Capitalism Kritik - GDI 2024

Cap K Starter – GDI 2024
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1NC Shell
AI innovation is the holy grail of capital accumulation
Ricaurte 22, Associate professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico, faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University, and co-founder of the Tierra Común network, a member of the Alliance for Inclusive Algorithms and the leader of the LAC Hub of the Feminist Artificial Intelligence Research Network, FR (Paolo Ricaurte, 3-4-2022, “Artificial Intelligence and the Feminist Decolonial Imagination,” Bot Populi, https://botpopuli.net/artificial-intelligence-and-the-feminist-decolonial-imagination/, accessed: 7-27-2022)
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the holy grail of capital accumulation and socio-political control in contemporary societies. Consequently, companies and governments are rapidly adopting AI as a fundamental tool to increase productivity and efficiency. However, the deployment of AI has also shown great potential for harm, especially for racialized women, non-binary people, and groups in other vulnerable situations like platform workers, immigrants, and refugees. The AI industry is predominantly located in a few countries, which increases the wealth gap between high-income economies in the Global North that produce these technologies, and low-income countries in the Global South that consume these technologies and provide the data for the AI industry to grow. Therefore, this hegemonic industry is contributing to the deepening of systemic inequalities globally.
To respond to the growing concerns of civil society about the negative impacts of AI, large tech corporations have developed ethical frameworks to reduce the potential harm associated with the deployment of AI technologies. In general, these frameworks provide narrow technical fixes to socio-technical problems, and in many cases, are just part of a broader strategy for ethics washing. However, UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, signed by 193 states in November 2021, provides a more comprehensive approach to AI risks. The framework considers the complete AI lifecycle (design, development, deployment, use, and disposal) and pays special attention to gender equality, cultural diversity, and the environment. However, to see this or any other ethical framework materialize, we need to remember that AI is a matter of power. It is used as a geopolitical tool that allows the concentration of wealth, knowledge, and control. This power concentration generates global asymmetries that contribute to the reproduction of oppressive systems such as capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy.
In this essay, I suggest advancing the feminist and decolonial imagination to develop AI technologies under ethical frameworks that consider intersecting systems of oppression at every step of the AI lifecycle. I also provide examples of AI projects that help us imagine alternative feminist and decolonial technological futures. I conclude by offering possible interventions to build technologies aligned with the right to a dignified life for humans and other beings, and to ensure that the rights of nature are respected.
Decolonizing and Depatriarchalizing AI
Decolonial studies comprise a heterogeneous set of thoughts characterized by the epistemic domination of the rational and modern Western thought that marks the beginning of modernity and the consolidation of the capitalist system. According to the Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano, the coloniality of power is the “colonial reason” that controls material resources, bodies, territories, subjectivities, intersubjectivities, and knowledge to accomplish the colonial, modern, eurocentric project. Coloniality is the sediment of the colonial experience in contemporary times. It explains the logic that sustains the supremacy of the West. This form of dominion is asserted through the imposition of universal forms of being (social hierarchies of gender, race, class, ability, language, and other intersectionalities), knowing (positivism, rationalism, binarisms), feeling (separation of affect and cognition, subordination of emotions and affects, secularism), doing (efficiency, utility, productivity), and living (consumerism, commodification, individualism). Colonization birthed modern capitalist societies through the dispossession of territories, labor exploitation, and violence against women. Dismantling these interconnected oppressions — materialized in the coloniality of being, knowing, feeling, doing, and living that they sustain — is necessary to decolonize the current hegemonic socio-technical systems. AI reproduces dispossession through data extractivism, epistemic violence, social orders of classification, and automated impoverishment. Therefore, to achieve gender equality, social, and environmental justice, we need to decolonize and depatriachalize AI, moving it away from the circles of capitalist accumulation, and from colonial and patriarchal relations.
A feminist decolonial imagination seeks to eradicate multidimensional socio-technical violence in the interconnectedness of oppressive systems. In this endeavor, it is crucial to unveil how the AI lifecycle and its associated social processes operate cognitively, emotionally, and pragmatically to construct worldviews and ways of relating and conceiving social existence. For example, AI technologies, particularly machine learning (ML) models, are used to decide who will be more inclined to commit a crime, who fits better to get financial aid or a job, what languages and whose knowledge is elevated, etc. Due to the biases incorporated in data and algorithmic models, and the punitive use of these technologies, the results of the deployment of intelligent systems in society are often discriminatory against women, non-binary people, immigrants, low-income groups, non-white populations, and non-English speakers. For example, the US Department of Homeland Security relies heavily on cloud services, surveillance technology, and predictive analytics to keep immigrants under check. This way, these technologies are deployed to deepen social asymmetries and knowledge gaps. Therefore, the questions that need to be asked are: Who collects and uses whose data? How is this done? Why is data collected? Who designs the algorithms and for whom? Who is benefiting from the deployment of ML models? What purposes does automation serve? What notions of gender, race, class, and justice are reinforced? What narratives, visions of the world, and imaginaries of the future are promoted and at what cost?
The effects of AI are visible in the configuration of multiple relationships at the micro, meso, and macro levels. On the one hand, at the micro level, our personal, social, cultural, and political relationships are algorithmically mediated. For example, there is evidence of digital interactions on social media negatively impacting the mental health of teen girls. Similarly, the commercialization of data implies a privacy risk, because our digital traces can be linked with our identities and used to influence our behaviors. At the meso level, algorithmically-enabled misinformation has a differentiated impact on minorities. Simultaneously, at the macro level, algorithmic manipulation has endangered Global South democracies by fueling extremism and polarization. Human-machine interactions also redefine the conception of what it means to be human, the limits and possibilities of human agency, and the power of algorithms in our lives. Additionally, new questions emerge with the advancement of Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G technologies, which foster ubiquitous communication between machines, and lead to the permanent surveillance of human life. As a result of capitalist, colonialist, and patriarchal systems of dispossession and exploitation, AI material production is dissociated from its effects on racialized women’s bodies and the territories they inhabit. Marginalized women and girls in the Global South are fundamental agents in the global supply chains that enable technological development. The territories they inhabit provide the natural resources required to produce technology. Women’s labor is fundamental to the digital economy. However, women and girls, especially from Southern countries are excluded from the circles of privilege that determine the direction of global AI governance, design, or audits. Despite this reality, when deployed, AI systems disproportionately affect Global South communities and territories, deepening the economic, socio-cultural, and knowledge inequalities between regions.
Capitalism drives extinction and structural violence.
Allinson et al 21 (Jamie, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Edinburgh University and author of The Age of Counter-revolution. China Miéville is the author of a number of highly acclaimed and prize-winning novels including October: The History of the Russian Revolution. Richard Seymour is the author of numerous works of non-fiction, His writing appears in the New York Times, London Review of Books, Guardian, Prospect, Jacobin. Rosie Warren is an Editor at Verso and the Editor-in-Chief of Salvage. All are writing for the Salvage Collective. “The Tragedy of the Worker: Toward the Proletarocene.” Introduction.
This is the question that vexed us as we set out to write The Tragedy of the Worker. From the vantage point of the present, the history of capitalist development is, as Marx expected, the history of the development of a global working class, the proletarianisation of the majority of the world’s population. But the very same process of that development has brought us to the precipice of climate disaster. Our position, to recall Trotsky’s rationalisation of War Communism in 1920, is in the highest degree tragic.
It is now clear that we will pass what scientists have long warned will be a tipping point of global warming, accelerating the already catastrophic consequences of capitalist emissions. How do we imagine emancipation on an at best partially habitable planet? Where once communists imagined seizing the means of production, taking the unprecedented capacities of capitalist infrastructures and using them to build a world of plenty, what must we imagine after the apocalypse has befallen us? What does it mean that as capitalism has become truly global, the gravediggers it has created dig not only capitalism’s grave, but also that of much organic life on earth?
Our answers to these questions remain rooted in the politics of revolutionary communism. Our stance is not based on the fantasy of a homeostatic nature that must be defended but on the critique of the capitalist metabolism – the Stoffwechsel- that must be overthrown. Earth scientists are accustomed to speak in terms of ‘cycles’ by which substances circulate in different forms: the water cycle, the rock cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the glacial-interglacial cycle, the carbon cycle, and others. One way of registering the catastrophe of climate change is to see these cycles – most of all, but not solely, the carbon cycle – as disordered, under- or over-accumulating. But this is to ignore the more fundamental circuit of which these now form epicycles, like Ptolemy’s sub-orbits of the heavenly bodies: the circuit of capital accumulation, M-C-M′.
This circuit accumulates profit and produces death. Neither is accidental. It is for this reason that the debates that capitalist ruling classes permit among themselves on ‘adaptation’ versus ‘mitigation’ take place on false premises. What is to be mitigated is the impact of climate change on accumulation, rendered through the ideology of ‘growth’ as something that benefits everyone. What we are to adapt to are the parameters of accumulation, sacrificing just enough islands, eco-systems, indigenous – and non-indigenous – cultures to maintain its imperatives for a period of time until new thresholds must be crossed, and new life sacrificed to the pagan idol of capital. Already, capitalist petro-modernity builds a certain quantum of acceptable death into its predicates: at the very least, the 8.7 million killed by fossil fuels each year according to Harvard University are considered a price worth paying for the stupendous advantages of fossil capital. And the sky can only keep going up, as deforestation, polar melt, ocean acidification, soil de-fertilisation and more intense wildfires and storms tear the web of life into patches. If the necropolitical calculus of the Covid-19 pandemic appears crass, just wait until its premises are applied to climate catastrophe.
Vote negative to reject the aff - Political reforms like the plan can’t solve crisis because they uphold capitalist institutions and practices. There is no escaping the logic of either/or: either the society of associated producers reacquires decision-making power from the capitalist state, or capitalism causes extinction.
Mészáros 8 (Istvan, Emeritus professor at University of Sussex, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time, p. 323-328, GAL)
The unreality of postulating the sustainable solution of the grave problems of our social order within the formal and legal framework and corresponding constraints of parliamentary politics arises from the fundamental misconception of the structural determinations of capital’s rule, as represented in all varieties that assert the dualism of civil society and the political state. The difficulty, insurmountable within the parliamentary framework, is this that since capital is actually in control of all vital aspects of the social metabolism, it can afford to define the separately constituted sphere of political legitimation as a strictly formal and legal matter, thereby necessarily excluding the possibility of being legitimately challenged in its substantive sphere of socioeconomic reproductive operation. Directly or indirectly, capital controls everything, including the parliamentary legislative process, even if the latter is supposed to be fully independent from capital in many theories that fictitiously hypostatize the “democratic equality” of all political forces participating in the legislative process. To envisage a very different relationship to the powers of decision making in our societies, now completely dominated by the forces of capital in every domain, it is necessary to radically challenge capital itself as the overall controller of social metabolic reproduction.
What makes this problem worse for all those who are looking for significant change on the margins of the established political system is that the latter can claim for itself genuine constitutional legitimacy in its present mode of functioning, based on the historically constituted inversion of the actual state of the material reproductive affairs. For inasmuch as the capitalist is not only the “personification of capital” but simultaneously functions also “as the personification of the social character of labor, of the total workshop as such,”53 the system can claim to represent the vitally necessary productive power of society vis-à-vis the individuals as the basis of their continued existence, incorporating the interest of all. In this way capital asserts itself not only as the defacto but also as the dejure power of society, in its capacity as the objectively given necessary condition of societal reproduction, and thereby as the constitutional foundation to its own political order. The fact that the constitutional legitimacy of capital is historically founded on the ruthless expropriation of the conditions of social metabolic reproduction—the means and material of labor—from the producers, and therefore capital’s claimed “constitutionality” (like the origin of all constitutions) is unconstitutional, is an unpalatable truth which fades away in the mist of a remote past. The “social productive powers of labor, or productive powers of social labor, first develop historically with the specifically capitalist mode of production, hence appear as something immanent in the capital-relation and inseparable from it.”54
This is how capital’s mode of social metabolic reproduction becomes eternalized and legitimated as a lawfully unchallengeable system. Legitimate contest is admissible only in relation to some minor aspects of the unalterable overall structure. The real state of affairs on the plane of socioeconomic reproduction—i.e., the actually exercised productive power of labor and its absolute necessity for securing capital’s own reproduction— disappears from sight. Partly because of the ignorance of the very far from legitimate historical origin of capital’s “primitive accumulation” and the concomitant, frequently violent, expropriation of property as the precondition of the system’s present mode of functioning; and partly because of the mystifying nature of the established productive and distributive relations. As Marx notes:
The objective conditions of labor do not appear as subsumed under the worker; rather, he appears as subsumed under them. Capital employs Labor. Even this relation in its simplicity is a personification of things and a reification of persons.55
None of this can be challenged and remedied within the framework of parliamentary political reform. It would be quite absurd to expect the abolition of the “personification of things and the reification of persons” by political decree, and just as absurd to expect the proclamation of such an intended reform within the framework of capital’s political institutions. For the capital system cannot function without the perverse overturning of the relationship between persons and things: capital’s alienated and reified powers dominate the masses of the people. Similarly, it would be a miracle if the workers who confront capital in the labor process as “isolated workers” could reacquire mastery over the social productive powers of their labor by some political decree, or even by a whole series of parliamentary reforms enacted under capital’s order of social metabolic control. For in these matters there can be no way of avoiding the irreconcilable conflict over the material stakes of “either/or.”
Capital can neither abdicate its— usurped— social productive powers in favor of labor, nor can it share them with labor, thanks to some wishful but utterly fictitious “political compromise.” For they constitute the overall controlling power of societal reproduction in the form of “the rule of wealth over society.” Thus it is impossible to escape, in the domain of the fundamental social metabolism, the severe logic of either/or. For either wealth, in the shape of capital, continues to rule over human society, taking it to the brink of self-destruction, or the society of associated producers learns to rule over alienated and reified wealth, with productive powers arising from the self-determined social labor of its individual—but no longer isolated—members.
Capital is the extra-parliamentary force par excellence. It cannot possibly be politically constrained by parliament in its power of social metabolic control. This is why the only mode of political representation compatible with capital’s mode of functioning is one that effectively denies the possibility of contesting its material power. And precisely because capital is the extra-parliamentary force par excellence, it has nothing to fear from the reforms that can be enacted within its parliamentary political framework.
Since the vital issue on which everything else hinges is that “the objective conditions of labor do not appear as subsumed under the worker” but, on the contrary, “he appears as subsumed under them,” no meaningful change is feasible without addressing this issue both in a form of politics capable of matching capital’s extra-parliamentary powers and modes of action, and in the domain of material reproduc­ tion. Thus, the only challenge that could affect the power of capital, in a sustainable manner, is 

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