Capitalism Kritik - Georgetown 2024

Cap K– GDS - 2024
1NC
A rigorous liberal legal framework promoting economic competition is the ONLY way neoliberalism can exist – the state serves to construct the necessary economic conditions for the market to exist and to shape our subjectivities and social relations towards those markets
Veitch 16 (Kenneth Veitch, Sussex Law School. “Law, social policy, and the neoliberal state,” Neoliberal Legality: Understanding the Role of Law in the Neoliberal Project, Edited By Honor Brabazon, 2016)
One of the myths surrounding neoliberalism is that it envisages a minimal role for the state. This myth, peddled by advocates and critics of neoliberalism alike, confuses the arguments about laissez-faire and the minimal state advanced by adherents of classical liberalism in the nineteenth century with the more nuanced views on the state propounded by theorists of neoliberalism. Of course, the goal of proponents of neoliberalism is to create a society founded upon the market – a market order – but this is not incompatible with a strong state; indeed, it demands a strong, active state to construct the necessary conditions for the establishment and maintenance of that market order. Thus, inter alia, the state must create markets where they do not already exist and ensure their continued operation; guarantee property rights; and ensure the absence of monopolies. But it needs to do more than this to ensure that societies function on the basis of markets. The state must also shape social relations accordingly and construct a specific worldview that enables the market to define the manner in which societies operate in practice. As Loïc Wacquant has noted: ‘[W]hat is “neo” about neoliberalism [is] the reengineering and redeployment of the state as the core agency that sets the rules and fabricates the subjectivities, social relations and collective representations suited to realising markets’.2 Wacquant’s analysis of neoliberalism is helpful for two reasons. First, in emphasising the importance of the state, he identifies neoliberalism as a political, as opposed to an economic, project. In other words, while the establishment of a market order is the goal of neoliberalism, this is accomplished through politics, rather than the product of neoclassical economics. Second, he points to the need to develop ‘a “thick” sociological conception’ of neoliberalism that identifies both the institutional means deployed by the state to establish, maintain, and impose the market order on society, and the types of consequences this has for citizenship. For Wacquant, those institutional means are not confined to the rules of the marketplace, but also include the criminal justice system – especially the prison, the ‘disciplinary’ social policy of workfare, and the ‘trope of individual responsibility’. Whether or not one agrees with the relevance of the particular institutional means or ‘logics’ he identifies, this manner of conceptualising neoliberalism and what he calls the crafting of the neoliberal state succeeds in highlighting the importance of concrete state institutional mechanisms in shaping the material components of those phenomena (e.g. the construction of new markets) and their symbolic components (‘the capacity that the state has to trace salient social demarcations and produce social reality through its work of inculcation of efficient categories and classifications’3 ). If we wish to understand market societies, we need to attend to the different ways and means through which the state constructs these. How does law fit within this analysis of neoliberalism and the crafting of the neoliberal state? While Wacquant himself includes (presumably the criminal) courts as part of the penal wing of the neoliberal state that he explores in his recent work, there is little discussion of the role that these, or law and legal categories more generally, play in neoliberalism and the construction of the neoliberal state. And yet for the pioneers of neoliberalism law was to play a foundational role in the development and implementation of the neoliberal vision. Two dimensions of this can be identified. First, for neoliberals, markets are creatures of law. Their existence demands, and depends on, the presence of a legal framework suited to this end. In Marxist terms, though contrary to traditional Marxist teachings, law, in this vision, is not a part of the superstructure determined by the economic base; rather, law is an inherent aspect of the base – law founds the market order, rather than being determined by it. This has consequences for common assumptions surrounding the nature of economic entities and their regulation. Thus, the property bought and sold on the market, the contracts through which the sale and purchase are made, and the companies involved in selling and buying the property are all, in the first instance, legal entities, rather than, as is commonly assumed, objects that exist outside of the law and are only subsequently regulated, or not, by the law. As Walter Lippmann, whose eponymous Colloquium is often cited as constituting the beginnings of neoliberalism, wrote: Only by recognizing that legal rights are declared and enforced by the state is it possible to make a rational examination of the value of any particular legal right. The latter-day liberals did not see this. They fell into a deep and confusing error when they failed to see that property, contracts, corporations, as well as governments, electorates, and courts, are creatures of law, and have no existence except as bundles of enforceable rights and duties.4 Second, for neoliberals law must take the form of a set of formal abstract general rules that apply equally to everyone’s conduct. This is necessary because the market order is based on the idea that individuals are free to pursue their different objectives via the market. The alternative – social law – defeats this purpose as it involves the creation of rules designed to further a particular, predetermined end such as the redistribution of wealth between classes. Here, law would prescribe individual conduct rather than respect liberty of action. The market order, then, is what Hayek refers to as a nomocracy (governed by law), as opposed to a teleocracy (governed by an end or ends). It is what he called a ‘private law society’ where the formal abstract general rules – the ‘rules of just conduct’ – that constitute the market order are synonymous with ‘the essential content of all contemporary systems of private law, [“]freedom of contract, the inviolability of property, and the duty to compensate for damage due to his fault[”]’.5 In his influential book The Road to Serfdom, Hayek was already setting out this vision of law in the course of his argument that competition – the defining norm of neoliberalism and what Hayek called ‘the principle of social organisation’ – required a rigorous legal framework for its successful and beneficial operation. It was a crucial part of what he endorsed as the state’s ‘planning for competition’, as opposed to ‘planning against competition’, which involved the ‘central direction of all economic activity according to a single plan, laying down how the resources of society should be “consciously directed” to serve particular ends in a definite way’.6
Global capitalism is unsustainable, causing extinction.
Martin '18 [Glen; 9/8/18; President of the World Constitution and Parliament Association, founder of the Radford University program in Peace Studies, Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Radford University in Virginia, PhD in Philosophy from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; "Human Beings Face Extinction: We Need to Act Now," https://dwfed.org/2018/09/human-beings-face-extinction-we-need-to-act-now]
The global climate is unraveling at rates far beyond the predictions of scientists. The studies are so common by this date, and the scientific evidence so pervasive going back at least half a century, that there is no need to cite sources about this fact. The oceans are dying, the fisheries are becoming exhausted. The forests are dying. They are devastated through human overuse, logging, wildfires, acid rain, and rapidly changing climate conditions.
Agricultural lands are drying up and losing productivity, the land, water, and air are polluted. Artificial human-made chemical compounds are found in the tissues of every living creature on Earth, with unknown synergistic effects. The oceans are rising, displacing millions of coastal dwellers and submerging prime agricultural lands.
The habitats for animals and life in general are disappearing, and many species go extinct daily. The polar caps are melting, irrevocably altering the planet’s climate. Rainfall is irregular, with periodic droughts alternating with devastating floods. ….
At the same time, the global human population unsustainability continues to increase. … …Noam Chomsky declares: “Survival of Organized Human Life Is at Risk Due to Climate Change and Nuclear Weapons.”
UN CHARTER’S UNTOUCHABLE SACRED COW PREVENTS GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP
Meanwhile, the nations of the world focus on “sovereignty,” militarism, national independence, trade wars, and unsustainable capitalist development. “Sovereign independence” is written into the UN charter in multiple ways and continues to function as an untouchable sacred cow, preventing the development of global citizenship everywhere on Earth. Each nation inculcates loyalty into its citizens and criminalizes any non-government sponsored relationships with foreign officials, which they label “disloyalty” and “treason.” Trillions of dollars are poured down the toilet of militarism that are needed to protect and restore the planetary environment.
FEW PEOPLE SEEM TO CARE
Nuclear weapons are refined and made “combat ready,” and countries like North Korea correctly understand that without the nuclear deterrent, they would suffer the same destruction as Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya. For the imperial system led by the U.S. and its NATO allies continues to work for a global hegemony to counter the growing influence of Russia and China, politically and economically, without concern for human rights, dignity, or the welfare and livelihood of many millions who appear of less worthiness to live because they are “not us.” Books such as Nuclear Madness by Helen Caldicott or The Doomsday Machine by Daniel Ellsberg regularly appear detailing the many times that the near use of these weapons has brought humanity close to extinction, but few seem to care. Our fragmentation, hate, fear, and need for “enemies” is so much greater than our desire for a future for our children or the planet.
SHOCK ALERT: IT’S A WAR SYSTEM, STUPID!
Our planetary system is inherently a war system requiring enemies and producing vast profits for the industries that supply and encourage this system. As climate and military disasters around the world increase so do the profits of the system of “disaster capitalism” described by Naomi Klein in her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine the Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Meanwhile the big banks and masters of the global monetary systems continue to dominate unsustainable global economics, running the world as a debt system from which they derive not only vast profits but vast political power, as Ellen Brown showed in detail in her 2007 book The Web of Debt.
IS THE RULING CLASS “INSANE” OR SIMPLY CRIMINAL?
A Google search reveals a number of articles by different authors who have declared that the ruling class is “insane.” Indeed, if bringing the entire planet to ruin in the service of ones personal greed for wealth and power is insane, then this label is appropriate, although I prefer the term “criminal,” since the majority of the ruling class of the world are simply criminals who control the mass media, the politicians, and the UN in the service of their criminal enterprises that are bringing humankind to extinction.
In the US, the majority of both Democrats and Republicans in the Washington, DC, government are criminals in this sense, serving both themselves and the ruling class. Many so-called liberals in the US are working to remove Trump as President, and to “take back our country.” But the truth is they never had “their country.” The ruling class has always had it, and human extinction advanced perhaps just as rapidly under Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, or Barack Obama. The mass media, the war system, and the “sovereign nation” propaganda keep the people of the US asleep no matter who is president. Whomever fills that office can do little because the system itself defeats rationality, recognition of our common planetary humanity, and the changes necessary for survival.
REFUSING TO BECOME WORLD CITIZENS IS A DEATH SENTENCE
Trump is a symptom and not a cause. People refuse to actualize what Karl Marx called our species-being. They refuse to become world citizens in any real sense of this word. They cling to their sovereign borders and delude themselves that somehow extinction can be avoided if the peoples of some 193 different, militarized sovereign nations all care about the environment, recycle, and “dispose” of the trash properly. Rather than living in what I call a “boundary-less world,” they insist on their puerile boundaries and identities, even as this exacerbates the rush to total climate collapse and human extinction. To cling to a tiny, exclusive identity that divides one from others who are “not me” becomes more important than the survival of the human race.
MASS MEDIA A MAIN SOURCE FOR IMMATURE IDEOLOGIES
It has often been pointed out that the mass media keep ordinary people distracted, immature, and unable to think clearly. The mass media are designed for this purpose. For more sophisticated ordinary people, there are sources like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post, which frame the immature ideologies in a more erudite manner to satisfy the egoism of the “educated” middle classes. But the entire world system is immature and structurally inculcates immaturity into the peoples of Earth.
MISGUIDED LOYALTIES TO OUTDATED SYSTEMS
The system of sovereign nation-states is nearly four centuries old, often said to have begun formally at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, developed at a time when people were riding horses and fighting with swords. The system of capitalism is just as old, developed at a time when the Earth seemed to have inexhaustible resources, was able to receive unlimited wastes from human industries, and the population of the world was a fraction of what it is today. These systems structurally condition people into loyalty to their puerile national identities and into a capitalism that has no concern for the environment or human dignity, but only for egoistically pursued private profit. “Freedom” becomes promoting egoistic self-interest regardless of the social or environmental consequences.
The alternative is to reject the plan in favor of commitment to organizing anti-capitalist international revolution.
Tavan '21 [Luca; 3/7/21; writer for Red Flag; "Worldwide revolution is possible and necessary," https://redflag.org.au/article/worldwide-revolution-possible-and-necessary/]
From the moment Marx and Engels urged workers of the world to unite at the climax of the Communist Manifesto, the goal of international revolution has been at the core of Marxist politics.
International revolution isn’t just a romantic dream, but an urgent necessity. It’s the only means by which capitalism can be permanently uprooted and replaced with socialism. This is because capitalism, unlike previous class societies, is a globally integrated system. “For the first time in history”, wrote British Marxist Colin Barker of this phenomenon, “capitalism has created a genuinely world society, where all our lives are entwined together in a common history and a common fate”.
Capitalism has linked every nation in a global chain of production. Take your mobile phone for example. It was likely assembled in China, using computer chips manufactured in Taiwan, powered by coal exported from Australia and produced with minerals mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo according to specifications developed in Europe or the United States. No single country produces all the things necessary to satisfy its population’s needs, unlike the various forms of society that came before capitalism, which were mostly self-sufficient and organised around small local economies.
Capitalism was established as a world system through immense robbery and violence—from the international slave trade, which fuelled the Industrial Revolution, to the murderous colonisation of what is now Australia. That same violence is today used by states to defend their imperialist interests, and discipline any movements that get in their way. Movements that aspire to national independence or that back left-wing reformist governments have been demolished with the aid of the great capitalist powers countless times in the past century, from the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile in 1973 to the 2019 Bolivian coup.
Revolutionary movements that attempt to overturn the entire capitalist system face a much more severe response. This was confirmed by the defeat of the Russian Revolution. In 1917 workers, radicalised by years of war and economic crisis, overthrew the tsarist regime and eventually took power into their own hands. In response, the capitalist powers of the world united to crush the workers’ state, in alliance with reactionaries who wanted to restore the tsarist regime. Unless revolutions can spread internationally and challenge the imperialist powers that have an interest in destroying them, they will be crushed.
A heroic effort by Russian workers and peasants fought off 16 foreign invading armies, but at a great cost. The working class was decimated, the factories were depopulated, and the radical working-class democracy that had been built withered. The isolation and poverty imposed on Russia made building socialism an impossibility, and a new Stalinist regime emerged that reversed most of the gains of the revolution.
Because Russian revolutionary socialists who pinned their hopes on spreading revolution across the globe were ultimately defeated, their example is used by defenders of capitalism as a cautionary tale today: that a worldwide revolution against the system is an impossible dream.
But capitalism’s global nature means that revolts tend to spread across national borders. Workers today share increasingly similar experiences: conditions of work, forms of consumption, lifestyles and political cultures. And the global integration of production serves to transmit struggle from one country to another. In 1974, for instance, resistance to the brutal military dictatorship in Chile spread to East Kilbride, Scotland, of all places. Workers at the Rolls Royce factory there learned that the engines they were repairing were being used by the Chilean air force to drop bombs on workers resisting the coup. They downed tools and refused to work on the engines, keeping them out of the hands of the military junta for four years.
While nationalism still has a powerful hold on the consciousness of many, it’s increasingly clear that the real line of polarisation across the globe is between the minority ruling class and the majority working class. And when revolts break out in one part of the world, people can identify with the causes and motivations of their struggles, and draw comparisons with their own situation. “Languages remain different,” observed UK Marxist Chris Harman in 1992, “but what they say is increasingly the same”. Harman’s words ring true in every wave of political radicalisation.
1968 is remembered as a year of global revolt, when millions of workers, students and oppressed people drew inspiration from each other’s movements. Activists in the US were radicalised by the heroic resistan

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