Aff - Ethics of Care 1AC - Michigan 7 2023 KLAB
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1AC - Ethics of Care The resolution’s expansion of welfare capitalism into every sphere of life does not address the root causes of oppression of women and minority groups – purely economic solutions are doomed to fail and recreate violence and exclusion Borchost and Siim 87 – Anette Borchost is a Danish professor of both Political Gender Research at CCWS Center for Comparative Welfare Studies and the Center for Labor Market Research, the Department of Political Science at Aalborg University and Birte Siim is a Danish political scientist specializing in gender studies. Women and the State: The Shifting Boundaries of Public and Private Practice 1 January 1987 “Women and the advanced welfare state – a new kind of patriarchal power?” https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=0ouADwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PT157&dq=welfare+state+is+patriarchy&ots=jdBxjpho-O&sig=kAkAyvvsMubQ-CxA-JZkRSwokPs#v=onepage&q&f=false (DOA 15 July 2023)/MCN The growth of the welfare economy from a woman's perspective The modern welfare state in Denmark has a long history, but the development of a comprehensive welfare economy dates back to the beginning of the 1960s. The gradual development of the welfare state in this century has been closely connected to the growing influence of the Social Democratic Party. The Social Democratic Party has been in government since the end of the 1920s, as in Sweden, although always in a minority position and dependent on alliances with other political parties. Since the 1930s a Social Democratic model of a welfare society has become the dominant political form of state intervention. In the 1960s state intervention was extended to new areas of society - both in relation to the economy and in relation to human reproduction. The Social Democratic Party combined support for the capitalist accumulation process with a substantial social reform programme for the working class in order to alleviate some of the social inequalities created by capitalism. From the 1960s the Danish and Swedish welfare states began to distinguish themselves from other welfare states like the British, influenced more by liberal ideas, and the Danish and Swedish welfare states became a model for the most advanced welfare states in the west.° One important characteristic was the dramatic expansion of the social, health, and educational sectors with their corresponding expenditures and the creation of a welfare economy as an important part of the total economy. Another important characteristic which distinguished the Scandinavian welfare states from other welfare states was their distinct corporatist profile. 10 This corporatism was built on an institutionalized collaboration between the dominant classes. Huge and extremely hierarchical, male-dominated organizations representing different class and professional interests obtained increasing power and influence. Working conditions were negotiated by these organizations, and conflicts between employers' and workers' organizations were settled by a formalized system of rules with state representatives functioning as neutral arbitrators. This expansion of the welfare economy and of the sphere government intervention has had very different consequences for men and women. On the one hand the expansion of the welfare economy in relation to human reproduction has been an important precondition for married women's integration into the formal labour market and for their growing social and economic independence in relation to men. The state has, through its policies, ideology, and different forms of legislation, helped women to become integrated as employees. The state has also helped women accomplish important reforms like free abortions and the removal of explicit sex-discriminating rules. On the other hand the state has basically supported the hierarchical gender division of work and has continued to limit women's power and influence in the public sphere through the structure and policies of the corporatist system. In this way the development of the Danish welfare state has been a very contradictory process for women. We argue that the Danish welfare state has not been neutral to women, rather it has contributed actively both to facilitate women's integration into the formal labour market and to institutionalize and legitimize women's double roles as mothers and workers. We therefore disagree with the conclusion that women's position is determined primarily by economic forces, especially the need for women's labour power. Instead we find that the state is an important mediator between the needs of the economy and the interests of different political actors. This does not necessarily mean that state policies have had the explicit and conscious purpose of reproducing the hierarchical gender division of work and male domination, which has not been the case in Denmark, where the institutionalization of women's double roles as mothers and workers has had the unintended effect of strengthening male domination in the public sphere. The limitations of state policies in obtaining sexual equality have become more visible during the economic crisis with mass unemployment. In Denmark there have been no explicit attempts to push women out of the labour market, but cutbacks in public expenditure are clearly working in the direction of marginalizing women in relation to the labour market. In the following we shall explore the contradictions in public policies towards women in more detail and outline our conclusions about a strengthening of what has been called social patriarchy. One crucial factor in the analyses of women's relation to the welfare state has become the question of women's political power. The breakdown of the breadwinner-homemaker family has increased women's independence from their husbands and has at the same time made women more dependent on the state as employees, clients and consumers of public services.11 We argue, however, that there are important differences in the degrees of dependence in the different welfare states connected to differences between their status as employees, consumers and clients. We find that women in the Danish and Swedish welfare states are subiect to a different form of dependency than women in welfare states such as those of Britain or the United States. The large state sector means that women have primarily become dependent on the state as employees and consumers of social services and only to a smaller extent as clients. The opposite is the case in Britain and the US where women to a larger extent are still dependent either on their husbands or on the state as clients. In the following we shall look into women's different roles as employees, consumers and clients in more detail. The continued exploitation of the unpaid labor of women is foundational to capitalistic accumulation Federici 04– Silvia Federici is a scholar, teacher, and feminist activist based in New York. She is a professor emerita and teaching fellow at Hofstra University in New York State, where she was a social science professor. She also taught at the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria. 15 September 2004 “Caliban and the Witch” https://files.libcom.org/files/Caliban%20and%20the%20Witch.pdf (DOA 14 July 2023)/MCN Against the Marxist orthodoxy, which explained women's “oppression” and sub- ordination to men as a residuum of feudal relations, Dalla Costa and James argued that the exploitation of women has played a central function in the process of capitalist accumulation, insofar as women have been the producers and reproducers of the most essential capitalist commodity: labor-power. As Dalla Costa put it, women's unpaid labor in the home has been the pillar upon which the exploitation of the waged workers, "wage slavery," has been built, and the secret of its productivity (1972:31). Thus, the power differential between women and men in capitalist society cannot be attributed to the irrelevance of housework for capitalist accumulation — an irrelevance belied by the strict rules that have governed women's lives — nor to the survival of timeless cultural schemes. Rather, it should be interpreted as the effect of a social system of production that does not recognize the production and reproduction of the worker as social-economic activity, and a source of capital accumulation, but mystifies it instead as a natural resource or a personal service, while profiting from the wageless condition of the labor involved. By rooting the exploitation of women in capitalist society in the sexual division of labor and women's unpaid work, Dalla Costa and James showed the possibility of transcending the dichotomy between patriarchy and class, and gave patriarchy a specific historical content. They also opened the way for a reinterpretation of the history of capitalism and class struggle from a feminist viewpoint. It was in this spirit that Leopoldina Fortunati and I began to study what can only be euphemistically described as the "transition to capitalism," and began to search for a history that we had not been taught in school, but proved to be decisive for our education. This history not only offered a theoretical understanding of the genesis of house- work in its main structural components: the separation of production from reproduction, the specifically capitalist use of the wage to command the labor of the unwaged, and the devaluation of women's social position with the advent of capitalism. It also provided a genealogy of the modern concepts of femininity and masculinity that challenged the postmodern assumption of an almost ontological predisposition in "Western Culture" to capture gender through binary oppositions. Sexual hierarchies, we found, are always at the service of a project of domination that can sustain itself only by dividing, on a continuously renewed basis, those it intends to rule. Fiscal redistribution within the existing economic structure does not allow for radical questioning of the social order necessary to destroy capitalism Azmanova, 20—Professor of Political and Social Science, University of Kent, Brussels School of International Studies (Albena, “Precarity Capitalism,” Capitalism on Edge: How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change Without Crisis or Utopia, Chapter 5, pp. 131-134, dml) It is not simply the alliance of center-left and center-right party elites and the electorates that propel them to public office who are the culprits for imposing “socially irresponsible rule.” The radical Left and the Far Right have done their share in contracting the space of political contestation. Calls against inequality (from the left) and for safeguarding societies from troublesome incomers (from the right) share a particular logic: they help to politicize the social evils that globally integrated capitalism incurs in the terms of distribution of membership within a given social order. This prevents questioning the social order within which equality and inclusion are being sought. When social harm is thematized in terms of inclusion and equality, it misrepresents instances of what I labeled as systemic injustice in chapter 2 as relational injustice instead. In other words, problems of the model of well-being generated by the sociopolitical system are translated as problems of one’s place or inclu- sion within it. This invites remedial policies of redistribution or inclusion/exclusion rather than radically altering the rules of the game. The most disturbing example of the fallacious politiciza- tion of otherwise valid social grievances is the recourse to xeno- phobia, where political actors have used the most easily available language of political mobilization—that of hatred—to cash in on social discontent. With the exception of environmental protest, which does indeed target the overall logic of capital accumulation (the way goods are produced, distributed and consumed), the shared myo- pia across forms of social protest and intellectual critique involves focusing attention on instances of injustice rooted in the asymmetrical distribution of economic, political, or symbolic power among actors, a practice engendering inequalities and exclusion. The logical solution, then, is to equalize power relations through redistribution and inclusion, rather than alter the very logic of social reproduction. This inability to question the political economy of capitalism and the democratic framework of politics in terms other than distribution and inclusion persists. It is well illustrated by the Occupy movement and what are now con- sidered radical calls for justice, such as “We Are the 99 Percent” and “Tax the Rich.” While anger is rightly and poignantly mobilized against the uneven distribution of advantage in our societies, it leaves the mechanisms that produce advantage unquestioned—and the whole way of life sodden with injustice for all. The elimination of power inequalities within a system of social relations is valuable in its own right, but such efforts have tended to divert attention away from forms of domination rooted in the operative logic of the social system beyond a concern with equal- ity and inclusion within that system. This is not an unfortunate oversight that can be remedied easily. It is driven by a compelling logic: the insistence on inclusion and equality within a certain model of well-being gives that model validity and vigor. We have to value the world within which we seek inclusion and equality; the harder the struggle to achieve access and status within that world, the more we value it. In chapter 2, I referred to this conundrum as the “paradox of emancipation.” By falling into the trap of the emancipation paradox, social protest and intellectual criticism inadvertently fortify the legitimacy of capitalism, without solving the social crisis. We remain trapped in the inflammatory condition I called “crisis of the crisis.” It is in this metamorphosis of the legitimacy relationship of current-day capitalist democracies that we find the key to the two paradoxes of the missing crisis of capitalism that I laid out in chapter 1. Capitalism avoids its legitimation crisis, even as it has violated the ground rule in its legitimation matrix of corre- lating social opportunities and risks. This is the case because the legitimacy deal—not despite, but through social protests—has gradually altered to exclude a robust social safety net. Social safety, even as it remains highly desirable, is no longer among the “political deliverables”—services public authority is required to deliver. By politicizing the roots of the crisis (e.g., a political economy that produces massive precariousness) into the frames of inequality and the menace of immigration, struggles against injustice are enabling the system not only to escape a legitimation crisis, but also to successfully co-opt the emancipatory energies of protest and thus regenerate itself. The pleading cry of the young Spanish Indignados—“We are not against the system, the system is against us”—was hardly a call for a revolution. Patriarchy preceded capitalism and continues to influence it – as long as patriarchy remains intact capitalistic accumulation will continue, making interrogating patriarchy a prerequisite to deconstructing capitalism Suliman 19– Nadine Suliman is a professor in Enviornmental Sociology at the University of Alberta. Societies 9 February 2019 “The Intertwining Relationship between Power and Patriarchy: Examples from Resource Extractive Industries” https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/9/1/14 (DOA 15 July 2023)/MCN 1.2. What Is Patriarchy? The patriarchal system is said to date back to before capitalism, where men dominated women and children within the family [13]. Patriarchy is commonly referred to as a structure or a system that governs social relations pertaining to binary genders within societies [14–16]. The main attribute of patriarchal social structures is the domination, oppression and exploitation of women by men [14,16,17]. It is worth noting that these generalized definitions of patriarchy do not adequately explain or address the obscurities and complexities of the term and its application in the social world, historically and currently, which are believed to be some of the reasons behind the sustainability of patriarchy over time [17,18]. It is imperative to fully understand and deconstruct all the elements of patriarchy and the male domination of all other genders, nature and property1 if we are to structurally and operationally dismantle it in the pursuit of equality [17,18]. Reasons behind its infiltration across cultures worldwide are not explicitly agreed upon, yet it is loosely attributed to colonization and the invasion of unclaimed/underprivileged territories [17]. Perhaps attempting to uncover patriarchal relations in the modern day, as discussed in this paper, will shed more light on its emergence and potentially poses a consequent step to this paper. It is perhaps striking, yet not so striking at the same time, that narratives on patriarchy persist in the literature where the same problems that existed decades ago, if not longer, are still discussed up to this day, with little to no progress on transforming the situation for the better or addressing the inequalities within the seemingly endless patriarchal system of this world [16,17,19]. Walby [16] (p. 214) discusses the operationalization of the concept of patriarchy; she states that “patriarchy is composed of six structures: the patriarchal mode of production, patriarchal relations in paid work, patriarchal relations in the state, male violence, patriarchal relations in sexuality, and patriarchal relations in cultural institutions, such as religion, the media and education”. Patriarchy is not derived from capitalism, although these six structures relate to it; it both pre-dates and post-dates capitalism [13,16]. Drastic changes undergone by patriarchy in the wake of capitalism are well acknowledged and do not alter the main argument of this paper, but they do provide a modern lens to be used for analyzing patriarchy relative to capitalism and, in particular, resource extractive industries that may have intensified the six structures mentioned above [16,17]. It is worth noting that this paper takes into consideration discrepancies regarding the definition of patriarchy. It is acknowledged that oppression against women is not seen as equal and experiences of women within patriarchal relations differ greatly across the globe and more specifically within extractive industries. Furthermore, domination of men by other men is also taken into consideration [16,20]. Arguably, one of the main premises of patriarchy was the confinement of women to the home due to the “mothering” claims and biological child bearing, which meant that men were obliged to fulfill the role of paid labor outside the home [13]. Such claims were threatening to the rise of capitalism, which mandated that everyone should work for money; however, the segregation of labor and the insistence on women’s “natural” reproductive role sustained the dominant role of males. This is not to say that there were/are no communities where women and men are seen as equal and patriarchy has no existence (see [13] for examples), but such cases are now considered exceptions. Patriarchy led to the development of hierarchical labor roles, placing women at the bottom of the hierarchy, especially pertaining to wages, forcing women to rely more on men and obliging them to marry men as per the social norms associated with binary genders, perform domestic chores, and so on. Such labor hierarchy and control over resources (financial or natural), will be explored in more detail through empirical examples in order to uncover such dynamics as they play out in modern day communities. Following the main objectives and goals, this paper theoretically discusses these often-hidden links and relationships—at least as hidden from mainst
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