AC - Black Terror NC - Method Testing Cap K Case 1A - Case ROB K 2N - ROB K Gordon (Case) 2A - Case ROB
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0 - G - Broken Interps
Tournament: Composite | Round: Finals | Opponent: Rule Breakers | Judge: Norm Setters Interpretation – Debaters must word all proposed theoretical interpretations (defined as proposed rules for the debate pertaining to the enforcement of fairness or education) as agential statements.
Interpretation: If the affirmative defends a consequentialist framework, they must explicitly delineate which theory of the good they defend in the form of a text in the 1ac.
Interpretation: Debaters must meet the disclosure interps that they disclose on their wiki
Interpretation – Debaters must send the text of their interpretations to the judge and opponent prior to the reading of the shell.
Interpretation – All theoretical interpretations must be worded proactively to indicate what debaters must do. To clarify, shells must say X is a good norm rather than saying we ought not allow for Y.
1/29/22
0 - G - Cap Inevitable
Tournament: Barkley Forum for High Schools | Round: 1 | Opponent: Harvard Westlake CC | Judge: Sutton, Dylan Neoliberalism is inevitable – broad support and elite cooption shut down opposition Vakulabharanam 12 – Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Hyderabad, India (Vamsi, “Why Does Neoliberalism Persist Even After the Global Crisis?,” 12-20-12, http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/12/why-does-neoliberalism-persist-even-after-the-global-crisis.html)
The 2007-9 crisis in global capitalism brought a new energy and focus to the heterodox economists, and more broadly to the critics of neoliberalism from different arenas of society. It seemed clear at that time that neoliberalism had run its course when it met its structural contradiction – with the burst of the US housing bubble and the concomitant financial crises across the world, it looked like the avenues through which demand was being generated were closed and the system was poised for structural change. Three years later, Southern Europe is witnessing an intense so-called sovereign debt crisis with the working people bearing the brunt of it, and real economies in the developed world are continuing to witness slow growth. The US seems to be under the threat of the so-called fiscal cliff (which seems more like a political event rather than an economic one). The economies that grew quickly during the neo-liberal period, like China and India, have slowed down considerably. Across the globe, we seem to be going through a period of uncertainty without a clear path ahead. Yet, neoliberalism persists. Why? There are multiple explanations for this. Bailout packages of various governments were directed at rescuing financial capital, and this has pitted the interests of financial capital against the interests of the majority. The global left has not been strong enough to take advantage of the crisis to better represent the interests of the majority. Governments across the world, after a brief gap, have returned to their neoliberal posture of supporting financial capital and so forth. There is truth in all these explanations. However, we need to broaden the array of explanations both to take into account the spatial diversity of neoliberalism, as well as to deepen our analytical understanding of this persistence. I offer one such explanation from field explorations in India to add to the existing explanations. This addition is not simply academic, but it shows the need for deeper political engagement to bring about systemic change, given that our explanations of the structural contradictions of neoliberalism are on the mark. In two recent field visits that we (a group of local researchers) undertook to understand the persistence of neoliberalism at the concrete level, we found some interesting phenomena. Both these visits were in the state of Andhra Pradesh in South India. The first visit was in the region of Telangana, which is highly politicized right now, as the people of the region are fighting for a separate state within the Indian nation-state. The second visit was to a tribal habitat in the northeastern region of the same state, where communist struggles have been active for a while. In both these areas, there are continued appropriations of common lands, common resources and minerals, such as Granite and Bauxite by local and foreign capitalist elites aided by the State. In the process, these elites are destroying the local livelihoods without creating credible alternative. Both these are classic cases of primitive accumulation or accumulation by dispossession, a process that has centrally defined neoliberalism over the last thirty-five years across the globe. Accumulation by dispossession operates in our times through the following modes of appropriation. First, it operates through the acquisition of lands from small producers such as peasants, tribal people, artisans and the urban poor in the name of Special Economic Zones and the like. Some of the lands acquired thus, have became open to speculative enterprises of real estate dealers. Second, there has been a large-scale privatization drive in most countries that has made public sector enterprises alienate their properties at throwaway prices to private players. Third, and these are the cases that we have focused on – commons have been appropriated with ease either because the laws governing them are weak or because common properties are often meddled with by the State. What we found in these two regions is that the particular modes of appropriation that have come into being with great force during the neoliberal period have persisted even after the crisis. Why is this the case? One explanation that ties in with the explanations above is that resistance has not been strong enough or effective from the people and their social movements or from the larger left movements. The other explanation that we offered is that neoliberalism has been able to create structures of populism that are deeply entrenched. The local elites have pursued a three-fold strategy for the continued appropriation of the commons. First, they (with the support of the State) have put in place various populist policy imperatives that have temporarily addressed the consumption needs of the majority without altering the deeper neoliberal structural forces that have inhibited employment growth and wage growth over the last thirty years. For example, there are schemes such as housing or subsidized food for the poor even as their productive resources such as land are acquired by the elites/states. These have tended to perpetuate themselves after the global crisis, even with the loud demands for austerity. Second, the elites have continued to appropriate common and public resources to keep their own accumulation levels above an acceptable minimum in a time of slowdown of accumulation opportunities through regular economic growth. Resistance is sought to be controlled through populism of the kind discussed above. Even in regions that are highly politicized, such as Telangana, the leadership of the movement has been hand-in-glove with the local elites who gain consistently through the perpetuation of these appropriation practices.Third, professionals and middle classes have been the beneficiaries of a system that has thrived on the creation of enclave economies where there is a sharing of rents among the elites and these professional groups. These professional classes have taken up key positions in the government, media, corporate executive roles, and as intermediaries between the elites and the working people who use the commons. The broad support of these classes for the local elites has played a key role in the perpetuation of neoliberalism. As long as these processes persist, neoliberalism will be strong on the ground, with the elites and non-elites bound together in the larger neoliberal system through the different, yet entangled processes of appropriation, rent sharing and populism. Of course, this cannot go on, since the logic of austerity is bound to create contradictions in the path of populism. However, this contradiction may unfold very differently across space and time, as not all governments are going to react identically to the demands of austerity. The 1 in the US (that the Occupy movement has targeted) or the top decile of the population (in countries like China and India) continue to benefit from the perpetuation of the neoliberal configuration while they are pitted against their large majorities. As long as the political groups on the ground do not make their voices heard loudly enough against the top 1 or the top 10, and as long as there are continued benefits for the elites from the perpetuation of neoliberalism, the system will persist. Cap is sustainable – adaptation overcomes systemic contradictions Keucheyan 14 – Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Paris-Sorbonne (Razmig, “Not even climate change will kill off capitalism,” 3-6-14, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/06/not-even-climate-change-will-kill-off-capitalism, accessed 5-27-16 Bozzles the Bozz-Dawg Bozz Bozz)
Arguably the single most important mistake the revolutionary movements of the 60s and 70s made was to overlook the resilience of capitalism. The idea – catastrophism, as it is often called – that the system was going to crumble under the pressure of its own contradictions, that the bourgeoisie produces its own "gravediggers" (as Marx and Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto) has been disproved. When the rate of profit started showing signs of decline in the first half of the 70s, the redistributive policies implemented after the second world war were terminated and the neoliberal revolution was launched. This resilience of capitalism has little to do with the dominant classes being particularly clever or far-sighted. In fact, they can keep on making mistakes – yet capitalism still thrives. Why? Capitalism has created a world of great complexity since its birth. Yet at its core, it is based on a set of simple mechanisms that can easily adapt to adversity. This is a kind of "generative grammar" in Noam Chomsky's sense: a finite set of rules can generate an infinity of outcomes. The context today is very different from that of the 60s and 70s. The global left, however, is in danger of committing the same error of underestimating capitalism all over again. Catastrophism, this time, takes the form of investing faith in a new object: climate change, and more generally the ecological crisis. There is a worryingly widespread belief in leftwing circles that capitalism will not survive the environmental crisis. The system, so the story goes, has reached its absolute limits: without natural resources – oil among them – it can't function, and these resources are fast depleting; the growing number of ecological disasters will increase the cost of maintaining infrastructures to unsustainable levels; and the impact of a changing climate on food prices will induce riots that will make societies ungovernable. The beauty of catastrophism, today as in the past, is that if the system is to crumble under the weight of its own contradictions, the weakness of the left ceases to be a problem. The end of capitalism takes the form of suicide rather than murder. So the absence of a murderer – that is, an organised revolutionary movement – doesn't really matter any more. But the left would be better off learning from its past mistakes. Capitalism might well be capable not only of adapting to climate change but of profiting from it. One hears that the capitalist system is confronted with a double crisis: an economic one that started in 2008, and an ecological one, rendering the situation doubly perilous. But one crisis can sometimes serve to solve another. Capitalism is responding to the challenge of the ecological crisis with two of its favourite weapons: financialisation and militarisation. In times of crisis, for instance, markets will require simultaneously that wages be cut and that people keep consuming. Opening the flow of credit allows the reconciliation of these two contradictory injunctions – at least until the next financial crisis. As Costas Lapavitsas has recently shown, finance has penetrated every nook and cranny of our everyday lives: housing, health, education, even nature. Carbon markets, weather or biodiversity derivatives, catastrophe bonds, among others, belong to a new variety of "environmental finance" products. Each one has its own specific way of functioning, but their overall purpose is to alleviate or spread the rising costs of climate change and the super-exploitation of the environment.
1/28/22
0 - G - Cap K vs Black Terror
Tournament: NEW YORK CITY INVITATIONAL DEBATE AND SPEECH TOURNAMENT | Round: Finals | Opponent: Basis Peoria PY | Judge: Hertzig, Bathily, Montague The only question of this debate is whether the affirmative offers a strategy to challenge racial capitalism. The ontology and semiotics of anti-blackness are locked into place through the alienation of black labor and abstraction through the form of capital – raising antiblackness to an ontological level ignores the contingency of capital risk. Amaro, 18 (Ramon Amaro, Lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London; Research Fellow in Digital Culture at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam; worked as Assistant Editor for the SAGE open access journal Big Data and Society; 2018, PhD, Philosophy, Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths; 2013, MA, Sociological Research, University of Essex; 1999, BSe, Mechanical Engineering, University of Michigan; “Machine Learning, Black Labour and Bio-epistemic Resistance,” presented as part of After Work: Life, Labour and Automation, a symposium exploring work and resistance through and against technology. Transcription from rvs, finders credit and cutting goes to tris) Okay, hi. My name is Ramon Amaro. Thank you to the organizers for having me here today. I’m actually going to diverge a second and take the conversation to an ontological and theoretical point that can hopefully emerge to different conversations as we go on later. Namely, what I want to begin with is the idea of bare life of the black female body, an idea that Alessandra Raengo argues must be understood if we are even to critique modern forms of capital, as what we know as the black form is already subsumed in the monetary form of capital and the fictive substance of race. What I mean, and what I would like to propose here in following Raengo, is what she calls “the ontological scandal” perpetuated by slavery. This scandal, according to Raengo, is repeated “with each instance of alienated black labor, each time blackness functions as the commodity form, and with each repetition they continue to be reified.” But what’s important is Raengo’s gesture presupposes that the production and subsequent domination of colonial nations today are predicated on the abstract reification of the black female body as a mode of currency. To even begin to address this ontological scandal, we must first think through how the black body is individuated as a currency of exchange within modern financial systems. For instance, extensive work has been done by Spillers, Hartman, and others to illuminate the important role of the cargo ship on the Middle Passage as a scene of capital exchange and racial subjection. However, I want to build on this work to think through the genesis of the black self as already informed by the logics of innumeration and speculative risk, where the pre-individuated state of black being is always already contaminated by the conditions of labor-based capital accumulation. But this accumulation also informs a dissonance between the real black sense of self and any social agreement that may abstract the black self into, as Denise DeSilva argues, a formative system of monetary value. In other words, as Ian BacComb describes, the growth of Anglo-European financial domination was not merely a cycle of labor and exchange, but a scaled transaction of quantifiable insurance risk associated with the contingency of death and illness aboard slave cargo ships. BacComb points to the British economy in particular to discuss the granting of a real existence of enslaved bodies inasmuch as the survival and the successful delivery of these bodies can be bought virtually as the hidden substance of insurance contracts and bills of credit. Or in the case of the British slave ship Zong, the enslaved body is underwritten as the speculative risk of capital, and public outrage. In this way, the importance of the enslaved body to modes of capital is not predicated to actual material flesh, or even the potential for that body to labor, but was instead articulated as an abstract flow of enumeration and probability. If, under this premise, we are to take W.B. DuBois at face value and consider the double consciousness of the racialized individual, then we are immediately confronted with the fragmentation of black genesis as a tension between what is made visible as blackness or black non-being, which Sylvia Wynters argues is already owned by ontology as a problem of bio-epistemic compliance and the regime of prototypical capital existence, which I argue is symptomatic of a larger logic of social quantification. So I just wanna diverge for a second and return to the issue of the Zong for those who aren’t familiar, the issue of the slave body on the British slaver was the start and emergence of the British insurance industry. If anyone knows, there was an illness that broke out on the slave ship, in the middle of the Atlantic, seven crew members died, and I think it was in term of like twenty slaves, and the captain of that ship decided that, actually, it was cheaper to throw all the slaves overboard and claim the insurance than it was to continue the passage. And when he returned back to England, he sued the insurance company, and that was the start of litigation -- of the body itself as being a virtual point of risk. And what I’m arguing is that, since that development, obviously we know how pervasive the insurance industry is, how pervasive capital mechanisms are at identifying risk and probability, and what I’m arguing here is, following Raengo, is that what we know today as modern capitalism in the UK is already predicated on the violence of the black female body. So, to continue, as the terms of contemporary capital depart from the derivation of value as the direct engagement with the body to the technics of labor practice, so in other words, it no longer became about the actual slave being delivered to do manual labor – the financial gain was greater from actually deriving insurance risk on the body itself. So the body only became a black body once it was subsumed into capital types of risk. These engagements emerged as adaptive forms of information exchange that, unlike popular believe, are indifferent to the specificity of the body. However, it is specific only as much as the racialized body can be extracted into quantifiable forms of data and pre-emption, which continues today to be defined as social value in contemporary techno-capital institutions. What I’m attempting to highlight is that while the technology of shipping and insurance risk, predicated on violence and the abstraction of the black body, were once the lens through which blackness was made visible, the emergence of new generative types of technology, like machine learning, enact an accelerated form of targeting and visibility that no longer require physicality, but depend on the meta-abstraction of all social phenomenon to locate the body as a measure of correlation and probability. So, in other words, after the Zong, following Raengo here, after the Zong, the idea of abstracting the body into actual risk, of course, further objectified the black body, but it also set a precedent of actual citizenship being viewed as potential financial gain or potential investment. The focus on self-transformation and collective affect produces a fragmented model of local resistance that exhausts political energies but cannot meaningfully challenge state repression or material need. Dean, 19 (Jodi, communist organizer associated with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, professor in the Political Science department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges; “From Allies to Comrades,“ Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging, Verso Books, 2019) How do we imagine political work? Under conditions where political change seems completely out of reach, we might imagine political work as self-transformation. At the very least, we can work on ourselves. In the intensely mediated networks of communicative capitalism, we might see our social media engagements as a kind of activism where Twitter and Facebook function as important sites of struggle. Perhaps we understand writing as important political work and hammer out opinion pieces, letters to the editors, and manifestoes. When we imagine political work, we often take electoral politics as our frame of reference, focusing on voting, lawn signs, bumper stickers, and campaign buttons. Or we think of activists as those who arrange phone banks, canvass door-to-door, and set up rallies. In yet another political imaginary, we might envision political work as study, whether done alone or with others. We might imagine political work as cultural production, the building of new communities, spaces, and ways of seeing. Our imaginary might have a militant, or even militarist, inflection: political work is carried out through marches, occupations, strikes, and blockades; through civil disobedience, direct action, and covert operations. Even with the recognition of the wide array of political activities, the ways people use them to respond to specific situations and capacities, and how they combine to enhance each other, we might still imagine radical political work as punching a Nazi in the face Throughout these various actions and activities, how are the relations among those fighting on the same side imagined? How do the activists and organizers, militants and revolutionaries relate to one another? During the weeks and months when the Occupy movement was at its peak, relations with others were often infused with a joyous sense of being together, with an enthusiasm for the collective co-creation of new patterns of action and ways of living.11 But the feeling didn’t last. The pressures of organizing diverse people and politics under conditions of police repression and real material need wore down even the most committed activists. Since then, on social media and across the broader left, relations among the politically engaged have again become tense and conflicted, often along lines of race and gender. Dispersed and disorganized, we’re uncertain of whom to trust and what to expect. We encounter contradictory injunctions to self-care and call out. Suspicion undermines support. Exhaustion displaces enthusiasm. Attention to comradeship, to the ways that shared expectations make political work not just possible but also gratifying, may help redirect our energies back to our common struggle. As former CPUSA member David Ross explained to Gornick: I knew that I could never feel passionately about the new movements as I had about the old, I realized that the CP has provided me with a sense of comradeship I would never have again, and that without that comradeship I could never be political. 12 For Ross, the Communist Party is what made Marxism. The party gave Marxism life, political purpose. This life-giving capacity came from comradeship. Ross continues: “The idea of politics as simply a diffused consciousness linked only to personal integrity was—is—anathema to me.” His description of politics as “a diffused consciousness linked only to personal integrity” fits today’s left milieus. Perhaps, then, his remedy— comradeship—will as well. Various people have told me their stories of feeling a rush of warmth when they were first welcomed into their party as a comrade. I’ve had this feeling myself. In his memoir Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid, the theorist Frank Wilderson, a former member of uMkhonto weSizwe, or MK, the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC), describes his first meeting with Chris Hani, the leader of the South African Communist Party and the chief of staff of MK. Wilderson writes, “I beamed like a schoolboy when he called me ‘comrade.’” 13 Wilderson chides himself for what he calls a “childish need for recognition.”14 Perhaps because he still puts Hani on a pedestal, he feels exposed in his enjoyment of the egalitarian disruption of comradeship. Wilderson hasn’t yet internalized the idea that he and Hani are political equals. “Comrade” holds out an equalizing promise, and when that promise is fulfilled, we confront our own continuing yet unwanted attachments to hierarchy, prestige, inadequacy. Accepting equality takes courage. Wilderson’s joy in hearing Hani call him “comrade” contrasts sharply with another instance Wilderson recounts where comrade was the term of address. In 1994, shortly before Wilderson was forced to leave South Africa, he encountered Nelson Mandela at an event hosted by Tribute magazine. After Mandela’s public remarks, Wilderson asked a question in which he addressed Mandela as “comrade.” “Not Mr. Mandela. Not sir, like the fawning advertising mogul who asked the first question. Comrade Mandela. It stitched him back into the militant garb he’d shed since the day he left prison.”15 Wilderson’s recollection shows how comrade’s equalizing insistence can be aggressive, an imposition of discipline. This is part of its power. Addressing another as “comrade” reminds them that something is expected of them Discipline and joy are two sides of the same coin, two aspects of comradeship as a mode of political belonging. As a form of address, figure of political relation, and carrier of expectations, comrade disrupts capitalist society’s hierarchical identifications of sex, race, and class. It insists on the equalizing sameness of those on the same side of a political struggle and renders that equalizing sameness productive of new modes of work and belonging. In this respect, comrade is a carrier of utopian longings in the sense theorized by Kathi Weeks. Weeks presents the utopian form as carrying out two functions: “One function is to alter our connection to the present, while the other is to shift our relationship to the future; one is productive of estrangement, the other of hope.”16 The first function mobilizes the negativity of disidentification and disinvestment. Present relations become strange, less binding on our sense of possibility. The second function redirects “our attention and energies toward an open future … providing a vision or glimmer of a better world.”17 The power of comrade is in how it negates old relations and promises new ones—the promise itself ushers them in, welcoming the new comrade into relations irreducible to their broader setting. Their cessation of revolutionary institution building abdicates the potential for true communual power, reducing revolution to reactive bursts of energy. Only dual power organizing can build institutions that meet the material needs of community and construct a revolutionary base in the face of compounding crises of climate change, imperialism, and fascism. Escalante, 19 Alyson, you should totally read her work for non-debate reasons, Marxist-Leninist, Materialist Feminist and Anti-Imperialist activist, "Communism and Climate Change: A Dual Power Approach," Failing That, Invent, https://failingthatinvent.home.blog/2019/02/15/communism-and-climate-change-a-dual-power-approach///AD I have previously argued that a crucial advantage to dual power strategy is that it gives the masses an infrastructure of socialist institutions which can directly provide for material needs in times of capitalist crisis. Socialist agricultural and food distribution programs can take ground that the capitalist state cedes by simultaneously meeting the needs of the masses while proving that socialist self-management and political institutions can function independently of capitalism. This approach is not only capable of literally saving lives in the case of crisis, but of demonstrating the possibility of a revolutionary project which seeks to destroy rather than reform capitalism. One of the most pressing of the various crises which humanity faces today is climate change. Capitalist production has devastated the planet, and everyday we discover that the small window of time for avoiding its most disastrous effects is shorter than previously understood. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that we have 12 years to limit (not even prevent) the more catastrophic effects of climate change. The simple, and horrific, fact that we all must face is that climate change has reached a point where many of its effects are inevitable, and we are now in a post-brink world, where damage control is the primary concern. The question is not whether we can escape a future of climate change, but whether we can survive it. Socialist strategy must adapt accordingly. In the face of this crisis, the democratic socialists and social democrats in the United States have largely settled on market based reforms. The Green New Deal, championed by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and the left wing of the Democratic Party, remains a thoroughly capitalist solution to a capitalist problem. The proposal does nothing to challenge capitalism itself, but rather seeks to subsidize market solutions to reorient the US energy infrastructure towards renewable energy production, to develop less energy consuming transportation, and the development of public investment towards these ends. The plan does nothing to call into question the profit incentives and endless resource consumption of capitalism which led us to this point. Rather, it seeks to reorient the relentless market forces of capitalism towards slightly less destructive technological developments. While the plan would lead to a massive investment in the manufacturing and deployment of solar energy infrastructure, National Geographic reports that, “Fabricating solar panels requires caustic chemicals such as sodium hydroxide and hydrofluoric acid, and the process uses water as well as electricity, the production of which emits greenhouse gases.” Technology alone cannot sufficiently combat this crisis, as the production of such technology through capitalist manufacturing infrastructure only perpetuates environmental harm. Furthermore, subsidizing and incentivizing renewable energy stops far short of actually combating the fossil fuel industry driving the current climate crisis. The technocratic market solutions offered in the Green New Deal fail to adequately combat the driving factors of climate change. What is worse, they rely on a violent imperialist global system in order to produce their technological solutions. The development of high-tech energy infrastructure and the development of low or zero emission transportation requires the import of raw material and rare earth minerals which the United States can only access because of the imperial division of the Global South. This imperial division of the world requires constant militarism from the imperial core nations, and as Lenin demonstrates in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, facilitates constant warfare as imperial states compete for spheres of influence in order to facilitate cheap resource extraction. The US military, one of many imperialist forces, is the single largest user of petroleum, and one of its main functions is to ensure oil access for the United States. Without challenging this imperialist division of the world and the role of the United States military in upholding it, the Green New Deal fails even further to challenge the underlying causes of climate change. Even with the failed promises of the Green New Deal itself, it is unlikely that this tepid market proposal will pass at all. Nancy Pelosi and other lead Democrats have largely condemned it and consider it “impractical” and “unfeasible.” This dismissal is crucial because it reveals the total inability of capitalism to resolve this crisis. If the center-left party in the heart of the imperial core sees even milquetoast capitalist reforms as a step too far, we ought to have very little hope that a reformist solution will present itself within the ever shrinking 12 year time frame. There are times for delicacy and there are times for bluntness, and we are in the latter. To put things bluntly: the capitalists are not going to save us, and if we don’t find a way to save ourselves, the collapse of human civilization is a real possibility. The pressing question we now face is: how are we going to save ourselves? Revolution and Dual Power If capitalism will not be able to resolve the current encroaching climate crisis, we must find a way to organize outside the confines of capitalist institutions, towards the end of overthrowing capitalism. If the Democratic Socialists of America backed candidates cannot offer real anti-capitalist solutions through the capitalist state, we should be skeptical of the possibility for any socialist organization doing so. The DSA is far larger and far more well funded than any of the other socialist organizations in the United States, and they have failed to produce anything more revolutionary than the Green New Deal. We have to abandon the idea that electoral strategy will be sufficient to resolve the underlying causes of this crisis within 12 years. While many radicals call for revolution instead of reform, the reformists often raise the same response: revolution is well and good, but what are you going to do in the mean time? In many ways this question is fair. The socialist left in the United States today is not ready for revolutionary action, and a mass base does not exist to back the various organizations which might undertake such a struggle. Revolutionaries must concede that we have much work to be done before a revolutionary strategy can be enacted. This is a hard truth, but it is true. Much of the left has sought to ignore this truth by embracing adventurism and violent protest theatrics, in the vain hope of sparking revolutionary momentum which does not currently exist. If this is the core strategy of the socialist left, we will accomplish nothing in the next 12 years. Such approaches are as useless as the opportunist reforms pushed by the social democrats. Our task in these 12 years is not simply to arm ourselves and hope that magically the masses will wake up prepared for revolution and willing to put their trust in our small ideological cadres. We must instead, build a movement, and with it we must build infrastructure which can survive revolution and provide a framework for socialist development. Dual power is tooled towards this project best. The Marxist Center network has done an impressive amount of work developing socialist institutions across the US, largely through tenants organizing and serve the people programs. The left wing factions within the DSA itself have also begun to develop mutual aid programs that could be useful for dual power strategy. At the same time, mutual aid is not enough. We cannot simply build these institutions as a reform to make capitalism more survivable. Rather, we must make these institutions part of a broader revolutionary movement and they ought to function as a material prefiguration to a socialist society and economy. The institutions we build as dual power outside the capitalist state today ought to be structured towards revolutionary ends, such that they will someday function as the early institutions of a revolutionary socialist society. To accomplish this goal, we cannot simply declare these institutions to be revolutionary. Rather they have to be linked together through an actual revolutionary movement working towards revolutionary ends. This means that dual power institutions cannot exist as ends in and of themselves, nor can abstract notions of mutual aid cannot be conceptualized as an end in itself. The explicit purpose of these institutions has to be to radicalize the masses through meeting their needs, and providing an infrastructure for a socialist movement to meet the needs of its members and the communities in which it operates. Revolutionary institutions that can provide food, housing, and other needs for a revolutionary movement will be crucial for building a base among the masses and for constructing the beginnings of a socialist infrastructure for when we eventually engage in revolutionary struggle. The alternative is to embrace the comradeship of the party – a partisan discipline and mutual accountability that enables a shared commitment to an international communist horizon. Dean, 19 (Jodi, communist organizer associated with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, professor in the Political Science department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges; “From Allies to Comrades,“ Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging, Verso Books, 2019) As comrades, our actions are voluntary, but they are not always of our own choosing. Comrades have to be able to count on each other even when we don’t like each other and even when we disagree. We do what needs to be done because we owe it to our comrades. In The Romance of American Communism, Vivian Gornick reports the words of a former member of the Communist Party USA, or CPUSA, who hated the daily grind of selling papers and canvassing expected of party cadre, but nevertheless, according to her, “I did it. I did it because if I didn’t do it, I couldn’t face my comrades the next day. And we all did it for the same reason: we were accountable to each other.”6 Put in psychoanalytic terms, the comrade functions as an ego ideal: the point from which party members assess themselves as doing important, meaningful work.7 Being accountable to another entails seeing your actions through their eyes. Are you letting them down or are you doing work that they respect and admire? In Crowds and Party, I present the good comrade as an ideal ego, that is to say, as how party members imagine themselves. 8 They may imagine themselves as thrilling orators, brilliant polemicists, skilled organizers, or courageous militants. In contrast with my discussion there, in the current book, I draw out how the comrade also functions as an ego ideal, the perspective that party members—and often fellow travelers—take toward themselves. This perspective is the effect of belonging on the same side as it works back on those who have committed themselves to common struggle. The comrade is a symbolic as well as an imaginary figure and it is the symbolic dimension of ego ideal I focus on here. My thinking about the comrade as a generic figure for those on the same side flows out of my work on communism as the horizon of left politics and my work on the party as the political form necessary for this politics. 9 To see our political horizon as communist is to highlight the emancipatory egalitarian struggle of the proletarianized against capitalist exploitation—that is, against the determination of life by market forces; by value; by the division of labor (on the basis of sex and race); by imperialism (theorized by Lenin in terms of the dominance of monopoly and finance capital); and by neocolonialism (theorized by Nkrumah as the last stage of imperialism). Today we see this horizon in struggles such as those led by women of color against police violence, white supremacy, and the murder and incarceration of black, brown, and working-class people. We see it in the infrastructure battles around pipelines, climate justice, and barely habitable cities with undrinkable water and contaminated soil. We see it in the array of social reproduction struggles against debt, foreclosure, and privatization, and for free, quality public housing, childcare, education, transportation, healthcare, and other basic services. We see it in the ongoing fight of LGBTQ people against harassment, discrimination, and oppression. It is readily apparent today that the communist horizon is the horizon of political struggle not for the nation but for the world; it is an international horizon. This is evident in the antagonism between the rights of immigrants and refugees and intensified nationalisms; in the necessity of a global response to planetary warming; and in anti-imperialist, decolonization, and peace movements. In these examples, communism is a force of negativity, the negation of the global capitalist present. Communism is also the name for the positive alternative to capitalism’s permanent and expanding exploitation, crisis, and immiseration, the name of a system of production based on meeting social needs—from each according to ability to each according to need, to paraphrase Marx’s famous slogan—in a way that is collectively determined and carried out by the producers. This positive dimension of communism attends to social relations, to how people treat each other, animals, things, and the world around them. Building communism entails more than resistance and riot. It requires the emancipated egalitarian organization of collective life. With respect to the party, intellectuals on the contemporary left tend to extract the party from the aspirations and accomplishments it enabled. Communist philosophers who disagree on a slew of theoretical questions, such as Antonio Negri and Alain Badiou, converge on the organizational question—no party! The party has been rejected as authoritarian, as outmoded, as ill-fitting a society of networks. Every other mode of political association may be revised, renewed, rethought, or reimagined except for the party of communists. This rejection of the party as a form for left politics is a mistake. It ignores the effects of association on those engaged in common struggle. It fails to learn from the everyday experiences of generations of activists, organizers, and revolutionaries. It relies on a narrow, fantasied notion of the party as a totalitarian machine. It neglects the courage, enthusiasm, and achievements of millions of party members for over a century. Rejection of the party form has been left dogmatism for the last thirty years and has gotten us nowhere. Fortunately, the movements of the squares in Greece and Spain, as well as lessons from the successes and limits of the Occupy movement, have pushed against this left dogmatism. They have reenergized interest in the party as a political form that can scale; a form that is flexible, adaptive, and expansive enough to endure beyond the joyous and disruptive moments of crowds in the streets. A theory of the comrade contributes to this renewal by drawing out the ways that shared commitment to a common struggle generates new strengths and new capacities. Over and against the reduction of party relations to the relations between the leaders and the led, comrade attends to the effects of political belonging on those on the same side of a political struggle. As we fight together for a world free of exploitation, oppression, and bigotry, we have to be able to trust and count on each other. Comrade names this relation. The comrade relation remakes the place from which one sees, what it is possible to see, and what possibilities can appear. It enables the revaluation of work and time, what one does, and for whom one does it. Is one’s work done for the people or for the bosses? Is it voluntary or done because one has to work? Does one work for personal provisions or for a collective good? We should recall Marx’s lyrical description of communism in which work becomes “life’s prime want.” We get a glimpse of that in comradeship: one wants to do political work. You don’t want to let down your comrades; you see the value of your work through their eyes, your new collective eyes. Work, determined not by markets but by shared commitments, becomes fulfilling. French communist philosopher and militant Bernard Aspe discusses the problem of contemporary capitalism as a loss of “common time”; that is, the loss of an experience of time generated and enjoyed through our collective being-together. 10 From holidays, to meals, to breaks, whatever common time we have is synchronized and enclosed in forms for capitalist appropriation. Communicative capitalism’s apps and trackers amplify this process such that the time of consumption can be measured in much the same way that Taylorism measured the time of production: How long did a viewer spend on a particular web page? Did a person watch a whole ad or click off of it after five seconds? In contrast, the common action that is the actuality of communist movement induces a collective change in capacities. Breaking from capitalism’s 24-7 injunctions to produce and consume for the bosses and owners, the discipline of common struggle expands possibilities for action and intensifies the sense of its necessity. The comrade is a figure for the relation through which this transformation of work and time occurs.
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0 - G - Cap K vs Dysfluency
Tournament: Lexington Winter Invitational | Round: 6 | Opponent: Academy Of Classical Christian Studies JM | Judge: Maher, TJ Crip theories frame disability as discursive and ideological at expense of focus on the material – only the alternatives focus on structures of disadvantage can address ableist violence Vehmas and Watson 14 (Simo – Professor of Disability Studies at the University of Helsinki, and Nick, Professor of Disability Studies at the University of Glasgow, “Moral wrongs, disadvantages, and disability: a critique of critical disability studies,” Disability and Society 29(44):638-650) Disabled people typically experience disadvantage in relation to the market and capitalism, and they have to a large extent been excluded from employment and from equal social participation, respect and wealth (Wolff and De-Shalit 2007 , 26). On top of these materialist disadvantages, disabled people are stigmatized as deviant and undesirable, and also subordinated to various oppressive hierarchical relations. For disabled people to achieve participatory parity, they require more than recognition; they need material help, targeted resource enhancement, and personal enhancement (Wolff and De-Shalit 2007 ). Disability is rooted in the economic structures of society and demands redistribution of goods and wealth. In contrast to some other oppressed groups, disabled people require more than the removal of barriers if they are to achieve social justice. This extra help might be small – for example, allowing a student with dyslexia extra time in an examination – through to complex interventions such as facilitated communication, a job support worker or 24-hour personal assistance. Whatever the size, it is an extra cost both to employers and to the state. These are real needs and represent real differences. Without an acceptance of these differences it is hard to see how we could move forward. Whilst these ‘ real differ- ences ’ can be presented as the result of dominant ableist discourses where disabled people ’ s needs are regarded as extra cost, this does not solve the problem. The prob- lems disabled people face require more than ideological change, and ideological change is of little use if it does not result in material change. CDS fails to account for the economic basis of disability and offers only the tools of deconstruction and the abolishment of cultural hierarchies to eradicate economic injustice. This, as Fraser ( 2000 ) has argued, would be possible in a society where there were no relatively autonomous markets and the distribution of goods were regulated through cultural values. In such a society, oppression based on iden- tity would translate perfectly into economic injustice and maldistribution. This is far from the current reality where ‘ marketization has pervaded all societies to some degree, at least partially decoupling economic mechanisms of distribution from cultural patterns of value and prestige ’ (Fraser 2000 , 111). Markets are not controlled by nor are they subsidiary to culture; ‘ as a result they generate economic inequalities that are not mere expressions of identity hierarchies ’ (Fraser 2000 ,111 – 112). The disadvantage related to disability is to a great extent a matter of economic injustice, and before this injustice can be corrected we have to be able to identify those indi- viduals and social groups that have been disadvantaged by social arrangements. Whilst this does create and foster categories and binaries between groups of people, it also requires some sort of categories to start with; namely, the various categories of disadvantage. The focus on affective resistance is multicultural neoliberalism at its worst---it replaces structural analysis with psychological self-esteem engineering which are products of neoliberalism’s individualistic focus Adolph Reed 13, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the interim national council of the Labor Party. Django Unchained, or, The Help: How “Cultural Politics” Is Worse Than No Politics at All, and Why, http://nonsite.org/feature/django-unchained-or-the-help-how-cultural-politics-is-worse-than-no-politics-at-all-and-why Defenses of Django Unchained pivot on claims about the social significance of the narrative of a black hero. One node of this argument emphasizes the need to validate a history of autonomous black agency and “resistance” as a politico-existential desideratum. It accommodates a view that stresses the importance of recognition of rebellious or militant individuals and revolts in black American history. Another centers on a notion that exposure to fictional black heroes can inculcate the sense of personal efficacy necessary to overcome the psychological effects of inequality and to facilitate upward mobility and may undermine some whites’ negative stereotypes about black people. In either register assignment of social or political importance to depictions of black heroes rests on presumptions about the nexus of mass cultural representation, social commentary, and racial justice that are more significant politically than the controversy about the film itself. In both versions, this argument casts political and economic problems in psychological terms. Injustice appears as a matter of disrespect and denial of due recognition, and the remedies proposed—which are all about images projected and the distribution of jobs associated with their projection—look a lot like self-esteem engineering. Moreover, nothing could indicate more strikingly the extent of neoliberal ideological hegemony than the idea that the mass culture industry and its representational practices constitute a meaningful terrain for struggle to advance egalitarian interests. It is possible to entertain that view seriously only by ignoring the fact that the production and consumption of mass culture is thoroughly embedded in capitalist material and ideological imperatives. That, incidentally, is why I prefer the usage “mass culture” to describe this industry and its products and processes, although I recognize that it may seem archaic to some readers. The mass culture v. popular culture debate dates at least from the 1950s and has continued with occasional crescendos ever since.5 For two decades or more, instructively in line with the retreat of possibilities for concerted left political action outside the academy, the popular culture side of that debate has been dominant, along with its view that the products of this precinct of mass consumption capitalism are somehow capable of transcending or subverting their material identity as commodities, if not avoiding that identity altogether. Despite the dogged commitment of several generations of American Studies and cultural studies graduate students who want to valorize watching television and immersion in hip-hop or other specialty market niches centered on youth recreation and the most ephemeral fads as both intellectually avant-garde and politically “resistive,” it should be time to admit that that earnest disposition is intellectually shallow and an ersatz politics. The idea of “popular” culture posits a spurious autonomy and organicism that actually affirm mass industrial processes by effacing them, especially in the putatively rebel, fringe, or underground market niches that depend on the fiction of the authentic to announce the birth of new product cycles. The power of the hero is a cathartic trope that connects mainly with the sensibility of adolescent boys—of whatever nominal age. Tarantino has allowed as much, responding to black critics’ complaints about the violence and copious use of “nigger” by proclaiming “Even for the film’s biggest detractors, I think their children will grow up and love this movie. I think it could become a rite of passage for young black males.”6 This response stems no doubt from Tarantino’s arrogance and opportunism, and some critics have denounced it as no better than racially presumptuous. But he is hardly alone in defending the film with an assertion that it gives black youth heroes, is generically inspirational or both. Similarly, in a January 9, 2012 interview on the Daily Show, George Lucas adduced this line to promote his even more execrable race-oriented live-action cartoon, Red Tails, which, incidentally, trivializes segregation in the military by reducing it to a matter of bad or outmoded attitudes. The ironic effect is significant understatement of both the obstacles the Tuskegee airmen faced and their actual accomplishments by rendering them as backdrop for a blackface, slapped-together remake of Top Gun. (Norman Jewison’s 1984 film, A Soldier’s Story, adapted from Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play, is a much more sensitive and thought-provoking rumination on the complexities of race and racism in the Jim Crow U.S. Army—an army mobilized, as my father, a veteran of the Normandy invasion, never tired of remarking sardonically, to fight the racist Nazis.) Lucas characterized his film as “patriotic, even jingoistic” and was explicit that he wanted to create a film that would feature “real heroes” and would be “inspirational for teenage boys.” Much as Django Unchained’s defenders compare it on those terms favorably to Lincoln, Lucas hyped Red Tails as being a genuine hero story unlike “Glory, where you have a lot of white officers running those guys into cannon fodder.” Of course, the film industry is sharply tilted toward the youth market, as Lucas and Tarantino are acutely aware. But Lucas, unlike Tarantino, was not being defensive in asserting his desire to inspire the young; he offered it more as a boast. As he has said often, he’d wanted for years to make a film about the Tuskegee airmen, and he reports that he always intended telling their story as a feel-good, crossover inspirational tale. Telling it that way also fits in principle (though in this instance not in practice, as Red Tails bombed at the box office) with the commercial imperatives of increasingly degraded mass entertainment. Dargis observed that the ahistoricism of the recent period films is influenced by market imperatives in a global film industry. The more a film is tied to historically specific contexts, the more difficult it is to sell elsewhere. That logic selects for special effects-driven products as well as standardized, decontextualized and simplistic—“universal”—story lines, preferably set in fantasy worlds of the filmmakers’ design. As Dargis notes, these films find their meaning in shopworn clichés puffed up as timeless verities, including uplifting and inspirational messages for youth. But something else underlies the stress on inspiration in the black-interest films, which shows up in critical discussion of them as well. All these films—The Help, Red Tails, Django Unchained, even Lincoln and Glory—make a claim to public attention based partly on their social significance beyond entertainment or art, and they do so because they engage with significant moments in the history of the nexus of race and politics in the United States. There would not be so much discussion and debate and no Golden Globe, NAACP Image, or Academy Award nominations for The Help, Red Tails, or Django Unchained if those films weren’t defined partly by thematizing that nexus of race and politics in some way. The pretensions to social significance that fit these films into their particular market niche don’t conflict with the mass-market film industry’s imperative of infantilization because those pretensions are only part of the show; they are little more than empty bromides, product differentiation in the patter of “seemingly timeless ideals” which the mass entertainment industry constantly recycles. (Andrew O’Hehir observes as much about Django Unchained, which he describes as “a three-hour trailer for a movie that never happens.”7) That comes through in the defense of these films, in the face of evidence of their failings, that, after all, they are “just entertainment.” Their substantive content is ideological; it is their contribution to the naturalization of neoliberalism’s ontology as they propagandize its universalization across spatial, temporal, and social contexts. Purportedly in the interest of popular education cum entertainment, Django Unchained and The Help, and Red Tails for that matter, read the sensibilities of the present into the past by divesting the latter of its specific historicity. They reinforce the sense of the past as generic old-timey times distinguishable from the present by superficial inadequacies—outmoded fashion, technology, commodities and ideas—since overcome. In The Help Hilly’s obsession with her pet project marks segregation’s petty apartheid as irrational in part because of the expense rigorously enforcing it would require; the breadwinning husbands express their frustration with it as financially impractical. Hilly is a mean-spirited, narrow-minded person whose rigid and tone-deaf commitment to segregationist consistency not only reflects her limitations of character but also is economically unsound, a fact that further defines her, and the cartoon version of Jim Crow she represents, as irrational. The deeper message of these films, insofar as they deny the integrity of the past, is that there is no thinkable alternative to the ideological order under which we live. This message is reproduced throughout the mass entertainment industry; it shapes the normative reality even of the fantasy worlds that masquerade as escapism. Even among those who laud the supposedly cathartic effects of Django’s insurgent violence as reflecting a greater truth of abolition than passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, few commentators notice that he and Broomhilda attained their freedom through a market transaction.8 This reflects an ideological hegemony in which students all too commonly wonder why planters would deny slaves or sharecroppers education because education would have made them more productive as workers. And, tellingly, in a glowing rumination in the Daily Kos, Ryan Brooke inadvertently thrusts mass culture’s destruction of historicity into bold relief by declaiming on “the segregated society presented” in Django Unchained and babbling on—with the absurdly ill-informed and pontifical self-righteousness that the blogosphere enables—about our need to take “responsibility for preserving racial divides” if we are “to put segregation in the past and fully fulfill Dr. King’s dream.”9 It’s all an indistinguishable mush of bad stuff about racial injustice in the old-timey days. Decoupled from its moorings in a historically specific political economy, slavery becomes at bottom a problem of race relations, and, as historian Michael R. West argues forcefully, “race relations” emerged as and has remained a discourse that substitutes etiquette for equality.10 This is the context in which we should take account of what “inspiring the young” means as a justification for those films. In part, the claim to inspire is a simple platitude, more filler than substance. It is, as I’ve already noted, both an excuse for films that are cartoons made for an infantilized, generic market and an assertion of a claim to a particular niche within that market. More insidiously, though, the ease with which “inspiration of youth” rolls out in this context resonates with three related and disturbing themes: 1) underclass ideology’s narratives—now all Americans’ common sense—that link poverty and inequality most crucially to (racialized) cultural inadequacy and psychological damage; 2) the belief that racial inequality stems from prejudice, bad ideas and ignorance, and 3) the cognate of both: the neoliberal rendering of social justice as equality of opportunity, with an aspiration of creating “competitive individual minority agents who might stand a better fighting chance in the neoliberal rat race rather than a positive alternative vision of a society that eliminates the need to fight constantly against disruptive market whims in the first place.”11 This politics seeps through in the chatter about Django Unchained in particular. Erin Aubry Kaplan, in the Los Angeles Times article in which Tarantino asserts his appeal to youth, remarks that the “most disturbing detail about slavery is the emotional violence and degradation directed at blacks that effectively keeps them at the bottom of the social order, a place they still occupy today.” Writing on the Institute of the Black World blog, one Dr. Kwa David Whitaker, a 1960s-style cultural nationalist, declaims on Django’s testament to the sources of degradation and “unending servitude that has rendered black Americans almost incapable of making sound evaluations of our current situations or the kind of steps we must take to improve our condition.”12 In its blindnessignorance to political economy, this notion of black cultural or psychological damage as either a legacy of slavery or of more indirect recent origin—e.g., urban migration, crack epidemic, matriarchy, babies making babies—comports well with the reduction of slavery and Jim Crow to interpersonal dynamics and bad attitudes. It substitutes a “politics of recognition” and a patter of racial uplift for politics and underwrites a conflation of political action and therapy. With respect to the nexus of race and inequality, this discourse supports victim-blaming programs of personal rehabilitation and self-esteem engineering—inspiration—as easily as it does multiculturalist respect for difference, which, by the way, also feeds back to self-esteem engineering and inspiration as nodes within a larger political economy of race relations. Either way, this is a discourse that displaces a politics challenging social structures that reproduce inequality with concern for the feelings and characteristics of individuals and of categories of population statistics reified as singular groups that are equivalent to individuals. This discourse has made it possible (again, but more sanctimoniously this time) to characterize destruction of low-income housing as an uplift strategy for poor people; curtailment of access to public education as “choice”; being cut adrift from essential social wage protections as “empowerment”; and individual material success as socially important role modeling. Neoliberalism’s triumph is affirmed with unselfconscious clarity in the ostensibly leftist defenses of Django Unchained that center on the theme of slaves’ having liberated themselves. Trotskyists, would-be anarchists, and psychobabbling identitarians have their respective sectarian garnishes: Trotskyists see everywhere the bugbear of “bureaucratism” and mystify “self-activity;” anarchists similarly fetishize direct action and voluntarism and oppose large-scale public institutions on principle, and identitarians romanticize essentialist notions of organic, folkish authenticity under constant threat from institutions. However, all are indistinguishable from the nominally libertarian right in their disdain for government and institutionally based political action, which their common reflex is to disparage as inauthentic or corrupt. Their cessation of revolutionary institution building abdicates the potential for true communual power, reducing revolution to reactive bursts of energy. This debate must be a question of the speed, scope, and scale of revolutionary strategy. Only dual power organizing can build institutions that meet the material needs of community and construct a revolutionary base in the face of compounding crises of climate change, imperialism, and fascism. Escalante, 19 Alyson, you should totally read her work for non-debate reasons, Marxist-Leninist, Materialist Feminist and Anti-Imperialist activist, "Communism and Climate Change: A Dual Power Approach," Failing That, Invent, https://failingthatinvent.home.blog/2019/02/15/communism-and-climate-change-a-dual-power-approach///AD I have previously argued that a crucial advantage to dual power strategy is that it gives the masses an infrastructure of socialist institutions which can directly provide for material needs in times of capitalist crisis. Socialist agricultural and food distribution programs can take ground that the capitalist state cedes by simultaneously meeting the needs of the masses while proving that socialist self-management and political institutions can function independently of capitalism. This approach is not only capable of literally saving lives in the case of crisis, but of demonstrating the possibility of a revolutionary project which seeks to destroy rather than reform capitalism. One of the most pressing of the various crises which humanity faces today is climate change. Capitalist production has devastated the planet, and everyday we discover that the small window of time for avoiding its most disastrous effects is shorter than previously understood. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that we have 12 years to limit (not even prevent) the more catastrophic effects of climate change. The simple, and horrific, fact that we all must face is that climate change has reached a point where many of its effects are inevitable, and we are now in a post-brink world, where damage control is the primary concern. The question is not whether we can escape a future of climate change, but whether we can survive it. Socialist strategy must adapt accordingly. In the face of this crisis, the democratic socialists and social democrats in the United States have largely settled on market based reforms. The Green New Deal, championed by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and the left wing of the Democratic Party, remains a thoroughly capitalist solution to a capitalist problem. The proposal does nothing to challenge capitalism itself, but rather seeks to subsidize market solutions to reorient the US energy infrastructure towards renewable energy production, to develop less energy consuming transportation, and the development of public investment towards these ends. The plan does nothing to call into question the profit incentives and endless resource consumption of capitalism which led us to this point. Rather, it seeks to reorient the relentless market forces of capitalism towards slightly less destructive technological developments. While the plan would lead to a massive investment in the manufacturing and deployment of solar energy infrastructure, National Geographic reports that, “Fabricating solar panels requires caustic chemicals such as sodium hydroxide and hydrofluoric acid, and the process uses water as well as electricity, the production of which emits greenhouse gases.” Technology alone cannot sufficiently combat this crisis, as the production of such technology through capitalist manufacturing infrastructure only perpetuates environmental harm. Furthermore, subsidizing and incentivizing renewable energy stops far short of actually combating the fossil fuel industry driving the current climate crisis. The technocratic market solutions offered in the Green New Deal fail to adequately combat the driving factors of climate change. What is worse, they rely on a violent imperialist global system in order to produce their technological solutions. The development of high-tech energy infrastructure and the development of low or zero emission transportation requires the import of raw material and rare earth minerals which the United States can only access because of the imperial division of the Global South. This imperial division of the world requires constant militarism from the imperial core nations, and as Lenin demonstrates in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, facilitates constant warfare as imperial states compete for spheres of influence in order to facilitate cheap resource extraction. The US military, one of many imperialist forces, is the single largest user of petroleum, and one of its main functions is to ensure oil access for the United States. Without challenging this imperialist division of the world and the role of the United States military in upholding it, the Green New Deal fails even further to challenge the underlying causes of climate change. Even with the failed promises of the Green New Deal itself, it is unlikely that this tepid market proposal will pass at all. Nancy Pelosi and other lead Democrats have largely condemned it and consider it “impractical” and “unfeasible.” This dismissal is crucial because it reveals the total inability of capitalism to resolve this crisis. If the center-left party in the heart of the imperial core sees even milquetoast capitalist reforms as a step too far, we ought to have very little hope that a reformist solution will present itself within the ever shrinking 12 year time frame. There are times for delicacy and there are times for bluntness, and we are in the latter. To put things bluntly: the capitalists are not going to save us, and if we don’t find a way to save ourselves, the collapse of human civilization is a real possibility. The pressing question we now face is: how are we going to save ourselves? Revolution and Dual Power If capitalism will not be able to resolve the current encroaching climate crisis, we must find a way to organize outside the confines of capitalist institutions, towards the end of overthrowing capitalism. If the Democratic Socialists of America backed candidates cannot offer real anti-capitalist solutions through the capitalist state, we should be skeptical of the possibility for any socialist organization doing so. The DSA is far larger and far more well funded than any of the other socialist organizations in the United States, and they have failed to produce anything more revolutionary than the Green New Deal. We have to abandon the idea that electoral strategy will be sufficient to resolve the underlying causes of this crisis within 12 years. While many radicals call for revolution instead of reform, the reformists often raise the same response: revolution is well and good, but what are you going to do in the mean time? In many ways this question is fair. The socialist left in the United States today is not ready for revolutionary action, and a mass base does not exist to back the various organizations which might undertake such a struggle. Revolutionaries must concede that we have much work to be done before a revolutionary strategy can be enacted. This is a hard truth, but it is true. Much of the left has sought to ignore this truth by embracing adventurism and violent protest theatrics, in the vain hope of sparking revolutionary momentum which does not currently exist. If this is the core strategy of the socialist left, we will accomplish nothing in the next 12 years. Such approaches are as useless as the opportunist reforms pushed by the social democrats. Our task in these 12 years is not simply to arm ourselves and hope that magically the masses will wake up prepared for revolution and willing to put their trust in our small ideological cadres. We must instead, build a movement, and with it we must build infrastructure which can survive revolution and provide a framework for socialist development. Dual power is tooled towards this project best. The Marxist Center network has done an impressive amount of work developing socialist institutions across the US, largely through tenants organizing and serve the people programs. The left wing factions within the DSA itself have also begun to develop mutual aid programs that could be useful for dual power strategy. At the same time, mutual aid is not enough. We cannot simply build these institutions as a reform to make capitalism more survivable. Rather, we must make these institutions part of a broader revolutionary movement and they ought to function as a material prefiguration to a socialist society and economy. The institutions we build as dual power outside the capitalist state today ought to be structured towards revolutionary ends, such that they will someday function as the early institutions of a revolutionary socialist society. To accomplish this goal, we cannot simply declare these institutions to be revolutionary. Rather they have to be linked together through an actual revolutionary movement working towards revolutionary ends. This means that dual power institutions cannot exist as ends in and of themselves, nor can abstract notions of mutual aid cannot be conceptualized as an end in itself. The explicit purpose of these institutions has to be to radicalize the masses through meeting their needs, and providing an infrastructure for a socialist movement to meet the needs of its members and the communities in which it operates. Revolutionary institutions that can provide food, housing, and other needs for a revolutionary movement will be crucial for building a base among the masses and for constructing the beginnings of a socialist infrastructure for when we eventually engage in revolutionary struggle. The alternative is to embrace the comradeship of the party – a partisan discipline and mutual accountability that enables a shared commitment to an international communist horizon. The party is not an authoritarian form, but a flexible organization structure capable of scaling beyond moments of disruption to meet the needs of the masses and negate the material and social relations of capitalist exploitation. Dean, 19 (Jodi, communist organizer associated with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, professor in the Political Science department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges; “From Allies to Comrades,“ Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging, Verso Books, 2019) As comrades, our actions are voluntary, but they are not always of our own choosing. Comrades have to be able to count on each other even when we don’t like each other and even when we disagree. We do what needs to be done because we owe it to our comrades. In The Romance of American Communism, Vivian Gornick reports the words of a former member of the Communist Party USA, or CPUSA, who hated the daily grind of selling papers and canvassing expected of party cadre, but nevertheless, according to her, “I did it. I did it because if I didn’t do it, I couldn’t face my comrades the next day. And we all did it for the same reason: we were accountable to each other.”6 Put in psychoanalytic terms, the comrade functions as an ego ideal: the point from which party members assess themselves as doing important, meaningful work.7 Being accountable to another entails seeing your actions through their eyes. Are you letting them down or are you doing work that they respect and admire? In Crowds and Party, I present the good comrade as an ideal ego, that is to say, as how party members imagine themselves. 8 They may imagine themselves as thrilling orators, brilliant polemicists, skilled organizers, or courageous militants. In contrast with my discussion there, in the current book, I draw out how the comrade also functions as an ego ideal, the perspective that party members—and often fellow travelers—take toward themselves. This perspective is the effect of belonging on the same side as it works back on those who have committed themselves to common struggle. The comrade is a symbolic as well as an imaginary figure and it is the symbolic dimension of ego ideal I focus on here. My thinking about the comrade as a generic figure for those on the same side flows out of my work on communism as the horizon of left politics and my work on the party as the political form necessary for this politics. 9 To see our political horizon as communist is to highlight the emancipatory egalitarian struggle of the proletarianized against capitalist exploitation—that is, against the determination of life by market forces; by value; by the division of labor (on the basis of sex and race); by imperialism (theorized by Lenin in terms of the dominance of monopoly and finance capital); and by neocolonialism (theorized by Nkrumah as the last stage of imperialism). Today we see this horizon in struggles such as those led by women of color against police violence, white supremacy, and the murder and incarceration of black, brown, and working-class people. We see it in the infrastructure battles around pipelines, climate justice, and barely habitable cities with undrinkable water and contaminated soil. We see it in the array of social reproduction struggles against debt, foreclosure, and privatization, and for free, quality public housing, childcare, education, transportation, healthcare, and other basic services. We see it in the ongoing fight of LGBTQ people against harassment, discrimination, and oppression. It is readily apparent today that the communist horizon is the horizon of political struggle not for the nation but for the world; it is an international horizon. This is evident in the antagonism between the rights of immigrants and refugees and intensified nationalisms; in the necessity of a global response to planetary warming; and in anti-imperialist, decolonization, and peace movements. In these examples, communism is a force of negativity, the negation of the global capitalist present. Communism is also the name for the positive alternative to capitalism’s permanent and expanding exploitation, crisis, and immiseration, the name of a system of production based on meeting social needs—from each according to ability to each according to need, to paraphrase Marx’s famous slogan—in a way that is collectively determined and carried out by the producers. This positive dimension of communism attends to social relations, to how people treat each other, animals, things, and the world around them. Building communism entails more than resistance and riot. It requires the emancipated egalitarian organization of collective life. With respect to the party, intellectuals on the contemporary left tend to extract the party from the aspirations and accomplishments it enabled. Communist philosophers who disagree on a slew of theoretical questions, such as Antonio Negri and Alain Badiou, converge on the organizational question—no party! The party has been rejected as authoritarian, as outmoded, as ill-fitting a society of networks. Every other mode of political association may be revised, renewed, rethought, or reimagined except for the party of communists. This rejection of the party as a form for left politics is a mistake. It ignores the effects of association on those engaged in common struggle. It fails to learn from the everyday experiences of generations of activists, organizers, and revolutionaries. It relies on a narrow, fantasied notion of the party as a totalitarian machine. It neglects the courage, enthusiasm, and achievements of millions of party members for over a century. Rejection of the party form has been left dogmatism for the last thirty years and has gotten us nowhere. Fortunately, the movements of the squares in Greece and Spain, as well as lessons from the successes and limits of the Occupy movement, have pushed against this left dogmatism. They have reenergized interest in the party as a political form that can scale; a form that is flexible, adaptive, and expansive enough to endure beyond the joyous and disruptive moments of crowds in the streets. A theory of the comrade contributes to this renewal by drawing out the ways that shared commitment to a common struggle generates new strengths and new capacities. Over and against the reduction of party relations to the relations between the leaders and the led, comrade attends to the effects of political belonging on those on the same side of a political struggle. As we fight together for a world free of exploitation, oppression, and bigotry, we have to be able to trust and count on each other. Comrade names this relation. The comrade relation remakes the place from which one sees, what it is possible to see, and what possibilities can appear. It enables the revaluation of work and time, what one does, and for whom one does it. Is one’s work done for the people or for the bosses? Is it voluntary or done because one has to work? Does one work for personal provisions or for a collective good? We should recall Marx’s lyrical description of communism in which work becomes “life’s prime want.” We get a glimpse of that in comradeship: one wants to do political work. You don’t want to let down your comrades; you see the value of your work through their eyes, your new collective eyes. Work, determined not by markets but by shared commitments, becomes fulfilling. French communist philosopher and militant Bernard Aspe discusses the problem of contemporary capitalism as a loss of “common time”; that is, the loss of an experience of time generated and enjoyed through our collective being-together. 10 From holidays, to meals, to breaks, whatever common time we have is synchronized and enclosed in forms for capitalist appropriation. Communicative capitalism’s apps and trackers amplify this process such that the time of consumption can be measured in much the same way that Taylorism measured the time of production: How long did a viewer spend on a particular web page? Did a person watch a whole ad or click off of it after five seconds? In contrast, the common action that is the actuality of communist movement induces a collective change in capacities. Breaking from capitalism’s 24-7 injunctions to produce and consume for the bosses and owners, the discipline of common struggle expands possibilities for action and intensifies the sense of its necessity. The comrade is a figure for the relation through which this transformation of work and time occurs. Alt solves the case Meekosha 2011 (Helen, School of Social Sciences and International Relations, University of New South Wales, “Decolonising disability: thinking and acting globally,” Disability and Society 26.6) Communism: The real movement to abolish disability The dominant ideas of the ruling class are the dominant ideas of the age. As revolutionaries we know this and must constantly be alert to the ways in which they influence and limit our own conception of how things are and where they might go. We are alert to the fact that in our popular culture it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. In the revolutionary milieu we reject -with varying degrees of success- the universality of wage labour, the state, the nuclear family and so on. In the piece I want to focus on an area most revolutionaries never bring into their analysis of political economy: disability. Disability, I will argue, is a feature of present day social relations, that it is specific to capitalism, that it will not go away as long as capitalism persists and finally that communism presents the answer to the problem of disability. In doing so I locate disability firmly in ‘the present state of things’ that Marx argued communists must seek to abolish. What is disability? Disability as it is commonly tacitly understood as the category we use to group together people whose bodies or minds are in some way defective. We have a certain conception of how bodies and minds ought to be, and people who deviate too much from that template we call disabled. Disability is usually thought of in terms of what people are not able to do: seeing, concentrating, walking, communicating and so on. Disabled people cannot do some important thing. Their ability to function is impaired. This conception of disability makes two important assumptions. First, it assumes that there is some ‘natural’ set of characteristics that non-defective people have, deviation from which we can call disability. Second, it assumes that society is, in some universal sense, a place where for a person to be living optimally they must be able to do all the things that the non-disabled reification Template Man (and he is a man) can do and that people who can’t present some sort of problem needing to be, by turns, managed, cared for and ignored. But where do these assumptions come from? Template Man is an elusive figure. He is usually only visible by inspecting his opposite. By seeing that a deaf person can’t hear and that a person with fatigue needs to sleep 11 hours a night, we know that Template Man can hear and sleeps eight hours a night. But quite why Template Man must be able to hear, we can’t say. These two features of Template Man are fairly universal throughout the capitalist world. But others are much more variable. For example in some parts of the world Template Man finds that meeting new people and moving jobs and houses comes easily to him. We know this because by examining pathologies such as social anxiety disorder, which are in part characterised by not being able to do these things, we know that Template Man can do these things. But in other parts of the world no such pathologies are apparent and Template Man neither has nor does not have these characteristics. So where is the key to this strange metaphysical entity defined only through deviations from him? Template Man is, of course, the ideal worker as defined by the needs of capital at any given moment and in any given place. Template man is negatively defined precisely because capital has no interest in nature of individual workers, or workers as individuals. Workers must be able to do certain things for certain periods of time. Everything else about them is irrelevant to the needs of capital. Workers must be able to sell their labour according to the needs of a large enough segment of the employing class that they can fulfil their role as commodities on the labour market. Workers must also be able to ‘reproduce’ (feed, rest, clean, relax, etc.) themselves for the cost of the wages they can command and in the time they are not having to sell their ability to work. Workers also need to take part in the purchasing of commodities capitalism uses to reproduce itself, from housing to entertainment to insurance. Bodies and minds which are not well adjusted to the tasks involved in carrying out these functions are disabled. They are at odds with the demands of capital in that place and time. To illustrate using the final example from the paragraph above, social anxiety stands in the way of the sale of labour power in Britain today since capital demands we be able to move around quickly and easily in order to do so and the content of much work in many industries involved interacting in a ‘friendly’ manner with strangers. There are plenty of communities in the world where almost none of the wage labour involves these things, and in these communities there is also no need for the idea of social anxiety disorder, and this is reflected in medical practice. You can't get a social anxiety disorder diagnosis in most of China, for instance (thought this may not last). To give another example, the explosion in Britain of diagnoses of specific learning disorders, such as dyslexia, has gone hand in hand with rising demand for more literate, numerate workers and the increased difficulty workers have reproducing themselves outside of work without these skills. We should also notice another implication of the fact that Template Man is negatively defined. Being able to do things well, or do things most people can’t, has nothing to do with disability. Disability is about what a person cannot do, not about what they can. The implications of this are quite important, as we will see later when we examine the first half of the dictum ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs’. The failure of reformism In the reformist notion of disability the problem of disability is a problem of inclusion. The basic category ‘disabled’ is taken as given (or natural), and the task of the reformer is to win changes in the institutions, buildings, etc. that disabled people want to use so that they can start to approach the level of access to things that non-disabled people have. In the technical jargon of the movement ‘reasonable adjustments’ should be made so that a person’s impairment (a characteristic such as chronic illness, autism, down’s syndrome or whatever) does not stop them accessing things as easily as people who do not have impairments. The extent to which they cannot access these things on an equitable basis is the extent to which they are disabled according to this view. As usual, the revolutionary examining the reformists’ approach has a great deal of sympathy for their goals, but also sees the forces that contradict the aims of the reformists, and which will, at a certain point, overpower them. Our aim is to remove such forces, not fight an interminable battle against them. If, as we have seen, disabled people are people who, as a group, cannot be easily integrated into the logic of capital then there is only so far they can go towards equality before capital starts to push them back. Of course, the reformist approach will win victories. Indeed, they will often appeal to the smooth functioning of capital in order to do so. For example, in the UK a program called ‘access to work’ has helped disabled people get jobs by funding equipment, building alterations and so on which mean that the labour power of particular disabled people is raised in value so it can compete in the labour market with that of non-disabled people. To give a simple illustration of how this works, there is no point in a company hiring a wheel chair user if their building cannot be accessed by them, and there’s no point splashing out on ramps if a similar worker can be hired instead, but if the state pays for the ramps, then the wheelchair user represents good value to the employer in the labour market. The state wins in this deal too, since through access to work it shifts people off of benefits and into work, and the scheme payed for itself through the tax revenue of the disabled people it got into employment alone. However, when there is a glut of unemployed labour and when the state is cutting benefits for disabled people anyway, the logic of the scheme breaks down since non-disabled people are there to do the jobs without the state expending money, and disabled people are ‘costing’ the state less anyway. Given that those are the conditions we are now living in, access to work is being scrapped. We should not, of course, deny the important role of disabled people in winning concessions from the state. The dynamic is not simply one of the state managing disabled people so as to maximise profits for bosses. Disabled people, like the working class in general, struggle and win concessions and in doing so alter the operation of capitalism. But when these concessions start to get in the way of the functioning of capital, it becomes extremely difficult to defend them. In times like this, when the conditions of the entire working class are under attack, it should come as no surprise that those sectors of the working class who are least well integrated in capital should be hit the hardest and this includes disabled people. Finally, it is worth noting that as disabled people win more and more concessions from the state due to their desire to participate in capitalist society on an equal footing, the more dependent they will become on the state, and when, as inevitably will happen, the state rolls back their victories, it will hit them much harder. These contradictions within the disability rights movement must lead us on to look for more radical solutions to the problem. The abolition of disability The abolition of disability has been a goal of many social movements and popular fantasies under capitalism. Examples of this abound. Eugenics had its heyday in Nazi Germany, but significantly predates Nazism and is a tendency that is still with us in attempts to make sure no children with down’s syndrome are born by scanning and aborting foetuses, to ‘managing’ the sexual behaviour of people with profound learning difficulties or mental health conditions, to flat out murder dressed up as ‘mercy killing’. Less despicable, but structurally similar, are the techno-fantasies that imagine that with the right medical science, no one need be disabled in the future. What these approaches have in common is that they do not wish to do away with disability; they wish to do away with disabled people. Since disability is not simply a collection of individuals, but a feature of capitalist social relations, their approaches are doomed to failure regardless of how morally acceptable we do or don’t find them. If disability is a feature particular to capitalism, and if communism abolishes capitalism, it follows then that communism abolishes disability. But how does it do this? It’s always dangerous to sketch out, even in the broadest terms, possible future societies. However, we may risk a few comments explaining why disability cannot exist under communism. Taking communist society characterised to be characterised by self management of production and life in general, and where the slogan ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs’ is applied, it is possible to see how disability can be done away with. It is easy to see how the phrase ‘to each according to their needs’ will abolish an aspect of disability. If we produce for need rather than profit there is no reason why we should not chose to produce buildings, equipment, technologies and so on that are designed on the assumption that physical and psychological variation of all sorts is a normal part of human society and that it is right to take this fully into account when producing thing for people to use. The phrase ‘from each according to their ability’ less obviously deals with disability, but is in fact more fundamental to understanding why communism abolishes it. As we have seen, disability is defined by people’s inability to do certain things that they are supposed, as good worker, to be able to do. Under capitalism workers are interchangeable. We are only allowed to produce (or, for that matter, consume) in ways designed to maximise profit. In a society where production is self managed and for use, it would be inconceivable to prevent people from contributing to society on the grounds of what they were unable to do, when there was a great number of things that they could do. In societies with less abundance than western capitalism, there simply has not been the surplus to allow people to go without contributing, albeit often in horrifically exploitative ways. Capitalism has created both the necessary surplus and the logic of production to stop disabled people in particular, and the working class in general, from contributing fully or often at all. Communism, through the self management of production according to the principle that people contribute in the ways they are most able to, overcomes capitalism’s exclusionary practice and overcomes the logic of alienation upon which capitalist production is built. The full and equal integration of all people into the reproduction of society, regardless of factors such as impairment, is surely the goal of communism and the foundation of a society in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all
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Tournament: Barkley Forum for High Schools | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Lynbrook SY | Judge: Copeland, Jordan, Larson Self-experimentation is neoliberalism par-excellence – their retreat to individualism only strengthens the market Villadsen and Dean 12 (Kaspar Villadsen – Associate Professor of Sociology at Copenhagen Business School, and Mitchell Dean – Research Professor of Sociology at Newcastle University, Australia, and Professor of Public Governance at Copenhagen Business School, “State-Phobia, Civil Society, and a Certain Vitalism,” Constellations 19(3):401-420, accessed 6-2-16 Bozzles the Bozz-Dawg Bozz Bozz) First, there are of course political costs of what is conceived as no longer being possible. They center on the difficulties, to say the least, of referring to the kind of knowledge of society or social structure that has been essential for public policy and provision as remedies against social inequality and as a condition of exercising civil, political, and social freedoms. To reject or displace the importance of such a form of knowledge is to put aside or diminish questions concerning the organization of state institutions, the prioritizing of resources, and the securing of minimum and universal standards. Does not a focus on the identifications that form communities or on aestheticized forms of self-creation through “somatic individuality” and an “ethic of vitalism”86 rule out, or at least undermine, this kind of knowledge and these key political questions? As far as the domains of multiple communities are concerned, we may then demand culturally sensitive services and diversified rights rather than uniform provision and universalism. In this respect, the “birth of community” seems to suffer from the same troubling fit with neoliberal strategies for dismantling welfare services and solidifying social segregation as does the postmodern discourse on cultural diversity and societal differentiation.87 There also are analytical costs, as pointed out by sociologists and geographers.88 It is simply very difficult to move between the local, the unique, the contingent, and the relatively unstructured to analyze extra-local contexts, systems, and institutional frameworks or to discern vectors, logics, and pathways that are embedded in larger-scale kinds of power and regulation. Rose and his colleagues are in danger of making a fetish of the localized and the empirical through a methodological commitment to contingency. A set of valid methodological concerns thus risks becoming an untenable ontological commitment to a particular vision of social and political life as unstructured flux and fluidity.89 As it stands, Rose's ethico-politics is a politics of self-creation that abjures social policy and appears once the social state has been displaced. It is striking, however, that Rose comes very close, as do post-Foucauldians such as William Connolly,90 to a positive conception of civil society. Thus, Rose's concept of politics seems to share the same space as civil society, i.e., it is an extra-state space of innovation, creativity, and critical contestation of state-centered politics and administration. While Rose may share with critical theorists and others a celebration of this realm and its self-creating agents, he brackets the long-lasting, central concern of this tradition to define the conditions of a thriving civil society, including what kind of an active sovereign state power needs to be in place for the potentially lethal conflicts of civil society to be kept in check. By adhering principally to a conception of power as productive and relational, Rose avoids these thorny issues and appears to leave us a fluid and experimental form of post-social politics. In short, there are elements of state-phobia in Rose and a related vitalism in the conclusion of his work on governmentality. These aspects become even more pronounced in his recent work on the multifarious contemporary dimensions of biopolitics from genetics to self-health practices and aesthetic interventions on the body.91 Here, Rose argues that the days of state-administered biopolitics, exemplified by the eugenic drive for biological and moral perfection, are over, and that they have been succeeded by alliances between self-creating consumers and pharmaceutical companies and biomedicine offering products and services for voluntary bodily improvements and risk minimization. Rose is at pains to avoid a purely negative view of this novel somatic ethics and recognizes the expanded possibilities for autonomy and self-formation offered by biotechnology, which “enables us to intervene upon ourselves in new ways.”92 The passage from “the social state” to “advanced liberalism” thus holds the promise of more diversified experimentation and contestation of truth claims about biological normality: “Our somatic individuality has become opened up to choice, prudence, and responsibility, to experimentation, to contestation – and so to a ‘vital politics’.”93 The phrase “art of living” is thus given a more substantive anchorage in the very materiality of the body (“somatic individuality”), and the concept of ethico-politics has been transmuted into etho-politics: By ethopolitics I mean to characterize ways in which the ethos of human existence… have come to provide the “medium” within which the self-government of the autonomous individual can be connected up with the imperatives of good government.… While ethopolitical concerns range from those of lifestyle to those of community, they coalesce around a kind of vitalism… in this highly contested domain, somatic individuals are the key actors.94 None of this escapes Rose's earlier dilemmas. If anything, the aporiae of state-phobia become more acute. If we follow Rose and raise “life itself” to a quasi-universal contemporary political agency, then it is difficult to understand how active choices of self-creation can be available to all without raising the question of the role of the state in ensuring universal access to basic health, promoting innovations in biomedicine, surgery, and the pharmaceutical industries, and securing a set of standards so that life can be lived in this self-governing way. Otherwise etho-politics becomes the preserve of a privileged caste or, at best, unevenly distributed, which then gets played out in the appropriation and allocation struggles that have been at the core of the territorial state's quest for civil peace and the welfare state's concern for universal social rights. The focus on affective resistance is multicultural neoliberalism at its worst---it replaces structural analysis with psychological self-esteem engineering which are products of neoliberalism’s individualistic focus Adolph Reed 13, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the interim national council of the Labor Party. Django Unchained, or, The Help: How “Cultural Politics” Is Worse Than No Politics at All, and Why, http://nonsite.org/feature/django-unchained-or-the-help-how-cultural-politics-is-worse-than-no-politics-at-all-and-why Defenses of Django Unchained pivot on claims about the social significance of the narrative of a black hero. One node of this argument emphasizes the need to validate a history of autonomous black agency and “resistance” as a politico-existential desideratum. It accommodates a view that stresses the importance of recognition of rebellious or militant individuals and revolts in black American history. Another centers on a notion that exposure to fictional black heroes can inculcate the sense of personal efficacy necessary to overcome the psychological effects of inequality and to facilitate upward mobility and may undermine some whites’ negative stereotypes about black people. In either register assignment of social or political importance to depictions of black heroes rests on presumptions about the nexus of mass cultural representation, social commentary, and racial justice that are more significant politically than the controversy about the film itself. In both versions, this argument casts political and economic problems in psychological terms. Injustice appears as a matter of disrespect and denial of due recognition, and the remedies proposed—which are all about images projected and the distribution of jobs associated with their projection—look a lot like self-esteem engineering. Moreover, nothing could indicate more strikingly the extent of neoliberal ideological hegemony than the idea that the mass culture industry and its representational practices constitute a meaningful terrain for struggle to advance egalitarian interests. It is possible to entertain that view seriously only by ignoring the fact that the production and consumption of mass culture is thoroughly embedded in capitalist material and ideological imperatives. That, incidentally, is why I prefer the usage “mass culture” to describe this industry and its products and processes, although I recognize that it may seem archaic to some readers. The mass culture v. popular culture debate dates at least from the 1950s and has continued with occasional crescendos ever since.5 For two decades or more, instructively in line with the retreat of possibilities for concerted left political action outside the academy, the popular culture side of that debate has been dominant, along with its view that the products of this precinct of mass consumption capitalism are somehow capable of transcending or subverting their material identity as commodities, if not avoiding that identity altogether. Despite the dogged commitment of several generations of American Studies and cultural studies graduate students who want to valorize watching television and immersion in hip-hop or other specialty market niches centered on youth recreation and the most ephemeral fads as both intellectually avant-garde and politically “resistive,” it should be time to admit that that earnest disposition is intellectually shallow and an ersatz politics. The idea of “popular” culture posits a spurious autonomy and organicism that actually affirm mass industrial processes by effacing them, especially in the putatively rebel, fringe, or underground market niches that depend on the fiction of the authentic to announce the birth of new product cycles. The power of the hero is a cathartic trope that connects mainly with the sensibility of adolescent boys—of whatever nominal age. Tarantino has allowed as much, responding to black critics’ complaints about the violence and copious use of “nigger” by proclaiming “Even for the film’s biggest detractors, I think their children will grow up and love this movie. I think it could become a rite of passage for young black males.”6 This response stems no doubt from Tarantino’s arrogance and opportunism, and some critics have denounced it as no better than racially presumptuous. But he is hardly alone in defending the film with an assertion that it gives black youth heroes, is generically inspirational or both. Similarly, in a January 9, 2012 interview on the Daily Show, George Lucas adduced this line to promote his even more execrable race-oriented live-action cartoon, Red Tails, which, incidentally, trivializes segregation in the military by reducing it to a matter of bad or outmoded attitudes. The ironic effect is significant understatement of both the obstacles the Tuskegee airmen faced and their actual accomplishments by rendering them as backdrop for a blackface, slapped-together remake of Top Gun. (Norman Jewison’s 1984 film, A Soldier’s Story, adapted from Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play, is a much more sensitive and thought-provoking rumination on the complexities of race and racism in the Jim Crow U.S. Army—an army mobilized, as my father, a veteran of the Normandy invasion, never tired of remarking sardonically, to fight the racist Nazis.) Lucas characterized his film as “patriotic, even jingoistic” and was explicit that he wanted to create a film that would feature “real heroes” and would be “inspirational for teenage boys.” Much as Django Unchained’s defenders compare it on those terms favorably to Lincoln, Lucas hyped Red Tails as being a genuine hero story unlike “Glory, where you have a lot of white officers running those guys into cannon fodder.” Of course, the film industry is sharply tilted toward the youth market, as Lucas and Tarantino are acutely aware. But Lucas, unlike Tarantino, was not being defensive in asserting his desire to inspire the young; he offered it more as a boast. As he has said often, he’d wanted for years to make a film about the Tuskegee airmen, and he reports that he always intended telling their story as a feel-good, crossover inspirational tale. Telling it that way also fits in principle (though in this instance not in practice, as Red Tails bombed at the box office) with the commercial imperatives of increasingly degraded mass entertainment. Dargis observed that the ahistoricism of the recent period films is influenced by market imperatives in a global film industry. The more a film is tied to historically specific contexts, the more difficult it is to sell elsewhere. That logic selects for special effects-driven products as well as standardized, decontextualized and simplistic—“universal”—story lines, preferably set in fantasy worlds of the filmmakers’ design. As Dargis notes, these films find their meaning in shopworn clichés puffed up as timeless verities, including uplifting and inspirational messages for youth. But something else underlies the stress on inspiration in the black-interest films, which shows up in critical discussion of them as well. All these films—The Help, Red Tails, Django Unchained, even Lincoln and Glory—make a claim to public attention based partly on their social significance beyond entertainment or art, and they do so because they engage with significant moments in the history of the nexus of race and politics in the United States. There would not be so much discussion and debate and no Golden Globe, NAACP Image, or Academy Award nominations for The Help, Red Tails, or Django Unchained if those films weren’t defined partly by thematizing that nexus of race and politics in some way. The pretensions to social significance that fit these films into their particular market niche don’t conflict with the mass-market film industry’s imperative of infantilization because those pretensions are only part of the show; they are little more than empty bromides, product differentiation in the patter of “seemingly timeless ideals” which the mass entertainment industry constantly recycles. (Andrew O’Hehir observes as much about Django Unchained, which he describes as “a three-hour trailer for a movie that never happens.”7) That comes through in the defense of these films, in the face of evidence of their failings, that, after all, they are “just entertainment.” Their substantive content is ideological; it is their contribution to the naturalization of neoliberalism’s ontology as they propagandize its universalization across spatial, temporal, and social contexts. Purportedly in the interest of popular education cum entertainment, Django Unchained and The Help, and Red Tails for that matter, read the sensibilities of the present into the past by divesting the latter of its specific historicity. They reinforce the sense of the past as generic old-timey times distinguishable from the present by superficial inadequacies—outmoded fashion, technology, commodities and ideas—since overcome. In The Help Hilly’s obsession with her pet project marks segregation’s petty apartheid as irrational in part because of the expense rigorously enforcing it would require; the breadwinning husbands express their frustration with it as financially impractical. Hilly is a mean-spirited, narrow-minded person whose rigid and tone-deaf commitment to segregationist consistency not only reflects her limitations of character but also is economically unsound, a fact that further defines her, and the cartoon version of Jim Crow she represents, as irrational. The deeper message of these films, insofar as they deny the integrity of the past, is that there is no thinkable alternative to the ideological order under which we live. This message is reproduced throughout the mass entertainment industry; it shapes the normative reality even of the fantasy worlds that masquerade as escapism. Even among those who laud the supposedly cathartic effects of Django’s insurgent violence as reflecting a greater truth of abolition than passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, few commentators notice that he and Broomhilda attained their freedom through a market transaction.8 This reflects an ideological hegemony in which students all too commonly wonder why planters would deny slaves or sharecroppers education because education would have made them more productive as workers. And, tellingly, in a glowing rumination in the Daily Kos, Ryan Brooke inadvertently thrusts mass culture’s destruction of historicity into bold relief by declaiming on “the segregated society presented” in Django Unchained and babbling on—with the absurdly ill-informed and pontifical self-righteousness that the blogosphere enables—about our need to take “responsibility for preserving racial divides” if we are “to put segregation in the past and fully fulfill Dr. King’s dream.”9 It’s all an indistinguishable mush of bad stuff about racial injustice in the old-timey days. Decoupled from its moorings in a historically specific political economy, slavery becomes at bottom a problem of race relations, and, as historian Michael R. West argues forcefully, “race relations” emerged as and has remained a discourse that substitutes etiquette for equality.10 This is the context in which we should take account of what “inspiring the young” means as a justification for those films. In part, the claim to inspire is a simple platitude, more filler than substance. It is, as I’ve already noted, both an excuse for films that are cartoons made for an infantilized, generic market and an assertion of a claim to a particular niche within that market. More insidiously, though, the ease with which “inspiration of youth” rolls out in this context resonates with three related and disturbing themes: 1) underclass ideology’s narratives—now all Americans’ common sense—that link poverty and inequality most crucially to (racialized) cultural inadequacy and psychological damage; 2) the belief that racial inequality stems from prejudice, bad ideas and ignorance, and 3) the cognate of both: the neoliberal rendering of social justice as equality of opportunity, with an aspiration of creating “competitive individual minority agents who might stand a better fighting chance in the neoliberal rat race rather than a positive alternative vision of a society that eliminates the need to fight constantly against disruptive market whims in the first place.”11 This politics seeps through in the chatter about Django Unchained in particular. Erin Aubry Kaplan, in the Los Angeles Times article in which Tarantino asserts his appeal to youth, remarks that the “most disturbing detail about slavery is the emotional violence and degradation directed at blacks that effectively keeps them at the bottom of the social order, a place they still occupy today.” Writing on the Institute of the Black World blog, one Dr. Kwa David Whitaker, a 1960s-style cultural nationalist, declaims on Django’s testament to the sources of degradation and “unending servitude that has rendered black Americans almost incapable of making sound evaluations of our current situations or the kind of steps we must take to improve our condition.”12 In its blindnessignorance to political economy, this notion of black cultural or psychological damage as either a legacy of slavery or of more indirect recent origin—e.g., urban migration, crack epidemic, matriarchy, babies making babies—comports well with the reduction of slavery and Jim Crow to interpersonal dynamics and bad attitudes. It substitutes a “politics of recognition” and a patter of racial uplift for politics and underwrites a conflation of political action and therapy. With respect to the nexus of race and inequality, this discourse supports victim-blaming programs of personal rehabilitation and self-esteem engineering—inspiration—as easily as it does multiculturalist respect for difference, which, by the way, also feeds back to self-esteem engineering and inspiration as nodes within a larger political economy of race relations. Either way, this is a discourse that displaces a politics challenging social structures that reproduce inequality with concern for the feelings and characteristics of individuals and of categories of population statistics reified as singular groups that are equivalent to individuals. This discourse has made it possible (again, but more sanctimoniously this time) to characterize destruction of low-income housing as an uplift strategy for poor people; curtailment of access to public education as “choice”; being cut adrift from essential social wage protections as “empowerment”; and individual material success as socially important role modeling. Neoliberalism’s triumph is affirmed with unselfconscious clarity in the ostensibly leftist defenses of Django Unchained that center on the theme of slaves’ having liberated themselves. Trotskyists, would-be anarchists, and psychobabbling identitarians have their respective sectarian garnishes: Trotskyists see everywhere the bugbear of “bureaucratism” and mystify “self-activity;” anarchists similarly fetishize direct action and voluntarism and oppose large-scale public institutions on principle, and identitarians romanticize essentialist notions of organic, folkish authenticity under constant threat from institutions. However, all are indistinguishable from the nominally libertarian right in their disdain for government and institutionally based political action, which their common reflex is to disparage as inauthentic or corrupt. Their cessation of revolutionary institution building abdicates the potential for true communual power, reducing revolution to reactive bursts of energy. This debate must be a question of the speed, scope, and scale of revolutionary strategy. Only dual power organizing can build institutions that meet the material needs of community and construct a revolutionary base in the face of compounding crises of climate change, imperialism, and fascism. Escalante, 19 Alyson, you should totally read her work for non-debate reasons, Marxist-Leninist, Materialist Feminist and Anti-Imperialist activist, "Communism and Climate Change: A Dual Power Approach," Failing That, Invent, https://failingthatinvent.home.blog/2019/02/15/communism-and-climate-change-a-dual-power-approach///AD I have previously argued that a crucial advantage to dual power strategy is that it gives the masses an infrastructure of socialist institutions which can directly provide for material needs in times of capitalist crisis. Socialist agricultural and food distribution programs can take ground that the capitalist state cedes by simultaneously meeting the needs of the masses while proving that socialist self-management and political institutions can function independently of capitalism. This approach is not only capable of literally saving lives in the case of crisis, but of demonstrating the possibility of a revolutionary project which seeks to destroy rather than reform capitalism. One of the most pressing of the various crises which humanity faces today is climate change. Capitalist production has devastated the planet, and everyday we discover that the small window of time for avoiding its most disastrous effects is shorter than previously understood. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that we have 12 years to limit (not even prevent) the more catastrophic effects of climate change. The simple, and horrific, fact that we all must face is that climate change has reached a point where many of its effects are inevitable, and we are now in a post-brink world, where damage control is the primary concern. The question is not whether we can escape a future of climate change, but whether we can survive it. Socialist strategy must adapt accordingly. In the face of this crisis, the democratic socialists and social democrats in the United States have largely settled on market based reforms. The Green New Deal, championed by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and the left wing of the Democratic Party, remains a thoroughly capitalist solution to a capitalist problem. The proposal does nothing to challenge capitalism itself, but rather seeks to subsidize market solutions to reorient the US energy infrastructure towards renewable energy production, to develop less energy consuming transportation, and the development of public investment towards these ends. The plan does nothing to call into question the profit incentives and endless resource consumption of capitalism which led us to this point. Rather, it seeks to reorient the relentless market forces of capitalism towards slightly less destructive technological developments. While the plan would lead to a massive investment in the manufacturing and deployment of solar energy infrastructure, National Geographic reports that, “Fabricating solar panels requires caustic chemicals such as sodium hydroxide and hydrofluoric acid, and the process uses water as well as electricity, the production of which emits greenhouse gases.” Technology alone cannot sufficiently combat this crisis, as the production of such technology through capitalist manufacturing infrastructure only perpetuates environmental harm. Furthermore, subsidizing and incentivizing renewable energy stops far short of actually combating the fossil fuel industry driving the current climate crisis. The technocratic market solutions offered in the Green New Deal fail to adequately combat the driving factors of climate change. What is worse, they rely on a violent imperialist global system in order to produce their technological solutions. The development of high-tech energy infrastructure and the development of low or zero emission transportation requires the import of raw material and rare earth minerals which the United States can only access because of the imperial division of the Global South. This imperial division of the world requires constant militarism from the imperial core nations, and as Lenin demonstrates in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, facilitates constant warfare as imperial states compete for spheres of influence in order to facilitate cheap resource extraction. The US military, one of many imperialist forces, is the single largest user of petroleum, and one of its main functions is to ensure oil access for the United States. Without challenging this imperialist division of the world and the role of the United States military in upholding it, the Green New Deal fails even further to challenge the underlying causes of climate change. Even with the failed promises of the Green New Deal itself, it is unlikely that this tepid market proposal will pass at all. Nancy Pelosi and other lead Democrats have largely condemned it and consider it “impractical” and “unfeasible.” This dismissal is crucial because it reveals the total inability of capitalism to resolve this crisis. If the center-left party in the heart of the imperial core sees even milquetoast capitalist reforms as a step too far, we ought to have very little hope that a reformist solution will present itself within the ever shrinking 12 year time frame. There are times for delicacy and there are times for bluntness, and we are in the latter. To put things bluntly: the capitalists are not going to save us, and if we don’t find a way to save ourselves, the collapse of human civilization is a real possibility. The pressing question we now face is: how are we going to save ourselves? Revolution and Dual Power If capitalism will not be able to resolve the current encroaching climate crisis, we must find a way to organize outside the confines of capitalist institutions, towards the end of overthrowing capitalism. If the Democratic Socialists of America backed candidates cannot offer real anti-capitalist solutions through the capitalist state, we should be skeptical of the possibility for any socialist organization doing so. The DSA is far larger and far more well funded than any of the other socialist organizations in the United States, and they have failed to produce anything more revolutionary than the Green New Deal. We have to abandon the idea that electoral strategy will be sufficient to resolve the underlying causes of this crisis within 12 years. While many radicals call for revolution instead of reform, the reformists often raise the same response: revolution is well and good, but what are you going to do in the mean time? In many ways this question is fair. The socialist left in the United States today is not ready for revolutionary action, and a mass base does not exist to back the various organizations which might undertake such a struggle. Revolutionaries must concede that we have much work to be done before a revolutionary strategy can be enacted. This is a hard truth, but it is true. Much of the left has sought to ignore this truth by embracing adventurism and violent protest theatrics, in the vain hope of sparking revolutionary momentum which does not currently exist. If this is the core strategy of the socialist left, we will accomplish nothing in the next 12 years. Such approaches are as useless as the opportunist reforms pushed by the social democrats. Our task in these 12 years is not simply to arm ourselves and hope that magically the masses will wake up prepared for revolution and willing to put their trust in our small ideological cadres. We must instead, build a movement, and with it we must build infrastructure which can survive revolution and provide a framework for socialist development. Dual power is tooled towards this project best. The Marxist Center network has done an impressive amount of work developing socialist institutions across the US, largely through tenants organizing and serve the people programs. The left wing factions within the DSA itself have also begun to develop mutual aid programs that could be useful for dual power strategy. At the same time, mutual aid is not enough. We cannot simply build these institutions as a reform to make capitalism more survivable. Rather, we must make these institutions part of a broader revolutionary movement and they ought to function as a material prefiguration to a socialist society and economy. The institutions we build as dual power outside the capitalist state today ought to be structured towards revolutionary ends, such that they will someday function as the early institutions of a revolutionary socialist society. To accomplish this goal, we cannot simply declare these institutions to be revolutionary. Rather they have to be linked together through an actual revolutionary movement working towards revolutionary ends. This means that dual power institutions cannot exist as ends in and of themselves, nor can abstract notions of mutual aid cannot be conceptualized as an end in itself. The explicit purpose of these institutions has to be to radicalize the masses through meeting their needs, and providing an infrastructure for a socialist movement to meet the needs of its members and the communities in which it operates. Revolutionary institutions that can provide food, housing, and other needs for a revolutionary movement will be crucial for building a base among the masses and for constructing the beginnings of a socialist infrastructure for when we eventually engage in revolutionary struggle. The alternative is to embrace the comradeship of the party – a partisan discipline and mutual accountability that enables a shared commitment to an international communist horizon. The party is not an authoritarian form, but a flexible organization structure capable of scaling beyond moments of disruption to meet the needs of the masses and negate the material and social relations of capitalist exploitation. Dean, 19 (Jodi, communist organizer associated with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, professor in the Political Science department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges; “From Allies to Comrades,“ Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging, Verso Books, 2019) As comrades, our actions are voluntary, but they are not always of our own choosing. Comrades have to be able to count on each other even when we don’t like each other and even when we disagree. We do what needs to be done because we owe it to our comrades. In The Romance of American Communism, Vivian Gornick reports the words of a former member of the Communist Party USA, or CPUSA, who hated the daily grind of selling papers and canvassing expected of party cadre, but nevertheless, according to her, “I did it. I did it because if I didn’t do it, I couldn’t face my comrades the next day. And we all did it for the same reason: we were accountable to each other.”6 Put in psychoanalytic terms, the comrade functions as an ego ideal: the point from which party members assess themselves as doing important, meaningful work.7 Being accountable to another entails seeing your actions through their eyes. Are you letting them down or are you doing work that they respect and admire? In Crowds and Party, I present the good comrade as an ideal ego, that is to say, as how party members imagine themselves. 8 They may imagine themselves as thrilling orators, brilliant polemicists, skilled organizers, or courageous militants. In contrast with my discussion there, in the current book, I draw out how the comrade also functions as an ego ideal, the perspective that party members—and often fellow travelers—take toward themselves. This perspective is the effect of belonging on the same side as it works back on those who have committed themselves to common struggle. The comrade is a symbolic as well as an imaginary figure and it is the symbolic dimension of ego ideal I focus on here. My thinking about the comrade as a generic figure for those on the same side flows out of my work on communism as the horizon of left politics and my work on the party as the political form necessary for this politics. 9 To see our political horizon as communist is to highlight the emancipatory egalitarian struggle of the proletarianized against capitalist exploitation—that is, against the determination of life by market forces; by value; by the division of labor (on the basis of sex and race); by imperialism (theorized by Lenin in terms of the dominance of monopoly and finance capital); and by neocolonialism (theorized by Nkrumah as the last stage of imperialism). Today we see this horizon in struggles such as those led by women of color against police violence, white supremacy, and the murder and incarceration of black, brown, and working-class people. We see it in the infrastructure battles around pipelines, climate justice, and barely habitable cities with undrinkable water and contaminated soil. We see it in the array of social reproduction struggles against debt, foreclosure, and privatization, and for free, quality public housing, childcare, education, transportation, healthcare, and other basic services. We see it in the ongoing fight of LGBTQ people against harassment, discrimination, and oppression. It is readily apparent today that the communist horizon is the horizon of political struggle not for the nation but for the world; it is an international horizon. This is evident in the antagonism between the rights of immigrants and refugees and intensified nationalisms; in the necessity of a global response to planetary warming; and in anti-imperialist, decolonization, and peace movements. In these examples, communism is a force of negativity, the negation of the global capitalist present. Communism is also the name for the positive alternative to capitalism’s permanent and expanding exploitation, crisis, and immiseration, the name of a system of production based on meeting social needs—from each according to ability to each according to need, to paraphrase Marx’s famous slogan—in a way that is collectively determined and carried out by the producers. This positive dimension of communism attends to social relations, to how people treat each other, animals, things, and the world around them. Building communism entails more than resistance and riot. It requires the emancipated egalitarian organization of collective life. With respect to the party, intellectuals on the contemporary left tend to extract the party from the aspirations and accomplishments it enabled. Communist philosophers who disagree on a slew of theoretical questions, such as Antonio Negri and Alain Badiou, converge on the organizational question—no party! The party has been rejected as authoritarian, as outmoded, as ill-fitting a society of networks. Every other mode of political association may be revised, renewed, rethought, or reimagined except for the party of communists. This rejection of the party as a form for left politics is a mistake. It ignores the effects of association on those engaged in common struggle. It fails to learn from the everyday experiences of generations of activists, organizers, and revolutionaries. It relies on a narrow, fantasied notion of the party as a totalitarian machine. It neglects the courage, enthusiasm, and achievements of millions of party members for over a century. Rejection of the party form has been left dogmatism for the last thirty years and has gotten us nowhere. Fortunately, the movements of the squares in Greece and Spain, as well as lessons from the successes and limits of the Occupy movement, have pushed against this left dogmatism. They have reenergized interest in the party as a political form that can scale; a form that is flexible, adaptive, and expansive enough to endure beyond the joyous and disruptive moments of crowds in the streets. A theory of the comrade contributes to this renewal by drawing out the ways that shared commitment to a common struggle generates new strengths and new capacities. Over and against the reduction of party relations to the relations between the leaders and the led, comrade attends to the effects of political belonging on those on the same side of a political struggle. As we fight together for a world free of exploitation, oppression, and bigotry, we have to be able to trust and count on each other. Comrade names this relation. The comrade relation remakes the place from which one sees, what it is possible to see, and what possibilities can appear. It enables the revaluation of work and time, what one does, and for whom one does it. Is one’s work done for the people or for the bosses? Is it voluntary or done because one has to work? Does one work for personal provisions or for a collective good? We should recall Marx’s lyrical description of communism in which work becomes “life’s prime want.” We get a glimpse of that in comradeship: one wants to do political work. You don’t want to let down your comrades; you see the value of your work through their eyes, your new collective eyes. Work, determined not by markets but by shared commitments, becomes fulfilling. French communist philosopher and militant Bernard Aspe discusses the problem of contemporary capitalism as a loss of “common time”; that is, the loss of an experience of time generated and enjoyed through our collective being-together. 10 From holidays, to meals, to breaks, whatever common time we have is synchronized and enclosed in forms for capitalist appropriation. Communicative capitalism’s apps and trackers amplify this process such that the time of consumption can be measured in much the same way that Taylorism measured the time of production: How long did a viewer spend on a particular web page? Did a person watch a whole ad or click off of it after five seconds? In contrast, the common action that is the actuality of communist movement induces a collective change in capacities. Breaking from capitalism’s 24-7 injunctions to produce and consume for the bosses and owners, the discipline of common struggle expands possibilities for action and intensifies the sense of its necessity. The comrade is a figure for the relation through which this transformation of work and time occurs.
1/30/22
0 - G - Death Reps
Tournament: Lexington Winter Invitational | Round: 2 | Opponent: Tampa-Jesuit MH | Judge: Claire Liu The unconditional affirmation of human life is a violent form of oppression which denies the possibility of value to death and reifies a master-slave dichotomy Baudrillard 02 (Jean, “The Spirit of Terrorism: Hypotheses on Terrorism” All the same, we should try to get beyond the moral imperative of unconditional respect for human life, and conceive that one might respect, both in the other and in oneself, something other than, and more than, life (existence isn’t everything, it is even the least of things): a destiny, a cause, a form of pride or of sacrifice. There are symbolic stakes which far exceed existence and freedom - which we find it unbearable to lose, because we have made them the fetishistic values of a universal humanist order. So we cannot imagine a terrorist act committed with entire autonomy and ‘freedom of conscience’. Now, choice in terms of symbolic obligations is sometimes profoundly mysterious - as in the case of Romand, the man with the double life, who murdered his whole family, not for fear of being unmasked, but for fear of inflicting on them the profound disappointment of discovering his deception. Committing suicide would not have expunged the crime from the record; he would merely have passed the shame off on to the others. Where is the courage, where the cowardice? The question of freedom, one’s own or that of others, no longer poses itself in terms of moral consciousness, and a higher freedom must allow us to dispose of it to the point of abusing or sacrificing it. Omar Khayyam: ‘Rather one freeman bind with chains of love than set a thousand prisoned captives free.’ Seen in that light, this is almost an overturning of the dialectic of domination, a paradoxical inversion of the master-slave relationship. In the past, the master was the one who was exposed to death, and could gamble with it. The slave was the one deprived of death and destiny, the one doomed to survival and labour. How do things stand today? We, the powerful, sheltered now from death and overprotected on all sides, occupy exactly the position of the slave; whereas those whose deaths are at their own disposal, and who do not have survival as their exclusive aim, are the ones who today symbolically occupy the position of master.
Our culture exists to escape death to the ultimate extreme – The most bloodthirsty form of capitalism is legitimized as we survive instead of live Baudrillard 76 (Jean, dead philosopher, Symbolic Exchange and Death, Sage Publications.) From this point on the obsession with death and the will to abolish death through accumulation become the fundamental motor of the rationality of political economy Value, in particular time as value, is accumulated in the phantasm of death deferred, pending the term of a linear infinity of value. Even those who no longer believe in a personal eternity believe in the infinity of time as they do in a species-capital of double-compound interests. The infinity of capital passes into the infinity of time, the eternity of a productive system no longer familiar with the reversibility of gift exchange , but instead with the irreversibility of quantitative growth. The accumulation of time imposes the idea of progress, as the accumulation of science imposes the idea of truth: in each case , what is accumulated is no longer symbolically exchanged , but becomes an objective dimension . Ultimately, the total objectivity of time, like total accumulation , is the total impossibility of symbolic exchange, that is, death . Hence the absolute impasse of political economy, which intends to eliminate death through accumulation : the time of accumulation is the time of death itself. We cannot hope for a dialectical revolution at the end of this process of spiralling hoarding. We already know that the economic rationalisation of exchange (the market) is the social form which produces scarcity (Marshall Sahlins, 'The original affluent society' , in Stone Age Economics Chicago: Aldine and Atherton, 1972 ) . Similarly, the infinite accumulation of time as value under the sign of general equivalence entails the absoLute scarcity of time that is death . A contradiction in capitalism? No, communism in this instance is in solidarity with political economy, since, in accordance with the same fantastic schema of an eternal accumulation of productive forces, communism too aims for the abolition of death . Only its total ignorance of death (save perhaps as a hostile horizon to be conquered by science and technics) has protected it up to now from the worst contradictions. For nothing can will the abolition of the law of value if you want to abolish death, that is, to preserve life as absolute value, at the same time . Life itself must leave the law of value and achieve a successful exchange against death. The materialists, with their idealistic life expurgated of death, a life 'free' at last of all ambivalence , hardly trouble themselves with this ? ' Our whole culture is just one huge effort to dissociate life and death, to ward off the ambivalence of death in the interests of life as value, and time as the general equivalent . The elimination of death is our phantasm , and ramifies in every direction : for religion , the afterlife and immortality; for science, truth; and for economics, productivity and accumulation . No other culture had this distinctive opposition of life and death in the interests of life as positivity: life as accumulation, death as due payment. No other culture had this impasse : as soon as the ambivaLence of life and death and the symbolic reversibility of death comes to an end, we enter into a process of accumulation of life as value; but by the same token, we also enter the field of the equivaLent production of death. So life-becomevalue is constantly perverted by the equivalent death. Death, at the same instant , becomes the object of a perverse desire. Desire invests the very separation of life and death. This is the only way that we can speak of a death-drive. This is the only way we can speak of the unconscious, for the unconscious is onLy the accumuLation of equivalent death , the death that is no longer exchanged and can only be cashed out in the phantasm. The symbolic is the inverse dream of an end of accumulation and a possible reversibility of death in exchange. Symbolic death, which has not undergone the imaginary disjunction of life and death which is at the origin of the reality of death, is exchanged in a social ritual of feasting. Imaginary-real death (our own ) can only be redeemed through the individual work of mourning, which the subject carries out over the death of others and over himself from the start of his own life. This work of mourning has fuelled Western metaphysics of death since Christianity, even in the metaphysical concept of the death drive .
Scenario Planning breeds positive feedback loops and replicates the threat of nuclear war and violence. Ossewarde, 17 Marinus, yes he’s back I’m sorry this article was just too good: “Unmasking scenario planning: The colonization of the future in the ‘Local Governments of the Future’ program.” Futures, Volume 93 (2017), Pages 80-88, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328716302798//AD *italic emphasis added Scenario planning is meant to be a dialectical quest for open futures, whereby alternative worlds are envisioned and judgement as to the most desirable world is suspended. Such a dialogical process, associated with democratic politics of world making, typically implies the critique, negation and transcendence of the established power constellation, which is by its very nature conservative. Hence, power holders are tempted to believe that their rule is indefinite and that history has ended – since all activities are directed towards the maintenance of the current order. Conversely, action, which ‘has an inherent tendency to force open all limitations and cut across all boundaries’ is discouraged (Arendt 1958: 190). Hannah Arendt therefore went so far as claiming that ‘action, seen from the viewpoint of the automatic processes which seem to determine the course of the world, looks like a miracle’ (Arendt 1958: 246). Established power elites may have an interest in scenario planning, but the future with which they are fascinated is the prolongation of their current worlds. In other words, scenario planning is used for colonizing the future. In a colonized ‘scenario planning’, predominant or currently powerful stakeholders do not search for alternative futures, but, instead, enact their own ideological discourses, imaginaries and frames. The current power constellation is left unquestioned, and taken for granted in the scenario planning, as if established power factions will perdure in the future. The negation of well-established biases and prejudices is held in check, in order to safeguard the status quo. Such conservativism is legitimized by referring to current trends that are endowed with the aura of necessity or inevitability (natural and eternal laws). A colonized ‘scenario planning’ therefore masks unequal and often illegitimate power relationships. Historically, it appears that scenario planning has more often than not been a tool for colonization, designed to secure the future rule of the established power complex. In the 1940s, Herman Kahn and the RAND Corporation developed scenario planning to enable US military rulers to forecast the moves of potential opponents and to accordingly develop counteroffensives in the nuclear arms race (Tevis 2010). In the 1970s, Pierre Wack and Royal Dutch/Shell established scenario planning activities as an integral part of strategic management, to secure oil interests in the context of ecological crisis and the oil crisis (Wack 1985; Chermack and Coons 2015). The stimulus for scenario planning in these cases was the perceived rise of uncertainties in a world that had become more unpredictable and potentially apocalyptic. Horror scenarios of nuclear wars and a Third World War had become commonplace in the 1950s. Stories of ecological catastrophe, with a vision of large tracts of the earth rendered uninhabitable, the collapse of global food production, the acidification of the oceans, sea-level rise and storms, and droughts of growing intensity, became common since the publication of the Club of Rome report in 1972 (Wright et al 2013). In the hands of ruling military, governmental and corporate powers, ‘scenario planning’ became a method for ensuring strategic victory in a context of uncertainties and complexities. Since such scenario planning aimed at predictability, ambiguities were undesirable factors that were better eliminated, both in theory and practice (Amer, Daim and Jetter 2013). Computer simulations, game theoretic tools, forecasting methods, trend research, horizon scanning, and visual imageries filtered out all that which could not be mapped (O’Brien 2016). Pierre Wack, who introduced scenario planning at Royal Dutch/Shell, emphasizes that the future is only half closed. He made a plea for the incorporation of both literary and technical methods in scenario planning, to facilitate both the imagination and calculation of probable futures (Chermack and Coons 2015). According to Wack, the future is partly determined by trends that cannot but persist (Van‘t Klooster and Van Asselt 2006). Population growth and ageing are examples of such trends; and the corresponding implications for food demand, transport, housing, and other kinds of infrastructure clearly have to be reckoned with in any scenario planning. At the same time, for Wack, the future cannot be fully outlined based on these data and graphics. The partial openness of the future lies in the unpredictability of future generations’ actions in reaction to these trends. Robotic warfare is one possible future; large-scale euthanasia is another. But it is also imaginable that ecological disasters may wipe off entire populations. These futures are imaginable and yet not simply fictive because the ‘material’ for their ‘creation’ is already available here and now. For instance, it is highly probable that white Americans will no longer be the majority population in the United States by 2050, but the question as to how white Americans will cope with living as a minority in the US invites different answers (Martín Alcoff 2015: 24; 26). Colonization aims at ruling out openness, with the aim of shaping a future (preferably one that seems to be the product of predetermined trends that cannot be altered by human decisions) in which the current status quo is preserved. O’Brien (2016) explains that Royal Dutch/Shell’s interest in scenario planning is motivated by its will to shape a future in which remains a dominant key actor that moulds the world in its own interest: its scenario planning practices and its wish to maintain its hegemony are interconnected. ‘Shell’s scenario plans,’ O’Brien (2016: 334) notes, ‘are credited with the company’s success in outwitting the thugs, and thereby contributing to the larger project of securing Western interests amidst the turmoil of globalization
Tournament: Barkley Forum for High Schools | Round: 6 | Opponent: American Heritage Plantation SS | Judge: Wu, Jalyn Open question justifies non-cognitivism and that proves emotivism Miller, Miller, Alexander. “Rejection of Non-Naturalism.” Introduction to Contemporary Metaethics. Oxford: Polity, 2003.explains: Ayer denies that moral judgments express beliefs: rather, moral judgments express emotions, or sentiments, of approval and disapproval. Since these emotions and sentiments are unlike beliefs in that they do not even purport to represent how the world is, the judgments which express them are not truth-apt. Compare your belief that there are children in the street, which purports to represent how the world is, with your horror at the fact that the children are torturing a cat. The belief has a representative function: it purports to represent how the world is, and it is true if and only if the world actually is as it represents it. The emotion of horror, on the other hand, has no such representative function: it is not the sort of thing that can even be assessed for truth or falsity. In short, moral judgments are neither true nor false: they do not state anything, but rather express our emotions and feelings. As Ayer puts it in a famous passage: “If I say to someone, ‘You acted wrongly in stealing that money’, I am not stating anything more than if I had simply said, ‘You stole that money’. In adding that this action is wrong, I am not making any further statement about it. I am simply evincing my moral disapproval about stealing it. It is as if I had said, ‘You stole that money’, in a peculiar tone of horror, or written with the addition of some special exclamation marks. The tone, or the exclamation marks, adds nothing to the literal meaning of the sentence. It merely serves to show that the expression of it is attended by certain feelings in the speaker.” (Ayer 1936 1946: 107; emphases added) It follows that: “If I now generalize my previous statement and say, ‘Stealing money is wrong,’ I produce a sentence which has no factual meaning – that is, expresses no proposition that can be either true or false.” (1936 1946: 107) Negates – 1 Unjust cannot unilaterally be true because every individual has different reactions and emotional responses to the resolution. 2 prohibitive ethics are inconsistent with emotivism, especially when it denies private control Cain, Cain, George. "Needs, Desires, Fears, and Freedom." The Downtown Review. Vol. 1. Iss. 1 (2015). Available at: http://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/tdr/vol1/iss1/7 Now, thus far we have discussed how humans are connected by common needs, desires, and fears. What people want most of all is the ability to have control of their persons, their lives, and their circumstances in order to satisfy their needs, fulfill their desires, and eliminate their fears if possible. In order to have such control, people need the freedom to do so. This freedom is commonly known as autonomy. Although what constitutes true autonomy is entirely subjective and varies from person to person, the most general definition of the term is the freedom of the individual to do whatever he wants to do without any hindrances.
1/29/22
0 - G - Empirics Fail
Tournament: NEW YORK CITY INVITATIONAL DEBATE AND SPEECH TOURNAMENT | Round: 2 | Opponent: Westford AW | Judge: Ribera, Claudia Consequences empirically impossible to predict. Menand 05, Louis Menand (the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard University) “Everybody’s An Expert” The New Yorker 2005 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/12/05/everybodys-an-expert// FSU SS “Expert Political Judgment” is not a work of media criticism. Tetlock is a psychologist—he teaches at Berkeley—and his conclusions are based on a long-term study that he began twenty years ago. He picked two hundred and eighty-four people who made their living “commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends,” and he started asking them to assess the probability that various things would or would not come to pass, both in the areas of the world in which they specialized and in areas about which they were not expert. Would there be a nonviolent end to apartheid in South Africa? Would Gorbachev be ousted in a coup? Would the United States go to war in the Persian Gulf? Would Canada disintegrate? (Many experts believed that it would, on the ground that Quebec would succeed in seceding.) And so on. By the end of the study, in 2003, the experts had made 82,361 forecasts. Tetlock also asked questions designed to determine how they reached their judgments, how they reacted when their predictions proved to be wrong, how they evaluated new information that did not support their views, and how they assessed the probability that rival theories and predictions were accurate. Tetlock got a statistical handle on his task by putting most of the forecasting questions into a “three possible futures” form. The respondents were asked to rate the probability of three alternative outcomes: the persistence of the status quo, more of something (political freedom, e.g. economic growth), or less of something (repression, e.g. recession). And he measured his experts on two dimensions: how good they were at guessing probabilities (did all the things they said had an x per cent chance of happening happen x per cent of the time?), and how accurate they were at predicting specific outcomes. The results were unimpressive. On the first scale, the experts performed worse than they would have if they had simply assigned an equal probability to all three outcomes—if they had given each possible future a thirty-three-per-cent chance of occurring. Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in other words, are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys, who would have distributed their picks evenly over the three choices.
10/16/21
0 - G - Exportability Framing v2
Tournament: Lexington Winter Invitational | Round: 6 | Opponent: Academy Of Classical Christian Studies JM | Judge: Maher, TJ Vote negative if by the 2AR the AFF is only good for people in this room or inside debate. It’s impossible to negate the idea that someone might have to do something in a certain context – that turns debate into a space for individualization and therapy rather than collective action.
1 You should collapse the inside/outside distinction for debate – in order to engage in ecologies of disability, we also need to prioritize disabled people that are outside of debate and use this space to discuss what can be done to improve their material conditions.
2 Method testing is good – cost-benefit analysis produces both depth and breadth. Solves intellectual myopia where we only look at aspects of experience that we want to look at.
There’s a presumption frame here – the solvency threshold isn’t just imagination or survival because people are always going to find interim modes of survivability in violent worlds, but it takes intention to produce worlds where that survival isn’t questioned in the first place.
1/16/22
0 - G - Exportability Framing vs Black Terror
Tournament: NEW YORK CITY INVITATIONAL DEBATE AND SPEECH TOURNAMENT | Round: Finals | Opponent: Basis Peoria PY | Judge: Hertzig, Bathily, Montague The framing for this debate should be that the AFF should affirm the exportability of their method as net beneficial to the status quo or an alternative and the negative should prove a DA to the method that outweighs the benefits or present a net beneficial and mutually exclusive alternative method.
This means you vote negative if by the 2AR the AFF is only good for people in this room or inside debate. It’s impossible to negate the idea that someone might have to do something in a certain context – that turns debate into a space for individualization and therapy rather than collective action.
1 You should collapse the inside/outside distinction for debate – to surrender to blackness in debate, we also need to prioritize black people that are outside of debate and use this space to discuss what can be done to improve their material conditions.
2 Method testing is good – cost-benefit analysis produces both depth and breadth. Solves intellectual myopia where we only look at aspects of experience that we want to look at.
3 Checks aff bias – not being able to negate means the AFF always wins.
4 Academic contestation – the black radical tradition is founded on important disagreements that develop into important historical lessons for revolutionaries – the Black Panther Party’s basement debates prove this activity has some potential for building revolution.
There’s a presumption frame here – the solvency threshold isn’t just imagination or survival because people are always going to find interim modes of survivability in violent worlds, but it takes intention to produce worlds where that survival isn’t questioned in the first place.
10/18/21
0 - G - Psychoanalysis Answers
Tournament: Lexington Winter Invitational | Round: 6 | Opponent: Academy Of Classical Christian Studies JM | Judge: Maher, TJ Psychoanalysis is psycho-violence – reductive models of the psyche cause alienation and annihilation of the self and destroy social analysis Deleuze 04 (Gilles, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VII, Desert Islands and Other Texts: 1953-1974, p. 274-76) I would like to present five propositions on psychoanalysis. The first is this: psychoanalysis today presents a political danger all of its own that is different from the implicit dangers of the old psychiatric hospital. The latter constitutes a place of localized captivity; psychoanalysis, on the other hand, works in the open air. The psychoanalyst has in a sense the same position that Marx accorded to the merchant in feudal society: working in the open pores of society, not only in pri¬vate offices, but also in schools, institutions, departmentalism, etc. This function puts us in a unique position with respect to the psychoanalytic project. We rec¬ognize that psychoanalysis tells us a great deal about the unconscious; but, in a certain way, it does so only to reduce the unconscious, to destroy it, to repulse it, to imagine it as a sort of parasite on consciousness. For psychoanalysis, it is fair to say there are always too many desires. The Freudian conception of the child as polymorphous pervert shows that there are always too many desires. In our view, however, there are never enough desires. We do not, by one method or another, wish to reduce the unconscious: we prefer to produce it: there is no unconscious that is already there; the unconscious must be produced politically, socially, and historically. The question is: in what place, in what circumstances, in the shadow of what events, can the unconscious be produced. Producing the unconscious means very precisely the production of desire in a historical social milieu or the appearance of statements and expressions of a new kind. My second proposition is that psychoanalysis is a complete machine, designed in advance to prevent people from talking, therefore from producing statements that suit them and the groups with which they have certain affinities. As soon as one begins analysis, one has the impression of talking. But one talks in vain; the entire psychoanalytical machine exists to suppress the conditions of a real expression. Whatever one says is taken into a sort of tourniquet, an inter¬pretive machine; the patient will never be able to get to what he really has to say. Desire or delirium (which are in a deep sense the same thing), desire-delirium is by its nature a libidinal investment of an entire historical milieu, of an entire social environment. What makes one delirious are classes, peoples, races, masses, mobs. Psychoanalysis, possessed of a pre-existing code, superintends a sort of destruction. This code consists of Oedipus, castration, the family romance; the most secret content of delirium, i.e. this divergence from the social and histori¬cal milieu, will be destroyed so that no delirious statement, corresponding to an overflow in the unconscious, will be able to get through the analytical machine. We say that the schizophrenic has to deal not with his family, nor with his par¬ents, but with peoples, populations, and tribes. We say that the unconscious is not a matter of generations or family genealogy, but rather of world population, and that the psychoanalytical machine destroys all this. I will cite just two exam¬ples: the celebrated example of President Schreber whose delirium is entirely about races, history, and wars. Freud doesn’t realize this and reduces the patient’s delirium exclusively to his relationship with his father. Another example is the Wolfman: when the Wolfman dreams of six or seven wolves, which is by defini¬tion a pack, i.e. a certain kind of group, Freud immediately reduces this multiplicity by bringing everything back to a single wolf who is necessarily the father. The entire collective libidinal expression manifested in the delirium of the Wolfman will be unable to make, let alone conceive of the statements that are for him the most meaningful. My third proposition is that psychoanalysis works in this way because of its automatic interpretation machine. This interpretation machine can be described in the following way: whatever you say, you mean something different. We can’t say enough about the damage these machines cause. When someone explains to me that what I say means something other than what I say, a split in the ego as subject is produced. This split is well known: what I say refers to me as the sub¬ject of an utterance or statement, what I mean refers to me as an expressing subject. This split is conjured by psychoanalysis as the basis for castration and prevents all production of statements. For example, in certain schools for prob¬lem children, dealing with character or even psychopathology, the child, in his work or play activities, is placed in a relationship with his educator, and in this context the child is understood as the subject of an utterance or statement; in his psychotherapy, he is put into a relationship with the analyst or the therapist, and there he is understood as an expressing subject. Whatever he does in the group in terms of his work and his play will be compared to a superior authority, that of the psychotherapist who alone will have the job of interpreting, such that the child himself is split; he cannot win acceptance for any statement about what really matters to him in his relationship or in his group. He will feel like he’s talk¬ing, but he will not be able to say a single word about what’s most essential to him. Indeed, what produces statements in each one of us is not ego as subject, it’s something entirely different: multiplicities, masses and mobs, peoples and tribes, collective arrangements; they cross through us, they are within us, and they seem unfamiliar because they are part of our unconscious. The challenge for a real psychoanalysis, an anti-psychoanalytical analysis, is to discover these col¬lective arrangements of expression, these collective networks, these peoples who are in us and who make us speak, and who are the source of our statements. This is the sense in which we set a whole field of experimentation, of personal or group experimentation, against the interpretive activities of psychoanalysis. My fourth proposition, to be quick, is that psychoanalysis implies a fairly peculiar power structure. The recent book by Castel, Le Psychanalysme, demon¬strates this point very well. The power structure occurs in the contract, a formidable liberal bourgeois institution. It leads to “transference” and culminates in the analyst’s silence. And the analyst’s silence is the greatest and the worst of interpretations. Psychoanalysis uses a small number of collective statements, which are those of capitalism itself regarding castration, loss, and family, and it tries to get this small number of collective statements specific to capitalism to enter into the individual statements of the patients themselves. We claim that one should do just the opposite, that is, start with the real individual statements, give people conditions, including the material conditions, for the production of their individual statements, in order to discover the real collective arrangements that produce them. My last proposition is that, for our part, we prefer not to participate in any effort consistent with a Freudo-Marxist perspective. And this for two reasons. The first is that, in the end, a Freudo-Marxist effort proceeds in general from a return to origins, or more specifically to the sacred texts: the sacred texts of Freud, the sacred texts of Marx. Our point of departure must be completely dif¬ferent: we refer not to sacred texts that must be, to a greater or lesser extent, interpreted, but to the situation as is, the situation of the bureaucratic apparatus in psychoanalysis, which is an effort to subvert these apparatuses. Marxism and Psychoanalysis, in two different ways, speak in the name of a kind of memory, of a culture of memory, and also speak in two different ways in the name of the requirements of a development. We believe on the contrary that one must speak in the name of a positive force of forgetting, in the name of what is for each indi¬vidual his own underdevelopment, what David Cooper aptly calls our inner third world. Secondly, what separates us from any Freudo-Marxist effort is that such projects seek primarily to reconcile two economies: political economy and libid¬inal or desiring economy. In Reich, too, we find the observance of this duality of this effort at reconciliation. Our point of view is on the contrary that there is but one economy and that the problem of a real anti-psychoanalytical analysis is to show how unconscious desire invests the forms of this economy. It is economy itself that is political economy and desiring economy. Homogenizing desire as disgust falsely universalizes, science doesn’t account for cultural difference, can’t scale up from individual to collective, naturalizes the power of the Symbolic Order, precludes practical politics – zeroes solvency – prefer a historically contingent theory of agentic desire Fraser 13. Nancy. Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science and Professor of Philosophy, The New School. Fortunes of Feminism. Verso Books. 140-9. Let me begin by posing two questions: What might a theory of discourse contribute to feminism? And what, therefore, should feminists look for in a theory of discourse? I suggest that a conception of discourse can help us understand at least four things, all of which are interrelated. First, it can help us understand how people’s social identities are fashioned and altered over time. Second, it can help us understand how, under conditions of inequality, social groups in the sense of collective agents are formed and unformed. Third, a conception of discourse can illuminate how the cultural hegemony of dominant groups in society is secured and contested. Fourth and finally, it can shed light on the prospects for emancipatory social change and political practice. Let me elaborate. First, consider the uses of a conception of discourse for understanding social identities. The basic idea here is that people’s social identities are complexes of meanings, networks of interpretation. To have a social identity, to be a woman or a man, for example, just is to live and to act under a set of descriptions. These descriptions, of course, are not simply secreted by peoples’s bodies; nor are they simply exuded by people’s psyches. Rather, they are drawn from the fund of interpretive possibilities available to agents in specific societies. It follows that, in order to understand the gender dimension of social identity, it does not suffice to study biology or psychology. Instead, one must study the historically specific social practices through which cultural descriptions of gender are produced and circulated.3 Moreover, social identities are exceedingly complex. They are knitted together from a plurality of different descriptions arising from a plurality of different signifying practices. Thus, no one is simply a woman; one is rather, for example, a white, Jewish, middle-class woman, a philosopher, a lesbian, a socialist, and a mother.4 Because everyone acts in a plurality of social contexts, moreover, the different descriptions comprising any individual’s social identity fade in and out of focus. Thus, one is not always a woman in the same degree; in some contexts, one’s womanhood figures centrally in the set of descriptions under which one acts; in others, it is peripheral or latent.5 Finally, it is not the case that people’s social identities are constructed once and for all and definitively fixed. Rather, they alter over time, shifting with shifts in agents’ practices and affiliations. Even the way in which one is a woman will shift— as it does, to take a dramatic example-, when one becomes a feminist. In short, social identities are discursively constructed in historically specific social contexts; they are complex and plural; and they shift over time. One use of a conception of discourse for feminist theorizing, then, is in understanding social identities in their full socio-cultural complexity, thus in demystifying static, single variable, essentialist views of gender identity. A second use of a conception of discourse for feminist theorizing is in understanding the formation of social groups. How does it happen, under conditions of domination, that people come together, arrange themselves under the banner of collective identities, and constitute themselves as collective social agents? How do class formation and, by analogy, gender formation occur? Clearly, group formation involves shifts in people’s social identities and therefore also in their relation to social discourse. One thing that happens here is that pre-existing strands of identities acquire a new sort of salience and centrality. These strands, previously submerged among many others, are reinscribed as the nub of new self-definitions and affiliations.6 For example, in the current wave of feminist ferment, many of us who had previously been “women” in some taken-for-granted way have now become “ women” in the very different sense of a discursively self-constituted political collectivity. In the process, we have remade entire regions of social discourse. We have invented new terms for describing social reality— for example, “sexism,” “ sexual harassment,” “ marital, date, and acquaintance rape,” “ labor force sex-segregation,” “ the double shift,” and “ wife-battery.” We have also invented new language games such as consciousness raising and new, institutionalized public spheres such as the Society for Women in Philosophy.7 The point is that the formation of social groups proceeds by struggles over social discourse. Thus, a conception of discourse is useful here, both for understanding group formation and for coming to grips with the closely related issue of socio-cultural hegemony. “Hegemony” is the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s term for the discursive face of power. It is the power to establish the “common sense” or “doxa” of a society, the fund of self-evident descriptions of social reality that normally go without saying.8 This includes the power to establish authoritative definitions of social situations and social needs, the power to define the universe of legitimate disagreement, and the power to shape the political agenda. Hegemony, then, expresses the advantaged position of dominant social groups with respect to discourse. It is a concept that allows us to recast the issues of social identity and social groups in the light of societal inequality. How do pervasive axes of dominance and subordination affect the production and circulation of social meanings? How does stratification along lines of gender, “race,” and class affect the discursive construction of social identities and the formation of social groups? The notion of hegemony points to the intersection of power, inequality, and discourse. However, it does not entail that the ensemble of descriptions that circulate in society comprise a monolithic and seamless web, nor that dominant groups exercise an absolute, topdown control of meaning. On the contrary, “hegemony” designates a process wherein cultural authority is negotiated and contested. It presupposes that societies contain a plurality of discourses and discursive sites, a plurality of positions and perspectives from which to speak. Of course, not all of these have equal authority. Yet conflict and contestation are part of the story. Thus, one use of a conception of discourse for feminist theorizing is to shed light on the processes by which the socio-cultural hegemony of dominant groups is achieved and contested. What are the processes by which definitions and interpretations inimical to women’s interests acquire cultural authority? What are the prospects for mobilizing counter-hegemonic feminist definitions and interpretations to create broad oppositional groups and alliances? The link between these questions and emancipatory political practice is, I believe, fairly obvious. A conception of discourse that lets us examine identities, groups, and hegemony in the ways I have been describing would be of considerable use to feminist practice. It would valorize the empowering dimensions of discursive struggles without leading to “culturalist” retreats from political engagement.9 In addition, the right kind of conception would counter the disabling assumption that women are just passive victims of male dominance. That assumption over-totalizes male dominance, treating men as the only social agents- and rendering inconceivable our own existence as feminist theorists and activists. In contrast, the sort of conception I have been proposing would help us understand how, even under conditions of subordination, women participate in the making of culture. 2. LACANIANISM AND THE LIMITS OF STRUCTURALISM In light of the foregoing, what sort of conception of discourse will be useful for feminist theorizing? What sort of conception best illuminates social identities, group formation, hegemony, and emancipatory practice? In the postwar period, two approaches to theorizing language became influential among political theorists. The first is the structuralist model, which studies language as a symbolic system or code. Derived from Saussure, this model is presupposed in the version of Lacanian theory I shall be concerned with here; in addition, it is abstractly negated but not entirely superseded in deconstruction and in related forms of French “women’s writing.” The second influential approach to theorizing language may be called the pragmatics model, which studies language at the level of discourses, as historically specific social practices of communication. Espoused by such thinkers as Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu, this model is operative in some but not all dimensions of the work of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. In the present section of this chapter, I shall argue that the first, structuralist model is of only limited usefulness for feminist theorizing. Let me begin by noting that there are good prima facie reasons for feminists to be suspicious of the structuralist model. This model constructs its object of study by abstracting from exactly what we need to focus on, namely, the social practice and social context of communication. Indeed, the abstraction from practice and context are among the founding gestures of Saussurean linguistics. Saussure began by splitting signification into langue, the symbolic system or code, and parole, speakers’ uses of language in communicative practice or speech. He then made the first of these, langue, the proper object of the new science of linguistics, and relegated the second, parole, to the status of a devalued remainder.10 At the same time, Saussure insisted that the study of langue be synchronic rather than diachronic; he thereby posited his object of study as static and atemporal, abstracting it from historical change. Finally, the founder of structuralist linguistics posited that langue was indeed a single system; he made its unity and systematicity consist in the putative fact that every signifier, every material, signifying element of the code, derives its meaning positionally through its difference from all of the others. Together, these founding operations render the structuralist approach of limited utility for feminist purposes." Because it abstracts from parole, the structuralist model brackets questions of practice, agency, and the speaking subject. Thus, it cannot shed light on the discursive practices through which social identities and social groups are formed. Because this approach brackets the diachronic, moreover, it will not tell us anything about shifts in identities and affiliations over time. Similarly, because it abstracts from the social context of communication, the model brackets issues of power and inequality. Thus, it cannot illuminate the processes by which cultural hegemony is secured and contested. Finally, because the model theorizes the fund of available linguistic meanings as a single symbolic system, it lends itself to a monolithic view of signification that denies tensions and contradictions among social meanings. In short, by reducing discourse to a “symbolic system," the structuralist model evacuates social agency, social conflict, and social practice.12 Let me now try to illustrate these problems by means of a brief discussion of Lacanianism. By “Lacanianism," I do not mean the actual thought of Jacques Lacan, which is far too complex to tackle here. I mean, rather, an ideal-typical neo-structuralist reading of Lacan that is widely credited among English-speaking feminists.'5 In discussing “ Lacanianism,” I shall bracket the question of the fidelity of this reading, which could be faulted for overemphasizing the influence of Saussure at the expense of other, countervailing influences, such as Hegel.'4 For my purposes, however, this ideal-typical, Saussurean reading of Lacan is useful precisely because it evinces with unusual clarity the difficulties that beset many conceptions of discourse that are widely considered “ poststructuralist” but that remain wedded in important respects to structuralism. Because their attempts to break free of structuralism remain abstract, such conceptions tend finally to recycle it. Lacanianism, as discussed here, is a paradigm case of “neostructuralism.” '5 At first sight, neo-structuralist Lacanianism seems to promise some advantages for feminist theorizing. By conjoining the Freudian problematic of the construction of gendered subjectivity to the Saussurean model of structural linguistics, it seems to provide each with its needed corrective. The introduction of the Freudian problematic promises to supply the speaking subject that is missing in Saussure and thereby to reopen the excluded questions about identity, speech, and social practice. Conversely, the use of the Saussurean model promises to remedy some of Freuds deficiencies. By insisting that gender identity is discursively constructed, Lacanianism appears to eliminate lingering vestiges of biologism in Freud, to treat gender as sociocultural all the way down, and to render it in principle more open to change. Upon closer inspection, however, the promised advantages fail to materialize. Instead, Lacanianism begins to look viciously circular. On the one hand, it purports to describe the process by which individuals acquire gendered subjectivity through their painful conscription as young children into a pre-existing phallocentric symbolic order. Here the structure of the symbolic order is presumed to determine the character of individual subjectivity. But, on the other hand, the theory also purports to show that the symbolic order must necessarily be phallocentric since the attainment of subjectivity requires submission to “the Father s Law.” Here, conversely, the nature of individual subjectivity, as dictated by an autonomous psychology, is presumed to determine the character of the symbolic order. One result of this circularity is an apparently ironclad determinism. As Dorothy Leland has noted, the theory casts the developments it describes as necessary, invariant, and unalterable.16 Phallocentrism, womans disadvantaged place in the symbolic order, the encoding of cultural authority as masculine, the impossibility of describing a nonphallic sexuality— in short, any number of historically contingent trappings of male dominance— now appear as invariable features of the human condition. Womens subordination, then, is inscribed as the inevitable destiny of civilization. I can spot several spurious steps in this reasoning, some of which have their roots in the presupposition of the structuralist model. First, to the degree Lacanianism has succeeded in eliminating biologism— and that is dubious for reasons I shall not go into here17 — it has replaced it with psychologism, the untenable view that autonomous psychological imperatives given independently of culture and history can dictate the way they are interpreted and acted on within culture and history. INSERT FOOTNOTE 17 17 Here I believe one can properly speak of Lacan. Lacan’s claim to have overcome biologism rests on his insistence that the phallus is not the penis. However, many feminist critics have shown that he fails to prevent the collapse of the symbolic signifier into the organ. The clearest indication of this failure is his claim, in The Meaning of the Phallus,” that the phallus becomes the master signifier because of its “turgidity” which suggests “ the transmission of vital flow” in copulation. See Jacques Lacan, “ T h e Meaning of the Phallus,” in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the ecole freudienne, eds. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1982. END FOOTNOTE 17 Lacanianism falls prey to psychologism to the extent that it claims that the phallocentricity of the symbolic order is required by the demands of an enculturation process that is itself independent of culture.18 If one half of Lacanianism’s circular argument is vitiated by psychologism, then the other half is vitiated by what I shall call symbolicism. By symbolicism I mean, first, the homogenizing reification of diverse signifying practices into a monolithic and all-pervasive “symbolic order,” and second, the endowing of that order with an exclusive and unlimited causal power to fix people’s subjectivities once and for all. Symbolicism, then, is an operation whereby the structuralist abstraction langue is troped into a quasi-divinity, a normative “symbolic order” whose power to shape identities dwarfs to the point of extinction that of mere historical institutions and practices. Actually, as Deborah Cameron has noted, Lacan himself equivocates on the expression “the symbolic order.” '9 Sometimes he uses this expression relatively narrowly to refer to Saussurean langue, the structure of language as a system of signs. In this narrow usage, Lacanianism would be committed to the implausible view that the sign system itself determines individuals’ subjectivities independently of the social context and social practice of its uses. At other times, Lacan uses the expression “ the symbolic order” far more broadly to refer to an amalgam that includes not only linguistic structures, but also cultural traditions and kinship structures, the latter mistakenly equated with social structure in general.20 In this broad usage, Lacanianism would conflate the ahistorical structural abstraction langue with variable historical phenomena like family forms and childrearing practices; cultural representations of love and authority in art, literature, and philosophy; the gender division of labor; forms of political organization and of other institutional sources of power and status. The result would be a conception of “the symbolic order” that essentializes and homogenizes contingent historical practices and traditions, erasing tensions, contradictions, and possibilities for change. This would be a conception, moreover, that is so broad that the claim that it determines the structure of subjectivity risks collapsing into an empty tautology.21 The combination of psychologism and symbolicism in Lacanianism results in a conception of discourse that is of limited usefulness for feminist theorizing. To be sure, this conception offers an account of the discursive construction of social identity. However, it is not an account that can make sense of the complexity and multiplicity of social identities, the ways they are woven from a plurality of discursive strands. Granted, Lacanianism stresses that the apparent unity and simplicity of ego identity is imaginary, that the subject is irreparably split both by language and drives. But this insistence on fracture does not lead to an appreciation of the diversity of the socio-cultural discursive practices from which identities are woven. It leads, rather, to a unitary view of the human condition as inherently tragic. In fact, Lacanianism differentiates identities only in binary terms, along the single axis of having or lacking the phallus. As Luce Irigaray has shown, this phallic conception of sexual difference is not an adequate basis for understanding femininity22— nor, I would add, masculinity. Still less, then, is it able to shed light on other dimensions of social identities, including ethnicity, color, and social class. Nor could the theory be emended to incorporate these manifestly historical phenomena, given its postulation of an ahistorical, tension-free “symbolic order” equated with kinship.23 Moreover, Lacanianism’s account of identity construction cannot account for identity shifts over time. It is committed to the general psychoanalytic proposition that gender identity (the only kind of identity it considers) is basically fixed once and for all with the resolution of the Oedipus complex. Lacanianism equates this resolution with the child’s entry into a fixed, monolithic, and all-powerful symbolic order. Thus, it actually increases the degree of identity fixity found in classical Freudian theory. It is true, as Jacqueline Rose points out, that the theory stresses that gender identity is always precarious, that its apparent unity and stability are always threatened by repressed libidinal drives.24 But this emphasis on precariousness is not an opening onto genuine historical thinking about shifts in peoples social identities. On the contrary, it is an insistence on a permanent, ahistorical condition, since for Lacanianism the only alternative to fixed gender identity is psychosis. If Lacanianism cannot provide an account of social identity that is useful for feminist theorizing, then it is unlikely to help us understand the formation of social groups. For Lacanianism, affiliation falls under the rubric of the imaginary. To affiliate with others, to align oneself with others in a social movement, would be to fall prey to the illusions of the imaginary ego. It would be to deny loss and lack, to seek an impossible unification and fulfillment. Thus, from the perspective of Lacanianism, collective movements would by definition be vehicles of delusion; they could not even in principle be emancipatory.25 Moreover, insofar as group formation depends on linguistic innovation, it is untheorizable from the perspective of Lacanianism. Because Lacanianism posits a fixed, monolithic symbolic system and a speaker who is wholly subjected to it, it is inconceivable that there could ever be any linguistic innovation. Speaking subjects could only ever reproduce the existing symbolic order; they could not possibly alter it. From this perspective, the question of cultural hegemony is blocked from view. There can be no question as to how the cultural authority of dominant groups in society is established and contested, no question of unequal negotiations between different social groups occupying different discursive positions. For Lacanianism, on the contrary, there is simply “ f/ie symbolic order,” a single universe of discourse that is so systematic, so all-pervasive, so monolithic that one cannot even conceive of such things as alternative perspectives, multiple discursive sites, struggles over social meanings, contests between hegemonic and counterhegemonic definitions of social situations, conflicts of interpretation of social needs. One cannot even conceive, really, of a plurality of different speakers. With the way blocked to a political understanding of identities, groups, and cultural hegemony, the way is also blocked to an understanding of political practice. For one thing, there is no conceivable agent of such practice. Lacanianism posits a view of the person as a non-sutured congeries of three moments, none of which can qualify as a political agent. The speaking subject is simply the grammatical “I,” a shifter wholly subjected to the symbolic order; it can only and forever reproduce that order. The ego is an imaginary projection, deluded about its own stability and self-possession, hooked on an impossible narcissistic desire for unity and self-completion; it therefore can only and forever tilt at windmills. Finally, there is the ambiguous unconscious, sometimes an ensemble of repressed libidinal drives, sometimes the face of language as Other, but never anything that could count as a social agent. Vote neg on presumption – if they are right about the symbolic order, demands for recognition are doomed to failure Lundberg 12 – Dr. Christian Lundberg, Co-Director of the University Program in Cultural Studies and Professor of Rhetoric at the University of North Carolina, PhD in Communication Studies from Northwestern University, MA in Divinity from Emory University, BA from the University of Redlands, Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric, p. 174-177 Thus, "as hysterics you demand a new master: you will get it!" At the register of manifest content, demands are claims for action and seemingly powerful, but at the level of the rhetorical form of the demand or in the register of enjoyment, demand is a kind of surrender. As a relation of address the hysterical demand is more a demand for recognition and love from an ostensibly repressive order than a claim for change. The limitation of the students' call on Lacan does not lie in the end they sought but in the fact that the hysterical address never quite breaks free from its framing of the master. The fundamental problem of democracy is not articulating resistance over and against hegemony but rather the practices of enjoyment that sustain an addiction to mastery and a deferral of desire. Hysteria is a politically effective subject position in some ways, but it is politically constraining from the perspective of organized political dissent. If not a unidirectional practice of resistance, hysteria is at best a politics of interruption. Imagine a world where the state was the perfect and complete embodiment of a hegemonic order, without interruption or remainder, and the discursive system was hermetically closed. Politics would be an impossibility: with no site for contest or reappropriation, politics would simply be the automatic extension of structure. Hysteria is a site of interruption, in that hysteria represents a challenge to our hypothetical system, refusing straightforward incorporation by its symbolic logic. But, stepping outside this hypothetical non-polity, on balance, hysteria is politically constraining because the form of the demand, as a way of organizing the field of political enjoyment, requires that the system continue to act in certain ways to sustain its logic. Though on the surface it is an act of symbolic dissent, hysteria represents an affirmation of a hegemonic order and is therefore a particularly fraught form of political subjectivization. The case of the hysteric produces an additional problem in defining jouissance as equivalent with hegemony. One way of defining hysteria is to say that it is a form of enjoyment that is defined by its very disorganization. As Gerard Wajcman frames it, the fundamental analytical problem in defining hysteria is precisely that it is a paradoxical refusal of organized enjoyment by a constant act of deferral. This deferral functions by asserting a form of agency over the Other while simultaneously demanding that the Other provide an organizing principle for hysterical enjoyment, something the Other cannot provide. Hysteria never moves beyond the question or the riddle, as Wajcman argues: the "hysteric ... cannot be mastered by knowledge and therefore remains outside of history, even outside its own .... If hysteria is a set of statements about the hysteric, then the hysteric is what eludes those statements, escapes this knowledge .... The history of hysteria bears witness to something fundamental in the human condition-being put under pressure to answer a question.T'" Thus, a difficulty for a relatively formal/ structural account of hegemony as a substitute for jouissance without reduction: where is the place for a practice of enjoyment that by its nature eludes nanling in the order of knowledge? This account of hysteria provides a significant test case for the equation betweenjouissance and hegemony, for the political promise and peril of demands and ultimately for the efficacy of a hysterical politics. But the results of such a test can only be born out in the realm of everyday politics. On Resistance: The Dangers of Enjoying One's Demands The demands of student revolutionaries and antiglobalization protestors provide a set of opportunities for interrogating hysteria as a political practice. For the antiglobalization protestors cited earlier, demands to be added to a list of dangerous globophobes uncannily condense a dynamic inherent to all demands for recognition. But the demands of the Mexico Solidarity Network and the Seattle Independent Media project demand more than recognition: they also demand danger as a specific mode of representation. "Danger" functions as a sign of something more than inclusion, a way of reaffirming the protestors' imaginary agency over processes of globalization. If danger represents an assertion of agency, and the assertion of agency is proportional to the deferral of desire to the master upon whom the demand is placed, then demands to be recognized as dangerous are doubly hysterical. Such demands are also demands for a certain kind of love, namely, the state might extend its love by recognizing the dangerousness of the one who makes the demand. At the level the demand's rhetorical function, dangerousness is metonymically connected with the idea that average citizens can effect change in the prevailing order, or that they might be recognized as agents who, in the instance of the list of globalophobic leaders, can command the Mexican state to reaffirm their agency by recognizing their dangerousness. The rhetorical structure of danger implies the continuing existence of the state or governing apparatus's interests, and these interests become a nodal point at which the hysterical demand is discharged. This structure generates enjoyment of the existence of oppressive state policies as a point for the articulation of identity. The addiction to the state and the demands for the state's love is also bound up with a fundamental dependency on the oppression of the state: otherwise the identity would collapse. Such demands constitute a reaffirmation of a hysterical subject position: they reaffirm not only the subject's marginality in the global system but the danger that protestors present to the global system. There are three practical implications for this formation. First, for the hysteric the simple discharge of the demand is both the beginning and satisfaction of the political project. Although there is always a nascent political potential in performance, in this case the performance of demand comes to fully eclipse the desires that animate content of the demand. Second, demand allows institutions that stand in for the global order to dictate the direction of politics. This is not to say that engaging such institutions is a bad thing; rather, it is to say that when antagonistic engagement with certain institutions is read as the end point of politics, the field of political options is relatively constrained. Demands to be recognized as dangerous by the Mexican government or as a powerful antiglobalization force by the WTO often function at the cost of addressing how practices of globalization are reaffirmed at the level of consumption, of identity, and so on or in thinking through alternative political strategies for engaging globalization that do not hinge on the state and the state's actions. Paradoxically, the third danger is that an addiction to the refusal of demands creates a paralyzing disposition toward institutional politics. Grossberg has identified a tendency in left politics to retreat from the "politics of policy and public debate.":" Although Grossberg identifies the problem as a specific coordination of "theory" and its relation to left politics, perhaps a hysterical commitment to marginality informs the impulse in some sectors to eschew engagements with institutions and institutional debate. An addiction to the state's refusal often makes the perfect the enemy of the good, implying a stifling commitment to political purity as a pretext for sustaining a structure of enjoyment dependent on refusal, dependent on a kind of paternal "no." Instead of seeing institutions and policy making as one part of the political field that might be pressured for contingent or relative goods, a hysterical politics is in the incredibly difficult position of taking an addressee (such as the state) that it assumes represents the totality of the political field; simultaneously it understands its addressee as constitutively and necessarily only a locus of prohibition. These paradoxes become nearly insufferable when one makes an analytical cut between the content of a demand and its rhetorical functionality. At the level of the content of the demand, the state or institutions that represent globalization are figured as illegitimate, as morally and politically compromised because of their misdeeds, Here there is an assertion of agency, but because the assertion of agency is simultaneously a deferral of desire, the identity produced in the hysterical demand is not only intimately tied to but is ultimately dependent on the continuing existence of the state, hegemonic order, or institution. At the level of affective investment, the state or institution is automatically figured as the legitimate authority over its domain. As Lacan puts it: "demand in itself ... is demand of a presence or of an absence ... pregnant with that Other to be situated within the needs that it can satisfy. Demand constitutes the Other as already possessing the 'privilege' of satisfying needs, that it is to say, the power of depriving them of that alone by which they are satisfied."46
1/16/22
0 - G - Skep
Tournament: Barkley Forum for High Schools | Round: 6 | Opponent: American Heritage Plantation SS | Judge: Wu, Jalyn 1 Permissibility Negates – a) Semantics – Just implies acting or being in conformity with what is morally upright or good, therefore if the resolution is permissible and therefore not unjust it acts according to what is morally upright and flows negative. That applies to presumption as well because Unjust means lacking in justice so the affirmative must actively prove that there exists a deficit in Justice. b) Logic – Propositions require positive justification before being accepted, otherwise one would be forced to accept the validity of logically contradictory propositions regarding subjects one knows nothing about, i.e if one knew nothing about P one would have to presume that both the “P” and “P” are true.
2 Presumption Negates – a There are logically more possibilities of a statement being false than true. For instance, to prove the statement that the pen is red the pen can only be red but the pen being any other color means the statement is false b We assume statements false, its why we don’t believe in conspiracy theories
The standard is consistency with the standpoint of the skeptic. Prefer –
Bindingness – The process of debating requires taking a skeptical approach to your opponents’ arguments and attempting to disprove their most basic principles, which means to say skepticial orientation is bad would deny your ability to respond to my arguments. 2. Inherency – All moral frameworks begin from the question of how to resolve skepticism which means it controls the internal link to all other framework education 3. Holding ourselves to a standard of absolute truth is necessary: A) Culpability – Truth is the standard to which we hold people accountable for their actions, absent an understanding of the way the world actually is, people could make up their own understandings which makes it impossible for us to every justify why something someone did was bad, incorrect, etc and tell them to change B) Outcomes – The truth of the world is the ultimate determiner of the success of our actions, for example, if we were to act as though climate change wasn’t real because it is convenient, we would die of climate change must faster C) Resolvability – Debate requires a maintenance of truth – if debaters could make arguments like affirm because 2+2=5 debate as a concept would become incoherent since there’s no metric to determine who is winning based on the truth of their claims.
Skepticism is correct – 1 Motivation – Ethical principles must be intrinsically motivational otherwise agents have no commitment to following principles. Absent this ethics can’t guide action as I could agree X is bad yet still imply that I am going to do X regardless. However, no universal motivation exists. Wittgenstein Wittgenstein, Ludwig. "A Lecture on Ethics." Heretics Society. Cambridge University. Cambridge University, Cambridge, England. 1 Nov. 1929. Address I said that so far as facts and propositions are concerned there is only relative value and relative good, right, etc. And let me, before I go on, illustrate this by a rather obvious example. The right road is the road which leads to an arbitrarily predetermined end and it is quite clear to us all that there is no sense in talking about the right road apart from such a predetermined goal. Now let us see what we could possibly mean by the expression, 'the absolutely right road.' I think it would be the road which everybody on seeing it would, with logical necessity, have to go, or be ashamed for not going. And similarly the absolute good, if it is a describable state of affairs, would be one which everybody, independent of his tastes and inclinations, would necessarily bring about or feel guilty for not bringing about. And I want to say that such a state of affairs is a chimera. No state of affairs has, in itself, what I would like to call the coercive power of an absolute judge.
2 Culpability – Ethics must hold agents culpable as otherwise we cannot be responsible for moral wrongdoings since they occur externally to our wills and will happen regardless of whether we advise against them. a Free will is biologically impossible Coyne 12 Jerry Coyne, Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at The University of Chicago, “Why You Don’t Really Have Free Will,” USAToday, January 1st, 2012 https://www.ethicalpsychology.com/2013/12/why-you-dont-really-have-free-will.html?m=1 The first is simple: we are biological creatures, collections of molecules that must obey the laws of physics. All the success of science rests on the regularity of those laws, which determine the behavior of every molecule in the universe. Those molecules, of course, also make up your brain — the organ that does the "choosing." And the neurons and molecules in your brain are the product of both your genes and your environment, an environment including the other people we deal with. Memories, for example, are nothing more than structural and chemical changes in your brain cells. Everything that you think, say, or do, must come down to molecules and physics. True "free will," then, would require us to somehow step outside of our brain's structure and modify how it works. Science hasn't shown any way we can do this because "we" are simply constructs of our brain. We can't impose a nebulous "will" on the inputs to our brain that can affect its output of decisions and actions, any more than a programmed computer can somehow reach inside itself and change its program.
3 Objectivity – Ethics must provide absolute accounts of goodness else agents simply act on their own passions and inferences which makes it impossible to evaluate any action as correct or incorrect. However, objectivity is impossible. A Argument from relativism Street 06, Street, Sharon. “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value.” Philosophical Studies January 2006. Pgs 118-121 Where I think the objection goes wrong, then, is as follows. The objection gains its plausibility by suggesting that rational reflection provides some means of standing apart from our evaluative judgments, sorting through them, and gradually separating out the true ones from the false—as if with the aid of some uncontaminated tool. But this picture cannot be right. For what rational reflection about evaluative matters involves, inescapably, is assessing some evaluative judgments in terms of others. Rational reflection must always proceed from some evaluative standpoint; it must work from some evaluative premises; it must treat some evaluative judgments as fixed, if only for the time being, as the assessment of other evaluative judgments is undertaken. In rational reflection, one does not stand completely apart from one’s starting fund of evaluative judgments: rather, one uses them, reasons in terms of them, holds some of them up for examination in light of others. The widespread consensus that the method of reflective equilibrium, broadly understood, is our sole means of proceeding in ethics is an acknowledgment of this fact: ultimately, we can test our evaluative judgments only by testing their consistency with our other evaluative judgments, combined of course with judgments about the (nonevaluative) facts. Thus, if the fund of evaluative judgments with which human reflection began was thoroughly contaminated with illegitimate influence—and the objector has offered no reason to doubt this part of the argument—then the tools of rational reflection were equally contaminated, for the latter are always just a subset of the former. It follows that all our reflection over the ages has really just been a process of assessing evaluative judgments that are mostly off the mark in terms of others that are mostly off the mark. And reflection of this kind isn’t going to get one any closer to evaluative truth, any more than sorting through contaminated materials with contaminated tools is going to get one closer to purity. So long as we assume that there is no relation between evolutionary influences and evaluative truth, the appeal to rational reflection offers no escape from the conclusion that, in the absence of an incredible coincidence, most of our evaluative judgments are likely to be false. B Moral facts are impossible due to the is/ought gap Gray Bracketed for clarity Grey, JW. "The Is/Ought Gap: How Do We Get "Ought" from "Is?"" Ethical Realism. N.p., 19 July 2011. Web. 28 Oct. 2015. https://ethicalrealism.wordpress.com/2011/07/19/the-isought-gap-how-do-we-get-ought-from-is/ How is the is/ought gap evidence of moral anti-realism? Moral anti-realists think that there are no irreducible moral facts—all moral truths can be reduced to our beliefs, desires, commitments, and so on. Anti-realists don’t think that anything is right or wrong apart from something like a social contract—it’s practical to commit ourselves to behaving ethically insofar as we will benefit when everyone else makes the same commitment as well. Three reasons that the is/ought gap is often taken to be evidence for anti-realism is because (a) the anti-realist sees no reason to think that what morally ought to be the case is a “moral fact” beyond our beliefs, desires, and commitments; (b) the anti-realist sees no reason to think that we could ever know such moral facts exist; and (c) the anti-realist solutions to the is/ought gap could be superior to the realist solutions. Is what morally ought to be the case a moral fact? Facts are states of affairs—actual things that exist and relations between things that exist. That a cat is on the mat is a fact. It’s unclear how what morally ought to be the case can be a fact. What morally ought to be is often quite different from the actual state of affairs in the world. A thief steals, a murderer kills, and so on. People aren’t actually doing what they ought to do. How can an state of affairs that ought to exist be said to be a fact when what ought to be the case is often quite different from what actually is exists or happens in the world? Anti-realists see no good answers for these questions, but they think anti-realism can solve the problem by avoiding it. If there are no moral facts, then we no longer need to answer these questions. How can we know what morally ought to be the case? Hume was an empiricist, so he thought we could only know about reality through observation. What we observe isn’t necessarily what ought to be. The actual state of affairs in the world can be quite different that what people morally ought to do. We do know what is the case because we can observe it. Looking at what is the case—the actually obtaining nonmoral facts—doesn’t seem to tell us what ought to be the case. So, it’s not obvious how we can know what morally ought to be the case assuming that it’s a moral fact. Anti-realists think that we can avoid this problem entirely by becoming anti-realists and admitting there are no moral facts.
4 Non-arbitrariness – Ethical beliefs cannot rely on arbitrary foundations as it would justify infinite contradictions. For instance, one could easily claim the sky is green without any ability for refutation as it accords with an arbitrary mindset. However, Ethics are arbitrary. A Argument from evolution Machuca 18 Diego E. Machuca “Moral Skepticism: An Introduction and Overview”, 02/27/2018 https://philarchive.org/archive/EMAMSA Accessed 3/8/21 AHSNPR Drawing especially on the work of evolutionary biologists, some moral skeptics have argued that the most plausible account of the origin of morality is the one that appeals to evolution: natural selection has forged certain faculties or capacities devoted to moral judgment. In their view, the evolutionary account defeats our first-order moral beliefs because it does not require that morality be true, but only that it be evolutionarily advantageous to believe that it is true. Evolutionary debunking strategies of this sort have been deployed in a systematic way particularly by Richard Joyce (2001: ch. 6; 2006; 2016c) and Sharon Street (2006; 2008). Joyce first appealed to the argument from evolution in his defense of a moral error theory, but later on used it to ground a skepticism about moral justification. Street employed the argument in her attack not merely on moral realism but on value realism in general. Although in the two articles in question she does not develop or defend it, she repeatedly mentions constructivism as the anti-realist view that sidesteps her evolutionary debunking argument against value realism. The defense, interpretation, and criticism of various types of evolutionary arguments for moral skepticism have of late attracted a lot of attention, and in fact the study of ‘the evolution of morality’ constitutes a burgeoning area in metaethics. The thrust of such arguments is that biological evolution is aimed not at moral belief-forming processes that are reliable, but at moral belief-forming processes that are adaptive. In other words, the evolutionary function of those processes is not that of tracking the truth: their general success at matching or accurately representing alleged objective moral facts explains neither their emergence nor their persistence. Humans are therefore disposed to make moral judgments regardless of the evidence to which they are exposed, regardless of whether there are or are not objective moral facts. Someone might object that, in order to be adaptive, such processes must be reliable, i.e., the moral judgments they form are evolutionarily useful—i.e., tend to promote survival and reproduction—because they are in general true. However, given that moral beliefs may well be adaptively useful even if they are not true, if what we know is only that evolution is aimed at moral belief-forming processes that are adaptive, then we do have here a defeater: even if some moral judgments are true, there is no reason for claiming that they are. This is the way in which evolutionary skeptical arguments are in general understood in the literature. Resuming the distinction between rebutting and undercutting defeaters discussed at the outset of the present section, the evolutionary account of the origin of our moral beliefs then provides an undercutting defeater for those beliefs: it does not show that they are false—for there might well be moral facts out there in the world—but rather that they were not formed in a reliable way because their source is not trustworthy, and hence that they are not epistemically justified. The resulting moral skepticism is therefore epistemological. However, as we will see, the evolutionary account has also been understood as providing a rebutting defeater for our moral beliefs: a reason for thinking that objective moral facts do not exist, and hence that such beliefs are false. The resulting moral skepticism is therefore ontological. When appealed to in relation to a moral error theory, evolutionary debunking considerations are normally used as a supplement to arguments that purport to establish the error-theoretic conclusion in order to account, once the conclusion is accepted, for the systematic error we commit in making moral judgments. This seems to be the case of Mackie, who briefly appealed to evolution as an alternative explanation of the origin of our moral sentiments and dispositions (1977: 113–114, 124, 192, 229, 239). Although Mackie (1985: 154) claimed that morality can be seen as an outgrowth from genetically determined retributive tendencies that were favored by evolutionary selection, 14 he did not offer an elaborate evolutionary account of morality in the way Joyce (2001: ch. 6; 2006) has. The latter maintains that the origin of morality is to be found in the development of human cooperation: an individual is more reproductively fit if his sympathetic desires to help his family members are supplemented by a sense of inescapable requirement to favor them that strengthens his motivation to perform helpful actions. This was accomplished by providing people with the belief that such actions have objective moral qualities. Once a cognitive capacity to believe that it is inescapably required to help family members was in place, it was exploited by natural selection to regulate also helpful behavior towards non-kin individuals. It must be remarked that Joyce’s view is not that every particular moral prescription can be evolutionarily explained, or that culture or the environment plays no role in determining moral beliefs. Rather, his view is that the tendency to use general moral categories and the belief that certain types of action bear objective moral properties are innate; that cultural influences can cause some of those actions to stop being regarded as moral or immoral, or cause other types of action to start being so regarded; and that moral dispositions require environmental cues to become manifest. For reasons that will become clear at the end of this subsection, it is important to note that Joyce is at some points cautious regarding the status of his evolutionary account of morality. He presents the hypothesis that natural selection has led us to commit the fundamental moral error as a “plausible speculation” (2001: 135). Also, although he regards the evolutionary hypothesis as plausible, coherent, and testable, and as the best story of the origin of morality we have (2006: 134, 137, 139– 140), and although he therefore answers the question “Is human morality innate?” in the affirmative, he remarks that “this is provisional and to a degree speculative, since the present evidence does not warrant answering the question in either a positive or a negative way with any confidence” (2006: 2). Finally, he observes that his evolutionary debunking argument “is conditional: It relies on an empirical premise concerning the evolution of morality which is yet to be established” (2016b: 9). In his first treatment of the evolutionary account of morality, Joyce not only remarks that it complements the arguments for moral error theory, but he makes the stronger claim that “the fact that moral thinking is a naturally evolved trait has error theoretical implications” (2001: 137) or “provides evidence in favor of the error theory” (2001: 148). In his view, the innateness of moral judgments undermines these judgments being true for the simple reason that if we have evolved to make these judgments irrespective of their being true, then one could not hold that the judgments are justified. And if they are unjustified, then although they could be true, their truth is in doubt. (2001: 159) But the fact that if we accept the evolutionary account, our moral beliefs are utterly unjustified, or we have no reason for thinking that they are true, or it is highly improbable or extremely unlikely that they are true, in no way establishes the ontological conclusion of moral error theory. Of course, the evolutionary account places the burden of proof on the non-minimal moral realist to provide us not only with a reason for believing that our moral beliefs are epistemically justified, but also with a reason for believing that there are objective moral facts or properties in the first place. Oddly enough, Joyce himself recognizes that the evolutionary account alone does not support an ontological conclusion, but rather an attitude of withholding of assent concerning the truth or falsity of moral judgments (2001: 160–168). In any case, in later works he explicitly remarks that one cannot argue for a moral error theory on the basis of evolutionary considerations, the correct skeptical conclusion being instead that all moral judgments are unjustified (Joyce 2006: ch. 6; 2016c; cf. 2016b: 8). Joyce’s later evolutionary debunking stance seems to vacillate between nihilistic and Pyrrhonian epistemological skepticism: sometimes he seems to believe that moral beliefs are intrinsically unjustified or that they have been shown to be so for good, and sometimes to believe that they can be deemed to be unjustified on the basis of the evidence available up to this point. Joyce’s epistemological version of the argument from evolution could be formulated as follows: 1. Our capacity to form first-order moral beliefs is an evolutionary adaptation produced by natural selection. 2. Biological evolution is not aimed at moral belief-forming processes that are reliable, i.e., processes whose function is to track the alleged moral truths. 3. Given 2, our having beliefs that objects possess moral properties is consistent with nothing ever possessing a moral property. Therefore: 4. Our first-order moral beliefs are epistemically unjustified. Street (2006) contends that evolutionary considerations pose a dilemma for realist theories of value (and hence for realist theories of moral value). The fact that the forces of natural selection have greatly shaped the content of our evaluative judgments raises the challenge to explain the relation between such evolutionary influences and the independent evaluative facts posited by the realist. 15 The first horn of the dilemma is the claim that there is no such relation, which results in an implausible skepticism: we would have to conclude that our evaluative judgments are contaminated by a distorting influence and hence that many or most of them are off the track. Although it is possible that “as a matter of sheer chance” our evaluative judgments accord with the allegedly independent evaluative facts, “this would require a fluke of luck that’s not only extremely unlikely . . . but also astoundingly convenient to the realist” (2006: 122). In response, one could appeal to rational reflection as another major influence on the content of our evaluative judgments that corrects the distorting influence of evolutionary pressures on such judgments. Although Street does not discard such an influence, she claims that, since rational reflection must proceed by using evaluative judgments, one would be assessing evolutionarily distorted evaluative judgments by means of other evolutionarily distorted evaluative judgments (2006: 124). The other horn of the dilemma is the claim that natural selection favored those ancestors who were able to grasp the independent evaluative truths, because tracking them was advantageous for survival and reproduction. But this account that presents itself as a scientific explanation is, in Street’s view, inferior on scientific grounds to the one according to which the tendency to make certain kinds of evaluative judgments rather than others contributed to our ancestors’ survival and reproduction because those judgments forged adaptive links between the circumstances in which our ancestors found themselves and their responses to such circumstances. This account is superior in terms of the usual criteria of scientific adequacy, for it is clearer, more parsimonious, and does a better job at illuminating the tendency in question (2006: 129–134). Once again, we see that a crucial premise in an argument against value realism is a best-explanation premise. With a focus on moral realism, Street’s argument could perhaps be formulated thus: 1. The forces of natural selection have had an indirect tremendous influence on the content of our moral judgments. 2. The moral realist owes us an explanation of the relation between such an evolutionary influence and the independent moral facts he posits. 3. He can claim either that (3a) there is no relation or that (3b) there is such a relation. 4. If he claims that (3a), then he is forced either (4a) to embrace a farfetched moral skepticism or (4b) to claim that an incredible coincidence took place. 16 5. If he claims that (3b), then he must propose a tracking account, which is scientifically unacceptable (since the adaptive link account provides the best explanation of why our tendency to make certain kinds of moral judgments rather than others contributed to our ancestors’ reproductive success). Therefore: 6. Moral realism is false, i.e., there are no independent moral facts. It is surprising that Street argues for an ontological conclusion regarding independent or objective moral facts on the basis of an evolutionary debunking argument. For it seems that evolutionary debunking arguments (and genealogical debunking arguments in general) can at most undermine the epistemic credentials of our substantive moral beliefs—i.e., can at most provide us with undercutting defeaters for those beliefs. Street’s own evolutionary debunking argument establishes at most that we have no reason for affirming that our moral beliefs match alleged objective moral facts because the best explanation of our tendency to make certain moral judgments makes no appeal to them. Even though the moral realist then owes us a reason for affirming that such facts exist, the argument does not prove that they do not. Note that such epistemological moral skepticism is different from (4a), the skeptical conclusion that Street regards as implausible or far-fetched. B Argument from relativity Mackie 90, J.L. Mackie, famous error theorist “Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong”, Penguin Books, ISBN 10: 0140135588, 1990 https://b-ok.cc/book/2532967/9b3856 Accessed 3/2/21 AHSNPR The argument from relativity has as its premises the well-known variation in moral codes from one society to another and from one period to another, and also the differences in moral beliefs between different groups and classes within a complex community. Such variation is in itself merely a truth of descriptive morality, a fact of anthropology which entails neither first order nor second order ethical views. Yet it may indirectly support second order subjectivism: radical differences between first order moral judgements make it difficult to treat those judgements as apprehensions of objective truths. But it is not the mere occurrence of disagreements that tells against the objectivity of values. Disagreement on questions in history or biology or cosmology does not show that there are no objective issues in these fields for investigators to disagree about. But such scientific disagreement results from speculative inference or explanatory hypotheses based on inadequate evidence, and it is hardly plausible to interpret moral disagreement in the same way. Disagreement about moral codes seems to reflect people’s adherence to and participation in different ways of life. The causal connection seems to be mainly that way round: it is that people approve of monogamy because they participate in a monogamous way of life rather than that they participate in a monogamous way of life because they approve of monogamy. Of course, the standards may be an idealization of the way of life from which they arise: the monogamy in which people participate may be less complete, less rigid. than that of which it leads them to approve. This is not to say that moral judgements are purely conventional. Of course, there have been and are moral heretics and moral reformers, people who have turned against the established rules and practices of their own communities for moral reasons, and often for moral reasons that we would endorse. But this can usually be understood as the extension, in ways which, though new and unconventional, seemed to them to be required for consistency, of rules to which they already adhered as arising out of an existing way of life. In short,' the argument from relativity has some force simply because the actual variations in the moral codes are more readily explained by the hypothesis that they reflect ways of life than by the hypothesis that they express perceptions, most of them seriously inadequate and badly distorted, of objective values. But there is a well-known counter to this argument from relativity, namely to say that the items for which objective validity is in the first place to be claimed are not specific moral rules or codes but very general basic principles which are recognized at least implicitly to some extent in all society - such principles as provide the foundations of what Sidgwick has caused different methods of ethics: the principle of universalizability, perhaps, or the rule that one ought to conform to the specific rules of any way of life in which one takes part, from which one profits, and on which one relies, or some utilitarian principle of doing what tends, or seems likely, to promote the general happiness It is easy to show that such general principles, married with differing concrete circumstances. different existing social patterns or different preferences, will beget different specific moral rules; and there is some plausibility in the claim that the specific rules -thus generated will vary from community to community or from group to group in close agreement with the actual variations in accepted codes. The argument from relativity can be only partly countered in this way. To take this line the moral objectivist has to say that it is only in these principles that the objective moral character attaches immediately to its descriptively specified ground or subject: other moral judgements are objectively valid or true. but only derivatively and contingently - if things had been otherwise, quite different sorts of actions would have been right. And despite the prominence in recent philosophical ethics of universalization, utilitarian principles, and the like, these are very far from constituting the whole of what is actually affirmed as basic in ordinary moral thought. Much of this is concerned rather with what Hare calls ‘ideals’ or, less kindly, 'fanaticism*. That is, people judge that some things are good or right and others are bad or wrong, not because - or at any rate not only because - they exemplify some general principle for which widespread implicit acceptance could be claimed, but because something about those things arouses certain responses immediately in them, though they would arouse radically and irresolvably different responses in others. ‘Moral sense’ or ‘intuition’ is an initially more plausible description of what supplies many of our basic moral judgements than ‘reason’. With regard to a l these starting points of moral thinking the argument from relativity remains in full force.
5 Empirics – the competition between competing ethics has been going for centuries. Leiter 2 Leiter, Brian. Moral Skepticism and Moral Disagreement: Developing an Argument from Nietzsche. March 25, 2010. With respect to very particularized moral disagreements — e.g., about questions of economic or social policy — which often trade on obvious factual ignorance or disagreement about complicated empirical questions, this seems a plausible retort. But for over two hundred years, Kantians and utilitarians have developed been developing increasingly systematic versions of their respective positions. The Aristotelian tradition in moral philosophy has an even longer history. Utilitarians They have become particularly adept at explaining how they can accommodate others Kantian and Aristotelian intuitions about particular cases and issues, though in ways that are usually found to be systematically unpersuasive to the competing traditions and which, in any case, do nothing to dissolve the disagreement about the underlying moral criteria and categories. Philosophers in each tradition increasingly talk only to each other, without even trying to convince those in the other traditions. And while there may well be ‘progress’ within traditions — e.g., most utilitarians regard Mill as an improvement on Bentham—there does not appear to be any progress towards in moral theory, in the sense of a consensus that particular fundamental theories of right action and the good life are deemed better than their predecessors. What we find now are simply the competing traditions — Kantian, Humean, Millian, Aristotelian, Thomist, perhaps now even Nietzschean — who often view their competitors as unintelligible or morally obtuse, but don’t have any actual arguments against the foundational principles of their competitors. There is, in short, no sign — I can think of none — that we are heading towards any epistemic rapprochement between these competing moral traditions. Are we really to believe that hyper-rational and reflective moral philosophers, whose lives, in most cases, are devoted to systematic reflection on philosophical questions, many of whom (historically) were independently wealthy (or indifferent to material success) and so immune to crass considerations of livelihood and material self-interest, and most of whom, in the modern era, spend professional careers refining their positions, and have been doing so as a professional class in university settings for well over a century — are we really supposed to believe that they have reached no substantial agreement on any foundational moral principle because of ignorance, irrationality, or partiality
Thus, I contend the skeptic would negate the resolution.
The skeptical conclusion being true denies the existence of justice prima facie. It proves that nothing can be just nor unjust as ethics itself is an imaginary construct. That means the aff is incapable of proving the truth of the resolution. 2. Skep linguistically negates because sentences derive meaning from their linguistic properties corresponding to facts about reality. For example, a claim like “my dog has four legs” requires you to have a dog and for that dog to actually have four legs. If unjust means immoral and wrongfulness doesn’t exist, the statement is false.
1/29/22
0 - G - Skep on case
Tournament: Lexington Winter Invitational | Round: 2 | Opponent: Tampa-Jesuit MH | Judge: Claire Liu Life itself isn’t intrinsically motivational so it can’t guide moral action – . Absent this ethics can’t guide action as I could agree X is bad yet still imply that I am going to do X regardless. However, no universal motivation exists. Wittgenstein Wittgenstein, Ludwig. "A Lecture on Ethics." Heretics Society. Cambridge University. Cambridge University, Cambridge, England. 1 Nov. 1929. Address I said that so far as facts and propositions are concerned there is only relative value and relative good, right, etc. And let me, before I go on, illustrate this by a rather obvious example. The right road is the road which leads to an arbitrarily predetermined end and it is quite clear to us all that there is no sense in talking about the right road apart from such a predetermined goal. Now let us see what we could possibly mean by the expression, 'the absolutely right road.' I think it would be the road which everybody on seeing it would, with logical necessity, have to go, or be ashamed for not going. And similarly the absolute good, if it is a describable state of affairs, would be one which everybody, independent of his tastes and inclinations, would necessarily bring about or feel guilty for not bringing about. And I want to say that such a state of affairs is a chimera. No state of affairs has, in itself, what I would like to call the coercive power of an absolute judge.
Biological moral theories terminate in skepticism –Argument from evolution Machuca 18 Diego E. Machuca “Moral Skepticism: An Introduction and Overview”, 02/27/2018 https://philarchive.org/archive/EMAMSA Accessed 3/8/21 AHSNPR Drawing especially on the work of evolutionary biologists, some moral skeptics have argued that the most plausible account of the origin of morality is the one that appeals to evolution: natural selection has forged certain faculties or capacities devoted to moral judgment. In their view, the evolutionary account defeats our first-order moral beliefs because it does not require that morality be true, but only that it be evolutionarily advantageous to believe that it is true. Evolutionary debunking strategies of this sort have been deployed in a systematic way particularly by Richard Joyce (2001: ch. 6; 2006; 2016c) and Sharon Street (2006; 2008). Joyce first appealed to the argument from evolution in his defense of a moral error theory, but later on used it to ground a skepticism about moral justification. Street employed the argument in her attack not merely on moral realism but on value realism in general. Although in the two articles in question she does not develop or defend it, she repeatedly mentions constructivism as the anti-realist view that sidesteps her evolutionary debunking argument against value realism. The defense, interpretation, and criticism of various types of evolutionary arguments for moral skepticism have of late attracted a lot of attention, and in fact the study of ‘the evolution of morality’ constitutes a burgeoning area in metaethics. The thrust of such arguments is that biological evolution is aimed not at moral belief-forming processes that are reliable, but at moral belief-forming processes that are adaptive. In other words, the evolutionary function of those processes is not that of tracking the truth: their general success at matching or accurately representing alleged objective moral facts explains neither their emergence nor their persistence. Humans are therefore disposed to make moral judgments regardless of the evidence to which they are exposed, regardless of whether there are or are not objective moral facts. Someone might object that, in order to be adaptive, such processes must be reliable, i.e., the moral judgments they form are evolutionarily useful—i.e., tend to promote survival and reproduction—because they are in general true. However, given that moral beliefs may well be adaptively useful even if they are not true, if what we know is only that evolution is aimed at moral belief-forming processes that are adaptive, then we do have here a defeater: even if some moral judgments are true, there is no reason for claiming that they are. This is the way in which evolutionary skeptical arguments are in general understood in the literature. Resuming the distinction between rebutting and undercutting defeaters discussed at the outset of the present section, the evolutionary account of the origin of our moral beliefs then provides an undercutting defeater for those beliefs: it does not show that they are false—for there might well be moral facts out there in the world—but rather that they were not formed in a reliable way because their source is not trustworthy, and hence that they are not epistemically justified. The resulting moral skepticism is therefore epistemological. However, as we will see, the evolutionary account has also been understood as providing a rebutting defeater for our moral beliefs: a reason for thinking that objective moral facts do not exist, and hence that such beliefs are false. The resulting moral skepticism is therefore ontological. When appealed to in relation to a moral error theory, evolutionary debunking considerations are normally used as a supplement to arguments that purport to establish the error-theoretic conclusion in order to account, once the conclusion is accepted, for the systematic error we commit in making moral judgments. This seems to be the case of Mackie, who briefly appealed to evolution as an alternative explanation of the origin of our moral sentiments and dispositions (1977: 113–114, 124, 192, 229, 239). Although Mackie (1985: 154) claimed that morality can be seen as an outgrowth from genetically determined retributive tendencies that were favored by evolutionary selection, 14 he did not offer an elaborate evolutionary account of morality in the way Joyce (2001: ch. 6; 2006) has. The latter maintains that the origin of morality is to be found in the development of human cooperation: an individual is more reproductively fit if his sympathetic desires to help his family members are supplemented by a sense of inescapable requirement to favor them that strengthens his motivation to perform helpful actions. This was accomplished by providing people with the belief that such actions have objective moral qualities. Once a cognitive capacity to believe that it is inescapably required to help family members was in place, it was exploited by natural selection to regulate also helpful behavior towards non-kin individuals. It must be remarked that Joyce’s view is not that every particular moral prescription can be evolutionarily explained, or that culture or the environment plays no role in determining moral beliefs. Rather, his view is that the tendency to use general moral categories and the belief that certain types of action bear objective moral properties are innate; that cultural influences can cause some of those actions to stop being regarded as moral or immoral, or cause other types of action to start being so regarded; and that moral dispositions require environmental cues to become manifest. For reasons that will become clear at the end of this subsection, it is important to note that Joyce is at some points cautious regarding the status of his evolutionary account of morality. He presents the hypothesis that natural selection has led us to commit the fundamental moral error as a “plausible speculation” (2001: 135). Also, although he regards the evolutionary hypothesis as plausible, coherent, and testable, and as the best story of the origin of morality we have (2006: 134, 137, 139– 140), and although he therefore answers the question “Is human morality innate?” in the affirmative, he remarks that “this is provisional and to a degree speculative, since the present evidence does not warrant answering the question in either a positive or a negative way with any confidence” (2006: 2). Finally, he observes that his evolutionary debunking argument “is conditional: It relies on an empirical premise concerning the evolution of morality which is yet to be established” (2016b: 9). In his first treatment of the evolutionary account of morality, Joyce not only remarks that it complements the arguments for moral error theory, but he makes the stronger claim that “the fact that moral thinking is a naturally evolved trait has error theoretical implications” (2001: 137) or “provides evidence in favor of the error theory” (2001: 148). In his view, the innateness of moral judgments undermines these judgments being true for the simple reason that if we have evolved to make these judgments irrespective of their being true, then one could not hold that the judgments are justified. And if they are unjustified, then although they could be true, their truth is in doubt. (2001: 159) But the fact that if we accept the evolutionary account, our moral beliefs are utterly unjustified, or we have no reason for thinking that they are true, or it is highly improbable or extremely unlikely that they are true, in no way establishes the ontological conclusion of moral error theory. Of course, the evolutionary account places the burden of proof on the non-minimal moral realist to provide us not only with a reason for believing that our moral beliefs are epistemically justified, but also with a reason for believing that there are objective moral facts or properties in the first place. Oddly enough, Joyce himself recognizes that the evolutionary account alone does not support an ontological conclusion, but rather an attitude of withholding of assent concerning the truth or falsity of moral judgments (2001: 160–168). In any case, in later works he explicitly remarks that one cannot argue for a moral error theory on the basis of evolutionary considerations, the correct skeptical conclusion being instead that all moral judgments are unjustified (Joyce 2006: ch. 6; 2016c; cf. 2016b: 8). Joyce’s later evolutionary debunking stance seems to vacillate between nihilistic and Pyrrhonian epistemological skepticism: sometimes he seems to believe that moral beliefs are intrinsically unjustified or that they have been shown to be so for good, and sometimes to believe that they can be deemed to be unjustified on the basis of the evidence available up to this point. Joyce’s epistemological version of the argument from evolution could be formulated as follows: 1. Our capacity to form first-order moral beliefs is an evolutionary adaptation produced by natural selection. 2. Biological evolution is not aimed at moral belief-forming processes that are reliable, i.e., processes whose function is to track the alleged moral truths. 3. Given 2, our having beliefs that objects possess moral properties is consistent with nothing ever possessing a moral property. Therefore: 4. Our first-order moral beliefs are epistemically unjustified. Street (2006) contends that evolutionary considerations pose a dilemma for realist theories of value (and hence for realist theories of moral value). The fact that the forces of natural selection have greatly shaped the content of our evaluative judgments raises the challenge to explain the relation between such evolutionary influences and the independent evaluative facts posited by the realist. 15 The first horn of the dilemma is the claim that there is no such relation, which results in an implausible skepticism: we would have to conclude that our evaluative judgments are contaminated by a distorting influence and hence that many or most of them are off the track. Although it is possible that “as a matter of sheer chance” our evaluative judgments accord with the allegedly independent evaluative facts, “this would require a fluke of luck that’s not only extremely unlikely . . . but also astoundingly convenient to the realist” (2006: 122). In response, one could appeal to rational reflection as another major influence on the content of our evaluative judgments that corrects the distorting influence of evolutionary pressures on such judgments. Although Street does not discard such an influence, she claims that, since rational reflection must proceed by using evaluative judgments, one would be assessing evolutionarily distorted evaluative judgments by means of other evolutionarily distorted evaluative judgments (2006: 124). The other horn of the dilemma is the claim that natural selection favored those ancestors who were able to grasp the independent evaluative truths, because tracking them was advantageous for survival and reproduction. But this account that presents itself as a scientific explanation is, in Street’s view, inferior on scientific grounds to the one according to which the tendency to make certain kinds of evaluative judgments rather than others contributed to our ancestors’ survival and reproduction because those judgments forged adaptive links between the circumstances in which our ancestors found themselves and their responses to such circumstances. This account is superior in terms of the usual criteria of scientific adequacy, for it is clearer, more parsimonious, and does a better job at illuminating the tendency in question (2006: 129–134). Once again, we see that a crucial premise in an argument against value realism is a best-explanation premise. With a focus on moral realism, Street’s argument could perhaps be formulated thus: 1. The forces of natural selection have had an indirect tremendous influence on the content of our moral judgments. 2. The moral realist owes us an explanation of the relation between such an evolutionary influence and the independent moral facts he posits. 3. He can claim either that (3a) there is no relation or that (3b) there is such a relation. 4. If he claims that (3a), then he is forced either (4a) to embrace a farfetched moral skepticism or (4b) to claim that an incredible coincidence took place. 16 5. If he claims that (3b), then he must propose a tracking account, which is scientifically unacceptable (since the adaptive link account provides the best explanation of why our tendency to make certain kinds of moral judgments rather than others contributed to our ancestors’ reproductive success). Therefore: 6. Moral realism is false, i.e., there are no independent moral facts. It is surprising that Street argues for an ontological conclusion regarding independent or objective moral facts on the basis of an evolutionary debunking argument. For it seems that evolutionary debunking arguments (and genealogical debunking arguments in general) can at most undermine the epistemic credentials of our substantive moral beliefs—i.e., can at most provide us with undercutting defeaters for those beliefs. Street’s own evolutionary debunking argument establishes at most that we have no reason for affirming that our moral beliefs match alleged objective moral facts because the best explanation of our tendency to make certain moral judgments makes no appeal to them. Even though the moral realist then owes us a reason for affirming that such facts exist, the argument does not prove that they do not. Note that such epistemological moral skepticism is different from (4a), the skeptical conclusion that Street regards as implausible or far-fetched.
Freedom denies the existence of moral value Plantigna An Existentialist's Ethics Author(s): Alvin Plantinga Source: The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Dec., 1958), pp. 235-256 In his choice he man defines himself, he defines the other, and he constitutes the world, not by creating it or giving it being, but by giving it whatever limitation, differentiation, form, and meaning that it has. The result of this fearful responsibility is anguish. Man is anguished because he alone must choose, and because he must choose. He is anguished also because he has no guarantee that he will not, at some future date, choose a different essence for himself in the future and therefore cease to be as this man. Anguish appears when we realize that there is nothing between us and our lives ; when we realize that we are entirely free and therefore utterly responsible. In The Reprieve Mathieu contemplates the fact that the coming war has completely cut him off from his past. "T am free,' he said suddenly. And his joy changed, on the spot, to a crushing sense of anguish."15 Anguish is the way our freedom reveals itself to consciousness. It is the consciousness that nothing separates me from any possibility whatever (BN 32). We cannot escape anguish. We may try?to try to escape anguish to adopt the atti tude of "bad faith" (BN 43), but such an attempt is doomed to failure, for we are anguish just as we are freedom. Even in bad faith we do not escape anguish, for in order to try to escape it, conceal it from ourselves, we must already know it (BN 45). Such is Sartre's doctrine of the responsibility and anguish following from our absolute freedom. This doctrine seems to take crucial moral notions very seriously. But in the last analysis the doctrine of absolute freedom undercuts the very possibility of morality. Sartre's responsibility and anguish are a delusion. Every choice, he tells us, is unconditioned and completely contingent; there is nothing to which it can appeal, and it is therefore "absurd." "It is absurd in this sense; that the choice is that by which all foundations, all reasons come into being, that by which the very notion of the absurd receives a meaning. It is absurd as being beyond all reasons" (BN 479). Every choice defines both value and rationality. But if that is so, then it is impossible to make a wrong choice. As we have seen, and as Sartre constantly repeats, mMy choice defines value; prior to my choice there is no right or wrong. But then mMy choice, in defining the right, can never be mistaken. Whatever I choose is right by definition.
1/15/22
0 - G - Spec Hedonism
Tournament: Lexington | Round: Quarters | Opponent: San Mateo YR | Judge: Choi, Dandu, Kraus Interpretation: If the affirmative defends hedonistic consequentialism, they must explicitly delineate which theory of hedonistic pleasure they defend in the text of the AC. B. Violation: They don’t and maximizing expected well-being doesn’t cut it. IEP No Author, xx-xx-xxxx, "Hedonism," No Publication, https://iep.utm.edu/hedonism/ Several contemporary varieties of hedonism have been defended, although usually by just a handful of philosophers or less at any one time. Other varieties of hedonism are also theoretically available but have received little or no discussion. Contemporary varieties of Prudential Hedonism can be grouped based on how they define pleasure and pain, as is done below. In addition to providing different notions of what pleasure and pain are, contemporary varieties of Prudential Hedonism also disagree about what aspect or aspects of pleasure are valuable for well-being (and the opposite for pain). The most well-known disagreement about what aspects of pleasure are valuable occurs between Quantitative and Qualitative Hedonists. Quantitative Hedonists argue that how valuable pleasure is for well-being depends on only the amount of pleasure, and so they are only concerned with dimensions of pleasure such as duration and intensity. Quantitative Hedonism is often accused of over-valuing animalistic, simple, and debauched pleasures. Qualitative Hedonists argue that, in addition to the dimensions related to the amount of pleasure, one or more dimensions of quality can have an impact on how pleasure affects well-being. The quality dimensions might be based on how cognitive or bodily the pleasure is (as it was for Mill), the moral status of the source of the pleasure, or some other non-amount-related dimension. Qualitative Hedonism is criticised by some for smuggling values other than pleasure into well-being by misleadingly labelling them as dimensions of pleasure. How these qualities are chosen for inclusion is also criticised for being arbitrary or ad hoc by some because inclusion of these dimensions of pleasure is often in direct response to objections that Quantitative Hedonism cannot easily deal with. That is to say, the inclusion of these dimensions is often accused of being an exercise in plastering over holes, rather than deducing corollary conclusions from existing theoretical premises. Others have argued that any dimensions of quality can be better explained in terms of dimensions of quantity. For example, they might claim that moral pleasures are no higher in quality than immoral pleasures, but that moral pleasures are instrumentally more valuable because they are likely to lead to more moments of pleasure or less moments of pain in the future. Hedonists also have differing views about how the value of pleasure compares with the value of pain. This is not a practical disagreement about how best to measure pleasure and pain, but rather a theoretical disagreement about comparative value, such as whether pain is worse for us than an equivalent amount of pleasure is good for us. The default position is that one unit of pleasure (sometimes referred to as a Hedon) is equivalent but opposite in value to one unit of pain (sometimes referred to as a Dolor). Several Hedonistic Utilitarians have argued that reduction of pain should be seen as more important than increasing pleasure, sometimes for the Epicurean reason that pain seems worse for us than an equivalent amount of pleasure is good for us. Imagine that a magical genie offered for you to play a game with him. The game consists of you flipping a fair coin. If the coin lands on heads, then you immediately feel a burst of very intense pleasure and if it lands on tails, then you immediately feel a burst of very intense pain. Is it in your best interests to play the game? Another area of disagreement between some Hedonists is whether pleasure is entirely internal to a person or if it includes external elements. Internalism about pleasure is the thesis that, whatever pleasure is, it is always and only inside a person. Externalism about pleasure, on the other hand, is the thesis that, pleasure is more than just a state of an individual (that is, that a necessary component of pleasure lies outside of the individual). Externalists about pleasure might, for example, describe pleasure as a function that mediates between our minds and the environment, such that every instance of pleasure has one or more integral environmental components. The vast majority of historic and contemporary versions of Prudential Hedonism consider pleasure to be an internal mental state. Perhaps the least known disagreement about what aspects of pleasure make it valuable is the debate about whether we have to be conscious of pleasure for it to be valuable. The standard position is that pleasure is a conscious mental state, or at least that any pleasure a person is not conscious of does not intrinsically improve their well-being. C. Standards:
Shiftiness – They can shift out of my turns based on whatever theory of the good they operate under due to the nature of a vague standard. Especially true because the warrants for their standard could justify different versions of hedonism as coming first and I wouldn’t know until the 1ar which gives them access to multiple contingent standards. 2. Strat – I lose 6 minutes of time during the AC to generate a strategy because I don't know what turns or strategy I can go for during the 1N absent which proves CX doesn’t check since it would occur after the skew. 3. Resolvability – Makes the round irresolvable since we can’t weigh different mechanisms for the good – Sentimentalism hijacks would make more sense under a motivational theory of hedonism – weighing ground is key since it ensures we can compare arguments that clash to access the ballot. No infinite spec – Reading a syllogism solves. Fairness is a voter since debate is a competitive activity that intrinsically requires equal footing when participating, to minimize one’s ability to participate in discussion disrespects the other member of the activity. Drop the debater – 1. Deterrence – Prevents reading the abusive practice in the future since it’s not worth risking the loss which is k2 norm setting indefensible practices die out 2. TS – Otherwise you’ll read a bunch of abusive practices for the time trade off 3. Epistemic Skew – The round has already been skewed so it’s impossible to evaluate the rest of the flow Competing interps – 1. Reasonability encourages a race to the margins of what counts as sufficiently fair which incentivizes as much abuse as possible 2. Norm setting – it encourages the most fair rule through debating competing models 3. Judge intervention – Reasonability begs the question of what the judge thinks is sufficient which takes the round out of the debaters hands. No RVIs – 1. It deters legitimate theory vs good theory debaters because you will lose on a shell even if it’s a good norm 2. Baiting – incentivizes people to be abusive and script counter-interps to win on the RVI which increases the existence of bad norms 3. It forces debaters to argue for bad practices even if they realize their interp is wrong which kills substance debate and norm setting since we have bad theory debates we agree on. Use a norm setting model – 1. It solves long term abuse whereas IRA only matters one round at a time 2. It’s best for the activity since it encourages deep reflection and debate about what the best world of debate looks like and strives toward it.
1/28/22
0 - G - Spec Util Type
Tournament: NEW YORK CITY INVITATIONAL DEBATE AND SPEECH TOURNAMENT | Round: 2 | Opponent: Westford AW | Judge: Ribera, Claudia Interpretation: If the affirmative defends a consequentialist framework, they must explicitly delineate which theory of the good they defend in the form of a text in the 1ac.
Each nuance of the ethic entails different obligations and would exclude different offense – there are 7 different versions. Mastin, Luke Mastin, Consequentialism, The basics of philosophy http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_consequentialism.html Some consequentialist theories include: Utilitarianism, which holds that an action is right if it leads to the most happiness for the greatest number of people ("happiness" here is defined as the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of pain). Hedonism, which is the philosophy holds that pleasure is the most important pursuit of mankind, and that individuals should strive to maximise their own total pleasure (net of any pain or suffering). Epicureanism is a more moderate approach (which still seeks to maximize happiness, but which defines happiness more as a state of tranquillity than pleasure). Egoism, which holds that an action is right if it maximizes good for the self. Thus, Egoism may license actions which are good for an individual even if detrimental to the general welfare. Asceticism, in some ways, the opposite of Egoism in that it describes a life characterized by abstinence from egoistic pleasures especially to achieve a spiritual goal. Altruism, which prescribes that an individual take actions that have the best consequences for everyone except for himself, according to Auguste Comte's dictum, "Live for others". Thus, individuals have a moral obligation to help, serve or benefit others, if necessary at the sacrifice of self-interest. Rule Consequentialism, which is a theory (sometimes seen as an attempt to reconcile Consequentialism and Deontology), holds that moral behaviour involves following certain rules, but that those rules should be chosen based on the consequences that the selection of those rules have. Some theorists holds that a certain set of minimal rules are necessary to ensure appropriate actions, while some hold that the rules are not absolute and may be violated if strict adherence to the rule would lead to much more undesirable consequences. Negative Consequentialism, which focuses on minimizing bad consequences rather than promoting good consequences. This may actually require active intervention (to prevent harm from being done), or may only require passive avoidance of bad outcomes.
B. Violation: They don’t and maximizing expected well-being doesn’t cut it. Crisp, Roger, "Well-Being", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/well-being/. Well-being is most commonly used in philosophy to describe what is non-instrumentally or ultimately good for a person. The question of what well-being consists in is of independent interest, but it is of great importance in moral philosophy, especially in the case of utilitarianism, according to which the only moral requirement is that well-being be maximized. Significant challenges to the very notion have been mounted, in particular by G.E. Moore and T.M. Scanlon. It has become standard to distinguish theories of well-being as either hedonist theories, desire theories, or objective list theories. According to the view known as welfarism, well-being is the only value. Also important in ethics is the question of how a person’s moral character and actions relate to their well-being.
10/16/21
0 - G - TT
Tournament: Lexington Winter Invitational | Round: 2 | Opponent: Tampa-Jesuit MH | Judge: Claire Liu The role of the ballot is determine the truth or falsity of the resolution. Constitutive: The ballot asks you to either vote aff or neg based on the given resolution a) Five dictionaries define to negate as to deny the truth of and affirm as to prove true which means its intrinsic to the nature of the activity b) Anything else is intervention Branse, David Brasne '15 (), 9-4-2015, "The Role of the Judge By David Branse (Part One)," NSD Update,http://nsdupdate.com/2015/09/04/the-role-of-the-judge-by-david-branse-part-one First, bindingness: the practice rules argument I’ve sketched out illustrates this point. Once a judge commits to a round in accordance with a set of rules, the reasons within the round are different – the rules are absolute and non-optional. When a person signs a contract, if they come to regard the terms of the contract as problematic, this is not a reason to disregard the contract. It might only be a reason to try to renegotiate it. A decision about the practicality of the contract cannot, in itself, generate a reason to disobey the terms of the agreement. Second, arbitrariness: A maxim that provides the judge with the authority to vote on their perceived assessment of the activity’s goals seems to only emphasize the arbitrary, subjective elements of debate. There would be something deeply objectionable about the referee deciding to declare the better exerciser winner. Impositions of practical judgments seem to just be unfair ex post facto rules that step outside the judge’s jurisdiction. This is especially true with debate – education claims may seem somewhat intuitive, but there is no reason imposing practical judgments ends there. For example, one judge could come to believe that debate is a unique space to construct value judgments, and therefore the best debater is the one who best establishes a philosophy to win the round. Even though debate is a unique space for philosophical argumentation, no debater would feel comfortable for a judge voting on the AC framework when the neg won contention level offense beneath that framework. Every judge will have different value judgments, and so the role of the judge in each round would oscillate. This emphasizes judge intervention, and destroys the chance for debaters to predict each other’s arguments and thus engage with them. Very few people are comfortable viewing debate as an activity with oscillating rules where judges cannot be held to any predictable standard. Fiat is illusory: Nothing leaves this round other than the result on the ballot which means even if there is a higher purpose, it doesn’t change anything and you should just write whatever is important on the ballot and vote for me. Answering this triggers constitutivism since the win is necessary for your scholarship which means rules inside of the game matter. Isomorphism: ROBs that aren’t phrased as binaries maximize leeway for interpretation as to who is winning offense. Scalar framing mechanisms necessitate that the judge has to intervene to see who is closest at solving a problem. Truth testing solves since it’s solely a question of if something is true or false, there isn’t a closest estimate. Bindingness: a) all arguments pre-assume that they are true as judges don’t vote an arguments proven false b) in order to win that your ROB is superior to TT you must prove true the claim that your ROB is better than TT. Intrinsicness: Truth Testing is internal to the process of debating Branse 2, 9-4-2015, "The Role of the Judge By David Branse (Part One)," NSD Update, http://nsdupdate.com/2015/09/04/the-role-of-the-judge-by-david-branse-part-one/ In debate, those rules are testing the truth of a pre-given and pre-prepared topic. Switch-side debate provides a unique forum where we A) don’t have to endorse our arguments as true since we contradict ourselves every round and, B) view the process of warranting as supremely valuable, and C) can challenge all ethical assumptions we hold. Truth testing allows debaters to analyze arguments from a wide range of viewpoints, with an emphasis on contesting the warrants of every argument. In my opinion, the value and skills garnered in debate arise from the process of debating, not the content of the arguments or a particular pedagogical viewpoint. Debaters learn to structure logical syllogisms to warrant everything from the outrageous to the intuitive. The process of truth testing teaches debaters how to make decisions in the real world. We learn how to justify our beliefs and become good advocates not by rejecting this paradigm but by embracing it. Competition to determine the truth of a proposition motivates debaters to engage in the very practices that provide us education. Debaters extensively prep and research unique topical ideas for the sake of winning. Few debaters would have learned as much as they did about the living wage without debate’s competitive incentive.
1/15/22
0 - G - TT v2
Tournament: Lexington Winter Invitational | Round: 4 | Opponent: King CP | Judge: Chen, Vanessa The role of the ballot is determine the truth or falsity of the resolution. Constitutive: The ballot asks you to either vote aff or neg based on the given resolution a) Five dictionaries define to negate as to deny the truth of and affirm as to prove true which means its intrinsic to the nature of the activity b) Anything else is intervention Branse, David Brasne '15 (), 9-4-2015, "The Role of the Judge By David Branse (Part One)," NSD Update,http://nsdupdate.com/2015/09/04/the-role-of-the-judge-by-david-branse-part-one First, bindingness: the practice rules argument I’ve sketched out illustrates this point. Once a judge commits to a round in accordance with a set of rules, the reasons within the round are different – the rules are absolute and non-optional. When a person signs a contract, if they come to regard the terms of the contract as problematic, this is not a reason to disregard the contract. It might only be a reason to try to renegotiate it. A decision about the practicality of the contract cannot, in itself, generate a reason to disobey the terms of the agreement. Second, arbitrariness: A maxim that provides the judge with the authority to vote on their perceived assessment of the activity’s goals seems to only emphasize the arbitrary, subjective elements of debate. There would be something deeply objectionable about the referee deciding to declare the better exerciser winner. Impositions of practical judgments seem to just be unfair ex post facto rules that step outside the judge’s jurisdiction. This is especially true with debate – education claims may seem somewhat intuitive, but there is no reason imposing practical judgments ends there. For example, one judge could come to believe that debate is a unique space to construct value judgments, and therefore the best debater is the one who best establishes a philosophy to win the round. Even though debate is a unique space for philosophical argumentation, no debater would feel comfortable for a judge voting on the AC framework when the neg won contention level offense beneath that framework. Every judge will have different value judgments, and so the role of the judge in each round would oscillate. This emphasizes judge intervention, and destroys the chance for debaters to predict each other’s arguments and thus engage with them. Very few people are comfortable viewing debate as an activity with oscillating rules where judges cannot be held to any predictable standard. Fiat is illusory: Nothing leaves this round other than the result on the ballot which means even if there is a higher purpose, it doesn’t change anything and you should just write whatever is important on the ballot and vote for me. Answering this triggers constitutivism since the win is necessary for your scholarship which means rules inside of the game matter. Isomorphism: ROBs that aren’t phrased as binaries maximize leeway for interpretation as to who is winning offense. Scalar framing mechanisms necessitate that the judge has to intervene to see who is closest at solving a problem. Truth testing solves since it’s solely a question of if something is true or false, there isn’t a closest estimate. Inclusion: a) other ROBs open the door for personal lives of debaters to factor into decisions and compare who is more oppressed which causes violence in a space where some people go to escape. b) Anything can function under truth testing insofar as it proves the resolution either true or false. Specific role of the ballots exclude all offense besides those that follow from their framework which shuts out people without the technical skill or resources to prep for it. Normativity: Truth testing is the only ROB that encourages moral action guiding in every situation through an ethical fwk. Other ROBs pinpoint a problem, yet fail to apply in other ethical circumstances besides the one at hand. Proves that other ROBs trigger permissibility since they don’t condemn things that fall outside the scope of discussion. Bindingness: a) all arguments pre-assume that they are true as judges don’t vote an arguments proven false b) in order to win that your ROB is superior to TT you must prove true the claim that your ROB is better than TT. Intrinsicness: Truth Testing is internal to the process of debating Branse 2, 9-4-2015, "The Role of the Judge By David Branse (Part One)," NSD Update, http://nsdupdate.com/2015/09/04/the-role-of-the-judge-by-david-branse-part-one/ In debate, those rules are testing the truth of a pre-given and pre-prepared topic. Switch-side debate provides a unique forum where we A) don’t have to endorse our arguments as true since we contradict ourselves every round and, B) view the process of warranting as supremely valuable, and C) can challenge all ethical assumptions we hold. Truth testing allows debaters to analyze arguments from a wide range of viewpoints, with an emphasis on contesting the warrants of every argument. In my opinion, the value and skills garnered in debate arise from the process of debating, not the content of the arguments or a particular pedagogical viewpoint. Debaters learn to structure logical syllogisms to warrant everything from the outrageous to the intuitive. The process of truth testing teaches debaters how to make decisions in the real world. We learn how to justify our beliefs and become good advocates not by rejecting this paradigm but by embracing it. Competition to determine the truth of a proposition motivates debaters to engage in the very practices that provide us education. Debaters extensively prep and research unique topical ideas for the sake of winning. Few debaters would have learned as much as they did about the living wage without debate’s competitive incentive. Critical pedagogy forces the judge into the role of coercer. Rickert, (Thomas, “"Hands Up, You're Free": Composition in a Post-Oedipal World”, JacOnline Journal, wbem) An example of the connection between violence and pedagogy is implicit in the notion of being "schooled" as it has been conceptualized by Giroux is and Peter Mcl.aren. They explain, "Fundamental to the principles that inform critical pedagogy is the conviction that schooling for self- and social empowerment is ethically prior to questions of epistemology or to a mastery oftechnical or social skills that are primarily tied to the logic of the marketplace" (153-54). A presumption here is that it is the teacher who knows (best), and this orientation gives the concept of schooling a particular bite: though it presents itself as oppositional to the state and the dominant forms of pedagogy that serve the state and its capitalist interests, it nevertheless reinscribes an authoritarian model that is congruent with any number of oedipalizing pedagogies that "school" the student in proper behavior. As Diane Davis notes, radical, feminist, and liberatory pedagogies "often camouflage pedagogical violence in their move from one mode of 'normalization' to another" and "function within a disciplinary matrix of power, a covert carceral system, that aims to create useful subjects for particular political agendas" (212). Such oedipalizing pedagogies are less effective in practice than what the claims for them assert; indeed, the attempt to "school" students in the manner called for by Giroux and McLaren is complicitous with the malaise of postmodern cynicism. Students will dutifully go through their liberatory motions, producing the proper assignments, but it remains an open question whether they carry an oppositional politics with them. The "critical distance" supposedly created with liberatory pedagogy also opens up a cynical distance toward the writing produced in class Truth testing is the only democratically agreed upon framing. All others assume individual interpretations are correct but that collapses to egoism. Mouffe Mouffe, Chantal. The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso, 2000. Print. LHP AA In coming to terms with pluralism, what is really at stake is power and antagonism and their ineradicable character. This can only be grasped from a perspective that puts into question the objectivism and essentialism which are dominant in democratic theory. In Hegemony and Socialist strategy, we delineated an approach that asserts that any social objectivity is constituted through acts of power. This means that any social objectivity is ultimately political and has to show the traces of the acts of exclusion which govern its constitution; what, following Derrida, can be referred to as its 'constitutive outside'. This point is decisive. It is because every object has inscribed in its very being something other than itself and that as a result, everything is constructed as difference. that its being cannot be conceived as pure 'presence' or 'objectivity'. Since the constitutive outside is present within the inside as its always real possibility every identity becomes purely contingent. This implies that we should not conceptualize power as an external relation taking place between two pre-constituted identities, but rather as constituting the identities themselves. This point of confluence between objectivity and power is what we have called 'hegemony'. When we envisage democratic politics from such an antiessentialist perspective, we can begin to understand that, for democracy to exist, no social agent should be able to claim any mastery of the foundation of society. This signifies that the relation between social agents becomes more democratic only as far as they accept the particularity and the limitation of their claims; that is, only in so far as they recognize their mutual relation as one from which power is ineradicable. The democratic society cannot be conceived any more as a society that would have realized the dream of a perfect harmony in social relations. Its democratic character can only be given by the fact that no limited social actor can attribute to herself or himself the representation of the totality. The main question of democratic politics becomes then not how to eliminate power, but how to constitute forms of power which are compatible with democratic values. To acknowledge the existence of relations of power and the need to transform them, while renouncing the illusion that we could free ourselves completely from power - this is what is specific to the project that we have called 'radical and plural democracy'. Such a project recognizes that the specificity of modern pluralist democracy - even a well-ordered one - does not reside in the absence of domination and of violence but resides in the establishment of a set of institutions through which they domination and violence can be limited and contested. To negate the ineradicable character of antagonism and to aim at a universal rational consensus - this is the real threat to democracy. Indeed, this can lead to violence being unrecognized and hidden behind appeals to . rationality', as is often the case in liberal thinking which disguises the necessary frontiers and forms of exclusion behind pretenses of 'neutrality'.
1/16/22
0 - G - Util Fwk
Tournament: Barkley Forum for High Schools | Round: 3 | Opponent: Pennsbury GB | Judge: Mitra, Shampurna The standard is maximizing expected well being. To clarify, hedonistic act util. Prefer – 1 Only pleasure and pain are intrinsically valuable – all other frameworks collapse. 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 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. 2 No intent foresight distinction for states. Enoch 07 Enoch, D The Faculty of Law, The Hebrew Unviersity, Mount Scopus Campus, Jersusalem. (2007). INTENDING, FORESEEING, AND THE STATE. Legal Theory, 13(02). doi:10.1017/s1352325207070048 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/legal-theory/article/intending-foreseeing-and-the-state/76B18896B94D5490ED0512D8E8DC54B2 The general difficulty of the intending-foreseeing distinction here stemmed, you will recall, from the feeling that attempting to pick and choose among the foreseen consequences of one’s actions those one is more and those one is less responsible for looks more like the preparation of a defense than like a genuine attempt to determine what is to be done. Hiding behind the intending-foreseeing distinction seems like an attempt to evade responsibility, and so thinking about the distinction in terms of responsibility serves 39. Anderson and Pildes, supra note 38. I will use this text as my example of an expressive theory here. 40. See id. at 1554, 1564. 41. For a general critique, see Mathew D. Adler, Expressive Theories of Law: A Skeptical Overview, 148 U. PA. L. REV. 1363 (1999–2000). 42. As Adler repeatedly notes, the understanding of expression Anderson and Pildes work with is amazingly broad, so that “To express an attitude through action is to act on the reasons the attitude gives us”; Anderson and Pildes, supra note 38, at 1510. If this is so, it seems that expression drops out of the picture and everything done with it can be done directly in terms of reasons. 43. This may be true of what Anderson and Pildes have in mind when they say that “expressive norms regulate actions by regulating the acceptable justifications for doing them”; id. at 1511. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 03 Aug 2014 IP address: 134.153.184.170 Intending, Foreseeing, and the State 91 to reduce even further the plausibility of attributing to it intrinsic moral significance. This consideration—however weighty in general—seems to me very weighty when applied to state action and to the decisions of state officials. For perhaps it may be argued that individuals are not required to undertake a global perspective, one that equally takes into account all foreseen consequences of their actions. Perhaps, in other words, individuals are entitled to (roughly) settle for having a good will, and beyond that let chips fall where they may. But this is precisely what stateswomen and statesmen—and certainly states—are not entitled to settle for.44 In making policy decisions, it is precisely the global (or at least statewide, or nationwide, or something of this sort) perspective that must be undertaken. Perhaps, for instance, an individual doctor is entitled to give her patient a scarce drug without thinking about tomorrow’s patients (I say “perhaps” because I am genuinely not sure about this), but surely when a state committee tries to formulate rules for the allocation of scarce medical drugs and treatments, it cannot hide behind the intending-foreseeing distinction, arguing that if it allows45 the doctor to give the drug to today’s patient, the death of tomorrow’s patient is merely foreseen and not intended. When making a policy-decision, this is clearly unacceptable. Or think about it this way (I follow Daryl Levinson here):46 perhaps restrictions on the responsibility of individuals are justified because individuals are autonomous, because much of the value in their lives comes from personal pursuits and relationships that are possible only if their responsibility for what goes on in the (more impersonal) world is restricted. But none of this is true of states and governments. They have no special relationships and pursuits, no personal interests, no autonomous lives to lead in anything like the sense in which these ideas are plausible when applied to individuals persons. So there is no reason to restrict the responsibility of states in anything like the way the responsibility of individuals is arguably restricted.47 States and state officials have much more comprehensive responsibilities than individuals do. Hiding behind the intending-foreseeing distinction thus more clearly constitutes an evasion of responsibility in the case of the former. So the evading-responsibility worry has much more force against the intending-foreseeing distinction when applied to state action than elsewhere.
3 Only consequentialism explains degrees of wrongness—if I break a promise to meet up for lunch, that is not as bad as breaking a promise to take a dying person to the hospital. Only the consequences of breaking the promise explain why the second one is much worse than the first which is the most intuitive. Outweighs- A Parsimony- metaphysics relies on long chains of questionable claims that make conclusions less likely. B Hijacks- intuitions are inevitable since even every framework must take some unjustified assumption as a starting point.
4 Prefer consequentialism to moral purity – moral purity and prioritizing specific groups causes complicity in injustice Isaac 02 – Professor of Political Science at Indiana-Bloomington (Jeffrey, “Ends, Means, and Politics,” Dissent Magazine 49(2), Spring 2002) Power is not a dirty word or an unfortunate feature of the world. It is the core of politics. Power is the ability to effect outcomes in the world. Politics, in large part, involves contests over the distribution and use of power. To accomplish anything in the political world, one must attend to the means that are necessary to bring it about. And to develop such means is to develop, and to exercise, power. To say this is not to say that power is beyond morality. It is to say that power is not reducible to morality. As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an unyielding concern with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility. The concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of one's intention does not ensure the achievement of what one intends. Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally compromised parties may seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean conscience of their supporters; (2) it fails to see that in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness; it is often a form of complicity in injustice. This is why, from the standpoint of politics--as opposed to religion--pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand. In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any effect; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action, that is most significant. Just as the alignment with "good" may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of "good" that generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that one's goals be sincere or idealistic; it is equally important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals and to judge these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized ways. Moral absolutism inhibits this judgment. It alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance. And it undermines political effectiveness.
Impact calc – Extinction mathematically outweighs. MacAskill 14 William, Oxford Philosopher and youngest tenured philosopher in the world, Normative Uncertainty, 2014 The human race might go extinct from a number of causes: asteroids, supervolcanoes, runaway climate change, pandemics, nuclear war, and the development and use of dangerous new technologies such as synthetic biology, all pose risks (even if very small) to the continued survival of the human race.184 And different moral views give opposing answers to question of whether this would be a good or a bad thing. It might seem obvious that human extinction would be a very bad thing, both because of the loss of potential future lives, and because of the loss of the scientific and artistic progress that we would make in the future. But the issue is at least unclear. The continuation of the human race would be a mixed bag: inevitably, it would involve both upsides and downsides. And if one regards it as much more important to avoid bad things happening than to promote good things happening then one could plausibly regard human extinction as a good thing.For example, one might regard the prevention of bads as being in general more important that the promotion of goods, as defended historically by G. E. Moore,185 and more recently by Thomas Hurka.186 One could weight the prevention of suffering as being much more important that the promotion of happiness. Or one could weight the prevention of objective bads, such as war and genocide, as being much more important than the promotion of objective goods, such as scientific and artistic progress. If the human race continues its future will inevitably involve suffering as well as happiness, and objective bads as well as objective goods. So, if one weights the bads sufficiently heavily against the goods, or if one is sufficiently pessimistic about humanity’s ability to achieve good outcomes, then one will regard human extinction as a good thing.187 However, even if we believe in a moral view according to which human extinction would be a good thing, we still have strong reason to prevent near-term human extinction. To see this, we must note three points. First, we should note that the extinction of the human race is an extremely high stakes moral issue. Humanity could be around for a very long time: if humans survive as long as the median mammal species, we will last another two million years. On this estimate, the number of humans in existence in the The future, given that we don’t go extinct any time soon, would be 2×10^14. So if it is good to bring new people into existence, then it’s very good to prevent human extinction. Second, human extinction is by its nature an irreversible scenario. If we continue to exist, then we always have the option of letting ourselves go extinct in the future (or, perhaps more realistically, of considerably reducing population size). But if we go extinct, then we can’t magically bring ourselves back into existence at a later date. Third, we should expect ourselves to progress, morally, over the next few centuries, as we have progressed in the past. So we should expect that in a few centuries’ time we will have better evidence about how to evaluate human extinction than we currently have. Given these three factors, it would be better to prevent the near-term extinction of the human race, even if we thought that the extinction of the human race would actually be a very good thing. To make this concrete, I’ll give the following simple but illustrative model. Suppose that we have 0.8 credence that it is a bad thing to produce new people, and 0.2 certain that it’s a good thing to produce new people; and the degree to which it is good to produce new people, if it is good, is the same as the degree to which it is bad to produce new people, if it is bad. That is, I’m supposing, for simplicity, that we know that one new life has one unit of value; we just don’t know whether that unit is positive or negative. And let’s use our estimate of 2×10^14 people who would exist in the future, if we avoid near-term human extinction. Given our stipulated credences, the expected benefit of letting the human race go extinct now would be (.8-.2)×(2×10^14) = 1.2×(10^14). Suppose that, if we let the human race continue and did research for 300 years, we would know for certain whether or not additional people are of positive or negative value. If so, then with the credences above we should think it 80 likely that we will find out that it is a bad thing to produce new people, and 20 likely that we will find out that it’s a good thing to produce new people. So there’s an 80 chance of a loss of 3×(10^10) (because of the delay of letting the human race go extinct), the expected value of which is 2.4×(10^10). But there’s also a 20 chance of a gain of 2×(10^14), the expected value of which is 4×(10^13). That is, in expected value terms, the cost of waiting for a few hundred years is vanishingly small compared with the benefit of keeping one’s options open while one gains new information.
TJFs – a) ground – every impact function under util whereas other ethics flow to one side exclusively. Kills fairness since we both need arguments to win b) Topic lit – most articles are written through the lens of util because they’re crafted for policymakers and the general public who take consequences to be important, not philosophy majors. Key to fairness and education – the lit is where we do research and determines how we engage in the round. c) Prep small school debaters only new a few good generics like the econ disad or the cap k to win every single util round but under kant since contentions are less variable and analytics are more important, big school block writing hoses them every time. Blocks don’t matter as much in util because innovation checks coaching bias. d) education – there are like 6 pieces of kant offense which under their model causes recycling of arguments which is uneducational whereas util advantages and new affs are broken often
1/28/22
0 - G - Util K
Tournament: NEW YORK CITY INVITATIONAL DEBATE AND SPEECH TOURNAMENT | Round: 2 | Opponent: Westford AW | Judge: Ribera, Claudia
Util justifies atrocities since it justifies allowing us to harm some for the benefit of others – even if they spew some pain quantifiability argument that doesn’t solve since there are still instances some get great benefit from others harm.
2. Util can’t justify intrinsic wrongness – We can’t know whether our action was good until we’ve evaluated the states of affairs they’ve produced since it’s based on the outcome of the action. For Example if asked the question “is rape okay?” a utilitarian would not be able to say yes because there are situations in which it would be morally obligatory to do so if it maximized pleasure. Probability doesn’t solve because that just allows for moral error and freezes action while attempting to calculate the perfect decision.
Two Impacts:
1 It triggers permissibility since they can’t generate a correct moral obligation that justifies affirming. That negates: A) Semantics – Ought is defined as expressing obligation which means absent a proactive obligation you vote neg since there’s a trichotomy between prohibition, obligation, and permissibility and proving one disproves the other two and B) Safety – It’s ethically safer to presume the squo since we know what the squo is but we can’t know whether the aff will be good or not if ethics are incoherent.
2 They read morally repugnant arguments. Thus the alternative is to drop the debater, to ensure that debate remains a space safe for all – the judge has a proximal obligation to ensure inaccessible practices don’t proliferate. Accessibility is a voting issue since all aff arguments presuppose that people feel safe in this space to respond to them.
10/16/21
00 - Contact
Tournament: Disclosure Demos | Round: 1 | Opponent: Disclosure Dinosaurs | Judge: People who probably like disclosure Contact Info - Email: frazierbat101@gmail.com
10/16/21
1 - SO - Alienation NC
Tournament: NEW YORK CITY INVITATIONAL DEBATE AND SPEECH TOURNAMENT | Round: 6 | Opponent: Bergen County Academies AK | Judge: Morris, Brendon Permissibility Negates –
Semantics – Ought is defined as expressing obligation which means absent a proactive obligation you vote neg since there’s a trichotomy between prohibition, obligation, and permissibility and proving one disproves the other two. Semantics o/w – a) it’s key to predictability since we prep based on the wording of the res and b) it’s constitutive to the rules of debate since the judge is obligated to vote on the resolutional text. 2. Safety – It’s ethically safer to presume the squo since we know what the squo is but we can’t know whether the aff will be good or not if ethics are incoherent. 3. Logic – Propositions require positive justification before being accepted, otherwise one would be forced to accept the validity of logically contradictory propositions regarding subjects one knows nothing about, i.e if one knew nothing about P one would have to presume that both the “P” and “P” are true. Volition, or the structure of the will, is a pre-condition for ethics and has intrinsic value – A) Proceduralism – the will is the mechanism by which every agent engages in any activity, which means regardless of the content of any ethical theory, the ability to will that theory is an intrinsic good B) Motivation – the structure of the will is the primary source of all our desires, reasons, and beliefs since it generates what counts as motivational to the subject C) Identity – the nature of the will is most constitutive to the creation of the subject since it determines what each subject considers intrinsic to its identity and what exists externally as an façade.
Ethical theories to evaluate the will face a dilemma – they are either paternally objectivist to the extent they restrict the will, or they are weakened by subjectivism to the extent that it’s impossible to make true moral claims. Jaeggi 14, Jaeggi, Rahel. “Alienation.” Columbia University Press, cup.columbia.edu/book/alienation/Scopa. From the perspective of liberal theory one aspect of the critique of alienation appears problematic above all others: theories of alienation appear to appeal to objective criteria that lie beyond the “sovereignty” of individuals to interpret for themselves what the good life consists in. Herbert Marcuse exemplifies this tendency of many theories of alienation in One Dimensional Man—a book that provided a crucial impulse for the New Left’s critique of alienation in the 1960s and 1970s— when, unconcerned with the liberal objection, he defends the validity of diagnoses of alienation with respect to the increased integration and identification with social relations that characterize the members of affluent industrial societies: “I have just suggested that the concept of alienation seems to become questionable when the individuals identify themselves with the existence which is imposed upon them and have in it their own development and satisfaction. This identification is not illusion, but reality. However, the reality constitutes a more progressive stage of alienation. The latter has become entirely objective; the subject which is alienated is swallowed up by its alienated existence.”10 The subjective satisfaction of those who are integrated into objectively alienated relations is, according to Marcuse, “a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood.”11 Here, however, the theory of alienation appears to have made itself immune to refutation. It would seem, then, that the concept of alienation belongs to a perfectionist ethical theory that presupposes, broadly speaking, that it is possible to determine what is objectively good for humans by identifying a set of properties or a set of functions inherent in human nature—a “purpose”—that ought to be realized. But if the foundation of modern morality and the fundamental conviction of liberal conceptions of society is the idea “that it should be left to each individual how he lives his own life” 12—that individuals are sovereign with respect to interpreting their own lives—then a theory of alienation that relies on objective perfectionist ideals appears to reject this idea in favor of a paternalist perspective that claims to “know better.” For the latter (and as seems to be the case for Marcuse), it is possible for something to count as objectively good for someone without him subjectively valuing it as such. By the same token, it is possible to criticize a form of life as alienated or false without there being any subjective perception of suffering. But can someone be alienated from herself in the sense outlined here if she herself fails to perceive it? Can we claim of someone that she is alienated from her own desires or driven by false (alienated) needs or that she pursues an alienated way of life if she claims to be living precisely the life she wants to lead? In diagnoses of alienation the question arises, then, whether there can be objective evidence of pathology that contradicts individuals’ subjective assessments or preferences. This is a dilemma that is difficult to resolve. On the one hand, the concept of alienation (this is what distinguishes it from weaker forms of critique) claims to be able to bring to individuals’ prima facie evaluations and preferences a deeper dimension of critique—a critical authority—that functions as a corrective to their own assertions. On the other hand, it is not easy to justify the position of such a critical corrective. What could the objective criteria that overrule the assessments and preferences of individuals be in this case? 13 The arguments from human nature frequently appealed to in this context demonstrate, even in their most methodologically sophisticated, “thin” variants, the problems that plague attempts to derive normative standards from some conception of human nature. 14 Even if there is—in a banal sense—something humans share on the basis of their natural, biological constitution, and even if—in a banal sense—certain functional needs can be derived from these basic presuppositions of human life (all humans need nourishment or certain climatic conditions in order to survive), these basic conditions imply very little when it comes to evaluating how humans, in relation to issues beyond mere survival, lead their lives. On the other hand, the more human nature is given a specific content such that it becomes relevant to (culturally specific) forms of life, the more controversial and contestable the claims become. How are we to define human nature when its extraordinary variability and malleability appear to be part of human nature itself?15 And how are we to pick out among diverse forms of human life those that really correspond to human nature, given that even forms of life criticized as alienated have been in some way developed, advanced, and lived by human beings?
Only a functional understanding of the will solves – it ensures the very nature of the will is taken care of through appropriate willing capacities, without over-limiting it to a strict set of substantive rules. This functional capacity of willing is mediated by social roles – as the authentic self is inexplicably linked to the self that engages in social communities with others through duplication. Understanding the functionality of the will is impossible in a vacuum. Jaeggi 2, Jaeggi, Rahel. “Alienation.” Columbia University Press, cup.columbia.edu/book/alienation/Scopa. The positions of both authors can be reduced to the following common denominator: roles are less alienating than constitutive for the development of persons and personality. They are constitutive in the sense that they are directly bound up with a person’s development and, so, “productive.” At first glance this position might seem to come down on one side of the two alternatives—an unconditional affirmation of roles—but after giving a brief account of the position, I will make use of it to move beyond the two alternatives. Once the “productivity thesis” has been articulated, it will be possible to distinguish between alienating and non-alienating aspects of role behavior. THE HUMAN BEING AS DOPPELGÄNGER Roles are productive. In and through them we first become ourselves. This is the essence of Helmuth Plessner’s conception of the positive significance of roles (which he developed as a direct response to critiques of them as alienating). “The human being is always himself only in ‘doubling’ in relation to a role figure he can experience. Also, all that he sees as comprising his authenticity is but the role he plays before himself and others.22 Roles on this view are not only necessary in order to make social interaction possible, whether this be a “being together” of individuals or a benign “passing each other by;” interaction mediated by roles is also constitutive of an individual’s relation to herself. This culminates in the act of appropriation – the ability to view yourself as a practical agent capable of taking up a project that actively changes your own subject and the role itself. Jaeggi 3, Jaeggi, Rahel. “Alienation.” Columbia University Press, cup.columbia.edu/book/alienation/Scopa. What does it mean to appropriate something?12 If the concept of appropriation refers to a specific relation between self and world, between individuals and objects (whether spiritual or material), what precisely does this relation look like, what are its particular character and its specific structure? Various aspects come together here, and together they account for the concept’s appeal and potential. As opposed to the mere learning of certain contents, talk of appropriation emphasizes that something is not merely passively taken up but actively worked through and independently assimilated. In contrast to merely theoretical insight into some issue, appropriation—comparable to the psychoanalytic process of “working through”—means that one can “deal with” what one knows, that it stands at one’s disposal as knowledge and that one really and practically has command over it. And appropriating a role means more than being able to fill it: one is, we could say, identified with it. Something that we appropriate does not remain external to ourselves. In making something our own, it becomes a part of ourselves in a certain respect. This suggests a kind of introjection and a mixing of oneself with the objects of appropriation. It also evokes the idea of productively and formatively interacting with what one makes one’s own. Appropriation does not leave what is appropriated unchanged. This is why the appropriation of public spaces, for example, means more than that one uses them. We make them our own by making a mark on them through what we do in and with them, by transforming them through appropriative use such that they first acquire a specific form through this use (though not necessarily in a material sense). Although it has one of its roots in an account of property relations, the concept of appropriation, in contrast to mere possession, emphasizes the particular quality of a process that first constitutes a real act of taking possession of something. Accordingly, appropriation is a particular mode of seizing possession.13 Someone who appropriates something puts her individual mark on it, inserts her own ends and qualities into it. This means that sometimes we must still make something that we already possess our own. Relations of appropriation, then, are characterized by several features: appropriation is a form of praxis, a way of relating practically to the world. It refers to a relation of penetration, assimilation, and internalization in which what is appropriated is at the same time altered, structured, and formed. The crucial point of this model (also of great importance for Marx) is a consequence of this structure of penetration and assimilation: appropriation always means a transformation of both poles of the relation. In a process of appropriation both what is appropriated and the appropriator are transformed. Thus, the standard is consistency with non-alienated relations. Prefer –
Performativity – Every exercise you engage in is an instance of using your volition to establish some relation to the world and only non-alienation can establish that relationship as normatively legitimate. 2. Action theory – Only viewing an agent as an active body capable of generating intentions can hold agents culpable and decipher the difference between actions and wishes. That’s a necessary feature of ethics since we must be able to warrant a coherent conception of what motivates our actions in order to provide a method to actually implement ethical principles. 3. Epistemology – Only an understanding of appropriation can unify the distinction between theoretical and practical knowledge. Theoretical abstract concepts like 2+2=4 are true and necessary, but can only becomes useful once explained in context of how they actualize in the world through our intentions. That means absent an explanation of how that knowledge mixes with the world around us, it becomes useless. Contention I contend that member nations of the WTO ought not reduce intellectual property protections for medicine. 1 Intellectual property is a self-expression of the subject. When it’s used in a way that doesn’t reflect the framer’s intent, it is alienating. Justin Hughes 98, "The Philosophy of Intellectual Property," 77 Georgetown L.J. 287, 330-350 (1988) https://cyber.harvard.edu/IPCoop/88hugh2.html AHSMAK recut emi Accessed 8/10/21 "On the Hegelian perspective, payments from intellectual property users to the property creator are acts of recognition." 3. Intellectual Property Under Hegel. For Hegel, intellectual property need not be justified by analogy to physical property. In fact, the analogy to physical property may distort the status Hegel ascribes to personality and mental traits in relation to the will. Hegel writes: Mental aptitudes, erudition, artistic skill, even things ecclesiastical (like sermons, masses, prayers, consecration of votive objects), inventions, and so forth, become subjects of a contract, brought on to a parity, through being bought and sold, with things recognized as things. It may be asked whether the artist, scholar, andc., is from the legal point of view in possession of his art, erudition, ability to preach a sermon, sing a mass, andc., that is, whether such attainments are "things." We may hesitate to call such abilities, attainments, aptitudes, andc., "things," for while possession of these may be the subject of business dealings and contracts, as if they were things, there is also something inward and mental about it, and for this reason the Understanding may be in perplexity about how to describe such possession in legal terms. . . . n205. Intellectual property provides a way out of this problem, by "materializing" these personal traits. Hegel goes on to say that "attainments, eruditions, talents, and so forth, are, of course, owned by free mind and are something internal and not external to it, but even so, by expressing them it may embody *338 them in something external and alienate them." n206.Hegel takes the position that one cannot alienate or surrender any universal element of one's self. Hence slavery is not permissible because by "alienating the whole of my time, as crystallized in my work, I would be making into another's property the substance of my being, my universal activity and actuality, my personality." n207 Similarly, there is no right to sacrifice one's life because that is the surrender of the "comprehensive sum of external activity." n208 This doctrine supplies at least a framework to answer the question of intellectual property that most concerns Hegel. It is a question we ignore today, but one that is not easy to answer: what justifies the author in alienating copies of his work while retaining the exclusive right to reproduce further copies of that work. A sculptor or painter physically embodies his will in the medium and produces one piece of art. When another artist copies this piece Hegel thinks that the hand-made copy "is essentially a product of the copyist's own mental and technical ability" and does not infringe upon the original artist's property. n209 The problem arises when a creator of intellectual property does not embody his will in an object in the same way the artist does. The writer physically manifests his will only "in a series of abstract symbols" which can be rendered into "things" by mechanical processes not requiring any talent. n210 The dilemma is exacerbated by the fact that "the purpose of a product of mind is that people other than its author should understand it and make it the possession of their ideas, memory, thinking, andc." n211 This concern for the common of ideas is familiar. In resolving this dilemma, Hegel says that the alienation of a single copy of a work need not entail the right to produce facsimiles because such reproduction is one of the "universal ways and means of expression . . . which belong to the author." n212 Just as he does not sell himself into slavery, the author keeps the universal aspect of expression as his own. The copy sold is for the buyer's own consumption; its only purpose is to allow the buyer to incorporate these ideas into his "self." Hegel also identifies the instrumentalist-labor justification as a consideration against granting full rights of reproduction to buyers of individual copies *339 of a work. Hegel admits that protecting intellectual property is "the purely negative, though the primary, means of advancing the sciences and arts." n213 Beyond this, Hegel says little. He declares that intellectual property is a "capital asset" and explicitly links this label to a later section in which he defines a "capital asset." n214 There is considerable literature on how Hegel did not develop the idea of "capital" to its logical conclusions, n215 but here "capital asset" can be understood as property which has a greater tendency to permanence and a greater ability than other property to give its own economic security 2 IP is key to recognizing agents through the personality in their work. Recognition is necessary for agents to be non-alienated bc we need to establish relations with the world. Hughes 2 - "The Philosophy of Intellectual Property," 77 Georgetown L.J. 287, 330-350 (1988) by Justin Hughes https://cyber.harvard.edu/IPCoop/88hugh2.html ahs emi At first blush, this economic rationale seems far removed from the concerns of personality theory, n244 yet it can be recast into the framework of the personality theory. From the Hegelian perspective, payments from intellectual property users to the property creator are acts of recognition. These payments acknowledge the individual's claim over the property, and it is through such acknowledgement that an individual is recognized by others as a person. n245 "Recognition" involves more than lip service. If I say "this forest is your property" and then proceed to flagrantly trespass, cut your timber, and hunt your deer, I have not recognized your property rights. Similarly, verbal recognition of an intellectual property claim is not equal to the recognition implicit in a payment. Purchasers of a copyrighted work or licensees of a patent form a circle of people recognizing the creator as a person. Furthermore, this generation of income complements the personality theory in as much as income facilitates further expression. When royalties from an invention allow the inventor to buy a grand piano he has always wanted, the transaction helps maximize personality. But this argument tends to be too broad. First, much income is used for basic necessities, leading to the vacuous position that life-sustenance is "personally maximizing" because it allows the personality to continue. Second, this approach could justify property rights for after-the-fact development of personality interests without requiring *350 such interests in the property at the time the property rights are granted. The personality theory provides a better, more direct justification for the alienation of intellectual property, especially copies. The alienation of copies is perhaps the most rational way to gain exposure for one's ideas. This is a non-economic, and perhaps higher, form of the idea of recognition: respect, honor, and admiration. Even for starving artists recognition of this sort may be far more valuable than economic rewards. Two conditions appear essential, however, to this justification of alienation: first, the creator of the work must receive public identification, and, second, the work must receive protection against any changes unintended or unapproved by the creator.VARA Hegel's prohibition of "complete" alienation of intellectual property appears to result from his recognition of the necessity for these two conditions. While he would permit alienation of copies, and even the rights to further reproduction, n246 he disapproves alienation of "those goods, or rather substantive characteristics, which constitute . . . private personality and the universal essence of . . . self-consciousness." n247 Such alienation necessarily occurs if the recognition of the connection between a creator and his expression is destroyed or distorted. When the first condition is violated, this recognition is destroyed; when the second condition is violated, it is distorted. 3. Objectification - Absent intellectual property, agents feel like objects since they aren’t recognized for their exercise of agency. They lack incentive to innovate bc they’re detached from their goods.
10/17/21
1 - SO - Impact D v1
Tournament: NEW YORK CITY INVITATIONAL DEBATE AND SPEECH TOURNAMENT | Round: 2 | Opponent: Westford AW | Judge: Ribera, Claudia No pandemic impact Barratt, DPhil, 17 (Owen-Cotton Barratt, John Halstead, Stefan Schubert, Haydn Belfield, Andrew Snyder-Beattie, Global Priorities Project 2017, 1/23/2017, accessed 2-8-2017, https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/Existential-Risks-2017-01-23.pdf) dlb For most of human history, natural pandemics have posed the greatest risk of mass global fatalities.37 However, there are some reasons to believe that natural pandemics are very unlikely to cause human extinction. Analysis of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red list database has shown that of the 833 recorded plant and animal species extinctions known to have occurred since 1500, less than 4 (31 species) were ascribed to infectious disease.38 None of the mammals and amphibians on this list were globally dispersed, and other factors aside from infectious disease also contributed to their extinction. It therefore seems that our own species, which is very numerous, globally dispersed, and capable of a rational response to problems, is very unlikely to be killed off by a natural pandemic. One underlying explanation for this is that highly lethal pathogens can kill their hosts before they have a chance to spread, so there is a selective pressure for pathogens not to be highly lethal. Therefore, pathogens are likely to co-evolve with their hosts rather than kill all possible hosts.39
10/16/21
1 - SO - Liberal Democracy K
Tournament: NEW YORK CITY INVITATIONAL DEBATE AND SPEECH TOURNAMENT | Round: 2 | Opponent: Westford AW | Judge: Ribera, Claudia Scenario planning is the violent pre-determination of reality by power, not a neutral technology that we should apply uniformly. It assumes the position of power and tasks itself with protecting it, adopting an inherently reactionary stance that stifles alternative imaginations. Ossewarde 17. (Dr. Marinus, Associate Professor at the University of Twente, “Unmasking scenario planning: The colonization of the future in the ‘Local Governments of the Future’ program.” Futures, Volume 93 (2017), Pages 80-88, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328716302798)//AD Scenario planning is meant to be a dialectical quest for open futures, whereby alternative worlds are envisioned and judgement as to the most desirable world is suspended. Such a dialogical process, associated with democratic politics of world making, typically implies the critique, negation and transcendence of the established power constellation, which is by its very nature conservative. Hence, power holders are tempted to believe that their rule is indefinite and that history has ended – since all activities are directed towards the maintenance of the current order. Conversely, action, which ‘has an inherent tendency to force open all limitations and cut across all boundaries’ is discouraged (Arendt 1958: 190). Hannah Arendt therefore went so far as claiming that ‘action, seen from the viewpoint of the automatic processes which seem to determine the course of the world, looks like a miracle’ (Arendt 1958: 246). Established power elites may have an interest in scenario planning, but the future with which they are fascinated is the prolongation of their current worlds. In other words, scenario planning is used for colonizing the future. In a colonized ‘scenario planning’, predominant or currently powerful stakeholders do not search for alternative futures, but, instead, enact their own ideological discourses, imaginaries and frames. The current power constellation is left unquestioned, and taken for granted in the scenario planning, as if established power factions will perdure in the future. The negation of well-established biases and prejudices is held in check, in order to safeguard the status quo. Such conservativism is legitimized by referring to current trends that are endowed with the aura of necessity or inevitability (natural and eternal laws). A colonized ‘scenario planning’ therefore masks unequal and often illegitimate power relationships. Historically, it appears that scenario planning has more often than not been a tool for colonization, designed to secure the future rule of the established power complex. In the 1940s, Herman Kahn and the RAND Corporation developed scenario planning to enable US military rulers to forecast the moves of potential opponents and to accordingly develop counteroffensives in the nuclear arms race (Tevis 2010). In the 1970s, Pierre Wack and Royal Dutch/Shell established scenario planning activities as an integral part of strategic management, to secure oil interests in the context of ecological crisis and the oil crisis (Wack 1985; Chermack and Coons 2015). The stimulus for scenario planning in these cases was the perceived rise of uncertainties in a world that had become more unpredictable and potentially apocalyptic. Horror scenarios of nuclear wars and a Third World War had become commonplace in the 1950s. Stories of ecological catastrophe, with a vision of large tracts of the earth rendered uninhabitable, the collapse of global food production, the acidification of the oceans, sea-level rise and storms, and droughts of growing intensity, became common since the publication of the Club of Rome report in 1972 (Wright et al 2013). In the hands of ruling military, governmental and corporate powers, ‘scenario planning’ became a method for ensuring strategic victory in a context of uncertainties and complexities. Since such scenario planning aimed at predictability, ambiguities were undesirable factors that were better eliminated, both in theory and practice (Amer, Daim and Jetter 2013). Computer simulations, game theoretic tools, forecasting methods, trend research, horizon scanning, and visual imageries filtered out all that which could not be mapped (O’Brien 2016). Pierre Wack, who introduced scenario planning at Royal Dutch/Shell, emphasizes that the future is only half closed. He made a plea for the incorporation of both literary and technical methods in scenario planning, to facilitate both the imagination and calculation of probable futures (Chermack and Coons 2015). According to Wack, the future is partly determined by trends that cannot but persist (Van‘t Klooster and Van Asselt 2006). Population growth and ageing are examples of such trends; and the corresponding implications for food demand, transport, housing, and other kinds of infrastructure clearly have to be reckoned with in any scenario planning. At the same time, for Wack, the future cannot be fully outlined based on these data and graphics. The partial openness of the future lies in the unpredictability of future generations’ actions in reaction to these trends. Robotic warfare is one possible future; large-scale euthanasia is another. But it is also imaginable that ecological disasters may wipe off entire populations. These futures are imaginable and yet not simply fictive because the ‘material’ for their ‘creation’ is already available here and now. For instance, it is highly probable that white Americans will no longer be the majority population in the United States by 2050, but the question as to how white Americans will cope with living as a minority in the US invites different answers (Martín Alcoff 2015: 24; 26). Colonization aims at ruling out openness, with the aim of shaping a future (preferably one that seems to be the product of predetermined trends that cannot be altered by human decisions) in which the current status quo is preserved. O’Brien (2016) explains that Royal Dutch/Shell’s interest in scenario planning is motivated by its will to shape a future in which remains a dominant key actor that moulds the world in its own interest: its scenario planning practices and its wish to maintain its hegemony are interconnected. ‘Shell’s scenario plans,’ O’Brien (2016: 334) notes, ‘are credited with the company’s success in outwitting the thugs, and thereby contributing to the larger project of securing Western interests amidst the turmoil of globalization.’ Such a hegemonic project has its prices in terms of human rights abuses, oil pollution and corporate crimes (Holzer 2007; Hennchen 2015). The organized fossil-fuel industry is powerful enough to protect its vested interests and to promote a strategy of inaction (no reduction of fossil-fuel emissions), so that nothing really changes. Michael Mann, a leading climate scientist, explains that to safeguard the current status quo, the fossil-fuel industry, including Royal Dutch/Shell, funds a ‘climate change denial campaign’ to discredit climate science – which advocates radical change now – and prevent dialogues. In this campaign, a significant part of the established power elites, including the Koch Brothers, and influential politicians like John McCain and Joe Lieberman, makes a mockery of climatology, and of particular scientists (Wright and Mann 2013). The pertinent question that ought to be raised, O’Brien (2016: 341) therefore concludes is: ‘whose future is being planned, by whom, for whom and to what ultimate end?’ When scenario planning is a tool for colonization, the future is planned by and for the established power constellation, even if ‘larger’ entities such as national, European or Western interests are invoked. Such scenario planning is legitimized by discrediting ‘doom scenarios’, through discourses on the liberating potential of technology (which should be able to solve the problems that it creates) and (correspondingly) on the inevitable course of history.
The AC framework mimics the deliberative model of liberal democracy that must tolerate fascist ideology to prove that it is perfectly tolerant, but they fail to realize that white supremacy cannot be defeated in the marketplace of ideas. Their framework, like most capitalist liberal democracies, tends towards fascism because platforming white supremacist ideology allows it to spread while disrupting anti-racist and anti-capitalist organizing. The alt is to reject the aff for endorsing a deliberative framework that platforms fascist rhetoric. Shaw 20. (Devin Zane Shaw, Professor of Philosophy at Douglas College, British Columbia, Ph.D. University of Ottawa, “Philosophies of Antifascism: Punching Nazis and Fighting White Supremacy,” Rowman and Littlefield International, 2020.)catire Beauvoir maintains that the imperative to reject oppression at any cost justifies the use of emancipatory violence. Her discussion of violence applies her general method of moral inquiry: after identifying an ideal (but impossible) situation, she proceeds to map the moral coordinates of failure—where indeed some failures are better than others. Hence she first identifies the ideal situation: “For a liberating action to be a thoroughly moral action, it would have to be achieved through a conversion of the oppressors: there would then be a reconciliation of all freedoms” (Beauvoir 1947 1976, 96–97). Presumably this conversion would be achieved through civil discourse, but Beauvoir calls it a utopian reverie. The oppressor “refuses to give up his privileges” (Beauvoir 1947 1976, 96). Nonetheless, the oppressor provides reasons to justify oppression. Beauvoir, before addressing justifications of violence, analyzes the oppressor’s justifications of oppression through the lens of political conflict. Practically speaking, the oppressor and the oppressed are not merely two sides of a debate, because the oppressor class also sets the terms of the debate (Marcuse 1969). Nonetheless, Beauvoir’s analysis serves a double purpose. First, it shows how these justifications are in bad faith. Second, and more importantly, it tests the political commitments of the reader by identifying the tropes of the oppressor’s discourse so that readers who might otherwise view themselves as committed to political emancipation, but who also feel an investment in these arguments, might be able to reflect upon and have done with them. Thus we must situate the exchange of reasons within a situation of oppression, which divides the world into oppressor and oppressed. I doubt that Beauvoir believes that these reasons are offered to persuade the oppressed, for that would acknowledge an intellectual equality between addressor and addressee denied by the oppressor. Hence these justifications or reasons need only “persuade” others: oppressors and their ideological accomplices, those with privilege, access, or advantage within the situation. Beauvoir situates these reasons as individual moments of a continuous order of justifications. In the first instance, then, justifications for the status quo could be categorized together insofar as they minimize the wrongs committed by oppression. At the most extreme, the oppressor offers reasons as to why either oppression is natural or why the oppressed desires oppression (Beauvoir 1947 1976, 83–87). If oppression is natural, then it is inevitable and impossible to fight—in this case the oppressed are attempting to overthrow the natural order of things. However, from an existentialist standpoint, where “existence precedes essence,” all situations of oppression are contingent but shaped historically by material conditions—thus no oppression is natural. The second argument is a variation on the first; it maintains that the oppressed desires oppression, with the implication that those who resist have illicit desires. We know that claims of this type were common tropes in the antebellum United States (and after), where the master “interrogates” his slaves about their condition and they express their consent. Of course, this trope is in bad faith. Were it meant otherwise, it would entail the intellectual reciprocity between master and slave that is denied by the master. In a system where they could be killed but not murdered, slaves opt for duplicity; when the moral and material means for revolt are available, the answer is entirely different. The foregoing arguments are illiberal. The remaining arguments are not illiberal. In the first, the oppressor appeals to universal, objective values. These values are then presented as unequivocally good in themselves:9 “It is not in his own name that he is fighting, but rather in the name of civilization, of institutions, of monuments, of virtues which realize objectively the situation which he intends to maintain” (Beauvoir 1947 1976, 91). This argument justifies the means (oppression) by appeal to lofty ideals, such as Progress. When appeals to universal, objective values like Progress are raised, Beauvoir contends that such terms cannot be posited as transcendent, existing outside of human projects. We cannot then use these values to determine the meaning of concrete projects or a particular situation; instead, our concrete projects give meaning to our ideals relative to social struggle. When these values are treated as transcendent and absolute, when one treats their societies or institutions as the embodiment of Progress, this legitimates oppression under the guise of paternalism (or worse). The ruling classes identify their institutions with Progress or Enlightenment, and when faced with opposition, they adduce, under “the pretext of ignorance” of the other, “the incompetence of the masses, of women, of the natives in the colonies,” in order to maintain their rule, the status quo of oppression, capital accumulation, and resource extraction (Beauvoir 1947 1976, 138–39). Proponents of “Western civilization,” for example, have for centuries exploited native populations in the colonized world in the name of historical Progress. The final trope frames oppression as merely one kind of interest in competition with other interests. As we have seen, oppression is a social structure that divides society into two, producing social conflict. To frame oppression as interest reduces political conflict to what Rancière has called parapolitics: all political claims are merely expressions of conflicting interests (see “3.1. Demarcating Egalitarianism”). This trope appeals broadly to abstract right: when the oppressed confronts the oppressor and seeks to correct a wrong, the oppressor objects that “under the pretext of freedom, there you go oppressing me in turn; you deprive me of my freedom” (Beauvoir 1947 1976, 90). Though Beauvoir quickly dismisses this argument, it demands further analysis. In one variant of the argument, these freedoms are also framed in zero-sum terms: “Respect for freedom is never without difficulty, and perhaps he may assert that one can never respect all freedoms at the same time” (Beauvoir 1947 1976, 96). In other words, granting rights to marginalized groups comes at the cost of those who already have rights. These arguments sometimes gain traction in well-meaning liberal discourses because they are framed in terms of a liberal understanding of rights. Sometimes these claims are specific: when we no-platform nazis, they often complain that their rights have been violated. Sometimes, these claims are broad: white nationalists and white supremacists, for example, present their views as if they represent white interests against other competing interests; that is, “It’s not ‘white supremacy,’ it’s a European-Canadian majority in a nation with European roots, which includes our history, our customs, our laws, our languages, our monuments, our faith, and our people.”10 In general, these claims frame white supremacy as merely the expression of one ethnic group among others while asserting that other ethnic groups are permitted a degree of social cohesion and social mobility now denied to whites. These claims, however, are made in bad faith. Leading figureheads of the alt-right and Far Right, such as Richard Spencer, have readily admitted that they appeal to rights such as free speech only in order to advance their agenda (Ami du Radical 2018). As Matthew Lyons points out, the European New Right has long rehearsed the rhetorical devices of—and provided an intellectual veneer to—the ethnonationalism and separatism to which these groups often appeal: they “championed ‘biocultural diversity’ against the homogenization supposedly brought by liberalism and globalization. They argued that true antiracism requires separating racial and ethnic groups to protect their unique cultures” (Lyons 2018, 58). These claims do not have to make a positive or convincing case; they must merely be effective in shifting the frame of the debate away from the idea that oppression is a social structure; they must merely undermine the legitimate political claims of the oppressed. Here Sartre’s analysis of the rhetorical strategies of anti-Semites is apropos: They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. . . . They fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side. (Sartre 1946a 1995, 20) In my view, when Sartre says anti-Semite, he means fascist. His book Anti-Semite and Jew was published after the defeat of fascism in Europe, and I believe that the terminological choice reflects this defeat: analyzing anti-Semitism points to forms of oppression that remain present in postwar Europe, whereas his readers might have dismissed his argument had he discussed the continued existence of fascist attitudes after the war. Thus, in contemporary parlance, Sartre contends that debating fascists either normalizes their views as worthy of debate or discredits the seriousness of their interlocutor. When the Far Right frames its agenda in terms of rights, this strategy aims to normalize their racist agenda, but it also treats all demands of political conflict as if they were merely competing interests. This parapolitical strategy appeals to those invested in the status quo because it presents all grievances in general as merely competing interests—occluding the possibility that political oppression is imbricated in the status quo itself. For Beauvoir, as for Sartre or Rancière, political and social conflict is not about competing interests that can be settled in the established terms of rights within a given institutional framework. Political struggle puts the very concept of freedom into question. Liberal democratic systems of consensus rest on some variation of a concept of freedom based on the harm principle.11 By contrast, Beauvoir defines freedom as having the moral and material ability “to surpass the given toward an open future” (Beauvoir 1947 1976, 91). In Rancière’s terms, Beauvoir’s analysis of discourse shows how the demands of the oppressed are a demonstration of disagreement.
10/16/21
1 - SO - Liberal Democracy K v2
Tournament: NEW YORK CITY INVITATIONAL DEBATE AND SPEECH TOURNAMENT | Round: Semis | Opponent: Harrison AA | Judge: Bathily, White, Stockstill Their intellectualization of health care policy does nothing but platform fascist argumentation that economizes our discussions and churns out academic garbage evaluating the “pros” and “cons” of IPR reductions for insulin. Their confrontation of medical violence in an argumentative activity forces us to platform opposing deliberations which spread white supremacist ideology while disrupting anti-racist and anti-capitalist organizing. The alt is to reject the aff for endorsing a deliberative framework that platforms fascist rhetoric. Shaw 20. (Devin Zane Shaw, Professor of Philosophy at Douglas College, British Columbia, Ph.D. University of Ottawa, “Philosophies of Antifascism: Punching Nazis and Fighting White Supremacy,” Rowman and Littlefield International, 2020.)catire Beauvoir maintains that the imperative to reject oppression at any cost justifies the use of emancipatory violence. Her discussion of violence applies her general method of moral inquiry: after identifying an ideal (but impossible) situation, she proceeds to map the moral coordinates of failure—where indeed some failures are better than others. Hence she first identifies the ideal situation: “For a liberating action to be a thoroughly moral action, it would have to be achieved through a conversion of the oppressors: there would then be a reconciliation of all freedoms” (Beauvoir 1947 1976, 96–97). Presumably this conversion would be achieved through civil discourse, but Beauvoir calls it a utopian reverie. The oppressor “refuses to give up his privileges” (Beauvoir 1947 1976, 96). Nonetheless, the oppressor provides reasons to justify oppression. Beauvoir, before addressing justifications of violence, analyzes the oppressor’s justifications of oppression through the lens of political conflict. Practically speaking, the oppressor and the oppressed are not merely two sides of a debate, because the oppressor class also sets the terms of the debate (Marcuse 1969). Nonetheless, Beauvoir’s analysis serves a double purpose. First, it shows how these justifications are in bad faith. Second, and more importantly, it tests the political commitments of the reader by identifying the tropes of the oppressor’s discourse so that readers who might otherwise view themselves as committed to political emancipation, but who also feel an investment in these arguments, might be able to reflect upon and have done with them. Thus we must situate the exchange of reasons within a situation of oppression, which divides the world into oppressor and oppressed. I doubt that Beauvoir believes that these reasons are offered to persuade the oppressed, for that would acknowledge an intellectual equality between addressor and addressee denied by the oppressor. Hence these justifications or reasons need only “persuade” others: oppressors and their ideological accomplices, those with privilege, access, or advantage within the situation. Beauvoir situates these reasons as individual moments of a continuous order of justifications. In the first instance, then, justifications for the status quo could be categorized together insofar as they minimize the wrongs committed by oppression. At the most extreme, the oppressor offers reasons as to why either oppression is natural or why the oppressed desires oppression (Beauvoir 1947 1976, 83–87). If oppression is natural, then it is inevitable and impossible to fight—in this case the oppressed are attempting to overthrow the natural order of things. However, from an existentialist standpoint, where “existence precedes essence,” all situations of oppression are contingent but shaped historically by material conditions—thus no oppression is natural. The second argument is a variation on the first; it maintains that the oppressed desires oppression, with the implication that those who resist have illicit desires. We know that claims of this type were common tropes in the antebellum United States (and after), where the master “interrogates” his slaves about their condition and they express their consent. Of course, this trope is in bad faith. Were it meant otherwise, it would entail the intellectual reciprocity between master and slave that is denied by the master. In a system where they could be killed but not murdered, slaves opt for duplicity; when the moral and material means for revolt are available, the answer is entirely different. The foregoing arguments are illiberal. The remaining arguments are not illiberal. In the first, the oppressor appeals to universal, objective values. These values are then presented as unequivocally good in themselves:9 “It is not in his own name that he is fighting, but rather in the name of civilization, of institutions, of monuments, of virtues which realize objectively the situation which he intends to maintain” (Beauvoir 1947 1976, 91). This argument justifies the means (oppression) by appeal to lofty ideals, such as Progress. When appeals to universal, objective values like Progress are raised, Beauvoir contends that such terms cannot be posited as transcendent, existing outside of human projects. We cannot then use these values to determine the meaning of concrete projects or a particular situation; instead, our concrete projects give meaning to our ideals relative to social struggle. When these values are treated as transcendent and absolute, when one treats their societies or institutions as the embodiment of Progress, this legitimates oppression under the guise of paternalism (or worse). The ruling classes identify their institutions with Progress or Enlightenment, and when faced with opposition, they adduce, under “the pretext of ignorance” of the other, “the incompetence of the masses, of women, of the natives in the colonies,” in order to maintain their rule, the status quo of oppression, capital accumulation, and resource extraction (Beauvoir 1947 1976, 138–39). Proponents of “Western civilization,” for example, have for centuries exploited native populations in the colonized world in the name of historical Progress. The final trope frames oppression as merely one kind of interest in competition with other interests. As we have seen, oppression is a social structure that divides society into two, producing social conflict. To frame oppression as interest reduces political conflict to what Rancière has called parapolitics: all political claims are merely expressions of conflicting interests (see “3.1. Demarcating Egalitarianism”). This trope appeals broadly to abstract right: when the oppressed confronts the oppressor and seeks to correct a wrong, the oppressor objects that “under the pretext of freedom, there you go oppressing me in turn; you deprive me of my freedom” (Beauvoir 1947 1976, 90). Though Beauvoir quickly dismisses this argument, it demands further analysis. In one variant of the argument, these freedoms are also framed in zero-sum terms: “Respect for freedom is never without difficulty, and perhaps he may assert that one can never respect all freedoms at the same time” (Beauvoir 1947 1976, 96). In other words, granting rights to marginalized groups comes at the cost of those who already have rights. These arguments sometimes gain traction in well-meaning liberal discourses because they are framed in terms of a liberal understanding of rights. Sometimes these claims are specific: when we no-platform nazis, they often complain that their rights have been violated. Sometimes, these claims are broad: white nationalists and white supremacists, for example, present their views as if they represent white interests against other competing interests; that is, “It’s not ‘white supremacy,’ it’s a European-Canadian majority in a nation with European roots, which includes our history, our customs, our laws, our languages, our monuments, our faith, and our people.”10 In general, these claims frame white supremacy as merely the expression of one ethnic group among others while asserting that other ethnic groups are permitted a degree of social cohesion and social mobility now denied to whites. These claims, however, are made in bad faith. Leading figureheads of the alt-right and Far Right, such as Richard Spencer, have readily admitted that they appeal to rights such as free speech only in order to advance their agenda (Ami du Radical 2018). As Matthew Lyons points out, the European New Right has long rehearsed the rhetorical devices of—and provided an intellectual veneer to—the ethnonationalism and separatism to which these groups often appeal: they “championed ‘biocultural diversity’ against the homogenization supposedly brought by liberalism and globalization. They argued that true antiracism requires separating racial and ethnic groups to protect their unique cultures” (Lyons 2018, 58). These claims do not have to make a positive or convincing case; they must merely be effective in shifting the frame of the debate away from the idea that oppression is a social structure; they must merely undermine the legitimate political claims of the oppressed. Here Sartre’s analysis of the rhetorical strategies of anti-Semites is apropos: They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. . . . They fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side. (Sartre 1946a 1995, 20) In my view, when Sartre says anti-Semite, he means fascist. His book Anti-Semite and Jew was published after the defeat of fascism in Europe, and I believe that the terminological choice reflects this defeat: analyzing anti-Semitism points to forms of oppression that remain present in postwar Europe, whereas his readers might have dismissed his argument had he discussed the continued existence of fascist attitudes after the war. Thus, in contemporary parlance, Sartre contends that debating fascists either normalizes their views as worthy of debate or discredits the seriousness of their interlocutor. When the Far Right frames its agenda in terms of rights, this strategy aims to normalize their racist agenda, but it also treats all demands of political conflict as if they were merely competing interests. This parapolitical strategy appeals to those invested in the status quo because it presents all grievances in general as merely competing interests—occluding the possibility that political oppression is imbricated in the status quo itself. For Beauvoir, as for Sartre or Rancière, political and social conflict is not about competing interests that can be settled in the established terms of rights within a given institutional framework. Political struggle puts the very concept of freedom into question. Liberal democratic systems of consensus rest on some variation of a concept of freedom based on the harm principle.11 By contrast, Beauvoir defines freedom as having the moral and material ability “to surpass the given toward an open future” (Beauvoir 1947 1976, 91). In Rancière’s terms, Beauvoir’s analysis of discourse shows how the demands of the oppressed are a demonstration of disagreement.
10/18/21
1 - SO - Rodl NC
Tournament: NEW YORK CITY INVITATIONAL DEBATE AND SPEECH TOURNAMENT | Round: 4 | Opponent: Prospect ST | Judge: Georges, Joey Permissibility Negates –
Semantics – Ought is defined as expressing obligation which means absent a proactive obligation you vote neg since there’s a trichotomy between prohibition, obligation, and permissibility and proving one disproves the other two. Semantics o/w – a) it’s key to predictability since we prep based on the wording of the res and b) it’s constitutive to the rules of debate since the judge is obligated to vote on the resolutional text. 2. Logic – Propositions require positive justification before being accepted, otherwise one would be forced to accept the validity of logically contradictory propositions regarding subjects one knows nothing about, i.e if one knew nothing about P one would have to presume that both the “P” and “P” are true.
Moral theories must judge action as a unified whole. If they did not, the separate steps in the chain of action would not be justified. In the process of doing a whole action, the steps are not disconnected, but rather so connected that one interruption would disrupt the entire action. Rodl 2K, Rodl I (Rödl, Sebastian. Self-Consciousness, Harvard University Press, 2000) Suppose I walked from a to c, via b. It may be that I decided to walk from a to b, and, having got there, then decided to walk from b to c. Or I decided to walk from a to c, and did. In the former case, I was walking from a to b, and then I was walking from b to c. But only in the latter case, not in the former, was I walking from a to c. As a movement, an action is not an aggregate, but a unity of phases.
And, that requires atemporal judgements – anything else can be disregarded at any moment which destroys motivation and culpability. Rodl 2, Rodl I (Rödl, Sebastian. Self-Consciousness, Harvard University Press, 2000)Because judgments that represent changeable states cannot be the ground of an intention, which is the principle of a movement. So the necessarily represented a unity of ends must bear a different kind of temporality. We shall now suggest that the relevant unity is a unity not of desire, but of what we shall call infinite ends. Just as the concept of desire, so is our concept of an infinite end defined by the form of a thought that constitutes adherence to it. As a man may desire noble things, so may his infinite ends be base, if base things figure in his thoughts of the relevant form. All-things-considered while desire judgments join subject and action-form at a time. An intention joins them progressively, guiding the progress of the action. If the representation of an infinite end is to provides the principle of temporal synthesis of an action and, it must not join subject and action-form neither at a time nor progressively, but in a way that, metaphorically speaking, always already contains the whole of a temporally extended action. We shall see that this means that its predication is time-general. “I am getting my tools because I want to repair my bicycle”, I say. “Why do you want to repair your bicycle?,” you ask. “ I want to go cycling.” But why go cycling? It is healthy. Is this an instrumental syllogism? It appears so. Does not it represent health as an end and cycling as a means? It is true, we call for example if health is an infinite end. But it is an end in a different sense from repairing a bicycle; the end and what is done in its service relate differently in these cases. Infinite ends are time-general; this distinguishes them from desires. I may one moment feel like going to the movies, the next moment feel like staying home, and a minute later again think that going to the movies would be nice. But it makes no sense to say that, one moment, I cared about my health, was completely indifferent to it the next moment, and a bit later again cared greatly about it. If I want health, then health manifests itself in actions at various times; wanting health is time-general and not tied to a moment. Action theory comes first –
States of affairs only care about ethical decision making insofar as there is an entity and an action that is coherent enough to achieve that normative end. Every decision made is an action, even inaction which means the NC is inescapable. 2. The AC framework collapses – A) Culpability – To conceive yourself as the cause of your actions, an analysis of how one acts is a priori – otherwise we would never hold agents accountable since they would claim they were not an agent capable of generating an action with normative force. B) To evaluate virtue we have to judge the ethicality of agents over a plethora of actions, that necessitates a unified account of an agents actions that judges them holistically to determine ethicality; absent action theory we cannot effectively determine if someone is a good agent Contention I contend that the aff violates the principles of action theory, the member nations of the WTO thusly have no obligation to reduce IP protections on medicines.
Agency – The aff does not have a coherent conception of agency that can follow through on an action – A) The aff defends multiple states taking the same action simultaneously which is incoherent since each state has its own set of obligations to its citizens and sets of laws. Absent a unified body they cannot act simultaneously. Aggregation fails to solve – agential quantities are not additive, 2 agents added to one another does not create a unified agent, in the same way 2 circles combined does not add to the circular quality of the object. B) States aren’t agents – they cannot have a unified intention to act since each agent that comprises the state has a different understanding of the good 2. Temporality – The aff violates the temporal conditions of action – A) The aff assigns a temporal bound to its ethical claim since it isolates a particular time property rights are incoherent, namely when it applies to intellectual property and medicine B) The aff can’t generate an atemporal obligation because it is contingent on empirical circumstances that the aff is currently taking place in (ie uniqueness)
10/16/21
1 - SO - Virtue Ethics Turns
Tournament: NEW YORK CITY INVITATIONAL DEBATE AND SPEECH TOURNAMENT | Round: 4 | Opponent: Prospect ST | Judge: Georges, Joey Even if you accept their view of virtues, they are non-codifiable. This means we cannot use virtue theory as a criterion, since the criterion is codified. My opponent can claim he's a virtuous man, and “knows” the resolution is false because he possesses the virtues. But he can't claim “virtue theory” implies that the resolution is false. Hursthouse, Rosalind, "Virtue Ethics", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2012/entries/ethics-virtue/. In the early days of virtue ethics' revival, the approach was associated with an “anti-codifiability” thesis about ethics, directed against the prevailing pretensions of normative theory. At the time, utilitarians and deontologists commonly (though not universally) held that the task of An Ethical theory iswas to come up with a code consisting of universal rules or principles (possibly only one, as in the case of act-utilitarianism) which would have two significant features: (a) can the rule(s) would amount to a decision procedure for determineing what the right action is was in any particular case; (b) the rule(s) would be stated in such terms that any non-virtuous person could understand and apply it (them) correctly. Virtue ethicists maintained, contrary to these two claims, that it was quite unrealistic to imagine that there could be such a code (see, in particular, McDowell 1979). The results of attempts to produce and employ such a code, in the heady days of the 1960s and 1970s, when medical and then bioethics boomed and bloomed, tended to support the virtue ethicists' claim. More and more utilitarians and deontologists found themselves agreed on their general rules but on opposite sides of the controversial moral issues in contemporary discussion. It came to be recognised that moral sensitivity, perception, imagination, and judgement informed by experience—phronesis in short—is needed to apply rules or principles correctly. Hence many (though by no means all) utilitarians and deontologists have explicitly abandoned (b) and much less emphasis is placed on (a). Nevertheless, the complaint that Virtue ethics does not produce codifiable principles is still a commonly voiced criticism of the approach, expressed as the objection that it is, in principle, unable to provide action-guidance.
and, Agency can’t exist because individuals are merely collections of molecules controlled by physics – Flows neg since it denies culpability. Coyne 12 Jerry Coyne, Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at The University of Chicago, “Why You Don’t Really Have Free Will,” USAToday, January 1st, 2012 https://www.ethicalpsychology.com/2013/12/why-you-dont-really-have-free-will.html?m=1 The first is simple: we are biological creatures, collections of molecules that must obey the laws of physics. All the success of science rests on the regularity of those laws, which determine the behavior of every molecule in the universe. Those molecules, of course, also make up your brain — the organ that does the "choosing." And the neurons and molecules in your brain are the product of both your genes and your environment, an environment including the other people we deal with. Memories, for example, are nothing more than structural and chemical changes in your brain cells. Everything that you think, say, or do, must come down to molecules and physics. True "free will," then, would require us to somehow step outside of our brain's structure and modify how it works. Science hasn't shown any way we can do this because "we" are simply constructs of our brain. We can't impose a nebulous "will" on the inputs to our brain that can affect its output of decisions and actions, any more than a programmed computer can somehow reach inside itself and change its program.
10/16/21
3 - JF - Decarbonization CP
Tournament: Barkley Forum for High Schools | Round: 1 | Opponent: Harvard Westlake CC | Judge: Sutton, Dylan Counter Plan – The United States federal government should decarbonize, democratize, and decommodify energy sources in the United States including penalties on carbon emissions, regulations to promote a transition to renewable energy, and distributing ownership and decision-making over utilities. CP solves the aff but avoids every DA to appropriating space Shaw et al. 18 (Robert Shaw, Thea Riofrancos, and Will Speck – Jacobin, “Eco-Socialism or Bust,” 4-20-18, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/04/fossil-fuels-renewable-energy-eco-socialism) In this terrain, there are several points of entry for eco-socialist politics. Broadly, our energy vision should center on the three D’s: decarbonize, democratize, and decommodify. Decarbonizing energy sources requires massive political confrontation with the fossil-fuel industry — a movement currently being led by the frontline communities most impacted by fossil-fuel extraction and its transformation — combined with federal and state-level policies that punish carbon emissions and a regulatory framework that encourages transition to renewable sources. Meanwhile, democratization and decommodification — the collective control of energy distribution that treats energy access as a human right rather than an opportunity for profit — are another point of entry. To achieve these ends, socialists must politicize the grid, and propose alternative visions of ownership and decision-making. In the United States, over two-thirds of electricity users are served by for-profit utilities. These private monopolies are often overseen by state-level energy commissions that are ripe for regulatory capture by Big Energy and the fossil-fuel industry. Even where utilities are publicly owned, technocratic governance structures provide limited fora for public input, let alone real democratic control. Building a bridge toward a socialist energy future requires a vision of a system that removes the profit motive from the delivery of utilities services and establishes energy as a universal human right alongside other basic human needs.
1/28/22
3 - JF - Mining CP
Tournament: Barkley Forum for High Schools | Round: 3 | Opponent: Pennsbury GB | Judge: Mitra, Shampurna CP Text – the appropriation of outer space is unjust, except in the case of private space mining. Private space mining is coming now because of global recognition of property rights Gilbert 21 (Alex Gilbert – complex systems researcher and a PhD student in space resources at the Colorado School of Mines, “Mining in Space Is Coming,” 4-26-21, https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/mining-in-space-is-coming) Space exploration is back. After decades of disappointment, a combination of better technology, falling costs and a rush of competitive energy from the private sector has put space travel front and center. indeed, many analysts (even some with their feet on the ground) believe that commercial developments in the space industry may be on the cusp of starting the largest resource rush in history: mining on the Moon, Mars and asteroids. While this may sound fantastical, some baby steps toward the goal have already been taken. Last year, NASA awarded contracts to four companies to extract small amounts of lunar regolith by 2024, effectively beginning the era of commercial space mining. Whether this proves to be the dawn of a gigantic adjunct to mining on earth — and more immediately, a key to unlocking cost-effective space travel — will turn on the answers to a host of questions ranging from what resources can be efficiently. As every fan of science fiction knows, the resources of the solar system appear virtually unlimited compared to those on Earth. There are whole other planets, dozens of moons, thousands of massive asteroids and millions of small ones that doubtless contain humungous quantities of materials that are scarce and very valuable (back on Earth). Visionaries including Jeff Bezos imagine heavy industry moving to space and Earth becoming a residential area. However, as entrepreneurs look to harness the riches beyond the atmosphere, access to space resources remains tangled in the realities of economics and governance. Start with the fact that space belongs to no country, complicating traditional methods of resource allocation, property rights and trade. With limited demand for materials in space itself and the need for huge amounts of energy to return materials to Earth, creating a viable industry will turn on major advances in technology, finance and business models. That said, there’s no grass growing under potential pioneers’ feet. Potential economic, scientific and even security benefits underlie an emerging geopolitical competition to pursue space mining. The United States is rapidly emerging as a front-runner, in part due to its ambitious Artemis Program to lead a multinational consortium back to the Moon. But it is also a leader in creating a legal infrastructure for mineral exploitation. The United States has adopted the world’s first space resources law, recognizing the property rights of private companies and individuals to materials gathered in space. However, the United States is hardly alone. Luxembourg and the United Arab Emirates (you read those right) are racing to codify space-resources laws of their own, hoping to attract investment to their entrepot nations with business-friendly legal frameworks. China reportedly views space-resource development as a national priority, part of a strategy to challenge U.S. economic and security primacy in space. Meanwhile, Russia, Japan, India and the European Space Agency all harbor space-mining ambitions of their own. Governing these emerging interests is an outdated treaty framework from the Cold War. Sooner rather than later, we’ll need new agreements to facilitate private investment and ensure international cooperation. What’s Out There Back up for a moment. For the record, space is already being heavily exploited, because space resources include non-material assets such as orbital locations and abundant sunlight that enable satellites to provide services to Earth. Indeed, satellite-based telecommunications and global positioning systems have become indispensable infrastructure underpinning the modern economy. Mining space for materials, of course, is another matter. In the past several decades, planetary science has confirmed what has long been suspected: celestial bodies are potential sources for dozens of natural materials that, in the right time and place, are incredibly valuable. Of these, water may be the most attractive in the near-term, because — with assistance from solar energy or nuclear fission — H2O can be split into hydrogen and oxygen to make rocket propellant, facilitating in-space refueling. So-called “rare earth” metals are also potential targets of asteroid miners intending to service Earth markets. Consisting of 17 elements, including lanthanum, neodymium, and yttrium, these critical materials (most of which are today mined in China at great environmental cost) are required for electronics. And they loom as bottlenecks in making the transition from fossil fuels to renewables backed up by battery storage. The Moon is a prime space mining target. Boosted by NASA’s mining solicitation, it is likely the first location for commercial mining. The Moon has several advantages. It is relatively close, requiring a journey of only several days by rocket and creating communication lags of only a couple seconds — a delay small enough to allow remote operation of robots from Earth. Its low gravity implies that relatively little energy expenditure will be needed to deliver mined resources to Earth orbit. Science Photo Library/Alamy Stock Photo The Moon may look parched — and by comparison to Earth, it is. But recent probes have confirmed substantial amounts of water ice lurking in permanently shadowed craters at the lunar poles. Further, it seems that solar winds have implanted significant deposits of helium-3 (a light stable isotope of helium) across the equatorial regions of the Moon. Helium-3 is a potential fuel source for secondand third-generation fusion reactors that one hopes will be in service later in the century. The isotope is packed with energy (admittedly hard to unleash in a controlled manner) that might augment sunlight as a source of clean, safe energy on Earth or to power fast spaceships in this century. Between its water and helium-3 deposits, the Moon could be the resource stepping-stone for further solar system exploration. Asteroids are another near-term mining target. There are all sorts of space rocks hurtling through the solar system, with varying amounts of water, rare earth metals and other materials on board. The asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter contains most of them, many of which are greater than a kilometer in diameter. Although the potential water and mineral wealth of the asteroid belt is vast, the long distance from Earth and requisite travel times and energy consumption rule them out as targets in the near term. Even the surface of celestial bodies pose a challenge to mining machinery since they consist of unconsolidated rocky materials called regolith instead of more familiar soil. Wannabe asteroid miners will thus be looking at smaller near-Earth asteroids. While they are much further away than the Moon, many of them could be reached using less energy — and some are even small enough to make it technically possible to tow them to Earth orbit for mining. Space mining may be essential to crewed exploration missions to Mars. Given the distance and relatively high gravity of Mars (twice that of the Moon), extraction and export of minerals to Earth seems highly unlikely. Rather, most resource extraction on Mars will focus on providing materials to supply exploration missions, refuel spacecraft and enable settlement. Technology Is the Difference The prospects for space mining are being driven by technological advances across the space industry. The rise of reusable rocket components and the now-widespread use of off-the-shelf parts are lowering both launch and operations costs. Once limited to government contract missions and the delivery of telecom satellites to orbit, private firms are now emerging as leaders in developing “NewSpace” activities — a catch-all term for endeavors including orbital tourism, orbital manufacturing and mini-satellites providing specialized services. The space sector, with a market capitalization of $400 billion, could grow to as much as $1 trillion by 2040 as private investment soars.
Space mining is key to sustainable mining, especially rare earth metals – shortages ensure resource wars MacWhorter 16 (Kevin McWhorter – JD Candidate at William and Mary, “Sustainable Mining: Incentivizing Asteroid Mining in the Name of Environmentalism,” February 2016, 40 Wm. and Mary Envtl. L. and Pol'y Rev. 645, https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmelpr/vol40/iss2/11/) In the next sixty years, scientists predict that certain elements crucial to modern industry such as platinum, zinc, copper, phosphorous, lead, gold, and indium could be exhausted on Earth. 12 Many of these have no synthetic alternative, unlike chemical elements such as oil or diamonds.13 Liquid-crystal display (LCD) televisions, cellphones, and laptops are among the various consumer technologies that use precious metals.14Further, green technologies including wind turbines, solar panels, and catalytic converters require these rare elements. 15 As demand rises for both types of technologies, and as reserves of rare metals fall, prices skyrocket.16 Demand for nonrenewable resources creates conflict, and consumerism in rich countries results in harsh labor treatment for poorer countries.17 In general, the mining industry is extremely destructive to Earth’s environment.18 In fact, depending on the method employed, mining can destroy entire ecosystems by polluting water sources and contributing to deforestation.19 It is by its nature an unsustainable practice, because it involves the extraction of a finite and non-renewable resource.20 Moreover, by extracting tiny amounts of metals from relatively large quantities of ore, the mining industry contributes the largest portion of solid wastes in the world.21 The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) describes the industry as the source of more toxic and hazardous waste than any other industrial sector in the United States, costing billions of dollars to address the public health and environmental threats to communities. 22 Poor regulations and oxymoronic corporate definitions of sustainability, however, make it unclear as to just how much waste the industry actually produces.23 Platinum provides an excellent case study of the issue, because it is an extremely rare and expensive metal—an ore expected to exist in vast quantities in asteroids.24 Further, production of platinum has increased sharply in the past sixty years in order to keep up with growing demand for use in new technologies.25 In fact, despite their high costs, platinum group metals are so useful that one of four industrial goods on Earth require them in production. 26 Scholars do not expect demand to slow any time soon.27 Among other technologies, industries use platinum in products such as catalytic converters, jewelry production, various catalysts for chemical processing, and hydrogen fuel cells.28 While there is no consensus on how far the Earth’s reserves of platinum will take humanity, many scientists agree that platinum ore reserves will deplete in a relatively short amount of time.29 With the rate of mining at an all-time high,30 it is increasingly clear that historical patterns of mineral resources and development cannot simply be assumed to continue unaltered into the future. 31 The platinum mining industry, however, has a strong incentive to increase its rate of extraction as profits grow with the rate of demand. Without any alternative, this destructive practice will continue into the future.32 So-called platinum-group metal (PGM) ores are mined through underground or open cut techniques.33 Due to these practices, all but a very small fraction of the mined platinum ore is disposed of as solid waste.34 The environmental consequences of platinum production are thus quite significant, but like the mining industry in general, the amount of waste is typically under-reported.35 While this is due to high production levels at the moment, those levels will only increase given the estimated future demand of platinum.36 In spite of the negative consequences, mining continues unabated because it is economically important to many areas.37 The future environmental costs provide a major challenge in creating a sustainable system. Relegating at least some mining companies to near-Earth asteroids would reduce the negative effects of future mining levels on Earth. The economic benefits of mining need not be sacrificed for the sake of the environment.38
Resource wars on Earth escalate – even perception of scarcity triggers conflict Klare 13 (Michael Klare – professor emeritus of peace and world-security studies at Hampshire College and senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association in Washington, “How Resource Scarcity and Climate Change Could Produce a Global Explosion,” 4-22-13, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/how-resource-scarcity-and-climate-change-could-produce-global-explosion/) Brace yourself. You may not be able to tell yet, but according to global experts and the US intelligence community, the earth is already shifting under you. Whether you know it or not, you’re on a new planet, a resource-shock world of a sort humanity has never before experienced. Two nightmare scenarios—a global scarcity of vital resources and the onset of extreme climate change—are already beginning to converge and in the coming decades are likely to produce a tidal wave of unrest, rebellion, competition and conflict. Just what this tsunami of disaster will look like may, as yet, be hard to discern, but experts warn of “water wars” over contested river systems, global food riots sparked by soaring prices for life’s basics, mass migrations of climate refugees (with resulting anti-migrant violence) and the breakdown of social order or the collapse of states. At first, such mayhem is likely to arise largely in Africa, Central Asia and other areas of the underdeveloped South, but in time, all regions of the planet will be affected. To appreciate the power of this encroaching catastrophe, it’s necessary to examine each of the forces that are combining to produce this future cataclysm. Resource Shortages and Resource Wars Start with one simple given: the prospect of future scarcities of vital natural resources, including energy, water, land, food and critical minerals. This in itself would guarantee social unrest, geopolitical friction and war. It is important to note that absolute scarcity doesn’t have to be on the horizon in any given resource category for this scenario to kick in. A lack of adequate supplies to meet the needs of a growing, ever more urbanized and industrialized global population is enough. Given the wave of extinctions that scientists are recording, some resources—particular species of fish, animals and trees, for example—will become less abundant in the decades to come, and may even disappear altogether. But key materials for modern civilization like oil, uranium and copper will simply prove harder and more costly to acquire, leading to supply bottlenecks and periodic shortages. Oil—the single most important commodity in the international economy—provides an apt example. Although global oil supplies may actually grow in the coming decades, many experts doubt that they can be expanded sufficiently to meet the needs of a rising global middle class that is, for instance, expected to buy millions of new cars in the near future. In its 2011 World Energy Outlook, the International Energy Agency claimed that an anticipated global oil demand of 104 million barrels per day in 2035 will be satisfied. This, the report suggested, would be thanks in large part to additional supplies of “unconventional oil” (Canadian tar sands, shale oil and so on), as well as 55 million barrels of new oil from fields “yet to be found” and “yet to be developed.” However, many analysts scoff at this optimistic assessment, arguing that rising production costs (for energy that will be ever more difficult and costly to extract), environmental opposition, warfare, corruption and other impediments will make it extremely difficult to achieve increases of this magnitude. In other words, even if production manages for a time to top the 2010 level of 87 million barrels per day, the goal of 104 million barrels will never be reached and the world’s major consumers will face virtual, if not absolute, scarcity. Water provides another potent example. On an annual basis, the supply of drinking water provided by natural precipitation remains more or less constant: about 40,000 cubic kilometers. But much of this precipitation lands on Greenland, Antarctica, Siberia and inner Amazonia where there are very few people, so the supply available to major concentrations of humanity is often surprisingly limited. In many regions with high population levels, water supplies are already relatively sparse. This is especially true of North Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East, where the demand for water continues to grow as a result of rising populations, urbanization and the emergence of new water-intensive industries. The result, even when the supply remains constant, is an environment of increasing scarcity. Wherever you look, the picture is roughly the same: supplies of critical resources may be rising or falling, but rarely do they appear to be outpacing demand, producing a sense of widespread and systemic scarcity. However generated, a perception of scarcity—or imminent scarcity—regularly leads to anxiety, resentment, hostility and contentiousness. This pattern is very well understood, and has been evident throughout human history.
1/28/22
3 - JF - Mining DA
Tournament: Barkley Forum for High Schools | Round: 1 | Opponent: Harvard Westlake CC | Judge: Sutton, Dylan Private space mining is coming now because of global recognition of property rights Gilbert 21 (Alex Gilbert – complex systems researcher and a PhD student in space resources at the Colorado School of Mines, “Mining in Space Is Coming,” 4-26-21, https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/mining-in-space-is-coming) Space exploration is back. After decades of disappointment, a combination of better technology, falling costs and a rush of competitive energy from the private sector has put space travel front and center. indeed, many analysts (even some with their feet on the ground) believe that commercial developments in the space industry may be on the cusp of starting the largest resource rush in history: mining on the Moon, Mars and asteroids. While this may sound fantastical, some baby steps toward the goal have already been taken. Last year, NASA awarded contracts to four companies to extract small amounts of lunar regolith by 2024, effectively beginning the era of commercial space mining. Whether this proves to be the dawn of a gigantic adjunct to mining on earth — and more immediately, a key to unlocking cost-effective space travel — will turn on the answers to a host of questions ranging from what resources can be efficiently. As every fan of science fiction knows, the resources of the solar system appear virtually unlimited compared to those on Earth. There are whole other planets, dozens of moons, thousands of massive asteroids and millions of small ones that doubtless contain humungous quantities of materials that are scarce and very valuable (back on Earth). Visionaries including Jeff Bezos imagine heavy industry moving to space and Earth becoming a residential area. However, as entrepreneurs look to harness the riches beyond the atmosphere, access to space resources remains tangled in the realities of economics and governance. Start with the fact that space belongs to no country, complicating traditional methods of resource allocation, property rights and trade. With limited demand for materials in space itself and the need for huge amounts of energy to return materials to Earth, creating a viable industry will turn on major advances in technology, finance and business models. That said, there’s no grass growing under potential pioneers’ feet. Potential economic, scientific and even security benefits underlie an emerging geopolitical competition to pursue space mining. The United States is rapidly emerging as a front-runner, in part due to its ambitious Artemis Program to lead a multinational consortium back to the Moon. But it is also a leader in creating a legal infrastructure for mineral exploitation. The United States has adopted the world’s first space resources law, recognizing the property rights of private companies and individuals to materials gathered in space. However, the United States is hardly alone. Luxembourg and the United Arab Emirates (you read those right) are racing to codify space-resources laws of their own, hoping to attract investment to their entrepot nations with business-friendly legal frameworks. China reportedly views space-resource development as a national priority, part of a strategy to challenge U.S. economic and security primacy in space. Meanwhile, Russia, Japan, India and the European Space Agency all harbor space-mining ambitions of their own. Governing these emerging interests is an outdated treaty framework from the Cold War. Sooner rather than later, we’ll need new agreements to facilitate private investment and ensure international cooperation. What’s Out There Back up for a moment. For the record, space is already being heavily exploited, because space resources include non-material assets such as orbital locations and abundant sunlight that enable satellites to provide services to Earth. Indeed, satellite-based telecommunications and global positioning systems have become indispensable infrastructure underpinning the modern economy. Mining space for materials, of course, is another matter. In the past several decades, planetary science has confirmed what has long been suspected: celestial bodies are potential sources for dozens of natural materials that, in the right time and place, are incredibly valuable. Of these, water may be the most attractive in the near-term, because — with assistance from solar energy or nuclear fission — H2O can be split into hydrogen and oxygen to make rocket propellant, facilitating in-space refueling. So-called “rare earth” metals are also potential targets of asteroid miners intending to service Earth markets. Consisting of 17 elements, including lanthanum, neodymium, and yttrium, these critical materials (most of which are today mined in China at great environmental cost) are required for electronics. And they loom as bottlenecks in making the transition from fossil fuels to renewables backed up by battery storage. The Moon is a prime space mining target. Boosted by NASA’s mining solicitation, it is likely the first location for commercial mining. The Moon has several advantages. It is relatively close, requiring a journey of only several days by rocket and creating communication lags of only a couple seconds — a delay small enough to allow remote operation of robots from Earth. Its low gravity implies that relatively little energy expenditure will be needed to deliver mined resources to Earth orbit. Science Photo Library/Alamy Stock Photo The Moon may look parched — and by comparison to Earth, it is. But recent probes have confirmed substantial amounts of water ice lurking in permanently shadowed craters at the lunar poles. Further, it seems that solar winds have implanted significant deposits of helium-3 (a light stable isotope of helium) across the equatorial regions of the Moon. Helium-3 is a potential fuel source for secondand third-generation fusion reactors that one hopes will be in service later in the century. The isotope is packed with energy (admittedly hard to unleash in a controlled manner) that might augment sunlight as a source of clean, safe energy on Earth or to power fast spaceships in this century. Between its water and helium-3 deposits, the Moon could be the resource stepping-stone for further solar system exploration. Asteroids are another near-term mining target. There are all sorts of space rocks hurtling through the solar system, with varying amounts of water, rare earth metals and other materials on board. The asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter contains most of them, many of which are greater than a kilometer in diameter. Although the potential water and mineral wealth of the asteroid belt is vast, the long distance from Earth and requisite travel times and energy consumption rule them out as targets in the near term. Even the surface of celestial bodies pose a challenge to mining machinery since they consist of unconsolidated rocky materials called regolith instead of more familiar soil. Wannabe asteroid miners will thus be looking at smaller near-Earth asteroids. While they are much further away than the Moon, many of them could be reached using less energy — and some are even small enough to make it technically possible to tow them to Earth orbit for mining. Space mining may be essential to crewed exploration missions to Mars. Given the distance and relatively high gravity of Mars (twice that of the Moon), extraction and export of minerals to Earth seems highly unlikely. Rather, most resource extraction on Mars will focus on providing materials to supply exploration missions, refuel spacecraft and enable settlement. Technology Is the Difference The prospects for space mining are being driven by technological advances across the space industry. The rise of reusable rocket components and the now-widespread use of off-the-shelf parts are lowering both launch and operations costs. Once limited to government contract missions and the delivery of telecom satellites to orbit, private firms are now emerging as leaders in developing “NewSpace” activities — a catch-all term for endeavors including orbital tourism, orbital manufacturing and mini-satellites providing specialized services. The space sector, with a market capitalization of $400 billion, could grow to as much as $1 trillion by 2040 as private investment soars.
Space mining is key to sustainable mining, especially rare earth metals – mining is disastrous for poor countries and the environment. MacWhorter 16 (Kevin McWhorter – JD Candidate at William and Mary, “Sustainable Mining: Incentivizing Asteroid Mining in the Name of Environmentalism,” February 2016, 40 Wm. and Mary Envtl. L. and Pol'y Rev. 645, https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmelpr/vol40/iss2/11/) In the next sixty years, scientists predict that certain elements crucial to modern industry such as platinum, zinc, copper, phosphorous, lead, gold, and indium could be exhausted on Earth. 12 Many of these have no synthetic alternative, unlike chemical elements such as oil or diamonds.13 Liquid-crystal display (LCD) televisions, cellphones, and laptops are among the various consumer technologies that use precious metals.14Further, green technologies including wind turbines, solar panels, and catalytic converters require these rare elements. 15 As demand rises for both types of technologies, and as reserves of rare metals fall, prices skyrocket.16 Demand for nonrenewable resources creates conflict, and consumerism in rich countries results in harsh labor treatment for poorer countries.17 In general, the mining industry is extremely destructive to Earth’s environment.18 In fact, depending on the method employed, mining can destroy entire ecosystems by polluting water sources and contributing to deforestation.19 It is by its nature an unsustainable practice, because it involves the extraction of a finite and non-renewable resource.20 Moreover, by extracting tiny amounts of metals from relatively large quantities of ore, the mining industry contributes the largest portion of solid wastes in the world.21 The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) describes the industry as the source of more toxic and hazardous waste than any other industrial sector in the United States, costing billions of dollars to address the public health and environmental threats to communities. 22 Poor regulations and oxymoronic corporate definitions of sustainability, however, make it unclear as to just how much waste the industry actually produces.23 Platinum provides an excellent case study of the issue, because it is an extremely rare and expensive metal—an ore expected to exist in vast quantities in asteroids.24 Further, production of platinum has increased sharply in the past sixty years in order to keep up with growing demand for use in new technologies.25 In fact, despite their high costs, platinum group metals are so useful that one of four industrial goods on Earth require them in production. 26 Scholars do not expect demand to slow any time soon.27 Among other technologies, industries use platinum in products such as catalytic converters, jewelry production, various catalysts for chemical processing, and hydrogen fuel cells.28 While there is no consensus on how far the Earth’s reserves of platinum will take humanity, many scientists agree that platinum ore reserves will deplete in a relatively short amount of time.29 With the rate of mining at an all-time high,30 it is increasingly clear that historical patterns of mineral resources and development cannot simply be assumed to continue unaltered into the future. 31 The platinum mining industry, however, has a strong incentive to increase its rate of extraction as profits grow with the rate of demand. Without any alternative, this destructive practice will continue into the future.32 So-called platinum-group metal (PGM) ores are mined through underground or open cut techniques.33 Due to these practices, all but a very small fraction of the mined platinum ore is disposed of as solid waste.34 The environmental consequences of platinum production are thus quite significant, but like the mining industry in general, the amount of waste is typically under-reported.35 While this is due to high production levels at the moment, those levels will only increase given the estimated future demand of platinum.36 In spite of the negative consequences, mining continues unabated because it is economically important to many areas.37 The future environmental costs provide a major challenge in creating a sustainable system. Relegating at least some mining companies to near-Earth asteroids would reduce the negative effects of future mining levels on Earth. The economic benefits of mining need not be sacrificed for the sake of the environment.38
1/28/22
3 - JF - Spec Private Entity
Tournament: Barkley Forum for High Schools | Round: 3 | Opponent: Pennsbury GB | Judge: Mitra, Shampurna Interpretation – The Affirmative must define private entities in a delineated card in the 1AC. Private entities involved a plethora of institutions and has several complexities like Quangos. UpCounsel ND – “Private Entity: Everything You Need to Know”. UpCounsel (interactive online service that makes it faster and easier for businesses to find and hire legal help). No Date. Accessed 12/17/21. https://www.upcounsel.com/private-entity A private entity can be a partnership, corporation, individual, nonprofit organization, company, or any other organized group that is not government-affiliated. Indian tribes and foreign public entities are not considered private entities. Unlike publicly traded companies, private companies do not have public stock offerings on Nasdaq, American Stock Exchange, or the New York Stock Exchange. Instead, they offer shares privately to interested investors, who may trade among themselves. Private Company vs. Private Entity The Companies Act of 2013 governs the registration of private companies. This type of company is formed by following the steps laid out by this law. Private entities are determined not by this law but by ownership and holding. For example, sole proprietorships and partnerships are designed as private entities. A private entity is not necessarily a private company, but all private companies are private entities. How Private Entities Work Although private companies can be of any size, they often include a small group of chosen investors who may include employees, colleagues, friends and family, and other interested parties. If this type of company needs funding to grow, it may seek it from venture capital firms or from large institutional investors. Some private companies eventually decide to go public with an initial public offering (IPO) of stock shares on a public exchange. Sometimes, public companies go private when a large investor buys a bulk of the outstanding stock shares and plans to remove them from public exchanges. How FOIA Affects Private Entities The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is a federal law that requires certain agencies to provide certain types of records to any person who asks. Major government bodies such as federal courts and Congress are exempt from FOIA. Some state agencies are also exempt depending on state laws governing public records. In general, FOIA applies to: Federal, state, and local government agencies, such as the Federal Communications Commission. Certain state legislatures depending on the laws in those states. Most private entities are not bound by federal FOIA laws. However, these laws may apply to private entities involved in government business. This situation occurred in Colorado in 2000, when a nonprofit corporation was required by the state's Court of Appeals to share documents related to a project it was working on with the city of Denver. Prefer:
1 – Stable Advocacy – they can redefine in the 1AR to wriggle out of DAs which kills high-quality engagement. We lose access to Tech Race DAs, case turns, and core Process CPs that have varying definitions – outweighs on reversibility since the 2NR can’t compensate after absurd 1AR shifts. CX can’t resolve this because (A) Not flowed so it’s non-verifiable (B) Skews 6 min of prep during the AC which is irreciprocal (C) They can lie and no way to check (D) Debaters are trained by coaches to be shifty. 2 – Real World – Policy makers must specify the entity that they are recognizing. It also means zero solvency – absent spec, private entities can circumvent since there is no delineated way to enforce the aff and means their solvency can’t actualize. 3 – Resolvability – Constantly morphing advocacies makes debate impossible because the judge doesn’t know what you defend or if a DA even links – comes first because the judge has to pick a winner and loser. It’s not frivolous, different definitions include or exclude state actors in various capacities which drastically changes negative engagement. Fairness is a voter since debate is a competitive activity that intrinsically requires equal footing when participating, to minimize one’s ability to participate in discussion disrespects the other member of the activity. Education is a voter because debate is funded for its educational value and it’s the only lasting benefit beyond individual rounds. Drop the debater – 1. Deterrence – Prevents reading the abusive practice in the future since it’s not worth risking the loss which is k2 norm setting indefensible practices die out 2. TS – Otherwise you’ll read a bunch of abusive practices for the time trade off 3. Epistemic Skew – The round has already been skewed so it’s impossible to evaluate the rest of the flow Competing interps – 1. Reasonability encourages a race to the margins of what counts as sufficiently fair which incentivizes as much abuse as possible 2. Norm setting – it encourages the most fair rule through debating competing models 3. Judge intervention – Reasonability begs the question of what the judge thinks is sufficient which takes the round out of the debaters hands. No RVIs – 1. It deters legitimate theory vs good theory debaters because you will lose on a shell even if it’s a good norm 2. Baiting – incentivizes people to be abusive and script counter-interps to win on the RVI which increases the existence of bad norms 3. It forces debaters to argue for bad practices even if they realize their interp is wrong which kills substance debate and norm setting since we have bad theory debates we agree on.
1/28/22
3 - JF - Technorationality K v2
Tournament: Barkley Forum for High Schools | Round: 3 | Opponent: Pennsbury GB | Judge: Mitra, Shampurna Reliance on international governance of space naturalizes Cold War rationalities of sovereignty – appeals to “peace” in space and “preserving” the commons belie the militarization necessary to secure outer space. The alternative is to reject the affirmatives representation of common ownership and embrace a collective affective orientation towards peacelessness. Craven 19 (Matt Craven – Professor of International Law, SOAS University of London, “‘Other Spaces’: Constructing the Legal Architecture of a Cold War Commons and the Scientific-Technical Imaginary of Outer Space,” The European Journal of International Law 30(2):547-572) Quite apart from the obvious qualifications that have to be made about the status of the meagrely ratified Moon Treaty, two initial aspects of the code are worth emphasizing. In the first place, it is easy to overlook the undoubtedly radical character of this extraversion of international law into outer space56 – international law was, on this view, suddenly declared to be of unlimited extent, inter-galactic as much as international, an omnipresent order disarticulated from the site of its geographical origin. In the second place, it was more than evident that the code, thus described, was replete with equivocations and silences. It said nothing about the jurisdictional delimitation of outer space, about remote sensing and direct television broadcasting, or about the allocation of rights over the geostationary orbit.57 Still less did it resolve the question as to whether claims to property might be made in relation to resources removed from celestial objects or whether military use of the ‘extra-celestial void’ was legitimate. And, to the extent that these might be attributed to a straightforward failure on the part of the drafters to pay attention to such issues, or perhaps more obviously to an evident lack of ‘political will’, the code may be read as largely transparent – as a literal or manifest representation of the limits of legal regulation in the conflictual circumstances of its production. Yet, as Louis Althusser points out, such a strategy of ‘innocent’ reading will only take us so far.58 It will tell us only what was already palpable to the authors of the code. What it will not do is tell us much about the conditions under which the code appeared, why it assumed the form it did or what pre-suppositions had to be held in place for it to make sense to its authors. For that, a strategy of ‘symptomatic reading’ would seem to be necessary.59 Such a strategy, as Althusser explains, involves not simply looking at a text for the purposes of determining what it seeks to make clear or manifest but, rather, attending also to its constitutive silences – by which he means, not simply what was not said but also what could not be said. The latter strategy, as he points out, involves identifying within a text the ‘problematic’ with which it is engaged – a framework or enquiry or mode of thought that enabled certain things to be ‘thinkable’, ‘visible’ or ‘legible’, and others, by contrast, ‘unthinkable’, ‘invisible’ or ‘illegible’. Symptomatic reading, in these terms, is set to reveal what must be silently repressed, or kept out of sight in order for that which is visible to have meaning. In order to approach the code for space with this strategy of reading in mind, we might want to begin with the observation that the code is structured around a set of oppositions: that outer space is a domain of peace, not of war; a domain of collaborative endeavour, not of competition; a domain of the future, not the past and, finally, a domain entirely beyond the order of sovereignty and the atmospheric conditions that enable it – a commons. Each of these oppositions, however, gives expression to an incipient relationship between the objective in question and its conditions of possibility: between the prohibition of violence and the violence necessary for keeping the peace; between utopian ideas and the dystopian imaginaries that engender them; and between the idea of a commons and the regimes of sovereignty and property from which it derives its content. Taking this formation as my starting point, I want to develop in the ensuing sections of this article the argument that the code for outer space was built upon two forms of illegibility, both of which may be associated with ‘Cold War’ thought. One of these concerns a suppression of the idea of outer space as a site of warfare; the other a suppression of the idea that space might be a site of primitive accumulation. 4 War and Peace in Space There was little doubt to any of the observers of the launch of Sputniks I and II in 1957 that, despite their overtly ‘scientific’ purposes, the arms race had taken a decisive new turn. The exploration of outer space clearly offered a range of potential benefits; alongside the possibility of research into the physics of the atmosphere, it also would facilitate the collection of a host of meteorological, geophysical and cartographic data, enable enhanced capacity for radio communication and television broadcasting, facilitate safe navigation and, finally, open up the possibility of experimental flights to the moon and beyond. No one, however, was blind to the military implications.60 Within the USA, in particular, there was a widespread belief that command over outer space was an imperative that could not be missed: ‘Whoever controls outer space’, it was often said, ‘controls the world’.61 In the wilder speculations, thus, it was imagined that a nuclear power might be in a position to launch guided missiles from a space platform to any point on earth with barely any possibility of response, that outer space would be filled with ‘orbiting bombers’ or that the moon would become the site of military rocket installations. ‘Control’ of outer space, thus, was immediately conceived as being vital as a matter of security. Such concerns seemed to place a premium upon ensuring that the ‘use’ of outer space was exclusively peaceful – a view that seemed to be affirmed not merely by the establishment of COPUOS and successive proposals put to the UN by both the USA and Soviet Union. It was also recognized in the US National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, which created a civilian space agency (NASA) and declared, in the process, that ‘it is the policy of the United States that activities in space should be devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of all mankind’.62 This theme was carried through into the code for outer space – UN General Assembly Resolution 1962 recognizing ‘the common interest of all mankind in the progress of the exploration and use of outer space for peaceful purposes’ and the Outer Space Treaty that added in Article 4 that states should not place nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction in orbit and that the moon and other celestial bodies shall be used by all states parties ‘exclusively for peaceful purposes’ (military bases and fortifications, in particular, being prohibited). Indeed, President Lyndon B. Johnson described the Outer Space Treaty as ‘the most important arms-control development since the limited test-ban treaty of 1963’.63 In an immediate sense, then, outer space was configured as a space radically distinct from atmospheric space and was placed at once beyond the field of both sovereignty and of war. These, however, were by no means co-terminous. The preferred analogy when discussing the status of outer space was often that of the high seas – like the seas, outer space should be marked by the principle of freedom of access and movement, a res communis incapable of being ‘enclosed’. In fact, this was the analogy used by the USA when defending its use of satellites for reconnaissance purposes; ‘reconnaissance’ from space, it was argued, was the functional equivalent of surveillance from the high seas.64 It is clear, however, that this analogy was problematic precisely because the high seas themselves were not immune from being brought within the field of military conflict.65 And, with that in mind, alternative modes of analysis were often proffered to ensure that the ‘commons’ was not to be equated with a potential field of battle.66 Nevertheless, there was always a certain equivocation running through discussions within the UN and elsewhere as to whether the military/non-military distinction was one that could be effectively held in place. Not only were the Declaration on Outer Space and Outer Space Treaty silent on certain vital matters – on the equipping of satellites, for example, with conventional weaponry or the militarization of the ‘extracelestial void’ – but the inclusion of Article 3, which instructed states to ‘carry on activities’ in accordance with international law and the UN Charter ‘in the interest of maintaining international peace and security’, gave expression to the idea, vaunted at various moments, that outer space may nevertheless be the site of military action in self-defence.67 ‘Peaceful’ use, on such a measure, was not to be calibrated by reference to the equipment or personnel put into space – whether military or civilian – but, rather, by reference to the ends or motivation of the actors in question.68 In the case of the USA, this was to resolve itself in the idea that ‘peaceful use’ should not be equated with ‘non-military use’ but, instead, with ‘non-aggressive’ use. As Senator Albert Gore was to put it, when speaking before the UN First Committee in 1962: it is the view of the United States that outer space should be used only for peaceful – that is, non-aggressive and beneficial – purposes. The question of military activities in space cannot be divorced from the question of military activities on earth. To banish these activities in both environments we must continue our efforts for general and complete disarmament with adequate safeguards. Until this is achieved, the test of any space activities must not be whether it is military or non-military, but whether or not it is consistent with the United Nations Charter and other obligations of law.69 The same general tenor was maintained in the discussion over Article 4 of the Outer Space Treaty concerning the demilitarization of the moon and celestial bodies. In this treaty, it was admitted that the use of military personnel ‘for scientific research or other peaceful purposes shall not be prohibited’, largely in recognition of the fact that for both space powers it was the military, not civilian agencies, who were responsible for developing rocket and other outer space capabilities. What one might see in this is a straightforward determination, on the part of both space powers, to continue the practice of exploiting outer space for purposes of defence whilst holding on, at the same time, to the general idea that outer space was a space of peaceful endeavour. Defensive militarization, here, was to be conceptualized as the functional equivalent of total demilitarization. Yet ‘defence’ was also an unstable category in circumstances of a bipolar military standoff that depended upon a balance of forces. For not only might an effective defence depend upon first strike capability (as the doctrine of ‘mutually assured destruction’ was to suggest),70 but also, as was later to become evident following the announcement of the US Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983,71 even the construction of an overtly ‘defensive’ system could assume an offensive cast if only one party possessed that capacity.72