Counter-interpretation: the power relations undergirding the 1AC should be a legitimate site of negation. Alternative sets of power relations are competitive, and we shouldn’t be held to every detail of alt implementation even if it seems utopian.

To take Utopia: I understand utopia as an ideal of human relations that is necessary to ground our critique of capitalism and of the societies in which it is entrenched, and that also shapes our vision of the societies which we want to emerge. I do not believe that this is the same as writing ‘recipes for the cookshops of the future’, as Marx accused utopian socialists of attempting, but I think it is important to have an account of what it is that makes capitalism wrong from a moral perspective. The same goes for the desirability of revolution and the way we understand and evaluate transformative practices that seek to move us beyond the status quo.

I have always been attracted to Rosa Luxemburg’s account of revolution, and the way she analyses its relationship to social reform. As Luxemburg points out correctly, the difference between reform and revolution is not in the way in which we try to realize certain ends but in the content of these ends, in what it is we want to reach. She suggests, again, correctly in my view, that the difference between reform and revolution is not whether one is gradual and more likely to succeed, or more or less representative of the general will, but in the kind of political goals we commit to, in the question of who holds power and for what reasons, and whether those power relations are entrenched into a legal system or not. One thing that I was struck by in Albena’s account and also in her set of positive proposals for what happens when we overcome capitalism and how to accelerate the transition is that they are all limited to policy proposals. But they do not seem to me to be political, in the sense that they do not speak to the redistribution of power relations in society and to the question of how you entrench those in the law. And so it seems to me that not much is said about the intersection between law and politics, and with reference to the political horizon within which those particular policy proposals are inscribed. And yet, if we try to turn these proposals into law and think about what fundamental transformations they bring to society, we might need a revolutionary upheaval of the status quo, and a very radical change in the legal systems we are familiar with. So, to return to the question of reform and revolution, the problem is not so much the difference in method – one is violent, the other is peaceful, one is slow, the other is faster – after all, history has familiarized us with reforms that are fast and violent, and with revolutions that are slow and peaceful. The problem is the difference in the content of fundamental legal disposition, the body of basic norms, whether and how fundamental principles of social cooperation are constitutionalized and how. The paths you discuss for overcoming capitalism, decommodification and the like, require a fundamental upheaval in the legal structures of our political institutions and a different set of power relations, in short, a revolution. And this in turn requires a normative vision within which we are able to assess critically your proposals, and to reflect on the related questions of justice and political legitimacy.