1ac- deleuze 1nc- shell nc cp 1ar- new shell all 2nr- all 2ar- all
Apple Valley
4
Opponent: Valley SJ | Judge: Andrew Shea
1ac- affect 1nc- wehelyie 1ar- all 2nr- k 2ar- case
Apple Valley
6
Opponent: Isidore Newman EE | Judge: Jenn Melin
1ac- affect 1nc- biopolitix 1ar- all 2nr- k 2ar- case
Barkley Forum
1
Opponent: Orange Luther AZ | Judge: Andrew Shaw
1ac- kant 1nc- t disclosure util da pic case turn case dump 1ar- pics bad all 2nr- t da 2ar- t case
Blake- John Edie Holiday Debates
2
Opponent: West Des Moines LS | Judge: Ursula Gruber
1ac- kant 1nc- cp case 1ar- all 2nr- all 2ar- ac perm
Blake- John Edie Holiday Debates
3
Opponent: West Des Moines Valley RT | Judge: Vishvak Bandi
1ac- kant 1nc- pic 1ar- all 2nr- cp 2ar- perm
Blake- John Edie Holiday Debates
5
Opponent: Eagan JS | Judge: Ethan Mirman
1ac- kant 1nc- asteroid mining 1ar- all 2nr- all 2ar- case
Blue Key
1
Opponent: Brookefield East DJ | Judge: Faizaan Dossani
1ac- kant 1nc- new affs bad logcon straight ref 1ar- all 2nr- logcon 2ar- independent voter
Blue Key
3
Opponent: Lexington AR | Judge: Javier Navarrete
1ac- kant 1nc- shell reps case 1ar- all 2n- reps case 2ar- case
Blue Key
6
Opponent: Lexington VM | Judge: JP Stuckert
1ac- ac 1nc- mollow ac 1ar- all 2nr- iv barber 2ar- all
Blue Key
Doubles
Opponent: Park City NL | Judge: sabrina callahan, tej gedela, rohit lakshman
1ac- kant 1nc- round reports combo shell existentialism 1ar- shell all 2nr- round reports 2ar- round reports case
Mid America
3
Opponent: American Heritage Broward MC | Judge: Ian Matuszeski
1ac- deleuze 1nc- tt deleuze k 4 hijacks case 1ar- all 2nr- hijacks case 2ar- hijacks case
Mid America Cup
2
Opponent: Strake EP | Judge: Bella Nadel
1ac- aff 1nc- kant disclosure act omission case 1ar- new shells turns 2nr- act omission 2ar- shell
Mid America Cup
6
Opponent: AHB EM | Judge: Grant Brown
1ac- deleuze 1nc- tt espec rodl pic hijacks case 2nr- rodl skep 2ar- case
Newark
2
Opponent: Ridge MS | Judge: Cryus Jackson
1ac- kant 1nc- shell da da 1ar- all 2nr- all 2ar- case
Newark
4
Opponent: Peninsula BD | Judge: Elijah Smith
1ac- affect 1nc- da util t 1ar- all 2n- da 2a- case
Princeton
Octas
Opponent: Harrison AC | Judge: faizaan dossani, eric he, micah thode
1ac- affect 1nc- curry da black women k case 1ar- all 2nr- k 2ar- case
Princeton
2
Opponent: Summit JC | Judge: Grant Brown
1ac- ac 1nc- k da rotb case 1ar- all shell 2nr- k 2ar- ac k
Princeton
3
Opponent: Olympia BO | Judge: Phoenix Pittman
1ac- affect 1nc- 2 shells cp cased dump 1ar- shell all 2nr- shell 2ar- case
Princeton
Doubles
Opponent: Olympia OE | Judge: ethan massa, andrew lee, fabrice ettiene
1ac- affect 1nc- 2 shells util da case 3 hijacks 1ar- all 2nr- cx checks bad hijack 2ar- case
Princeton
6
Opponent: Walt Whitman EY | Judge: Jalyn Wu
1ac- affect 1nc- cap case 1ar- spec status all 2nr- all 2ar- shell
Yale
2
Opponent: Lovejoy JV | Judge: Anand Rao
1ac- stock 1nc- cap case 1ar- all 2nr- k case 2ar- presumption perm
Yale
4
Opponent: Charlotte Latin EL | Judge: Andrew Lee
1ac- kant 1nc- cap case 1ar- shell all 2n- cap 2ar- shell
To modify or delete round reports, edit the associated round.
Cites
Entry
Date
0 - Contact Info
Tournament: na | Round: 1 | Opponent: na | Judge: na Hey, I'm Olivia! she/her
fb: Olivia Liu (pls friend request me first) email: olivialiu82@gmail.com Contact me before round if you want me to disclose in any specific way
I will try to provide any content warnings. Let me know before round if you have any specific triggers.
9/26/21
0 - Disclosure Note
Tournament: any | Round: Quads | Opponent: any | Judge: any update: for some reason, the wiki will not allow me to paste in cites for select rounds (completely random idek). they keep deleting themselves, so refer to os for disclosure
For my wikify button glitches out so I've just pasted cites in without bolding/first 3 last 3 very sorry for ppl who only look at cites. anyway, pls refer too osource docs serves as an i-meet to violations on cites, i'm trying my best here thanks
1/28/22
0 - Disclosure Note PLEASE READ
Tournament: any | Round: Quads | Opponent: any | Judge: any for some of apple valley and princeton, im unable to paste in cites. they keep deleting themselves, refer to os for disclosure
For my wikify button glitches out so I've just pasted cites in without bolding/first 3 last 3 very sorry for ppl who only look at cites. anyway, pls refer too osource docs serves as an i-meet to violations on cites, i'm trying my best here thanks
12/4/21
0 - Navigation
Tournament: na | Round: Quads | Opponent: na | Judge: na G - Generics NSD - camp SO - September/October ND - November/December JF - January/February
9/26/21
G - Broken Interps
Tournament: any | Round: Quads | Opponent: any | Judge: any interpretation: the negative debater must concede the affirmative framework absent a substantive reason why you can’t engage interpretation: if the aff clarifies their advocacy in the form of a text in the 1AC then the negative must have a text in the 1NC clarifying their advocacy interp: The neg must have a delineated text in the NC that specifies the status of the cp Interp: the negative debater must not read a plan inclusive counter advocacy
1/28/22
G - Broken Interps
Tournament: any | Round: Quads | Opponent: any | Judge: any interpretation: the negative debater must concede the affirmative framework absent a substantive reason why you can’t engage interpretation: if the aff clarifies their advocacy in the form of a text in the 1AC then the negative must have a text in the 1NC clarifying their advocacy interp: The neg must have a delineated text in the NC that specifies the status of the cp Interp: the negative debater must not read a plan inclusive counter advocacy
3~ Pleasure and pain are the starting point for moral reasoning—they’re our most baseline desires and the only things that explain the intrinsic value of objects or actions
Moen 16, Ole Martin (PhD, Research Fellow in Philosophy at University of Oslo). "An Argument for Hedonism." Journal of Value Inquiry 50.2 (2016): 267. Let us start by observing, empirically, that a widely shared judgment about intrinsic
AND
notion of legal standing will outstrip the power relations that ground Pettit’s theory.
4~ Extinction 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
AND
with the benefit of keeping one’s options open while one gains new information.
9/18/21
JF - Kant
Tournament: Blake- John Edie Holiday Debates | Round: 2 | Opponent: West Des Moines LS | Judge: Ursula Gruber Ethics must be derived from the constitutive features of agents – ethics based internally fail because they can’t generate universal obligations and ethics based externally fail because they are nonbinding as agents could opt-out and have no motivation to follow them which means they fail to guide action. Constitutivism solves – it allows for universal obligations among all agents but they are binding and cannot be opted out of. Next, only practical reason is constitutive: 1 Regress – to question why one should reason concedes its authority since it is an act of reasoning itself which proves it’s binding and inescapable 2 Agents can shift between different identities but doing so requires reason - it unifies the subject and is the only enterprise agents cannot escape Ferrero 09 (Luca Ferrero, Luca Ferrero is a Philosophy professor at University of California, Riverside. His areas of interest are Agency Theory, including Intentionality and Personal identity; Practical Reasoning; and Meta-Ethics, “Constitutivism and the Inescapability of Agency”. Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. IV, Jan 12, 2009. https://philarchive.org/archive/FERCATv1 BHHS AK recut Agency is special in two respects. First, agency is the enterprise with the largest jurisdiction.¹² All ordinary enterprises fall under it. To engage in any ordinary enterprise is ipso facto to engage in the enterprise of agency. In addition, there are instances of behavior that fall under no other enterprise but agency. First, intentional transitions in and out of particular enterprises might not count as moves within those enterprises, but they are still instances of intentional agency, of bare intentional agency, so to say. Second, agency is the locus where we adjudicate the merits and demerits of participating in any ordinary enterprise. Reasoning whether to participate in a particular enterprise is often conducted outside of that enterprise, even while one is otherwise engaged in it. Practical reflection is a manifestation of full-fledged intentional agency but it does not necessarily belong to any other specific enterprise. Once again, it might be an instance of bare intentional agency. In the limiting case, agency is the only enterprise that would still keep a subject busy if she were to attempt a ‘radical re-evaluation’ of all of her engagements and at least temporarily suspend her participation in all ordinary enterprises.
That justifies universalizability - insofar as there is no a priori distinction between reasoners, a reason for one agent must also be a reason for another; if all agents cannot set and pursue an end, it is not constitutive of agency. Willing a maxim that violates freedom is a contradiction in conception – you cannot violate someone’s freedom without having your own freedom to do so. Thus, the standard is consistency with the categorical imperative– actions that terminate in contradictions when universalized are bad, so only our restrictions can solve Impact calc: Intentions first – only the intention in pursuing a certain end is relevant when considering whether or not it is universalizable. Prefer for action theory - Any action can be split into infinite smaller actions. For example, when I’m taking a bite of food, I am making infinite movements of my hand and mouth – only the intention unifies the action. If we can’t unify action, we can’t call actions moral or immoral because they are made up of infinite parts.
Also Prefer Additionally –
1 We must value freedom insofar as we value our ends which justifies valuing the freedom of agents setting and pursuing ends since anything else would be contradictory. This means we can’t treat others as a mere means to an end Gewirth ’84 Alan Gewirth, “The Ontological Basis of Natural Law: A Critique and an Alternative,” The American Journal of Jurisprudence, Vol. 29, No. 1 (1984), Pg. 95–121. Gewirth was professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. CHSTM Brackets for gendered language/grammar BHHS AK recut Let me briefly sketch the main line of argument that leads to this conclusion. As I have said, the argument is based on the generic features of human action. To begin with, every agent acts for purposes he they regards as good. Hence, he they must regard as necessary goods the freedom and well-being that are the generic features and necessary conditions of his action and successful action in general. From this, it follows that every agent logically must hold or accept that he has they have rights to these conditions. For if he were to deny that he has they have these rights, then he they would have to admit that it is permissible for others persons to remove from him the very conditions of freedom and well-being that, as an agent, he they must have. But it is contradictory for him to hold both that he must have these conditions and also that he may not have them. Hence, on pain of self-contradiction, every agent must accept that he has rights to freedom and well-being. Moreover, every agent must further admit that all other agents also have those rights, since all other actual or prospective agents they have the same general characteristics of agency on which they must ground his their own right-claims.¶ What I am saying, then, is that every agent, simply by virtue of being an agent, must regard his freedom and well being as necessary goods and must hold that he and all other actual or prospective agents have rights to these necessary goods. Hence, every agent, on pain of self-contradiction, must accept the following principle: Act in accord with the generic rights of your recipients as well as of yourself. The generic rights are rights to the generic features of action, freedom, and well-being. I call this the Principle of Generic Consistency (PGC), because it combines the formal consideration of consistency with the material consideration of the generic features and rights of action
2 Performativity – arguing against my framework presupposes freedom because without freedom to reason you would not be able to make arguments and try to win. – this means that contesting any of my arguments proves my framework true.
3 A posteriori ethics fail: A Is/Ought Gap – experience just describes how the world is but doesn’t indicate how it ought to be which means there must be an a priori conception of good B Inability to know each other’s experience makes it an unreliable basis for ethics because different experiences bring different concepts of truth – only a priori ethics solve since a priori truths are accessible to all agents 4 Consequentialism fails – A Predictions assumes specific causes of past consequences which can’t be verified as the actual cause B Butterfly effect - every action has infinite consequences so it is impossible to evaluate an action; one government policy could end up causing nuclear war in a million years. C Aggregation is impossible – pleasure and pain are subjective
5 Real World Education – an understanding of my fw is key to understanding the law in the real world because most states abide by inviolable side-constraints in their constitutions – Germany proves. Ripstein Ripstein, Arthur. Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2009 Strictly speaking, the right to dignity is not an enumerated right in the German Basic Law says, but the organizing principle under which all enumerated rights—ranging from life and security of the person through freedom of expression, movement, association, and employment and the right to a fair trial to equality before the law—are organized. It appears as Art. I.1: “Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority.” Art. I.3 explains that the enumerated rights follow: “The following basic rights shall bind the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary as directly applicable law.” Other, enumerated rights are subject to proportionality analysis, through which they can be restricted in light of each other so as to give effect to a consistent system of rights. The right to dignity is the basis of the state’s power to legislate and so is not subject to any limitation, even in light of the enumerated rights falling under it, because—to put it in explicitly Kantian terms—citizens could not give themselves a law that turned them into mere objects.
6 Oppression is caused by arbitrary exclusion of others – only universalizability makes sure that we include everyone equally. Farr 02 Arnold Farr. Arnold Farr is a Philosophy professor at the University of Kentucky. His research interests are German idealism, Marxism, critical theory, philosophy of race, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, and liberation philosophy. He has published numorous articles and book chapters on all of these subjects, “Can a Philosophy of Race Afford to Abandon the Kantian Categorical Imperative?”, 2002, blog.ufba.br/kant/files/2009/12/Can-a-Philosophy-of-Race-Afford-to-Abandon-the.pdf. /BHHS AK recut The attack on Kantian formalism began with Hegel’s criticism of the Kantian philosophy.14 The list of contemporary theorists who follow Hegel’s line of criticism is far too long to deal with in the scope of this paper. Although these theorists may approach the problem of Kantian formalism from a variety of angles, the spirit of their criticism is basically the same: The universality of the categorical imperative is an abstraction from one’s empirical conditions. Kant is often accused of making the moral agent an abstract, empty, noumenal subject. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Kantian subject is an embodied, empirical, concrete subject. However, this concrete subject has a dual nature. Kant claims in the Critique of Pure Reason as well as in the Grounding that human beings have an intelligible and empirical character.15 It is impossible to understand and do justice to Kant’s moral theory without taking seriously the relation between these two characters. The very concept of morality is impossible without the tension between the two. By “empirical character” Kant simply means that we have a sensual nature. We are physical creatures with physical drives or desires. The very fact that I cannot simply satisfy my desires without considering the rightness or wrongness of my actions suggests that my empirical character must be held in check by something, or else I behave like a Freudian id. My empirical character must be held in check by my intelligible character, which is the legislative activity of practical reason. It is through our intelligible character that we formulate principles that keep our empirical impulses in check. The categorical imperative is the supreme principle of morality that is constructed by the moral agent in his/her moment of self-transcendence. What I have called self-transcendence may be best explained in the following passage by Onora O’Neill: In restricting our maxims to those that meet the test of the categorical imperative we refuse to base our lives on maxims that necessarily make our own case an exception. The reason why a universilizability criterion is morally significant is that it makes our own case no special exception (G, IV, 404). In accepting the Categorical Imperative we accept the moral reality of other selves, and hence the possibility (not, note, the reality) of a moral community. The Formula of Universal Law enjoins no more than that we act only on maxims that are open to others also.16 O’Neill’s description of the universalizability criterion includes the notion of self-transcendence that I am working to explicate here to the extent that like self-transcendence, universalizable moral principles require that the individual think beyond his or her own particular desires. The individual is not allowed to exclude others as rational moral agents who have the right to act as he acts in a given situation. For example, if I decide to use another person merely as a means for my own end I must recognize the other person’s right to do the same to me. I cannot consistently will that I use another as a means only and will that I not be used in the same manner by another. Hence, the universalizability criterion is a principle of consistency and a principle of inclusion. That is, in choosing my maxims I attempt to include the perspective of other moral agents.
Thus, I defend the resolution as a general principle: Resolved: The appropriation of outer space by private entities is unjust. PICs don’t negate since the aff tolerates exceptions
Offense 1 Humans have an obligation to respect potential ET life and their property. They may exist beyond recognition of a rationalist, meaning colonization entails using them as a mere means Brian Patrick Green 2014, Santa Clara University, "Ethical Approaches to Astrobiology and Space Exploration: Comparing Kant, Mill, and Aristotle," https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/markkula/5/ SHSOL More than that, Kant not only allowed that extraterrestrial intelligences might exist, he believed that if they did not yet exist, that someday they would,5 and that some of these ETIs would be inferior and some superior to humans in intelligence.6 One might wonder if the young Kant’s belief in ETIs continued into his older years, when he was writing on ethics. There is good evidence that it does. Writing his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, 30 years after his work on the nebular hypothesis, Kant is explicit – he is not just discussing humans, but “all rational beings.” 7 So with respect deontology and extraterrestrial intelligent life, Case 1) on the chart, Kant would extend the same full dignity and respect to ETIs which humans owe to each other, in accord with his categorical imperative, which requires the universalizability of moral norms8 and treating all rational beings as ends in themselves.9 For deontology and non-intelligent life, Case 2), Kant argues that animals, as non-rational beings, are of only relative worth. They are not as ends in themselves, not persons, but things.10 If humans discovered non-intelligent life on other worlds (most likely microbes, but if larger then we would have to carefully evaluate what it means to be intelligent, and make sure the discovered life does not qualify), according to Kant, we could do with it as we pleased. While some contemporary moral philosophers have tried to reinterpret or rehabilitate Kant on animals, these works are developments of Kant’s philosophy; they are not his philosophy itself.11 So while Kantianism might be modifiable into a system which is more friendly towards the rest of the living world, without these modifications it is not. For non-life and Kantian deontology, Case 3), there is likewise a simple answer: nonliving things are just things. Non-living things are not a moral concern, they are merely instrumental, and as such intelligent creatures can treat these things as they wish. However, there is an odd exception to this conclusion which is worth mentioning (and which I note with a star in the table). Kant believed that if other planets were not yet inhabited, they someday would be. If this is the case, then what of planets currently without intelligent life but which may someday have ETIs it? Ought we ought to anticipate these intelligent creatures and therefore respect them proactively by respecting their prospective goods? Kant does not say (perhaps because he was not interested in speculating or because humans were, in his time, far from being in a position to affect the futures of these planets). However, given the importance of rational beings in Kant’s system (rationality, teleology, and morality are the purpose of universe) the answer is possibly, or even probably, yes.
2 Private entities are incapable of making omnilateral decisions as privatization entails that they withhold information which limits deliberation over making maxims. Chiara Cordelli 2016, University of Chicago, Political Science https://www.law.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/What-is-Wrong-With-Privatization_UCB.pdfDulles VN The intrinsic wrong of privatization, I will suggest, rather consists in the creation of an institutional arrangement that, by its very constitution, denies those who are subject to it equal freedom. I understand freedom as an interpersonal relationship of reciprocal independence. To be free is not to be subordinated to another person’s unilateral will. By building on an analytical reconstruction of Kant’s Doctrine of Right, I will argue that current forms of privatization reproduce (to a different degree) within a civil condition the very same defects that Kant attributes to the state of nature, or to a pre-civil condition, thereby making a rightful condition of reciprocal independence impossible. Importantly, this is so even if private actors are publicly authorized through contract and subject to regulations, and even if they are committed to reason in accordance with the public good. The reason for this, as I will explain, derives from the fact that private agents are constitutionally incapable of acting omnilaterally, even if their actions are omnilaterally authorized by government through some delegation mechanism, e.g. a voluntary contract. Omnilateralness, I will suggest, must be understood as a function of 1) rightful judgment and 2) unity. By rightful judgment I mean the capacity to reason publicly and to make universal rules that are valid for everyone, according to a juridical ideal of right, as necessary to solve the problem of the unilateral imposition of private wills on others. By unity I mean the capacity to make rules and decisions that change the normative situation of others, as a part of a unified system of decision-making. The condition of unity is crucial, as I shall later explain, insofar as there might be multiple interpretations compatible with rightful judgment, which would still problematically leave the definition of people’s rightful entitlements indeterminate. Further, the practical realization of the juridical idea of an omnilateral will, I will contend, requires embeddedness within a shared collective practice of decision-making. In practice, rightful judgment can only obtain when certain shared background frameworks that structure practical reasoning and confer unity to that reasoning are in place. The rules of public administration and the authority structure of bureaucracy should be understood as playing this essential function of giving empirical and practical reality to the omnilateral will, as far as the execution of rules and the concrete definition of entitlements are concerned. Together, these two requirements are necessary, (whether they are also sufficient is a different question), to make an action the omnilateral action of a state, which has the moral power to change the normative situation of citizens, by fixing the content of their rights and duties in accordance with the equal freedom of all. The phenomenon of privatization thus raises the fundamental questions of why we need political institutions to begin with, and what makes an action an action of the state. Insofar as private agents make decisions that fundamentally alter the normative situation (the rights and duties) of citizens, and insofar as, by definition, private agents are not public officials embedded in that shared collective practice, their decisions, even if well intentioned and authorized through contract, cannot count as omnilateral acts of the state. They rather and necessarily remain unilateral acts of men. Hence, I will conclude, for the very same reasons that we have, following Kant, a duty to exit the state of nature so as to solve the twofold problems of the unilateral imposition of will on others and the indeterminacy of rights, we also have a duty to limit privatization and to support, on normative grounds, a case for the re-bureaucratization of certain functions. Therefore, my paper provides foundational reasons to agree with Richard Rorty’s nonfoundational defense of bureaucracy as stated in the opening epigraph, since only agents who are appropriately embedded within a bureaucratic structure, properly understood, are, in many cases, capable of acting omnilaterally. The “bosses” I am here concerned with are not primarily those who 5 can unilaterally impose their will on us in their capacity as private employers, but rather any private actor who acts unilaterally while in the garb of the state.
3 Space Exploration is non universalizable - a). Entails that everyone leaves Earth which means that no one would be around to create the means to leave earth b). Assumes all agents have access to the resources to fund a space trip, and is thus exclusionary. Benjamin Segobaetso 2018, Project Officer at United Nations Association in Canada “Ethical Implications of the Colonization, Privatization and Commercialization of Outer Space.” https://ruor.uottawa.ca/bitstream/10393/38318/1/Benjamin_Segobaetso_2018.pdf?fbclid=IwAR2yROoOf_np9HL97WmBB-xDUGSZnQrRPbvs2Gmo6V5NlyEFBoSLWxQFuV0Dulles VN It can be argued through Kantian ethics that our record here on Earth paints a picture of neoliberal and capitalist policies with tendencies to favour the highest bidder at the exclusion of the under privileged and puts profit first at the expense of the environment. For Kantians, there are two questions that we must ask ourselves whenever we decide to act: Can I rationally will that everyone act as I propose to act? If the answer is no, then we must not perform the action. (ii) Does my action respect the goals of human beings? Again, if the answer is no, then we must not perform the action. Kantian ethicists would argue that extending to space neoliberal and capitalist policies is immoral because these systems create economic disparities and life threatening environmental injustices; therefore, they are set up in a way that we could 16 not rationally will everyone to act the way they act either here on Earth or in space. Also, Kantian ethicists would ask whether the action of extending neoliberal and capitalist policies to space would respect the goals of extra-terrestrial intelligent life if any rather than merely using them for humans’ own purposes? If the answer is no, then the participating agent must not perform the action. Kant wrote on the possible existence of extra-terrestrial intelligent species in the final pages of the last book that he published, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1978). In this publication, Kant hinted that the highest concept of the Alien species may be that of a terrestrial rational being eines irdischen vernünftigen ; however, he argued that it will be difficult to describe its characteristics because there is no knowledge available of a non-terrestrial rational being nicht irdischen Wesen which could be used as a reference in regards to its properties and ultimately classify that terrestrial being as rational. This dilemma will continue until extraterrestrial intelligent life is discovered because comparing two species of rational beings has to be on the basis of experience, but that experience has not been possible yet (Kant, 237-238).
1/28/22
JF - Kant v2
Tournament: Newark | Round: 2 | Opponent: Ridge MS | Judge: Cryus Jackson Ethics must be derived from the constitutive features of agents – ethics based internally fail because they can’t generate universal obligations and ethics based externally fail because they are nonbinding as agents could opt-out and have no motivation to follow them which means they fail to guide action. Constitutivism solves – it allows for universal obligations among all agents but they are binding and cannot be opted out of. Next, only practical reason is constitutive: 1 Regress – to question why one should reason concedes its authority since it is an act of reasoning itself which proves it’s binding and inescapable 2 Humans naturally aspire to be rational and impulsively attempt to reason from a perspective that transcends their unique circumstance – proves my framework is key to a stable concept of agency. This hijacks other frameworks because they presuppose a consistent concept of an agent; without a clearly defined agent, ethics have nothing to guide and fail. Velleman 05 David J. Velleman. J. David Velleman is Professor of Philosophy and Bioethics at New York University and Miller Research Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He primarily works in the areas of ethics, moral psychology, and related areas such as the philosophy of action, and practical reasoning, “A Brief Introduction to Kantian Ethics.” Self to Self. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005, https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/philosophy/logic/self-self-selected-essays?format=HBandisbn=9780521854290 SHS AK Why not accept "I don't feel like it" as a reason on this occasion while resolving to reject it on all others? Again the answer is clear. If a consideration counts as a reason for acting, then it counts as a reason whenever it is true. And on almost any morning, it's true that you don't feel like swimming. Yet if a reason is a consideration that counts as a reason whenever it's true, then why not dispense with reasons so defined? Why do you feel compelled to act for that sort of consideration? Since you don't feel like swimming, you might just roll over and go back to sleep, without bothering to find some fact about the present occasion from which you're willing to draw similar implications whenever it is true. How odd, to skip exercise in order to sleep and then to lose sleep anyway over finding a reason not to exercise! Kant offered an explanation for this oddity. His explanation was that acting for reasons is essential to being a person, something to which you unavoidably aspire. In order to be a person, you must have an approach to the world that is sufficiently coherent and constant to qualify as a single, continuing point-of-view. And part of what gives you a single, continuing point-of-view is your acceptance of particular considerations as having the force of reasons whenever they are true. We might be tempted to make this point by saying that you are a unified, persisting person and hence that you do approach practical questions from a point-of-view framed by constant reasons. But this way of making the point wouldn't explain why you feel compelled to act for reasons; it would simply locate acting for reasons in a broader context, as part of what makes you a person. One of Kant's greatest insights, however, is that a unified, persisting person is something that you are because it is something that you aspire to be. Antecedently to this aspiration, you are merely aware that you are capable of being a person. But any creature aware that it is capable of being a person, in Kant's view, is ipso facto capable of appreciating the value of being a person and is therefore ineluctably drawn toward personhood. The value of being a person in the present context is precisely that of attaining a perspective that transcends that of your current, momentary self. Right now, you would rather sleep than swim, but you also know that if you roll over and sleep, you will wake up wishing that you had swum instead. Your impulse to decide on the basis of reasons is, at bottom, an impulse to transcend these momentary points-of-view, by attaining a single, constant perspective that can subsume both of them. It's like the impulse to attain a higher vantage point that overlooks the restricted standpoints on the ground below. This higher vantage point is neither your current perspective of wanting to sleep, nor your later perspective of wishing you had swum, but a timeless perspective from which you can reflect on now-wanting-this and later-wishing-that, a perspective from which you can attach constant practical implications to these considerations and come to a stable, all-things-considered judgment.
That justifies universalizability - insofar as there is no a priori distinction between reasoners, a reason for one agent must also be a reason for another; if all agents cannot set and pursue an end, it is not constitutive of agency. Willing a maxim that violates freedom is a contradiction in conception – you cannot violate someone’s freedom without having your own freedom to do so. Thus, the standard is consistency with the universal freedom– actions that terminate in contradictions when universalized are bad, so only our restrictions can solve Impact calc: Intentions first – only the intention in pursuing a certain end is relevant when considering whether or not it is universalizable. Prefer for action theory - Any action can be split into infinite smaller actions. For example, when I’m taking a bite of food, I am making infinite movements of my hand and mouth – only the intention unifies the action. If we can’t unify action, we can’t call actions moral or immoral because they are made up of infinite parts.
Also Prefer Additionally –
1 We must value freedom insofar as we value our ends which justifies valuing the freedom of agents setting and pursuing ends since anything else would be contradictory. This means we can’t treat others as a mere means to an end Gewirth ’84 Alan Gewirth, “The Ontological Basis of Natural Law: A Critique and an Alternative,” The American Journal of Jurisprudence, Vol. 29, No. 1 (1984), Pg. 95–121. Gewirth was professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. CHSTM Brackets for gendered language/grammar BHHS AK recut Let me briefly sketch the main line of argument that leads to this conclusion. As I have said, the argument is based on the generic features of human action. To begin with, every agent acts for purposes he they regards as good. Hence, he they must regard as necessary goods the freedom and well-being that are the generic features and necessary conditions of his action and successful action in general. From this, it follows that every agent logically must hold or accept that he has they have rights to these conditions. For if he were to deny that he has they have these rights, then he they would have to admit that it is permissible for others persons to remove from him the very conditions of freedom and well-being that, as an agent, he they must have. But it is contradictory for him to hold both that he must have these conditions and also that he may not have them. Hence, on pain of self-contradiction, every agent must accept that he has rights to freedom and well-being. Moreover, every agent must further admit that all other agents also have those rights, since all other actual or prospective agents they have the same general characteristics of agency on which they must ground his their own right-claims.¶ What I am saying, then, is that every agent, simply by virtue of being an agent, must regard his freedom and well being as necessary goods and must hold that he and all other actual or prospective agents have rights to these necessary goods. Hence, every agent, on pain of self-contradiction, must accept the following principle: Act in accord with the generic rights of your recipients as well as of yourself. The generic rights are rights to the generic features of action, freedom, and well-being. I call this the Principle of Generic Consistency (PGC), because it combines the formal consideration of consistency with the material consideration of the generic features and rights of action
2 Performativity – arguing against my framework presupposes freedom because without freedom to reason you would not be able to make arguments and try to win. – this means that contesting any of my arguments proves my framework true.
3 A posteriori ethics fail: a Problem of induction Vickers 14, John Vickers, 2014, The Problem of Induction, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/ The original problem of induction can be simply put. It concerns the support or justification of inductive methods; methods that predict or infer, in Hume's words, that “instances of which we have had no experience resemble those of which we have had experience” (THN, 89). Such methods are clearly essential in scientific reasoning as well as in the conduct of our everyday affairs. The problem is how to support or justify them and it leads to a dilemma: the principle cannot be proved deductively, for it is contingent, and only necessary truths can be proved deductively. Nor can it be supported inductively—by arguing that it has always or usually been reliable in the past—for that would beg the question by assuming just what is to be proved. b Is/Ought Gap – experience just describes how the world is but doesn’t indicate how it ought to be which means there must be an a priori conception of good c Inability to know each other’s experience makes it an unreliable basis for ethics because different experiences bring different concepts of truth – only a priori ethics solve since a priori truths are accessible to all agents 4 Consequentialism fails – A Predictions assumes specific causes of past consequences which can’t be verified as the actual cause B Butterfly effect - every action has infinite consequences so it is impossible to evaluate an action; one government policy could end up causing nuclear war in a million years. C Aggregation is impossible – pleasure and pain are subjective
5 Parameters A Accessibility – Other frameworks like Util require massive amounts of research that under resourced kids can’t access – encouraging research heavy debates always favors big schools. My framework solves - is super easy to understand and you only need to think of analytic arguments in round B Real World Education – an understanding of my fw is key to understanding the law in the real world because most states abide by inviolable side-constraints in their constitutions – Germany proves. Ripstein Ripstein, Arthur. Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2009 Strictly speaking, the right to dignity is not an enumerated right in the German Basic Law says, but the organizing principle under which all enumerated rights—ranging from life and security of the person through freedom of expression, movement, association, and employment and the right to a fair trial to equality before the law—are organized. It appears as Art. I.1: “Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority.” Art. I.3 explains that the enumerated rights follow: “The following basic rights shall bind the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary as directly applicable law.” Other, enumerated rights are subject to proportionality analysis, through which they can be restricted in light of each other so as to give effect to a consistent system of rights. The right to dignity is the basis of the state’s power to legislate and so is not subject to any limitation, even in light of the enumerated rights falling under it, because—to put it in explicitly Kantian terms—citizens could not give themselves a law that turned them into mere objects.
Thus, I defend the resolution as a general principle: Resolved: The appropriation of outer space by private entities is unjust.
Offense 1 Humans have an obligation to respect potential ET life and their property. They may exist beyond recognition of a rationalist, meaning colonization entails using them as a mere means Brian Patrick Green 2014, Santa Clara University, "Ethical Approaches to Astrobiology and Space Exploration: Comparing Kant, Mill, and Aristotle," https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/markkula/5/ SHSOL More than that, Kant not only allowed that extraterrestrial intelligences might exist, he believed that if they did not yet exist, that someday they would,5 and that some of these ETIs would be inferior and some superior to humans in intelligence.6 One might wonder if the young Kant’s belief in ETIs continued into his older years, when he was writing on ethics. There is good evidence that it does. Writing his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, 30 years after his work on the nebular hypothesis, Kant is explicit – he is not just discussing humans, but “all rational beings.” 7 So with respect deontology and extraterrestrial intelligent life, Case 1) on the chart, Kant would extend the same full dignity and respect to ETIs which humans owe to each other, in accord with his categorical imperative, which requires the universalizability of moral norms8 and treating all rational beings as ends in themselves.9 For deontology and non-intelligent life, Case 2), Kant argues that animals, as non-rational beings, are of only relative worth. They are not as ends in themselves, not persons, but things.10 If humans discovered non-intelligent life on other worlds (most likely microbes, but if larger then we would have to carefully evaluate what it means to be intelligent, and make sure the discovered life does not qualify), according to Kant, we could do with it as we pleased. While some contemporary moral philosophers have tried to reinterpret or rehabilitate Kant on animals, these works are developments of Kant’s philosophy; they are not his philosophy itself.11 So while Kantianism might be modifiable into a system which is more friendly towards the rest of the living world, without these modifications it is not. For non-life and Kantian deontology, Case 3), there is likewise a simple answer: nonliving things are just things. Non-living things are not a moral concern, they are merely instrumental, and as such intelligent creatures can treat these things as they wish. However, there is an odd exception to this conclusion which is worth mentioning (and which I note with a star in the table). Kant believed that if other planets were not yet inhabited, they someday would be. If this is the case, then what of planets currently without intelligent life but which may someday have ETIs it? Ought we ought to anticipate these intelligent creatures and therefore respect them proactively by respecting their prospective goods? Kant does not say (perhaps because he was not interested in speculating or because humans were, in his time, far from being in a position to affect the futures of these planets). However, given the importance of rational beings in Kant’s system (rationality, teleology, and morality are the purpose of universe) the answer is possibly, or even probably, yes.
2 Private entities are incapable of making omnilateral decisions as privatization entails that they withhold information which limits deliberation over making maxims. Chiara Cordelli 2016, University of Chicago, Political Science https://www.law.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/What-is-Wrong-With-Privatization_UCB.pdfDulles VN The intrinsic wrong of privatization, I will suggest, rather consists in the creation of an institutional arrangement that, by its very constitution, denies those who are subject to it equal freedom. I understand freedom as an interpersonal relationship of reciprocal independence. To be free is not to be subordinated to another person’s unilateral will. By building on an analytical reconstruction of Kant’s Doctrine of Right, I will argue that current forms of privatization reproduce (to a different degree) within a civil condition the very same defects that Kant attributes to the state of nature, or to a pre-civil condition, thereby making a rightful condition of reciprocal independence impossible. Importantly, this is so even if private actors are publicly authorized through contract and subject to regulations, and even if they are committed to reason in accordance with the public good. The reason for this, as I will explain, derives from the fact that private agents are constitutionally incapable of acting omnilaterally, even if their actions are omnilaterally authorized by government through some delegation mechanism, e.g. a voluntary contract. Omnilateralness, I will suggest, must be understood as a function of 1) rightful judgment and 2) unity. By rightful judgment I mean the capacity to reason publicly and to make universal rules that are valid for everyone, according to a juridical ideal of right, as necessary to solve the problem of the unilateral imposition of private wills on others. By unity I mean the capacity to make rules and decisions that change the normative situation of others, as a part of a unified system of decision-making. The condition of unity is crucial, as I shall later explain, insofar as there might be multiple interpretations compatible with rightful judgment, which would still problematically leave the definition of people’s rightful entitlements indeterminate. Further, the practical realization of the juridical idea of an omnilateral will, I will contend, requires embeddedness within a shared collective practice of decision-making. In practice, rightful judgment can only obtain when certain shared background frameworks that structure practical reasoning and confer unity to that reasoning are in place. The rules of public administration and the authority structure of bureaucracy should be understood as playing this essential function of giving empirical and practical reality to the omnilateral will, as far as the execution of rules and the concrete definition of entitlements are concerned. Together, these two requirements are necessary, (whether they are also sufficient is a different question), to make an action the omnilateral action of a state, which has the moral power to change the normative situation of citizens, by fixing the content of their rights and duties in accordance with the equal freedom of all. The phenomenon of privatization thus raises the fundamental questions of why we need political institutions to begin with, and what makes an action an action of the state. Insofar as private agents make decisions that fundamentally alter the normative situation (the rights and duties) of citizens, and insofar as, by definition, private agents are not public officials embedded in that shared collective practice, their decisions, even if well intentioned and authorized through contract, cannot count as omnilateral acts of the state. They rather and necessarily remain unilateral acts of men. Hence, I will conclude, for the very same reasons that we have, following Kant, a duty to exit the state of nature so as to solve the twofold problems of the unilateral imposition of will on others and the indeterminacy of rights, we also have a duty to limit privatization and to support, on normative grounds, a case for the re-bureaucratization of certain functions. Therefore, my paper provides foundational reasons to agree with Richard Rorty’s nonfoundational defense of bureaucracy as stated in the opening epigraph, since only agents who are appropriately embedded within a bureaucratic structure, properly understood, are, in many cases, capable of acting omnilaterally. The “bosses” I am here concerned with are not primarily those who 5 can unilaterally impose their will on us in their capacity as private employers, but rather any private actor who acts unilaterally while in the garb of the state.
1/8/22
JF - Kant v3
Tournament: Barkley Forum | Round: 1 | Opponent: Orange Luther AZ | Judge: Andrew Shaw Ethics must be derived from the constitutive features of agents – Next, only practical reason is constitutive: 1 Regress – to question why one should reason concedes its authority since it is an act of reasoning itself which proves it’s binding and inescapable 2 Agents can shift between different identities but doing so requires reason - it unifies the subject and is the only enterprise agents cannot escape Ferrero 09 (Luca Ferrero, Luca Ferrero is a Philosophy professor at University of California, Riverside. His areas of interest are Agency Theory, including Intentionality and Personal identity; Practical Reasoning; and Meta-Ethics, “Constitutivism and the Inescapability of Agency”. Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. IV, Jan 12, 2009. https://philarchive.org/archive/FERCATv1 BHHS AK recut Agency is special in two respects. First, agency is the enterprise with the largest jurisdiction.¹² All ordinary enterprises fall under it. To engage in any ordinary enterprise is ipso facto to engage in the enterprise of agency. In addition, there are instances of behavior that fall under no other enterprise but agency. First, intentional transitions in and out of particular enterprises might not count as moves within those enterprises, but they are still instances of intentional agency, of bare intentional agency, so to say. Second, agency is the locus where we adjudicate the merits and demerits of participating in any ordinary enterprise. Reasoning whether to participate in a particular enterprise is often conducted outside of that enterprise, even while one is otherwise engaged in it. Practical reflection is a manifestation of full-fledged intentional agency but it does not necessarily belong to any other specific enterprise. Once again, it might be an instance of bare intentional agency. In the limiting case, agency is the only enterprise that would still keep a subject busy if she were to attempt a ‘radical re-evaluation’ of all of her engagements and at least temporarily suspend her participation in all ordinary enterprises.
That justifies universalizability - insofar as there is no a priori distinction between reasoners, a reason for one agent must also be a reason for another; if all agents cannot set and pursue an end, it is not constitutive of agency. Willing a maxim that violates freedom is a contradiction in conception – you cannot violate someone’s freedom without having your own freedom to do so.
Thus, the standard is consistency with the categorical imperative.
Impact calc: Intentions first – only the intention in pursuing a certain end is relevant when considering whether or not it is universalizable. Prefer for action theory - Any action can be split into infinite smaller actions. For example, when I’m taking a bite of food, I am making infinite movements of my hand and mouth – only the intention unifies the action. If we can’t unify action, we can’t call actions moral or immoral because they are made up of infinite parts. Prefer additionally:
1 Performativity – arguing against my framework presupposes freedom because without freedom to reason you would not be able to make arguments and try to win. – this means that contesting any of my arguments proves my framework true.
2 Humans have unconditional value since they have the power to confer value onto objects – means humans are ends in themselves and must not be treated as a mere means Korsgaard 83 (Christine Korsgaard, Christine Marion Korsgaard is an American philosopher and Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University whose main scholarly interests are in moral philosophy and its history; the relation of issues in moral philosophy to issues in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the theory of personal identity; the theory of personal relationships; and in normativity in general, “Two Distinctions in Goodness,” The Philosophical Review Vol. 92, No. 2 (Apr., 1983), pp. 169-195, JSTOR) BHHS AK recut The argument shows how Kant's idea of justification works. It can be read as a kind of regress upon the conditions, starting from an important assumption. The assumption is that when a rational being makes a choice or undertakes an action, they he or she supposes the object to be good, and its pursuit to be justified. At least, if there is a categorical imperative there must be objectively good ends, for then there are necessary actions and so necessary ends (G 45-46/427-428 and Doctrine of Virtue 43-44/384-385). In order for there to be any objectively good ends, however, there must be something that is unconditionally good and so can serve as a sufficient condition of their goodness. Kant considers what this might be: it cannot be an object of inclination, for those have only a conditional worth, "for if the inclinations and the needs founded on them did not exist, their object would be without worth" (G 46/428). It cannot be the inclinations themselves because a rational being would rather be free from them. Nor can it be external things, which serve only as means. So, Kant asserts, the unconditionally valuable thing must be "humanity" or "rational nature," which he defines as "the power set to an end" (G 56/437 and DV 51/392). Kant explains that regarding your existence as a rational being as an end in itself is a "subjective principle of human action." By this I understand him to mean that we must regard ourselves as capable of conferring value upon the objects of our choice, the ends that we set, because we must regard our ends as good. But since "every other rational being thinks of his existence by the same rational ground which holds also for myself' (G 47/429), we must regard others as capable of conferring value by reason of their rational choices and so also as ends in themselves. Treating another as an end in itself thus involves making that person's ends as far as possible your own (G 49/430). The ends that are chosen by any rational being, possessed of the humanity or rational nature that is fully realized in a good will, take on the status of are objective goods. They are not intrinsically valuable, but they are objectively valuable in the sense that every rational being has a reason to promote or realize them. 3 A posteriori ethics fail: a Problem of induction Vickers 14, John Vickers, 2014, The Problem of Induction, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/ The original problem of induction can be simply put. It concerns the support or justification of inductive methods; methods that predict or infer, in Hume's words, that “instances of which we have had no experience resemble those of which we have had experience” (THN, 89). Such methods are clearly essential in scientific reasoning as well as in the conduct of our everyday affairs. The problem is how to support or justify them and it leads to a dilemma: the principle cannot be proved deductively, for it is contingent, and only necessary truths can be proved deductively. Nor can it be supported inductively—by arguing that it has always or usually been reliable in the past—for that would beg the question by assuming just what is to be proved. b Is/Ought Gap – experience just describes how the world is but doesn’t indicate how it ought to be which means there must be an a priori conception of good c Inability to know each other’s experience makes it an unreliable basis for ethics because different experiences bring different concepts of truth – only a priori ethics solve since a priori truths are accessible to all agents
4 Consequentialism fails – A They only judge actions after they occur, which fails action guidance B Every action has infinite stemming consequences, because every consequence can cause another consequence. Probability doesn’t solve because 1) Probability is improvable, as it relies on inductive knowledge, but induction from past events can’t lead to deduction of future events and 2) Probability assumes causation, we can’t assume every act was actually the cause of tangible outcomes C Every action is infinitely divisible, only intents unify action because we intend the end point of an action – but consequences cannot determine what step of action is moral or not. D There’s no objective arbiter to evaluate consequences E You can’t aggregate consequences, happiness and sadness are immutable – ten headaches don’t make a migraine
5 Resolvability: Clarity of weighing under interpretation of Kantianism: perfect duties above imperfect duties, duties in right, etc. All other FWs are consequentialist that use unquantifiable prob, mag, or prob x mag. Resolvability is an independent voter because otherwise the judge can’t make a decision which means it’s a constraint on any ROB because otherwise the round is impossible
6 Actor specificity—societies are just conglomerates of reasoners. Laurence 11 Ben Laurence 2011 (Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago) “An Anscombean Approach to Collective Action” in Ford and Hornsby, Eds. Essays on Anscombe's Intention (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011) 293-294 “It is enough that the same order displayed in collective action explanation can also be represented as a set of rational transitions justifying the actions undertaken by members of a group in light of a shared objective. In this way, whether or not there is strictly speaking a unitary knowing subject of the whole action, we can still see the actions in question as recommended by reasoning. This reasoning will not, of course, occur through the exercise of a separate practical reason possessed by the group, but rather through the reasoning of the individual members as the execute their shared objective. We might sum this up by saying that just as a collective agent can only act through the actions of its individual members, it can only know through their knowing, and reason through their reasoning.”
Thus, the advocacy: Resolved: The appropriation of outer space by private entities is unjust. I’m willing to spec what you want as long as I don’t abandon my maxim.
Offense 1 Out of the possibility of extraterrestrial reasoners, we have an obligation to respect their habitats and not interfere through exploration. Brian Patrick Green 2014, Santa Clara University, "Ethical Approaches to Astrobiology and Space Exploration: Comparing Kant, Mill, and Aristotle," Scholar Commons, https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/markkula/5/ But to assume that Kant has not considered these questions is an enormous mistake. In 1755, quite early in his career, Kant published the book Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, where he described the solar nebular hypothesis (now the accepted theory for how the solar system formed).4 More than that, Kant not only allowed that extraterrestrial intelligences might exist, he believed that if they did not yet exist, that someday they would,5 and that some of these ETIs would be inferior and some superior to humans in intelligence.6 One might wonder if the young Kant’s belief in ETIs continued into his older years, when he was writing on ethics. There is good evidence that it does. Writing his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, 30 years after his work on the nebular hypothesis, Kant is explicit – he is not just discussing humans, but “all rational beings.” 7 So with respect deontology and extraterrestrial intelligent life, Case 1) on the chart, Kant would extend the same full dignity and respect to ETIs which humans owe to each other, in accord with his categorical imperative, which requires the universalizability of moral norms8 and treating all rational beings as ends in themselves.9 For deontology and non-intelligent life, Case 2), Kant argues that animals, as non-rational beings, are of only relative worth. They are not as ends in themselves, not persons, but things.10 If humans discovered non-intelligent life on other worlds (most likely microbes, but if larger then we would have to carefully evaluate what it means to be intelligent, and make sure the discovered life does not qualify), according to Kant, we could do with it as we pleased. While some contemporary moral philosophers have tried to reinterpret or rehabilitate Kant on animals, these works are developments of Kant’s philosophy; they are not his philosophy itself.11 So while Kantianism might be modifiable into a system which is more friendly towards the rest of the living world, without these modifications it is not. For non-life and Kantian deontology, Case 3), there is likewise a simple answer: nonliving things are just things. Non-living things are not a moral concern, they are merely instrumental, and as such intelligent creatures can treat these things as they wish. However, there is an odd exception to this conclusion which is worth mentioning (and which I note with a star in the table). Kant believed that if other planets were not yet inhabited, they someday would be. If this is the case, then what of planets currently without intelligent life but which may someday have it? Ought we to anticipate these intelligent creatures and therefore respect them proactively by respecting their prospective goods? Kant does not say (perhaps because he was not interested in speculating or because humans were, in his time, far from being in a position to affect the futures of these planets). However, given the importance of rational beings in Kant’s system (rationality, teleology, and morality are the purpose of universe) the answer is possibly, or even probably, yes.
2 Private entities are incapable of making omnilateral decisions as privatization entails that they withhold information which limits deliberation over making maxims. Chiara Cordelli 2016, University of Chicago, Political Science and the College cordelli@uchicago.edu https://www.law.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/What-is-Wrong-With-Privatization_UCB.pdf The intrinsic wrong of privatization, I will suggest, rather consists in the creation of an institutional arrangement that, by its very constitution, denies those who are subject to it equal freedom. I understand freedom as an interpersonal relationship of reciprocal independence. To be free is not to be subordinated to another person’s unilateral will. By building on an analytical reconstruction of Kant’s Doctrine of Right, I will argue that current forms of privatization reproduce (to a different degree) within a civil condition the very same defects that Kant attributes to the state of nature, or to a pre-civil condition, thereby making a rightful condition of reciprocal independence impossible. Importantly, this is so even if private actors are publicly authorized through contract and subject to regulations, and even if they are committed to reason in accordance with the public good. The reason for this, as I will explain, derives from the fact that private agents are constitutionally incapable of acting omnilaterally, even if their actions are omnilaterally authorized by government through some delegation mechanism, e.g. a voluntary contract. Omnilateralness, I will suggest, must be understood as a function of 1) rightful judgment and 2) unity. By rightful judgment I mean the capacity to reason publicly and to make universal rules that are valid for everyone, according to a juridical ideal of right, as necessary to solve the problem of the unilateral imposition of private wills on others. By unity I mean the capacity to make rules and decisions that change the normative situation of others, as a part of a unified system of decision-making. The condition of unity is crucial, as I shall later explain, insofar as there might be multiple interpretations compatible with rightful judgment, which would still problematically leave the definition of people’s rightful entitlements indeterminate. Further, the practical realization of the juridical idea of an omnilateral will, I will contend, requires embeddedness within a shared collective practice of decision-making. In practice, rightful judgment can only obtain when certain shared background frameworks that structure practical reasoning and confer unity to that reasoning are in place. The rules of public administration and the authority structure of bureaucracy should be understood as playing this essential function of giving empirical and practical reality to the omnilateral will, as far as the execution of rules and the concrete definition of entitlements are concerned. Together, these two requirements are necessary, (whether they are also sufficient is a different question), to make an action the omnilateral action of a state, which has the moral power to change the normative situation of citizens, by fixing the content of their rights and duties in accordance with the equal freedom of all. The phenomenon of privatization thus raises the fundamental questions of why we need political institutions to begin with, and what makes an action an action of the state. Insofar as private agents make decisions that fundamentally alter the normative situation (the rights and duties) of citizens, and insofar as, by definition, private agents are not public officials embedded in that shared collective practice, their decisions, even if well intentioned and authorized through contract, cannot count as omnilateral acts of the state. They rather and necessarily remain unilateral acts of men. Hence, I will conclude, for the very same reasons that we have, following Kant, a duty to exit the state of nature so as to solve the twofold problems of the unilateral imposition of will on others and the indeterminacy of rights, we also have a duty to limit privatization and to support, on normative grounds, a case for the re-bureaucratization of certain functions. Therefore, my paper provides foundational reasons to agree with Richard Rorty’s nonfoundational defense of bureaucracy as stated in the opening epigraph, since only agents who are appropriately embedded within a bureaucratic structure, properly understood, are, in many cases, capable of acting omnilaterally. The “bosses” I am here concerned with are not primarily those who 5 can unilaterally impose their will on us in their capacity as private employers, but rather any private actor who acts unilaterally while in the garb of the state.
3 Space is not subject to property rights – a). It has no physical manifestation as space is by definition the absence of matter which means it cannot be measured, bordered, or divided, thus it cannot be owned b). Owning unexplored planets/space is incoherent – there could be other agents there, and it can’t be deemed an agents property lest agents have a rational conception of it.
4 Space Exploration is non universalizable - a). Entails that everyone leaves Earth which means that no one would be around to create the means to leave earth
4 Libertarianism turns don’t apply: A Privatization of space inherently relies on an anti-libertarian state-based model Shammas and Holen 19 (Victor L. Oslo Metropolitan University, Tomas B. Independent scholar) “One giant leap for capitalistkind: private enterprise in outer space,” Palgrave Communications, 1-29-19, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-019-0218-9 TDI recut Dulles VN But the entrepreneurial libertarianism of capitalistkind is undermined by the reliance of the entire NewSpace complex on extensive support from the state, ‘a public-private financing model underpinning long-shot start-ups' that in the case of Musk’s three main companies (SpaceX, SolarCity Corp., and Tesla) has been underpinned by $4.9 billion dollars in government subsidies (Hirsch, 2015). In the nascent field of space tourism, Cohen (2017) argues that what began as an almost entirely private venture quickly ground to a halt in the face of insurmountable technical and financial obstacles, only solved by piggybacking on large state-run projects, such as selling trips to the International Space Station, against the objections of NASA scientists. The business model of NewSpace depends on the taxpayer’s dollar while making pretensions to individual self-reliance. The vast majority of present-day clients of private aerospace corporations are government clients, usually military in origin. Furthermore, the bulk of rocket launches in the United States take place on government property, usually operated by the US Air Force or NASA.Footnote13 This inward tension between state dependency and capitalist autonomy is itself a product of neoliberalism’s contradictory demand for a minimal, “slim” state, while simultaneously (and in fact) relying on a state reengineered and retooled for the purposes of capital accumulation (Wacquant, 2012). As Lazzarato writes, ‘To be able to be “laissez-faire”, it is necessary to intervene a great deal' (2017, p. 7). Space libertarianism is libertarian in name only: behind every NewSpace venture looms a thick web of government spending programs, regulatory agencies, public infrastructure, and universities bolstered by research grants from the state. SpaceX would not exist were it not for state-sponsored contracts of satellite launches. Similarly, in 2018, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—the famed origin of the World Wide Web—announced that it would launch a ‘responsive launch competition', meaning essentially the reuse of launch vehicles, representing an attempt by the state to ‘harness growing commercial capabilities' and place them in the service of the state’s interest in ensuring ‘national security' (Foust, 2018b).
1/28/22
ND - Kant
Tournament: Blue Key | Round: 1 | Opponent: Brookefield East DJ | Judge: Faizaan Dossani The meta-ethic is procedural moral realism. This entails that moral facts stem from procedures while substantive realism holds that moral truths exist independently of that in the empirical world. Prefer procedural realism – 1 Uncertainty – our experiences are inaccessible to others which allows people to say they don’t experience the same, however a priori principles are universally applied to all agents. 2 Is/Ought Gap – we can only perceive what is, not what ought to be. It’s impossible to derive an ought statement from descriptive facts about the world, necessitating a priori premises.
Next, prefer practical reason 1 Regress – to question why one should reason concedes its authority since it is an act of reasoning itself which proves it’s binding and inescapable 2 Agents can shift between different identities but doing so requires reason - it unifies the subject and is the only enterprise agents cannot escape Ferrero 09 (Luca Ferrero, Luca Ferrero is a Philosophy professor at University of California, Riverside. His areas of interest are Agency Theory, including Intentionality and Personal identity; Practical Reasoning; and Meta-Ethics, “Constitutivism and the Inescapability of Agency”. Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. IV, Jan 12, 2009. https://philarchive.org/archive/FERCATv1 BHHS AK recut Agency is special in two respects. First, agency is the enterprise with the largest jurisdiction.¹² All ordinary enterprises fall under it. To engage in any ordinary enterprise is ipso facto to engage in the enterprise of agency. In addition, there are instances of behavior that fall under no other enterprise but agency. First, intentional transitions in and out of particular enterprises might not count as moves within those enterprises, but they are still instances of intentional agency, of bare intentional agency, so to say. Second, agency is the locus where we adjudicate the merits and demerits of participating in any ordinary enterprise. Reasoning whether to participate in a particular enterprise is often conducted outside of that enterprise, even while one is otherwise engaged in it. Practical reflection is a manifestation of full-fledged intentional agency but it does not necessarily belong to any other specific enterprise. Once again, it might be an instance of bare intentional agency. In the limiting case, agency is the only enterprise that would still keep a subject busy if she were to attempt a ‘radical re-evaluation’ of all of her engagements and at least temporarily suspend her participation in all ordinary enterprises.
That justifies universalizability - insofar as there is no a priori distinction between reasoners, a reason for one agent must also be a reason for another; if all agents cannot set and pursue an end, it is not constitutive of agency. Willing a maxim that violates freedom is a contradiction in conception – you cannot violate someone’s freedom without having your own freedom to do so. Thus, the standard is consistency with the categorical imperative– actions that terminate in contradictions when universalized are bad, so only our restrictions can solve Impact calc: Intentions first – only the intention in pursuing a certain end is relevant when considering whether or not it is universalizable. Prefer for action theory - Any action can be split into infinite smaller actions. For example, when I’m taking a bite of food, I am making infinite movements of my hand and mouth – only the intention unifies the action. If we can’t unify action, we can’t call actions moral or immoral because they are made up of infinite parts.
Also Prefer Additionally –
1 We must value freedom insofar as we value our ends which justifies valuing the freedom of agents setting and pursuing ends since anything else would be contradictory Gewirth ’84 Alan Gewirth, “The Ontological Basis of Natural Law: A Critique and an Alternative,” The American Journal of Jurisprudence, Vol. 29, No. 1 (1984), Pg. 95–121. Gewirth was professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. CHSTM Brackets for gendered language/grammar BHHS AK recut Let me briefly sketch the main line of argument that leads to this conclusion. As I have said, the argument is based on the generic features of human action. To begin with, every agent acts for purposes he they regards as good. Hence, he they must regard as necessary goods the freedom and well-being that are the generic features and necessary conditions of his action and successful action in general. From this, it follows that every agent logically must hold or accept that he has they have rights to these conditions. For if he were to deny that he has they have these rights, then he they would have to admit that it is permissible for others persons to remove from him the very conditions of freedom and well-being that, as an agent, he they must have. But it is contradictory for him to hold both that he must have these conditions and also that he may not have them. Hence, on pain of self-contradiction, every agent must accept that he has rights to freedom and well-being. Moreover, every agent must further admit that all other agents also have those rights, since all other actual or prospective agents they have the same general characteristics of agency on which they must ground his their own right-claims.¶ What I am saying, then, is that every agent, simply by virtue of being an agent, must regard his freedom and well being as necessary goods and must hold that he and all other actual or prospective agents have rights to these necessary goods. Hence, every agent, on pain of self-contradiction, must accept the following principle: Act in accord with the generic rights of your recipients as well as of yourself. The generic rights are rights to the generic features of action, freedom, and well-being. I call this the Principle of Generic Consistency (PGC), because it combines the formal consideration of consistency with the material consideration of the generic features and rights of action
2 Performativity – arguing against my framework presupposes freedom because without freedom to reason you would not be able to make arguments and try to win. – this means that contesting any of my arguments proves my framework true.
3 Oppression is caused by arbitrary exclusion of others – only universalizability makes sure that we include everyone equally. Farr 02 Arnold Farr. Arnold Farr is a Philosophy professor at the University of Kentucky. His research interests are German idealism, Marxism, critical theory, philosophy of race, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, and liberation philosophy. He has published numorous articles and book chapters on all of these subjects, “Can a Philosophy of Race Afford to Abandon the Kantian Categorical Imperative?”, 2002, blog.ufba.br/kant/files/2009/12/Can-a-Philosophy-of-Race-Afford-to-Abandon-the.pdf. /BHHS AK recut The attack on Kantian formalism began with Hegel’s criticism of the Kantian philosophy.14 The list of contemporary theorists who follow Hegel’s line of criticism is far too long to deal with in the scope of this paper. Although these theorists may approach the problem of Kantian formalism from a variety of angles, the spirit of their criticism is basically the same: The universality of the categorical imperative is an abstraction from one’s empirical conditions. Kant is often accused of making the moral agent an abstract, empty, noumenal subject. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Kantian subject is an embodied, empirical, concrete subject. However, this concrete subject has a dual nature. Kant claims in the Critique of Pure Reason as well as in the Grounding that human beings have an intelligible and empirical character.15 It is impossible to understand and do justice to Kant’s moral theory without taking seriously the relation between these two characters. The very concept of morality is impossible without the tension between the two. By “empirical character” Kant simply means that we have a sensual nature. We are physical creatures with physical drives or desires. The very fact that I cannot simply satisfy my desires without considering the rightness or wrongness of my actions suggests that my empirical character must be held in check by something, or else I behave like a Freudian id. My empirical character must be held in check by my intelligible character, which is the legislative activity of practical reason. It is through our intelligible character that we formulate principles that keep our empirical impulses in check. The categorical imperative is the supreme principle of morality that is constructed by the moral agent in his/her moment of self-transcendence. What I have called self-transcendence may be best explained in the following passage by Onora O’Neill: In restricting our maxims to those that meet the test of the categorical imperative we refuse to base our lives on maxims that necessarily make our own case an exception. The reason why a universilizability criterion is morally significant is that it makes our own case no special exception (G, IV, 404). In accepting the Categorical Imperative we accept the moral reality of other selves, and hence the possibility (not, note, the reality) of a moral community. The Formula of Universal Law enjoins no more than that we act only on maxims that are open to others also.16 O’Neill’s description of the universalizability criterion includes the notion of self-transcendence that I am working to explicate here to the extent that like self-transcendence, universalizable moral principles require that the individual think beyond his or her own particular desires. The individual is not allowed to exclude others as rational moral agents who have the right to act as he acts in a given situation. For example, if I decide to use another person merely as a means for my own end I must recognize the other person’s right to do the same to me. I cannot consistently will that I use another as a means only and will that I not be used in the same manner by another. Hence, the universalizability criterion is a principle of consistency and a principle of inclusion. That is, in choosing my maxims I attempt to include the perspective of other moral agents. 4 We adopt certain identities to govern our actions like a debater – this presupposes agency and hijacks ROBs and ROJs because a judge is a practical identity. CHRISTINE M. Korsgaard 92 Christine Korsgaard, Christine Marion Korsgaard is an American philosopher and Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University whose main scholarly interests are in moral philosophy and its history; the relation of issues in moral philosophy to issues in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the theory of personal identity; the theory of personal relationships; and in normativity in general “The Sources of Normativity”, THE TANNER LECTURES ON HUMAN VALUES Delivered at Clare Hall, Cambridge University 16-17 Nov 1992 /SHS AK recut The Solution: Those who think that the human mind is internally luminous and transparent to itself think that the term “self-consciousness” is appropriate because what we get in human consciousness is a direct encounter with the self. Those who think that the human mind has a reflective structure use the term too, but for a different reason. The reflective structure of the mind is a source of “self-consciousness” because it forces us to have a conception of ourselves. As Kant argues, this is a fact about what it is like to be reflectively conscious and it does not prove the existence of a metaphysical self. From a third person point of view, outside of the deliberative standpoint, it may look as if what happens when someone makes a choice is that the strongest of his conflicting desires wins. But that isn’t the way it is for you when you deliberate. When you deliberate, it is as if there is were something over and above all of your desires, something that is you, and that chooses which desire to act on. This means that the principle or law by which you determine your actions is one that you regard as being expressive of yourself. To identify with such a principle or law is to be, in St. Paul’s famous phrase, a law to yourself.6 An agent might think of herself as a Citizen in the Kingdom of Ends. Or she might think of herself as a member of a family or an ethnic group or a nation. She might think of herself as the steward of her own interests, and then she will be an egoist. Or she might think of herself as the slave of her passions, and then she will be a wanton. And how she thinks of herself will determine whether it is the law of the Kingdom of Ends, or the law of some smaller group, or the law of the egoist, or the law of the wanton that is the law that she is to herself. The conception of one’s identity in question here is not a theoretical one, a view about what as a matter of inescapable scientific fact you are. It is better understood as a description under which you value yourself, a description under which you find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking. So I will call this a conception of your practical identity. Practical identity is a complex matter and for the average person there will be a jumble of such conceptions. You are a human being, a woman or a man, an adherent of a certain religion, a member of an ethnic group, someone’s friend, and so on. And all of these identities give rise to reasons and obligations. Your reasons express your identity, your nature; your obligations spring from what that identity forbids.
5 A posteriori ethics fail: a Problem of induction Vickers 14, John Vickers, 2014, The Problem of Induction, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/ The original problem of induction can be simply put. It concerns the support or justification of inductive methods; methods that predict or infer, in Hume's words, that “instances of which we have had no experience resemble those of which we have had experience” (THN, 89). Such methods are clearly essential in scientific reasoning as well as in the conduct of our everyday affairs. The problem is how to support or justify them and it leads to a dilemma: the principle cannot be proved deductively, for it is contingent, and only necessary truths can be proved deductively. Nor can it be supported inductively—by arguing that it has always or usually been reliable in the past—for that would beg the question by assuming just what is to be proved. 5 Consequentialism fails – A Predictions assumes specific causes of past consequences which can’t be verified as the actual cause B Butterfly effect - every action has infinite consequences so it is impossible to evaluate an action; one government policy could end up causing nuclear war in a million years. C Aggregation is impossible – pleasure and pain are subjective
6 Parameters - Accessibility – Other frameworks like Util require massive amounts of research that under resourced kids can’t access – encouraging research heavy debates always favors big schools. My framework solves - is super easy to understand and you only need to think of analytic arguments in round
Prefer a non-domination model: 1 arbitrariness makes for constant uncertainty, 2 a non-interference model devalues the subject insofar as it makes people have unequal freedoms
Thus, I defend the resolution as a general principle: Resolved: A just government ought to recognize an unconditional right of workers to strike. I’m willing to spec what you want as long as I don’t abandon my maxim. CPs and PICs don’t negate –and they don’t disprove my general thesis.
Spec – Oxford Dictionary defines Just based on or behaving according to what is morally right and fair
Government: the governing body of a nation, state, or community just government is one that follows a kantian framework
Enforcement is through International Framework Agreements but it’s irrelevant under the fw. Def of unconditional right to strike: NLRB 85 National Labor Relations Board; “Legislative History of the Labor Management Relations Act, 1947: Volume 1,” Jan 1985; https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=7o1tA__v4xwCandrdid=book-7o1tA__v4xwCandrdot=1 Justin Edited for gendered language As for the so-called absolute or unconditional right to strike—there are no absolute rights that do not have their corresponding responsibilities. Under our American Anglo-Saxon system, each individual is entitled to the maximum of freedom, provided however (and this provision is of first importance), his their freedom has due regard for the rights and freedoms of others. The very safeguard of our freedoms is the recognition of this fundamental principle. I take issue very definitely with the suggestion that there is an absolute and unconditional right to concerted action (which after all is what the strike is) which endangers the health and welfare of our people in order to attain a selfish end.
Offense
1 The right to strike is necessary for workers to exercise their over working conditions to ensure that they are not treated as a mere means Chima 13 (Sylvester Chima, Programme of Bio and Research Ethics and Medical Law, Nelson R Mandela School of Medicine and School of Nursing and Public Health, College of Health Sciences, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa, 11-18-2013, accessed on 6-22-2021, BMC Medical Ethics, "Global medicine: Is it ethical or morally justifiable for doctors and other healthcare workers to go on strike?", https://bmcmedethics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1472-6939-14-S1-S5) BHHS AK Some philosophers have described moral obligations or duties, which ought to guide ethical behavior, such as the duty of fidelity or the obligation to keep promises, and beneficence - the obligation to do 'good' 10. However, it has been suggested that some other equally compelling moral duties or ethical obligations may conflict with the above duties, such as the right to justice. Justice is the right to fair treatment in light of what is owed a person 63. For example, it may be argued that everybody is equally entitled to a just wage for just work. The philosopher Immanuel Kant based his moral theory on a categorical imperative which encourages moral agents to act, based on a principle, which they would deem to become a universal law 64. One can argue that the decision by any HCW to go on strike may not be universalisable. However, looking at this decision from the principle of respect for autonomy, or freedom of choice, one can conclude that individual autonomy is a sentiment which is desirable for all human beings. Accordingly, every worker should be free to choose whether to work or not, based on a whether any specific set of conditions of their own choosing have been met. Kant argues further that moral agents or individuals should be treated, "whether in your own person or in that of any other, never solely as a means, but always as an end" 64. This idea that individuals should be treated as ends in themselves has influenced political philosophy for centuries, and stresses the libertarian ideology that people should not have their individual freedoms curtailed either for others or for the good of society in general 10, 64. From this axiomatic considerations, one can conclude that it would be unethical for people to be used as slaves or be forced to work for inadequate wages or under slave-like conditions 4, 10, 12, 51. The issue of HCW strikes can also be analyzed from utilitarian principles as formulated by one of its major disciples JS Mills as follows 65: 2 Strikes are a form of setting and pursuing ends and the omnilateral will has the obligation to protect the right to do so – anything else is a form of the government restricting freedom
3 Corporations must respect the diginity of employees; the right to strike is an extension of human dignity.
McCrudden 08 Christopher McCrudden, Human Dignity and Judicial Interpretation of Human Rights, European Journal of International Law, Volume 19, Issue 4, September 2008, Pages 655–724, https://doi.org/10.1093/ejil/chn043 Dignity has functioned, thirdly, as a source from which new rights may be derived, and existing rights extended. In the Israeli context, for example, human dignity has been seen as providing a basis on which to import rights that had not, intentionally, been included in the text of the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty. As Kretzmer observes, ‘the Basic Law does not mention many of the fundamental rights that are protected under most constitutions and international human rights instruments …. The most blatant exclusions are equality, freedom of religion and conscience and freedom of speech.’414 These were excluded because of the inability to generate a consensus among the parties in the Knesset that they should be included at that time. Notably, several of the religious parties objected to their inclusion. Given that the self-perceived role of the Israeli Supreme Court is to assist in the building of an Israel that is committed to the broad range of human rights, that was unsatisfying. Conceptualizing human dignity as a general value ‘has enabled the Court to resort to the concept to create rights in various situations’, including in those contexts where the excluded rights would otherwise have been expected to operate.415 In some cases, the Court has used this method to recognize precisely those rights which were deliberately omitted from the Basic Law because of the lack of political consensus.416 For example, in the Hupert case, the Court asserted that the right to equality could be derived from human dignity and as a consequence merited constitutional protection.417 Other rights that have been derived from dignity in a similar manner include freedom of religion, the right to strike, the right of minors not to be subject to corporal punishment, and the right to know the identity of one's parents.418 Bowie 98 A Kantian Theory of Meaningful, Norman E. Bowie Vol. 17, No. 9/10, How to Make Business Ethics Operational: Creating Effective Alliances: The 10th Annual EBEN Conference (Jul., 1998), pp. 1083-1092 https://www.jstor.org/stable/25073937?origin=JSTOR-pdf
A corporation can be considered moral in that Kantian sense only if the humanity of employees is treated as an end and not as a means merely. 2. If a corporation is to treat the humanity of employees as an end and not as a means, merely, then a corporation should honor the self-respect of the employees.3. To honor the employees’ self respect, the employee must have a certain amount of independence as well as the ability to satisfy a certain amount of their desires. Thus, the corporation should allow a certain amount of independence and make it possible that employees can satisfy a certain amount of their desires. 4. In an economic system, people achieve independence and satisfaction of their desires using their wages which they earn as employees. Thus a corporation should pay employees a living wage, that is, a wage sufficient to provide a certain amount of independence and some amount of satisfaction of desires. though this is as much as one can say given the Kantian text, I believe one can begin to formulate a Kantian theory of meaningful work. First, meaningful work provides a salary sufficient for the worker to exercise her independence and provides for her phsyical well-being and the satisfaction of some of her desires. Second, it seems obvious that meaningful work in a capitalist economy, be it the work of managers or the work of employees, must support the dignity of human beings. That is, capitalist work should support or enhance the dignity of human beings as moral agents. And since for Kant autonomy and rationality are necessary for moral agency. Work that deadens autonomy or that undermines rationality is immoral.
10/30/21
ND - Kant v2
Tournament: Blue Key | Round: 3 | Opponent: Lexington AR | Judge: Javier Navarrete FW
Ethics must be derived from the constitutive features of agents – ethics based internally fail because they can’t generate universal obligations and ethics based externally fail because they are nonbinding as agents could opt-out and have no motivation to follow them which means they fail to guide action. Constitutivism solves – it allows for universal obligations among all agents but they are binding and cannot be opted out of.
Next, only practical reason is constitutive: 1 Regress – to question why one should reason concedes its authority since it is an act of reasoning itself which proves it’s binding and inescapable 2 Agents can shift between different identities but doing so requires reason - it unifies the subject and is the only enterprise agents cannot escape Ferrero 09 (Luca Ferrero, Luca Ferrero is a Philosophy professor at University of California, Riverside. His areas of interest are Agency Theory, including Intentionality and Personal identity; Practical Reasoning; and Meta-Ethics, “Constitutivism and the Inescapability of Agency”. Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. IV, Jan 12, 2009. https://philarchive.org/archive/FERCATv1 BHHS AK recut Agency is special in two respects. First, agency is the enterprise with the largest jurisdiction.¹² All ordinary enterprises fall under it. To engage in any ordinary enterprise is ipso facto to engage in the enterprise of agency. In addition, there are instances of behavior that fall under no other enterprise but agency. First, intentional transitions in and out of particular enterprises might not count as moves within those enterprises, but they are still instances of intentional agency, of bare intentional agency, so to say. Second, agency is the locus where we adjudicate the merits and demerits of participating in any ordinary enterprise. Reasoning whether to participate in a particular enterprise is often conducted outside of that enterprise, even while one is otherwise engaged in it. Practical reflection is a manifestation of full-fledged intentional agency but it does not necessarily belong to any other specific enterprise. Once again, it might be an instance of bare intentional agency. In the limiting case, agency is the only enterprise that would still keep a subject busy if she were to attempt a ‘radical re-evaluation’ of all of her engagements and at least temporarily suspend her participation in all ordinary enterprises.
That justifies universalizability - insofar as there is no a priori distinction between reasoners, a reason for one agent must also be a reason for another; if all agents cannot set and pursue an end, it is not constitutive of agency. Willing a maxim that violates freedom is a contradiction in conception – you cannot violate someone’s freedom without having your own freedom to do so.
Thus, the standard is consistency with the categorical imperative– actions that terminate in contradictions when universalized are bad, so only our restrictions can solve Impact calc: Intentions first – only the intention in pursuing a certain end is relevant when considering whether or not it is universalizable. Prefer for action theory - Any action can be split into infinite smaller actions. For example, when I’m taking a bite of food, I am making infinite movements of my hand and mouth – only the intention unifies the action. If we can’t unify action, we can’t call actions moral or immoral because they are made up of infinite parts. Prefer additionally:
1 Performativity – arguing against my framework presupposes freedom because without freedom to reason you would not be able to make arguments and try to win. – this means that contesting any of my arguments proves my framework true. 2 Kantianism is compatible with critical thought and provides valuable principles in resolving minority oppression. Mills ‘17, Charles W. (2017). Black Radical Kantianism. Res Philosophica 95 (1):1-33. AHS RG Why Kant, though? To begin with, there is the strategic argument from Kant’s rise to centrality in contemporary Western normative theory over the last half-century. With the demise or at least considerable diminution in significance of the utilitarian liberalism (Jeremy Bentham, James and John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick) that was hegemonic from the early 1800s to the mid-twentieth century, it is deontological/contractarian liberalism that is now most influential, whether in analytic Anglo-American political theory or Continental critical theory. Immanuel Kant is now regarded not merely as the most important ethicist of modernity, but as one of its most significant normative political theorists also.1 So a racially informed engagement with this body of discourse would have the virtues of being in dialogue with what is now the central strand in Western ethico-political theory: Afro-modern political thought in conversation with Euro-modern political thought. But second, in addition to these strategic considerations (and perhaps more importantly), the key principles and ideals of Kant’s ethico-political thought are, once deracialized, very attractive: the respect for the rights of individual persons, the ideal of the Rechtsstaat (admittedly somewhat modified from Kant’s own version), and the vision of a global cosmopolitan order of equals. The problem, in my opinion, has been less Kant’s own racism (since it is simply bracketed by most contemporary Kantians)2 than the failure to rethink these principles and ideals in the light of a modernity structured by racial domination. And that brings me to the third point. In contrast with, say, a dialogue between European and Asian political traditions, which at least for long periods of time developed largely separately from one another, the Euro-modern and the Afro-modern traditions are intimately and dialectically linked. As emphasized at the start, the latter develops in specific contestation of the former, involving both resistance to and rejection of its crucial tenets insofar as they rationalize and justify Euro-domination, while nonetheless sometimes seeking to appropriate and modify others for emancipatory ends (Bogues 2003). So developing a “black radical Kantianism” as a self-conscious enterprise should be not merely instrumentally and intrinsically valuable, but illuminative of a counter-hegemonic normative system already present in Afro-modern thought, if not self-denominatedly “Kantian,” formed in opposition to a white domination predicated on the denial of equal personhood to blacks.
3 A posteriori ethics fail: a– induction is circular because it relies on the assumption that nature will hold uniform but we could only reach that conclusion through inductive reasoning based on observation of past events.
Consequentialism fails – A Predictions assumes specific causes of past consequences which can’t be verified as the actual cause B Butterfly effect - every action has infinite consequences so it is impossible to evaluate an action; one government policy could end up causing nuclear war in a million years.
4 Oppression is caused by arbitrary exclusion of others – only universalizability makes sure that we include everyone equally. Farr 02 Arnold Farr. Arnold Farr is a Philosophy professor at the University of Kentucky. His research interests are German idealism, Marxism, critical theory, philosophy of race, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, and liberation philosophy. He has published numorous articles and book chapters on all of these subjects, “Can a Philosophy of Race Afford to Abandon the Kantian Categorical Imperative?”, 2002, blog.ufba.br/kant/files/2009/12/Can-a-Philosophy-of-Race-Afford-to-Abandon-the.pdf. /BHHS AK recut The attack on Kantian formalism began with Hegel’s criticism of the Kantian philosophy.14 The list of contemporary theorists who follow Hegel’s line of criticism is far too long to deal with in the scope of this paper. Although these theorists may approach the problem of Kantian formalism from a variety of angles, the spirit of their criticism is basically the same: The universality of the categorical imperative is an abstraction from one’s empirical conditions. Kant is often accused of making the moral agent an abstract, empty, noumenal subject. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Kantian subject is an embodied, empirical, concrete subject. However, this concrete subject has a dual nature. Kant claims in the Critique of Pure Reason as well as in the Grounding that human beings have an intelligible and empirical character.15 It is impossible to understand and do justice to Kant’s moral theory without taking seriously the relation between these two characters. The very concept of morality is impossible without the tension between the two. By “empirical character” Kant simply means that we have a sensual nature. We are physical creatures with physical drives or desires. The very fact that I cannot simply satisfy my desires without considering the rightness or wrongness of my actions suggests that my empirical character must be held in check by something, or else I behave like a Freudian id. My empirical character must be held in check by my intelligible character, which is the legislative activity of practical reason. It is through our intelligible character that we formulate principles that keep our empirical impulses in check. The categorical imperative is the supreme principle of morality that is constructed by the moral agent in his/her moment of self-transcendence. What I have called self-transcendence may be best explained in the following passage by Onora O’Neill: In restricting our maxims to those that meet the test of the categorical imperative we refuse to base our lives on maxims that necessarily make our own case an exception. The reason why a universilizability criterion is morally significant is that it makes our own case no special exception (G, IV, 404). In accepting the Categorical Imperative we accept the moral reality of other selves, and hence the possibility (not, note, the reality) of a moral community. The Formula of Universal Law enjoins no more than that we act only on maxims that are open to others also.16 O’Neill’s description of the universalizability criterion includes the notion of self-transcendence that I am working to explicate here to the extent that like self-transcendence, universalizable moral principles require that the individual think beyond his or her own particular desires. The individual is not allowed to exclude others as rational moral agents who have the right to act as he acts in a given situation. For example, if I decide to use another person merely as a means for my own end I must recognize the other person’s right to do the same to me. I cannot consistently will that I use another as a means only and will that I not be used in the same manner by another. Hence, the universalizability criterion is a principle of consistency and a principle of inclusion. That is, in choosing my maxims I attempt to include the perspective of other moral agents.
Thus, the advocacy: Resolved: A just government ought to recognize an unconditional right of workers to strike. I’m willing to spec what you want as long as I don’t abandon my maxim. CPs and PICs don’t negate – I defend the resolution as a general principle and they don’t disprove my general thesis.
Offense 1 The right to strike is necessary for workers to exercise their over working conditions to ensure that they are not treated as a mere means Chima 13 (Sylvester Chima, Programme of Bio and Research Ethics and Medical Law, Nelson R Mandela School of Medicine and School of Nursing and Public Health, College of Health Sciences, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa, 11-18-2013, accessed on 6-22-2021, BMC Medical Ethics, "Global medicine: Is it ethical or morally justifiable for doctors and other healthcare workers to go on strike?", https://bmcmedethics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1472-6939-14-S1-S5) Some philosophers have described moral obligations or duties, which ought to guide ethical behavior, such as the duty of fidelity or the obligation to keep promises, and beneficence - the obligation to do 'good' 10. However, it has been suggested that some other equally compelling moral duties or ethical obligations may conflict with the above duties, such as the right to justice. Justice is the right to fair treatment in light of what is owed a person 63. For example, it may be argued that everybody is equally entitled to a just wage for just work. The philosopher Immanuel Kant based his moral theory on a categorical imperative which encourages moral agents to act, based on a principle, which they would deem to become a universal law 64. One can argue that the decision by any HCW to go on strike may not be universalisable. However, looking at this decision from the principle of respect for autonomy, or freedom of choice, one can conclude that individual autonomy is a sentiment which is desirable for all human beings. Accordingly, every worker should be free to choose whether to work or not, based on a whether any specific set of conditions of their own choosing have been met. Kant argues further that moral agents or individuals should be treated, "whether in your own person or in that of any other, never solely as a means, but always as an end" 64. This idea that individuals should be treated as ends in themselves has influenced political philosophy for centuries, and stresses the libertarian ideology that people should not have their individual freedoms curtailed either for others or for the good of society in general 10, 64. From this axiomatic considerations, one can conclude that it would be unethical for people to be used as slaves or be forced to work for inadequate wages or under slave-like conditions 4, 10, 12, 51. The issue of HCW strikes can also be analyzed from utilitarian principles as formulated by one of its major disciples JS Mills as follows 65: 2 Employers coercively restrict bargaining rights of their workers in the interest of the corporation - that’s non-universalizable Wilson et al. 17 (Valerie Wilson, Josh Bivens, and Lora Engdahl, 8-24-2017, accessed on 7-4-2021, Economic Policy Institute, "How today’s unions help working people: Giving workers the power to improve their jobs and unrig the economy", https://www.epi.org/publication/how-todays-unions-help-working-people-giving-workers-the-power-to-improve-their-jobs-and-unrig-the-economy/) Almost half (48 percent) of workers polled said they’d vote to create a union in their workplace tomorrow if they got the chance.67 But workers are being deprived of that opportunity. Because unions and collective bargaining are effective at giving workers power, they are opposed by corporate interests and policymakers representing the highest-earning 1 percent.68 For decades, fierce corporate opposition has suppressed the freedom to form unions and bargain collectively in the private sector by promoting anti-union campaigns in workplaces seeking to unionize and by lobbying lawmakers to pass laws depriving private-sector unions of funds needed to operate. This activity has tracked the dramatic, rapid increase of corporate political activity that began in the mid-1970s, with a specific “call-to-arms” for U.S. corporations that quadrupled the number of corporate PACs from 1976 to 1980.69 More recently, anti-union lobbyists have passed legislation weakening unions in states such as Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin that were once union strongholds.70 Outdated labor laws have failed to provide workers with protection from this employer onslaught against collective bargaining. And corporate lobbyists have blocked reforms to labor laws that would protect workers’ collective bargaining rights with meaningful penalties for violations and better processes for organizing. Employers are exploiting loopholes, including by misclassifying workers as independent contractors to get around labor laws that protect employees. By going after union funding, employer interests and their allied lawmakers can wipe out one of the crucial pillars of support for pro-worker candidates and causes. If unions have fewer members, or if the law hamstrings unions’ ability to collect administrative fees from the workers they represent, there will be less union money spent on advocating for workers in general. As Gordon Lafer, associate professor at the Labor Education and Research Center at the University of Oregon, notes, “The labor movement serves as the primary political counterweight to the corporate agenda on a long list of issues that are not per se labor-related. To the extent that unions can be removed as a politically meaningful force, the rest of the agenda becomes much easier to execute.”71’ That affirms – an unconditional right to strike grants workers the freedom to bargain collectively without coercive tactics from employers
10/30/21
ND - Kant v3
Tournament: Blue Key | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Park City NL | Judge: sabrina callahan, tej gedela, rohit lakshman Ethics must be derived from the constitutive features of agents – ethics based internally fail because they can’t generate universal obligations and ethics based externally fail because they are nonbinding as agents could opt-out and have no motivation to follow them which means they fail to guide action. Constitutivism solves – it allows for universal obligations among all agents but they are binding and cannot be opted out of.
Next, only practical reason is constitutive: 1 Regress – to question why one should reason concedes its authority since it is an act of reasoning itself which proves it’s binding and inescapable 2 Agents can shift between different identities but doing so requires reason - it unifies the subject and is the only enterprise agents cannot escape Ferrero 09 (Luca Ferrero, Luca Ferrero is a Philosophy professor at University of California, Riverside. His areas of interest are Agency Theory, including Intentionality and Personal identity; Practical Reasoning; and Meta-Ethics, “Constitutivism and the Inescapability of Agency”. Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. IV, Jan 12, 2009. https://philarchive.org/archive/FERCATv1 BHHS AK recut Agency is special in two respects. First, agency is the enterprise with the largest jurisdiction.¹² All ordinary enterprises fall under it. To engage in any ordinary enterprise is ipso facto to engage in the enterprise of agency. In addition, there are instances of behavior that fall under no other enterprise but agency. First, intentional transitions in and out of particular enterprises might not count as moves within those enterprises, but they are still instances of intentional agency, of bare intentional agency, so to say. Second, agency is the locus where we adjudicate the merits and demerits of participating in any ordinary enterprise. Reasoning whether to participate in a particular enterprise is often conducted outside of that enterprise, even while one is otherwise engaged in it. Practical reflection is a manifestation of full-fledged intentional agency but it does not necessarily belong to any other specific enterprise. Once again, it might be an instance of bare intentional agency. In the limiting case, agency is the only enterprise that would still keep a subject busy if she were to attempt a ‘radical re-evaluation’ of all of her engagements and at least temporarily suspend her participation in all ordinary enterprises.
That justifies universalizability - insofar as there is no a priori distinction between reasoners, a reason for one agent must also be a reason for another; if all agents cannot set and pursue an end, it is not constitutive of agency. Willing a maxim that violates freedom is a contradiction in conception – you cannot violate someone’s freedom without having your own freedom to do so.
Thus, the standard is consistency with the categorical imperative– actions that terminate in contradictions when universalized are bad, so only our restrictions can solve Impact calc: Intentions first – only the intention in pursuing a certain end is relevant when considering whether or not it is universalizable. Prefer for action theory - Any action can be split into infinite smaller actions. For example, when I’m taking a bite of food, I am making infinite movements of my hand and mouth – only the intention unifies the action. If we can’t unify action, we can’t call actions moral or immoral because they are made up of infinite parts. Prefer additionally:
1 Performativity – arguing against my framework presupposes freedom because without freedom to reason you would not be able to make arguments and try to win. – this means that contesting any of my arguments proves my framework true. Kantianism is compatible with critical thought and provides valuable principles in resolving minority oppression. Mills ‘17, Charles W. (2017). Black Radical Kantianism. Res Philosophica 95 (1):1-33. AHS RG Why Kant, though? To begin with, there is the strategic argument from Kant’s rise to centrality in contemporary Western normative theory over the last half-century. With the demise or at least considerable diminution in significance of the utilitarian liberalism (Jeremy Bentham, James and John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick) that was hegemonic from the early 1800s to the mid-twentieth century, it is deontological/contractarian liberalism that is now most influential, whether in analytic Anglo-American political theory or Continental critical theory. Immanuel Kant is now regarded not merely as the most important ethicist of modernity, but as one of its most significant normative political theorists also.1 So a racially informed engagement with this body of discourse would have the virtues of being in dialogue with what is now the central strand in Western ethico-political theory: Afro-modern political thought in conversation with Euro-modern political thought. But second, in addition to these strategic considerations (and perhaps more importantly), the key principles and ideals of Kant’s ethico-political thought are, once deracialized, very attractive: the respect for the rights of individual persons, the ideal of the Rechtsstaat (admittedly somewhat modified from Kant’s own version), and the vision of a global cosmopolitan order of equals. The problem, in my opinion, has been less Kant’s own racism (since it is simply bracketed by most contemporary Kantians)2 than the failure to rethink these principles and ideals in the light of a modernity structured by racial domination. And that brings me to the third point. In contrast with, say, a dialogue between European and Asian political traditions, which at least for long periods of time developed largely separately from one another, the Euro-modern and the Afro-modern traditions are intimately and dialectically linked. As emphasized at the start, the latter develops in specific contestation of the former, involving both resistance to and rejection of its crucial tenets insofar as they rationalize and justify Euro-domination, while nonetheless sometimes seeking to appropriate and modify others for emancipatory ends (Bogues 2003). So developing a “black radical Kantianism” as a self-conscious enterprise should be not merely instrumentally and intrinsically valuable, but illuminative of a counter-hegemonic normative system already present in Afro-modern thought, if not self-denominatedly “Kantian,” formed in opposition to a white domination predicated on the denial of equal personhood to blacks.
4 A posteriori ethics fail: a– induction is circular because it relies on the assumption that nature will hold uniform but we could only reach that conclusion through inductive reasoning based on observation of past events. 5 Consequentialism fails – A Predictions assumes specific causes of past consequences which can’t be verified as the actual cause B Butterfly effect - every action has infinite consequences so it is impossible to evaluate an action; one government policy could end up causing nuclear war in a million years.
Freedom implies an innate right to determine the course of your actions. In the state of nature, power controls this. Absent of a public authority, rights violations are inevitable. Thus we need an omni-lateral will. Any claim for destruction of the state means you negate. Varden 10 “A Kantian Conception of Free Speech” by Helga Varden Chapter from: “Freedom of Expression in a Diverse World” edited by Deirdre Golash 2010 “The first important distinction between Kant and much contemporary liberal thought issues from Kant’s argument that it is not in principle possible for individuals to realize right in the state of nature. Kant explicitly rejects the common assumption in liberal theories of his time as well as today that virtuous private individuals can interact in ways reconcilable both with one another’s right to freedom and their corresponding innate and acquired private rights. All the details of this argument are beyond the scope of this paper. It suffices to say that ideal problems of assurance and indeterminacy regarding the specification, application and enforcement of the principles of private right to actual interactions lead Kant to conclude that rightful interaction is in principle impossible in the state of nature.5 Kant argues that only a public authority can solve these problems in a way reconcilable with everyone’s right to freedom. This is why we find Kant starting his discussion of public right with this claim: however well disposed and right-loving men might be, it still lies a priori in the rational idea of such a condition (one that is not rightful) that before a public lawful condition is established individuals human beings... can never be secure against violence from one another, since each has her own right to do what seems right and good to her and not be dependent upon another’s opinion about this (6: 312).6 There are no rightful obligations in the state of nature, since in this condition might (‘violence’, or arbitrary judgments and ‘opinion’ about ‘what seems right and good’) rather than right (freedom under law) ultimately governs interactions. According to Kant, therefore, only the establishment of a public authority can enable interaction in ways reconcilable with each person’s innate right to freedom. Moreover, only a public authority can ensure interaction consistent with what Kant argues are our innate rights (to bodily integrity and honor) and our acquired rights (to private prop- erty, contract and status relations). The reason is that only the public authority can solve the problems of assurance and indeterminacy without violating anyone’s right to freedom. The public authority can solve these problems because it represents the will of all and yet the will of no one in particular. Because the public authority is representative in this way – by being “united a priori ” or by being an “omnilateral” will (6: 263) – it can regulates on behalf of everyone rather than on behalf of anyone in particular. For these reasons, civil society is seen as the only means through which our interactions can become subject to universal laws that restrict everyone’s freedom reciprocally rather than as subject to anyone’s arbitrary choices.” (46-47)
Practical reasoning demands that agents recognize their universal subjectivity to form commitments with people deemed different. O'Neill 1, Onora (2000). Bounds of Justice. Cambridge University Press. In the second place, the ethnocentrism of norm-based reasoning matters for relations between insiders and outsiders. Once upon a time it might not have mattered if those who lived in homogeneous but isolated societies reasoned in ways that could not have been accessible to hypothetical others with whom they had no connection. But today societies, cultures and traditions are not bounded or impervious. So it matters when reasoning is based on principles that are internal to some tradition yet not even accessible to outsiders. Ethnocentric reasoning will fail or falter for those who attempt communication across boundaries; it will lack authority – and may prove inaccessible to others. Norm-based conceptions of reason will not suffice in a pluralist world. If any ways of organizing either thinking or action are to have quite general authority, they cannot presuppose the norms and opinions of a particular time and place. Analogous points might be made about more individualistic, commitment-based conceptions of practical reason. These too need not be intrinsically conservative, since we can revise and change our commitments and projects across our lives. However, such reasoning, although not necessarily selfish, will unavoidably be self-centred: it argues from my commitments, my life-projects and my attachments. My commitments, projects and attachments may not be selfish, but equally they may not be noble: there are those who are moved to rescue their wives from drowning, and those who are not. There are even those whose commitments are selfish, who may be moved to drown their wives when opportunity arises. Even when a project is deeply internalized, its vindication may be meagre. Yet it is not clear what opening is left either for vindication or for criticism within a view that construes actual commitments, actual attachments and actual personal projects as the bed-rock of practical reasoning. These commitments will no doubt prove motivating, but it does not follow that it is rational to live lives that express whatever commitments happen to have been internalized. Can there not be principles for all, and that any attempt to persuade others to principles which do not meet this condition must lack authority. Since in our world reasoning must reach beyond the like-minded, our practical reasoning must often be based on principles that are widely accessible; its authority will vanish if we duck the requirement to keep to such structures. Where we attempt to base practical reasoning on principles that do not meet this requirement, at least some others will find that we put forward principles that they cannot share, and will understandably judge our proposals arbitrary and lacking in authority - in short, unreasoned. This stripped-down Kantian conception of practical reasoning shares the focus of norm-based and commitment-based conceptions of practical reason: it is directed at action, or rather at the norms and commitments, the practices and projects, by which we collectively or individually organize our lives. It is directed at actions as specified by certain act-descriptions, rather than at acts considered as instruments for producing results. Where it differs from norm-based or commitment-based conceptions of practical reasoning is in its view of the scope of reasoning, of the fixity of identities and of the mutual accessibility of traditions. It allows for the thought that what might seem a reason for me or for the insiders of some tradition, even a reason that is burnt into souls, may not be any sort of reason for others. Insiders’ reasoning - Kant spoke of a private use of reason) ? – cannot reach outsiders except by linking it with other reasoning which they can follow. Where this is achieved, practical reasoning may be able to link those who are outsiders to one another's traditions and offer reasons for changes in deep commitments, even in sense of identity. 6 Kant is a heuristic by which we should approach problems of justice – the rejection of deceit and coercion creates rigid constraints, but leaves room for specificity and more detailed answers to conflict. O'Neill 2, Onora (2000). Bounds of Justice. Cambridge University Press. This sketch of a reading of Kant's account of practical reason by itself does nothing to rebut the classic charge that the Categorical Imperative leads only to empty formalism. Perhaps the demand for universalizability will draw no significant ethical distinctions, let alone help us to think about justice. After all, the limited conception of practical reason just proposed enjoins only the rejection of non-universalizable principles, on the grounds that these are not even competent for general authority in guiding thought or action. Kant's account of reason is only a second-order constraint on our adoption of principles for dealing with life and thought Here I can offer no more than the merest sketches to suggest why there may be arguments from the demand of universalizability to certain principles of obligation, some of them relevant to any public domain, and so to justice.25 The sketches do not stick to Kant's own way of developing his practical philosophy, which is often designed around rather awkwardly schematic illustrations designed to give instances that fill out a set grid of perfect and imperfect duties to self and to others, of which he thinks only perfect duties to others relevant to questions of justice. 26 If we take simply the idea that we can offer reasons for the adoption only of those principles which (we take it) others on the receiving end of reasoning could also adopt, then a range of types of action must be rejected. We cannot offer reasons to all for adopting principles of deceit (one of Kant's favourite examples), of injury or of coercion. For we cannot coherently assume that all could adopt these principles: we know that were they even widely adopted, those acting on them would meet at least some success, and hence that at least some others would be the victims of this success, so that contrary to hypothesis they could not be universally adopted. The rejection of these principles provides a starting point for constructing a more detailed account of principles of justice. Of course, these are very indeterminate principles: but they are less indeterminate than many of the principles of liberty and equality that have recently been the preferred building blocks for theories of justice. One of the interesting respects in which they are more determinate is that they are evidently principles for finite, mutually vulnerable beings – for beings who might in principle suffer by being the victims of deceit, injury or coercion. Principles of equality and liberty are on the surface more abstract. However, despite the fact that they leave so much open, these are significant constraints, since there are also many sorts of action and institution whose fundamental principles could not be followed by all – for example, principles based on deceit, injury or coercion.27 Those who refuse to base lives or policies on injury or on deceit may have many options in most situations - and yet taken both individually and jointly, these constraints can be highly demanding.
Thus, the advocacy: Resolved: A just government ought to recognize an unconditional right of workers to strike. I’m willing to spec what you want as long as I don’t abandon my maxim. CPs and PICs don’t negate – I defend the resolution as a general principle and they don’t disprove my general thesis.
Spec - 1 Enforcement is through International Framework Agreements but it’s irrelevant under the fw. 2 Definition of unconditional right to strike: NLRB 85 National Labor Relations Board; “Legislative History of the Labor Management Relations Act, 1947: Volume 1,” Jan 1985; https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=7o1tA__v4xwCandrdid=book-7o1tA__v4xwCandrdot=1 Justin Edited for gendered language As for the so-called absolute or unconditional right to strike—there are no absolute rights that do not have their corresponding responsibilities. Under our American Anglo-Saxon system, each individual is entitled to the maximum of freedom, provided however (and this provision is of first importance), his their freedom has due regard for the rights and freedoms of others. The very safeguard of our freedoms is the recognition of this fundamental principle. I take issue very definitely with the suggestion that there is an absolute and unconditional right to concerted action (which after all is what the strike is) which endangers the health and welfare of our people in order to attain a selfish end.
Offense 1 The right to strike is necessary for workers to exercise their over working conditions to ensure that they are not treated as a mere means Chima 13 (Sylvester Chima, Programme of Bio and Research Ethics and Medical Law, Nelson R Mandela School of Medicine and School of Nursing and Public Health, College of Health Sciences, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa, 11-18-2013, accessed on 6-22-2021, BMC Medical Ethics, "Global medicine: Is it ethical or morally justifiable for doctors and other healthcare workers to go on strike?", https://bmcmedethics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1472-6939-14-S1-S5) Some philosophers have described moral obligations or duties, which ought to guide ethical behavior, such as the duty of fidelity or the obligation to keep promises, and beneficence - the obligation to do 'good' 10. However, it has been suggested that some other equally compelling moral duties or ethical obligations may conflict with the above duties, such as the right to justice. Justice is the right to fair treatment in light of what is owed a person 63. For example, it may be argued that everybody is equally entitled to a just wage for just work. The philosopher Immanuel Kant based his moral theory on a categorical imperative which encourages moral agents to act, based on a principle, which they would deem to become a universal law 64. One can argue that the decision by any HCW to go on strike may not be universalisable. However, looking at this decision from the principle of respect for autonomy, or freedom of choice, one can conclude that individual autonomy is a sentiment which is desirable for all human beings. Accordingly, every worker should be free to choose whether to work or not, based on a whether any specific set of conditions of their own choosing have been met. Kant argues further that moral agents or individuals should be treated, "whether in your own person or in that of any other, never solely as a means, but always as an end" 64. This idea that individuals should be treated as ends in themselves has influenced political philosophy for centuries, and stresses the libertarian ideology that people should not have their individual freedoms curtailed either for others or for the good of society in general 10, 64. From this axiomatic considerations, one can conclude that it would be unethical for people to be used as slaves or be forced to work for inadequate wages or under slave-like conditions 4, 10, 12, 51. The issue of HCW strikes can also be analyzed from utilitarian principles as formulated by one of its major disciples JS Mills as follows 65: 2 Regardless of the effectiveness of strikes, they are a form of setting and pursuing ends and the omnilateral will has the obligation to protect the right to do so – anything else is a form of the government restricting freedom 3 Employers coercively restrict bargaining rights of their workers in the interest of the corporation - that’s non-universalizable Wilson et al. 17 (Valerie Wilson, Josh Bivens, and Lora Engdahl, 8-24-2017, accessed on 7-4-2021, Economic Policy Institute, "How today’s unions help working people: Giving workers the power to improve their jobs and unrig the economy", https://www.epi.org/publication/how-todays-unions-help-working-people-giving-workers-the-power-to-improve-their-jobs-and-unrig-the-economy/) Almost half (48 percent) of workers polled said they’d vote to create a union in their workplace tomorrow if they got the chance.67 But workers are being deprived of that opportunity. Because unions and collective bargaining are effective at giving workers power, they are opposed by corporate interests and policymakers representing the highest-earning 1 percent.68 For decades, fierce corporate opposition has suppressed the freedom to form unions and bargain collectively in the private sector by promoting anti-union campaigns in workplaces seeking to unionize and by lobbying lawmakers to pass laws depriving private-sector unions of funds needed to operate. This activity has tracked the dramatic, rapid increase of corporate political activity that began in the mid-1970s, with a specific “call-to-arms” for U.S. corporations that quadrupled the number of corporate PACs from 1976 to 1980.69 More recently, anti-union lobbyists have passed legislation weakening unions in states such as Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin that were once union strongholds.70 Outdated labor laws have failed to provide workers with protection from this employer onslaught against collective bargaining. And corporate lobbyists have blocked reforms to labor laws that would protect workers’ collective bargaining rights with meaningful penalties for violations and better processes for organizing. Employers are exploiting loopholes, including by misclassifying workers as independent contractors to get around labor laws that protect employees. By going after union funding, employer interests and their allied lawmakers can wipe out one of the crucial pillars of support for pro-worker candidates and causes. If unions have fewer members, or if the law hamstrings unions’ ability to collect administrative fees from the workers they represent, there will be less union money spent on advocating for workers in general. As Gordon Lafer, associate professor at the Labor Education and Research Center at the University of Oregon, notes, “The labor movement serves as the primary political counterweight to the corporate agenda on a long list of issues that are not per se labor-related. To the extent that unions can be removed as a politically meaningful force, the rest of the agenda becomes much easier to execute.”71’ That affirms – an unconditional right to strike grants workers the freedom to bargain collectively without coercive tactics from employers
12/5/21
ND - Omnipresent Affection
Tournament: Blue Key | Round: 6 | Opponent: Lexington VM | Judge: JP Stuckert Affect, the ability to experience and to be experienced, is the only constitutive feature: I am experiencing my Word doc, my opponent, just as much as you are experiencing me. There is no way to escape affection. Thinking is only a feature of me and doesn’t determine the subject. Subjectivity is fluid—the only intrinsic feature of the subject is that everything is changing, thus stable subjecthood fails. Emphasis on particular aspects of subjectivity only drives division in the proletariat. There are two kinds of affect, active and reactive— Active affect allows us to extend and compose our own boundaries whereas reactive affect only indicates our body’s ability to be affected. Embracing active affect is key to breaking free from the pervasive state mindset and instead creating spaces for resistance and radical change so that we can reform the state
Thus, the standard and role of the ballot is to embrace a politics of active affect. To clarify, we reject things that reinforce stability or the majoritarian subject. Current systems of education only serve to produce majoritarian bodies that are unable to think outside the system and who become increasingly recognizable, killing the potential for any resistance. Wallins, Jason. “Deleuze and Guattari, Politics and Education.” Bloomsbur Publishing, 2014, Pgs. 119-121 SHS KS As a social machine through which ‘labour power and the socius as a whole is manufactured’, schooling figures in the production of social territories that already anticipate a certain kind of people (Guattari, 2009, p. 47). And what kind of people does orthodox schooling seek to produce but a ‘molar public’, or, rather, a public regulated in the abstract image of segmentary social categories (age, gender, ethnicity, class, rank, achievement) (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987)? Such an aspiration is intimately wed to the territorializing powers of the State, for as Deleuze and Guattari argue (1983), State power first requires a ‘representational subject’ as both an abstract and unconscious model in relation to which one is taught to desire. As Massumi (2002) writes, ‘the subject is made to be in conformity with the systems that produces it, such that the subject reproduces the system’ (p. 6). Where education has historically functioned to regulate institutional life according to such segmentary molar codes, its modes of production have taken as their teleological goal the production of a ‘majoritarian people’, or, more accurately, a people circuited to their representational self-similarity according to State thought. This is, in part, the threat that Aoki (2005) identifies in the planned curriculum and its projection of an abstract essentialism upon a diversity of concrete educational assemblages (a school, a class, a curriculum, etc.). Apropos Deleuze, Aoki argues that the standardization of education has effectively reduced difference to a matter of difference in degree. That is, in reference to the stratifying power of the planned curriculum, Aoki avers that difference is always-already linked to an abstract image to which pedagogy ought to aspire and in conformity to which its operations become recognizable as ‘education’ per se. Against political action then, orthodox educational thought conceptualizes social life alongside the ‘categories of the Negative’, eschewing difference for conformity, flows for unities, mobile arrangements for totalizing systems (Foucault, 1983, p. xiii). Twisting Deleuze, might we claim that the people are missing in education? That is, where education aspires to invest desire in the production of a ‘majoritarian’ or ‘molar’ public, the prospect of thinking singularities are stayed, not only through the paucity of enunciatory forms and images available for thinking education in the first place, but further, through the organization of the school’s enunciatory machines into vehicles of representation that repeat in molarizing forms of self-reflection, ‘majoritarian’ perspective, and dominant circuits of desiring-investment. Herein, the impulse of standardization obliterates alternative subject formations and the modes of counter-signifying enunciation that might palpate them. Repelling the singular, the ‘majoritarian’ and standardizing impulse of education takes as its ‘fundamental’ mode of production the reification of common sense, or, rather, the territorialization of thought according to that which is given (that which everyone already knows). Figuring in a mode ‘of identification that brings diversity in general to bear upon the form of the Same’, common sense functions to stabilize patterns of social production by tethering them to molar orders of meaning and dominant regimes of social signification (Deleuze, 1990, p. 78). As Daignault argues, in so far as it repels the anomalous by reterritorializing it within prior systems of representation, common sense constitutes a significant and lingering problem in contemporary education (Hwu, 2004). Its function, Daignault alludes apropos Serres, is oriented to the annihilation of difference. Hence, where the conceptualization of ‘public’ education is founded in common sense, potentials for political action through tactics of proliferation, disjunction, and singularization are radically delimited and captured within prior territorialities of use (Foucault, 1983, p. xiii). The problem of this scenario is clear: common sense has yet to force us to think in a manner capable of subtracting desire from majoritarian thought in lieu of alternative forms of organization and experimental expression. In so far as it functions as a vehicle of ‘molarization’, reifying a common universe of reference for enunciation, the school fails to produce conditions for thinking in a manner that is not already anticipated by such referential ‘possibilities’. Hence, while antithetical to the espoused purpose of schooling, the majoritarian impulse of the school has yet to produce conditions for thinking – at least in the Deleuzian (2000) sense whereupon thought proceeds from a necessary violence to those habits of repetition with which thought becomes contracted. Prefer additionally: 1 The state is a neutral tool but can be used as a destructive force of reactive desire as it can codify and regulate all social interactions as well as destroy those deemed deviant. Robinson 09 Andrew. Andrew Robinson is a political theorist and activist based in the UK. His book Power, Resistance and Conflict in the Contemporary World: Social Movements, Networks and Hierarchies (co-authored with Athina Karatzogianni) was published in Sep 2009 by Routledge. “In Theory Why Deleuze (still) matters: States, war-machines and radical transformation”. Ceasefire. September 10th In this article, I have chosen to concentrate on the conceptual pairing of states and war-machines as a way of understanding the differences between autonomous social networks and hierarchical, repressive formations. Deleuze and Guattari view the ‘state’ as a particular kind of institutional regime derived from a set of social relations which can be traced to a way of seeing focused on the construction of fixities and representation. There is thus a basic form of the state (a “state-form”) in spite of the differences among specific states. Since Deleuze and Guattari’s theory is primarily relational and processual, the state exists primarily as a process rather than a thing. The state-form is defined by the processes or practices of ‘overcoding’, ‘despotic signification’ and ‘machinic enslavement’. These attributes can be explained one at a time. The concept of despotic signification, derived from Lacan’s idea of the master-signifier, suggests that, in statist thought, a particular signifier is elevated to the status of standing for the whole, and the other of this signifier (remembering that signification is necessarily differential) is defined as radically excluded. ‘Overcoding’ consists in the imposition of the regime of meanings arising from this fixing of representations on the various processes through which social life and desire operate. In contrast to the deep penetration which occurs in capitalism, states often do this fairly lightly, but with brutality around the edges. Hence for instance, in historical despotic states, the inclusion of peripheral areas only required their symbolic subordination, and not any real impact on everyday life in these areas. Overcoding also, however, entails the destruction of anything which cannot be represented or encoded. ‘Machinic enslavement’ occurs when assembled groups of social relations and desires, known in Deleuzian theory as ‘machines’, are rendered subordinate to the regulatory function of the despotic signifier and hence incorporated in an overarching totality. This process identifies Deleuze and Guattari’s view of the state-form with Mumford’s idea of the megamachine, with the state operating as a kind of absorbing and enclosing totality, a bit like the Borg in Star Trek, eating up and assimilating the social networks with which it comes into contact. Crucially, while these relations it absorbs often start out as horizontal, or as hierarchical only at a local level, their absorption rearranges them as vertical and hierarchical aggregates. It tends to destroy or reduce the intensity of horizontal connections, instead increasing the intensity of vertical subordination. Take, for instance, the formation of the colonial state in Africa: loose social identities were rigidly reclassified as exclusive ethnicities, and these ethnicities were arranged in hierarchies (for instance, Tutsi as superior to Hutu) in ways which created rigid boundaries and oppressive relations culminating in today’s conflicts. According to this theory of the state-form, states are at once ‘isomorphic’, sharing a basic structure and function, and heterogeneous, differing in how they express this structure. In particular, states vary in terms of the relative balance between ‘adding’ and ‘subtracting axioms’ (capitalism is also seen as performing these two operations). An axiom here refers to the inclusion of a particular group or social logic or set of desires as something recognised by a state: examples of addition of axioms would be the recognition of minority rights (e.g. gay rights), the recognition and systematic inclusion of minority groups in formal multiculturalism (e.g. Indian ‘scheduled castes’), the creation of niche markets for particular groups (e.g. ‘ethnic food’ sections in supermarkets), and the provision of inclusive services (e.g. support for independent living for people with disabilities). It is most marked in social-democratic kinds of states. The subtraction of axioms consists in the encoding of differences as problems to be suppressed, for example in the classification of differences as crimes, the institutionalisation of unwanted minorities (e.g. ‘sectioning’ people who are psychologically different), or the restriction of services to members of an in-group (excluding ‘disruptive’ children, denying council housing to migrants). This process reaches its culmination in totalitarian states. It is important to realise that in both cases, the state is expressing the logic of the state-form, finding ways to encode and represent differences; but that the effects of the two strategies on the freedom and social power of marginalised groups are very different. The state is also viewed as a force of ‘antiproduction’. This term is defined against the ‘productive’ or creative power Deleuze and Guattari believe resides in processes of desiring-production (the process through which desires are formed and connected to objects or others) and social production (the process of constructing social ‘assemblages’ or networks). Desiring-production tends to proliferate differences, because desire operates through fluxes and breaks, overflowing particular boundaries. The state as machine of antiproduction operates to restrict, prevent or channel these flows of creative energy so as to preserve fixed social forms and restrict the extent of difference which is able to exist, or the connections it is able to form. Hence, states try to restrict and break down the coming-together of social networks by prohibiting or making difficult the formation of hierarchical assemblages; it operates to block ‘subject-formation’ in terms of social groups, or the emergence of subjectivities which are not already encoded in dominant terms. Take for instance the laws on ‘dispersal’, in which the British state allows police to break up groups (often of young people) congregating in public spaces. Absurdly, the state defines the social act of coming-together as anti-social, because it creates a space in which different kinds of social relations can be formed. The state wishes to have a monopoly on how people interrelate, and so acts to prevent people from associating horizontally. Another example of antiproduction is the way that participation in imposed activities
2. The aff is key to adopt and test new resistance for students as contemporary pedagogical sites – operating internally is essential to hearing from multiple perspectives and forming new affective relations Manning and Massumi 18 Erin and Brian; “A Cryptoeconomy of Affect”; interviewed by Uriah Todoroff for The New Inquiry; Massumi is known for his translations of French post-structuralist classics like Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987); Manning is a prolific author whose last published book was The Minor Gesture (2016). They work together at the SenseLab in Montreal, a research laboratory Manning created to experiment with collective pedagogy. The lab provides a base for intellectual and creative activity that is intended to spin off into projects that grow or die according to their own momentum.; https://thenewinquiry.com/a-cryptoeconomy-of-affect/; BP There are people all over the world we don’t know who are doing this kind of work, who are creating ways of working together, inventing new forms of collaboration, engaging with complex ecological models of encounter, who are inventing new forms of value. We never believe we are alone doing this work. The question we have isn’t the usual start-up question of how to scale up, it’s how do we create techniques for the registering of that which doesn’t register? The 3E Process Seed Bank is deeply allied to the question of what else learning and living can be, having grown out of its sister project the Three Ecologies Institute. We actually began there, with the Three Ecologies Institute, working from Félix Guattari’s definition of the three ecologies as the conceptual (psychic, mental), the environmental, and the social. It was only two years ago that we realized that thinking value transversally across the three ecologies required us to also take financial value into account. We see the 3E as a kind of intensifier of modes of thinking and living dedicated to inventing ways that we can continue to learn together, regardless of our age, background, or learning style. We don’t see it as an opposite to the university; we see it as a parasite. You could put the emphasis on the site: a para-site, a para-institution that maintains relations with the institution of the university but operates by a different logic. It would be very naive of us to think you could just walk out of capitalism. We’re not that naive. Neoliberalism is our natural environment. We therefore operate with what we call strategic duplicity. This involves recognizing what works in the systems we work against. Which means: We don’t just oppose them head on. We work with them, strategically, while nurturing an alien logic that moves in very different directions. One of the things we know that the university does well is that it attracts really interesting people. The university can facilitate meetings that can change lives. But systemically, it fails. And the systemic failure is getting more and more acute. And so what we imagine is that the Institute, assisted by the 3E Process Seed Bank, will create a new space that might overlap with some of the things the university does well, without being a part of it (or being subsumed by its logic). MASSUMI.— Going back to the question of value, we want to create an economy around the platform that does not follow any of the usual economic principles. There will be no individual ownership or shares. There will be no units of account, no currency or tokens used internally. The model of activity will not be transactional. Individual interest will not be used as an incentivizer. What there will be is a complex space of relation for people to create intensities of experience together, in emergent excess over what they could have created working separately, or in traditional teams. It’s meant to be self-organizing, with no separate administrative structure or hierarchy, and even no formal decision-making rules. It’s anarchistic in that sense, but through mobilizing a surplus of organizing potential, rather than lacking organization. You could also call it communistic, in the sense that there is no individual value holding. Everything is common. MANNING.— Undercommon. MASSUMI.— Yes, undercommonly. The undercommons is Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s word for emergent collectivity, which is one of our inspirations. We want to foster emergence and process, but at the same time find ways of making it sustainable. That means that the strategic duplicity has to extend to the economy as we currently know it. We have to be parasitical to the capitalist economy, while operating according to a logic that is totally alien to it. What we’re thinking of is making the collaborative process moving through the platform function according to the radically anti-capitalist principles we were just talking about, centering on the collective production of surplus values of life, and separating that from the dominant economy by a membrane. A membrane creates a separation, but at the same time allows for movements across. It has a certain porosity. The idea is that we would find ways, associated with the affect-o-meter we were describing earlier, to register qualitative shifts in the creative process as it moves over its formative thresholds, and moves back and forth between online operations and offline events. What would be registered is the affective intensity of the production of surplus value of life, its ebbs and flows. The membrane would consist in a translation of those qualitative flows into a numerical expression, which would feed into a cryptocurrency. Basically, we’d be mining crypto with collaborative creative energies—monetizing emergent collectivity. The currency would be “backed” by the confidence we could build in our ability to keep the creative process going and spin it off into other projects, as evidenced by the activities of the Three Ecologies Institute as an experiment in alter-education.
Offense Thus, I affirm—Resolved: A just government ought to recognize an unconditional right of workers to strike. I’ll defend the resolution as a general principle and PICS don’t negate because general principles tolerate exceptions. I’ll spec whatever you want me to in cx as long as it doesn’t force me to abandon my maximum.
Contention 1: Oppression staticizes subjects as “workers” creating an interlocking affect that prevent fluidity to become more than a worker Gourevitch 18 Alex Gourevitch is an associate professor political science at Brown University. “The Right to Strike: A Radical View.” 2018. American Political Science Review. https://sci-hub.se/10.1017/s0003055418000321 THE FACTS OF OPPRESSION IN TYPICAL LIBERAL CAPITALIST SOCIETIES To explain why the right to strike is a right to resist oppression, I first must give an account of the relevant oppression. Oppression is the unjustifiable deprivation of freedom. Some deprivations or restrictions of freedom are justified and therefore do not count as oppression. The oppression that matters for this article is the class-based oppression of a typical liberal capitalist society. By the class-based oppression, I mean the fact that the majority of able-bodied people find themselves forced to work for members of a relatively small group who dominate control over productive assets and who, thereby, enjoy unjustifiable control over the activities and products of those workers. There are workers and then there are owners and their managers. The facts I refer to here are mostly drawn from the United States to keep a consistent description of a specific society. While there is meaningful variation across liberal capitalist nations, the basic facts of class-based oppression do not change in a way that vitiates my argument’s applicability to those countries too. Empirical analysis of each country to which the argument applies, and how it would apply, is a separate project. The first element of oppression in a class society resides in the fact that (a) there are some who are forced into the labor market while others are not and (b) those who are forced to work—workers—have to work for those who own productive resources. Workers are forced into the labor market because they have no reasonable alternative but to find a job.8 They cannot produce necessary goods for themselves, nor can they rely on the charity of others, nor can they count on adequate state benefits. The only way most people can gain reliable access to necessary goods is by buying them. The most reliable, often only, way most people have of acquiring enough money to buy those goods is through employment. That is the sense in which they have no reasonable alternative but to find a job working for an employer. Depending on how we measure income and wealth, about 60–80 of Americans are in this situation for most of their adult lives.9 This forcing is not symmetrical. A significant minority is not similarly forced to work for someone else, though they might do so freely. That minority has enough wealth, either inherited or accumulated or both, that they have a reasonable alternative to entering the labor market. So, this first dimension of oppression comes not from the fact that some are forced to work, but from the fact that the forcing is unequal and that asymmetry means some are forced to work for others.10 That is to say, what makes it oppressive is the wrong of unequally forcing the majority to work, for whatever purpose, while others face no such forcing at all.11 That way of organizing and distributing coercive work obligations, and of imposing certain kinds of forcing on workers, is an unjustifiable way of limiting their freedom and therefore oppressive. To fix ideas, I call this the structural element of oppression in class societies. 8 For a fuller analysis of workers being asymmetrically forced to work, or forced into particular occupations see Cohen (1988a,1988b), Ezorsky (2007), and Stanczyk (unpublished). These are primarily analytic descriptions of forcing, not normative analyses of what is wrong with that forcing. 9 For the 60–80 statistic, see Henwood (2005, 125). The statistics on wealth among the lower deciles is complex. A recent study shows that the net wealth of the bottom 50 is roughly 0. So at least 50 of US households are forced to use job-related income to meet annual expenses, though that has to be modified for those who receive (insufficient to live on) welfare benefits (Saez and Zucman 2014; Wolff 2012). 10 To be clear, the oppression here is not with any and all unequal and asymmetric forcing but with the inequality that arises from the class structure of society. For instance, it is not oppressive nor an unjust constraint on individual freedom, to force the able-bodied to do some work to support the disabled, children, the sick, the elderly, or the otherwise socially dependent who cannot perform a share of necessary labor. Though even there, there is some presumption that that burden of working for those who cannot work should be shared equally, and that individuals should not be forced to work for any purpose and under any conditions whatsoever. What I am describing as oppression is not the very fact that some work and others don’t, but the inequality and asymmetry that arises from the inequalities in ownership and control. This forcing is unequal in that some ablebodied—and even some who by all rights should not have to work at all—are forced to work while other able-bodied individuals are not forced to work. And it is asymmetric in that those who have to work are, on the whole, forced to work for those who hire them, under conditions controlled primarily by employers. This structural element leads to a second, interpersonal dimension of oppression in the workplace itself. Workers are forced to join workplaces typically characterized by large swathes of uncontrolled managerial power and authority. This oppression is interpersonal in the sense that it is power that specific individuals— employers and their managers—have to get other specific individuals—employees—to do what they want. We can distinguish between three overlapping forms that this interpersonal, workplace oppression takes: subordination, delegation, and dependence. Subordination: Employers have what are sometimes called “managerial prerogatives,”12 which are legislative and judicial grants of authority to owners and their managers to make decisions about investment, hiring and firing, plant location, work process, and the like.13 These powers come from judicial precedent and from the constellation of corporate, labor, contract, and property law. Managers may change working speeds and assigned tasks, the hours of work, or even force workers to spend up to an hour going through security lines after work without paying them (Integrity Staffing Solutions, Inc. v. Busk 2014). Managers may fire workers for Facebook comments, their sexual orientation, for being too sexually appealing, or for not being appealing enough (Emerson 2011; Hess 2013; Strauss 2013; Velasco 2011). Workers may be given more tasks than can be performed in the allotted time, locked in the workplace overnight, required to work in extreme heat and other physically hazardous conditions, or punitively isolated from other coworkers (Greenhouse 2009, 26–27, 49–55, 89, 111–112; Hsu 2011; JOMO 2013; Urbina 2013). Managers may pressure employees into unwanted political behavior (HertelFernandez 2015). In all of these cases, managers are exercising legally permitted prerogatives.14 The law does not require that workers have any formal say in how those powers are exercised. In fact, in nearly every liberal capitalist country, employees are defined, in law, as “subordinates.”15 This is subordination in the strict sense: workers are subject to the will of the employer. Delegation: There are also other discretionary legal powers that managers have not by legal statute or precedent but because workers have voluntarily delegated these powers in the contract. For instance, workers might sign a contract that allows managers to require employees to submit to random drug testing or unannounced searches (American Civil Liberties Union 2017). In the United States, 18 of current employees and 37 of workers in their lifetime work under noncompete agreements (Bunker 2016). These clauses give managers legal power to forbid workers from working for competitors. The contract that the Communications Workers of America had with Verizon until 2015 included a right for managers to force employers to perform from 10 to 15 hours of overtime per week and to take some other day instead of Saturday as an off-day (Gourevitch 2016a). These legal powers are not parts of the managerial prerogatives that all employers have. Rather, they are voluntarily delegated to employers by workers. In many cases, though the delegation is in one sense voluntary, in another sense it is forced. This will especially be the case if workers, who are forced to find jobs, can only find jobs in sectors where the only contracts available are ones that require these kinds of delegations. Dependence: Finally, managers might have the material power to force employees to submit to commands or even to accept violations of their rights because of the worker’s dependence on the employer. A headline example is wage-theft, which affects American workers to the tune of $8– $14 billion per year (Eisenbray 2015; Judson and Francisco-McGuire 2012; NELP 2013; Axt 2013). In other cases, workers have been forced to wear diapers rather than go to the bathroom, refused legally required lunch breaks, or pressured to work through them, forced to keep working after their shift is up, or denied the right to read or turn on air conditioning during break (Oxfam 2015; BennettSmith 2012; Egelko 2011; Greenhouse 2009, 3– 12; Little 2013; Vega 2012). Other employers have forced their workers to stay home rather than go out on weekends or to switch churches and alter religious practices on pain of being fired and deported (Garrison, Bensinger, and Singer-Vine 2015). In these cases, employers are not exercising legal prerogatives, they are instead taking advantage of the material power that comes with threatening to fire or otherwise discipline workers. This material power to get workers to do things that employers want is in part a function of the class structure of society, both in the wide sense of workers being asymmetrically dependent on owners, and in the narrower sense of workers being legally subordinate to employers. Subordination, delegation, and dependence add up to a form of interpersonal oppression that employers and their managers have over their employees. The weight and scope of this oppression will vary, but those are variations on a theme. Employers and managers enjoy wide swaths of uncontrolled or insufficiently controlled power over their employees. This is the second face of oppression in a class society and it is a live issue. For instance, during the Verizon strike of 2016, one major complaint was that, when out on the job, hanging cable, or repairing lines, some technicians had to ask their manager for permission to go to the bathroom or to get a drink of water. As one striker said in an interview, “Do I have to tell my boss every single minute of what I am doing? This is basic human dignity” (Gourevitch 2016b). If they did not ask or wait to get clear approval from their manager, then they were guilty of a time code violation and were suspended for up to six weeks. The strike made workplace control a direct issue and one measure of its success was a change in disciplinary proceedings (ibid.). To take another example, the Fight for $15 strikes have made control over scheduling a central demand, even managing in certain states and municipalities to pass laws mandating minimal regularity and predictability in weekly schedules (Andrias 2016, 47–70). So, if the first face of oppression is that workers are forced to work for some employer or another who does not face a similar kind of forcing; the second face is that workers are forced to become de jure and de facto subordinates to a specific employer.16 The third face of oppression is the systematic distributive effects of structural and interpersonal oppression. While some instances of class-based oppression are idiosyncratic, in general it has consistent distributive effects. The structural and interpersonal oppression of workers produces wage-bargains and limits on wealth accumulation that reproduce workers’ economic dependence on employers, their over or underemployment, and thereby allows a relatively small group of owners and highly paid managers to accumulate most of the wealth and income. I cannot discuss the extensive literature on inequality. I can only cite some generally well-known facts and papers pointing to the role of inequalities in power as determining factors in these outcomes.17 To the degree that inequalities are a product of structural and workplace oppression, distributive outcomes are their own dimension of oppression and serve to reproduce those basic class relationships. Above all, there is one unjustifiable distributive effect of this oppression: that the majority of wage-bargains ensure the reproduction of that oppressive class structure. At any given point in time, a majority of workers do not earn enough to both meet their needs and to save such that they can employ themselves or start their own businesses. They must therefore remain workers or, to the degree they rise, they do so either by displacing others or by taking the structurally limited number of opportunities available.18 Each of these different faces of oppression— structural, interpersonal, and distributive—is a distinct injustice. Together they form an interrelated and mutually reinforcing set of oppressive relationships. The various ways in which workers are forced to work, made subject to dominating authority, and made asymmetrically dependent in the economy does not produce a fair way of distributing the obligation to work and the rewards of social production. Rather, it constrains their freedom in a way that secures the exploitation of one class by another. The weight of these different oppressions is unevenly experienced across different segments of workers. Various factors modify the basic facts about class and oppression. We have seen, for instance, the difference between being in a high labor supply versus a low labor supply sector. High labor supply sectors involve more intense labor competition, resulting in weaker bargaining power for workers and intensified oppression. The opposite holds for lower labor supply sectors—like software programmers or fiber-optics technicians—whose greater bargaining power means they face class-based oppression less intensively. This has downstream consequences for our analysis of particular strikes, but it does not affect the argument for the right to strike itself. My description of the economy is controversial. Some will either reject aspects of the empirical description, find it too underspecified to agree, or they will disagree with the normative interpretation of it as involving systematic, unjustified restrictions on workers’ freedom. Any attempt to give a more detailed account of this political economy of exploitation would leave no room for the rest of the argument. In what follows, the reader does not have to agree with every aspect of my description of liberal capitalist arrangements. One need only agree that the typical liberal capitalist economy is characterized by considerable, class-based oppression of workers, for reasons similar to the ones I have just provided, to then think that the right to strike can be seen as a right to resist oppression. Strikes disrupt the codification processes and capitalist system enforced by the state, creating revolutionary and non-linear power that realizes the subjects affective potential and allows them to embrace active affect. Holland 12 Eugene Holland; Non-Linear Historical Materialism; Or, What is Revolutionary in Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History?; from Chapter 2 of Time and History in Deleuze and Serres (2012) (Dr. Holland is Professor and Chair of Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University.) SHS KS Political struggle thus necessarily involves two co-existent kinds of activity: on one hand, there is struggle within the axiomatic, for whatever ameliorations can be wrung from capital and/or the State through direct confrontation – and this is a mode of struggle that Deleuze and Guattari insist is perfectly valid and necessary (Deleuze et al., 1987, p. 471). On the other hand, there is the struggle to escape axiomatization and codifi cation altogether –the mode of struggle via de-coding and “ lines-of-flight ”that they in some sense prefer. What is given is always ‘ the coexistence and inseparability of that which the system conjugates, and that which never ceases to escape it following lines of flight that are themselves connectable ’ , as Deleuze andGuattari put it in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze et al., 1987, p. 473). And this connectability of lines-of-fl ight is crucial, politically. What in the fi rst volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia were called “ schizophrenic ”lines-of-fl ight are politically useless –or worse –if they do not intersect and connect up to constitute some kind of critical mass, as Deleuze andGuattari are careful to specify more clearly in the second volume. Yet even here, the conditions for such a critical mass becoming revolutionary are left somewhat vague: the slogan ‘ a new people on a new earth ’echoes throughout their collaborative work as a kind of refrain; and they do suggest that the ultimate challenge is to ‘ construct revolutionary connections over and against contre the conjugations of the axiomatic ’(Deleuze et al., 1987, p. 473). But we need to try to get clearer about just which conditions are conducive to the formation of connections among lines-of-fl ight and about how a critical mass of revolutionary connections could overcome the conjugations of the capitalist axiomatic. For insight into these questions, I propose that we return to the process with which we started: reading Capital backwards. This would mean focusing less on the power of capital accumulation than on so-called “ primitive accumulation ” , which as we saw is not really primitive but always ongoing, and not really accumulation but rather dispossession; and it would mean, like Althusser, highlighting in our considerations the non-linear conditions of reproduction rather than the linear causality of production/accumulation. And I propose that we examine in this light the key political-economic strategies of anti-capitalist struggle –and I specify “ political-economic ”strategies (those of radical syndicalism, if you will) to rule out of consideration what we might call more narrowly political strategies –state-centric or party-electoral strategies –as insuffi - ciently revolutionary. These political-economic strategies are the strike, and especially the general strike. As Walter Benjamin has very clearly noted, the general strike is distinctive in that it is non-confrontational (although he would say non-violent, which is not quite the same thing, and perhaps a little too optimistic) (Benjamin, 1978, pp. 277 – 300). In principle, a strike does not involves one power bloc directly confronting another, but rather one bloc withdrawing from its previous mode of engagement (wage-slavery) vis- à -vis the other. The same is true of the general strike, which expands the act of withdrawal to a larger scale: here we have a critical mass of workers walking away en masse from their engagement with capital. Yet from the perspective of reproduction and so-called primitive accumulation –and this is key –what the masses are walking away “ from ” –capital accumulation –is actually less important than what they are able to walk “ towards ” : rejecting capital is less important than having something sustaining and sustainable to rely on. You will recall that the crucial catalyst entailed by primitive accumulation was enforced dependence on capitalist markets: remove this catalyst, and capitalism no longer “ becomes necessary ” , to invoke Althusser once again. More important than directly confronting capital, in other words, is securing alternative means of life, an alternative mode of reproduction. Even more important: such alternatives already exist. One of the great virtues of Gibson-Graham ’ s work is to demonstrate how incomplete capitalism actually is and how many alternative economies co-exist within or beside it (Gibson-Graham, 1996; 2006). Community Supported Agriculture; the co-op movement; the Open-Source Software movement; Fair Trade –all these, and many more, constitute viable, actually existing alternatives to capitalism. And all it will take for them, in connection with others, to become revolutionary –in the specifi cally non-linear sense I am proposing –is for a critical mass of people to invest their life-activity in them, rather than in capitalist markets. We tend to think of linear revolutions as punctual: 1917, 1848 and so on –even though they probably were not. But the non-linear revolution I am talking about is even less punctual: it entails instead what I elsewhere call the strategy of the ‘ slowmotion general strike ’(Holland, forthcoming). Critical masses of people in various aspects of their life-activity just walk away from capital –having secured in advance at least the rudiments of alternative means of life. This does not have to happen all at once: but as soon as suffi cient numbers of people in enough areas of life do so, a tipping point will have been reached, a non-linear bifurcation threshold crossed, beyond which capitalism will not only no longer be necessary, it will actually become-unnecessary. As the slow-motion general strike reaches completion, that is to say, it is not just the State, but also capitalism itself that ends up withering away. Contention 2: Strikes allows workers to use active affect to reclaim their own authority and resisting the territorializing barriers of workplaces Gourevitch 18, A. (2018). The Right to Strike: A Radical View. American Political Science Review, 1–13. doi:10.1017/s0003055418000321 (Alex Gourevitch is an Assistant Professor of Political Sci- ence, Brown University) SHS KS There is more than one way to justify the right to strike and, in so doing, to explain the shape that right ought to have. As we shall see, there is the liberal, the social- democratic, and the radical account. Any justi cation of a right must give an account not just of the interest it protects but of how that right is shaped to protect that interest. In the case of the radical argument for the right to strike, which I will defend against the other two con- ceptions, the relevant human interest is liberty. Work- ers have an interest in resisting the oppression of class society by using their collective power to reduce that oppression. Their interest is a liberty interest in a dou- ble sense. First, it is an interest in not being oppressed, or in not facing certain kinds of forcing, coercion, and subjection to authority that they shouldn’t have to. Any resistance to those kinds of unjusti ed limitations of freedom carries with it, at least implicitly, a demand for liberties not yet enjoyed.19 That is a demand for a control over portions of one’s life that one does not yet enjoy. Second, and consequently, the right to strike is grounded in an interest in using one’s own individual and collective agency to resist—or even overcome— that oppression. The interest in using one’s own agency to resist oppression ows naturally from the demand for liberties not yet enjoyed. After all, that demand for control is in the name of giving proper space to work- ers’ capacity for self-determination, which is the same capacity that expresses itself in the activity of striking for greater freedom. On this radical view, the right to strike has both an intrinsic and instrumental relation to liberty. It has in- trinsic value as an (at least implicit) demand for self- emancipation or the winning of greater liberty through one’s own efforts. It has instrumental value insofar as the strike is on the whole an effective means for resist- ing the oppressiveness of a class society. For the right to strike to enjoy its proper connection to liberty, work- ers must have a reasonable chance of carrying out an effective strike, otherwise it would lose its instrumen- tal value as a way of resisting oppression. If prevented from using a reasonable array of effective means, ex- ercising the right to strike would not be a means of reducing oppression and, therefore, strikes would also be of very limited value as acts of self-emancipation. It would not be an instance of workers attempting to use their own capacity for self-determination to increase the control they ought to have over the terms of their daily activity.
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ND - Omnipresent Affection v2
Tournament: Apple Valley | Round: 1 | Opponent: Valley RT | Judge: Momo Khattak Affect, the ability to experience and to be experienced, is the only constitutive feature: I am experiencing my Word doc, my opponent, just as much as you are experiencing me. There is no way to escape affection. Thinking is only a feature of me and doesn’t determine the subject. Subjectivity is fluid—the only intrinsic feature of the subject is that everything is changing, thus stable subjecthood fails. Emphasis on particular aspects of subjectivity only drives division in the proletariat. There are two kinds of affect, active and reactive— Active affect allows us to extend and compose our own boundaries whereas reactive affect only indicates our body’s ability to be affected. Everything is constituted by relationality: so all negations manifest themselves as affirmation since the relations certainly existed and are valid, so all negation collapses to an affirmation of affective encounters. Embracing active affect is key to breaking free from the pervasive state mindset and instead creating spaces for resistance and radical change so that we can reform the state Thus, the standard and role of the ballot is to embrace a politics of active affect. To clarify, we reject things that reinforce stability or the majoritarian subject. Current systems of education only serve to produce majoritarian bodies that are unable to think outside the system and who become increasingly recognizable, killing the potential for any resistance. Wallins, Jason. “Deleuze and Guattari, Politics and Education.” Bloomsbur Publishing, 2014, Pgs. 119-121 SHS KS As a social machine through which ‘labour power and the socius as a whole is manufactured’, schooling figures in the production of social territories that already anticipate a certain kind of people (Guattari, 2009, p. 47). And what kind of people does orthodox schooling seek to produce but a ‘molar public’, or, rather, a public regulated in the abstract image of segmentary social categories (age, gender, ethnicity, class, rank, achievement) (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987)? Such an aspiration is intimately wed to the territorializing powers of the State, for as Deleuze and Guattari argue (1983), State power first requires a ‘representational subject’ as both an abstract and unconscious model in relation to which one is taught to desire. As Massumi (2002) writes, ‘the subject is made to be in conformity with the systems that produces it, such that the subject reproduces the system’ (p. 6). Where education has historically functioned to regulate institutional life according to such segmentary molar codes, its modes of production have taken as their teleological goal the production of a ‘majoritarian people’, or, more accurately, a people circuited to their representational self-similarity according to State thought. This is, in part, the threat that Aoki (2005) identifies in the planned curriculum and its projection of an abstract essentialism upon a diversity of concrete educational assemblages (a school, a class, a curriculum, etc.). Apropos Deleuze, Aoki argues that the standardization of education has effectively reduced difference to a matter of difference in degree. That is, in reference to the stratifying power of the planned curriculum, Aoki avers that difference is always-already linked to an abstract image to which pedagogy ought to aspire and in conformity to which its operations become recognizable as ‘education’ per se. Against political action then, orthodox educational thought conceptualizes social life alongside the ‘categories of the Negative’, eschewing difference for conformity, flows for unities, mobile arrangements for totalizing systems (Foucault, 1983, p. xiii). Twisting Deleuze, might we claim that the people are missing in education? That is, where education aspires to invest desire in the production of a ‘majoritarian’ or ‘molar’ public, the prospect of thinking singularities are stayed, not only through the paucity of enunciatory forms and images available for thinking education in the first place, but further, through the organization of the school’s enunciatory machines into vehicles of representation that repeat in molarizing forms of self-reflection, ‘majoritarian’ perspective, and dominant circuits of desiring-investment. Herein, the impulse of standardization obliterates alternative subject formations and the modes of counter-signifying enunciation that might palpate them. Repelling the singular, the ‘majoritarian’ and standardizing impulse of education takes as its ‘fundamental’ mode of production the reification of common sense, or, rather, the territorialization of thought according to that which is given (that which everyone already knows). Figuring in a mode ‘of identification that brings diversity in general to bear upon the form of the Same’, common sense functions to stabilize patterns of social production by tethering them to molar orders of meaning and dominant regimes of social signification (Deleuze, 1990, p. 78). As Daignault argues, in so far as it repels the anomalous by reterritorializing it within prior systems of representation, common sense constitutes a significant and lingering problem in contemporary education (Hwu, 2004). Its function, Daignault alludes apropos Serres, is oriented to the annihilation of difference. Hence, where the conceptualization of ‘public’ education is founded in common sense, potentials for political action through tactics of proliferation, disjunction, and singularization are radically delimited and captured within prior territorialities of use (Foucault, 1983, p. xiii). The problem of this scenario is clear: common sense has yet to force us to think in a manner capable of subtracting desire from majoritarian thought in lieu of alternative forms of organization and experimental expression. In so far as it functions as a vehicle of ‘molarization’, reifying a common universe of reference for enunciation, the school fails to produce conditions for thinking in a manner that is not already anticipated by such referential ‘possibilities’. Hence, while antithetical to the espoused purpose of schooling, the majoritarian impulse of the school has yet to produce conditions for thinking – at least in the Deleuzian (2000) sense whereupon thought proceeds from a necessary violence to those habits of repetition with which thought becomes contracted. Prefer additionally: 1 The state is a neutral tool but can be used as a destructive force of reactive desire as it can codify and regulate all social interactions as well as destroy those deemed deviant. Robinson 09 Andrew. Andrew Robinson is a political theorist and activist based in the UK. His book Power, Resistance and Conflict in the Contemporary World: Social Movements, Networks and Hierarchies (co-authored with Athina Karatzogianni) was published in Sep 2009 by Routledge. “In Theory Why Deleuze (still) matters: States, war-machines and radical transformation”. Ceasefire. September 10th In this article, I have chosen to concentrate on the conceptual pairing of states and war-machines as a way of understanding the differences between autonomous social networks and hierarchical, repressive formations. Deleuze and Guattari view the ‘state’ as a particular kind of institutional regime derived from a set of social relations which can be traced to a way of seeing focused on the construction of fixities and representation. There is thus a basic form of the state (a “state-form”) in spite of the differences among specific states. Since Deleuze and Guattari’s theory is primarily relational and processual, the state exists primarily as a process rather than a thing. The state-form is defined by the processes or practices of ‘overcoding’, ‘despotic signification’ and ‘machinic enslavement’. These attributes can be explained one at a time. The concept of despotic signification, derived from Lacan’s idea of the master-signifier, suggests that, in statist thought, a particular signifier is elevated to the status of standing for the whole, and the other of this signifier (remembering that signification is necessarily differential) is defined as radically excluded. ‘Overcoding’ consists in the imposition of the regime of meanings arising from this fixing of representations on the various processes through which social life and desire operate. In contrast to the deep penetration which occurs in capitalism, states often do this fairly lightly, but with brutality around the edges. Hence for instance, in historical despotic states, the inclusion of peripheral areas only required their symbolic subordination, and not any real impact on everyday life in these areas. Overcoding also, however, entails the destruction of anything which cannot be represented or encoded. ‘Machinic enslavement’ occurs when assembled groups of social relations and desires, known in Deleuzian theory as ‘machines’, are rendered subordinate to the regulatory function of the despotic signifier and hence incorporated in an overarching totality. This process identifies Deleuze and Guattari’s view of the state-form with Mumford’s idea of the megamachine, with the state operating as a kind of absorbing and enclosing totality, a bit like the Borg in Star Trek, eating up and assimilating the social networks with which it comes into contact. Crucially, while these relations it absorbs often start out as horizontal, or as hierarchical only at a local level, their absorption rearranges them as vertical and hierarchical aggregates. It tends to destroy or reduce the intensity of horizontal connections, instead increasing the intensity of vertical subordination. Take, for instance, the formation of the colonial state in Africa: loose social identities were rigidly reclassified as exclusive ethnicities, and these ethnicities were arranged in hierarchies (for instance, Tutsi as superior to Hutu) in ways which created rigid boundaries and oppressive relations culminating in today’s conflicts. According to this theory of the state-form, states are at once ‘isomorphic’, sharing a basic structure and function, and heterogeneous, differing in how they express this structure. In particular, states vary in terms of the relative balance between ‘adding’ and ‘subtracting axioms’ (capitalism is also seen as performing these two operations). An axiom here refers to the inclusion of a particular group or social logic or set of desires as something recognised by a state: examples of addition of axioms would be the recognition of minority rights (e.g. gay rights), the recognition and systematic inclusion of minority groups in formal multiculturalism (e.g. Indian ‘scheduled castes’), the creation of niche markets for particular groups (e.g. ‘ethnic food’ sections in supermarkets), and the provision of inclusive services (e.g. support for independent living for people with disabilities). It is most marked in social-democratic kinds of states. The subtraction of axioms consists in the encoding of differences as problems to be suppressed, for example in the classification of differences as crimes, the institutionalisation of unwanted minorities (e.g. ‘sectioning’ people who are psychologically different), or the restriction of services to members of an in-group (excluding ‘disruptive’ children, denying council housing to migrants). This process reaches its culmination in totalitarian states. It is important to realise that in both cases, the state is expressing the logic of the state-form, finding ways to encode and represent differences; but that the effects of the two strategies on the freedom and social power of marginalised groups are very different. The state is also viewed as a force of ‘antiproduction’. This term is defined against the ‘productive’ or creative power Deleuze and Guattari believe resides in processes of desiring-production (the process through which desires are formed and connected to objects or others) and social production (the process of constructing social ‘assemblages’ or networks). Desiring-production tends to proliferate differences, because desire operates through fluxes and breaks, overflowing particular boundaries. The state as machine of antiproduction operates to restrict, prevent or channel these flows of creative energy so as to preserve fixed social forms and restrict the extent of difference which is able to exist, or the connections it is able to form. Hence, states try to restrict and break down the coming-together of social networks by prohibiting or making difficult the formation of hierarchical assemblages; it operates to block ‘subject-formation’ in terms of social groups, or the emergence of subjectivities which are not already encoded in dominant terms. Take for instance the laws on ‘dispersal’, in which the British state allows police to break up groups (often of young people) congregating in public spaces. Absurdly, the state defines the social act of coming-together as anti-social, because it creates a space in which different kinds of social relations can be formed. The state wishes to have a monopoly on how people interrelate, and so acts to prevent people from associating horizontally. Another example of antiproduction is the way that participation in imposed activities
2. The aff is key to adopt and test new resistance for students as contemporary pedagogical sites – operating internally is essential to hearing from multiple perspectives and forming new affective relations Manning and Massumi 18 Erin and Brian; “A Cryptoeconomy of Affect”; interviewed by Uriah Todoroff for The New Inquiry; Massumi is known for his translations of French post-structuralist classics like Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987); Manning is a prolific author whose last published book was The Minor Gesture (2016). They work together at the SenseLab in Montreal, a research laboratory Manning created to experiment with collective pedagogy. The lab provides a base for intellectual and creative activity that is intended to spin off into projects that grow or die according to their own momentum.; https://thenewinquiry.com/a-cryptoeconomy-of-affect/; BP There are people all over the world we don’t know who are doing this kind of work, who are creating ways of working together, inventing new forms of collaboration, engaging with complex ecological models of encounter, who are inventing new forms of value. We never believe we are alone doing this work. The question we have isn’t the usual start-up question of how to scale up, it’s how do we create techniques for the registering of that which doesn’t register? The 3E Process Seed Bank is deeply allied to the question of what else learning and living can be, having grown out of its sister project the Three Ecologies Institute. We actually began there, with the Three Ecologies Institute, working from Félix Guattari’s definition of the three ecologies as the conceptual (psychic, mental), the environmental, and the social. It was only two years ago that we realized that thinking value transversally across the three ecologies required us to also take financial value into account. We see the 3E as a kind of intensifier of modes of thinking and living dedicated to inventing ways that we can continue to learn together, regardless of our age, background, or learning style. We don’t see it as an opposite to the university; we see it as a parasite. You could put the emphasis on the site: a para-site, a para-institution that maintains relations with the institution of the university but operates by a different logic. It would be very naive of us to think you could just walk out of capitalism. We’re not that naive. Neoliberalism is our natural environment. We therefore operate with what we call strategic duplicity. This involves recognizing what works in the systems we work against. Which means: We don’t just oppose them head on. We work with them, strategically, while nurturing an alien logic that moves in very different directions. One of the things we know that the university does well is that it attracts really interesting people. The university can facilitate meetings that can change lives. But systemically, it fails. And the systemic failure is getting more and more acute. And so what we imagine is that the Institute, assisted by the 3E Process Seed Bank, will create a new space that might overlap with some of the things the university does well, without being a part of it (or being subsumed by its logic). MASSUMI.— Going back to the question of value, we want to create an economy around the platform that does not follow any of the usual economic principles. There will be no individual ownership or shares. There will be no units of account, no currency or tokens used internally. The model of activity will not be transactional. Individual interest will not be used as an incentivizer. What there will be is a complex space of relation for people to create intensities of experience together, in emergent excess over what they could have created working separately, or in traditional teams. It’s meant to be self-organizing, with no separate administrative structure or hierarchy, and even no formal decision-making rules. It’s anarchistic in that sense, but through mobilizing a surplus of organizing potential, rather than lacking organization. You could also call it communistic, in the sense that there is no individual value holding. Everything is common. MANNING.— Undercommon. MASSUMI.— Yes, undercommonly. The undercommons is Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s word for emergent collectivity, which is one of our inspirations. We want to foster emergence and process, but at the same time find ways of making it sustainable. That means that the strategic duplicity has to extend to the economy as we currently know it. We have to be parasitical to the capitalist economy, while operating according to a logic that is totally alien to it. What we’re thinking of is making the collaborative process moving through the platform function according to the radically anti-capitalist principles we were just talking about, centering on the collective production of surplus values of life, and separating that from the dominant economy by a membrane. A membrane creates a separation, but at the same time allows for movements across. It has a certain porosity. The idea is that we would find ways, associated with the affect-o-meter we were describing earlier, to register qualitative shifts in the creative process as it moves over its formative thresholds, and moves back and forth between online operations and offline events. What would be registered is the affective intensity of the production of surplus value of life, its ebbs and flows. The membrane would consist in a translation of those qualitative flows into a numerical expression, which would feed into a cryptocurrency. Basically, we’d be mining crypto with collaborative creative energies—monetizing emergent collectivity. The currency would be “backed” by the confidence we could build in our ability to keep the creative process going and spin it off into other projects, as evidenced by the activities of the Three Ecologies Institute as an experiment in alter-education.
Offense Thus, I affirm—Resolved: A just government ought to recognize an unconditional right of workers to strike. I’ll spec whatever you want me to in cx as long as it doesn’t force me to abandon my maximum.
Contention 1: Oppression staticizes subjects as “workers” creating an interlocking effects that prevent fluidity to become more than a worker Gourevitch 18 Alex Gourevitch is an associate professor political science at Brown University. “The Right to Strike: A Radical View.” 2018. American Political Science Review. https://sci-hub.se/10.1017/s0003055418000321 THE FACTS OF OPPRESSION IN TYPICAL LIBERAL CAPITALIST SOCIETIES To explain why the right to strike is a right to resist oppression, I first must give an account of the relevant oppression. Oppression is the unjustifiable deprivation of freedom. Some deprivations or restrictions of freedom are justified and therefore do not count as oppression. The oppression that matters for this article is the class-based oppression of a typical liberal capitalist society. By the class-based oppression, I mean the fact that the majority of able-bodied people find themselves forced to work for members of a relatively small group who dominate control over productive assets and who, thereby, enjoy unjustifiable control over the activities and products of those workers. There are workers and then there are owners and their managers. The facts I refer to here are mostly drawn from the United States to keep a consistent description of a specific society. While there is meaningful variation across liberal capitalist nations, the basic facts of class-based oppression do not change in a way that vitiates my argument’s applicability to those countries too. Empirical analysis of each country to which the argument applies, and how it would apply, is a separate project. The first element of oppression in a class society resides in the fact that (a) there are some who are forced into the labor market while others are not and (b) those who are forced to work—workers—have to work for those who own productive resources. Workers are forced into the labor market because they have no reasonable alternative but to find a job.8 They cannot produce necessary goods for themselves, nor can they rely on the charity of others, nor can they count on adequate state benefits. The only way most people can gain reliable access to necessary goods is by buying them. The most reliable, often only, way most people have of acquiring enough money to buy those goods is through employment. That is the sense in which they have no reasonable alternative but to find a job working for an employer. Depending on how we measure income and wealth, about 60–80 of Americans are in this situation for most of their adult lives.9 This forcing is not symmetrical. A significant minority is not similarly forced to work for someone else, though they might do so freely. That minority has enough wealth, either inherited or accumulated or both, that they have a reasonable alternative to entering the labor market. So, this first dimension of oppression comes not from the fact that some are forced to work, but from the fact that the forcing is unequal and that asymmetry means some are forced to work for others.10 That is to say, what makes it oppressive is the wrong of unequally forcing the majority to work, for whatever purpose, while others face no such forcing at all.11 That way of organizing and distributing coercive work obligations, and of imposing certain kinds of forcing on workers, is an unjustifiable way of limiting their freedom and therefore oppressive. To fix ideas, I call this the structural element of oppression in class societies. 8 For a fuller analysis of workers being asymmetrically forced to work, or forced into particular occupations see Cohen (1988a,1988b), Ezorsky (2007), and Stanczyk (unpublished). These are primarily analytic descriptions of forcing, not normative analyses of what is wrong with that forcing. 9 For the 60–80 statistic, see Henwood (2005, 125). The statistics on wealth among the lower deciles is complex. A recent study shows that the net wealth of the bottom 50 is roughly 0. So at least 50 of US households are forced to use job-related income to meet annual expenses, though that has to be modified for those who receive (insufficient to live on) welfare benefits (Saez and Zucman 2014; Wolff 2012). 10 To be clear, the oppression here is not with any and all unequal and asymmetric forcing but with the inequality that arises from the class structure of society. For instance, it is not oppressive nor an unjust constraint on individual freedom, to force the able-bodied to do some work to support the disabled, children, the sick, the elderly, or the otherwise socially dependent who cannot perform a share of necessary labor. Though even there, there is some presumption that that burden of working for those who cannot work should be shared equally, and that individuals should not be forced to work for any purpose and under any conditions whatsoever. What I am describing as oppression is not the very fact that some work and others don’t, but the inequality and asymmetry that arises from the inequalities in ownership and control. This forcing is unequal in that some ablebodied—and even some who by all rights should not have to work at all—are forced to work while other able-bodied individuals are not forced to work. And it is asymmetric in that those who have to work are, on the whole, forced to work for those who hire them, under conditions controlled primarily by employers. This structural element leads to a second, interpersonal dimension of oppression in the workplace itself. Workers are forced to join workplaces typically characterized by large swathes of uncontrolled managerial power and authority. This oppression is interpersonal in the sense that it is power that specific individuals— employers and their managers—have to get other specific individuals—employees—to do what they want. We can distinguish between three overlapping forms that this interpersonal, workplace oppression takes: subordination, delegation, and dependence. Subordination: Employers have what are sometimes called “managerial prerogatives,”12 which are legislative and judicial grants of authority to owners and their managers to make decisions about investment, hiring and firing, plant location, work process, and the like.13 These powers come from judicial precedent and from the constellation of corporate, labor, contract, and property law. Managers may change working speeds and assigned tasks, the hours of work, or even force workers to spend up to an hour going through security lines after work without paying them (Integrity Staffing Solutions, Inc. v. Busk 2014). Managers may fire workers for Facebook comments, their sexual orientation, for being too sexually appealing, or for not being appealing enough (Emerson 2011; Hess 2013; Strauss 2013; Velasco 2011). Workers may be given more tasks than can be performed in the allotted time, locked in the workplace overnight, required to work in extreme heat and other physically hazardous conditions, or punitively isolated from other coworkers (Greenhouse 2009, 26–27, 49–55, 89, 111–112; Hsu 2011; JOMO 2013; Urbina 2013). Managers may pressure employees into unwanted political behavior (HertelFernandez 2015). In all of these cases, managers are exercising legally permitted prerogatives.14 The law does not require that workers have any formal say in how those powers are exercised. In fact, in nearly every liberal capitalist country, employees are defined, in law, as “subordinates.”15 This is subordination in the strict sense: workers are subject to the will of the employer. Delegation: There are also other discretionary legal powers that managers have not by legal statute or precedent but because workers have voluntarily delegated these powers in the contract. For instance, workers might sign a contract that allows managers to require employees to submit to random drug testing or unannounced searches (American Civil Liberties Union 2017). In the United States, 18 of current employees and 37 of workers in their lifetime work under noncompete agreements (Bunker 2016). These clauses give managers legal power to forbid workers from working for competitors. The contract that the Communications Workers of America had with Verizon until 2015 included a right for managers to force employers to perform from 10 to 15 hours of overtime per week and to take some other day instead of Saturday as an off-day (Gourevitch 2016a). These legal powers are not parts of the managerial prerogatives that all employers have. Rather, they are voluntarily delegated to employers by workers. In many cases, though the delegation is in one sense voluntary, in another sense it is forced. This will especially be the case if workers, who are forced to find jobs, can only find jobs in sectors where the only contracts available are ones that require these kinds of delegations. Dependence: Finally, managers might have the material power to force employees to submit to commands or even to accept violations of their rights because of the worker’s dependence on the employer. A headline example is wage-theft, which affects American workers to the tune of $8– $14 billion per year (Eisenbray 2015; Judson and Francisco-McGuire 2012; NELP 2013; Axt 2013). In other cases, workers have been forced to wear diapers rather than go to the bathroom, refused legally required lunch breaks, or pressured to work through them, forced to keep working after their shift is up, or denied the right to read or turn on air conditioning during break (Oxfam 2015; BennettSmith 2012; Egelko 2011; Greenhouse 2009, 3– 12; Little 2013; Vega 2012). Other employers have forced their workers to stay home rather than go out on weekends or to switch churches and alter religious practices on pain of being fired and deported (Garrison, Bensinger, and Singer-Vine 2015). In these cases, employers are not exercising legal prerogatives, they are instead taking advantage of the material power that comes with threatening to fire or otherwise discipline workers. This material power to get workers to do things that employers want is in part a function of the class structure of society, both in the wide sense of workers being asymmetrically dependent on owners, and in the narrower sense of workers being legally subordinate to employers. Subordination, delegation, and dependence add up to a form of interpersonal oppression that employers and their managers have over their employees. The weight and scope of this oppression will vary, but those are variations on a theme. Employers and managers enjoy wide swaths of uncontrolled or insufficiently controlled power over their employees. This is the second face of oppression in a class society and it is a live issue. For instance, during the Verizon strike of 2016, one major complaint was that, when out on the job, hanging cable, or repairing lines, some technicians had to ask their manager for permission to go to the bathroom or to get a drink of water. As one striker said in an interview, “Do I have to tell my boss every single minute of what I am doing? This is basic human dignity” (Gourevitch 2016b). If they did not ask or wait to get clear approval from their manager, then they were guilty of a time code violation and were suspended for up to six weeks. The strike made workplace control a direct issue and one measure of its success was a change in disciplinary proceedings (ibid.). To take another example, the Fight for $15 strikes have made control over scheduling a central demand, even managing in certain states and municipalities to pass laws mandating minimal regularity and predictability in weekly schedules (Andrias 2016, 47–70). So, if the first face of oppression is that workers are forced to work for some employer or another who does not face a similar kind of forcing; the second face is that workers are forced to become de jure and de facto subordinates to a specific employer.16 The third face of oppression is the systematic distributive effects of structural and interpersonal oppression. While some instances of class-based oppression are idiosyncratic, in general it has consistent distributive effects. The structural and interpersonal oppression of workers produces wage-bargains and limits on wealth accumulation that reproduce workers’ economic dependence on employers, their over or underemployment, and thereby allows a relatively small group of owners and highly paid managers to accumulate most of the wealth and income. I cannot discuss the extensive literature on inequality. I can only cite some generally well-known facts and papers pointing to the role of inequalities in power as determining factors in these outcomes.17 To the degree that inequalities are a product of structural and workplace oppression, distributive outcomes are their own dimension of oppression and serve to reproduce those basic class relationships. Above all, there is one unjustifiable distributive effect of this oppression: that the majority of wage-bargains ensure the reproduction of that oppressive class structure. At any given point in time, a majority of workers do not earn enough to both meet their needs and to save such that they can employ themselves or start their own businesses. They must therefore remain workers or, to the degree they rise, they do so either by displacing others or by taking the structurally limited number of opportunities available.18 Each of these different faces of oppression— structural, interpersonal, and distributive—is a distinct injustice. Together they form an interrelated and mutually reinforcing set of oppressive relationships. The various ways in which workers are forced to work, made subject to dominating authority, and made asymmetrically dependent in the economy does not produce a fair way of distributing the obligation to work and the rewards of social production. Rather, it constrains their freedom in a way that secures the exploitation of one class by another. The weight of these different oppressions is unevenly experienced across different segments of workers. Various factors modify the basic facts about class and oppression. We have seen, for instance, the difference between being in a high labor supply versus a low labor supply sector. High labor supply sectors involve more intense labor competition, resulting in weaker bargaining power for workers and intensified oppression. The opposite holds for lower labor supply sectors—like software programmers or fiber-optics technicians—whose greater bargaining power means they face class-based oppression less intensively. This has downstream consequences for our analysis of particular strikes, but it does not affect the argument for the right to strike itself. My description of the economy is controversial. Some will either reject aspects of the empirical description, find it too underspecified to agree, or they will disagree with the normative interpretation of it as involving systematic, unjustified restrictions on workers’ freedom. Any attempt to give a more detailed account of this political economy of exploitation would leave no room for the rest of the argument. In what follows, the reader does not have to agree with every aspect of my description of liberal capitalist arrangements. One need only agree that the typical liberal capitalist economy is characterized by considerable, class-based oppression of workers, for reasons similar to the ones I have just provided, to then think that the right to strike can be seen as a right to resist oppression. Strikes disrupt the codification processes and capitalist system enforced by the state, creating revolutionary and non-linear power that realizes the subjects affective potential and allows them to embrace active affect. Holland 12 Eugene Holland; Non-Linear Historical Materialism; Or, What is Revolutionary in Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History?; from Chapter 2 of Time and History in Deleuze and Serres (2012) (Dr. Holland is Professor and Chair of Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University.) SHS KS Political struggle thus necessarily involves two co-existent kinds of activity: on one hand, there is struggle within the axiomatic, for whatever ameliorations can be wrung from capital and/or the State through direct confrontation – and this is a mode of struggle that Deleuze and Guattari insist is perfectly valid and necessary (Deleuze et al., 1987, p. 471). On the other hand, there is the struggle to escape axiomatization and codifi cation altogether –the mode of struggle via de-coding and “ lines-of-flight ”that they in some sense prefer. What is given is always ‘ the coexistence and inseparability of that which the system conjugates, and that which never ceases to escape it following lines of flight that are themselves connectable ’ , as Deleuze andGuattari put it in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze et al., 1987, p. 473). And this connectability of lines-of-fl ight is crucial, politically. What in the fi rst volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia were called “ schizophrenic ”lines-of-fl ight are politically useless –or worse –if they do not intersect and connect up to constitute some kind of critical mass, as Deleuze andGuattari are careful to specify more clearly in the second volume. Yet even here, the conditions for such a critical mass becoming revolutionary are left somewhat vague: the slogan ‘ a new people on a new earth ’echoes throughout their collaborative work as a kind of refrain; and they do suggest that the ultimate challenge is to ‘ construct revolutionary connections over and against contre the conjugations of the axiomatic ’(Deleuze et al., 1987, p. 473). But we need to try to get clearer about just which conditions are conducive to the formation of connections among lines-of-fl ight and about how a critical mass of revolutionary connections could overcome the conjugations of the capitalist axiomatic. For insight into these questions, I propose that we return to the process with which we started: reading Capital backwards. This would mean focusing less on the power of capital accumulation than on so-called “ primitive accumulation ” , which as we saw is not really primitive but always ongoing, and not really accumulation but rather dispossession; and it would mean, like Althusser, highlighting in our considerations the non-linear conditions of reproduction rather than the linear causality of production/accumulation. And I propose that we examine in this light the key political-economic strategies of anti-capitalist struggle –and I specify “ political-economic ”strategies (those of radical syndicalism, if you will) to rule out of consideration what we might call more narrowly political strategies –state-centric or party-electoral strategies –as insuffi - ciently revolutionary. These political-economic strategies are the strike, and especially the general strike. As Walter Benjamin has very clearly noted, the general strike is distinctive in that it is non-confrontational (although he would say non-violent, which is not quite the same thing, and perhaps a little too optimistic) (Benjamin, 1978, pp. 277 – 300). In principle, a strike does not involves one power bloc directly confronting another, but rather one bloc withdrawing from its previous mode of engagement (wage-slavery) vis- à -vis the other. The same is true of the general strike, which expands the act of withdrawal to a larger scale: here we have a critical mass of workers walking away en masse from their engagement with capital. Yet from the perspective of reproduction and so-called primitive accumulation –and this is key –what the masses are walking away “ from ” –capital accumulation –is actually less important than what they are able to walk “ towards ” : rejecting capital is less important than having something sustaining and sustainable to rely on. You will recall that the crucial catalyst entailed by primitive accumulation was enforced dependence on capitalist markets: remove this catalyst, and capitalism no longer “ becomes necessary ” , to invoke Althusser once again. More important than directly confronting capital, in other words, is securing alternative means of life, an alternative mode of reproduction. Even more important: such alternatives already exist. One of the great virtues of Gibson-Graham ’ s work is to demonstrate how incomplete capitalism actually is and how many alternative economies co-exist within or beside it (Gibson-Graham, 1996; 2006). Community Supported Agriculture; the co-op movement; the Open-Source Software movement; Fair Trade –all these, and many more, constitute viable, actually existing alternatives to capitalism. And all it will take for them, in connection with others, to become revolutionary –in the specifi cally non-linear sense I am proposing –is for a critical mass of people to invest their life-activity in them, rather than in capitalist markets. We tend to think of linear revolutions as punctual: 1917, 1848 and so on –even though they probably were not. But the non-linear revolution I am talking about is even less punctual: it entails instead what I elsewhere call the strategy of the ‘ slowmotion general strike ’(Holland, forthcoming). Critical masses of people in various aspects of their life-activity just walk away from capital –having secured in advance at least the rudiments of alternative means of life. This does not have to happen all at once: but as soon as suffi cient numbers of people in enough areas of life do so, a tipping point will have been reached, a non-linear bifurcation threshold crossed, beyond which capitalism will not only no longer be necessary, it will actually become-unnecessary. As the slow-motion general strike reaches completion, that is to say, it is not just the State, but also capitalism itself that ends up withering away. Contention 2: Strikes allows workers to use active affect to reclaim their own authority and resisting the territorializing barriers of workplaces Gourevitch 18, A. (2018). The Right to Strike: A Radical View. American Political Science Review, 1–13. doi:10.1017/s0003055418000321 (Alex Gourevitch is an Assistant Professor of Political Sci- ence, Brown University) SHS KS There is more than one way to justify the right to strike and, in so doing, to explain the shape that right ought to have. As we shall see, there is the liberal, the social- democratic, and the radical account. Any justi cation of a right must give an account not just of the interest it protects but of how that right is shaped to protect that interest. In the case of the radical argument for the right to strike, which I will defend against the other two con- ceptions, the relevant human interest is liberty. Work- ers have an interest in resisting the oppression of class society by using their collective power to reduce that oppression. Their interest is a liberty interest in a dou- ble sense. First, it is an interest in not being oppressed, or in not facing certain kinds of forcing, coercion, and subjection to authority that they shouldn’t have to. Any resistance to those kinds of unjusti ed limitations of freedom carries with it, at least implicitly, a demand for liberties not yet enjoyed.19 That is a demand for a control over portions of one’s life that one does not yet enjoy. Second, and consequently, the right to strike is grounded in an interest in using one’s own individual and collective agency to resist—or even overcome— that oppression. The interest in using one’s own agency to resist oppression ows naturally from the demand for liberties not yet enjoyed. After all, that demand for control is in the name of giving proper space to work- ers’ capacity for self-determination, which is the same capacity that expresses itself in the activity of striking for greater freedom. On this radical view, the right to strike has both an intrinsic and instrumental relation to liberty. It has in- trinsic value as an (at least implicit) demand for self- emancipation or the winning of greater liberty through one’s own efforts. It has instrumental value insofar as the strike is on the whole an effective means for resist- ing the oppressiveness of a class society. For the right to strike to enjoy its proper connection to liberty, work- ers must have a reasonable chance of carrying out an effective strike, otherwise it would lose its instrumen- tal value as a way of resisting oppression. If prevented from using a reasonable array of effective means, ex- ercising the right to strike would not be a means of reducing oppression and, therefore, strikes would also be of very limited value as acts of self-emancipation. It would not be an instance of workers attempting to use their own capacity for self-determination to increase the control they ought to have over the terms of their daily activity.
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ND - Omnipresent Affection v3
Tournament: Princeton | Round: 2 | Opponent: Summit JC | Judge: Grant Brown Affect, the ability to experience and to be experienced, is the only constitutive feature: I am experiencing my Word doc, my opponent, just as much as you are experiencing me. There is no way to escape affection. Thinking is only a feature of me and doesn’t determine the subject. Subjectivity is fluid—the only intrinsic feature of the subject is that everything is changing, thus stable subjecthood fails. Emphasis on particular aspects of subjectivity only drives division in the proletariat. There are two kinds of affect, active and reactive— Active affect allows us to extend and compose our own boundaries whereas reactive affect only indicates our body’s ability to be affected.
Embracing active affect is key to breaking free from the pervasive state mindset and instead creating spaces for resistance and radical change so that we can reform the state Thus, the standard and role of the ballot is to embrace a politics of active affect. To clarify, we reject things that reinforce stability or the majoritarian subject. Current systems of education only serve to produce majoritarian bodies that are unable to think outside the system and who become increasingly recognizable, killing the potential for any resistance. Wallins, Jason. “Deleuze and Guattari, Politics and Education.” Bloomsbur Publishing, 2014, Pgs. 119-121 SHS KS As a social machine through which ‘labour power and the socius as a whole is manufactured’, schooling figures in the production of social territories that already anticipate a certain kind of people (Guattari, 2009, p. 47). And what kind of people does orthodox schooling seek to produce but a ‘molar public’, or, rather, a public regulated in the abstract image of segmentary social categories (age, gender, ethnicity, class, rank, achievement) (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987)? Such an aspiration is intimately wed to the territorializing powers of the State, for as Deleuze and Guattari argue (1983), State power first requires a ‘representational subject’ as both an abstract and unconscious model in relation to which one is taught to desire. As Massumi (2002) writes, ‘the subject is made to be in conformity with the systems that produces it, such that the subject reproduces the system’ (p. 6). Where education has historically functioned to regulate institutional life according to such segmentary molar codes, its modes of production have taken as their teleological goal the production of a ‘majoritarian people’, or, more accurately, a people circuited to their representational self-similarity according to State thought. This is, in part, the threat that Aoki (2005) identifies in the planned curriculum and its projection of an abstract essentialism upon a diversity of concrete educational assemblages (a school, a class, a curriculum, etc.). Apropos Deleuze, Aoki argues that the standardization of education has effectively reduced difference to a matter of difference in degree. That is, in reference to the stratifying power of the planned curriculum, Aoki avers that difference is always-already linked to an abstract image to which pedagogy ought to aspire and in conformity to which its operations become recognizable as ‘education’ per se. Against political action then, orthodox educational thought conceptualizes social life alongside the ‘categories of the Negative’, eschewing difference for conformity, flows for unities, mobile arrangements for totalizing systems (Foucault, 1983, p. xiii). Twisting Deleuze, might we claim that the people are missing in education? That is, where education aspires to invest desire in the production of a ‘majoritarian’ or ‘molar’ public, the prospect of thinking singularities are stayed, not only through the paucity of enunciatory forms and images available for thinking education in the first place, but further, through the organization of the school’s enunciatory machines into vehicles of representation that repeat in molarizing forms of self-reflection, ‘majoritarian’ perspective, and dominant circuits of desiring-investment. Herein, the impulse of standardization obliterates alternative subject formations and the modes of counter-signifying enunciation that might palpate them. Repelling the singular, the ‘majoritarian’ and standardizing impulse of education takes as its ‘fundamental’ mode of production the reification of common sense, or, rather, the territorialization of thought according to that which is given (that which everyone already knows). Figuring in a mode ‘of identification that brings diversity in general to bear upon the form of the Same’, common sense functions to stabilize patterns of social production by tethering them to molar orders of meaning and dominant regimes of social signification (Deleuze, 1990, p. 78). As Daignault argues, in so far as it repels the anomalous by reterritorializing it within prior systems of representation, common sense constitutes a significant and lingering problem in contemporary education (Hwu, 2004). Its function, Daignault alludes apropos Serres, is oriented to the annihilation of difference. Hence, where the conceptualization of ‘public’ education is founded in common sense, potentials for political action through tactics of proliferation, disjunction, and singularization are radically delimited and captured within prior territorialities of use (Foucault, 1983, p. xiii). The problem of this scenario is clear: common sense has yet to force us to think in a manner capable of subtracting desire from majoritarian thought in lieu of alternative forms of organization and experimental expression. In so far as it functions as a vehicle of ‘molarization’, reifying a common universe of reference for enunciation, the school fails to produce conditions for thinking in a manner that is not already anticipated by such referential ‘possibilities’. Hence, while antithetical to the espoused purpose of schooling, the majoritarian impulse of the school has yet to produce conditions for thinking – at least in the Deleuzian (2000) sense whereupon thought proceeds from a necessary violence to those habits of repetition with which thought becomes contracted. Prefer additionally: 1 Active affect is able to organize to undermine static structures, whereas reactive affect becomes coopted and utilized by the state to ceaselessly destroy and form strict confines for identity and being — the aff is a form of negative state action where we sap power from conventionally oppressive institutions Robinson 10 Andre; Ceasefire; “Why Deleuze (still) matters: States, war-machines and radical transformation”; https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-deleuze-war-machine/; political theorist; LCA-BP So what, in Deleuzian theory, is the alternative to the state? Deleuze and Guattari argue for a type of assemblage (social group or cluster of relations) which they refer to as the ‘war-machine’, though with the proviso that certain kinds of ‘war-machines’ can also be captured and used by states. This should not be considered a militarist theory, and the term ‘war-machine’ is in many respects misleading. It is used because Deleuze and Guattari derive their theory from Pierre Clastres’ theory of the role of ritualised (often non-lethal) warfare among indigenous groups. Paul Patton has suggested that the war-machine would be better called a metamorphosis-machine, others have used the term ‘difference engine’, a machine of differentiation, and there is a lot of overlap with the idea of autonomous groups or movements in how the war-machine is theorised. We should also remember that ‘machine’ in Deleuze and Guattari simply refers to a combination of forces or elements; it does not have overtones of instrumentalism or of mindless mechanisms – a social group, an ecosystem, a knight on horseback are all ‘machines’. The term ‘war-machine’ has the unfortunate connotations of brutal military machinery and of uncontrollable militarist apparatuses such as NATO, which operate with a machine-like rigidity and inhumanity (c.f. the phrase ‘military-industrial complex’). For Deleuze and Guattari, these kinds of statist war-machines are also war-machines of a sort, because they descend from a historical process through which states ‘captured’ or incorporated autonomous social movements (particularly those of nomadic indigenous societies) and made them part of the state so as to contain their subversive power. Early states learned to capture war-machines because they were previously vulnerable to being destroyed by the war-machines of nomadic stateless societies, having no similar means of response. Hence, armies are a kind of hybrid social form, containing some of the power of autonomous war-machines but contained in such a way as to harness it to state instrumentalism and inhumanity. Captured in this way, war-machines lose their affirmative force, becoming simply machines of purposeless destruction – having lost the purpose of deterritorialisation (see below), they take on the purpose of pure war as a goal in itself. Deleuze and Guattari argue that state-captured war-machines are regaining their autonomy in a dangerous way, tending to replace limited war in the service of a state’s goals with a drive to total war. This drive is expressed for instance in the ‘war on terror’ as permanent state of emergency. There was a recent controversy about Israeli strategists adopting Deleuzian ideas, which reflects the continuities between state war-machines and autonomous war-machines, but depends on a selective conceptual misreading in which the drive to total war denounced by Deleuze and Guattari is explicitly valorised. The Israeli army is a captured war-machine in the worst possible sense, pursuing the destruction of others’ existential territories in order to accumulate destructive power for a state. For Deleuze and Guattari, it is not the Israeli army but the Palestinian resistance which is a war-machine in the full sense. The autonomous war-machine, as opposed to the state-captured war-machine, is a form of social assemblage directed against the state, and against the coalescence of sovereignty. They way such machines undermine the state is by exercising diffuse power to break down concentrated power, and through the replacement of ‘striated’ (regulated, marked) space with ‘smooth’ space (although the war-machine is the ‘constituent element of smooth space’, I shall save discussion of smooth space for some other time). In Clastres’ account of Amazonian societies, on which Deleuze and Guattari’s theory is based, this is done by means of each band defending its own autonomy, and reacting to any potential accumulation of power by other bands. One could similarly think of how neighbourhood gangs resist subordination by rival gangs, or how autonomous social movements resist concentrations of political power. Autonomous social movements, such as the European squatters’ movement, the Zapatistas, and networks of protest against summits, are the principal example Deleuze and Guattari have in mind of war-machines in the global North, though they also use the concept in relation to Southern guerrilla and popular movements such as the Palestinian intifada and the Vietnamese resistance to American occupation, and also in relation to everyday practices of indigenous groups resisting state control. One could also argue that the ‘war-machine’ is implicit in practices of everyday resistance of the kind studies by James Scott. Marginal groups, termed ‘minorities’ in Deleuzian theory, often coalesce as war-machines because the state-form is inappropriate for them.
2. The aff is key to adopt and test new resistance for students as contemporary pedagogical sites – operating internally is essential to hearing from multiple perspectives and forming new affective relations Manning and Massumi 18 Erin and Brian; “A Cryptoeconomy of Affect”; interviewed by Uriah Todoroff for The New Inquiry; Massumi is known for his translations of French post-structuralist classics like Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987); Manning is a prolific author whose last published book was The Minor Gesture (2016). They work together at the SenseLab in Montreal, a research laboratory Manning created to experiment with collective pedagogy. The lab provides a base for intellectual and creative activity that is intended to spin off into projects that grow or die according to their own momentum.; https://thenewinquiry.com/a-cryptoeconomy-of-affect/; BP There are people all over the world we don’t know who are doing this kind of work, who are creating ways of working together, inventing new forms of collaboration, engaging with complex ecological models of encounter, who are inventing new forms of value. We never believe we are alone doing this work. The question we have isn’t the usual start-up question of how to scale up, it’s how do we create techniques for the registering of that which doesn’t register? The 3E Process Seed Bank is deeply allied to the question of what else learning and living can be, having grown out of its sister project the Three Ecologies Institute. We actually began there, with the Three Ecologies Institute, working from Félix Guattari’s definition of the three ecologies as the conceptual (psychic, mental), the environmental, and the social. It was only two years ago that we realized that thinking value transversally across the three ecologies required us to also take financial value into account. We see the 3E as a kind of intensifier of modes of thinking and living dedicated to inventing ways that we can continue to learn together, regardless of our age, background, or learning style. We don’t see it as an opposite to the university; we see it as a parasite. You could put the emphasis on the site: a para-site, a para-institution that maintains relations with the institution of the university but operates by a different logic. It would be very naive of us to think you could just walk out of capitalism. We’re not that naive. Neoliberalism is our natural environment. We therefore operate with what we call strategic duplicity. This involves recognizing what works in the systems we work against. Which means: We don’t just oppose them head on. We work with them, strategically, while nurturing an alien logic that moves in very different directions. One of the things we know that the university does well is that it attracts really interesting people. The university can facilitate meetings that can change lives. But systemically, it fails. And the systemic failure is getting more and more acute. And so what we imagine is that the Institute, assisted by the 3E Process Seed Bank, will create a new space that might overlap with some of the things the university does well, without being a part of it (or being subsumed by its logic). MASSUMI.— Going back to the question of value, we want to create an economy around the platform that does not follow any of the usual economic principles. There will be no individual ownership or shares. There will be no units of account, no currency or tokens used internally. The model of activity will not be transactional. Individual interest will not be used as an incentivizer. What there will be is a complex space of relation for people to create intensities of experience together, in emergent excess over what they could have created working separately, or in traditional teams. It’s meant to be self-organizing, with no separate administrative structure or hierarchy, and even no formal decision-making rules. It’s anarchistic in that sense, but through mobilizing a surplus of organizing potential, rather than lacking organization. You could also call it communistic, in the sense that there is no individual value holding. Everything is common. MANNING.— Undercommon. MASSUMI.— Yes, undercommonly. The undercommons is Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s word for emergent collectivity, which is one of our inspirations. We want to foster emergence and process, but at the same time find ways of making it sustainable. That means that the strategic duplicity has to extend to the economy as we currently know it. We have to be parasitical to the capitalist economy, while operating according to a logic that is totally alien to it. What we’re thinking of is making the collaborative process moving through the platform function according to the radically anti-capitalist principles we were just talking about, centering on the collective production of surplus values of life, and separating that from the dominant economy by a membrane. A membrane creates a separation, but at the same time allows for movements across. It has a certain porosity. The idea is that we would find ways, associated with the affect-o-meter we were describing earlier, to register qualitative shifts in the creative process as it moves over its formative thresholds, and moves back and forth between online operations and offline events. What would be registered is the affective intensity of the production of surplus value of life, its ebbs and flows. The membrane would consist in a translation of those qualitative flows into a numerical expression, which would feed into a cryptocurrency. Basically, we’d be mining crypto with collaborative creative energies—monetizing emergent collectivity. The currency would be “backed” by the confidence we could build in our ability to keep the creative process going and spin it off into other projects, as evidenced by the activities of the Three Ecologies Institute as an experiment in alter-education. This proves strategies of subversion and infiltration lead to movements that won’t be coopted- serve as red herrings. Offense Thus, I affirm—Resolved: A just government ought to recognize an unconditional right of workers to strike. I’ll defend the resolution as a general principle and PICS don’t negate because general principles tolerate exceptions. I’ll spec whatever you want me to in cx as long as it doesn’t force me to abandon my maximum.
Contention 1: Oppression staticizes subjects as “workers” creating an interlocking effects that prevent fluidity to become more than a worker Gourevitch 18 Alex Gourevitch is an associate professor political science at Brown University. “The Right to Strike: A Radical View.” 2018. American Political Science Review. https://sci-hub.se/10.1017/s0003055418000321 THE FACTS OF OPPRESSION IN TYPICAL LIBERAL CAPITALIST SOCIETIES To explain why the right to strike is a right to resist oppression, I first must give an account of the relevant oppression. Oppression is the unjustifiable deprivation of freedom. Some deprivations or restrictions of freedom are justified and therefore do not count as oppression. The oppression that matters for this article is the class-based oppression of a typical liberal capitalist society. By the class-based oppression, I mean the fact that the majority of able-bodied people find themselves forced to work for members of a relatively small group who dominate control over productive assets and who, thereby, enjoy unjustifiable control over the activities and products of those workers. There are workers and then there are owners and their managers. The facts I refer to here are mostly drawn from the United States to keep a consistent description of a specific society. While there is meaningful variation across liberal capitalist nations, the basic facts of class-based oppression do not change in a way that vitiates my argument’s applicability to those countries too. Empirical analysis of each country to which the argument applies, and how it would apply, is a separate project. The first element of oppression in a class society resides in the fact that (a) there are some who are forced into the labor market while others are not and (b) those who are forced to work—workers—have to work for those who own productive resources. Workers are forced into the labor market because they have no reasonable alternative but to find a job.8 They cannot produce necessary goods for themselves, nor can they rely on the charity of others, nor can they count on adequate state benefits. The only way most people can gain reliable access to necessary goods is by buying them. The most reliable, often only, way most people have of acquiring enough money to buy those goods is through employment. That is the sense in which they have no reasonable alternative but to find a job working for an employer. Depending on how we measure income and wealth, about 60–80 of Americans are in this situation for most of their adult lives.9 This forcing is not symmetrical. A significant minority is not similarly forced to work for someone else, though they might do so freely. That minority has enough wealth, either inherited or accumulated or both, that they have a reasonable alternative to entering the labor market. So, this first dimension of oppression comes not from the fact that some are forced to work, but from the fact that the forcing is unequal and that asymmetry means some are forced to work for others.10 That is to say, what makes it oppressive is the wrong of unequally forcing the majority to work, for whatever purpose, while others face no such forcing at all.11 That way of organizing and distributing coercive work obligations, and of imposing certain kinds of forcing on workers, is an unjustifiable way of limiting their freedom and therefore oppressive. To fix ideas, I call this the structural element of oppression in class societies. 8 For a fuller analysis of workers being asymmetrically forced to work, or forced into particular occupations see Cohen (1988a,1988b), Ezorsky (2007), and Stanczyk (unpublished). These are primarily analytic descriptions of forcing, not normative analyses of what is wrong with that forcing. 9 For the 60–80 statistic, see Henwood (2005, 125). The statistics on wealth among the lower deciles is complex. A recent study shows that the net wealth of the bottom 50 is roughly 0. So at least 50 of US households are forced to use job-related income to meet annual expenses, though that has to be modified for those who receive (insufficient to live on) welfare benefits (Saez and Zucman 2014; Wolff 2012). 10 To be clear, the oppression here is not with any and all unequal and asymmetric forcing but with the inequality that arises from the class structure of society. For instance, it is not oppressive nor an unjust constraint on individual freedom, to force the able-bodied to do some work to support the disabled, children, the sick, the elderly, or the otherwise socially dependent who cannot perform a share of necessary labor. Though even there, there is some presumption that that burden of working for those who cannot work should be shared equally, and that individuals should not be forced to work for any purpose and under any conditions whatsoever. What I am describing as oppression is not the very fact that some work and others don’t, but the inequality and asymmetry that arises from the inequalities in ownership and control. This forcing is unequal in that some ablebodied—and even some who by all rights should not have to work at all—are forced to work while other able-bodied individuals are not forced to work. And it is asymmetric in that those who have to work are, on the whole, forced to work for those who hire them, under conditions controlled primarily by employers. This structural element leads to a second, interpersonal dimension of oppression in the workplace itself. Workers are forced to join workplaces typically characterized by large swathes of uncontrolled managerial power and authority. This oppression is interpersonal in the sense that it is power that specific individuals— employers and their managers—have to get other specific individuals—employees—to do what they want. We can distinguish between three overlapping forms that this interpersonal, workplace oppression takes: subordination, delegation, and dependence. Subordination: Employers have what are sometimes called “managerial prerogatives,”12 which are legislative and judicial grants of authority to owners and their managers to make decisions about investment, hiring and firing, plant location, work process, and the like.13 These powers come from judicial precedent and from the constellation of corporate, labor, contract, and property law. Managers may change working speeds and assigned tasks, the hours of work, or even force workers to spend up to an hour going through security lines after work without paying them (Integrity Staffing Solutions, Inc. v. Busk 2014). Managers may fire workers for Facebook comments, their sexual orientation, for being too sexually appealing, or for not being appealing enough (Emerson 2011; Hess 2013; Strauss 2013; Velasco 2011). Workers may be given more tasks than can be performed in the allotted time, locked in the workplace overnight, required to work in extreme heat and other physically hazardous conditions, or punitively isolated from other coworkers (Greenhouse 2009, 26–27, 49–55, 89, 111–112; Hsu 2011; JOMO 2013; Urbina 2013). Managers may pressure employees into unwanted political behavior (HertelFernandez 2015). In all of these cases, managers are exercising legally permitted prerogatives.14 The law does not require that workers have any formal say in how those powers are exercised. In fact, in nearly every liberal capitalist country, employees are defined, in law, as “subordinates.”15 This is subordination in the strict sense: workers are subject to the will of the employer. Delegation: There are also other discretionary legal powers that managers have not by legal statute or precedent but because workers have voluntarily delegated these powers in the contract. For instance, workers might sign a contract that allows managers to require employees to submit to random drug testing or unannounced searches (American Civil Liberties Union 2017). In the United States, 18 of current employees and 37 of workers in their lifetime work under noncompete agreements (Bunker 2016). These clauses give managers legal power to forbid workers from working for competitors. The contract that the Communications Workers of America had with Verizon until 2015 included a right for managers to force employers to perform from 10 to 15 hours of overtime per week and to take some other day instead of Saturday as an off-day (Gourevitch 2016a). These legal powers are not parts of the managerial prerogatives that all employers have. Rather, they are voluntarily delegated to employers by workers. In many cases, though the delegation is in one sense voluntary, in another sense it is forced. This will especially be the case if workers, who are forced to find jobs, can only find jobs in sectors where the only contracts available are ones that require these kinds of delegations. Dependence: Finally, managers might have the material power to force employees to submit to commands or even to accept violations of their rights because of the worker’s dependence on the employer. A headline example is wage-theft, which affects American workers to the tune of $8– $14 billion per year (Eisenbray 2015; Judson and Francisco-McGuire 2012; NELP 2013; Axt 2013). In other cases, workers have been forced to wear diapers rather than go to the bathroom, refused legally required lunch breaks, or pressured to work through them, forced to keep working after their shift is up, or denied the right to read or turn on air conditioning during break (Oxfam 2015; BennettSmith 2012; Egelko 2011; Greenhouse 2009, 3– 12; Little 2013; Vega 2012). Other employers have forced their workers to stay home rather than go out on weekends or to switch churches and alter religious practices on pain of being fired and deported (Garrison, Bensinger, and Singer-Vine 2015). In these cases, employers are not exercising legal prerogatives, they are instead taking advantage of the material power that comes with threatening to fire or otherwise discipline workers. This material power to get workers to do things that employers want is in part a function of the class structure of society, both in the wide sense of workers being asymmetrically dependent on owners, and in the narrower sense of workers being legally subordinate to employers. Subordination, delegation, and dependence add up to a form of interpersonal oppression that employers and their managers have over their employees. The weight and scope of this oppression will vary, but those are variations on a theme. Employers and managers enjoy wide swaths of uncontrolled or insufficiently controlled power over their employees. This is the second face of oppression in a class society and it is a live issue. For instance, during the Verizon strike of 2016, one major complaint was that, when out on the job, hanging cable, or repairing lines, some technicians had to ask their manager for permission to go to the bathroom or to get a drink of water. As one striker said in an interview, “Do I have to tell my boss every single minute of what I am doing? This is basic human dignity” (Gourevitch 2016b). If they did not ask or wait to get clear approval from their manager, then they were guilty of a time code violation and were suspended for up to six weeks. The strike made workplace control a direct issue and one measure of its success was a change in disciplinary proceedings (ibid.). To take another example, the Fight for $15 strikes have made control over scheduling a central demand, even managing in certain states and municipalities to pass laws mandating minimal regularity and predictability in weekly schedules (Andrias 2016, 47–70). So, if the first face of oppression is that workers are forced to work for some employer or another who does not face a similar kind of forcing; the second face is that workers are forced to become de jure and de facto subordinates to a specific employer.16 The third face of oppression is the systematic distributive effects of structural and interpersonal oppression. While some instances of class-based oppression are idiosyncratic, in general it has consistent distributive effects. The structural and interpersonal oppression of workers produces wage-bargains and limits on wealth accumulation that reproduce workers’ economic dependence on employers, their over or underemployment, and thereby allows a relatively small group of owners and highly paid managers to accumulate most of the wealth and income. I cannot discuss the extensive literature on inequality. I can only cite some generally well-known facts and papers pointing to the role of inequalities in power as determining factors in these outcomes.17 To the degree that inequalities are a product of structural and workplace oppression, distributive outcomes are their own dimension of oppression and serve to reproduce those basic class relationships. Above all, there is one unjustifiable distributive effect of this oppression: that the majority of wage-bargains ensure the reproduction of that oppressive class structure. At any given point in time, a majority of workers do not earn enough to both meet their needs and to save such that they can employ themselves or start their own businesses. They must therefore remain workers or, to the degree they rise, they do so either by displacing others or by taking the structurally limited number of opportunities available.18 Each of these different faces of oppression— structural, interpersonal, and distributive—is a distinct injustice. Together they form an interrelated and mutually reinforcing set of oppressive relationships. The various ways in which workers are forced to work, made subject to dominating authority, and made asymmetrically dependent in the economy does not produce a fair way of distributing the obligation to work and the rewards of social production. Rather, it constrains their freedom in a way that secures the exploitation of one class by another. The weight of these different oppressions is unevenly experienced across different segments of workers. Various factors modify the basic facts about class and oppression. We have seen, for instance, the difference between being in a high labor supply versus a low labor supply sector. High labor supply sectors involve more intense labor competition, resulting in weaker bargaining power for workers and intensified oppression. The opposite holds for lower labor supply sectors—like software programmers or fiber-optics technicians—whose greater bargaining power means they face class-based oppression less intensively. This has downstream consequences for our analysis of particular strikes, but it does not affect the argument for the right to strike itself. My description of the economy is controversial. Some will either reject aspects of the empirical description, find it too underspecified to agree, or they will disagree with the normative interpretation of it as involving systematic, unjustified restrictions on workers’ freedom. Any attempt to give a more detailed account of this political economy of exploitation would leave no room for the rest of the argument. In what follows, the reader does not have to agree with every aspect of my description of liberal capitalist arrangements. One need only agree that the typical liberal capitalist economy is characterized by considerable, class-based oppression of workers, for reasons similar to the ones I have just provided, to then think that the right to strike can be seen as a right to resist oppression.
Strikes disrupt the codification processes and capitalist system enforced by the state, creating revolutionary and non-linear power that realizes the subjects affective potential and allows them to embrace active affect. Holland 12 Eugene Holland; Non-Linear Historical Materialism; Or, What is Revolutionary in Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History?; from Chapter 2 of Time and History in Deleuze and Serres (2012) (Dr. Holland is Professor and Chair of Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University.) SHS KS Political struggle thus necessarily involves two co-existent kinds of activity: on one hand, there is struggle within the axiomatic, for whatever ameliorations can be wrung from capital and/or the State through direct confrontation – and this is a mode of struggle that Deleuze and Guattari insist is perfectly valid and necessary (Deleuze et al., 1987, p. 471). On the other hand, there is the struggle to escape axiomatization and codifi cation altogether –the mode of struggle via de-coding and “ lines-of-flight ”that they in some sense prefer. What is given is always ‘ the coexistence and inseparability of that which the system conjugates, and that which never ceases to escape it following lines of flight that are themselves connectable ’ , as Deleuze andGuattari put it in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze et al., 1987, p. 473). And this connectability of lines-of-fl ight is crucial, politically. What in the fi rst volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia were called “ schizophrenic ”lines-of-fl ight are politically useless –or worse –if they do not intersect and connect up to constitute some kind of critical mass, as Deleuze andGuattari are careful to specify more clearly in the second volume. Yet even here, the conditions for such a critical mass becoming revolutionary are left somewhat vague: the slogan ‘ a new people on a new earth ’echoes throughout their collaborative work as a kind of refrain; and they do suggest that the ultimate challenge is to ‘ construct revolutionary connections over and against contre the conjugations of the axiomatic ’(Deleuze et al., 1987, p. 473). But we need to try to get clearer about just which conditions are conducive to the formation of connections among lines-of-fl ight and about how a critical mass of revolutionary connections could overcome the conjugations of the capitalist axiomatic. For insight into these questions, I propose that we return to the process with which we started: reading Capital backwards. This would mean focusing less on the power of capital accumulation than on so-called “ primitive accumulation ” , which as we saw is not really primitive but always ongoing, and not really accumulation but rather dispossession; and it would mean, like Althusser, highlighting in our considerations the non-linear conditions of reproduction rather than the linear causality of production/accumulation. And I propose that we examine in this light the key political-economic strategies of anti-capitalist struggle –and I specify “ political-economic ”strategies (those of radical syndicalism, if you will) to rule out of consideration what we might call more narrowly political strategies –state-centric or party-electoral strategies –as insuffi - ciently revolutionary. These political-economic strategies are the strike, and especially the general strike. As Walter Benjamin has very clearly noted, the general strike is distinctive in that it is non-confrontational (although he would say non-violent, which is not quite the same thing, and perhaps a little too optimistic) (Benjamin, 1978, pp. 277 – 300). In principle, a strike does not involves one power bloc directly confronting another, but rather one bloc withdrawing from its previous mode of engagement (wage-slavery) vis- à -vis the other. The same is true of the general strike, which expands the act of withdrawal to a larger scale: here we have a critical mass of workers walking away en masse from their engagement with capital. Yet from the perspective of reproduction and so-called primitive accumulation –and this is key –what the masses are walking away “ from ” –capital accumulation –is actually less important than what they are able to walk “ towards ” : rejecting capital is less important than having something sustaining and sustainable to rely on. You will recall that the crucial catalyst entailed by primitive accumulation was enforced dependence on capitalist markets: remove this catalyst, and capitalism no longer “ becomes necessary ” , to invoke Althusser once again. More important than directly confronting capital, in other words, is securing alternative means of life, an alternative mode of reproduction. Even more important: such alternatives already exist. One of the great virtues of Gibson-Graham ’ s work is to demonstrate how incomplete capitalism actually is and how many alternative economies co-exist within or beside it (Gibson-Graham, 1996; 2006). Community Supported Agriculture; the co-op movement; the Open-Source Software movement; Fair Trade –all these, and many more, constitute viable, actually existing alternatives to capitalism. And all it will take for them, in connection with others, to become revolutionary –in the specifi cally non-linear sense I am proposing –is for a critical mass of people to invest their life-activity in them, rather than in capitalist markets. We tend to think of linear revolutions as punctual: 1917, 1848 and so on –even though they probably were not. But the non-linear revolution I am talking about is even less punctual: it entails instead what I elsewhere call the strategy of the ‘ slowmotion general strike ’(Holland, forthcoming). Critical masses of people in various aspects of their life-activity just walk away from capital –having secured in advance at least the rudiments of alternative means of life. This does not have to happen all at once: but as soon as suffi cient numbers of people in enough areas of life do so, a tipping point will have been reached, a non-linear bifurcation threshold crossed, beyond which capitalism will not only no longer be necessary, it will actually become-unnecessary. As the slow-motion general strike reaches completion, that is to say, it is not just the State, but also capitalism itself that ends up withering away.
Contention 2: Strikes allows workers to use active affect to reclaim their own authority and resisting the territorializing barriers of workplaces Gourevitch 18, A. (2018). The Right to Strike: A Radical View. American Political Science Review, 1–13. doi:10.1017/s0003055418000321 (Alex Gourevitch is an Assistant Professor of Political Sci- ence, Brown University) SHS KS There is more than one way to justify the right to strike and, in so doing, to explain the shape that right ought to have. As we shall see, there is the liberal, the social- democratic, and the radical account. Any justi cation of a right must give an account not just of the interest it protects but of how that right is shaped to protect that interest. In the case of the radical argument for the right to strike, which I will defend against the other two con- ceptions, the relevant human interest is liberty. Work- ers have an interest in resisting the oppression of class society by using their collective power to reduce that oppression. Their interest is a liberty interest in a dou- ble sense. First, it is an interest in not being oppressed, or in not facing certain kinds of forcing, coercion, and subjection to authority that they shouldn’t have to. Any resistance to those kinds of unjusti ed limitations of freedom carries with it, at least implicitly, a demand for liberties not yet enjoyed.19 That is a demand for a control over portions of one’s life that one does not yet enjoy. Second, and consequently, the right to strike is grounded in an interest in using one’s own individual and collective agency to resist—or even overcome— that oppression. The interest in using one’s own agency to resist oppression ows naturally from the demand for liberties not yet enjoyed. After all, that demand for control is in the name of giving proper space to work- ers’ capacity for self-determination, which is the same capacity that expresses itself in the activity of striking for greater freedom. On this radical view, the right to strike has both an intrinsic and instrumental relation to liberty. It has in- trinsic value as an (at least implicit) demand for self- emancipation or the winning of greater liberty through one’s own efforts. It has instrumental value insofar as the strike is on the whole an effective means for resist- ing the oppressiveness of a class society. For the right to strike to enjoy its proper connection to liberty, work- ers must have a reasonable chance of carrying out an effective strike, otherwise it would lose its instrumen- tal value as a way of resisting oppression. If prevented from using a reasonable array of effective means, ex- ercising the right to strike would not be a means of reducing oppression and, therefore, strikes would also be of very limited value as acts of self-emancipation. It would not be an instance of workers attempting to use their own capacity for self-determination to increase the control they ought to have over the terms of their daily activity.
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ND - Omnipresent Affection v4
Tournament: Princeton | Round: 3 | Opponent: Olympia BO | Judge: Phoenix Pittman Affect, the ability to experience and to be experienced, is the only constitutive feature: I am experiencing my Word doc, my opponent, just as much as you are experiencing me. There is no way to escape affection. Thinking is only a feature of me and doesn’t determine the subject. Subjectivity is fluid—the only intrinsic feature of the subject is that everything is changing, thus stable subjecthood fails. Emphasis on particular aspects of subjectivity only drives division in the proletariat. There are two kinds of affect, active and reactive— Active affect allows us to extend and compose our own boundaries whereas reactive affect only indicates our body’s ability to be affected.
Embracing active affect is key to breaking free from the pervasive state mindset and instead creating spaces for resistance and radical change so that we can reform the state Thus, the standard and role of the ballot is to embrace a politics of active affect. To clarify, we reject things that reinforce stability or the majoritarian subject. Current systems of education only serve to produce majoritarian bodies that are unable to think outside the system and who become increasingly recognizable, killing the potential for any resistance. Wallins, Jason. “Deleuze and Guattari, Politics and Education.” Bloomsbur Publishing, 2014, Pgs. 119-121 SHS KS As a social machine through which ‘labour power and the socius as a whole is manufactured’, schooling figures in the production of social territories that already anticipate a certain kind of people (Guattari, 2009, p. 47). And what kind of people does orthodox schooling seek to produce but a ‘molar public’, or, rather, a public regulated in the abstract image of segmentary social categories (age, gender, ethnicity, class, rank, achievement) (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987)? Such an aspiration is intimately wed to the territorializing powers of the State, for as Deleuze and Guattari argue (1983), State power first requires a ‘representational subject’ as both an abstract and unconscious model in relation to which one is taught to desire. As Massumi (2002) writes, ‘the subject is made to be in conformity with the systems that produces it, such that the subject reproduces the system’ (p. 6). Where education has historically functioned to regulate institutional life according to such segmentary molar codes, its modes of production have taken as their teleological goal the production of a ‘majoritarian people’, or, more accurately, a people circuited to their representational self-similarity according to State thought. This is, in part, the threat that Aoki (2005) identifies in the planned curriculum and its projection of an abstract essentialism upon a diversity of concrete educational assemblages (a school, a class, a curriculum, etc.). Apropos Deleuze, Aoki argues that the standardization of education has effectively reduced difference to a matter of difference in degree. That is, in reference to the stratifying power of the planned curriculum, Aoki avers that difference is always-already linked to an abstract image to which pedagogy ought to aspire and in conformity to which its operations become recognizable as ‘education’ per se. Against political action then, orthodox educational thought conceptualizes social life alongside the ‘categories of the Negative’, eschewing difference for conformity, flows for unities, mobile arrangements for totalizing systems (Foucault, 1983, p. xiii). Twisting Deleuze, might we claim that the people are missing in education? That is, where education aspires to invest desire in the production of a ‘majoritarian’ or ‘molar’ public, the prospect of thinking singularities are stayed, not only through the paucity of enunciatory forms and images available for thinking education in the first place, but further, through the organization of the school’s enunciatory machines into vehicles of representation that repeat in molarizing forms of self-reflection, ‘majoritarian’ perspective, and dominant circuits of desiring-investment. Herein, the impulse of standardization obliterates alternative subject formations and the modes of counter-signifying enunciation that might palpate them. Repelling the singular, the ‘majoritarian’ and standardizing impulse of education takes as its ‘fundamental’ mode of production the reification of common sense, or, rather, the territorialization of thought according to that which is given (that which everyone already knows). Figuring in a mode ‘of identification that brings diversity in general to bear upon the form of the Same’, common sense functions to stabilize patterns of social production by tethering them to molar orders of meaning and dominant regimes of social signification (Deleuze, 1990, p. 78). As Daignault argues, in so far as it repels the anomalous by reterritorializing it within prior systems of representation, common sense constitutes a significant and lingering problem in contemporary education (Hwu, 2004). Its function, Daignault alludes apropos Serres, is oriented to the annihilation of difference. Hence, where the conceptualization of ‘public’ education is founded in common sense, potentials for political action through tactics of proliferation, disjunction, and singularization are radically delimited and captured within prior territorialities of use (Foucault, 1983, p. xiii). The problem of this scenario is clear: common sense has yet to force us to think in a manner capable of subtracting desire from majoritarian thought in lieu of alternative forms of organization and experimental expression. In so far as it functions as a vehicle of ‘molarization’, reifying a common universe of reference for enunciation, the school fails to produce conditions for thinking in a manner that is not already anticipated by such referential ‘possibilities’. Hence, while antithetical to the espoused purpose of schooling, the majoritarian impulse of the school has yet to produce conditions for thinking – at least in the Deleuzian (2000) sense whereupon thought proceeds from a necessary violence to those habits of repetition with which thought becomes contracted. Prefer additionally: 1 Active affect is able to organize to undermine static structures, whereas reactive affect becomes coopted and utilized by the state to ceaselessly destroy and form strict confines for identity and being — the aff is a form of negative state action where we sap power from conventionally oppressive institutions Robinson 10 Andre; Ceasefire; “Why Deleuze (still) matters: States, war-machines and radical transformation”; https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-deleuze-war-machine/; political theorist; LCA-BP So what, in Deleuzian theory, is the alternative to the state? Deleuze and Guattari argue for a type of assemblage (social group or cluster of relations) which they refer to as the ‘war-machine’, though with the proviso that certain kinds of ‘war-machines’ can also be captured and used by states. This should not be considered a militarist theory, and the term ‘war-machine’ is in many respects misleading. It is used because Deleuze and Guattari derive their theory from Pierre Clastres’ theory of the role of ritualised (often non-lethal) warfare among indigenous groups. Paul Patton has suggested that the war-machine would be better called a metamorphosis-machine, others have used the term ‘difference engine’, a machine of differentiation, and there is a lot of overlap with the idea of autonomous groups or movements in how the war-machine is theorised. We should also remember that ‘machine’ in Deleuze and Guattari simply refers to a combination of forces or elements; it does not have overtones of instrumentalism or of mindless mechanisms – a social group, an ecosystem, a knight on horseback are all ‘machines’. The term ‘war-machine’ has the unfortunate connotations of brutal military machinery and of uncontrollable militarist apparatuses such as NATO, which operate with a machine-like rigidity and inhumanity (c.f. the phrase ‘military-industrial complex’). For Deleuze and Guattari, these kinds of statist war-machines are also war-machines of a sort, because they descend from a historical process through which states ‘captured’ or incorporated autonomous social movements (particularly those of nomadic indigenous societies) and made them part of the state so as to contain their subversive power. Early states learned to capture war-machines because they were previously vulnerable to being destroyed by the war-machines of nomadic stateless societies, having no similar means of response. Hence, armies are a kind of hybrid social form, containing some of the power of autonomous war-machines but contained in such a way as to harness it to state instrumentalism and inhumanity. Captured in this way, war-machines lose their affirmative force, becoming simply machines of purposeless destruction – having lost the purpose of deterritorialisation (see below), they take on the purpose of pure war as a goal in itself. Deleuze and Guattari argue that state-captured war-machines are regaining their autonomy in a dangerous way, tending to replace limited war in the service of a state’s goals with a drive to total war. This drive is expressed for instance in the ‘war on terror’ as permanent state of emergency. There was a recent controversy about Israeli strategists adopting Deleuzian ideas, which reflects the continuities between state war-machines and autonomous war-machines, but depends on a selective conceptual misreading in which the drive to total war denounced by Deleuze and Guattari is explicitly valorised. The Israeli army is a captured war-machine in the worst possible sense, pursuing the destruction of others’ existential territories in order to accumulate destructive power for a state. For Deleuze and Guattari, it is not the Israeli army but the Palestinian resistance which is a war-machine in the full sense. The autonomous war-machine, as opposed to the state-captured war-machine, is a form of social assemblage directed against the state, and against the coalescence of sovereignty. They way such machines undermine the state is by exercising diffuse power to break down concentrated power, and through the replacement of ‘striated’ (regulated, marked) space with ‘smooth’ space (although the war-machine is the ‘constituent element of smooth space’, I shall save discussion of smooth space for some other time). In Clastres’ account of Amazonian societies, on which Deleuze and Guattari’s theory is based, this is done by means of each band defending its own autonomy, and reacting to any potential accumulation of power by other bands. One could similarly think of how neighbourhood gangs resist subordination by rival gangs, or how autonomous social movements resist concentrations of political power. Autonomous social movements, such as the European squatters’ movement, the Zapatistas, and networks of protest against summits, are the principal example Deleuze and Guattari have in mind of war-machines in the global North, though they also use the concept in relation to Southern guerrilla and popular movements such as the Palestinian intifada and the Vietnamese resistance to American occupation, and also in relation to everyday practices of indigenous groups resisting state control. One could also argue that the ‘war-machine’ is implicit in practices of everyday resistance of the kind studies by James Scott. Marginal groups, termed ‘minorities’ in Deleuzian theory, often coalesce as war-machines because the state-form is inappropriate for them.
2. The aff is key to adopt and test new resistance for students as contemporary pedagogical sites – operating internally is essential to hearing from multiple perspectives and forming new affective relations Manning and Massumi 18 Erin and Brian; “A Cryptoeconomy of Affect”; interviewed by Uriah Todoroff for The New Inquiry; Massumi is known for his translations of French post-structuralist classics like Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987); Manning is a prolific author whose last published book was The Minor Gesture (2016). They work together at the SenseLab in Montreal, a research laboratory Manning created to experiment with collective pedagogy. The lab provides a base for intellectual and creative activity that is intended to spin off into projects that grow or die according to their own momentum.; https://thenewinquiry.com/a-cryptoeconomy-of-affect/; BP There are people all over the world we don’t know who are doing this kind of work, who are creating ways of working together, inventing new forms of collaboration, engaging with complex ecological models of encounter, who are inventing new forms of value. We never believe we are alone doing this work. The question we have isn’t the usual start-up question of how to scale up, it’s how do we create techniques for the registering of that which doesn’t register? The 3E Process Seed Bank is deeply allied to the question of what else learning and living can be, having grown out of its sister project the Three Ecologies Institute. We actually began there, with the Three Ecologies Institute, working from Félix Guattari’s definition of the three ecologies as the conceptual (psychic, mental), the environmental, and the social. It was only two years ago that we realized that thinking value transversally across the three ecologies required us to also take financial value into account. We see the 3E as a kind of intensifier of modes of thinking and living dedicated to inventing ways that we can continue to learn together, regardless of our age, background, or learning style. We don’t see it as an opposite to the university; we see it as a parasite. You could put the emphasis on the site: a para-site, a para-institution that maintains relations with the institution of the university but operates by a different logic. It would be very naive of us to think you could just walk out of capitalism. We’re not that naive. Neoliberalism is our natural environment. We therefore operate with what we call strategic duplicity. This involves recognizing what works in the systems we work against. Which means: We don’t just oppose them head on. We work with them, strategically, while nurturing an alien logic that moves in very different directions. One of the things we know that the university does well is that it attracts really interesting people. The university can facilitate meetings that can change lives. But systemically, it fails. And the systemic failure is getting more and more acute. And so what we imagine is that the Institute, assisted by the 3E Process Seed Bank, will create a new space that might overlap with some of the things the university does well, without being a part of it (or being subsumed by its logic). MASSUMI.— Going back to the question of value, we want to create an economy around the platform that does not follow any of the usual economic principles. There will be no individual ownership or shares. There will be no units of account, no currency or tokens used internally. The model of activity will not be transactional. Individual interest will not be used as an incentivizer. What there will be is a complex space of relation for people to create intensities of experience together, in emergent excess over what they could have created working separately, or in traditional teams. It’s meant to be self-organizing, with no separate administrative structure or hierarchy, and even no formal decision-making rules. It’s anarchistic in that sense, but through mobilizing a surplus of organizing potential, rather than lacking organization. You could also call it communistic, in the sense that there is no individual value holding. Everything is common. MANNING.— Undercommon. MASSUMI.— Yes, undercommonly. The undercommons is Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s word for emergent collectivity, which is one of our inspirations. We want to foster emergence and process, but at the same time find ways of making it sustainable. That means that the strategic duplicity has to extend to the economy as we currently know it. We have to be parasitical to the capitalist economy, while operating according to a logic that is totally alien to it. What we’re thinking of is making the collaborative process moving through the platform function according to the radically anti-capitalist principles we were just talking about, centering on the collective production of surplus values of life, and separating that from the dominant economy by a membrane. A membrane creates a separation, but at the same time allows for movements across. It has a certain porosity. The idea is that we would find ways, associated with the affect-o-meter we were describing earlier, to register qualitative shifts in the creative process as it moves over its formative thresholds, and moves back and forth between online operations and offline events. What would be registered is the affective intensity of the production of surplus value of life, its ebbs and flows. The membrane would consist in a translation of those qualitative flows into a numerical expression, which would feed into a cryptocurrency. Basically, we’d be mining crypto with collaborative creative energies—monetizing emergent collectivity. The currency would be “backed” by the confidence we could build in our ability to keep the creative process going and spin it off into other projects, as evidenced by the activities of the Three Ecologies Institute as an experiment in alter-education. This proves strategies of subversion and infiltration lead to movements that won’t be coopted- serve as red herrings. Offense Thus, I affirm—Resolved: A just government ought to recognize an unconditional right of workers to strike. I’ll defend the resolution as a general principle and PICS don’t negate because general principles tolerate exceptions. I’ll spec whatever you want me to in cx as long as it doesn’t force me to abandon my maximum.
Contention 1: Oppression staticizes subjects as “workers” creating an interlocking effects that prevent fluidity to become more than a worker Gourevitch 18 Alex Gourevitch is an associate professor political science at Brown University. “The Right to Strike: A Radical View.” 2018. American Political Science Review. https://sci-hub.se/10.1017/s0003055418000321 THE FACTS OF OPPRESSION IN TYPICAL LIBERAL CAPITALIST SOCIETIES To explain why the right to strike is a right to resist oppression, I first must give an account of the relevant oppression. Oppression is the unjustifiable deprivation of freedom. Some deprivations or restrictions of freedom are justified and therefore do not count as oppression. The oppression that matters for this article is the class-based oppression of a typical liberal capitalist society. By the class-based oppression, I mean the fact that the majority of able-bodied people find themselves forced to work for members of a relatively small group who dominate control over productive assets and who, thereby, enjoy unjustifiable control over the activities and products of those workers. There are workers and then there are owners and their managers. The facts I refer to here are mostly drawn from the United States to keep a consistent description of a specific society. While there is meaningful variation across liberal capitalist nations, the basic facts of class-based oppression do not change in a way that vitiates my argument’s applicability to those countries too. Empirical analysis of each country to which the argument applies, and how it would apply, is a separate project. The first element of oppression in a class society resides in the fact that (a) there are some who are forced into the labor market while others are not and (b) those who are forced to work—workers—have to work for those who own productive resources. Workers are forced into the labor market because they have no reasonable alternative but to find a job.8 They cannot produce necessary goods for themselves, nor can they rely on the charity of others, nor can they count on adequate state benefits. The only way most people can gain reliable access to necessary goods is by buying them. The most reliable, often only, way most people have of acquiring enough money to buy those goods is through employment. That is the sense in which they have no reasonable alternative but to find a job working for an employer. Depending on how we measure income and wealth, about 60–80 of Americans are in this situation for most of their adult lives.9 This forcing is not symmetrical. A significant minority is not similarly forced to work for someone else, though they might do so freely. That minority has enough wealth, either inherited or accumulated or both, that they have a reasonable alternative to entering the labor market. So, this first dimension of oppression comes not from the fact that some are forced to work, but from the fact that the forcing is unequal and that asymmetry means some are forced to work for others.10 That is to say, what makes it oppressive is the wrong of unequally forcing the majority to work, for whatever purpose, while others face no such forcing at all.11 That way of organizing and distributing coercive work obligations, and of imposing certain kinds of forcing on workers, is an unjustifiable way of limiting their freedom and therefore oppressive. To fix ideas, I call this the structural element of oppression in class societies. 8 For a fuller analysis of workers being asymmetrically forced to work, or forced into particular occupations see Cohen (1988a,1988b), Ezorsky (2007), and Stanczyk (unpublished). These are primarily analytic descriptions of forcing, not normative analyses of what is wrong with that forcing. 9 For the 60–80 statistic, see Henwood (2005, 125). The statistics on wealth among the lower deciles is complex. A recent study shows that the net wealth of the bottom 50 is roughly 0. So at least 50 of US households are forced to use job-related income to meet annual expenses, though that has to be modified for those who receive (insufficient to live on) welfare benefits (Saez and Zucman 2014; Wolff 2012). 10 To be clear, the oppression here is not with any and all unequal and asymmetric forcing but with the inequality that arises from the class structure of society. For instance, it is not oppressive nor an unjust constraint on individual freedom, to force the able-bodied to do some work to support the disabled, children, the sick, the elderly, or the otherwise socially dependent who cannot perform a share of necessary labor. Though even there, there is some presumption that that burden of working for those who cannot work should be shared equally, and that individuals should not be forced to work for any purpose and under any conditions whatsoever. What I am describing as oppression is not the very fact that some work and others don’t, but the inequality and asymmetry that arises from the inequalities in ownership and control. This forcing is unequal in that some ablebodied—and even some who by all rights should not have to work at all—are forced to work while other able-bodied individuals are not forced to work. And it is asymmetric in that those who have to work are, on the whole, forced to work for those who hire them, under conditions controlled primarily by employers. This structural element leads to a second, interpersonal dimension of oppression in the workplace itself. Workers are forced to join workplaces typically characterized by large swathes of uncontrolled managerial power and authority. This oppression is interpersonal in the sense that it is power that specific individuals— employers and their managers—have to get other specific individuals—employees—to do what they want. We can distinguish between three overlapping forms that this interpersonal, workplace oppression takes: subordination, delegation, and dependence. Subordination: Employers have what are sometimes called “managerial prerogatives,”12 which are legislative and judicial grants of authority to owners and their managers to make decisions about investment, hiring and firing, plant location, work process, and the like.13 These powers come from judicial precedent and from the constellation of corporate, labor, contract, and property law. Managers may change working speeds and assigned tasks, the hours of work, or even force workers to spend up to an hour going through security lines after work without paying them (Integrity Staffing Solutions, Inc. v. Busk 2014). Managers may fire workers for Facebook comments, their sexual orientation, for being too sexually appealing, or for not being appealing enough (Emerson 2011; Hess 2013; Strauss 2013; Velasco 2011). Workers may be given more tasks than can be performed in the allotted time, locked in the workplace overnight, required to work in extreme heat and other physically hazardous conditions, or punitively isolated from other coworkers (Greenhouse 2009, 26–27, 49–55, 89, 111–112; Hsu 2011; JOMO 2013; Urbina 2013). Managers may pressure employees into unwanted political behavior (HertelFernandez 2015). In all of these cases, managers are exercising legally permitted prerogatives.14 The law does not require that workers have any formal say in how those powers are exercised. In fact, in nearly every liberal capitalist country, employees are defined, in law, as “subordinates.”15 This is subordination in the strict sense: workers are subject to the will of the employer. Delegation: There are also other discretionary legal powers that managers have not by legal statute or precedent but because workers have voluntarily delegated these powers in the contract. For instance, workers might sign a contract that allows managers to require employees to submit to random drug testing or unannounced searches (American Civil Liberties Union 2017). In the United States, 18 of current employees and 37 of workers in their lifetime work under noncompete agreements (Bunker 2016). These clauses give managers legal power to forbid workers from working for competitors. The contract that the Communications Workers of America had with Verizon until 2015 included a right for managers to force employers to perform from 10 to 15 hours of overtime per week and to take some other day instead of Saturday as an off-day (Gourevitch 2016a). These legal powers are not parts of the managerial prerogatives that all employers have. Rather, they are voluntarily delegated to employers by workers. In many cases, though the delegation is in one sense voluntary, in another sense it is forced. This will especially be the case if workers, who are forced to find jobs, can only find jobs in sectors where the only contracts available are ones that require these kinds of delegations. Dependence: Finally, managers might have the material power to force employees to submit to commands or even to accept violations of their rights because of the worker’s dependence on the employer. A headline example is wage-theft, which affects American workers to the tune of $8– $14 billion per year (Eisenbray 2015; Judson and Francisco-McGuire 2012; NELP 2013; Axt 2013). In other cases, workers have been forced to wear diapers rather than go to the bathroom, refused legally required lunch breaks, or pressured to work through them, forced to keep working after their shift is up, or denied the right to read or turn on air conditioning during break (Oxfam 2015; BennettSmith 2012; Egelko 2011; Greenhouse 2009, 3– 12; Little 2013; Vega 2012). Other employers have forced their workers to stay home rather than go out on weekends or to switch churches and alter religious practices on pain of being fired and deported (Garrison, Bensinger, and Singer-Vine 2015). In these cases, employers are not exercising legal prerogatives, they are instead taking advantage of the material power that comes with threatening to fire or otherwise discipline workers. This material power to get workers to do things that employers want is in part a function of the class structure of society, both in the wide sense of workers being asymmetrically dependent on owners, and in the narrower sense of workers being legally subordinate to employers. Subordination, delegation, and dependence add up to a form of interpersonal oppression that employers and their managers have over their employees. The weight and scope of this oppression will vary, but those are variations on a theme. Employers and managers enjoy wide swaths of uncontrolled or insufficiently controlled power over their employees. This is the second face of oppression in a class society and it is a live issue. For instance, during the Verizon strike of 2016, one major complaint was that, when out on the job, hanging cable, or repairing lines, some technicians had to ask their manager for permission to go to the bathroom or to get a drink of water. As one striker said in an interview, “Do I have to tell my boss every single minute of what I am doing? This is basic human dignity” (Gourevitch 2016b). If they did not ask or wait to get clear approval from their manager, then they were guilty of a time code violation and were suspended for up to six weeks. The strike made workplace control a direct issue and one measure of its success was a change in disciplinary proceedings (ibid.). To take another example, the Fight for $15 strikes have made control over scheduling a central demand, even managing in certain states and municipalities to pass laws mandating minimal regularity and predictability in weekly schedules (Andrias 2016, 47–70). So, if the first face of oppression is that workers are forced to work for some employer or another who does not face a similar kind of forcing; the second face is that workers are forced to become de jure and de facto subordinates to a specific employer.16 The third face of oppression is the systematic distributive effects of structural and interpersonal oppression. While some instances of class-based oppression are idiosyncratic, in general it has consistent distributive effects. The structural and interpersonal oppression of workers produces wage-bargains and limits on wealth accumulation that reproduce workers’ economic dependence on employers, their over or underemployment, and thereby allows a relatively small group of owners and highly paid managers to accumulate most of the wealth and income. I cannot discuss the extensive literature on inequality. I can only cite some generally well-known facts and papers pointing to the role of inequalities in power as determining factors in these outcomes.17 To the degree that inequalities are a product of structural and workplace oppression, distributive outcomes are their own dimension of oppression and serve to reproduce those basic class relationships. Above all, there is one unjustifiable distributive effect of this oppression: that the majority of wage-bargains ensure the reproduction of that oppressive class structure. At any given point in time, a majority of workers do not earn enough to both meet their needs and to save such that they can employ themselves or start their own businesses. They must therefore remain workers or, to the degree they rise, they do so either by displacing others or by taking the structurally limited number of opportunities available.18 Each of these different faces of oppression— structural, interpersonal, and distributive—is a distinct injustice. Together they form an interrelated and mutually reinforcing set of oppressive relationships. The various ways in which workers are forced to work, made subject to dominating authority, and made asymmetrically dependent in the economy does not produce a fair way of distributing the obligation to work and the rewards of social production. Rather, it constrains their freedom in a way that secures the exploitation of one class by another. The weight of these different oppressions is unevenly experienced across different segments of workers. Various factors modify the basic facts about class and oppression. We have seen, for instance, the difference between being in a high labor supply versus a low labor supply sector. High labor supply sectors involve more intense labor competition, resulting in weaker bargaining power for workers and intensified oppression. The opposite holds for lower labor supply sectors—like software programmers or fiber-optics technicians—whose greater bargaining power means they face class-based oppression less intensively. This has downstream consequences for our analysis of particular strikes, but it does not affect the argument for the right to strike itself. My description of the economy is controversial. Some will either reject aspects of the empirical description, find it too underspecified to agree, or they will disagree with the normative interpretation of it as involving systematic, unjustified restrictions on workers’ freedom. Any attempt to give a more detailed account of this political economy of exploitation would leave no room for the rest of the argument. In what follows, the reader does not have to agree with every aspect of my description of liberal capitalist arrangements. One need only agree that the typical liberal capitalist economy is characterized by considerable, class-based oppression of workers, for reasons similar to the ones I have just provided, to then think that the right to strike can be seen as a right to resist oppression.
Strikes disrupt the codification processes enforced by the state, creating revolutionary and non-linear power that realizes the subjects affective potential and allows them to embrace active affect. Holland 12 Eugene Holland; Non-Linear Historical Materialism; Or, What is Revolutionary in Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History?; from Chapter 2 of Time and History in Deleuze and Serres (2012) (Dr. Holland is Professor and Chair of Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University.) SHS KS Political struggle thus necessarily involves two co-existent kinds of activity: on one hand, there is struggle within the axiomatic, for whatever ameliorations can be wrung from capital and/or the State through direct confrontation – and this is a mode of struggle that Deleuze and Guattari insist is perfectly valid and necessary (Deleuze et al., 1987, p. 471). On the other hand, there is the struggle to escape axiomatization and codifi cation altogether –the mode of struggle via de-coding and “ lines-of-flight ”that they in some sense prefer. What is given is always ‘ the coexistence and inseparability of that which the system conjugates, and that which never ceases to escape it following lines of flight that are themselves connectable ’ , as Deleuze andGuattari put it in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze et al., 1987, p. 473). And this connectability of lines-of-fl ight is crucial, politically. What in the fi rst volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia were called “ schizophrenic ”lines-of-fl ight are politically useless –or worse –if they do not intersect and connect up to constitute some kind of critical mass, as Deleuze andGuattari are careful to specify more clearly in the second volume. Yet even here, the conditions for such a critical mass becoming revolutionary are left somewhat vague: the slogan ‘ a new people on a new earth ’echoes throughout their collaborative work as a kind of refrain; and they do suggest that the ultimate challenge is to ‘ construct revolutionary connections over and against contre the conjugations of the axiomatic ’(Deleuze et al., 1987, p. 473). But we need to try to get clearer about just which conditions are conducive to the formation of connections among lines-of-fl ight and about how a critical mass of revolutionary connections could overcome the conjugations of the capitalist axiomatic. For insight into these questions, I propose that we return to the process with which we started: reading Capital backwards. This would mean focusing less on the power of capital accumulation than on so-called “ primitive accumulation ” , which as we saw is not really primitive but always ongoing, and not really accumulation but rather dispossession; and it would mean, like Althusser, highlighting in our considerations the non-linear conditions of reproduction rather than the linear causality of production/accumulation. And I propose that we examine in this light the key political-economic strategies of anti-capitalist struggle –and I specify “ political-economic ”strategies (those of radical syndicalism, if you will) to rule out of consideration what we might call more narrowly political strategies –state-centric or party-electoral strategies –as insuffi - ciently revolutionary. These political-economic strategies are the strike, and especially the general strike. As Walter Benjamin has very clearly noted, the general strike is distinctive in that it is non-confrontational (although he would say non-violent, which is not quite the same thing, and perhaps a little too optimistic) (Benjamin, 1978, pp. 277 – 300). In principle, a strike does not involves one power bloc directly confronting another, but rather one bloc withdrawing from its previous mode of engagement (wage-slavery) vis- à -vis the other. The same is true of the general strike, which expands the act of withdrawal to a larger scale: here we have a critical mass of workers walking away en masse from their engagement with capital. Yet from the perspective of reproduction and so-called primitive accumulation –and this is key –what the masses are walking away “ from ” –capital accumulation –is actually less important than what they are able to walk “ towards ” : rejecting capital is less important than having something sustaining and sustainable to rely on. You will recall that the crucial catalyst entailed by primitive accumulation was enforced dependence on capitalist markets: remove this catalyst, and capitalism no longer “ becomes necessary ” , to invoke Althusser once again. More important than directly confronting capital, in other words, is securing alternative means of life, an alternative mode of reproduction. Even more important: such alternatives already exist. One of the great virtues of Gibson-Graham ’ s work is to demonstrate how incomplete capitalism actually is and how many alternative economies co-exist within or beside it (Gibson-Graham, 1996; 2006). Community Supported Agriculture; the co-op movement; the Open-Source Software movement; Fair Trade –all these, and many more, constitute viable, actually existing alternatives to capitalism. And all it will take for them, in connection with others, to become revolutionary –in the specifi cally non-linear sense I am proposing –is for a critical mass of people to invest their life-activity in them, rather than in capitalist markets. We tend to think of linear revolutions as punctual: 1917, 1848 and so on –even though they probably were not. But the non-linear revolution I am talking about is even less punctual: it entails instead what I elsewhere call the strategy of the ‘ slowmotion general strike ’(Holland, forthcoming). Critical masses of people in various aspects of their life-activity just walk away from capital –having secured in advance at least the rudiments of alternative means of life. This does not have to happen all at once: but as soon as suffi cient numbers of people in enough areas of life do so, a tipping point will have been reached, a non-linear bifurcation threshold crossed, beyond which capitalism will not only no longer be necessary, it will actually become-unnecessary. As the slow-motion general strike reaches completion, that is to say, it is not just the State, but also capitalism itself that ends up withering away.
Contention 2: Strikes allows workers to use active affect to reclaim their own authority and resisting the territorializing barriers of workplaces Gourevitch 18, A. (2018). The Right to Strike: A Radical View. American Political Science Review, 1–13. doi:10.1017/s0003055418000321 (Alex Gourevitch is an Assistant Professor of Political Sci- ence, Brown University) SHS KS There is more than one way to justify the right to strike and, in so doing, to explain the shape that right ought to have. As we shall see, there is the liberal, the social- democratic, and the radical account. Any justi cation of a right must give an account not just of the interest it protects but of how that right is shaped to protect that interest. In the case of the radical argument for the right to strike, which I will defend against the other two con- ceptions, the relevant human interest is liberty. Work- ers have an interest in resisting the oppression of class society by using their collective power to reduce that oppression. Their interest is a liberty interest in a dou- ble sense. First, it is an interest in not being oppressed, or in not facing certain kinds of forcing, coercion, and subjection to authority that they shouldn’t have to. Any resistance to those kinds of unjusti ed limitations of freedom carries with it, at least implicitly, a demand for liberties not yet enjoyed.19 That is a demand for a control over portions of one’s life that one does not yet enjoy. Second, and consequently, the right to strike is grounded in an interest in using one’s own individual and collective agency to resist—or even overcome— that oppression. The interest in using one’s own agency to resist oppression ows naturally from the demand for liberties not yet enjoyed. After all, that demand for control is in the name of giving proper space to work- ers’ capacity for self-determination, which is the same capacity that expresses itself in the activity of striking for greater freedom. On this radical view, the right to strike has both an intrinsic and instrumental relation to liberty. It has in- trinsic value as an (at least implicit) demand for self- emancipation or the winning of greater liberty through one’s own efforts. It has instrumental value insofar as the strike is on the whole an effective means for resist- ing the oppressiveness of a class society. For the right to strike to enjoy its proper connection to liberty, work- ers must have a reasonable chance of carrying out an effective strike, otherwise it would lose its instrumen- tal value as a way of resisting oppression. If prevented from using a reasonable array of effective means, ex- ercising the right to strike would not be a means of reducing oppression and, therefore, strikes would also be of very limited value as acts of self-emancipation. It would not be an instance of workers attempting to use their own capacity for self-determination to increase the control they ought to have over the terms of their daily activity.
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ND - Omnipresent Affection v5
Tournament: Princeton | Round: 6 | Opponent: Walt Whitman EY | Judge: Jalyn Wu Affect, the ability to experience and to be experienced, is the only constitutive feature: I am experiencing my Word doc, my opponent, just as much as you are experiencing me. There is no way to escape affection. Thinking is only a feature of me and doesn’t determine the subject. Subjectivity is fluid—the only intrinsic feature of the subject is that everything is changing, thus stable subjecthood fails. Emphasis on particular aspects of subjectivity only drives division in the proletariat.
There are two kinds of affect, active and reactive— Active affect allows us to extend and compose our own boundaries whereas reactive affect only indicates our body’s ability to be affected. Everything is constituted by relationality: so all negations manifest themselves as affirmation since the relations certainly existed and are valid, so all negation collapses to an affirmation of affective encounters. Embracing active affect is key to breaking free from the pervasive state mindset and instead creating spaces for resistance and radical change so that we can reform the state Thus, the standard and role of the ballot is to embrace a politics of active affect. To clarify, we reject things that reinforce stability or the majoritarian subject. Current systems of education only serve to produce majoritarian bodies that are unable to think outside the system and who become increasingly recognizable, killing the potential for any resistance. Wallins, Jason. “Deleuze and Guattari, Politics and Education.” Bloomsbur Publishing, 2014, Pgs. 119-121 SHS KS As a social machine through which ‘labour power and the socius as a whole is manufactured’, schooling figures in the production of social territories that already anticipate a certain kind of people (Guattari, 2009, p. 47). And what kind of people does orthodox schooling seek to produce but a ‘molar public’, or, rather, a public regulated in the abstract image of segmentary social categories (age, gender, ethnicity, class, rank, achievement) (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987)? Such an aspiration is intimately wed to the territorializing powers of the State, for as Deleuze and Guattari argue (1983), State power first requires a ‘representational subject’ as both an abstract and unconscious model in relation to which one is taught to desire. As Massumi (2002) writes, ‘the subject is made to be in conformity with the systems that produces it, such that the subject reproduces the system’ (p. 6). Where education has historically functioned to regulate institutional life according to such segmentary molar codes, its modes of production have taken as their teleological goal the production of a ‘majoritarian people’, or, more accurately, a people circuited to their representational self-similarity according to State thought. This is, in part, the threat that Aoki (2005) identifies in the planned curriculum and its projection of an abstract essentialism upon a diversity of concrete educational assemblages (a school, a class, a curriculum, etc.). Apropos Deleuze, Aoki argues that the standardization of education has effectively reduced difference to a matter of difference in degree. That is, in reference to the stratifying power of the planned curriculum, Aoki avers that difference is always-already linked to an abstract image to which pedagogy ought to aspire and in conformity to which its operations become recognizable as ‘education’ per se. Against political action then, orthodox educational thought conceptualizes social life alongside the ‘categories of the Negative’, eschewing difference for conformity, flows for unities, mobile arrangements for totalizing systems (Foucault, 1983, p. xiii). Twisting Deleuze, might we claim that the people are missing in education? That is, where education aspires to invest desire in the production of a ‘majoritarian’ or ‘molar’ public, the prospect of thinking singularities are stayed, not only through the paucity of enunciatory forms and images available for thinking education in the first place, but further, through the organization of the school’s enunciatory machines into vehicles of representation that repeat in molarizing forms of self-reflection, ‘majoritarian’ perspective, and dominant circuits of desiring-investment. Herein, the impulse of standardization obliterates alternative subject formations and the modes of counter-signifying enunciation that might palpate them. Repelling the singular, the ‘majoritarian’ and standardizing impulse of education takes as its ‘fundamental’ mode of production the reification of common sense, or, rather, the territorialization of thought according to that which is given (that which everyone already knows). Figuring in a mode ‘of identification that brings diversity in general to bear upon the form of the Same’, common sense functions to stabilize patterns of social production by tethering them to molar orders of meaning and dominant regimes of social signification (Deleuze, 1990, p. 78). As Daignault argues, in so far as it repels the anomalous by reterritorializing it within prior systems of representation, common sense constitutes a significant and lingering problem in contemporary education (Hwu, 2004). Its function, Daignault alludes apropos Serres, is oriented to the annihilation of difference. Hence, where the conceptualization of ‘public’ education is founded in common sense, potentials for political action through tactics of proliferation, disjunction, and singularization are radically delimited and captured within prior territorialities of use (Foucault, 1983, p. xiii). The problem of this scenario is clear: common sense has yet to force us to think in a manner capable of subtracting desire from majoritarian thought in lieu of alternative forms of organization and experimental expression. In so far as it functions as a vehicle of ‘molarization’, reifying a common universe of reference for enunciation, the school fails to produce conditions for thinking in a manner that is not already anticipated by such referential ‘possibilities’. Hence, while antithetical to the espoused purpose of schooling, the majoritarian impulse of the school has yet to produce conditions for thinking – at least in the Deleuzian (2000) sense whereupon thought proceeds from a necessary violence to those habits of repetition with which thought becomes contracted. Prefer additionally: 1 Active affect is able to organize to undermine static structures, whereas reactive affect becomes coopted and utilized by the state to ceaselessly destroy and form strict confines for identity and being — the aff is a form of negative state action where we sap power from conventionally oppressive institutions Robinson 10 Andre; Ceasefire; “Why Deleuze (still) matters: States, war-machines and radical transformation”; https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-deleuze-war-machine/; political theorist; LCA-BP So what, in Deleuzian theory, is the alternative to the state? Deleuze and Guattari argue for a type of assemblage (social group or cluster of relations) which they refer to as the ‘war-machine’, though with the proviso that certain kinds of ‘war-machines’ can also be captured and used by states. This should not be considered a militarist theory, and the term ‘war-machine’ is in many respects misleading. It is used because Deleuze and Guattari derive their theory from Pierre Clastres’ theory of the role of ritualised (often non-lethal) warfare among indigenous groups. Paul Patton has suggested that the war-machine would be better called a metamorphosis-machine, others have used the term ‘difference engine’, a machine of differentiation, and there is a lot of overlap with the idea of autonomous groups or movements in how the war-machine is theorised. We should also remember that ‘machine’ in Deleuze and Guattari simply refers to a combination of forces or elements; it does not have overtones of instrumentalism or of mindless mechanisms – a social group, an ecosystem, a knight on horseback are all ‘machines’. The term ‘war-machine’ has the unfortunate connotations of brutal military machinery and of uncontrollable militarist apparatuses such as NATO, which operate with a machine-like rigidity and inhumanity (c.f. the phrase ‘military-industrial complex’). For Deleuze and Guattari, these kinds of statist war-machines are also war-machines of a sort, because they descend from a historical process through which states ‘captured’ or incorporated autonomous social movements (particularly those of nomadic indigenous societies) and made them part of the state so as to contain their subversive power. Early states learned to capture war-machines because they were previously vulnerable to being destroyed by the war-machines of nomadic stateless societies, having no similar means of response. Hence, armies are a kind of hybrid social form, containing some of the power of autonomous war-machines but contained in such a way as to harness it to state instrumentalism and inhumanity. Captured in this way, war-machines lose their affirmative force, becoming simply machines of purposeless destruction – having lost the purpose of deterritorialisation (see below), they take on the purpose of pure war as a goal in itself. Deleuze and Guattari argue that state-captured war-machines are regaining their autonomy in a dangerous way, tending to replace limited war in the service of a state’s goals with a drive to total war. This drive is expressed for instance in the ‘war on terror’ as permanent state of emergency. There was a recent controversy about Israeli strategists adopting Deleuzian ideas, which reflects the continuities between state war-machines and autonomous war-machines, but depends on a selective conceptual misreading in which the drive to total war denounced by Deleuze and Guattari is explicitly valorised. The Israeli army is a captured war-machine in the worst possible sense, pursuing the destruction of others’ existential territories in order to accumulate destructive power for a state. For Deleuze and Guattari, it is not the Israeli army but the Palestinian resistance which is a war-machine in the full sense. The autonomous war-machine, as opposed to the state-captured war-machine, is a form of social assemblage directed against the state, and against the coalescence of sovereignty. They way such machines undermine the state is by exercising diffuse power to break down concentrated power, and through the replacement of ‘striated’ (regulated, marked) space with ‘smooth’ space (although the war-machine is the ‘constituent element of smooth space’, I shall save discussion of smooth space for some other time). In Clastres’ account of Amazonian societies, on which Deleuze and Guattari’s theory is based, this is done by means of each band defending its own autonomy, and reacting to any potential accumulation of power by other bands. One could similarly think of how neighbourhood gangs resist subordination by rival gangs, or how autonomous social movements resist concentrations of political power. Autonomous social movements, such as the European squatters’ movement, the Zapatistas, and networks of protest against summits, are the principal example Deleuze and Guattari have in mind of war-machines in the global North, though they also use the concept in relation to Southern guerrilla and popular movements such as the Palestinian intifada and the Vietnamese resistance to American occupation, and also in relation to everyday practices of indigenous groups resisting state control. One could also argue that the ‘war-machine’ is implicit in practices of everyday resistance of the kind studies by James Scott. Marginal groups, termed ‘minorities’ in Deleuzian theory, often coalesce as war-machines because the state-form is inappropriate for them.
2. The aff is key to adopt and test new resistance for students as contemporary pedagogical sites – operating internally is essential to hearing from multiple perspectives and forming new affective relations Manning and Massumi 18 Erin and Brian; “A Cryptoeconomy of Affect”; interviewed by Uriah Todoroff for The New Inquiry; Massumi is known for his translations of French post-structuralist classics like Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987); Manning is a prolific author whose last published book was The Minor Gesture (2016). They work together at the SenseLab in Montreal, a research laboratory Manning created to experiment with collective pedagogy. The lab provides a base for intellectual and creative activity that is intended to spin off into projects that grow or die according to their own momentum.; https://thenewinquiry.com/a-cryptoeconomy-of-affect/; BP There are people all over the world we don’t know who are doing this kind of work, who are creating ways of working together, inventing new forms of collaboration, engaging with complex ecological models of encounter, who are inventing new forms of value. We never believe we are alone doing this work. The question we have isn’t the usual start-up question of how to scale up, it’s how do we create techniques for the registering of that which doesn’t register? The 3E Process Seed Bank is deeply allied to the question of what else learning and living can be, having grown out of its sister project the Three Ecologies Institute. We actually began there, with the Three Ecologies Institute, working from Félix Guattari’s definition of the three ecologies as the conceptual (psychic, mental), the environmental, and the social. It was only two years ago that we realized that thinking value transversally across the three ecologies required us to also take financial value into account. We see the 3E as a kind of intensifier of modes of thinking and living dedicated to inventing ways that we can continue to learn together, regardless of our age, background, or learning style. We don’t see it as an opposite to the university; we see it as a parasite. You could put the emphasis on the site: a para-site, a para-institution that maintains relations with the institution of the university but operates by a different logic. It would be very naive of us to think you could just walk out of capitalism. We’re not that naive. Neoliberalism is our natural environment. We therefore operate with what we call strategic duplicity. This involves recognizing what works in the systems we work against. Which means: We don’t just oppose them head on. We work with them, strategically, while nurturing an alien logic that moves in very different directions. One of the things we know that the university does well is that it attracts really interesting people. The university can facilitate meetings that can change lives. But systemically, it fails. And the systemic failure is getting more and more acute. And so what we imagine is that the Institute, assisted by the 3E Process Seed Bank, will create a new space that might overlap with some of the things the university does well, without being a part of it (or being subsumed by its logic). MASSUMI.— Going back to the question of value, we want to create an economy around the platform that does not follow any of the usual economic principles. There will be no individual ownership or shares. There will be no units of account, no currency or tokens used internally. The model of activity will not be transactional. Individual interest will not be used as an incentivizer. What there will be is a complex space of relation for people to create intensities of experience together, in emergent excess over what they could have created working separately, or in traditional teams. It’s meant to be self-organizing, with no separate administrative structure or hierarchy, and even no formal decision-making rules. It’s anarchistic in that sense, but through mobilizing a surplus of organizing potential, rather than lacking organization. You could also call it communistic, in the sense that there is no individual value holding. Everything is common. MANNING.— Undercommon. MASSUMI.— Yes, undercommonly. The undercommons is Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s word for emergent collectivity, which is one of our inspirations. We want to foster emergence and process, but at the same time find ways of making it sustainable. That means that the strategic duplicity has to extend to the economy as we currently know it. We have to be parasitical to the capitalist economy, while operating according to a logic that is totally alien to it. What we’re thinking of is making the collaborative process moving through the platform function according to the radically anti-capitalist principles we were just talking about, centering on the collective production of surplus values of life, and separating that from the dominant economy by a membrane. A membrane creates a separation, but at the same time allows for movements across. It has a certain porosity. The idea is that we would find ways, associated with the affect-o-meter we were describing earlier, to register qualitative shifts in the creative process as it moves over its formative thresholds, and moves back and forth between online operations and offline events. What would be registered is the affective intensity of the production of surplus value of life, its ebbs and flows. The membrane would consist in a translation of those qualitative flows into a numerical expression, which would feed into a cryptocurrency. Basically, we’d be mining crypto with collaborative creative energies—monetizing emergent collectivity. The currency would be “backed” by the confidence we could build in our ability to keep the creative process going and spin it off into other projects, as evidenced by the activities of the Three Ecologies Institute as an experiment in alter-education. This proves strategies of subversion and infiltration lead to movements that won’t be coopted- serve as red herrings. Offense Thus, I affirm—Resolved: A just government ought to recognize an unconditional right of workers to strike. I’ll defend the resolution as a general principle and PICS don’t negate because general principles tolerate exceptions. I’ll spec whatever you want me to in cx as long as it doesn’t force me to abandon my maximum.
Contention 1: Oppression staticizes subjects as “workers” creating an interlocking effects that prevent fluidity to become more than a worker Gourevitch 18 Alex Gourevitch is an associate professor political science at Brown University. “The Right to Strike: A Radical View.” 2018. American Political Science Review. https://sci-hub.se/10.1017/s0003055418000321 THE FACTS OF OPPRESSION IN TYPICAL LIBERAL CAPITALIST SOCIETIES To explain why the right to strike is a right to resist oppression, I first must give an account of the relevant oppression. Oppression is the unjustifiable deprivation of freedom. Some deprivations or restrictions of freedom are justified and therefore do not count as oppression. The oppression that matters for this article is the class-based oppression of a typical liberal capitalist society. By the class-based oppression, I mean the fact that the majority of able-bodied people find themselves forced to work for members of a relatively small group who dominate control over productive assets and who, thereby, enjoy unjustifiable control over the activities and products of those workers. There are workers and then there are owners and their managers. The facts I refer to here are mostly drawn from the United States to keep a consistent description of a specific society. While there is meaningful variation across liberal capitalist nations, the basic facts of class-based oppression do not change in a way that vitiates my argument’s applicability to those countries too. Empirical analysis of each country to which the argument applies, and how it would apply, is a separate project. The first element of oppression in a class society resides in the fact that (a) there are some who are forced into the labor market while others are not and (b) those who are forced to work—workers—have to work for those who own productive resources. Workers are forced into the labor market because they have no reasonable alternative but to find a job.8 They cannot produce necessary goods for themselves, nor can they rely on the charity of others, nor can they count on adequate state benefits. The only way most people can gain reliable access to necessary goods is by buying them. The most reliable, often only, way most people have of acquiring enough money to buy those goods is through employment. That is the sense in which they have no reasonable alternative but to find a job working for an employer. Depending on how we measure income and wealth, about 60–80 of Americans are in this situation for most of their adult lives.9 This forcing is not symmetrical. A significant minority is not similarly forced to work for someone else, though they might do so freely. That minority has enough wealth, either inherited or accumulated or both, that they have a reasonable alternative to entering the labor market. So, this first dimension of oppression comes not from the fact that some are forced to work, but from the fact that the forcing is unequal and that asymmetry means some are forced to work for others.10 That is to say, what makes it oppressive is the wrong of unequally forcing the majority to work, for whatever purpose, while others face no such forcing at all.11 That way of organizing and distributing coercive work obligations, and of imposing certain kinds of forcing on workers, is an unjustifiable way of limiting their freedom and therefore oppressive. To fix ideas, I call this the structural element of oppression in class societies. 8 For a fuller analysis of workers being asymmetrically forced to work, or forced into particular occupations see Cohen (1988a,1988b), Ezorsky (2007), and Stanczyk (unpublished). These are primarily analytic descriptions of forcing, not normative analyses of what is wrong with that forcing. 9 For the 60–80 statistic, see Henwood (2005, 125). The statistics on wealth among the lower deciles is complex. A recent study shows that the net wealth of the bottom 50 is roughly 0. So at least 50 of US households are forced to use job-related income to meet annual expenses, though that has to be modified for those who receive (insufficient to live on) welfare benefits (Saez and Zucman 2014; Wolff 2012). 10 To be clear, the oppression here is not with any and all unequal and asymmetric forcing but with the inequality that arises from the class structure of society. For instance, it is not oppressive nor an unjust constraint on individual freedom, to force the able-bodied to do some work to support the disabled, children, the sick, the elderly, or the otherwise socially dependent who cannot perform a share of necessary labor. Though even there, there is some presumption that that burden of working for those who cannot work should be shared equally, and that individuals should not be forced to work for any purpose and under any conditions whatsoever. What I am describing as oppression is not the very fact that some work and others don’t, but the inequality and asymmetry that arises from the inequalities in ownership and control. This forcing is unequal in that some ablebodied—and even some who by all rights should not have to work at all—are forced to work while other able-bodied individuals are not forced to work. And it is asymmetric in that those who have to work are, on the whole, forced to work for those who hire them, under conditions controlled primarily by employers. This structural element leads to a second, interpersonal dimension of oppression in the workplace itself. Workers are forced to join workplaces typically characterized by large swathes of uncontrolled managerial power and authority. This oppression is interpersonal in the sense that it is power that specific individuals— employers and their managers—have to get other specific individuals—employees—to do what they want. We can distinguish between three overlapping forms that this interpersonal, workplace oppression takes: subordination, delegation, and dependence. Subordination: Employers have what are sometimes called “managerial prerogatives,”12 which are legislative and judicial grants of authority to owners and their managers to make decisions about investment, hiring and firing, plant location, work process, and the like.13 These powers come from judicial precedent and from the constellation of corporate, labor, contract, and property law. Managers may change working speeds and assigned tasks, the hours of work, or even force workers to spend up to an hour going through security lines after work without paying them (Integrity Staffing Solutions, Inc. v. Busk 2014). Managers may fire workers for Facebook comments, their sexual orientation, for being too sexually appealing, or for not being appealing enough (Emerson 2011; Hess 2013; Strauss 2013; Velasco 2011). Workers may be given more tasks than can be performed in the allotted time, locked in the workplace overnight, required to work in extreme heat and other physically hazardous conditions, or punitively isolated from other coworkers (Greenhouse 2009, 26–27, 49–55, 89, 111–112; Hsu 2011; JOMO 2013; Urbina 2013). Managers may pressure employees into unwanted political behavior (HertelFernandez 2015). In all of these cases, managers are exercising legally permitted prerogatives.14 The law does not require that workers have any formal say in how those powers are exercised. In fact, in nearly every liberal capitalist country, employees are defined, in law, as “subordinates.”15 This is subordination in the strict sense: workers are subject to the will of the employer. Delegation: There are also other discretionary legal powers that managers have not by legal statute or precedent but because workers have voluntarily delegated these powers in the contract. For instance, workers might sign a contract that allows managers to require employees to submit to random drug testing or unannounced searches (American Civil Liberties Union 2017). In the United States, 18 of current employees and 37 of workers in their lifetime work under noncompete agreements (Bunker 2016). These clauses give managers legal power to forbid workers from working for competitors. The contract that the Communications Workers of America had with Verizon until 2015 included a right for managers to force employers to perform from 10 to 15 hours of overtime per week and to take some other day instead of Saturday as an off-day (Gourevitch 2016a). These legal powers are not parts of the managerial prerogatives that all employers have. Rather, they are voluntarily delegated to employers by workers. In many cases, though the delegation is in one sense voluntary, in another sense it is forced. This will especially be the case if workers, who are forced to find jobs, can only find jobs in sectors where the only contracts available are ones that require these kinds of delegations. Dependence: Finally, managers might have the material power to force employees to submit to commands or even to accept violations of their rights because of the worker’s dependence on the employer. A headline example is wage-theft, which affects American workers to the tune of $8– $14 billion per year (Eisenbray 2015; Judson and Francisco-McGuire 2012; NELP 2013; Axt 2013). In other cases, workers have been forced to wear diapers rather than go to the bathroom, refused legally required lunch breaks, or pressured to work through them, forced to keep working after their shift is up, or denied the right to read or turn on air conditioning during break (Oxfam 2015; BennettSmith 2012; Egelko 2011; Greenhouse 2009, 3– 12; Little 2013; Vega 2012). Other employers have forced their workers to stay home rather than go out on weekends or to switch churches and alter religious practices on pain of being fired and deported (Garrison, Bensinger, and Singer-Vine 2015). In these cases, employers are not exercising legal prerogatives, they are instead taking advantage of the material power that comes with threatening to fire or otherwise discipline workers. This material power to get workers to do things that employers want is in part a function of the class structure of society, both in the wide sense of workers being asymmetrically dependent on owners, and in the narrower sense of workers being legally subordinate to employers. Subordination, delegation, and dependence add up to a form of interpersonal oppression that employers and their managers have over their employees. The weight and scope of this oppression will vary, but those are variations on a theme. Employers and managers enjoy wide swaths of uncontrolled or insufficiently controlled power over their employees. This is the second face of oppression in a class society and it is a live issue. For instance, during the Verizon strike of 2016, one major complaint was that, when out on the job, hanging cable, or repairing lines, some technicians had to ask their manager for permission to go to the bathroom or to get a drink of water. As one striker said in an interview, “Do I have to tell my boss every single minute of what I am doing? This is basic human dignity” (Gourevitch 2016b). If they did not ask or wait to get clear approval from their manager, then they were guilty of a time code violation and were suspended for up to six weeks. The strike made workplace control a direct issue and one measure of its success was a change in disciplinary proceedings (ibid.). To take another example, the Fight for $15 strikes have made control over scheduling a central demand, even managing in certain states and municipalities to pass laws mandating minimal regularity and predictability in weekly schedules (Andrias 2016, 47–70). So, if the first face of oppression is that workers are forced to work for some employer or another who does not face a similar kind of forcing; the second face is that workers are forced to become de jure and de facto subordinates to a specific employer.16 The third face of oppression is the systematic distributive effects of structural and interpersonal oppression. While some instances of class-based oppression are idiosyncratic, in general it has consistent distributive effects. The structural and interpersonal oppression of workers produces wage-bargains and limits on wealth accumulation that reproduce workers’ economic dependence on employers, their over or underemployment, and thereby allows a relatively small group of owners and highly paid managers to accumulate most of the wealth and income. I cannot discuss the extensive literature on inequality. I can only cite some generally well-known facts and papers pointing to the role of inequalities in power as determining factors in these outcomes.17 To the degree that inequalities are a product of structural and workplace oppression, distributive outcomes are their own dimension of oppression and serve to reproduce those basic class relationships. Above all, there is one unjustifiable distributive effect of this oppression: that the majority of wage-bargains ensure the reproduction of that oppressive class structure. At any given point in time, a majority of workers do not earn enough to both meet their needs and to save such that they can employ themselves or start their own businesses. They must therefore remain workers or, to the degree they rise, they do so either by displacing others or by taking the structurally limited number of opportunities available.18 Each of these different faces of oppression— structural, interpersonal, and distributive—is a distinct injustice. Together they form an interrelated and mutually reinforcing set of oppressive relationships. The various ways in which workers are forced to work, made subject to dominating authority, and made asymmetrically dependent in the economy does not produce a fair way of distributing the obligation to work and the rewards of social production. Rather, it constrains their freedom in a way that secures the exploitation of one class by another. The weight of these different oppressions is unevenly experienced across different segments of workers. Various factors modify the basic facts about class and oppression. We have seen, for instance, the difference between being in a high labor supply versus a low labor supply sector. High labor supply sectors involve more intense labor competition, resulting in weaker bargaining power for workers and intensified oppression. The opposite holds for lower labor supply sectors—like software programmers or fiber-optics technicians—whose greater bargaining power means they face class-based oppression less intensively. This has downstream consequences for our analysis of particular strikes, but it does not affect the argument for the right to strike itself. My description of the economy is controversial. Some will either reject aspects of the empirical description, find it too underspecified to agree, or they will disagree with the normative interpretation of it as involving systematic, unjustified restrictions on workers’ freedom. Any attempt to give a more detailed account of this political economy of exploitation would leave no room for the rest of the argument. In what follows, the reader does not have to agree with every aspect of my description of liberal capitalist arrangements. One need only agree that the typical liberal capitalist economy is characterized by considerable, class-based oppression of workers, for reasons similar to the ones I have just provided, to then think that the right to strike can be seen as a right to resist oppression.
Strikes disrupt the codification processes enforced by the state, creating revolutionary and non-linear power that realizes the subjects affective potential and allows them to embrace active affect. Holland 12 Eugene Holland; Non-Linear Historical Materialism; Or, What is Revolutionary in Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History?; from Chapter 2 of Time and History in Deleuze and Serres (2012) (Dr. Holland is Professor and Chair of Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University.) SHS KS Political struggle thus necessarily involves two co-existent kinds of activity: on one hand, there is struggle within the axiomatic, for whatever ameliorations can be wrung from capital and/or the State through direct confrontation – and this is a mode of struggle that Deleuze and Guattari insist is perfectly valid and necessary (Deleuze et al., 1987, p. 471). On the other hand, there is the struggle to escape axiomatization and codifi cation altogether –the mode of struggle via de-coding and “ lines-of-flight ”that they in some sense prefer. What is given is always ‘ the coexistence and inseparability of that which the system conjugates, and that which never ceases to escape it following lines of flight that are themselves connectable ’ , as Deleuze andGuattari put it in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze et al., 1987, p. 473). And this connectability of lines-of-fl ight is crucial, politically. What in the fi rst volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia were called “ schizophrenic ”lines-of-fl ight are politically useless –or worse –if they do not intersect and connect up to constitute some kind of critical mass, as Deleuze andGuattari are careful to specify more clearly in the second volume. Yet even here, the conditions for such a critical mass becoming revolutionary are left somewhat vague: the slogan ‘ a new people on a new earth ’echoes throughout their collaborative work as a kind of refrain; and they do suggest that the ultimate challenge is to ‘ construct revolutionary connections over and against contre the conjugations of the axiomatic ’(Deleuze et al., 1987, p. 473). But we need to try to get clearer about just which conditions are conducive to the formation of connections among lines-of-fl ight and about how a critical mass of revolutionary connections could overcome the conjugations of the capitalist axiomatic. For insight into these questions, I propose that we return to the process with which we started: reading Capital backwards. This would mean focusing less on the power of capital accumulation than on so-called “ primitive accumulation ” , which as we saw is not really primitive but always ongoing, and not really accumulation but rather dispossession; and it would mean, like Althusser, highlighting in our considerations the non-linear conditions of reproduction rather than the linear causality of production/accumulation. And I propose that we examine in this light the key political-economic strategies of anti-capitalist struggle –and I specify “ political-economic ”strategies (those of radical syndicalism, if you will) to rule out of consideration what we might call more narrowly political strategies –state-centric or party-electoral strategies –as insuffi - ciently revolutionary. These political-economic strategies are the strike, and especially the general strike. As Walter Benjamin has very clearly noted, the general strike is distinctive in that it is non-confrontational (although he would say non-violent, which is not quite the same thing, and perhaps a little too optimistic) (Benjamin, 1978, pp. 277 – 300). In principle, a strike does not involves one power bloc directly confronting another, but rather one bloc withdrawing from its previous mode of engagement (wage-slavery) vis- à -vis the other. The same is true of the general strike, which expands the act of withdrawal to a larger scale: here we have a critical mass of workers walking away en masse from their engagement with capital. Yet from the perspective of reproduction and so-called primitive accumulation –and this is key –what the masses are walking away “ from ” –capital accumulation –is actually less important than what they are able to walk “ towards ” : rejecting capital is less important than having something sustaining and sustainable to rely on. You will recall that the crucial catalyst entailed by primitive accumulation was enforced dependence on capitalist markets: remove this catalyst, and capitalism no longer “ becomes necessary ” , to invoke Althusser once again. More important than directly confronting capital, in other words, is securing alternative means of life, an alternative mode of reproduction. Even more important: such alternatives already exist. One of the great virtues of Gibson-Graham ’ s work is to demonstrate how incomplete capitalism actually is and how many alternative economies co-exist within or beside it (Gibson-Graham, 1996; 2006). Community Supported Agriculture; the co-op movement; the Open-Source Software movement; Fair Trade –all these, and many more, constitute viable, actually existing alternatives to capitalism. And all it will take for them, in connection with others, to become revolutionary –in the specifi cally non-linear sense I am proposing –is for a critical mass of people to invest their life-activity in them, rather than in capitalist markets. We tend to think of linear revolutions as punctual: 1917, 1848 and so on –even though they probably were not. But the non-linear revolution I am talking about is even less punctual: it entails instead what I elsewhere call the strategy of the ‘ slowmotion general strike ’(Holland, forthcoming). Critical masses of people in various aspects of their life-activity just walk away from capital –having secured in advance at least the rudiments of alternative means of life. This does not have to happen all at once: but as soon as suffi cient numbers of people in enough areas of life do so, a tipping point will have been reached, a non-linear bifurcation threshold crossed, beyond which capitalism will not only no longer be necessary, it will actually become-unnecessary. As the slow-motion general strike reaches completion, that is to say, it is not just the State, but also capitalism itself that ends up withering away.
Contention 2: Strikes allows workers to use active affect to reclaim their own authority and resisting the territorializing barriers of workplaces Gourevitch 18, A. (2018). The Right to Strike: A Radical View. American Political Science Review, 1–13. doi:10.1017/s0003055418000321 (Alex Gourevitch is an Assistant Professor of Political Sci- ence, Brown University) SHS KS There is more than one way to justify the right to strike and, in so doing, to explain the shape that right ought to have. As we shall see, there is the liberal, the social- democratic, and the radical account. Any justi cation of a right must give an account not just of the interest it protects but of how that right is shaped to protect that interest. In the case of the radical argument for the right to strike, which I will defend against the other two con- ceptions, the relevant human interest is liberty. Work- ers have an interest in resisting the oppression of class society by using their collective power to reduce that oppression. Their interest is a liberty interest in a dou- ble sense. First, it is an interest in not being oppressed, or in not facing certain kinds of forcing, coercion, and subjection to authority that they shouldn’t have to. Any resistance to those kinds of unjusti ed limitations of freedom carries with it, at least implicitly, a demand for liberties not yet enjoyed.19 That is a demand for a control over portions of one’s life that one does not yet enjoy. Second, and consequently, the right to strike is grounded in an interest in using one’s own individual and collective agency to resist—or even overcome— that oppression. The interest in using one’s own agency to resist oppression ows naturally from the demand for liberties not yet enjoyed. After all, that demand for control is in the name of giving proper space to work- ers’ capacity for self-determination, which is the same capacity that expresses itself in the activity of striking for greater freedom. On this radical view, the right to strike has both an intrinsic and instrumental relation to liberty. It has in- trinsic value as an (at least implicit) demand for self- emancipation or the winning of greater liberty through one’s own efforts. It has instrumental value insofar as the strike is on the whole an effective means for resist- ing the oppressiveness of a class society. For the right to strike to enjoy its proper connection to liberty, work- ers must have a reasonable chance of carrying out an effective strike, otherwise it would lose its instrumen- tal value as a way of resisting oppression. If prevented from using a reasonable array of effective means, ex- ercising the right to strike would not be a means of reducing oppression and, therefore, strikes would also be of very limited value as acts of self-emancipation. It would not be an instance of workers attempting to use their own capacity for self-determination to increase the control they ought to have over the terms of their daily activity.
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ND - Omnipresent Affection v6
Tournament: Princeton | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Olympia OE | Judge: ethan massa, andrew lee, fabrice ettiene Affect, the ability to experience and to be experienced, is the only constitutive feature: I am experiencing my Word doc, my opponent, just as much as you are experiencing me. There is no way to escape affection. Thinking is only a feature of me and doesn’t determine the subject. Subjectivity is fluid—the only intrinsic feature of the subject is that everything is changing, thus stable subjecthood fails. Emphasis on particular aspects of subjectivity only drives division in the proletariat.
There are two kinds of affect, active and reactive— Active affect allows us to extend and compose our own boundaries whereas reactive affect only indicates our body’s ability to be affected. Embracing active affect is key to breaking free from the pervasive state mindset and instead creating spaces for resistance and radical change so that we can reform the state Thus, the standard and role of the ballot is to embrace a politics of active affect. To clarify, we reject things that reinforce stability or the majoritarian subject. Current systems of education only serve to produce majoritarian bodies that are unable to think outside the system and who become increasingly recognizable, killing the potential for any resistance. Wallins, Jason. “Deleuze and Guattari, Politics and Education.” Bloomsbur Publishing, 2014, Pgs. 119-121 SHS KS As a social machine through which ‘labour power and the socius as a whole is manufactured’, schooling figures in the production of social territories that already anticipate a certain kind of people (Guattari, 2009, p. 47). And what kind of people does orthodox schooling seek to produce but a ‘molar public’, or, rather, a public regulated in the abstract image of segmentary social categories (age, gender, ethnicity, class, rank, achievement) (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987)? Such an aspiration is intimately wed to the territorializing powers of the State, for as Deleuze and Guattari argue (1983), State power first requires a ‘representational subject’ as both an abstract and unconscious model in relation to which one is taught to desire. As Massumi (2002) writes, ‘the subject is made to be in conformity with the systems that produces it, such that the subject reproduces the system’ (p. 6). Where education has historically functioned to regulate institutional life according to such segmentary molar codes, its modes of production have taken as their teleological goal the production of a ‘majoritarian people’, or, more accurately, a people circuited to their representational self-similarity according to State thought. This is, in part, the threat that Aoki (2005) identifies in the planned curriculum and its projection of an abstract essentialism upon a diversity of concrete educational assemblages (a school, a class, a curriculum, etc.). Apropos Deleuze, Aoki argues that the standardization of education has effectively reduced difference to a matter of difference in degree. That is, in reference to the stratifying power of the planned curriculum, Aoki avers that difference is always-already linked to an abstract image to which pedagogy ought to aspire and in conformity to which its operations become recognizable as ‘education’ per se. Against political action then, orthodox educational thought conceptualizes social life alongside the ‘categories of the Negative’, eschewing difference for conformity, flows for unities, mobile arrangements for totalizing systems (Foucault, 1983, p. xiii). Twisting Deleuze, might we claim that the people are missing in education? That is, where education aspires to invest desire in the production of a ‘majoritarian’ or ‘molar’ public, the prospect of thinking singularities are stayed, not only through the paucity of enunciatory forms and images available for thinking education in the first place, but further, through the organization of the school’s enunciatory machines into vehicles of representation that repeat in molarizing forms of self-reflection, ‘majoritarian’ perspective, and dominant circuits of desiring-investment. Herein, the impulse of standardization obliterates alternative subject formations and the modes of counter-signifying enunciation that might palpate them. Repelling the singular, the ‘majoritarian’ and standardizing impulse of education takes as its ‘fundamental’ mode of production the reification of common sense, or, rather, the territorialization of thought according to that which is given (that which everyone already knows). Figuring in a mode ‘of identification that brings diversity in general to bear upon the form of the Same’, common sense functions to stabilize patterns of social production by tethering them to molar orders of meaning and dominant regimes of social signification (Deleuze, 1990, p. 78). As Daignault argues, in so far as it repels the anomalous by reterritorializing it within prior systems of representation, common sense constitutes a significant and lingering problem in contemporary education (Hwu, 2004). Its function, Daignault alludes apropos Serres, is oriented to the annihilation of difference. Hence, where the conceptualization of ‘public’ education is founded in common sense, potentials for political action through tactics of proliferation, disjunction, and singularization are radically delimited and captured within prior territorialities of use (Foucault, 1983, p. xiii). The problem of this scenario is clear: common sense has yet to force us to think in a manner capable of subtracting desire from majoritarian thought in lieu of alternative forms of organization and experimental expression. In so far as it functions as a vehicle of ‘molarization’, reifying a common universe of reference for enunciation, the school fails to produce conditions for thinking in a manner that is not already anticipated by such referential ‘possibilities’. Hence, while antithetical to the espoused purpose of schooling, the majoritarian impulse of the school has yet to produce conditions for thinking – at least in the Deleuzian (2000) sense whereupon thought proceeds from a necessary violence to those habits of repetition with which thought becomes contracted. Prefer additionally: 1 Active affect is able to organize to undermine static structures, whereas reactive affect becomes coopted and utilized by the state to ceaselessly destroy and form strict confines for identity and being — the aff is a form of negative state action where we sap power from conventionally oppressive institutions Robinson 10 Andre; Ceasefire; “Why Deleuze (still) matters: States, war-machines and radical transformation”; https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-deleuze-war-machine/; political theorist; LCA-BP So what, in Deleuzian theory, is the alternative to the state? Deleuze and Guattari argue for a type of assemblage (social group or cluster of relations) which they refer to as the ‘war-machine’, though with the proviso that certain kinds of ‘war-machines’ can also be captured and used by states. This should not be considered a militarist theory, and the term ‘war-machine’ is in many respects misleading. It is used because Deleuze and Guattari derive their theory from Pierre Clastres’ theory of the role of ritualised (often non-lethal) warfare among indigenous groups. Paul Patton has suggested that the war-machine would be better called a metamorphosis-machine, others have used the term ‘difference engine’, a machine of differentiation, and there is a lot of overlap with the idea of autonomous groups or movements in how the war-machine is theorised. We should also remember that ‘machine’ in Deleuze and Guattari simply refers to a combination of forces or elements; it does not have overtones of instrumentalism or of mindless mechanisms – a social group, an ecosystem, a knight on horseback are all ‘machines’. The term ‘war-machine’ has the unfortunate connotations of brutal military machinery and of uncontrollable militarist apparatuses such as NATO, which operate with a machine-like rigidity and inhumanity (c.f. the phrase ‘military-industrial complex’). For Deleuze and Guattari, these kinds of statist war-machines are also war-machines of a sort, because they descend from a historical process through which states ‘captured’ or incorporated autonomous social movements (particularly those of nomadic indigenous societies) and made them part of the state so as to contain their subversive power. Early states learned to capture war-machines because they were previously vulnerable to being destroyed by the war-machines of nomadic stateless societies, having no similar means of response. Hence, armies are a kind of hybrid social form, containing some of the power of autonomous war-machines but contained in such a way as to harness it to state instrumentalism and inhumanity. Captured in this way, war-machines lose their affirmative force, becoming simply machines of purposeless destruction – having lost the purpose of deterritorialisation (see below), they take on the purpose of pure war as a goal in itself. Deleuze and Guattari argue that state-captured war-machines are regaining their autonomy in a dangerous way, tending to replace limited war in the service of a state’s goals with a drive to total war. This drive is expressed for instance in the ‘war on terror’ as permanent state of emergency. There was a recent controversy about Israeli strategists adopting Deleuzian ideas, which reflects the continuities between state war-machines and autonomous war-machines, but depends on a selective conceptual misreading in which the drive to total war denounced by Deleuze and Guattari is explicitly valorised. The Israeli army is a captured war-machine in the worst possible sense, pursuing the destruction of others’ existential territories in order to accumulate destructive power for a state. For Deleuze and Guattari, it is not the Israeli army but the Palestinian resistance which is a war-machine in the full sense. The autonomous war-machine, as opposed to the state-captured war-machine, is a form of social assemblage directed against the state, and against the coalescence of sovereignty. They way such machines undermine the state is by exercising diffuse power to break down concentrated power, and through the replacement of ‘striated’ (regulated, marked) space with ‘smooth’ space (although the war-machine is the ‘constituent element of smooth space’, I shall save discussion of smooth space for some other time). In Clastres’ account of Amazonian societies, on which Deleuze and Guattari’s theory is based, this is done by means of each band defending its own autonomy, and reacting to any potential accumulation of power by other bands. One could similarly think of how neighbourhood gangs resist subordination by rival gangs, or how autonomous social movements resist concentrations of political power. Autonomous social movements, such as the European squatters’ movement, the Zapatistas, and networks of protest against summits, are the principal example Deleuze and Guattari have in mind of war-machines in the global North, though they also use the concept in relation to Southern guerrilla and popular movements such as the Palestinian intifada and the Vietnamese resistance to American occupation, and also in relation to everyday practices of indigenous groups resisting state control. One could also argue that the ‘war-machine’ is implicit in practices of everyday resistance of the kind studies by James Scott. Marginal groups, termed ‘minorities’ in Deleuzian theory, often coalesce as war-machines because the state-form is inappropriate for them.
2. The aff is key to adopt and test new resistance for students as contemporary pedagogical sites – operating internally is essential to hearing from multiple perspectives and forming new affective relations Manning and Massumi 18 Erin and Brian; “A Cryptoeconomy of Affect”; interviewed by Uriah Todoroff for The New Inquiry; Massumi is known for his translations of French post-structuralist classics like Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987); Manning is a prolific author whose last published book was The Minor Gesture (2016). They work together at the SenseLab in Montreal, a research laboratory Manning created to experiment with collective pedagogy. The lab provides a base for intellectual and creative activity that is intended to spin off into projects that grow or die according to their own momentum.; https://thenewinquiry.com/a-cryptoeconomy-of-affect/; BP There are people all over the world we don’t know who are doing this kind of work, who are creating ways of working together, inventing new forms of collaboration, engaging with complex ecological models of encounter, who are inventing new forms of value. We never believe we are alone doing this work. The question we have isn’t the usual start-up question of how to scale up, it’s how do we create techniques for the registering of that which doesn’t register? The 3E Process Seed Bank is deeply allied to the question of what else learning and living can be, having grown out of its sister project the Three Ecologies Institute. We actually began there, with the Three Ecologies Institute, working from Félix Guattari’s definition of the three ecologies as the conceptual (psychic, mental), the environmental, and the social. It was only two years ago that we realized that thinking value transversally across the three ecologies required us to also take financial value into account. We see the 3E as a kind of intensifier of modes of thinking and living dedicated to inventing ways that we can continue to learn together, regardless of our age, background, or learning style. We don’t see it as an opposite to the university; we see it as a parasite. You could put the emphasis on the site: a para-site, a para-institution that maintains relations with the institution of the university but operates by a different logic. It would be very naive of us to think you could just walk out of capitalism. We’re not that naive. Neoliberalism is our natural environment. We therefore operate with what we call strategic duplicity. This involves recognizing what works in the systems we work against. Which means: We don’t just oppose them head on. We work with them, strategically, while nurturing an alien logic that moves in very different directions. One of the things we know that the university does well is that it attracts really interesting people. The university can facilitate meetings that can change lives. But systemically, it fails. And the systemic failure is getting more and more acute. And so what we imagine is that the Institute, assisted by the 3E Process Seed Bank, will create a new space that might overlap with some of the things the university does well, without being a part of it (or being subsumed by its logic). MASSUMI.— Going back to the question of value, we want to create an economy around the platform that does not follow any of the usual economic principles. There will be no individual ownership or shares. There will be no units of account, no currency or tokens used internally. The model of activity will not be transactional. Individual interest will not be used as an incentivizer. What there will be is a complex space of relation for people to create intensities of experience together, in emergent excess over what they could have created working separately, or in traditional teams. It’s meant to be self-organizing, with no separate administrative structure or hierarchy, and even no formal decision-making rules. It’s anarchistic in that sense, but through mobilizing a surplus of organizing potential, rather than lacking organization. You could also call it communistic, in the sense that there is no individual value holding. Everything is common. MANNING.— Undercommon. MASSUMI.— Yes, undercommonly. The undercommons is Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s word for emergent collectivity, which is one of our inspirations. We want to foster emergence and process, but at the same time find ways of making it sustainable. That means that the strategic duplicity has to extend to the economy as we currently know it. We have to be parasitical to the capitalist economy, while operating according to a logic that is totally alien to it. What we’re thinking of is making the collaborative process moving through the platform function according to the radically anti-capitalist principles we were just talking about, centering on the collective production of surplus values of life, and separating that from the dominant economy by a membrane. A membrane creates a separation, but at the same time allows for movements across. It has a certain porosity. The idea is that we would find ways, associated with the affect-o-meter we were describing earlier, to register qualitative shifts in the creative process as it moves over its formative thresholds, and moves back and forth between online operations and offline events. What would be registered is the affective intensity of the production of surplus value of life, its ebbs and flows. The membrane would consist in a translation of those qualitative flows into a numerical expression, which would feed into a cryptocurrency. Basically, we’d be mining crypto with collaborative creative energies—monetizing emergent collectivity. The currency would be “backed” by the confidence we could build in our ability to keep the creative process going and spin it off into other projects, as evidenced by the activities of the Three Ecologies Institute as an experiment in alter-education. This proves strategies of subversion and infiltration lead to movements that won’t be coopted- serve as red herrings. Offense Thus, I affirm—Resolved: A just government ought to recognize an unconditional right of workers to strike. I’ll defend the resolution as a general principle and PICS don’t negate because general principles tolerate exceptions. I’ll spec whatever you want me to in cx as long as it doesn’t force me to abandon my maximum.
Contention 1: Oppression staticizes subjects as “workers” creating an interlocking effects that prevent fluidity to become more than a worker Gourevitch 18 Alex Gourevitch is an associate professor political science at Brown University. “The Right to Strike: A Radical View.” 2018. American Political Science Review. https://sci-hub.se/10.1017/s0003055418000321 THE FACTS OF OPPRESSION IN TYPICAL LIBERAL CAPITALIST SOCIETIES To explain why the right to strike is a right to resist oppression, I first must give an account of the relevant oppression. Oppression is the unjustifiable deprivation of freedom. Some deprivations or restrictions of freedom are justified and therefore do not count as oppression. The oppression that matters for this article is the class-based oppression of a typical liberal capitalist society. By the class-based oppression, I mean the fact that the majority of able-bodied people find themselves forced to work for members of a relatively small group who dominate control over productive assets and who, thereby, enjoy unjustifiable control over the activities and products of those workers. There are workers and then there are owners and their managers. The facts I refer to here are mostly drawn from the United States to keep a consistent description of a specific society. While there is meaningful variation across liberal capitalist nations, the basic facts of class-based oppression do not change in a way that vitiates my argument’s applicability to those countries too. Empirical analysis of each country to which the argument applies, and how it would apply, is a separate project. The first element of oppression in a class society resides in the fact that (a) there are some who are forced into the labor market while others are not and (b) those who are forced to work—workers—have to work for those who own productive resources. Workers are forced into the labor market because they have no reasonable alternative but to find a job.8 They cannot produce necessary goods for themselves, nor can they rely on the charity of others, nor can they count on adequate state benefits. The only way most people can gain reliable access to necessary goods is by buying them. The most reliable, often only, way most people have of acquiring enough money to buy those goods is through employment. That is the sense in which they have no reasonable alternative but to find a job working for an employer. Depending on how we measure income and wealth, about 60–80 of Americans are in this situation for most of their adult lives.9 This forcing is not symmetrical. A significant minority is not similarly forced to work for someone else, though they might do so freely. That minority has enough wealth, either inherited or accumulated or both, that they have a reasonable alternative to entering the labor market. So, this first dimension of oppression comes not from the fact that some are forced to work, but from the fact that the forcing is unequal and that asymmetry means some are forced to work for others.10 That is to say, what makes it oppressive is the wrong of unequally forcing the majority to work, for whatever purpose, while others face no such forcing at all.11 That way of organizing and distributing coercive work obligations, and of imposing certain kinds of forcing on workers, is an unjustifiable way of limiting their freedom and therefore oppressive. To fix ideas, I call this the structural element of oppression in class societies. 8 For a fuller analysis of workers being asymmetrically forced to work, or forced into particular occupations see Cohen (1988a,1988b), Ezorsky (2007), and Stanczyk (unpublished). These are primarily analytic descriptions of forcing, not normative analyses of what is wrong with that forcing. 9 For the 60–80 statistic, see Henwood (2005, 125). The statistics on wealth among the lower deciles is complex. A recent study shows that the net wealth of the bottom 50 is roughly 0. So at least 50 of US households are forced to use job-related income to meet annual expenses, though that has to be modified for those who receive (insufficient to live on) welfare benefits (Saez and Zucman 2014; Wolff 2012). 10 To be clear, the oppression here is not with any and all unequal and asymmetric forcing but with the inequality that arises from the class structure of society. For instance, it is not oppressive nor an unjust constraint on individual freedom, to force the able-bodied to do some work to support the disabled, children, the sick, the elderly, or the otherwise socially dependent who cannot perform a share of necessary labor. Though even there, there is some presumption that that burden of working for those who cannot work should be shared equally, and that individuals should not be forced to work for any purpose and under any conditions whatsoever. What I am describing as oppression is not the very fact that some work and others don’t, but the inequality and asymmetry that arises from the inequalities in ownership and control. This forcing is unequal in that some ablebodied—and even some who by all rights should not have to work at all—are forced to work while other able-bodied individuals are not forced to work. And it is asymmetric in that those who have to work are, on the whole, forced to work for those who hire them, under conditions controlled primarily by employers. This structural element leads to a second, interpersonal dimension of oppression in the workplace itself. Workers are forced to join workplaces typically characterized by large swathes of uncontrolled managerial power and authority. This oppression is interpersonal in the sense that it is power that specific individuals— employers and their managers—have to get other specific individuals—employees—to do what they want. We can distinguish between three overlapping forms that this interpersonal, workplace oppression takes: subordination, delegation, and dependence. Subordination: Employers have what are sometimes called “managerial prerogatives,”12 which are legislative and judicial grants of authority to owners and their managers to make decisions about investment, hiring and firing, plant location, work process, and the like.13 These powers come from judicial precedent and from the constellation of corporate, labor, contract, and property law. Managers may change working speeds and assigned tasks, the hours of work, or even force workers to spend up to an hour going through security lines after work without paying them (Integrity Staffing Solutions, Inc. v. Busk 2014). Managers may fire workers for Facebook comments, their sexual orientation, for being too sexually appealing, or for not being appealing enough (Emerson 2011; Hess 2013; Strauss 2013; Velasco 2011). Workers may be given more tasks than can be performed in the allotted time, locked in the workplace overnight, required to work in extreme heat and other physically hazardous conditions, or punitively isolated from other coworkers (Greenhouse 2009, 26–27, 49–55, 89, 111–112; Hsu 2011; JOMO 2013; Urbina 2013). Managers may pressure employees into unwanted political behavior (HertelFernandez 2015). In all of these cases, managers are exercising legally permitted prerogatives.14 The law does not require that workers have any formal say in how those powers are exercised. In fact, in nearly every liberal capitalist country, employees are defined, in law, as “subordinates.”15 This is subordination in the strict sense: workers are subject to the will of the employer. Delegation: There are also other discretionary legal powers that managers have not by legal statute or precedent but because workers have voluntarily delegated these powers in the contract. For instance, workers might sign a contract that allows managers to require employees to submit to random drug testing or unannounced searches (American Civil Liberties Union 2017). In the United States, 18 of current employees and 37 of workers in their lifetime work under noncompete agreements (Bunker 2016). These clauses give managers legal power to forbid workers from working for competitors. The contract that the Communications Workers of America had with Verizon until 2015 included a right for managers to force employers to perform from 10 to 15 hours of overtime per week and to take some other day instead of Saturday as an off-day (Gourevitch 2016a). These legal powers are not parts of the managerial prerogatives that all employers have. Rather, they are voluntarily delegated to employers by workers. In many cases, though the delegation is in one sense voluntary, in another sense it is forced. This will especially be the case if workers, who are forced to find jobs, can only find jobs in sectors where the only contracts available are ones that require these kinds of delegations. Dependence: Finally, managers might have the material power to force employees to submit to commands or even to accept violations of their rights because of the worker’s dependence on the employer. A headline example is wage-theft, which affects American workers to the tune of $8– $14 billion per year (Eisenbray 2015; Judson and Francisco-McGuire 2012; NELP 2013; Axt 2013). In other cases, workers have been forced to wear diapers rather than go to the bathroom, refused legally required lunch breaks, or pressured to work through them, forced to keep working after their shift is up, or denied the right to read or turn on air conditioning during break (Oxfam 2015; BennettSmith 2012; Egelko 2011; Greenhouse 2009, 3– 12; Little 2013; Vega 2012). Other employers have forced their workers to stay home rather than go out on weekends or to switch churches and alter religious practices on pain of being fired and deported (Garrison, Bensinger, and Singer-Vine 2015). In these cases, employers are not exercising legal prerogatives, they are instead taking advantage of the material power that comes with threatening to fire or otherwise discipline workers. This material power to get workers to do things that employers want is in part a function of the class structure of society, both in the wide sense of workers being asymmetrically dependent on owners, and in the narrower sense of workers being legally subordinate to employers. Subordination, delegation, and dependence add up to a form of interpersonal oppression that employers and their managers have over their employees. The weight and scope of this oppression will vary, but those are variations on a theme. Employers and managers enjoy wide swaths of uncontrolled or insufficiently controlled power over their employees. This is the second face of oppression in a class society and it is a live issue. For instance, during the Verizon strike of 2016, one major complaint was that, when out on the job, hanging cable, or repairing lines, some technicians had to ask their manager for permission to go to the bathroom or to get a drink of water. As one striker said in an interview, “Do I have to tell my boss every single minute of what I am doing? This is basic human dignity” (Gourevitch 2016b). If they did not ask or wait to get clear approval from their manager, then they were guilty of a time code violation and were suspended for up to six weeks. The strike made workplace control a direct issue and one measure of its success was a change in disciplinary proceedings (ibid.). To take another example, the Fight for $15 strikes have made control over scheduling a central demand, even managing in certain states and municipalities to pass laws mandating minimal regularity and predictability in weekly schedules (Andrias 2016, 47–70). So, if the first face of oppression is that workers are forced to work for some employer or another who does not face a similar kind of forcing; the second face is that workers are forced to become de jure and de facto subordinates to a specific employer.16 The third face of oppression is the systematic distributive effects of structural and interpersonal oppression. While some instances of class-based oppression are idiosyncratic, in general it has consistent distributive effects. The structural and interpersonal oppression of workers produces wage-bargains and limits on wealth accumulation that reproduce workers’ economic dependence on employers, their over or underemployment, and thereby allows a relatively small group of owners and highly paid managers to accumulate most of the wealth and income. I cannot discuss the extensive literature on inequality. I can only cite some generally well-known facts and papers pointing to the role of inequalities in power as determining factors in these outcomes.17 To the degree that inequalities are a product of structural and workplace oppression, distributive outcomes are their own dimension of oppression and serve to reproduce those basic class relationships. Above all, there is one unjustifiable distributive effect of this oppression: that the majority of wage-bargains ensure the reproduction of that oppressive class structure. At any given point in time, a majority of workers do not earn enough to both meet their needs and to save such that they can employ themselves or start their own businesses. They must therefore remain workers or, to the degree they rise, they do so either by displacing others or by taking the structurally limited number of opportunities available.18 Each of these different faces of oppression— structural, interpersonal, and distributive—is a distinct injustice. Together they form an interrelated and mutually reinforcing set of oppressive relationships. The various ways in which workers are forced to work, made subject to dominating authority, and made asymmetrically dependent in the economy does not produce a fair way of distributing the obligation to work and the rewards of social production. Rather, it constrains their freedom in a way that secures the exploitation of one class by another. The weight of these different oppressions is unevenly experienced across different segments of workers. Various factors modify the basic facts about class and oppression. We have seen, for instance, the difference between being in a high labor supply versus a low labor supply sector. High labor supply sectors involve more intense labor competition, resulting in weaker bargaining power for workers and intensified oppression. The opposite holds for lower labor supply sectors—like software programmers or fiber-optics technicians—whose greater bargaining power means they face class-based oppression less intensively. This has downstream consequences for our analysis of particular strikes, but it does not affect the argument for the right to strike itself. My description of the economy is controversial. Some will either reject aspects of the empirical description, find it too underspecified to agree, or they will disagree with the normative interpretation of it as involving systematic, unjustified restrictions on workers’ freedom. Any attempt to give a more detailed account of this political economy of exploitation would leave no room for the rest of the argument. In what follows, the reader does not have to agree with every aspect of my description of liberal capitalist arrangements. One need only agree that the typical liberal capitalist economy is characterized by considerable, class-based oppression of workers, for reasons similar to the ones I have just provided, to then think that the right to strike can be seen as a right to resist oppression.
Strikes disrupt the codification processes enforced by the state, creating revolutionary and non-linear power that realizes the subjects affective potential and allows them to embrace active affect. Holland 12 Eugene Holland; Non-Linear Historical Materialism; Or, What is Revolutionary in Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History?; from Chapter 2 of Time and History in Deleuze and Serres (2012) (Dr. Holland is Professor and Chair of Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University.) SHS KS Political struggle thus necessarily involves two co-existent kinds of activity: on one hand, there is struggle within the axiomatic, for whatever ameliorations can be wrung from capital and/or the State through direct confrontation – and this is a mode of struggle that Deleuze and Guattari insist is perfectly valid and necessary (Deleuze et al., 1987, p. 471). On the other hand, there is the struggle to escape axiomatization and codifi cation altogether –the mode of struggle via de-coding and “ lines-of-flight ”that they in some sense prefer. What is given is always ‘ the coexistence and inseparability of that which the system conjugates, and that which never ceases to escape it following lines of flight that are themselves connectable ’ , as Deleuze andGuattari put it in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze et al., 1987, p. 473). And this connectability of lines-of-fl ight is crucial, politically. What in the fi rst volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia were called “ schizophrenic ”lines-of-fl ight are politically useless –or worse –if they do not intersect and connect up to constitute some kind of critical mass, as Deleuze andGuattari are careful to specify more clearly in the second volume. Yet even here, the conditions for such a critical mass becoming revolutionary are left somewhat vague: the slogan ‘ a new people on a new earth ’echoes throughout their collaborative work as a kind of refrain; and they do suggest that the ultimate challenge is to ‘ construct revolutionary connections over and against contre the conjugations of the axiomatic ’(Deleuze et al., 1987, p. 473). But we need to try to get clearer about just which conditions are conducive to the formation of connections among lines-of-fl ight and about how a critical mass of revolutionary connections could overcome the conjugations of the capitalist axiomatic. For insight into these questions, I propose that we return to the process with which we started: reading Capital backwards. This would mean focusing less on the power of capital accumulation than on so-called “ primitive accumulation ” , which as we saw is not really primitive but always ongoing, and not really accumulation but rather dispossession; and it would mean, like Althusser, highlighting in our considerations the non-linear conditions of reproduction rather than the linear causality of production/accumulation. And I propose that we examine in this light the key political-economic strategies of anti-capitalist struggle –and I specify “ political-economic ”strategies (those of radical syndicalism, if you will) to rule out of consideration what we might call more narrowly political strategies –state-centric or party-electoral strategies –as insuffi - ciently revolutionary. These political-economic strategies are the strike, and especially the general strike. As Walter Benjamin has very clearly noted, the general strike is distinctive in that it is non-confrontational (although he would say non-violent, which is not quite the same thing, and perhaps a little too optimistic) (Benjamin, 1978, pp. 277 – 300). In principle, a strike does not involves one power bloc directly confronting another, but rather one bloc withdrawing from its previous mode of engagement (wage-slavery) vis- à -vis the other. The same is true of the general strike, which expands the act of withdrawal to a larger scale: here we have a critical mass of workers walking away en masse from their engagement with capital. Yet from the perspective of reproduction and so-called primitive accumulation –and this is key –what the masses are walking away “ from ” –capital accumulation –is actually less important than what they are able to walk “ towards ” : rejecting capital is less important than having something sustaining and sustainable to rely on. You will recall that the crucial catalyst entailed by primitive accumulation was enforced dependence on capitalist markets: remove this catalyst, and capitalism no longer “ becomes necessary ” , to invoke Althusser once again. More important than directly confronting capital, in other words, is securing alternative means of life, an alternative mode of reproduction. Even more important: such alternatives already exist. One of the great virtues of Gibson-Graham ’ s work is to demonstrate how incomplete capitalism actually is and how many alternative economies co-exist within or beside it (Gibson-Graham, 1996; 2006). Community Supported Agriculture; the co-op movement; the Open-Source Software movement; Fair Trade –all these, and many more, constitute viable, actually existing alternatives to capitalism. And all it will take for them, in connection with others, to become revolutionary –in the specifi cally non-linear sense I am proposing –is for a critical mass of people to invest their life-activity in them, rather than in capitalist markets. We tend to think of linear revolutions as punctual: 1917, 1848 and so on –even though they probably were not. But the non-linear revolution I am talking about is even less punctual: it entails instead what I elsewhere call the strategy of the ‘ slowmotion general strike ’(Holland, forthcoming). Critical masses of people in various aspects of their life-activity just walk away from capital –having secured in advance at least the rudiments of alternative means of life. This does not have to happen all at once: but as soon as suffi cient numbers of people in enough areas of life do so, a tipping point will have been reached, a non-linear bifurcation threshold crossed, beyond which capitalism will not only no longer be necessary, it will actually become-unnecessary. As the slow-motion general strike reaches completion, that is to say, it is not just the State, but also capitalism itself that ends up withering away.
12/5/21
SO - Deleuze
Tournament: Mid America Cup | Round: 2 | Opponent: Strake EP | Judge: Bella Nadel Subjectivity is the basis of ethics because asking what we ought to do begs the question of what constitutes the subject in the first place The subject is fundamentally unstable: every aspect is in constant flux due to things like time. Personal evolution proves this - I’m not the same person I was 5 years ago. Furthermore, subjects are always experiencing relation, which itself changes. For example, your relationship to your parents shifts based on your ages. Affect, the ability to experience and to be experienced, is the only constitutive feature: I am experiencing my Word doc, my opponent, just as much as you are experiencing me. There is no way to escape affection. Thinking is only a feature of me and doesn’t determine the subject. Subjectivity is fluid—the only intrinsic feature of the subject is that everything is changing, thus stable subjecthood fails. There are two kinds of affect, active and reactive— Active affect allows us to extend and compose our own boundaries whereas reactive affect only indicates our body’s ability to be affected. Embracing active affect is key to breaking free from the pervasive state mindset and instead creating spaces for resistance and radical change so that we can reform the state K and R 13 Karatzogianni, Athina and Robinson, Andy. “Schizorevolutions vs. Microfascisms: A Deleuzo-Nietzchean Perspective on State, Security, and Active/Reactive Networks.” University of Leicester, . 2013. SHS KS The impulse to condemn deviance, resistance and insurrection is disturbingly strong in academia, and doubtless strengthened by revulsion against network terror. Yet this networked rebellion of the excluded is the key to hopes for a better world. In the spiral of terror between states and movements, it is important to recognise that the source is the state and the weak point is in the movements. In today’s social war, the Other is not even accorded the honour of being an enemy in a fair fight. As long as social conflicts are seen through a statist frame, social war is doomed to continue, because discursive exclusion produces social war as its underside, and renders resistance both necessary and justified. The cycle of terror starts with the state: its terror at an existential level of losing control and fixity. This terrified state produces state terror and thereby creates the conditions for movement terror. It is naive to look for a way out from this side of the equation. State terror can end only when the state, both accepts the proliferation of networks beyond its control, and adopts a more humble role for itself, or when it collapses or is destroyed. On the other side, we should find hope in the proliferation of resistance among the excluded. We need to see in movements of the excluded the radical potential and not only the reactive distortions. To take Tupac Shakur’s metaphor, we need to see the rose that grows from concrete, not merely the thorns. The problem is, rather, that many of the movements on the network side of the equation are still thinking, seeing and feeling like states. Such movements are potential bearers of the Other of the state-form, of networks as alternatives to states, affinity against hegemony, abundance against scarcity. The question thus becomes how they can learn to valorise what they are -- autonomous affinity-networks -- rather than internalising majoritarian norms. For instance, in terms of the impact of technosocial transformations on agency, the negotiation of ideology, order of dissent in relation to capitalism as a social code, remains hostage to labor processes and to thick identities of local/regional or national interests, which fail to move contemporary movements to an active affinity to a common humanity and a pragmatic solution for an ethical, non exploitative form of production (Karatzogianni and Schandorf, 2012). Here the exception may like in the global justice movements and Occupy, although still here the discourse remains often in reactive mode, due to state crackdowns experienced by the movements. There is a great need to find ways to energise hope against fear. Hope as an active force can be counterposed to the reactive power of fear. People are not in fact powerless, but are made to feel powerless by the pervasiveness of the dominant social fantasy and of separation. This yields a temptation to fall back on the power of ‘the powerful’, those who gain a kind of distorted agency through alienation. But powerlessness and constituted power are both effects of alienation, which can be broken down by creating affinity-network forms of life. An emotional shift can thus be enough to revolutionise subjectivities. Hence, as Vaneigem argues, ‘to work for delight and authentic festivity is barely distinguishable from preparing for a general insurrection’ (Vaneigem 1967: 50-1). It has been argued in utopian studies that fear and hope form part of a coxntinuum, expressing ‘aspects of affective ambivalence’ connected to the indeterminacy of the future (McManus 2005). The type of hope needed is active and immanent, brought into the present as a propulsive force rather than deferred to the future. Deleuze and Guattari use the term ‘absolute deterritorialisation’ for this possibility. In his work on conflict transformation, John Paul Lederach emphasises the need to turn negative energies into creative energies and mobilising hope against fear (Lederach and Maiese, n.d.: 2-3; Lederach, 2005). How is this change in vital energies to be accomplished? Deleuze and Guattari invoke a figure of the shaman as a way to overcome reactive energies (1983: 167-8). They call for a type of revolutionary social movement ‘that follows the lines of escape of desire; breaches the wall and causes flows to move; assembles its machines and its groups-in-fusion in the enclaves or at the periphery’, countering reactive energies (ibid. 277). In looking at how this might operate in practice, let us examine briefly the Colombian feminist anti-militarist group La Ruta Pacifica de las Mujeres. In particular, the aspects of social weaving and collective mourning prominent in their methodology are crucial forms of creative shamanism, which turns fear into hope. Their approach involves ‘the deconstruction of the pervasive symbolism of violence and war and the substitution of a new visual and textual language and creative rituals’ (Cockburn, 2005: 14; Brouwer, 2008: 62). Weaving as a metaphor refers to social recomposition, the reconstruction of affinity; being ‘bound’ through social weaving is believed to control fear. It is taken as a way to counter everyday violence on the frontlines of the ‘war on terror’. Rituals of mourning and weaving are believed by participants to disarm the armed and create invisible connections among participants (Colorado, 2003). La Ruta seek to create new combinations of cognitive and emotional elements strong enough to disrupt dominant monologues (Cockburn, 2005: 14). Weaving reconstructs social connections and life-cycles, and thereby enhances wellbeing (ibid. 15). Participants recount inner strength and physical recovery as effects of such rituals (Brouwer, 2008: 85). Hence, it is in open spaces, safe spaces, and spaces of dialogue that hope can be found to counter the spiral of terror. This opening of space, this creation of autonomous zones, should be viewed as a break with the majoritarian logics of social control. The coming ‘other worlds’ counterposed to the spaces of terror are not an integrated ‘new order’, but rather, a proliferation of smooth spaces in a horizontality without borders. These ‘other worlds’ are being built unconsciously, wherever networks, affinity and hope counterpose themselves to state terror and the desire for fixed identity be it national, ethnic, religious or cultural. It is in the incommensurable antagonism between the autonomous zones of these ‘other worlds’ and the terror state’s demands for controlled spaces to serve capital, that the nexus of the conflicts of the present and near-future lies. And interestingly, there is also a certain active/reactive difference between state responses in the Turkey and Brazil protests of June 2013.
Active affect is able to organize to undermine static structures, whereas reactive affect becomes coopted and utilized by the state to ceaselessly destroy and form strict confines for identity and being — the aff is a form of negative state action where we reduce the powers of conventionally oppressive institutions Robinson 10 Andre; Ceasefire; “Why Deleuze (still) matters: States, war-machines and radical transformation”; https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-deleuze-war-machine/; political theorist; LCA-BP So what, in Deleuzian theory, is the alternative to the state? Deleuze and Guattari argue for a type of assemblage (social group or cluster of relations) which they refer to as the ‘war-machine’, though with the proviso that certain kinds of ‘war-machines’ can also be captured and used by states. This should not be considered a militarist theory, and the term ‘war-machine’ is in many respects misleading. It is used because Deleuze and Guattari derive their theory from Pierre Clastres’ theory of the role of ritualised (often non-lethal) warfare among indigenous groups. Paul Patton has suggested that the war-machine would be better called a metamorphosis-machine, others have used the term ‘difference engine’, a machine of differentiation, and there is a lot of overlap with the idea of autonomous groups or movements in how the war-machine is theorised. We should also remember that ‘machine’ in Deleuze and Guattari simply refers to a combination of forces or elements; it does not have overtones of instrumentalism or of mindless mechanisms – a social group, an ecosystem, a knight on horseback are all ‘machines’. The term ‘war-machine’ has the unfortunate connotations of brutal military machinery and of uncontrollable militarist apparatuses such as NATO, which operate with a machine-like rigidity and inhumanity (c.f. the phrase ‘military-industrial complex’). For Deleuze and Guattari, these kinds of statist war-machines are also war-machines of a sort, because they descend from a historical process through which states ‘captured’ or incorporated autonomous social movements (particularly those of nomadic indigenous societies) and made them part of the state so as to contain their subversive power. Early states learned to capture war-machines because they were previously vulnerable to being destroyed by the war-machines of nomadic stateless societies, having no similar means of response. Hence, armies are a kind of hybrid social form, containing some of the power of autonomous war-machines but contained in such a way as to harness it to state instrumentalism and inhumanity. Captured in this way, war-machines lose their affirmative force, becoming simply machines of purposeless destruction – having lost the purpose of deterritorialisation (see below), they take on the purpose of pure war as a goal in itself. Deleuze and Guattari argue that state-captured war-machines are regaining their autonomy in a dangerous way, tending to replace limited war in the service of a state’s goals with a drive to total war. This drive is expressed for instance in the ‘war on terror’ as permanent state of emergency. There was a recent controversy about Israeli strategists adopting Deleuzian ideas, which reflects the continuities between state war-machines and autonomous war-machines, but depends on a selective conceptual misreading in which the drive to total war denounced by Deleuze and Guattari is explicitly valorised. The Israeli army is a captured war-machine in the worst possible sense, pursuing the destruction of others’ existential territories in order to accumulate destructive power for a state. For Deleuze and Guattari, it is not the Israeli army but the Palestinian resistance which is a war-machine in the full sense. The autonomous war-machine, as opposed to the state-captured war-machine, is a form of social assemblage directed against the state, and against the coalescence of sovereignty. The way such machines undermine the state is by exercising diffuse power to break down concentrated power, and through the replacement of ‘striated’ (regulated, marked) space with ‘smooth’ space (although the war-machine is the ‘constituent element of smooth space’, I shall save discussion of smooth space for some other time). In Clastres’ account of Amazonian societies, on which Deleuze and Guattari’s theory is based, this is done by means of each band defending its own autonomy, and reacting to any potential accumulation of power by other bands. One could similarly think of how neighbourhood gangs resist subordination by rival gangs, or how autonomous social movements resist concentrations of political power. Autonomous social movements, such as the European squatters’ movement, the Zapatistas, and networks of protest against summits, are the principal example Deleuze and Guattari have in mind of war-machines in the global North, though they also use the concept in relation to Southern guerrilla and popular movements such as the Palestinian intifada and the Vietnamese resistance to American occupation, and also in relation to everyday practices of indigenous groups resisting state control. One could also argue that the ‘war-machine’ is implicit in practices of everyday resistance of the kind studies by James Scott. Marginal groups, termed ‘minorities’ in Deleuzian theory, often coalesce as war-machines because the state-form is inappropriate for them.
Thus, the standard is to embrace a politics of active affect. To clarify, we reject things that reinforce stability or the majoritarian subject. Current systems of education only serve to produce majoritarian bodies that are unable to think outside the system and who become increasingly recognizable, killing the potential for any resistance. Wallins, Jason. “Deleuze and Guattari, Politics and Education.” Bloomsbur Publishing, 2014, Pgs. 119-121 SHS KS As a social machine through which ‘labour power and the socius as a whole is manufactured’, schooling figures in the production of social territories that already anticipate a certain kind of people (Guattari, 2009, p. 47). And what kind of people does orthodox schooling seek to produce but a ‘molar public’, or, rather, a public regulated in the abstract image of segmentary social categories (age, gender, ethnicity, class, rank, achievement) (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987)? Such an aspiration is intimately wed to the territorializing powers of the State, for as Deleuze and Guattari argue (1983), State power first requires a ‘representational subject’ as both an abstract and unconscious model in relation to which one is taught to desire. As Massumi (2002) writes, ‘the subject is made to be in conformity with the systems that produces it, such that the subject reproduces the system’ (p. 6). Where education has historically functioned to regulate institutional life according to such segmentary molar codes, its modes of production have taken as their teleological goal the production of a ‘majoritarian people’, or, more accurately, a people circuited to their representational self-similarity according to State thought. This is, in part, the threat that Aoki (2005) identifies in the planned curriculum and its projection of an abstract essentialism upon a diversity of concrete educational assemblages (a school, a class, a curriculum, etc.). Apropos Deleuze, Aoki argues that the standardization of education has effectively reduced difference to a matter of difference in degree. That is, in reference to the stratifying power of the planned curriculum, Aoki avers that difference is always-already linked to an abstract image to which pedagogy ought to aspire and in conformity to which its operations become recognizable as ‘education’ per se. Against political action then, orthodox educational thought conceptualizes social life alongside the ‘categories of the Negative’, eschewing difference for conformity, flows for unities, mobile arrangements for totalizing systems (Foucault, 1983, p. xiii). Twisting Deleuze, might we claim that the people are missing in education? That is, where education aspires to invest desire in the production of a ‘majoritarian’ or ‘molar’ public, the prospect of thinking singularities are stayed, not only through the paucity of enunciatory forms and images available for thinking education in the first place, but further, through the organization of the school’s enunciatory machines into vehicles of representation that repeat in molarizing forms of self-reflection, ‘majoritarian’ perspective, and dominant circuits of desiring-investment. Herein, the impulse of standardization obliterates alternative subject formations and the modes of counter-signifying enunciation that might palpate them. Repelling the singular, the ‘majoritarian’ and standardizing impulse of education takes as its ‘fundamental’ mode of production the reification of common sense, or, rather, the territorialization of thought according to that which is given (that which everyone already knows). Figuring in a mode ‘of identification that brings diversity in general to bear upon the form of the Same’, common sense functions to stabilize patterns of social production by tethering them to molar orders of meaning and dominant regimes of social signification (Deleuze, 1990, p. 78). As Daignault argues, in so far as it repels the anomalous by reterritorializing it within prior systems of representation, common sense constitutes a significant and lingering problem in contemporary education (Hwu, 2004). Its function, Daignault alludes apropos Serres, is oriented to the annihilation of difference. Hence, where the conceptualization of ‘public’ education is founded in common sense, potentials for political action through tactics of proliferation, disjunction, and singularization are radically delimited and captured within prior territorialities of use (Foucault, 1983, p. xiii). The problem of this scenario is clear: common sense has yet to force us to think in a manner capable of subtracting desire from majoritarian thought in lieu of alternative forms of organization and experimental expression. In so far as it functions as a vehicle of ‘molarization’, reifying a common universe of reference for enunciation, the school fails to produce conditions for thinking in a manner that is not already anticipated by such referential ‘possibilities’. Hence, while antithetical to the espoused purpose of schooling, the majoritarian impulse of the school has yet to produce conditions for thinking – at least in the Deleuzian (2000) sense whereupon thought proceeds from a necessary violence to those habits of repetition with which thought becomes contracted. Prefer additionally: Thus I affirm: Resolved: The member nations of the World Trade Organization ought to reduce intellectual property protections for medicines. I’ll defend the resolution as a general principle and PICS don’t negate because general principles tolerate exceptions. I’ll spec whatever you want me to in cx as long as it doesn’t force me to abandon my maximum.
Oxford defines: Reduce as “make smaller or less in amount, degree, or size.”
Medicine as “a compound or preparation used for the treatment or prevention of disease”
Intellectual Property Protection is defined as “protection for inventions, literary and artistic works, symbols, names, and images created by the mind.”
World Trade Organization is “an intergovernmental organization that regulates and facilitates international trade between nations.”
Offense 1 Property protections are a manifestation of the creeping shadow in our comfortable lawscape. Every object has a distinct and undeniable patent, trademark or copyright symbol, each serving as a daunting reminder of the ever-present state and commodifying our affect P-M 13 Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 13 Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Atmospheres of law: Senses, affects, lawscapes, Emotion, Space and Society, Volume 7, 2013, Pages 35-44, ISSN 1755-4586, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2012.03.001.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1755458612000266 (Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, LLB, LLM, PhD, is a Professor of Law and Theory at the University of Westminster, and founder and Director of The Westminster Law and Theory Lab.) SHS KS *brackets used for grammatical clarity Let me therefore allow a little bit of law, and specifically intellectual property law, to emerge. Think of your initial welcome to the lawscape: the music, the smell, the taste, the textures. Think of how cosy you felt. Think of your affects — you wanted to have a Coke, you had a Coke; you wanted to stay in the room, you stayed in the room. Think of the atmosphere, comfortable, safe, energising. No law, just smooth space, reassuringly urban, tasteful yet with a hint of home-baking. At the same time, you realise that there is a bit of law around to protect you: you close the door behind you, this is your private space, the law protects that. You were offered the Coke, you did not steal it; you legitimately bought your iPad (ok, from Hong Kong but who knows this). The atmosphere is assembled by a safe, small measure of law, there to protect you and to make you feel immune in your enclosed sphere. But look again. Or rather, smell, listen, touch again. The red and yellow colour combination is a registered trademark of KODAK (Vaver, 2005). The smell of roses comes from the rubber used for the floor of the room — the Sumitomo Rubbers’s successful application for trademark.1 The first notes of Für Elise by Beethoven have been registered as a trademark by a Dutch company. The iPad touch screen is part of patented technology for which Apple has been in dispute with Samsung over the past few years (see also Parisi, 2008 on touch technologies).2 Finally, the Coke, well!, the Coke is obviously one of the best examples of a fully protected product in terms of taste, appearance, logo, bottle — the whole lot. And the bonus of sorts in the room: if you were to approach the darts, you would see that they emanate a distinct smell of dark beer. Even this combination is successfully registered by Unicorn Products, 3 a company who obviously thought that its target audience would be able to identify with it, and wanted to secure that no one else would use it. These are just some examples. As Vaver (2005: 897) points out, “over time there has been constant pressure from industry – note, not consumers – to widen the subject matter of protection to include as trademark virtually any perceptible feature in the sensory world that can be used to attract custom.” There are myriads of other laws that categorise, determine and restrict urban space, such as planning law (Valverde, 2011), property law (Blomley, 2004), environmental law (PhilippopoulosMihalopoulos, 2007) and health and safety regulations (and the mythology that feeds back, Almond, 2009). I chose to introduce the issue of atmospheres on the basis of intellectual property law because of is the fact that sensory control is direct and unmediated to the body, yet it manages to diffuse and dissimulate itself. This it does in two ways: first, by targeting the environment rather than the body (Sloterdijk, 2009), and precisely through this diffusing manoeuvre managing to have the greatest impact on the body; and second, by dissimulating itself as desire, that is as personal preference that ‘demands’ Kodak, Coke, Apple, or beer-scented darts. In some cases, the proffered hyperreality is superimposed on a more basic desire for, say, natural smells or tastes. This sensory desire, as Emily Grabham has convincingly demonstrated (in her case, touch), “embeds itself into the normative fabric of the law, creating and maintaining expectations around what is proper, decent and safe” (Grabham, 2009: 350). This means that the legal sensorium becomes “detached from specific moments and mobilised within legal processes” (2009: 350), indeed becomes fetishised by the law only to be snuggly reattached, I would argue, to the materiality of the situation in hand, claiming echoes of universality. But this is the paradox: the more universal the law, the more diffused it is. The more diffused it is, the more anomic a space appears. The room is just a room. The legal affect is found in this excess of law, in law’s ubiquitous presence that tends to hide under rose-smelling rubber surfaces. The atmosphere of the lawscape is perfectly engineered to appear as a city that is guided by preference, choice, opportunity, freedom. Scratch the surface and you feel the law pushing all these preferences into corridors of affective movement, atmospherics of legal passion that are material through and through yet appear reassuringly distant and abstract. 2 Intellectual property regimes biologically regulate affective expression and force the subject into binary, mechanical, categories. Wolodzko 18 – Agnieszka Anna, Bodies within affect. : on practicing contaminating matters through bioart, 2018, https://scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/handle/1887/66889 The particular discrepancy between the practice of affect and its control, between discovering the relations of transformation and managing these relations in order to achieve particular formations, is present in the practices of biotechnology. Take, for instance, the patenting of the human genome, which touches the very intimate and existential realm of what it means to have and be a body. Donna Dickenson reports that, according to common law, once a part of your body is separated from you, it is legally treated as waste and as not belonging to anybody lat. res nullius.22 Dickenson believes that this disposable attitude to body parts that have been detached from the body is due to the traditional distinction between a person and raw matter. Unlike a body part, persons cannot be owned as this would undermine the notion of human dignity.23 However, as Dickenson states, recent biotechnological practices undermine the boundaries between what can be considered as a person and what is just a raw body part, which results making the body a much more fluid and hybrid phenomenon. The scale and implications of the hybridity and relationality of the body as a result of biotechnological practices can be seen, for instance, within the phenomenon of human genome patenting and genetic testing, the most lucrative applications of biotechnological innovations.24 Till 2013, it was common practice to patent the human genome once it had been isolated from the body. Even though genes are not an invention as such, their isolation from a body was considered an innovative practice and thus subject to patenting laws.25 This resulted in an enormous biomarket, where, in the 1980s-1990s, till 2005, over twenty per cent of the human genome was patented in the US.26 A patent is “a legal right granted to inventors by national governments to exclude others from making, using or selling their invention in a given country,”27 and so, in this context, its function presupposes that parts of our own body are legally owned by companies and institutions.28 Most importantly, gene patents are usually applied to all methods of their detection. This means that every test and tool involved in the management of a particular sequence are covered by patent laws. The patent thus reaches a very broad research area, and this may have consequences for future innovation and medical care. Since the main role of patents in the biotechnology that has induced genetic testing was to allow for private investment in research and development, biotechnology has transformed from a common good into a commodification and exploitation of the body. Arguably, things have changed once the US Supreme Court banned the patenting of “natural” genes in the case of the Myriad Genetics Inc., the company that discovered the sequence and location of BRCA1 and BRCA1 – a gene mutation that increases the risk of ovarian and breast cancer: “A naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated, but cDNA is patent eligible because it is not naturally occurring.”29 However, things become more ambiguous when we look not only at the differences, but also at the similarities between DNA and its copy, cDNA (complementary DNA). cDNA is “a type of a man-made DNA composition, which is made in a lab with an enzyme that creates DNA from RNA template.”30 Not naturally occurring, and structurally and functionally different from DNA, cDNA thus complies with the patent law. Nevertheless, some critics argue that, despite its structural and functional difference, which allows for the further research, the copy (cDNA) still holds exactly the same information as the original (DNA).31 Moreover, because cDNA is not distinct from the methods it is extracted with, there is no specification of how much intervention is actually needed in order for the gene to be legally patented, since mere simple separation from the body is no longer a boundary.32 Despite the lack of boundaries and clear definitions of what a body’s natural state is and what its manipulated state is, Myriad, (like other companies involved in human gene patenting), practices what is now called personalized medicine. Bodies are practiced as autonomous and fixed identities, independent from collective relations.33 As Dickenson argues, personalized medicine deliberately positions itself against we medicine, emphasising individual responsibility and care, rather than a collective and relational understanding of the way our bodies are. We witnessed the power of individual choice when the American actress Angelina Jolie announced that she had undergone a double mastectomy due to the presence of the BRCA gene in her body. This was in 2013, just before the Supreme Court decision in the Myriad case and the actress’s experience provoked a public debate about the necessity of testing for the cancer gene. However, the media conveniently failed to mention the patent that applied to the BRCA gene, and just how expensive the test to detect it was (in 2013, the test cost between US$3,000 and US$4,000).34 Moreover, the decision to undergo the mastectomy – which for the average woman does not end with a full breast reconstruction as it did in Jolie’s case – was portrayed as being a woman’s – a mother’s – individual choice. The discussion of the elective surgery largely ignored any discussion of the financial, political or social situation of women, or of the industry involved in performing these tests. Importantly, in order for the testing to be accurate and certain, a large database of the variation of this mutation is needed. You need “we medicine in order to perform a successful me medicine.”35 In other words, to be accurate, any medicine depends on a range of relational practices and multiple bodies from various social, political and biological states. Any distinction, therefore, between “me” and “we” medicine is an artificial one. Medical practice has exposed how “me” medicine has already been “we” medicine. The tangible danger, however, is that these relational practices become veiled by the abstract categories of individuality and autonomy. In other words, while we are already living within affect, and are already practicing affect’s contaminations and its multiple relations and implications for various spheres of living bodies, we have never really changed our logic with regard to affect. In the case of Myriad, while, in principle, researchers, share their genome database in order to provide an exchange of information for the common good and to promote innovation and accurate medical care, fear of competition led the company to stop contributing to the data already in 2004. It has also stopped publicising new information about variations. As a major performer of tests for the BRCA gene, Myriad has thus significantly restricted research on breast cancer. The company’s self-interest, clothed in a policy of personalized medicine has stopped the flow of data and, therefore, causing less accurate medical care.36 What is worse, after the US Supreme Court decision of 15 April 2013, Myriad filed a number of lawsuits against laboratories that had started to offer the BRCA test more cheaply.37 What we learn from the BRCA case, is that by failing to change the logic of thinking about the bodies and as a result of its perpetuation of the belief in the autonomy of bodies, despite their obvious dependence on bodies’ relationality, the gene patenting industry has created even stronger hierarchies among bodies. The industry’s policies have enacted a strong belief in determinism, ascribed to DNA within the practices of biotechnological, economic and political application. The idea of the autonomous body is stronger than the actual matters of practice and relations that construct the body. Such practice of the body has preserved the nature/culture divide in a bizarrely paradoxical way. The US Supreme Court’s decision perpetuates a belief in the exclusion of nature from any economic-political spheres. As long as something does not occur in “nature”, it can be patented. However, as shown in the case of Myriad, the copy (cDNA) of DNA that is to be patented holds exactly the same information as the original (DNA). The border between what occurs naturally and culturally, what is original and what is a copy, is thus blurred. Without the “original” DNA there would be no cDNA in the first place. Moreover, what is considered as artificial and therefore ready for manipulation and commodification, materially influences and transforms what we consider to be “natural”. The promise of cure and treatment that has justified the privatization and monopolization of research, ultimately influences our own bodies and lives. Patented genes sequences do not regard a particular body, but “the body”. Patents have a universal function, which, in turn, incorporates all our bodies under its law. Once you have a breast cancer, part of you, what you think of as the “natural” you, belongs, in practice, to the corporation. The artificial divide between the “state of nature” and man-made practice does not respond to our bodies, which are an entanglement of living matter and practices. Furthermore, the Myriad case is also a striking example because it shows the consequences of our lack of understanding that biotechnology has a real material impact on our social and political life. Here, the idea of personhood and human dignity cannot do justice to the scale of novelty and unpredictability of the biotechnological world. Biobanks, which are the modern equivalent of surveillance and property, have resulted in: commodified cell lines, such as those in the Henrietta Lacks legal case,38 promises of regenerative medicine via new methods that transform a cell from an adult body into any other type of a cell, and CRISPR genome editing, which makes the idea of designer babies not just futuristic speculation, but a scientific possibly.39 Indeed, these new biotechnological inventions have undermined any doubt about the influence that biotechnology already has in shaping our lives. These phenomena are not just the concern of bioethical committees and economic policies, they directly touch the multiple political, social and cultural realms of our existence. Ingeborg Reichle called the unprecedented power inherent to the use of biotechnology “bottom-up eugenics”, which is not based directly on a socio-cultural idea and narration, but rather the market and profit.40 As Robert Zwijnenberg argues, biotechnology inevitably correlates with such problems as, for instance, human enhancement, posing not only ethical and legal problems, but forcing more philosophically and culturally varied questions and attitudes, i.e. “who and what do we want to be as humans, and who and what do we want to become?”41 Biotechnological innovations that allow us to manipulate our bodies construct economicsocial realities that do not respond to disciplinary divisions. Economic and political demands are strongly entangled with scientific findings, technologies and their agencies, which, in turn, inevitably influence social and cultural, individual and the population’s practices, as well as our lives and bodies. However, as the Myriad case shows, once these multiple entanglements are applied according to the traditional beliefs in autonomy, individuation and personalization, which do not respond to the relational nature of phenomena, we enter into the realm of utopian beliefs in purity and clear-cut boundaries between species and disciplines. For instance, transhumanists’ desire for designer babies and perfect humans,42 fuelled by an unquestioning use of technology, is just one among many examples of using relationality not as an ontological way of being, but as a means for strengthening the fixed ideas about our bodies. We already live and practice affect, that is why, if we do not think and act according to its dynamic nature, we create even sharper dualisms, polarizations and hierarchies. It is therefore time to map these material and relational ways of understanding. It is time to map bodies within affect, in order to meet the challenges of the biotechnological future. The question is, how to do that? How can we relationally practice the relational nature of our bodies? In other words, how do we make matters of affect matter?
9/26/21
SO - Deleuze v2
Tournament: Mid America | Round: 3 | Opponent: American Heritage Broward MC | Judge: Ian Matuszeski Subjectivity is the basis of ethics because asking what we ought to do begs the question of what constitutes the subject in the first place The subject is fundamentally unstable: every aspect is in constant flux due to things like time. Personal evolution proves this - I’m not the same person I was 5 years ago. Furthermore, subjects are always experiencing relation, which itself changes. For example, your relationship to your parents shifts based on your ages. Affect, the ability to experience and to be experienced, is the only constitutive feature: I am experiencing my Word doc, my opponent, just as much as you are experiencing me. There is no way to escape affection. Thinking is only a feature of me and doesn’t determine the subject. Subjectivity is fluid—the only intrinsic feature of the subject is that everything is changing, thus stable subjecthood fails. There are two kinds of affect, active and reactive— Active affect allows us to extend and compose our own boundaries whereas reactive affect only indicates our body’s ability to be affected. Embracing active affect is key to breaking free from the pervasive state mindset and instead creating spaces for resistance and radical change so that we can reform the state Active affect is able to organize to undermine static structures, whereas reactive affect becomes coopted and utilized by the state to ceaselessly destroy and form strict confines for identity and being — the aff is a form of negative state action where we reduce the powers of conventionally oppressive institutions. Robinson 10 Andre; Ceasefire; “Why Deleuze (still) matters: States, war-machines and radical transformation”; https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-deleuze-war-machine/; political theorist; LCA-BP So what, in Deleuzian theory, is the alternative to the state? Deleuze and Guattari argue for a type of assemblage (social group or cluster of relations) which they refer to as the ‘war-machine’, though with the proviso that certain kinds of ‘war-machines’ can also be captured and used by states. This should not be considered a militarist theory, and the term ‘war-machine’ is in many respects misleading. It is used because Deleuze and Guattari derive their theory from Pierre Clastres’ theory of the role of ritualised (often non-lethal) warfare among indigenous groups. Paul Patton has suggested that the war-machine would be better called a metamorphosis-machine, others have used the term ‘difference engine’, a machine of differentiation, and there is a lot of overlap with the idea of autonomous groups or movements in how the war-machine is theorised. We should also remember that ‘machine’ in Deleuze and Guattari simply refers to a combination of forces or elements; it does not have overtones of instrumentalism or of mindless mechanisms – a social group, an ecosystem, a knight on horseback are all ‘machines’. The term ‘war-machine’ has the unfortunate connotations of brutal military machinery and of uncontrollable militarist apparatuses such as NATO, which operate with a machine-like rigidity and inhumanity (c.f. the phrase ‘military-industrial complex’). For Deleuze and Guattari, these kinds of statist war-machines are also war-machines of a sort, because they descend from a historical process through which states ‘captured’ or incorporated autonomous social movements (particularly those of nomadic indigenous societies) and made them part of the state so as to contain their subversive power. Early states learned to capture war-machines because they were previously vulnerable to being destroyed by the war-machines of nomadic stateless societies, having no similar means of response. Hence, armies are a kind of hybrid social form, containing some of the power of autonomous war-machines but contained in such a way as to harness it to state instrumentalism and inhumanity. Captured in this way, war-machines lose their affirmative force, becoming simply machines of purposeless destruction – having lost the purpose of deterritorialisation (see below), they take on the purpose of pure war as a goal in itself. Deleuze and Guattari argue that state-captured war-machines are regaining their autonomy in a dangerous way, tending to replace limited war in the service of a state’s goals with a drive to total war. This drive is expressed for instance in the ‘war on terror’ as permanent state of emergency. There was a recent controversy about Israeli strategists adopting Deleuzian ideas, which reflects the continuities between state war-machines and autonomous war-machines, but depends on a selective conceptual misreading in which the drive to total war denounced by Deleuze and Guattari is explicitly valorised. The Israeli army is a captured war-machine in the worst possible sense, pursuing the destruction of others’ existential territories in order to accumulate destructive power for a state. For Deleuze and Guattari, it is not the Israeli army but the Palestinian resistance which is a war-machine in the full sense. The autonomous war-machine, as opposed to the state-captured war-machine, is a form of social assemblage directed against the state, and against the coalescence of sovereignty. The way such machines undermine the state is by exercising diffuse power to break down concentrated power, and through the replacement of ‘striated’ (regulated, marked) space with ‘smooth’ space (although the war-machine is the ‘constituent element of smooth space’, I shall save discussion of smooth space for some other time). In Clastres’ account of Amazonian societies, on which Deleuze and Guattari’s theory is based, this is done by means of each band defending its own autonomy, and reacting to any potential accumulation of power by other bands. One could similarly think of how neighbourhood gangs resist subordination by rival gangs, or how autonomous social movements resist concentrations of political power. Autonomous social movements, such as the European squatters’ movement, the Zapatistas, and networks of protest against summits, are the principal example Deleuze and Guattari have in mind of war-machines in the global North, though they also use the concept in relation to Southern guerrilla and popular movements such as the Palestinian intifada and the Vietnamese resistance to American occupation, and also in relation to everyday practices of indigenous groups resisting state control. One could also argue that the ‘war-machine’ is implicit in practices of everyday resistance of the kind studies by James Scott. Marginal groups, termed ‘minorities’ in Deleuzian theory, often coalesce as war-machines because the state-form is inappropriate for them. Ethics must be a constant interrogation of static norms. This creation of new lines of flight redefines current concepts of normativity to that of deterritorialization. Thus, the standard is to vote for the debater who best promotes the conditions for fluid subjectivity. Smith 03 Daniel W. Smith (2003) Deleuze and the liberal tradition: normativity, freedom and judgement, Economy and Society, 32:2, 299-324 Deleuze would no doubt have followed the same approach in his analysis of normativity had he addressed the issue directly. Foucault himself spoke of the power of what he called the process of normalization, which creates us, as subjects, in terms of existing force relations and existing ‘norms’. For Foucault, normalization is not merely an abstract principle of adjudication but an already actualized (and always actualized) power relation. Foucault’s question then became: is it possible to escape, or at least resist, this power of normalization? In Deleuze’s terminology, the same question would be stated in the following terms: within a given social assemblage or ‘territoriality’, where can one find the ‘line of flight’, or the movement of relative deterritorialization, by means of 51Q 08smith (ds) Page 307 Thursday, April 17, 2003 8:45 PM 308 Economy and Society which one can escape from or transform the existing norm (or territoriality)? From this viewpoint, neither Foucault nor Deleuze avoid the issue of normativity, they simply analyze it in terms of an immanent process. The error of transcendence would be to posit normative criteria as abstract universals, even if these are defined in intersubjective or communicative terms. From the viewpoint of immanence, by contrast, it is the process itself that must account for both the production of the norm as well as its possible destruction or alteration. In a given assemblage, one will indeed find normative criteria that govern, for instance, the application of the power of the State, but one will also find the means for the critique and modification of those norms, their deterritorialization. A truly ‘normative’ principle must not only provide norms for condemning abuses of power, but also a means for condemning norms that have themselves become abuses of power (e.g. the norms that governed the treatment of women, slaves, minorities, etc.). An immanent process, in other words, must, at one and the same time, function as a principle of critique as well as a principle of creation (the ‘genetic’ method). ‘The conditions of a true critique and a true creation are one and the same’ (Deleuze 1994: 139). The one cannot and ‘must’ not exist without the other If deterritorialization functions as a norm for Patton, then, it is a somewhat paradoxical norm. Within any assemblage, what is normative is deterritorialization, that is, the creation of ‘lines of flight’ (Deleuze) or ‘resistance’ (Foucault) that allow one to break free from a given norm, or to transform the norm. What ‘must’ always remain normative is the ability to critique and transform existing norms, that is, to create something new (the category of the new should be understood here in the broad sense, including not only social change, but also artistic creation, conceptual innovation and so on.) One cannot have pre-existing norms or criteria for the new; otherwise it would not be new, but already foreseen. This is the basis on which Patton argues that Deleuze’s conception of power is explicitly normative: ‘What a given assemblage is capable of doing or becoming’, he writes, ‘is determined by the lines of flight or deterritorialization which it can sustain’ (Patton 2000: 106). (One might note here that the concept of ‘nomadic war-machines’, which was introduced in A Thousand Plateaus, is Deleuze and Guattari’s attempt to address the question of a social formation that would itself be constructed along such movements or lines of flight. Patton suggests that such assemblages should in fact be called ‘metamorphosis’ machines (2000: 110), since they have only an external relation to war and a historically contingent relation to nomads; this is a suggestion that will no doubt be taken up by others. Metamorphosis machines would be the conditions of actualization of absolute deterritorialization and the means by which relative deterritorialization occurs: ‘They bring connections to bear against the great conjunction of the apparatuses of capture or domination.’ . . . A metamorphosis machine would then be one that . . . engenders the production of something altogether different. (Patton 2000: 110) 51Q 08smith (ds) Page 308 Thursday, April 17, 2003 8:45 PM Daniel W. Smith: Deleuze and the liberal tradition 309 Patton is therefore using the concept ‘normativity’ in a quite different manner than Fraser or Habermas. They would say that deterritorialization is not normative, and cannot be, since it eludes any universal criteria and indeed allows for their modification. Patton in effect responds by saying: for that very reason, it is deterritorialization that should be seen as a normative concept, even if that entails a new concept of what normativity is. At one point in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze writes that ‘one can conserve the word essence, if one wishes, but only on the condition of saying that essence is precisely the accident or the event’ (1994: 191). Patton seems to be saying something similar: one can conserve the word normativity, if one wishes, but only on the condition of saying that the normative is the new or the deterritorialized. Patton’s own trajectory is thus beginning to come into focus: rather than simply dropping or ignoring the concept of normativity, he instead proposes to create a new concept of normativity by critiquing components of the old one, and linking it up with a quite different set of related concepts. In this manner, he is effecting a transformation of the liberal concept, while still attempting to situate his own work fully within the liberal tradition. Thus I affirm: Resolved: The member nations of the World Trade Organization ought to reduce intellectual property protections for medicines. I’ll defend the resolution as a general principle and PICS don’t negate because general principles tolerate exceptions. I’ll spec whatever you want me to in cx as long as it doesn’t force me to abandon my maximum.
Offense 1 Property protections are a manifestation of the creeping shadow in our comfortable lawscape. Every object has a distinct and undeniable patent, trademark or copyright symbol, each serving as a daunting reminder of the ever-present state and commodifying our affect P-M 13 Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 13 Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Atmospheres of law: Senses, affects, lawscapes, Emotion, Space and Society, Volume 7, 2013, Pages 35-44, ISSN 1755-4586, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2012.03.001.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1755458612000266 (Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, LLB, LLM, PhD, is a Professor of Law and Theory at the University of Westminster, and founder and Director of The Westminster Law and Theory Lab.) SHS KS *brackets used for grammatical clarity Let me therefore allow a little bit of law, and specifically intellectual property law, to emerge. Think of your initial welcome to the lawscape: the music, the smell, the taste, the textures. Think of how cosy you felt. Think of your affects — you wanted to have a Coke, you had a Coke; you wanted to stay in the room, you stayed in the room. Think of the atmosphere, comfortable, safe, energising. No law, just smooth space, reassuringly urban, tasteful yet with a hint of home-baking. At the same time, you realise that there is a bit of law around to protect you: you close the door behind you, this is your private space, the law protects that. You were offered the Coke, you did not steal it; you legitimately bought your iPad (ok, from Hong Kong but who knows this). The atmosphere is assembled by a safe, small measure of law, there to protect you and to make you feel immune in your enclosed sphere. But look again. Or rather, smell, listen, touch again. The red and yellow colour combination is a registered trademark of KODAK (Vaver, 2005). The smell of roses comes from the rubber used for the floor of the room — the Sumitomo Rubbers’s successful application for trademark.1 The first notes of Für Elise by Beethoven have been registered as a trademark by a Dutch company. The iPad touch screen is part of patented technology for which Apple has been in dispute with Samsung over the past few years (see also Parisi, 2008 on touch technologies).2 Finally, the Coke, well!, the Coke is obviously one of the best examples of a fully protected product in terms of taste, appearance, logo, bottle — the whole lot. And the bonus of sorts in the room: if you were to approach the darts, you would see that they emanate a distinct smell of dark beer. Even this combination is successfully registered by Unicorn Products, 3 a company who obviously thought that its target audience would be able to identify with it, and wanted to secure that no one else would use it. These are just some examples. As Vaver (2005: 897) points out, “over time there has been constant pressure from industry – note, not consumers – to widen the subject matter of protection to include as trademark virtually any perceptible feature in the sensory world that can be used to attract custom.” There are myriads of other laws that categorise, determine and restrict urban space, such as planning law (Valverde, 2011), property law (Blomley, 2004), environmental law (PhilippopoulosMihalopoulos, 2007) and health and safety regulations (and the mythology that feeds back, Almond, 2009). I chose to introduce the issue of atmospheres on the basis of intellectual property law because of is the fact that sensory control is direct and unmediated to the body, yet it manages to diffuse and dissimulate itself. This it does in two ways: first, by targeting the environment rather than the body (Sloterdijk, 2009), and precisely through this diffusing manoeuvre managing to have the greatest impact on the body; and second, by dissimulating itself as desire, that is as personal preference that ‘demands’ Kodak, Coke, Apple, or beer-scented darts. In some cases, the proffered hyperreality is superimposed on a more basic desire for, say, natural smells or tastes. This sensory desire, as Emily Grabham has convincingly demonstrated (in her case, touch), “embeds itself into the normative fabric of the law, creating and maintaining expectations around what is proper, decent and safe” (Grabham, 2009: 350). This means that the legal sensorium becomes “detached from specific moments and mobilised within legal processes” (2009: 350), indeed becomes fetishised by the law only to be snuggly reattached, I would argue, to the materiality of the situation in hand, claiming echoes of universality. But this is the paradox: the more universal the law, the more diffused it is. The more diffused it is, the more anomic a space appears. The room is just a room. The legal affect is found in this excess of law, in law’s ubiquitous presence that tends to hide under rose-smelling rubber surfaces. The atmosphere of the lawscape is perfectly engineered to appear as a city that is guided by preference, choice, opportunity, freedom. Scratch the surface and you feel the law pushing all these preferences into corridors of affective movement, atmospherics of legal passion that are material through and through yet appear reassuringly distant and abstract. 2 Intellectual property regimes biologically regulate affective expression and force the subject into binary, mechanical, categories. Wolodzko 18 – Agnieszka Anna, Bodies within affect. : on practicing contaminating matters through bioart, 2018, https://scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/handle/1887/66889 The particular discrepancy between the practice of affect and its control, between discovering the relations of transformation and managing these relations in order to achieve particular formations, is present in the practices of biotechnology. Take, for instance, the patenting of the human genome, which touches the very intimate and existential realm of what it means to have and be a body. Donna Dickenson reports that, according to common law, once a part of your body is separated from you, it is legally treated as waste and as not belonging to anybody lat. res nullius.22 Dickenson believes that this disposable attitude to body parts that have been detached from the body is due to the traditional distinction between a person and raw matter. Unlike a body part, persons cannot be owned as this would undermine the notion of human dignity.23 However, as Dickenson states, recent biotechnological practices undermine the boundaries between what can be considered as a person and what is just a raw body part, which results making the body a much more fluid and hybrid phenomenon. The scale and implications of the hybridity and relationality of the body as a result of biotechnological practices can be seen, for instance, within the phenomenon of human genome patenting and genetic testing, the most lucrative applications of biotechnological innovations.24 Till 2013, it was common practice to patent the human genome once it had been isolated from the body. Even though genes are not an invention as such, their isolation from a body was considered an innovative practice and thus subject to patenting laws.25 This resulted in an enormous biomarket, where, in the 1980s-1990s, till 2005, over twenty per cent of the human genome was patented in the US.26 A patent is “a legal right granted to inventors by national governments to exclude others from making, using or selling their invention in a given country,”27 and so, in this context, its function presupposes that parts of our own body are legally owned by companies and institutions.28 Most importantly, gene patents are usually applied to all methods of their detection. This means that every test and tool involved in the management of a particular sequence are covered by patent laws. The patent thus reaches a very broad research area, and this may have consequences for future innovation and medical care. Since the main role of patents in the biotechnology that has induced genetic testing was to allow for private investment in research and development, biotechnology has transformed from a common good into a commodification and exploitation of the body. Arguably, things have changed once the US Supreme Court banned the patenting of “natural” genes in the case of the Myriad Genetics Inc., the company that discovered the sequence and location of BRCA1 and BRCA1 – a gene mutation that increases the risk of ovarian and breast cancer: “A naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated, but cDNA is patent eligible because it is not naturally occurring.”29 However, things become more ambiguous when we look not only at the differences, but also at the similarities between DNA and its copy, cDNA (complementary DNA). cDNA is “a type of a man-made DNA composition, which is made in a lab with an enzyme that creates DNA from RNA template.”30 Not naturally occurring, and structurally and functionally different from DNA, cDNA thus complies with the patent law. Nevertheless, some critics argue that, despite its structural and functional difference, which allows for the further research, the copy (cDNA) still holds exactly the same information as the original (DNA).31 Moreover, because cDNA is not distinct from the methods it is extracted with, there is no specification of how much intervention is actually needed in order for the gene to be legally patented, since mere simple separation from the body is no longer a boundary.32 Despite the lack of boundaries and clear definitions of what a body’s natural state is and what its manipulated state is, Myriad, (like other companies involved in human gene patenting), practices what is now called personalized medicine. Bodies are practiced as autonomous and fixed identities, independent from collective relations.33 As Dickenson argues, personalized medicine deliberately positions itself against we medicine, emphasising individual responsibility and care, rather than a collective and relational understanding of the way our bodies are. We witnessed the power of individual choice when the American actress Angelina Jolie announced that she had undergone a double mastectomy due to the presence of the BRCA gene in her body. This was in 2013, just before the Supreme Court decision in the Myriad case and the actress’s experience provoked a public debate about the necessity of testing for the cancer gene. However, the media conveniently failed to mention the patent that applied to the BRCA gene, and just how expensive the test to detect it was (in 2013, the test cost between US$3,000 and US$4,000).34 Moreover, the decision to undergo the mastectomy – which for the average woman does not end with a full breast reconstruction as it did in Jolie’s case – was portrayed as being a woman’s – a mother’s – individual choice. The discussion of the elective surgery largely ignored any discussion of the financial, political or social situation of women, or of the industry involved in performing these tests. Importantly, in order for the testing to be accurate and certain, a large database of the variation of this mutation is needed. You need “we medicine in order to perform a successful me medicine.”35 In other words, to be accurate, any medicine depends on a range of relational practices and multiple bodies from various social, political and biological states. Any distinction, therefore, between “me” and “we” medicine is an artificial one. Medical practice has exposed how “me” medicine has already been “we” medicine. The tangible danger, however, is that these relational practices become veiled by the abstract categories of individuality and autonomy. In other words, while we are already living within affect, and are already practicing affect’s contaminations and its multiple relations and implications for various spheres of living bodies, we have never really changed our logic with regard to affect. In the case of Myriad, while, in principle, researchers, share their genome database in order to provide an exchange of information for the common good and to promote innovation and accurate medical care, fear of competition led the company to stop contributing to the data already in 2004. It has also stopped publicising new information about variations. As a major performer of tests for the BRCA gene, Myriad has thus significantly restricted research on breast cancer. The company’s self-interest, clothed in a policy of personalized medicine has stopped the flow of data and, therefore, causing less accurate medical care.36 What is worse, after the US Supreme Court decision of 15 April 2013, Myriad filed a number of lawsuits against laboratories that had started to offer the BRCA test more cheaply.37 What we learn from the BRCA case, is that by failing to change the logic of thinking about the bodies and as a result of its perpetuation of the belief in the autonomy of bodies, despite their obvious dependence on bodies’ relationality, the gene patenting industry has created even stronger hierarchies among bodies. The industry’s policies have enacted a strong belief in determinism, ascribed to DNA within the practices of biotechnological, economic and political application. The idea of the autonomous body is stronger than the actual matters of practice and relations that construct the body. Such practice of the body has preserved the nature/culture divide in a bizarrely paradoxical way. The US Supreme Court’s decision perpetuates a belief in the exclusion of nature from any economic-political spheres. As long as something does not occur in “nature”, it can be patented. However, as shown in the case of Myriad, the copy (cDNA) of DNA that is to be patented holds exactly the same information as the original (DNA). The border between what occurs naturally and culturally, what is original and what is a copy, is thus blurred. Without the “original” DNA there would be no cDNA in the first place. Moreover, what is considered as artificial and therefore ready for manipulation and commodification, materially influences and transforms what we consider to be “natural”. The promise of cure and treatment that has justified the privatization and monopolization of research, ultimately influences our own bodies and lives. Patented genes sequences do not regard a particular body, but “the body”. Patents have a universal function, which, in turn, incorporates all our bodies under its law. Once you have a breast cancer, part of you, what you think of as the “natural” you, belongs, in practice, to the corporation. The artificial divide between the “state of nature” and man-made practice does not respond to our bodies, which are an entanglement of living matter and practices. Furthermore, the Myriad case is also a striking example because it shows the consequences of our lack of understanding that biotechnology has a real material impact on our social and political life. Here, the idea of personhood and human dignity cannot do justice to the scale of novelty and unpredictability of the biotechnological world. Biobanks, which are the modern equivalent of surveillance and property, have resulted in: commodified cell lines, such as those in the Henrietta Lacks legal case,38 promises of regenerative medicine via new methods that transform a cell from an adult body into any other type of a cell, and CRISPR genome editing, which makes the idea of designer babies not just futuristic speculation, but a scientific possibly.39 Indeed, these new biotechnological inventions have undermined any doubt about the influence that biotechnology already has in shaping our lives. These phenomena are not just the concern of bioethical committees and economic policies, they directly touch the multiple political, social and cultural realms of our existence. Ingeborg Reichle called the unprecedented power inherent to the use of biotechnology “bottom-up eugenics”, which is not based directly on a socio-cultural idea and narration, but rather the market and profit.40 As Robert Zwijnenberg argues, biotechnology inevitably correlates with such problems as, for instance, human enhancement, posing not only ethical and legal problems, but forcing more philosophically and culturally varied questions and attitudes, i.e. “who and what do we want to be as humans, and who and what do we want to become?”41 Biotechnological innovations that allow us to manipulate our bodies construct economicsocial realities that do not respond to disciplinary divisions. Economic and political demands are strongly entangled with scientific findings, technologies and their agencies, which, in turn, inevitably influence social and cultural, individual and the population’s practices, as well as our lives and bodies. However, as the Myriad case shows, once these multiple entanglements are applied according to the traditional beliefs in autonomy, individuation and personalization, which do not respond to the relational nature of phenomena, we enter into the realm of utopian beliefs in purity and clear-cut boundaries between species and disciplines. For instance, transhumanists’ desire for designer babies and perfect humans,42 fuelled by an unquestioning use of technology, is just one among many examples of using relationality not as an ontological way of being, but as a means for strengthening the fixed ideas about our bodies. We already live and practice affect, that is why, if we do not think and act according to its dynamic nature, we create even sharper dualisms, polarizations and hierarchies. It is therefore time to map these material and relational ways of understanding. It is time to map bodies within affect, in order to meet the challenges of the biotechnological future. The question is, how to do that? How can we relationally practice the relational nature of our bodies? In other words, how do we make matters of affect matter?
9/25/21
SO - Deleuze v3
Tournament: Mid America Cup | Round: 6 | Opponent: AHB EM | Judge: Grant Brown Subjectivity is the basis of ethics because asking what we ought to do begs the question of what constitutes the subject in the first place The subject is fundamentally unstable: every aspect is in constant flux due to things like time. Personal evolution proves this - I’m not the same person I was 5 years ago. Furthermore, subjects are always experiencing relation, which itself changes. For example, your relationship to your parents shifts based on your ages. Affect, the ability to experience and to be experienced, is the only constitutive feature: I am experiencing my Word doc, my opponent, just as much as you are experiencing me. There is no way to escape affection. Thinking is only a feature of me and doesn’t determine the subject. Subjectivity is fluid—the only intrinsic feature of the subject is that everything is changing, thus stable subjecthood fails. There are two kinds of affect, active and reactive— Active affect allows us to extend and compose our own boundaries whereas reactive affect only indicates our body’s ability to be affected. Embracing active affect is key to breaking free from the pervasive state mindset and instead creating spaces for resistance and radical change so that we can reform the state K and R 13 Karatzogianni, Athina and Robinson, Andy. “Schizorevolutions vs. Microfascisms: A Deleuzo-Nietzchean Perspective on State, Security, and Active/Reactive Networks.” University of Leicester, . 2013. SHS KS The impulse to condemn deviance, resistance and insurrection is disturbingly strong in academia, and doubtless strengthened by revulsion against network terror. Yet this networked rebellion of the excluded is the key to hopes for a better world. In the spiral of terror between states and movements, it is important to recognise that the source is the state and the weak point is in the movements. In today’s social war, the Other is not even accorded the honour of being an enemy in a fair fight. As long as social conflicts are seen through a statist frame, social war is doomed to continue, because discursive exclusion produces social war as its underside, and renders resistance both necessary and justified. The cycle of terror starts with the state: its terror at an existential level of losing control and fixity. This terrified state produces state terror and thereby creates the conditions for movement terror. It is naive to look for a way out from this side of the equation. State terror can end only when the state, both accepts the proliferation of networks beyond its control, and adopts a more humble role for itself, or when it collapses or is destroyed. On the other side, we should find hope in the proliferation of resistance among the excluded. We need to see in movements of the excluded the radical potential and not only the reactive distortions. To take Tupac Shakur’s metaphor, we need to see the rose that grows from concrete, not merely the thorns. The problem is, rather, that many of the movements on the network side of the equation are still thinking, seeing and feeling like states. Such movements are potential bearers of the Other of the state-form, of networks as alternatives to states, affinity against hegemony, abundance against scarcity. The question thus becomes how they can learn to valorise what they are -- autonomous affinity-networks -- rather than internalising majoritarian norms. For instance, in terms of the impact of technosocial transformations on agency, the negotiation of ideology, order of dissent in relation to capitalism as a social code, remains hostage to labor processes and to thick identities of local/regional or national interests, which fail to move contemporary movements to an active affinity to a common humanity and a pragmatic solution for an ethical, non exploitative form of production (Karatzogianni and Schandorf, 2012). Here the exception may like in the global justice movements and Occupy, although still here the discourse remains often in reactive mode, due to state crackdowns experienced by the movements. There is a great need to find ways to energise hope against fear. Hope as an active force can be counterposed to the reactive power of fear. People are not in fact powerless, but are made to feel powerless by the pervasiveness of the dominant social fantasy and of separation. This yields a temptation to fall back on the power of ‘the powerful’, those who gain a kind of distorted agency through alienation. But powerlessness and constituted power are both effects of alienation, which can be broken down by creating affinity-network forms of life. An emotional shift can thus be enough to revolutionise subjectivities. Hence, as Vaneigem argues, ‘to work for delight and authentic festivity is barely distinguishable from preparing for a general insurrection’ (Vaneigem 1967: 50-1). It has been argued in utopian studies that fear and hope form part of a coxntinuum, expressing ‘aspects of affective ambivalence’ connected to the indeterminacy of the future (McManus 2005). The type of hope needed is active and immanent, brought into the present as a propulsive force rather than deferred to the future. Deleuze and Guattari use the term ‘absolute deterritorialisation’ for this possibility. In his work on conflict transformation, John Paul Lederach emphasises the need to turn negative energies into creative energies and mobilising hope against fear (Lederach and Maiese, n.d.: 2-3; Lederach, 2005). How is this change in vital energies to be accomplished? Deleuze and Guattari invoke a figure of the shaman as a way to overcome reactive energies (1983: 167-8). They call for a type of revolutionary social movement ‘that follows the lines of escape of desire; breaches the wall and causes flows to move; assembles its machines and its groups-in-fusion in the enclaves or at the periphery’, countering reactive energies (ibid. 277). In looking at how this might operate in practice, let us examine briefly the Colombian feminist anti-militarist group La Ruta Pacifica de las Mujeres. In particular, the aspects of social weaving and collective mourning prominent in their methodology are crucial forms of creative shamanism, which turns fear into hope. Their approach involves ‘the deconstruction of the pervasive symbolism of violence and war and the substitution of a new visual and textual language and creative rituals’ (Cockburn, 2005: 14; Brouwer, 2008: 62). Weaving as a metaphor refers to social recomposition, the reconstruction of affinity; being ‘bound’ through social weaving is believed to control fear. It is taken as a way to counter everyday violence on the frontlines of the ‘war on terror’. Rituals of mourning and weaving are believed by participants to disarm the armed and create invisible connections among participants (Colorado, 2003). La Ruta seek to create new combinations of cognitive and emotional elements strong enough to disrupt dominant monologues (Cockburn, 2005: 14). Weaving reconstructs social connections and life-cycles, and thereby enhances wellbeing (ibid. 15). Participants recount inner strength and physical recovery as effects of such rituals (Brouwer, 2008: 85). Hence, it is in open spaces, safe spaces, and spaces of dialogue that hope can be found to counter the spiral of terror. This opening of space, this creation of autonomous zones, should be viewed as a break with the majoritarian logics of social control. The coming ‘other worlds’ counterposed to the spaces of terror are not an integrated ‘new order’, but rather, a proliferation of smooth spaces in a horizontality without borders. These ‘other worlds’ are being built unconsciously, wherever networks, affinity and hope counterpose themselves to state terror and the desire for fixed identity be it national, ethnic, religious or cultural. It is in the incommensurable antagonism between the autonomous zones of these ‘other worlds’ and the terror state’s demands for controlled spaces to serve capital, that the nexus of the conflicts of the present and near-future lies. And interestingly, there is also a certain active/reactive difference between state responses in the Turkey and Brazil protests of June 2013.
Active affect is able to organize to undermine static structures, whereas reactive affect becomes coopted and utilized by the state to ceaselessly destroy and form strict confines for identity and being — the aff is a form of negative state action where we reduce the powers of conventionally oppressive institutions Robinson 10 Andre; Ceasefire; “Why Deleuze (still) matters: States, war-machines and radical transformation”; https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-deleuze-war-machine/; political theorist; LCA-BP So what, in Deleuzian theory, is the alternative to the state? Deleuze and Guattari argue for a type of assemblage (social group or cluster of relations) which they refer to as the ‘war-machine’, though with the proviso that certain kinds of ‘war-machines’ can also be captured and used by states. This should not be considered a militarist theory, and the term ‘war-machine’ is in many respects misleading. It is used because Deleuze and Guattari derive their theory from Pierre Clastres’ theory of the role of ritualised (often non-lethal) warfare among indigenous groups. Paul Patton has suggested that the war-machine would be better called a metamorphosis-machine, others have used the term ‘difference engine’, a machine of differentiation, and there is a lot of overlap with the idea of autonomous groups or movements in how the war-machine is theorised. We should also remember that ‘machine’ in Deleuze and Guattari simply refers to a combination of forces or elements; it does not have overtones of instrumentalism or of mindless mechanisms – a social group, an ecosystem, a knight on horseback are all ‘machines’. The term ‘war-machine’ has the unfortunate connotations of brutal military machinery and of uncontrollable militarist apparatuses such as NATO, which operate with a machine-like rigidity and inhumanity (c.f. the phrase ‘military-industrial complex’). For Deleuze and Guattari, these kinds of statist war-machines are also war-machines of a sort, because they descend from a historical process through which states ‘captured’ or incorporated autonomous social movements (particularly those of nomadic indigenous societies) and made them part of the state so as to contain their subversive power. Early states learned to capture war-machines because they were previously vulnerable to being destroyed by the war-machines of nomadic stateless societies, having no similar means of response. Hence, armies are a kind of hybrid social form, containing some of the power of autonomous war-machines but contained in such a way as to harness it to state instrumentalism and inhumanity. Captured in this way, war-machines lose their affirmative force, becoming simply machines of purposeless destruction – having lost the purpose of deterritorialisation (see below), they take on the purpose of pure war as a goal in itself. Deleuze and Guattari argue that state-captured war-machines are regaining their autonomy in a dangerous way, tending to replace limited war in the service of a state’s goals with a drive to total war. This drive is expressed for instance in the ‘war on terror’ as permanent state of emergency. There was a recent controversy about Israeli strategists adopting Deleuzian ideas, which reflects the continuities between state war-machines and autonomous war-machines, but depends on a selective conceptual misreading in which the drive to total war denounced by Deleuze and Guattari is explicitly valorised. The Israeli army is a captured war-machine in the worst possible sense, pursuing the destruction of others’ existential territories in order to accumulate destructive power for a state. For Deleuze and Guattari, it is not the Israeli army but the Palestinian resistance which is a war-machine in the full sense. The autonomous war-machine, as opposed to the state-captured war-machine, is a form of social assemblage directed against the state, and against the coalescence of sovereignty. The way such machines undermine the state is by exercising diffuse power to break down concentrated power, and through the replacement of ‘striated’ (regulated, marked) space with ‘smooth’ space (although the war-machine is the ‘constituent element of smooth space’, I shall save discussion of smooth space for some other time). In Clastres’ account of Amazonian societies, on which Deleuze and Guattari’s theory is based, this is done by means of each band defending its own autonomy, and reacting to any potential accumulation of power by other bands. One could similarly think of how neighbourhood gangs resist subordination by rival gangs, or how autonomous social movements resist concentrations of political power. Autonomous social movements, such as the European squatters’ movement, the Zapatistas, and networks of protest against summits, are the principal example Deleuze and Guattari have in mind of war-machines in the global North, though they also use the concept in relation to Southern guerrilla and popular movements such as the Palestinian intifada and the Vietnamese resistance to American occupation, and also in relation to everyday practices of indigenous groups resisting state control. One could also argue that the ‘war-machine’ is implicit in practices of everyday resistance of the kind studies by James Scott. Marginal groups, termed ‘minorities’ in Deleuzian theory, often coalesce as war-machines because the state-form is inappropriate for them. Ethics must be a constant interrogation of static norms. This creation of new lines of flight redefines current concepts of normativity to that of deterritorialization. Thus, the standard is to vote for the debater who best promotes the conditions for fluid subjectivity. Smith 03 Daniel W. Smith (2003) Deleuze and the liberal tradition: normativity, freedom and judgement, Economy and Society, 32:2, 299-324 Deleuze would no doubt have followed the same approach in his analysis of normativity had he addressed the issue directly. Foucault himself spoke of the power of what he called the process of normalization, which creates us, as subjects, in terms of existing force relations and existing ‘norms’. For Foucault, normalization is not merely an abstract principle of adjudication but an already actualized (and always actualized) power relation. Foucault’s question then became: is it possible to escape, or at least resist, this power of normalization? In Deleuze’s terminology, the same question would be stated in the following terms: within a given social assemblage or ‘territoriality’, where can one find the ‘line of flight’, or the movement of relative deterritorialization, by means of 51Q 08smith (ds) Page 307 Thursday, April 17, 2003 8:45 PM 308 Economy and Society which one can escape from or transform the existing norm (or territoriality)? From this viewpoint, neither Foucault nor Deleuze avoid the issue of normativity, they simply analyze it in terms of an immanent process. The error of transcendence would be to posit normative criteria as abstract universals, even if these are defined in intersubjective or communicative terms. From the viewpoint of immanence, by contrast, it is the process itself that must account for both the production of the norm as well as its possible destruction or alteration. In a given assemblage, one will indeed find normative criteria that govern, for instance, the application of the power of the State, but one will also find the means for the critique and modification of those norms, their deterritorialization. A truly ‘normative’ principle must not only provide norms for condemning abuses of power, but also a means for condemning norms that have themselves become abuses of power (e.g. the norms that governed the treatment of women, slaves, minorities, etc.). An immanent process, in other words, must, at one and the same time, function as a principle of critique as well as a principle of creation (the ‘genetic’ method). ‘The conditions of a true critique and a true creation are one and the same’ (Deleuze 1994: 139). The one cannot and ‘must’ not exist without the other If deterritorialization functions as a norm for Patton, then, it is a somewhat paradoxical norm. Within any assemblage, what is normative is deterritorialization, that is, the creation of ‘lines of flight’ (Deleuze) or ‘resistance’ (Foucault) that allow one to break free from a given norm, or to transform the norm. What ‘must’ always remain normative is the ability to critique and transform existing norms, that is, to create something new (the category of the new should be understood here in the broad sense, including not only social change, but also artistic creation, conceptual innovation and so on.) One cannot have pre-existing norms or criteria for the new; otherwise it would not be new, but already foreseen. This is the basis on which Patton argues that Deleuze’s conception of power is explicitly normative: ‘What a given assemblage is capable of doing or becoming’, he writes, ‘is determined by the lines of flight or deterritorialization which it can sustain’ (Patton 2000: 106). (One might note here that the concept of ‘nomadic war-machines’, which was introduced in A Thousand Plateaus, is Deleuze and Guattari’s attempt to address the question of a social formation that would itself be constructed along such movements or lines of flight. Patton suggests that such assemblages should in fact be called ‘metamorphosis’ machines (2000: 110), since they have only an external relation to war and a historically contingent relation to nomads; this is a suggestion that will no doubt be taken up by others. Metamorphosis machines would be the conditions of actualization of absolute deterritorialization and the means by which relative deterritorialization occurs: ‘They bring connections to bear against the great conjunction of the apparatuses of capture or domination.’ . . . A metamorphosis machine would then be one that . . . engenders the production of something altogether different. (Patton 2000: 110) 51Q 08smith (ds) Page 308 Thursday, April 17, 2003 8:45 PM Daniel W. Smith: Deleuze and the liberal tradition 309 Patton is therefore using the concept ‘normativity’ in a quite different manner than Fraser or Habermas. They would say that deterritorialization is not normative, and cannot be, since it eludes any universal criteria and indeed allows for their modification. Patton in effect responds by saying: for that very reason, it is deterritorialization that should be seen as a normative concept, even if that entails a new concept of what normativity is. At one point in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze writes that ‘one can conserve the word essence, if one wishes, but only on the condition of saying that essence is precisely the accident or the event’ (1994: 191). Patton seems to be saying something similar: one can conserve the word normativity, if one wishes, but only on the condition of saying that the normative is the new or the deterritorialized. Patton’s own trajectory is thus beginning to come into focus: rather than simply dropping or ignoring the concept of normativity, he instead proposes to create a new concept of normativity by critiquing components of the old one, and linking it up with a quite different set of related concepts. In this manner, he is effecting a transformation of the liberal concept, while still attempting to situate his own work fully within the liberal tradition.
Thus I affirm: Resolved: The member nations of the World Trade Organization ought to reduce intellectual property protections for medicines. I’ll defend the resolution as a general principle and PICS don’t negate because general principles tolerate exceptions. I’ll spec whatever you want me to in cx as long as it doesn’t force me to abandon my maximum. Offense 1 Property protections are a manifestation of the creeping shadow in our comfortable lawscape. Every object has a distinct and undeniable patent, trademark or copyright symbol, each serving as a daunting reminder of the ever-present state and commodifying our affect P-M 13 Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 13 Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Atmospheres of law: Senses, affects, lawscapes, Emotion, Space and Society, Volume 7, 2013, Pages 35-44, ISSN 1755-4586, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2012.03.001.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1755458612000266 (Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, LLB, LLM, PhD, is a Professor of Law and Theory at the University of Westminster, and founder and Director of The Westminster Law and Theory Lab.) SHS KS *brackets used for grammatical clarity Let me therefore allow a little bit of law, and specifically intellectual property law, to emerge. Think of your initial welcome to the lawscape: the music, the smell, the taste, the textures. Think of how cosy you felt. Think of your affects — you wanted to have a Coke, you had a Coke; you wanted to stay in the room, you stayed in the room. Think of the atmosphere, comfortable, safe, energising. No law, just smooth space, reassuringly urban, tasteful yet with a hint of home-baking. At the same time, you realise that there is a bit of law around to protect you: you close the door behind you, this is your private space, the law protects that. You were offered the Coke, you did not steal it; you legitimately bought your iPad (ok, from Hong Kong but who knows this). The atmosphere is assembled by a safe, small measure of law, there to protect you and to make you feel immune in your enclosed sphere. But look again. Or rather, smell, listen, touch again. The red and yellow colour combination is a registered trademark of KODAK (Vaver, 2005). The smell of roses comes from the rubber used for the floor of the room — the Sumitomo Rubbers’s successful application for trademark.1 The first notes of Für Elise by Beethoven have been registered as a trademark by a Dutch company. The iPad touch screen is part of patented technology for which Apple has been in dispute with Samsung over the past few years (see also Parisi, 2008 on touch technologies).2 Finally, the Coke, well!, the Coke is obviously one of the best examples of a fully protected product in terms of taste, appearance, logo, bottle — the whole lot. And the bonus of sorts in the room: if you were to approach the darts, you would see that they emanate a distinct smell of dark beer. Even this combination is successfully registered by Unicorn Products, 3 a company who obviously thought that its target audience would be able to identify with it, and wanted to secure that no one else would use it. These are just some examples. As Vaver (2005: 897) points out, “over time there has been constant pressure from industry – note, not consumers – to widen the subject matter of protection to include as trademark virtually any perceptible feature in the sensory world that can be used to attract custom.” There are myriads of other laws that categorise, determine and restrict urban space, such as planning law (Valverde, 2011), property law (Blomley, 2004), environmental law (PhilippopoulosMihalopoulos, 2007) and health and safety regulations (and the mythology that feeds back, Almond, 2009). I chose to introduce the issue of atmospheres on the basis of intellectual property law because of is the fact that sensory control is direct and unmediated to the body, yet it manages to diffuse and dissimulate itself. This it does in two ways: first, by targeting the environment rather than the body (Sloterdijk, 2009), and precisely through this diffusing manoeuvre managing to have the greatest impact on the body; and second, by dissimulating itself as desire, that is as personal preference that ‘demands’ Kodak, Coke, Apple, or beer-scented darts. In some cases, the proffered hyperreality is superimposed on a more basic desire for, say, natural smells or tastes. This sensory desire, as Emily Grabham has convincingly demonstrated (in her case, touch), “embeds itself into the normative fabric of the law, creating and maintaining expectations around what is proper, decent and safe” (Grabham, 2009: 350). This means that the legal sensorium becomes “detached from specific moments and mobilised within legal processes” (2009: 350), indeed becomes fetishised by the law only to be snuggly reattached, I would argue, to the materiality of the situation in hand, claiming echoes of universality. But this is the paradox: the more universal the law, the more diffused it is. The more diffused it is, the more anomic a space appears. The room is just a room. The legal affect is found in this excess of law, in law’s ubiquitous presence that tends to hide under rose-smelling rubber surfaces. The atmosphere of the lawscape is perfectly engineered to appear as a city that is guided by preference, choice, opportunity, freedom. Scratch the surface and you feel the law pushing all these preferences into corridors of affective movement, atmospherics of legal passion that are material through and through yet appear reassuringly distant and abstract. 2 Intellectual property regimes biologically regulate affective expression and force the subject into binary, mechanical, categories. Wolodzko 18 – Agnieszka Anna, Bodies within affect. : on practicing contaminating matters through bioart, 2018, https://scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/handle/1887/66889 The particular discrepancy between the practice of affect and its control, between discovering the relations of transformation and managing these relations in order to achieve particular formations, is present in the practices of biotechnology. Take, for instance, the patenting of the human genome, which touches the very intimate and existential realm of what it means to have and be a body. Donna Dickenson reports that, according to common law, once a part of your body is separated from you, it is legally treated as waste and as not belonging to anybody lat. res nullius.22 Dickenson believes that this disposable attitude to body parts that have been detached from the body is due to the traditional distinction between a person and raw matter. Unlike a body part, persons cannot be owned as this would undermine the notion of human dignity.23 However, as Dickenson states, recent biotechnological practices undermine the boundaries between what can be considered as a person and what is just a raw body part, which results making the body a much more fluid and hybrid phenomenon. The scale and implications of the hybridity and relationality of the body as a result of biotechnological practices can be seen, for instance, within the phenomenon of human genome patenting and genetic testing, the most lucrative applications of biotechnological innovations.24 Till 2013, it was common practice to patent the human genome once it had been isolated from the body. Even though genes are not an invention as such, their isolation from a body was considered an innovative practice and thus subject to patenting laws.25 This resulted in an enormous biomarket, where, in the 1980s-1990s, till 2005, over twenty per cent of the human genome was patented in the US.26 A patent is “a legal right granted to inventors by national governments to exclude others from making, using or selling their invention in a given country,”27 and so, in this context, its function presupposes that parts of our own body are legally owned by companies and institutions.28 Most importantly, gene patents are usually applied to all methods of their detection. This means that every test and tool involved in the management of a particular sequence are covered by patent laws. The patent thus reaches a very broad research area, and this may have consequences for future innovation and medical care. Since the main role of patents in the biotechnology that has induced genetic testing was to allow for private investment in research and development, biotechnology has transformed from a common good into a commodification and exploitation of the body. Arguably, things have changed once the US Supreme Court banned the patenting of “natural” genes in the case of the Myriad Genetics Inc., the company that discovered the sequence and location of BRCA1 and BRCA1 – a gene mutation that increases the risk of ovarian and breast cancer: “A naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated, but cDNA is patent eligible because it is not naturally occurring.”29 However, things become more ambiguous when we look not only at the differences, but also at the similarities between DNA and its copy, cDNA (complementary DNA). cDNA is “a type of a man-made DNA composition, which is made in a lab with an enzyme that creates DNA from RNA template.”30 Not naturally occurring, and structurally and functionally different from DNA, cDNA thus complies with the patent law. Nevertheless, some critics argue that, despite its structural and functional difference, which allows for the further research, the copy (cDNA) still holds exactly the same information as the original (DNA).31 Moreover, because cDNA is not distinct from the methods it is extracted with, there is no specification of how much intervention is actually needed in order for the gene to be legally patented, since mere simple separation from the body is no longer a boundary.32 Despite the lack of boundaries and clear definitions of what a body’s natural state is and what its manipulated state is, Myriad, (like other companies involved in human gene patenting), practices what is now called personalized medicine. Bodies are practiced as autonomous and fixed identities, independent from collective relations.33 As Dickenson argues, personalized medicine deliberately positions itself against we medicine, emphasising individual responsibility and care, rather than a collective and relational understanding of the way our bodies are. We witnessed the power of individual choice when the American actress Angelina Jolie announced that she had undergone a double mastectomy due to the presence of the BRCA gene in her body. This was in 2013, just before the Supreme Court decision in the Myriad case and the actress’s experience provoked a public debate about the necessity of testing for the cancer gene. However, the media conveniently failed to mention the patent that applied to the BRCA gene, and just how expensive the test to detect it was (in 2013, the test cost between US$3,000 and US$4,000).34 Moreover, the decision to undergo the mastectomy – which for the average woman does not end with a full breast reconstruction as it did in Jolie’s case – was portrayed as being a woman’s – a mother’s – individual choice. The discussion of the elective surgery largely ignored any discussion of the financial, political or social situation of women, or of the industry involved in performing these tests. Importantly, in order for the testing to be accurate and certain, a large database of the variation of this mutation is needed. You need “we medicine in order to perform a successful me medicine.”35 In other words, to be accurate, any medicine depends on a range of relational practices and multiple bodies from various social, political and biological states. Any distinction, therefore, between “me” and “we” medicine is an artificial one. Medical practice has exposed how “me” medicine has already been “we” medicine. The tangible danger, however, is that these relational practices become veiled by the abstract categories of individuality and autonomy. In other words, while we are already living within affect, and are already practicing affect’s contaminations and its multiple relations and implications for various spheres of living bodies, we have never really changed our logic with regard to affect. In the case of Myriad, while, in principle, researchers, share their genome database in order to provide an exchange of information for the common good and to promote innovation and accurate medical care, fear of competition led the company to stop contributing to the data already in 2004. It has also stopped publicising new information about variations. As a major performer of tests for the BRCA gene, Myriad has thus significantly restricted research on breast cancer. The company’s self-interest, clothed in a policy of personalized medicine has stopped the flow of data and, therefore, causing less accurate medical care.36 What is worse, after the US Supreme Court decision of 15 April 2013, Myriad filed a number of lawsuits against laboratories that had started to offer the BRCA test more cheaply.37 What we learn from the BRCA case, is that by failing to change the logic of thinking about the bodies and as a result of its perpetuation of the belief in the autonomy of bodies, despite their obvious dependence on bodies’ relationality, the gene patenting industry has created even stronger hierarchies among bodies. The industry’s policies have enacted a strong belief in determinism, ascribed to DNA within the practices of biotechnological, economic and political application. The idea of the autonomous body is stronger than the actual matters of practice and relations that construct the body. Such practice of the body has preserved the nature/culture divide in a bizarrely paradoxical way. The US Supreme Court’s decision perpetuates a belief in the exclusion of nature from any economic-political spheres. As long as something does not occur in “nature”, it can be patented. However, as shown in the case of Myriad, the copy (cDNA) of DNA that is to be patented holds exactly the same information as the original (DNA). The border between what occurs naturally and culturally, what is original and what is a copy, is thus blurred. Without the “original” DNA there would be no cDNA in the first place. Moreover, what is considered as artificial and therefore ready for manipulation and commodification, materially influences and transforms what we consider to be “natural”. The promise of cure and treatment that has justified the privatization and monopolization of research, ultimately influences our own bodies and lives. Patented genes sequences do not regard a particular body, but “the body”. Patents have a universal function, which, in turn, incorporates all our bodies under its law. Once you have a breast cancer, part of you, what you think of as the “natural” you, belongs, in practice, to the corporation. The artificial divide between the “state of nature” and man-made practice does not respond to our bodies, which are an entanglement of living matter and practices. Furthermore, the Myriad case is also a striking example because it shows the consequences of our lack of understanding that biotechnology has a real material impact on our social and political life. Here, the idea of personhood and human dignity cannot do justice to the scale of novelty and unpredictability of the biotechnological world. Biobanks, which are the modern equivalent of surveillance and property, have resulted in: commodified cell lines, such as those in the Henrietta Lacks legal case,38 promises of regenerative medicine via new methods that transform a cell from an adult body into any other type of a cell, and CRISPR genome editing, which makes the idea of designer babies not just futuristic speculation, but a scientific possibly.39 Indeed, these new biotechnological inventions have undermined any doubt about the influence that biotechnology already has in shaping our lives. These phenomena are not just the concern of bioethical committees and economic policies, they directly touch the multiple political, social and cultural realms of our existence. Ingeborg Reichle called the unprecedented power inherent to the use of biotechnology “bottom-up eugenics”, which is not based directly on a socio-cultural idea and narration, but rather the market and profit.40 As Robert Zwijnenberg argues, biotechnology inevitably correlates with such problems as, for instance, human enhancement, posing not only ethical and legal problems, but forcing more philosophically and culturally varied questions and attitudes, i.e. “who and what do we want to be as humans, and who and what do we want to become?”41 Biotechnological innovations that allow us to manipulate our bodies construct economicsocial realities that do not respond to disciplinary divisions. Economic and political demands are strongly entangled with scientific findings, technologies and their agencies, which, in turn, inevitably influence social and cultural, individual and the population’s practices, as well as our lives and bodies. However, as the Myriad case shows, once these multiple entanglements are applied according to the traditional beliefs in autonomy, individuation and personalization, which do not respond to the relational nature of phenomena, we enter into the realm of utopian beliefs in purity and clear-cut boundaries between species and disciplines. For instance, transhumanists’ desire for designer babies and perfect humans,42 fuelled by an unquestioning use of technology, is just one among many examples of using relationality not as an ontological way of being, but as a means for strengthening the fixed ideas about our bodies. We already live and practice affect, that is why, if we do not think and act according to its dynamic nature, we create even sharper dualisms, polarizations and hierarchies. It is therefore time to map these material and relational ways of understanding. It is time to map bodies within affect, in order to meet the challenges of the biotechnological future. The question is, how to do that? How can we relationally practice the relational nature of our bodies? In other words, how do we make matters of affect matter?
9/26/21
SO - Kant
Tournament: Yale | Round: 4 | Opponent: Charlotte Latin EL | Judge: Andrew Lee Ethics must be derived from the constitutive features of agents – Constitutivism solves – it allows for universal obligations among all agents but they are binding and cannot be opted out of.
Next, only practical reason is constitutive: 1 Regress – 2 Agents can shift between different identities but doing so requires reason - it unifies the subject and is the only enterprise agents cannot escape Ferrero 09 (Luca Ferrero, Luca Ferrero is a Philosophy professor at University of California, Riverside. His areas of interest are Agency Theory, including Intentionality and Personal identity; Practical Reasoning; and Meta-Ethics, “Constitutivism and the Inescapability of Agency”. Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. IV, Jan 12, 2009. https://philarchive.org/archive/FERCATv1 BHHS AK recut Agency is special in two respects. First, agency is the enterprise with the largest jurisdiction.¹² All ordinary enterprises fall under it. To engage in any ordinary enterprise is ipso facto to engage in the enterprise of agency. In addition, there are instances of behavior that fall under no other enterprise but agency. First, intentional transitions in and out of particular enterprises might not count as moves within those enterprises, but they are still instances of intentional agency, of bare intentional agency, so to say. Second, agency is the locus where we adjudicate the merits and demerits of participating in any ordinary enterprise. Reasoning whether to participate in a particular enterprise is often conducted outside of that enterprise, even while one is otherwise engaged in it. Practical reflection is a manifestation of full-fledged intentional agency but it does not necessarily belong to any other specific enterprise. Once again, it might be an instance of bare intentional agency. In the limiting case, agency is the only enterprise that would still keep a subject busy if she were to attempt a ‘radical re-evaluation’ of all of her engagements and at least temporarily suspend her participation in all ordinary enterprises.
That justifies universalizability - insofar as there is no a priori distinction between reasoners, a reason for one agent must also be a reason for another; if all agents cannot set and pursue an end, it is not constitutive of agency. Willing a maxim that violates freedom is a contradiction in conception – you cannot violate someone’s freedom without having your own freedom to do so.
Thus, the standard is consistency with the categorical imperative
Impact calc: Intentions first – only the intention in pursuing a certain end is relevant when considering whether or not it is universalizable. Prefer for Action theory – Any action can be split into infinite smaller actions. For example, when I’m taking a bite of food, I am making infinite movements of my hand and mouth – only reason allows you to unify the action. If we can’t unify actions, then we can’t call actions moral or immoral because they are made up of infinite different combinations of smaller ones. Prefer additionally:
1 Arguing against my framework presupposes freedom because without freedom to reason you would not be able to make arguments and try to win. – this means that contesting any of my arguments proves my framework true. 2 A posteriori ethics fail: a Problem of induction Vickers 14, John Vickers, 2014, The Problem of Induction, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/ The original problem of induction can be simply put. It concerns the support or justification of inductive methods; methods that predict or infer, in Hume's words, that “instances of which we have had no experience resemble those of which we have had experience” (THN, 89). Such methods are clearly essential in scientific reasoning as well as in the conduct of our everyday affairs. The problem is how to support or justify them and it leads to a dilemma: the principle cannot be proved deductively, for it is contingent, and only necessary truths can be proved deductively. Nor can it be supported inductively—by arguing that it has always or usually been reliable in the past—for that would beg the question by assuming just what is to be proved.
3 Parameters Accessibility – Other frameworks like Util require massive amounts of research that under resourced kids can’t access – encouraging research heavy debates always favors big schools. My framework solves - is super easy to understand and you only need to think of analytic arguments in round
Thus, the defend the resolution as a general principle Resolved: The member nations of the World Trade Organization ought to reduce intellectual property protections for medicines. I’m willing to spec what you want as long as I don’t abandon my maxim. For now enforcement is removing trips plus, and I defend all member nations and all medicines – ill defend certain nations or medicines though cuz its irrelevant under the fw
Affirm 1) IPPs violate essential freedoms, including barring participation in the scientific community, and basic human rights Hale 18 (Zachary Hale, 4-4-2018, accessed on 8-22-2021, The Arkansas Journal of Social Change and Public Service, "Patently Unfair: The Tensions Between Human Rights and Intellectual Property Protection - The Arkansas Journal of Social Change and Public Service", https://ualr.edu/socialchange/2018/04/04/patently-unfair/) BHHS AK Although the right to the protection of “moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary, or artistic production,”32 is a human right as defined in the UDHR and the ICESCR, the current system of intellectual property protection conflicts with and even violates rights that are considered to be fundamental to human life. Although intellectual property instruments are certainly used to violate essential civil and political freedoms like the freedom of expression, and economic and social freedoms like the freedom to share in the scientific advancements of society, the most blatant violations of human rights caused by intellectual property protection occur in the fields of nutrition, healthcare, and culture.33 Of these essential entitlements, the rights to food and health are made even more significant by their relationship to the most fundamental of all human rights: the right to life. 2) Property rights for medical patents can’t be universalizable – a) they restrict freedom from death by foreclosing possible treatment, that’s a contradiction Merges 11 Merges, Robert P. Justifying Intellectual Property. JIP-Chapter-9.pdf. (n.d.). https://www.law.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/JIP-Chapter-9.pdf OL Under Kant’s Universal Principle of Right (UPR), “laws secure our right to external freedom of choice to the extent that this freedom is compatible with everyone else’s freedom of choice under a universal law.”8 As I ex- plained in Chapter 3, Kant’s theory of property rights expresses a special instance of this general principle: property is widely available, yet denied when individual appropriation interferes with the freedom of others. Kant says that although the need for robust property drives the formation of civil society, property rights are nonetheless subject to this “universalizing” principle. Under the operation of the UPR, property rights are constrained: they must not be so broad that they interfere with the freedom of fellow citizens. In a Kantian state, individual property is both necessary—to pro- mote autonomy and self-development; see Chapter 3—and necessarily re- stricted under the UPR.9 Death is the ultimate restraint on autonomy; there is no more “self” to guide after a person dies. So when a claim to property by person A leads to the death of aperson B, Kant’s Universal Principle would seem to rebut that claim. As with other issues, however, Kant’s views in this regard are not so simple. In particular, he expressed complex views on the legal defense of “necessity,” which bears a close resemblance to the property-limiting prin- ciple I am attributing to him here.10 Kant says, in effect, that in at least one important example of necessity—where A kills B, or at least puts B in im- mediate grave danger, to save A’s own life—one who commits a necessary act is culpable but not punishable.11 As with so much in the K cantian canon, there is a great deal of debate over just what Kant was trying to say about necessity. One view—at least as plausible as most others, and more plausible than some—holds that Kant thought of necessity as something like an excuse or defense: a wrong act is not made right by necessity, but it is insulated from formal legal liability.12 This view, well described by among others the Kant scholar Arthur Ripstein, depends on the distinction between formal, positive law (“external,” in Kant’s terminology; see Chap- ter 3) and “internal” morality. Property for Kant is an absolute right, and taking it without permission is always objectively wrong. But at the same time, some takings are not punishable by the state because they fall outside the proper bounds of legitimate lawmaking. Because Kant did not explicitly discuss the necessity defense as it per- tains to property rights, any application of his thinking to the case of phar- maceutical patents can only be speculation. Even so, there is one point to make. As I explained in some detail in Chapter 3, there is generally a high degree of symmetry between Kant’s thinking on law and his theory of property. The UPR is a good example; as I explained in Chapter 3, the idea that property can extend only up to the point that it interferes with the freedom of others is simply one specific application of the general Kantian take on law and freedom. Thus, the analysis of the pharmaceutical patents problem would turn on the issue of property’s effect on the freedom of those suffering from treatable diseases. To put it simply, it is difficult to be sure of the exact conclusion Kant would reach with regard to the issue, but I am sure that the analysis would turn on the freedom-restricting qualities of pharmaceutical patents. It is hard to know the right answer, but not hard to pose the right question: should property extend so far as to cut off or restrain the freedom of those who might be treated? In my view, the freedom of disease sufferers is so constrained that the property rights in pharmaceutical patents must give way. As I said, this is not the only plausible reading of Kant’s Universal Principle with respect to the problem at hand. But I think it is the best reading, and it is certainly the best I can do, given Kant’s text and the problem of pharmaceutical patents as I understand it. b) universalizing the act of restricting the production or manufacturing of a medicine results in a contradiction because you would be restricting your own ability to produce existing nor new medicines
4 Property rights minimize the opportunity of innovation which limits individual freedom by creating monopolies. They also limit the use of tangible objects such as medicines for their purpose. Cernea and Uszkai 12 Cernea, Mihail-Valentin, and Radu Uszkai. The Clash between Global Justice and Pharmaceutical Patents: A Critical Analysis. 2012, the-clash-between-global-justice-and-drug-patents-a-critical-analysis.pdf. SJEP To make this point clearer, we regard property as an ethical institution which emerged in the context of reiterated conflict between agents for tangible goods. A useful analogy would be, for example, the particular way in which David Hume discusses the emergence of justice in the context of scarcity in which agents pursue their own interests4 . As a result, the purpose of property rights would be that of avoiding or minimizing the possibility of conflict and that of increasing the costs of free-riding or trespassing. Let’s take the following example which will illustrate better our point. Assume that X is a philosophy student and has a copy of Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Y is a college of him but he does not have the book. They both have to write an essay on Kant’s categorical imperative. Because Y does not have the book, let’s assume that he decides, whether by the use of coercion or fraud to take his book. As a result, the theft leaves X without his property because tangible goods are rivalrous in consumption. Both student can’t, at the same time but in a different place read about Kant’s categorical imperative from the same copy. Now a different example: suppose X invents a new way of harvesting corn and Y harvests his corn accordingly. This situation is quite different in comparison to the case we presented earlier, because Y does not leaves X without either his new harvesting mechanisms which he created but neither without the idea behind the mechanism. It would be hard to say that Y stole something from X because the consumption of intangible goods such as ideas does not have the same rivalrous property as a copy of a book written by Kant. Actually, the existence of the patent system fosters the scarcity of ideas. In this context patents represent unjustified state-granted monopolies. Moreover, intellectual property rights have another profound immoral consequence: it limits the use of tangible objects which we acquired fully in line with market rules.
Only the plan can solve covid access – inequalities heighten the risk of mutations and uneven development – neg objections miss the boat.
Kumar 21 ~Rajeesh; Associate Fellow at the Institute, currently working on a project titled "Emerging Powers and the Future of Global Governance: India and International Institutions." He has PhD in International Organization from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Prior to joining MP-IDSA in 2016, he taught at JamiaMilliaIslamia, New Delhi (2010-11and 2015-16) and University of Calicut, Kerala (2007-08). His areas of research interest are International Organizations, India and Multilateralism, Global Governance, and International Humanitarian Law. He is the co-editor of two books;Eurozone Crisis and the Future of Europe: Political Economy of Further Integration and Governance (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); and Islam, Islamist Movements and Democracy in the Middle East: Challenges, Opportunities and Responses (Delhi: Global Vision Publishing, 2013); "WTO TRIPS Waiver and COVID-19 Vaccine Equity," IDSA Issue Briefs; https://idsa.in/issuebrief/wto-trips-waiver-covid-vaccine-rkumar-120721~~ Justin According to Duke Global Health Innovation Center, which monitors COVID-19 vaccine purchases
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, from trade-offs to pressurising, to make the waiver happen.
Yes scale-up for covid.
Erfani et al 21 ~Parsa; Lawrence Gostin; Vanessa Kerry; Parsa Erfani is a Fogarty Global Health Scholar at Harvard Medical School and the University of Global Health Equity. Lawrence Gostin is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, director of the school’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, and director of the World Health Organization Center on National and Global Health Law. Vanessa Kerry is a critical care physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, director of the Program for Global Public Policy at Harvard Medical School, and CEO of Seed Global Health, a nonprofit that trains health workers in countries with critical shortages; "Beyond a symbolic gesture: What’s needed to turn the IP waiver into Covid-19 vaccines," STAT; 5/19/21; https://www.statnews.com/2021/05/19/beyond-a-symbolic-gesture-whats-needed-to-turn-the-ip-waiver-into-covid-19-vaccines/~~ Justin Currently many idle suppliers can’t begin vaccine production until they upgrade and repurpose existing manufacturing
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to acquire the IP necessary for mRNA technologies— which is currently missing.
Studies show that vaccine distribution solve COVID. Reject any ev that don’t assume vaccine nationalism.
Compares two models of HARs and LARs Allows for mutation simulations Princeton University 8/17 Princeton University. "Vaccine stockpiling by nations could lead
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study strongly supports that ethical position showing that stockpiling will undermine global health."
Independently strategic patenting harms innovation incentives during pandemics – encourages reproduction of generics and decrease breakthroughs.
Gurgula 20 ~Olga; Lecturer in Intellectual Property Law at Brunel Law School, Brunel University London. She is also a Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Martin Programme on Affordable Medicines, University of Oxford; "Strategic Patenting by Pharmaceutical Companies – Should Competition Law Intervene?" Springer Link; 10/28/20; https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40319-020-00985-0~~#Sec4~~ Justin As the COVID-19 pandemic is sweeping through the world, thousands of people
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at blocking follow-on innovation by competitors should raise competition law concerns.
Covid escalates multiple security threats that cause extinction
Recna 21 ~Research Center for Nuclear Weapon Abolition; Nagasaki, Japan; "Pandemic Futures and Nuclear Weapon Risks: The Nagasaki 75th Anniversary pandemic-nuclear nexus scenarios final report," Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament; 5/28/21; https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25751654.2021.1890867~~ Justin The Challenge: Multiple Existential Threats The relationship between pandemics and war is as
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by nuclear threat, with cascading effects on the risk of nuclear war.
Nuclear detonations cause extinction, and no rainout effect– self-lofting means soot goes above the clouds
Starr 15 Steven Starr, 10-14-2015, "Nuclear War, Nuclear Winter, and Human Extinction," Federation Of American Scientists, ~Steven Starr is the director of the University of Missouri’s Clinical Laboratory Science Program, as well as a senior scientist at the Physicians for Social Responsibility. He has been published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the Strategic Arms Reduction (STAR) website of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.~, https://fas.org/pir-pubs/nuclear-war-nuclear-winter-and-human-extinction/, SJBE While it is impossible to precisely predict all the human impacts that would result from
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engage in an unwinnable academic debate as to whether any humans will survive.
Plan text: The member nations of the World Trade Organization ought to reduce intellectual property protections for medicines during pandemics.
Reduce is defined by Oxford as make smaller or less in amount, degree, or size.
Enforcement through limited IP waivers solve – patent term extensions are normal means and solves innovation and scale-up.
Young and Potts-Szeliga 21 ~Roberta; Counsel in Seyfarth’s Litigation department and Intellectual Property and Patent Litigation practice groups in Los Angeles; Jamaica Potts-Szeliga; Partner in Seyfarth’s Litigation department and Intellectual Property and Patent Litigation practice groups in Washington, DC. She also provides advice on FDA regulatory issues and is part of the firm’s Health Care, Life Sciences, and Pharmaceuticals team; "A Third Option: Limited IP Waiver Could Solve Our Pandemic Vaccine Problems," IP Watch Dog; 7/21/21; https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2021/07/21/third-option-limited-ip-waiver-solve-pandemic-vaccine-problems/id=135732/~~ Justin Limited Waiver Approach This article suggests a third option, between voluntary vaccine donation
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deter the technological investment to create life-saving solutions in the future.
A rating" for Availability only. Our future generations deserve nothing less.
WTO cred solves wars that go nuclear.
Hamann 09 ~Georgia; 2009; J.D. Candidate, Vanderbilt University Law School; "Replacing Slingshots with Swords: Implications of the Antigua-Gambling 22.6 Panel Report for Developing Countries and the World Trading System," VANDERBILT JOURNAL OF TRANSNATIONAL LAW, http://www.jogoremoto.pt/docs/extra/duqJ53.pdf~~ Justin Both Antigua and the U.S. claimed the resolution of the arbitration as
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keenly aware of the responsibility they have to uphold the organization’s credibility.108