PERM DO THE AFF then THE ALT. Capitalist harms are contingent and irreducible to their theory of power. The AFF’s analysis is a necessary ethic.

One significant and creative “economy” which seems to have somewhat broken away from the traditional, expert-driven protocols has to do with the symbolic and material conditions of the generation termed “millennials” (born between the year 1980 and 2000) as they patch something novel and curious together right under the noses of the institutionalized capitalism that has betrayed them. (And they make the capitalists very nervous indeed). The decimating social, economic, and political consequences of late capitalism and its seemingly open-ended global financial and economic crises, such as that witnessed from 2007 through 2009, have turned the millennials into a generation of “absolute beginners” when pondering their life choices and reaching traditional adulthood markers (i.e., self-sufficiency, marriage, family formation). For instance, access to stable employment, housing, and even health services3 are contingent upon an economic mode of subjectification in which everyone is responsible for managing their own human capital to maximal effect (Fraser 2003: 168). According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, henceforth) (2016), despite being the most highly educated generation in history, young people (15–29 year-olds) worldwide navigate between unemployment and poorer-quality jobs (e.g., temporary contracts and low wage jobs) much more so than their older counterparts. Moreover, 15% of young people in high-income countries and 26% in (lower/upper) middle-income countries are not participants in education, employment, or training (NEET) (OECD 2016, International Labour Office 2015). In this regard, the new horizons of possibility and generational pushback against downward mobility embrace aspects of a “sharing” and “post-ownership” economy.4 While the social, political, and economic organizing principles of capitalism are far from being dépassé, the centrality of new and perhaps more ethical economic practices (of the self) surrounding, for instance, the do-it-yourself (DIY) cottage industry movements (often caricatured in Western countries under the guise of the ‘hipster’ or ‘fauxhemian’), are adopted by the millennials to varying degrees of socio-economic synergy, connecting the private and public, the local and global, the system and the lifeworld. Engulfed by digital technologies, globalization, terrorism, and economic downturn we find a metamodern5 structure of feeling (Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010, 2015) and an ontological, epistemological, and practical “oscillation between a typically modern commitment and a markedly postmodern detachment” (Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010: 2). In a broad sense, the social relations of economic activity for the metamodern are rerouted to address discursive orders of (repressive-depressive) capitalist accumulation and economic rationality in the 20th century.

But that is just one creative and itself socially and ethically problematic example of an alternative actualization of economy; it does not stand in any sort of substantial emancipatory relation to those outside of itself and is thus of little value to critical theory. The resources necessary for the empowerment of millennials or, in a wider spectrum the global middle classes, to construct alternatives is not something shared by the vast majority of those subject to the untoward consequences of global capitalism. To begin to develop an ethical posture toward the economic world for our times, we need a broader domain of answers to the question of what is possible for us, possible in the seemingly impossible material realm of the economic, a realm which ethics can only pretend to escape at its own peril if we are to speak meaningfully and critically about our own accountability: Given what seems to be the inexorability of economic accounting in and throughout every aspect of human – and not only human – existence, from the base of the base to the tip of the superstructure, and given also that its operations implicate each of us in loss, cost, debt, death, and other continuous or ultimate reckonings, it is understandable that the dream of an escape from economy should be so sweet and the longing for it so pervasive and recurrent. Since it does appear to be inescapable, however, the better, that is, more effective, more profitable, alternative would seem to be not to seek to go beyond economy but to do the best we can going through…(Smith 1988: 17).

A useful starting point for “going through” economy is to draw upon William Schweiker’s (1987) appeal to three classical terms, each of which refers back to a particular type of economy, of human dwelling. These terms remind us of the polysemy of the term economy, and of how much we lose by referencing it as a singularity. Schweiker (1987: 92), in the context of ecumenical theology, writes: [T]he conceptual polysemy of Oikumene prompts three interrelated areas of inquiry for ecumenical theology: dwelling as such (oikeo); the houses of communities in which humans dwell (oikoi); and human world (oikumene).

The particularities of various economies, as well as that which they share in common, compel us to recognize that the meaning of “economy” is contingent, often radically so. Part of that contingency involves the range of meanings and interpretations which accompany the ethical evaluations which follow from the fact that economic force becomes moral power when it is enacted in a world of others. Those are often, but need not be, particular others, since the consequences of economic force often extend to unknown others in unknown worlds. That is a fact that both immediately exposes the poverty of contractarian ethics so very common in capitalist ethics and has much to say about the inability of global capitalism to answer those affected by but distant from its power. [How do the unborn or the globally displaced enter into a contract, economic or social?] At its core, capitalism not only misrecognizes distal others but remains, under the cover of contractarianism and utilitarianism, morally indifferent to them just as it exploits them. Ethics, that discipline which seeks to understand moral force, now comes to betray its own normative justification, as its very terms are coopted by neoliberalism. Commenting upon Alex Honneth’s work, Zambrana (2013: 96–97) explains: We are faced with the “perplexing predicament, Honneth argues, that in the context of neoliberalism the emancipatory meaning of individualism, equality, achievement, and intimacy revert to their opposite. In an era of deregulation and privatization, trickle-down economics and personal responsibility, international financial flows and the power of global firms, these normative achievements have become legitimizing principles for capitalist expansion.

Ethics is thus stood on its head: everything is justified to the extent that it serves capital under the cover of ethics. Zambrana (2013: 97) continues: Honneth writes that he is interested in “the peculiar fact that today much normative progress of the last decades has been turned into its opposite, a culture that decreases solidarity and independence, and, under the pressure of a neoliberal de-domestification of capitalism, has become a mechanism of social integration,” (see Honneth and Hartmann 2006: 41).

The scope of Schweiker’s reminder of the breadth of the term economy combines with Zambrana’s reminder of the moral and social destructiveness of modern economic ethics which is indeed quite dangerous in the context of contemporary economics—creating the very conditions that make its own moral vocabulary part of the construction of conditions of life opposite to that which it morally professes. If that is the case, and we think that it is, the intellectual resources necessary to recover and sustain ethically meaningful economics reside elsewhere than within the conventional lexicon and discursive protocols of the disciplines of ethics and of economics. Terms like justice, rights, utility, and the good are corrupted to the point where their very use facilitates the advancement of forms of life which are opposed to them. Paraphrasing Foucault, the regimes of truth and of ethics which have constructed us are now consummately dangerous. If that is in fact the case, then novel approaches, post-liberal approaches, to the relation between economics and ethics are needed. The remainder of this paper suggests one such novel approach, a hermeneutic and interpretive approach which treats binding norms with some suspicion.