K - Capitalism - Michigan 7 2023 CFLMP

K—Capitalism—CFMLP
Thanks to Adhi Thirumala, Joseph Hong, Jun Kwon, Lila Daoudi, Luke Park, Mira Baba, Rishabh Jain, and Rishi Shetty for tons of hard work!
This is a supplement to the starter packet capitalism kritik. We have links to some of the new affs that have been put out, some impact/sustainability updates, and a few new alt options, including some with more backline development. Commons is better if you want a more material alt, whereas the psychoanalysis alt is more framework-heavy. There are a few new answers, including stuff to answer some of the new alts (along with plenty of psychoanalysis answers, don’t worry). Check some of the dedev/degrowth/etc files that have been put out by other labs for more work on sustainability/the transition/etc (for both sides!).
RIP to the Buddhism K. We tried.
“I am anti-capitalism because I hate seeing others succeed before me.”—Jun Kwon
Neg
Links
Link---Carbon Tax
The carbon tax gets bogged down in the consumption trap.
Mair 19 — Simon Mair, a Research Fellow at the University of Surrey, works in the systems analysis strand of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity, 2019 (“Climate Change and Capitalism: A Political Marxist View.,” resilience, July 11th, Available Online at https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-07-11/climate-change-and-capitalism-a-political-marxist-view/, Accessed 06-27-2023)//rjain
No decarbonisation under capitalism
Because of the structural drivers towards growth that we see under capitalism, it is extremely unlikely that capitalism can avoid catastrophic climate change. The structural drive for growth means that efforts to reduce carbon emissions will be overwhelmed by the expansion of economic activity. This is controversial to most mainstream environmentalists (and to many socialists). But it is the clear experience of the history of capitalism.
To date, resources have not been conserved under capitalism. Rather when we become more efficient or find new resources, this frees up resources that are used by other parts of the capitalist machine. This explains why, for example, renewable energy and nuclear power remain only a small part of the global energy system (Figure 2). Under capitalism, low-carbon energy sources have grown but they have not replaced fossil fuel at any meaningful scale. Instead low-carbon energy is simply another energy pot available to fuel growth in economic activity in order to generate profits.
The same is also true of energy efficiency gains. Energy efficiency can be a key contributor for decarbonising the global economy. But only if it is coupled to a plan to limit the size of the economy. Under capitalism, energy efficiency measures actually drive economic growth. This happens for the same reason renewable energy doesn’t lead to decarbonisation. Energy efficiency improves productivity and reduces costs. In this way it reinforces capitalist growth imperatives, driving the expansion of the economy which requires more energy to be used overall.
This is also why progressive action on climate change will undermine capitalism. We will only successfully avoid catastrophic climate change if we are able to break the dominance of the market, and break the social imaginary that ineffectually ties fulfilment to consumption.
So, where do we go from here?
The economy, the energy system, and the environment are all inextricably linked. Combining ecological economics and Political Marxism, I have set out a framework in which climate change can be seen not only as a consequence of capitalism but as fundamental to it. Widespread fossil fuel use was enabled by, and necessary for, the capitalist dynamics of productivity growth and expansion. Climate change is a feature, not a bug of capitalism.
To avoid catastrophic climate change, we have to break the expansionary cycle of the economy. Otherwise technological improvements, renewable energy, and energy efficiency gains will do nothing but add to the stock of ways that capitalists grow the economy and their profits. Likewise carbon taxes and other market mechanisms will simply reinforce the core dynamics of the market and any positive effects will be overwhelmed by growth. Growth will increase energy use, including fossil fuel use. This will plunge us into a world that we do not know how to live in. It is likely that ‘hothouse earth’ will eventually destroy capitalism. But not before destroying the livelihoods of millions through extreme weather, greater incidence of disease, and ecological breakdown. There is no reason to believe this will lead to a better future.
Breaking the expansionary cycle of the economy in a just way requires rolling back markets. We must instead use commons, household, and state-based production as the principal means of meeting the collective needs of society. Only in this way can we break the societal drive for productivity growth and expansion. There is nothing inherently more sustainable in non-market forms of production (all economic activity uses energy), but these systems lack the expansionary drive of markets. Consequently, energy efficiency gains and new technologies can be used to replace fossil fuels rather than add to them.
This transition has the potential to be hopeful, a chance to build a more humane system. This system will be materially poorer than today’s society. But this is not ‘eco-austerity’. Much of the energy we use today is in producing goods that we do not need, that do not fulfil our needs. Richard Seymour articulates this in the context of the labour theory of value:
The overproduction of ‘stuff’ is largely achieved by making a costly withdrawal from the worker’s body, a form of life-impoverishing austerity. And a great deal of that ‘stuff’ is not for workers’ consumption, but rather, where it is not consumed as profit and dividends, is dead labour whose main effect is to achieve a further extraction of labour. We might think of energy conservation as class self-defence.
Put another way, consumption is an ineffective way of building a good life. Collectively limiting our consumption could open a path to a better economic system.
The 1AC’s framing of redistributing carbon tax subsidies is a wolf in sheep’s clothing in that it relies on a crony-capitalist strategy of propagating “the solution to climate change” to mask neoliberal protectionism – that causes retaliation from WTO allies which turns the case
Holtz-Eakin 2/9(Douglas Holtz-Eakin is the President of the American Action Forum, 2-9-2023, "Crony Capitalism and Protectionism in Climate Policy Clothing," AAF, https://www.americanactionforum.org/daily-dish/crony-capitalism-and-protectionism-in-climate-policy-clothing/)//BRownRice
**Set up for this in cross – ask about the specifics of the tax based on what the ev says
Back to basics. The research literature shows that the most effective policy to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) is an economy-wide, revenue-neutral, upstream carbon tax. Economy-wide means that all carbon consumption is taxed and done so at the same rate – no demonizing coal, lambasting petroleum, or other uneven policies. Revenue-neutral means that the proceeds of the carbon tax are used to reduce or eliminate other taxes on capital and labor that would be a detriment to growth. A carbon tax is not a way to grow a larger government. It is a way to reduce the corporation income tax, payroll tax, and so forth. Finally, upstream means that carbon is taxed at the first point it enters the economy – at the wellhead or mine and so forth.
Producers subject to the tax would be forced to pass the tax along in their prices. That is, of course, the point. GHG-intensive products would become less attractive, forcing their manufacturers to reduce the GHG content through efficiencies, substitution, and innovation. The carbon is the price signal the guides production, innovation, employment, and consumption in a cleaner direction. Eakinomics has zero doubts that a well-designed carbon tax would simultaneously support vigorous economic growth and reduced GHG emissions.
There are two additional important footnotes to “well-designed.” First, the carbon tax is sufficient as a mitigation strategy and everything else should go away, including the vast, burdensome regulatory morass under the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, and dozens of other pieces of legislation. Keeping those regulations wouldn’t help with emissions and will burden growth.
Second, some imports are not subject to GHG restrictions and are perceived to put domestic producers at a competitive disadvantage, which proponents say could cause carbon leakage (carbon-intensive production moved overseas to avoid the tax). To prevent this, the carbon tax should be imposed on imports. It is this notion of a carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) that is the subject of Tori Smith’s U.S. Carbon Border Adjustment Proposals and World Trade Organization Compliance. She notes that the European Union has announced a transition to implementing a CBAM in 2023, and by 2026 “importers will need to purchase CBAM certificates, the price of which will be determined by the Emissions Trading System (ETS). The EU’s approach is not a traditional border adjustment, however, because it does not include rebates for exporters.”
As she reviews, there have already been proposals in the United States to tax imports based on their carbon content. But there is a big difference. The EU already has in place carbon pricing in member countries. The CBAM is an expansion of Europe’s existing system. The United States does not have a domestic carbon price. Indeed, instead of making carbon-intensive products relatively more expensive, the Biden strategy (as passed in the Inflation Reduction Act) is to throw taxpayer money at cleaner activities in an uncoordinated, willy-nilly, inefficent fashion.
That’s not a climate strategy. It’s giving taxpayer subsidies to your friends, aka crony capitalism. And adding a carbon tariff to the mix doesn’t make it a CBAM – it’s just protectionist industrial policy. So, it isn’t a strategy for the coexistence of progress on climate and rising standards of living. Even worse, Smith points out that it is likely to be illegal under our agreements with the World Trade Organization (WTO).
“Uncertainty about the permissibility of CBAMs should give U.S. policymakers considering such a policy pause, because neglecting WTO rules could leave the United States open to retaliation by its trading partners. In recent years, U.S. trade policy and legislation, most recently with the Inflation Reduction Act, has disregarded WTO rules. The Biden Administration is currently engaged in yet another trade dispute with allies over its neglect of WTO rules in implementing the IRA. While debate among scholars remains, there do seem to be three principles to follow to have a “reduced risk of violating WTO law” when considering a CBAM: (1) the carbon tax must apply to domestic goods and imports; (2) imports from all WTO members must be treated the same; and (3) rebates for exports cannot exceed the carbon tax.”
Beware crony, protectionist proposals dressed up as climate policy.
Link---Debt/Deficit Spending
The 1AC weaponizes debt creation in the service of neoliberal hierarchy.
Pistor, Katharina(Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law and director of the Center on Global Legal Transformation at Columbia Law School), 2019, “The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality” //damien jiu
If there is one asset that defines capitalism, it is debt—not any debt, but debt that can be easily transferred from one investor to another, and preferably debt that is convertible into state money at any time on the behest of its holders, the creditors. Convertibility of private debt on demand is typically assumed but is not always an enforceable claim. The logic of a private economy is that you can sell only if you find a willing buyer, that is, a private buyer. If private buyers retreat, demand declines, and asset prices fall, investors who recently thought that they had huge amounts of wealth at their fingertips might lose it in no time. To lock in past gains, investors will try to convert their private assets into state money, the only financial asset that is guaranteed to keep its nominal value.1 The reason is that, unlike private entities, states do not have a binding survival constraint. They can print money and they have the power to unilaterally impose burdens on their citizens in the form of taxes or austerity measures, thereby ensuring their own survival. When private parties run out of money, they may request help from their peers, but they cannot force them to deliver. If they fail to garner support, they face extinction; the only alternative is to go to the source of state money: the government or its central bank.
As noted in chapter 1, convertibility is one of the key attributes of capital; its relevance is most apparent in the case of financial assets, in particular, debt instruments. For holders of these assets, convertibility has the same importance that durability had for landowners or major lenders to corporations who sought a stable capital base against which to lend. Investors in tradable instruments are fickle; they are constantly on the move as their holders are out to find yet another profit opportunity. It therefore makes little sense to lock them up behind real or legal shields. But this does not mean that holders of financial assets do not crave certainty; their certainty comes from the ability to convert their assets into cash on demand without a serious loss. The trick is to make these assets look almost like state money, that is, to cloak them in legal modules that enhance the chances that they can be converted into cash on demand. The history of debt finance can therefore be retold as a story about how claims to future pay have been coded in law to ensure their convertibility into state money on demand, without suffering serious loss. This chapter traces the coding techniques for the most basic forms of debt, the notes and later the bills of exchange that emerged between the twelfth and the seventeenth centuries, all the way to modern-day securitized assets and credit derivatives. The story also illustrates the shift away from landowners, the privileged holders of property rights who often figured as debtors in the past, to creditors as the asset holders who enjoy the strongest legal protection. Signs for this shift have long been evident, but only after land had been thoroughly dethroned in the late nineteenth century did financial assets come to the fore as a leading source of private wealth. As we shift focus from owners to creditors, and from land to debt, we will encounter the same legal modules that we have seen at play before: contract, property and collateral law, trust, corporate, and bankruptcy law. These legal modules mitigate the risk associated with debt and in doing so have fueled its expansion from one unprecedented height to another—to be followed only too often by equally steep downturns, safe only for the successful intervention of states and their central banks. Huge gains could be made along the way, and losses were often shifted to others.
These losses tend to fall primarily on two groups: The unsecured debtors, that is, creditors who by operation of general bankruptcy rules are last in line to share in the leftovers; and states, or rather their citizens, whose future productivity they commit when bailing out failing entities. In the absence of state backing, debt cycles would draw their natural circles, making and destroying wealth along the way. Many states have smoothed out these cycles by standing by to protect holders of these assets from the abyss, time and again; others that were either unwilling or unable to do so have seen their economies ravaged by debt crises that destroyed wealth and brought economic decline. In addition, they had to cede sovereignty to their creditors, to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), or “the Troika,” comprised of the IMF, the ECB, and the European Commission. When stepping into the void by offering new credit to borrowers that were shunned by private creditors, or when buying assets from creditors that no longer found any private takers, states have tended to protect assets and asset holders that were critical for the survival of the system and have left the rest to fend for themselves. In so doing, they have helped stabilize finance, but they have also contributed to the massive concentration of wealth in the hands of those at the top of a financial system that is not flat, but deeply hierarchical.2
Link---Degrowth
Degrowth movements get bogged down by capitalism. They misunderstand both Marx and capitalism.
Aukema 23 — Justin Aukema, an associate professor of economics at Osaka Metropolitan University, Ph.D. Japanese Studies, Sophia University, M.A. Japanese Studies, Sophia University, and a B.A. History, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, 2023 (“Why Capitalism Loves Degrowth,” Compact Magazine, March 7th, Available Online at https://compactmag.com/article/why-capitalism-loves-degrowth, Accessed 06-28-2023)//rjain
Once the dream of neo-Malthusian elites and a fringe of ascetic environmentalists, the notion of “degrowth” has lately been embraced by many on the left, including some Marxists. This should raise eyebrows: Marxism has generally been understood as a “Promethean” political philosophy that aims at fully developing productive forces to generate widely shared abundance. How did this unlikely convergence happen? Saitō Kōhei’s new book, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, offers some valuable clues. The book’s original 2020 edition was a smash success in Japan, and its English debut has already begun to make waves.
Saitō’s basic premise is simple enough: The capitalist drive toward “growth” is destroying the planet, so we must rapidly adopt what he terms “degrowth communism” if humanity is to survive the climate crisis. The author’s conclusion that “degrowth is incompatible with capitalism, and it is essentially an anti-capitalist project” is sure to resonate with a younger generation favorably disposed toward socialist ideas and inundated with warnings of impending climate disaster.
“The purpose of capitalism is not ‘growth.’”
But Saitō’s pretense to offer a path beyond our present political impasses is misleading on at least two accounts. First, the purpose of capitalism isn’t “growth,” but value creation and capital accumulation, and capital needs both expansion and contraction to realize this process. As the previous three decades of economic stagnation, austerity, and crisis indicate, degrowth is already an integral part of our economic paradigm, not a means of moving beyond it.
Second, Saitō’s conceptualization of “communism” entirely discards Marx’s understanding of class struggle and, more astonishingly, denies almost any role to the working class. This is because for him, the primary struggle is between capitalism and the planet, rather than workers and capitalists. But in abandoning the notion of a revolutionary working class as the agent of change, Saitō ends up tacitly endorsing something that sounds much like what we already have today: an elite-led green movement embraced by, rather than at odds with, the capitalist class.
Saitō and degrowth proponents take for granted that the purpose of capitalism is growth. But among mainstream economists, the idea that constant growth isn’t just possible but also desirable only dates back to the 1950s. Matthias Schmelzer, himself a prominent degrowth advocate, makes this clear in his 2016 book, The Hegemony of Growth. As Schmelzer admits, economists had long understood that capitalism goes through cyclical periods of boom and bust, expansion and contraction, growth and degrowth. Perhaps more important, despite paying li

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