Coloniality and Property Supplement - Michigan 2024

K Supplement -- Coloniality & Property -- BLP
Thanks to Kara, Nolan, and Caroline for your hard work on this file.
Sarah
Property/Coloniality
Neg
A2: Inevitable/Human Nature
Humans are less self-serving and can successfully be integrated into a communist system.
Kemp 16. [Kemp is an Associate Professor of French at Oxford University and a Fellow of Somerville College, where he teaches French language and literature.] “Was Communism Doomed?: Human Nature, Psychology and the Communist Economy” file:///Users/karakang/Downloads/978-3-319-32780-8.pdf Kkang
Perhaps the most important question for communism, given its emphasis on communal functioning, is whether people’s ability to get along with and cooperate with one another can be changed. At least one present-day writer, Steven Pinker, argues that it can be changed and that in fact it has been. In The better angels of our nature: A history of violence and humanity, he presents a mass of evidence indicating that, contrary to what most people believe, people are becoming less violent in a variety of different ways. Over time they have become less likely to kill one another in wars, less likely to murder, and more likely to concede rights to women, minorities, homosexuals, and even animals. 38 38 Pinker, Better angels . 44 Was Communism Doomed? How might this have come about? Pinker’s basic argument is that people have become nicer. He is uncomfortable with the possibility that people have become better at empathising with each other, that is, feeling the emotions of others as if they were one’s own. 39 More likely, he considers, is that people have become better at self-control, and he points to evidence, ranging from gradual falls in the interest rate charged on money—greater self-control should result in a greater tendency to forgo present pleasures for future ones and so lead to lower interest rates—to improved nutrition, that indicates that people in the developed world at least have developed better self-control. 40 Another possibility is that the adoption of rational–legal morality by much of the Western world has improved people’s ability to foresee that acting in a particular way is likely to produce a painful and unpleasant reaction from others. Put slightly diff erently, we remain self-interested, but our self-interest has become better informed. 41 Finally, drawing on Flynn’s work, he suggests that there has been an increase in people’s ability to reason and that this in turn has produced both an increase in liberal attitudes on many issues and a greater ability to take different perspectives. 42
Americans are pro-socialism – that solves.
Fraser Institute 23 [The Fraser Institute is an independent, non-partisan research and educational organization based in Canada.] https://www.fraserinstitute.org/article/young-americans-support-abstract-and-unworkable-socialism Kkang
Young Americans support abstract and unworkable socialism Appeared in the Daily Caller, March 3, 2023 Young Americans support abstract and unworkable socialism It’s undeniable that in western countries including the United States, young people are expressing a preference for profound economic and social change including socialism. But of course, young Americans never lived in a world with widespread socialism and the misery it created. In fact, their version of “socialism” has never existed and is unworkable. According to a 2017 poll, a majority of American millennials preferred to live in a “socialist, communist, or fascist nation than in a capitalist one.” The Feb. 2019 cover of The Economist heralded “The Rise of Millennial Socialism” and featured poll results from Gallup showing 51 per cent of people aged 18-29 approved of socialism. And most recently, our new poll indicated that 45 per cent of Americans aged 18-24 agree that socialism is the ideal economic system for the U.S. Critically, however, most polls do not define socialism. Historically, socialism has meant that the state owns or controls the means of production—that is, raw materials, plants, equipment, technology and even the labor needed to turn inputs into goods and services. For those old enough to remember, the economic outcome of such socialism was so bad that the system collapsed under the weight of its own failures and largely ceased to exist after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the late-1980s and early-1990s. Today, however, only 32 per cent of Americans in our poll define socialism as government taking control of companies and industries such that the state—not individuals and entrepreneurs—control the economy. Rather, when Americans today express support for socialism, what they really mean is more expansive government. Specifically, 58 per cent of Americans define socialism as the government providing more services and 47 per cent define it as the government guaranteeing a minimum income for all citizens. Among younger Americans (ages 18-34), those percentages increase to 66 per cent and 53 per cent, respectively.
A2: Feser
Aff’s notion of human nature is illogical.
Jesse Spafford 20. A Lecturer at the Victoria University of Wellington. [Spafford’s] research focuses on debates between libertarians, socialists, and anarchists over the moral status of the market and the state. (https://jessespafford.com/research) “Social Anarchism and the rejection of private property” https://jessespafford.com/files/SpaffordSocialAnarchism.pdf Kkang
There are three quick responses that can be made to this argument. First, the argument rests on an equivocation between the kind of control one has of one’s body and the kind of control Feser associates with initial appropriation. In the case of the body, the agent exercises direct control over the body in the sense that she can manipulate the body simply by willing it to do certain things; by contrast, the control over resources Feser describes involves physically keeping others from being able to manipulate those resources, e.g., by building a fence or placing armed guards around a patch of land.24 However, if agential control is what makes the thesis of selfownership plausible, it is unclear why physical control would make resource ownership plausible.25
Second, even if one grants that both forms of control are equally relevant to establishing ownership, Brian McElwee persuasively argues that the plausibility of the self-ownership thesis stems not only from the fact that one controls one’s own body, but also from the facts that one feels pain and pleasure through one’s body, one needs one’s body, and one’s body is irreplaceable when it comes to satisfying this need.26 If these conditions are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for having ownership of an object, then mere control of a natural resource will not suffice to establish ownership of that resource.
Finally, if one takes seriously Feser’s control thesis, then it would seemingly follow that parents own their children. After all, assuming that agency emerges in children sometime after birth, the parents of a child are the first people to “show up and take possession” of its body. Thus, they would seemingly have the right to that body, with the agent who comes to inhabit that body being analogous to the latecomer who arrives at a patch of land that has already been fenced in.27 This implausible conclusion would seem to be a reduction of Feser’s argument.28
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However, the fact that coercion ultimately benefits some other person would not seem to be an adequate justification for that act. As an illustration of this point, consider the case of two castaways stranded on an island with minimal resources. After a few months of bare subsistence, something fortunate happens: a small motorboat washes up onto the beach. However, when the castaways attempt to climb into the boat, they quickly discover that the boat can only carry one of them, as the weight of both causes the bow to submerge. Thinking quickly, one castaway says to the other,
Perm---2NC
The perm fails
Krystyna Swiderska 21. Krystyna Swiderska is principal researcher in IIED's Natural Resource research group (IIED). “Here's why Indigenous economics is the key to saving nature” https://www.iied.org/heres-why-indigenous-economics-key-saving-nature Kkang
Mainstream economic activities on Indigenous lands have rarely benefited Indigenous Peoples, who make up 6% of the world’s population but 19% of the extreme poor.
In fact, their situation has often deteriorated (PDF), due to loss of land and natural resources, and the weakening of cultural ties and social cohesion. Integration with market economies has led to social tension and conflict, limited opportunities for meaningful employment, low returns for producers and a shift towards consumerist lifestyles.
The dominant approach to nature conservation through protected areas also reflects a Western worldview that separates people and nature, often excluding Indigenous people to protect biodiversity. Many state-run protected areas have resulted in negative social impacts, are losing biodiversity and are not effectively or equitably managed, as IPBES found (PDF).
Alt---Indigenous Society
The alternative is to reject capitalism and build an anarchist society inspired by Semai and Mbuti indigenous cultures by adopting a gift economy
Peter Gelderloos 10. Peter Gelderloos is an American anarchist activist and writer. (Wikipedia) “Anarchy Works” https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-anarchy-works Kkang
1. Human Nature
Anarchism challenges the typical Western conception of human nature by envisioning societies built on cooperation, mutual aid, and solidarity between people, rather than competition and survival of the fittest.
Aren’t people naturally selfish?
Everybody has a sense of self-interest, and the capability to act in a selfish way at other people’s expense. But everyone also has a sense of the needs of those around them, and we are all capable of generous and selfless actions. Human survival depends on generosity. The next time someone tells you a communal, anarchistic society could not work because people are naturally selfish, tell him he should withhold food from his children pending payment, do nothing to help his parents have a dignified retirement, never donate to charities, and never help his neighbors or be kind to strangers unless he receives compensation. Would he be able to lead a fulfilling existence, taking the capitalist philosophy to its logical conclusions? Of course not. Even after hundreds of years of being suppressed, sharing and generosity remain vital to human existence. You don’t have to look to radical social movements to find examples of this. The United States may be, on a structural level, the most selfish nation in the world — it is the richest of “developed” countries, but has among the lowest life expectancies because the political culture would sooner let poor people die than give them healthcare and welfare. But even in the US it’s easy to find institutional examples of sharing that form an important part of the society. Libraries offer an interconnected network of millions of free books. PTA potlucks and neighborhood barbecues bring people together to share food and enjoy each other’s company. What examples of sharing might develop outside the restrictive bounds of state and capital?
Currency-based economies have only existed a few thousand years, and capitalism has only been around a few hundred years. The latter has proven to work quite miserably, leading to the greatest inequalities of wealth, the largest mass starvations, and the worst distribution systems in world history — though hats off, it’s produced a lot of wonderful gadgets. It might surprise people to learn how common other types of economies have been in earlier times, and how much they differed from capitalism.
One economy developed over and over by humans on every continent has been the gift economy. In this system, if people have more than they need of anything, they give it away. They don’t assign value, they don’t count debts. Everything you don’t use personally can be given as a gift to someone else, and by giving more gifts you inspire more generosity and strengthen the friendships that keep you swimming in gifts too. Many gift economies lasted for thousands of years, and proved much more effective at enabling all of the participants to meet their needs. Capitalism may have drastically increased productivity, but to what end? On one side of your typical capitalist city someone is starving to death while on the other side someone is eating caviar.
Western economists and political scientists initially assumed that many of these gift economies were actually barter economies: proto-capitalist exchange systems lacking an efficient currency: “I’ll give you one sheep for twenty loaves of bread.” In general, this is not how these societies described themselves. Later, anthropologists who went to live in such societies and were able to shed their cultural biases showed people in Europe that many of these were indeed gift economies, in which people intentionally kept no tally of who owed what to whom so as to foster a society of generosity and sharing.
What these anthropologists may not have known is that gift economies have never been totally suppressed in the West; in fact they surfaced frequently within rebellious movements. Anarchists in the US today also exemplify the desire for relationships based on generosity and the guarantee that everyone’s needs will be met. In a number of towns and cities, anarchists hold Really Really Free Markets — essentially, flea markets without prices. People bring goods they have made or things they don’t need anymore and give them away for free to passersby or other participants. Or, they share useful skills with one another. In one free market in North Carolina, every month:
two hundred or more people from all walks of life gather at the commons in the center of our town. They bring everything from jewelry to firewood to give away, and take whatever they want. There are booths offering bicycle repair, hairstyling, even tarot readings. People leave with full-size bed frames and old computers; if they don’t have a vehicle to transport them, volunteer drivers are available. No money changes hands, no one haggles over the comparative worth of items or services, nobody is ashamed about being in need. Contrary to government ordinances, no fee is paid for the use of this public space, nor is anyone “in charge.” Sometimes a marching band appears; sometimes a puppetry troupe performs, or people line up to take a swing at a piñata. Games and conversations take place around the periphery, and everyone has a plate of warm food and a bag of free groceries. Banners hang from branches and rafters proclaiming “FOR THE COMMONS, NOT LANDLORDS OR BUREAUCRACY” and “NI JEFES, NI FRONTERAS” and a king-size blanket is spread with radical reading material, but these aren’t essential to the event — this is a social institution, not a demonstration.
Thanks to our monthly ‘Free Markets, everyone in our town has a working reference point for anarchist economics. Life is a little easier for those of us with low or no income, and relationships develop in a space in which social class and financial means are at least temporarily irrelevant.[2]
The traditional society of the Semai, in Malaya, is based on gift-giving rather than bartering. We could not find any accounts of their society recorded by the Semai themselves, but they explained how it worked to Robert Dentan, a Western anthropologist who lived with them for a time. Dentan writes that the “system by which the Semai distribute food and services is one of the most significant ways in which members of a community are knit together... Semai economic exchanges are more like Christmas exchanges than like commercial exchanges.”[3] It was considered “punan,” or taboo, for members of Semai society to calculate the value of gifts given or received. Other commonly held rules of etiquette included the duty to share whatever they had that they did not immediately need, and the duty to share with guests and anyone who asked. It was punan not to share or to refuse a request, but also to ask for more than someone could give.
Many other societies have also distributed and exchanged surpluses as gifts. Aside from the social cohesion and joy that is gained from sharing with your community without greedily keeping accounts, a gift economy can also be justified in terms of personal interests. Often, a person cannot consume what they produce all by themselves. The meat from a day’s hunt will go bad before you can eat it all. A tool, like a saw, will lay unused most of the time if it is the property of a single person. It makes more sense to give away most of the meat or share your saw with your neighbors, because you are ensuring that in the future they will give extra food to you and share their tools with you — thus ensuring that you have access to more food and a wider range of tools, and you and your neighbors become richer without having to exploit anybody.
From what we know, however, members of gift economies would probably not justify their actions with arguments of calculated self-interest, but with moral reasoning, explaining sharing as the right thing to do. After all, an economic surplus is the result of a certain way of looking at the world: it is a social choice and not a material certainty. Societies must choose, over time, to work more than they need to, to quantify value, or to only consume the minimum required for their survival and to surrender all the rest of their produce to a common storehouse controlled by a class of leaders. Even if a hunting party or a group of gatherers gets lucky and brings home a huge amount of food, there is no surplus if they consider it normal to share it with everyone else, glut themselves with a big feast, or invite a neighboring community to party until all the food is eaten. It’s certainly more fun that way than measuring out pounds of food and calculating what percentage we earned.
As for loafers, even if people do not calculate the value of gifts and keep a balance sheet, they will notice if someone consistently refuses to share or contribute to the group, violating the customs of the society and the sense of mutual aid. Gradually, such people will damage their relationships, and miss out on some of the nicer benefits of living in a society. It seems that in all known gift economies, even the laziest of people were never refused food — in stark contrast to capitalism — but feeding a few loafers is an insignificant drain on a society’s resources, especially when compared to pampering the voracious elite of our society. And losing this tiny amount of resources is far preferable to losing our compassion and letting people starve to death. In more extreme cases, if members of such a society were more aggressively parasitic, attempting to monopolize resources or force other people to work for them — in other words, acting like capitalists — they could be ostracized and even expelled from the society.
Some stateless societies have chiefs who play ritual roles, often related to giving gifts and spreading resources. In fact, the term “chief” can be deceptive because there have been so many different human societies that have had what the West classifies as “chiefs,” and in each society the role entailed something a little different. In many societies chiefs held no coercive power: their responsibility was to mediate disputes or conduct rituals, and they were expected to be more generous than anyone else. Ultimately they worked harder and had less personal wealth than others. One study found that a common reason for the people to depose or expel a chief was if the chief was not considered generous enough.[4]
Aren’t people naturally competitive?
In Western society, compe

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