Capitalism Kritik – cndi 2014 Negative
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- The alternative is to vote negative to refuse to participate in the violent logic of capitalism.
Capitalism Kritik – CNDI 2014Negative1NCOcean development and exploration continues capitalist pillage of the oceans.PSL 13 (PSL 5-31-13, Liberation Party for Socialism, http://www.pslweb.org/liberationnews/newspaper/vol-7-no-7/the-pillaging-of-the-earths-oceans.html, accessed 5-31-13 The oceans of the world are vast and deep. They cover 71 percent of the Earth’s surface and contain 97 percent of the planet’s water. The oceans seem boundless in water, marine life and energy to sustain the planet’s life and atmosphere. But the oceans are experiencing profound stress, due to escalating factors directly related to capitalist production and the degradation of the environment. Alarming reports by marine scientists have been sounding the danger to the world’s oceans and the need for urgent action. The International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) warns that “massive marine extinction” already may be underway due to rapidly worsening stresses on marine ecosystems. But, as capitalism’s search for profits intensifies, the devastation of the oceans is only accelerating. Three main stresses — global warming, acidification of the oceans, and decreased oxygen —have led to such declines in many of the marine ecosystems that the conditions have met or surpassed “worst-case scenarios” predicted in the first decade of this 21st century. IPSO stated in 2011, “[W]e now face losing marine species and entire marine ecosystems, such as coral reefs, within a single generation. Unless action is taken now, the consequences of our activities are at a high risk of causing, through the combined effects of climate change, overexploitation, pollution and habitat loss, the next globally significant extinction event in the ocean. It is notable that the occurrence of multiple high intensity stressors has been a prerequisite for all the five global extinction events of the past 600 million years.” Such a catastrophe would, needless to say, affect humanity and all life on Earth. Yet capitalists have rejected in international forums even basic accords to limit the exploitation of the oceans or to slow down the belching of fossil fuels into the environment. By far the biggest abuser of the environment is the United States Working within the capitalist system for ocean development and exploration only ensures continuous environmental exploitation.Clausen 08 [‘The Oceanic Crisis: Capitalism and the Degradation of the Marine Ecosystems’, by Brett Clarkkand Rebbeca Clausen.. Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Jul/Aug2008, Vol. 60 Issue 3, p91-111. 21pg.] The world is at a crossroads in regard to the ecological crisis. Ecological degradation under global capitalism extends to the entire biosphere. Oceans that were teeming with abundance are being deci- mated by the continual intrusion of exploitive economic operations. At the same time that scientists are documenting the complexity and interdependency of marine species, we are witnessing an oceanic crisis as natural conditions, ecological processes, and nutrient cycles are being undermined through overfishing and transformed due to global warming. The expansion of the accumulation system, along with tech- nological advances in fishing, have intensified the exploitation of the world ocean; facilitated the enormous capture of fishes (both target and bycatch); extended the spatial reach of fishing operations; broadened the species deemed valuable on the market; and disrupted metabolic and reproductive processes of the ocean. The quick-fix solution of aquaculture enhances capital’s control over production without re- solving ecological contradictions. It is wise to recognize, as Paul Burkett has stated, that “short of human extinction, there is no sense in which capitalism can be relied upon to permanently ‘break down’ under the weight of its depletion and degradation of natural wealth.”Capital is driven by the competition for the accumulation of wealth, and short-term profits provide the immediate pulse of capitalism. It cannot operate under conditions that require reinvestment in the reproduction of nature, which may entail time scales of a hundred or more years. Such requirements stand op posed to the immediate interests of profit. The qualitative relation between humans and nature is subsumed under the drive to accumulate capital on an ever-larger scale. Marx lamented that to capital, “Time is everything, man is nothing; he is at the most, time’s carcase. Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything.”Productive relations are concerned with production time, labor costs, and the circulation of capital—not the diminish- ing conditions of existence. Capital subjects natural cycles and processes (via controlled feeding and the use of growth hormones) to its economic cycle. The maintenance of natural conditions is not a concern. The bounty of nature is taken for granted and appropriated as a free gift. As a result, the system is inherently caught in a fundamental crisis arising from the transformation and destruction of nature. István Mészáros elaborates this point, stating: For today it is impossible to think of anything at all concerning the ele-mentary conditions of social metabolic reproduction which is not lethally threatened by the way in which capital relates to them—the only way in which it can. This is true not only of humanity’s energy requirements, or of the management of the planet’s mineral resources and chemical potentials, but of every facet of the global agriculture, including the devastation caused by large scale de-forestation, and even the most irresponsible way of dealing with the element without which no human being can survive: water itself....In the absence of miraculous solutions, capital’s arbitrarily self-asserting attitude to the objective determinations of causality and time in the end inevitably brings a bitter harvest, at the expense of humanity [and nature itself]. The alternative is to vote negative to refuse to participate in the violent logic of capitalism.Herod 04 (James, http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/GetFre/4thEd/4-index.htm, Getting Free, 4th Edition) It is time to try to describe, at first abstractly and later concretely, a strategy for destroying capitalism. This strategy, at its most basic, calls for pulling time, energy, and resources out of capitalist civilization and putting them into building a new civilization. The image then is one of emptying out capitalist structures, hollowing them out, by draining wealth, power, and meaning out of them until there is nothing left but shells. This is definitely an aggressive strategy. It requires great militancy, and constitutes an attack on the existing order. The strategy clearly recognizes that capitalism is the enemy and must be destroyed, but it is not a frontal attack aimed at overthrowing the system, but an inside attack aimed at gutting it, while simultaneously replacing it with something better, something we want. Thus capitalist structures (corporations, governments, banks, schools, etc.) are not seized so much as simply abandoned. Capitalist relations are not fought so much as they are simply rejected. We stop participating in activities that support (finance, condone) the capitalist world and start participating in activities that build a new world while simultaneously undermining the old. We create a new pattern of social relations alongside capitalist relations and then we continually build and strengthen our new pattern while doing every thing we can to weaken capitalist relations. In this way our new democratic, non-hierarchical, non-commodified relations can eventually overwhelm the capitalist relations and force them out of existence. This is how it has to be done. This is a plausible, realistic strategy. To think that we could create a whole new world of decent social arrangements overnight, in the midst of a crisis, during a so-called revolution, or during the collapse of capitalism, is foolhardy. Our new social world must grow within the old, and in opposition to it, until it is strong enough to dismantle and abolish capitalist relations. Such a revolution will never happen automatically, blindly, determinably, because of the inexorable, materialist laws of history. It will happen, and only happen, because we want it to, and because we know what we’re doing and know how we want to live, and know what obstacles have to be overcome before we can live that way, and know how to distinguish between our social patterns and theirs. But we must not think that the capitalist world can simply be ignored, in a live and let live attitude, while we try to build new lives elsewhere. (There is no elsewhere.) There is at least one thing, wage-slavery, that we can’t simply stop participating in (but even here there are ways we can chip away at it). Capitalism must be explicitly refused and replaced by something else. This constitutes War, but it is not a war in the traditional sense of armies and tanks, but a war fought on a daily basis, on the level of everyday life, by millions of people. It is a war nevertheless because the accumulators of capital will use coercion, brutality, and murder, as they have always done in the past, to try to block any rejection of the system. They have always had to force compliance; they will not hesitate to continue doing so. Nevertheless, there are many concrete ways that individuals, groups, and neighborhoods can gut capitalism, which I will enumerate shortly. We must always keep in mind how we became slaves; then we can see more clearly how we can cease being slaves. We were forced into wage-slavery because the ruling class slowly, systematically, and brutally destroyed our ability to live autonomously. By driving us off the land, changing the property laws, destroying community rights, destroying our tools, imposing taxes, destroying our local markets, and so forth, we were forced onto the labor market in order to survive, our only remaining option being to sell, for a wage, our ability to work. It’s quite clear then how we can overthrow slavery. We must reverse this process. We must begin to reacquire the ability to live without working for a wage or buying the products made by wage-slaves (that is, we must get free from the labor market and the way of living based on it), and embed ourselves instead in cooperative labor and cooperatively produced goods. Another clarification is needed. This strategy does not call for reforming capitalism, for changing capitalism into something else. It calls for replacing capitalism, totally, with a new civilization. This is an important distinction, because capitalism has proved impervious to reforms, as a system. We can sometimes in some places win certain concessions from it (usually only temporary ones) and win some (usually short-lived) improvements in our lives as its victims, but we cannot reform it piecemeal, as a system. Thus our strategy of gutting and eventually destroying capitalism requires at a minimum a totalizing image, an awareness that we are attacking an entire way of life and replacing it with another, and not merely reforming one way of life into something else. Many people may not be accustomed to thinking about entire systems and social orders, but everyone knows what a lifestyle is, or a way of life, and that is the way we should approach it. The thing is this: in order for capitalism to be destroyed millions and millions of people must be dissatisfied with their way of life. They must want something else and see certain existing things as obstacles to getting what they want. It is not useful to think of this as a new ideology. It is not merely a belief-system that is needed, like a religion, or like Marxism, or Anarchism. Rather it is a new prevailing vision, a dominant desire, an overriding need. What must exist is a pressing desire to live a certain way, and not to live another way. If this pressing desire were a desire to live free, to be autonomous, to live in democratically controlled communities, to participate in the self-regulating activities of a mature people, then capitalism could be destroyed. Otherwise we are doomed to perpetual slavery and possibly even to extinction. Directory: rest -> wikis -> openev -> spaces -> 2014 -> pages -> Berkeley -> attachments pages -> Thorium doesn’t solve – multiple reasons pages -> Neg 1NC’s 1NC: Afro-Pessimism (remembrance) attachments -> Barracudas Lab Supplement – cndi 2014 gmo fish Supplement pages -> They homogenize all slave routes into the atlantic pages -> Jaden Lessnick " McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves rolled. " pages -> Counterplan Sampler – gdi 14 On Shore cp pages -> Security is articulated through hegemonic masculinity as a means to preserve Western power and values – this causes violence, marginalization, and domination attachments -> Ecofeminism k framework attachments -> Table of Contents Middle Passage Aff & Neg cndi 2014 2 Download 240.95 Kb. Share with your friends:
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