K - Capitalism K - Georgetown 2023 Starter

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The problem of contemporary capitalism is not unequal distributions of income, but unequal distributions of power – contra the 1AC’s depiction of inequality as an unfortunate byproduct of otherwise free and voluntary markets, grappling with inequality requires recognizing the constitutive nature of legally administered coercion to market transactions. The markets have not failed; they are working exactly as they are supposed to
Somers 21 – Professor Emerita of Sociology and History at the University of Michigan.
Margaret R. Somers, “Toward a predistributive democracy: Diagnosing oligarchy, dedemocratization, and the deceits of market justice,” in The Condition of Democracy: Neoliberal Politics and Sociological Perspectives, vol. 1, eds. Jürgen Mackert, Hannah Wolf and Bryan S. Turner, Routledge 2021, pp. 62-64, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3888508.
The power of predistribution: Denaturalizing market naturalism
Market naturalism is of course a complete fiction: the market has no laws, natural or otherwise; there is no market neutrality free of power and politics; unequal income and wealth do not reflect market justice, merit, or worth; nor is there any moral justification for restricting democratic practices to that of market-conformity. No matter; with market naturalism and justice political economy produced the most formidable ideational regime of the last two centuries, one which continues to give moral credit to the wealthy while shaming the poor for moral deficiencies; to condemn government efforts to alleviate the suffering of those in need; and to legally enhance and protect the power of capital over and against that of a democratic citizenry.
Against the metaphysics of market naturalism, Polanyi ([1944] 2001) challenged the assumptions that endowed market justice with the privilege of adjudicating moral worth. His method was to reverse engineer the epistemic sleight of hand by which the market was made morally privileged precisely because it was declared free of moral contamination and political interest. Since the entire edifice rested on the nominalist naturalism of the economy, he had only to dismantle this naturalist illusion and the moral code of market justice would collapse precipitously.
Polanyi (1957) developed an alternative institutionalist political economy based on the premise that all of social life is based on institutions, coercion, and power rather than nature, voluntarism, and neutrality, and that free markets do not exist in the wild but are engineered to appear as such. His most counterintuitive and paradigm-changing argument is that actual markets are constituted by the very power, coercion, and violence abhorred and repudiated by the market naturalist ideal. Free market doctrine claims an economy made efficient and free by its liberation from government interference, but Polanyi denies that markets and governments are separate and autonomous entities. Government action cannot ‘interfere’ in the economy; government rules, rights, and legal powers are what constitute the economy in the first place. The market is itself an allocative institution of power.
What appear to be free, natural, and autonomous markets are politically engineered in at least three ways: (1) predistributive legal and political power; (2) the power to extract social wealth and convert it to private gain; (3) the power to disempower democracy.
From the myth of the stateless market to predistributive political engineering
The concept of predistribution20 conveys the Polanyian (1957) insight that primary market outcomes (wages, income, wealth), which appear to be the result of impersonal autonomous market forces (globalization, automation, the price mechanism), are in fact driven by government policies, legal coercions, and institutional powers. The concept plays on the contrast with the more familiar one of redistribution: whereas the latter focuses on government policies (especially taxation) outside the economy, predistribution exposes how government policies and legal powers actually shape the structure of markets inside the economy and influence primary market predistribution. It upends the binary that attributes politics, power, and governance to the public sphere, and freedom from power to the private. By putting law and government engineering into the heart of the price mechanism, predistribution challenges the very idea of the economy as the ‘private’ sector separate from government and law and puts an end to the myth of the stateless market.21
Examples of predistributive governance that are treated as natural to markets include copyright and patent laws that favour Big Pharma and obstruct fair competition (intellectual property law); crippling anti-union judicial rulings that have created radical asymmetries of power in waged labour and in the workplace (contract law); vigorous disabling of anti-trust law since the 1970s, leading to massive corporate consolidation (monopolies and anti-trust); financial instruments that create wealth out of legal technologies; bankruptcy laws written by the financial sector (bankruptcy law); and defanged regulatory agencies (lack of enforcement).22
A key feature of predistributive practices is that they are designed to occlude the exercise of political or legal power inside the economy and to instead appear simply to be in the nature of things. Unlike redistribution, which is aggressively contested in the open realm of government policy and legislative debate, predistribution operates inside the black box of the market, and is fiercely shielded from public scrutiny. The result is that market outcomes continue to be perceived as reflecting impersonal natural market forces. Indeed, the very novelty and unfamiliarity of the term ‘predistribution’ testifies to the successful depoliticization of primary market inequalities, making the ever increasing levels of wealth that have moved upward to the rich and super rich appear nonpolitical and simply market driven rather than as the result of predistributive power.23 Alas even much of the left tends to attribute decades of rising inequality to ‘unfettered’ and ‘deregulated’ markets rather than to politically and legally engineered ones.24
Predistribution, as a concept, echoes the pathbreaking insights of the legal realists (Block, 2013; Britton-Purdy et al., 2020; Fried, 1998; Hale, 1920, 1923, 1943; Rahman, 2016b) and American institutionalists (Novak, 2019; Veblen, 1904, 1936; Commons, 1924, 1934) who in the 1920s and 1930s argued that contra the laissez-faire free contract ideology of their day, the economy is constitutively enmeshed in legally administered coercions.25 They demonstrated how those coercions underpinned all economic transactions through the rights and capacities allocated by law to market participants, which in turn explains the relative bargaining power of labour and employers, of renters and property owners, of consumers and firms, and so on (see also Woodruff, 2014). Like legal realism, predistribution exposes the deceit that attributes power and coercion exclusively to the state, while denying the power of political and legal engineering to effect market outcomes.
Neoliberal governance makes extinction inevitable – its try or die to transition to a more accountable government
MacKay 18 – Professor of Sociology, Mohawk College
Kevin MacKay, also a union activist & executive director of a sustainable community development cooperative, The Ecological Crisis is a Political Crisis, 2018, https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-09-25/the-ecological-crisis-is-a-political-crisis/
With each passing day, reports on global climate change become increasingly bleak. Recent research has affirmed that the glaciers are melting faster than anticipated1, and that acidification, with its catastrophic effect on ocean ecosystems, is also proceeding faster than feared2. As the concentration of atmospheric carbon continues to rise, so does the likelihood we’ve passed the tipping point for irreversible climate change.3
When one looks at other critical earth ecosystems, the danger is equally apparent. Soil is being destroyed.4 Fresh water shortages are wracking several continents and leaving billions of people without reliable access to clean drinking water.5 Fish stocks are plummeting.6 Oceans are clogged with plastic garbage.7 Biodiversity is disappearing at an alarming rate.8 In the face of this full-spectrum ecological assault, a growing number of scientists have been saying that the collapse of civilization is now unavoidable.9
Stopping the destructive effects of industrial, capitalist civilization has now become the defining challenge of our age. If we don’t radically change our society’s course within the next 30 years, then a deep collapse and protracted Dark Age are all but assured. In order to confront this challenge, we need to understand what is causing civilization’s crisis, and most importantly, how the crisis can be resolved. At stake is nothing less than a viable future on this planet.
The Five Horsemen of the Modern Day Apocalypse
In my book, Radical Transformation: Oligarchy, Collapse, and the Crisis of Civilization, I argue that industrial civilization is being driven toward collapse by five key forces – related to terminal dysfunction within its ecological, economic, socio-cultural, and political sub-systems:
Dissociation: globalized production and distribution systems disrupt people’s ability to put their own actions, and the actions of elites, into a coherent causal and ethical framework. Actions by individuals, institutions, and systems of governance are therefore disconnected from their effect on the natural world and on other peoples. Without this critical feedback, even well-intentioned actors can’t make rational and ethical choices regarding their behaviour.
Complexity: the world-spanning nature of industrial capitalist civilization, and the massive number of interrelationships it represents, make predicting the effect of any given change on the system as a whole devilishly difficult. Disastrous tipping points loom in several of civilization’s systems – from the collapse of ocean ecology to the threat of nuclear war. In addition, because the crisis cannot be contained in one part of the globe, the dysfunctions can’t be dealt with in isolation.
Stratification: a profoundly unequal distribution of wealth – both globally and within nations – leads to mass human poverty, displacement, and to premature death through disease and continuous warfare. Stratification also leads to political instability, eroding a society’s social cohesion and undermining decision-making structures.
Overshoot: the economic practices of industrial capitalism are exceeding ecological limits. Our civilization is critically degrading the biosphere, burning through non-renewable energy sources, and shifting the entire climatic balance.
Oligarchy: in states worldwide, political decision-making is controlled by a numerically small, wealthy elite. This form of government serves to lock in patterns of conflict, oppression, and ecological destruction.
Societies as Decision-Making Systems
Each of the horsemen presents a significant threat to civilization’s viability. However, oligarchy is particularly important as it deals with a society’s decision-making systems. In his 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or to Succeed, geographer Jared Diamond argued that many past civilizations have collapsed due to their inability to make correct decisions in the face of existential threats.10 Diamond drew on the work of archaeologist Joseph Tainter, who in his 1998 book The Collapse of Complex Societies, argued that civilizations fail due to a constellation of factors.11
To Tainter, the ultimate mistake failed civilizations made was to continually solve problems by adding social complexity, and as a result, increasing the society’s energy needs. Eventually, Tainter argued that civilizations encounter a “thermodynamic crisis” in which they are unable to sustain an energy-intensive level of complexity. The result is collapse – ecological devastation, political upheaval, and mass population die-off.
The tendency for societies to collapse under excessive energy demands is an important insight. However, what Tainter and Diamond failed to appreciate is how oligarchy is an even more fundamental cause of civilization collapse.
Oligarchic control compromises a society’s ability to make correct decisions in the face of existential threats. This explains a seeming paradox in which past civilizations have collapsed despite possessing the cultural and technological know-how needed to resolve their crises. The problem wasn’t that they didn’t understand the source of the threat or the way to avert it. The problem was that societal elites benefitted from the system’s dysfunctions and prevented available solutions.
Oligarchic Control in “Democratic” States
Citizens in countries such as Canada, the United States, Australia, or the Eurozone members, would generally consider themselves to be living in democratic societies. However, when the political systems of Western democracies are scrutinized, clear and pervasive signs of oligarchy emerge.
A 2014 study by American political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page revealed that the great majority of political decisions made in the United States reflect the interests of elites. After studying nearly 1,800 policy decisions passed between 1981 and 2002, the researchers argued that “both individual economic elites and organized interest groups (including corporations, largely owned and controlled by wealthy elites) play a substantial part in affecting public policy, but the general public has little or no independent influence.”12
Today, oligarchic control over decision-making, and its catastrophic ecological effects, have never been clearer. In the U.S., Donald Trump and his billionaire-dominated cabinet are seeking to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency13, to question climate science14, and to pursue a policy of “American energy dominance” that will dramatically expand production of fossil fuels.15
U.S. energy companies are also having a profound impact on domestic energy policy by accelerating the development of hard-to-access fuel sources through hydraulic fracturing, deep-sea oil drilling, and mountain-top removal coal mining.16 At the same time, fossil fuel oligarchs are working overtime to dismantle green energy initiatives, such as the Koch brothers’ war on the solar industry in Florida, and in other cities across the continent.17
In Canada, often thought of as more progressive than its southern neighbor, the situation hasn’t been much different. Under prime minister Stephen Harper’s two terms, the Canadian state became an unapologetic cheerleader for extracting some of the world’s dirtiest oil –Tar Sands bitumen. Harper accelerated Tar Sands production, leading to the clear-cutting of thousands of acres of boreal forest, the diversion of millions of gallons of freshwater, and the creation of miles of toxic tailings ponds, filled with water contaminated by the bitumen extraction process.18
Like the Trump administration, the Harper government silenced federal climate scientists.19 The government also targeted environmental charities and non-profits, using funding cuts and the threat of audits to undermine climate advocacy.20 When a movement of national outrage swept Harper from power in 2015, Canadians were hopeful that climate change would once more be taken seriously. However, the new government of Justin Trudeau, while embracing the international discourse on global warming, has shown a continued allegiance to the fossil-fuel oligarchy by committing over $7 billion in federal funds to purchase the failing Kinder-Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline.21
What is To Be Done?
To create a sustainable future, we must first learn the lessons of the past, and what archaeological research shows is that throughout history, civilizations that have been captive to the interests of an oligarchic elite have all collapsed.22 Today’s industrial, capitalist civilization is trapped in this same deadly cycle.
As long as a self-interested elite controls decision-making in modern states, we will be far too late to avoid the effects of steadily contracting ecological limits. In addition, we will be unable to avert the downward spiral of economic crisis, conflict, and warfare that will result as oligarchs scramble to maintain their wealth and power in the face of dwindling resources and mounting crisis.23
Breaking free from this destructive pattern will require us to take political and economic power back from the 1% and return it to the hands of citizens. This means that advocates for ecological sustainability must move far beyond individual actions, lobbying, or reform of existing political and economic institutions. If we are to have a chance, we must ensure that governments make decisions based on the public good, not on private profit.
Radically transforming industrial, capitalist civilization won’t be easy. It will require movements for environmental sustainability, social justice, and economic fairness to come together, and to realize their common interest in dismantling the system of oligarchy and building a democratic, eco-socialist society.24 This “movement of movements” must put aside sectarian squabbles, and finally realize that the goals of economic justice, human rights, and ecological sustainability are all intrinsically linked.
Such changes may seem like a tall order, but hope can be found in the deepening struggle being waged to protect our fragile ecosystems. First Nations groups are leading this charge and beginning to win some important victories. The inspiring Water Protectors of Standing Rock were able to disrupt the Dakota Access Pipeline in the face of intense government oppression.25 In Canada, Several British Columbia First Nations recently won an impressive court victory in their opposition to the Trans Mountain pipeline.26
If successful grassroots struggles can be linked with equally hopeful movements for real political change, then there is hope for the future. However, if we continue on with “business as usual” – hoping that change will come from lifestyle choices and the interchangeable representatives of elite political parties, then the future looks grim indeed.
The alternative is an ethic of predistributive democratization – we affirm an opening of the exercise of market power to the public, allowing democratic control over the economy – that also solves the case better than the plan
Somers 21 – Professor Emerita of Sociology and History at the University of Michigan.
Margaret R. Somers, “Toward a predistributive democracy: Diagnosing oligarchy, dedemocratization, and the deceits of market justice,” in The Condition of Democracy: Neoliberal Politics and Sociological Perspectives, vol. 1, eds. Jürgen Mackert, Hannah Wolf and Bryan S. Turner, Routledge 2021, pp. 72-76, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3888508.
Toward a predistributive democracy
Market justice was born under the false flag of nature and the myth of the stateless market. Based on this fictional naturalism – unencumbered by the biased hands of power and social ideas of morality – political economy then attributed moral privilege to market outcomes. Predistribution – legal/political, social, and dedemocratizing – is a solvent; once it strips away the make-believe symmetry between the laws of nature and those of the market, it exposes market justice as empirically and morally bankrupt – it is neither true nor just. Where then does that leave us? Is there an alternative metric of justice?
Redistributive justice has been the traditional philosophy of compensating for unjust deserts, and redistributive social provisioning continues to be an essential element in a progressive polit

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