
show that the romantic yearning for wholeness is always the opposite of [*1948] what it
appears to be. n286 We paranoids need our enemies to organize our enjoyment.
Paranoid construction is, in the end, a philosophical interpretation, even in the clinical
cases. n287 As Schlag has perceived, the symbolic order of law is artificial. It only
exists because we insist it does. We all fear that the house of cards may come crashing
down. Paradoxically, it is this very "anxiety" that shores up the symbolic. The normal
person knows he [OR SHE] must keep insisting that the symbolic order exists precisely
because the person knows it is a fiction. n288
The paranoid, however, assigns this role to the bureaucracy (and thereby absolves [HER
OR] himself from the responsibility). Thus, paranoid delusion allows for the maintenance
of a "cynical" distance between the paranoid subject and the realm of mad psychosis. n289
In truth, cynicism toward bureaucracy shows nothing but the unconfronted depth to
which the cynic is actually committed to what ought to be abolished.
A2: REALISM/AFF IS UTOPIAN

_____ INSERT TAG AT SOME POINT
Zizek, 2000
Slavoj, Senior Researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana,
Contingency, Hegemony, and Universality, “Holding the Place”, pg. 324-5
The first thing to note about this neoliberal cliché is that the neutral reference to the
necessities of the market economy, usually invoked in order to -categorize--grand
ideological projects as unrealistic utopias, is itself to be inserted into the series of great
modern utopian projects. That is to say - as Fredric Jameson has pointed out - what
characterizes utopia is not a belief in the essential goodness of human nature, or some
similar naive notion, but, rather, belief in some global mechanism which, applied to the
whole of society, will automatically bring about the balanced state of progress and
happiness one is arian' potential – today’s predominant forms of ideological ‘closure' takes
the precise form of mental block which pre1!ents us .from imagining fundamental social
change, in the interests of an allegedly <realistic' and <mature' attitude. longing for - and,
in this precise sense, is not the market precisely the name for such a mechanism which,
properly applied, will bring about the optimal state of society? So, again, the first answer
of the Left to those - Leftists themselves ¬who bemoan the loss of the utopian impetus in
our societies should be that this impetus is alive and well- not only in the Rightist
'fundamentalist' populism which advocates 'the return to grassroots democracy ,'but above
all among the advocates of the market economy themselves. 12 The second answer should
be a clear line of distinction between utopia and ideology: ideology is not only a. utopian
project o{ social transformation with no realistic chance of actualization; no less
ideological is the anti-utopian stance of those who 'realistically' devalue every global
project of social transformation as 'utopian', that is, as unrealistic dreaming and/ or
harboring totality. In his Seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 13 Lacan developed an
opposition between 'knave' and 'fool' as the two intellectual attitudes: the right-wing
intellectual is a knave, a conformist Who considers the mere existence of the given order as
an argument for it, and mocks the Left for its 'utopian' plans, which necessarily lead to
catastrophe; while the left-wing intellectual is a fool, a court jester who publicly displays
the lie of the existing order, but in a way which suspends the performative efficiency of his
speech. In the years immediately after the fall of Socialism, the knave was a
neoconservative advocate of the free market who cruelly rejected all forms of social
solidarity as counterproductive sentimentalism; while the fool was a deconstructionist
cultural critic who, by means of his ludic procedures destined to 'subvert' the existing
order, actually served as its supplement. Today, however, the relationship between the
couple knave-fool and the political opposition Right/Left is more and more the inversion of
the standard figures of Rightist knave and Leftist fool: are not the Third Way theoreticians
ultimately to day's knaves, figures who preach cynical resignation, that is, the necessary
failure of every attempt actually to change something in the basic functioning of global
capitalism? And are not the conservative fools - those conservatives whose original modern
model is Pascal and who as it were show the hidden cards of the ruling ideology, bringing
to light its underlying mechanisms which, in order to remain operative, have to be
repressed - far more attractive? Today, in the face of this Leftist knavery, it is more
important than ever to hold this utopian place of the global alternative open, even if it
remains empty, living on borrowed time, awaiting. the content to fill it in.
A2: Radical/Deep Ecology

_____ Their seemingly radical identification with the non-human constructs a fantasy of a
natural world out of balance. This paranoic projection is only narcissism. The aff is sure
that they must do something to save the ape. In the meantime, they veil the radical
complexity and chaotic processes of the external environment behind a façade of
harmonious unity waiting to be realized. These fantasy formations have the deleterious
consequence of making environmental politics seem a matter of grandiose political
strategies, further distancing us from real changes in the socio-political fabric of society.
Swyngedouw, 2006
Erik, Dept of Geography in the School of Environment and Development at Manchester
University, “Impossible Sustainability and the Post-Political Condition,
http://www.liv.ac.uk/geography/seminars/Sustainabilitypaper.doc
Slavoj Žižek suggests in Looking Awry that the current ecological crisis is indeed a radical
condition that not only constitutes a real and present danger, but, equally importantly,
“questions our most unquestionable presuppositions, the very horizon of our meaning, our
everyday understanding of ‘nature’ as a regular, rhythmic process” (Zizek, (1992) 2002:
34). It raises serious questions about what were long considered self-evident certainties. He
argues that this fundamental threat to our deepest convictions of what we always thought
we knew for certain about nature is co-constitutive of our general unwillingness to take the
ecological crisis completely serious. It is this destabilising effect that explains “the fact that
the typical, predominant reaction to it still consists in a variation of the famous disavowal,
“I know very well (that things are deadly serious, that what is at stake is our very survival),
but just the same I don’t really believe, … and that is why I continue to act as if ecology is
of no lasting consequence for my everyday life” (page 35). The same unwillingness to
question our very assumptions about what nature is (and even more so what natures might
‘become’) also leads to the typical obsessive reactions of those who DO take the ecological
crisis seriously. Žižek considers both the case of the environmental activist, who in his or
her relentless and obsessive activism to achieve a transformation of society in more
ecologically sustainable ways expresses a fear that to stop acting would lead to
catastrophic consequences. In his words, obsessive acting becomes a tactic to stave off the
ultimate catastrophe, i.e. “if I stop doing what I am doing, the world will come to an end in
an ecological Armageddon”. Others, of course, see all manner of transcendental signs in
the ‘revenge of nature’, read it as a message that signals our destructive intervention in
nature and urge us to change our relationship with nature. In other words, we have to listen
to nature’s call, as expressed by the pending environmental catastrophe, and respond to its
message that pleas for a more benign, associational relation with nature, a post-human
affective connectivity, as a cosmopolitical “partner in dialogue”. While the first attitude
radically ignores the reality of possible ecological disaster, the other two, which are usually
associated with actors defending ‘sustainable’ solutions for our current predicament, are equally problematic in
that they both ignore, or are blind to the inseparable gap between our symbolic
representation (our understanding) of Nature and the actual acting of a wide range of
radically different and, often contingent, natures. In other words, there is – of necessity – an
unbridgeable gap, a void, between our dominant view of Nature (as a predictable and
determined set of processes that tends towards a (dynamic) equilibrium – but one that is
disturbed by our human actions and can be ‘rectified’ with proper sustainable practices)
and the acting of natures as an (often) unpredictable, differentiated, incoherent, open-
ended, complex, chaotic (although by no means unordered or un-patterned) set of
processes. The latter implies the existence not only of many natures, but, more importantly,
it also assumes the possibility of all sorts of possible future natures, all manner of
imaginable different human-non human assemblages and articulations, and all kinds of
different possible socio-environmental becomings. The inability to take ‘natures’ seriously
is dramatically illustrated by the controversy over the degree to which disturbing
environmental change is actually taking place and the risks or dangers associated with it.
Lomborg’s The Sceptical Environmentalist captures one side of this controversy in all its
phantasmagorical perversity (Lomborg, 1998), while climate change doomsday pundits
represent the other. Both sides of the debate argue from an imaginary position of the
presumed existence of a dynamic balance and equilibrium, the point of ‘good’ nature, but
one side claims that the world is veering off the correct path, while the other side
(Lomborg and other sceptics) argues that we are still pretty much on nature’s course. With
our gaze firmly fixed on capturing an imaginary ‘idealised’ Nature, the controversy further
solidifies our conviction of the possibility of a harmonious, balanced, and fundamentally
benign ONE Nature if we would just get our interaction with it right, an argument blindly
(and stubbornly) fixed on the question of where Nature’s rightful point of benign existence resides. This
futile debate, circling around an assumedly centred, known, and singular Nature, certainly permits -- in fact
invites -- imagining ecological catastrophe at some distant point (global burning (or freezing) through
climate change, resource depletion, death by overpopulation). Indeed, imagining catastrophe and fantasising
about the final ecological Armageddon seems considerably easier for most environmentalists than envisaging
relatively small changes in the socio-political and cultural-economic organisation of local and global life here
and now. Or put differently, the world’s premature ending in a climatic Armageddon seems easier to imagine
(and sell to the public) than a transformation of (or end to) the neo-liberal capitalist order that
keeps on practicing expanding energy use and widening and deepening its ecological
footprint. It is this sort of considerations that led Slavoj Žižek controversially to state that
“nature does not exist”. Of course, he does not imply that there are no such ‘things’ as
quarks or other subatomic particles, black holes, tsunamis, sunshine, trees, or HIV viruses.
Even less would he decry the radical effects of CO2 and other greenhouse gases on the
climate or the lethal consequences of water contamination for the world’s poor. On the
contrary, they are very real, many posing serious environmental problems, occasionally
threatening entire populations (AIDS, for example), but he insists that the Nature we see
and work with is necessarily radically imagined, scripted, symbolically charged; and is
radically distant from the natures that are there, which are complex, chaotic, often
unpredictable, often radically contingent, risky, patterned in endlessly complex ways,
ordered along ‘strange’ attractors. In other words, there is no balanced, dynamic equilibrium
based nature out there that needs or requires salvation in name of either Nature itself or of
an equally imagined universal human survival. ‘Nature’ simply does not exist. There is
nothing foundational in nature that needs, demands, or requires sustaining. The debate and
controversies over nature and what do with it, in contrast, signals rather our political
inability to engage in directly political and social argument and strategies about re-
arranging the social co-ordinates of everyday life and the arrangements of socio-metabolic
organisation (something usually called capitalism) that we inhabit. In order words, imagining a benign
and ‘sustainable’ Nature avoids asking the politically sensitive, but vital, question as to
what kind of socio-environmental arrangements do we wish to produce, how can this be
achieved, and what sort of natures do we wish to inhabit.

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ADI 08 Hooper/Boyle/Jennings

There’s Something About Capital (Aff) Pg. 1 of 30

Capitalism Bad Affirmative

_____ AMERICAN CAPITALISM WAS BORN OUT OF THE AGRICULTURAL

_____ THE TYRANNY OF THE SYSTEM ISN’T INEVITABLE. BY VIRTUE OF ITS

Deployed in the name of either revolutionary or retrograde causes, masochism works by

CONTENTION THREE: SO YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION?

_____ VIEWING DEBATE AS A BANAL GAME OF FIAT WARS PRECLUDES FOCUS

SOLVENCY EXT: MULTITUDE

SOLVENCY EXT: USING THE STATE AGAINST ITSELF

SOLVENCY EXT: LETTER OF THE LAW

IMPACT EXT: ENVIRONMENT

With respect to "industrialism," we need to remember that

IMPACT EXT: ENVIRONMENT

Capitalism will result in the destruction of the natural world unless

It is this obsession with capital accumulation that distinguishes

IMPACT EXT: VALUE TO LIFE

Instead, Jameson prefers to focus on the various ways in which "nature"

IMPACT EXT: EXTINCTION

From the longer view offered by a historical-materialist critique of

The unprecedented dangers of this new global disorder are revealed in

The United States is seeking to exercise sovereign authority over the

IMPACT EXT: ENVIRONMENT

IMPACT EXT: STARVATION

A2: USE OF LAW BAD

Should normative legal scholarship be abolished, as Professor Schlag suggests? Some of

A2: USE OF LAW BAD

A2: REALISM/AFF IS UTOPIAN

A2: Radical/Deep Ecology

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