1AC Trips Lay 1N Innovation extinction link no trips solvency 1AR Neg doesn't link to innovation conceded preempt arguement Infrastructure is bad because of Trips Compulsory Licensing doesn't exist because of Trips 2N Conceded no innovation link No aff solvency cus infrastructure again Conceded CL argument but kept going for it 2AR OW on access my offense ow on probability cus neg conceded offense
Bronx
3
Opponent: Hawken KJ | Judge: Patrick McGhee
1AC Trips 1N Counterfeits w bad link Innovation ow CL kills innovation Trips don't solve access 1AR Counterfeit solves side effects CL doesn't impact innovation Access ow innovation Neg prioritizes the global north Trips solve access neg was wrong based on misunderstanding 2N Conceed Counterfeits CL kills innovation Aff HAS to decrease profits 2AR No innovation link access ow innovation no impact RFD AFF
Glenbrooks
2
Opponent: Coppell SK | Judge: Ogundare, Temitope
1AC Util Climate Democracy 1N Econ DA government arbitration CP
Harvard
1
Opponent: Acton-Boxborough ALi | Judge: Patel, Vandan
AC Property NC Set Col K Innovation Mining DA wo util or extinction impacts ( Rest was all
Harvard
4
Opponent: Ridge VS | Judge: Saianurag Karavadi
1AC Property 1N Psycho K
Harvard
6
Opponent: Bergen County AK | Judge: Weiler, Reed
1AC Deleuze 1N Disclosure No full text ( util innovation DA
Palm Classic
3
Opponent: Marlborough JH | Judge: Salazar, Davd
1AC Property 1N T-Fwrk random cp idek what it said Mining DA Went for theory ))
Palm Classic
2
Opponent: Zeeh, Thane | Judge: Tays KM
1AC Property 1N T-Fwrk Mining DA SBSP Pic Cap Good Rest was all
Princeton
2
Opponent: Ardrey Kell RG | Judge: Michael Zhou
1AC Microworkers 1N Cant Spec Tech DA
Princeton
4
Opponent: Millburn AX | Judge: Dossani, Faizaan
1AC Microwork 1N Setcol K
Sunvite
3
Opponent: American Heritage Broward JA | Judge: Maher, TJ
1AC Property 1N T fwrk On case was util space col good engaging in state good 1AR all 2N T fwrk and util 2AR t fwrk case util
Woodward
3
Opponent: Marlborough Mehta | Judge: Justin Hsu
1AC Deleuze K 1N Util Contracts CP Mining DA 1AR all 2N AC util mining da 2AR AC util mining da
Woodward
3
Opponent: Marlborough Mehta | Judge: Justin Hsu
1AC Deleuze K 1N Util Contracts CP Mining DA 1AR all 2N AC util mining da 2AR AC util mining da
Yale
1
Opponent: Dr Phillips AI | Judge: Gina Pisciotta
1AC Trips 1N Innovation ow 1AR Extend Trips delink out of 1N 2N Dropped offense attacked profit margin solvency 2AR Extended solvency they still didn't link weigh
Yale
3
Opponent: Ridge MK | Judge: Qing Liu
1AC Trips Plus Lay 1N Innovation through profit counterfeits trips allows for monopolys 1AR Accesability ow delink innovation da 2N Accesability bad innovation solves through preventing counterfeits 2AR ow accesability delink counterfeits
Yale
6
Opponent: Hawkins AS | Judge: Shreyas Iyer
1AC Trips 1N Innovation and Counterfeits Aff is non T 1AR Innovation doesn't link No counterfeit solvency Aff is T extend ac 2N Aff is non T Innovation does link concede counterfeits but extend 2AR Aff is t innovation doesn't link counterfeits dont link Accesability ow
1AC Trips Lay 1N BIG Innovation DA 1AR Access ow plus I dont link 2N Trips does link access doesn't solve innovation ow 2AR Access ow no innovation link plan solves infrastructure
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Cites
Entry
Date
Contact Info
Tournament: Contact Info | Round: 1 | Opponent: Nobody | Judge: Nobody Messenger: Harris Layson Email: harrislayson@icloud.com Phone: 407-242-2633 Try Messenger first, then phone, then email If for some reason I don't meet your cite standards i.e. forgetting page numbers, just ask me and I'll fix it as soon as i can
1/22/22
G - FW - Util
Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 2 | Opponent: Coppell SK | Judge: Ogundare, Temitope The standard is maximizing expected well-being. Its hedonistic act-util Independently prefer: 1 Actor specificity A governments must aggregate because their policies benefit some and harm others so the only non-arbitrary way to prioritize is by helping the most amount of people B No act-omission distinction – governments have to yes/no policies which means that choosing to omit is an act itself so side constraints freeze action C Actor specificity comes first because different agents have different obligations. We have to look at how the government make decisions 2 It’s a lexical pre-requisite. Threats to bodily security and life preclude the ability for moral actors to effectively act upon other moral theories since they are in a constant state of crisis that inhibit the ideal moral conditions which other theories presuppose. 3 theory: A Topic lit – most articles are written through the lens of util since they’re crafted for policymakers and the general public to understand who take consequences to be important, not philosophy majors. Fairness and education since it’s a lens through which we engage the res. 4 Pain and pleasure are intrinsically valuable – to justify beyond that runs into moral incoherence. Moen 16, Moen 16 Ole Martin Moen, Research Fellow in Philosophy at University of Oslo “An Argument for Hedonism” Journal of Value Inquiry (Springer), 50 (2) 2016: 267–281 SJDI RCT by JPark Let us start by observing, empirically, that a widely shared judgment about intrinsic value and disvalue is that pleasure is intrinsically valuable and pain is intrinsically disvaluable. On virtually any proposed list of intrinsic values and disvalues (we will look at some of them below), pleasure is included among the intrinsic values and pain among the intrinsic disvalues. This inclusion makes intuitive sense, moreover, for there is something undeniably good about the way pleasure feels and something undeniably bad about the way pain feels, and neither the goodness of pleasure nor the badness of pain seems to be exhausted by the further effects that these experiences might have. “Pleasure” and “pain” are here understood inclusively, as encompassing anything hedonically positive and anything hedonically negative.2 The special value statuses of pleasure and pain are manifested in how we treat these experiences in our everyday reasoning about values. If you tell me that you are heading for the convenience store, I might ask: “What for?” This is a reasonable question, for when you go to the convenience store you usually do so, not merely for the sake of going to the convenience store, but for the sake of achieving something further that you deem to be valuable. You might answer, for example: “To buy soda.” This answer makes sense, for soda is a nice thing and you can get it at the convenience store. I might further inquire, however: “What is buying the soda good for?” This further question can also be a reasonable one, for it need not be obvious why you want the soda. You might answer: “Well, I want it for the pleasure of drinking it.” If I then proceed by asking “But what is the pleasure of drinking the soda good for?” the discussion is likely to reach an awkward end. The reason is that the pleasure is not good for anything further; it is simply that for which going to the convenience store and buying the soda is good.3 As Aristotle observes: “We never ask a man what his end is in being pleased, because we assume that pleasure is choice worthy in itself.”4 Presumably, a similar story can be told in the case of pains, for if someone says “This is painful!” we never respond by asking: “And why is that a problem?” We take for granted that if something is painful, we have a sufficient explanation of why it is bad. If we are onto something in our everyday reasoning about values, it seems that pleasure and pain are both places where we reach the end of the line in matters of value.
5 Extinction hijacks and side constrains the framework – it o/w and comes first Pummer 15 Theron, Junior Research Fellow in Philosophy at St. Anne's College, University of Oxford. “Moral Agreement on Saving the World” Practical Ethics, University of Oxford. May 18, 2015 AT There appears to be lot of disagreement in moral philosophy. Whether these many apparent disagreements are deep and irresolvable, I believe there is at least one thing it is reasonable to agree on right now, whatever general moral view we adopt: that it is very important to reduce the risk that all intelligent beings on this planet are eliminated by an enormous catastrophe, such as a nuclear war. How we might in fact try to reduce such existential risks is discussed elsewhere. My claim here is only that we – whether we’re consequentialists, deontologists, or virtue ethicists – should all agree that we should try to save the world. According to consequentialism, we should maximize the good, where this is taken to be the goodness, from an impartial perspective, of outcomes. Clearly one thing that makes an outcome good is that the people in it are doing well. There is little disagreement here. If the happiness or well-being of possible future people is just as important as that of people who already exist, and if they would have good lives, it is not hard to see how reducing existential risk is easily the most important thing in the whole world. This is for the familiar reason that there are so many people who could exist in the future – there are trillions upon trillions… upon trillions. There are so many possible future people that reducing existential risk is arguably the most important thing in the world, even if the well-being of these possible people were given only 0.001 as much weight as that of existing people. Even on a wholly person-affecting view – according to which there’s nothing (apart from effects on existing people) to be said in favor of creating happy people – the case for reducing existential risk is very strong. As noted in this seminal paper, this case is strengthened by the fact that there’s a good chance that many existing people will, with the aid of life-extension technology, live very long and very high quality lives. You might think what I have just argued applies to consequentialists only. There is a tendency to assume that, if an argument appeals to consequentialist considerations (the goodness of outcomes), it is irrelevant to non-consequentialists. But that is a huge mistake. Non-consequentialism is the view that there’s more that determines rightness than the goodness of consequences or outcomes; it is not the view that the latter don’t matter. Even John Rawls wrote, “All ethical doctrines worth our attention take consequences into account in judging rightness. One which did not would simply be irrational, crazy.” Minimally plausible versions of deontology and virtue ethics must be concerned in part with promoting the good, from an impartial point of view. They’d thus imply very strong reasons to reduce existential risk, at least when this doesn’t significantly involve doing harm to others or damaging one’s character. What’s even more surprising, perhaps, is that even if our own good (or that of those near and dear to us) has much greater weight than goodness from the impartial “point of view of the universe,” indeed even if the latter is entirely morally irrelevant, we may nonetheless have very strong reasons to reduce existential risk. Even egoism, the view that each agent should maximize her own good, might imply strong reasons to reduce existential risk. It will depend, among other things, on what one’s own good consists in. If well-being consisted in pleasure only, it is somewhat harder to argue that egoism would imply strong reasons to reduce existential risk – perhaps we could argue that one would maximize her expected hedonic well-being by funding life extension technology or by having herself cryogenically frozen at the time of her bodily death as well as giving money to reduce existential risk (so that there is a world for her to live in!). I am not sure, however, how strong the reasons to do this would be. But views which imply that, if I don’t care about other people, I have no or very little reason to help them are not even minimally plausible views (in addition to hedonistic egoism, I here have in mind views that imply that one has no reason to perform an act unless one actually desires to do that act). To be minimally plausible, egoism will need to be paired with a more sophisticated account of well-being. To see this, it is enough to consider, as Plato did, the possibility of a ring of invisibility – suppose that, while wearing it, Ayn could derive some pleasure by helping the poor, but instead could derive just a bit more by severely harming them. Hedonistic egoism would absurdly imply she should do the latter. To avoid this implication, egoists would need to build something like the meaningfulness of a life into well-being, in some robust way, where this would to a significant extent be a function of other-regarding concerns (see chapter 12 of this classic intro to ethics). But once these elements are included, we can (roughly, as above) argue that this sort of egoism will imply strong reasons to reduce existential risk. Add to all of this Samuel Scheffler’s recent intriguing arguments (quick podcast version available here) that most of what makes our lives go well would be undermined if there were no future generations of intelligent persons. On his view, my life would contain vastly less well-being if (say) a year after my death the world came to an end. So obviously if Scheffler were right I’d have very strong reason to reduce existential risk. We should also take into account moral uncertainty. What is it reasonable for one to do, when one is uncertain not (only) about the empirical facts, but also about the moral facts? I’ve just argued that there’s agreement among minimally plausible ethical views that we have strong reason to reduce existential risk – not only consequentialists, but also deontologists, virtue ethicists, and sophisticated egoists should agree. But even those (hedonistic egoists) who disagree should have a significant level of confidence that they are mistaken, and that one of the above views is correct. Even if they were 90 sure that their view is the correct one (and 10 sure that one of these other ones is correct), they would have pretty strong reason, from the standpoint of moral uncertainty, to reduce existential risk. Perhaps most disturbingly still, even if we are only 1 sure that the well-being of possible future people matters, it is at least arguable that, from the standpoint of moral uncertainty, reducing existential risk is the most important thing in the world. Again, this is largely for the reason that there are so many people who could exist in the future – there are trillions upon trillions… upon trillions. (For more on this and other related issues, see this excellent dissertation). Of course, it is uncertain whether these untold trillions would, in general, have good lives. It’s possible they’ll be miserable. It is enough for my claim that there is moral agreement in the relevant sense if, at least given certain empirical claims about what future lives would most likely be like, all minimally plausible moral views would converge on the conclusion that we should try to save the world. While there are some non-crazy views that place significantly greater moral weight on avoiding suffering than on promoting happiness, for reasons others have offered (and for independent reasons I won’t get into here unless requested to), they nonetheless seem to be fairly implausible views. And even if things did not go well for our ancestors, I am optimistic that they will overall go fantastically well for our descendants, if we allow them to. I suspect that most of us alive today – at least those of us not suffering from extreme illness or poverty – have lives that are well worth living, and that things will continue to improve. Derek Parfit, whose work has emphasized future generations as well as agreement in ethics, described our situation clearly and accurately: “We live during the hinge of history. Given the scientific and technological discoveries of the last two centuries, the world has never changed as fast. We shall soon have even greater powers to transform, not only our surroundings, but ourselves and our successors. If we act wisely in the next few centuries, humanity will survive its most dangerous and decisive period. Our descendants could, if necessary, go elsewhere, spreading through this galaxy…. Our descendants might, I believe, make the further future very good. But that good future may also depend in part on us. If our selfish recklessness ends human history, we would be acting very wrongly.” (From chapter 36 of On What Matters)
12/4/21
JF22 - AC - Deleuze
Tournament: Harvard | Round: 6 | Opponent: Bergen County AK | Judge: Weiler, Reed
JF22 – AC - Deleuze
Framework
The body is constituted by the unending stream of affect. Yet only active affects are able to hold the line against determinist causes and effects, otherwise the subject becomes chained with passivity they have no sovereign control over. The subject must recognize certain interactions of joy and constitute relations with those specific movements in order for the affect to become active and the subject to attain power, HARDT "14
Hardt, Michael. "The power to be affected." International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 28.3 (2015): 215-222. This is a team purchased PDF accessed Jan 1 LHP HL The next step requires that we understand, engage, and select among the affects
AND
are defined by relations, but it will change you for the better.
The Transcendent subject of normativity fails in every creation of the new. It is this static sense of the rulebook that justifies constant state oppression and ignores constant passive and active affect. Deterritorialization is the only normative method that can critique the status quo and reassert new, egalitarian models constituted by realized active affect. Was it not deterritorialization that legalized gay marriage, passed the civil rights act, passed the 13th amendment? SMITH "03
~Daniel W. Smith (2003) Deleuze and the liberal tradition: normativity, freedom and judgement, Economy and Society, 32:2, 299-324, DOI: 10.1080/030851403200007345~ This is a team purchased PDF accessed Jan 1 LHP HL The first liberal notion Patton makes use of in his reading of Deleuze is the
AND
while still attempting to situate his own work fully within the liberal tradition.
Independently prefer our views of normativity and instability:
1~ Bindingness – every experience redefines us as subjects and leads to some affective response, we can’t opt out of being part of assemblages since those are molded around us
2~ Hijacks other frameworks – affectivity is a prerequisite to evaluating the effects of other actions since we first need to know how they change the subject
3~ Pre-fiat praxis – they get up and larp as a policy actor or kritikal academic only in the circumstances of the round but engage in different normative standards outside the round, proves obligations are subjective to situation
Minoritarian movements and constitutions of normativity are fostered by democratic becomings. It is only through reterritorializing social conceptions of identity that we become able to create a new society capable of realizing difference and breaking away from the major standard all are held to contrast. Thus, the standard and ROB is to become democratic, PATTON "08
Patton, Paul. "Becoming-democratic." Deleuze and politics (2008): 178-195. This is a team purchased PDF accessed Jan 1 LHP HL In democratic societies, responding to the intolerable will inevitably engage with elements of the
AND
tion of existing democracies and their reconfiguration in new social and political forms.
Impact Calc:
~1~ The 1AC framework comes at a higher layer to theory, —A~ deterritorialization constitutes our understanding of education i.e., questioning racist pedagogies in the past, —B~ and our understanding of fairness, i.e., recognition of equality as a value is from deterritorialization of prior views –C~ theory itself is a static territorialized standard that disregards assemblages –D~ theory is a major standard all are held to contrast, it IS NOT about access to debate, it’s about them WEAPONIZING theory otherwise they would have asked before the round or ADVOCATE for norms outside of round
~2~ Controls the internal link to all K alts and radical politics – the ability to speak out and fight for particular reforms is guaranteed by the deterritorialization and democratic becomings – alternatives without the aff shut down the collective ability to reterritorialize societal norms to advance that agenda
Offense
Outer Space constitutes enormous potential for lines of flight if presented in a smooth model that implies no arborescent connections between points. However, practices of appropriation attempt to organize and strictly territorialize Outer Space into static modes that prevent nomadic flows and impose striation and arborescent hierarchy into Earth itself through modes of positivity and cartography, SAGE "16
Sage, Daniel. How outer space made America: Geography, organization and the cosmic sublime. Routledge, 2016. This is a team purchased PDF accessed Feb 10. LHP HL Within Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987) we are provided
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not take place without reterritorialization’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 101).
Private appropriation and expansion of markets seek to compartmentalize and enforce major thought onto outer space. Only a nomadic relation of Cosmopolitan identity frees the space nomad to freely roam outer space, free of appropriation. Thus, I affirm the resolution through the lens of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. I will answer any questions about the advocacy during cx to clarify, TURNER and HOLTON "10
Turner, Bryan S., and Robert J. Holton, eds. The Routledge international handbook of globalization studies. New York: Routledge, 2010. This is a team purchased PDF accessed Jan 29 LHP HL Our argument has major implications for social identity and the politics of outer space.
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lead to the creation of alternative social, environmental, and political priorities.
Expansion of capital into space creates a space for it to thrive, preventing engagement with new strata and entrenching every corner of the earth with even more exploitation– Shammas and Holen 19:
~(Victor L, a sociologist working at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo; Tomas B., independent scholar in Oslo, Norway) "One giant leap for capitalistkind: private enterprise in outer space," 1-29-2019, pg. 5-6~ TDI Recut LHP PS, last access December 23 No longer terra nullius, space is now the new terra firma of capitalistkind:
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space as a domain made accessible in legal, technical, and economic ways
Underview
"Appropriation of outer space" by private entities refers to the exercise of exclusive control of space.
TIMOTHY JUSTIN TRAPP, JD Candidate @ UIUC Law, ’13, TAKING UP SPACE BY ANY OTHER MEANS: COMING TO TERMS WITH THE NONAPPROPRIATION ARTICLE OF THE OUTER SPACE TREATY UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LAW REVIEW ~Vol. 2013 No. 4~ https://www.illinoislawreview.org/wp-content/ilr-content/articles/2013/4/Trapp.pdf, DOA: Feb 19 2022 The issues presented in relation to the nonappropriation article of the Outer Space Treaty should
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218 In some aspects, this seems to effect exactly what those signatory nations
~1~ The aff gets 1AR theory –A~ checks infinite abuse in the 1N –B~ provides aff flex in 4 min 1ar against 7 min 1n –C~ If u get theory I do too, I couldn’t have read it in 1ac since abuse happened after
~2~ 1AR theory paradigm –A~ No RVIs, 6 min 2N has time to respond to every layer, but 3 min 2ar only has time to go for one, it’s a no risk solution for the aff –B~ DTD, your abuse skewed the entire round, I had to sacrifice a quarter of the 1ar to check your abuse –C~ competing interps, reasonability is arbitrary and a race to the bottom
~3~ Yes RVIs on 1N theory –A~ chilling effect, debaters could read 7 minutes of shells I can’t win off of and must spend the entire 1ar responding too –B~ Aff flex, double bind: either the interpretation is true and the 6min 2n should not have any problem collapsing and winning, or the interpretation is abusive to read, and you should lose for forcing me to respond to it
~4~ No new 2N args: 2ar only gets 3mins to respond, leads to structural preclusion
~5~ 1AR theory first, 6min 2N has the ability to split time on BOTH theory layers, allows the 3 min 2ar to engage if the 2N only goes for 3min of a specific interpretation
~6~ CX checks solve, ask me in cross or before round to meet your frivolous interpretations. That lets us actually begin to debate without the abuse you talk about
~7~ 1N must respond to args on every place they occur in the 1ac flow individually OR explicitly group them, they have enough time in the 7min 1N and otherwise it gets confusing for judges and debaters to realize concessions and flow
.
2/20/22
JF22 - AC - Property
Tournament: Sunvite | Round: 1 | Opponent: Cardinal Gibbons RS | Judge: Beckford, Saied Anti Blackness and Settler Colonialism are world-breaking forces. Whiteness has conquered every frontier of this planet and seeks to own, privitize, and destroy the universe, WALKER 82 Alice Walker 1982. "Only Justice Can Stop a Curse | Reimagine!." Reimaginerpe.org. n.d. Web. 16 Oct. 2019. https://www.reimaginerpe.org/node/946 QH DOA: Feb 19, 2022 This is a curse-prayer that Zora Neale Hurston, novelist and anthropologist, collected in the 1920s. And by then it was already old. I have often marveled at it. At the precision of its anger, the absoluteness of its bitterness. Its utter hatred of the enemies it condemns. It is a curse-prayer by a person who would readily, almost happily, commit suicide, if it meant her enemies would also die. Horribly. I am sure it was a woman who first prayed this curse. And I see her - Black, Yellow, Brown or Red, "aboriginal" as the Ancients are called in South Africa and Australia and other lands invaded, expropriated and occupied by whites. And I think, with astonishment, that the curse-prayer of this colored woman—starved, enslaved, humiliated and carelessly trampled to death—over centuries, is coming to pass. Indeed, like ancient peoples of color the world over, who have tried to tell the white man of the destruction that would inevitably follow from the uranium mining plunder of their sacred lands, this woman—along with millions and billions of obliterated sisters, brothers and children—seems to have put such enormous energy into her hope for revenge, that her curse seems close to bringing it about. And it is this hope for revenge, finally, I think, that is at the heart of People of Color's resistance to any anti-nuclear movement. In any case, this has been my own problem. When I have considered the enormity of the white man's crimes against humanity. Against women. Against every living person of color. Against the poor. Against my mother and my father. Against me . . . . When I consider that at this very moment he wishes to take away what little freedom I have died to achieve, through denial of my right to vote . . . . Has already taken away education, medicine, housing and food. . . . That William Shockley is saying at this moment that he will run for the Senate of my country to push his theory that Blacks are genetically inferior and should be sterilized. . . . When I consider that he is, they are, a real and present threat to my life and the life of my daughter, my people, I think - in perfect harmony with my sisters of long ago: Let the earth marinate in poisons. Let the bombs cover the ground like rain. For nothing short of total destruction will ever teach them anything. And it would be good, perhaps, to put an end to the species in any case, rather than let the white man continue to subjugate it, and continue to let their lust dominate, exploit and despoil not just our planet, but the rest of the universe, which is their clear and oft-stated intention; leaving their arrogance and litter not just on the moon, but on everything they can reach. If we have any true love for the stars, planets, the rest of Creation, we must do everything we can to keep white man away from them. They who have appointed themselves our representatives to the rest of the universe. They who have never met any new creature without exploiting, abusing and destroying it. They who say we poor and colored and female and elderly blight neighborhoods, while they blight worlds. What they have done to the Old, they will do to the New. Under the white man every star would become a South Africa, every planet a Vietnam. Fatally irradiating ourselves may in fact be the only way to save others from what Earth has already become. And this is a consideration that I believe requires some serious thought from every one of us. However, just as the sun shines on the godly and the ungodly alike, so does nuclear radiation. And with this knowledge it becomes increasingly difficult to embrace the thought of extinction purely for the assumed satisfaction of—from the grave—achieving revenge. Or even of accepting our demise as a planet as a simple and just preventative medicine administered to the universe. Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it. In any case, Earth is my home—though for centuries white people have tried to convince me I have no right to exist, except in the dirtiest, darkest corners of the globe. So let me tell you: I intend to protect my home. Praying—not a curse—only the hope that my courage will not fail my love. But if by some miracle, and all our struggle, the earth is spared, only justice to every living thing (and everything alive) will save humankind. And we are not saved yet. Only justice can stop a curse. We are told that space travel is for our greatest minds, obscuring the original frontier. For the conquering of the stars requires the conquering of the mind. The tabula rasa mind is the original battlefield, violently securing the empty interiority of the enlightenment body. Ownership of the earth secured ownership over one's mind, MOTEN and HARNEY 1 Moten and Harney 21, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney, “The Theft of Assembly”, All Incomplete, Minor Compositions, 2021, pg(16), HTE https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Harney_Stefano_Moten_Fred_All_Incomplete_2021.pdf DOA: Feb 19, 2022 If this is true, we should be worried. In its origins, and its contemporary mutations, logistics is a regulatory force standing against us, standing against the earth. Logistics begins in loss and emptiness. And it begins in a fundamental misapprehension called spacetime. The loss that marks ownership, specifically the ownership of private property, the loss of sharing, the loss of the earth and the consequent making of the world, is simultaneously the misapprehension that what is privatized is empty and will be filled by ownership itself, by properties, by properties placed into it. This emptiness will be filled with an interior. This emptiness is confirmed by logistics, by the mobilization, the colonizing drive, of this interior – where properties are imported into empty space. This begins, again, with Locke or, at least, we can begin again through him. His concept of the mind as tabula rasa – often portrayed as an Enlightenment move away from predetermination – is a projection of this emptiness that must be owned and filled. For this emptiness to become private property it must be filled with and located in the coordinates of space and time. Space emerges as the delimitation of what is mine, and time begins with the theft and imposition when it became mine. The individual mind and its coming to maturity out of the tabula rasa mark this first conquest. Enlightenment interiority emerged from this emplotment of time and space – to borrow from Hayden White – this separation from what is shared. But interiority is only for the owning mind. Because what allows this mind to take possession of itself is its ability to grasp property, which is something it now posits as beyond itself. It takes what it is taken from for what it needs to create itself, and not just needs but compulsively, interminably, voraciously seeks without end. In other words, the emplotment of time and space in the mind takes place through the emplotment of time and space on earth, in a conversion of emptiness into world, and is simultaneously taken as a fulfillment of mind, its interior appointment in and of what can now be conceptualized as body. Is it a leap to say logic and logistics start here inseparably?
The European colonial project begins and begins and begins through property. For as many means in enlightenment thought, there are no ends on the frontier of conquest. The privatized appropriation of outer space is racial capitalism's continual drive towards death. The Martian frontier lays as only one stop on logistics’ intergalactic assembly line of domination. And thus I affirm that the appropriation of outer space by private entities is unjust.
Whiteness globalizes itself through property. To own and improve the Earth is to separate oneself from all. Only the mythically differentiated subject can own the land, animals, and resources that offer its relation to it, MOTEN and HARNEY 2 Moten and Harney 21, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney, “Usufruct and Use”, All Incomplete, Minor Compositions, 2021, pg(28-30), HTE https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Harney_Stefano_Moten_Fred_All_Incomplete_2021.pdf DOA: Feb 19, 2022 What does it mean to stand for improvement? Or worse, to stand for what business calls a ‘commitment to continuous improvement‘? It means to stand for the brutal speciation of all. To take a stand for speciation is the beginning of a diabolical usufruct. Improvement comes to us by way of an innovation in land tenure, where individuated ownership, derived from increasing the land’s productivity, is given in the perpetual, and thus arrested, becoming of exception’s miniature. This is to say that from the outset, the ability to own – and that ability’s first derivative, self-possession – is entwined with the ability to make more productive. In order to be improved, to be rendered more productive, land must be violently reduced to its productivity, which is the regulatory diminishment and management of earthly generativity. Speciation is this general reduction of the earth to productivity and submission of the earth to techniques of domination that isolate and enforce particular increases in and accelerations of productivity. In this regard, (necessarily European) man, in and as the exception, imposes speciation upon himself, in an operation that extracts and excepts himself from the earth in order to confirm his supposed dominion over it. And just as the earth must be forcefully speciated to be possessed, man must forcefully speciate himself in order to enact this kind of possession. This is to say that racialization is present in the very idea of dominion over the earth; in the very idea and enactment of the exception; in the very nuts and bolts of possession-by-improvement. Forms of racialization that both Michel Foucault and, especially and most vividly, Robinson identify in medieval Europe become usufructed with modern possession through improvement. Speciated humans are endlessly improved through the endless work they do on their endless way to becoming Man. This is the usufruct of man. In early modern England, establishing title to land by making it more productive meant eliminating biodiversity and isolating and breeding a species – barley or rye or pigs. Localized ecosystems were aggressively transformed so that monocultural productivity smothers anacultural generativity. The emergent relation between speciation and racialization is the very conception and conceptualization of the settler. Maintenance of that relation is his vigil and his eve. For the encloser, possession is established through improvement – this is true for the possession of land and for the possession of self. The Enlightenment is the universalization/globalization of the imperative to possess and its corollary, the imperative to improve. However, this productivity must always confront its contradictory impoverishment: the destruction of its biosphere and its estrangement in, if not from, entanglement, both of which combine to ensure the liquidation of the human differential that is already present in the very idea of man, the exception. To stand for such improvement is to invoke policy, which attributes depletion to the difference, which is to say the wealth, whose simultaneous destruction and accumulation policy is meant to operationalize. This attribution of a supposedly essential lack, an inevitable and supposedly natural diminution, is achieved alongside the imposition of possession-by-improvement. To make policy is to impose speciation upon everybody and everything, to inflict impoverishment in the name of improvement, to invoke the universal law of the usufruct of man. In this context, continuous improvement, as it emerged with decolonization and particularly with the defeat of national capitalism in the 1970s, is the continuous crisis of speciation in the surround of the general antagonism. This is the contradiction Robinson constantly invoked and analyzed with the kind of profound and solemn optimism that comes from being with, and being of service to, your friends
Ownership is at the heart of colonial logistics feedback loop. The more the enlightenment man owns, the more violence he must commit to protect it. Whiteness developed as an exponential militarized force to protect all he appropriated on the frontier, MOTEN and HARNEY 3 Moten and Harney 21, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney, “The Theft of Assembly”, All Incomplete, Minor Compositions, 2021, pg(16-17), HTE https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Harney_Stefano_Moten_Fred_All_Incomplete_2021.pdf DOA: Feb 19, 2022 This is why there is no separating Locke the Enlightenment thinker from Locke the writer on race, the author of the notorious colonial constitution of the Carolinas. Ownership was a feedback loop – the more you own the more you own yourself. The more logistics you apply the more logic you acquire; the more logic you deploy the more logistics you require. As Hortense Spillers says, the transatlantic slave trade was the supply chain of Enlightenment. It was never-ending quest and conquest, because ownership is perpetual loss. Gilles Deleuze said that he would rather call power “sad.” We might say the same of ownership, where lies the most direct sense of loss of sharing. This feeling of loss translates into a diabolical obsession with loss prevention. Logistics emerges as much as the science of loss prevention as the science of moving property through the emptiness, of making the world as it travels by filling it. This is not making the road as we walk, in the anarchist tradition. This is converting everything in its path into a coordinated time and space for ownership. Such seizing, such grasping, and such loss prevention is the mode of operation for the wickedness of the Atlantic slave trade, the first massive, diabolic, commercial logistics. Already this feedback loop of ownership experiences amplified loss, the loss of sharing, with each emplotment. But now, in taking up the European heritage of race and slavery that Robinson identifes as emerging in the class struggle in Europe in the centuries directly before Locke and extending into Locke’s own time, a double loss is experienced, an intensifcation of the ownership feedback loop (and what we call the subject reaction). This evil emplotment of Africans is experienced as the potential loss of property that can flee. It is in this double loss of sharing – given in owning and in the imposition of being-owned – that the most deadly, planet-threatening, disease of the species-being emerges: whiteness. And it is for this reason that we can say logistics is the white science. (This is what many white people – who are the people, as James Baldwin says, who think they are white or that they ought to be – are doing when you see them walk straight past a queue of people and take a seat, or move to the center of a crowded room, or speak more loudly than those around them, or block a sidewalk while discussing ‘choices’ with their toddler. Making theory out of practice, they are emplotted, as they’ve been taught to do, establishing the spacetime of possession and self-possession in ownership. Every step they take is a standing of ground, a stomping of the world out of earthly existence and into racial capitalist human being. It grows more pronounced the more it is threatened, consumed by its own feedback loop, and it produces sharper and sharper subject reactions in the face of this threat. This is the old/new fascism: not the anonymity of following the leader, but the subject reaction to leadership, which can just as easily imagine itself to be liberal dissent from, as supposedly opposed to a lock(e)-step repetition of, its call. Politics pathologizes the general antagonism in order to prescribe more and more politics. We refuse this prescription and embrace a metaphysics of incompleteness, MOTEN and HARNEY 4 Moten and Harney 21, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney, “We Want a Precedent”, All Incomplete, Minor Compositions, 2021, pg(23-26), HTE https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Harney_Stefano_Moten_Fred_All_Incomplete_2021.pdf DOA: Feb 19, 2022 Our President, our deluded and degraded and demonic sovereign, in whatever form this abstraction of our abstract and wholly fictional equivalence will have taken, is a featureless point on a long and hopelessly straight line of knock-offs. It’s like how Richard of Bordeaux, who can do whatever he wants except stop himself from doing whatever he wants, carries around his own deposition (disguised as the serial murder that constitutes the peaceful transition of power and its vulgar ceremonies) like a genetic faw, as the illegitimate but inevitably heritable Bolingbroke-ass ambitions that leave him with ever increasingly etiolated capacities for self-refection. So that in all its singularly focused limitation and qualification, in the relative nothingness of the prison that it calls a world, the all-encompassing and all to be settled sphere that it stomps all over all the time, posing for an impossible arc of deadly and impossible pictures, our President, whichever one you ever wanted or didn’t want, each one after the other in noticeable imperial decline, is just a sick, uneasy head in a hollow crown, making us watch it talk about how it’s gonna kill us and then making us watch it kill us. 2. What we want is usually said to be all bound up with what we don’t have. Zoe Leonard’s been talking about what we want, though, slantedly, in the dimensionless infinity room we can’t even crawl around in when we cruise the rub and whirr of the city as a grove of aspen in late fall, in the mountains, held and unheld at the bottom of the sea. She’s talking about what we want in relation to what we have when what we have is all this experience of not having, of shared nothing, of sharing nothingness. She speaks of and from a common underprivilege, from the privilege of the common underground, in and from the wealth of a precarity that goes from hand to hand, as a caress. Look at all the richness we have, she says, in having lost, in having suffered, in having been suffered, in suffering one another as if we were one another’s little children, as if we were in love with one another, as if we loved one another so much that all one and another can do is go. We want a president, Zoe says, who’s loved and lost all that with us, who’s shared our little all, our little nothing. Such a thing, the general and generative nothingness that is more and less than political, would be unprecedented. Maybe she doesn’t want a president; maybe she wants a precedent, the endlessly new thing of the absolutely no thing, its Zen xenogenerosity, its queer reproductivity, which keeps on beginning in beginning’s absence as ungoverned and ungovernable care(ss). 3. Is it possible to want what you have become in suffering, both in the absence and in the depths of suffrage, without wanting what it is to suffer? Can you want what it is to be all, and want what it is to be whole, without wanting to be complete? Is it possible to crave the general incompleteness without that seemingly unbearable desire to be pierced, ruptured, broken? In lieu of the president we want and don’t want, we have Cedric Robinson, whom just a little while ago we lost. He says: If, in some spiteful play, one were compelled by some demon or god to choose a transgression against Nietzsche so profound and fundamental to his temperament and intention as to break apart the ground on which his philosophy stood, one could do no better than this: a society which has woven into its matrix for the purpose of suspending and neutralizing those forces antithetic to individual autonomy, the constructed reality that all are equally incomplete. A logic is being jousted here. Is it not so that the emergence of power as the instrument of certainty in human organization is seen by many to be the consequence of and response to the circumstances of inequality and sensed social entropy? Is it not so that individual autonomy, rare enough in the first condition and imperiled by the second, is in the final construction made foreign? And does not, logically, even autonomy require for its nurturance a hothouse of certitude similar to that required for the evolution of power – autonomy being to a degree a variant of power? Then the principle of incompleteness – the absence of discrete organismic integrity, if it were to occupy in a metaphysics the place of inequality in political philosophy, would bring to human society a paradigm subversive to political authority as the archetypical resolution, as the prescription for order.5 How can we come more accurately to understand American democracy – the brutality of our improvement, the viciousness of the ways we are put to use – as the praxis of privatized interest in inequality, expressed in the theory of the abstract equality of every complete individual, whose constant recitation brutally regulates the general interest in an equality given in and as an absolute incompleteness that defies individuation? How can we come to understand that the interinanimation of our bondage and our freedom – and, therefore, of our liberalism and our protest – is the metaphysical foundation of a national political philosophy that we have come to claim in violation of the precedent we want. How can we disavow that claim, having learned to want to want the order from which our forced desire is derived to be drowned in the disorder of all (the nothing) we have? How can we more intensely feel the physics of our surround, our social aesthetic, the gravity of our love and loss, our shared, radically sounded, radically sent incompleteness? What would it mean to say we cannot take a position on politics – even the old and honorable ‘I don’t vote because I’m Marxist‘ position? What if we said we have no options, that here we don’t even have the option of no option? We think that would be good. Zoe gets us started: to think off of what we want is lightly to inhabit not being and not having, here.
The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater with the best method for partial education. Racial capitalism calls us into individuation through a total education that demands a call to order through instruction and self-improvement, MOTEN and HARNEY 5 Moten and Harney 21, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney, “A Partial Education”, All Incomplete, Minor Compositions, 2021, pg(62-67), HTE https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Harney_Stefano_Moten_Fred_All_Incomplete_2021.pdf DOA: Feb 19, 2022 Now Foucault stressed that because this instruction represented the reform of ‘perverted‘ bodies – bodies that previously had no such discipline – any call for reforming the modern prison was a call for more instruction. Reform produced more instruction. Instruction produced more constraint, or discipline. Discipline only confirmed the underlying perversion of these bodies, and called forth more reform, which called forth more instruction to reform the perversion discipline confirmed. This process is reflected in Foucault’s use of the oxymoron “perverted individual,” an oxymoron that is nonetheless the source of total education. Perversion violates the principle of the individual by failing to accede to its proper boundaries and comportments, and thus the perverted individual is an ongoing violation that calls total education into being. In Foucault’s account, perversion appears as a turning aside (from the truth) that is, somehow, prior, already existing. A prior turn. An already given turning that requires straightening, that summons reform. Instruction is how we get straightened out insofar as it is how one is straightened out. Correction begins with the ascription of the body itself, the imposition of body onto flesh; the attribution of perversion to the specific body, which justifies its correction, follows from its isolation and manifests itself as the theft of the body that has been imposed by those who assert a right to instruct insofar as theirs are bodies that they have supposedly both claimed and transcended. The ascription of body, the imposition of bounded and enclosed self-possession, of a discrete self subject to ownership, of ownership activated and confirmed either in theft or trade, might be said to be the first reform, the first improvement, insofar as it is the condition of possibility of reform, or improvement. The assignment of body to flesh is the first stripe of the long, hard, torturously straight, tortuously straightened row. Instruction is the setting in order, the straightening out. Instruction thereby reveals the essential relationship between improvement and impoverishment, between the private and privation at the heart of total education. Perversion’s wealth becomes education’s profit. Today there would appear to be few examples of Foucault’s total education in prison regimes. The program of reform, the program of prisoner improvement, has been replaced almost everywhere by one of punishment alone, or what Foucault calls simply the deprivation of liberty. At the same time, in pointing out that the current prison program of ‘slow-motion genocide’ has long been the global norm in racialized regimes, abolitionist scholars refuse to countenance reform of the exception, alerting us to the fact that reform of the prison and reform of the prisoner are as much modalities of genocide as the interplay of privation and privatization that racial incarceration relentlessly innovates.29 But what if? What if perversion is placed under constraint in the very idea of individuation, which projects improvement’s subject as improvement’s object? Then the figure of the perverted individual is always already in the system. Conversely, if perversion’s location in the individual body is a form of imprisonment and instruction, then perversion is an already given anti-/ante-individuation. If prison/school are two sides of a common institutional structure that operates by way of individuation, then perversion is a pre-carceral breaking out of prison, a pre-scholarly dropping out of school, that continually reveals the ubiquity of the total education that hunts it down and puts it to work. Insofar as it is the case that in prison and in school one’s job is to learn, to get it straight, to straighten out, then it is also the case that every citizen and non-citizen, every person and non-person, every worker who is in or out of work – even the enemy combatant, the prisoner, and the supposedly unemployable – is subject to a total education Whiteness is anti-thetical to relationality and community formation, abolition requires working against the subject, HARNEY 17 Stefano Harney (part 2), by Michael Schapira and Jesse Montgomery, August 10, 2017Jesse Montgomery is an editor at Full Stop and a graduate student in the English department at Vanderbilt University. Michael Schapira is an Interviews editor at Full Stop and teaches Philosophy at Hofstra University. A version of this conversation originally appeared in the Full Stop Quarterly Issue #5.http://www.full-stop.net/2017/08/10/interviews/michael-schapira-and-jesse-montgomery/stefano-harney-part-2/ DOA: Feb 19, 2022 The authors quote Frank Wilderson on the way blackness can never be disimbricated from the violence of slavery. Then they say: ‘Those who would risk extending solidarity across racial boundaries would find themselves the recipient of exemplary violence in order to instill fear of constant consequence for this treason. Ever after, meaningful cross-racial affinity can only be found in moments of revolutionary violence.” (IStefano Harney (part 2) | Full Stoptalics in the original.) Now this is an historical observation on their part, but to some extent it is also programmatic for the authors. As an observation, well, they have just convinced me of its validity in the last 250 pages, and as program, well, I’m not a pacifist. I’m for self-defense, and that can be violent. But do words like solidarity, affinity, to say nothing of the unlovely term allyship, accidentally preserve something we want to abolish? And I feel bad using Shirley and Stafford to make this point because theirs is such a good book, but maybe that’s why I feel compelled to say, ‘even here’ this question comes up. What I mean is who is this someone in solidarity with blackness, who is this ally of blackness, who is this someone with affinity to black struggle? I think this means that this someone has his or her own struggles and is indicating that now she or he wants to join not in common struggles, but in the struggles of blackness. Because in a sense you have to have your own thing to be an ally or to be in solidarity. Ok, but what are your own struggles from which you would be offering solidarity, allyship, affinity? Are you organizing in the white community, is that it? I think that is the implication, that you have been working in white communities, and/or on the environment, or feminist issues, etc. But the problem is, there’s no such thing as a white community. A white community is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron. You can’t organize an oxymoron. The only thing you can do with a white community is work to abolish it. Moreover at that point of abolition we may be able to say there is no such thing as a community, that a community is an oxymoron. You can’t commune and have a community. Communing is anti-community. It’s undercommon. Maybe the only kind of community that is possible is the maroon community, because it is by definition not a community, and when in some historical instances (of necessity even) it became one, it took on the same murderous qualities of any community. Okay, so then the question arising, if you do abolish the white community, what of the people who were marked as white, and in many cases who dwelt in the supremacy of whiteness, what becomes of them? Well, in the practice of abolition they will move closer to the only thing they ever had that was about life and not death, about love and not hate, blackness. This is to say, people who present as white are not allies, or in solidarity, or showing affinity, because they have nothing of their own, no place from which to show this, no resource to bring, unless and until they embrace the one thing of their own they disown. The thing that can’t be owned born(e) of the owned, blackness. Now white people aren’t coming with much blackness, by definition. And this is why the underlying humility motivating terms like ally, solidarity, and affinity is not misplaced, if that is indeed what underlies their use in practice. In any case, whiteness is either absence or violence, and in either case, not much to offer as an ally. But on the other hand white people have a big role to play in the revolutionary violence Shirley and Stafford speak of because the act of abolition of white communities is a monumental task.
2/20/22
JF22 - AC - Property v2
Tournament: Sunvite | Round: 3 | Opponent: American Heritage Broward JA | Judge: Maher, TJ Anti Blackness and Settler Colonialism are world-breaking forces. Whiteness has conquered every frontier of this planet and seeks to own, privitize, and destroy the universe, WALKER 82 Alice Walker 1982. "Only Justice Can Stop a Curse | Reimagine!." Reimaginerpe.org. n.d. Web. 16 Oct. 2019. https://www.reimaginerpe.org/node/946 QH DOA: Feb 19, 2022 This is a curse-prayer that Zora Neale Hurston, novelist and anthropologist, collected in the 1920s. And by then it was already old. I have often marveled at it. At the precision of its anger, the absoluteness of its bitterness. Its utter hatred of the enemies it condemns. It is a curse-prayer by a person who would readily, almost happily, commit suicide, if it meant her enemies would also die. Horribly. I am sure it was a woman who first prayed this curse. And I see her - Black, Yellow, Brown or Red, "aboriginal" as the Ancients are called in South Africa and Australia and other lands invaded, expropriated and occupied by whites. And I think, with astonishment, that the curse-prayer of this colored woman—starved, enslaved, humiliated and carelessly trampled to death—over centuries, is coming to pass. Indeed, like ancient peoples of color the world over, who have tried to tell the white man of the destruction that would inevitably follow from the uranium mining plunder of their sacred lands, this woman—along with millions and billions of obliterated sisters, brothers and children—seems to have put such enormous energy into her hope for revenge, that her curse seems close to bringing it about. And it is this hope for revenge, finally, I think, that is at the heart of People of Color's resistance to any anti-nuclear movement. In any case, this has been my own problem. When I have considered the enormity of the white man's crimes against humanity. Against women. Against every living person of color. Against the poor. Against my mother and my father. Against me . . . . When I consider that at this very moment he wishes to take away what little freedom I have died to achieve, through denial of my right to vote . . . . Has already taken away education, medicine, housing and food. . . . That William Shockley is saying at this moment that he will run for the Senate of my country to push his theory that Blacks are genetically inferior and should be sterilized. . . . When I consider that he is, they are, a real and present threat to my life and the life of my daughter, my people, I think - in perfect harmony with my sisters of long ago: Let the earth marinate in poisons. Let the bombs cover the ground like rain. For nothing short of total destruction will ever teach them anything. And it would be good, perhaps, to put an end to the species in any case, rather than let the white man continue to subjugate it, and continue to let their lust dominate, exploit and despoil not just our planet, but the rest of the universe, which is their clear and oft-stated intention; leaving their arrogance and litter not just on the moon, but on everything they can reach. If we have any true love for the stars, planets, the rest of Creation, we must do everything we can to keep white man away from them. They who have appointed themselves our representatives to the rest of the universe. They who have never met any new creature without exploiting, abusing and destroying it. They who say we poor and colored and female and elderly blight neighborhoods, while they blight worlds. What they have done to the Old, they will do to the New. Under the white man every star would become a South Africa, every planet a Vietnam. Fatally irradiating ourselves may in fact be the only way to save others from what Earth has already become. And this is a consideration that I believe requires some serious thought from every one of us. However, just as the sun shines on the godly and the ungodly alike, so does nuclear radiation. And with this knowledge it becomes increasingly difficult to embrace the thought of extinction purely for the assumed satisfaction of—from the grave—achieving revenge. Or even of accepting our demise as a planet as a simple and just preventative medicine administered to the universe. Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it. In any case, Earth is my home—though for centuries white people have tried to convince me I have no right to exist, except in the dirtiest, darkest corners of the globe. So let me tell you: I intend to protect my home. Praying—not a curse—only the hope that my courage will not fail my love. But if by some miracle, and all our struggle, the earth is spared, only justice to every living thing (and everything alive) will save humankind. And we are not saved yet. Only justice can stop a curse. We are told that space travel is for our greatest minds, obscuring the original frontier. For the conquering of the stars requires the conquering of the mind. The tabula rasa mind is the original battlefield, violently securing the empty interiority of the enlightenment body. Ownership of the earth secured ownership over one's mind, MOTEN and HARNEY 1 Moten and Harney 21, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney, “The Theft of Assembly”, All Incomplete, Minor Compositions, 2021, pg(16), HTE https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Harney_Stefano_Moten_Fred_All_Incomplete_2021.pdf DOA: Feb 19, 2022 If this is true, we should be worried. In its origins, and its contemporary mutations, logistics is a regulatory force standing against us, standing against the earth. Logistics begins in loss and emptiness. And it begins in a fundamental misapprehension called spacetime. The loss that marks ownership, specifically the ownership of private property, the loss of sharing, the loss of the earth and the consequent making of the world, is simultaneously the misapprehension that what is privatized is empty and will be filled by ownership itself, by properties, by properties placed into it. This emptiness will be filled with an interior. This emptiness is confirmed by logistics, by the mobilization, the colonizing drive, of this interior – where properties are imported into empty space. This begins, again, with Locke or, at least, we can begin again through him. His concept of the mind as tabula rasa – often portrayed as an Enlightenment move away from predetermination – is a projection of this emptiness that must be owned and filled. For this emptiness to become private property it must be filled with and located in the coordinates of space and time. Space emerges as the delimitation of what is mine, and time begins with the theft and imposition when it became mine. The individual mind and its coming to maturity out of the tabula rasa mark this first conquest. Enlightenment interiority emerged from this emplotment of time and space – to borrow from Hayden White – this separation from what is shared. But interiority is only for the owning mind. Because what allows this mind to take possession of itself is its ability to grasp property, which is something it now posits as beyond itself. It takes what it is taken from for what it needs to create itself, and not just needs but compulsively, interminably, voraciously seeks without end. In other words, the emplotment of time and space in the mind takes place through the emplotment of time and space on earth, in a conversion of emptiness into world, and is simultaneously taken as a fulfillment of mind, its interior appointment in and of what can now be conceptualized as body. Is it a leap to say logic and logistics start here inseparably?
The European colonial project begins and begins and begins through property. For as many means in enlightenment thought, there are no ends on the frontier of conquest. The privatized appropriation of outer space is racial capitalism's continual drive towards death. The Martian frontier lays as only one stop on logistics’ intergalactic assembly line of domination. And thus I affirm that the appropriation of outer space by private entities is unjust.
Whiteness globalizes itself through property. To own and improve the Earth is to separate oneself from all. Only the mythically differentiated subject can own the land, animals, and resources that offer its relation to it, MOTEN and HARNEY 2 Moten and Harney 21, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney, “Usufruct and Use”, All Incomplete, Minor Compositions, 2021, pg(28-30), HTE https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Harney_Stefano_Moten_Fred_All_Incomplete_2021.pdf DOA: Feb 19, 2022 What does it mean to stand for improvement? Or worse, to stand for what business calls a ‘commitment to continuous improvement‘? It means to stand for the brutal speciation of all. To take a stand for speciation is the beginning of a diabolical usufruct. Improvement comes to us by way of an innovation in land tenure, where individuated ownership, derived from increasing the land’s productivity, is given in the perpetual, and thus arrested, becoming of exception’s miniature. This is to say that from the outset, the ability to own – and that ability’s first derivative, self-possession – is entwined with the ability to make more productive. In order to be improved, to be rendered more productive, land must be violently reduced to its productivity, which is the regulatory diminishment and management of earthly generativity. Speciation is this general reduction of the earth to productivity and submission of the earth to techniques of domination that isolate and enforce particular increases in and accelerations of productivity. In this regard, (necessarily European) man, in and as the exception, imposes speciation upon himself, in an operation that extracts and excepts himself from the earth in order to confirm his supposed dominion over it. And just as the earth must be forcefully speciated to be possessed, man must forcefully speciate himself in order to enact this kind of possession. This is to say that racialization is present in the very idea of dominion over the earth; in the very idea and enactment of the exception; in the very nuts and bolts of possession-by-improvement. Forms of racialization that both Michel Foucault and, especially and most vividly, Robinson identify in medieval Europe become usufructed with modern possession through improvement. Speciated humans are endlessly improved through the endless work they do on their endless way to becoming Man. This is the usufruct of man. In early modern England, establishing title to land by making it more productive meant eliminating biodiversity and isolating and breeding a species – barley or rye or pigs. Localized ecosystems were aggressively transformed so that monocultural productivity smothers anacultural generativity. The emergent relation between speciation and racialization is the very conception and conceptualization of the settler. Maintenance of that relation is his vigil and his eve. For the encloser, possession is established through improvement – this is true for the possession of land and for the possession of self. The Enlightenment is the universalization/globalization of the imperative to possess and its corollary, the imperative to improve. However, this productivity must always confront its contradictory impoverishment: the destruction of its biosphere and its estrangement in, if not from, entanglement, both of which combine to ensure the liquidation of the human differential that is already present in the very idea of man, the exception. To stand for such improvement is to invoke policy, which attributes depletion to the difference, which is to say the wealth, whose simultaneous destruction and accumulation policy is meant to operationalize. This attribution of a supposedly essential lack, an inevitable and supposedly natural diminution, is achieved alongside the imposition of possession-by-improvement. To make policy is to impose speciation upon everybody and everything, to inflict impoverishment in the name of improvement, to invoke the universal law of the usufruct of man. In this context, continuous improvement, as it emerged with decolonization and particularly with the defeat of national capitalism in the 1970s, is the continuous crisis of speciation in the surround of the general antagonism. This is the contradiction Robinson constantly invoked and analyzed with the kind of profound and solemn optimism that comes from being with, and being of service to, your friends
Ownership is at the heart of colonial logistics feedback loop. The more the enlightenment man owns, the more violence he must commit to protect it. Whiteness developed as an exponential militarized force to protect all he appropriated on the frontier, MOTEN and HARNEY 3 Moten and Harney 21, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney, “The Theft of Assembly”, All Incomplete, Minor Compositions, 2021, pg(16-17), HTE https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Harney_Stefano_Moten_Fred_All_Incomplete_2021.pdf DOA: Feb 19, 2022 This is why there is no separating Locke the Enlightenment thinker from Locke the writer on race, the author of the notorious colonial constitution of the Carolinas. Ownership was a feedback loop – the more you own the more you own yourself. The more logistics you apply the more logic you acquire; the more logic you deploy the more logistics you require. As Hortense Spillers says, the transatlantic slave trade was the supply chain of Enlightenment. It was never-ending quest and conquest, because ownership is perpetual loss. Gilles Deleuze said that he would rather call power “sad.” We might say the same of ownership, where lies the most direct sense of loss of sharing. This feeling of loss translates into a diabolical obsession with loss prevention. Logistics emerges as much as the science of loss prevention as the science of moving property through the emptiness, of making the world as it travels by filling it. This is not making the road as we walk, in the anarchist tradition. This is converting everything in its path into a coordinated time and space for ownership. Such seizing, such grasping, and such loss prevention is the mode of operation for the wickedness of the Atlantic slave trade, the first massive, diabolic, commercial logistics. Already this feedback loop of ownership experiences amplified loss, the loss of sharing, with each emplotment. But now, in taking up the European heritage of race and slavery that Robinson identifes as emerging in the class struggle in Europe in the centuries directly before Locke and extending into Locke’s own time, a double loss is experienced, an intensifcation of the ownership feedback loop (and what we call the subject reaction). This evil emplotment of Africans is experienced as the potential loss of property that can flee. It is in this double loss of sharing – given in owning and in the imposition of being-owned – that the most deadly, planet-threatening, disease of the species-being emerges: whiteness. And it is for this reason that we can say logistics is the white science. (This is what many white people – who are the people, as James Baldwin says, who think they are white or that they ought to be – are doing when you see them walk straight past a queue of people and take a seat, or move to the center of a crowded room, or speak more loudly than those around them, or block a sidewalk while discussing ‘choices’ with their toddler. Making theory out of practice, they are emplotted, as they’ve been taught to do, establishing the spacetime of possession and self-possession in ownership. Every step they take is a standing of ground, a stomping of the world out of earthly existence and into racial capitalist human being. It grows more pronounced the more it is threatened, consumed by its own feedback loop, and it produces sharper and sharper subject reactions in the face of this threat. This is the old/new fascism: not the anonymity of following the leader, but the subject reaction to leadership, which can just as easily imagine itself to be liberal dissent from, as supposedly opposed to a lock(e)-step repetition of, its call. Politics pathologizes the general antagonism in order to prescribe more and more politics. We refuse this prescription and embrace a metaphysics of incompleteness, MOTEN and HARNEY 4 Moten and Harney 21, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney, “We Want a Precedent”, All Incomplete, Minor Compositions, 2021, pg(23-26), HTE https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Harney_Stefano_Moten_Fred_All_Incomplete_2021.pdf DOA: Feb 19, 2022 Our President, our deluded and degraded and demonic sovereign, in whatever form this abstraction of our abstract and wholly fictional equivalence will have taken, is a featureless point on a long and hopelessly straight line of knock-offs. It’s like how Richard of Bordeaux, who can do whatever he wants except stop himself from doing whatever he wants, carries around his own deposition (disguised as the serial murder that constitutes the peaceful transition of power and its vulgar ceremonies) like a genetic faw, as the illegitimate but inevitably heritable Bolingbroke-ass ambitions that leave him with ever increasingly etiolated capacities for self-refection. So that in all its singularly focused limitation and qualification, in the relative nothingness of the prison that it calls a world, the all-encompassing and all to be settled sphere that it stomps all over all the time, posing for an impossible arc of deadly and impossible pictures, our President, whichever one you ever wanted or didn’t want, each one after the other in noticeable imperial decline, is just a sick, uneasy head in a hollow crown, making us watch it talk about how it’s gonna kill us and then making us watch it kill us. 2. What we want is usually said to be all bound up with what we don’t have. Zoe Leonard’s been talking about what we want, though, slantedly, in the dimensionless infinity room we can’t even crawl around in when we cruise the rub and whirr of the city as a grove of aspen in late fall, in the mountains, held and unheld at the bottom of the sea. She’s talking about what we want in relation to what we have when what we have is all this experience of not having, of shared nothing, of sharing nothingness. She speaks of and from a common underprivilege, from the privilege of the common underground, in and from the wealth of a precarity that goes from hand to hand, as a caress. Look at all the richness we have, she says, in having lost, in having suffered, in having been suffered, in suffering one another as if we were one another’s little children, as if we were in love with one another, as if we loved one another so much that all one and another can do is go. We want a president, Zoe says, who’s loved and lost all that with us, who’s shared our little all, our little nothing. Such a thing, the general and generative nothingness that is more and less than political, would be unprecedented. Maybe she doesn’t want a president; maybe she wants a precedent, the endlessly new thing of the absolutely no thing, its Zen xenogenerosity, its queer reproductivity, which keeps on beginning in beginning’s absence as ungoverned and ungovernable care(ss). 3. Is it possible to want what you have become in suffering, both in the absence and in the depths of suffrage, without wanting what it is to suffer? Can you want what it is to be all, and want what it is to be whole, without wanting to be complete? Is it possible to crave the general incompleteness without that seemingly unbearable desire to be pierced, ruptured, broken? In lieu of the president we want and don’t want, we have Cedric Robinson, whom just a little while ago we lost. He says: If, in some spiteful play, one were compelled by some demon or god to choose a transgression against Nietzsche so profound and fundamental to his temperament and intention as to break apart the ground on which his philosophy stood, one could do no better than this: a society which has woven into its matrix for the purpose of suspending and neutralizing those forces antithetic to individual autonomy, the constructed reality that all are equally incomplete. A logic is being jousted here. Is it not so that the emergence of power as the instrument of certainty in human organization is seen by many to be the consequence of and response to the circumstances of inequality and sensed social entropy? Is it not so that individual autonomy, rare enough in the first condition and imperiled by the second, is in the final construction made foreign? And does not, logically, even autonomy require for its nurturance a hothouse of certitude similar to that required for the evolution of power – autonomy being to a degree a variant of power? Then the principle of incompleteness – the absence of discrete organismic integrity, if it were to occupy in a metaphysics the place of inequality in political philosophy, would bring to human society a paradigm subversive to political authority as the archetypical resolution, as the prescription for order.5 How can we come more accurately to understand American democracy – the brutality of our improvement, the viciousness of the ways we are put to use – as the praxis of privatized interest in inequality, expressed in the theory of the abstract equality of every complete individual, whose constant recitation brutally regulates the general interest in an equality given in and as an absolute incompleteness that defies individuation? How can we come to understand that the interinanimation of our bondage and our freedom – and, therefore, of our liberalism and our protest – is the metaphysical foundation of a national political philosophy that we have come to claim in violation of the precedent we want. How can we disavow that claim, having learned to want to want the order from which our forced desire is derived to be drowned in the disorder of all (the nothing) we have? How can we more intensely feel the physics of our surround, our social aesthetic, the gravity of our love and loss, our shared, radically sounded, radically sent incompleteness? What would it mean to say we cannot take a position on politics – even the old and honorable ‘I don’t vote because I’m Marxist‘ position? What if we said we have no options, that here we don’t even have the option of no option? We think that would be good. Zoe gets us started: to think off of what we want is lightly to inhabit not being and not having, here.
The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater with the best method for partial education. The way they link back to the ROB is to describe the best method for resisting individuation and the call to order by capital. Racial capitalism calls us into individuation through a total education that demands a call to order through instruction and self-improvement, MOTEN and HARNEY 5 Moten and Harney 21, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney, “A Partial Education”, All Incomplete, Minor Compositions, 2021, pg(62-67), HTE https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Harney_Stefano_Moten_Fred_All_Incomplete_2021.pdf DOA: Feb 19, 2022 Now Foucault stressed that because this instruction represented the reform of ‘perverted‘ bodies – bodies that previously had no such discipline – any call for reforming the modern prison was a call for more instruction. Reform produced more instruction. Instruction produced more constraint, or discipline. Discipline only confirmed the underlying perversion of these bodies, and called forth more reform, which called forth more instruction to reform the perversion discipline confirmed. This process is reflected in Foucault’s use of the oxymoron “perverted individual,” an oxymoron that is nonetheless the source of total education. Perversion violates the principle of the individual by failing to accede to its proper boundaries and comportments, and thus the perverted individual is an ongoing violation that calls total education into being. In Foucault’s account, perversion appears as a turning aside (from the truth) that is, somehow, prior, already existing. A prior turn. An already given turning that requires straightening, that summons reform. Instruction is how we get straightened out insofar as it is how one is straightened out. Correction begins with the ascription of the body itself, the imposition of body onto flesh; the attribution of perversion to the specific body, which justifies its correction, follows from its isolation and manifests itself as the theft of the body that has been imposed by those who assert a right to instruct insofar as theirs are bodies that they have supposedly both claimed and transcended. The ascription of body, the imposition of bounded and enclosed self-possession, of a discrete self subject to ownership, of ownership activated and confirmed either in theft or trade, might be said to be the first reform, the first improvement, insofar as it is the condition of possibility of reform, or improvement. The assignment of body to flesh is the first stripe of the long, hard, torturously straight, tortuously straightened row. Instruction is the setting in order, the straightening out. Instruction thereby reveals the essential relationship between improvement and impoverishment, between the private and privation at the heart of total education. Perversion’s wealth becomes education’s profit. Today there would appear to be few examples of Foucault’s total education in prison regimes. The program of reform, the program of prisoner improvement, has been replaced almost everywhere by one of punishment alone, or what Foucault calls simply the deprivation of liberty. At the same time, in pointing out that the current prison program of ‘slow-motion genocide’ has long been the global norm in racialized regimes, abolitionist scholars refuse to countenance reform of the exception, alerting us to the fact that reform of the prison and reform of the prisoner are as much modalities of genocide as the interplay of privation and privatization that racial incarceration relentlessly innovates.29 But what if? What if perversion is placed under constraint in the very idea of individuation, which projects improvement’s subject as improvement’s object? Then the figure of the perverted individual is always already in the system. Conversely, if perversion’s location in the individual body is a form of imprisonment and instruction, then perversion is an already given anti-/ante-individuation. If prison/school are two sides of a common institutional structure that operates by way of individuation, then perversion is a pre-carceral breaking out of prison, a pre-scholarly dropping out of school, that continually reveals the ubiquity of the total education that hunts it down and puts it to work. Insofar as it is the case that in prison and in school one’s job is to learn, to get it straight, to straighten out, then it is also the case that every citizen and non-citizen, every person and non-person, every worker who is in or out of work – even the enemy combatant, the prisoner, and the supposedly unemployable – is subject to a total education Whiteness is anti-thetical to relationality and community formation, abolition requires working against the subject, HARNEY 17 Stefano Harney (part 2), by Michael Schapira and Jesse Montgomery, August 10, 2017Jesse Montgomery is an editor at Full Stop and a graduate student in the English department at Vanderbilt University. Michael Schapira is an Interviews editor at Full Stop and teaches Philosophy at Hofstra University. A version of this conversation originally appeared in the Full Stop Quarterly Issue #5.http://www.full-stop.net/2017/08/10/interviews/michael-schapira-and-jesse-montgomery/stefano-harney-part-2/ DOA: Feb 19, 2022 The authors quote Frank Wilderson on the way blackness can never be disimbricated from the violence of slavery. Then they say: ‘Those who would risk extending solidarity across racial boundaries would find themselves the recipient of exemplary violence in order to instill fear of constant consequence for this treason. Ever after, meaningful cross-racial affinity can only be found in moments of revolutionary violence.” (IStefano Harney (part 2) | Full Stoptalics in the original.) Now this is an historical observation on their part, but to some extent it is also programmatic for the authors. As an observation, well, they have just convinced me of its validity in the last 250 pages, and as program, well, I’m not a pacifist. I’m for self-defense, and that can be violent. But do words like solidarity, affinity, to say nothing of the unlovely term allyship, accidentally preserve something we want to abolish? And I feel bad using Shirley and Stafford to make this point because theirs is such a good book, but maybe that’s why I feel compelled to say, ‘even here’ this question comes up. What I mean is who is this someone in solidarity with blackness, who is this ally of blackness, who is this someone with affinity to black struggle? I think this means that this someone has his or her own struggles and is indicating that now she or he wants to join not in common struggles, but in the struggles of blackness. Because in a sense you have to have your own thing to be an ally or to be in solidarity. Ok, but what are your own struggles from which you would be offering solidarity, allyship, affinity? Are you organizing in the white community, is that it? I think that is the implication, that you have been working in white communities, and/or on the environment, or feminist issues, etc. But the problem is, there’s no such thing as a white community. A white community is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron. You can’t organize an oxymoron. The only thing you can do with a white community is work to abolish it. Moreover at that point of abolition we may be able to say there is no such thing as a community, that a community is an oxymoron. You can’t commune and have a community. Communing is anti-community. It’s undercommon. Maybe the only kind of community that is possible is the maroon community, because it is by definition not a community, and when in some historical instances (of necessity even) it became one, it took on the same murderous qualities of any community. Okay, so then the question arising, if you do abolish the white community, what of the people who were marked as white, and in many cases who dwelt in the supremacy of whiteness, what becomes of them? Well, in the practice of abolition they will move closer to the only thing they ever had that was about life and not death, about love and not hate, blackness. This is to say, people who present as white are not allies, or in solidarity, or showing affinity, because they have nothing of their own, no place from which to show this, no resource to bring, unless and until they embrace the one thing of their own they disown. The thing that can’t be owned born(e) of the owned, blackness. Now white people aren’t coming with much blackness, by definition. And this is why the underlying humility motivating terms like ally, solidarity, and affinity is not misplaced, if that is indeed what underlies their use in practice. In any case, whiteness is either absence or violence, and in either case, not much to offer as an ally. But on the other hand white people have a big role to play in the revolutionary violence Shirley and Stafford speak of because the act of abolition of white communities is a monumental task.
“Appropriation of outer space” by private entities refers to the exercise of exclusive control of space, TRAPP 13 TIMOTHY JUSTIN TRAPP, JD Candidate @ UIUC Law, ’13, TAKING UP SPACE BY ANY OTHER MEANS: COMING TO TERMS WITH THE NONAPPROPRIATION ARTICLE OF THE OUTER SPACE TREATY UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LAW REVIEW Vol. 2013 No. 4 https://www.illinoislawreview.org/wp-content/ilr-content/articles/2013/4/Trapp.pdf The issues presented in relation to the nonappropriation article of the Outer Space Treaty should be clear.214 The ITU has, quite blatantly, created something akin to “property interests in outer space.”215 It allows nations to exclude others from their orbital slots, even when the nation is not currently using that slot.216 This is directly in line with at least one definition of outer-space appropriation.217 Start Footnote 217Id. at 236 (“Appropriation of outer space, therefore, is ‘the exercise of exclusive control or exclusive use’ with a sense of permanence, which limits other nations’ access to it.”) (quoting Milton L. Smith, The Role of the ITU in the Development of Space Law, 17 ANNALS AIR and SPACE L. 157, 165 (1992)). End Footnote 217The ITU even allows nations with unused slots to devise them to other entities, creating a market for the property rights set up by this regulation.218 In some aspects, this seems to effect exactly what those signatory nations of the Bogotá Declaration were trying to accomplish, albeit through different means.219 Private appropriation of extracted space resources is distinct from appropriation “of” outer space. Despite longstanding permission of appropriation of extracted resources, sovereign claims are still universally prohibited. Abigail D. Pershing, J.D. Candidate @ Yale, B.A. UChicago,’19, "Interpreting the Outer Space Treaty's Non-Appropriation Principle: Customary International Law from 1967 to Today," Yale Journal of International Law 44, no. 1, https://openyls.law.yale.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.13051/6733/Pershing.pdf?sequence=2, DOA: Feb 19: 2022 II. THE FIRST SHIFT IN CUSTOMARY INTERNATIONAL LAW’S INTERPRETATION OF THE NON-APPROPRIATION PRINCIPLE Since the drafting of the Outer Space Treaty, several States have chosen to reinterpret the non-appropriation principle as narrower in scope than its drafters originally intended. This reinterpretation has gone largely unchallenged and has in fact been widely adopted by space-faring nations. In turn, this has had the effect of changing customary international law relating to the non-appropriation principle. Shifting away from its original blanket application in 1967, States have carved out an exception to the non-appropriation principle, allowing appropriation of extracted space resources.53 This Part examines this shift in the context of the two branches of the United Nation’s customary international law standard: State practice and opinio juris. A. State Practice The earliest hint of a change in customary international law relating to the interpretation of the non-appropriation clause came in 1969, when the United States first sent astronauts to the moon. As part of his historic journey, astronaut Neil Armstrong collected moonrocks that he brought back with him to Earth and promptly handed off to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as U.S. property.54 Later, the USSR similarly claimed lunar material as government property, some of which was eventually sold to private citizens. 55 These first instances of space resource appropriation did not draw much attention, but they presented a distinct shift marking the beginning of a new period in State practice. Having previously been limited by their technological capabilities, States could now establish new practices with respect to celestial bodies. This was the beginning of a pattern of appropriation that slowly unfolded over the next few decades and has since solidified into the general and consistent State practice necessary to establish the existence of customary international law. Currently, the U.S. government owns 842 pounds of lunar material.56 There is little question that NASA and the U.S. government consider this material, as well as other space materials collected by American astronauts, to be government property.57 In fact, NASA explicitly endorses U.S. property rights over these moon rocks, stating that “lunar material retrieved from the Moon during the Apollo Program is U.S. government property.”5 The U.S. delegation’s reaction to the language of the 1979 Moon Agreement further cemented this interpretation that appropriation of extracted resources is a permissible exception to the non-appropriation clause of Article II. Although the United States is not a party to the Moon Agreement, it did participate in the negotiations.59 The Moon Agreement states in relevant part: Neither the surface nor the subsurface of the moon, nor any part thereof or natural resources in place, shall become property of any State, international intergovernmental or nongovernmental organization, national organization or nongovernmental entity or of any natural person.60 In response to this language, the U.S. delegation made a statement laying out the American view that the words “in place” imply that private property rights apply to extracted resources61—a comment that went completely unchallenged. That all States seemed to accept this point, even those bound by the Moon Agreement, is further evidence of a shift in customary international law.62 B. Opinio Juris: Domestic Legislation Domestic law, both in the United States and abroad, provides further evidence of the shift in customary international law surrounding the issue of nonappropriation as it relates to extracted space resources. Domestic U.S. space law is codified at Section 51 of the U.S. Code and has been regularly modified to expand private actors’ rights in space.63 Beginning in 1984, the Commercial Space Launch Act provided that “the United States should encourage private sector launches and associated services.”64 The goal of the 1984 Act was to support commercial space launches by private companies and individuals.65 It did not, however, specifically discuss commercial exploitation of space. The first such mention of commercial use of space appeared in 2004, with the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act.66 This Act specifically aimed at regulating space tourism but did not explicitly guarantee any private rights in space.67 The most significant change in U.S. space law came with the passage of the Spurring Private Aerospace Competitiveness and Entrepreneurship (SPACE) Act in 2015. As incorporated into Section 51 of the Code, this Act provides: A United States citizen engaged in commercial recovery of an asteroid resource or a space resource under this chapter shall be entitled to any asteroid resource or space resource obtained, including to possess, own, transport, use, and sell the asteroid resource or space resource obtained in accordance with applicable law, including the international obligations of the United States.68 Whereas the idea that private corporations might go into space may have seemed far-fetched to the drafters of the Outer Space Treaty, the SPACE Act of 2015 was the first instance of a government recognizing such a trend and officially supporting private companies’ commercial rights to space resources under law. With the new 2015 amendment to Section 51 in place, U.S. companies can now rest assured that any profits they reap from space mining are firmly legal—at least within U.S. jurisdictions. Although the United States was the first country to officially reinterpret the non-appropriation principle, other countries are following suit. On July 20, 2017, Luxembourg passed a law entitled On the Exploration and Utilization of Space Resources with a vote of fifty-five to two.69 The law took effect on August 1, 2017.70 Article 1 of the new law states simply that “space resources can be appropriated,” and Article 3 expressly grants private companies permission to explore and use space resources for commercial purposes.71 Official commentary on the law establishes that its goal is to provide companies with legal certainty regarding ownership over space materials—a goal that the commentators regard as legal under the Outer Space Treaty despite the non-appropriation principle.72 The next country to enact similar legislation may be the United Arab Emirates (UAE). According to the UAE Space Agency director general, Mohammed Al Ahbabi, the UAE is currently in the process of drafting a space law covering both human space exploration and commercial activities such as mining.73 To further this goal, in 2017 the UAE set up the Space Agency Working Group on Space Policy and Law to specify the procedures, mechanisms, and other standards of the space sector, including an appropriate legal framework.74 C. Opinio Juris: Legal Scholarship Other major space powers are also considering similar laws in the future, including Japan, China, and Australia. 75 Senior officials within China’s space program have explicitly stated that the country’s goal is to explore outer space and to take advantage of outer space resources.76 The general international trend clearly points in this direction in anticipation of a potential “space gold rush.” 7 Mirroring the shift in State practice and domestic laws, the legal community has also changed its approach to the interpretation of the nonappropriation principle. Whereas at the time of the ratification of the Outer Space Treaty the majority of legal scholars tended to apply the non-appropriation principle broadly, most legal scholars now view appropriation of extracted materials as permissible.78 Brandon Gruner underscores that this new view is historically distinct from prior legal interpretation, noting that modern interpretations of the Outer Space Treaty’s non-appropriation principle differ from those of the Treaty’s authors.79 In contrast to earlier legal theory that denied the possibility of appropriation of any space resources, scholars now widely accept that extracting space resources from celestial bodies is a “use” permitted by the Outer Space Treaty and that extracted materials become the property of the entity that performed the extraction.80 Stressing the fact that the Treaty does not explicitly prohibit appropriating resources from outer space, other authors conclude that the use of extracted space resources is permitted, meaning that the new SPACE Act is a plausible interpretation of the Outer Space Treaty.81 However, scholars have been careful to cabin the extent to which they accept the legality of appropriation. For instance, although Thomas Gangale and Marilyn Dudley-Rowley acknowledge the legality of private appropriation of extracted space resources, they nonetheless emphasize that “ownership of and the right to use extraterrestrial resources is distinct from ownership of real property” and that any such claim to real property is illegal.82 Lawrence Cooper is also careful to point out this distinction: “the Outer Space Treaties recognize sovereignty over property placed into space, property produced in space, and resources removed from their place in space, but ban sovereignty claims by states; international law extends this ban to individuals.”83 Although there remain some scholars who still insist on the illegality of the 2015 U.S. law and State appropriation of space resources generally,84 their dominance has waned since the 1960s. These scholars are now a minority in the face of general acceptance among the legal community that minerals and other space resources, once extracted, may be legally claimed as property. 85 Taken together, the elements described above—statements made in the international arena, de facto appropriation of space resources in the form of moon rocks, the adoption of new national policies permitting appropriation of extracted space resources, and the weight of the international legal community’s opinion— indicate a fundamental shift in customary international law. The Outer Space Treaty’s non-appropriation clause has been redefined via customary international law norms from its broad application to now include a carve-out allowing appropriation of space resources once such resources have been extracted.
2/20/22
JF22 - AC - Property v3
Tournament: Palm Classic | Round: 2 | Opponent: Zeeh, Thane | Judge: Tays KM Anti-Blackness and Settler Colonialism are world-breaking forces. Whiteness has conquered every frontier of this planet and seeks to own, privatize, and destroy the universe, WALKER 82 Alice Walker 1982. "Only Justice Can Stop a Curse | Reimagine!." Reimaginerpe.org. n.d. Web. 16 Oct. 2019. https://www.reimaginerpe.org/node/946 QH DOA: Feb 19 2022 This is a curse-prayer that Zora Neale Hurston, novelist and anthropologist, collected in the 1920s. And by then it was already old. I have often marveled at it. At the precision of its anger, the absoluteness of its bitterness. Its utter hatred of the enemies it condemns. It is a curse-prayer by a person who would readily, almost happily, commit suicide, if it meant her enemies would also die. Horribly. I am sure it was a woman who first prayed this curse. And I see her - Black, Yellow, Brown or Red, "aboriginal" as the Ancients are called in South Africa and Australia and other lands invaded, expropriated and occupied by whites. And I think, with astonishment, that the curse-prayer of this colored woman—starved, enslaved, humiliated and carelessly trampled to death—over centuries, is coming to pass. Indeed, like ancient peoples of color the world over, who have tried to tell the white man of the destruction that would inevitably follow from the uranium mining plunder of their sacred lands, this woman—along with millions and billions of obliterated sisters, brothers and children—seems to have put such enormous energy into her hope for revenge, that her curse seems close to bringing it about. And it is this hope for revenge, finally, I think, that is at the heart of People of Color's resistance to any anti-nuclear movement. In any case, this has been my own problem. When I have considered the enormity of the white man's crimes against humanity. Against women. Against every living person of color. Against the poor. Against my mother and my father. Against me . . . . When I consider that at this very moment he wishes to take away what little freedom I have died to achieve, through denial of my right to vote . . . . Has already taken away education, medicine, housing and food. . . . That William Shockley is saying at this moment that he will run for the Senate of my country to push his theory that Blacks are genetically inferior and should be sterilized. . . . When I consider that he is, they are, a real and present threat to my life and the life of my daughter, my people, I think - in perfect harmony with my sisters of long ago: Let the earth marinate in poisons. Let the bombs cover the ground like rain. For nothing short of total destruction will ever teach them anything. And it would be good, perhaps, to put an end to the species in any case, rather than let the white man continue to subjugate it, and continue to let their lust dominate, exploit and despoil not just our planet, but the rest of the universe, which is their clear and oft-stated intention; leaving their arrogance and litter not just on the moon, but on everything they can reach. If we have any true love for the stars, planets, the rest of Creation, we must do everything we can to keep white man away from them. They who have appointed themselves our representatives to the rest of the universe. They who have never met any new creature without exploiting, abusing and destroying it. They who say we poor and colored and female and elderly blight neighborhoods, while they blight worlds. What they have done to the Old, they will do to the New. Under the white man every star would become a South Africa, every planet a Vietnam. Fatally irradiating ourselves may in fact be the only way to save others from what Earth has already become. And this is a consideration that I believe requires some serious thought from every one of us. However, just as the sun shines on the godly and the ungodly alike, so does nuclear radiation. And with this knowledge it becomes increasingly difficult to embrace the thought of extinction purely for the assumed satisfaction of—from the grave—achieving revenge. Or even of accepting our demise as a planet as a simple and just preventative medicine administered to the universe. Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it. In any case, Earth is my home—though for centuries white people have tried to convince me I have no right to exist, except in the dirtiest, darkest corners of the globe. So let me tell you: I intend to protect my home. Praying—not a curse—only the hope that my courage will not fail my love. But if by some miracle, and all our struggle, the earth is spared, only justice to every living thing (and everything alive) will save humankind. And we are not saved yet. Only justice can stop a curse.
The recognition of collective vulnerability through the deployment of collective extinction cannot be used to justify the furtherance of colonialist practices without reinforcing the position of indigeneity as non-life – Salih and Corry 21: Salih R, Corry O. Displacing the Anthropocene: Colonisation, extinction and the unruliness of nature in Palestine. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. January 2021. doi:10.1177/2514848620982834 DOA: Feb 19 2022 LHP BT + LHP PS With these considerations in mind, let us go back to Chakrabarty’s notion that the Anthropocene scenario of collective extinction requires that ‘we’ the ‘human’ species activate a ‘common’ ethical or pre-political stance that might take humans beyond the divisive (in)justices of politics. For that purpose, he borrows the notion ‘epochal consciousness’ from philosopher Carl Jaspers who coined it in the 1950s while contemplating the potential and imminent destruction of the planet by the atomic bomb: An epochal consciousness cannot be charged with the function of producing solutions for an epochal crisis because all possible concrete solutions of an epochal problem—and Jaspers welcomes them all—will be partial or departmental, one important department being that of politics, the specialization of politicians (2016: 146) Epochal consciousness therefore has to be pre-political, leading humans to feel as one whole: ‘It is about how we comport ourselves with regard to the world under contemplation in a moment of global crisis; it is what sustains our horizon of action’ (2016: 146). It is, for Chakrabarty, ‘a thought space that came before and above/beyond politics, without, however, foreshortening the space for political disputation and differences’ (2016: 181). Despite the notion of epochal consciousness being precarious and at risk of shattering into fragments again, for Chakrabarty ‘it remains a thought experiment in the face of an emergency that requires us to move toward composing the common’ (2016: 146–147). What Chakrabarty refers to as ‘our smaller histories of conflicting attachments, desires and aspirations’ (2016: 183) are, from the vantage points of Palestinian Indigenous nature and people, shown to be the very sites through which – historically and in the present day – profoundly unequal and violent processes have effected techniques of extinction (fossilisation) of Indigenous Life. The supposed aggregate merging of ‘human’ and ‘natural’ in the Anthropocene is not merely an unfortunate bi-product of economic and technical development or nuclear testing. The pervasive and strenuous – yet unfinished and fractured – endeavour to make the settlers and settler-Nature Indigenous, show the centrality of colonial geonto-politics in ordering and reordering the boundaries between Life and Nonlife. From this point of view, rather than a single species ‘impacting’ upon nature, threatening extinction for a common humanity, it is more appropriate to argue that the very possibility of human and non-human Life is determined by past and ongoing colonial architectures of power. Although the ‘Anthropocene’ offers us a fuller and more complex understanding of the ontological depth and temporal scales of violence, it does not in itself offer hope that this violence might be subsumed under the planetary whole. In this sense, while recognising the heuristic potential of calling for an epochal consciousness in the face of threats of collective extinction, we would argue that a mood of common vulnerability must reinforce and expand, rather than suspend or defer, attention to local and time-bound injustices. Recognising and resolving such injustices should be a necessary prelude to facing, in an ethical mood, the common threat we do face as a species. This is particularly so when, as the case of Palestine shows, Indigenous populations have historically been – and continue to be – de-humanised, disposed of, violently erased or consigned to the sphere of Nonlife. Conclusions In this article, we have explored the historical and contemporary example of settler colonialism in Palestine suggesting that the recasting of the Life/Nonlife divide has been not incidental to, but part-constitutive of, the political operation of this project. As constitutive modalities of settler colonialism, Life and Nonlife are always discursively assigned rather than being straight forward ontological givens, and this assigning is the result of intra-human injustices and political struggles albeit through their entanglement with the nonhuman. By reading settler colonialism in Palestine through the lens of geontopower, we aimed to offer a case in point to challenge suggestions that questions of intra-human justice can be occluded by a more encompassing Anthropocene condition of collective vulnerability. From the vantage point of Palestine, we argue the contrary: given that power and politics are at the very core of the ways in which nature and humans become enmeshed or forcibly separated, only when these inequalities are conceived, and then foregrounded, is there a possibility of recognising a common or global vulnerability. For Palestinian refugees and their nature, the threat of collective extinction is not a future common risk, but a process entrenched in their everyday reality since 1948. Like aboriginal Australians and other native populations, Palestinians were ‘fossilised’ and their entanglements with nature were forced to the Nonlife side of the geonto-political distinction (the ‘desert’ and the ‘virus’, to use Povinelli’s evocative figures). Importantly, however, we also showed how these operations are fractured and unfinished. Drawing from sources as diverse as personal memories, ethnographic explorations, novels and works of art, we showed that ecological ruins not only bring to light what has been destroyed, allowing the recovery of traces of a previous life, but also most crucially have an afterlife, unsettling politically drawn Life/Nonlife boundaries. Far from a nostalgic claim to a pristine and authentic life-world that preexisted the settler colonial intervention, indigeneity thus signifies an intimate form of reciprocation of native people to their vegetation and animals – an Indigenous entanglement, which proved recalcitrant to taming and fossilisation. It is perhaps no coincidence that Sabr, the Arabic name for the cacti fruits, also means patience and signifies endurance as a natural and human virtue.
We are told that space travel is for our greatest minds, obscuring the original frontier. For the conquering of the stars requires the conquering of the mind. The tabula rasa mind is the original battlefield, violently securing the empty interiority of the enlightenment body. Ownership of the earth secured ownership over one's mind, MOTEN and HARNEY 1 Moten and Harney 21, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney, “The Theft of Assembly”, All Incomplete, Minor Compositions, 2021, pg(16), HTE https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Harney_Stefano_Moten_Fred_All_Incomplete_2021.pdf DOA: Feb 19 2022 If this is true, we should be worried. In its origins, and its contemporary mutations, logistics is a regulatory force standing against us, standing against the earth. Logistics begins in loss and emptiness. And it begins in a fundamental misapprehension called spacetime. The loss that marks ownership, specifically the ownership of private property, the loss of sharing, the loss of the earth and the consequent making of the world, is simultaneously the misapprehension that what is privatized is empty and will be filled by ownership itself, by properties, by properties placed into it. This emptiness will be filled with an interior. This emptiness is confirmed by logistics, by the mobilization, the colonizing drive, of this interior – where properties are imported into empty space. This begins, again, with Locke or, at least, we can begin again through him. His concept of the mind as tabula rasa – often portrayed as an Enlightenment move away from predetermination – is a projection of this emptiness that must be owned and filled. For this emptiness to become private property it must be filled with and located in the coordinates of space and time. Space emerges as the delimitation of what is mine, and time begins with the theft and imposition when it became mine. The individual mind and its coming to maturity out of the tabula rasa mark this first conquest. Enlightenment interiority emerged from this emplotment of time and space – to borrow from Hayden White – this separation from what is shared. But interiority is only for the owning mind. Because what allows this mind to take possession of itself is its ability to grasp property, which is something it now posits as beyond itself. It takes what it is taken from for what it needs to create itself, and not just needs but compulsively, interminably, voraciously seeks without end. In other words, the emplotment of time and space in the mind takes place through the emplotment of time and space on earth, in a conversion of emptiness into world, and is simultaneously taken as a fulfillment of mind, its interior appointment in and of what can now be conceptualized as body. Is it a leap to say logic and logistics start here inseparably?
The European colonial project begins and begins and begins through property. For as many means in enlightenment thought, there are no ends on the frontier of conquest. The privatized appropriation of outer space is racial capitalism's continual drive towards death. And thus I affirm that the appropriation of outer space by private entities is unjust.
Whiteness globalizes itself through property. To own and improve the Earth is to separate oneself from all. Only the mythically differentiated subject can own the land, animals, and resources that offer its relation to it, MOTEN and HARNEY 2 Moten and Harney 21, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney, “Usufruct and Use”, All Incomplete, Minor Compositions, 2021, pg(28-30), HTE https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Harney_Stefano_Moten_Fred_All_Incomplete_2021.pdf DOA: Feb 19 2022 What does it mean to stand for improvement? Or worse, to stand for what business calls a ‘commitment to continuous improvement‘? It means to stand for the brutal speciation of all. To take a stand for speciation is the beginning of a diabolical usufruct. Improvement comes to us by way of an innovation in land tenure, where individuated ownership, derived from increasing the land’s productivity, is given in the perpetual, and thus arrested, becoming of exception’s miniature. This is to say that from the outset, the ability to own – and that ability’s first derivative, self-possession – is entwined with the ability to make more productive. In order to be improved, to be rendered more productive, land must be violently reduced to its productivity, which is the regulatory diminishment and management of earthly generativity. Speciation is this general reduction of the earth to productivity and submission of the earth to techniques of domination that isolate and enforce particular increases in and accelerations of productivity. In this regard, (necessarily European) man, in and as the exception, imposes speciation upon himself, in an operation that extracts and excepts himself from the earth in order to confirm his supposed dominion over it. And just as the earth must be forcefully speciated to be possessed, man must forcefully speciate himself in order to enact this kind of possession. This is to say that racialization is present in the very idea of dominion over the earth; in the very idea and enactment of the exception; in the very nuts and bolts of possession-by-improvement. Forms of racialization that both Michel Foucault and, especially and most vividly, Robinson identify in medieval Europe become usufructed with modern possession through improvement. Speciated humans are endlessly improved through the endless work they do on their endless way to becoming Man. This is the usufruct of man. In early modern England, establishing title to land by making it more productive meant eliminating biodiversity and isolating and breeding a species – barley or rye or pigs. Localized ecosystems were aggressively transformed so that monocultural productivity smothers anacultural generativity. The emergent relation between speciation and racialization is the very conception and conceptualization of the settler. Maintenance of that relation is his vigil and his eve. For the encloser, possession is established through improvement – this is true for the possession of land and for the possession of self. The Enlightenment is the universalization/globalization of the imperative to possess and its corollary, the imperative to improve. However, this productivity must always confront its contradictory impoverishment: the destruction of its biosphere and its estrangement in, if not from, entanglement, both of which combine to ensure the liquidation of the human differential that is already present in the very idea of man, the exception. To stand for such improvement is to invoke policy, which attributes depletion to the difference, which is to say the wealth, whose simultaneous destruction and accumulation policy is meant to operationalize. This attribution of a supposedly essential lack, an inevitable and supposedly natural diminution, is achieved alongside the imposition of possession-by-improvement. To make policy is to impose speciation upon everybody and everything, to inflict impoverishment in the name of improvement, to invoke the universal law of the usufruct of man. In this context, continuous improvement, as it emerged with decolonization and particularly with the defeat of national capitalism in the 1970s, is the continuous crisis of speciation in the surround of the general antagonism. This is the contradiction Robinson constantly invoked and analyzed with the kind of profound and solemn optimism that comes from being with, and being of service to, your friends
Ownership is at the heart of colonial logistics feedback loop. The more the enlightenment man owns, the more violence he must commit to protect it. Whiteness developed as an exponential militarized force to protect all he appropriated on the frontier, MOTEN and HARNEY 3 Moten and Harney 21, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney, “The Theft of Assembly”, All Incomplete, Minor Compositions, 2021, pg(16-17), HTE https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Harney_Stefano_Moten_Fred_All_Incomplete_2021.pdf DOA: Feb 19 2022 This is why there is no separating Locke the Enlightenment thinker from Locke the writer on race, the author of the notorious colonial constitution of the Carolinas. Ownership was a feedback loop – the more you own the more you own yourself. The more logistics you apply the more logic you acquire; the more logic you deploy the more logistics you require. As Hortense Spillers says, the transatlantic slave trade was the supply chain of Enlightenment. It was never-ending quest and conquest, because ownership is perpetual loss. Gilles Deleuze said that he would rather call power “sad.” We might say the same of ownership, where lies the most direct sense of loss of sharing. This feeling of loss translates into a diabolical obsession with loss prevention. Logistics emerges as much as the science of loss prevention as the science of moving property through the emptiness, of making the world as it travels by filling it. This is not making the road as we walk, in the anarchist tradition. This is converting everything in its path into a coordinated time and space for ownership. Such seizing, such grasping, and such loss prevention is the mode of operation for the wickedness of the Atlantic slave trade, the first massive, diabolic, commercial logistics. Already this feedback loop of ownership experiences amplified loss, the loss of sharing, with each emplotment. But now, in taking up the European heritage of race and slavery that Robinson identifes as emerging in the class struggle in Europe in the centuries directly before Locke and extending into Locke’s own time, a double loss is experienced, an intensifcation of the ownership feedback loop (and what we call the subject reaction). This evil emplotment of Africans is experienced as the potential loss of property that can flee. It is in this double loss of sharing – given in owning and in the imposition of being-owned – that the most deadly, planet-threatening, disease of the species-being emerges: whiteness. And it is for this reason that we can say logistics is the white science. (This is what many white people – who are the people, as James Baldwin says, who think they are white or that they ought to be – are doing when you see them walk straight past a queue of people and take a seat, or move to the center of a crowded room, or speak more loudly than those around them, or block a sidewalk while discussing ‘choices’ with their toddler. Making theory out of practice, they are emplotted, as they’ve been taught to do, establishing the spacetime of possession and self-possession in ownership. Every step they take is a standing of ground, a stomping of the world out of earthly existence and into racial capitalist human being. It grows more pronounced the more it is threatened, consumed by its own feedback loop, and it produces sharper and sharper subject reactions in the face of this threat. This is the old/new fascism: not the anonymity of following the leader, but the subject reaction to leadership, which can just as easily imagine itself to be liberal dissent from, as supposedly opposed to a lock(e)-step repetition of, its call. Politics pathologizes the general antagonism in order to prescribe more and more politics. We refuse this prescription and embrace a metaphysics of incompleteness, MOTEN and HARNEY 4 Moten and Harney 21, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney, “We Want a Precedent”, All Incomplete, Minor Compositions, 2021, pg(23-26), HTE https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Harney_Stefano_Moten_Fred_All_Incomplete_2021.pdf DOA: Feb 19 2022 Our President, our deluded and degraded and demonic sovereign, in whatever form this abstraction of our abstract and wholly fictional equivalence will have taken, is a featureless point on a long and hopelessly straight line of knock-offs. It’s like how Richard of Bordeaux, who can do whatever he wants except stop himself from doing whatever he wants, carries around his own deposition (disguised as the serial murder that constitutes the peaceful transition of power and its vulgar ceremonies) like a genetic faw, as the illegitimate but inevitably heritable Bolingbroke-ass ambitions that leave him with ever increasingly etiolated capacities for self-refection. So that in all its singularly focused limitation and qualification, in the relative nothingness of the prison that it calls a world, the all-encompassing and all to be settled sphere that it stomps all over all the time, posing for an impossible arc of deadly and impossible pictures, our President, whichever one you ever wanted or didn’t want, each one after the other in noticeable imperial decline, is just a sick, uneasy head in a hollow crown, making us watch it talk about how it’s gonna kill us and then making us watch it kill us. 2. What we want is usually said to be all bound up with what we don’t have. Zoe Leonard’s been talking about what we want, though, slantedly, in the dimensionless infinity room we can’t even crawl around in when we cruise the rub and whirr of the city as a grove of aspen in late fall, in the mountains, held and unheld at the bottom of the sea. She’s talking about what we want in relation to what we have when what we have is all this experience of not having, of shared nothing, of sharing nothingness. She speaks of and from a common underprivilege, from the privilege of the common underground, in and from the wealth of a precarity that goes from hand to hand, as a caress. Look at all the richness we have, she says, in having lost, in having suffered, in having been suffered, in suffering one another as if we were one another’s little children, as if we were in love with one another, as if we loved one another so much that all one and another can do is go. We want a president, Zoe says, who’s loved and lost all that with us, who’s shared our little all, our little nothing. Such a thing, the general and generative nothingness that is more and less than political, would be unprecedented. Maybe she doesn’t want a president; maybe she wants a precedent, the endlessly new thing of the absolutely no thing, its Zen xenogenerosity, its queer reproductivity, which keeps on beginning in beginning’s absence as ungoverned and ungovernable care(ss). 3. Is it possible to want what you have become in suffering, both in the absence and in the depths of suffrage, without wanting what it is to suffer? Can you want what it is to be all, and want what it is to be whole, without wanting to be complete? Is it possible to crave the general incompleteness without that seemingly unbearable desire to be pierced, ruptured, broken? In lieu of the president we want and don’t want, we have Cedric Robinson, whom just a little while ago we lost. He says: If, in some spiteful play, one were compelled by some demon or god to choose a transgression against Nietzsche so profound and fundamental to his temperament and intention as to break apart the ground on which his philosophy stood, one could do no better than this: a society which has woven into its matrix for the purpose of suspending and neutralizing those forces antithetic to individual autonomy, the constructed reality that all are equally incomplete. A logic is being jousted here. Is it not so that the emergence of power as the instrument of certainty in human organization is seen by many to be the consequence of and response to the circumstances of inequality and sensed social entropy? Is it not so that individual autonomy, rare enough in the first condition and imperiled by the second, is in the final construction made foreign? And does not, logically, even autonomy require for its nurturance a hothouse of certitude similar to that required for the evolution of power – autonomy being to a degree a variant of power? Then the principle of incompleteness – the absence of discrete organismic integrity, if it were to occupy in a metaphysics the place of inequality in political philosophy, would bring to human society a paradigm subversive to political authority as the archetypical resolution, as the prescription for order.5 How can we come more accurately to understand American democracy – the brutality of our improvement, the viciousness of the ways we are put to use – as the praxis of privatized interest in inequality, expressed in the theory of the abstract equality of every complete individual, whose constant recitation brutally regulates the general interest in an equality given in and as an absolute incompleteness that defies individuation? How can we come to understand that the interinanimation of our bondage and our freedom – and, therefore, of our liberalism and our protest – is the metaphysical foundation of a national political philosophy that we have come to claim in violation of the precedent we want. How can we disavow that claim, having learned to want to want the order from which our forced desire is derived to be drowned in the disorder of all (the nothing) we have? How can we more intensely feel the physics of our surround, our social aesthetic, the gravity of our love and loss, our shared, radically sounded, radically sent incompleteness? What would it mean to say we cannot take a position on politics – even the old and honorable ‘I don’t vote because I’m Marxist‘ position? What if we said we have no options, that here we don’t even have the option of no option? We think that would be good. Zoe gets us started: to think off of what we want is lightly to inhabit not being and not having, here. The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater with the best method for partial education. Racial capitalism calls us into individuation through a total education that demands a call to order through instruction and self-improvement, MOTEN and HARNEY 5 Moten and Harney 21, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney, “A Partial Education”, All Incomplete, Minor Compositions, 2021, pg(62-67), HTE https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Harney_Stefano_Moten_Fred_All_Incomplete_2021.pdf DOA: Feb 19 2022 Now Foucault stressed that because this instruction represented the reform of ‘perverted‘ bodies – bodies that previously had no such discipline – any call for reforming the modern prison was a call for more instruction. Reform produced more instruction. Instruction produced more constraint, or discipline. Discipline only confirmed the underlying perversion of these bodies, and called forth more reform, which called forth more instruction to reform the perversion discipline confirmed. This process is reflected in Foucault’s use of the oxymoron “perverted individual,” an oxymoron that is nonetheless the source of total education. Perversion violates the principle of the individual by failing to accede to its proper boundaries and comportments, and thus the perverted individual is an ongoing violation that calls total education into being. In Foucault’s account, perversion appears as a turning aside (from the truth) that is, somehow, prior, already existing. A prior turn. An already given turning that requires straightening, that summons reform. Instruction is how we get straightened out insofar as it is how one is straightened out. Correction begins with the ascription of the body itself, the imposition of body onto flesh; the attribution of perversion to the specific body, which justifies its correction, follows from its isolation and manifests itself as the theft of the body that has been imposed by those who assert a right to instruct insofar as theirs are bodies that they have supposedly both claimed and transcended. The ascription of body, the imposition of bounded and enclosed self-possession, of a discrete self subject to ownership, of ownership activated and confirmed either in theft or trade, might be said to be the first reform, the first improvement, insofar as it is the condition of possibility of reform, or improvement. The assignment of body to flesh is the first stripe of the long, hard, torturously straight, tortuously straightened row. Instruction is the setting in order, the straightening out. Instruction thereby reveals the essential relationship between improvement and impoverishment, between the private and privation at the heart of total education. Perversion’s wealth becomes education’s profit. Today there would appear to be few examples of Foucault’s total education in prison regimes. The program of reform, the program of prisoner improvement, has been replaced almost everywhere by one of punishment alone, or what Foucault calls simply the deprivation of liberty. At the same time, in pointing out that the current prison program of ‘slow-motion genocide’ has long been the global norm in racialized regimes, abolitionist scholars refuse to countenance reform of the exception, alerting us to the fact that reform of the prison and reform of the prisoner are as much modalities of genocide as the interplay of privation and privatization that racial incarceration relentlessly innovates.29 But what if? What if perversion is placed under constraint in the very idea of individuation, which projects improvement’s subject as improvement’s object? Then the figure of the perverted individual is always already in the system. Conversely, if perversion’s location in the individual body is a form of imprisonment and instruction, then perversion is an already given anti-/ante-individuation. If prison/school are two sides of a common institutional structure that operates by way of individuation, then perversion is a pre-carceral breaking out of prison, a pre-scholarly dropping out of school, that continually reveals the ubiquity of the total education that hunts it down and puts it to work. Insofar as it is the case that in prison and in school one’s job is to learn, to get it straight, to straighten out, then it is also the case that every citizen and non-citizen, every person and non-person, every worker who is in or out of work – even the enemy combatant, the prisoner, and the supposedly unemployable – is subject to a total education Whiteness is anti-thetical to relationality and community formation, abolition requires working against the subject, HARNEY 17 Stefano Harney (part 2), by Michael Schapira and Jesse Montgomery, August 10, 2017Jesse Montgomery is an editor at Full Stop and a graduate student in the English department at Vanderbilt University. Michael Schapira is an Interviews editor at Full Stop and teaches Philosophy at Hofstra University. A version of this conversation originally appeared in the Full Stop Quarterly Issue #5.http://www.full-stop.net/2017/08/10/interviews/michael-schapira-and-jesse-montgomery/stefano-harney-part-2/DOA: Feb 19 2022 The authors quote Frank Wilderson on the way blackness can never be disimbricated from the violence of slavery. Then they say: ‘Those who would risk extending solidarity across racial boundaries would find themselves the recipient of exemplary violence in order to instill fear of constant consequence for this treason. Ever after, meaningful cross-racial affinity can only be found in moments of revolutionary violence.” (IStefano Harney (part 2) | Full Stoptalics in the original.) Now this is an historical observation on their part, but to some extent it is also programmatic for the authors. As an observation, well, they have just convinced me of its validity in the last 250 pages, and as program, well, I’m not a pacifist. I’m for self-defense, and that can be violent. But do words like solidarity, affinity, to say nothing of the unlovely term allyship, accidentally preserve something we want to abolish? And I feel bad using Shirley and Stafford to make this point because theirs is such a good book, but maybe that’s why I feel compelled to say, ‘even here’ this question comes up. What I mean is who is this someone in solidarity with blackness, who is this ally of blackness, who is this someone with affinity to black struggle? I think this means that this someone has his or her own struggles and is indicating that now she or he wants to join not in common struggles, but in the struggles of blackness. Because in a sense you have to have your own thing to be an ally or to be in solidarity. Ok, but what are your own struggles from which you would be offering solidarity, allyship, affinity? Are you organizing in the white community, is that it? I think that is the implication, that you have been working in white communities, and/or on the environment, or feminist issues, etc. But the problem is, there’s no such thing as a white community. A white community is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron. You can’t organize an oxymoron. The only thing you can do with a white community is work to abolish it. Moreover at that point of abolition we may be able to say there is no such thing as a community, that a community is an oxymoron. You can’t commune and have a community. Communing is anti-community. It’s undercommon. Maybe the only kind of community that is possible is the maroon community, because it is by definition not a community, and when in some historical instances (of necessity even) it became one, it took on the same murderous qualities of any community. Okay, so then the question arising, if you do abolish the white community, what of the people who were marked as white, and in many cases who dwelt in the supremacy of whiteness, what becomes of them? Well, in the practice of abolition they will move closer to the only thing they ever had that was about life and not death, about love and not hate, blackness. This is to say, people who present as white are not allies, or in solidarity, or showing affinity, because they have nothing of their own, no place from which to show this, no resource to bring, unless and until they embrace the one thing of their own they disown. The thing that can’t be owned born(e) of the owned, blackness. Now white people aren’t coming with much blackness, by definition. And this is why the underlying humility motivating terms like ally, solidarity, and affinity is not misplaced, if that is indeed what underlies their use in practice. In any case, whiteness is either absence or violence, and in either case, not much to offer as an ally. But on the other hand white people have a big role to play in the revolutionary violence Shirley and Stafford speak of because the act of abolition of white communities is a monumental task.
Property is a concept created as a weapon of colonization. Indigenous peoples had a shared ownership of the land, but colonial structures ripped that away and created instead an original dispossessive ownership, forming both property and theft simultaneously. Thus, when the land becomes property, it becomes made so for theft, NICHOLS “18 Nichols, Robert. "Theft is property! The recursive logic of dispossession." Political Theory 46.1 (2018): 3-28. DOA: Feb 19 2022 LHP HL One concern stands out most prominently. To speak of dispossession is to use a negative term. It is “negative” both in the ordinary language sense (i.e., pejorative) but also in the more philosophical sense, in that it signals the absence of some attribute. Most intuitively, a condition of dispossession is characterized by a privation of possession. In this obvious, ordinary, and commonly used sense of the term, dispossession means something like a normatively objectionable loss of possession, essentially a species of theft. Inasmuch as this is implied by the concept, however, a new set of conceptual and practical complications arise. For such a formulation appears, first, generally parasitic upon a background system of law that could establish the normative context in which a violation (e.g., theft) could be recognized, condemned, and punished. Second and more specifically, the term seems necessarily appended to a proprietary and commoditized model of social relations. Insofar as critical theorists generally seek to leverage the category of dispossession as a tool of radical, emancipatory politics in the critique of extant legal authority and proprietary relations, recourse to this language thus seems potentially contradictory and self-defeating. In the Anglo settler colonial countries of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, term. concept of dispossession as a gravitational center, this is really an analysis of a “space of problematization” (in Foucault’s language) rather than a singular concept. The problem-space in question brings together shifting configurations of property, law, race, and rights and has been previously examined in a variety of languages (including expropriation and eminent domain) and in diverse normative registers. The study undertaken here takes a different tack. Although I use the and the United States, this concern has taken on a very specific form. In this context, Indigenous peoples have often been accused of putting forward a contradictory set of claims, namely, that they are the original and natural owners of the land that has been stolen from them, and that the earth is not something in which any one person or group of people can have exclusive proprietary rights. The supposed tension between these claims has been exploited to significant success by a number of critics, particularly right-wing populists in these societies, who view white settlers as the true owners of these lands, both collectively (through the extension of territorial sovereignty and public law) and individually (through the devices of private property). The Indigenous social and political theorist Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Goenpul Tribe of the Quandamooka Nation) has recently provided a concrete instantiation of this logic and the stakes of its apprehension. As part of a more general investigation into the diverse manifestations of what she terms the “possessive logic of white patriarchal sovereignty,” Moreton-Robinson analyzes 16 the so-called history wars in her native Australia. Sparked by the publication of Keith Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, this debate centered on his polemical claim that the colonization of Australia was fundamentally a nonviolent process that eventually benefited its Indigenous inhabitants. As Windshuttle put it, “Rather than genocide and frontier warfare, British colonization of Australia brought civilized society and the rule of law.”17 Of most relevance to our purposes here, however, Windshuttle has also asserted that at the point of contact with Europeans, Australian Aborigines lacked any conception of “property,” or perhaps even of “land” as a discreet entity in which 18 Although formulated in more sophisticated and sympathetic terms, a range of academic treatments has voiced similar concerns. Work by the legal and political philosopher Jeremy Waldron provides a case in point. In a series of essays covering more than a decade, Waldron questions the underlying coherence of the very idea of an “indigenous right.” In particular, he has explicitly raised the objection that, inasmuch as Indigenous rights appear to rest upon claims to “first occupancy,” they are often appeals to untenable and unverifiable chains of ownership back to “time-immemorial.”20 By eschewing precision in the defining of “indigeneity,” Waldron moreover warns, proponents import an “ineffable, almost mystical element” to the term, the ascription of which leads to the one could claim property. argument: if Indigenous peoples “did not have a concept of ownership ... there was no theft, no war, and no need to have a treaty.”19 Aileen Moreton-Robinson unpacks the logic of the “rhetorical heightening of the unexceptional fact of having been here first.”21 Although Waldron’s argument derives from a specific contractualist tradition of liberal analytic thought, it finds an unlikely resonance with a set of more radical left critics. Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright, for instance, voice similar concerns with the “autochthonous discourses of ‘Native’ rights” in which Indigenous peoples are “subordinated and defined (by both the dominated and the dominating) metaphysically as being of the land colonized by various European empires.”22 Similar unease with the trajectory of Indigenous political 23 One could say much more about these contemporary disputes. Indeed, many Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars alike are currently engaged in these heated debates. Initially, however, I wish simply to flag how such concerns drive at a basic conceptual ambiguity at the heart of dispossession. Critics wish to catch Indigenous peoples and their allies on the horns of a dilemma: either one claims prior possession of the land in a recognizable propertied form—thus universalizing and backdating a general possessive logic as the appropriate normative benchmark—or one disavows possession as such, apparently 24 This book responds to this challenge, first, by providing an alternative conceptual framework through which to view dispossession and, second, by substantiating this as relevant to the actual historical development of Anglo settler colonialism and Indigenous resistance. I argue that, in the specific context with which we are concerned, “dispossession” may be coherently reconstructed to refer to a process in which new proprietary relations are generated but under structural conditions that demand their simultaneous negation. In effect, the dispossessed come to “have” something they cannot use, except by alienating it to another. This process has been notoriously difficult to apprehend because it is novel in a number of important ways. First, dispossession of this sort combines two processes typically thought distinct: it transforms nonproprietary relations into critique has been voiced by important contributors to critical race theory. each of these cases, the concern is that Indigenous peoples’ claims to “original ownership” are untenable, politically problematic for their implications on other, non-Indigenous communities, or both. undercutting the force of a subsequent claim of dispossession. one sense at least, this critique does highlight a curious juxtaposition of claims that often animate Indigenous politics in the Anglophone world, namely, that the earth is not to be thought of as property at all, and that it has been stolen from its rightful owners. And indeed, in Inproprietary ones while, at the same time, systematically transferring control and title of this (newly formed) property. In this way, dispossession merges commodification (or, perhaps more accurately, “propertization”) and theft into one moment. Second, because of the way dispossession generates property under conditions that require its divestment and alienation, those negatively impacted by this process—the dispossessed—are figured as “original owners” but only retroactively, that is, refracted backward through the process itself. The claims of the dispossessed may appear contradictory or question-begging, then, since they appear to both presuppose and resist the logic of “original possession.” When framed correctly however, we can see that this is in fact a reflection of the peculiarity of the dispossessive process itself. In the extended argument of this book, I plot this movement as one of transference, transformation, and retroactive attribution. In the interests of giving this peculiar logic a name and as a means of differentiating it from other proximate processes, I theorize this specifically as recursive dispossession. Recursion is a term that is used in a variety of fields of study—most notably, logic, mathematics, and computer science—each of which employs its own 25 specific, technical definitions. technical and discipline-specific uses of the terms share the general sense of a self-referential and self-reinforcing logic. Recursion is not, therefore, simple tautology. Rather than a completely closed circuit, in which one part of a procedure refers directly back to its starting point, recursive procedures loop back upon themselves in a “boot-strapping” manner such that each iteration is not only different from the last but builds upon or augments its original postulate. Recursion therefore combines self-reference with positive feedback effects. (If it has a geometric form, it is the helix, not the circle.) In the context with which we are concerned here, dispossession can rightly be said to exhibit a “recursive” structure because it produces what it presupposes. For instance, in a standard formulation one would assume that “property” is logically, chronologically, and normatively prior to “theft.” However, in this (colonial) context, theft is the mechanism and means by which property is generated: hence its recursivity. Recursive dispossession is effectively a form of property- generating theft.
Appropriation: Bohm 13 JEFF BOHM, Chief Judge. In re Cowin, 492 B.R. 858 (Bankr. S.D. Tex. 2013). TDI
Application of the Facts in the Instant Disputes to Embezzlement under Section 523(a)(4) "The Debtor appropriated funds." "Appropriation" is defined as "the exercise of control over property; a taking of possession." BLACK'S LAW DICTIONARY 98 (7th ed. 1999). In connection with its analysis under the TTLA in section C.2.b., supra, this Court has determined that the Debtor appropriated the excess proceeds from the foreclosure sales of the Countrywide Property, the Chase Property, and the WMC Property that rightfully belonged to the Plaintiffs. Not only did the Debtor control the disposition of the excess proceeds via the WCL and Dampkring Deeds of Trust, but he ensured that the proceeds were deposited to Perc and TRH, entities controlled by his co-conspirator Allan Groves. Thus, the first element is satisfied. (ii) "The appropriation was for the Debtor's use or benefit." This element does not require a showing that the Debtor himself personally benefitted by the amounts that the Plaintiffs were damaged. For example, in affirming a bankruptcy court's decision that a debt was nondischargeable due to embezzlement under section 523(a)(4), the Sixth Circuit stated:
1 prefer 1AC definitions, anything else means the 1N gets something super abstract and I don’t link 2 O/w as common usage since it garners neg ground like lib, kant, etc.
2/20/22
JF22 - AC - Property v4
Tournament: Palm Classic | Round: 3 | Opponent: Marlborough JH | Judge: Salazar, Davd Anti-Blackness and Settler Colonialism are world-breaking forces. Whiteness has conquered every frontier of this planet and seeks to own, privatize, and destroy the universe, WALKER 82 Alice Walker 1982. "Only Justice Can Stop a Curse | Reimagine!." Reimaginerpe.org. n.d. Web. 16 Oct. 2019. https://www.reimaginerpe.org/node/946 QH DOA: Feb 19 2022 This is a curse-prayer that Zora Neale Hurston, novelist and anthropologist, collected in the 1920s. And by then it was already old. I have often marveled at it. At the precision of its anger, the absoluteness of its bitterness. Its utter hatred of the enemies it condemns. It is a curse-prayer by a person who would readily, almost happily, commit suicide, if it meant her enemies would also die. Horribly. I am sure it was a woman who first prayed this curse. And I see her - Black, Yellow, Brown or Red, "aboriginal" as the Ancients are called in South Africa and Australia and other lands invaded, expropriated and occupied by whites. And I think, with astonishment, that the curse-prayer of this colored woman—starved, enslaved, humiliated and carelessly trampled to death—over centuries, is coming to pass. Indeed, like ancient peoples of color the world over, who have tried to tell the white man of the destruction that would inevitably follow from the uranium mining plunder of their sacred lands, this woman—along with millions and billions of obliterated sisters, brothers and children—seems to have put such enormous energy into her hope for revenge, that her curse seems close to bringing it about. And it is this hope for revenge, finally, I think, that is at the heart of People of Color's resistance to any anti-nuclear movement. In any case, this has been my own problem. When I have considered the enormity of the white man's crimes against humanity. Against women. Against every living person of color. Against the poor. Against my mother and my father. Against me . . . . When I consider that at this very moment he wishes to take away what little freedom I have died to achieve, through denial of my right to vote . . . . Has already taken away education, medicine, housing and food. . . . That William Shockley is saying at this moment that he will run for the Senate of my country to push his theory that Blacks are genetically inferior and should be sterilized. . . . When I consider that he is, they are, a real and present threat to my life and the life of my daughter, my people, I think - in perfect harmony with my sisters of long ago: Let the earth marinate in poisons. Let the bombs cover the ground like rain. For nothing short of total destruction will ever teach them anything. And it would be good, perhaps, to put an end to the species in any case, rather than let the white man continue to subjugate it, and continue to let their lust dominate, exploit and despoil not just our planet, but the rest of the universe, which is their clear and oft-stated intention; leaving their arrogance and litter not just on the moon, but on everything they can reach. If we have any true love for the stars, planets, the rest of Creation, we must do everything we can to keep white man away from them. They who have appointed themselves our representatives to the rest of the universe. They who have never met any new creature without exploiting, abusing and destroying it. They who say we poor and colored and female and elderly blight neighborhoods, while they blight worlds. What they have done to the Old, they will do to the New. Under the white man every star would become a South Africa, every planet a Vietnam. Fatally irradiating ourselves may in fact be the only way to save others from what Earth has already become. And this is a consideration that I believe requires some serious thought from every one of us. However, just as the sun shines on the godly and the ungodly alike, so does nuclear radiation. And with this knowledge it becomes increasingly difficult to embrace the thought of extinction purely for the assumed satisfaction of—from the grave—achieving revenge. Or even of accepting our demise as a planet as a simple and just preventative medicine administered to the universe. Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it. In any case, Earth is my home—though for centuries white people have tried to convince me I have no right to exist, except in the dirtiest, darkest corners of the globe. So let me tell you: I intend to protect my home. Praying—not a curse—only the hope that my courage will not fail my love. But if by some miracle, and all our struggle, the earth is spared, only justice to every living thing (and everything alive) will save humankind. And we are not saved yet. Only justice can stop a curse.
The recognition of collective vulnerability through the deployment of collective extinction cannot be used to justify the furtherance of colonialist practices without reinforcing the position of indigeneity as non-life – Salih and Corry 21: Salih R, Corry O. Displacing the Anthropocene: Colonisation, extinction and the unruliness of nature in Palestine. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. January 2021. doi:10.1177/2514848620982834 DOA: Feb 19 2022 LHP BT + LHP PS With these considerations in mind, let us go back to Chakrabarty’s notion that the Anthropocene scenario of collective extinction requires that ‘we’ the ‘human’ species activate a ‘common’ ethical or pre-political stance that might take humans beyond the divisive (in)justices of politics. For that purpose, he borrows the notion ‘epochal consciousness’ from philosopher Carl Jaspers who coined it in the 1950s while contemplating the potential and imminent destruction of the planet by the atomic bomb: An epochal consciousness cannot be charged with the function of producing solutions for an epochal crisis because all possible concrete solutions of an epochal problem—and Jaspers welcomes them all—will be partial or departmental, one important department being that of politics, the specialization of politicians (2016: 146) Epochal consciousness therefore has to be pre-political, leading humans to feel as one whole: ‘It is about how we comport ourselves with regard to the world under contemplation in a moment of global crisis; it is what sustains our horizon of action’ (2016: 146). It is, for Chakrabarty, ‘a thought space that came before and above/beyond politics, without, however, foreshortening the space for political disputation and differences’ (2016: 181). Despite the notion of epochal consciousness being precarious and at risk of shattering into fragments again, for Chakrabarty ‘it remains a thought experiment in the face of an emergency that requires us to move toward composing the common’ (2016: 146–147). What Chakrabarty refers to as ‘our smaller histories of conflicting attachments, desires and aspirations’ (2016: 183) are, from the vantage points of Palestinian Indigenous nature and people, shown to be the very sites through which – historically and in the present day – profoundly unequal and violent processes have effected techniques of extinction (fossilisation) of Indigenous Life. The supposed aggregate merging of ‘human’ and ‘natural’ in the Anthropocene is not merely an unfortunate bi-product of economic and technical development or nuclear testing. The pervasive and strenuous – yet unfinished and fractured – endeavour to make the settlers and settler-Nature Indigenous, show the centrality of colonial geonto-politics in ordering and reordering the boundaries between Life and Nonlife. From this point of view, rather than a single species ‘impacting’ upon nature, threatening extinction for a common humanity, it is more appropriate to argue that the very possibility of human and non-human Life is determined by past and ongoing colonial architectures of power. Although the ‘Anthropocene’ offers us a fuller and more complex understanding of the ontological depth and temporal scales of violence, it does not in itself offer hope that this violence might be subsumed under the planetary whole. In this sense, while recognising the heuristic potential of calling for an epochal consciousness in the face of threats of collective extinction, we would argue that a mood of common vulnerability must reinforce and expand, rather than suspend or defer, attention to local and time-bound injustices. Recognising and resolving such injustices should be a necessary prelude to facing, in an ethical mood, the common threat we do face as a species. This is particularly so when, as the case of Palestine shows, Indigenous populations have historically been – and continue to be – de-humanised, disposed of, violently erased or consigned to the sphere of Nonlife. Conclusions In this article, we have explored the historical and contemporary example of settler colonialism in Palestine suggesting that the recasting of the Life/Nonlife divide has been not incidental to, but part-constitutive of, the political operation of this project. As constitutive modalities of settler colonialism, Life and Nonlife are always discursively assigned rather than being straight forward ontological givens, and this assigning is the result of intra-human injustices and political struggles albeit through their entanglement with the nonhuman. By reading settler colonialism in Palestine through the lens of geontopower, we aimed to offer a case in point to challenge suggestions that questions of intra-human justice can be occluded by a more encompassing Anthropocene condition of collective vulnerability. From the vantage point of Palestine, we argue the contrary: given that power and politics are at the very core of the ways in which nature and humans become enmeshed or forcibly separated, only when these inequalities are conceived, and then foregrounded, is there a possibility of recognising a common or global vulnerability. For Palestinian refugees and their nature, the threat of collective extinction is not a future common risk, but a process entrenched in their everyday reality since 1948. Like aboriginal Australians and other native populations, Palestinians were ‘fossilised’ and their entanglements with nature were forced to the Nonlife side of the geonto-political distinction (the ‘desert’ and the ‘virus’, to use Povinelli’s evocative figures). Importantly, however, we also showed how these operations are fractured and unfinished. Drawing from sources as diverse as personal memories, ethnographic explorations, novels and works of art, we showed that ecological ruins not only bring to light what has been destroyed, allowing the recovery of traces of a previous life, but also most crucially have an afterlife, unsettling politically drawn Life/Nonlife boundaries. Far from a nostalgic claim to a pristine and authentic life-world that preexisted the settler colonial intervention, indigeneity thus signifies an intimate form of reciprocation of native people to their vegetation and animals – an Indigenous entanglement, which proved recalcitrant to taming and fossilisation. It is perhaps no coincidence that Sabr, the Arabic name for the cacti fruits, also means patience and signifies endurance as a natural and human virtue.
We are told that space travel is for our greatest minds, obscuring the original frontier. For the conquering of the stars requires the conquering of the mind. The tabula rasa mind is the original battlefield, violently securing the empty interiority of the enlightenment body. Ownership of the earth secured ownership over one's mind, MOTEN and HARNEY 1 Moten and Harney 21, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney, “The Theft of Assembly”, All Incomplete, Minor Compositions, 2021, pg(16), HTE https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Harney_Stefano_Moten_Fred_All_Incomplete_2021.pdf DOA: Feb 19 2022 If this is true, we should be worried. In its origins, and its contemporary mutations, logistics is a regulatory force standing against us, standing against the earth. Logistics begins in loss and emptiness. And it begins in a fundamental misapprehension called spacetime. The loss that marks ownership, specifically the ownership of private property, the loss of sharing, the loss of the earth and the consequent making of the world, is simultaneously the misapprehension that what is privatized is empty and will be filled by ownership itself, by properties, by properties placed into it. This emptiness will be filled with an interior. This emptiness is confirmed by logistics, by the mobilization, the colonizing drive, of this interior – where properties are imported into empty space. This begins, again, with Locke or, at least, we can begin again through him. His concept of the mind as tabula rasa – often portrayed as an Enlightenment move away from predetermination – is a projection of this emptiness that must be owned and filled. For this emptiness to become private property it must be filled with and located in the coordinates of space and time. Space emerges as the delimitation of what is mine, and time begins with the theft and imposition when it became mine. The individual mind and its coming to maturity out of the tabula rasa mark this first conquest. Enlightenment interiority emerged from this emplotment of time and space – to borrow from Hayden White – this separation from what is shared. But interiority is only for the owning mind. Because what allows this mind to take possession of itself is its ability to grasp property, which is something it now posits as beyond itself. It takes what it is taken from for what it needs to create itself, and not just needs but compulsively, interminably, voraciously seeks without end. In other words, the emplotment of time and space in the mind takes place through the emplotment of time and space on earth, in a conversion of emptiness into world, and is simultaneously taken as a fulfillment of mind, its interior appointment in and of what can now be conceptualized as body. Is it a leap to say logic and logistics start here inseparably?
The European colonial project begins and begins and begins through property. For as many means in enlightenment thought, there are no ends on the frontier of conquest. The privatized appropriation of outer space is racial capitalism's continual drive towards death. And thus I affirm that the appropriation of outer space by private entities is unjust.
Whiteness globalizes itself through property. To own and improve the Earth is to separate oneself from all. Only the mythically differentiated subject can own the land, animals, and resources that offer its relation to it, MOTEN and HARNEY 2 Moten and Harney 21, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney, “Usufruct and Use”, All Incomplete, Minor Compositions, 2021, pg(28-30), HTE https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Harney_Stefano_Moten_Fred_All_Incomplete_2021.pdf DOA: Feb 19 2022 What does it mean to stand for improvement? Or worse, to stand for what business calls a ‘commitment to continuous improvement‘? It means to stand for the brutal speciation of all. To take a stand for speciation is the beginning of a diabolical usufruct. Improvement comes to us by way of an innovation in land tenure, where individuated ownership, derived from increasing the land’s productivity, is given in the perpetual, and thus arrested, becoming of exception’s miniature. This is to say that from the outset, the ability to own – and that ability’s first derivative, self-possession – is entwined with the ability to make more productive. In order to be improved, to be rendered more productive, land must be violently reduced to its productivity, which is the regulatory diminishment and management of earthly generativity. Speciation is this general reduction of the earth to productivity and submission of the earth to techniques of domination that isolate and enforce particular increases in and accelerations of productivity. In this regard, (necessarily European) man, in and as the exception, imposes speciation upon himself, in an operation that extracts and excepts himself from the earth in order to confirm his supposed dominion over it. And just as the earth must be forcefully speciated to be possessed, man must forcefully speciate himself in order to enact this kind of possession. This is to say that racialization is present in the very idea of dominion over the earth; in the very idea and enactment of the exception; in the very nuts and bolts of possession-by-improvement. Forms of racialization that both Michel Foucault and, especially and most vividly, Robinson identify in medieval Europe become usufructed with modern possession through improvement. Speciated humans are endlessly improved through the endless work they do on their endless way to becoming Man. This is the usufruct of man. In early modern England, establishing title to land by making it more productive meant eliminating biodiversity and isolating and breeding a species – barley or rye or pigs. Localized ecosystems were aggressively transformed so that monocultural productivity smothers anacultural generativity. The emergent relation between speciation and racialization is the very conception and conceptualization of the settler. Maintenance of that relation is his vigil and his eve. For the encloser, possession is established through improvement – this is true for the possession of land and for the possession of self. The Enlightenment is the universalization/globalization of the imperative to possess and its corollary, the imperative to improve. However, this productivity must always confront its contradictory impoverishment: the destruction of its biosphere and its estrangement in, if not from, entanglement, both of which combine to ensure the liquidation of the human differential that is already present in the very idea of man, the exception. To stand for such improvement is to invoke policy, which attributes depletion to the difference, which is to say the wealth, whose simultaneous destruction and accumulation policy is meant to operationalize. This attribution of a supposedly essential lack, an inevitable and supposedly natural diminution, is achieved alongside the imposition of possession-by-improvement. To make policy is to impose speciation upon everybody and everything, to inflict impoverishment in the name of improvement, to invoke the universal law of the usufruct of man. In this context, continuous improvement, as it emerged with decolonization and particularly with the defeat of national capitalism in the 1970s, is the continuous crisis of speciation in the surround of the general antagonism. This is the contradiction Robinson constantly invoked and analyzed with the kind of profound and solemn optimism that comes from being with, and being of service to, your friends
Ownership is at the heart of colonial logistics feedback loop. The more the enlightenment man owns, the more violence he must commit to protect it. Whiteness developed as an exponential militarized force to protect all he appropriated on the frontier, MOTEN and HARNEY 3 Moten and Harney 21, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney, “The Theft of Assembly”, All Incomplete, Minor Compositions, 2021, pg(16-17), HTE https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Harney_Stefano_Moten_Fred_All_Incomplete_2021.pdf DOA: Feb 19 2022 This is why there is no separating Locke the Enlightenment thinker from Locke the writer on race, the author of the notorious colonial constitution of the Carolinas. Ownership was a feedback loop – the more you own the more you own yourself. The more logistics you apply the more logic you acquire; the more logic you deploy the more logistics you require. As Hortense Spillers says, the transatlantic slave trade was the supply chain of Enlightenment. It was never-ending quest and conquest, because ownership is perpetual loss. Gilles Deleuze said that he would rather call power “sad.” We might say the same of ownership, where lies the most direct sense of loss of sharing. This feeling of loss translates into a diabolical obsession with loss prevention. Logistics emerges as much as the science of loss prevention as the science of moving property through the emptiness, of making the world as it travels by filling it. This is not making the road as we walk, in the anarchist tradition. This is converting everything in its path into a coordinated time and space for ownership. Such seizing, such grasping, and such loss prevention is the mode of operation for the wickedness of the Atlantic slave trade, the first massive, diabolic, commercial logistics. Already this feedback loop of ownership experiences amplified loss, the loss of sharing, with each emplotment. But now, in taking up the European heritage of race and slavery that Robinson identifes as emerging in the class struggle in Europe in the centuries directly before Locke and extending into Locke’s own time, a double loss is experienced, an intensifcation of the ownership feedback loop (and what we call the subject reaction). This evil emplotment of Africans is experienced as the potential loss of property that can flee. It is in this double loss of sharing – given in owning and in the imposition of being-owned – that the most deadly, planet-threatening, disease of the species-being emerges: whiteness. And it is for this reason that we can say logistics is the white science. (This is what many white people – who are the people, as James Baldwin says, who think they are white or that they ought to be – are doing when you see them walk straight past a queue of people and take a seat, or move to the center of a crowded room, or speak more loudly than those around them, or block a sidewalk while discussing ‘choices’ with their toddler. Making theory out of practice, they are emplotted, as they’ve been taught to do, establishing the spacetime of possession and self-possession in ownership. Every step they take is a standing of ground, a stomping of the world out of earthly existence and into racial capitalist human being. It grows more pronounced the more it is threatened, consumed by its own feedback loop, and it produces sharper and sharper subject reactions in the face of this threat. This is the old/new fascism: not the anonymity of following the leader, but the subject reaction to leadership, which can just as easily imagine itself to be liberal dissent from, as supposedly opposed to a lock(e)-step repetition of, its call. Politics pathologizes the general antagonism in order to prescribe more and more politics. We refuse this prescription and embrace a metaphysics of incompleteness, MOTEN and HARNEY 4 Moten and Harney 21, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney, “We Want a Precedent”, All Incomplete, Minor Compositions, 2021, pg(23-26), HTE https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Harney_Stefano_Moten_Fred_All_Incomplete_2021.pdf DOA: Feb 19 2022 Our President, our deluded and degraded and demonic sovereign, in whatever form this abstraction of our abstract and wholly fictional equivalence will have taken, is a featureless point on a long and hopelessly straight line of knock-offs. It’s like how Richard of Bordeaux, who can do whatever he wants except stop himself from doing whatever he wants, carries around his own deposition (disguised as the serial murder that constitutes the peaceful transition of power and its vulgar ceremonies) like a genetic faw, as the illegitimate but inevitably heritable Bolingbroke-ass ambitions that leave him with ever increasingly etiolated capacities for self-refection. So that in all its singularly focused limitation and qualification, in the relative nothingness of the prison that it calls a world, the all-encompassing and all to be settled sphere that it stomps all over all the time, posing for an impossible arc of deadly and impossible pictures, our President, whichever one you ever wanted or didn’t want, each one after the other in noticeable imperial decline, is just a sick, uneasy head in a hollow crown, making us watch it talk about how it’s gonna kill us and then making us watch it kill us. 2. What we want is usually said to be all bound up with what we don’t have. Zoe Leonard’s been talking about what we want, though, slantedly, in the dimensionless infinity room we can’t even crawl around in when we cruise the rub and whirr of the city as a grove of aspen in late fall, in the mountains, held and unheld at the bottom of the sea. She’s talking about what we want in relation to what we have when what we have is all this experience of not having, of shared nothing, of sharing nothingness. She speaks of and from a common underprivilege, from the privilege of the common underground, in and from the wealth of a precarity that goes from hand to hand, as a caress. Look at all the richness we have, she says, in having lost, in having suffered, in having been suffered, in suffering one another as if we were one another’s little children, as if we were in love with one another, as if we loved one another so much that all one and another can do is go. We want a president, Zoe says, who’s loved and lost all that with us, who’s shared our little all, our little nothing. Such a thing, the general and generative nothingness that is more and less than political, would be unprecedented. Maybe she doesn’t want a president; maybe she wants a precedent, the endlessly new thing of the absolutely no thing, its Zen xenogenerosity, its queer reproductivity, which keeps on beginning in beginning’s absence as ungoverned and ungovernable care(ss). 3. Is it possible to want what you have become in suffering, both in the absence and in the depths of suffrage, without wanting what it is to suffer? Can you want what it is to be all, and want what it is to be whole, without wanting to be complete? Is it possible to crave the general incompleteness without that seemingly unbearable desire to be pierced, ruptured, broken? In lieu of the president we want and don’t want, we have Cedric Robinson, whom just a little while ago we lost. He says: If, in some spiteful play, one were compelled by some demon or god to choose a transgression against Nietzsche so profound and fundamental to his temperament and intention as to break apart the ground on which his philosophy stood, one could do no better than this: a society which has woven into its matrix for the purpose of suspending and neutralizing those forces antithetic to individual autonomy, the constructed reality that all are equally incomplete. A logic is being jousted here. Is it not so that the emergence of power as the instrument of certainty in human organization is seen by many to be the consequence of and response to the circumstances of inequality and sensed social entropy? Is it not so that individual autonomy, rare enough in the first condition and imperiled by the second, is in the final construction made foreign? And does not, logically, even autonomy require for its nurturance a hothouse of certitude similar to that required for the evolution of power – autonomy being to a degree a variant of power? Then the principle of incompleteness – the absence of discrete organismic integrity, if it were to occupy in a metaphysics the place of inequality in political philosophy, would bring to human society a paradigm subversive to political authority as the archetypical resolution, as the prescription for order.5 How can we come more accurately to understand American democracy – the brutality of our improvement, the viciousness of the ways we are put to use – as the praxis of privatized interest in inequality, expressed in the theory of the abstract equality of every complete individual, whose constant recitation brutally regulates the general interest in an equality given in and as an absolute incompleteness that defies individuation? How can we come to understand that the interinanimation of our bondage and our freedom – and, therefore, of our liberalism and our protest – is the metaphysical foundation of a national political philosophy that we have come to claim in violation of the precedent we want. How can we disavow that claim, having learned to want to want the order from which our forced desire is derived to be drowned in the disorder of all (the nothing) we have? How can we more intensely feel the physics of our surround, our social aesthetic, the gravity of our love and loss, our shared, radically sounded, radically sent incompleteness? What would it mean to say we cannot take a position on politics – even the old and honorable ‘I don’t vote because I’m Marxist‘ position? What if we said we have no options, that here we don’t even have the option of no option? We think that would be good. Zoe gets us started: to think off of what we want is lightly to inhabit not being and not having, here. The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater with the best method for partial education. Racial capitalism calls us into individuation through a total education that demands a call to order through instruction and self-improvement, MOTEN and HARNEY 5 Moten and Harney 21, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney, “A Partial Education”, All Incomplete, Minor Compositions, 2021, pg(62-67), HTE https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Harney_Stefano_Moten_Fred_All_Incomplete_2021.pdf DOA: Feb 19 2022 Now Foucault stressed that because this instruction represented the reform of ‘perverted‘ bodies – bodies that previously had no such discipline – any call for reforming the modern prison was a call for more instruction. Reform produced more instruction. Instruction produced more constraint, or discipline. Discipline only confirmed the underlying perversion of these bodies, and called forth more reform, which called forth more instruction to reform the perversion discipline confirmed. This process is reflected in Foucault’s use of the oxymoron “perverted individual,” an oxymoron that is nonetheless the source of total education. Perversion violates the principle of the individual by failing to accede to its proper boundaries and comportments, and thus the perverted individual is an ongoing violation that calls total education into being. In Foucault’s account, perversion appears as a turning aside (from the truth) that is, somehow, prior, already existing. A prior turn. An already given turning that requires straightening, that summons reform. Instruction is how we get straightened out insofar as it is how one is straightened out. Correction begins with the ascription of the body itself, the imposition of body onto flesh; the attribution of perversion to the specific body, which justifies its correction, follows from its isolation and manifests itself as the theft of the body that has been imposed by those who assert a right to instruct insofar as theirs are bodies that they have supposedly both claimed and transcended. The ascription of body, the imposition of bounded and enclosed self-possession, of a discrete self subject to ownership, of ownership activated and confirmed either in theft or trade, might be said to be the first reform, the first improvement, insofar as it is the condition of possibility of reform, or improvement. The assignment of body to flesh is the first stripe of the long, hard, torturously straight, tortuously straightened row. Instruction is the setting in order, the straightening out. Instruction thereby reveals the essential relationship between improvement and impoverishment, between the private and privation at the heart of total education. Perversion’s wealth becomes education’s profit. Today there would appear to be few examples of Foucault’s total education in prison regimes. The program of reform, the program of prisoner improvement, has been replaced almost everywhere by one of punishment alone, or what Foucault calls simply the deprivation of liberty. At the same time, in pointing out that the current prison program of ‘slow-motion genocide’ has long been the global norm in racialized regimes, abolitionist scholars refuse to countenance reform of the exception, alerting us to the fact that reform of the prison and reform of the prisoner are as much modalities of genocide as the interplay of privation and privatization that racial incarceration relentlessly innovates.29 But what if? What if perversion is placed under constraint in the very idea of individuation, which projects improvement’s subject as improvement’s object? Then the figure of the perverted individual is always already in the system. Conversely, if perversion’s location in the individual body is a form of imprisonment and instruction, then perversion is an already given anti-/ante-individuation. If prison/school are two sides of a common institutional structure that operates by way of individuation, then perversion is a pre-carceral breaking out of prison, a pre-scholarly dropping out of school, that continually reveals the ubiquity of the total education that hunts it down and puts it to work. Insofar as it is the case that in prison and in school one’s job is to learn, to get it straight, to straighten out, then it is also the case that every citizen and non-citizen, every person and non-person, every worker who is in or out of work – even the enemy combatant, the prisoner, and the supposedly unemployable – is subject to a total education Whiteness is anti-thetical to relationality and community formation, abolition requires working against the subject. This is the only way I as a white person can engage, HARNEY 17 Stefano Harney (part 2), by Michael Schapira and Jesse Montgomery, August 10, 2017Jesse Montgomery is an editor at Full Stop and a graduate student in the English department at Vanderbilt University. Michael Schapira is an Interviews editor at Full Stop and teaches Philosophy at Hofstra University. A version of this conversation originally appeared in the Full Stop Quarterly Issue #5.http://www.full-stop.net/2017/08/10/interviews/michael-schapira-and-jesse-montgomery/stefano-harney-part-2/ DOA: Feb 19 2022 The authors quote Frank Wilderson on the way blackness can never be disimbricated from the violence of slavery. Then they say: ‘Those who would risk extending solidarity across racial boundaries would find themselves the recipient of exemplary violence in order to instill fear of constant consequence for this treason. Ever after, meaningful cross-racial affinity can only be found in moments of revolutionary violence.” (IStefano Harney (part 2) | Full Stoptalics in the original.) Now this is an historical observation on their part, but to some extent it is also programmatic for the authors. As an observation, well, they have just convinced me of its validity in the last 250 pages, and as program, well, I’m not a pacifist. I’m for self-defense, and that can be violent. But do words like solidarity, affinity, to say nothing of the unlovely term allyship, accidentally preserve something we want to abolish? And I feel bad using Shirley and Stafford to make this point because theirs is such a good book, but maybe that’s why I feel compelled to say, ‘even here’ this question comes up. What I mean is who is this someone in solidarity with blackness, who is this ally of blackness, who is this someone with affinity to black struggle? I think this means that this someone has his or her own struggles and is indicating that now she or he wants to join not in common struggles, but in the struggles of blackness. Because in a sense you have to have your own thing to be an ally or to be in solidarity. Ok, but what are your own struggles from which you would be offering solidarity, allyship, affinity? Are you organizing in the white community, is that it? I think that is the implication, that you have been working in white communities, and/or on the environment, or feminist issues, etc. But the problem is, there’s no such thing as a white community. A white community is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron. You can’t organize an oxymoron. The only thing you can do with a white community is work to abolish it. Moreover at that point of abolition we may be able to say there is no such thing as a community, that a community is an oxymoron. You can’t commune and have a community. Communing is anti-community. It’s undercommon. Maybe the only kind of community that is possible is the maroon community, because it is by definition not a community, and when in some historical instances (of necessity even) it became one, it took on the same murderous qualities of any community. Okay, so then the question arising, if you do abolish the white community, what of the people who were marked as white, and in many cases who dwelt in the supremacy of whiteness, what becomes of them? Well, in the practice of abolition they will move closer to the only thing they ever had that was about life and not death, about love and not hate, blackness. This is to say, people who present as white are not allies, or in solidarity, or showing affinity, because they have nothing of their own, no place from which to show this, no resource to bring, unless and until they embrace the one thing of their own they disown. The thing that can’t be owned born(e) of the owned, blackness. Now white people aren’t coming with much blackness, by definition. And this is why the underlying humility motivating terms like ally, solidarity, and affinity is not misplaced, if that is indeed what underlies their use in practice. In any case, whiteness is either absence or violence, and in either case, not much to offer as an ally. But on the other hand white people have a big role to play in the revolutionary violence Shirley and Stafford speak of because the act of abolition of white communities is a monumental task.
Property is a concept created as a weapon of colonization. Indigenous peoples had a shared ownership of the land, but colonial structures ripped that away and created instead an original dispossessive ownership, forming both property and theft simultaneously. Thus, when the land becomes property, it becomes made so for theft, NICHOLS “18 Nichols, Robert. "Theft is property! The recursive logic of dispossession." Political Theory 46.1 (2018): 3-28.This is from a team purchased PDF, DOA: Feb 19 2022 LHP HL One concern stands out most prominently. To speak of dispossession is to use a negative term. It is “negative” both in the ordinary language sense (i.e., pejorative) but also in the more philosophical sense, in that it signals the absence of some attribute. Most intuitively, a condition of dispossession is characterized by a privation of possession. In this obvious, ordinary, and commonly used sense of the term, dispossession means something like a normatively objectionable loss of possession, essentially a species of theft. Inasmuch as this is implied by the concept, however, a new set of conceptual and practical complications arise. For such a formulation appears, first, generally parasitic upon a background system of law that could establish the normative context in which a violation (e.g., theft) could be recognized, condemned, and punished. Second and more specifically, the term seems necessarily appended to a proprietary and commoditized model of social relations. Insofar as critical theorists generally seek to leverage the category of dispossession as a tool of radical, emancipatory politics in the critique of extant legal authority and proprietary relations, recourse to this language thus seems potentially contradictory and self-defeating. In the Anglo settler colonial countries of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, term. concept of dispossession as a gravitational center, this is really an analysis of a “space of problematization” (in Foucault’s language) rather than a singular concept. The problem-space in question brings together shifting configurations of property, law, race, and rights and has been previously examined in a variety of languages (including expropriation and eminent domain) and in diverse normative registers. The study undertaken here takes a different tack. Although I use the and the United States, this concern has taken on a very specific form. In this context, Indigenous peoples have often been accused of putting forward a contradictory set of claims, namely, that they are the original and natural owners of the land that has been stolen from them, and that the earth is not something in which any one person or group of people can have exclusive proprietary rights. The supposed tension between these claims has been exploited to significant success by a number of critics, particularly right-wing populists in these societies, who view white settlers as the true owners of these lands, both collectively (through the extension of territorial sovereignty and public law) and individually (through the devices of private property). The Indigenous social and political theorist Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Goenpul Tribe of the Quandamooka Nation) has recently provided a concrete instantiation of this logic and the stakes of its apprehension. As part of a more general investigation into the diverse manifestations of what she terms the “possessive logic of white patriarchal sovereignty,” Moreton-Robinson analyzes 16 the so-called history wars in her native Australia. Sparked by the publication of Keith Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, this debate centered on his polemical claim that the colonization of Australia was fundamentally a nonviolent process that eventually benefited its Indigenous inhabitants. As Windshuttle put it, “Rather than genocide and frontier warfare, British colonization of Australia brought civilized society and the rule of law.”17 Of most relevance to our purposes here, however, Windshuttle has also asserted that at the point of contact with Europeans, Australian Aborigines lacked any conception of “property,” or perhaps even of “land” as a discreet entity in which 18 Although formulated in more sophisticated and sympathetic terms, a range of academic treatments has voiced similar concerns. Work by the legal and political philosopher Jeremy Waldron provides a case in point. In a series of essays covering more than a decade, Waldron questions the underlying coherence of the very idea of an “indigenous right.” In particular, he has explicitly raised the objection that, inasmuch as Indigenous rights appear to rest upon claims to “first occupancy,” they are often appeals to untenable and unverifiable chains of ownership back to “time-immemorial.”20 By eschewing precision in the defining of “indigeneity,” Waldron moreover warns, proponents import an “ineffable, almost mystical element” to the term, the ascription of which leads to the one could claim property. argument: if Indigenous peoples “did not have a concept of ownership ... there was no theft, no war, and no need to have a treaty.”19 Aileen Moreton-Robinson unpacks the logic of the “rhetorical heightening of the unexceptional fact of having been here first.”21 Although Waldron’s argument derives from a specific contractualist tradition of liberal analytic thought, it finds an unlikely resonance with a set of more radical left critics. Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright, for instance, voice similar concerns with the “autochthonous discourses of ‘Native’ rights” in which Indigenous peoples are “subordinated and defined (by both the dominated and the dominating) metaphysically as being of the land colonized by various European empires.”22 Similar unease with the trajectory of Indigenous political 23 One could say much more about these contemporary disputes. Indeed, many Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars alike are currently engaged in these heated debates. Initially, however, I wish simply to flag how such concerns drive at a basic conceptual ambiguity at the heart of dispossession. Critics wish to catch Indigenous peoples and their allies on the horns of a dilemma: either one claims prior possession of the land in a recognizable propertied form—thus universalizing and backdating a general possessive logic as the appropriate normative benchmark—or one disavows possession as such, apparently 24 This book responds to this challenge, first, by providing an alternative conceptual framework through which to view dispossession and, second, by substantiating this as relevant to the actual historical development of Anglo settler colonialism and Indigenous resistance. I argue that, in the specific context with which we are concerned, “dispossession” may be coherently reconstructed to refer to a process in which new proprietary relations are generated but under structural conditions that demand their simultaneous negation. In effect, the dispossessed come to “have” something they cannot use, except by alienating it to another. This process has been notoriously difficult to apprehend because it is novel in a number of important ways. First, dispossession of this sort combines two processes typically thought distinct: it transforms nonproprietary relations into critique has been voiced by important contributors to critical race theory. each of these cases, the concern is that Indigenous peoples’ claims to “original ownership” are untenable, politically problematic for their implications on other, non-Indigenous communities, or both. undercutting the force of a subsequent claim of dispossession. one sense at least, this critique does highlight a curious juxtaposition of claims that often animate Indigenous politics in the Anglophone world, namely, that the earth is not to be thought of as property at all, and that it has been stolen from its rightful owners. And indeed, in Inproprietary ones while, at the same time, systematically transferring control and title of this (newly formed) property. In this way, dispossession merges commodification (or, perhaps more accurately, “propertization”) and theft into one moment. Second, because of the way dispossession generates property under conditions that require its divestment and alienation, those negatively impacted by this process—the dispossessed—are figured as “original owners” but only retroactively, that is, refracted backward through the process itself. The claims of the dispossessed may appear contradictory or question-begging, then, since they appear to both presuppose and resist the logic of “original possession.” When framed correctly however, we can see that this is in fact a reflection of the peculiarity of the dispossessive process itself. In the extended argument of this book, I plot this movement as one of transference, transformation, and retroactive attribution. In the interests of giving this peculiar logic a name and as a means of differentiating it from other proximate processes, I theorize this specifically as recursive dispossession. Recursion is a term that is used in a variety of fields of study—most notably, logic, mathematics, and computer science—each of which employs its own 25 specific, technical definitions. technical and discipline-specific uses of the terms share the general sense of a self-referential and self-reinforcing logic. Recursion is not, therefore, simple tautology. Rather than a completely closed circuit, in which one part of a procedure refers directly back to its starting point, recursive procedures loop back upon themselves in a “boot-strapping” manner such that each iteration is not only different from the last but builds upon or augments its original postulate. Recursion therefore combines self-reference with positive feedback effects. (If it has a geometric form, it is the helix, not the circle.) In the context with which we are concerned here, dispossession can rightly be said to exhibit a “recursive” structure because it produces what it presupposes. For instance, in a standard formulation one would assume that “property” is logically, chronologically, and normatively prior to “theft.” However, in this (colonial) context, theft is the mechanism and means by which property is generated: hence its recursivity. Recursive dispossession is effectively a form of property- generating theft.
Appropriation: Bohm 13 JEFF BOHM, Chief Judge. In re Cowin, 492 B.R. 858 (Bankr. S.D. Tex. 2013). TDI
Application of the Facts in the Instant Disputes to Embezzlement under Section 523(a)(4) "The Debtor appropriated funds." "Appropriation" is defined as "the exercise of control over property; a taking of possession." BLACK'S LAW DICTIONARY 98 (7th ed. 1999). In connection with its analysis under the TTLA in section C.2.b., supra, this Court has determined that the Debtor appropriated the excess proceeds from the foreclosure sales of the Countrywide Property, the Chase Property, and the WMC Property that rightfully belonged to the Plaintiffs. Not only did the Debtor control the disposition of the excess proceeds via the WCL and Dampkring Deeds of Trust, but he ensured that the proceeds were deposited to Perc and TRH, entities controlled by his co-conspirator Allan Groves. Thus, the first element is satisfied. (ii) "The appropriation was for the Debtor's use or benefit." This element does not require a showing that the Debtor himself personally benefitted by the amounts that the Plaintiffs were damaged. For example, in affirming a bankruptcy court's decision that a debt was nondischargeable due to embezzlement under section 523(a)(4), the Sixth Circuit stated: Private appropriation of extracted space resources is distinct from appropriation “of” outer space. Despite longstanding permission of appropriation of extracted resources, sovereign claims are still universally prohibited. Abigail D. Pershing, J.D. Candidate @ Yale, B.A. UChicago,’19, "Interpreting the Outer Space Treaty's Non-Appropriation Principle: Customary International Law from 1967 to Today," Yale Journal of International Law 44, no. 1 https://openyls.law.yale.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.13051/6733/Pershing.pdf?sequence=2, DOA: Feb 19: 2022 II. THE FIRST SHIFT IN CUSTOMARY INTERNATIONAL LAW’S INTERPRETATION OF THE NON-APPROPRIATION PRINCIPLE Since the drafting of the Outer Space Treaty, several States have chosen to reinterpret the non-appropriation principle as narrower in scope than its drafters originally intended. This reinterpretation has gone largely unchallenged and has in fact been widely adopted by space-faring nations. In turn, this has had the effect of changing customary international law relating to the non-appropriation principle. Shifting away from its original blanket application in 1967, States have carved out an exception to the non-appropriation principle, allowing appropriation of extracted space resources.53 This Part examines this shift in the context of the two branches of the United Nation’s customary international law standard: State practice and opinio juris. A. State Practice The earliest hint of a change in customary international law relating to the interpretation of the non-appropriation clause came in 1969, when the United States first sent astronauts to the moon. As part of his historic journey, astronaut Neil Armstrong collected moonrocks that he brought back with him to Earth and promptly handed off to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as U.S. property.54 Later, the USSR similarly claimed lunar material as government property, some of which was eventually sold to private citizens. 55 These first instances of space resource appropriation did not draw much attention, but they presented a distinct shift marking the beginning of a new period in State practice. Having previously been limited by their technological capabilities, States could now establish new practices with respect to celestial bodies. This was the beginning of a pattern of appropriation that slowly unfolded over the next few decades and has since solidified into the general and consistent State practice necessary to establish the existence of customary international law. Currently, the U.S. government owns 842 pounds of lunar material.56 There is little question that NASA and the U.S. government consider this material, as well as other space materials collected by American astronauts, to be government property.57 In fact, NASA explicitly endorses U.S. property rights over these moon rocks, stating that “lunar material retrieved from the Moon during the Apollo Program is U.S. government property.”5 The U.S. delegation’s reaction to the language of the 1979 Moon Agreement further cemented this interpretation that appropriation of extracted resources is a permissible exception to the non-appropriation clause of Article II. Although the United States is not a party to the Moon Agreement, it did participate in the negotiations.59 The Moon Agreement states in relevant part: Neither the surface nor the subsurface of the moon, nor any part thereof or natural resources in place, shall become property of any State, international intergovernmental or nongovernmental organization, national organization or nongovernmental entity or of any natural person.60 In response to this language, the U.S. delegation made a statement laying out the American view that the words “in place” imply that private property rights apply to extracted resources61—a comment that went completely unchallenged. That all States seemed to accept this point, even those bound by the Moon Agreement, is further evidence of a shift in customary international law.62 B. Opinio Juris: Domestic Legislation Domestic law, both in the United States and abroad, provides further evidence of the shift in customary international law surrounding the issue of nonappropriation as it relates to extracted space resources. Domestic U.S. space law is codified at Section 51 of the U.S. Code and has been regularly modified to expand private actors’ rights in space.63 Beginning in 1984, the Commercial Space Launch Act provided that “the United States should encourage private sector launches and associated services.”64 The goal of the 1984 Act was to support commercial space launches by private companies and individuals.65 It did not, however, specifically discuss commercial exploitation of space. The first such mention of commercial use of space appeared in 2004, with the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act.66 This Act specifically aimed at regulating space tourism but did not explicitly guarantee any private rights in space.67 The most significant change in U.S. space law came with the passage of the Spurring Private Aerospace Competitiveness and Entrepreneurship (SPACE) Act in 2015. As incorporated into Section 51 of the Code, this Act provides: A United States citizen engaged in commercial recovery of an asteroid resource or a space resource under this chapter shall be entitled to any asteroid resource or space resource obtained, including to possess, own, transport, use, and sell the asteroid resource or space resource obtained in accordance with applicable law, including the international obligations of the United States.68 Whereas the idea that private corporations might go into space may have seemed far-fetched to the drafters of the Outer Space Treaty, the SPACE Act of 2015 was the first instance of a government recognizing such a trend and officially supporting private companies’ commercial rights to space resources under law. With the new 2015 amendment to Section 51 in place, U.S. companies can now rest assured that any profits they reap from space mining are firmly legal—at least within U.S. jurisdictions. Although the United States was the first country to officially reinterpret the non-appropriation principle, other countries are following suit. On July 20, 2017, Luxembourg passed a law entitled On the Exploration and Utilization of Space Resources with a vote of fifty-five to two.69 The law took effect on August 1, 2017.70 Article 1 of the new law states simply that “space resources can be appropriated,” and Article 3 expressly grants private companies permission to explore and use space resources for commercial purposes.71 Official commentary on the law establishes that its goal is to provide companies with legal certainty regarding ownership over space materials—a goal that the commentators regard as legal under the Outer Space Treaty despite the non-appropriation principle.72 The next country to enact similar legislation may be the United Arab Emirates (UAE). According to the UAE Space Agency director general, Mohammed Al Ahbabi, the UAE is currently in the process of drafting a space law covering both human space exploration and commercial activities such as mining.73 To further this goal, in 2017 the UAE set up the Space Agency Working Group on Space Policy and Law to specify the procedures, mechanisms, and other standards of the space sector, including an appropriate legal framework.74 C. Opinio Juris: Legal Scholarship Other major space powers are also considering similar laws in the future, including Japan, China, and Australia. 75 Senior officials within China’s space program have explicitly stated that the country’s goal is to explore outer space and to take advantage of outer space resources.76 The general international trend clearly points in this direction in anticipation of a potential “space gold rush.” 7 Mirroring the shift in State practice and domestic laws, the legal community has also changed its approach to the interpretation of the nonappropriation principle. Whereas at the time of the ratification of the Outer Space Treaty the majority of legal scholars tended to apply the non-appropriation principle broadly, most legal scholars now view appropriation of extracted materials as permissible.78 Brandon Gruner underscores that this new view is historically distinct from prior legal interpretation, noting that modern interpretations of the Outer Space Treaty’s non-appropriation principle differ from those of the Treaty’s authors.79 In contrast to earlier legal theory that denied the possibility of appropriation of any space resources, scholars now widely accept that extracting space resources from celestial bodies is a “use” permitted by the Outer Space Treaty and that extracted materials become the property of the entity that performed the extraction.80 Stressing the fact that the Treaty does not explicitly prohibit appropriating resources from outer space, other authors conclude that the use of extracted space resources is permitted, meaning that the new SPACE Act is a plausible interpretation of the Outer Space Treaty.81 However, scholars have been careful to cabin the extent to which they accept the legality of appropriation. For instance, although Thomas Gangale and Marilyn Dudley-Rowley acknowledge the legality of private appropriation of extracted space resources, they nonetheless emphasize that “ownership of and the right to use extraterrestrial resources is distinct from ownership of real property” and that any such claim to real property is illegal.82 Lawrence Cooper is also careful to point out this distinction: “the Outer Space Treaties recognize sovereignty over property placed into space, property produced in space, and resources removed from their place in space, but ban sovereignty claims by states; international law extends this ban to individuals.”83 Although there remain some scholars who still insist on the illegality of the 2015 U.S. law and State appropriation of space resources generally,84 their dominance has waned since the 1960s. These scholars are now a minority in the face of general acceptance among the legal community that minerals and other space resources, once extracted, may be legally claimed as property. 85 Taken together, the elements described above—statements made in the international arena, de facto appropriation of space resources in the form of moon rocks, the adoption of new national policies permitting appropriation of extracted space resources, and the weight of the international legal community’s opinion— indicate a fundamental shift in customary international law. The Outer Space Treaty’s non-appropriation clause has been redefined via customary international law norms from its broad application to now include a carve-out allowing appropriation of space resources once such resources have been extracted.
1 prefer 1AC definitions, anything else means the 1N gets something super abstract and I don’t link 2 O/w as common usage since it garners neg ground like lib, kant, etc.
2/20/22
JF22 - AC - Property v5
Tournament: Harvard | Round: 1 | Opponent: Acton-Boxborough ALi | Judge: Patel, Vandan Anti-Blackness and Settler Colonialism are world-breaking forces. Whiteness has conquered every frontier of this planet and seeks to own, privatize, and destroy the universe, WALKER 82 Alice Walker 1982. "Only Justice Can Stop a Curse | Reimagine!." Reimaginerpe.org. n.d. Web. 16 Oct. 2019. https://www.reimaginerpe.org/node/946 QH DOA: Feb 19, 2022 This is a curse-prayer that Zora Neale Hurston, novelist and anthropologist, collected in the 1920s. And by then it was already old. I have often marveled at it. At the precision of its anger, the absoluteness of its bitterness. Its utter hatred of the enemies it condemns. It is a curse-prayer by a person who would readily, almost happily, commit suicide, if it meant her enemies would also die. Horribly. I am sure it was a woman who first prayed this curse. And I see her - Black, Yellow, Brown or Red, "aboriginal" as the Ancients are called in South Africa and Australia and other lands invaded, expropriated and occupied by whites. And I think, with astonishment, that the curse-prayer of this colored woman—starved, enslaved, humiliated and carelessly trampled to death—over centuries, is coming to pass. Indeed, like ancient peoples of color the world over, who have tried to tell the white man of the destruction that would inevitably follow from the uranium mining plunder of their sacred lands, this woman—along with millions and billions of obliterated sisters, brothers and children—seems to have put such enormous energy into her hope for revenge, that her curse seems close to bringing it about. And it is this hope for revenge, finally, I think, that is at the heart of People of Color's resistance to any anti-nuclear movement. In any case, this has been my own problem. When I have considered the enormity of the white man's crimes against humanity. Against women. Against every living person of color. Against the poor. Against my mother and my father. Against me . . . . When I consider that at this very moment he wishes to take away what little freedom I have died to achieve, through denial of my right to vote . . . . Has already taken away education, medicine, housing and food. . . . That William Shockley is saying at this moment that he will run for the Senate of my country to push his theory that Blacks are genetically inferior and should be sterilized. . . . When I consider that he is, they are, a real and present threat to my life and the life of my daughter, my people, I think - in perfect harmony with my sisters of long ago: Let the earth marinate in poisons. Let the bombs cover the ground like rain. For nothing short of total destruction will ever teach them anything. And it would be good, perhaps, to put an end to the species in any case, rather than let the white man continue to subjugate it, and continue to let their lust dominate, exploit and despoil not just our planet, but the rest of the universe, which is their clear and oft-stated intention; leaving their arrogance and litter not just on the moon, but on everything they can reach. If we have any true love for the stars, planets, the rest of Creation, we must do everything we can to keep white man away from them. They who have appointed themselves our representatives to the rest of the universe. They who have never met any new creature without exploiting, abusing and destroying it. They who say we poor and colored and female and elderly blight neighborhoods, while they blight worlds. What they have done to the Old, they will do to the New. Under the white man every star would become a South Africa, every planet a Vietnam. Fatally irradiating ourselves may in fact be the only way to save others from what Earth has already become. And this is a consideration that I believe requires some serious thought from every one of us. However, just as the sun shines on the godly and the ungodly alike, so does nuclear radiation. And with this knowledge it becomes increasingly difficult to embrace the thought of extinction purely for the assumed satisfaction of—from the grave—achieving revenge. Or even of accepting our demise as a planet as a simple and just preventative medicine administered to the universe. Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it. In any case, Earth is my home—though for centuries white people have tried to convince me I have no right to exist, except in the dirtiest, darkest corners of the globe. So let me tell you: I intend to protect my home. Praying—not a curse—only the hope that my courage will not fail my love. But if by some miracle, and all our struggle, the earth is spared, only justice to every living thing (and everything alive) will save humankind. And we are not saved yet. Only justice can stop a curse.
The recognition of collective vulnerability through the deployment of collective extinction cannot be used to justify the furtherance of colonialist practices without reinforcing the position of indigeneity as non-life – Salih and Corry 21: Salih R, Corry O. Displacing the Anthropocene: Colonisation, extinction and the unruliness of nature in Palestine. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. January 2021. doi:10.1177/2514848620982834 DOA Feb 19, 2022 LHP BT + LHP PS With these considerations in mind, let us go back to Chakrabarty’s notion that the Anthropocene scenario of collective extinction requires that ‘we’ the ‘human’ species activate a ‘common’ ethical or pre-political stance that might take humans beyond the divisive (in)justices of politics. For that purpose, he borrows the notion ‘epochal consciousness’ from philosopher Carl Jaspers who coined it in the 1950s while contemplating the potential and imminent destruction of the planet by the atomic bomb: An epochal consciousness cannot be charged with the function of producing solutions for an epochal crisis because all possible concrete solutions of an epochal problem—and Jaspers welcomes them all—will be partial or departmental, one important department being that of politics, the specialization of politicians (2016: 146) Epochal consciousness therefore has to be pre-political, leading humans to feel as one whole: ‘It is about how we comport ourselves with regard to the world under contemplation in a moment of global crisis; it is what sustains our horizon of action’ (2016: 146). It is, for Chakrabarty, ‘a thought space that came before and above/beyond politics, without, however, foreshortening the space for political disputation and differences’ (2016: 181). Despite the notion of epochal consciousness being precarious and at risk of shattering into fragments again, for Chakrabarty ‘it remains a thought experiment in the face of an emergency that requires us to move toward composing the common’ (2016: 146–147). What Chakrabarty refers to as ‘our smaller histories of conflicting attachments, desires and aspirations’ (2016: 183) are, from the vantage points of Palestinian Indigenous nature and people, shown to be the very sites through which – historically and in the present day – profoundly unequal and violent processes have effected techniques of extinction (fossilisation) of Indigenous Life. The supposed aggregate merging of ‘human’ and ‘natural’ in the Anthropocene is not merely an unfortunate bi-product of economic and technical development or nuclear testing. The pervasive and strenuous – yet unfinished and fractured – endeavour to make the settlers and settler-Nature Indigenous, show the centrality of colonial geonto-politics in ordering and reordering the boundaries between Life and Nonlife. From this point of view, rather than a single species ‘impacting’ upon nature, threatening extinction for a common humanity, it is more appropriate to argue that the very possibility of human and non-human Life is determined by past and ongoing colonial architectures of power. Although the ‘Anthropocene’ offers us a fuller and more complex understanding of the ontological depth and temporal scales of violence, it does not in itself offer hope that this violence might be subsumed under the planetary whole. In this sense, while recognising the heuristic potential of calling for an epochal consciousness in the face of threats of collective extinction, we would argue that a mood of common vulnerability must reinforce and expand, rather than suspend or defer, attention to local and time-bound injustices. Recognising and resolving such injustices should be a necessary prelude to facing, in an ethical mood, the common threat we do face as a species. This is particularly so when, as the case of Palestine shows, Indigenous populations have historically been – and continue to be – de-humanised, disposed of, violently erased or consigned to the sphere of Nonlife. Conclusions In this article, we have explored the historical and contemporary example of settler colonialism in Palestine suggesting that the recasting of the Life/Nonlife divide has been not incidental to, but part-constitutive of, the political operation of this project. As constitutive modalities of settler colonialism, Life and Nonlife are always discursively assigned rather than being straight forward ontological givens, and this assigning is the result of intra-human injustices and political struggles albeit through their entanglement with the nonhuman. By reading settler colonialism in Palestine through the lens of geontopower, we aimed to offer a case in point to challenge suggestions that questions of intra-human justice can be occluded by a more encompassing Anthropocene condition of collective vulnerability. From the vantage point of Palestine, we argue the contrary: given that power and politics are at the very core of the ways in which nature and humans become enmeshed or forcibly separated, only when these inequalities are conceived, and then foregrounded, is there a possibility of recognising a common or global vulnerability. For Palestinian refugees and their nature, the threat of collective extinction is not a future common risk, but a process entrenched in their everyday reality since 1948. Like aboriginal Australians and other native populations, Palestinians were ‘fossilised’ and their entanglements with nature were forced to the Nonlife side of the geonto-political distinction (the ‘desert’ and the ‘virus’, to use Povinelli’s evocative figures). Importantly, however, we also showed how these operations are fractured and unfinished. Drawing from sources as diverse as personal memories, ethnographic explorations, novels and works of art, we showed that ecological ruins not only bring to light what has been destroyed, allowing the recovery of traces of a previous life, but also most crucially have an afterlife, unsettling politically drawn Life/Nonlife boundaries. Far from a nostalgic claim to a pristine and authentic life-world that preexisted the settler colonial intervention, indigeneity thus signifies an intimate form of reciprocation of native people to their vegetation and animals – an Indigenous entanglement, which proved recalcitrant to taming and fossilisation. It is perhaps no coincidence that Sabr, the Arabic name for the cacti fruits, also means patience and signifies endurance as a natural and human virtue.
We are told that space travel is for our greatest minds, obscuring the original frontier. For the conquering of the stars requires the conquering of the mind. The tabula rasa mind is the original battlefield, violently securing the empty interiority of the enlightenment body. Ownership of the earth secured ownership over one's mind, MOTEN and HARNEY 1 Moten and Harney 21, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney, “The Theft of Assembly”, All Incomplete, Minor Compositions, 2021, pg(16), HTE https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Harney_Stefano_Moten_Fred_All_Incomplete_2021.pdf DOA: Feb 19, 2022 If this is true, we should be worried. In its origins, and its contemporary mutations, logistics is a regulatory force standing against us, standing against the earth. Logistics begins in loss and emptiness. And it begins in a fundamental misapprehension called spacetime. The loss that marks ownership, specifically the ownership of private property, the loss of sharing, the loss of the earth and the consequent making of the world, is simultaneously the misapprehension that what is privatized is empty and will be filled by ownership itself, by properties, by properties placed into it. This emptiness will be filled with an interior. This emptiness is confirmed by logistics, by the mobilization, the colonizing drive, of this interior – where properties are imported into empty space. This begins, again, with Locke or, at least, we can begin again through him. His concept of the mind as tabula rasa – often portrayed as an Enlightenment move away from predetermination – is a projection of this emptiness that must be owned and filled. For this emptiness to become private property it must be filled with and located in the coordinates of space and time. Space emerges as the delimitation of what is mine, and time begins with the theft and imposition when it became mine. The individual mind and its coming to maturity out of the tabula rasa mark this first conquest. Enlightenment interiority emerged from this emplotment of time and space – to borrow from Hayden White – this separation from what is shared. But interiority is only for the owning mind. Because what allows this mind to take possession of itself is its ability to grasp property, which is something it now posits as beyond itself. It takes what it is taken from for what it needs to create itself, and not just needs but compulsively, interminably, voraciously seeks without end. In other words, the emplotment of time and space in the mind takes place through the emplotment of time and space on earth, in a conversion of emptiness into world, and is simultaneously taken as a fulfillment of mind, its interior appointment in and of what can now be conceptualized as body. Is it a leap to say logic and logistics start here inseparably?
The European colonial project begins and begins and begins through property. For as many means in enlightenment thought, there are no ends on the frontier of conquest. The privatized appropriation of outer space is racial capitalism's continual drive towards death. And thus I affirm that the appropriation of outer space by private entities is unjust.
Whiteness globalizes itself through property. To own and improve the Earth is to separate oneself from all. Only the mythically differentiated subject can own the land, animals, and resources that offer its relation to it, MOTEN and HARNEY 2 Moten and Harney 21, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney, “Usufruct and Use”, All Incomplete, Minor Compositions, 2021, pg(28-30), HTE https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Harney_Stefano_Moten_Fred_All_Incomplete_2021.pdf DOA: Feb 19, 2022 What does it mean to stand for improvement? Or worse, to stand for what business calls a ‘commitment to continuous improvement‘? It means to stand for the brutal speciation of all. To take a stand for speciation is the beginning of a diabolical usufruct. Improvement comes to us by way of an innovation in land tenure, where individuated ownership, derived from increasing the land’s productivity, is given in the perpetual, and thus arrested, becoming of exception’s miniature. This is to say that from the outset, the ability to own – and that ability’s first derivative, self-possession – is entwined with the ability to make more productive. In order to be improved, to be rendered more productive, land must be violently reduced to its productivity, which is the regulatory diminishment and management of earthly generativity. Speciation is this general reduction of the earth to productivity and submission of the earth to techniques of domination that isolate and enforce particular increases in and accelerations of productivity. In this regard, (necessarily European) man, in and as the exception, imposes speciation upon himself, in an operation that extracts and excepts himself from the earth in order to confirm his supposed dominion over it. And just as the earth must be forcefully speciated to be possessed, man must forcefully speciate himself in order to enact this kind of possession. This is to say that racialization is present in the very idea of dominion over the earth; in the very idea and enactment of the exception; in the very nuts and bolts of possession-by-improvement. Forms of racialization that both Michel Foucault and, especially and most vividly, Robinson identify in medieval Europe become usufructed with modern possession through improvement. Speciated humans are endlessly improved through the endless work they do on their endless way to becoming Man. This is the usufruct of man. In early modern England, establishing title to land by making it more productive meant eliminating biodiversity and isolating and breeding a species – barley or rye or pigs. Localized ecosystems were aggressively transformed so that monocultural productivity smothers anacultural generativity. The emergent relation between speciation and racialization is the very conception and conceptualization of the settler. Maintenance of that relation is his vigil and his eve. For the encloser, possession is established through improvement – this is true for the possession of land and for the possession of self. The Enlightenment is the universalization/globalization of the imperative to possess and its corollary, the imperative to improve. However, this productivity must always confront its contradictory impoverishment: the destruction of its biosphere and its estrangement in, if not from, entanglement, both of which combine to ensure the liquidation of the human differential that is already present in the very idea of man, the exception. To stand for such improvement is to invoke policy, which attributes depletion to the difference, which is to say the wealth, whose simultaneous destruction and accumulation policy is meant to operationalize. This attribution of a supposedly essential lack, an inevitable and supposedly natural diminution, is achieved alongside the imposition of possession-by-improvement. To make policy is to impose speciation upon everybody and everything, to inflict impoverishment in the name of improvement, to invoke the universal law of the usufruct of man. In this context, continuous improvement, as it emerged with decolonization and particularly with the defeat of national capitalism in the 1970s, is the continuous crisis of speciation in the surround of the general antagonism. This is the contradiction Robinson constantly invoked and analyzed with the kind of profound and solemn optimism that comes from being with, and being of service to, your friends
Ownership is at the heart of colonial logistics feedback loop. The more the enlightenment man owns, the more violence he must commit to protect it. Whiteness developed as an exponential militarized force to protect all he appropriated on the frontier, MOTEN and HARNEY 3 Moten and Harney 21, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney, “The Theft of Assembly”, All Incomplete, Minor Compositions, 2021, pg(16-17), HTE https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Harney_Stefano_Moten_Fred_All_Incomplete_2021.pdf DOA: Feb 19, 2022 This is why there is no separating Locke the Enlightenment thinker from Locke the writer on race, the author of the notorious colonial constitution of the Carolinas. Ownership was a feedback loop – the more you own the more you own yourself. The more logistics you apply the more logic you acquire; the more logic you deploy the more logistics you require. As Hortense Spillers says, the transatlantic slave trade was the supply chain of Enlightenment. It was never-ending quest and conquest, because ownership is perpetual loss. Gilles Deleuze said that he would rather call power “sad.” We might say the same of ownership, where lies the most direct sense of loss of sharing. This feeling of loss translates into a diabolical obsession with loss prevention. Logistics emerges as much as the science of loss prevention as the science of moving property through the emptiness, of making the world as it travels by filling it. This is not making the road as we walk, in the anarchist tradition. This is converting everything in its path into a coordinated time and space for ownership. Such seizing, such grasping, and such loss prevention is the mode of operation for the wickedness of the Atlantic slave trade, the first massive, diabolic, commercial logistics. Already this feedback loop of ownership experiences amplified loss, the loss of sharing, with each emplotment. But now, in taking up the European heritage of race and slavery that Robinson identifes as emerging in the class struggle in Europe in the centuries directly before Locke and extending into Locke’s own time, a double loss is experienced, an intensifcation of the ownership feedback loop (and what we call the subject reaction). This evil emplotment of Africans is experienced as the potential loss of property that can flee. It is in this double loss of sharing – given in owning and in the imposition of being-owned – that the most deadly, planet-threatening, disease of the species-being emerges: whiteness. And it is for this reason that we can say logistics is the white science. (This is what many white people – who are the people, as James Baldwin says, who think they are white or that they ought to be – are doing when you see them walk straight past a queue of people and take a seat, or move to the center of a crowded room, or speak more loudly than those around them, or block a sidewalk while discussing ‘choices’ with their toddler. Making theory out of practice, they are emplotted, as they’ve been taught to do, establishing the spacetime of possession and self-possession in ownership. Every step they take is a standing of ground, a stomping of the world out of earthly existence and into racial capitalist human being. It grows more pronounced the more it is threatened, consumed by its own feedback loop, and it produces sharper and sharper subject reactions in the face of this threat. This is the old/new fascism: not the anonymity of following the leader, but the subject reaction to leadership, which can just as easily imagine itself to be liberal dissent from, as supposedly opposed to a lock(e)-step repetition of, its call. Politics pathologizes the general antagonism in order to prescribe more and more politics. We refuse this prescription and embrace a metaphysics of incompleteness, MOTEN and HARNEY 4 Moten and Harney 21, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney, “We Want a Precedent”, All Incomplete, Minor Compositions, 2021, pg(23-26), HTE https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Harney_Stefano_Moten_Fred_All_Incomplete_2021.pdf DOA: Feb 19, 2022 Our President, our deluded and degraded and demonic sovereign, in whatever form this abstraction of our abstract and wholly fictional equivalence will have taken, is a featureless point on a long and hopelessly straight line of knock-offs. It’s like how Richard of Bordeaux, who can do whatever he wants except stop himself from doing whatever he wants, carries around his own deposition (disguised as the serial murder that constitutes the peaceful transition of power and its vulgar ceremonies) like a genetic faw, as the illegitimate but inevitably heritable Bolingbroke-ass ambitions that leave him with ever increasingly etiolated capacities for self-refection. So that in all its singularly focused limitation and qualification, in the relative nothingness of the prison that it calls a world, the all-encompassing and all to be settled sphere that it stomps all over all the time, posing for an impossible arc of deadly and impossible pictures, our President, whichever one you ever wanted or didn’t want, each one after the other in noticeable imperial decline, is just a sick, uneasy head in a hollow crown, making us watch it talk about how it’s gonna kill us and then making us watch it kill us. 2. What we want is usually said to be all bound up with what we don’t have. Zoe Leonard’s been talking about what we want, though, slantedly, in the dimensionless infinity room we can’t even crawl around in when we cruise the rub and whirr of the city as a grove of aspen in late fall, in the mountains, held and unheld at the bottom of the sea. She’s talking about what we want in relation to what we have when what we have is all this experience of not having, of shared nothing, of sharing nothingness. She speaks of and from a common underprivilege, from the privilege of the common underground, in and from the wealth of a precarity that goes from hand to hand, as a caress. Look at all the richness we have, she says, in having lost, in having suffered, in having been suffered, in suffering one another as if we were one another’s little children, as if we were in love with one another, as if we loved one another so much that all one and another can do is go. We want a president, Zoe says, who’s loved and lost all that with us, who’s shared our little all, our little nothing. Such a thing, the general and generative nothingness that is more and less than political, would be unprecedented. Maybe she doesn’t want a president; maybe she wants a precedent, the endlessly new thing of the absolutely no thing, its Zen xenogenerosity, its queer reproductivity, which keeps on beginning in beginning’s absence as ungoverned and ungovernable care(ss). 3. Is it possible to want what you have become in suffering, both in the absence and in the depths of suffrage, without wanting what it is to suffer? Can you want what it is to be all, and want what it is to be whole, without wanting to be complete? Is it possible to crave the general incompleteness without that seemingly unbearable desire to be pierced, ruptured, broken? In lieu of the president we want and don’t want, we have Cedric Robinson, whom just a little while ago we lost. He says: If, in some spiteful play, one were compelled by some demon or god to choose a transgression against Nietzsche so profound and fundamental to his temperament and intention as to break apart the ground on which his philosophy stood, one could do no better than this: a society which has woven into its matrix for the purpose of suspending and neutralizing those forces antithetic to individual autonomy, the constructed reality that all are equally incomplete. A logic is being jousted here. Is it not so that the emergence of power as the instrument of certainty in human organization is seen by many to be the consequence of and response to the circumstances of inequality and sensed social entropy? Is it not so that individual autonomy, rare enough in the first condition and imperiled by the second, is in the final construction made foreign? And does not, logically, even autonomy require for its nurturance a hothouse of certitude similar to that required for the evolution of power – autonomy being to a degree a variant of power? Then the principle of incompleteness – the absence of discrete organismic integrity, if it were to occupy in a metaphysics the place of inequality in political philosophy, would bring to human society a paradigm subversive to political authority as the archetypical resolution, as the prescription for order.5 How can we come more accurately to understand American democracy – the brutality of our improvement, the viciousness of the ways we are put to use – as the praxis of privatized interest in inequality, expressed in the theory of the abstract equality of every complete individual, whose constant recitation brutally regulates the general interest in an equality given in and as an absolute incompleteness that defies individuation? How can we come to understand that the interinanimation of our bondage and our freedom – and, therefore, of our liberalism and our protest – is the metaphysical foundation of a national political philosophy that we have come to claim in violation of the precedent we want. How can we disavow that claim, having learned to want to want the order from which our forced desire is derived to be drowned in the disorder of all (the nothing) we have? How can we more intensely feel the physics of our surround, our social aesthetic, the gravity of our love and loss, our shared, radically sounded, radically sent incompleteness? What would it mean to say we cannot take a position on politics – even the old and honorable ‘I don’t vote because I’m Marxist‘ position? What if we said we have no options, that here we don’t even have the option of no option? We think that would be good. Zoe gets us started: to think off of what we want is lightly to inhabit not being and not having, here. The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater with the best method for partial education. Racial capitalism calls us into individuation through a total education that demands a call to order through instruction and self-improvement, MOTEN and HARNEY 5 Moten and Harney 21, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney, “A Partial Education”, All Incomplete, Minor Compositions, 2021, pg(62-67), HTE https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Harney_Stefano_Moten_Fred_All_Incomplete_2021.pdf DOA: Feb 19, 2022 Now Foucault stressed that because this instruction represented the reform of ‘perverted‘ bodies – bodies that previously had no such discipline – any call for reforming the modern prison was a call for more instruction. Reform produced more instruction. Instruction produced more constraint, or discipline. Discipline only confirmed the underlying perversion of these bodies, and called forth more reform, which called forth more instruction to reform the perversion discipline confirmed. This process is reflected in Foucault’s use of the oxymoron “perverted individual,” an oxymoron that is nonetheless the source of total education. Perversion violates the principle of the individual by failing to accede to its proper boundaries and comportments, and thus the perverted individual is an ongoing violation that calls total education into being. In Foucault’s account, perversion appears as a turning aside (from the truth) that is, somehow, prior, already existing. A prior turn. An already given turning that requires straightening, that summons reform. Instruction is how we get straightened out insofar as it is how one is straightened out. Correction begins with the ascription of the body itself, the imposition of body onto flesh; the attribution of perversion to the specific body, which justifies its correction, follows from its isolation and manifests itself as the theft of the body that has been imposed by those who assert a right to instruct insofar as theirs are bodies that they have supposedly both claimed and transcended. The ascription of body, the imposition of bounded and enclosed self-possession, of a discrete self subject to ownership, of ownership activated and confirmed either in theft or trade, might be said to be the first reform, the first improvement, insofar as it is the condition of possibility of reform, or improvement. The assignment of body to flesh is the first stripe of the long, hard, torturously straight, tortuously straightened row. Instruction is the setting in order, the straightening out. Instruction thereby reveals the essential relationship between improvement and impoverishment, between the private and privation at the heart of total education. Perversion’s wealth becomes education’s profit. Today there would appear to be few examples of Foucault’s total education in prison regimes. The program of reform, the program of prisoner improvement, has been replaced almost everywhere by one of punishment alone, or what Foucault calls simply the deprivation of liberty. At the same time, in pointing out that the current prison program of ‘slow-motion genocide’ has long been the global norm in racialized regimes, abolitionist scholars refuse to countenance reform of the exception, alerting us to the fact that reform of the prison and reform of the prisoner are as much modalities of genocide as the interplay of privation and privatization that racial incarceration relentlessly innovates.29 But what if? What if perversion is placed under constraint in the very idea of individuation, which projects improvement’s subject as improvement’s object? Then the figure of the perverted individual is always already in the system. Conversely, if perversion’s location in the individual body is a form of imprisonment and instruction, then perversion is an already given anti-/ante-individuation. If prison/school are two sides of a common institutional structure that operates by way of individuation, then perversion is a pre-carceral breaking out of prison, a pre-scholarly dropping out of school, that continually reveals the ubiquity of the total education that hunts it down and puts it to work. Insofar as it is the case that in prison and in school one’s job is to learn, to get it straight, to straighten out, then it is also the case that every citizen and non-citizen, every person and non-person, every worker who is in or out of work – even the enemy combatant, the prisoner, and the supposedly unemployable – is subject to a total education Whiteness is anti-thetical to relationality and community formation, abolition requires working against the subject. This is the only way I as a white person can engage, HARNEY 17 Stefano Harney (part 2), by Michael Schapira and Jesse Montgomery, August 10, 2017Jesse Montgomery is an editor at Full Stop and a graduate student in the English department at Vanderbilt University. Michael Schapira is an Interviews editor at Full Stop and teaches Philosophy at Hofstra University. A version of this conversation originally appeared in the Full Stop Quarterly Issue #5.http://www.full-stop.net/2017/08/10/interviews/michael-schapira-and-jesse-montgomery/stefano-harney-part-2/ DOA: Feb 19, 2022 The authors quote Frank Wilderson on the way blackness can never be disimbricated from the violence of slavery. Then they say: ‘Those who would risk extending solidarity across racial boundaries would find themselves the recipient of exemplary violence in order to instill fear of constant consequence for this treason. Ever after, meaningful cross-racial affinity can only be found in moments of revolutionary violence.” (IStefano Harney (part 2) | Full Stoptalics in the original.) Now this is an historical observation on their part, but to some extent it is also programmatic for the authors. As an observation, well, they have just convinced me of its validity in the last 250 pages, and as program, well, I’m not a pacifist. I’m for self-defense, and that can be violent. But do words like solidarity, affinity, to say nothing of the unlovely term allyship, accidentally preserve something we want to abolish? And I feel bad using Shirley and Stafford to make this point because theirs is such a good book, but maybe that’s why I feel compelled to say, ‘even here’ this question comes up. What I mean is who is this someone in solidarity with blackness, who is this ally of blackness, who is this someone with affinity to black struggle? I think this means that this someone has his or her own struggles and is indicating that now she or he wants to join not in common struggles, but in the struggles of blackness. Because in a sense you have to have your own thing to be an ally or to be in solidarity. Ok, but what are your own struggles from which you would be offering solidarity, allyship, affinity? Are you organizing in the white community, is that it? I think that is the implication, that you have been working in white communities, and/or on the environment, or feminist issues, etc. But the problem is, there’s no such thing as a white community. A white community is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron. You can’t organize an oxymoron. The only thing you can do with a white community is work to abolish it. Moreover at that point of abolition we may be able to say there is no such thing as a community, that a community is an oxymoron. You can’t commune and have a community. Communing is anti-community. It’s undercommon. Maybe the only kind of community that is possible is the maroon community, because it is by definition not a community, and when in some historical instances (of necessity even) it became one, it took on the same murderous qualities of any community. Okay, so then the question arising, if you do abolish the white community, what of the people who were marked as white, and in many cases who dwelt in the supremacy of whiteness, what becomes of them? Well, in the practice of abolition they will move closer to the only thing they ever had that was about life and not death, about love and not hate, blackness. This is to say, people who present as white are not allies, or in solidarity, or showing affinity, because they have nothing of their own, no place from which to show this, no resource to bring, unless and until they embrace the one thing of their own they disown. The thing that can’t be owned born(e) of the owned, blackness. Now white people aren’t coming with much blackness, by definition. And this is why the underlying humility motivating terms like ally, solidarity, and affinity is not misplaced, if that is indeed what underlies their use in practice. In any case, whiteness is either absence or violence, and in either case, not much to offer as an ally. But on the other hand white people have a big role to play in the revolutionary violence Shirley and Stafford speak of because the act of abolition of white communities is a monumental task.
Property is a concept created as a weapon of colonization. Indigenous peoples had a shared ownership of the land, but colonial structures ripped that away and created instead an original dispossessive ownership, forming both property and theft simultaneously. Thus, when the land becomes property, it becomes made so for theft, NICHOLS “18 Nichols, Robert. "Theft is property! The recursive logic of dispossession." Political Theory 46.1 (2018): 3-28. Team owned PDF, DOA: Feb 19, 2022 LHP HL One concern stands out most prominently. To speak of dispossession is to use a negative term. It is “negative” both in the ordinary language sense (i.e., pejorative) but also in the more philosophical sense, in that it signals the absence of some attribute. Most intuitively, a condition of dispossession is characterized by a privation of possession. In this obvious, ordinary, and commonly used sense of the term, dispossession means something like a normatively objectionable loss of possession, essentially a species of theft. Inasmuch as this is implied by the concept, however, a new set of conceptual and practical complications arise. For such a formulation appears, first, generally parasitic upon a background system of law that could establish the normative context in which a violation (e.g., theft) could be recognized, condemned, and punished. Second and more specifically, the term seems necessarily appended to a proprietary and commoditized model of social relations. Insofar as critical theorists generally seek to leverage the category of dispossession as a tool of radical, emancipatory politics in the critique of extant legal authority and proprietary relations, recourse to this language thus seems potentially contradictory and self-defeating. In the Anglo settler colonial countries of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, term. concept of dispossession as a gravitational center, this is really an analysis of a “space of problematization” (in Foucault’s language) rather than a singular concept. The problem-space in question brings together shifting configurations of property, law, race, and rights and has been previously examined in a variety of languages (including expropriation and eminent domain) and in diverse normative registers. The study undertaken here takes a different tack. Although I use the and the United States, this concern has taken on a very specific form. In this context, Indigenous peoples have often been accused of putting forward a contradictory set of claims, namely, that they are the original and natural owners of the land that has been stolen from them, and that the earth is not something in which any one person or group of people can have exclusive proprietary rights. The supposed tension between these claims has been exploited to significant success by a number of critics, particularly right-wing populists in these societies, who view white settlers as the true owners of these lands, both collectively (through the extension of territorial sovereignty and public law) and individually (through the devices of private property). The Indigenous social and political theorist Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Goenpul Tribe of the Quandamooka Nation) has recently provided a concrete instantiation of this logic and the stakes of its apprehension. As part of a more general investigation into the diverse manifestations of what she terms the “possessive logic of white patriarchal sovereignty,” Moreton-Robinson analyzes 16 the so-called history wars in her native Australia. Sparked by the publication of Keith Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, this debate centered on his polemical claim that the colonization of Australia was fundamentally a nonviolent process that eventually benefited its Indigenous inhabitants. As Windshuttle put it, “Rather than genocide and frontier warfare, British colonization of Australia brought civilized society and the rule of law.”17 Of most relevance to our purposes here, however, Windshuttle has also asserted that at the point of contact with Europeans, Australian Aborigines lacked any conception of “property,” or perhaps even of “land” as a discreet entity in which 18 Although formulated in more sophisticated and sympathetic terms, a range of academic treatments has voiced similar concerns. Work by the legal and political philosopher Jeremy Waldron provides a case in point. In a series of essays covering more than a decade, Waldron questions the underlying coherence of the very idea of an “indigenous right.” In particular, he has explicitly raised the objection that, inasmuch as Indigenous rights appear to rest upon claims to “first occupancy,” they are often appeals to untenable and unverifiable chains of ownership back to “time-immemorial.”20 By eschewing precision in the defining of “indigeneity,” Waldron moreover warns, proponents import an “ineffable, almost mystical element” to the term, the ascription of which leads to the one could claim property. argument: if Indigenous peoples “did not have a concept of ownership ... there was no theft, no war, and no need to have a treaty.”19 Aileen Moreton-Robinson unpacks the logic of the “rhetorical heightening of the unexceptional fact of having been here first.”21 Although Waldron’s argument derives from a specific contractualist tradition of liberal analytic thought, it finds an unlikely resonance with a set of more radical left critics. Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright, for instance, voice similar concerns with the “autochthonous discourses of ‘Native’ rights” in which Indigenous peoples are “subordinated and defined (by both the dominated and the dominating) metaphysically as being of the land colonized by various European empires.”22 Similar unease with the trajectory of Indigenous political 23 One could say much more about these contemporary disputes. Indeed, many Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars alike are currently engaged in these heated debates. Initially, however, I wish simply to flag how such concerns drive at a basic conceptual ambiguity at the heart of dispossession. Critics wish to catch Indigenous peoples and their allies on the horns of a dilemma: either one claims prior possession of the land in a recognizable propertied form—thus universalizing and backdating a general possessive logic as the appropriate normative benchmark—or one disavows possession as such, apparently 24 This book responds to this challenge, first, by providing an alternative conceptual framework through which to view dispossession and, second, by substantiating this as relevant to the actual historical development of Anglo settler colonialism and Indigenous resistance. I argue that, in the specific context with which we are concerned, “dispossession” may be coherently reconstructed to refer to a process in which new proprietary relations are generated but under structural conditions that demand their simultaneous negation. In effect, the dispossessed come to “have” something they cannot use, except by alienating it to another. This process has been notoriously difficult to apprehend because it is novel in a number of important ways. First, dispossession of this sort combines two processes typically thought distinct: it transforms nonproprietary relations into critique has been voiced by important contributors to critical race theory. each of these cases, the concern is that Indigenous peoples’ claims to “original ownership” are untenable, politically problematic for their implications on other, non-Indigenous communities, or both. undercutting the force of a subsequent claim of dispossession. one sense at least, this critique does highlight a curious juxtaposition of claims that often animate Indigenous politics in the Anglophone world, namely, that the earth is not to be thought of as property at all, and that it has been stolen from its rightful owners. And indeed, in Inproprietary ones while, at the same time, systematically transferring control and title of this (newly formed) property. In this way, dispossession merges commodification (or, perhaps more accurately, “propertization”) and theft into one moment. Second, because of the way dispossession generates property under conditions that require its divestment and alienation, those negatively impacted by this process—the dispossessed—are figured as “original owners” but only retroactively, that is, refracted backward through the process itself. The claims of the dispossessed may appear contradictory or question-begging, then, since they appear to both presuppose and resist the logic of “original possession.” When framed correctly however, we can see that this is in fact a reflection of the peculiarity of the dispossessive process itself. In the extended argument of this book, I plot this movement as one of transference, transformation, and retroactive attribution. In the interests of giving this peculiar logic a name and as a means of differentiating it from other proximate processes, I theorize this specifically as recursive dispossession. Recursion is a term that is used in a variety of fields of study—most notably, logic, mathematics, and computer science—each of which employs its own 25 specific, technical definitions. technical and discipline-specific uses of the terms share the general sense of a self-referential and self-reinforcing logic. Recursion is not, therefore, simple tautology. Rather than a completely closed circuit, in which one part of a procedure refers directly back to its starting point, recursive procedures loop back upon themselves in a “boot-strapping” manner such that each iteration is not only different from the last but builds upon or augments its original postulate. Recursion therefore combines self-reference with positive feedback effects. (If it has a geometric form, it is the helix, not the circle.) In the context with which we are concerned here, dispossession can rightly be said to exhibit a “recursive” structure because it produces what it presupposes. For instance, in a standard formulation one would assume that “property” is logically, chronologically, and normatively prior to “theft.” However, in this (colonial) context, theft is the mechanism and means by which property is generated: hence its recursivity. Recursive dispossession is effectively a form of property- generating theft.
“Appropriation of outer space” by private entities refers to the exercise of exclusive control of space. TIMOTHY JUSTIN TRAPP, JD Candidate @ UIUC Law, ’13, TAKING UP SPACE BY ANY OTHER MEANS: COMING TO TERMS WITH THE NONAPPROPRIATION ARTICLE OF THE OUTER SPACE TREATY UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LAW REVIEW Vol. 2013 No. 4 https://www.illinoislawreview.org/wp-content/ilr-content/articles/2013/4/Trapp.pdf, DOA: Feb 19 2022 The issues presented in relation to the nonappropriation article of the Outer Space Treaty should be clear.214 The ITU has, quite blatantly, created something akin to “property interests in outer space.”215 It allows nations to exclude others from their orbital slots, even when the nation is not currently using that slot.216 This is directly in line with at least one definition of outer-space appropriation.217 Start Footnote 217Id. at 236 (“Appropriation of outer space, therefore, is ‘the exercise of exclusive control or exclusive use’ with a sense of permanence, which limits other nations’ access to it.”) (quoting Milton L. Smith, The Role of the ITU in the Development of Space Law, 17 ANNALS AIR and SPACE L. 157, 165 (1992)). End Footnote 217The ITU even allows nations with unused slots to devise them to other entities, creating a market for the property rights set up by this regulation.218 In some aspects, this seems to effect exactly what those signatory nations Private appropriation of extracted space resources is distinct from appropriation “of” outer space. Despite longstanding permission of appropriation of extracted resources, sovereign claims are still universally prohibited. Abigail D. Pershing, J.D. Candidate @ Yale, B.A. UChicago,’19, "Interpreting the Outer Space Treaty's Non-Appropriation Principle: Customary International Law from 1967 to Today," Yale Journal of International Law 44, no. 1, https://openyls.law.yale.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.13051/6733/Pershing.pdf?sequence=2, DOA: Feb 19: 2022 II. THE FIRST SHIFT IN CUSTOMARY INTERNATIONAL LAW’S INTERPRETATION OF THE NON-APPROPRIATION PRINCIPLE Since the drafting of the Outer Space Treaty, several States have chosen to reinterpret the non-appropriation principle as narrower in scope than its drafters originally intended. This reinterpretation has gone largely unchallenged and has in fact been widely adopted by space-faring nations. In turn, this has had the effect of changing customary international law relating to the non-appropriation principle. Shifting away from its original blanket application in 1967, States have carved out an exception to the non-appropriation principle, allowing appropriation of extracted space resources.53 This Part examines this shift in the context of the two branches of the United Nation’s customary international law standard: State practice and opinio juris. A. State Practice The earliest hint of a change in customary international law relating to the interpretation of the non-appropriation clause came in 1969, when the United States first sent astronauts to the moon. As part of his historic journey, astronaut Neil Armstrong collected moonrocks that he brought back with him to Earth and promptly handed off to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as U.S. property.54 Later, the USSR similarly claimed lunar material as government property, some of which was eventually sold to private citizens. 55 These first instances of space resource appropriation did not draw much attention, but they presented a distinct shift marking the beginning of a new period in State practice. Having previously been limited by their technological capabilities, States could now establish new practices with respect to celestial bodies. This was the beginning of a pattern of appropriation that slowly unfolded over the next few decades and has since solidified into the general and consistent State practice necessary to establish the existence of customary international law. Currently, the U.S. government owns 842 pounds of lunar material.56 There is little question that NASA and the U.S. government consider this material, as well as other space materials collected by American astronauts, to be government property.57 In fact, NASA explicitly endorses U.S. property rights over these moon rocks, stating that “lunar material retrieved from the Moon during the Apollo Program is U.S. government property.”5 The U.S. delegation’s reaction to the language of the 1979 Moon Agreement further cemented this interpretation that appropriation of extracted resources is a permissible exception to the non-appropriation clause of Article II. Although the United States is not a party to the Moon Agreement, it did participate in the negotiations.59 The Moon Agreement states in relevant part: Neither the surface nor the subsurface of the moon, nor any part thereof or natural resources in place, shall become property of any State, international intergovernmental or nongovernmental organization, national organization or nongovernmental entity or of any natural person.60 In response to this language, the U.S. delegation made a statement laying out the American view that the words “in place” imply that private property rights apply to extracted resources61—a comment that went completely unchallenged. That all States seemed to accept this point, even those bound by the Moon Agreement, is further evidence of a shift in customary international law.62 B. Opinio Juris: Domestic Legislation Domestic law, both in the United States and abroad, provides further evidence of the shift in customary international law surrounding the issue of nonappropriation as it relates to extracted space resources. Domestic U.S. space law is codified at Section 51 of the U.S. Code and has been regularly modified to expand private actors’ rights in space.63 Beginning in 1984, the Commercial Space Launch Act provided that “the United States should encourage private sector launches and associated services.”64 The goal of the 1984 Act was to support commercial space launches by private companies and individuals.65 It did not, however, specifically discuss commercial exploitation of space. The first such mention of commercial use of space appeared in 2004, with the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act.66 This Act specifically aimed at regulating space tourism but did not explicitly guarantee any private rights in space.67 The most significant change in U.S. space law came with the passage of the Spurring Private Aerospace Competitiveness and Entrepreneurship (SPACE) Act in 2015. As incorporated into Section 51 of the Code, this Act provides: A United States citizen engaged in commercial recovery of an asteroid resource or a space resource under this chapter shall be entitled to any asteroid resource or space resource obtained, including to possess, own, transport, use, and sell the asteroid resource or space resource obtained in accordance with applicable law, including the international obligations of the United States.68 Whereas the idea that private corporations might go into space may have seemed far-fetched to the drafters of the Outer Space Treaty, the SPACE Act of 2015 was the first instance of a government recognizing such a trend and officially supporting private companies’ commercial rights to space resources under law. With the new 2015 amendment to Section 51 in place, U.S. companies can now rest assured that any profits they reap from space mining are firmly legal—at least within U.S. jurisdictions. Although the United States was the first country to officially reinterpret the non-appropriation principle, other countries are following suit. On July 20, 2017, Luxembourg passed a law entitled On the Exploration and Utilization of Space Resources with a vote of fifty-five to two.69 The law took effect on August 1, 2017.70 Article 1 of the new law states simply that “space resources can be appropriated,” and Article 3 expressly grants private companies permission to explore and use space resources for commercial purposes.71 Official commentary on the law establishes that its goal is to provide companies with legal certainty regarding ownership over space materials—a goal that the commentators regard as legal under the Outer Space Treaty despite the non-appropriation principle.72 The next country to enact similar legislation may be the United Arab Emirates (UAE). According to the UAE Space Agency director general, Mohammed Al Ahbabi, the UAE is currently in the process of drafting a space law covering both human space exploration and commercial activities such as mining.73 To further this goal, in 2017 the UAE set up the Space Agency Working Group on Space Policy and Law to specify the procedures, mechanisms, and other standards of the space sector, including an appropriate legal framework.74 C. Opinio Juris: Legal Scholarship Other major space powers are also considering similar laws in the future, including Japan, China, and Australia. 75 Senior officials within China’s space program have explicitly stated that the country’s goal is to explore outer space and to take advantage of outer space resources.76 The general international trend clearly points in this direction in anticipation of a potential “space gold rush.” 7 Mirroring the shift in State practice and domestic laws, the legal community has also changed its approach to the interpretation of the nonappropriation principle. Whereas at the time of the ratification of the Outer Space Treaty the majority of legal scholars tended to apply the non-appropriation principle broadly, most legal scholars now view appropriation of extracted materials as permissible.78 Brandon Gruner underscores that this new view is historically distinct from prior legal interpretation, noting that modern interpretations of the Outer Space Treaty’s non-appropriation principle differ from those of the Treaty’s authors.79 In contrast to earlier legal theory that denied the possibility of appropriation of any space resources, scholars now widely accept that extracting space resources from celestial bodies is a “use” permitted by the Outer Space Treaty and that extracted materials become the property of the entity that performed the extraction.80 Stressing the fact that the Treaty does not explicitly prohibit appropriating resources from outer space, other authors conclude that the use of extracted space resources is permitted, meaning that the new SPACE Act is a plausible interpretation of the Outer Space Treaty.81 However, scholars have been careful to cabin the extent to which they accept the legality of appropriation. For instance, although Thomas Gangale and Marilyn Dudley-Rowley acknowledge the legality of private appropriation of extracted space resources, they nonetheless emphasize that “ownership of and the right to use extraterrestrial resources is distinct from ownership of real property” and that any such claim to real property is illegal.82 Lawrence Cooper is also careful to point out this distinction: “the Outer Space Treaties recognize sovereignty over property placed into space, property produced in space, and resources removed from their place in space, but ban sovereignty claims by states; international law extends this ban to individuals.”83 Although there remain some scholars who still insist on the illegality of the 2015 U.S. law and State appropriation of space resources generally,84 their dominance has waned since the 1960s. These scholars are now a minority in the face of general acceptance among the legal community that minerals and other space resources, once extracted, may be legally claimed as property. 85 Taken together, the elements described above—statements made in the international arena, de facto appropriation of space resources in the form of moon rocks, the adoption of new national policies permitting appropriation of extracted space resources, and the weight of the international legal community’s opinion— indicate a fundamental shift in customary international law. The Outer Space Treaty’s non-appropriation clause has been redefined via customary international law norms from its broad application to now include a carve-out allowing appropriation of space resources once such resources have been extracted.
1 prefer 1AC definitions, anything else means the 1N gets something super abstract and I don’t link 2 O/w as common usage since it garners neg ground like lib, kant, etc.
2/20/22
JF22 - AC - Property v6
Tournament: Harvard | Round: 4 | Opponent: Ridge VS | Judge: Saianurag Karavadi Anti-Blackness and Settler Colonialism are world-breaking forces. Whiteness has conquered every frontier of this planet and seeks to own, privatize, and destroy the universe, WALKER 82 Alice Walker 1982. "Only Justice Can Stop a Curse | Reimagine!." Reimaginerpe.org. n.d. Web. 16 Oct. 2019. https://www.reimaginerpe.org/node/946 QH DOA: Feb 19, 2022 This is a curse-prayer that Zora Neale Hurston, novelist and anthropologist, collected in the 1920s. And by then it was already old. I have often marveled at it. At the precision of its anger, the absoluteness of its bitterness. Its utter hatred of the enemies it condemns. It is a curse-prayer by a person who would readily, almost happily, commit suicide, if it meant her enemies would also die. Horribly. I am sure it was a woman who first prayed this curse. And I see her - Black, Yellow, Brown or Red, "aboriginal" as the Ancients are called in South Africa and Australia and other lands invaded, expropriated and occupied by whites. And I think, with astonishment, that the curse-prayer of this colored woman—starved, enslaved, humiliated and carelessly trampled to death—over centuries, is coming to pass. Indeed, like ancient peoples of color the world over, who have tried to tell the white man of the destruction that would inevitably follow from the uranium mining plunder of their sacred lands, this woman—along with millions and billions of obliterated sisters, brothers and children—seems to have put such enormous energy into her hope for revenge, that her curse seems close to bringing it about. And it is this hope for revenge, finally, I think, that is at the heart of People of Color's resistance to any anti-nuclear movement. In any case, this has been my own problem. When I have considered the enormity of the white man's crimes against humanity. Against women. Against every living person of color. Against the poor. Against my mother and my father. Against me . . . . When I consider that at this very moment he wishes to take away what little freedom I have died to achieve, through denial of my right to vote . . . . Has already taken away education, medicine, housing and food. . . . That William Shockley is saying at this moment that he will run for the Senate of my country to push his theory that Blacks are genetically inferior and should be sterilized. . . . When I consider that he is, they are, a real and present threat to my life and the life of my daughter, my people, I think - in perfect harmony with my sisters of long ago: Let the earth marinate in poisons. Let the bombs cover the ground like rain. For nothing short of total destruction will ever teach them anything. And it would be good, perhaps, to put an end to the species in any case, rather than let the white man continue to subjugate it, and continue to let their lust dominate, exploit and despoil not just our planet, but the rest of the universe, which is their clear and oft-stated intention; leaving their arrogance and litter not just on the moon, but on everything they can reach. If we have any true love for the stars, planets, the rest of Creation, we must do everything we can to keep white man away from them. They who have appointed themselves our representatives to the rest of the universe. They who have never met any new creature without exploiting, abusing and destroying it. They who say we poor and colored and female and elderly blight neighborhoods, while they blight worlds. What they have done to the Old, they will do to the New. Under the white man every star would become a South Africa, every planet a Vietnam. Fatally irradiating ourselves may in fact be the only way to save others from what Earth has already become. And this is a consideration that I believe requires some serious thought from every one of us. However, just as the sun shines on the godly and the ungodly alike, so does nuclear radiation. And with this knowledge it becomes increasingly difficult to embrace the thought of extinction purely for the assumed satisfaction of—from the grave—achieving revenge. Or even of accepting our demise as a planet as a simple and just preventative medicine administered to the universe. Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it. In any case, Earth is my home—though for centuries white people have tried to convince me I have no right to exist, except in the dirtiest, darkest corners of the globe. So let me tell you: I intend to protect my home. Praying—not a curse—only the hope that my courage will not fail my love. But if by some miracle, and all our struggle, the earth is spared, only justice to every living thing (and everything alive) will save humankind. And we are not saved yet. Only justice can stop a curse.
The recognition of collective vulnerability through the deployment of collective extinction cannot be used to justify the furtherance of colonialist practices without reinforcing the position of indigeneity as non-life – Salih and Corry 21: Salih R, Corry O. Displacing the Anthropocene: Colonisation, extinction and the unruliness of nature in Palestine. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. January 2021. doi:10.1177/2514848620982834 DOA Feb 19, 2022 LHP BT + LHP PS With these considerations in mind, let us go back to Chakrabarty’s notion that the Anthropocene scenario of collective extinction requires that ‘we’ the ‘human’ species activate a ‘common’ ethical or pre-political stance that might take humans beyond the divisive (in)justices of politics. For that purpose, he borrows the notion ‘epochal consciousness’ from philosopher Carl Jaspers who coined it in the 1950s while contemplating the potential and imminent destruction of the planet by the atomic bomb: An epochal consciousness cannot be charged with the function of producing solutions for an epochal crisis because all possible concrete solutions of an epochal problem—and Jaspers welcomes them all—will be partial or departmental, one important department being that of politics, the specialization of politicians (2016: 146) Epochal consciousness therefore has to be pre-political, leading humans to feel as one whole: ‘It is about how we comport ourselves with regard to the world under contemplation in a moment of global crisis; it is what sustains our horizon of action’ (2016: 146). It is, for Chakrabarty, ‘a thought space that came before and above/beyond politics, without, however, foreshortening the space for political disputation and differences’ (2016: 181). Despite the notion of epochal consciousness being precarious and at risk of shattering into fragments again, for Chakrabarty ‘it remains a thought experiment in the face of an emergency that requires us to move toward composing the common’ (2016: 146–147). What Chakrabarty refers to as ‘our smaller histories of conflicting attachments, desires and aspirations’ (2016: 183) are, from the vantage points of Palestinian Indigenous nature and people, shown to be the very sites through which – historically and in the present day – profoundly unequal and violent processes have effected techniques of extinction (fossilisation) of Indigenous Life. The supposed aggregate merging of ‘human’ and ‘natural’ in the Anthropocene is not merely an unfortunate bi-product of economic and technical development or nuclear testing. The pervasive and strenuous – yet unfinished and fractured – endeavour to make the settlers and settler-Nature Indigenous, show the centrality of colonial geonto-politics in ordering and reordering the boundaries between Life and Nonlife. From this point of view, rather than a single species ‘impacting’ upon nature, threatening extinction for a common humanity, it is more appropriate to argue that the very possibility of human and non-human Life is determined by past and ongoing colonial architectures of power. Although the ‘Anthropocene’ offers us a fuller and more complex understanding of the ontological depth and temporal scales of violence, it does not in itself offer hope that this violence might be subsumed under the planetary whole. In this sense, while recognising the heuristic potential of calling for an epochal consciousness in the face of threats of collective extinction, we would argue that a mood of common vulnerability must reinforce and expand, rather than suspend or defer, attention to local and time-bound injustices. Recognising and resolving such injustices should be a necessary prelude to facing, in an ethical mood, the common threat we do face as a species. This is particularly so when, as the case of Palestine shows, Indigenous populations have historically been – and continue to be – de-humanised, disposed of, violently erased or consigned to the sphere of Nonlife. Conclusions In this article, we have explored the historical and contemporary example of settler colonialism in Palestine suggesting that the recasting of the Life/Nonlife divide has been not incidental to, but part-constitutive of, the political operation of this project. As constitutive modalities of settler colonialism, Life and Nonlife are always discursively assigned rather than being straight forward ontological givens, and this assigning is the result of intra-human injustices and political struggles albeit through their entanglement with the nonhuman. By reading settler colonialism in Palestine through the lens of geontopower, we aimed to offer a case in point to challenge suggestions that questions of intra-human justice can be occluded by a more encompassing Anthropocene condition of collective vulnerability. From the vantage point of Palestine, we argue the contrary: given that power and politics are at the very core of the ways in which nature and humans become enmeshed or forcibly separated, only when these inequalities are conceived, and then foregrounded, is there a possibility of recognising a common or global vulnerability. For Palestinian refugees and their nature, the threat of collective extinction is not a future common risk, but a process entrenched in their everyday reality since 1948. Like aboriginal Australians and other native populations, Palestinians were ‘fossilised’ and their entanglements with nature were forced to the Nonlife side of the geonto-political distinction (the ‘desert’ and the ‘virus’, to use Povinelli’s evocative figures). Importantly, however, we also showed how these operations are fractured and unfinished. Drawing from sources as diverse as personal memories, ethnographic explorations, novels and works of art, we showed that ecological ruins not only bring to light what has been destroyed, allowing the recovery of traces of a previous life, but also most crucially have an afterlife, unsettling politically drawn Life/Nonlife boundaries. Far from a nostalgic claim to a pristine and authentic life-world that preexisted the settler colonial intervention, indigeneity thus signifies an intimate form of reciprocation of native people to their vegetation and animals – an Indigenous entanglement, which proved recalcitrant to taming and fossilisation. It is perhaps no coincidence that Sabr, the Arabic name for the cacti fruits, also means patience and signifies endurance as a natural and human virtue.
We are told that space travel is for our greatest minds, obscuring the original frontier. For the conquering of the stars requires the conquering of the mind. The tabula rasa mind is the original battlefield, violently securing the empty interiority of the enlightenment body. Ownership of the earth secured ownership over one's mind, MOTEN and HARNEY 1 Moten and Harney 21, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney, “The Theft of Assembly”, All Incomplete, Minor Compositions, 2021, pg(16), HTE https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Harney_Stefano_Moten_Fred_All_Incomplete_2021.pdf DOA: Feb 19, 2022 If this is true, we should be worried. In its origins, and its contemporary mutations, logistics is a regulatory force standing against us, standing against the earth. Logistics begins in loss and emptiness. And it begins in a fundamental misapprehension called spacetime. The loss that marks ownership, specifically the ownership of private property, the loss of sharing, the loss of the earth and the consequent making of the world, is simultaneously the misapprehension that what is privatized is empty and will be filled by ownership itself, by properties, by properties placed into it. This emptiness will be filled with an interior. This emptiness is confirmed by logistics, by the mobilization, the colonizing drive, of this interior – where properties are imported into empty space. This begins, again, with Locke or, at least, we can begin again through him. His concept of the mind as tabula rasa – often portrayed as an Enlightenment move away from predetermination – is a projection of this emptiness that must be owned and filled. For this emptiness to become private property it must be filled with and located in the coordinates of space and time. Space emerges as the delimitation of what is mine, and time begins with the theft and imposition when it became mine. The individual mind and its coming to maturity out of the tabula rasa mark this first conquest. Enlightenment interiority emerged from this emplotment of time and space – to borrow from Hayden White – this separation from what is shared. But interiority is only for the owning mind. Because what allows this mind to take possession of itself is its ability to grasp property, which is something it now posits as beyond itself. It takes what it is taken from for what it needs to create itself, and not just needs but compulsively, interminably, voraciously seeks without end. In other words, the emplotment of time and space in the mind takes place through the emplotment of time and space on earth, in a conversion of emptiness into world, and is simultaneously taken as a fulfillment of mind, its interior appointment in and of what can now be conceptualized as body. Is it a leap to say logic and logistics start here inseparably?
The European colonial project begins and begins and begins through property. For as many means in enlightenment thought, there are no ends on the frontier of conquest. The privatized appropriation of outer space is racial capitalism's continual drive towards death. And thus I affirm that the appropriation of outer space by private entities is unjust.
Whiteness globalizes itself through property. To own and improve the Earth is to separate oneself from all. Only the mythically differentiated subject can own the land, animals, and resources that offer its relation to it, MOTEN and HARNEY 2 Moten and Harney 21, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney, “Usufruct and Use”, All Incomplete, Minor Compositions, 2021, pg(28-30), HTE https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Harney_Stefano_Moten_Fred_All_Incomplete_2021.pdf DOA: Feb 19, 2022 What does it mean to stand for improvement? Or worse, to stand for what business calls a ‘commitment to continuous improvement‘? It means to stand for the brutal speciation of all. To take a stand for speciation is the beginning of a diabolical usufruct. Improvement comes to us by way of an innovation in land tenure, where individuated ownership, derived from increasing the land’s productivity, is given in the perpetual, and thus arrested, becoming of exception’s miniature. This is to say that from the outset, the ability to own – and that ability’s first derivative, self-possession – is entwined with the ability to make more productive. In order to be improved, to be rendered more productive, land must be violently reduced to its productivity, which is the regulatory diminishment and management of earthly generativity. Speciation is this general reduction of the earth to productivity and submission of the earth to techniques of domination that isolate and enforce particular increases in and accelerations of productivity. In this regard, (necessarily European) man, in and as the exception, imposes speciation upon himself, in an operation that extracts and excepts himself from the earth in order to confirm his supposed dominion over it. And just as the earth must be forcefully speciated to be possessed, man must forcefully speciate himself in order to enact this kind of possession. This is to say that racialization is present in the very idea of dominion over the earth; in the very idea and enactment of the exception; in the very nuts and bolts of possession-by-improvement. Forms of racialization that both Michel Foucault and, especially and most vividly, Robinson identify in medieval Europe become usufructed with modern possession through improvement. Speciated humans are endlessly improved through the endless work they do on their endless way to becoming Man. This is the usufruct of man. In early modern England, establishing title to land by making it more productive meant eliminating biodiversity and isolating and breeding a species – barley or rye or pigs. Localized ecosystems were aggressively transformed so that monocultural productivity smothers anacultural generativity. The emergent relation between speciation and racialization is the very conception and conceptualization of the settler. Maintenance of that relation is his vigil and his eve. For the encloser, possession is established through improvement – this is true for the possession of land and for the possession of self. The Enlightenment is the universalization/globalization of the imperative to possess and its corollary, the imperative to improve. However, this productivity must always confront its contradictory impoverishment: the destruction of its biosphere and its estrangement in, if not from, entanglement, both of which combine to ensure the liquidation of the human differential that is already present in the very idea of man, the exception. To stand for such improvement is to invoke policy, which attributes depletion to the difference, which is to say the wealth, whose simultaneous destruction and accumulation policy is meant to operationalize. This attribution of a supposedly essential lack, an inevitable and supposedly natural diminution, is achieved alongside the imposition of possession-by-improvement. To make policy is to impose speciation upon everybody and everything, to inflict impoverishment in the name of improvement, to invoke the universal law of the usufruct of man. In this context, continuous improvement, as it emerged with decolonization and particularly with the defeat of national capitalism in the 1970s, is the continuous crisis of speciation in the surround of the general antagonism. This is the contradiction Robinson constantly invoked and analyzed with the kind of profound and solemn optimism that comes from being with, and being of service to, your friends
Ownership is at the heart of colonial logistics feedback loop. The more the enlightenment man owns, the more violence he must commit to protect it. Whiteness developed as an exponential militarized force to protect all he appropriated on the frontier, MOTEN and HARNEY 3 Moten and Harney 21, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney, “The Theft of Assembly”, All Incomplete, Minor Compositions, 2021, pg(16-17), HTE https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Harney_Stefano_Moten_Fred_All_Incomplete_2021.pdf DOA: Feb 19, 2022 This is why there is no separating Locke the Enlightenment thinker from Locke the writer on race, the author of the notorious colonial constitution of the Carolinas. Ownership was a feedback loop – the more you own the more you own yourself. The more logistics you apply the more logic you acquire; the more logic you deploy the more logistics you require. As Hortense Spillers says, the transatlantic slave trade was the supply chain of Enlightenment. It was never-ending quest and conquest, because ownership is perpetual loss. Gilles Deleuze said that he would rather call power “sad.” We might say the same of ownership, where lies the most direct sense of loss of sharing. This feeling of loss translates into a diabolical obsession with loss prevention. Logistics emerges as much as the science of loss prevention as the science of moving property through the emptiness, of making the world as it travels by filling it. This is not making the road as we walk, in the anarchist tradition. This is converting everything in its path into a coordinated time and space for ownership. Such seizing, such grasping, and such loss prevention is the mode of operation for the wickedness of the Atlantic slave trade, the first massive, diabolic, commercial logistics. Already this feedback loop of ownership experiences amplified loss, the loss of sharing, with each emplotment. But now, in taking up the European heritage of race and slavery that Robinson identifes as emerging in the class struggle in Europe in the centuries directly before Locke and extending into Locke’s own time, a double loss is experienced, an intensifcation of the ownership feedback loop (and what we call the subject reaction). This evil emplotment of Africans is experienced as the potential loss of property that can flee. It is in this double loss of sharing – given in owning and in the imposition of being-owned – that the most deadly, planet-threatening, disease of the species-being emerges: whiteness. And it is for this reason that we can say logistics is the white science. (This is what many white people – who are the people, as James Baldwin says, who think they are white or that they ought to be – are doing when you see them walk straight past a queue of people and take a seat, or move to the center of a crowded room, or speak more loudly than those around them, or block a sidewalk while discussing ‘choices’ with their toddler. Making theory out of practice, they are emplotted, as they’ve been taught to do, establishing the spacetime of possession and self-possession in ownership. Every step they take is a standing of ground, a stomping of the world out of earthly existence and into racial capitalist human being. It grows more pronounced the more it is threatened, consumed by its own feedback loop, and it produces sharper and sharper subject reactions in the face of this threat. This is the old/new fascism: not the anonymity of following the leader, but the subject reaction to leadership, which can just as easily imagine itself to be liberal dissent from, as supposedly opposed to a lock(e)-step repetition of, its call. Politics pathologizes the general antagonism in order to prescribe more and more politics. We refuse this prescription and embrace a metaphysics of incompleteness, MOTEN and HARNEY 4 Moten and Harney 21, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney, “We Want a Precedent”, All Incomplete, Minor Compositions, 2021, pg(23-26), HTE https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Harney_Stefano_Moten_Fred_All_Incomplete_2021.pdf DOA: Feb 19, 2022 Our President, our deluded and degraded and demonic sovereign, in whatever form this abstraction of our abstract and wholly fictional equivalence will have taken, is a featureless point on a long and hopelessly straight line of knock-offs. It’s like how Richard of Bordeaux, who can do whatever he wants except stop himself from doing whatever he wants, carries around his own deposition (disguised as the serial murder that constitutes the peaceful transition of power and its vulgar ceremonies) like a genetic faw, as the illegitimate but inevitably heritable Bolingbroke-ass ambitions that leave him with ever increasingly etiolated capacities for self-refection. So that in all its singularly focused limitation and qualification, in the relative nothingness of the prison that it calls a world, the all-encompassing and all to be settled sphere that it stomps all over all the time, posing for an impossible arc of deadly and impossible pictures, our President, whichever one you ever wanted or didn’t want, each one after the other in noticeable imperial decline, is just a sick, uneasy head in a hollow crown, making us watch it talk about how it’s gonna kill us and then making us watch it kill us. 2. What we want is usually said to be all bound up with what we don’t have. Zoe Leonard’s been talking about what we want, though, slantedly, in the dimensionless infinity room we can’t even crawl around in when we cruise the rub and whirr of the city as a grove of aspen in late fall, in the mountains, held and unheld at the bottom of the sea. She’s talking about what we want in relation to what we have when what we have is all this experience of not having, of shared nothing, of sharing nothingness. She speaks of and from a common underprivilege, from the privilege of the common underground, in and from the wealth of a precarity that goes from hand to hand, as a caress. Look at all the richness we have, she says, in having lost, in having suffered, in having been suffered, in suffering one another as if we were one another’s little children, as if we were in love with one another, as if we loved one another so much that all one and another can do is go. We want a president, Zoe says, who’s loved and lost all that with us, who’s shared our little all, our little nothing. Such a thing, the general and generative nothingness that is more and less than political, would be unprecedented. Maybe she doesn’t want a president; maybe she wants a precedent, the endlessly new thing of the absolutely no thing, its Zen xenogenerosity, its queer reproductivity, which keeps on beginning in beginning’s absence as ungoverned and ungovernable care(ss). 3. Is it possible to want what you have become in suffering, both in the absence and in the depths of suffrage, without wanting what it is to suffer? Can you want what it is to be all, and want what it is to be whole, without wanting to be complete? Is it possible to crave the general incompleteness without that seemingly unbearable desire to be pierced, ruptured, broken? In lieu of the president we want and don’t want, we have Cedric Robinson, whom just a little while ago we lost. He says: If, in some spiteful play, one were compelled by some demon or god to choose a transgression against Nietzsche so profound and fundamental to his temperament and intention as to break apart the ground on which his philosophy stood, one could do no better than this: a society which has woven into its matrix for the purpose of suspending and neutralizing those forces antithetic to individual autonomy, the constructed reality that all are equally incomplete. A logic is being jousted here. Is it not so that the emergence of power as the instrument of certainty in human organization is seen by many to be the consequence of and response to the circumstances of inequality and sensed social entropy? Is it not so that individual autonomy, rare enough in the first condition and imperiled by the second, is in the final construction made foreign? And does not, logically, even autonomy require for its nurturance a hothouse of certitude similar to that required for the evolution of power – autonomy being to a degree a variant of power? Then the principle of incompleteness – the absence of discrete organismic integrity, if it were to occupy in a metaphysics the place of inequality in political philosophy, would bring to human society a paradigm subversive to political authority as the archetypical resolution, as the prescription for order.5 How can we come more accurately to understand American democracy – the brutality of our improvement, the viciousness of the ways we are put to use – as the praxis of privatized interest in inequality, expressed in the theory of the abstract equality of every complete individual, whose constant recitation brutally regulates the general interest in an equality given in and as an absolute incompleteness that defies individuation? How can we come to understand that the interinanimation of our bondage and our freedom – and, therefore, of our liberalism and our protest – is the metaphysical foundation of a national political philosophy that we have come to claim in violation of the precedent we want. How can we disavow that claim, having learned to want to want the order from which our forced desire is derived to be drowned in the disorder of all (the nothing) we have? How can we more intensely feel the physics of our surround, our social aesthetic, the gravity of our love and loss, our shared, radically sounded, radically sent incompleteness? What would it mean to say we cannot take a position on politics – even the old and honorable ‘I don’t vote because I’m Marxist‘ position? What if we said we have no options, that here we don’t even have the option of no option? We think that would be good. Zoe gets us started: to think off of what we want is lightly to inhabit not being and not having, here. The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater with the best method for partial education. Racial capitalism calls us into individuation through a total education that demands a call to order through instruction and self-improvement, MOTEN and HARNEY 5 Moten and Harney 21, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney, “A Partial Education”, All Incomplete, Minor Compositions, 2021, pg(62-67), HTE https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Harney_Stefano_Moten_Fred_All_Incomplete_2021.pdf DOA: Feb 19, 2022 Now Foucault stressed that because this instruction represented the reform of ‘perverted‘ bodies – bodies that previously had no such discipline – any call for reforming the modern prison was a call for more instruction. Reform produced more instruction. Instruction produced more constraint, or discipline. Discipline only confirmed the underlying perversion of these bodies, and called forth more reform, which called forth more instruction to reform the perversion discipline confirmed. This process is reflected in Foucault’s use of the oxymoron “perverted individual,” an oxymoron that is nonetheless the source of total education. Perversion violates the principle of the individual by failing to accede to its proper boundaries and comportments, and thus the perverted individual is an ongoing violation that calls total education into being. In Foucault’s account, perversion appears as a turning aside (from the truth) that is, somehow, prior, already existing. A prior turn. An already given turning that requires straightening, that summons reform. Instruction is how we get straightened out insofar as it is how one is straightened out. Correction begins with the ascription of the body itself, the imposition of body onto flesh; the attribution of perversion to the specific body, which justifies its correction, follows from its isolation and manifests itself as the theft of the body that has been imposed by those who assert a right to instruct insofar as theirs are bodies that they have supposedly both claimed and transcended. The ascription of body, the imposition of bounded and enclosed self-possession, of a discrete self subject to ownership, of ownership activated and confirmed either in theft or trade, might be said to be the first reform, the first improvement, insofar as it is the condition of possibility of reform, or improvement. The assignment of body to flesh is the first stripe of the long, hard, torturously straight, tortuously straightened row. Instruction is the setting in order, the straightening out. Instruction thereby reveals the essential relationship between improvement and impoverishment, between the private and privation at the heart of total education. Perversion’s wealth becomes education’s profit. Today there would appear to be few examples of Foucault’s total education in prison regimes. The program of reform, the program of prisoner improvement, has been replaced almost everywhere by one of punishment alone, or what Foucault calls simply the deprivation of liberty. At the same time, in pointing out that the current prison program of ‘slow-motion genocide’ has long been the global norm in racialized regimes, abolitionist scholars refuse to countenance reform of the exception, alerting us to the fact that reform of the prison and reform of the prisoner are as much modalities of genocide as the interplay of privation and privatization that racial incarceration relentlessly innovates.29 But what if? What if perversion is placed under constraint in the very idea of individuation, which projects improvement’s subject as improvement’s object? Then the figure of the perverted individual is always already in the system. Conversely, if perversion’s location in the individual body is a form of imprisonment and instruction, then perversion is an already given anti-/ante-individuation. If prison/school are two sides of a common institutional structure that operates by way of individuation, then perversion is a pre-carceral breaking out of prison, a pre-scholarly dropping out of school, that continually reveals the ubiquity of the total education that hunts it down and puts it to work. Insofar as it is the case that in prison and in school one’s job is to learn, to get it straight, to straighten out, then it is also the case that every citizen and non-citizen, every person and non-person, every worker who is in or out of work – even the enemy combatant, the prisoner, and the supposedly unemployable – is subject to a total education Whiteness is anti-thetical to relationality and community formation, abolition requires working against the subject. This is the only way I as a white person can engage, HARNEY 17 Stefano Harney (part 2), by Michael Schapira and Jesse Montgomery, August 10, 2017Jesse Montgomery is an editor at Full Stop and a graduate student in the English department at Vanderbilt University. Michael Schapira is an Interviews editor at Full Stop and teaches Philosophy at Hofstra University. A version of this conversation originally appeared in the Full Stop Quarterly Issue #5.http://www.full-stop.net/2017/08/10/interviews/michael-schapira-and-jesse-montgomery/stefano-harney-part-2/ DOA: Feb 19, 2022 The authors quote Frank Wilderson on the way blackness can never be disimbricated from the violence of slavery. Then they say: ‘Those who would risk extending solidarity across racial boundaries would find themselves the recipient of exemplary violence in order to instill fear of constant consequence for this treason. Ever after, meaningful cross-racial affinity can only be found in moments of revolutionary violence.” (IStefano Harney (part 2) | Full Stoptalics in the original.) Now this is an historical observation on their part, but to some extent it is also programmatic for the authors. As an observation, well, they have just convinced me of its validity in the last 250 pages, and as program, well, I’m not a pacifist. I’m for self-defense, and that can be violent. But do words like solidarity, affinity, to say nothing of the unlovely term allyship, accidentally preserve something we want to abolish? And I feel bad using Shirley and Stafford to make this point because theirs is such a good book, but maybe that’s why I feel compelled to say, ‘even here’ this question comes up. What I mean is who is this someone in solidarity with blackness, who is this ally of blackness, who is this someone with affinity to black struggle? I think this means that this someone has his or her own struggles and is indicating that now she or he wants to join not in common struggles, but in the struggles of blackness. Because in a sense you have to have your own thing to be an ally or to be in solidarity. Ok, but what are your own struggles from which you would be offering solidarity, allyship, affinity? Are you organizing in the white community, is that it? I think that is the implication, that you have been working in white communities, and/or on the environment, or feminist issues, etc. But the problem is, there’s no such thing as a white community. A white community is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron. You can’t organize an oxymoron. The only thing you can do with a white community is work to abolish it. Moreover at that point of abolition we may be able to say there is no such thing as a community, that a community is an oxymoron. You can’t commune and have a community. Communing is anti-community. It’s undercommon. Maybe the only kind of community that is possible is the maroon community, because it is by definition not a community, and when in some historical instances (of necessity even) it became one, it took on the same murderous qualities of any community. Okay, so then the question arising, if you do abolish the white community, what of the people who were marked as white, and in many cases who dwelt in the supremacy of whiteness, what becomes of them? Well, in the practice of abolition they will move closer to the only thing they ever had that was about life and not death, about love and not hate, blackness. This is to say, people who present as white are not allies, or in solidarity, or showing affinity, because they have nothing of their own, no place from which to show this, no resource to bring, unless and until they embrace the one thing of their own they disown. The thing that can’t be owned born(e) of the owned, blackness. Now white people aren’t coming with much blackness, by definition. And this is why the underlying humility motivating terms like ally, solidarity, and affinity is not misplaced, if that is indeed what underlies their use in practice. In any case, whiteness is either absence or violence, and in either case, not much to offer as an ally. But on the other hand white people have a big role to play in the revolutionary violence Shirley and Stafford speak of because the act of abolition of white communities is a monumental task.
Property is a concept created as a weapon of colonization. Indigenous peoples had a shared ownership of the land, but colonial structures ripped that away and created instead an original dispossessive ownership, forming both property and theft simultaneously. Thus, when the land becomes property, it becomes made so for theft, NICHOLS “18 Nichols, Robert. "Theft is property! The recursive logic of dispossession." Political Theory 46.1 (2018): 3-28. Team owned PDF, DOA: Feb 19, 2022 LHP HL One concern stands out most prominently. To speak of dispossession is to use a negative term. It is “negative” both in the ordinary language sense (i.e., pejorative) but also in the more philosophical sense, in that it signals the absence of some attribute. Most intuitively, a condition of dispossession is characterized by a privation of possession. In this obvious, ordinary, and commonly used sense of the term, dispossession means something like a normatively objectionable loss of possession, essentially a species of theft. Inasmuch as this is implied by the concept, however, a new set of conceptual and practical complications arise. For such a formulation appears, first, generally parasitic upon a background system of law that could establish the normative context in which a violation (e.g., theft) could be recognized, condemned, and punished. Second and more specifically, the term seems necessarily appended to a proprietary and commoditized model of social relations. Insofar as critical theorists generally seek to leverage the category of dispossession as a tool of radical, emancipatory politics in the critique of extant legal authority and proprietary relations, recourse to this language thus seems potentially contradictory and self-defeating. In the Anglo settler colonial countries of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, term. concept of dispossession as a gravitational center, this is really an analysis of a “space of problematization” (in Foucault’s language) rather than a singular concept. The problem-space in question brings together shifting configurations of property, law, race, and rights and has been previously examined in a variety of languages (including expropriation and eminent domain) and in diverse normative registers. The study undertaken here takes a different tack. Although I use the and the United States, this concern has taken on a very specific form. In this context, Indigenous peoples have often been accused of putting forward a contradictory set of claims, namely, that they are the original and natural owners of the land that has been stolen from them, and that the earth is not something in which any one person or group of people can have exclusive proprietary rights. The supposed tension between these claims has been exploited to significant success by a number of critics, particularly right-wing populists in these societies, who view white settlers as the true owners of these lands, both collectively (through the extension of territorial sovereignty and public law) and individually (through the devices of private property). The Indigenous social and political theorist Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Goenpul Tribe of the Quandamooka Nation) has recently provided a concrete instantiation of this logic and the stakes of its apprehension. As part of a more general investigation into the diverse manifestations of what she terms the “possessive logic of white patriarchal sovereignty,” Moreton-Robinson analyzes 16 the so-called history wars in her native Australia. Sparked by the publication of Keith Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, this debate centered on his polemical claim that the colonization of Australia was fundamentally a nonviolent process that eventually benefited its Indigenous inhabitants. As Windshuttle put it, “Rather than genocide and frontier warfare, British colonization of Australia brought civilized society and the rule of law.”17 Of most relevance to our purposes here, however, Windshuttle has also asserted that at the point of contact with Europeans, Australian Aborigines lacked any conception of “property,” or perhaps even of “land” as a discreet entity in which 18 Although formulated in more sophisticated and sympathetic terms, a range of academic treatments has voiced similar concerns. Work by the legal and political philosopher Jeremy Waldron provides a case in point. In a series of essays covering more than a decade, Waldron questions the underlying coherence of the very idea of an “indigenous right.” In particular, he has explicitly raised the objection that, inasmuch as Indigenous rights appear to rest upon claims to “first occupancy,” they are often appeals to untenable and unverifiable chains of ownership back to “time-immemorial.”20 By eschewing precision in the defining of “indigeneity,” Waldron moreover warns, proponents import an “ineffable, almost mystical element” to the term, the ascription of which leads to the one could claim property. argument: if Indigenous peoples “did not have a concept of ownership ... there was no theft, no war, and no need to have a treaty.”19 Aileen Moreton-Robinson unpacks the logic of the “rhetorical heightening of the unexceptional fact of having been here first.”21 Although Waldron’s argument derives from a specific contractualist tradition of liberal analytic thought, it finds an unlikely resonance with a set of more radical left critics. Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright, for instance, voice similar concerns with the “autochthonous discourses of ‘Native’ rights” in which Indigenous peoples are “subordinated and defined (by both the dominated and the dominating) metaphysically as being of the land colonized by various European empires.”22 Similar unease with the trajectory of Indigenous political 23 One could say much more about these contemporary disputes. Indeed, many Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars alike are currently engaged in these heated debates. Initially, however, I wish simply to flag how such concerns drive at a basic conceptual ambiguity at the heart of dispossession. Critics wish to catch Indigenous peoples and their allies on the horns of a dilemma: either one claims prior possession of the land in a recognizable propertied form—thus universalizing and backdating a general possessive logic as the appropriate normative benchmark—or one disavows possession as such, apparently 24 This book responds to this challenge, first, by providing an alternative conceptual framework through which to view dispossession and, second, by substantiating this as relevant to the actual historical development of Anglo settler colonialism and Indigenous resistance. I argue that, in the specific context with which we are concerned, “dispossession” may be coherently reconstructed to refer to a process in which new proprietary relations are generated but under structural conditions that demand their simultaneous negation. In effect, the dispossessed come to “have” something they cannot use, except by alienating it to another. This process has been notoriously difficult to apprehend because it is novel in a number of important ways. First, dispossession of this sort combines two processes typically thought distinct: it transforms nonproprietary relations into critique has been voiced by important contributors to critical race theory. each of these cases, the concern is that Indigenous peoples’ claims to “original ownership” are untenable, politically problematic for their implications on other, non-Indigenous communities, or both. undercutting the force of a subsequent claim of dispossession. one sense at least, this critique does highlight a curious juxtaposition of claims that often animate Indigenous politics in the Anglophone world, namely, that the earth is not to be thought of as property at all, and that it has been stolen from its rightful owners. And indeed, in Inproprietary ones while, at the same time, systematically transferring control and title of this (newly formed) property. In this way, dispossession merges commodification (or, perhaps more accurately, “propertization”) and theft into one moment. Second, because of the way dispossession generates property under conditions that require its divestment and alienation, those negatively impacted by this process—the dispossessed—are figured as “original owners” but only retroactively, that is, refracted backward through the process itself. The claims of the dispossessed may appear contradictory or question-begging, then, since they appear to both presuppose and resist the logic of “original possession.” When framed correctly however, we can see that this is in fact a reflection of the peculiarity of the dispossessive process itself. In the extended argument of this book, I plot this movement as one of transference, transformation, and retroactive attribution. In the interests of giving this peculiar logic a name and as a means of differentiating it from other proximate processes, I theorize this specifically as recursive dispossession. Recursion is a term that is used in a variety of fields of study—most notably, logic, mathematics, and computer science—each of which employs its own 25 specific, technical definitions. technical and discipline-specific uses of the terms share the general sense of a self-referential and self-reinforcing logic. Recursion is not, therefore, simple tautology. Rather than a completely closed circuit, in which one part of a procedure refers directly back to its starting point, recursive procedures loop back upon themselves in a “boot-strapping” manner such that each iteration is not only different from the last but builds upon or augments its original postulate. Recursion therefore combines self-reference with positive feedback effects. (If it has a geometric form, it is the helix, not the circle.) In the context with which we are concerned here, dispossession can rightly be said to exhibit a “recursive” structure because it produces what it presupposes. For instance, in a standard formulation one would assume that “property” is logically, chronologically, and normatively prior to “theft.” However, in this (colonial) context, theft is the mechanism and means by which property is generated: hence its recursivity. Recursive dispossession is effectively a form of property- generating theft.
“Appropriation of outer space” by private entities refers to the exercise of exclusive control of space. TIMOTHY JUSTIN TRAPP, JD Candidate @ UIUC Law, ’13, TAKING UP SPACE BY ANY OTHER MEANS: COMING TO TERMS WITH THE NONAPPROPRIATION ARTICLE OF THE OUTER SPACE TREATY UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LAW REVIEW Vol. 2013 No. 4 https://www.illinoislawreview.org/wp-content/ilr-content/articles/2013/4/Trapp.pdf, DOA: Feb 19 2022 The issues presented in relation to the nonappropriation article of the Outer Space Treaty should be clear.214 The ITU has, quite blatantly, created something akin to “property interests in outer space.”215 It allows nations to exclude others from their orbital slots, even when the nation is not currently using that slot.216 This is directly in line with at least one definition of outer-space appropriation.217 Start Footnote 217Id. at 236 (“Appropriation of outer space, therefore, is ‘the exercise of exclusive control or exclusive use’ with a sense of permanence, which limits other nations’ access to it.”) (quoting Milton L. Smith, The Role of the ITU in the Development of Space Law, 17 ANNALS AIR and SPACE L. 157, 165 (1992)). End Footnote 217The ITU even allows nations with unused slots to devise them to other entities, creating a market for the property rights set up by this regulation.218 In some aspects, this seems to effect exactly what those signatory nations Private appropriation of extracted space resources is distinct from appropriation “of” outer space. Despite longstanding permission of appropriation of extracted resources, sovereign claims are still universally prohibited. Abigail D. Pershing, J.D. Candidate @ Yale, B.A. UChicago,’19, "Interpreting the Outer Space Treaty's Non-Appropriation Principle: Customary International Law from 1967 to Today," Yale Journal of International Law 44, no. 1, https://openyls.law.yale.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.13051/6733/Pershing.pdf?sequence=2, DOA: Feb 19: 2022 II. THE FIRST SHIFT IN CUSTOMARY INTERNATIONAL LAW’S INTERPRETATION OF THE NON-APPROPRIATION PRINCIPLE Since the drafting of the Outer Space Treaty, several States have chosen to reinterpret the non-appropriation principle as narrower in scope than its drafters originally intended. This reinterpretation has gone largely unchallenged and has in fact been widely adopted by space-faring nations. In turn, this has had the effect of changing customary international law relating to the non-appropriation principle. Shifting away from its original blanket application in 1967, States have carved out an exception to the non-appropriation principle, allowing appropriation of extracted space resources.53 This Part examines this shift in the context of the two branches of the United Nation’s customary international law standard: State practice and opinio juris. A. State Practice The earliest hint of a change in customary international law relating to the interpretation of the non-appropriation clause came in 1969, when the United States first sent astronauts to the moon. As part of his historic journey, astronaut Neil Armstrong collected moonrocks that he brought back with him to Earth and promptly handed off to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as U.S. property.54 Later, the USSR similarly claimed lunar material as government property, some of which was eventually sold to private citizens. 55 These first instances of space resource appropriation did not draw much attention, but they presented a distinct shift marking the beginning of a new period in State practice. Having previously been limited by their technological capabilities, States could now establish new practices with respect to celestial bodies. This was the beginning of a pattern of appropriation that slowly unfolded over the next few decades and has since solidified into the general and consistent State practice necessary to establish the existence of customary international law. Currently, the U.S. government owns 842 pounds of lunar material.56 There is little question that NASA and the U.S. government consider this material, as well as other space materials collected by American astronauts, to be government property.57 In fact, NASA explicitly endorses U.S. property rights over these moon rocks, stating that “lunar material retrieved from the Moon during the Apollo Program is U.S. government property.”5 The U.S. delegation’s reaction to the language of the 1979 Moon Agreement further cemented this interpretation that appropriation of extracted resources is a permissible exception to the non-appropriation clause of Article II. Although the United States is not a party to the Moon Agreement, it did participate in the negotiations.59 The Moon Agreement states in relevant part: Neither the surface nor the subsurface of the moon, nor any part thereof or natural resources in place, shall become property of any State, international intergovernmental or nongovernmental organization, national organization or nongovernmental entity or of any natural person.60 In response to this language, the U.S. delegation made a statement laying out the American view that the words “in place” imply that private property rights apply to extracted resources61—a comment that went completely unchallenged. That all States seemed to accept this point, even those bound by the Moon Agreement, is further evidence of a shift in customary international law.62 B. Opinio Juris: Domestic Legislation Domestic law, both in the United States and abroad, provides further evidence of the shift in customary international law surrounding the issue of nonappropriation as it relates to extracted space resources. Domestic U.S. space law is codified at Section 51 of the U.S. Code and has been regularly modified to expand private actors’ rights in space.63 Beginning in 1984, the Commercial Space Launch Act provided that “the United States should encourage private sector launches and associated services.”64 The goal of the 1984 Act was to support commercial space launches by private companies and individuals.65 It did not, however, specifically discuss commercial exploitation of space. The first such mention of commercial use of space appeared in 2004, with the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act.66 This Act specifically aimed at regulating space tourism but did not explicitly guarantee any private rights in space.67 The most significant change in U.S. space law came with the passage of the Spurring Private Aerospace Competitiveness and Entrepreneurship (SPACE) Act in 2015. As incorporated into Section 51 of the Code, this Act provides: A United States citizen engaged in commercial recovery of an asteroid resource or a space resource under this chapter shall be entitled to any asteroid resource or space resource obtained, including to possess, own, transport, use, and sell the asteroid resource or space resource obtained in accordance with applicable law, including the international obligations of the United States.68 Whereas the idea that private corporations might go into space may have seemed far-fetched to the drafters of the Outer Space Treaty, the SPACE Act of 2015 was the first instance of a government recognizing such a trend and officially supporting private companies’ commercial rights to space resources under law. With the new 2015 amendment to Section 51 in place, U.S. companies can now rest assured that any profits they reap from space mining are firmly legal—at least within U.S. jurisdictions. Although the United States was the first country to officially reinterpret the non-appropriation principle, other countries are following suit. On July 20, 2017, Luxembourg passed a law entitled On the Exploration and Utilization of Space Resources with a vote of fifty-five to two.69 The law took effect on August 1, 2017.70 Article 1 of the new law states simply that “space resources can be appropriated,” and Article 3 expressly grants private companies permission to explore and use space resources for commercial purposes.71 Official commentary on the law establishes that its goal is to provide companies with legal certainty regarding ownership over space materials—a goal that the commentators regard as legal under the Outer Space Treaty despite the non-appropriation principle.72 The next country to enact similar legislation may be the United Arab Emirates (UAE). According to the UAE Space Agency director general, Mohammed Al Ahbabi, the UAE is currently in the process of drafting a space law covering both human space exploration and commercial activities such as mining.73 To further this goal, in 2017 the UAE set up the Space Agency Working Group on Space Policy and Law to specify the procedures, mechanisms, and other standards of the space sector, including an appropriate legal framework.74 C. Opinio Juris: Legal Scholarship Other major space powers are also considering similar laws in the future, including Japan, China, and Australia. 75 Senior officials within China’s space program have explicitly stated that the country’s goal is to explore outer space and to take advantage of outer space resources.76 The general international trend clearly points in this direction in anticipation of a potential “space gold rush.” 7 Mirroring the shift in State practice and domestic laws, the legal community has also changed its approach to the interpretation of the nonappropriation principle. Whereas at the time of the ratification of the Outer Space Treaty the majority of legal scholars tended to apply the non-appropriation principle broadly, most legal scholars now view appropriation of extracted materials as permissible.78 Brandon Gruner underscores that this new view is historically distinct from prior legal interpretation, noting that modern interpretations of the Outer Space Treaty’s non-appropriation principle differ from those of the Treaty’s authors.79 In contrast to earlier legal theory that denied the possibility of appropriation of any space resources, scholars now widely accept that extracting space resources from celestial bodies is a “use” permitted by the Outer Space Treaty and that extracted materials become the property of the entity that performed the extraction.80 Stressing the fact that the Treaty does not explicitly prohibit appropriating resources from outer space, other authors conclude that the use of extracted space resources is permitted, meaning that the new SPACE Act is a plausible interpretation of the Outer Space Treaty.81 However, scholars have been careful to cabin the extent to which they accept the legality of appropriation. For instance, although Thomas Gangale and Marilyn Dudley-Rowley acknowledge the legality of private appropriation of extracted space resources, they nonetheless emphasize that “ownership of and the right to use extraterrestrial resources is distinct from ownership of real property” and that any such claim to real property is illegal.82 Lawrence Cooper is also careful to point out this distinction: “the Outer Space Treaties recognize sovereignty over property placed into space, property produced in space, and resources removed from their place in space, but ban sovereignty claims by states; international law extends this ban to individuals.”83 Although there remain some scholars who still insist on the illegality of the 2015 U.S. law and State appropriation of space resources generally,84 their dominance has waned since the 1960s. These scholars are now a minority in the face of general acceptance among the legal community that minerals and other space resources, once extracted, may be legally claimed as property. 85 Taken together, the elements described above—statements made in the international arena, de facto appropriation of space resources in the form of moon rocks, the adoption of new national policies permitting appropriation of extracted space resources, and the weight of the international legal community’s opinion— indicate a fundamental shift in customary international law. The Outer Space Treaty’s non-appropriation clause has been redefined via customary international law norms from its broad application to now include a carve-out allowing appropriation of space resources once such resources have been extracted.
1 prefer 1AC definitions, anything else means the 1N gets something super abstract and I don’t link 2 O/w as common usage since it garners neg ground like lib, kant, etc.
Anti-Blackness and Settler Colonialism are world-breaking forces. Whiteness has conquered every frontier of this planet and seeks to own, privatize, and destroy the universe, WALKER 82
Alice Walker 1982. "Only Justice Can Stop a Curse | Reimagine!." Reimaginerpe.org. n.d. Web. 16 Oct. 2019. https://www.reimaginerpe.org/node/946 QH DOA: Feb 19, 2022 This is a curse-prayer that Zora Neale Hurston, novelist and anthropologist,
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And we are not saved yet. Only justice can stop a curse.
We are told that space travel is for our greatest minds, obscuring the original frontier. For the conquering of the stars requires the conquering of the mind. The tabula rasa mind is the original battlefield, violently securing the empty interiority of the enlightenment body. Ownership of the earth secured ownership over one's mind, MOTEN and HARNEY 1
. Is it a leap to say logic and logistics start here inseparably?
The European colonial project begins and begins and begins through property. For as many means in enlightenment thought, there are no ends on the frontier of conquest. The privatized appropriation of outer space is racial capitalism's continual drive towards death. And thus I affirm that the appropriation of outer space by private entities is unjust.
Whiteness globalizes itself through property. To own and improve the Earth is to separate oneself from all. Only the mythically differentiated subject can own the land, animals, and resources that offer its relation to it, MOTEN and HARNEY 2
that comes from being with, and being of service to, your friends
Ownership is at the heart of colonial logistics feedback loop. The more the enlightenment man owns, the more violence he must commit to protect it. Whiteness developed as an exponential militarized force to protect all he appropriated on the frontier, MOTEN and HARNEY 3
opposed to a lock(e)-step repetition of, its call.
Politics pathologizes the general antagonism in order to prescribe more and more politics. We refuse this prescription and embrace a metaphysics of incompleteness, MOTEN and HARNEY 4
we want is lightly to inhabit not being and not having, here.
The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater with the best method for partial education. Racial capitalism calls us into individuation through a total education that demands a call to order through instruction and self-improvement, MOTEN and HARNEY 5
Moten and Harney 21, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney, "A Partial Education", All Incomplete, Minor Compositions, 2021, pg(62-67), ~HTE~ https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Harney'Stefano'Moten'Fred'All'Incomplete'2021.pdf DOA: Feb 19, 2022 Now Foucault stressed that because this instruction represented the reform of ‘perverted‘ bodies
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the prisoner, and the supposedly unemployable – is subject to a total education
Whiteness is anti-thetical to relationality and community formation, abolition requires working against the subject. This is the only way I as a white person can engage, HARNEY 17
Stefano Harney (part 2), by Michael Schapira and Jesse Montgomery, August 10, 2017Jesse Montgomery is an editor at Full Stop and a graduate student in the English department at Vanderbilt University. Michael Schapira is an Interviews editor at Full Stop and teaches Philosophy at Hofstra University. A version of this conversation originally appeared in the Full Stop Quarterly Issue ~#5.http://www.full-stop.net/2017/08/10/interviews/michael-schapira-and-jesse-montgomery/stefano-harney-part-2/ DOA: Feb 19, 2022 The authors quote Frank Wilderson on the way blackness can never be disimbricated from the
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of because the act of abolition of white communities is a monumental task.
Property is a concept created as a weapon of colonization. Indigenous peoples had a shared ownership of the land, but colonial structures ripped that away and created instead an original dispossessive ownership, forming both property and theft simultaneously. Thus, when the land becomes property, it becomes made so for theft, NICHOLS "18
Nichols, Robert. "Theft is property! The recursive logic of dispossession." Political Theory 46.1 (2018): 3-28. Team owned PDF, DOA: Feb 19, 2022 LHP HL One concern stands out most prominently. To speak of dispossession is to use a
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recursivity. Recursive dispossession is effectively a form of property- generating theft.
"Appropriation of outer space" by private entities refers to the exercise of exclusive control of space.
TIMOTHY JUSTIN TRAPP, JD Candidate @ UIUC Law, ’13, TAKING UP SPACE BY ANY OTHER MEANS: COMING TO TERMS WITH THE NONAPPROPRIATION ARTICLE OF THE OUTER SPACE TREATY UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LAW REVIEW ~Vol. 2013 No. 4~ https://www.illinoislawreview.org/wp-content/ilr-content/articles/2013/4/Trapp.pdf, DOA: Feb 19 2022 The issues presented in relation to the nonappropriation article of the Outer Space Treaty should
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218 In some aspects, this seems to effect exactly what those signatory nations
The recognition of collective vulnerability through the deployment of collective extinction cannot be used to justify the furtherance of colonialist practices without reinforcing the position of indigeneity as non-life – Salih and Corry 21:
Salih R, Corry O. Displacing the Anthropocene: Colonisation, extinction and the unruliness of nature in Palestine. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. January 2021. doi:10.1177/2514848620982834 DOA Feb 19, 2022 LHP BT + LHP PS With these considerations in mind, let us go back to Chakrabarty’s notion that the
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, also means patience and signifies endurance as a natural and human virtue.
3/18/22
ND21 - ADV - Climate
Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 2 | Opponent: Coppell SK | Judge: Ogundare, Temitope Contention: Climate Strikes: 2:20, 1:47 Climate Change is ongoing, current checks have not solved. We are still on path to experience catastrophic warming. BBC 1 “What Is Climate Change? A Really Simple Guide.” BBC News, BBC, 13 Oct. 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-24021772. World temperatures are rising because of human activity, and climate change now threatens every aspect of human life. Left unchecked, humans and nature will experience catastrophic warming, with worsening droughts, greater sea level rise and mass extinction of species. We face a huge challenge, but there are potential solutions. What is climate change? Climate is the average weather in a place over many years. Climate change is a shift in those average conditions. The rapid climate change we are now seeing is caused by humans using oil, gas and coal for their homes, factories and transport. When these fossil fuels burn, they release greenhouse gases - mostly carbon dioxide (CO2). These gases trap the Sun's heat and cause the planet's temperature to rise. The world is now about 1.2C warmer than it was in the 19th Century - and the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen by 50. Temperature rises must slow down if we want to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, scientists say. They say global warming needs to be kept to 1.5C by 2100. However, unless further action is taken, the planet could still warm by more than 2C by the end of this century. A report in 2021 by the Climate Action Tracker group calculated that the world was heading for 2.4C of warming by the end of the century. If nothing is done, scientists think global warming could exceed 4C in the future, leading to devastating heatwaves, millions losing their homes to rising sea levels and irreversible loss of plant and animal species. Current government policy action is not enough. We need social movements with at least 3.5 of the population to gain traction and create a social movement capable of saving the planet. Current strikes fail to gain traction with people unwilling to participate in civil disobedience. Legalizing the unconditional right to strike solves by making climate strikes not a form of civil disobedience. SERHAN Serhan, Yasmeen. “CAN 3.5 Percent Save the Planet?” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 8 Nov. 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/11/cop26-climate-activism/620641/. Although world leaders were gathered in Glasgow for the United Nations Climate Change Conference last week, Greta Thunberg said change wouldn’t be coming from within the summit’s halls. “That is not leadership—this is leadership,” Thunberg said of, and to, her fellow activists. “This is what leadership looks like.” The way many environmental campaigners, including Thunberg, see it, they are the ones who helped create the space for governments to take more decisive action on climate change—an issue that has attracted growing levels of concern across the world’s advanced economies, including from a majority of people in the United States. Through protests, school strikes, and other nonviolent actions, they have been credited with raising public awareness about the seriousness of the climate crisis, and the need for governments to solve it. Yet despite these efforts, many climate activists I spoke with recently lamented that COP26 was failing to meet the urgency of the moment. A major question facing today’s climate movement is what critical mass is required to compel governments to take its demands more seriously. If millions of people aren’t enough to pressure leaders to take drastic and enforceable action on climate change, how many are? And what will it take for others to be moved to join them? There isn’t a magic figure guaranteed to tip the balance in favor of widespread climate mitigation, of course. But some environmental campaigners have worked with a particular number in mind: 3.5 percent. This comes from the work of the political scientist Erica Chenoweth, whose research found that nonviolent movements require the active participation of at least 3.5 percent of a population in order to achieve serious political change. This so-called 3.5 percent rule was derived from Chenoweth’s study of hundreds of protests from 1900 to 2006, and has made an impact on contemporary movements, including Extinction Rebellion, an international climate-advocacy group based in London whose founders cite Chenoweth as a source of inspiration (the group publicly states that it needs the involvement of 2 million people, or roughly 3.5 percent of the British population, in order to succeed). When I interviewed Chenoweth last year, they explained their findings in a more matter-of-fact way: Nonviolent protests are more successful than their violent counterparts because they are better at eliciting broad and diverse support from the societies in which they take place. This makes these movements more inclusive, and also more innovative. These kinds of protests don’t necessarily succeed because they appeal to the morality of those in power, but rather because they effectively constrain a government’s options by undermining its support in various pillars of society, such as bureaucrats, the media, and business elites. If 3.5 percent of a country’s—or the world’s—population backs any one issue or policy proposal, that is a substantial enough voting bloc, consumer market, and workforce to get those in power to pay attention. The climate movement has already demonstrated this kind of influence. Fridays for Future, which was started by Thunberg in 2018 as a solitary school strike in protest of climate inaction, has since attracted millions of participants around the world and earned Thunberg an international platform, as well as high-profile meetings with world leaders and global institutions. In Britain, Extinction Rebellion has been credited with influencing Parliament’s 2019 decision to declare a climate emergency and commit to reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, making the country the first major economy to do so. In the United States, the youth-led Sunrise Movement has been widely recognized for its role in elevating the climate crisis on the national agenda. But with few exceptions, none of these efforts has been able to surpass the 3.5 percent threshold. Part of the challenge comes down to the fact that many of these movements were stymied by the pandemic, which forced them online. Others have been vilified for their more disruptive tactics: Extinction Rebellion, as well as its U.K.-focused offshoot, Insulate Britain, has become notorious for its commitment to civil disobedience, which has at times involved blocking bridges, freeways, and public transport. A recent poll found that less than 20 percent of Britons have a positive view of Extinction Rebellion. Insulate Britain, which has been on the receiving end of negative press over its recent spate of road blockages, has also seen a decline in public support. The way many within these movements see it, their goal isn’t to inconvenience people; it’s to help raise awareness about the seriousness of the challenge we are all facing, and to be just disruptive enough to compel those in power to act. “Most of the people in Extinction Rebellion and other climate activists don’t actually want to be doing this,” Christina See, an Extinction Rebellion spokesperson in New York City, told me of the recent road closures. “But we’re also looking at the future and saying, ‘Okay, what is our future going to be like unless we fight for action now?’” Read: We’re heading straight for a demi-Armageddon In many ways, this argument makes sense. The inconvenience posed by these groups pales in comparison with the kind of disruption that awaits if the climate crisis is left unresolved. Some of the more extreme weather events fueled by climate change, including flash floods, wildfires, and heat waves, are already being experienced. Not only is climate science on climate activists’ side, but they also feel that history is too. “The suffragettes were vilified,” Tracey Mallaghan, a spokesperson for Insulate Britain, told me, in reference to the more violent arm of Britain’s suffragist movement. “If you look back at history, it’s always been a small percentage of the population fighting until it changes. And then everybody agrees that it was always that way and should have been done.” But unlike their historical counterparts, climate activists don’t have the luxury of time. For this reason, environmental campaigners such as Rupert Read have been calling for the formation of a “moderate flank”—one that he believes can attract a broader base of public support and, in turn, accelerate the movement’s aims. It’s not that Read is averse to Extinction Rebellion’s civil disobedience—in fact, we spoke the day after a hearing in his trial, in which he has been charged with criminal damage for his participation in an Extinction Rebellion protest last year. But he believes that in order for it and other like-minded movements to be successful, they need to galvanize those who wouldn’t necessarily want to engage in civil disobedience. When I asked Read what this moderate flank would look like, he told me that some iterations of it already exist, in the form of workplace-oriented groups such as Lawyers for Net Zero and Parents for Future, a network inspired by Thunberg’s movement. These kinds of organizations can help bring the climate movement closer to the 3.5 percent prescribed by Chenoweth, but Read said he doesn’t think even that will be enough to achieve the kind of drastic societal change that environmental campaigners are agitating for. “You need to have a large body of people who are going to be actively in support, and an even larger body of people who are going to be willing to make the kinds of changes that you’re after,” Read said. “That’s one reason why … we have to be careful about overly polarizing strategies.” While they may differ on tactics, if all climate campaigners can agree on one thing, it’s that “volume matters,” Clare Farrell, a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, told me, noting that even if COP26 fails, it could at the very least motivate more people to get involved, however they choose to. “That’s the message that I hope people are going to get after the COP: Nobody’s coming to save us.” Climate change causes extinction we have to act now. Specktor 19 Brandon; writes about the science of everyday life for Live Science, and previously for Reader's Digest magazine, where he served as an editor for five years; "Human Civilization Will Crumble by 2050 If We Don't Stop Climate Change Now, New Paper Claims," livescience, 6/4/19; https://www.livescience.com/65633-climate-change-dooms-humans-by-2050.html LHP SV The current climate crisis, they say, is larger and more complex than any humans have ever dealt with before. General climate models — like the one that the United Nations' Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) used in 2018 to predict that a global temperature increase of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) could put hundreds of millions of people at risk — fail to account for the sheer complexity of Earth's many interlinked geological processes; as such, they fail to adequately predict the scale of the potential consequences. The truth, the authors wrote, is probably far worse than any models can fathom. How the world ends What might an accurate worst-case picture of the planet's climate-addled future actually look like, then? The authors provide one particularly grim scenario that begins with world governments "politely ignoring" the advice of scientists and the will of the public to decarbonize the economy (finding alternative energy sources), resulting in a global temperature increase 5.4 F (3 C) by the year 2050. At this point, the world's ice sheets vanish; brutal droughts kill many of the trees in the Amazon rainforest (removing one of the world's largest carbon offsets); and the planet plunges into a feedback loop of ever-hotter, ever-deadlier conditions. "Thirty-five percent of the global land area, and 55 percent of the global population, are subject to more than 20 days a year of lethal heat conditions, beyond the threshold of human survivability," the authors hypothesized. Meanwhile, droughts, floods and wildfires regularly ravage the land. Nearly one-third of the world's land surface turns to desert. Entire ecosystems collapse, beginning with the planet's coral reefs, the rainforest and the Arctic ice sheets. The world's tropics are hit hardest by these new climate extremes, destroying the region's agriculture and turning more than 1 billion people into refugees. This mass movement of refugees — coupled with shrinking coastlines and severe drops in food and water availability — begin to stress the fabric of the world's largest nations, including the United States. Armed conflicts over resources, perhaps culminating in nuclear war, are likely. The result, according to the new paper, is "outright chaos" and perhaps "the end of human global civilization as we know it."
12/4/21
ND21 - ADV - Democracy
Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 2 | Opponent: Coppell SK | Judge: Ogundare, Temitope Contention: Democracy: 2:50 American democracy is currently under siege by the politics of Donald Trump. The 2020 attempted coup was just the beginning. 2024 could destroy American democracy entirely. PILKINGTON 21 Pilkington, Ed. “'Terrifying for American Democracy': Is Trump Planning for a 2024 Coup?” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 14 Nov. 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/14/trump-president-2024-election-coup-republicans. LH HL At 1.35pm on 6 January, the top Republican in the US Senate, Mitch McConnell, stood before his party and delivered a dire warning. If they overruled the will of 81 million voters by blocking Joe Biden’s certification as president in a bid to snatch re-election for the defeated candidate, Donald Trump, “it would damage our Republic forever”. Five minutes before he started speaking, hundreds of Trump supporters incited by the then president’s false claim that the 2020 election had been stolen broke through Capitol police lines and were storming the building. McConnell’s next remark has been forgotten in the catastrophe that followed – the inner sanctums of America’s democracy defiled, five people dead, and 138 police officers injured. He said: “If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral. We’d never see the whole nation accept an election again. Every four years would be a scramble for power at any cost.” Eleven months on, McConnell’s words sound eerily portentous. What could be construed as an anti-democratic scramble for power at any cost is taking place right now in jurisdictions across the country. Republican leaders loyal to Trump are vying to control election administrations in key states in ways that could drastically distort the outcome of the presidential race in 2024. With the former president hinting strongly that he may stand again, his followers are busily manoeuvring themselves into critical positions of control across the US – from which they could launch a far more sophisticated attempt at an electoral coup than Trump’s effort to hang on to power in 2020. Trump holds a rally in Perry, Georgia, in September. Photograph: Sean Rayford/Getty Images The machinations are unfolding right across the US at all levels of government, from the local precinct, through counties and states, to the national stage of Congress. The stage is being set for a spectacle that could, in 2024, make last year’s unprecedented assault on American democracy look like a dress rehearsal. The Guardian has spoken to leading Republican election experts, specialists in voting practices, democracy advocates and election officials in swing states, all of whom fear that McConnell’s warning is coming true. “In 2020 Donald Trump put a huge strain on the fabric of this democracy, on the country,” said Ben Ginsberg, a leading election lawyer who represented four of the last six Republican presidential nominees. “In 2024 the strain on the fabric could turn into a tear.” Since Joe Biden was inaugurated on 20 January, Trump has dug himself deeper into his big lie about the “rigged election” that was stolen from him. Far from cooling on the subject, he has continued to amplify the false claim in ever more brazen terms. Advertisement Initially he condemned the violence at the US Capitol on 6 January. But in recent months Trump has emerged as an unashamed champion of the insurrectionists, calling them “great people” and a “loving crowd”, and lamenting that they are now being “persecuted so unfairly”. Trump recorded a video last month praising Ashli Babbitt, the woman shot dead by a police officer as she tried to break into the speaker’s lobby, where Congress members were hiding in fear of their lives. Babbitt was a “truly incredible person”, he said. Michael Waldman, who as president of the Brennan Center is one of the country’s authorities on US elections, told the Guardian that Trump was normalizing the anti-democratic fury that erupted that day. “He has gone from being embarrassed to treating 6 January as one of the high points of his presidency. Ashli Babbitt is now being lionized as this noble martyr as opposed to a violent insurrectionist trying to break into the House of Representatives chamber.” Over the past year Trump has spread the stolen election lie far and wide, telling supporters at his regular presidential campaign-style rallies that 2020 was “the most corrupt election in the history of our country”. He has used his iron grip over the Republican party to cajole officials in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Texas, Wisconsin and other states to conduct “audits” of the 2020 election count in further vain searches for fraud. Texas lawmakers at the state capitol in September. Photograph: Tamir Kalifa/Getty Images One of the most eccentric of these “audits” (or “fraudits”, as they have been called) was carried out in Arizona by a company called Cyber Ninjas, which had virtually no experience in elections and whose owner supported the “Stop the Steal” movement. Paradoxically, even this effort concluded that Biden had indeed won the state, recording an even bigger margin for the Democratic candidate than the official count. The idea of the stolen election continues to spread like an airborne contagion. A poll released this week by the Public Religion Research Institute found that two-thirds of Republicans still believe the myth that Trump won. More chilling still, almost a third of Republicans agree with the contention that American patriots may have to resort to violence “in order to save our country”. Waldman said the big lie is now ubiquitous. “The louder Trump yelled the more his supporters thought he was telling the truth. Increasingly the institutional machinery of the Republican party is organized around fealty to the big lie and the willingness to steal the next election, and that is terrifying for the future of American democracy.” Ned Foley, a constitutional law professor at Ohio State University, said the current moment is “unique in American history”. He called it “electoral McCarthyism”. Foley sees parallels between Trump and the anticommunist panic or “red scare” whipped up by senator from Wisconsin Joe McCarthy in the 1950s. “What’s unique about Trump and about what he’s trying to do in 2024 is that he’s applying McCarthy-like tactics to voting, and that’s never happened before.” Electoral McCarthyism is being felt most acutely at state level. In several of the battlegrounds where the 2024 contest largely will be fought and won, a clear pattern is emerging. Trump has endorsed a number of Republican candidates for key state election positions who share a common feature: they all avidly embrace the myth of the stolen election and the lie that Biden is an impostor in the White House.The candidates are being aggressively promoted for secretary of state positions – the top official that oversees elections in US states. Should any one of them succeed, they would hold enormous sway over the running of the 2024 presidential election in their state, including how the votes would be counted. The plan stabilizes democracy – 1 Rights protection – strikes are fundamental to democratic citizenship – that solves power imbalances and communication while improving freedom – OHCHR 17: “UN Rights Expert: ‘Fundamental Right to Strike Must Be Preserved.’” OHCHR, 2017, www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=21328andLangID=E. LHP PS As stated in my 2016 thematic report to the General Assembly (A/71/385), the right to strike has been established in international law for decades, in global and regional instruments, such as in the ILO Convention No. 87 (articles 3, 8 and 10), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (article 8), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (article 22), the European Convention on Human Rights (article 11), and the American Convention on Human Rights (article 16). The right is also enshrined in the constitutions of at least 90 countries. The right to strike has in effect become customary international law. The right to strike is also an intrinsic corollary of the fundamental right of freedom of association. It is crucial for millions of women and men around the world to assert collectively their rights in the workplace, including the right to just and favourable conditions of work, and to work in dignity and without fear of intimidation and persecution. Moreover, protest action in relation to government social and economic policy, and against negative corporate practices, forms part of the basic civil liberties whose respect is essential for the meaningful exercise of trade union rights. This right enables them to engage with companies and governments on a more equal footing, and Member States have a positive obligation to protect this right, and a negative obligation not to interfere with its exercise. Moreover, protecting the right to strike is not simply about States fulfilling their legal obligations. It is also about them creating democratic and equitable societies that are sustainable in the long run. The concentration of power in one sector – whether in the hands of government or business – inevitably leads to the erosion of democracy, and an increase in inequalities and marginalization with all their attendant consequences. The right to strike is a check on this concentration of power. 2 Participation – the plan fosters civic participation – that’s vital to democracy and cements the election – McElwee 15: McElwee, Sean. “How Unions Boost Democratic Participation.” The American Prospect, 16 Sept. 2015, prospect.org/labor/unions-boost-democratic-participation/. LHP PS Labor organizer Helen Marot once observed, "The labor unions are group efforts in the direction of democracy." What she meant is that more than simply vehicles for the economic interests of workers (which they certainly are), labor unions also foster civic participation for workers. And nowhere is this clearer than in voter turnout, which has suffered in recent years along with union membership. Indeed, new data from the Census Bureau and a new analysis of American National Election Studies data support the case that unions' declining influence has also deeply harmed democracy. In 2014, voter turnout was abysmal, even for a midterm. Census data suggest that only 41.9 percent of the citizen population over 18 turned out to vote. However, as I note in my new Demos report Why Voting Matters, there are dispiriting gaps in turnout across class, race, and age. To examine how unions might affect policy, I performed a new analysis of both Census Bureau and American National Election Studies data. The data below, from the 2014 election, show the differences in voter turnout between union and non-union workers (the sample only includes individuals who were employed, and does not include self-employed workers). While only 39 percent of non-union workers voted in 2014, fully 52 percent of union workers did. As part of ongoing research, James Feigenbaum, an economics PhD candidate at Harvard, ran a regression using American National Election Studies data suggesting that union members are about 4 percentage points more likely to vote and 3 points more likely to register (after controlling for demographic factors) and individuals living in a union household are 2.5 points more likely to vote and register. This is largely in line with the earlier estimates of Richard Freeman. Other research has found an even stronger turnout effect from unions. Daniel Stegmueller and Michael Becher find that after applying numerous demographic controls, union members are 10 points more likely to vote. What's particularly important is that unions boost turnout among low- and middle-income individuals. In a 2006 study, political scientists Jan Leighley and Jonathan Nagler found that, "the decline in union membership since 1964 has affected the aggregate turnout of both low and middle-income individuals more than the aggregate turnout of high-income individuals." In 2014, the gap between unions and non-union workers shrunk at the highest rung of the income ladder. There was a 15-point gap among those earning less than $25,000 (40 percent turnout for union workers, and 25 percent turnout for non-union workers). Among those earning more than $100,000, the gap was far smaller (49 percent for non-union workers and 52 percent for union workers). Individuals living in union households are also more progressive than those in non-union households. I examined 2012 ANES data and find that union households aren't largely different from non-union households on many issues regarding government spending, but they are more likely to have voted for Obama, identify as Democratic, and support a robust role for the government in reducing income inequality. When looking at union members specifically, the gaps become slightly larger. More upscale union members are far more progressive than their non-union counterparts. Non-union households with an income above $60,000 oppose government intervention to reduce inequality by 11 points, with 32.2 percent in favor and 43.4 percent against. But richer union households support government intervention, with 42.5 percent in favor and 29.9 percent opposed. As Richard B. Freeman has pointed out, "union members are more likely to vote for a Democrat for the House or Presidency than demographically comparable nonunion voters." He similarly finds that "unionism moves members to the left of where they would be given their socioeconomic status," in line with the data I examined from 2012. A 2013 study by Jasmine Kerrissey and Evan Schofer finds that union members are not only more likely to vote, but also more likely to belong to other associations, and to protest. They also find that these effects are strongest among people with lower levels of education, suggesting that unions may help mobilize the least politically active groups. A recent study of European countries finds union members vote more and identifies those aspects of union membership that contribute to the higher turnout. Other studies support the idea that civic participation creates a feedback loop that leads to higher voting rates. Another factor is that union members make more money, and higher income is correlated with voting behavior. Finally, union members are encouraged by peers and the union to engage in politics, which also contributes to higher levels of turnout. It's not entirely surprising that politicians who savage unions often share a similar contempt for the right to vote. Democracy in the workplace leads to democracy more broadly throughout society. Workers with more democratic workplaces are more likely to democratically engage in in society. Further, when unions and progressives demonstrate that government can benefit them, Americans are more likely to want to participate in decision-making. For all these reasons, unions play a unique and indispensable role in the progressive project. As Larry Summers, certainly not a leftist, recently argued, "the weakness of unions leaves a broad swath of the middle class largely unrepresented in the political process." Extinction – multiple warrants - Kendall-Taylor 16: Andrea; Deputy national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council, Senior associate in the Human Rights Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington; “How Democracy’s Decline Would Undermine the International Order,” CSIS; 7/15/16; https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-democracyE28099s-decline-would-undermine-international-order///SJWen It is rare that policymakers, analysts, and academics agree. But there is an emerging consensus in the world of foreign policy: threats to the stability of the current international order are rising. The norms, values, laws, and institutions that have undergirded the international system and governed relationships between nations are being gradually dismantled. The most discussed sources of this pressure are the ascent of China and other non-Western countries, Russia’s assertive foreign policy, and the diffusion of power from traditional nation-states to nonstate actors, such as nongovernmental organizations, multinational corporations, and technology-empowered individuals. Largely missing from these discussions, however, is the specter of widespread democratic decline. Rising challenges to democratic governance across the globe are a major strain on the international system, but they receive far less attention in discussions of the shifting world order. In the 70 years since the end of World War II, the United States has fostered a global order dominated by states that are liberal, capitalist, and democratic. The United States has promoted the spread of democracy to strengthen global norms and rules that constitute the foundation of our current international system. However, despite the steady rise of democracy since the end of the Cold War, over the last 10 years we have seen dramatic reversals in respect for democratic principles across the globe. A 2015 Freedom House report stated that the “acceptance of democracy as the world’s dominant form of government—and of an international system built on democratic ideals—is under greater threat than at any point in the last 25 years.” Although the number of democracies in the world is at an all-time high, there are a number of key trends that are working to undermine democracy. The rollback of democracy in a few influential states or even in a number of less consequential ones would almost certainly accelerate meaningful changes in today’s global order. Democratic decline would weaken U.S. partnerships and erode an important foundation for U.S. cooperation abroad. Research demonstrates that domestic politics are a key determinant of the international behavior of states. In particular, democracies are more likely to form alliances and cooperate more fully with other democracies than with autocracies. Similarly, authoritarian countries have established mechanisms for cooperation and sharing of “worst practices.” An increase in authoritarian countries, then, would provide a broader platform for coordination that could enable these countries to overcome their divergent histories, values, and interests—factors that are frequently cited as obstacles to the formation of a cohesive challenge to the U.S.-led international system. Recent examples support the empirical data. Democratic backsliding in Hungary and the hardening of Egypt’s autocracy under Abdel Fattah el-Sisi have led to enhanced relations between these countries and Russia. Likewise, democratic decline in Bangladesh has led Sheikh Hasina Wazed and her ruling Awami League to seek closer relations with China and Russia, in part to mitigate Western pressure and bolster the regime’s domestic standing. Although none of these burgeoning relationships has developed into a highly unified partnership, democratic backsliding in these countries has provided a basis for cooperation where it did not previously exist. And while the United States certainly finds common cause with authoritarian partners on specific issues, the depth and reliability of such cooperation is limited. Consequently, further democratic decline could seriously compromise the United States’ ability to form the kinds of deep partnerships that will be required to confront today’s increasingly complex challenges. Global issues such as climate change, migration, and violent extremism demand the coordination and cooperation that democratic backsliding would put in peril. Put simply, the United States is a less effective and influential actor if it loses its ability to rely on its partnerships with other democratic nations. A slide toward authoritarianism could also challenge the current global order by diluting U.S. influence in critical international institutions, including the United Nations , the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Democratic decline would weaken Western efforts within these institutions to advance issues such as Internet freedom and the responsibility to protect. In the case of Internet governance, for example, Western democracies support an open, largely private, global Internet. Autocracies, in contrast, promote state control over the Internet, including laws and other mechanisms that facilitate their ability to censor and persecute dissidents. Already many autocracies, including Belarus, China, Iran, and Zimbabwe, have coalesced in the “Likeminded Group of Developing Countries” within the United Nations to advocate their interests. Within the IMF and World Bank, autocracies—along with other developing nations—seek to water down conditionality or the reforms that lenders require in exchange for financial support. If successful, diminished conditionality would enfeeble an important incentive for governance reforms. In a more extreme scenario, the rising influence of autocracies could enable these countries to bypass the IMF and World Bank all together. For example, the Chinese-created Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank and the BRICS Bank—which includes Russia, China, and an increasingly authoritarian South Africa—provide countries with the potential to bypass existing global financial institutions when it suits their interests. Authoritarian-led alternatives pose the risk that global economic governance will become fragmented and less effective. Violence and instability would also likely increase if more democracies give way to autocracy. International relations literature tells us that democracies are less likely to fight wars against other democracies, suggesting that interstate wars would rise as the number of democracies declines. Moreover, within countries that are already autocratic, additional movement away from democracy, or an “authoritarian hardening,” would increase global instability. Highly repressive autocracies are the most likely to experience state failure, as was the case in the Central African Republic, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. In this way, democratic decline would significantly strain the international order because rising levels of instability would exceed the West’s ability to respond to the tremendous costs of peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance, and refugee flows. Finally, widespread democratic decline would contribute to rising anti-U.S. sentiment that could fuel a global order that is increasingly antagonistic to the United States and its values. Most autocracies are highly suspicious of U.S. intentions and view the creation of an external enemy as an effective means for boosting their own public support. Russian president Vladimir Putin, Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, and Bolivian president Evo Morales regularly accuse the United States of fomenting instability and supporting regime change. This vilification of the United States is a convenient way of distracting their publics from regime shortcomings and fostering public support for strongman tactics. Since 9/11, and particularly in the wake of the Arab Spring, Western enthusiasm for democracy support has waned. Rising levels of instability, including in Ukraine and the Middle East, fragile governance in Afghanistan and Iraq, and sustained threats from terrorist groups such as ISIL have increased Western focus on security and stability. U.S. preoccupation with intelligence sharing, basing and overflight rights, along with the perception that autocracy equates with stability, are trumping democracy and human rights considerations. While rising levels of global instability explain part of Washington’s shift from an historical commitment to democracy, the nature of the policy process itself is a less appreciated factor. Policy discussions tend to occur on a country-by-country basis—leading to choices that weigh the costs and benefits of democracy support within the confines of a single country. From this perspective, the benefits of counterterrorism cooperation or access to natural resources are regularly judged to outweigh the perceived costs of supporting human rights. A serious problem arises, however, when this process is replicated across countries. The bilateral focus rarely incorporates the risks to the U.S.-led global order that arise from widespread democratic decline across multiple countries. Many of the threats to the current global order, such as China’s rise or the diffusion of power, are driven by factors that the United States and West more generally have little leverage to influence or control. Democracy, however, is an area where Western actions can affect outcomes. Factoring in the risks that arise from a global democratic decline into policy discussions is a vital step to building a comprehensive approach to democracy support. Bringing this perspective to the table may not lead to dramatic shifts in foreign policy, but it would ensure that we are having the right conversation.
12/4/21
SO - TripsLarp
Tournament: Yale | Round: 6 | Opponent: Hawkins AS | Judge: Shreyas Iyer Thus, the standard is maximizing expected well-being. Independently prefer: 1 Actor specificity A governments must aggregate because their policies benefit some and harm others so the only non-arbitrary way to prioritize is by helping the most amount of people B No act-omission distinction – governments have to yes/no policies which means that choosing to omit is an act itself so side constraints freeze action C Actor specificity comes first because different agents have different obligations. Takes out calc indicts because they’re empirically denied. 2 It’s a lexical pre-requisite. Threats to bodily security and life preclude the ability for moral actors to effectively act upon other moral theories since they are in a constant state of crisis that inhibit the ideal moral conditions which other theories presuppose. 3 theory: A Topic lit – most articles are written through the lens of util since they’re crafted for policymakers and the general public to understand who take consequences to be important, not philosophy majors. Fairness and education since it’s a lens through which we engage the res. 4 Only pleasure and pain are intrinsically valuable – all other values can be explained with reference to pleasure. Moen 16 Ole Martin Moen, Research Fellow in Philosophy at University of Oslo “An Argument for Hedonism” Journal of Value Inquiry (Springer), 50 (2) 2016: 267–281 SJDI I think several things should be said in response to Moore’s challenge to hedonists. First, I do not think the burden of proof lies on hedonists to explain why the additional values are not intrinsic values. If someone claims that X is intrinsically valuable, this is a substantive, positive claim, and it lies on him or her to explain why we should believe that X is in fact intrinsically valuable. Possibly, this could be done through thought experiments analogous to those employed in the previous section. Second, there is something peculiar about the list of additional intrinsic values that counts in hedonism’s favor: the listed values have a strong tendency to be well explained as things that help promote pleasure and avert pain. To go through Frankena’s list, life and consciousness are necessary presuppositions for pleasure; activity, health, and strength bring about pleasure; and happiness, beatitude, and contentment are regarded by Frankena himself as “pleasures and satisfactions.” The same is arguably true of beauty, harmony, and “proportion in objects contemplated,” and also of affection, friendship, harmony, and proportion in life, experiences of achievement, adventure and novelty, self-expression, good reputation, honor and esteem. Other things on Frankena’s list, such as understanding, wisdom, freedom, peace, and security, although they are perhaps not themselves pleasurable, are important means to achieve a happy life, and as such, they are things that hedonists would value highly. Morally good dispositions and virtues, cooperation, and just distribution of goods and evils, moreover, are things that, on a collective level, contribute a happy society, and thus the traits that would be promoted and cultivated if this were something sought after. To a very large extent, the intrinsic values suggested by pluralists tend to be hedonic instrumental values. Indeed, pluralists’ suggested intrinsic values all point toward pleasure, for while the other values are reasonably explainable as a means toward pleasure, pleasure itself is not reasonably explainable as a means toward the other values. Some have noticed this. Moore himself, for example, writes that though his pluralistic theory of intrinsic value is opposed to hedonism, its application would, in practice, look very much like hedonism’s: “Hedonists,” he writes “do, in general, recommend a course of conduct which is very similar to that which I should recommend.”24 Ross writes that “it is quite certain that by promoting virtue and knowledge we shall inevitably produce much more pleasant consciousness. These are, by general agreement, among the surest sources of happiness for their possessors.”25 Roger Crisp observes that “those goods cited by non-hedonists are goods we often, indeed usually, enjoy.”26 What Moore and Ross do not seem to notice is that their observations give rise to two reasons to reject pluralism and endorse hedonism. The first reason is that if the suggested non-hedonic intrinsic values are potentially explainable by appeal to just pleasure and pain (which, following my argument in the previous chapter, we should accept as intrinsically valuable and disvaluable), then—by appeal to Occam’s razor—we have at least a pro tanto reason to resist the introduction of any further intrinsic values and disvalues. It is ontologically more costly to posit a plurality of intrinsic values and disvalues, so in case all values admit of explanation by reference to a single intrinsic value and a single intrinsic disvalue, we have reason to reject more complicated accounts. The fact that suggested non-hedonic intrinsic values tend to be hedonistic instrumental values does not, however, count in favor of hedonism solely in virtue of being most elegantly explained by hedonism; it also does so in virtue of creating an explanatory challenge for pluralists. The challenge can be phrased as the following question: If the non-hedonic values suggested by pluralists are truly intrinsic values in their own right, then why do they tend to point toward pleasure and away from pain?27 Thus, maximizing general welfare is a prerequisite to any other value criterion
Plan Plan Text -- Resolved: The member nations of the WTO ought to reduce intellectual property protections for medicines to TRIPS. TRIPS increases innovation, encourages creativity, and equalizes the playing field. Willis 13 Willis, Ben. “The Arguments for and against the Trips Agreement.” E-International Relations, E-International Relations, 23 Dec. 2013, www.e-ir.info/2013/12/23/the-arguments-for-and-against-the-trips-agreement/. Various wider benefits to society are said to accrue from the imposition of temporary monopolies and other limitations that result from private IPRs (WTO, 2008: 39; CIPR, 2002: 14-18). By instituting legal protection – tackling piracy and counterfeiting – the disclosure of new knowledge and creativity is encouraged, and the significant costs associated with the creative process (such as with research and development) can therefore be recouped and remuneration earned. Innovation is thus both rewarded and further promoted. The scope and reliability offered by a global IPR regime should not only stimulate domestic innovation, but the security offered to developed world patent holders and others can also encourage foreign direct investment, technology transfer and licensing, and the diffusion of knowledge to the developing world (Matthews, 2002: 108-111). TRIPS is therefore able to play a significant role in the overall promotion of trade and economic development. The agreement also takes care to recognise the differing position of member states vis-à-vis their relative economic status, administrative capabilities, and technological base. As per other WTO agreements, developing countries were afforded special and differential treatment as detailed in Part VI of the agreement under ‘transitional arrangements’. While developed countries had to ensure compliance by 1 January 1996, developing and post-communist countries were instead allocated a further four years to achieve this (with another five years granted for new patents products). Under Article 66.1, least-developed countries (LDCs) were given until 2006 to enact TRIPS, with the possibility of further extensions; the 2001 Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health has also subsequently allowed a further ten years for pharmaceutical products for LDCs (WTO, 2001). Article 66.2 meanwhile explicitly encourages technology transfer from developed states to the LDCs so as to assist in the establishment of a viable technological base, and Article 67 obliges developed countries to provide technical and financial assistance to facilitate implementation of the agreement. A further advantage inherent within TRIPS is the ‘flexibility’ offered to all members in interpreting various articles of the agreement (Vandoren, 2001). Article 27.3, for example, allows members to exclude certain inventions and subject matter from patentability, and permits the protection of others – such as plant varieties – through compatible sui generis systems. The Doha Declaration reiterated that developing countries have the right to grant compulsory licences or allow parallel importing for pharmaceutical products under Article 31 to tackle ‘national emergencies or other circumstances of extreme urgency’ – and that public health crises such as HIV/AIDS , malaria, and other epidemics can be declared as such (WTO, 2001). Crucially, TRIPS also represents a significant improvement on previous IPR agreements in having considerable monitoring, enforcement, and dispute settlement capabilities (Matthews, 2002: 79-95). A TRIPS Council – comprising all WTO members – reviews national legislation and implementation of the agreement. Should serious disputes occur, any member may ultimately bring a case to the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Body, which has the power to issue punitive trade sanctions to ensure compliance. Successful cases launched by Ecuador and Brazil show that the dispute resolution mechanism works for both developed and developing countries alike (MIP, 2010). TRIPS is therefore seen by its supporters as representing an enforceable global system of IPR protection that plays an essential role in the modern global information society. By rewarding and encouraging innovation, it facilitates international trade, spurs economic growth, and enables technological progress and the dissemination of knowledge, ultimately benefiting both producers and users throughout the developed and developing world.
Advantage: Access 4 minutes The TRIPS agreement is positive, it sets a good ground and should be kept, TRIPS is good, but the IP protection on medicine that should be removed is TRIPS-plus because it decreases access to medicine and has devastating impacts on developing countries.
TRIPS-plus kills access to medicines through removal of generic competition. This disproportionally effects developing countries: Reid 15 Jennifer Reid. Infojustice. June 18, 2025. THE EFFECTS OF TRIPS-PLUS IP PROVISIONS ON ACCESS TO AFFORDABLE MEDICINES. http://infojustice.org/archives/34601 The effects of patenting pharmaceutical products on access to medicines in developing countries are relatively recent as these countries have only been mandated by the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) rules to grant patents on pharmaceuticals since 2005. As a result there are a limited number of empirical studies documenting these effects. However, patents grant the patent holder a monopoly on the market that allows the blocking of price-lowering generic competition and the raising of prices which restricts affordable access to medicines. Where patent and other intellectual property (IP) barriers do not exist, generic competition has proven to lower prices of medicines. The attached memo provides numerous examples where intellectual property rules stronger than those required by TRIPS have raised the cost of medicines. For example, the US Food and Drug Administration reports that “on average, the cost of a generic drug is 80 to 85 percent lower than the brand name product.” The experience of HIV medicines prices illustrates this. When first-line antiretroviral medicines were first introduced in developing countries, they were priced out of reach of millions at more than US $10,000 per patient, per year. Following the introduction of generic versions, prices fell dramatically. Today prices for first line regimens in developing countries are 99 percent lower – as low as $100 per person, per year. Evidence documenting the effect of TRIPS and patenting of pharmaceuticals on promoting innovation is similarly lacking, however some reports have already documented the lack of impact patents have in promoting innovation targeting the specific needs of patients in developing countries. Implementation of stricter IP obligations (referred to as TRIPS-plus) is even more recent for many countries, but increasingly these additional or expanded provisions that go beyond what is required by the TRIPS agreement and which limit TRIPS flexibilities have been pushed for or implemented in developing countries through trade agreements and other tools. These include patent term extensions, patent linkage, data exclusivity, lower patentability criteria and additional enforcement measures. Examples of TRIPS-plus provisions appearing in trade agreements include the Dominican Republic-Central America FTA (DR-CAFTA), the US-Jordan free trade agreement and the currently under negotiation Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) between 12 Pacific-Rim countries, including several developing countrie=s. The effects of TRIPS-plus provisions on access to affordable medicines and pricing are not yet well documented, particularly in developing countries. However, a review of existing literature indicates that a number of studies, reports and statements, have in fact documented, assessed and/or projected the effects of TRIPS-plus provisions on access to medicines, including at least 28 resources. Several of these are from countries like the US that have had a longer experience in the implementation of TRIPS-plus provisions in their national law. Increased IP protections decrease accessibility and create monopolies, eliminating competition. This stops people from obtaining lifesaving medicines and vaccines and prevents economic stimulation. Islam et al 19 Islam, M.D., Kaplan, W.A., Trachtenberg, D. et al. Impacts of intellectual property provisions in trade treaties on access to medicine in low and middle income countries: a systematic review. Global Health 15, 88 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12992-019-0528-0 Our systematic literature review makes several contributions: First, the studies we have reviewed show that changes in IP policy due to the implementation of trade agreements are associated with changes in price, medicines expenditure and sales, consumer welfare, and ultimately the affordability, of medicines. The direction and magnitude of the effects differ between ex-ante and ex-post studies. Regarding prices and costs of medicines, ex-ante studies predict that prices and costs (primarily public expenditure) of medicines could increase several hundred percent due to the impact of various IP provisions such as increased patent enforcement, TRIP-plus and other provisions in various multilateral and bilateral agreements. These ex-ante studies confirm what the theory would say 35 i.e., that stronger IP monopoly rights would tend to eliminate competition and thus incur societal costs which are higher prices for IP products. On the other hand, empirical ex-post studies found at most a moderate increase in prices and costs of medicines due to the imposition of similarly heightened IP rules. There is, however, some consensus between ex-ante and ex-post studies that TRIPS-plus provisions relating to clinical data protection, rather than the imposition of more stringent patent rules, would cause a larger increase in prices and costs of medicines and lead to lower access to medicines. We note that extending the patent term may have an additionally important, but as-yet undifferentiated, impact since most data protection provisions are confined within the period of existing patent protection and are not additive to patent extensions. Second, the reported impacts of IP changes due to trade agreements on access to medicines seem clearly multifactorial. Duggan et al. 24 found an insignificant increase in medicine prices after patent law reform and argued that this might be because the existing generic producers are ‘grandfathered’ and continue to produce the generic medicines even after patent enforcement. This is because TRIPS does not require retroactive IP protection on pre-1994 medicines. Kyle and Qian 26 found that the existence of a patented molecule does not always block generic imitation, nor does the lack of patents always deter an originator from making a product available. They also pointed out that effects of IP may well be different depending on the size of the local generic sector, e.g., the impact in India with its large and robust generic medicine sector may be different as compared most other low and middle income countries. They asserted that the “... existence of IPs is neither necessary nor sufficient ...” for the launch of pharmaceutical innovations at the country level. This suggests substantial heterogeneity in the effects of IPs, both across countries and across medicines.
Killing access to medicines puts millions of lives who are dealing with HIV in developing countries at stake. Global Affairs Canada. “HIV/AIDS in developing countries.” June 8, 2017. https://www.international.gc.ca/world-monde/issues_development-enjeux_developpement/global_health-sante_mondiale/hiv_aids-vih_sida.aspx?lang=eng HIV stands for human immunodeficiency virus. This virus breaks down the body’s immune system. Without the protection against infection and disease, HIV causes people to become sick with infections that wouldn't normally affect them. If it is left untreated HIV can lead to the disease AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome). Sub-Saharan Africa remains the most affected area. At the end of 2015, there were 36.7 million people worldwide living with HIV. Sub-Saharan Africa remains the most affected area with nearly 1 in every 25 adults living with HIV. In the hardest-hit countries, girls account for more than 80 of all new HIV infections among adolescents. Globally adolescent girls and young women (15-24 years) are twice as likely as males of the same age to be at risk of HIV. Access to drugs and health services makes a difference There is progress in the fight against HIV/AIDS. In 2016, 17.3 million people living with HIV had access to anti-retroviral therapy and fewer people are dying of AIDS-related illnesses. In 2015, 1.1 million people died from AIDS-related causes worldwide, compared to 2 million in 2005. There was a 45 decrease in new infections between 2000 and 2015. This progress is largely due to advances such as scaled-up access to new drugs and treatments, improved access to health services through stronger health systems, and effective prevention programs and public awareness campaigns.
Limited IP protections in LDCs in the short term serve no risk to big pharma, as infrastructure to develop medicines isn’t existing. Bonadio 21 Bonadio, Enrico. “World's Poorest Countries Allowed to Keep Copying Patent-Protected DrugsEn.” The Conversation, The Conversation, 23 Apr. 2021, theconversation.com/worlds-poorest-countries-allowed-to-keep-copying-patent-protected-drugs-50799. It costs pharmaceuticals companies about US$2.6 billioin to develop a new drug. If these companies were not allowed to protect their investment with patents, it is doubtful that any new drugs would be developed. So patents are an important incentive. But patent protection doesn’t work for poor countries. Intellectual property (IP) rights, like patents, aren’t an effective incentive in countries which have not reached an adequate level of economic development because they have no intellectual property to protect. IP rights might be effective over the long term, but only after a local and relatively strong pharmaceutical industry is developed. The exemption could be dropped once countries that have benefited from it have developed enough, and the industry reaches a self-sustaining size. Although building a home grown pharmaceuticals industry is not a requirement of the WTO waiver, a strong local industry would give poor countries direct access to much needed cheap medicines. The WTO’s transitional waiver makes sense. By temporarily allowing LDCs to ignore patents on drugs, it gives them time to develop their own pharmaceuticals industries. And we are already seeing evidence of this happening. According to the UN agencies, UNDP and UNAids, the proportion of people with HIV who are not receiving antiretrovirals reduced from 90 in 2006 to 63 in 2013 thanks to the availability of drugs made by LDCs. Despite some criticisms, the WTO’s decision to extend the waiver should be praised. It seems fair and reasonable, and it doesn’t excessively jeopardise companies that make branded (non-generic) drugs. They don’t seem to lose much from missed royalties. Overall, the poorest countries account for less than 2 of the world’s gross domestic product and about 1 of global trade in goods. Not a big business opportunity for big pharma. Overall, TRIPS-plus diminishes the competition that drives innovation and the economy and prevents people from obtaining lifesaving medicine. And, TRIPS + is not necessary for maintaining a profit for big pharma. TRIPS-plus provisions aren’t even effective in a vacuum, which means removing them would not hurt the economy – U.S. report proves https://www.usitc.gov/publications/332/pub5199.pdf The Commission finds that the effects of membership in RTAs with TRIPS-plus provisions are ambiguous. On the one hand, RTAs with TRIPS-plus provisions have a positive and statistically significant effect on members’ total trade across all sectors. However, such RTAs typically include other substantial tariff and nontariff commitments which can also increase trade. To further explore this issue, the Commission examined the effects of RTAs with TRIPS-plus provisions separately on trade in IPR-intensive sectors and non-IPR-intensive sectors. While RTAs with TRIPS-plus provisions are found to have a positive and statistically significant effect on trade in IPR-intensive sectors, they have a larger effect on non-IPRintensive sectors than on IPR-intensive sectors. 494 Thus, there is limited evidence of TRIPS-plus provisions actually increasing trade in IPR-intensive sectors, as other commitments in RTAs may be driving the positive effects on trade for both IPR-intensive and non-IPR-intensive sectors. As reflected in the literature, TRIPS has already increased trade in IPR-intensive sectors such that the additional effects of TRIPS-plus provisions may be relatively small.
9/18/21
SO-TripsLay
Tournament: Yale | Round: 1 | Opponent: Dr Phillips AI | Judge: Gina Pisciotta broken check open source