UMKC SDI 2014 Capitalism K 1

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UMKC SDI 2014 Capitalism K 2

Link- Fishing Quotas

Fishing quota systems rely on neoliberal market-based solutions – they place property rights at the center of the issueBecky Mansfield in 2008, Professor in Department of Geography, Assessing market-based environmental policy using a case study of North Pacific fisheries, Global Environmental Change 16:1

Fisheries play an important role in this drive toward market-based environmental policy. Many commentators use the example of fisheries to promote their more general argument about the importance of market mechanisms for the

environment (e.g. Adler, 2000; Anderson and Leal, 2001; De Alessi, 2000; Kula, 1998). From within a neoliberal framework, fisheries seem to present a clear argument not only for market mechanisms in general, but also specifically for property rights (Hannesson, 2004). Even today, fisheries are mainly open access, and around the world they face crises of overfishing and overcapitalization. Regulators have tried to address these problems using a wide-variety of mechanisms, from gear limits and limited entry to seasons and protected areas, but problems continue to exist. Citing this

confluence of features—open access, intractable problems, and ineffective regulation—proponents of market approaches argue that assigning property rights is the only way to address problems associated with fisheries. As a general argument, proponents make the case that open access offers perverse incentives that encourage overcapitalization, rent dissipation, and, eventually, overfishing; i.e.

these incentives make it economically rational for the individual to overcapitalize and overuse resources, even though the larger outcome is negative. Thus, the central argument is that assigning property rights is an essential move away from traditional, command and control approaches.

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Link- Aquaculture

Aquaculture is part of the process of capitalist fishing- it only displaces environmental impacts down the road, and cannot solve food security because it is still profit driven. The result is increased environmental degradation and continued biodiversity loss.Brett Clark and Rebecca Clausen in 2008, PhD, Sociology, University of Oregon, The Oceanic Crisis: Capitalism and the Degradation of Marine Ecosystem, Monthly Review, http://monthlyreview.org/2008/07/01/the-oceanic-crisis-capitalism-and-the-degradation-of-marine-ecosystem

The massive decline in fish stocks has led capitalist development to turn to a new way of increasing profits—intensified production of fishes. Capitalist aquaculture represents not only a quantitative change in the intensification and concentration of production; it also

places organisms’ life cycles under the complete control of private for-profit ownership .31 This new industry, it is claimed, is “the fastest-growing form of agriculture in the world.” It boasts of having ownership from “egg to plate” and substantially alters the ecological

and human dimensions of a fishery.32 Aquaculture (sometimes also referred to as aquabusiness) involves subjecting nature to the logic of capital. Capital attempts to overcome natural and social barriers through its constant innovations. In this, enterprises attempt to commodify, invest in, and develop new elements of nature that previously existed outside the political-economic competitive sphere: As Edward Carr wrote in the Economist, the sea “is a resource that must be preserved and harvested….To enhance its uses, the water must become ever more like the land, with owners, laws and limits. Fishermen must behave more like ranchers than hunters.”33 As worldwide commercial fish stocks decline due to overharvest and other

anthropogenic causes, aquaculture is witnessing a rapid expansion in the global economy. Aquaculture’s contribution to global supplies of fish increased from 3.9 percent of total worldwide production by weight in 1970 to 27.3 percent in 2000. In 2004, aquaculture and capture fisheries produced 106 million tons of fish and “aquaculture accounted for 43 percent.”34 According to Food and Agriculture Organization statistics, aquaculture is growing more rapidly than all other animal food producing sectors. Hailed as the “Blue Revolution,” aquaculture is frequently compared to agriculture’s Green Revolution as a way to achieve food security and economic growth among the poor and in the third world. The cultivation of farmed salmon as a high-value, carnivorous species destined for

market in core nations has emerged as one of the more lucrative (and controversial) endeavors in aquaculture production.35 Much like the Green Revolution, the Blue Revolution may produce temporary increases in yields, but it does not usher in a solution to food security (or environmental problems). Food security is tied to issues of distribution. Given that the Blue Revolution is driven by the pursuit of profit, the desire for monetary gain trumps the distribution of food to those in need .36 Industrial aquaculture intensifies fish production by transforming the natural life histories of wild fish stocks into a combined animal feedlot. Like monoculture agriculture,

aquaculture furthers the capitalistic division of nature, only its realm of operation is the marine world. In order to maximize return on investment,

aquaculture must raise thousands of fish in a confined net-pen. Fish are separated from the natural environment and the various relations of exchange found in a food web and ecosystem. The fish’s reproductive life cycle is altered so that it can be propagated and raised until the optimum time for

mechanical harvest. Aquaculture interrupts the most fundamental metabolic process—the ability of an organism to obtain its required nutrient uptake. Because the most profitable farmed fish are carnivorous, such as Atlantic salmon, they depend on a diet that is high in fishmeal and fish oil. For example, raising Atlantic salmon requires four pounds of fishmeal to produce every one pound of salmon .

Consequently, aquaculture production depends heavily on fishmeal imported from South America to feed the farmed carnivorous species.37 The inherent contradiction in extracting fishmeal is that industries must increase their exploitation of marine fish in order to feed the farm-raised fish—thereby increasing the pressure on wild stocks to an even larger extent. Such operations also increase the amount of bycatch . Three of the world’s five largest fisheries are now exclusively harvesting pelagic fish for fishmeal, and these fisheries account for a quarter of the total global catch .

Rather than diminishing the demands placed on marine ecosystems, capitalist aquaculture actually increases them, accelerating the fishing down the food chain process. The environmental degradation of populations of marine species, ecosystems, and tropic levels continues.38

UMKC SDI 2014 Capitalism K 4Aquaculture can’t solve fishing problems because it relies on the same wasteful industrial practices as factory farming- it increases waste, use of antibiotics, and harmful chemicals in the ocean.Brett Clark and Rebecca Clausen in 2008, PhD, Sociology, University of Oregon, The Oceanic Crisis: Capitalism and the Degradation of Marine Ecosystem, Monthly Review, http://monthlyreview.org/2008/07/01/the-oceanic-crisis-capitalism-and-the-degradation-of-marine-ecosystem

Capitalist aquaculture—which is really aquabusiness—represents a parallel example of capital following the patterns of agribusiness. Similar to combined animal feedlots, farmed fish are penned up in high-density cages making them susceptible to disease. Thus, like in the production of beef, pork, and chicken, farmed fish are fed fishmeal that contains antibiotics, increasing concerns about antibiotic exposure in society. In “Silent Spring of the Sea,” Don Staniford explains, “The use of antibiotics in salmon farming has been prevalent right from the beginning, and their use in aquaculture globally has grown to such an extent that resistance is now threatening human health as well as

other marine species.” Aquaculturists use a variety of chemicals to kill parasites, such as sea lice, and diseases that spread quickly throughout

the pens. The dangers and toxicities of these pesticides in the marine environment are magnified because of the long food chain.39 Once subsumed into the capitalist process, life cycles of animals are increasingly geared to economic cycles of exchange by decreasing the amount of time required for growth. Aquabusiness conforms to these pressures, as researchers are attempting to shorten the growth time required for fish to reach market size. Recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) has been added to some fish feeds to stimulate growth in fishes in aquaculture farms in Hawaii. Experiments with fish transgenics—the transfer of DNA from one species to another—are being done to increase the rate of

weight gain, causing altered fish to grow from 60 percent to 600 percent larger than wild stocks.40 These growth mechanisms illustrate capitalist aquaculture’s drive to transform nature to facilitate the generation of profit. In addition, aquaculture alters waste assimilation. The introduction of net-pens leads to a break in the natural assimilation of waste in the marine environment. The pens convert coastal ecosystems, such as bays, inlets, and fjords, into aquaculture ponds, destroying nursery areas that support ocean fisheries. For instance, salmon net-pens allow fish feces and uneaten feed to flow directly into coastal waters, resulting in substantial discharges of nutrients. The excess nutrients are toxic to the marine communities that occupy the ocean floor

beneath the net-pens, causing massive die offs of entire benthic populations.41 Other waste products are concentrated around net-pens as well, such as diseases and parasites introduced by the caged salmon to the surrounding marine organisms. The Blue Revolution is not an environmental solution to declining fish stocks. In fact, it is an intensification of the social metabolic order that creates ruptures in marine ecosystems. “The coastal and marine support areas needed for resource inputs and waste assimilation [is]…

50,000 times the cultivation area for intensive salmon cage farming.”42 This form of aquaculture places even more demands upon ecosystems, undermining their resiliency. Although aquabusiness is efficient at turning fish into a commodity for markets given the extensive control that is executed over the productive conditions, it is even more energy inefficient than fisheries, demanding more fuel energy investment than the energy produced.43 Confronted by declines in fish stock, capital is attempting to shift production to aquaculture. However, this intense form of production for profit continues to exhaust the oceans and produce a concentration of waste that causes further problems for ecosystems, undermining their ability to regenerate at all levels.

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Link- Sustainable DevelopmentSustainable development fails to uproot capitalism- it leaves market ideology intact that ensures inequality and environmental degradation- it has become a synonym for neoliberalismRichard Kahn in 2008, Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations & Research at the University of North Dakota From Education for Sustainable Development to Ecopedagogy: Sustaining Capitalism or Sustaining Life?, Green Theory & Praxis: The Journal of Ecopedagogy Volume 4, No. 1 (2008)

There is also the political and economic global Third Way of so-called liberal centrists like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, whom the New York Times has referred to as the “Impresario of Philanthropy” (Dugger, 2006) because of his Clinton Global Initiative and his work on behalf of disaster relief related to the

recent Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. The rhetoric of this approach champions sustainable development as a win-win-win for people, business, and the environment, in which the following policy goals are upheld: 1) development “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (Brundtland, 1987) and 2) development improves “the quality of human life while living within the carrying capacity of supporting ecosystems” (Munro and Holdgate, 1991). In its tendency to deploy quasi-leftist slogans, Clintonian Third Way politics claims that it wants to put a human face to globalization and that it supports inclusive educational,

medical, and civic development throughout the global South in a manner much akin to that demanded by leaders in Latin America and Africa. But if this Third Way political vision really intends to deliver greater equity, security, and quality of life to the previously disenfranchised, it is especially noteworthy that it also mandates that “existing property and market power divisions [be left] firmly off the agenda” (Porter and Craig, 2004, p. 390). A 2000 speech by Clinton to the University of Warwick exemplifies this claim and so reveals why astute globalization critics such as Perry Anderson have characterized Thirdwayism as merely “the best ideological shell of neo-liberalism today” (Anderson, 2000, p. 11). In his speech, Clinton rhetorically plugs building the necessary “consensus” to allow for the opening of previously closed markets and rule-based trade, such as that sponsored by the International Monetary Fund, in the name of a global humanitarianism, which can overcome disasters such as global warming, disease, hunger, and terrorism: I disagree with the anti-globalization protestors who suggest that poor countries should somehow be saved from development by keeping their doors closed to trade. I think that is a recipe for continuing their poverty, not erasing it. More open markets would give the world’s poorest nations more chances to grow and prosper. Now, I know that many people don’t believe that. And I know that inequality, as I said, in the last few years has increased in many nations. But the answer is not to abandon

the path of expanded trade, but, instead, to do whatever is necessary to build a new consensus on trade (Clinton, 2000). The neoliberal market mechanism remains largely the same, then, in both Third Way welfarism and the aggressive corporatism favored by the current Bush

administration. The only difference between them may be the nature of the trade rules and goals issued by the governing consensus. In this, the Clinton Global Initiative is a poster child for the ideology of most U.S. center-left liberals, who believe that administrations can learn to legislate temperance by creating more and more opportunities for intemperate economic investment in alternative ,

socially responsible markets. The sustainable development vision thereby maintained is of a highly integrated world society ,

centered and predicated on economic trade, presided over by beneficent leaders who act in the best interests of the people (while they turn an honest

profit to boot). However, in this respect we might wonder, as Garrett Hardin put it, “Who shall watch the watchers themselves?” (Hardin, 1968, p. 1245).

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Link- Sustainable DevelopmentSustainable development is not the answer- it will still require massive increases in consumption to maintain standards of living- the result will be an ecological crisis that ensures extinctionRichard Kahn in 2008, Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations & Research at the University of North Dakota From Education for Sustainable Development to Ecopedagogy: Sustaining Capitalism or Sustaining Life?, Green Theory & Praxis: The Journal of Ecopedagogy Volume 4, No. 1 (2008)

In response to the evidence of planetary ecocide, biocide, and zoöcide, critical educators have begun to wonder if global institutions are capable of interpreting the idea of the “limits to growth” (Meadows, Randers, and Meadows, 2004) in any fashion beyond an open-market neoliberalism. Again, in its most egalitarian form, sustainable development is offered as a political and economic platform that can generate wealth among the poor (and rich), raise living standards for all, and protect the environment. Yet as the environmental theorist Ted Trainer notes, the mean present standard of living enjoyed by those across the planet is already estimated to utilize somewhere between two to four times the amount of sustainable resources provided by the Earth proper. Therefore, if the world’s population continues to rise toward nine billion people, and if global living standards increase commensurate to the rhetoric of sustainable development boosters, it can be reasonably calculated that in order to have a sustainable planet by the year 2070, it will be necessary to have technoscientific advances capable of enabling sixty times as much production and consumption as is presently maintained (Trainer, 2002). Further, future sustainable industries could afford to generate only one-half to one-third the amount of their counterparts’ present environmental costs (Trainer,

2002). But according to the United Nations Environment Programme’s GEO-3 report, a vision of continued growth of this kind is consonant only with planetary extinction : either great changes are made in our global lifestyle now or an irrevocable social and ecological crisis will grip the world by 2032 (United Nations Environment Programme, 2002).

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Link- Green CapitalismMarket-based solutions to environmental crisis and the “greening” of capitalism fail to address the fundamental historical reality of ecological destruction – a system of production that primarily values profit and private property is structured to sacrifice environmental sustainability wherever it prevents economic growth – failure to challenge capitalism will result in extinction Foster, 2k11

[John Bellamy, Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon, Capitalism and the Accumulation of Catastrophe, Monthly Review, December 2011]

In the twenty-first century it is customary to view the rise of planetary ecological problems as a surprising development scarcely conceivable prior to the last few decades. It is here, however, that we have the most to learn from the analysis of nineteenth-century thinkers who played a role in the development of ecology, including both early ecological scientists and classical historical materialists. Science has long warned of the negative, destructive side of the human transformation of the earth—a warning which the system, driven by its own imperatives, has continually sought to downplay. Indeed, what distinguishes our time from earlier centuries is not so much the conservation of catastrophe, which has long been recognized, but rather the accelerated pace at which such destruction is now manifesting itself, i.e., what I am calling the accumulation of catastrophe. The desertification arising in pre-capitalist times, partly through human action, manifested itself over centuries, even millennia. Today changes in the land, the atmosphere, the oceans, indeed the entire life-support system of the earth, are the product of mere decades. If in the past, Darwin was struck that in a mere three centuries after European colonization, the ecology of the island of St. Helena had been destroyed to the point that it was reduced to “desert”—today, in only two generations, we have altered the biogeochemical processes of the entire planet.28 The absence of a historical perspective on the conservation, even accumulation, of catastrophe is a major barrier to needed change in our time. Many environmentalists, including some who perceive themselves as being on the left, persist in believing that we can address our immense and growing ecological problems without altering our fundamental social-production relationships. All that is necessary in this view is the combined magic of green technology and green markets. Short-term fixes are presumed to be adequate solutions, while society remains on the same essential course as before. Indeed, the dominant perspective on ecology can be characterized, I believe, as consisting of three successive stages of denial: (1) the denial altogether of the planetary ecological crisis (or its human cause); (2) the denial that the ecological crisis is fundamentally due to the system of production in which we live, namely capitalism; and (3) the denial that capitalism is constitutionally incapable of overcoming this global ecological threat—with capital now being presented instead as the savior of the environment. The first stage of ecological denial is easy to understand. This is the form of denial represented by Exxon-Mobil. Such outright denial of the destructive consequences of their actions is the automatic response of corporations generally when faced with the prospect of environmental regulations, which would negatively affect their bottom lines. It is also the form of absolute denial promoted by climate-change denialists themselves, who categorically reject the reality of human agency in global climate change. The second stage of denial, a retreat from the first, is to admit there is a problem, while dissociating it from the larger socioeconomic system. The famous IPAT formula, i.e. Environmental Impact = Population x Consumption x Technology (which amounts to saying that these are the three factors behind our environmental problems/solutions), has been used by some to suggest that population growth, the consumption habits of most individuals, and inappropriate technology carry the totality of blame for environmental degradation. The answer then is sustainable population, sustainable consumption, and sustainable technology. This approach, though seemingly matter-of-fact, and deceptively radical, derives its acceptability for the vested interests from the fact that it generally serves to disguise the more fundamental reality of the treadmill of capitalist production itself.29 The third stage of denial, a last-ditch defense, and exhibiting a greater level of desperation on the part of the established order, is, I would argue, the most dangerous of all. It admits that the environmental crisis is wrapped up with the existence of capitalism, but argues that what we need is an entirely new kind of capitalism: variously called “sustainable capitalism,” “green capitalism,” “natural capitalism,” and “climate capitalism” by thinkers as various as Al Gore, Paul Hawken, Amory and L. Hunter Lovins, and Jonathon Porritt.30 The argument here varies but usually begins with the old trope that capitalism is the most efficient economic system possible—a form of “spontaneous order” arising from an invisible hand—and that the answer to ecological problems is to make it more efficient still by internalizing costs on the environment previously externalized by the system. Aside from the presumed magic of the market itself, and moral claims as to “the greening of corporations,” this is supposed to be achieved by means of a black box of technological wonders. Implicit in all such views is the notion that capitalism can be made sustainable, without altering its accumulation or economic growth imperative and without breaking with the dominant social relations. The exponential growth of the system ad infinitum is possible, we are told, while simultaneously generating a sustainable relation to the planet. This of course runs up against what Herman Daly has called the Impossibility Theorem: If the whole world were to have an ecological footprint the size of the United States we would need multiple planets.31 The idea that such a development process can persist permanently on a single planet (and indeed that we are not at this point already confronting earthly limits) is of course an exercise in delusion, bordering on belief in the supernatural. “Capitalism,” as the great environmental economist K. William

UMKC SDI 2014 Capitalism K 8Kapp once wrote, is “an economy of unpaid costs.”32 It can persist and even prosper only insofar as it is able to externalize its costs on the mass of the population and the surrounding environment. Whenever the destruction is too severe the system simply seeks to engineer another spatial fix. Yet, a planetary capitalism is from this standpoint a contradiction in terms: it means that there is nowhere finally to externalize the social and environmental costs of capitalist destruction (we cannot ship our toxic waste into outer space!), and no external resources to draw upon in the face of the enormous squandering of resources inherent to the system (we can’t solve our problems by mining the moon!). Market-based solutions to climate change, such as emissions trading, have been shown to promote profits, and to facilitate economic growth and financial wealth, while increasing carbon emissions. From an environmental standpoint, therefore, they are worse than nothing— since they stand in the way of effective action. Nor are the technologies most acceptable to the system (since not requiring changes in property relations) the answer. So-called “clean coal” or carbon capture and storage technologies are economically unfeasible and ecologically dubious, and serve mainly as an ideological justification for keeping coal-fired plants going. Worse still, are geoengineering schemes like dumping sulfur particles in the atmosphere or iron filings in the ocean (the first in order to deflect the sun’s rays, the second in order to promote algal growth to increase ocean absorption of carbon). These schemes carry with them the potential for even greater ecological disasters: in the first case, this could lead to a reduction of photosynthesis, in the second the expansion of dead zones. Remember the Sorcerer’s Apprentice!33 The potential for the accumulation of catastrophe on a truly planetary level as a result of geoengineering technology is so great that it would be absolute folly to proceed in this way—simply in order to avoid changes in the mode of production, i.e., a fundamental transformation of our way of life, property relations, and metabolism with nature. Science tells us that we are crossing planetary boundaries everywhere we look, from climate change, to ocean acidification, to species destruction, to freshwater shortages, to chemical pollution of air, water, soil, and humans. The latest warning sign is the advent of what is called “extreme weather”—a direct outgrowth of climate change. As Hansen says: “Global warming increases the intensity of droughts and heat waves, and thus the area of forest fires. However, because a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor, global warming must also increase the intensity of the other extreme of the hydrologic cycle—meaning heavier rains, more extreme floods, and more intense storms driven by latent heat.” Scientists involved in the new area of climate-attribution science, where extreme weather events are examined for their climate signatures, are now arguing that we are rapidly approaching a situation where the proverbial “‘hundred-year’ flood” no longer occurs simply once a century, but every few years. Natural catastrophes are thus likely to become more severe and more frequent occurrences in the lives of all living beings. The hope of some scientists is that this will finally wake up humanity to its true danger.34 How are we to understand the challenge of the enormous accumulation of catastrophe, and the no less massive human action required to address this? In the 1930s John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay entitled “Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren,” aimed at defending capitalism in response to revolutionary social challenges then arising. Keynes argued that we should rely for at least a couple more generations on the convenient lie of the Smithian invisible hand—accepting greed as the basis of a spontaneous economic order. We should therefore continue the pretense that “fair is foul and foul is fair” for the sake of the greater accumulation of wealth in society that such an approach would bring. Eventually, in the time of our “grandchildren”—maybe a “hundred years” hence (i.e., by the early 2030s)—Keynes assumed, the added wealth created by these means would be great enough that we could begin to tell the truth: that foul is foul and fair is fair. It would then be necessary for humanity to address the enormous inequalities and injustices produced by the system, engaging in a full-scale redistribution of wealth, and a radical transformation of the ends of production.35 Yet, the continued pursuit of Keynes’s convenient lie over the last eight decades has led to a world far more polarized and beset with contradictions than he could have foreseen . It is a world prey to the enormous unintended consequences of accumulation without limits: namely, global economic stagnation, financial crisis, and planetary ecological destruction. Keynes, though aware of some of the negative economic aspects of capitalist production, had no real understanding of the ecological perils—of which scientists had already long been warning. Today these perils are impossible to overlook. Faced with impending ecological catastrophe, it is more necessary than ever to abandon Keynes’s convenient lie and espouse the truth: that foul is foul and fair is fair. Capitalism, the society of “après moi le déluge!” is a system that fouls its own nest—both the human-social conditions and the wider natural environment on which it depends. The accumulation of capital is at the same time accumulation of catastrophe, not only for a majority of the world’s people, but living species generally. Hence, nothing is fairer—more just, more beautiful, and more necessary—today than the struggle to overthrow the regime of capital and to create a system of substantive equality and sustainable human development; a socialism for the twenty-first century. “Well grubbed, old mole!”36

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Link- Green TechShort term technocratic solutions will fail – abrupt climate shifts necessitate a transition from capitalist mode of productionFoster in 2009(John Bellamy, Professor of Sociology at Oregon, “The Ecological Revolution,” Page 109-111)

Nevertheless, there is every reason to believe that placing so much faith in economic growth and technological change as answers to global warming is shortsighted and naive . Considerable uncertainty exists as to how far human society can actually support such ""gradual" climate change-since human beings are themselves part of nature and dependent on the world around them in manifold ways. But the problem does not stop there. Scientists are now raising the even more alarming question of abrupt climate change, i.e., climate change of a scale and suddenness-shifting from a time-span of decades-to-centuries to one of years-to-

decades-that would definitely have catastrophic effects for human society. Abrupt climate change is usually seen as change arising from gradual causes that lead to the crossing of a threshold, triggering a sudden shift to a new state-with the shift determined by the climate system itself and occurring at a rate much faster than the initial cause . Such shifts have occurred numerous times in history, one of the clearest being the abrupt cooling of the Younger Dryas (named after an arctic wildflower that thrived in the climate of the time), which began 12,700 years ago and lasted 1300 years, interrupting the warming associated with the end of the last ice age. A lesser instance of abrupt

climate change occurred 8,200 years ago and lasted around a century. In the worst of all current, plausible scenarios, such abrupt climate change could occur sometime over the next couple of decades-though this is still seen by scientists as highly unlikely. Such abrupt climate change is believed to result from disruption of the thermohaline circulation, a global ocean conveyor that moves warm, saline tropical waters northward in the Atlantic with the Gulf Stream as its northern arm, and then loops south. (“Thermohaline" comes from the Greek words for heat, "thermos," and for salt, "halos.") The heat from this warmer water, when it reaches the North Atlantic, is released into the atmosphere, creating milder winters than would otherwise exist at those latitudes, and allowing the dense surface waters to cool and sink. This draws additional warmer, saline water from the south, helping to keep the conveyor going. Differences

in the density of ocean waters associated with the saline content drive this ocean conveyor. Abrupt climate change arises from a lessening or collapse of the thermohaline circulation due to increased river runoff, melting ice, and changes in precipitation-all of which serve to increase the amount of freshwater supplied to the North Atlantic. As the salinity of the ocean waters decreases a

dramatic lessening or complete collapse of the North Atlantic conveyor circulation can occur. The current global warming is seen as potentially triggering this effect. According to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, in Climate Change 2001, "beyond 2100, the thermohaline circulation could completely, and possibly irreversibly, shut-down in either hemisphere" if global warming is “large enough and applied long

enough."6 Two basic scenarios are worth considering: (l) If the ocean conveyor slows down or collaps es during the next two decades, it could cool the North Atlantic region by as much as 5°C (9°F), creating winters of much greater severity. (2) If, however, the conveyor slows down in a century, the drop in temperature in the North Atlantic could temporarily compensate for the rise in surface temperature associated with the enhanced greenhouse effect though once the thermohaline circulation recovered the "deferred" warming could be delivered within a decade. The second of these two scenarios is viewed as much more likely. Yet, recent scientific studies, including a major report in 2002 by the National Academy of Sciences, have

stressed that the thermohaline circulation could possibly "decrease ... very fast" -resulting in a sudden switch of climate early this century that although still thought unlikely cannot be ruled out altogether. Seeming to confirm these fears, a report in Nature in 2002 concluded that the North Atlantic has been freshening dramatically for forty years; while a report a year earlier suggested that the ocean

conveyor may already be slowing down." Faced with the uncertain hazards of such a "low probability, high impact" event, scientists associated with the National Academy of Sciences study recommended that society take what steps it could, if not too costly, to protect itself against such an extreme outcome. "If a shutdown were to happen soon," Richard Alley, who chaired the scientific team releasing the National Academy of Sciences study, observed in The Two-Mile Time Machine, “it could produce a large event, perhaps almost as large as the Younger Dryas, dropping northern temperatures and spreading droughts far larger than the changes that have affected humans through

recorded history, and perhaps speeding warming in the far south. The end of humanity? No. An uncomfortable time for humanity? Yes."8 These assessments and recommendations on abrupt climate change were offered with so much caution by climate scientists that they might easily have been ignored altogether by a society that in its upper echelons is devoted to the accumulation of capital and little else. That this did not happen is due to the fact that the issue was taken up and dramatized in the Pentagon report.

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Link- Green Tech/MarketsThe affirmative’s promotion of new green energy markets operates under the backdrop of the ideological assertion that politics should be limited to protecting ‘business as usual’ – instead, you should align yourself with restoring a sustainable relationship with nature as to guarantee ecological sustainability. Foster in 2009(John Bellamy, Professor of Sociology at Oregon, “The Ecological Revolution,” Page 47-52)

Most climate scientists, including Lovelock and Hansen, follow the IPCC in basing their main projections of global warming on a socioeconomic scenario described as "business-as-usual." The dire trends indicated are predicated on our fundamental economic and

technological developments and our basic relation to nature remaining the same. The question we need to ask then is what actually is business-as-

usual? What can be changed and how fast? With time running out, the implication is that it is necessary to alter business-as-usual in radical ways in order to

stave off or lessen catastrophe. Yet the dominant solutions-those associated with the dominant ideology, i.e., the ideology of the

dominant class-emphasize minimal changes in business-as-usual that will somehow get us off the hook. After being directed to the growing planetary threats of global warming and species extinction, we are told that the answer is better gas mileage and better emissions standards, the introduction of hydrogen-powered cars, the capture and sequestration of carbon dioxide within production, improved conservation, and voluntary cutbacks in

consumption. Environmental political scientists specialize in the construction of new environmental policy regimes, embodying state and market regulations. Environmental economists talk of tradable pollution permits and the incorporation of all

environmental factors into the market to ensure their efficient use. Some environmental sociologists (my own field) speak of ecological modernization: a panoply of green taxes, green regulations, and new green technologies, even the greening of capitalism itself. Futurists describe a new technological world in which the weight of nations on the earth is miraculously lifted as a result of digital

"dematerialization" of the economy. In all of these views, however, there is one constant: the fundamental character of business-as-usual is hardly changed at all. Indeed, what all such analyses intentionally avoid is the fact that business-as-usual in our society, in any fundamental sense, means the capitalist economy-an economy run on the logic of profit and accumulation. Moreover,

there is little acknowledgement or even appreciation of the fact that the Hobbesian war of all against all that characterizes capitalism requires for its fulfillment a universal war on nature. In this sense, new technology cannot solve the problem since it is inevitably used to further the class war and to increase the scale of the economy, and thus the degradation of the environment. Whenever production dies down or social resistance imposes barriers on the expansion of capital, the answer is always to find new ways to exploit and degrade nature more intensively. To quote, once again, Pontecorvo's Burn'. "That is the logic of profit. ... One builds to make money and to go on making it or to make more sometimes it is necessary to destroy." Ironically, this destructive relation of capitalism to the environment was probably understood better in the nineteenth century-at a time when social analysts were acutely aware of the issue of revolutionary changes taking place in the mode of production

and how this was transforming the human relation to nature. As a result, environmental soci ologists of the more radical stamp in the United States, where the contradiction between economy and ecology nowadays is especially acute, draw heavily on three interrelated ideas derived from Marx and the critique of capitalist political economy dating back to the nineteenth century: (I) the treadmill of production; (2) the second contradiction of capitalism; and (3) the metabolic rift. The first of these, the treadmill of production, describes capitalism as an unstoppable, accelerating treadmill that constantly increases the scale of the throughput of energy and raw materials as part of its quest for profit and accumulation, thereby pressing on the earth's

absorptive capacity. "Accumulate, Accumulate!" For capital, Marx wrote, "that is Moses and the prophets”12 The second of these notions, the second contradiction of capitalism, is the idea that capitalism, in addition to its primary economic contradiction stemming from class inequalities in production and distribution, also undermines the human and natural conditions ( i.e.,

environmental conditions) of production on which its economic advancement ultimate ly rests . For example, by systematically removing forests we lay the grounds for increasing scarcities in this area-the more so to the extent that globalization makes this contradiction universal. This heightens the overall cost of economic development and creates an economic crisis for capitalism based

on supply-side constraints on production. IS The third notion, the metabolic rift, suggests that the logic of capi tal accumulation inexorably creates a rift in the metabolism between society and nature, severing basic processes of natural reproduction. This raises the issue of the ecological sustainability- not simply in relation to the scale of the economy, but also, and even more importantly, in the form and intensity of the interaction between nature and society under capitalism. 14 I shall concentrate on the third of these notions, the metabolic rift, since this is the most complex of these three socio-ecological concepts, and the one that has been the focus of my own research in this area, particularly in my book Marx's Ecology. Marx was greatly influenced by the work of the leading agricultural chemist of his time, Justus von Liebig. Liebig had developed an analysis of the ecological contradictions of industrialized capitalist agriculture. He argued that such industrialized agriculture, as present in its most developed form in England in the nineteenth century, was a robbery system, depleting the soil. Food and fiber were transported hundreds-even in some cases

UMKC SDI 2014 Capitalism K 11thousands-of miles from the country to the city. This meant that essential soil nutrients, such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, were transported as well. Rather than being returned to the soil these essential nutrients ended up polluting the cities, for example, in the degradation of the Thames in London. The natural conditions for the reproduction of the soil were thus destroyed. To compensate for the resulting decline in soil fertility the British raided the Napoleonic battlefields and the catacombs of Europe for bones with which to fertilize the soil of the English countryside. They also resorted to the importation of guano on a vast scale from the islands off the coast of Peru, followed by the importation of Chilean nitrates (after the War of the Pacific in which Chile seized parts of Peru and Bolivia rich in guano and nitrates). The United States sent out ships throughout the oceans searching for guano, and ended up seizing ninety-four islands, rocks, and keys between the passage of the 1856 Guano Islands Act and 1903, sixty-six of which were officially recognized as U.S. appurtenances and nine of which remain U.S. possessions today. This reflected a great crisis of capitalist agriculture in the nineteenth century that was only solved in part with the development of synthetic fertilizer nitrogen early in the twentieth century-and which led eventually to the overuse of fertilizer nitrogen, itself a major environmental problem. In reflecting on this crisis of capitalist agriculture, Marx adopted the concept of metabolism, which had been introduced by nineteenth-

century biologists and chemists, including Liebig, and applied it to socioecological relations. All life is based on metabolic processes between organisms and their environment. Organisms carry out an exchange of energy and matter with their environment, which are integrated with their own internal life processes. It is not a stretch to think of the nest of a bird as part of the bird's metabolic process. Marx explicitly defined the labor process as the "metabolic interaction between man and nature." In terms of the ecological problem, he spoke of "an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism," whereby the conditions for the necessary reproduction

of the soil were continually severed, breaking the metabolic cycle. "Capitalist production," he wrote, "therefore only develops the techniques and the degree of com bination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth-the soil and the worker." Marx saw this rift not simply in national terms but as related to imperialism as well. "England," he wrote, "has indirectly exported the soil of Ireland, without even allowing its cultivators the means for replacing the constituents of the exhausted soil." This principle of metabolic rift obviously has a very wide application and has in fact been applied by environmental sociologists in recent years to problems

such as global warming and the ecological degradation of the world's oceans. 16 What is seldom recognized, however, is that Marx went immediately from a conception of the metabolic rift to the necessity of metabolic restoration, arguing that "by destroying the circumstances surrounding that metabolism, which originated in a merely natural and spontaneous fashion, it [capitalist production] compels its systematic restoration as a regulative law of social reproduc tion." The reality of the metabolic rift pointed to the

necessity of the restoration of nature, through sustainable production . .It is this dialectical understanding of the socio-ecological problem that led Marx to what is perhaps the most radical conception of socio ecological sustainability ever developed. Thus, he wrote in the third volume of Capital: From the standpoint of a higher socio-economic formation, the private property of individuals in

the earth will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men. Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as boni patns familias [good heads of the household ]. For Marx, in other words, the present relation of human beings to the earth under private accumulation could be compared to slavery . Just as “private property of one man in other men" is no longer deemed acceptable, so private ownership of the earth and nature by human beings (even whole countries) must be transcended. The human relation to nature must be regulated so to guarantee its existence "in an improved state to succeeding generations." His reference to the notion of "good heads of the household" hearkened back to the ancient Greek notion of household or oikos from which we get both "economy" (from oikonomia or household management) and

"ecology" (from oikologia or household study). Marx pointed to the necessity of a more radical, sustainable relation of human beings to production in accord with what we would now view as ecological rather than merely economic notions. "Freedom, in this sphere," the realm of natural necessity, he insisted, "can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human

metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control ... accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy,"!? The destructive uncontrollability of capitalism, emanating from its dual character as a system of class and imperial exploitation and as an enslaver and destroyer of the earth itself, was thus well understood by Marx. With regard to the film, Burn!, we saw how the exploitation of human beings was tied to the destruction of the earth. Relations of domination changed but the answer remained the same: to burn the island as a means of winning the class/imperial war. Today, a few hundred people taken together own more wealth than the income of

billions of the world's population. To maintain this system of global inequality a glob al system of repression has been developed and is constantly put in motion. And, along with it, vast new systems of destructive exploitation of the earth, such as modem agribusiness, have evolved.

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Link- RenewablesEven switching entirely to renewables is insufficient to stave of environmental collapse brought on by capitalism – it would just enable even more production of consumer goodsSmith in 2011(Richard, Institute for Policy Research & Development, “Green Capitalism: the god that failed”, real-world economics review, issue no. 56)

Energy generation is probably the one field where there are substantial possibilities for greening industry. The prospect of “clean green energy” – solar, wind, and other renewable -- is everybody’s favorite green tech innovation. Shifting most electricity generation to solar, wind and other renewables could radically dematerialize this sector and reduce the largest single demand for coal as well as oil and natural gas, and so could, in principle, dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, acid rain, and also bring wide health benefits. But, the first problem with this tech fix is that it’s difficult to produce “base-load” power – consistent 24/7 power generation -- with renewables.65 Sunlight, wind, and water flow are all variable and unpredictable. But trainloads of coal and oil can normally be depended upon. Renewable

energy scientists argue that integrated comprehensive systems can solve the problem of base-load generation. The I.E.A. estimates that solar power alone could produce almost a quarter of the world’s electricity needs by 2050 .66 But as Ted Trainer points out, given the variable and intermittent output of renewables like solar and wind, even if sun and wind were to be large contributors to electricity supply, given the need for backup reserve capacity, little or no reduction in the amount of coal or nuclear capacity would be feasible. 67 This is one reason why scientists like James Hansen and James Lovelock, who are skeptical about the base-load potential of renewables, have called for a radical shift to nuclear power as the only way to get 24/7 power in the near future. But of course,

nuclear reactors pose a different set of problems. For a start, there is the virtually inevitable threat of accidents soere, sometime. Then there is the as-yet-unsolved problem of what to do with all the spent fuel. But in addition, it is also not clear that uranium fuel is any less an inexhaustible resource than oil was once thought to be. And the potential tech fix for the tech fix – the thesis that “next generation” “fast” nuclear reactors could recycle their own fuel or run on spent fuel, has a certain familiar “too-cheap-to-meter” ring to it, but remains for the moment hypothetical, and in any event, will certainly be a hugely expensive and dangerous way to boil water.68 Yet even if we could get a dramatic shift to solar and other renewables for energy generation, given the Jevons paradox noted above, we cannot assume that this would

necessarily lead to large permanent reductions in overall pollution. For if there are no non-market constraints on production, then the advent of cheap clean energy production could just as easily encourage the production of endless electric vehicles, appliances, lighting, laptops, phones, iPads and new toys we can’t even imagine yet .69 The expanded production all this stuff, on a global scale, would just consume ever more raw materials, more metals, plastics, rare earths, etc., produce more pollution, destroy more of the environment, and all end up in some landfill somewhere someday. In short, at the end of the day, the only way society can really put the brakes on overconsumption of electricity is to impose non-market limits on electricity production and consumption, enforce radical conservation, rationing, and stop making all the unnecessary gadgets that demand endless supplies of power.

UMKC SDI 2014 Capitalism K 13

Link- FFsEnergy solutions rooted in the capitalist mode of production based on the use of fossil fuels for production and circulation create a metabolic rift in the natural carbon cycles of the environment – failure to achieve systemic change in this mode of production dooms any attempt to solve the climate crisis to failure Sas, 2k10

[Jonathan, B.A. (Honours), University of Toronto, University of British Columbia (Vancouver), Fossil Fuel, Capitalism, and the State: A Critical Approach to the International Climate Change Discourse, Master’s Thesis in Political Science, August 2010]

The mutually transformative dynamics of the nature-society relationship are important (if perhaps obvious), but for the purposes of my argument, it is the notion of the „rift‟ that is of particular value. 22 The „metabolic rift‟ refers to human interruption in or interference with the metabolism of a natural system, one that results in the degradation or destruction of that natural system. Foster (2000) demonstrates that Marx viewed metabolic rifts as a necessary outcome of the conditions of capitalist relations of production. Due, for example, to the massive expansion and extension of trade across and between distant places, as well as the (related) increase in the concentration of populations in cities (what Marx spoke of as the growing division between „town and country‟), capitalism leads to the physical displacement of energy and matter from one place to other places. This effectively takes this matter and energy away from the ecosystem in which it evolved, and where it could have been recycled, and displaces it elsewhere. Marx applied this theory to his study of nutrient cycles in the soil.23 The conditions of production that exist under capitalism, he argued, tend to prevent the natural recycling of materials within given natural systems. This is what is meant by the development of a rift in a natural process or cycle. Clark and York (2005) have extended the application of the metabolic rift theory in order to specifically understand “human influence on the carbon cycle and its consequences” under the conditions of a now more advanced iteration of capitalism that exists today (Clark and York, 2005, p. 396). They argue that global climate change relates directly to the historical era and logic of capitalist social relations, and that the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere as “waste” and its interference with the carbon cycle is intrinsically tied to industrial capitalist production. The metabolic rift theory as applied to climate change seems to make sense if we accept the scientific understanding of the carrying capacity or natural limits of the atmosphere to cycle carbon. The theory is further supported by the fact that it was not until the emergence of industrial level capitalism that CO2 emissions greatly expanded in scale. In the most recent of the United State‟s ghg emission inventory assessments, the Environmental Protection Agency had this to say about the carbon cycle: “Billions of tons of carbon in the form of CO2 are absorbed by oceans and living biomass (i.e., sinks) and are emitted to the atmosphere annually through natural processes (i.e., sources). When in equilibrium, carbon fluxes among these various reservoirs are roughly balanced” (EPA, 2010). Since the Industrial Revolution (or since approximately 1750) however, global atmospheric concentrations of CO2 have risen about 36 percent, an increase that is principally attributed to the combustion of fossil fuels and one that appears to be linked to a rupture in the „balance‟ of the carbon cycle (IPCC 2007). This, I believe, lends considerable weight to the argument that the dramatic increases in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere are tied to the current fossil fuel mode of production constitutive of the existing capitalist system. There is an important point of departure here between the argument I am developing and the position of that of Clark and York and other ecological Marxist thinkers for that matter. While I am sympathetic to the ecological Marxist critique I have outlined thus far, one that views the degradation of the carbon cycle (and nature more generally) as internal to the forces and relations of capitalism itself, I differ in that I understand this tendency to be one internal to the historically specific character of the capitalist system that has existed to date – i.e. as internal to the fossil fuel mode of production rather than to capitalism per se.24 Thus, as I return to in much further detail in the final section of this paper, I do not agree that any form of capitalism is necessarily incapable of mending the rift in the carbon cycle or of operating more soundly within the ecological limits of the planet more generally. Nevertheless, I understand Clark and York (2005, p. 412) to be correct in arguing that the global capitalist system (at least in its current incarnation) depends upon massive quantities of fossil fuel in order to operate at the current scale of production to say nothing of an increasing scale of production. The recent opening of arctic wildlife havens to off shore oil drilling and the catastrophic oil spill that resulted after the malfunction of an under water drilling well in the Gulf of Mexico are potent reminders that capitalism‟s “constant demand for energy necessitates the continual plundering of the earth for new reserves of fossil fuel” (Ibid.). The effect of capitalism‟s expansionary tendency again comes into play as further capital accumulation seems to lead to the exploitation of more and more fossilized energy sources thereby reproducing the rift in the earth‟s natural carbon cycle. To reiterate, the rift is evidenced by the fact that emissions stemming directly from anthropogenic sources, namely through industrial capitalist production and circulation, not only pools CO2 as “atmospheric waste” at unprecedented and ever-accelerating rates, but this accumulation of CO2 occurs at a rate that the natural carbon sinks can no longer metabolize (i.e., absorb).25 The metabolic rift in the carbon cycle presents serious, if not damning implications for the coherency of the norms that underpin the dominant climate discourse. With the fossil fuel mode of production that continues to characterize global capitalism today, CO2 continues to create a metabolic rift in the carbon cycle. How then, we must reflect, can reducing ghg emissions be compatible with the maintenance and expansion of a liberal economic order, an order that reinforces the kind of conditions that have led to the generation and accumulation of emissions in the first place? Liberalizing global trade and finance, for example, would not be possible without the exploitation of the physical properties of fossil fuel. For both the production and circulation of

UMKC SDI 2014 Capitalism K 14goods, current trends in global trade seem to be tied inextricably to the exploitation of fossil fuels. The preceding discussion strongly suggests that a solution to the climate crisis cannot be found unless the productive forces of the system are radically transformed. This kind of radical transformation is absent from the Kyoto Protocol as well as the ongoing post-2012 climate negotiations. The dominant climate discourse, embedded as it is in the fossil fuel mode of production, is fundamentally flawed. It remains difficult to envision how the international community of states will ever meet the steep reduction targets the IPCC deems necessary to avert a climate crisis within the prevailing socio-economic structures of capitalism today.

Fossil fuel production internally powers the generalization and expansion of capitalist modes and relations of production Sas, 2k10

[Jonathan, B.A. (Honours), University of Toronto, University of British Columbia (Vancouver), Fossil Fuel, Capitalism, and the State: A Critical Approach to the International Climate Change Discourse, Master’s Thesis in Political Science, August 2010]

As outlined in the introduction, the exploitation of fossil fuel energy has played a crucial role in the growth of global CO2 emissions linked to current climatic warming trends. There is an essential connection, moreover between the global growth in fossil fuel consumption and the historical emergence and development of the global (industrial) capitalist system over the past two and half odd centuries . It is no secret that fossil fuel energy has been indispensable to the growth of the global economy, but a careful exploration of the dynamics of this relationship and its implications for achieving reductions in ghgs is of particular importance in light to the current logic of the dominant climate discourse. To this end, Mathew Huber’s (2009) historical materialist account of the immutable role that fossilized energy played in enabling -or more accurately, in powering- the productive forces of capitalism, as well as its role in the continued reproduction of capitalist social relations, is particularly instructive. Huber‟s analysis underscores the importance of the monumental shift from solar or biological sources of energy (for example, muscles, wood, wind and water) to fossilized sources (first coal and later oil and gas) and how this shift fundamentally transformed the conditions and relations of production . The exploitation of the massively more productive properties of fossilized energy over muscle energy, he contends, led to the transfer of the “core productive forces” of society from bodies to machinery – a critical shift that was essential to the onset of the industrial revolution (Ibid., p. 109).15 Consistent with a dialectical understanding of energy and social processes, Huber‟s analysis also focuses on the importance that this shift in energy had on the relations of production. With the productive forces (machinery) able to be powered by fossil energy, the relations of production necessarily changed as the worker (wage laborer) became a less important physical productive force . “The emergence of large-scale fossilized production” Huber explains, “hastened the generalization and extension of the wage labor relationship on an expanded scale heretofore unseen” as concentrated spaces of production (i.e., factories) began to develop rapidly (2009, p. 110). With the discovery of fossilized energy sources, the operation of capitalist production (that is, of industrial machinery) became dependent on a constant supply of this energy to sustain its (constantly expanding) operations. The historically specific relationship between fossil fuel energy and the development and evolution of industrial capitalism must be conceived of as a „fossil fuel mode of production.‟ In other words, fossil fuel “internally powers the forces and relations of capitalist production” (Huber, 2009, p. 108). As I elaborate on further in the following section, it follows that the „mammoth productivity‟ of capitalist production, and its concurrent massive generation of waste (as CO2 emissions) can be traced to the exploitation of the productive power of fossilized energy (Huber, p. 110).

UMKC SDI 2014 Capitalism K 15

Link/!- Overfishing

Capitalist production is the root cause of overfishing- it creates commodity markets that encourage over consumption and exploitation, and industrialization that allows fishing on a massive scaleBrett Clark and Rebecca Clausen in 2008, PhD, Sociology, University of Oregon, The Oceanic Crisis: Capitalism and the Degradation of Marine Ecosystem, Monthly Review, http://monthlyreview.org/2008/07/01/the-oceanic-crisis-capitalism-and-the-degradation-of-marine-ecosystem

Humans have long been connected to the ocean’s metabolic processes by harvesting marine fish and vegetation.

Harvesting methods and processes have varied depending on the structure of social production . Subsistence fishing is a practice woven throughout human history, beginning with the harvesting of shellfish along seashores and shallow lakes, and progressing with the

development of tools such as stone-tipped fishing spears, fishhooks, lines, and nets. This was originally based upon fishing for use of the fish. What was caught was used to feed families and communities. Through the process of fishing, human labor has been intimately linked to ocean processes, gaining an understanding of fish migrations, tides, and ocean currents. The size of a human population in a particular region influenced the extent of

exploitation. But the introduction of commodity markets and private ownership under the capitalist system of production altered the relationship of fishing labor to the resources of the seas. Specific species had an exchange value. As a result, certain fish were seen as being more valuable. This led to fishing practices that focused on catching as many of a particular fish, such as cod, as possible. Non-commercially viable species harvested indiscriminately alongside the target species were discarded as waste. As capitalism developed and spread, intensive extraction by industrial capture fisheries became the norm. Increased demands were placed on the oceans and overfishing resulted in the severe depletion of wild fish stocks. In Empty Ocean, Richard Ellis states, “Throughout the world’s oceans, food fishes once believed to be immeasurable in number are now recognized as greatly

depleted and in some cases almost extinct. A million vessels now fish the world’s oceans, twice as many as there were twenty-five years ago. Are there twice as many fish as before? Hardly.” How did this situation develop?10 The beginning of capitalist industrialization marked the most noticeable and significant changes in fisheries practices. Mechanization, automation, and mass production/consumption characterized an era of increased fixed capital investments. Profit-driven investment in efficient production led to fishing technologies that for the first time made the exhaustion of deep-sea fish stocks a real possibility. Such transformations can be seen in how groundfishing, the capture of fish that swim in close proximity to the ocean’s bottom, changed through the years.

UMKC SDI 2014 Capitalism K 16

Link/!- OverfishingCapitalism encourages market competition and overproduction that makes overfishing inevitable- these profit motives are responsible for the worst fishing practicesBrett Clark and Rebecca Clausen in 2008, PhD, Sociology, University of Oregon, The Oceanic Crisis: Capitalism and the Degradation of Marine Ecosystem, Monthly Review, http://monthlyreview.org/2008/07/01/the-oceanic-crisis-capitalism-and-the-degradation-of-marine-ecosystem

Competitive markets create incentives to expand production, regardless of resource decline. Thus, in reaction to decreased stocks due to overfishing, groundfishing fleets moved farther offshore into waters off of the coast of Canada to increase the supply of valuable fish to new markets. The fleet’s ability to continue moving into unexploited waters obscured recognition of the severe resource depletion that was

occurring. As a result, the process of overfishing particular ecosystems to supply a specific good for the market expanded, subjecting more of the ocean to the same system of degradation.12 The distant water fleets were made possible by the advent of factory trawlers . Factory trawlers represent the pinnacle of capital investment and extractive intensification in the global fisheries. In Distant Water William Warner presents a portrayal of a factory trawler’s capacity: Try to imagine a mobile and completely self-contained timber cutting machine that could smash through the roughest trails of the forest, cut down trees, mill them, and deliver consumer-ready lumber in half the time of normal logging and milling

operations. This was exactly what factory trawlers did—this was exactly their effect on fish—in the forests of the deep. It could not long go unnoticed. Factory trawlers pull nylon nets a thousand feet long through the ocean, potentially capturing 400 tons of fish during a single netting. Industrial trawlers can process and freeze their catch as they travel.13 Such technological development extended the systematic exploitation and scale of harvesting of fishes. The natural limits of fish populations combined with capital’s need to expand led to the development of immense trawlers that increased the productive capacity and efficiency of operations. These ships allowed fishermen to seek out areas in the ocean where valuable fish were available, providing the means to capture massive quantities of fish in a single trip. Overcoming the shortage of fishes in one area was accomplished by even more intensive harvesting with new ships and equipment, such as sonar, in other regions of the oceans.

The pursuit of vast quantities of commercial fishes in different areas of the ocean expanded the depletion of other species, as they were exploited and discarded as bycatch. The swath of the seas subjected to the dictates of the market increased, whether a

fish was sold as a commodity or thrown overboard as a waste product.14 Competition for market share between companies and capital’s investment in advanced technology intensified fishery exploitation. Competing international companies sought nature’s diminishing bounty, causing further international conflict in the “race for fish.” President Truman responded to these disputes by attempting to expand U.S. corporate interests. He issued two proclamations expanding U.S. authority beyond territorial waters trying to further territorial enclosure of its adjacent seas out to the limits of the continental shelf. Coastal states around the world struggled to transform the property rights of the open ocean to benefit their nations. In response to growing conflict, the United Nations convened the First United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea in Geneva in 1958.

UMKC SDI 2014 Capitalism K 17

Link- PoMo/Identity PoliticsPostmodern critiques of identity and truth ignore that capitalism is once again a problem that requires more than a multitude of sites of resistance but rather an organized global struggle.Zizek and Daly in 4

(Slavoj, Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Sociology at Ljubljana University, Glyn, Senior Lecturer in Politics at University College in Northhampton, “Conversations with Zizek”, Page 146-149)

I don't mean economy in the vulgar sense of, yes we must do something for workers' lot. I am aiming here at something more radical. I think that there is a central idea developed by Georg Lukacs and the Frankfurt School which, in spite of all my criticism of the Western Marxist tradition, is today more actual than ever. The idea is that the economy is not simply one among the social spheres. The basic insight of the Marxist critique of political economy — of commodity fetishism and so on — is that the economy has a certain prototranscendental social status.

Economy provides a generative matrix for phenomena which in the first approach has nothing to do with economy as such. For example, we can speak about reification, the commodification of culture and of politics and so on . At the level of form, the capitalist economy has a universal scope. So what interests me is the global structuring dimension of what goes on at the level of capitalist economy. It is not just one

domain among the others. Here again I disagree with the postmodern mantra: gender, ethnic struggle, gender, whatever, and then class. Class is not one in the series. For class, we read, of course, anticapitalist economic struggle. You insist upon the importance of class and yet the idea of class as a unified agency has been heavily critiqued from a variety of perspectives. Do you still

consider the working class to be a revolutionary agency in the Marxist sense? Well, yes and no. The problem for me is, what is working class today? I think that

we should certainly abandon any fetish about the centrality of the working class. But at the same time we should abandon the opposite (postmodern) fetish: that the working class is disappearing; that it is meaningless to speak about the working class . Both are wrong. There are a couple of trends today. One trend is the growing structural role of unemployed people. It is clear that with this new logic of contemporary capitalism,

the tendency is more and more for you not to have a lifelong permanent job , but to change jobs every two or three years. Some postmodern ideologists celebrate this as a new liberation in the sense that you don't have a fixed identity : to use the fashionable

term, you have `portfolio subjectivity'. This is a typical postmodern ideological operation, where the horror of never being certain whether you have a job or not is sold as the new freedom. You are not fixed to one identity; you have to reinvent yourself every two or three years. So this

stratum of unemployed is no longer simply an excess but is something that is structurally inscribed. The working class is split into those who have jobs and those who don't have jobs. The second split which renders problematic the traditional notion of the working class is the split between intellectual and manual labour. There are two positions here. One is simply to say, yes, manual labour is disappearing from sight, but it's still present in terms of the millions who work in service economies, the immigrant workers doing the dirty jobs here, the

global sweat factories in Indonesia and so on. So our societies have to rely upon the manual labour of the working class proper. On the opposite side we have this quick sleight of hand claiming that intellectual labour is also part of the proletariat today , that all these computer programmers are also

exploited and so on. Somehow I think that both positions are false and we should simply accept this split as definitive. The third opposition, which we have already touched on, is the relationship between the first and the third world . According to traditional Marxism, true capital should be first world capital. Of course, in contrast to that we have the Maoist position, according to which class struggle is today turning into the struggle of whole countries, in the sense that there are countries, for example the United States and the United Kingdom, which are already in themselves bourgeois nations.

And there are nations which, as nations, stand for proletarian nations. I oppose this, but I see in it the signal of a problem. So to be clear, although you would reject the fetish of class, you would nonetheless ascribe a certain political priority to class struggle , at least in terms of its anti-capitalism? My position is almost classical Marxist in the sense that I would insist that anti-capitalist struggle is not simply one among other political struggles for greater equality,

cultural recognition, anti-sexism and so on. I believe in the central structuring role of the anti-capitalist struggle. And I don't think that my position is

as crazy or idiosyncratic as it appeared maybe a couple of years ago. It is not only the so-called Seattle Movement; there are many other signals that demonstrate that — how shall I put it? — capitalism is becoming a problem again; that the honeymoon of globalization, which

lasted through the 1990s, is coming to an end . It's in this context that we can also understand the incredible success of Negri and Hardt's Empire, which points out that people are

again perceiving capitalism as a problem. It is no longer the old story that the ideological battles are over and that capitalism has won. Capitalism is once more a problem. This would be my starting point. And I am not thinking of anti-capitalist struggle just in terms of consumerist movements. This is not enough. We need to do more than simply organize a multitude of sites of resistance against capitalism. There is a basic necessity to translate this resistance into a more global project — otherwise we will merely be creating regulatory instances that control only the worst excesses of capitalism .

UMKC SDI 2014 Capitalism K 18

Link- Critical PhilosophyPhilosophy’s obsession with difference and the indeterminacy and play of symbols prevents a solidified and coherent understanding of capitalism. It trades off with meaningful analysis of the way capitalism has ordered society, stifling resistance.Zavarzadeh in 95 (Mas’ud, prolific writer and expert on class ideology, post-ality: Marxism and postmodernism, post-ality the (dis)simulations of cybercapitalism)

Post-ality is the ensemble of all practices that, as a totality, obscure the production practices of capitalism—which is based on the

extraction of surplus labor (the source of accumulation of capital)—by announcing the arrival of a new society which is post-production, post-labor, post-ideology, post-white and post-capitalist. Post-ality, in other words, is a regime of class struggle against the workers that posits a structural change, a rupture, in capitalism: one that severs the past of capitalism from what is regards to be its radically different and "new" present (which unlike its past is now free from

exploitation). In doing so, post-ality attempts to solve—in the theoretical imaginary—the historical and material contradictions of capitalism caused by the social division of labor. There is therefore a great urgency among the ideologists of the ruling class to discredit any effort to theorize post-ality (as I am doing here)

because such theorization produces knowledge of contemporary capitalism and the strategies that are used to justify it. This discrediting of theories about post-ality takes many forms—as might be expected in the capitalist knowledge industry in which theorists compete for a living with each other in meeting the needs of the agents of capital for ever newer concepts. The most popular form now of deconstructing "totality" in order to obscure the working of capitalism ) is one that questions the very possibility of any "totality" by pointing to the epistemological aporias of the theory of concepts (concept = totality). The strategy, in other words, is to dismantle the frames of intelligibility that make the articulation of such "totalities" as post-ality (and what it justifies, namely 'capitalism") possible. "Totality" is ostensibly put in question, by such theorists of the ruling class as Derrida and deMan, on epistemological grounds. According to them, all con cepts are effects of tropes (Paul deMan, Allegories of Reading 144-47), and as such,

they are language constructs. Moreover, since language is a "field ... of play' (Writing and Difference 289, emphasis in the original), all concepts are said to be simply unstable, differential networks of "infinite substitutions" of signs and not an articulation of the real. Thus, there is always "something missing" from concepts—the something that "excludes totalization" (Writing and Difference 289).

However, these ludic arguments about the playfulness that deprives the concept of its truth ("totality"), exclude themselves from the laws of play and place their own truth (totalizing against totalizing) beyond the differential volatility of substitutions. These ludic theories also forget that play is always a movement of parts within a structure of conflicts and contradictions and these contradictions are effects of class difference and class antagonisms. (This is the line of argument that I will follow throughout my text since I am not interested in simply

performing reflexive and deconstructive readings that bring down an argument by putting its founding threads in question.) Thus the very playfulness of play (making sense of playfulness) is a historical effect whose meaning is determined by the social relations of production . What is received as the playfulness of the trope—a lively metaphor— in, for example, Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins and the Foundations of inequality among Men (1754) is a "dead metaphor" in the discourses of Euroamerican Depression 11930's). This historicity of the "playfulness" (its non-self-evidence) necessitates that DeMan and other readers constantly annotate Rousseau's "dead metaphors" to give them "life" and make the "playfulness" of their "play" receivable by readers

situated in an entirely different historical situation and material conditions- If metaphors in and of themselves were playful (that is if language was

autonomous), there would be no need for annotation. The fact that there is such a need and furthermore that there are fierce contestations over what kind of annotations are appropriate is itself part of the logic of interpretation which is determined by the historical level of class struggle. if "language is about language" as deMan argues (153), the playfulness of the trope should be immanent; an always already of the language confronting itself as a result of the transocial laws of signification. But as deMan's annotation of Rousseau shows,

playfulness in a text has to be marked and the marking varies from one period to period another according to the level of class struggle- the struggle, in short, over what is seen to be the "legitimate" ratio of surplus labor. The marking of a text, then, Is always class struggle carried on in the tropics of language . DeMan 's notion that "all language is about language" (153) is not only a "totalization" but also a part of a class theory of language that posits language as a closed arrangement of signs and reduces all social differences that mobilize signs as interior semiotic differences ("difference within") in which lan - guage "confronts itself" and escapes history. However, the totalizations of the rul ing class , as I will discuss throughout this essay, are never seen as "tolalizations" but as the transhistorical truth of life itself. The epistemological questioning of "totality,"

which serves as the basis for rejecting post ality as a concept, is an ideological alibi to dismantle the theoretical foundation of a coherent knowledge of capitalism as a "totality"—that is, as a sys tematic and complex set of interconnected economic, cultural, political and theo retical practices. Derrida's idea of differance (the founding concept of detotalizing) informs the entire project of postmarxism in which the very notion of society as a totality is decentered and in place of a collective subject of

UMKC SDI 2014 Capitalism K 19revolution is placed the decentralized, detotalized and differential "hegemony" of a loose coalition, This "war on totality" (Iyoutard,

The Post nodern Condition 82), thus, is not limited to poststructuralist writers but increasingly becomes the project of a generalized "left." For instance, following the announcement that the first issue of 'Transformation would focus on the question of the "Post-al," one "left" writer responded, in a letter to me, with a troping discrediting of the concept, saying that the "Post" meant "mail" and concluded that "hence'hyper-post-ality'=(?) too many stamps on the envelope, 'post-al (Flexi)workplace'=all-night sorting office?" One is hard-pressed to find a difference between the leftist discrediting of concepts

and the poststructuralist deconstruction—both marginalize the concepts necessary to grasp capitalism as a totality (the laws of

motion of capital). The institutionalized "left" is equally invested in the erasure of concepts and the dispersion of the social totality into an ensemble of the heterogeneous and incommensurate experiences of 'agent' its 'social movements," When the "rigorous" arguments of the philoso-pher on behalf of capital fails, the State jokester takes over and defends the rule of swage labor through "phrases" and "puns" --although in the "with" writings of such pun(kisters as Lacan, Derrida, Butler, Ulmer ... the epistemological and the joke are sutured into the post-al paralogy. <3-4>

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Link- Discourse FocusTheir focus on signifiers and localized resistance is rooted in a fear of power-it disables all political stances and allows the hegemonic forces of elites to expand unchecked. Resistance will fail until it is focused on a positive exercise of powerBertens in 95 (Johannes and Willem, the idea of postmodernism: a history, pg 197-199)

Postmodernism, however, repeats the defeatist gestures of modernism, although admittedly on another level. Like Keane, McGowan sees a deeply democratic impulse at work in postmodern thought: ‘we should recognize how fully the ideal of an egalitarian, pluralistic democratic order informs most postmodern work’ (28). But it is caught in the dilemma created by its deep-rooted suspicion of power. ‘postmodernism finds itself between a rock and a hard place, unable to ground democracy by appeal to external, nonhuman principles, but unwilling to accept humanly generated principles as legitimate norms rather than further instances of arrangements imposed by power’ (28). Laclau and Mouffe and Best and Kellner belong to that small group of theorists that seek legitimation in the intersubjectivity of their historicist models, to the extent even that they downplay the role that power plays, or has played, in the near background. One way out of the dilemma that McGowan sketches would seem to be offered by the attempt to subvert the existing order by way of play, jouissance but the impotence of such an aestheticist strategy is obvious. Anti-representation has its effects in the field of cultural politics, although even there the longevity of those effects should not be overestimated, but it has little to contribute in the field of social politics. It offers the postmodernist a semblance of freedom, but it is, as McGowan remarks, ‘unprofitably close to the modernist goal of autonomy’ (2). Significantly, autonomy is the term that Rorty uses to describe the objective of his postmodern ‘ironist’, who is not in the business of supplying himself and his fellow ironists with a method, a platform, or a rationale. He is just doing the same thing that all ironists do — attempting autonomy. He is trying to get out from under inherited contingencies and make his own contingencies, get out from under an old final vocabulary and fashion one which will be all his own. The generic trait of ironists is that they do not hope to have their doubts about their final vocabularies settled by something larger than themselves. This means that their criterion for resolving doubts, their criterion of private perfection, is autonomy rather than affiliation to a power other than themselves. Rorty’s ironist attempts to retreat to a separate space, far from the political crowd. This postmodern emulation of negative modernist strategies is the consequence either of the fear of representation and power expressed by Lyotard and by Foucault or of the fear — expressed most dearly by Jameson, Baudrillard, and other theorists who draw on the Frankfurter Schule— that the capitalist monolith, so much more powerful now than under modernity, immediately will render all resistance ineffective. (We remember that for Baudrillard resisting simulation is itself a simulation.) If the monolith has indeed become virtually all-powerful, then autonomy, whether on the personal or on the group level, automatically is an important political category, even if ineffective. McGowan’s conclusion that postmodern theorists on the whole ‘remain wedded to modernist notions of distance and disengagement as enabling radical critique’ is fully warranted. In fact, Jameson had already said as much of Lyotard in his foreword to The Postmodern Condition. The radical anti-representationalism that is a favorite postmodern strategy in the creation of distance is at the same time politically crippling. On the level of the group, or community, the postmodern insistence on distance and difference hides a similar danger, because on this level difference can exist only in the interstices of hegemony. The centrifugal forces of the postmodern may easily cause a rupture between the margins and the hegemonic center, and thus hurl the margins into what is in effect a political void, even if that void is experienced as a new freedom. The upshot of all this is that much postmodern theory, because of its fierce opposition to the politics of modernity, is wholly apolitical in the macropolitical sense. The fears of representation, of power, and of a social reality wholly dominated by capitalism, have steered most postmodern theorists towards the tactics of micropolitics while leaving the field of macropolitics to the enemy. Mark Poster has remarked that the problem for theory ‘is to generate discourses whose power effects are limited as much as possible to the subversion of power’ (Poster 1989: 30). Poster’s formulation, no matter how cautious, recognizes that power must not only be subverted but also exercised. It is the refusal to claim power, that is, to move from a negative to a positive conception of postmodern politics that has kept feminists on their guard vis a vis most postmodern theory.

UMKC SDI 2014 Capitalism K 21

Impacts

UMKC SDI 2014 Capitalism K 22

!- ExtinctionCapital expansion relies on the objectification of nature and humans in the name of rationality-this not only degrades life, it literally destroys it through violent ecological and social relationships-the impact is extinctionNoah De Lissovoy in 08 Capitalism Nature Socialism Volume 19, Issue 1, 2008 Capitalism Nature Socialism Volume 19, Issue 1, 2008, Dialectic of Emergency/Emergency of the Dialectic

Emergency, as crisis, can in the first instance be understood in terms of the coming to fruition of the essential conflicts that are constitutive of capitalism as a historical process. Marx and Engels described the contradiction which drives history forward as that between the forces and the relations of production.7 In this account, the productive social capacities born within a mode of production eventually come to collide with the logic that organizes it as a system of social relationships. This contradiction can only be resolved in the transition to a different society. In the

case of capitalism, its inherent course of development entails a process of production that is necessarily more and more collectivized and rationalized. This cannot be reconciled with social relations that depend upon an irrational immiseration of the majority

along with an absolutely brutal individualism, both real and ideological.8 However, as Herbert Marcuse showed in developing the tradition of critical theory, the development of the forces of production cannot be separated from the destructive effects inherent in the relationship of exploitation at the core of the production of capital.9 In other words, technological rationality, scientific management, and organizational “efficiency” are not neutral historical developments that might characterize an authentically

socialist as much as a capitalist society. Rather, they represent in themselves an instrumentalization of human being and social reason repeated in the reduction of human creativity to the commodity labor power and in the appropriation of surplus value through the labor process itself. Nevertheless, the idea that capitalism gives rise to an unprecedented social potential beyond its own capacity to manage remains immensely useful. As it

continues its relentless expansion beyond all boundaries, capitalism initiates a new form of globalized sociality that it cannot rationally control, and whose potentials are increasingly realized as political and environmental destruction . Indeed,

while globalization represents the point at which capital closes in on the complete subjugation of the world, as both culture and nature,10 it is also the stage at which its crises and failures also achieve a planetary scale and threaten systemic ecological collapse. Arguably, it is only at this historical moment that capitalism's inherent contradictions are fully materialized, and it is only with the aggregation of human experience on a global scale that a truly international counter-force to capital can be imagined. In this sense, the ascendant emergency time of the new millennium is a step forward, so to speak, in the historical dialectic that leads ultimately to the overcoming of capitalism itself. In other words, in the same way that the development of manufacturing

broke the bonds of feudalism and laid the groundwork for the appearance and organization of the proletariat,11 capitalism as globalization unwittingly creates the conditions for more powerful disruptions of the process of accumulation by newly crystallized and mobilized global forces. The extended crisis of empire that has come to be called the “war on terror,” the clash between the relentless assimilative drive of transnational capital and new forms of popular, environmental, and indigenous opposition, and even the natural catastrophes of earthquakes, hurricanes, and tsunamis (fundamentally mediated as they are by political-economic facts and relationships) would represent the terrible

moments of this drama of history accelerating toward the resolution of its constitutive contradictions. At the same time, however, it is also an essential aspect of the temporality of emergency that it begins to appear that there is not enough “time” for this very dialectic to work itself out. There is first of all the literal boundary to history as development potentially presented by global climate change, the exhaustion of natural resources, ecological collapse, and war. In István Mészáros’ terms, this is the “specter of total uncontrollability” of capital in the present, which threatens all life in its catastrophic self-expansionary logic and thus puts the lie to the putative wisdom of the market .12 In Mészáros’ analysis, the political crisis and the ecological crisis are joined. As capitalism increasingly shifts the allocation of resources from re-usable to immediately “used-up” goods, it establishes a spectacularly wasteful society.13 This principle is perfected in the military-industrial complex, which establishes a parasitic cycle of consumption that bypasses altogether the satisfaction of real human needs, while threatening actual apocalypse.14 But in addition to these limits on development, there is the problem that the dialectic of class struggle drawn by Marx has uncovered a deeper and more objective historical logic in the discontinuities and ruptures of capitalism without having yet produced a social agent capable of challenging capital's rule. Certainly proletarian and peasant movements confront capital in different places all over the globe; but the consolidation and organization of a unified revolutionary class has not kept pace with capital's own development. It is not so much that this counter-subject is empirically weak; the problem is rather its failure to become itself at the same pace that capital has accomplished its own becoming and expansion. The emergence of the historical subject and consciousness that would be able to confront and dismantle power then has to take

place at an accelerated pace—indeed, almost suddenly.

UMKC SDI 2014 Capitalism K 23

!- OceansOcean degradation is structurally inevitable under capitalism- it ensures the commodification of ocean resources and their exploitation Brett Clark and Rebecca Clausen in 2008, PhD, Sociology, University of Oregon, The Oceanic Crisis: Capitalism and the Degradation of Marine Ecosystem, Monthly Review, http://monthlyreview.org/2008/07/01/the-oceanic-crisis-capitalism-and-the-degradation-of-marine-ecosystem

The world ocean covers approximately 70 percent of the earth. It has been an integral part of human history, providing food and ecological services. Yet conservation efforts and concerns with environmental degradation have mostly focused on terrestrial issues. Marine scientists and oceanographers have recently made remarkable discoveries in regard to the intricacies of marine food webs and the richness of oceanic biodiversity. However, the excitement over these discoveries is dampened due to an awareness of the rapidly accelerating threat to the biological integrity of marine ecosystems.1

At the start of the twenty-first century marine scientists focused on the rapid depletion of marine fish, revealing that 75 percent of major fisheries are fully exploited, overexploited, or depleted. It is estimated “that the global ocean has lost more than 90% of large predatory fishes.” The depletion of ocean fish stock due to overfishing has disrupted metabolic relations within the oceanic ecosystem at multiple trophic and spatial

scales.2 Despite warnings of impending collapse of fish stock, the oceanic crisis has only worsened. The severity is made evident in a

recent effort to map the scale of human impact on the world ocean. A team of scientists analyzed seventeen types of anthropogenic drivers of ecological change (e.g., organic pollution from agricultural runoff, overfishing, carbon dioxide emissions, etc.) for marine ecosystems. The findings are clear: No area of the world ocean “is unaffected by human influence,” and over 40 percent of marine ecosystems are heavily affected by multiple factors. Polar seas are on the verge of significant change. Coral reefs and continental shelves have suffered severe deterioration. Additionally, the world ocean is a crucial factor in the carbon cycle, absorbing approximately a third to a half of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere . The increase in the portion of carbon dioxide has led to an increase in ocean temperature and a slow drop in the pH of surface waters—making them more acidic—disrupting shell-forming plankton and reef-building

species. Furthermore, invasive species have negatively affected 84 percent of the world’s coastal waters—decreasing biodiversity and

further undermining already stressed fisheries.3 Scientific analysis of oceanic systems presents a sobering picture of the coevolution of human society and the marine environment during the capitalist industrial era. The particular environmental problems related to the ocean cannot be viewed as isolated issues or aberrations of human ingenuity, only to be corrected through further technological development. Rather these ecological conditions must be understood as they relate to the systematic expansion of capital and the exploitation of nature for profit . Capital has a particular social metabolic order—the material interchange between society and nature—that subsumes the world to the logic of accumulation. It is a system of self-expanding value, which must reproduce itself on an ever-larger scale.4 Here we examine the social metabolic order of capital and its relationship with the oceans to (a) examine the anthropogenic causes of fish stock depletion, (b) detail the ecological consequences of ongoing capitalist production in relation to the ocean environment, and (c) highlight the ecological contradictions of capitalist aquaculture.5

UMKC SDI 2014 Capitalism K 24

!- OverfishingCapitalism is responsible for industrial fishing, undermining biodiversity and leading to policies like trawling Brett Clark and Rebecca Clausen in 2008, PhD, Sociology, University of Oregon, The Oceanic Crisis: Capitalism and the Degradation of Marine Ecosystem, Monthly Review, http://monthlyreview.org/2008/07/01/the-oceanic-crisis-capitalism-and-the-degradation-of-marine-ecosystem

Industrialized capitalist fishing allows for vast quantities of target fish to be harvested at once . At the same time, it leads to an immense amount of non-target marine life—bycatch—being captured. Bycatch are commercially unviable species, thus they are seen as waste. The “trash fish” are often ground up and thrown back into the ocean . Part of the bycatch includes juveniles of the target fish, which, if the mortality is increased among this population, undercuts the success of recovery. Obviously, the populations of the discarded species

are negatively affected by this practice, furthering the depletion of marine life. The most wasteful operation is trawling for shrimp. The capture and discarding of bycatch disrupts the habitats and trophic webs within ecosystems . The scale of the disruption is quite significant. It is estimated that an average of 27 million tons of fish are discarded each year in commercial fisheries around the world, and that the United States has

a .28 ratio of bycatch discard to landings.22 Species extinction is the direct impact of overfishing, which is in part driven by the pursuit of capital accumulation and is facilitated by the technological innovations that are employed for this particular purpose, in what has become known as a “race for fish.”23 Capitalist practices are creating a loss of marine biodiversity and undermining the resiliency of marine ecosystems. Valiela states, “The magnitude of the fishing harvest and the examples of major alterations to marine food webs by predator removal suggest that effects of fishing are ecologically substantial at large spatial scales.” The “major alteration to marine food webs” due to overexploitation provides the clearest example of ecological degradation in the metabolic processes of the ocean.24

Continued overfishing threatens to collapse all marine biodiversityBrett Clark and Rebecca Clausen in 2008, PhD, Sociology, University of Oregon, The Oceanic Crisis: Capitalism and the Degradation of Marine Ecosystem, Monthly Review, http://monthlyreview.org/2008/07/01/the-oceanic-crisis-capitalism-and-the-degradation-of-marine-ecosystem

Equally disrupting, but less apparent than species effects, are the ecosystem effects caused by fishery exploitation, especially “fishing down the food chain.”25 As overfishing depletes the most commercially viable top predators (i.e., snapper, tuna, cod,

and swordfish), competition drives commercial fishers to begin harvesting species of lower trophic levels . The downward shift is global, according to the model analysis of UN statistics describing worldwide catches of fish over a forty-year time span. If this quest is pursued to its logical end, scientists warn it will lead to the wholesale collapse of marine ecosystems . Fishing down the food chain erodes the base of marine biodiversity and undermines the biophysical cornerstone of ocean fisheries. The recent

discoveries of marine trophic interactions suggest that the lower trophic levels of marine food webs provide an integral and complex foundation—disrupting this base undermines the metabolic cycle of energy flows within marine ecosystems .

UMKC SDI 2014 Capitalism K 25

!- OceansCapitalism can do nothing to save the environment- at best it can delay collapse- overproduction and waste make eco-collapse inevitable- only a revolution against capital can solveBrett Clark and Rebecca Clausen in 2008, PhD, Sociology, University of Oregon, The Oceanic Crisis: Capitalism and the Degradation of Marine Ecosystem, Monthly Review, http://monthlyreview.org/2008/07/01/the-oceanic-crisis-capitalism-and-the-degradation-of-marine-ecosystem

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 decimated 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 technological 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 resolving 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 .”44

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 opposed 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.”45 Productive relations are concerned with production time, labor costs, and the circulation of capital—not the diminishing 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 elementary 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].46 An analysis of the oceanic crisis confirms the destructive qualities of private for-profit operations. Dire conditions are being generated as the resiliency of marine ecosystems in general is being undermined. To make matters worse, sewage from feedlots and fertilizer runoff from farms are transported by rivers to gulfs and bays, overloading marine ecosystems with excess nutrients , which contribute to an

expansion of algal production. This leads to oxygen-poor water and the formation of hypoxic zones—otherwise known as “dead zones” because crabs and fishes suffocate within these areas. It also compromises natural processes that remove nutrients from the waterways. Around 150 dead zones have been identified around the world. A dead zone is the end result of unsustainable practices of food production on land. At the same time, it contributes to the

loss of marine life in the seas, furthering the ecological crisis of the world ocean. Coupled with industrialized capitalist fisheries and aquaculture, the oceans are experiencing ecological degradation and constant pressures of extraction that are severely depleting the populations of fishes and other marine life. The severity of the situation is that if current practices and rates of fish capture continue marine ecosystems and fisheries around the world could collapse by the year 2050 .47 To advert turning the seas into a watery grave, what is needed is nothing less than a worldwide revolution in our relation to nature, and thus of global society itself.

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!- Spills overThe commodification of the environment spills over into our social relationships- the cultures and people that depend on ecosystems are also discardedRichard Kahn in 2008, Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations & Research at the University of North Dakota From Education for Sustainable Development to Ecopedagogy: Sustaining Capitalism or Sustaining Life?, Green Theory & Praxis: The Journal of Ecopedagogy Volume 4, No. 1 (2008)

Almost all of these trends are escalating and most are accelerating. Even during what recently amounted to a current economic downturn,

transnational markets and development continued to flow and evolve, and the globalization of technocapital (Best and Kellner, 2001)

continues to fuel yet another vast reconstruction of the myriad planetary political, economic, and sociocultural forces into a futuristic

information society. Over the last few decades then, humanity has unfolded like a shock wave across the face of the Earth, one that has led

to an exponential increase of transnational marketplaces and startling achievements in science and technology, but one that has also had devastating effects on planetary ecosystems, both individually and as a whole. Most telling has been the parallel tendency over this time period toward mass extinction for the great diversity of nonhuman species, including vast numbers of mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. Comparing the numbers involved in this catastrophe with the handful of other great extinctions within the prehistoric record has led the

esteemed paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey to dub this age as the time of “the Sixth Extinction,” a great vanishing of creatures over the last

thirty-odd years such as the planet did not see during its previous sixty-five million (Leaky and Lewin, 1995). The critical theorist Herbert Marcuse referred to the sort of systemic disregard for life evinced by statistics such as these as “ecocide” (Kellner 2005, p. 173) – the attempt to annihilate natural places by turning them into capitalist cultural spaces, a process that works hand in hand with the genocide and dehumanization of people as an expression of the market economy’s perpetual expansion . More recently, others speak of ecocide as the destruction of the higherorder relations that govern ecosystems generally (Broswimmer, 2002), as when economies of need take areas characterized by complexity and diversity (like the Amazonian rainforest) and reduce them to the deforested and unstable monoculture of soybeans for cattle feed.

However, while it is no doubt possible to disable an ecosystem from sustaining much life, it is not clear that one can actually kill it. Instead,

we are witnessing a process by which bioregions are being transformed pathologically from natural ecologies of scale that support life to capitalist ecologies that function beyond limit and threaten death. In this way, the current globalization of neoliberal capitalism, which institutes classist, racist, sexist, and speciesist oppression, is a sort of biocidal , or as I ultimately argue elsewhere

(Kahn, 2006), a zoöcidal agent.

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!- EnvironmentIts try or die for the alternative – we only have a small window to alter the massive amount of ecological destruction that has taken place under the guiding logic of capital. Foster in 2009(John Bellamy, Professor of Sociology at Oregon, “The Ecological Revolution,” Page 43-46)

In the years that have elapsed since the second earth summit it has become increasingly difficult to separate the class and imperial war inherent to capitalism from war on the planet itself. At a time when the United States is battling for imperial control of the richest oil region on earth, the ecology of the planet is experiencing rapid deterioration, marked most dramatically by global warming. Meanwhile, the neoliberal economic restructuring emanating from the new regime of monopoly-finance capital is not only undermining the economic welfare of much of humanity, but is also , in some

regions, removing such basic ecological conditions of human existence as access to clean air, drinkable water, and adequate food. Ecologists who once warned of the possibility of future apocalypse now insist that global disaster is on Our doorstep. Bill

McKibben, author of The End of Nature, declared in his article "The Debate Is Over" in the November 17,2005, issue of RollingStone magazine that we are now entering the “Oh Shit" era of global warming. At first, he wrote, there was the "I wonder what will happen?" era. Then there was the

"Can this really be true?" era. Now we are in the Oh Shit era. We now know that it is too late to avert global disaster entirely. All we can do is limit its scope and intensity. Much of the uncertainty has to do with the fact that "the world ... has some trapdoors-mechanisms that don't work in straightforward fashion, but instead trigger a nasty chain reaction.?" In his book, The Revenge of Gaia, influential scientist James Lovelock, best known as the originator of the Gaia hypothesis, has issued a grim assessment of the earth's prospects based on such sudden chain reactions." Voicing the concerns of numerous scientists, Lovelock highlights a number of positive feedback mechanisms that could-and in his view almost certainly will-amplify the earth warming

tendency. The destructive effect of increasing global temperatures on ocean algae and tropical forests (on top of the direct

removal of these forests) will, it is feared, reduce the capacity of the oceans and forests to absorb car bon dioxide, raising the global temperature still further, The freeing up and release into the atmosphere of enormous quantities of methane (a greenhouse gas twenty-four times as potent as carbon dioxide) as the permafrost of the arctic tundra thaws due to global warming, consti tutes another such vicious spiral. Just as ominous, the reduction of the earth's reflectivity as melting white ice at the poles is replaced with blue seawater is

threatening to ratchet-up global temperatures. In Lovelock's cataclysmic view, the earth has probably already passed the point of no return and temperatures are destined to rise eventually as much as 8 0 C (140 F) in temperate regions. The human species will survive in some form, he assures us. Nevertheless, he points to "an imminent shift in our climate towards one that could easily be described as Hell: so hot, so deadly that only a handful of the teeming billions now alive will survive,"? He offers, as the sole means of partial salvation, a massive technical fix: a global program to expand nuclear power facilities throughout the earth as a limited substitute to the carbondioxide-emitting fossil fuel economy. The thought that

such a Faustian bargain would pave its own path to hell seems scarcely to have crossed his mind. Lovelock's fears are not easily dismissed. James Hansen,

who did so much to bring the issue of global warming to world attention, has recently issued his own warning. In an article entitled "The Threat to the Planet," Hansen points out that animal and plant species are migrat ing throughout the earth in response to global warming-though not fast enough in relation to changes in their environments- -and that alpine species are being "pushed off the planet." We are facing, he contends, the possibility of mass extinctions associated with increasing global temperature, comparable to earlier periods in the earth's history in which 50 to 90 percent of living species were lost. The greatest immediate threat to humanity from climate change, Hansen argues, is associated with the destabilization of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. A little more than 1’C (1.8' F) separates the climate of today from the warmest interglacial periods in the last half million years when the sea level was as much as sixteen feet higher. Further, increases in temperature this century by around 2.80 C (50 F), if business-as-usual continues, could lead to a long-term rise in sea level by as

much as eighty feet, judging by what happened the last time the earth's temperature rose this high-three million years ago. "We have," Hansen says, "at most ten years-not ten years to decide upon action but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions"- if we are to prevent such disastrous outcomes from becoming inevitable. One crucial decade, in other words, separates us from irreversible changes that could produce a very different world. The contradictions of the entire Holocene-the

geological epoch in which human civilization has developed-are suddenly being revealed in our time.10 In the Oh shit era, the debate, McKibben says, is over. There is no longer any doubt that global warming represents a crisis of earth-shak ing proportions. Yet, it is absolutely essential to understand that this is only one part of what we call the environmental crisis. The global eco logical threat as a whole is made up of a large number of interrelated crises and problems that are confronting us simultaneously. In my 1994 book, The Vulnerable Planet, I started out with a brief litany of some of these, to which others might now be added:

Overpopulation, destruction of the ozone layer, global warming, extinc tion of species, loss of genetic diversity, acid rain, nuclear contamination, tropical deforestation, the elimination of climax forests, wetland destruction, soil erosion, desertification, floods, famine, the despoliation of lakes, streams, and rivers, the drawing down and

UMKC SDI 2014 Capitalism K 28contamination of ground water, the pollution of coastal waters and estuaries, the destruction of coral reefs, oil spills, overfishing, expanding landfills, toxic wastes, the poisonous effects of insecticides and herbicides, exposure to hazards on the job, urban congestion, and the depletion of nonrenewable resources. The point is that not just global warming

but many of these other problems as well can each be seen as constituting a global ecological crisis. Today, every major ecosystem on the earth is in decline. Issues of environmental justice are becoming more prominent and pressing everywhere we turn. Underlying this is the fact that the class/imperial war that defines capitalism as a world system, and that governs its system of accumulation, is a juggernaut that knows no limits. In this deadly conflict the natural world is seen as a mere instrument of world social domination. Hence, capital by its very logic imposes what is in effect a scorched earth strategy. The planetary ecological crisis is increasingly all-encompassing, a product of the destructive uncontrollability of a rapidly globalizing capitalist economy, which knows no law other than its own drive to exponential expansion.

Capitalism has failed to avoid extinction through ecological crisis – only a massive re-ordering of the mode of production can bring environmental sustainabilitySmith in 2011(Richard, Institute for Policy Research & Development, “Green Capitalism: the god that failed”, real-world economics review, issue no. 56)

We can’t shop our way to sustainability because the problems we face cannot be solved by individual choices in the marketplace. In fact most of the ecological problems we face from global warming to deforestation, to overfishing, to pollution, to species extinction and many others, are way beyond the scope of companies, industries, even countries. They require concerted, large-scale national and international action. And they require direct economic planning at global, national and local levels. For example, the world’s climate scientists tell us we’re doomed unless we shut down the coal industry and sharply reduce our consumption of all fossil fuels. But even the world’s largest corporations, such as Exxon Mobil, can’t afford to take such losses, to sacrifice its owners -- merely to save the humans. Corporations can’t make the socially and ecologically rational decisions that need to be made to save the humans because they represent only private particular interests, not the social and universal interests of humanity, the environment, and future generations . But society can afford to close down coal, retrench oil production and socialize those losses. Society can ration oil, like we did during World War II, and

society can redeploy labor and resources to construct the things we do need to save the humans, like renewable energy, public transit, energy efficient housing for all, and many other social needs that are currently unmet by the market system. In the final analysis, the only way to align production with society’s interests and the needs of the environment is to do so directly. The huge global problems we face require the visible hand of direct economic planning to re-organize the world economy to meet the needs of humans and the environment, to enforce limits on consumption and pollution, to fairly ration and distribute the goods and services we produce for the benefit of each and every person on the planet, and to conserve resources so that future generations of humans and other life forms can also live their lives to the full. All this is inconceivable without the abolition of capitalist private property in the means of production and the institution of collective bottom-up democratic control over the economy and society. And it will be impossible to build functioning national and global economic democracies unless we also abolish global economic inequality. This is both the greatest moral imperative of our time and it is also essential to winning world-wide popular support for the profound changes we must make to prevent the collapse of civilization . A tall order to be sure. But we will need even taller waterproof boots if we don’t make this happen. If Paul Hawken, Lester Brown, Francis Cairncross and Paul Krugman have a better plan, where is it?98

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!- Laundry ListCapitalism fosters war, environmental destruction, imperialism, and values antithetical to healthy communities and human relationships Magdoff, 2k12

[Fred, Professor Emertus of Plant and Soil Science at the University of Vermont in Burlington and Director of the Monthly Review Foundation, Harmony and Ecological Civilization: Beyond the Capitalist Alienation of Nature, Monthly Review, 2012]

There is an overriding issue when considering harmony as I have briefly described it. Harmony in the world—among its people and between humans and the rest of the ecosystems—is not possible in the context of capitalism. Capitalism, a system that has been in existence for some 500 years (merchant capitalism for approximately 250 years and industrial capitalism for about 250 years)—a relatively short time in the 150,000 year history of anatomically modern humans—has shown that it fosters interpersonal relations and metabolic interactions with the earth that are detrimental to achieving a harmonious existence. This is a result of capitalism’s basic characteristics and the relationships it creates as it normally functions. The purpose of capitalism is not to satisfy human needs and preserve the environment. There is only one purpose and driving force—ultimately responsible for both its dynamic periods and its crises and long periods of slow growth (stagnation)—and that is the accumulation of capital without end. The capitalist system has a number of basic characteristics and also fosters specific human characteristics and relationships. Here are ten key aspects of capitalism: •• It has to grow (or else it is in crisis) and its very logic and motivating force impels growth. •• It has no other driving force than the accumulation of ever greater amounts of capital. •• Through the creation of so-called “externalities” (or side effects) it wreaks damage on humans as well as the ecosystem and the life support systems needed by humanity and other species. In Paul Sweezy’s words: “As far as the natural environment is concerned, capitalism perceives it not as something to be cherished and enjoyed but as a means to the paramount ends of profit-making and still more capital accumulation.”1 •• It promotes the use of nonrenewable resources without regard to the needs of future generations, as if there was no end to them, and abuses even renewable resources such as ocean fisheries and forests. •• It creates vast inequality in income, wealth, and power both within and between countries. Not only class, but race, gender, and other inequalities are built into its laws of motion. •• It requires and produces a reserve army of labor—people precariously connected to the economy, most kept in poverty or near poverty—so that labor is available during economic upswings and workers can easily be fired when not needed by businesses. •• It promotes national economic and political competition and imperialism, leading to wars for domination and access to resources. •• It fosters and rewards those particular human traits that are useful for thriving or even just existing in such a possessive-individualist society— selfishness, individualism, competition, greed, exploitation of others, consumerism—while not allowing the full expression of those human characteristics needed for a harmonious society (cooperation, sharing, empathy, and altruism). •• It leads to the breakdown of human health since people operate in a hierarchical society, with many working under dangerous and physically debilitating conditions or in jobs that are repetitive and boring—while subject to job loss or fear of losing their job. (There are many adverse long-term health effects following the loss of one’s job.)2 •• It leads to the breakdown of healthy communities as people become more solitary in outlook and behavior and indigenous culture is replaced by the dominant national or international capitalist culture and outlook. People become dedicated to obtaining more for themselves and their families and depending less on reciprocal relationships with others.

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!- Structural ViolenceEven every day structural violence like police brutality and militarized schooling are products of capitalism-they are disciplinary measures to maintain class divisions and subjugate the poor

McNally in 10, David, activist and Professor of Political Science at York University in Toronto, Ontario, and past chair of the university's Department of Political Science Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance

On the economic front, the Volcker Shock—and similar policies in countries from Britain to Bolivia—were designed to make employment more precarious, through mass layoff s, factory closures, public sector job cuts, and the replacement of full-time by part-time work. Alan Budd, chief economic advisor to former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, was surprisingly forthright about all this. “Rising unemployment,” he argued, “was a very desirable way of reducing

the strength of the working class . . . What was engineered—in Marxist terms—was a crisis in capitalism which re-created a reserve army of labor, and has allowed the capitalists to make high profits ever since.”241 In short, generate unemployment and you will curb workers’ powers of resistance. By fostering job insecurity in these ways, a new political climate was engineered, one designed to buttress market discipline. Through the media and the pronouncements of politicians, a cultural atmosphere was created that disparaged nonconformity and rebellion while extolling obedience and respect for those in power. A law and order regime, to be discussed below, threatened those who challenged authority. TV shows glorifying cops became the rage. In all these ways, people were warned of the severe risks involved in standing up to

dictatorial managers, organizing a union, or going on strike. Do any of the above, came the message, and you could easily be replaced. All of which reminds us

that, notwithstanding the force of economic coercion imposed by market dependence, capitalism has always required an intricate web of social, political, and legal coercion organized in and through the state . Fundamental to intensified state coercion was a get-tough “law and order” regime that was backed up by increasingly militarized policing . Poor communities of color suffered an invasion of ever more brutal and intrusive policing ; radical political movements were infiltrated and harassed,

their members frequently jailed on trumped up charges and, in the case of groups like the Black Panther Party, chillingly

murdered. Schools in poor communities were subjected to heightened surveillance and dramatically increased police presence (in

the U.S. this has included jails in schools). And on the street level, those who hang around, gather on corners, and generally do not lead the disciplined lives of the neoliberal era are immediately suspect and liable to be confronted by police , their very mode of life

deemed suspicious. Not that any of this is new. But it was a return to (and an intensifi cation of ) older forms of keeping poor, working class people in line.

Once again, it was truly a neo-liberalism, the revival of policies and practices that had characterized capitalism in its early (classically

liberal) phase. <115-116>

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!- Ethics

The naturalizing process of capitalism masks its role in ensuring subjugation on a global scale. Our primary ethico-political responsibility is to challenge the organizing principles which found this systemZizek and Daly in 4

(Slavoj and Glyn, Conversations with Zizek pg. 14-16)

For Zizek it is imperative that we cut through this Gordian knot of postmodern protocol and recognize that our ethico-political responsibility is to confront the constitutive violence of today's global capitalism and its obscene naturalization/ anonymization of the millions who are subju gated by it throughout the world . Against the standardized positions of postmodern culture – with all its pieties

concerning 'multiculturalist' etiquette – Zizek is arguing for a politics that might be called 'radically incorrect' in the sense that it breaks with these

types of positions' and focuses instead on the very organizing principles of today's social reality: the principles of global liberal capitalism. This requires some care and subtlety. For far too long, Marxism has been bedevilled by an almost fetishistic economism that has tended towards political morbidity. With the likes of Hilferding and Gramsci, and more recently Laclau and Mouffe, crucial theoretical advances have been made that enable the transcendence of all forms of economism. In this new context, however, Zizek argues that the problem that now

presents itself is almost that of the opposite fetish. That is to say, the prohibitive anxieties surrounding the taboo of economism can function as a way of not engaging with economic reality and as a way of im plicitly accepting the latter as a basic horizon of existence. In an ironic Freudian-Lacanian twist, the fear of economism can end up reinforcing a de facto economic necessity in respect of contemporary capitalism (i.e. the initial prohibition conjures up the very thing it fears). This is not to endorse any kind of retrograde return to economism.

Zizek's point is rather that in rejecting eco nomism we should not lose sight of the systemic power of capital in shaping the lives and destinies of humanity and our very sense of the possible. In particular we should not overlook Marx's central insight

that in order to create a uni versal global system the forces of capitalism seek to conceal the politico-discursive violence of its construction through a kind of gentrification of that system . What is persistently denied by neo-liberals such as Rorty

(1989) and Fukuyama (1992) is that the gentrification of global liberal capitalism is one whose 'universalism' fundamentally reproduces and depends upon a disavowed violence that excludes vast sectors of the world's population. In this way,

neo-liberal ide ology attempts to naturalize capitalism by presenting its out comes of winning and losing as if they were simply a matter of chance and sound judgement in a neutral marketplace. Capitalism does indeed create a space for a certain diversity, at least for the central capitalist regions, but it is neither neutral nor ideal and its price in terms of social exclusion is exorbitant. That is to say,

the human cost in terms of inherent global poverty and degraded 'life-chances' cannot be calculated within the existing economic rationale and, in consequence, social exclusion remains mystified and name less (viz. the patronizing

reference to the 'developing world'). And Zizek's point is that this mystification is mag nified through capitalism's profound capacity to ingest its own excesses and negativity: to redirect (or misdirect) social antagonisms and to absorb them within a culture of differ ential affirmation . Instead of Bolshevism, the tendency today is towards a kind of political boutiquism that is readily sustained by postmodern

forms of consumerism and lifestyle. Against this Zizek argues for a new universalism whose primary ethical directive is to confront the fact that our forms of social existence are founded on exclusion on a global scale. While it is perfectly true that universalism can never become Universal (it will always require a hegemonic-particular embodiment in order to have any meaning),

what is novel about Zizek's universalism is that it would not attempt to conceal this fact or to reduce the status of the abject Other to that of a 'glitch' in an otherwise sound matrix.

UMKC SDI 2014 Capitalism K 32

Alternative

UMKC SDI 2014 Capitalism K 33

Alt- HMThe alternative is to reject the affirmative in favor of a historical materialist methodology to challenge capitalism. This method is critical to generate a pedagogy which privileges the relations of production for a better understanding of social and political oppression.Andrew N. McNight in 2010 University of Alabama at Birmingham, A Pragmatic and pedagogically Minded Revaluation of Historical Materialism, Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, vol.8. no.2, http://www.jceps.com/PDFs/08-2-04.pdf

Toward a reconstruction of historical materialism, Habermas (1979) adopts many tenets of Marxian theory. Notably, he adopts a common belief that ethical social action can lead to progress, or what he, and Lukacs before him, term ―social evolution‖ (130). Habermas, however, renders historical materialism less ideologically rigid and more interrelated to the pursuit of concepts like ―moral-practical insight‖ (120), and the ―moralization of motives for action [italics omitted]‖ (136). This can easily be described using the familiar terms of freedom to control one‘s own production, freedom from oppressive economic dictates, freedom to one‘s own cultural identity and from cultural violence being visited upon the

former, etc. He views this reconstruction of historical materialism as making necessary revisions in a theory ―whose

potential for stimulation has still not been exhausted‖ (95). His revision is still materialist in that it concerns the Marxian categories of production and reproduction, and historical in that it seeks to identify causes of social change and potentially new and more complex forms of social organization toward ―securing a normatively prescribed societal identity, a culturally interpreted ‗good‘ or ‗tolerable‘ life‖ (142). Habermas (1979) posits historical materialism not simply as a heuristic, but, as aforementioned, a ―theory of social evolution‖ (130) that

can be used to solve many of the problems confronting the moral development of social life. Progress is, under this historical and materialist rubric, both social and physical; it represents advances in ―empirical knowledge and moral-practical insight . . . the development of productive forces and the maturity of forms of social intercourse‖ (142). Habermas (1979), however, warns against a retrogression of Marx‘s general theory into ―historical objectivism . . . [where] philosophical questions [are suppressed] in favor of a scientistic understanding‖ (96).

Although suspicious of absolute narratives, he also takes a different stance from some on the postmodern left that the instability of social norms is necessarily beneficial to the moral development of a society . In neo-normative tenor he

states, ―a philosophical ethics not restricted to metaethical statements is possible today only if we can reconstruct general presuppositions of communication and procedures for justifying norms and values‖ (97). These presuppositions set the boundaries for social change as the ability of the populace at large to analyze social circumstances and learn their intricacies: ―a developmental logic [that may explain] the range of variations within which cultural values, moral

representation - can be changed and can find different historical expression‖ (98). Put crudely, the social learning a given culture can accommodate, and the emotional capacity of consciousness to conflict with the underlying contradictions within a given society, is related to the quality and quantity of direct systemic social change .

UMKC SDI 2014 Capitalism K 34

Alt- Our Method KeyOur method is key-only our analysis of the metabolic rift between nature and society caused by capitalism allows for a full understanding of marine ecology- this is the only way to transition to an economy away from capitalRebecca Clausen University of Oregon, and Brett Clark University of Oregon, 2005, The Metabolic Rift and Marine Ecology: An Analysis of the Ocean Crisis Within Capitalist Production, Organization Environment 2005 18: 422

Our goal is twofold: to contribute to the development of theory in environmental sociology via the concept of the metabolic rift and to provide an approach for

understanding the developing oceanic crisis that is being perpetuated by the expansion of capitalist operations in the oceans. Foster (1999, 2000) presented how Marx approached environmental problems in his day primarily through an analysis rooted in the metabolism of natural systems, which included studying the material exchange between organisms and systems, as well as the operations of systems themselves. Metabolism, the relationship of exchange within and between nature and humans, is one of the foundational concepts in ecology. It provides an avenue for examining the qualitative and quantitative dimensions of relationships and for analyzing the dialectic between nature and society. Buttel (2002), one of the key figures in environmental

sociology, argued that the metabolic rift is one of the most important theoretical concepts in environmental sociology (p. 46). It has quickly become a prominent idea in environmental sociology (Burkett, 1999; Clark, 2003; Dickens, 2004; Fischer-Kowalski & Haberl, 1998; Foster & Burkett, 2000;

Foster & Clark, 2003; Moore, 2000, 2003; York, Rosa, & Dietz, 2003a, 2003b). Whereas the metabolic rift theory was originally described in the context of agriculture and the soil crisis, we offer an adoption of this theory by extending its usage to the study of the interaction between society and the oceans. We analyze how the expansion of capitalist enterprise into the oceans led to the depletion of fish stock and how these natural limits encouraged capital to invest in aquaculture as a “quick fix .”We

conclude by suggesting that aquaculture fails to resolve the metabolic rift between society and the seas . To accomplish these tasks, we start with a discussion of metabolism and the metabolic rift and invite an extension of this theory to the oceans . After we

address the biology of the ocean and marine metabolism, we examine human interactions with the ocean in the context of capitalist development. It is appropriate to investigate the human-ocean relationship in the context of capitalism because it has been the dominant economic system influencing human interactions with nature for several hundred years. From this

analysis, we address how capital interactions have created rifts in the ocean metabolism, ranging from species-level decline to ecosystem collapse. Capital seeks to overcome these natural barriers and continue intensified production through the creation of aquaculture. Here, we highlight how capital fails to escape from the metabolic rift of its own making.

Rather, given capitalism’s drive to accumulate regardless of the ecological consequence, aquaculture expands the metabolic rift in new directions.

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Alt- Our Method KeyOnly our method provides the comprehensive understanding of nature and society needed to diagnose and propose solutions to the ecological ocean crisis- we are a prerequisite to the affRebecca Clausen University of Oregon, and Brett Clark University of Oregon, 2005, The Metabolic Rift and Marine Ecology: An Analysis of the Ocean Crisis Within Capitalist Production, Organization Environment 2005 18: 422

The metabolic rift has become a powerful conceptual tool for analyzing human interactions with nature and ecological degradation. Foster (1999, 2000) illustrates how Marx’s conception of the metabolic rift under capitalism illuminates socialnatural relations and degradation in a number of ways: (a) the decline in soil fertility as a result of disrupting the soil nutrient cycle; (b)

scientific and technological developments, under capitalist relations, increase the exploitation of nature , intensifying the

degradation of soil; (c) capitalist operations lead to the accumulation of waste, which become a pollution problem; and (d) capital’s attempts to surmount environmental problems fail to resolve the immediate metabolic rift, thus contributing to further environmental problems. We extend the theory of the metabolic rift to marine ecosystems. A metabolic rift is a rupture in the metabolic processes of a system. Natural cycles, such as the reproduction rate of fish or the energy transfer through trophic levels, are interrupted. We situate the human-marine relationship within the period of global capitalism, which is the primary force organizing the social metabolism with nature. By historically contextualizing this metabolic rift, we can highlight the oceanic crisis in the making . Marine ecosystems are experiencing the same exploitive disconnect recognized between soil ecology and capitalist agriculture due to aquaculture’s intensification of production and concentration of wastes . Intensification and concentration of fisheries production creates a quantitative increase in the rate of biomass depletion and aquatic pollution. However, the qualitative changes to the conditions of the marine ecosystem resulting from aquaculture’s productive reorganization may present an even greater challenge to the

stability of human-ocean interactions and the resiliency of the oceans themselves. The qualitative changes taking place extend beyond ecosystem disruption and include the interaction between humans and the ocean. As capitalist production in the aquatic realm expands, the alienation of humans from nature increases . Through the application of metabolic rift analysis, we can gain a greater understanding of the dynamic relationships involved in the oceanic crisis. To begin the analysis, a review of marine ecological processes is required.

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Alt- Our Method BestOur method has distinct advantages to the aff methodology- it provides comprehensive analysis of the problem, and prevents the use of solutions that will only exacerbate the ecological crisis through technological fixes.Rebecca Clausen University of Oregon, and Brett Clark University of Oregon, 2005, The Metabolic Rift and Marine Ecology: An Analysis of the Ocean Crisis Within Capitalist Production, Organization Environment 2005 18: 422

The work of Foster and colleagues has introduced Marx’s concept of metabolism as a central theory in environmental sociology for understanding the human relationship to nature. By rooting metabolism in the productive labor process, Marx demonstrates how capitalist production forces a rift in the interdependent metabolic processes connecting humans and the natural world. Important to such analysis is the awareness that Marx located the metabolic rift concept in the concrete circumstances and crisis of his time: the degradation of soil fertility under capitalist agriculture. The concept of metabolic rift, however, is thoroughly relevant to today’s agro-industrial food industries and is crucial to explain capitalism’s ever-deepening effect on nature. To illustrate the theoretical and conceptual power of Marx’s use of the metabolic rift, we demonstrate how this theory informs and advances our

understanding of the human relationship to the ocean. The application of the metabolic rift to human-ocean relations offers four critical analyses. First, the concept of metabolism provides a historical and comprehensive lens to view the changing interactions between human labor and the marine environment over time, as organized by a productive system. By bringing together the

concepts of marine energy transfers and historic fishing trends, we can begin to understand the full effects of fishery depletion on the marine ecosystem. Second, the metabolic rift offers a framework to understand how the technological developments ,

under capitalist relations, increase the exploitation of nature. The simultaneous emergence of distant water trawlers with efficient refrigeration and overland transportation infrastructure led to cumulative effects of marine ecological degradation. The consequences of removing top predators, and subsequently fishing down the food chain, did not occur because of lack of managerial oversight. Rather, they were the product of competitive markets propelling technological

advance, as capital sought to surmount social and natural barriers to accumulation. Overcoming the initial oceanic crisis (fisheries depletion) by introducing artificial means of growth and reproduction is a trend thoroughly developed by the metabolic rift and provides the third critical analysis in understanding human relations to the ocean. The rapid emergence of aquaculture in the global economy conforms to the pattern of intensified production made profitable by increasing output and minimizing labor inputs. Mediated by pesticides, growth hormones, and high density cages, aquaculture is welcomed by capital investment as a quick fix to

the problem of ecological limits. The final, and most powerful, analysis that metabolic rift theory provides to our understanding of the human-ocean environment concerns the revealed consequences of aquaculture . The contradictions posed by

concentrated wastes, net loss of marine protein due to inefficient fishmeal conversions, worker displacement, and human health effects of PCBs reveal the inability of cap-ital to transcend existing rifts. In sum, capital intensifies rifts in the metabolic interactions between society and the sea. Following Marx’s analysis, it is not surprising that continued capitalist aquaculture production in the marine environment would instigate a political move for privatizing what is now our last remaining commons: the open ocean.

The historical and contemporary insights gained by applying the concepts of metabolism and metabolic rift to the oceans suggest that this theory will continue to inform and inspire our understanding of the naturesociety dialectic. At

the same time, it presents the depth and breadth of the ecological crisis in the making.

UMKC SDI 2014 Capitalism K 37

Alt- Eco-PedagogyEco-pedagogy is critical to promoting environmental awareness- current environmental education will fail because it focuses on technology and markets as solution- only eco-pedagogy combines social and environmental perspectivesRichard Kahn in 2008, Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations & Research at the University of North Dakota From Education for Sustainable Development to Ecopedagogy: Sustaining Capitalism or Sustaining Life?, Green Theory & Praxis: The Journal of Ecopedagogy Volume 4, No. 1 (2008)

As a form of critical theory of education, ecopedagogy can work at a meta-level to offer dialectical critiques of environmental education and education for sustainable development as hegemonic forms of educational discourse that have been created by state agencies that seek to appear to be developing pedagogy relevant to alleviating our mounting global ecological crisis. While environmental education

strategies undoubtedly accomplish much that is welcome and good from an ecopedagogical perspective, ecopedagogy questions (especially within the context of the United

States) the ways in which environmental education is often reduced to forms of experiential and outdoor pedagogy that deal uncritically with the experience of “nature” proffered therein – an ideological zone of wilderness representations that are potentially informed by a mélange of

racist, sexist, classist and speciesist values. Further, ecopedagogy has begun to pose problems into the way environmental education has become tethered to state and corporate-sponsored science and social studies standards, or otherwise fails to articulate the political need for widespread knowledge of the ways in which modern society and industrial culture promotes unsustainable lifestyles, even as it remains marginalized in the research, teacher-training and educational leadership programs of graduate schools of education. Ecopedagogy also maintains a critical relationship to the ongoing UN-sponsored Decade of Education for Sustainable Development

(2005-2015). Ecopedagogues hope to utilize education for sustainable development to make strategic interventions on behalf of the oppressed, but ecopedagogy also attempts to generate conscientization upon the concept of sustainable development proper and thereby uncloak it of the sort of ambiguity that presently allows neoliberal economic planners in either their aggressively imperialist or Third Way economic/political variants to autocratically modernize the world despite the well-known consequential socio-cultural and ecological costs. Freirean critical pedagogy is synonymous with its popular literacy campaigns7 on behalf of democratic justice and

ecopedagogy accordingly seeks to develop at least three varieties of ecoliteracy throughout society in the name of a more just, democratic and sustainable planetary civilization: the technical/functional, the cultural, and the critical. Taken together, these three forms of ecoliteracy should be seen as holistically complimentary to one another, overlapping, and not in a hierarchical, logical, or linear relationship.

UMKC SDI 2014 Capitalism K 38

At: Aff Args

UMKC SDI 2014 Capitalism K 39

At: PermThe perm fails- only the alternative has a method that allows us to fully understand the dialectic between social relations and ecological relations-the inclusion of the aff’s economic focus ensures the alt is ignoredRebecca Clausen University of Oregon, and Brett Clark University of Oregon, 2005, The Metabolic Rift and Marine Ecology: An Analysis of the Ocean Crisis Within Capitalist Production, Organization Environment 2005 18: 422

We draw on theoretical contributions from environmental sociology to understand changes in the human-ocean relationship and to interpret our coevolutionary

relation to the marine environment. Environmental sociology takes nature seriously, recognizing the dynamic interaction between nature and society. The consequences of this relationship remain a major area of study. A materialist approach has become the bedrock of the prominent perspectives and theories within environmental sociology: ecological modernization, the treadmill of production, and the metabolic rift

(Foster, 1999; Mol, 1995; Schnaiberg, 1980). Ecological modernization contends that through the ongoing development of modern productive systems and institutions, society will advance to a rational, sustainable, and green society. Market forces have to be allowed to develop to create the technological means to facilitate this transformation within the existing order (Mol, 1995). The treadmill of production theory runs counter to ecological modernization. Schnaiberg (1980), author of the treadmill of production theory, argues that modern societies, especially market-dominated ones, are driven by a ceaseless commitment to growth , regardless of its social and

ecological costs. Producers constantly attempt to expand production in the pursuit of more profit.With government support, production is allowed

to expand, increasing the demands placed on nature and generating ever-greater amounts of waste. Both ecological modernization and the treadmill of production focus on the intersection of the economy and nature, which is appropriate given the centrality of the economic structure in shaping human interactions with nature. Yet, at the same time, nature remains in the background. Little effort is dedicated to analyzing the function, interaction, and transformation of natural processes and cycles with regard to social systems, in terms of their own development . Both realms of the dialectic between nature and society need to be studied to gain a greater understanding of the interaction and transformations that occur.We contend that the theory of the metabolic rift, as developed by Marx and explained by Foster (1999, 2000), provides the necessary means for grappling with the nature-society relation.

UMKC SDI 2014 Capitalism K 40

At: Framework

Our critique has educational importance in this round- it is vital that in educational settings we challenge technocratic framings of sustainable development in favor of radical socioeconomic critique- only we provide an alternate paradigm that encourages ecological healthRichard Kahn in 2008, Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations & Research at the University of North Dakota From Education for Sustainable Development to Ecopedagogy: Sustaining Capitalism or Sustaining Life?, Green Theory & Praxis: The Journal of Ecopedagogy Volume 4, No. 1 (2008)

The critical environmental educator Edgar González-Gaudiano (2005) has remarked that like environmental education before it, education for sustainable development might be a “floating signifier” or “interstitial tactic” capable of providing diverse groups opportunities to produce alliances as part of the construction of a new educational discourse. However, he also finds it troubling that non-environmental educators “either appear to be uninformed or have shown

no interest in the inception of a Decade that concerns their work” (p. 244). For his part, Bob Jickling (2005) is worried by the apparently instrumentalist and deterministic nature of education for sustainable development thus far . In his opinion, it is extremely troubling that education for sustainable development’s tendency as a field to date is to treat education as merely a method for delivering and propagating experts’ ideas about sustainable development, rather than as a participatory and

metacognitive engagement with students over what (if anything) sustainable development even means. Indeed, if this is all that is to be expected of and from education for sustainable development, then it may be concluded that it basically amounts to the latest incarnation of what Ivan Illich cynically referred to as the prison of the “global classroom” (Illich and Verne, 1981). Yet it should be pointed out that despite his serious reservations, Jickling notes that

there may be many educators already doing good work under this moniker as well. The next decade will ultimately decide whether education for sustainable development is little more than the latest educational fad, or worse yet, that it turns out to be nothing other than a seductive pedagogical “greenwash” developed by and for big business-as-usual in the name of combating social and ecological disasters. Due to the inherent ideological biases currently associated with the term “sustainable

development,” the decade now underway demands careful attention and analysis by critical educators in this regard. Specifically, educators will need to explain how, and if, notions of sustainability can critically question the various recipes for disaster (in all of their left, center, and

rightist formulations) that are the well-established social and human development models (in this respect, see Gadotti, 2008). On the other hand, if education for sustainable development is utilized strategically to advance a radical ecopedagogy (Kahn, 2008), it could be the boost that education desperately needs in order to finally begin to adequately deal with the apocalyptic demands now being wrought upon society by planetary ecological crises. In this way, what has been heretofore known as environmental education could at last move beyond its discursive marginality and a real hope for an ecological and planetary society could be sustained through the widespread development of radical socioeconomic critiques and the sort of emancipatory life practices that could move beyond those programmatically offered by the culture industries and the State.

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At: Cap good: Collapse Inevitable

Neoliberal finance capitalism is structured to produce crisis – whenever wealth becomes concentrated to heavily at the top it has historically produced economic catastrophe Peet, 2k11

[Richard, Professor of Geography at Clarke University, Contradictions of Finance Capitalism, Monthly Review, December 2011]

These secular shifts produce the defining U-shape to the history of upper-class incomes under capitalism over the last hundred years. Chart 1 shows the percentage of income going to the highest income 0.1 percent, 1.0 percent and 5.0 percent of the U.S. population.11 It is based on tax returns, which tend to understate income going to the rich, if only because the rich hide their money better and employ tax accountants more skilled than the bureaucratic accountants used by the Internal Revenue Service. Using the highest income 1 percent as a surrogate for the “capitalist class,” between 1917 (when the historical tax data begin) and the late 1930s, capitalists under classical liberalism received between 15 and 25 percent of total reported income, with a peak occurring in 1929, as the Great Depression began. Between 1945 and 1979, under the Keynesian policy regime, this proportion dropped, to a quite consistent 10 percent. Then under the neoliberal policy regime, the percentage rose again to 15–25 percent, with a peak occurring in 2007, as the Great Recession started. In other words liberalism and neoliberalism produce economic growth that exclusively benefits the rich and super rich in terms of income. Intervention, even by the relatively non-interventionist, “liberal-democratic” Keynesian state in the United States, reduces the proportion of income going to the super rich and redistributes income and state-subsidized services to the poorer sections of the population. Neoliberalism is development for the already rich. This can be taken as indubitable fact. Examining data for fifteen countries with comparable time series, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez find the historical U-shape to be typical for nine countries (UK, United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Argentina, Sweden, and Norway), by comparison with a group of six countries where the share of the top 1 percent was high during liberalism, dropped during Keynesianism, and has remained low since (France, Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands, Japan, and Singapore).12 Countries in the former, U-shaped group of countries are neoliberal, where the state intervenes exclusively on behalf of the capitalist class. The latter countries are Keynesian/social democratic remnants, where notions of regulating the economy on behalf of everyone have diminished but still linger faintly on—some people call this the “European Social Model.”13 The neoliberal policy regime, stressing unfettered profit-making as the driving force in capitalist expansion, deliberately redirects the economy towards producing more and more income for people who cannot possibly consume it, no matter how hard they try, and therefore must save and invest. Neoliberal policy results in the accumulation of huge surpluses in the hands of relatively few people—150,000 “taxpaying units” in the United States, and perhaps 1 million people in the global capitalist class. In the neoliberal regime, income from business and capital investment overwhelm even high CEO salaries leading to immense accumulations in the hands of very few people. The accumulation of these immense income surpluses as capital under neoliberalism was the leading social force in the recreation of late-twentieth-century finance capitalism. Neoliberal policy deliberately constructed the main ingredient of finance capitalism—overaccumulation of money capital in the bank accounts of the wealthy few.

UMKC SDI 2014 Capitalism K 42

At: Cap Saves Environment

Economic growth does not lead to widespread efforts to address environmental destruction – instead, it leads towards measures that improve wealthy areas without concern for othersBlackwater, 2k12

[Bill, Associate Editor of the quarterly Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy, “The Denialism of Progressive Environmentalism,” Monthly Review, June 2012]

As if that were not enough, the next problem is the way in which Nordhaus and Shellenberger concentrate solely on one element of the environmental consequences of economic growth—carbon emissions. In this they perform intellectual sleight of hand. They are quick to criticize other environmentalists for arguing that there are limits to economic growth, but the only limit they pay attention to is atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. About a range of other limits— such as biodiversity, availability of freshwater, and soil nitrogen—they have nothing to offer. This is unsurprising: these wider limits cannot be overcome, even in theory, by investments in low-carbon technologies financed by ongoing growth. Even accepting their terms and concentrating only on carbon emissions, Nordhaus and Shellenberger are misapplying the central logic within the idea of the EKC. They make great play of the way in which environmentalists are stuck within a “pollution paradigm,” harking back to campaigns to improve individual aspects of environmental quality, such as cleaning up lakes and reducing local air pollution. This will not work for global warming, they argue, since the key to tackling this is the creation of zero carbon infrastructure, which will in turn require the unleashing of the creative forces of economic development. In making this argument, however, it is precisely Nordhaus and Shellenberger who are stuck within their own pollution paradigm. Where the EKC has any purchase is precisely in the area of local pollution. Urban air quality in affluent regions has improved since the 1950s with the passing of clean air acts, deindustrialization, and improvements in motor vehicle technology. But where there is no evidence for an EKC is in the net impact of economic growth on the environment overall. Carbon emissions are, in fact, a near perfect anti-argument to the EKC, since they are both so intimately associated with economic growth and, in themselves, non-polluting in an immediate sense, being neither toxic to breathe nor even personally noticeable. The logic of the EKC will tend to lead towards measures which simply improve the ambient environment of wealthy areas, for instance by locating power plants and heavy industry elsewhere, allowing more affluent consumers to continue enjoying the economic benefits of fossil fuels without so much of the accompanying local pollution—that is, local to them.

UMKC SDI 2014 Capitalism K 43

At: Cap Solves EfficiencyThe relentless pursuit of economic growth under capitalism will subvert any efficiency gains made by the affirmative – only a transition away from the capitalist system can achieve a restoration of the metabolic relation to nature. Foster in 2009(John Bellamy, Professor of Sociology at Oregon, “The Ecological Revolution,” Page 62-64)

Recently, however, in his Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Grossing from Crisis to Sustainability, Speth has emerged as a devastating critic of capitalism's destruction of the environment. In this radical rethinking, he has chosen to confront the full perils brought on by the present

economic system, with its pursuit of growth and accumulation at any cost. "Capitalism as we know it today," he writes, "is incapable of sustaining the environment." The crucial problem from an environmental perspective, he believes, is exponential economic growth, which is the driving element of capitalism. Little hope can be provided in this respect by so-called "dematerialization" (the notion that growth can involve a decreasing impact on the environment), since it can be shown that the expansion of output overwhelms all increases in efficiency in throughput of materials and energy . Hence, one can only

conclude that "right now ... growth is the enemy of [the] environment. Economy and environment remain in collision." Here, the issue of

capitalism becomes unavoidable. "Economic growth is modern capitalism's principal and most prized product." Speth favorably quotes Samuel Bowles and Richard Edwards's Understanding Capitalism, which bluntly stated: "Capitalism is differentiated from other economic systems by its drive to accumulate, its predisposition toward change, and its built-in tendency to expand." The principal environmental problem for Speth then is capitalism as

the "operating system of the modern economy. "Today's corporations have been called 'externalizing machines. '" Indeed, "there are fundamental biases in capitalism that favor the present over the future and the private over the public." Quoting the system's own defenders, Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus, in the seventeenth edition of their textbook on Macroeconomics, Speth points out that capitalism is the quintessential "Ruthless Economy," engaged "in the relentless pursuit of profits." Building on this critique, Speth goes on to conclude in his

book that: (1) "today's system of political economy, referred to here as modern capitalism, is destructive of the environment, and not in a minor way hut in a way that profoundly threatens the planet"; (2) "the affluent societies have reached or soon will reach the point where, as Keynes put it, the economic problem has been solved ... there is enough to go around"; (3) "in the more affluent societies, modern capitalism is no longer enhancing human well-being"; (4) "the international social movement for change-which refers to itself as 'the irresistible rise of global anti-capitalism'-is stronger than many imagine and will grow stronger; there is a coalescing of forces: peace, social justice, community, ecology, feminism-a movement of movements"; (5) "people and groups are busily planting the seeds of change through a host of alternative arrangements, and still other attractive directions for upgrading to a new operating system have been identified"; and (6) "the end of the Cold War ... opens the door ... for the questioning of today's capitalism." Speth does not actually embrace socialism, which he associates, in the Cold War manner, with Soviet-type societies in their most regressive form. Thus, he argues explicitly for a "nonsocialist" alternative to capitalism. Such a system would make use of markets (but not the self-regulating market society of traditional capitalism) and would promote a "New Sustainability World" or a "Social Greens World" (also called "Eco-Communalism") as depicted by the Global Scenario Group. The latter scenario has been identified with radical thinkers like William Morris (who was inspired by both Marx and Rusltin).ln this sense, Speth's arguments are not far from that of the socialist movement of the twenty-first century, which is aimed at the core

values of social justice and ecological sustainability. The object is to create a future in which generations still to come will be able to utilize their creative abilities to the fullest, while having their basic needs met: a result made possible only through the rational reorganization by the associated producers of the human metabolism with nature .13 Such rational reorganization of the metabolism between nature and society needs to be directed not simply at climate change but also at a whole host of other environmental problems. No single issue captures the depth and breadth of what we call "the

environmental problem," which encompasses all of these ecological contradictions of our society and more. If we are facing a "moment of truth" with respect to ecology today, it has to do with the entire gamut of capitalism's effects on natural (and human) reproduction. Any attempt to solve one of these problems (such as climate change) without addressing the others is likely to fail, since these ecological crises, although distinct in various ways, typically share common causes. Only a unified vision that sees human production as not only social, but also rooted in a metabolic relation to nature, will provide the necessary basis to confront an ecological rift that is now as wide as the planet .

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At: Cap k2 Growth

Conventional economic measures disprove the argument that neoliberal, free-market capitalism is best for growth Peet, 2k11

[Richard, Professor of Geography at Clarke University, Contradictions of Finance Capitalism, Monthly Review, December 2011]

Dividing the postwar era into these two periods, the Keynesian social democratic policy regime up to 1980 and the neoliberal policy regime dominant after, we can compare the results of two, intracapitalist forms of social economy. The measure used by conventional economists to measure economic well-being is economic growth— “growth is good.” Economic growth in the OECD countries, the richest in the world, averaged 3.5 percent a year in the period 1961–80, basically during Keynesianism, and 2.0 percent a year in 1981–99, basically during neoliberalism. In developing countries (excluding China) the equivalent figures were 3.2 percent and 0.7 percent.6 In other words, Keynesianism vastly outperformed neoliberalism in conventional (mainstream) terms. So why were all those number-crunching economists not adherents of Keynesianism in the 1980s and ‘90s? The answer can only be that mainstream economics is not “science for humanity,” but rather “ideology on the side of capital.”

UMKC SDI 2014 Capitalism K 45

At: Cap solves hungerHunger is not a result of food shortages but an economic organization of society that fosters overabundance – overproduction causes unemployment and makes food unaffordable despite the fact that enough is produced annually to feed everyone D’Amato, 2k12

[Paul, Managing Editor of the International Socialist Review, Protecting the Environment, July 27th, 2012, http://socialistworker.org/2012/07/27/protecting-the-environment]

Some 800 million people in the world go hungry. But it isn't because there isn't enough food. Figures provided in the United Nations' Human Development Report for 1999 show that food production outstripped population growth by 25 percent over the last decade. According to the 1998 edition of the excellent book World Hunger: Twelve Myths, there's enough food produced in the world to give every person 3,500 calories a day--well higher than the medically recommended requirement. People go hungry not because of shortages, but because they can't afford to buy enough food. In 1844, Frederick Engels wrote that "every adult produces more than he can himself consume." More than 150 years later, human productivity has leaped far beyond anything Engels could have imagined. The irony of capitalism is that it isn't scarcity that produces hunger and unemployment but overabundance. Capitalist crisis, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto, produces the "absurd" situation of people thrown out of work because there's "too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce." There is, in short, plenty to go around. The shortages argument is used by the ruling class to convince us that inequality can't be overcome.

UMKC SDI 2014 Capitalism K 46

Aff Answers

UMKC SDI 2014 Capitalism K 47

No Root CausesNo single cause of conflictBarnett et al 7

Michael, Hunjoon Kim, Madalene O’Donnell, Laura Sitea, Global Governance, “Peacebuilding: What is in a Name?”, Questia

Because there are multiple contributing causes of conflict, almost any international assistance effort that addresses any perceived or real grievance can arguably be called "peacebuilding." Moreover, anyone invited to imagine the causes of violent conflict might generate a rather expansive laundry list of issues to be addressed in the postconflict period, including income distribution, land reform, democracy and the rule of law, human security, corruption, gender equality, refugee reintegration, economic development, ethnonational divisions, environmental degradation, transitional justice, and on and on. There are at least two good reasons for such a fertile imagination. One, there is no master variable for explaining either the outbreak of violence or the construction of a positive peace but merely groupings of factors across categories such as greed and grievance, and catalytic events. Variables that might be relatively harmless in some contexts can be a potent cocktail in others.

Conversely, we have relatively little knowledge regarding what causes peace or what the paths to peace are .

Although democratic states that have reasonably high per capita incomes are at a reduced risk of conflict , being democratic and rich is no guarantor of a positive peace, and illiberal and poor countries, at times, also have had their share of success. Second, organizations are likely to claim that their core competencies and mandates are critical to peacebuilding. They might be right. They also might be opportunistic. After all, if peacebuilding is big business, then there are good bureaucratic reasons for claiming that they are an invaluable partner.

Claims of Root Causality are Grounded in Deterministic Theories That Preclude Effective SolutionsHutchinson ‘4

Fred Hutchison - March 22, 2004. “American innovation and the culture war: A golden age of American innovation”. http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/hutchison/040322

When liberals speak of the "root causes" of social problems, they typically are borrowing ideas from economic determinism. Root cause arguments obscure rather than enlighten. The poor are not responsible for their poverty because of root causes — we are told. Criminals are not resssponsible for crime because of root causes. Terrorists are not responsible for murder because of root causes. Such thinking rules out the idea of human conscience, and moral responsibility. When the belief in root causes relieves us of responsibility for our actions it also weakens the belief in the existence of free will. Nothing will destroy a golden age of innovation faster than a paralysis of the will. If we doubt we have a will because of a belief in the myth of root causes, the will becomes either paralyzed or undisciplined. We become ether zombies or maniacs — and return to adolescence.

Capitalism and structural violence is not the root cause of war - We have to solve large-scale violent conflicts before we can focus on everyday forms of violence.Goldstein 1

Joshua Goldstein, Int’l Rel Prof @ American U, 2001, War and Gender, p. 412

First, peace activists face a dilemma in thinking about causes of war and working for peace. Many peace scholars and activists support the approach, “if you want peace, work for justice.” Then, if one believes that sexism contributes to war one can work for gender justice specifically (perhaps among others) in order to pursue peace. This approach brings strategic allies to the peace movement (women, labor, minorities), but rests on the assumption that injustices cause war. The evidence in this book suggests that causality runs at least as strongly the other way. War is not a product of capitalism, imperialism, gender, innate aggression, or any other single cause, although all of these influence wars’ outbreaks and outcomes. Rather, war has in part fueled and sustained these and other injustices.9 So,”if you want peace, work for peace.” Indeed, if you want justice (gender and others), work for peace. Causality does not run just upward through the levels of analysis, from types of individuals, societies, and governments up to war. It runs downward too. Enloe suggests that changes in attitudes towards war and the military may be the most important way to “reverse women’s oppression.” The dilemma is that peace work focused on justice brings to the peace movement energy, allies, and moral grounding, yet, in light of this book’s evidence, the emphasis on injustice as the main cause of war seems to be empirically inadequate.

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Cap Good- Solves War

Turn – Capitalism solves war – interdependency, democracy and constructive competition Griswold, 05 (Daniel, director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at Cato, “Peace on earth? Try free trade among men”, http://www.freetrade.org/node/282)

As one little-noticed headline on an Associated Press story recently reported, "War declining worldwide, studies say." According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the number of armed conflicts around the world has been in decline for the past half century. In just the past 15 years, ongoing conflicts have dropped from 33 to 18, with all of them now civil conflicts within countries. As 2005 draws to an end, no two nations in the world are at war with each other. The death toll from war has also been falling. According to the AP story, "The number killed in battle has fallen to its lowest point in the post-World War II period, dipping below 20,000 a year by one measure. Peacemaking missions, meanwhile, are growing in number." Those estimates are down sharply from annual tolls ranging from 40,000 to 100,000 in the 1990s, and from a peak of 700,000 in 1951 during the Korean War. Many causes lie behind the good news -- the end of the Cold War and the spread of democracy, among them -- but

expanding trade and globalization appear to be playing a major role. Far from stoking a "World on Fire," as one misguided American author

has argued, growing commercial ties between nations have had a dampening effect on armed conflict and war, for three main reasons. First, trade and globalization have reinforced the trend toward democracy, and democracies don't pick fights with each other. Freedom to trade nurtures democracy by expanding the middle class in globalizing countries and equipping people with tools of communication such as cell phones, satellite TV, and the Internet. With trade comes more travel, more contact with people in other countries, and more exposure to

new ideas. Thanks in part to globalization, almost two thirds of the world's countries today are democracies -- a record high. Second, as national economies become more integrated with each other, those nations have more to lose should war break out. War in a globalized world not only means human casualties and bigger government, but also ruptured trade and investment ties

that impose lasting damage on the economy. In short, globalization has dramatically raised the economic cost of war. Third, globalization allows nations to acquire wealth through production and trade rather than conquest of territory and resources. Increasingly, wealth is measured in terms of intellectual property, financial assets, and human capital.

Capitalism solves warCudd 10 – Dean of Humanities and Professor of Philosophy @ KU

Anne Cudd, “Capitalism for and Against: A Feminist Debate,” Google Book

Does capitalism cause more wars? This has long been an argument of socialists against capitalism, but it seems a flimsy one. First, it is clear that the communist experiments of the twentieth century were every bit as militaristic and capable of aggressive wars as the capitalist ones. Second, it is commonly asserted, and I think Professor Holmstrom would agree, that democratic nations do not wage war against each other. But democratic countries tend toward capitalism, since that seems to be what people choose when given the chance. As with slavery, the logic of capitalism tells against war , in general, as that wipes out potential trading partners. Capitalist competition is a positive-sum game, not a zero or negative sum. I agree wholeheartedly with Professor Holmstrom's assertion that security is than broader military security; the security of persons and property generally is the necessary condition for capitalist development.

UMKC SDI 2014 Capitalism K 49

Cap Good- Solves Environment

Capitalism solves environment-it encourages people to use resources efficientlyWalberg and Bast, 03 (Herbert J. Walberg, distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Joseph L. Bast, C.E.O. of the Heartland Institute, October 23, 2003, “Education and Capitalism: How Overcoming Our Fear of Markets and Economics Can Improve America's Schools”, page X)

WHY CAPITALISM PROTECTS THE ENVIRONMENT What has made this vast improvement in environmental quality possible in the United States? Why have countries without capitalist institutions made less progress? The security of personal possessions made possible by the capitalist institution of private-property rights is a key

reason why capitalism protects the environment. Where property rights are secure, the owners of property (land as well as other physical

assets) are more likely to invest in improvements that increase the property’s long-term value .Why plant trees if yur right to eventually harvest them is at risk? Why manage a forest for sustained yields in the future if someone else will capture the profit of their eventual harvest?

Evidence that secure property rights are the key to good stewardship of assets is all around us. Privately owned houses are better maintained than rental units. Privately owned cars and trucks are better maintained than fleet vehicles (owned by an employer) and leased vehicles. In the former Soviet Union, privately owned gardens—representing only a small share of the land devoted to agriculture—produced as much as half of the fruits and vegetables produced by the entire country. In virtually every neighborhood in the United States, most front yards are neatly groomed and often elaborately landscaped, whereas the strip of public land between the sidewalk and the street is often weedy, poorly trimmed, and

neglected. Markets, the second capitalist institution, tend to increase efficiency and reduce waste by putting resources under the control of those who value them most highly. This tends to ratchet downward the amount of any resource that is not used or consumed during production, a practice that produces cleaner-burning fuels and machines, lower-emission manufacturing processes, fewer byproducts shipped to landfills, and so on . A good example of this is the fact that the amount of energy required to produce a dollar of goods and services in the United States fell 1.3 percent a year from 1985 to 2000 and is expected to fall 1.6 percent

per year from 2000 to 2020.48 Finally, the wealth created by the institutions of capitalism makes it possible to invest more resources to protect the environment. Once again, the United States is the best example of this tendency. The cost of complying with environmental regulations in 2000 was approximately $267 billion, or nearly $2,000 for every household.49 Only a capitalist society can afford to spend so much.

UMKC SDI 2014 Capitalism K 50

Cap Good- GrowthCapitalism is key to growth-it encourages new productionNorberg 3 – MA in History

Johan Norberg, Fellow at Timbro and CATO, MA with a focus in economics and philosophy, In Defense of Global Capitalism, pg. 64

The growth of world prosperity is not a “miracle” or any of the other mystifying terms we customarily apply to countries that have succeeded economically and socially. Schools are not built, nor are incomes generated, by sheer luck, like a bolt from the blue. These things happen when people begin to think along new lines and work hard to bring their ideas to fruition. But people do that everywhere, and there is no reason why certain people in certain places during certain periods in history should be intrinsically smarter or more capable than others. What makes the difference is whether the environment permits and encourages ideas and work, or instead puts obstacles in their way. That depends on whether people are free to explore their way ahead, to own property, to invest for the long term, to conclude private agreements, and to trade with others. In short, it depends on whether or not the countries have capitalism. In the affluent world we have had capitalism in one form or another for a couple of centuries. That is how the countries of the West became “the affluent world.” Capitalism has given people both the liberty and the incentive to create, produce, and trade, thereby generating prosperity.

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At: Environment Impact- It’s resilient

The environment is resilient -- it has withstood ridiculous amounts of destructionEasterbrook 95, Distinguished Fellow, Fullbright Foundation

(Gregg, A Moment on Earth pg 25)

IN THE AFTERMATH OF EVENTS SUCH AS LOVE CANAL OR THE Exxon Valdez oil spill, every reference to the environment is prefaced with the adjective "fragile." "Fragile environment" has become a welded phrase of the modern lexicon, like "aging hippie" or "fugitive

financier." But the notion of a fragile environment is profoundly wrong. Individual animals, plants, and people are distressingly fragile. The environment that

contains them is close to indestructible. The living environment of Earth has survived ice ages; bombardments of cosmic radiation more deadly than atomic fallout; solar radiation more powerful than the worst-case projection for ozone depletion; thousand-year periods of intense volcanism releasing global air pollution far worse than that made by any factory; reversals of the planet's magnetic poles; the rearrangement of continents; transformation of plains into mountain ranges and of seas into plains; fluctuations of ocean currents and the jet stream; 300-foot vacillations in sea levels; shortening and lengthening of the seasons caused by shifts in the planetary axis; collisions of asteroids and comets bearing far more force than man's nuclear arsenals; and the years without summer that followed these impacts. Yet hearts beat on, and petals unfold still. Were the environment fragile it would have expired many eons before the advent of the industrial affronts of the dreaming ape. Human assaults on the environment, though mischievous, are pinpricks compared to forces of the magnitude nature is accustomed to resisting.

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At: Cap Collapse InevitableCap is sustainable – panics and recessions strengthen itFriedman, 2010 (George, “The Global Crisis of Legitimacy,” STRATFOR, May 4, http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20100503_global_crisis_legitimacy?utm_source=GWeekly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=100504&utm_content=readmore&elq=9bc82c399a6d4ec6bdb0dd4b45b1c193)

Financial panics are an integral part of capitalism. So are economic recessions . The system generates them and it becomes stronger because of them. Like forest fires, they are painful when they occur, yet without them, the forest could not survive. They impose discipline, punishing the reckless, rewarding the cautious. They do so imperfectly, of course, as at times the reckless are rewarded and the cautious penalized. Political crises — as opposed to normal financial panics — emerge when the reckless appear to be the beneficiaries of the crisis they have caused, while the rest of society bears the burdens of their recklessness. At that point, the crisis ceases to be financial or economic. It becomes political. The financial and economic systems are subsystems of the broader political system. More precisely, think of nations as consisting of three basic systems: political, economic and military. Each of these systems has elites that manage it. The three systems are constantly interacting — and in a healthy polity, balancing each other, compensating for failures in one as well as taking advantage of success. Every nation has a different configuration within and between these systems. The relative weight of each system differs, as does the importance of its elites. But each nation contains these systems, and no system exists without the other two.

Capitalism isn’t collapsing – financial crises create a demand for the market – this is empirically provenZakaria, ’09 [Fareed, Editor of Newsweek International, Former managing editor of Foreign Affairs, “The Capitalist Manifesto: Greed is Good” http://www.newsweek.com/id/201935]

Consider our track record over the past 20 years, starting with the stock-market crash of 1987 , when on Oct. 19 the Dow Jones lost

23 percent, the largest one-day loss in its history. The legendary economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote that he just hoped that the coming recession wouldn't prove as painful as the Great Depression. It turned out to be a blip on the way to an even bigger, longer boom. Then there was the 1997 East Asian crisis, during the depths of which Paul Krugman wrote in a Fortune

cover essay, "Never in the course of economic events—not even in the early years of the Depression—has so large a part of the world economy experienced so devastating a fall from grace." He went on to argue that if Asian countries did not adopt his radical strategy—currency

controls—"we could be looking at the kind of slump that 60 years ago devastated societies, destabilized governments, and eventually led to war." Only one Asian country instituted currency controls, and partial ones at that. All rebounded within two years. Each crisis convinced observers that it signaled the end of some new, dangerous feature of the economic landscape. But often that novelty accelerated in the years that followed. The 1987 crash was said to be the product of computer trading, which has, of course, expanded dramatically since then. The East Asian crisis was meant to end the happy talk about "emerging markets," which are now at the center of world growth. The collapse of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998—which then–Treasury secretary Robert Rubin described as "the worst financial crisis in 50 years"—was meant to be the end of hedge funds, which then massively expanded. The technology bubble's bursting in 2000 was supposed to put an end to the dreams of oddball Internet startups. Goodbye, Pets.com; hello, Twitter. Now we hear that this crisis is the end of derivatives. Let's see. Robert Shiller, one of the few who predicted this crash almost exactly—and

the dotcom bust as well—argues that in fact we need more derivatives to make markets more stable. A few years from now, strange as it may sound, we might all find that we are hungry for more capitalism, not less. An economic crisis slows growth, and when countries need growth, they turn to markets. After the Mexican and East Asian currency crises—which were far more painful in those countries

than the current downturn has been in America—we saw the pace of market-oriented reform speed up. If, in the years ahead, the American consumer remains reluctant to spend, if federal and state governments groan under their debt loads, if government-owned companies remain expensive burdens, then private-sector activity will become the only path to create jobs. The simple truth is that with all its flaws, capitalism remains the most productive economic engine we have yet invented. Like Churchill's line about democracy, it is the worst of all economic systems, except for the others. Its chief vindication today has come halfway across the world, in countries like China and India, which have been able to grow and pull hundreds of millions of people out of poverty by supporting markets and free trade. Last month India held elections during the worst of this crisis. Its powerful left-wing parties campaigned against liberalization and got their worst drubbing at the polls in 40 years.

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Cap Inevitable- Human NatureHuman nature means economic competition is inevitableWilkinson 5 – MA in Philosophy

Will Wilkinson, MA in Philosophy, former Academic Coordinator of the Social Change Project and the Global Prosperity Initiative at The Mercatus Center at George Mason University, “Capitalism and Human Nature,” 1-2005, http://www.cato.org/research/articles/wilkinson-050201.html

Tragically, human nature isn't at all as advertised, and neither is pine needle tea. According to the U.S. State Department, at least one million North Koreans have died of famine since 1995. Marx's theory of human nature, like Kim Jong Il's theory of pine needle tea, is a biological fantasy, and we have the corpses to prove it. Which may drive us to wonder: if communism is deadly because it is contrary to human nature, does that imply that capitalism, which is contrary to communism, is distinctively compatible with human nature? A growing scientific discipline called evolutionary psychology specializes in uncovering the truth about human nature, and it is already illuminating what we know about the possibilities of human social organization. How natural is capitalism? Evolutionary Psychology 101 Evolutionary psychology seeks to understand the unique nature of the human mind by applying the logic and methods of contemporary evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology. The main working assumption of evolutionary psychology is that the mind is a variegated toolkit of specialized functions (think of a Swiss Army knife) that has evolved through natural selection to solve specific problems faced by our forebears. Distinct mental functions—e.g., perception; reading other people's intentions; responding emotionally to potential mates—are underwritten by different neurological "circuits" or "modules," which can each be conceived as mini computer programs selected under environmental pressure to solve specific problems of survival and reproduction typical in the original setting of human evolution, the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, the "EEA." Strictly speaking, the EEA is a statistical composite of environmental pressures that account for the evolutionary selection of our distinctively human traits. Loosely, the EEA was the period called the Pleistocene during which humans lived as hunter-gatherers from about 1.6 million years ago up until the invention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago. According to evolutionary psychologists, the basic constitution of the human mind hasn't changed appreciably for about 50,000 years. Thus the evolutionary psychologist's slogan: modern skulls house Stone Age minds. As pioneers of evolutionary psychology Leda Cosmides and John Tooby put it: The key to understanding how the modern mind works is to realize that its circuits were not designed to solve the day-to-day problems of a modern American—they were designed to solve the day-to-day problems of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Understanding the problems faced by members of human hunter-gatherer bands in the EEA can therefore help us to understand a great deal about human nature, and the prospects and pathologies of modern social systems. First, a word of caution: We cannot expect to draw any straightforward positive political lessons from evolutionary psychology. It can tell us something about the kind of society that will tend not to work, and why. But it cannot tell us which of the feasible forms of society we ought to aspire to. We cannot, it turns out, infer the naturalness of capitalism from the manifest failure of communism to accommodate human nature. Nor should we be tempted to infer that natural is better. Foraging half-naked for nuts and berries is natural, while the New York Stock Exchange and open-heart surgery would boggle our ancestors' minds. What evolutionary psychology really helps us to appreciate is just what an unlikely achievement complex, liberal, market-based societies really are. It helps us to get a better grip on why relatively free and fabulously wealthy societies like ours are so rare and, possibly, so fragile. Evolutionary psychology helps us to understand that successful market liberal societies require the cultivation of certain psychological tendencies that are weak in Stone Age minds and the suppression or sublimation of other tendencies that are strong. Free, capitalist societies, where they can be made to work, work with human nature. But it turns out that human nature is not easy material to work with. There is a rapidly expanding library of books that try to spell out the moral, political and economic implications of evolutionary psychology. (The Origins of Virtue by Matt Ridley, Darwinian Politics by Paul Rubin, and The Company of Strangers by Paul Seabright are good ones). Below is a short tour of just a few features of human nature emphasized by evolutionary psychologists that highlight the challenges of developing and sustaining a modern market liberal order. We are Coalitional The size of hunter-gather bands in the EEA ranged from 25 to about 150 people. The small size of those groups ensured that everyone would know everyone else; that social interactions would be conducted face-to-face; and that reputations for honesty, hard work, and reliability would be common knowledge. Even today, people's address books usually contain no more than 150 names. And military squadrons generally contain about as many people as Pleistocene hunting expeditions. Experiments by psychologists Leda Cosmides and Robert Kurzban have shown that human beings have specialized abilities to track shifting alliances and coalitions, and are eager to define others as inside or outside their own groups. Coalitional categories can easily lead to violence and war between groups. Think of Hutus and Tutsis, Albanians and Serbs, Shiites and Sunnis, Crips and the Bloods, and so on ad nauseam. However, coalitional categories are fairly fluid. Under the right circumstances, we can learn to care more about someone's devotion to the Red Sox or Yankees than their skin color, religion, or social class. We cannot, however, consistently think of ourselves as members only of that one grand coalition: the Brotherhood of Mankind. Our disposition to think in terms of "us" versus "them" is irremediable and it has unavoidable political implications. Populist and racialist political rhetoric encourages people to identify themselves as primarily rich or poor, black or white. It is important to avoid designing institutions, such as racial preference programs, that reinforce coalitional categories that have no basis in biology and may heighten some of the tensions they are meant to relax. A great deal of the animosity toward free trade, to take a different example, depends on economically and morally inappropriate coalitional distinctions between workers in Baltimore (us) and workers in Bangalore (them). Positively, free trade is laudable for the way it encourages us to see to members of unfamiliar groups as partners, not enemies. We are Hierarchical Like many animals and all primates, humans form hierarchies of dominance. It is easy to recognize social hierarchies in modern life. Corporations, government, chess clubs, and churches all have formal hierarchical structures of officers. Informal structures of dominance and status may be the leading cause of tears in junior high students. The dynamics of dominance hierarchies in the EEA was complex. Hierarchies play an important role in guiding collective efforts and distributing scarce resources without having to resort to violence. Daily affairs run more smoothly if everyone knows what is expected of him. However, space at the top of the hierarchy is scarce and a source of conflict and competition. Those who command higher status in social hierarchies have better access to material resources and mating opportunities. Thus, evolution favors the psychology of males and females who are able successfully to compete for positions of dominance. Living at the bottom of the dominance heap is a raw deal, and we are not built to take it lying down. There is evidence that lower status males naturally form coalitions to check the power of more dominant males and to achieve relatively egalitarian distribution of resources. In his book Hierarchy in the Forest, anthropologist Christopher Boehm calls these coalitions against the powerful "reverse dominance hierarchies." Emory professor of economics and law Paul Rubin usefully distinguishes between "productive" and "allocative" hierarchies. Productive hierarchies are those that organize cooperative efforts to achieve otherwise unattainable mutually advantageous gains. Business organizations are a prime example. Allocative hierarchies, on the other hand, exist mainly to transfer resources to the top. Aristocracies and dictatorships are extreme examples. Although the nation-state can perform productive functions, there is the constant risk that it becomes dominated by allocative hierarchies. Rubin warns that our natural wariness of zero-sum allocative hierarchies, which helps us to guard against the concentration of power in too few hands, is often directed at modern positive-sum productive hierarchies, like corporations, thereby threatening the viability of enterprises that tend to make everyone better off. There is no way to stop dominance-seeking behavior. We may hope only to channel it to non-harmful uses. A free society therefore requires that positions of dominance and status be widely available in a multitude of

UMKC SDI 2014 Capitalism K 54productive hierarchies, and that opportunities for greater status and dominance through predation are limited by the constant vigilance of "the people"—the ultimate reverse dominance hierarchy. A flourishing civil society permits almost everyone to be the leader of something, whether the local Star Trek fan club or the city council, thereby somewhat satisfying the human taste for hierarchical status, but to no one's serious detriment. We are Envious Zero-sum Thinkers Perhaps the most depressing lesson of evolutionary psychology for politics is found in its account of the deep-seated human capacity for envy and, related, of our difficulty in understanding the idea of gains from trade and increases in productivity—the idea of an ever-expanding "pie" of wealth. There is evidence that greater skill and initiative could lead to higher status and bigger shares of resources for an individual in the EEA. But because of the social nature of hunting and gathering, the fact that food spoiled quickly, and the utter absence of privacy, the benefits of individual success in hunting or foraging could not be easily internalized by the individual, and were expected to be shared. The EEA was for the most part a zero-sum world, where increases in total wealth through invention, investment, and extended economic exchange were totally unknown. More for you was less for me. Therefore, if anyone managed to acquire a great deal more than anyone else, that was pretty good evidence that theirs was a stash of ill-gotten gains, acquired by cheating, stealing, raw force, or, at best, sheer luck. Envy of the disproportionately wealthy may have helped to reinforce generally adaptive norms of sharing and to help those of lower status on the dominance hierarchy guard against further predation by those able to amass power. Our zero-sum mentality makes it hard for us to understand how trade and investment can increase the amount of total wealth. We are thus ill-equipped to easily understand our own economic system. These features of human nature—that we are coalitional, hierarchical, and envious zero-sum thinkers—would seem to make liberal capitalism extremely unlikely. And it is. However, the benefits of a liberal market order can be seen in a few further features of the human mind and social organization in the EEA. Property Rights are Natural The problem of distributing scarce resources can be handled in part by implicitly coercive allocative hierarchies. An alternative solution to the problem of distribution is the recognition and enforcement of property rights. Property rights are prefigured in nature by the way animals mark out territories for their exclusive use in foraging, hunting, and mating. Recognition of such rudimentary claims to control and exclude minimizes costly conflict, which by itself provides a strong evolutionary reason to look for innate tendencies to recognize and respect norms of property. New scientific research provides even stronger evidence for the existence of such property "instincts." For example, recent experimental work by Oliver Goodenough, a legal theorist, and Christine Prehn, a neuroscientist, suggests that the human mind evolved specialized modules for making judgments about moral transgressions, and transgressions against property in particular. Evolutionary psychology can help us to understand that property rights are not created simply by strokes of the legislator's pen. Mutually Beneficial Exchange is Natural Trade and mutually beneficial exchange are human universals, as is the division of labor. In their groundbreaking paper, "Cognitive Adaptations for Social Exchange," Cosmides and Tooby point out that, contrary to widespread belief, hunter-gatherer life is not "a kind of retro-utopia" of "indiscriminate, egalitarian cooperation and sharing." The archeological and ethnographic evidence shows that hunter-gatherers were involved in numerous forms of trade and exchange. Some forms of hunter-gatherer trading can involve quite complex specialization and the interaction of supply and demand. Most impressive, Cosmides and Tooby have shown through a series of experiments that human beings are able easily to solve complex logical puzzles involving reciprocity, the accounting of costs and benefits, and the detection of people who have cheated on agreements. However, we are unable to solve formally identical puzzles that do not deal with questions of social exchange. That, they argue, points to the existence of "functionally specialized, content-dependent cognitive adaptations for social exchange." In other words, the human mind is " built" to trade . Trust and Hayek's Two Orders It is easy to see a kind of in vitro capitalism in the evolved human propensity to recognize property rights, specialize in productive endeavors, and engage in fairly complex forms of social exchange. However, the kind of freedom and wealth we enjoy in the United States remains a chimera to billions. While our evolved capacities are the scaffolding upon which advanced liberal capitalism has been built, they are, quite plainly, not enough, as the hundreds of millions who live on less than a dollar a day can attest. The path from the EEA to laptops and lattes requires a great cultural leap. In recent work, Nobel Prize-winning economists Douglass North and Vernon Smith have stressed that the crucial juncture is the transition from personal to impersonal exchange. Economic life in the EEA was based on repeated face-to-face interactions with well-known members of the community. Agreements were policed mainly by public knowledge of reputation. If you cheated or shirked, your stock of reputation would decline, and so would your prospects. Our evolutionary endowment prepared us to navigate skillfully through that world of personal exchange. However, it did not prepare us to cooperate and trade with total strangers whom we had never met and might never see again. The road to prosperity must cross a chasm of uncertainty and mistrust. The transition to extended, impersonal market order requires the emergence of "institutions that make human beings willing to treat strangers as honorary friends" as Paul Seabright puts it. The exciting story of the way these institutions piggybacked on an evolved psychology designed to solve quite different ecological problems is the topic of Seabright's book, The Company of Strangers, as well as an important part of forthcoming works by Douglass North and Vernon Smith. As he so often did, F. A. Hayek anticipated contemporary trends. Hayek understood that our kind of economy and society, which he called an extended order, or "macro-cosmos," is in many ways alien to our basic psychological constitution, which is geared to deal with life in small groups, the "micro-cosmos." We live in two worlds, the face-to-face world of the tribe, family, school, and firm, and the impersonal, anonymous world of huge cities, hyper-specialization, and trans-world trade. Each world has its own set of rules, and we confuse them at our peril. As Hayek writes in The Fatal Conceit: If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed, rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e., of the small band or troop, or of, say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilization), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. So we must learn to live in two sorts of worlds at once. The balance is delicate. Once we appreciate the improbability and fragility of our wealth and freedom, it becomes clear just how much respect and gratitude we owe to the belief systems, social institutions, and personal virtues that allowed for the emergence of our "wider civilization" and that allow us to move between our two worlds without destroying or crushing either. Evolutionary Psychology and Political Humility The key political lesson of evolutionary psychology is simply that there is a universal human nature. The human mind comprises many distinct, specialized functions, and is not an all-purpose learning machine that can be reformatted at will to realize political dreams. The shape of society is constrained by our evolved nature . Remaking humanity through politics is a biological impossibility on the order of curing cancer with pine needle tea. We can, however, work with human nature—and we have. We have, through culture, enhanced those traits that facilitate trust and cooperation, channeled our coalitional and status-seeking instincts toward productive uses, and built upon our natural suspicion of power to preserve our freedom. We can, of course, do better. As Immanuel Kant famously remarked, "from the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can be made." But, in the words of philosopher, Denis Dutton, It is not . . . that no beautiful carving or piece of furniture can be produced from twisted wood; it is rather that whatever is finally created will only endure if it takes into account the grain, texture, natural joints, knotholes, strengths and weaknesses of the original material. Evolutionary psychology, by helping us better understand human nature, can aid us in cultivating social orders that do not foolishly attempt to cut against the grain of human nature . We can learn how best to work with the material of humanity to encourage and preserve societies, like own, that are not only beautiful, but will endure.

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Alt Fails- Cap is adaptiveAlt doesn’t solve cap—its too adaptive Mead 9 – Senior Fellow @ CFR

2/4, Walter Russell, Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, Only Makes You Stronger: Why the recession bolstered America, The New Republic

Even before the Panic of 2008 sent financial markets into turmoil and launched what looks like the worst global recession in decades, talk of American decline was omnipresent. In the long term, the United States faces the rise of Asia and the looming fiscal problems posed by Medicare and other entitlement programs. In the short term, there is a sense that, after eight years of George W. Bush, the world, full of disdain for our way of life, seems to be spinning out of our--and perhaps anybody's--control. The financial panic simply brought all that simmering anxiety to a boil, and the consensus now seems to be that the United States isn't just in danger of decline, but in the full throes of it--the beginning of a "post-American" world. Perhaps--but the long history of capitalism suggests another possibility. After all, capitalism has seen a steady procession of economic crises and panics, from the seventeenth-century Tulip Bubble in the Netherlands and the Stop of the Exchequer under Charles II in England through the Mississippi and South Sea bubbles of the early eighteenth century, on through the crises associated with the Napoleonic wars and the spectacular economic crashes that repeatedly wrought havoc and devastation to millions throughout the nineteenth century. The panics of 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893, and 1907 were especially severe, culminating in the Great Crash of 1929, which set off a depression that would not end until World War II. The series of crises continued after the war, and the last generation has seen the Penn Central bankruptcy in 1970, the first Arab oil crisis of 1973, the Third Worl d debt crisis of 1982, the S&L crisis, the Asian crisis of 1997, the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2001, and today's global financial meltdown. And yet, this relentless series of crises has not disrupted the rise of a global capitalist system, centered first on the power of the United Kingdom and then, since World War II, on the power of the United States. After more than 300 years, it seems reasonable to conclude that financial and economic crises do not, by themselves, threaten either the international capitalist system or the special role within it of leading capitalist powers like the United Kingdom and the United States. If anything, the opposite seems true--that financial crises in some way sustain Anglophone power and capitalist development.

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Alt DA- BacklashCapitalism is inevitable—the alternative strengthens the hand of the right by alienating moderates Wilson, 2000 (John K, coordinator of the Independent Press Association’s Campus Journalism Project, How the Left can Win Arguments and Influence People, pages 14-17)

Capitalism is far too ingrained in American life to eliminate. If you go into the most impoverished areas of America, you will find that the people who live there are not seeking government control over factories or even more social welfare programs; they're hoping, usually in vain, for a fair chance to share in

the capitalist wealth. The poor do not pray for socialism-they strive to be a part of the capitalist system. They want jobs, they want to start businesses, and they want to make money and be successful. What's wrong with America is not capitalism as a system but capitalism as a religion. We worship the accumulation of wealth and treat the horrible inequality between rich and poor as if it were an act of God. Worst of all, we allow the government to exacerbate the financial divide by favoring the wealthy: go anywhere in America, and compare a rich suburb with a poor town-the city services, schools, parks, and practically

everything else will be better financed in the place populated by rich people. The aim is not to overthrow capitalism but to overhaul it. Give it a social-justice tune-up, make it more efficient, get the economic engine to hit on all cylinders for everybody, and stop putting out so many environmentally hazardous substances. To some people, this goal means selling out leftist ideals for the sake of capitalism. But the right thrives on having an ineffective opposition. The Revolutionary Communist Party helps stabilize the "free market" capitalist system by making it seem as if the only alternative to free-market capitalism is a return to Stalinism. Prospective activists for change are instead channeled into pointless discussions about the revolutionary potential of the proletariat. Instead of working to persuade people to accept progressive ideas, the far left talks to itself (which may be a blessing, given the way it communicates) and tries to sell copies of the Socialist Worker to an uninterested public.

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Alt DA- Transition WarsAttempting to move away from capitalism will cause transitional conflicts that will end in increased domination and unsustainable exploitation. Gubrud, 97 (Mark Avrum at the Center for Superconductivity Research, “Nanotechnology and International Security”)

With molecular manufacturing, international trade in both raw materials and finished goods can be replaced by decentralized production for local consumption, using locally available materials. The decline of international trade will undermine a powerful source of common interest. Further, artificial intelligence will displace skilled as well as unskilled labor. A world system based on wage labor, transnational capitalism and global markets will necessarily give way. We imagine that a golden age is possible, but we don’t know how to organize one. As global capitalism retreats, it will leave behind a world dominated by politics, and possibly feudal concentrations of wealth and power. Economic insecurity, and fears for the material and moral future of humankind may lead to the rise of demagogic and intemperate national leaders. With almost two hundred sovereign nations, each struggling to create a new economic and social order, perhaps the most predictable outcome is chaos: shifting alignments, displaced populations, power struggles, ethnic conflicts inflamed by demagogues, class conflicts, land disputes, etc. Small and underdeveloped nations will be more than ever dependent on the major powers for access to technology, and more than ever vulnerable to sophisticated forms of control or subversion, or to outright domination. Competition among the leading technological powers for the political loyalty of clients might imply reversion to some form of nationalistic imperialism.