Aff - MAGA 1AC - Michigan 7 2023 KLAB

Everyone stand for the flag
Our country
Our nation is under attack
Everywhere our beautiful system is under attack
We have controlled and built our nation through rightful labor and wages
But they keep rising up- the left is trying to kill our way of life THIS IS HOW THEY THINK
Fraser, 22—Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science at The New School (Nancy, interviewed by Nancy Steinert, “Contesting Cannibal Capitalism,” https://zeitschrift-luxemburg.de/artikel/contesting-cannibal-capitalism/, dml)
Living under the terrible pressure of this acute general crisis, many people are defecting from the prevailing common sense that previously more or less held things together. They no longer believe that free markets are the solution to their problems, that governments need only “remove all the red tape” and let the market do its magic. They are turning away from entrenched elites and mainstream political parties.
This adds a new dimension to the crisis, which now includes what Antonio Gramsci called a “crisis of hegemony”. People are looking for new, out-of-the-box solutions. On the one hand, this represents an opening for emancipatory left-wing projects, but it also has a dark side: many gravitate to authoritarian strong men who engage in vicious scapegoating of minorities. Every country has its own version of this, be it the alt-right white supremacy movement in the United States or the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany.
But there are also more progressive answers, aren’t there?
Yes, we can also see a lot of left-wing energy: proliferating protests, attempts to form new parties, and a growing hunger for emancipatory engagement. But so far all this activism remains dispersed and fragmented — it doesn’t rise to the level of a counterhegemony, let alone converge on a shared project.
One reason is that capitalism in general, and our capitalism in particular, present an enormous complexity of life conditions. Not everyone experiences the crisis in the same way. There’s a lot to protest and movements often grab the one aspect that they perceive as especially pressing. For some, this is police shootings. For others, it’s low wages or precarious work. For still others, it’s rising sea levels, extreme heat, and wildfires or the unavailability of high-quality affordable childcare.
In other words, people are in motion in many places around many issues. All of these are real issues. Efforts to solve them through democratic collective action are not only rational but can lead to more expansive solidarities and to broader, more radical projects. For that to happen, however, it’s necessary to for people to connect the dots — to see that all the various problems generating dispersed protest are grounded in one and the same social system: namely, the especially predatory, cannibalistic present form of capitalism. We need to make visible the connections between different struggles that are too often obscured.
How can we overcome the obscuring of these connections ? What kinds of demands and framings could bring people together instead?
I think the first step — and I’m now speaking both as a critical theorist and as an activist — is to disclose the interconnections of these phenomena. To give people a map that connects the dots, enabling protests movements to locate themselves in relation to others, to find potential allies and eventually join forces. I don’t mean this in a Leninist sense — it’s not about subordinating some supposedly “secondary” issues to allegedly more important ones. It’s rather about reformulating one’s claims in ways that open the door to cooperation and encourage broader projects.
Through this type of process, it might be possible to win over at least some, maybe even many, people who now gravitate to right-wing populism. I don’t mean the committed authoritarians or “principled” racists — they are unreachable and not worth the breath. But they don’t exhaust the populist ranks. There are also lots of people who haven’t been exposed to credible left alternatives, and absent such exposure, when there’s no one offering a good class-line that speaks to them, they end up voting for right-wing parties. We should change that by offering them something better.
Is it our task as socialists to show those looking for connections the bigger picture?
Absolutely. Look, whether it’s the Trumpists in the US or the AfD in Germany, these guys have a narrative. Of course, their narrative does not embrace everybody — on the contrary, it embraces some precisely buy excluding others. Unfortunately, a lot of people find it quite convincing.
What we need is something that can compete effectively with that — that can be even more powerful and convincing. Progressive neoliberalism (with its stress on breaking glass ceilings and “putting black faces in high places”) is not the answer. Everybody can see that it’s a failure. With this in disrepute, there’s an opening for developing forms of feminism, anti-racism, eco-politics, and democratic politics that are oriented to an expanded understanding of the working class and pivotal change.
What would a viable left alternative that could make a difference look like?
We need an alliance of feminist, anti-racist, pro-democracy, environmental, and labour movements. Such an alliance could be powerful if each of the participating groups saw its specific problems as stemming from the same perverse social system as the others’, and converged on the aim of transforming that system.
This doesn’t require that they merge their differences in some abstract universalism. On the contrary, each element of the coalition can and should maintain and develop its specific political identity, while sharing a diagnosis of the status quo.
The concept of “intersectionality” aims to capture this sort of practice, insofar as it points to multiple problems that intersect yet share a common cause. When it comes to change and transformation, however, intersectionality might not suffice. What we rather need is a stronger sense of solidarity, something we can share.
Does this also imply a new understanding of the revolutionary subject of today — the working class?
Yes, that’s exactly what I was just hinting at. We need to turn away from the traditional understanding of the working class, which focused on free proletarians who perform industrialized labour in return for a wage. Certainly, that’s an important face of capitalist labour, but not the whole story.
Capitalism also depends on unfree or dependent workers, whose labour is expropriated, as opposed to exploited, and who are racialized and constructed as violable. These workers, too, belong to the working class, as does another major group of capitalism’s workers: those gendered care workers, unpaid or underpaid, on whom capital also free-rides.
Both racialized sub-work and gendered care work are essential to capital accumulation. Without them, there could be no exploited workers, no raw materials, no commodity production, surplus value, or capital. So, capitalism relies on not one, but three different faces of labour, functionally interconnected in one and the same social system, and these faces of labour are transforming today.
Much traditional manufacturing work has been offshored to semi-peripheral regions, where labour rights are weak and unions are non-existent. Much social reproductive work now takes the form of low-wage service work, performed in public institutions and for-profit firms by deportable migrants, with no secure residency rights. In both cases, the labour is “semi-free”, as the workers lack actionable rights and political protections.
The conclusion I draw is that we need to develop an enlarged view of the “working class”, one that encompasses all three faces of capitalist labour in their mutual intersections. Such a view could provide the basis for an enlarged coalition, one with the political heft and breadth of vision to become an emancipatory counterhegemonic bloc.
How exactly can movements make use of this concept and why is it crucial for their success today?
Every movement, whatever its focus, should be class-sensitive in the expanded sense I just outlined. Feminism, for example, should become a “feminism of the 99%”, as opposed to the corporate feminism aimed at “cracking the glass ceiling”. Likewise, eco-politics should become trans-environmental, linked to other emancipatory claims and struggles — single-issue versions are really “environmentalisms of the rich.” Labour movements must incorporate both “#MeToo” claims for a workplace free of harassment and assault and the claims of sub-workers and care workers.
These are only two examples for what is needed in constructing a counter-hegemonic block. The climate-labour turn is another great example. Looking at two sectors from a mutually connecting perspective has helped to overcome this deeply mistaken idea of ecology being a single-issue movement or something that pertains only to those in relatively secure situations.
By connecting labour struggles with social reproduction, ecology, and democracy, we gain the chance to attract a broad popular base. A Left that implements this sort of strategy has the chance could give the other forces in play a real run for their money. It could go toe-to-toe with right-wing populists, on the one hand, and corporate liberals, on the other.
Many people have been mobilized by the idea that “another world is possible”. This appears somewhat diminished in the face of the urgency of the climate crisis.
Of course, the timeframe of the ecological crisis requires major forms of transformative action. Some might become passive and discouraged by the fact that there’s not much time, but we’re also seeing a real sense of urgency, and a lot of energy, trying to rise to the occasion.
I’m heartened by the amount of engagement and the rise of new generations of young activists. In some respect, this reminds me of the late 1960s when I became a radical left activist. Nowadays, as a professor, I’m encountering tremendous demand among students who want to learn about eco-Marxism and socialism — subjects that weren’t particularly popular in previous decades.
So you see reason to be optimistic about the future?
What I see is an enormous interest in making connections. We’re past the moment in which young radicals were focused on constituting a separate voice. People now feel that the urgency not to separate but to connect. The popularity of intersectionality, eco-Marxism, and social-reproduction feminism are symptoms of that desire for connection. I see a lot of creativity and energy among those who trying to develop new radical frameworks that can make these connections. It’s a good time to be an intellectual.
"There are no great limits to growth because there are no limits of human intelligence, imagination, and wonder."
-Ronald Reagan
Linus Blomqvist 18, visiting researcher at the University of Tasmania where he is part of a team studying drivers of agricultural expansion and forecasting future land-use change, MESc from Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, where he specialized in environmental economics, and a BA in Geography from Cambridge University, 04/04/18, “Decoupling or Degrowth? Why "Peak Stuff" May Not Be As Dire As You’ve Heard,” https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/conservation/is-decoupling-doomed
Does humanity’s growing use of materials mean that decoupling is impossible? In a word, no, and attempts to reduce all resource and environmental problems to our material footprint won’t help us solve problems of resource scarcity or environmental impacts. In a recent article for Fast Company, the University of London’s Jason Hickel claims that humanity can only consume 50 billion tons of “stuff” each year (compared to current consumption levels at about 80 billion tons). And according to several papers that Hickel cites, that can’t be achieved in the foreseeable future, given growing populations and economies. The only solution, according to Hickel, is to ditch our addiction to GDP growth. Hickel is challenging the concept of “green growth,” which he describes as “absolute decoupling of GDP from material use.” But before talking about evidence for or against decoupling, it's important to ask: decoupling of what? Broadly, there are two reasons to worry about consumption: running out of materials (like fossil fuels) and environmental impacts (like pollution or habitat loss). These often get conflated in unhelpful ways. What Hickel refers to when he talks about decoupling is material flows, which are dominated by things like fossil fuels, metal ores, construction minerals, biomass, and the like. Lumping different material flows together can be misleading, in that it groups together resources that are being used sustainably with those that aren’t, and/or resources that cause big environmental impacts with those that cause smaller environmental impacts. So let’s look at the materials at play here. For several of the materials with the biggest footprint in terms of volume (construction minerals, metal ores, etc.), the problem isn’t really that we're at risk of running out of stuff. Construction minerals account for a large portion of global material flows, but those are resources like stone — last time I checked, we weren't approaching peak stone. (Cue joke about the end of the Stone Age.) We could have a perfectly sustainable civilization without absolutely decoupling from stone for a long time. The 50 billion tons limit is completely arbitrary — it was based on material consumption in the year 2000 — and shouldn’t be taken as the dividing line between sustainability and environmental doom. What about environmental impacts? Here, too, aggregate resource consumption can give a misleading picture. Some of the big items in material flows (again, like construction minerals) account for a pretty small portion of environmental impacts like greenhouse emissions or land use. For biomass, we've managed to increase production and thus mass flows a lot using the same amount of land, so the impacts haven't gone up in proportion to the mass flows. When we look at the actual impacts — like greenhouse emissions, habitat loss, pollution of air and water, and so on — we're seeing some positive trends, and in fact some instances of absolute decoupling. Emissions of several pollutants (like sulfur dioxide) have peaked and declined globally, although they are still going up in some developing nations; nitrogen oxides and nitrous oxide emissions are flat globally. Total farmland area (the most important driver of biodiversity and habitat loss and an important driver of carbon emissions) has peaked, although it's plausible that it will go up again. Water extraction peaked several decades ago in the United States, in spite of increasing industrial and agricultural output. Greenhouse emissions have not peaked globally, and may continue to go up for a while, making carbon emissions perhaps the least decoupled and most concerning of all trends. Even relative decoupling has come to a halt as coal-heavy China accounts for an increasing share of global emissions. As Breakthrough has written about for a long time now, we are still a long way from scalable food and energy systems that run without fossil fuels. But here, too, the most pragmatic solutions involve accelerating technological substitution of clean energy for dirty energy — the same general process of decoupling that has driven progress in other resources. Some or most of these trends may be moving too slowly for Hickel and other observers, and indeed, where acceleration is possible, that should be both the technological and policy goal. But aggregate human consumption of resources doesn’t tell us much of interest about either resource sustainability or environmental impacts. To get at those problems, we need to look at things resource by resource, pollutant by pollutant. And when we do that, we see some significant progress, along with some still-worrying trends. Above all, though, we know that as societies develop, food and energy production gets more resource-efficient, economic growth slows down, and fertility rates decline. All of these trends still imply large environmental impacts in the future. But while intentional economic degrowth or hard limits on resource use seem far-fetched, absolute decoupling of the things that matter — environmental impacts — is still a very real possibility.
Capitalist accumulation is sustainable, causes hope and planetary prosperity.
Robinson, 23—Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Global and International Studies, and Latin American Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara (William, “The Violent Crackup of the Post-WWII International Order: Notes on the Geopolitical Crisis and Global Capital,” Journal of World-Systems Research, Vol. 29, No. 1, dml)
Some scholars have framed the crisis of global capitalism in terms of a declining U.S. hegemony and the rise of a Chinese competitor. But no new nation-state power can supply the political authority necessary to stabilize the now-inextricably integrated global economy. The crisis of hegemony in the international system takes place within this single, integrated global economy. No one state, no matter how powerful, can control the process of global accumulation. This disjuncture between a globalized economy and a nation-state-based system of political authority generates enormous geopolitical tensions. The end of Western domination of world capitalism is upon us as the center of gravity of the global economy shifts to China. But China will not become a new hegemon. Rather, we are moving towards political multipolarity at a time of acute crisis in global capitalism—prolonged economic turbulence and political decay.
The breakdown of the political organization of world capitalism is not the cause but the consequence of contradictions internal to a globally integrated system of capital accumulation. Escalating geopolitical conflict is pushing us towards global conflagration. Wars provide enormous outlet for surplus accumulated capital. Historically they have pulled the capitalist system out of accumulation crisis while they serve to deflect attention from political tensions and problems of legitimacy. The most urgent task at this time is to prevent World War III. The more we understand the changing nature of this beast that is global capitalism, the better we are situated to work out strategies of resistance and transformation. The task before us is ever more urgent in the face of the threat of nuclear holocaust, the collapse of the biosphere, and ever more acute inequality, immiseration, and social disintegration around the world.
Capitalism solves disease- it is the cure for our society
Seo, 22—Professor of Environmental and Natural Resource Economics at the Muaebak Institute of Global Warming Studies (S. Niggol, “Pandemic Analysis III: The Great Reset, People’s Uprisings, and Other Radical Change Proposals,” The Economics of Pandemics: Exploring Globally Shared Experiences, Chapter 5, pp. 155-177, SpringerLink, dml)
Based on these interpretations, the advocates argue that the COVID-19 pandemic reveals that a revolutionary socialist program is the only solution to the global capitalism’s failures on the pandemic. Further, they assert that the pandemic gives the impetus to the ongoing deeply rooted class struggle between the ruling class and the working class while it necessitates a fundamental social change toward a Marxist government (IMT 2020; SEPA 2020).
Henceforth, based on a rather brief review of this movement, the present author would like to outline several critiques on their proposals. The first is that they look over the fact that the most advanced capitalist economy has succeeded in producing highly effective pandemic virus vaccines in record time, in only nine months, because of the entre

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