Tournament: McNeil | Round: 1 | Opponent: Round Rock Bhutani | Judge: Pangottil, Kevin
An unconditional right to strike means that there are no limits on when workers may exercise their right to strike or on the justifications workers have for their strike. However, this does not require the AFF to prove that there are no ethical or legal restrictions on the tactics workers can use in carrying out their right to strike. In other words, the AFF does not have the burden of proving that workers are entitled to murder people in the streets as a strike tactic. Holding the AFF to that burden would make it impossible to win.
Ought is defined by dictionary.com as expressing a moral obligation. Thus, the resolution expresses a judgment about the moral obligations of governments.
Part 1: Volition
All moral theories are grounded in the significance of our volition because it is the only thing that we can bear full responsibility over. Volition refers to our ability to freely set and pursue our own goals. Humans have different desires, but unlike animals we are able to choose whether to enforce and act on these desires.
Jaeggi (Rahel Jaeggi is a professor of practical philosophy and social philosophy at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Alienation. Columbia University Press. 2014 --- KW)
“On the one hand, self-alienation can be understood, with Frankfurt, as being “delivered over to” our own desires and longings. (We could call this “first order” alienation.) These desires can take on an overwhelming power that presents itself as a “force alien to ourselves.” This is not due to their irresistible character alone: “It is because we do not identify ourselves with them and do not want them to move us.” 29 2. These feelings and passions are the raw material that we relate to evaluatively or with respect to which we form our will. Whether a person identifies himself with these passions, or whether they occur as alien forces that remain outside the boundaries of his volitional identity, depends upon what he himself they themselves wants their his will to be. 30 Hence the volitional attitudes on this level, in contrast to unformed first-order desires, can be shaped and structured and are wholly at our command: they are “entirely up to” us. A crucial implication of this account is the distinction between power and authority . Passions, according to this account, have volitional power but no volitional authority. Frankfurt elaborates: “In fact, the passions do not really make any claims on us at all. . . . Their effectiveness in moving us is entirely a matter of sheer brute force.” 31 3. What we do not freely have at our command, in contrast, is our volitional nature, the deep structure of our will itself. On the level of volitional necessities we are determined; here it is not “entirely up to us” how we determine our will; our volitional nature determines us and. Yet our volitional necessities determine us in a different sense from that in which passions or first-order desires do: they compel us, one could say, not as alien powers but rather to be ourselves. They are not a brute force because they are not an external power but rather the power of what we really want or really are . “It is an element of his established volitional nature and hence of his identity as a person.” 32 For this reason Frankfurt can claim in his adoption example that the mother experiences the limitation of her will—her “not being able to”—as a kind of liberation. Self-alienation, then, means acting against one’s volitional nature. Hence the mother who wants to give up her child has formed a second order volition that conflicts with her volitional nature. If she acted in accordance with this second order volition, she would alienate herself—a “second order” alienation. This means that it would run counter to what constitutes her as a person; it would undermine the conditions of her identity. Self-alienation on this level consists, then, in not being in agreement with one’s own person, with what constitutes oneself as a person. The assumption of a volitional nature appears, then, to solve the problem of finding a criterion for authentic desires and their authorization that I have raised in conjunction with the theme of self-alienation. The standard for the appropriateness or inappropriateness of identifying with a desire is our volitional nature; our desires—our real desires—are authorized in relation to it. In what follows, however, I will explain why this, too, fails to solve the problem raised in our initial example.
Part 2: Appropriation
Appropriation is when one looks at the world around them and includes the world through their will. A drug addict appropriates the world when they choose to quit drugs through their will.
Jaeggi (Rahel Jaeggi is a professor of practical philosophy and social philosophy at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Alienation. Columbia University Press. 2014 --- KW)
“The underlying idea of freedom here can be understood by turning to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right . Formulated schematically, the basic thought is that freedom must give itself reality, must determine , concretize, or realize itself as something, and this has two aspects. On the one hand, the merely negated world, as negated, remains external to the individual, hence alien and not subject to her influence. Actual, realized freedom, in contrast, consists not in abstracting from the world but in appropriating it. The important point here is that this appropriation is a transformation. The abstract, negative freedom of withdrawing from the world, in contrast, remains, in its withdrawal, bound to what it withdraws from (or negates); it can reject it but not transform it. Realized, positive freedom in Hegel’s sense refers, then, to an appropria- tive transformation (or transformative appropriation) of the conditions under which it realizes itself. 24 Freedom means being able to make something— namely, the conditions under which one lives—one’s own. And, conversely, an independence that preserves itself only by disregarding the actual world remains abstract. As Allen Wood puts this point: We do not achieve true self-sufficiency in relation to an other by escaping it or separating ourselves from it—as by Stoical aloofness from our external condition, or Kantian detachment from empirical motives. Such a strategy is self-defeating, like the strategy of the neurotic personality that avoids the trauma of failure by precluding from the outset any possibility of success. True independence in relation to an other is achieved rather by struggling with otherness, overcoming it, and making it our own. 25 On the other hand, the person remains unreal because she lacks all specifi c properties. Becoming a person for Hegel means “putting one’s will into something,” and that also means giving oneself specific properties by willing something in the world. In such a relation to the world, the person first realizes herself as a person, and in that her freedom first becomes concrete. Hegel can be understood here as developing a dialectic of freedom and determinacy. If I identify with nothing, then nothing limits me. I can then do anything. The problem, however, is that being able to do anything also means that I elude being “grasped” and that I have no determinate contours. I am not a specific person who wants and is able to do specific things; instead, my freedom remains empty and abstract. As long as I do not put my will into anything determinate, this freedom is not real but only an indeterminate possibility. Hence the individual who locates her freedom in not identifying with anything, in not determining herself as anything and not putting her will into anything, falls prey to an erroneous idea of sovereignty and independence— erroneous, because such a position is grounded in a one-sided and formal idea of freedom or independence. (Thus Hegel and Frankfurt share the idea that a person must commit herself to and identify with something in order to make her freedom concrete.) A will that remains indifferent to its concrete properties is therefore not free in the full sense. It is indeed free to renounce identifications, but at the price of the self’s emptiness and impoverishment. On this basis one could also argue against what Nietzsche would later call the “free spirit.” 26 Freedom of choice, then, is only the formal aspect of freedom. The freedom of indif- ference, of distancing and renouncing identifications, is incomplete, and it becomes complete only when the will determines its content by choosing something determinate or orienting itself positively toward something. Of course, the negative or merely formal side of freedom has for Hegel its own rightful claims (and not merely historically): the “right of indifference” consists in the requirement that in order to be able to determine one- self freely, as something, one must be able to abstract from that very quality. Raymond Geuss has pointed out that in his positive conception of freedom Hegel attempts to integrates both the act of reflection (which depends on the dissolving of attachments) and that of identification. The individual who determines herself must—in agreement with Frankfurt’s theory of identification and wholeheartedness—determine herself as something. She must do this, however, in a reflective act of free choice that presupposes the possibility of distancing herself from what she is at present. Thus for Hegel—in any case one can describe his attempt in this way—negative freedom is a constitutive condition of positive freedom; negative freedom is sublated ( aufgehoben ) into positive freedom. One can sharpen these thoughts even further by returning to the views of Frankfurt discussed in chapter 7: for Hegel commitment is not only (as for Frankfurt) a condition of freedom; it is also the case (in contrast to Frankfurt) that freedom is a condition of having commitments. (This same structure underlies the theme of the free appropriation of self and world that I will contrast in part 3 with the processes of alienation diagnosed here.)
Therefore, the standard for this round is resisting alienation.
Alienation occurs when an agent is not able to appropriate their surroundings. Being able to change their world with their volition allows them to remain true to themselves. One who always intends or wills but doesn’t act upon it isn’t a moral agent because an alienated perspective cannot bring itself to the world that their surroundings are unknown to them.
Jaeggi (Rahel Jaeggi is a professor of practical philosophy and social philosophy at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Alienation. Columbia University Press. 2014 --- KW)
“THE CONCEPT OF ALIENATION REFERS to an entire bundle of intertwined topics. Alienation means indifference and internal division, but also powerlessness and relationlessness with respect to oneself and to a world experienced as indifferent and alien. Alienation is the inability to establish a relation to other human beings, to things, to social institutions and thereby also—so the fundamental intuition of the theory of alienation—to oneself. An alienated world presents itself to individuals as insignificant and meaningless, as rigidified or impoverished, as a world that is not one’s own, which is to say, a world in which one is not “at home” and over which one can have no influence. The alienated subject becomes a stranger to itself; it no longer experiences itself as an “actively effective subject” but a “passive object” at the mercy of unknown forces.1 One can speak of alienation “wherever individuals do not find themselves in their own actions”2 or wherever we cannot be master over the being that we ourselves are (as Heidegger might have put it). The alienated person, according to the early Alasdair MacIntyre, is “a stranger in the world that he himself has made.”3”
In a free-market economy, there is an asymmetry in power between workers and employers; this leads to the oppression of workers at the hands of their employers.
Gourevitch 18 (Alex Gourevitch, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Brown University. “A Radical Defense of the Right to Strike” Jacobin. 7/12/2018 https://jacobinmag.com/2018/07/right-to-strike-freedom-civil-liberties-oppression -- KW)
“Class-based oppression is inextricable from liberal capitalism. While meaningful variation exists across capitalist societies, one of the fundamental unifying facts is this: the majority of able-bodied people are forced to work for members of a relatively small group, who dominate control over productive assets and who, thereby, enjoy control over the activities and products of those workers. There are workers, and then there are owners and their managers. Workers are pushed into the labor market because they have no reasonable alternative to looking for a job. They cannot produce the goods they need for themselves, nor can they rely on the charity of others, nor can they count on adequate state benefits. Depending on how we measure income and wealth, about 60 to 80 percent of Americans fall into this category for most of their adult lives. This structural compulsion is not symmetric. A significant minority of the population has enough wealth — whether inherited or accumulated or both — that they can avoid entering the labor market. They might happen to work, but they are not forced to do so. The oppression, then, stems not from the fact that some are forced to work. After all, if socially necessary work were shared equally, then it might be fair to force each to do their share. The oppression stems from the fact that the forcing is unequal —that only some are made to work for others, producing whatever employers pay them to produce. This structural inequality feeds into a second, interpersonal dimension of oppression. Workers are forced to join workplaces typically characterized by large swathes of uncontrolled managerial power and authority. This oppression is interpersonal because it is power that specific individuals (employers and their managers) have to get other specific individuals (employees) to do what they want. We can distinguish between three overlapping forms that this interpersonal, workplace oppression takes: subordination, delegation, and dependence. Subordination: Employers have what are sometimes called “managerial prerogatives” — legislative and judicial grants of authority to owners and their managers to make decisions about investment, hiring and firing, plant location, work process, and the like. Managers may change working speeds and assigned tasks, the hours of work, or, as Amazon currently does, force employees to spend up to an hour going through security lines after work without paying them. They can fire workers for Facebook comments, their sexual orientation, for being too sexually appealing, or for not being appealing enough. They can give workers more tasks than can be performed in the allotted time, lock employees in the workplace overnight, require employees to labor in extreme heat and other physically hazardous conditions, or punitively isolate workers from other coworkers. They can pressure employees to take unwanted political action, or, in the case of nurses, force employees to work for twenty-two different doctors. What unifies these seemingly disparate examples is that, in all cases, managers are exercising legally permitted prerogatives. The law does not require that workers have any formal say in how those powers are exercised. In fact, in nearly every liberal capitalist country (including social democracies like Sweden), employees are defined, in law, as “subordinates.” This is subordination in the strict sense: workers are subject to the will of the employer. Delegation: There are additional discretionary legal powers that managers enjoy not by legal statute or precedent but because workers have delegated these powers in the contract. For instance, workers might sign a contract that allows managers to require employees to submit to random drug testing or unannounced searches. In the United States, 18 percent of current employees and 37 percent of workers in their lifetime work under noncompete agreements. These clauses give managers the legal power to forbid employees from working for competitors, in some cases reducing these workers to near indentured service. The contract that the Communications Workers of America had with Verizon until 2015 included a right for managers to force employers to perform from ten to fifteen hours of overtime per week and to take some other day instead of Saturday as an off-day. While workers have granted these prerogatives to employers voluntarily, in many cases it’s only technically voluntary because of the compulsion to work. This is especially true if workers can only find jobs in sectors where these kinds of contracts proliferate. Which leads to the third face of oppression: the distributive effects of class inequality. The normal workings of liberal capitalism elevate a relatively small group of owners and highly paid managers to the pinnacle of society, where they accumulate most of the wealth and income. Meanwhile, most workers do not earn enough to both meet their needs and to save such that they can employ themselves or start their own businesses. The few that do rise displace others or take the structurally limited number of opportunities available. The rest remain workers. Dependence: Finally, managers might have the material power to force employees to submit to commands or even to accept violations of their rights because of the worker’s dependence on the employer. A headline example is wage theft, which affects American workers to the tune of $8 to $14 billion per year. Employers regularly break labor law, by disciplining, threatening, or firing workers who wish to organize, strike, or otherwise exercise supposedly protected labor rights. In other cases, workers have been refused bathroom breaks and resorted to wearing diapers, denied legally required lunch breaks or pressured to work through them, forced to keep working after their shift, or denied the right to read or turn on air conditioning during break. In particularly egregious examples, employers have forced their workers to stay home rather than go out on weekends or to switch churches and alter religious practices on pain of being fired and deported. There are also the many cases of systematic sexual harassment, in those wide regions of the economy where something more than a public shaming is needed to control bosses. In all these instances, employers are not exercising legal powers to command. Instead they are taking advantage of the material power that comes with threatening to fire or otherwise discipline workers. This material power to get workers to do things that employers want is in part a function of the class structure of society, both in the broad sense of workers being unequally dependent on owners, and in the narrower sense of workers being legally subordinate to employers. The oppression lies not just in the existence of these powers, nor in some capitalist bad apples, but in how these powers are typically used. Managers tend to use these powers “rationally,” to exploit workers and extract profits. Each of these different faces of oppression — structural, interpersonal, and distributive — is a distinct injustice. Together they form the interrelated and mutually reinforcing elements of class domination that are typical of capitalist societies.”
The impact is that these forms of domination alienate workers from the world and themselves.
Jaeggi 14 (Rahel Jaeggi is a professor of practical philosophy and social philosophy at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Alienation. Columbia University Press. 2014 --- KW))
“We can identify two dimensions of the deficit in the relation to self and world that Marx theorizes as alienation: first, the inability meaningfully to identify with what one does and with those with whom one does it; second, the inability to exert control over what one does—that is, the inability to be, individually or collectively, the subject of one’s actions. Alienation from the object—from the product of one’s own activity—means at once loss of control and dispossession: asthe alienated worker (as the seller of her labor power) no longer has at her disposal what she herself has produced; it does not belong to her. Her product it is exchanged on a market she does not control and under conditions she does not control. Alienation also means that the object must appear to her as fragmented: laboring under conditions of specialization and the division of labor, the worker has no relation to the product of her work as a whole. As someone who is involved in one of the many specialized acts that make up the production of Adam Smith’s famous pin, she has no relation to the pin as a finished product, as small as the pin might be. Put differently, the product of her specific labor—her specific contribution to the production of the pin—does not fit for her into a meaningful whole, a unity with significance. The same pairing of powerlessness and loss of meaning (or impoverish- ment) marks the worker’s alienation from her own activity. Alienated labor is, on the one hand, unfree activity, labor in which and into which one is forced. In her labor the alienated worker is not the master of what she does. Standing under foreign command, her labor is determined by another, or heteronomous . “If he relates to his own activity as to an unfree activity, then he relates to it as an activity performed in the service, under the domination, the coercion, and the yoke of another human being.” 5 And, being powerless, the worker can neither comprehend nor control the process as a whole of which she is a part but that remains untransparent to her. At the same time, alienated labor is also characterized by—as a counterpart to the product’s fragmenta- tion—the fragmentation and impoverishment of laboring activity. Thus Marx also regards as alienated the dullness and limited character of the labor itself, “which make the human being into as abstract a being as possible, a lathe, etc., and transforms her into a spiritual and physical monstrosity” (as he says in his “Comments on James Mill”). Alienation from others, from the world of social relations of cooperation, also reflects these two dimensions: in alienated labor the worker has no control over what she, together with others, does. And in alienated labor others are for her, one could say, “structurally indifferent.” It is interesting and of great importance for his theory that Marx denounces not only the instrumentalization of the worker by the owner of her labor power but also the instrumental relation to herself that the worker acquires through it. From Marx’s perspective, the instrumental relation that the worker develops (or is forced to develop) to herself and to her labor under conditions of alienation also appears problematic—or, more forcefully, “inhuman.” What is alienating about alienated labor is that it has no intrinsic purpose, that it is not (at least also) performed for its own sake. Activities performed in an alienated way are understood by those who carry them out not as ends but only as means. In the same way, one regards the capacities one acquires from or brings to the activity—and therefore also oneself—as means rather than ends. In other words, one does not identify with what one does. Instrumentalization, in turn, intensifies into utter meaninglessness : When Marx says that under conditions of alienation life itself becomes a means (“life itself appears only as a means to life ”) 7 —what should be an end takes on the character of a means—he is describing a completely meaningless event, or, as one could say, the structure of meaninglessness itself. Formulated differently, for Marx the infinite regress of ends is meaninglessness. In this respect Marx is an Aristotelian: there must be an end that is not itself in turn a means.”
The unconditional right to strike is key to workers resisting their alienation for several reasons:
First, The right to strike allows for workers to invert and leverage their relationship with employers, while quitting terminates that relationship.
Gourevitch 2016( Alex Gourevitch, Associate Professor of Political Science at Brown University, June 2016 -- A.V. )
The right to strike is peculiar. It is not a right to quit. The right to quit is part of freedom of contract and the mirror of employment-at-will. Workers may quit when they no longer wish to work for an employer; employers may fire their employees when they no longer want to employ them. Either workers quitting or employers firing their employees are acts that of those acts severs the contractual relationship and the two parties are no longer assumed to be in
any relationship at all. The right to strike, however, assumes the continuity of the very relationship that is suspended. Workers on strike refuse to work but do not claim to have left the job. After all, the whole point of a strike is that it is a collective work stoppage, not a collective quitting of the job. This is the feature of the strike that has marked it out from other forms of social action. If a right to strike is not a right to quit, what is it? It is the right that workers claim to refuse to perform work they have agreed to do while retaining a right to the job. Most of what is peculiar, not to mention fraught, about a strike is contained in that latter clause. Yet, surprisingly, few commentators recognize just how central and yet peculiar this claim is.16 Opponents of the right to strike are sometimes more alive to its distinctive features than defenders. One critic, for instance, makes the distinction between quitting and striking the basis of his entire argument: the unqualified right to withdraw labour, which is a clear right of free men, does not describe the behaviour of strikers.... Strikers ... withdraw from the performance of their jobs, but in the only relevant sense they do not withdraw their labour. The jobs from which they have withdrawn performance belong to them, they maintain.17
The impact is that the unconditional right to strike resists alienation because workers are able to take control of a relationship that has been forced upon them. Striking allows the workers to appropriate the job and the relationship they will have with the employer.
Gourevitch 16 (Alex Gourevitch, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Brown University. “
Quitting Work but Not the Job: Liberty and the Right to Strike” Vol. 14, No. 2. June 2016. https://www.academia.edu/28797150? - JC)
“We now have a way of explaining the right to strike as something decidedly more modern than just residual protection of some feudal guild privilege. The right to strike springs organically from the fact of structural domination. Striking is a way of resisting that domination at the point in that structure at which workers find themselves—the particular job they are bargaining over. It is not that workers believe they have some special privilege but quite the opposite. It is their lack of privilege, their vulnerability, that generates the claim. Structural domination makes its most immediate appearsance in the threat of being exploited by a particular employer, even though the point of structural domination is that workers can be exploited by any potential employer. The sharpest form that structural domination takes is through the threat of being fired, or of never being hired in the first place. The claim that strikers make to their job is, therefore, in the first instance, a dramatization of the fact that their relationship is not voluntary, it is not accidental and contingent. They are always already forced to be in a contractual relationship with some employer or another. The refusal to perform work while retaining the right to the job is a way of bringing to the fore this social and structural element in their condition. It vivifies the real nature of the production relationship that workers find themselves in. Quitting the work but not the job is a way of saying that this society is not and cannot be just a system of voluntary exchanges among independent producers. There is an underlying structure of unequal dependence, maintained through the system of contracts, that even the “most voluntary” arrangements conceal.”
Second, the right to strike expresses and promotes the freedom of workers.
Gourevitch 18(Alex Gourevitch, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Brown University. “A Radical Defense of the Right to Strike” Jacobin. 7/12/2018 https://jacobinmag.com/2018/07/right-to-strike-freedom-civil-liberties-oppression -- KW)
“Workers have an interest in resisting the oppression of class society by using their collective power to reduce, or even overcome, that oppression. Their interest is a liberty interest in a double sense. First, resistance to that class-based oppression carries with it, at least implicitly, a demand for freedoms not yet enjoyed. A higher wage expands workers’ freedom of choice. Expanded labor rights increase workers’ collective freedom to influence the terms of employment. Whatever the concrete set of issues, workers’ strike demands are always also a demand for control over portions of one’s life that they do not yet enjoy. Second, strikes don’t just aim at winning more freedom — they are themselves expressions of freedom. When workers walk out, they’re using their own individual and collective agency to win the liberties they deserve. The same capacity for self-determination that workers invoke to demand more freedom is the capacity they exercise when winning their demands. Freedom, not industrial stability or simply higher living standards, is the name of their desire. Put differently, the right to strike has both an intrinsic and instrumental relation to freedom. It has intrinsic value as an (at least implicit) demand for self-emancipation. And it has instrumental value insofar as the strike is an effective means for resisting the oppressionveness of a class society and achieving new freedoms. But if all this is correct, and the right to strike is something that we should defend, then it also has to be meaningful. The right loses its connection to workers’ freedom if they have little chance of exercising it effectively. Otherwise they’re simply engaging in a symbolic act of defiance — laudable, perhaps, but not a tangible means of fighting oppression. The right to strike must therefore cover at least some of the coercive tactics that make strikes potent, like sit-downs and mass pickets. It is therefore often perfectly justified for strikers to exercise their right to strike by using these tactics, even when these tactics are illegal.
The impact of this card is that the unconditional right to strike allows workers to resist their alienation in three ways:
A) because of its intrinsic relationship to freedom, exercising the right to strike is itself an expression of the workers freedom; it is literally the workers demanding self-determination and, thus, asserting their power to appropriate themselves and their job.
B) because of its instrumental relationship to freedom…. workers can use the right to strike to successfully pressure their employers to improve their working conditions in order for them to be able to live meaningful lives. This means the right to strike can be used by workers to further appropriate themselves and the world.
C). The impact is that only when the right to strike is unconditional can it be used to resist alienation because the liberties of the employers, including their right to property, are used as legal tools to maintain the alienation of workers. If the negative advocates for a conditional right to strike that prohibits all forms of coercion, this would actually perpetuate the alienation of workers because a conditional right to strike will completely fail as an instrument for bringing about worker freedom.