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We begin in Jurez, Mexico. The system of maquiladoras, or female industrial labor exploitation, is representative of the system of capitalism in Mexico today. The people of Jurez are trapped in a cycle of poverty where there seems to be no alternative.
Vogel 04 (Richard D. Vogela political reporter who monitors the effects of globalization on working people and their communities. He has published articles in WorkingUSA, Monthly Review, Canadian Dimension, and is the contributor of "Marxist Theories of Migration" to the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration. Stolen Birthright: The US Conquest and Exploitation to the Mexican People 2004 http://www.houstonculture.org/hispanic/conquest6.html)//rainy

In Ciudad Jurez, as everywhere, economic power translates into political power. In this city where half the population lives in homes without sewer service, municipal administrators have made accommodating foreign-owned factories their top priority. The official 2010 development plan for the city focuses on paving projects and the development of roads between the maquiladoras and the border crossings, while ignoring the social services that impact the quality of everyday life for Mexican citizens. Family life, the foundation of every community, has deteriorated under the influence of the maquiladoras. About half of the families that reside in the two and three room adobe houses in the working-class neighborhoods of Jurez are headed by single mothers, many of whom toil long hours in the maquiladoras for subsistence wages. The resulting stress on families has lead to chronic problems of poor health, family violence, and child labor exploitation. Children suffer the most. Because of the lack of child-care programs, kids are often left home alone all day and fall prey to the worst aspects of street culture, such as substance abuse and gang violence. Ciudad Jurez, by any measure of social progress, is moving backward rather than forward under the influence of the maquiladora industry.

Penetrated by U.S super-capitalism, Juarez is proof that Mexico has accepted the idea that the Mexicans are the subordinate object to economics
Vogel 04 (Richard D. Vogela political reporter who monitors the effects of globalization on working people and their communities. He has published articles in WorkingUSA, Monthly Review, Canadian Dimension, and is the contributor of "Marxist Theories of Migration" to the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration. Stolen Birthright: The US Conquest and Exploitation to the Mexican People 2004 http://www.houstonculture.org/hispanic/conquest6.html rainy) The situation in Ciudad Jurez is not exceptional. The millions of jobs that have been created along the border since 1965 have sparked a mass migration to the North, but the lives of Mexican workers have not improved under the reign of the maquiladoras. Since the 1982 economic crisis in Mexico, wages have declined and working conditions have deteriorated in the maquiladora sector, mirroring the stagnation of the economy at large. The U. S. was quick to exploit the crisis. During

the oil boom of the 1970s, finance capitalists from the North had extended easy credit to the Mexican bourgeoisie who went on an unbridled spending spree that mortgaged the future of the country. The economic bust in the early 1980s offered U.S. and other creditors a golden opportunity. Through the World
Bank and World Trade Organization (WTO), they insisted on the devaluation of the peso and the imposition of financial austerity programs on the country in order to repay the outstanding loans and, at the same time, tighten their control over the Mexican economy. The

domestic austerity programs imposed on Mexico were promoted under the slogan "short-term pain for long-term gain". The Mexican government, afraid of losing credit from the North and
unwilling to reform the economy to benefit working class Mexicans, agreed to the following austerity programs that freed up money for debt repayment and opened

Mexico to further U.S. penetration and exploitation:

- To cut social spending. The Mexican government increased fees for medical services, resulting in less treatment, widespread suffering, and needless deaths among the poorer segments of the Mexican population. The government also increased public school fees, a move that forced many poor parents to pull their children, especially girls, out of school. This austerity program also required a reduction of pension payments, shifting the burden of debt to the disabled and elderly. -

To shrink

government. Because the government was the largest employer in Mexico in the early 1980s, this change resulted in massive

lay-offs and increased nationwide unemployment. The poor, hit hardest by this program, became desperate to work at any wage. -

To increase interest rates. This economic policy cut off loans to small farmers and businessmen, crippling the domestic economy and increasing unemployment across the country. This policy shift dramatically expanded the ranks of the poor. - To eliminate regulations on the foreign ownership of resources and businesses. This change allowed U.S. capitalists to gain control of key industries such as mining and allowed them to penetrate deeper into the heart of Mexico. To attract more investment from the U.S. and other rich nations, the Mexican government secretly pledged not to enforce labor and environmental laws against foreign businesses. - To eliminate tariffs. This reform undermined Mexican-owned industries and opened the markets of Mexico to U.S. and Canada. Unable to compete against advanced and, in many cases, government subsidized North
American producers, many domestic industries had to shut down and lay off their workforce. This policy hit Mexican agriculture especially hard -- well over a million small farmers were wiped out. - To privatize government-owned enterprises. This economic policy transferred many assets owned by the Mexican people to private, often U.S., ownership. The transportation, communication, and mining industries were hit the hardest. State enterprises were sold at a fraction of their actual worth, and their transfer to private ownership resulted in higher prices and reduced services across the nation. - To

reduce government subsidies for bread, petroleum, fertilizer, etc. This change increased the cost of living in Mexico beyond the resources of average citizens and exacerbated the distress of the poor. - To reorient the Mexican economy away from domestic production and toward export production through tax incentives. This move threatened food security,
increased the exploitation of natural resources by foreign interests, and increased Mexican dependence on expensive imported food and manufactured goods. The

"short-term pain for long-term gain" slogan used to justify the U.S.imposed austerity programs has proven in practice to be long-term pain for Mexican workers and long-term gain for U.S. capitalism. One major result of the programs has been a mass migration of desperate
Mexican workers to the maquiladora cities on the U.S.-Mexico border. Between 1980 and 2000, the populations of Tijuana, Ciudad Jurez, Ciudad Acua, Reynosa, and Matamoros more than doubled. The population booms at Mexicali, Nogales, Piedras Negras, and Nuevo Laredo were not far behind. The advantage to U.S. capitalism was swift and substantial -- by 1983 two thirds of the foreign investment in Mexico was concentrated in the maquiladoras and, in one year (between 1982 and 1983), wages were cut in half (from $1.38 to $.67 per hour). The

superprofits realized by America firms helped pull the U.S. out of its own economic crisis and attracted even more American capital to Mexico.
Between 1982 and 1987, the number of maquiladoras and the maquiladora workforce nearly doubled. During the same period, because of the skyrocketing populations, and because the maquiladoras paid such low wages and so few taxes, social conditions continued to deteriorated in the boomtowns along the border. The

maquiladora system has proven so advantageous to U.S. capitalism that every American president of the last four decades has actively sought to expand the program and push it ever deeper into Mexico. A major milestone in the U.S. quest to further exploit Mexico and her people was the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) of 1994.

This is representative of the crisis of capitalism destroying alternative ways to approach economics only through exploration of different forms of economics can we create resistance to capitalist hegemony George DEMARTINO - Professor of international economics @ U of Denver, 2013, Work in Progress posted, Ethical
Economic Engagement in a World Beyond Control, Rethinking Marxism)//ctc In the years immediately following the publication of The End of Capitalism, Gibson- Graham and their extraordinary cohort of academic colleagues, students

and community allies increasingly turned their attention away from critique toward liberatory projects of economic construction. The shift in focus reflected growing ethical awareness on the part of the participants in the diverse economies project. A Postcapitalist Politics explored with great care the contours of the already-present diverse economy, the challenges that lay in the path of those who sought to pursue and deepen economic difference, and the possibilities for economic emancipation that are available even in the presence of apparently all-powerful

capitalist institutions . As they would put it later on, [F]or years we have undertaken projects of deconstructing existing local economies to reveal a landscape of radical heterogeneity, populated by an array of capitalist and noncapitalist enterprises; market, alternative market and
nonmarket transactions; paid, unpaid and alternatively compensated labor; and various forms of finance and property a diverse economy in place (Gibson-Graham 2006, 2008). In this diverse multiplicity we

find glimmers of the future, existing economic forms and practices that can be enrolled in constructing a new economy here and now, one that is more focused on social wellbeing and less on growth and profitability (Gibson- Graham 2011, 2). Notably, the book (and other Gibson-Graham work of the past
decade) turned a careful eye to the question of how to cultivate an economic subject that could open up to the possibilities associated with economic difference. Gibson-Graham explored abstractly in their theoretical work and concretely in their community work the stubborn resistance to imaging and welcoming opportunities to live differently. Even

those harboring anger and resentment toward a capitalist system that exploited and then discarded themfor instance, workers rendered unemployed by capital flightoften refused to engage the idea of creating alternative enterprises under worker control (Gibson-Graham 2003). Instead, they aspired to return to employment in the capitalist sector that, they felt, had abused them. What is it about the human psyche, Gibson-Graham asked, that so often prevents actors from recognizing, imagining and welcoming opportunities to live differently? What bodily processes interrupt the capacity to grab hold of the chance to break free from practices that are recognized as oppressive? And how in practice do we overcome the fear, resignation, anger and resentment that block the exploration of alternative economic identities? In A Postcapitalist Politics, An Ethics of the
Local (2003) and other work Gibson- Graham explore the power of language and theory, but also interpersonal encounter and collaboration, in confronting and overcoming these obstacles. What they would later come to call hybrid

research collectives came to serve as the chief practical vehicle for pursuing projects of economic emancipation. The collective joins university and community-based researchers with other community members in joint projects to inventory already existing alternative economic practices and indigenous resources and capacities, and to imagine and pursue economic practices and build economic institutions that defy traditional conceptions of just what economic forms are and are not achievable and sustainable. A central goal is to proliferate economic formsto generate a vibrant economic ecosystem populated by all sorts of economic speciesrather than to pursue a pre-defined set of models of economic engagement. Implicit in the project is the need to inquire into economic alternatives without judgment; to silence the reflexive skepticism that haunts the academic mind so as to allow for the frothy spawn (Gibson-Graham 1996) of new and as-of-yet unimagined progeny. Of equal importance is the task of promoting safe spaces within which economic agents who are marginalized and emptied of aspiration regenerate themselves as vibrant economic subjects who recognize the potency of their agency in making the world anew.

This exploration of economics is our project the Hybrid Research Collective, or HRC. Any attempt to destroy capitalism will fail absent the affirmatives breaking down of the idea that capitalism is hegemonic in the first place. George DEMARTINO - Professor of international economics @ U of Denver, 2013, Work in Progress posted, Ethical
Economic Engagement in a World Beyond Control, Rethinking Marxism)//rainy //ctc

The J.K. Gibson-Graham project is, in a word, saturated with ethical content. Present from the start of their collaboration as J.K. Gibson Graham, the ethical content has become more explicit and intentional as the project has evolved. In their forthcoming book with Jenny Cameron and Stephen Healy, begun before Julies death, the

ethical content is front and center. They write, For us, taking back the economy through ethical action means surviving together well and equitably, distributing surplus to enrich social and environmental health, encountering others in ways that supports their wellbeing as well as ours, consuming sustainably, maintaining, replenishing and growing our natural and cultural commons, investing our wealth so the at future generations can live well. An economy in which these ethical actions take place or are being worked toward is what we call a community economya space of decision where we recognize and negotiate our interdependence with other humans, other species and our environment. In the process of recognizing and negotiating, we become a community (Gibson-Graham, Cameron
and Healy forthcoming). The community or diverse economy project took root in recognition that much of the Marxian scholarship on the nature of capitalism that flourished in the latter part of the 20th century presumed an ontology that unwittingly effaced the political efficacy of capital isms critics. In the End of Capitalism (as we knew it), Gibson- Graham faulted Marxian thought for contributing to the capitalist hegemony that Marxists sought to displace. In Gibson-Grahams view, Marxism erred in theorizing capitalism as having essential properties that insulated it from all but the most heroic political resistancea kind of resistance, in fact, that was hardly possible and, in any event, largely undesirable. The forms of Marxism that Gibson-Graham targeted forced the conclusion that capitalism was effectively beyond challenge in fact if not in principle. In the traditional Marxian account,

capitalism was marked by the ontological properties of unity, singularity and totality (Gibson-Graham 1996,

ch. 11). Gibson Graham argued that capitalism was theorized as self-generative and re-generative, protean adaptable almost without limit so that any prosaic or achievable challenge or alternative to it could and would be assimilated to its needs.

Capitalism was also seen to infuse all aspects of the social formation that sustained itthere was no authentically non-capitalist space (geographical, political, economic, ideational or cultural) that was immune to capitalist
penetration. Non-capitalist sites and practices were rendered epiphenomenalas vestigial and, so, not yet capitalism; as functional to capitalism; or otherwise subordinate to capitalism. The presumption of this ontological binary, in which capitalism

and only capitalism occupies a privileged, essential position, renders resistance futile, as the Borgs would say. Not in principle, of course. Indeed, in
the traditional Marxian account capitalism is understood to be fraught with contradictions that open up the theoretical possibility for a mass movement or workers (and their class allies) with the power and objective interest in overthrowing it. But in practice, the vision of capitalism as ontologically privileged makes a mockery of any actual, practical resistance. Trade union struggles for higher wages or worker rights? Community campaigns to protect the environment, or to assert control over local capitalist corporations? These piecemeal

efforts can only ever displace but never resolve the contradictions they target (OConnor 1988). In the end, capitalism emerges from these skirmishes ever stronger and refined. Indeed, the challenges are absorbed and exploited by capital to increase surplus
production and extraction. We now have fair trade commodities and green products, for instance, which command a higher pr ice on the market and secure a higher rate of return for capital. Gibson-Graham found in poststructuralist, feminist, queer, and anti-essentialist Marxian accounts a basis for displacing the traditional Marxian ontology and its associated political imaginary. What if, they asked, the capitalism we confront achieves hegemony not largely as a consequence of its deep structural attributes but in part as a consequence of the knowledges of it that its Marxian critics and others generate and sustain? What if we collaborate in capitalisms construction as a unit y, singularity and totality by the very way that we theorize it (JK Gibson-Graham 1996)? What

if we recognize the imagined, narrative basis of the purportedly scientific Marxian accounts that project onto capitalism the properties that they believe themselves to simply discover? If this is so then perhaps alternative narratives of capitalism, alternative imaginaries, might be available to us that would effectively deny capitalism these properties. Alternative visions of capitalism might recognize that it is ever incomplete, porous, and even fragile. These counter- narratives might then open up the terrain for the production of non-capitalist economies
right here, right now. In this imaginary, an imaginary that simply refuses the ontological privilege with wh ich weve invested capitalism, a largely negative project of resistance to what cant be resisted is displaced by a largely positive project of invention and construc tion. No

longer is it required of us that we engineer a grand oppositional, mass movement that can take on all of capitalism from the US to China all at once; indeed, no longer is there a Capitalism that needs to be uprooted and displaced so that non-capitalisms can proliferate. Instead, the alternative narrative beckons us to recognize that social formations comprise capitalist practices alongside all sorts of other economic practices that, together, populate a dense, diverse economic landscape. This vision calls on us to recognize that instead of inhabiting a capitalist universe, a barren economic monoculture, we are situated always in an economic pluriverse that is teeming with diverse economic creatures and creations that share and shape the landscape. This kind of landscape may afford us ample space for economic experimentation that can yield and nurture all sorts of non-capitalist economic practices. Indeed, we may realize that weve been constructing these projects all along, in our families, with our friends and
neighbors, in our community organizations and even in many of our formal economic institutions, without recognizing the import of the achievement. And not just us. It

may be that our most ardent defenders of Capitalism are closeted class

revolutionaries in the privacy of their own homes, and also in their churches and country clubs, where they engage unwittingly in non- capitalist, non-exploitative and perhaps even communist practices.

Capitalism results in neo-imperialist wars, poverty and genocide of populations deemed useless to the system
Larry EVEREST, correspondent for Revolution newspaper, May 24 2012, WAR AND GLOBAL CAPITALISM: Money for Jobs Not for War: American Chauvinism and Reformist Illusions http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31024) The slogan also promotes the idea that the political powers-that-beif pressured by enough peoplecould scale back their military, stop attacking other countries, and instead use the money for jobs, education, and other social welfare programs at home. But thats not how the system actually operates! Wars,

invasions, and occupations are not policies of one set of politicians or another, or arbitrary choices made by this or that president. At this stage in history, capitalism is a global system, with the U.S. the worlds most dominant capitalist-imperialist power, presiding over a worldwide empire of exploitation. This empire rests on the domination of the oppressed countries where the vast majority of humanity lives, and on control of labor, markets, and resources. This entails the violent suppression of the masses of people in the dominated areasand also entails fighting off challenges from other imperialists as well as rising forces in those countries that stand in the way. This requires a monstrously huge military that is deployed worldwide, with bases in over 100 countries, and wars when necessary. The wars for domination in the Middle East, Central Asia, and elsewhere dont interfere with the functioning of U.S. capitaltheyre absolutely essential to it, and to the U.S.s overall global dominance. This is why the U.S. rulers are compelledand willing tospend trillions on the military, including during periods of severe economic and fiscal stress, no matter who happens to sit in the White House or Congress. This system of global capitalism-imperialism headed by the U.S. is the main source of the horrors that torment so many across the globefrom the ethnic cleansing and slow genocide of the Palestinian people by the U.S. and Israel, to the mass incarceration and slow genocide of Black people in the U.S.; from the rape of the planet to the systematic degradation and violence against womenhere and around the world; from the extreme deprivation and starvation faced by billions across the planet to the growing poverty and desperation faced by millions in the U.S.

We are exposing the grisly violence of capitalism in Juarez you have an ethical obligation to oppose the poverty, rape, gang violence, and exploitation there
Charles BOWDEN, American non-fiction author and journalist, Harpers Magazine, WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING, December

1996, ctc
I am here because of a seventeen-year-old girl named Adriana Avila Gress. The whole thing started very simply. I was drinking black coffee and reading a Juarez newspaper, and there, tucked away in the back pages, where the small crimes of the city bleed for a few inches, I saw her face. She was smiling at me and wore a strapless gown riding on breasts powered by an uplift bra, and a pair of fancy gloves reached above her elbows almost to her armpits. The story said she'd disappeared, all 1.6 meters of her. I turned to a friend I was having breakfast with and said, "What's this about?" He replied matter-of-factly, "Oh, they

disappear all the time. Guys kidnap them, rape them, and kill them." Them? Oh, he continued, you know, the young girls who work in the maquiladoras, the foreign-owned factories, the ones who have to leave for work when it is still dark. Of course, I knew that violence is normal weather in Juarez. As a local fruit vendor told an American daily, "Even the devil is scared of living here." That's when it started for me. The photographers, like Jaime showing me his slides, are the next logical step to understanding the world in which beaming seventeen-year-old girls suddenly vanish. The cities of Ciudad Juarez and

El Paso, Texas, constitute the largest border community on earth, but hardly anyone seems to admit that the Mexican side exists. Within this forgotten urban maze stalk some of the boldest photographers still roaming the streets with 35-mm cameras. Over the past two years I have become a student of their work, because I think they are capturing something: the look of the future. This future is based on the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, and industrial growth producing poverty faster than it distributes wealth. We have these models in our heads about growth, development, infrastructure. Juarez doesn't look like any of these images, and so our ability to see this city comes and goes, mainly goes. A nation that has never hosted a jury trial, that has been dominated by one party for most of this century, that is carpeted with corruption and poverty and pockmarked with billionaires is perceived as an emerging democracy marching toward First World standing. The snippets of fact that once in a great while percolate up through the Mexican press are ignored by the U.S. government and its citizens.
Mexico may be the last great drug experience for the American people, one in which reality gives way to pretty colors. These photographs literally give people a picture of an economic world they cannot comprehend. Juarez

is not a backwater but the new City on the Hill, beckoning us all to a grisly state of things. I've got my feet propped up on a
coffee table, a glass of wine in my hand, and as far as the half-dozen photographers present for the slide show are concerned this is my first day of school and they're not sure if I've got what it takes to be a good student. After all, no one comes here if he has a choice, and absolutely no one comes to view their work. The

photographers of Juarez once put on an exhibition. No one in El Paso, separated from Mexico by thirty feet of river, was interested in hanging their work, so they found a small room in Juarez and hung big prints they could not really afford to make. They called their show Nada Que Ver "Nothing to See." Beginning in the early 1980s, photographers began to show up
with university degrees and tattered copies of the work of New York's famous street shooter, Weegee (Arthur Fellig). A tradition of gritty, unsentimental, and loving street shooting that has all but perished in the United States was reborn in Juarez, in part because the papers offered a market but mostly because the streets could not be denied. The street shooters of Juarez are mainly young and almost always broke. Pay at the half-dozen newspapers runs from fifty to eighty dollars a week, and they must provide their own cameras. Film is rationed by their employers. "We

are like firemen," Jaime Bailleres explains, "only here we fight fires with our bare hands." The slide presentation clicks away. A child of seven is pinned under a massive beam. He and his father were tearing apart a building for its old bricks when the ceiling collapsed. Jaime says that the child is whimpering and saying he is afraid of death . He lasted a few minutes more. Alfredo Carrillo stares intently at the images as Jaime gives him tips on how to frame different scenes. A hand reaches out from under a blanket-a cop cut down by AK-47s in front of a mansion owned by Amado Carrillo Fuentes. Carrillo is a local businessman. U.S. authorities calculate that he moves more than 100 tons of cocaine a year across the Rio Grande and into El Paso. He is estimated to be grossing $200 million a week, and to the joy of economists, this business is hard currency and cash-and-carry. To my untrained eye the dimensions of the dope business are simple: without it the
Mexican economy would totally collapse." (1) A gold ring gleams on the cop's dead hand; for Bailleres it is a study in the ways of power. Alfredo says, "All

these young kids dream of being Amado Carrillo." The competition is rough. Yesterday, Juan Manuel Bueno Duenas, twenty-three, got into a dispute with a drug dealer. Juan belonged to Los Harpys. Today at 4:30 P.M. he was buried in the municipal cemetery by his fellow gang members. The campo santo was crowded with people, the afterflow of the Day of the Dead observance. Carloads of guys from Barrio Chico, rivals of Los Harpys, opened fire on the procession. No one is certain how many people were wounded. The gangs of Juarez, los pandillas, kill at least 200 people a year. Accepting such realities is possible; thinking about them is not. Survival in Juarez is based on alcohol, friendships, and laughter, much laughter. But this happens in private. The streets are full of people wearing masks.

The HRC is a process of revealing the different invisible economic forms and promoting them for the purpose of experimentation. JK GIBSON-GRAHAM, A feminist project of belonging for the Anthropocene, 2010, //rainy //ctc
We are suggesting experiments in regional development. But who or what is it that experiments? Who or what learns and transforms? How is the becoming world initiated in an intentional, responsive, responsible way? Elsewhere we have nominated for this role something Callon calls a hybrid research collective, an assemblage that, through research, increases possibilities for (being in) the world (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2009, 11; Callon and Rabeharisoa 2003; Roelvink 2008, 2009). Research is a site where new publics are marshaled around matters of concern, and university based research is where experimentation is supported. So why not conceive of university based action research as a potential catalyst for going on in a different mode of humanity, starting where we are, in our own regions? What have we got to lose? If we accept our belonging to a planet made up of complex matter that cuts across personhood, animality and objecthood, what kind of regional development might emerge? Again, we have no concrete idea. But we are interested in outlining some steps toward answering that question by enrolling activities we have employed in regional action research and recalibrating them with sensitivity to the more than human. Our community partnering research has usually begun starting where we are by inviting participants to inventory the range of economic practices and assets that are often overlooked as potential contributors to regional development. Lets think about starting with this intervention and extending our regional inventory to encompass the more than human. First, there would be the task of compiling a regional profile. Usually this includes marshaling official statistics about demographic characteristics and trends, housing stock, community services, transport, infrastructure, local government and, most importantly, mainstream economic structure, including capitalist and self-employed business activity, paid employment and income levels. Our project would build on this regional profile by including elements of the diverse economy (see Figure 4). Such an expanded vision of economy is not easily available as there are few official statistics on many activities in the lower cells of any of the diverse economy columns. The process of generating a diverse economy regional profile would involve enrolling people to collect indicative data about the economic activities they care about. There might be little chance of conducting a comprehensive survey of diverse economic activities, but this may not matter. In the process of compiling and mapping, teams of hybrid researchers would form collective learning assemblages that would potentially become open to belonging in new ways.

Hegemonic economic thought makes ethics impossible the idea of a normalized economy is violence through economic colonization that makes extinction inevitable
Ethan Lloyd MILLER @ University of Massachusetts, May 2011, RETHINKING ECONOMY FOR REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT: ONTOLOGY, PERFORMATIVITY AND ENABLING FRAMEWORKS FOR PARTICIPATORY VISION AND ACTION, ctc - Conventional RED = conventional regional economic development - the trinity/triple-bottom-line is the categorization of everything into economics, society, and nature - positions held by conventional RED are in italics

Ecological and social relationships are also subsumed within conventional RED by a notion of "amenities," collectively defined as "cultural, historic, natural or built environmental resources that increasingly contribute to our notion of quality of life" (Shaffer, Deller, and Marcouiller 2004, 7). 19 In this conception, the beings and relationships constituting society and nature are positioned not as resource inputs for production, but rather as supporting background contexts within which economic

development plays out. As amenities, these constitutive interrelationships appear as pleasant sources of attraction that might add value to a given process of economic growth (or, in their absence, might hinder such a process) (Green 2001); that might increase the competitiveness of a
region by providing a more appealing stage upon which economic drama can unfold (Rogerson 1999; Wojan and McGranahan 2007); that may "reduce transaction

costs" and thus enhance economic activity (Stimson, Stough, and Roberts 2006, 321); or may

even be transformable into resources (sustainably, of course) for commodity production.20 The notion of a "regional milieu," found extensively throughout recent work on the role of innovation and "knowledge spillovers" in enhancing regional economic competitiveness, is often a more nuanced and robust--but ultimately similar-- version of the amenity approach to social and ecological relations (Amin 1999). In all of these conceptualizations, the

economic is foregrounded as the active, productive force against a background of passive objects or instrumentalized relationships. Despite the occasional invocation of a "triple-bottom-line," Stimson, Stough and Roberts build their core discourse and analysis around only the economic node of this trinity . It is one thing to invoke a valuation of the economic, social and natural; it is quite another to enact this in analytical models of regional development. When the substantive questions are asked and the numbers are gathered and stacked in columns, it is the "economic"--specifically constituted by measurements of wages, jobs, productivity and aggregate regional growth--that stands at the center of the picture. "Some constraint on the pursuit of economic values, particularly the quest for high economic growth, may be necessary in the short term," write Stimson, Stough and Roberts,"but it is unreasonable and unrealistic for societies to lower long-term economic aspirations" (2006, 218). The discourse of the triple bottom line only serves, then, to obscure the fact that in a contest between the three domains, the economic stands most likely to prevail . Ecological imperatives are acceptable so long as they can generate increased revenues for economic processes: hence the strong emphasis in recent regional development literature on what Pike, Rodrguez-Pose,
and Tomaney call "ecological modernisation," including "the promotion of more efficient economic growth that uses fewer natural resources, regulated markets and using environmental practices as an economic driver" (2006, 115). Social

imperatives

are important--as in Shaffer, Deller and Marcouiller's acknowledgement of society as "a subtle background force that defines the norms, values and ethics that determine right from wrong, good from bad" (2004, 7)--but they are also constituted as soft and subjective (or "political") in contrast to the objective (measurable, calculable, predictable) necessities of the economic . It is, in the end, economic imperatives that rise to the top: "the overall purpose of community economic development policy is to reduce or abolish the barriers (economic, cultural, and/or 35 political) in product and factor markets that prevent the positive culmination of economic development processes" (Shaffer, Deller, and Marcouiller 2006, 70). There are at least two distinct critical responses that
can be generated in relation to the tripartite ontological structure presented by conventional RED. The first approach might view the distinction itself as constructed but essentially innocent, placing critical emphasis on the ways in which the relation between the three realms has become imbalanced in contemporary economic development practice. Even if the ontological structure itself is revealed as a historical production (which, to be clear, it is not in Stimson, Stough and Roberts), the problem is seen in the domain of the relations among elements of the trinity. Stimson, Stough and Roberts allude to such a perspective in suggesting that the "primary objective of sustainable regional development will be to restore the equilibrium" between the economic, social and ecological realms (2006, 218). Such an

approach, however, does not sufficiently examine the politics of the ontological distinctions themselves. A second approach--one which I adopt--refuses to accept the innocence of economy, nature and society as categories. Far from being neutral tools for understanding differences in the world, these distinctions make slices through actual bodies and interrelationships in ways that enable and sustain the particular dominance of the economic as well as its associated forms of violence, exploitation and colonization.21 "The economy," in enclosing its space of operation, externalizes all of the relationships, behaviors, rationalities and ethical dynamics that it wishes to

ignore, undermine or exploit to "society." Society, in a similar but broader move, builds its membrane by externalizing all people, species, relationships and dynamics that it wishes to exclude from ethical consideration and political deliberation to "nature." Nature, as the ultimate externality, serves a simultaneous role as the final ontological dump and the final ontological ground, both resource and recourse--on one hand, the place to which all excluded are banished to become resources or ghosts; on the other hand, the source of "objective" legitimation for any operation in the economic or social domains which someone seeks to render uncontestable by (of course) an operation of "naturalizing" (Yanagisako and Delaney 1995). 22 We can see two emergent effects of these separations. First, the separation of economy as a sphere distinct from society and nature makes possible-and even plausible--the assertion that "value judgments concerning social welfare should remain in the realm of politics, not economics" (Shaffer, Deller, and Marcouiller 2004, 9). This is
a common notion throughout mainstream economic literature, reflected in the distinction between "positive" and "normative" economics and a frequent injunction toward the former (Friedman 1970). In this way, categories

that are inevitably linked with value practices (McMurtry 1998; De Angelis 2007) are able to generate knowledges of the world that render these practices effectively invisible behind a veil of apparent objectivity. Asserting the necessity of a particular form of economic development to improve well-being becomes simply a description of what is and what must be rather than a normative attempt to intervene in the world. This is particularly insidious since the "economic" effectively maintains an exclusive right to activities understood as crucial for the reproduction of contemporary life (i.e., jobs and money) and can therefore draw on the power of this claim while also presenting its process of knowledge production and intervention as "objective." A second move enabled by the separation of an economic domain from all others is the erasure of a wide variety of fundamental life processes from view as legitimate and integral elements of human livelihoods. We have, on one side,
economy--the domain where people "make a living"; while on the other side lies society (where people gain meaning, participate in culture, have relationships, make ethical judgments, etc.) and nature (from which we draw resources or gain benefits). The

social and biophysical relationships--the constitutive interrelationships-- that make life itself possible and form the primary basis for all activities that might be construed as economic are separated from the very domain that purports to examine how humans meet needs, satisfy wants and create well-being (i.e., "economics"). In this ontology, slicing across and through interconnections between and among humans and nonhumans, both nature and society are rendered variously --as we have seen in conventional RED- into

collections of resources or sets of background "amenities" to be utilized. The ontology of economy, society and nature that undergirds conventional RED (as well as much of the broader culture from which it emerges) effectively severs us-- conceptually, materially, and experientially--from the responsibilities that our interrelationships as members of a community of life demand. When interrelationships become invisible , or when culturally-constructed dynamics are
conceived as ontological 38 facts, then we all need) is

ethics becomes impossible . It is because the "economy" (which

that we call "jobs." It

seen as different from society that we can justify the violence done to our is because

bodies and minds and hearts by the regime of coercive labor

the "economy" is seen as fundamentally different from nature that we can justify treating all other beings as resources (or ignoring them altogether) (Plumwood 2002) and end up with a system of livelihood that undermines our own conditions of existence and secures the ongoing violence of colonization
(Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 1998). 23

The plan creates an economy focused on interdependence rather than growth that results in sustainability and interdependence within the environment
Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 09 [J. K. Gibson-Graham; Department of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts, Gerda
Roelvink Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy, University of Western Sydney, An Economic Ethics for the Anthropocene"]//BMitch Necessity What

do humans, other species and ecosystems need in order to survive with some kind of dignity? This (anthropomorphic?) question increasingly intrudes upon what were formerly purely economic deliberations. The needs of animals, plants, soils and water sources, for example, have become a matter of concern that is reorganizing the food production industry. Reorganization has
been moved along by rogue infectious agents such as the prions that cause mad cow disease (Whatmore 2002) and the algae that grow in stagnant water holes but also by the environmental and animal liberation movements. The need for chickens to scratch the earth, move about, take dust baths, nest at night and lay eggs in comfort is acknowledged and accommodated in the growing organic free range poultry industry. While the price of the eggs and poultry meat from this sector cannot compete with that of mainstream producers, the presence of this niche has put pressure on the mainstream to improve the living conditions of its birds. Gerardo Ramos of Holyoke, Massachusetts has initiated a small business around more-than-human needs, responding to the plight of dying coral reefs by focusing his education and livelihood on them. Though he never completed high school, Ramos has taught himself to read the English-language textbooks and articles that have made him an expert on coral reef habitats. His business, Marine Reef Habitat, supplies institutions, individuals and businesses with fresh and saltwater tanks, fish and corals. Eventually, with the stock of corals generated through coral farming, and his savings supplemented by donations, Ramos intends to restore the coral reefs of his native Puerto Rico, where he used to swim and fish as a child before the reefs were decimated by pollution. Surplus Traditionally, Marxists and labor

advocates have been militantly concerned about the exploitative capitalist class process in which surplus (value) is appropriated by nonproducers from the workers who produce it. What if we added to our concern about the exploitative
interdependence between producers and non-producers a concern for the unaccounted-for exploitation of the non-human world? Because the

contribution of the more than human is not taken into account, in practice it ends up in the residual we identify as surplus. This is true for exploitative and nonexploitative enterprises alikecapitalist firms, worker cooperatives, independent producers, etc. To recognize and account for the needs of the non-human world would be to raise the social allocation to necessity and reduce the social surplus generated and finally appropriated.3 It would mean the growth of activities focused on regeneration and maintenance of the environmental commons and the dignity of animal life as an integral part of production. It would mean a fundamental change in the nature of business thinking and practice. Indeed, with a smaller surplus available for investment, the whole economics of growth might be called into question, and an opening created for a new economics focused on sustenance and interdependence. Such a shift seems impossible when posed in macro terms, but the beginnings of a change are clearly visible at the firm and industry levels . A New Hampshire
electronics firm, for example, was at first resistant to regulation by the US Environmental Protection Agency and only reluctantly allocated a distribution of surplus to comply with clean air and water regulations. Ten years later the picture had entirely changed: the department that was initially assigned the task of compliance had become the center of innovation and cost-saving in the firm, and also the area where employees were most desirous of working. New people with environmentalist values had joined the company and older personnel had left or been influenced to change (James Hamm, personal communication). While the impact on surplus was probably positive, the example reminds us that new distributions of surplus are always taking place (if often toward executive compensation) and such distributions are increasingly targeted to meeting the needs of the more than human (see, for

example, Gibson-Graham and ONeill 2001). Reflections The

community economy coordinates focus attention on ethical practices that produce economic connection and change. Distinct but interrelated, the coordinates prompt us, for example, to trace the ways that attending to the needs of the more than human reallocates surplus, shifts patterns of consumption, and replenishes a commons(or not). They constitute rudimentary elements of an economic theorycategories that separate out points of analytical interest (these could be called entry points) while at the same time enabling us to map and differentiate the ethical space of an economy . They help to distance us from the structural dynamics that have plagued economic theorizing, allowing us to represent an economy as a space of negotiated interdependence rather than a functional (or dysfunctional) growth machine. They also offer a tool for discerning an emerging
economic order and participating in its performative consolidation (Callon 2007).4 We have collated and displayed here just a few among the multitude of ethical projects that are arguably and even demonstrably bringing a more-than-simply-human economy into being. At the same time, in this essay and elsewhere, weve

been engaged in a number of related activities, including bringing an experimental (learning) rather than critical (judging) stance to ethical projects; amplifying and integrating small projects and disparate processes (via the community economy concept, for example); coming up with schematics and categorizations (like the coordinates and the inventory kit) that can orient research and proliferate economic possibilities; interpreting and disseminating key ideas and innovations; translating and making connections between different knowledge systems and communities; developing a pedagogy and protocols for listening to what was previously inarticulate; extending the collective to students, colleagues and other communities; transforming the collectives concerns into tangible and transportable objects of public policy; fostering credibility and working against inevitable attempts to discount the viability and significance of collective achievements (Santos 2004). We see these activities as an academic contribution to hybrid research collectives that are building community economies. In what follows we track several such collectives that are engaged in co-creating a
community economy for the Anthropocene.

Our local approach spills over to global economic experimentation

Healy 08 *Stephen Healy Worcester State College, Alternative Economies
http://www.communityeconomies.org/site/assets/media/stephenhealy/Alternative-Economies.pdf March]//BMitch

For those who focus on neoliberalism as well as those who are interested in the self-consciously alternative economy, the economy is generally structured by a hierarchical spatial ontology in which the local is nested within the regional, national and global scales. Viewed as containers, activities on a global scaleinternational financial markets, for exampleare assumed to have more determining power than local projects that appear to be containeda LETS system or a worker cooperative. In this way, a hierarchically ordered space effectively affirms the dominance of (global) capitalism while consigning economic experiments to relative powerlessness . The metonymical pairing of global-capitalism and local-alternatives structures our understanding of economic space even when an alternative economic practice becomes global in scope. Altertrade (or fair trade), in spite of its expanding presence in the global marketplace, is dismissed by its critics as small in relation to global trade as a whole (as, of course, are many sectors of international trade) and vulnerable to competition and cooptation. Whats remarkable about this depiction is that alter-trade could just as easily be represented as a powerful innovation, one that has injected an ethical sensibility into

trade that did not exist twenty years ago. Alter-trade is energized by an ethical dynamic of growth (rather than by a structural
dynamic of competition and increasing market share) that works against cooptation, draws increasing numbers of products into fair trade marketing, and links together more and more people. Perhaps in order to see the potential of alter-trade, what is required is a different spatial ontology that does not presume in advance the connection between scale, size and power. Recently Jones, Martin and Woodward have proposed a flat spatial ontology based on the site as an unfolding materiality that constructs and reconstructs space through its often uneven and temporary connection to other (distant) sites. In this conception there are no spatial categories or containers that pre-arrange the world into ordered spaces. Another flat

spatial ontology is offered by Gibson-Graham, whose feminist political imaginary is premised on a geography of ubiquity. Because women are everywhere, local and household-based feminist projects can be globally transformative; because diverse economies are everywhere, the projects of local economic activists can have world-changing effects. Linked semiotically rather than organizationally, these projects have the potential to configure a place-based global movement for economic transformation. Flat spatial ontologies have several implications for theorizing and enacting economic difference. First, it becomes easier to see economies as selforganizing spaces of contingent relationality where there is no presumption of dominance and subordination (though these will of course be found to exist in particular settings). When capitalist class relations are no longer to be regarded as necessarily dominant, it becomes more difficult to imagine that other social sites and processes (households, for example) are bound to the task of capitalist reproduction or that economic alternatives are awash in a capitalist sea. Second, a flat spatial ontology allows us to see economic diversity as globally dispersed, while at the same time creating potential connections among disparate locations and processes. In the flat space of economic difference, economic geographers interested in contributing to alternative economies might play a constructive role in translating experiments from one location to another, formalizing lessons learned from experiments in one place for other places, and working imaginatively with individuals, communities, and regions to produce and disseminate economic innovation. Given the ubiquity of potential sites for these sorts of academic interventionshouseholds, enterprises, communities, regions they could conceivably be conducted on a global scale. But in conceptualizing this politics of research and the future direction of scholarly interest in alternative economies, it becomes crucial to return to the concept of performativity and the way that it differs from just electing to think differently.

1ac plan
Thus, ____ and I ask you to imagine that the United States federal government substantially increases its economic engagement towards Jurez, Mexico through hybrid research collective programs.

1ac 2
Through this debate, we have taught you about the HRC and a future outside of capitalism. But to be honest, youve been in the hybrid research collective this whole time. Debate is the HRC. We bring you new ideas of labor, property, enterprise, finance, transactions and more and we have mapped the possibility of new forms of becoming within economics. Only through discursive resistance within every space of thought what well call the politics of ubiquity can we begin to resist capitalism here and now
Miller 13 *Ethan Miller University of Western Sydney Community Economy: Ontology, Ethics, and Politics for RadicallyDemocratic Economic Organizing http://www.communityeconomies.org/site/assets/media/Ethan_Miller/Miller_CommunityEconomy.pdf]//BMitch Thus far I have sidestepped an important dimension in Gibson-Graham's concept of community economy. In one sense, the term is mobilized in the three ways that I have described above. In another, the

term stands as a tentative proposal for an alternative fixing of economic identity around a new nodal point (Gibson-Graham 2006a, 78). This is to say that the community economy could itself become a political project to unify *the+ discursive terrain of multiple diverse economies, challenging the hegemony of capitalocentric social formations: Articulating the multiple, heterogeneous sites of struggle, such a discourse could resignify all economic transactions and relations , capitalist and noncapitalist, in terms of their sociality and interdependence, and their ethical participation in being-incommon as part of a 'community economy'. (Gibson-Graham 2006a, 97) Here we see an aspiration to collapse the meta-ethical moment of CE2 into CE3's moment of politics and to pose a political articulation around the question of the exposure and negotiation of social interdependence. Such a move would politicizeand thus make explicit the potential antagonisms withinthe Nancian distinction between socially imploded generality and socially exposed particularity. A community economy would be built by those who seek to sustain and struggle for spaces in which interdependence is visible and collectively negotiated, opposing processes of uncommoning or enclosure in all their forms. What does this look like as an organizing project? One might be tempted to imagine the formation of a coalition identified with ethical exposure, oriented around a commitment only to the question of ethics itself. Indeed, GibsonGraham's aspiration is toward some kind of substantive linking, asking how do we multiply, amplify, and connect these different activities? (2006a, 80). Yet her counterhegemonic articulation of community economy is not meant to suggest the construction of anything resembling an organizationally-coherent movement. Her preferred theory of change is based, rather, on a feminist political imaginary inspired by the complex intermixing of alternative discourses, shared language, embodied practices, self-cultivation, emplaced actions, and global transformation associated with second-wave feminism (2006b, xxvii). Transformation occurs, in this view, through ubiquity rather than unity (2006a, xxiv), in a vast set of disarticulated 'places'...related analogically rather than organizationally and connected through webs of signification (2006b, xxvii). Community economy as a counterhegemonic discourse might thus link diverse projects of ethical exposure and negotiation

emotionally and semiotically rather than primarily through organizational ties (2006b, xxiii). Is this not how capitalocentric hegemony was, in fact, established? While institutional articulation has clearly been essential for the rise of such a force, haven't the emotional and semiotic dimensions of capitalist discourse also been crucial in rendering noncapitalist practices, and potential spaces of collective creation and resistance, effectively invisible? Perhaps. Yet capitalist hegemonic articulations have been robustly positive in their
content, never shying away from the common-being that CE1 demands we unwork, or from closing the ethical spaces that CE2 demands we open. Can the near-emptiness of a community economy meta-ethic generate the kind of identificatory power that a strong nodal point requires? Is there enough family resemblance (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, 179) between various instances of community economy (CE2) to enable politically effective connections to emerge across vast difference? These are questions to which a solidarity economy approach might answer no.

Traditional forms of political discussion are melancholic and nostalgic conceptions of political certainty make us slaves to institutions and destroy our agency
Gibson-Graham 06 [J. K. Gibson-Graham, University of Minnesota A Post-Capitalist Politics p. 5//BMitch

Nostalgia for old forms of political organization (like international movements of worker solidarity or unions that had teeth) and attachment to the political victories of yesteryear (such as the nationalization of industry or protection for key sectors) blinds us to the political opportunities at hand.
We come to love our left passions and reasons, our left analyses and convictions, more than we love the existing world that we presumably seek to alter (W. Brown *1999, 21+ paraphrasing Benjamin). Melancholia

conserves and preserves,

turning its hatred toward the new and blaming thoseincluding poststructuralists and practitioners of identity politics (22)who betray the old ideals. It is from this stance that place-based activism of the kind we advocate is seen as accommodationist and divisive. As a departure from the politics of the past, place-based movements are suspect and likely to be seen as already incorporated into the capitalist world order. Here we have not only the melancholic attachment to the traditional paranoid style of theorizing, but the melancholic impulse to separate from and punish those who stray and innovate. Again there is work to be done to melt the frozen heart of the
putative leftist, where the conservative, backward-looking attachment to feelings, analyses, and relationships blocks any move toward present possibility and connection (W. Brown 1999, 22). To be a leftist is historically to be identied with the radical potential of the exploited and oppressed working class. Excluded

from power yet xated on the powerful, the radical subject is caught in the familiar ressentiment of the slave against the master. Feelings of hatred and revenge toward the powerful sit side by side with the moral superiority of the lowly (and therefore good) over the high and mighty (and therefore bad) (Newman [2000, 2] paraphrasing Nietzsche). Moralism provides an emotional shoring up of the reactive stance of the weak, who dene themselves in opposition to the strong (3).11 With the dissolution in recent times of positive projects of socialist construction, left moralism has been energized by increasing investments in injury, failure, and victimhood (W. Brown 1995). When power is identied with what is ruthless and dominating, it becomes something the left must distance itself from, lest it be co-opted or compromised (Newman 2000). Fearing implication with those in power, we become attached to guarding and demonstrating our purity rather than mucking around in everyday politics. Those who engage in such work may nd themselves accused of betraying their values, sleeping with the enemy, bargaining with the devilall manner of transgressions and betrayals. A moralistic stance fuels doubts about whether local economic experimentation can do anything but shore up a repressive state apparatus, or whether action research reproduces the power of the manipulative academic over the passive community. Focused on the glass

half empty rather than half full, this angry and skeptical political sensibility is seldom if ever satised. Successful political innovation seems perpetually blocked or postponed because it requires an entirely new relation to power. It will need to escape power, go beyond it, obliterate it, transform it, making the radical shift from a controlling, dominating power to an enabling, liberating one (Newman 2000). But since distance from power is the marker of authentic radicalism and desire is bound up in the purity of powerlessness, the move to reinhabit power is deferred. If we are to make the shift from victimhood to potency, from judgment to enactment, from protest to positive projects, we also need to work on the moralistic stance that clings to a singular conception of power and blocks experimentation with power in its many forms. Widely present if not fully manifest in any person or pronouncement, this culture of thinking and feeling creates a political sensibility that is paradoxically depoliticized. The theoretical closure of paranoia, the backwardlooking political certainty of melancholia and the moralistic skepticism toward power render the world eectively uncontestable . The accompanying aects of despair, separation, and resentment are negative and repudiating, inhospitable to adventure and innovation, at best cautious and lacking in temerity. From our perspective, these stances are what must be worked against if we are to pursue a new economic politics . Thankfully those same theorists who have helped to identify the barely conscious contours of a habit of thinking that blocks possibility have also led us to potential strategies for loosening its hold over us.
The practices of what Nietzsche called self-artistry or self-overcoming (Connolly 2002, 77; Newman 2000, 20) and Foucault called

self-cultivation or care of the self are an important entry point for eecting changes in thinking and being in the world.12 If our goal as thinkers is the proliferation of dierent economies, what we most need is an open and hospitable orientation toward the objects of our thought. We need to foster a love of the world, as Arendt says, rather than masterful knowing, or melancholy or moralistic detachment. To do this, perhaps we need to draw on the pleasures of friendliness, trust, conviviality, and companionable connection. Our repertory of tactics might include seducing, cajoling, enrolling, enticing, inviting. There could be a greater role in our thinking for invention and playfulness, enchantment and exuberance. And we could start to develop an interest in unpredictability, contingency, experimentation, or even an attachment to the limits of understanding and the possibilities of escape. Shifting Stances How do we disinvest in what we are, what we habitually feel and do, and turn ourselves to a project of becoming? How do we work against mastery, melancholia, and moralism and cultivate capacities that can energize and support the creation of other economies? If we want other worlds and other economies, how do we make ourselves a condition of possibility for their emergence? Clearly there are powerful pressures that keep us thinking and feeling in the same old ways. But as Connolly points out, there are also countervailing pressures and possibilities . . . at
work in the layered corporeality of cultural beings. Thinking bounces in magical bumps and charges across zones marked by dierences of speed, capacity, and intensity. It is above all in the dicey relations between the zones that the seeds of creativity are planted. For

thinking, again, is not harnessed by the tasks of representation and knowledge. Through its layered intra- and intercorporeality new ideas, theories, and identities are sometimes propelled into being. These new ideas, concepts, sensibilities, and identities later become objects of knowledge. Thinking is thus creative as well as representative, and its creativity is aided by the fact that the process of thinking is not entirely controlled by the agents of thought. (2002, 6566) There are, he suggests, experimental practices that we can employ to reeducate ourselves, to convince our bodies to adopt fundamentally dierent attitudes that we intellectually entertain as a belief,

new aective relations with the world (78). We can work in the conscious realm to devise practices that produce the kind of embodied, aect-imbued pre-thoughts that we want to foster. And in the daily rehearsal of these practices we can hope that they will become part of our
thereby producing makeup, part of a cell memory that will increasingly assert itself without resort to conscious calling.13 Practicing Weak Theory, Adopting Reparative Motives, and Producing Positive Affect What if we believed, as Sedgwick suggests, that the goal of theory were not only to extend and deepen knowledge by conrming what we already knowthat the world is full of cruelty, misery, and loss, a place of domination and systemic oppression? What if we asked theory to do something elseto help us see openings, to help us to nd happiness, to provide a space of freedom and possibility? As

a means of getting theory to yield something new, Sedgwick suggests reducing its reach, localizing its purview, practicing a weak form of theory that cannot encompass the present and shut down the future (2003, 134). Little more than description, weak theory couldnt know that social experiments are already coopted and thus doomed to fail or to reinforce dominance; it couldnt tell us that the world economy will be transformed by an international revolutionary movement rather than through the disorganized proliferation of local projects. Zen master Shunryu Suzuki reminds us that *i]n the beginners mind there are many possibilities, in the experts mind there are few (1970, 1). The practice of doing weak theory requires acting as a beginner, refusing to know too much, allowing success to inspire and failure to educate , refusing to extend diagnoses too widely or deeply.14 Weak theory can be undertaken with a reparative motive that welcomes surprise, entertains hope, makes connection, tolerates coexistence and oers care for the new. As the impulse to judge or discredit other theoretical agendas arises, one can practice making room for others, imagining a terrain on which the success of one project need not come at the expense of another. Producing such spaciousness is particularly useful for a project of rethinking economy, where the problem is the scarcity rather than the inconsistency of economic concepts. 15 Reparative theorizing can
be called on to open our assessments of repudiated movements and practices, fostering anities and even aliations. We can choose to cultivate appreciation, taking heart, for example, from the ways that identity politics has opened doors to class politics, or the ways in which a politics of recognition is already also a politics of redistribution.16 We

can practice relinquishing melancholic attachment to the past with its established narratives and entrenched blame. With a commitment to coexistence, we can work toward a way of thinking that might place us alongside our political others, mutually recognizable as oriented in the same direction even if pursuing dierent paths.17 Practicing weak theory allows us to deexoticize power, accepting it as our mundane, pervasive, uneven milieu. We can observe how we produce our own powerlessness with respect to the economy, for example, by theorizing unfolding logics and structural formations that close o the contestable arrangements we associate with politics. As we teach ourselves to come back with a beginners mind to possibilities, we can begin to explore the multiple forms of power, their spatialities and temporalities, their modes of transmission, reach and (in)eectivity. A dierentiated landscape of force, constraint, freedom, and opportunity emerges and we can open to the surge of positive energy that suddenly becomes available for mobilization. In the last part of this chapter we present a reading of two lms, showing how one, The Full Monty, portrays
movements that sidestep the paranoia, melancholia, and moralism of traditional left thinking as exemplied in the other, Bras sed O.18 Our aim is to illustrate the stance that we feel needs to be cultivated for the task of imagining and enacting a postcapitalist politics. What follows, then, is an experiment in reading that might nudge us toward a dierent aective relationship to the world and its possibilities.

Without the plan, debate is dominated by consultants, not policymakers: irresponsibly crafting marketing strategies, incapable of advocating social change. Only the affirmative can create responsible methodology which is an independent reason to vote affirmative.
MASON 13 (Arthur, Assistant Professor, Justice and Social Inquiry, School of Social Transformation, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences @ Arizona State U., Cartel Consciousness and Horizontal Integration in Energy Industry Cultures of Energy: Power, Practices, Technologies, 2013, pp. 126-129)

The culture of power surrounding large-scale energy systems over the past century can best be described as forms of collusion whose decision-making authority relies on structural positions of bureaucratic- and capitalist-led industry organization. In this chapter, I depart from this model by drawing attention to the increasing role played in energy policy decision-making by one group of experts, intermediaries (consultants) whose authority is based not on their structural position but instead on their theoretical knowledge and independent stance within the energy sector. In the past, energy systems were highly regulated by a national political community in which expertise was embedded as part of the originary political organizational form. Wrestling civilian control of nuclear power from the military, for example, resulted in the establishment of a core set of experts embedded within U.S. congressional politics. Atomic scientists and expectations of nuclear power as too cheap to meter were present in the popular imagination. However, the transparency of expertise was not autonomous from government nor did experts view themselves as independent of any sector of the industry. This is
the case even after the 1970s, when expansion in the scope of conflict and interested publics led to bureaucratic fragmentation and reorganization of nuclear power. In fact, one need only draw attention to popular catchphrases of collusion and government capture throughout the twentieth century to realize that prior

to restructuring of energy markets in the 1980s, the culture of power and political decision-making was based upon structural position in industrial organization. The notion of iron triangles or subgovernments, for example, draws attention to the closedcircle partnerships of industry leaders, congressional member, and technocratic elites involved in promoting nuclear power from the postwar years to the 1970s (Temples 1980). Managerial consensus reflects the backroom arrangements of public utility officials and industry leaders that results in expansion of electricity transmission from the Depression era to the restructuring of the 1980s (Hirsh 2001). Natural monopoly and negotiated settlements refer to growth of the natural gas industry to, in the case of the former, a government selection process, and in the latter, pre-agreements that forestall litigation among pipeline builders, natural gas producers, and distributors (Doucet and Littlechild 2006; Tussing and Tippee 1995). The

government-sponsored project, as in the Manhattan Project that exemplifies an alliance of military and managerial expertise, was not limited to the advent of the nuclear era but inclusive of other federally sanctioned megaprojects (Rochlin 1994). Interest group may be included here, especially the forms of claims-making across civil and govermentental spheres to remediate environmental insult (Tugwell 1980; Wapner 1995). All such phrases call attention to a crucial feature of twentieth-century styles of collusion: the forces that influence and indeed authorize political and economic arrangements are based on decision-making authority in which possessors of theoretical knowledge are the dominated faction of the dominating group. Curiously, the most pervasive arrangement of collusion in which the dissembedding of expertise becomes transparent is the cartel. A cartel refers to a group of sellers whose intent is to fix prices and production outputs in concert to maximize wealth, usually by strategy of trial and error. The cartel arrangement is associated with oligopolistic industries in which the presence of few sellers facilitates coordination. Oligopoly means few sellers in the marketplace, often with strategic interaction among rival firms. While each
firm may independently decide its strategy, its actions anticipate the reaction of rival firms. Among students of cartel theory,

anticipation and reaction represents a "consciousness of interdependence" (Dibadj 2010:595). That is, even

without intent to agree on specific conditions, oligopolies are marked by coordinated conduct across industries where prices are suspiciously similar or change in rapidly parallel ways (gasoline, airline tickets, cell phone rates, credit-card fees, movie tickets). This coordinated conduct has given rise to the phrase conscious parallelism, to describe a tacitly collusive conduct in which firms engage in parallel behavior in order to gain collusive profits but where a cartel is not set up explicitly. The absence of explicit agreement is consequential in antitrust law, where the cartel fulfills a "contract,"
"combination," or "conspiracy" requirement (section 1 of the Sherman Act). In the legal profession, conscious parallelism is restricted to "probable reactions of competitors" in setting their prices (Turner 1962). "Although it is hard to find a precise definition," conscious parallelism refers to "tacit collusion in which each firm in an oligopoly realizes that it is within the interests of the entire group of firms to maintain a high price or to avoid vigorous price competition, and the firms act in accordance with this realization" (Hylton 200373, emphases added). In this chapter, I energy policy

highlight the role of independent experts in decision-making by focusing on the forms they employ for realizing interdependence among energy companies. I draw attention to representational strategies used by consultants (workshops, commodified forms of knowledge, expert advice) for translating information into knowledge that becomes the collective property of energy industry elites. I argue that the advisory services of firms such as Wood Mackenzie, Cambridge Energy, and others structure the location and content of high-level conversations within the newly privatized and globalized energy markets. Through mastery of skill gained through experience, competency in education and employment, the discrimination they perform as it pertains to judgment between knowledge claims based on one's involvement in certain social networks, consultants reduce the complexity of facts into the kinds of simplicity that can form the basis of decisionmaking. In so doing, experts disentangle themselves from political and economic rights in techno-economic decision-making by addressing, at least on the surface of things, reasons for adopting their advice in virtue of the things that they do and know rather than as members of institutions. To characterize their role, I begin by outlining the ascendency of energy consultants and then identify media representations, such as brochures and advertisements produced by consultant firms, through which clients become witness to a detailed interplay of images about global modernity. These images establish a relation between consultants' intended audience (energy executives), those defined as outside this audience (energy consumers), and the future. Because of its resonance with risk, the future is open to contestation. Contestation is the norm in the energy decision-making arena where a cartel alliance and cartel-like consciousness are reconstructed continuously. The temporary stabilization of an alliance relies upon a sustained perception of the credibility of a given future. To be sustained, it is incumbent to replicate an image of the future that is both believable and authoritative.

Our imagination approach to the plan doesnt mean we shouldnt care about Juarez - we still think that a HRC project should occur there, and we ask you to imagine that it does. If you think about the first time fiat was explained to you, youll realize that fiat is always mere imagination. Well still answer disads about our thought project, we just think that the discursive act of imagining is more important. Ethics through fixed models and policy solutions are doomed to remaining in current dogma only imaginative experimentation is able to resist commodification
Gibson-Graham 06 [J. K. Gibson-Graham, University of Minnesota A Post-Capitalist Politics p. 87]//BMitch

We are proposing that a discourse of the community economy has the capacity to politicize the economic in new ways by resignifying economy as a site of decision, of ethical praxis, instead of as the ultimate reality/ container/constraint; and all economic practices as inherently social and always connected in their concrete particularities to the commerce of being-together. (Nancy 2000, 74) Resocializing (and repoliticizing) the economy involves making explicit the sociality that is always present , and thus constituting the various forms and practices of interdependence as matters for reection, discussion, negotiation, and action. But where might we look for strategies for negotiating plurality and interdependence, the
ethics of connection that make up the fabric of economy? How might we redress the positioning of community as an afterthought to the given of the individual in thinking about economic matters? And what might a nonfantastical, nonsingular vision of the community economy be? Here we

are seeking the ethical coordinates for a political practice, not a model or a plan, nor elements of a xed ideology, a dogma that we have to subscribe to (De Angelis 2003, 4). Nancy reminds us that Marx and Freud were two of the few thinkers who have attempted
to redress the relegation of the plural, social or communitarian dimension to the status of an addition to that of a primitive individual given (2000, 44). Marxs

project of exposing the social nature of capitalist economic relations, especially the way in which exchange masked the social origins of surplus value, is central to our understanding of economic relations and thus to the task of resocializing the economy.10 His theory of surplus labor and Resnick and Wols anti-essentialist Marxian analysis of the class process oer
some conceptual tools for practically approaching economic being-in-common. A class process involves the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus labor (in labor, product, or value form) and is but one way of representing and accounting for ows of labor in a society (Gibson-Graham, Resnick, and Wol 2000a, 2001).11 Whether or not we acknowledge it, our own existence at every level can be seen as the eect of the labor of others. For our purposes, then, labor has an inessential commonalitya solidarity that in no way contains an essence (Agamben 1993, 19)that might give us some purchase on economic being-in-common. If we

wish to emphasize the becoming of new and as yet unthought ways of economic being, we might focus on the multiple possibilities that emerge from the inessential commonality of negotiating our own implication in the existence of others. An ethical praxis of being-in-common could involve cultivating an awareness of what is necessary to personal and social survival; how social surplus is appropriated and distributed; whether and how social surplus is to be produced and consumed; and how a commons is produced and sustained. Negotiations around these key coordinates and the interactions between them could inform an ethics and politics of the community economy.12

capitalist thought 1ac v2

1ac 1
Contention One is Hegemony Latin American economic policy is marked by dependency on capitalism Latin America is trapped as a resource for raw materials and labor for the West
Adrin Sotelo VALENCIA Center of Latin American Studies @ National Autonomous University of Mexico, 25 March 2013, Latin America: Dependency and Super-Exploitation Critical Sociology, This is due to the following reason. Dependency, as understood in Marinis terms, implies

the negation of the central belief that the UN Economic Commission for Latin America proposed from the very start, namely, that economic autonomy in Latin America would come with industrialization, import substitution, technical progress, and the development of internal markets. Not only has their thesis not proven true over the last three decades, but as Marini warned in various works (e.g. Marini, 1993a) the dependency has in fact deepened. It is worth exploring in greater detail Marinis argument that Latin America contributed to the shift from
absolute to relative surplus value in classic capitalism in England during the industrial revolution. It is argued that the region played this role particularly from 1840 onwards when it created a global food supply that affected the cheapening of the English labor force in the industrial revolution, thus helping to strengthen the transition towards the production of relative surplus value (Marini, 1973: 16). As one of his original contributions in this area, this idea forms the basis of any contemporary theorization of labors superexploitation. In light of this approach, we are led to consider the role that contemporary

Latin America is playing as a labor pool for the development of industrialized countries such as the USA, Western Europe and Japan particularly in view of the conversion of many of our countries, such as Mxico, into net importers of food and raw materials. The utilization of labor super-exploitation as a lever for the development of productivity implies a strong relationship between the increasingly flexible management of labor currently under way and the dynamic of technology deployment in Latin America. The latter issue is of great importance as it relates to the introduction of
production systems and work organization of a Toyotist nature that significantly increases the intensity of work and sponsors the improvement of productivity per employed laborer at the expense of wages and overall working conditions. This forms part of a historic process in Latin America. Indeed, from the very beginning, advanced

capitalism articulated and subordinated labor in the appropriation of absolute surplus value through extended working hours and the intensification of the labor force, and relative surplus value (lowering the value of the labor force), at least from the time of the industrial revolution in England, and gradually incorporated workers in the consumption of goods produced by the factories of big industry. It was this that influenced Marx himself in Capital to visualize the possibility of exploiting labor by reducing wages below the value of workforce as a phenomenon aimed at countering the tendency for the rate of profit to decline (Marx, 1974: 235). By conceptualizing this possibility as a long-term structural practice and making it part
of his general analysis of capital analysis, he found it consistent with his larger methodological premise as developed in Capital that the

value of labor power (like any other commodity) always corresponds to its market price new period was originated, one famously characterized by students of the sociology of work as the Fordist-Taylorist system of mass production where the newly inserted worker on the assembly line was both producer and consumer of goods produced by modern industry as
(Marx, 2000: 177). Subsequently, a in the illustrative case of automobiles (see Braverman, 1974). The merit and novelty of the dependency approach proposed by

Marini is that he forged the super-exploitation category that was left out of the overall analysis of Marxs Capital as the core and guiding principle of capitalist development in the underdeveloped socioeconomic formations of the periphery of the world system. This has allowed us to historically and structurally differentiate such countries from the development of countries under classical capitalism. Applying that category to the analysis of contemporary capitalism, and in particular to the new historical stage that
opened in the late 1980s with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the US invasion of Iraq in the so-called Gulf War (1991), all of which coincided with a widespread and large-scale transition to tangible and intangible production and telecommunications (a third industrial revolution), Marini points out three conditions that capital had to first

address in order to open this new stage of history. First, he emphasized

the achievement of the higher degree of exploitation of labor throughout the system in order to increase the mass of surplus value, something only possible with the defeats of the labor movement insurgent in the countries of the capitalist center and in the periphery, including Latin America. Second, there was a need to intensify the concentration of capital in advanced economies in order to ensure investment in scientific and technological development and industrial upgrading, thus implying large transfers of value from the dependent countries of Latin America (the so-called unequal exchange) in order to increase capital accumulation. This development consequently aggravated the problems of employment, salary, social exclusion and poverty in large parts of the population in the periphery. Third, an expansion of market scale was needed in order to put into place the large investments required to modernize the industrial apparatus. Marini concludes that all of this
updated the laws and basic mechanisms of the capitalist system: especially the law of value ... which operates by comparing the actual value of the goods, the working time invested in its creation, and therefore including the time that meets the demand for inputs and means of production and reproduction of the labor force (Marini, 1990).1 During the 1990s, the

achievement of these three conditions allowed the conversion of the Latin American economy into a neoliberal economy dependent on a sustained pattern of accumulation and reproduction of capital subordinated to capital-cycle dynamics of hegemonic countries of advanced capitalism, and, increasingly, the reproductive cycle of the Chinese economy. The structural setting of the Latin American economy as geared to the world market, based on reproductive patterns embedded in processes of re-technology import and central countries, is a reflection of this new form of dependency that makes it more vulnerable to external contradictions imposed by the global capitalist accumulation in the 21st
century. We can therefore suggest three themes that permeate dependency theory today and suggest the agenda for future research. They are: 1) the

new dependency which is the propensity for the specialization of production in Latin American economies that is stimulated by the systematic application of neoliberal economic policy; 2) the concentration of income as one of the perverse features of the dependent economy
that requires investigation; and 3) the politically derived tensions that obtain between democracy and the growing propensities to political authoritarianism.

Transition to a more sustainable economic system is impossible absent an exploration of different economic practices that capitalism renders invisible. This exploration of economics is our project the Hybrid Research Collective, or HRC. Any attempt to destroy capitalism will fail absent the affirmatives breaking down of the idea that capitalism is hegemonic in the first place. George DEMARTINO - Professor of international economics @ U of Denver, 2013, Work in Progress posted, Ethical
Economic Engagement in a World Beyond Control, Rethinking Marxism)//rainy //ctc
The J.K. Gibson-Graham project is, in a word, saturated with ethical content. Present from the start of their collaboration as J.K. Gibson Graham, the ethical content has become more explicit and intentional as the project has evolved. In their forthcoming book with Jenny Cameron and Stephen Healy, begun before Julies death, the

ethical content is front and center. They write, For us, taking back the economy through ethical action means surviving together well and equitably, distributing surplus to enrich social and environmental health, encountering others in ways that supports their wellbeing as well as ours, consuming sustainably, maintaining, replenishing and growing our natural and cultural commons, investing our wealth so the at future generations can live well. An economy in which these ethical actions take place or are being worked toward is what we call a community economya space of decision where we recognize and negotiate our interdependence with other humans, other species and our environment. In the process of recognizing and negotiating, we become a community (Gibson-Graham, Cameron
and Healy forthcoming). The community or diverse economy project took root in recognition that much of the Marxian scholarship on the nature of capitalism that flourished in the latter part of the 20th century presumed an ontology that unwittingly effaced the political efficacy of capitalisms critics. In the End of Capitalism (as we knew it), Gibson- Graham faulted Marxian thought for contributing to the capitalist hegemony that Marxists sought to displace. In Gibson-Grahams view, Marxism erred in theorizing capitalism as having essential properties that insulated it from all but the

most heroic political resistancea kind of resistance, in fact, that was hardly possible and, in any event, largely undesirable. The forms of Marxism that Gibson-Graham targeted forced the conclusion that capitalism was effectively beyond challenge in fact if not in principle. In the traditional Marxian

capitalism was marked by the ontological properties of unity, singularity and totality (Gibson-Graham 1996, ch. 11). Gibson Graham argued that capitalism was theorized as self-generative and re-generative, protean
account, adaptable almost without limit so that any prosaic or achievable challenge or alternative to it could and would be assimilated to its needs.

Capitalism was also seen to infuse all aspects of the social formation that sustained itthere was no authentically non-capitalist space (geographical, political, economic, ideational or cultural) that was immune to capitalist
penetration. Non-capitalist sites and practices were rendered epiphenomenalas vestigial and, so, not yet capitalism; as functional to capitalism; or otherwise subordinate to capitalism. The presumption of this ontological binary, in which capitalism

and only capitalism occupies a privileged, essential position, renders resistance futile, as the Borgs would say. Not in principle, of course. Indeed, in
the traditional Marxian account capitalism is understood to be fraught with contradictions that open up the theoretical possibility for a mass movement or workers (and their class allies) with the power and objective interest in overthrowing it. But in practice, the vision of capitalism as ontologically privileged makes a mockery of any actual, practical resistance. Trade union struggles for higher wages or worker rights? Community campaigns to protect the environment, or to assert control over local capitalist corporations? These piecemeal

efforts can only ever displace but never resolve the contradictions they target (OConnor 1988). In the end, capitalism emerges from these skirmishes ever stronger and refined. Indeed, the challenges are absorbed and exploited by capital to increase surplus
production and extraction. We now have fair trade commodities and green products, for instance, which command a higher pr ice on the market and secure a higher rate of return for capital. Gibson-Graham found in poststructuralist, feminist, queer, and anti-essentialist Marxian accounts a basis for displacing the traditional Marxian ontology and its associated political imaginary. What if, they asked, the capitalism we confront achieves hegemony not largely as a consequence of its deep structural attributes but in part as a consequence of the knowledges of it that its Marxian critics and others generate and sustain? What if we collaborate in capitalisms construction as a unit y, singularity and totality by the very way that we theorize it (JK Gibson-Graham 1996)? What

if we recognize the imagined, narrative basis of the purportedly scientific Marxian accounts that project onto capitalism the properties that they believe themselves to simply discover? If this is so then perhaps alternative narratives of capitalism, alternative imaginaries, might be available to us that would effectively deny capitalism these properties. Alternative visions of capitalism might recognize that it is ever incomplete, porous, and even fragile. These counter- narratives might then open up the terrain for the production of non-capitalist economies
right here, right now. In this imaginary, an imaginary that simply refuses the ontological privilege with wh ich weve invested capitalism, a largely negative project of resistance to what cant be resisted is displaced by a largely positive project of invention and construc tion. No

longer is it required of us that we engineer a grand oppositional, mass movement that can take on all of capitalism from the US to China all at once; indeed, no longer is there a Capitalism that needs to be uprooted and displaced so that non-capitalisms can proliferate. Instead, the alternative narrative beckons us to recognize that social formations comprise capitalist practices alongside all sorts of other economic practices that, together, populate a dense, diverse economic landscape. This vision calls on us to recognize that instead of inhabiting a capitalist universe, a barren economic monoculture, we are situated always in an economic pluriverse that is teeming with diverse economic creatures and creations that share and shape the landscape. This kind of landscape may afford us ample space for economic experimentation that can yield and nurture all sorts of non-capitalist economic practices. Indeed, we may realize that weve been constructing these projects all along, in our families, with our friends and
neighbors, in our community organizations and even in many of our formal economic institutions, without recognizing the import of the achievement. And not just us. It

may be that our most ardent defenders of Capitalism are closeted class revolutionaries in the privacy of their own homes, and also in their churches and country clubs, where they engage unwittingly in non- capitalist, non-exploitative and perhaps even communist practices.

The HRC project constitutes bringing researchers and activists to local populations in order to educate them and instruct them to differentiate the economy JK GIBSON-GRAHAM, A feminist project of belonging for the Anthropocene, 2010, //rainy //ctc

We are suggesting experiments in regional development. But who or what is it that experiments? Who or what learns and transforms? How is the becoming world initiated in an intentional, responsive, responsible way? Elsewhere we have nominated for this role something Callon calls a hybrid research collective, an assemblage that, through research, increases possibilities for (being in) the world (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2009, 11; Callon and Rabeharisoa 2003; Roelvink 2008, 2009). Research is a site where new publics are marshaled around matters of concern, and university based research is where experimentation is supported. So why not conceive of university based action research as a potential catalyst for going on in a different mode of humanity, starting where we are, in our own regions? What have we got to lose? If we accept our belonging to a planet made up of complex matter that cuts across personhood, animality and objecthood, what kind of regional development might emerge? Again, we have no concrete idea. But we are interested in outlining some steps toward answering that question by enrolling activities we have employed in regional action research and recalibrating them with sensitivity to the more than human. Our community partnering research has usually begun starting where we are by inviting participants to inventory the range of economic practices and assets that are often overlooked as potential contributors to regional development. Lets think about starting with this intervention and extending our regional inventory to encompass the more than human. First, there would be the task of compiling a regional profile. Usually this includes marshaling official statistics about demographic characteristics and trends, housing stock, community services, transport, infrastructure, local government and, most importantly, mainstream economic structure, including capitalist and self-employed business activity, paid employment and income levels. Our project would build on this regional profile by including elements of the diverse economy (see Figure 4). Such an expanded vision of economy is not easily available as there are few official statistics on many activities in the lower cells of any of the diverse economy columns. The process of generating a diverse economy regional profile would involve enrolling people to collect indicative data about the economic activities they care about. There might be little chance of conducting a comprehensive survey of diverse economic activities, but this may not matter. In the process of compiling and mapping, teams of hybrid researchers would form collective learning assemblages that would potentially become open to belonging in new ways.

You have an ethical obligation to object to current economic practice in Latin America it makes poverty, environmental destruction, and militarism inevitable
Makwana 6 (Rajesh, STWR, 23rd November 06, http://www.stwr.org/globalization/neoliberalism-and-economic-globalization.html, ZBurdette) The dramatic economic and social improvement seen in these countries has not stopped them from being demonized by the US. Cuba is a well known example of this propaganda. Deemed to be a danger to freedom and the American way of life, Cuba has been subject to intense US political, economic and military pressure in order to tow the neoliberal line. Washington and the mainstream media in the US have recently embarked on a similar propaganda exercise aimed at Venezuelas president Chavez. This over-reaction by Washington to economic nationalism is consistent with their foreign policy objectives which have not changed significantly for the past 150 years. Securing resources and economic dominance has been and continues to be the USAs main economic objective. According to Maria Pez Victor: Since 1846 the United States has carried out no fewer than 50 military invasions and destabilizing operations involving 12 different Latin American countries. Yet, none of these countries has ever had the capacity to threaten US security in any

significant way. The US intervened because of perceived threats to its economic control and expansion. For this reason it has also supported some of the regions most vicious dictators such as Batista, Somoza, Trujillo, and Pinochet. As a result of corporate and US influence, the key international bodies that developing countries
are forced to turn to for assistance, such as the World Bank and IMF, are major exponents of the neoliberal agenda. The WTO openly asserts its intention to improve global business opportunities; the IMF is heavily influenced by the Wall Street and private financiers, and the World Bank ensures corporations benefit from development project contracts. They all gain considerably from the neo-liberal model. So influential are corporations at this time that many of the worst violators of human rights have even entered a Global Compact with the United Nations, the worlds foremost humanitarian body. Due to this international convergence of economic ideology, it is no coincidence that the

there are huge differences between the neoliberal dogma that the US and EU dictate to the world and the policies that they themselves adopt. Whilst fiercely advocating the removal of barriers to trade, investment and employment, The US economy remains one of the most protected in the world. Industrialized nations only reached their state of economic development by fiercely protecting their industries from foreign markets and investment. For economic
assumptions that are key to increasing corporate welfare and growth are the same assumptions that form the thrust of mainstream global economic policy. However, growth to benefit developing countries, the international community must be allow ed to nurture their infant industries. Instead economically dominant countries are kicking away the ladder to achieving development by imposing an ideology that suits their own economic needs. The US and EU also provide huge subsidies to many sectors of industry.

Despite their neoliberal rhetoric, most capitalist countries have increased their levels of state intervention over the past 25 years, and the size of their government has increased. The requirement is to do as I say, not as I do. Given the tiny proportion of individuals that benefit from neoliberal policies, the chasm between what is good for the economy and what serves
These devastate small industries in developing countries, particularly farmers who cannot compete with the price of subsidized goods in international markets.

the public good is growing fast . Decisions to follow these policies are out of the hands of the public, and the national sovereignty of many Below we examine the false assumptions of neoliberal policies and their effect on the global economy. Economic Growth Economic growth, as
developing countries continues to be violated, preventing them from prioritizing urgent national needs. measured in GDP, is the yardstick of economic globalization which is fiercely pursued by multinationals and countries alike. It is the commercial activity of the tiny portion of multinational corporations that drives economic growth in industrialized nations. Two hundred corporations account for a third of global economic growth. Corporate trade currently accounts for over 50% of global economic growth and as much as 75% of GDP in the EU. The proportion of trade to GDP continues to grow, highlighting the belief that

Corporations have to go to extraordinary lengths in order to reflect endless growth in their accounting books. As a result, finite resources are wasted and the environment is dangerously neglected. The equivalent of two football fields of natural forest is cleared each second by profit hungry corporations. Economic growth is also used by the World Bank and government economists to measure progress in developing countries. But, whilst economic growth clearly does have benefits, the evidence strongly suggests that these benefits do not trickle down to the 986 million people living in extreme poverty, representing 18 percent of the world population (World Bank, 2007). Nor has economic growth addressed inequality and income distribution. In addition, accurate assessments of both poverty levels and the overall benefits of economic growth have proved impossible due to the inadequacy of the
economic growth is the only way to prosper a country and reduce poverty. Logically, however, a model for continual financial growth is unsustainable. statistical measures employed. The mandate for economic growth is the perfect platform for corporations which, as a result, have grown rapidly in their economic activity,

this very model is also the cause of the growing inequalities seen across the globe. The privatization of resources and profits by the few at the expense of the many, and the inability of the poorest people to afford market prices, are both likely causes. Free Trade Free trade is the foremost demand of neoliberal globalization. In its current form, it simply translates as greater access to emerging markets for corporations and their host nations. These demands are contrary to the original assumptions of free trade as affluent countries adopt and maintain protectionist measures. Protectionism allows a nation to strengthen its industries by levying taxes and quotas on imports, thus increasing their own industrial
profitability and political influence. Yet capacity, output and revenue. Subsidies in the US and EU allow corporations to keep their prices low, effectively pushing smaller producers in developing countries out of the market and impeding development. With this self interest driving globalization, economically powerful nations have created a global trading regime with which they can

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the US, Canada, and Mexico is an example of free-market fundamentalism that gives corporations legal rights at the expense of national sovereignty. Since its implementation it has caused job loss, undermined labour rights, privatized essential services, increased inequality and caused environmental destruction. In Europe only 5% of EU citizens work in agriculture, generating just 1.6% of EU GDP compared to more than 50% of citizens in
determine the terms of trade. developing countries. However, the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) provides subsidies to EU farmers to the tune of 30 billion, 80% of which goes to only 20% of farmers to guarantee their viability, however inefficient this may be. The General Agreement on Trade and Services (GATS) was agreed at the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1994. Its aim is to remove any restrictions and internal government regulations that are considered to be "barriers to trade". The agreement effectively abolishes a governments sovereign right to regulate subsidies and provide essential national services on behalf of its citizens. The Trade Related agreement on International Property Rights (TRIPS) forces developing countries to extend property rights to seeds and plant varieties. Control over these resources and services are instead granted to corporate interests

These examples represent modern free trade which is clearly biased in its approach. It fosters corporate globalization at the expense of local economies, the environment, democracy and human rights. The primary beneficiaries of international trade are large, multinational corporations who fiercely lobby at all levels of national and global governance to further the free trade agenda.
through the GATS and TRIPS framework.

Hegemonic economic thought makes ethics impossible the idea of a normalized economy is violence through economic colonization that makes extinction inevitable
Ethan Lloyd MILLER @ University of Massachusetts, May 2011, RETHINKING ECONOMY FOR REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT: ONTOLOGY, PERFORMATIVITY AND ENABLING FRAMEWORKS FOR PARTICIPATORY VISION AND ACTION, ctc - Conventional RED = conventional regional economic development - the trinity/triple-bottom-line is the categorization of everything into economics, society, and nature - positions held by conventional RED are in italics

Ecological and social relationships are also subsumed within conventional RED by a notion of "amenities," collectively defined as "cultural, historic, natural or built environmental resources that increasingly contribute to our notion of quality of life" (Shaffer, Deller, and Marcouiller 2004, 7). 19 In this conception, the beings and relationships constituting society and nature are positioned not as resource inputs for production, but rather as supporting background contexts within which economic development plays out. As amenities, these constitutive interrelationships appear as pleasant sources of attraction that might add value to a given process of economic growth (or, in their absence, might hinder such a process) (Green 2001); that might increase the competitiveness of a
region by providing a more appealing stage upon which economic drama can unfold (Rogerson 1999; Wojan and McGranahan 2007); that may "reduce transaction

costs" and thus enhance economic activity (Stimson, Stough, and Roberts 2006, 321); or may

even be transformable into resources (sustainably, of course) for commodity production.20 The notion of a "regional milieu," found extensively throughout recent work on the role of innovation and "knowledge spillovers" in enhancing regional economic competitiveness, is often a more nuanced and robust--but ultimately similar-- version of the amenity approach to social and ecological relations (Amin 1999). In all of these conceptualizations, the

economic is foregrounded as the active, productive force against a background of passive objects or instrumentalized relationships. Despite the occasional invocation of a "triple-bottom-line," Stimson, Stough and Roberts build their core discourse and analysis around only the economic node of this trinity. It is one thing to invoke a valuation of the economic, social and natural; it is quite another to enact this in analytical models of regional development. When the substantive questions are asked and the numbers are gathered and stacked in columns, it is the "economic"--specifically constituted by measurements of wages, jobs, productivity and aggregate regional growth--that stands at the center of the picture. "Some constraint on the pursuit of economic values, particularly the quest for high economic growth, may be necessary in the short term," write Stimson, Stough and Roberts,"but it is unreasonable and unrealistic for societies to lower long-term economic aspirations" (2006, 218). The discourse of the triple bottom line only serves, then, to obscure the fact that in a contest between the three domains, the economic stands most likely to prevail . Ecological imperatives are acceptable so long as they can generate increased revenues for economic processes: hence the strong emphasis in recent regional development literature on what Pike, Rodrguez-Pose,
and Tomaney call "ecological modernisation," including "the promotion of more efficient economic growth that uses fewer natural resources, regulated markets and using environmental practices as an economic driver" (2006, 115). Social

imperatives

are important--as in Shaffer, Deller and Marcouiller's acknowledgement of society as "a subtle background force that defines the norms, values and ethics that determine right from wrong, good from bad" (2004, 7)--but they are also constituted as soft and subjective (or "political") in contrast to the objective (measurable, calculable, predictable) necessities of the economic . It is, in the end, economic imperatives that rise to the top: "the overall purpose of community economic development policy is to reduce or abolish the barriers (economic, cultural, and/or 35 political) in product and factor markets that prevent the positive culmination of economic development processes" (Shaffer, Deller, and Marcouiller 2006, 70). There are at least two distinct critical responses that
can be generated in relation to the tripartite ontological structure presented by conventional RED. The first approach might view the distinction itself as constructed but essentially innocent, placing critical emphasis on the ways in which the relation between the three realms has become imbalanced in contemporary economic development practice. Even if the ontological structure itself is revealed as a historical production (which, to be clear, it is not in Stimson, Stough and Roberts), the problem is seen in the domain of the relations among elements of the trinity. Stimson, Stough and Roberts allude to such a perspective in suggesting that the "primary objective of sustainable regional development will be to restore the equilibrium" between the economic, social and ecological realms (2006, 218). Such an

approach, however, does not sufficiently examine the politics of the ontological distinctions themselves. A second approach--one which I adopt--refuses to accept the innocence of economy, nature and society as categories. Far from being neutral tools for understanding differences in the world, these distinctions make slices through actual bodies and interrelationships in ways that enable and sustain the particular dominance of the economic as well as its associated forms of violence, exploitation and colonization.21 "The economy," in enclosing its space of operation, externalizes all of the relationships, behaviors, rationalities and ethical dynamics that it wishes to ignore, undermine or exploit to "society." Society, in a similar but broader move, builds its membrane by externalizing all people, species, relationships and dynamics that it wishes to exclude from ethical consideration and political deliberation to "nature." Nature, as the ultimate externality, serves a simultaneous role as the final ontological dump and the final ontological ground, both resource and recourse--on one hand, the place to which all excluded are banished to become resources or ghosts; on the other hand, the source of "objective" legitimation for any operation in the economic or social domains which someone seeks to render uncontestable by (of course) an operation of "naturalizing" (Yanagisako and Delaney 1995). 22 We can see two emergent effects of these separations. First, the separation of economy as a sphere distinct from society and nature makes possible-and even plausible--the assertion that "value judgments concerning social welfare should remain in the realm of politics, not economics" (Shaffer, Deller, and Marcouiller 2004, 9). This is
a common notion throughout mainstream economic literature, reflected in the distinction between "positive" and "normative" economics and a frequent injunction toward the former (Friedman 1970). In this way, categories

that are inevitably linked with value practices (McMurtry 1998; De Angelis 2007) are able to generate knowledges of the world that render these practices effectively invisible behind a veil of apparent objectivity. Asserting the necessity of a particular form of economic development to improve well-being becomes simply a description of what is and what must be rather than a normative attempt to intervene in the world. This is particularly insidious since the "economic" effectively maintains an exclusive right to activities understood as crucial for the reproduction of contemporary life (i.e., jobs and money) and can therefore draw on the power of this claim while also presenting its process of knowledge production and intervention as "objective." A second move enabled by the separation of an economic domain from all others is the erasure of a wide variety of fundamental life processes

from view as legitimate and integral elements of human livelihoods. We have, on one side,
economy--the domain where people "make a living"; while on the other side lies society (where people gain meaning, participate in culture, have relationships, make ethical judgments, etc.) and nature (from which we draw resources or gain benefits). The

social and biophysical relationships--the constitutive interrelationships-- that make life itself possible and form the primary basis for all activities that might be construed as economic are separated from the very domain that purports to examine how humans meet needs, satisfy wants and create well-being (i.e., "economics"). In this ontology, slicing across and through interconnections between and among humans and nonhumans, both nature and society are rendered variously --as we have seen in conventional RED- into

collections of resources or sets of background "amenities" to be utilized. The ontology of economy, society and nature that undergirds conventional RED (as well as much of the broader culture from which it emerges) effectively severs us-- conceptually, materially, and experientially--from the responsibilities that our interrelationships as members of a community of life demand. When interrelationships become invisible , or when culturally-constructed dynamics are
conceived as ontological 38 facts, then we all need) is

ethics becomes impossible . It is because the "economy" (which

seen as different from society that we can justify the violence done to our

bodies and minds and hearts by the regime of coercive labor that we call "jobs." It is because the "economy" is seen as fundamentally different from nature that we can justify treating all other beings as resources (or ignoring them altogether) (Plumwood 2002) and end up with a system of livelihood that undermines our own conditions of existence and secures the ongoing violence of colonization
(Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 1998). 23

Some economic forms the HRC would promote are: alternative paid, reciprocal labor, fair trade, alternative currencies, cooperative banks, micro-finance, volunteer, and worker cooperatives. Our recognition of different economic forms allows us to see our interdependence with the environment and approach daily life ethically.
Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 09 [J. K. Gibson-Graham; Department of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts, Gerda
Roelvink Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy, University of Western Sydney, An Economic Ethics for the Anthropocene"]//BMitch Taking off from this characterization, we

could perhaps say that through our own ( h ybrid) r esearch c ollective s we have been attempting to produce a new econo-sociality. Over the past

two decades we have worked with community researchers drawn from all walks of life as well as NGOs, government agencies, small businesses, academic researchers and students in a variety of locations in the USA, Australia and the Philippines (Gibson-Graham 2006). Our action

research around the world has attempted to reclaim the economy as a site of ethical decision-making and practice. In all our research conversations the economy, rather than being seen as out there in the stock markets and corporate headquarters of global cities, has been domesticated, brought down to size and made visible as a site of everyday activities and familiar institutions. A powerful image that has emerged from these

conversations is that of an iceberg with formal market transactions, wage labor and capitalist enterprise at the tip, underpinned by a myriad of submerged but sustaining alternative and nonmarket transactions, alternatively paid and unpaid labor, alternative capitalist and non-capitalist enterprises (see www.communityeconomies.org). We have used this image and the diverse economy diagram in which it is encoded (Gibson-Graham 2006:71) as an inventory kitnot unlike the perfume industrys odor kitto produce economic actors attuned to their multiple economic roles. This kit locates everyone as contributing to (and part of) the economy in different and multiple ways: the grandmother who gifts her caring labor to mind a grandchild so that the parents can join the paid work force, the corporate executive who volunteers several hours a week at a local food bank, the trash-picker who recycles the rubbish of a city in the majority world, the poor farmer who harvests his neighbors rice as part of a time-honored reciprocal labor relationship and the policeman who turns a blind eye to the movement of illegal drugs within a neighborhood in return for kick-backs. The heightened economic sensibility

that arises from using this kit has spun off discussions about the ethical choices that confront people in daily life, as they participate in a diverse economy of interdependent being-incommon. Retrospectively, we can understand our research experience as involving a hybrid research collective learning to be affected by economic diversity. Such learning provokes a questioning of all the inherited givens that see, for example, the unemployed as economically inactive, the household as a dependent site of consumption, minimally capitalized selfemployed businesses as unviable, cooperatives as backward-looking, capitalist corporations as unable to care for the environment, and unionized workers as defending collective wellbeing. The diverse economy catapults multiplicity and economic differentiation to the fore and helps us to counter the ingrained belief that capitalist economic relations are the only driving economic force. Once this one-way street toward development becomes just one among a number of avenues, economic innovation proliferates. New possibilities for enterprise development emerge from discussions
around the inventory kit; as these possibilities are pursued, new enterprise forms are created, which lead to greater differentiation of the inventory kit and the possibility of developing new types of enterprises in different locations. In our action research people and agencies have been transformatively affected and new body-worlds (or body-economies) have been created, ones that are dynamic and differentiating rather than stuck and singular. Localities

that were defined in terms of deficiency and need have been re-experienced as sites of surplus possibility where alternative pathways to shaping economies are continually opening up. Taken together, these processes of co-constitution are producing a new econo-sociality (what we have called a community economy) at the core of which is the negotiation of interdependence. The diverse economy inventory kit assists with clarifying the ethical choices involved. Will a local
government continue to grant free access to a closed pre-school building so that a group of volunteers can keep their Santas workshop open? The kit helps local officials to locate all the economic activities (barter with the corporate sector, volunteer training labor, work-forthe dole, gold coin donations for access to materials, gifts of paints and timber, recycling of waste paint, production for use by local residents, sale of surplus product) that

flow through and around the workshop and contribute to the integration and resilience of the local community
(Cameron and Gibson 2005). Will a farming community continue to value and engage in the longstanding practice of reciprocal labor exchange? The diverse economy kit helps community researchers recognize this form of labor as a key contributor to livelihoods in the agricultural sector, and to propose that it be drawn upon as a resource for the fledgling phase of social enterprise development (Community Economies Collective and Gibson 2009). While these examples suggest how close we have come to practicing an economic ethics of human interdependence, they also indicate how distant we still are from an ethics for the Anthropocene. In small and local ways, the human being-in-common of our action research has changed the world, including ourselves and our research collectives; and in more extensive ways, it has changed (that is, contributed to) the world of possibility. But we are just beginning to be affected by the coming of the Anthropocene, and have barely glimpsed the world of economic possibility it carries with it. In the next section we attempt to extend our thinking to the ethics of more-than-human interdependence, seeking out already existing projects that are learning/acting/being with a more-than-human world.

Our local approach spills over to global economic experimentation

Healy 08 *Stephen Healy Worcester State College, Alternative Economies
http://www.communityeconomies.org/site/assets/media/stephenhealy/Alternative-Economies.pdf March]//BMitch

For those who focus on neoliberalism as well as those who are interested in the self-consciously alternative economy, the economy is generally structured by a hierarchical spatial ontology in which the local is nested within the regional, national and global scales. Viewed as containers, activities on a global scaleinternational financial markets, for exampleare assumed to have more determining power than local projects that appear to be containeda LETS system or a worker cooperative. In this way, a hierarchically ordered space effectively affirms the dominance of (global) capitalism while consigning economic experiments to relative powerlessness . The metonymical pairing of global-capitalism and local-alternatives structures our understanding of economic space even when an alternative economic practice becomes global in scope. Altertrade (or fair trade), in spite of its expanding presence in the global marketplace, is dismissed by its critics as small in relation to global trade as a whole (as, of course, are many sectors of international trade) and vulnerable to competition and cooptation. Whats remarkable about this depiction is that alter-trade could just as easily be represented as a powerful innovation, one that has injected an ethical sensibility into trade that did not exist twenty years ago. Alter-trade is energized by an ethical dynamic of growth (rather than by a structural
dynamic of competition and increasing market share) that works against cooptation, draws increasing numbers of products into fair trade marketing, and links together more and more people. Perhaps in order to see the potential of alter-trade, what is required is a different spatial ontology that does not presume in advance the connection between scale, size and power. Recently Jones, Martin and Woodward have proposed a flat spatial ontology based on the site as an unfolding materiality that constructs and reconstructs space through its often uneven and temporary connection to other (distant) sites. In this conception there are no spatial categories or containers that pre-arrange the world into ordered spaces. Another flat

spatial ontology is offered by Gibson-Graham, whose feminist political imaginary is premised on a geography of ubiquity. Because women are everywhere, local and household-based feminist projects can be globally transformative; because diverse economies are everywhere, the projects of local economic activists can have world-changing effects . Linked semiotically rather than organizationally, these projects have the potential to configure a place-based global movement for economic transformation. Flat spatial ontologies have several implications for theorizing and enacting economic difference. First, it becomes easier to see economies as self-organizing spaces of contingent relationality where there is no presumption of dominance and subordination (though these will of course be found to exist in particular settings). When capitalist class relations are no longer to be regarded as necessarily dominant, it becomes more difficult to imagine that other social sites and processes (households, for example) are bound to the task of capitalist reproduction or that economic alternatives are awash in a capitalist sea. Second, a flat spatial ontology allows us to see economic diversity as globally dispersed, while at the same time creating potential connections among disparate locations and processes. In the flat space of economic difference, economic geographers interested in contributing to alternative economies might play a constructive role in translating experiments from one location to another, formalizing lessons learned from experiments in one place for other places, and working imaginatively with individuals, communities, and regions to produce and disseminate economic innovation. Given the ubiquity of potential sites for these sorts

of academic interventionshouseholds, enterprises, communities, regions they could conceivably

be conducted on a global scale . But in conceptualizing this politics of research and

the future direction of scholarly interest in alternative economies,

it becomes crucial to return to the concept of performativity and the way that it differs from just electing to think differently.

1ac Advocacy
Thus, ___ and I ask you to imagine that hybrid research collective programs are implemented in Cuba, Mexico, or Venezuela.

1ac 2
Contention Two is Bienvenidos. Through this debate, we are teaching you about the HRC and a future outside of capitalism. But to be honest, youve been in the hybrid research collective this whole time. Debate is the HRC. We bring you new ideas of labor, property, enterprise, finance, transactions and more and we have mapped the possibility of new forms of becoming within economics. Our performative discourse of the 1AC produces new knowledge and breaks down capitalism
Miller 11 (Ethan Lloyd Miller-- masters of science @ University of Massachusetts Amherst RETHINKING ECONOMY FOR
REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT: ONTOLOGY, PERFORMATIVITY AND ENABLING FRAMEWORKS FOR PARTICIPATORY VISION AND ACTION http://www.communityeconomies.org/site/assets/media/Ethan_Miller/Miller_RethinkingEconomy_MSThesis-2011.pdf May 2011//rainy) A realist approach to epistemology asserts the existence of a world "out there," independent of any accounts made of that world (Law 2007a). In this way, stories or theories describe the world--they can be more or less accurate representations of an objective reality. A performative approach to discourse breaks with such a conception. While able to remain agnostic (or to hold, even, contradictory opinions) about ontology (the question of the "reality" of an "external world"),

theorists who embrace performativity recognize that meaning-making processes organize our experiences of the world and, in so doing, influence our ways of feeling, thinking and acting. It is impossible to demarcate the lines that separate "the world" from these processes through which we encounter it and with which we then act to intervene in it. Our concepts of the world emerge from the world, but they also contribute to making it. The production of knowledge, the creation of representations of our world(s)--economies being no exception--is an exercise of performative power in which we participate in the process of mobilizing actors and constructing real relationships. Referring specifically to the stories told by academic researchers, Law and Urry write that "social inquiry and its methods are productive: they (help to) make social realities and social worlds. They do not simply describe the world as it is, but also enact it" (2004, 391). Put differently, "research methods...are performative...they have effects, they make differences, they enact realities; and they can help to being into being what they also discover" (Law and Urry 2004, 392).

Our advocacy provides a framework for engagement, not a specific policy ethics through fixed policy solutions are doomed to remaining in current dogma. Only imaginative experimentation is able to resist commodification
Gibson-Graham 06 [J. K. Gibson-Graham, University of Minnesota A Post-Capitalist Politics p. 87]//BMitch

We are proposing that a discourse of the community economy has the capacity to politicize the economic in new ways by resignifying economy as a site of decision, of ethical praxis, instead of as the ultimate reality/ container/constraint; and all economic practices as inherently social and always connected in their concrete particularities to the commerce of being-together. (Nancy 2000, 74) Resocializing (and repoliticizing) the economy

involves making explicit the sociality that is always present , and thus constituting the various forms and practices of interdependence as matters for reection, discussion, negotiation, and action. But where might we look for strategies for negotiating plurality and interdependence, the
ethics of connection that make up the fabric of economy? How might we redress the positioning of community as an afterthought to the given of the individual in thinking about economic matters? And what might a nonfantastical, nonsingular vision of the community economy be? Here we

are seeking the ethical coordinates for a political practice, not a model or a plan, nor elements of a xed ideology, a dogma that we have to subscribe to (De Angelis 2003, 4). Nancy reminds us that Marx and Freud were two of the few thinkers who have attempted
to redress the relegation of the plural, social or communitarian dimension to the status of an addition to that of a primitive individual given (2000, 44). Marxs

project of exposing the social nature of capitalist economic relations, especially the way in which exchange masked the social origins of surplus value, is central to our understanding of economic relations and thus to the task of resocializing the economy.10 His theory of surplus labor and Resnick and Wols anti-essentialist Marxian analysis of the class process oer
some conceptual tools for practically approaching economic being-in-common. A class process involves the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus labor (in labor, product, or value form) and is but one way of representing and accounting for ows of labor in a society (Gibson-Graham, Resnick, and Wol 2000a, 2001).11 Whether or not we acknowledge it, our own existence at every level can be seen as the eect of the labor of others. For our purposes, then, labor has an inessential commonalitya solidarity that in no way contains an essence (Agamben 1993, 19)that might give us some purchase on economic being-in-common. If we

wish to emphasize the becoming of new and as yet unthought ways of economic being, we might focus on the multiple possibilities that emerge from the inessential commonality of negotiating our own implication in the existence of others. An ethical praxis of being-in-common could involve cultivating an awareness of what is necessary to personal and social survival; how social surplus is appropriated and distributed; whether and how social surplus is to be produced and consumed; and how a commons is produced and sustained. Negotiations around these key coordinates and the interactions between them could inform an ethics and politics of the community economy.12

Traditional forms of political discussion are melancholic and nostalgic conceptions of political certainty destroy political change and agency
Gibson-Graham 06 [J. K. Gibson-Graham, University of Minnesota A Post-Capitalist Politics p. 5//BMitch

Nostalgia for old forms of political organization (like international movements of worker solidarity or unions that had teeth) and attachment to the political victories of yesteryear (such as the nationalization of industry or protection for key sectors) blinds us to the political opportunities at hand.
We come to love our left passions and reasons, our left analyses and convictions, more than we love the existing world that we presumably seek to alter (W. Brown *1999, 21+ paraphrasing Benjamin). Melancholia

conserves and preserves,

turning its hatred toward the new and blaming thoseincluding poststructuralists and practitioners of identity politics (22)who betray the old ideals. It is from this stance that place-based activism of the kind we advocate is seen as accommodationist and divisive. As a departure from the politics of the past, place-based movements are suspect and likely to be seen as already incorporated into the capitalist world order. Here we have not only the melancholic attachment to the traditional paranoid style of theorizing, but the melancholic impulse to separate from and punish those who stray and innovate. Again there is work to be done to melt the frozen heart of the
putative leftist, where the conservative, backward-looking attachment to feelings, analyses, and relationships blocks any move toward present possibility and connection (W. Brown 1999, 22). To be a leftist is historically to be identied with the radical potential of the exploited and oppressed working class.

Excluded from power yet xated on the powerful,

the radical subject is caught in the familiar ressentiment of the slave against the master. Feelings of hatred and revenge toward the powerful sit side by side with the moral superiority of the lowly (and therefore good) over the high and mighty (and therefore bad) (Newman [2000, 2] paraphrasing Nietzsche). Moralism provides an emotional shoring up of the reactive stance of the weak, who dene themselves in opposition to the strong (3).11 With the dissolution in recent times of positive projects of socialist construction, left moralism has been energized by increasing investments in injury, failure, and victimhood (W. Brown 1995). When power is identied with what is ruthless and dominating, it becomes something the left must distance itself from, lest it be co-opted or compromised (Newman 2000). Fearing implication with those in power, we become attached to guarding and demonstrating our purity rather than mucking around in everyday politics. Those who engage in such work may nd themselves accused of betraying their values, sleeping with the enemy, bargaining with the devilall manner of transgressions and betrayals. A moralistic stance fuels doubts about whether local economic experimentation can do anything but shore up a repressive state apparatus, or whether action research reproduces the power of the manipulative academic over the passive community. Focused on the glass half empty rather than half full, this angry and skeptical political sensibility is seldom if ever satised. Successful political innovation seems perpetually blocked or postponed because it requires an entirely new relation to power. It will need to escape power, go beyond it, obliterate it, transform it, making the radical shift from a controlling, dominating power to an enabling, liberating one (Newman 2000). But since distance from power is the marker of authentic radicalism and desire is bound up in the purity of powerlessness, the move to reinhabit power is deferred. If we are to make the shift from victimhood to potency, from judgment to enactment, from protest to positive projects, we also need to work on the moralistic stance that clings to a singular conception of power and blocks experimentation with power in its many forms. Widely present if not fully manifest in any person or pronouncement, this culture of thinking and feeling creates a political sensibility that is paradoxically depoliticized. The theoretical closure of paranoia, the backwardlooking political certainty of melancholia and the moralistic skepticism toward power render the world eectively uncontestable . The accompanying aects of despair, separation, and resentment are negative and repudiating
, inhospitable to adventure a nd innovation, at be st cautious and lacking in te merity. From our perspective,

these stances are what must be worked against if we are to pursue a new economic politics . those same theorists who have helped to identify the barely conscious contours of a habit of
Thankfully . The practices of what Nietzs che called sel f-artistry or sel f-overcoming (Connolly 2002, 77 ; New man 20 00, 20 ) and Fouca ult called

thinking that blocks possibility have also led us to potential strategies for loosening its hold over us self-cultivation or care of the self are an important entry point for eecting changes in thinking and being in the world. If our goal as thinkers is the proliferation of dierent economies, what we most need is an open and hospitable orientation toward the objects of our thought. We need to foster a love of the world, rather than masterful knowing, perhaps we need to draw on the pleasures of friendliness, trust, conviviality, and companionable connection. Our repertory of tactics might include seducing, cajoling, enrolling, enticing, inviting. There could be a greater role in our thinking for invention and playfulness, enchantment and exuberance. And we could start to develop an interest in unpredictability, contingency, experimentation, or even an attachment to the limits of understanding and the possibilities of escape. How do we work against mastery, melancholia, and moralism and cultivate capacities that can energize and support the creation of other economies? there are powerful pressures that keep us thinking and feeling in the same old ways. there are countervailing possibilities For thinking is not harnessed by the tasks of representation and knowledge. Through its layered intra- and intercorporeality new ideas, theories, and identities are propelled into being Thinking is creative as well as representative its creativity is aided by the fact that the process of thinking is not entirely controlled by the agents of thought. There are, practices we can employ to reeducate ourselves, producing new aective relations with the world We can work in the conscious realm to devise practices that produce pre-thoughts that we want to foster. As a means of getting theory to yield something new, Sedgwick suggests reducing its reach, localizing its purview, practicing a weak form of theory that cannot encompass the present weak theory couldnt know that social experiments are already coopted and thus doomed to fail or to reinforce dominance; it couldnt tell us that the world economy will be transformed by an international revolutionary movement rather than through the disorganized proliferation of local projects. *i+n the beginners mind there are many possibilities, in the experts mind there are few The practice of doing weak theory requires acting as a beginner, allowing success to inspire and failure to educate refusing to extend diagnoses widely Weak theory can be undertaken with a reparative motive that welcomes surprise, entertains hope, makes connection, tolerates coexistence and o ers care As the impulse to judge or discredit other theoretical agendas arises, one can practice making room for others imagining a terrain on which the success of one project need not come at the expense of another. Producing spaciousness is useful for a project of rethinking economy, where the problem is the scarcity rather than the inconsistency of economic concepts. We can practice relinquishing melancholic attachment to the past with its established narratives and entrenched blame. we can work toward a way of thinking that might place us alongside our political others, mutually recognizable
12 as Arendt says, or melancholy or moralistic detachme nt. To do this, Shifting Stances How do we disi nvest in what we are, what we habitually feel and do, and turn ourselves to a pr oject of be coming? If we want other worl ds and other e conomie s, how do we make ourselve s a condition of possi bility for their emergence? Clearly But as Connolly points out, also pressures and . . . at work in the layered corporeality of cultural beings. T hinking bounces in magical bumps and charges across z ones marked by di er ences of spee d, ca pacity, and i ntensity. It is above all in the di cey relations between the zones that the see ds of creativ ity are planted. , again, sometime s . These new ideas, concept s, sen sibilities, and i dentities later become obje cts of knowle dge. thus , and (2002, 656 6) he suggests, experi mental that to convince our bodie s to adopt fundame ntally dierent attitudes that we intellectually entertain as a belief, thereby (78). the kind of embodie d, a ect -imbued of cr uelty, misery, and loss, a place of domi nation and systemi c oppressi on? W hat if we asked the ory to do s omething else to hel p us s ee ope nings, to help us to nd happine ss, to pr ovide a spa ce of free dom and possi bility? and shut dow n the future (2003, 1 34). Little more t han de scription, Zen master Shunryu S uzuki re minds us that (1970, 1). refusing to know too much, , too or deeply.14 for the new. , such particularly 15 Reparative theorizing can be calle d on to open our ass ess ments of rep udiated move ment s and pra ctices , fostering a nities and even aliations. We can choose to cultivate appreciation, taking heart, for e xa mple, from the ways that identity politics has opene d doors to clas s politics, or the ways in whi ch a politics of recognition is alrea dy also a politi cs of redistributi on.16 With a commit ment to coe xisten ce,

And in the daily rehearsal of thes e practices we ca n hope that they will become part of our make up, part of a cell memory that will increasingly assert itself without res ort to consci ous calling.13 Pra cticing Weak Theory, Adopting Reparative Motives, and Producing Positive Affect W hat if we beli eved, as Sedgwick s uggests, that the goa l of theory were not only to e xtend a nd de epen k nowledge by conr ming what we already know that the world is full

Practicing weak theory allows us to deexoticize power, accepting it as our mundane, pervasive, uneven milieu. We can observe how we produce our own powerlessness with respect to the economy, for example, by theorizing unfolding logics and structural formations that close o the contestable arrangements we associate with politics. As we teach ourselves to come back with a beginners mind to possibilities, we can begin to explore the multiple forms of power, their spatialities and temporalities, their modes of transmission, reach and (in)eectivity. A dierentiated landscape of force,
as oriented in the same direction even if pursuing dierent paths
.17

constraint, freedom, and opportunity emerges and we can open to the surge of positive energy that suddenly becomes available for mobilization. In the last part of this chapter
we present a reading of two lms, showing how one, The Full Monty, portrays movements that sidestep the paranoia, melancholia, and moralism of traditional left thinking as exemplied in the other, Brassed O.18 Our aim is to illustrate the stance that we feel needs to be cultivated for the task of imagining and enacting a postcapitalist politics. What follows, then, is an experiment in reading that might nudge us toward a dierent aective relationship to the world and its possibilities.

Without the aff, debate is dominated by consultants, not policymakers: irresponsibly crafting marketing strategies, incapable of advocating social change. Only the affirmative can create responsible methodology which is an independent reason to vote affirmative.
MASON 13 (Arthur, Assistant Professor, Justice and Social Inquiry, School of Social Transformation, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences @ Arizona State U., Cartel Consciousness and Horizontal Integration in Energy Industry Cultures of Energy: Power, Practices, Technologies, 2013, pp. 126-129)
In this chapter, I

highlight the role of independent experts in energy policy decision-making by focusing on the forms they employ for realizing interdependence among energy companies. I draw attention to representational strategies used by consultants (workshops, commodified forms of knowledge, expert advice) for translating information into knowledge that becomes the collective property of energy industry elites. I argue that the advisory services of firms such as Wood Mackenzie, Cambridge Energy, and others structure the location and content of high-level conversations within the newly privatized and globalized energy markets. Through mastery of skill gained through experience, competency in education and employment, the discrimination they perform as it pertains to judgment between knowledge claims based on one's involvement in certain social networks, consultants reduce the complexity of facts into the kinds of simplicity that can form the basis of decisionmaking. In so doing, experts disentangle themselves from political and economic rights in techno-economic decision-making by addressing, at least on the surface of things, reasons for adopting their advice in virtue of the things that they do and know rather than as members of institutions. To characterize their role, I begin by outlining the ascendency of energy consultants and then identify media representations, such as brochures and advertisements produced by consultant firms, through which clients become witness to a detailed interplay of images about global modernity. These images establish a relation between consultants' intended audience (energy executives), those defined as outside this audience (energy consumers), and the future. Because of its resonance with risk, the future is open to contestation. Contestation is the norm in the energy decision-making arena where a cartel alliance and cartel-like consciousness are reconstructed continuously. The temporary stabilization of an alliance relies upon a sustained perception of the credibility of a given future. To be sustained, it is incumbent to replicate an image of the future that is both believable and authoritative.

Their demand for us to read policy arguments incorporates us into neoliberalism space for critical theory is crucial to decision-making and democracy
WOLFE 11 (Cary, Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Prof. of English @ Rice U., THEORY AS A RESEARCH PROGRAMME THE VERY IDEA Theory After Theory, pp. 45-48)
In this light, the

task of theory is made doubly formidable when the corporate ethos of the university is wedded to the intellectual traditionalism that furthers it, you might say, by other means. It is precisely for these reasons that the humanities must, in Derrida's view, dedicate themselves to the principle of unconditional discussion, unconditional freedom of thought (Derrida 2002: 202, 203), even though this unconditionality is never entirely possible. For Derrida, if that
unconditional freedom is the raison d'etre of the university (versus, say, technical training and the development of applied knowledge), the humanities are its 'originary and privileged place of presentation, of manifestation, of safekeeping' (ibid.: 207). In the context of the humanities so understood, then, theory

serves as a place of irredentist resistance or even, analogically, as a sort of principle of civil disobedience, even of dissidence in the name of a superior law and a justice of thought (ibid.: 208). This last passage helps underscore the fact that what might seem 'apolitical' or 'uncommitted' to some in Derrida's approach to such questions is, in fact, a product of his taking quite seriously his responsibility to the humanities and to the university as a philosopher or, if you like, a themist (leaving aside for the moment how we might want to precisely conjugate those terms). In fact, as he points out in ' The Principle of Reason', many ostensibly more 'committed' forms of 'political thought' in the contemporary university are quite easily recontained as part of its standard operating machinery of dissensus a shopping mall pluralism, if you like, serving a fundamentally neoliberal project of incorporation. Here, we would do well to remember Rajan's
contextualization of the changing role of cultural studies not in terms of the ostensibly political projects it announces and embraces for itself, but in terms of the hegemonic norms of the contemporary university and its disciplinary protocols: a situation in which 'the social is now the unquestioned ground of the humanities' , and the humanities refuse to 'claim a way of thinking the social from the outside' (Rajan 2001: 74). Regarding 'sociology

or politology' , Derrida writes that 'I would be the last to want to disqualify them. But whatever conceptual apparatus they may have', he continues, they never question scientific normativity, beginning with the value of objectivity or objectification, which governs and authorizes their discourse . . . These sociologies of the institution remain in this sense internal to the university, intra-institutional, controlled by the deepseated standards, even the programs, of the space that they claim to analyze. (Derrida 1983: 149) In this light, to model knowledge in the humanities on the sciences is to remain 'homogeneous with the discourse that dominates the university in the last analysis'. And to use such a project to create an 'objective' basis for politics, no matter how 'revolutionary', as Derrida puts it, is therefore to leave unquestioned 'the most conservative forces of the university' (ibid.:
149). This is not to say that such work is a waste of time; it is simply to say that it is situated in multiple ways conceptually, institutionally and ideologically. And here, it seems to me, theory

finds a crucial role at the present moment in asserting itself against the representationalism (to use Rorty's term) that links what at first might look like strange bedfellows: a cultural studies that thinks the social 'as the unquestioned ground of the humanities' (Raj an 2001: 74) and a 'scientific' orientation that grounds the humanities on a 'methodologico-ontological' basis. Moreover, to remember that Derrida pens his critique in the early 1980s, at the dawn of the Reagan era, is to recall those pressures of corporatization and federal divestment (well glossed by Lambert, among others) that will in the years that follow exert increasing pressure on the humanities to justify themselves in terms of a 'relevance' whose ground lay elsewhere, in society or nature. And it is here that we may bring into sharper focus, an additional context for

the political work of 'professing' theory that I mentioned earlier: the context of globalization (or 'mondialisation', to use the French term Derrida prefers). If

the effect of current cultural studies in this context is, according to Rajan, to simulate the preservation of civil society after the permutation of the classical public sphere' into an essentially market and consumerist logic of 'representation' (ibid.: 69-70), then the attempt to meet that shortcoming by deploying 'scientific' or ontological models of theory (which would, precisely, not depend on the continuation of identity politics by other means) runs aground on a different set of problems. In Derrida's view, globalization is driven by (indeed would be impossible without) the kind of 'calculation' of reason that anchors the production-centred ethos of the corporate university: namely, the standardization and commodification of knowledge via information technologies (Derrida 1983: 14). So if (to put it very schematically) in the corporate university, theory-qua-cultural studies serves globalization by helping along the neoliberal project of ideological incorporation, then theory-qua-scientificresearch-programme serves globalization not so much by its direct subordination to utility, but rather by extending a picture of what counts as 'real' knowledge 'realist', 'scientific', 'materialist', 'empiricist' and 'hard' that underwrites a productioncentred ethos. Over and against both, theory as 'unconditional' thought may feel 'soft', frivolous or even risky, but 'to claim to eliminate that risk, Derrida writes, 'by an institutional program is quite simply to erect a barricade against a future' not the future, crucially, but a future (Derrida 1983: 1819). It is to duck theory's challenge to 'define new responsibilities in the face of the university's total subjection to the technologies of informatization' (Derrida 1983: 14). And it is on this point that we may most clearly distinguish Derrida's view from Rorty's. For Derrida, theory

is indeed crucial to democratic society, and to the place of institutions of higher learning within it. But he does not exactly subordinate theory to politics (as in Rorty's declaration of 'the priority of democracy to philosophy'), much less to any specific politics (such as Rorty's liberalism) (Rorty 1991: 17 5). For Derrida, the commitment to theory as unconditional thought means that 'the university should thus also be the place in which nothing is beyond question, not even the current and determined figure of democracy, not even the traditional idea of critique' (Derrida 2002: 20 5). But neither does Derrida's view subordinate politics to theory, since theory is always situated within a historical,
ideological and institutional conjuncture of the sort we have been tracing here, the sort that en frames the corporate university and its hegemonic forms of disciplinarity. Or - to put it in a shorthand that sharpens his distance from Rorty's liberal pragmatism for

Derrida, it is not possible to talk about the unconditional duty of theory without also talking about the conditional contexts of capitalism, globalization and the corporate university that over-determine theory's role at this present moment. And in that light - at that nexus of institutional power, economic pressure and disciplinary hegemony a final irony of the idea of theory as a research programme is that one might well wonder why the 'science' that it aspires to would ever take it seriously.

State-centric approaches water down any attempt to revolutionize and change politics
GODDARD 2006 The Encounter between Guattari and Berandi and the Post Modern Era Felix and Alice in Wonderland
http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpbifo1.htm What this type of radio achieved most of all was the short-circuiting of representation in both the aesthetic sense of representing the social realities they dealt with and in the political sense of the delegate or the authorised spokesperson, in favour of generating a space of direct communication in which, as Guattari put it, it is as if, in

some immense, permanent meeting placegiven the size of the potential audienceanyone, even the most hesitant, even those with

the weakest voices, suddenly have the possibility of expressing themselves whenever they wanted. In these conditions, one can expect certain truths to find a new matter of expression. In this
sense, Radio Alice was also an intervention into the language of media; the transformation from what Guattari calls the police languages of the managerial milieu and the University to a direct language of desire: direct speech, living speech, full of confidence, but also hesitation, contradiction, indeed even absurdity, is charged with desire. And it

is always this aspect of desire that spokespeople, commentators and beaureaucrats of every stamp tend to reduce, to filter. [...] Languages of desire invent new means and tend to lead straight to action; they begin by touching, by provoking laughter, by moving people, and then they make people want to move out, towards those who speak and toward those stakes of concern to them. It is this activating dimension of popular free radio that most distinguishes it from the usual pacifying operations of the mass media and that also posed the greatest threat to the authorities; if people were just sitting at home
listening to strange political broadcasts, or being urged to participate in conventional, organised political actions such as demonstrations that would be tolerable but once

you start mobilising a massive and unpredictable political affectivity and subjectivation that is autonomous, self-referential and self-reinforcing, then this is a cause for panic on the part of the forces of social order, as was amply demonstrated in Bologna in 1977.
Finally, in the much more poetic and manifesto-like preface with which Guattari introduces the translation of texts and documents form Radio Alice, he comes to a conclusion which can perhaps stand as an embryonic formula for the emergence of the post-media era as anticipated by Radio Alice and the Autonomia movement more generally: In Bologna and Rome,

the thresholds of a revolution without any relation to the ones that have overturned history up until today have been illuminated, a revolution that will throw out not only capitalist regimes but also the bastions of beaureaucratic socialism [...] , a revolution, the fronts of which will perhaps embrace entire continents but which will also be concentrated sometimes on a specific neighbourhood, a factory, a school. Its wagers concern just as much the great economic and technological choices as attitudes, relations to the world and singularities of desire. Bosses, police officers, politicians, beuareaucrats, professors and psycho-analysts will in vain conjugate their efforts to stop it, channel it, recuperate it, they will in vain sophisticate, diversify and miniaturise their weapons to the infinite, they will no longer succede in gathering up the immense movement of flight and the multitude of molecular mutations of desire that it has already unleashed. The police have liquidated Aliceits animators are hunted,
condemned, imprisoned, their sites are pillagedbut its work of revolutionary deterritorialisation is pursued ineluctably right up to the nervous fibres of its persecutors. This is because the revolution unleashed by Alice was not reducible to a political or media form but was rather an explosion of mutant desire capable of infecting the entire social field because of its slippery ungraspability and irreducibility to existing sociopolitical categories. It

leaves the forces of order scratching their heads because they dont know where the crack-up is coming from since it doesnt rely on pre-existing identities or even express a future programme but rather only expresses immanently its own movement of autoreferential self-constitution, the proliferation of desires capable of resonating even with the forces of order themselves which now have to police not only these dangerous outsiders but also their own desires.

This shift from fixed political subjectivities and a specified programme is the key to the transformation to a post-political politics and indeed to a post-media era in that politics becomes an unpredictable, immanent process of becoming rather than the fulfilment of a transcendental narrative. In todays political language one could say that what counts is the pure potential that another world is possible and the
movement towards it rather than speculation as to how that world will be organised. As Guattari concludes: The point of view of the Alicians on this question is the following: they consider that the movement that arrives at destroying the gigantic capitalistbeaureaucratic machine will be, a fortiori, completely capable of constructing an other worldthe stage to outline projections of societal change.

collective competence in the matter will come to it in the course of the journey, without it being necessary, at the present

feminism 1ac

1ac 1
We begin in Jurez, Mexico. The system of maquiladoras, or female industrial labor exploitation, is representative of the system of capitalism in Mexico today. The people of Jurez are trapped in a cycle of poverty where there seems to be no alternative.
Vogel 04 (Richard D. Vogela political reporter who monitors the effects of globalization on working people and their communities. He has published articles in WorkingUSA, Monthly Review, Canadian Dimension, and is the contributor of "Marxist Theories of Migration" to the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration. Stolen Birthright: The US Conquest and Exploitation to the Mexican People 2004 http://www.houstonculture.org/hispanic/conquest6.html)//rainy

In Ciudad Jurez, as everywhere, economic power translates into political power. In this city where half the population lives in homes without sewer service, municipal administrators have made accommodating foreign-owned factories their top priority. The official 2010 development plan for the city focuses on paving projects and the development of roads between the maquiladoras and the border crossings, while ignoring the social services that impact the quality of everyday life for Mexican citizens. Family life, the foundation of every community, has deteriorated under the influence of the maquiladoras. About half of the families that reside in the two and three room adobe houses in the working-class neighborhoods of Jurez are headed by single mothers, many of whom toil long hours in the maquiladoras for subsistence wages. The resulting stress on families has lead to chronic problems of poor health, family violence, and child labor exploitation. Children suffer the most. Because of the lack of child-care programs, kids are often left home alone all day and fall prey to the worst aspects of street culture, such as substance abuse and gang violence. Ciudad Jurez, by any measure of social progress, is moving backward rather than forward under the influence of the maquiladora industry.

Maquiladoras are the most demeaning systems of imprisonment to womyn. In this system of near-forced labor, womyn are mere prostitutes to the client: business interests.
(Katie Pantaleo 06 @ California University of Pennsylvania, Fall 2006 GENDERED VIOLENCE: MURDER IN THE MAQUILADORAS Sociological Viewpoints ctc//rainy)

Capitalist theory also plays an important part in gender issues in the maquiladoras (Ruiz 1987). Karl Marx observed that capitalist enterprises operate in order to generate a profit. One of the ways to increase profit is to cut labor costs. Therefore, capitalist enterprises seek sources of less expensive labor, which explains
the placement of the maquiladoras in an area where a supply of unskilled, uneducated workers reside. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has

a capitalist approach to the maquiladoras. Sweatshops are not a recent development in the world; the idea of cheap labor has been used many times by sweatshops. The maquiladoras in Mexico began around 1965, but it was the result of globalization, which created the free trade agreement on imports and exports between the U nited S tates and Mexico, that fueled the growth of the maquiladoras. The low wages and poor working conditions of the maquiladoras are the consequence of capitalism because it is the major transnational corporations who ultimately control the maquiladora industry and the wages that women receive (Quintero-Ramirez 2002). Capitalism works with patriarchy to force women into doing more work in the home than work in the labor market . But then it also forces them into the secondary labor market where female stereotypes prevail and where they have to work for lower wages. According to Jessica
Livingston (2004), For capitalism to benefit maximally from womens participation in both capitalistic and domestic modes of production, the gender-based division of labor and the patriarchal relations that support it must be maintained. When

capitalism and patriarchy come together, they form patriarchal capitalism, where the males control the means to production and control the women themselves. The combination of the two provides a major disability for the women of the Mexican society . Basically, some men feel that the women should be doing the majority of the work at home, but also outside of the home. This causes conflict for women between home and work. However, they are still under the control of men in each sphere of their life. In her book Women and Work in Mexicos Maquiladoras, Altha Cravey (1998) uses the
concept of social reproduction to describe the work women do in the home. Social reproduction refers to domestic work, such as laundry, preparing meals, and cleaning, and also biological reproduction and caring for children. Cravey also believes that even though this area of work is not compensated for, it is vital to society. While this may be true, it can be concluded that the

concept of social reproduction, since it mainly pertains to women, is a result of patriarchal capitalism. Capitalism helps to explain the significance of the maquiladoras. First, the maquiladoras benefit the U nited S tates because they provide cheap labor combined with advanced technology. This translates into more profit, but for the U nited S tates, not necessarily for Mexico. Maquiladoras are the U.S.
gateway to cheap labor (Livingston 2004). Second, use

and control of maquiladoras gives the U nited S tates

more access to the markets in Mexico and Latin America (International Trade Data System 2004). It seems as though the
United States is just using their power to control worldly markets, and having Mexico under their belt opens the door to more possibilities. Finally, Mexico does seem to benefit from the maquiladoras because they provide more jobs to individuals in the country. However, no

matter how many jobs the maquiladoras provide, the workers are still overworked and underpaid and many of the women are taken advantage of and abused. In relation to the maquiladoras, some feminists view capitalism as a form of prostitution. The maquiladoras signify a commodity exchange relationship similar to the exchange relationship between a prostitute and her client (Livingston 2004). Women are forced to work under the control of men to make certain goods for a low price. Therefore, patriarchy also plays a part in this act of prostitution.

Maquiladora employers punch womyn in the stomach each month to damage any possible unborn child and secure their work force. After all, what could be more important than cheap labor?
Pantaleo 06 (Katie Pantaleo-- graduate from California University of Pennsylvania-- president of Sociology Club @ UPenn.
Masters in Social Policy from Duquesne University. Gendered Violence: Murder in the Maquiladoras p. 13 http://www.pasocsociety.org/article2.pdf //rainy)

One of the problems that many Mexican women face while working in maquiladoras has less to do with discrimination in hiring and more to do with discriminating practices in the workplace. While there is no discrimination against women working in maquiladoras, there is pregnancy discrimination in the workplace. Women who are pregnant are turned away immediately, while those who are hired can be subject to established practices designed to discourage and prevent pregnancy. These practices are as follows: pregnancy testing, proof of menstruation, and physical harm. First of all, women can be forced to undergo pregnancy testing throughout their work term (Abell 1999). This occurs randomly and
without notice and usually consists of a urine test. A second practice is more painful for the women, psychologically and emotionally. Each

month, women may be mandated to demonstrate proof of their menstruation by showing sanitary napkins to managers. Also a series of intrusive questions are asked to each female employee, such as the date of her last period, what kind of contraception she uses, and when the last time was she had sex (Koerner 1999). The third practice adds physical harm to the existing emotional and psychological stress. Women may be deliberately punched in the stomach and abdomen by managers to make sure that they are not pregnant or to damage any unborn child. Because of these practices, female maquiladora

workers suffer numerous consequences. In relation to reproduction in general, maquiladora workers are likely to
have irregular menstruation, miscarriages, fertility problems, and to bear children with birth defects such as premature births or low birth weight (Abell 1999). The

maquiladora management justify these practices because they fear that pregnant women will disrupt the flow of work within the maquiladoras especially in the later stages in pregnancy when the women will leave work to return home to care for their child. By turning away women who are already pregnant and controlling the pregnancy status of current employees, maquiladora owners are preventing future disruptions within the workplace. Also, a law exists in
Mexico that insists on paid maternity leave, which employers find to be expensive (Abell 1999). According to Koerner (1999), the management of the maquiladoras or the Mexican Institute of Social Security is responsible for paying maternity benefits, depending on the length of employment of the women. If she has made social security payments for at least thirty weeks during the preceding twelve months prior to receiving benefits, the Mexican Institute of Social Security pays for maternity leave.

maquiladora employers rationalize these demeaning practices by arguing that they do not want to pay the legally granted maternity leave to workers not only because it is expensive but also because it would mean possibly losing full-time employees.
Otherwise, the maquiladora management must pay the benefits. Therefore,

This violence extends past the maintenance of workforce in Juarez, womyn are tortured, raped, and murdered you have an ethical obligation to reject their sexualization and objectification
Pantaleo 06 (Katie Pantaleo-- graduate from California University of Pennsylvania-- president of Sociology Club @ UPenn.
Masters in Social Policy from Duquesne University. Gendered Violence: Murder in the Maquiladoras p. 13 http://www.pasocsociety.org/article2.pdf //rainy)

Murder, torture, and rape are three things that many women today might fear. However, for the women working in the maquiladora industry around Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City in Mexico, this is a nightmare that becomes a frequent reality. It has been suggested that the demeaning practices and activities emphasizing womens bodies that take place in the maquiladoras are closely related to the murders. Female sexuality, which is encouraged within the maquiladoras, becomes a precursor to violence towards women. Since some of the girls who work in the maquiladoras sometimes attend bars after work for fun or prostitution, a stigma is attributed to all women who work in the maquiladoras.
These girls are considered to be living a double life of assembly work in the day and prostitution at night (Nathan 1997). Because of this, Mexican society feels that young maquiladora workers are bad girls who are asking for trouble. However, those girls who are not involved in prostitution still do not return home until late at night. After working their shift, women workers leave the sweatshops very late at night and it is then that they sometimes disappear, never to be seen alive again. While walking through dimly lit areas in order to get home or to the nearest bus stop,

many young women and girls are

attacked, raped, and frequently murdered. The description of a typical female victim varies, although most are
poor, slim, and have dark shoulder length hair. According to Diego Cevallos (2003), a reporter for CorpWatch, *The average fatality is a] woman between the ages of 15 and 30 [who works in a maquiladora]. Most of the

victims bodies have been found in outlying areas of the city and usually bear signs of torture and rape. In some cases they have been burned, and many have had their nipples bitten off. The murder victims have been found semi-nude, their panties twisted around their ankles, mouth open in a scream, eyes protruding After being subjected to such torture, the lifeless bodies of the young women are discarded in deserts where they are left to decompose. By the time they are found, sometimes weeks later, the bodies are unidentifiable (Livingston 2004). Despite the rising number of murders , few investigations have been completed and most requests to do so are ignored.

Continual destruction of the feminine in Ciudad Juarez ensures unending violence and necropolitical genocide
Melissa WRIGHT, Departments of Geography and Womens Studies @ Pennsylvania State University, Spring 2011, Necropolitics, Narcopolitics, and Femicide: Gendered Violence on the Mexico-U.S. Border, Signs, Volume 36, Number 3, ctc To that end, I

examine the wars over the interpretation of death in northern Mexico through the concept of necropolitics as elaborated by the postcolonial scholar Achille Mbembe. Mbembe denes necropolitics to be politics as a work of death (2003, 12), which he presents as a corrective
complement to Michel Foucaults widely used idea of biopolitics (Mbembe 2002). Foucault argues that modern liberal governance differed from previous absolutist versions in that it controlled the population not through the threat of death but through techniques for controlling living populations. Biopolitics, he writes, consists of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations (Foucault 1979, 140). The justication for modern governments, he continues, rests on the reproduction of living subjects. While using Foucaults argument as a point of departure, Mbembe argues that biopolitics

is not sufcient for explaining how the threat of violent death continues to prevail as a technique of governance in contemporary settings, and he challenges Foucaults
reliance on Western European examples to develop his theory of the kinship binding the production of states to the reproduction of their subjects. Mbembe

instead draws examples from the more politically volatile states of the postcolonial context to insist that they provide insights through which we can understand politics as a form of war in which the sovereign emerges through the determination of who dies or who does not die and, therefore, lives. Mbembe, however, employs Foucaults analysis to turn attention to how the meaning of death in necropolitics, like the meaning of life in biopolitics, emerges through interpretations of embodiment of corpses, of who kills, and of who is targeted for death. Biopolitics is intimately wound into necropolitics, since governments protect the lives of some by justifying the deaths of others (Braidotti 2007). Thus, he argues, addressing the relationship between politics and death is essential for understanding how states emerge through the reproduction of death, including its meaning and representation, as the counterpart to life (Mbembe 2003, 16 ).1 With this concept of necropolitics in mind, I examine how the wars over the political meaning of death in relation both to femicide and to the events called drug violence unfold through a gendering of space, of violence, and of subjectivity. My objective is twofold: rst, to demonstrate how the antifemicide movement illustrates the stakes for a democratic Mexican state and its citizens while governing elites argue that the violence devastating Ciudad Juarez is a positive outcome of the governments war against organized crime; and second, to show how a politics of gender is central to this kind of necropolitics . I am not the rst feminist theorist to point out that gender politics are foundational not only to the formation of the liberal democratic institutions that emerged out of the destruction of absolutist states but also to the organization of states as the legitimate arbiters of violence (Landes 1988; Melzer and Rabine 1992; McMillan 2009). For instance, as historian Joan Landes has written, a pervasive gendering of the public sphere operates as a mechanism of violence for dening and controlling the modern liberal subjec t around the exclusion of the feminine from the public sphere of politics, economy, and culture (1988, 2). Gender, in other words, is central to the violent dynamics linking the production of states to the reproduction of their subjects. As the proliferation of gendered violence around the world indicates, this kind of violence is constitutive of necropolitics: the politics of death and the politics of gender go hand in hand (United
Nations 2006). As the antifemicide movement clearly demonstrates, however, the neglect of gender so prevalent in discussions such as Mbembes limits the political possibilities for subverting the relations of power reproduced through gendered necropolitic s as people encounter the violence of gender in their daily lives (Ahmetbeyzade 2008).2

Through gender roles, maquiladora workers have learned to accept their economic role as a slave to the maquilas.
Elvia ARRIOLA, @ De Paul University, 2000, VOICES FROM THE BARBED WIRES OF DESPAIR: WOMEN IN THE MAQUILADORAS, LATINA CRITICAL LEGAL THEORY, AND GENDER AT THE U.S.-MEXICO BORDER, http://www.womenontheborder.org/Articles/Voices%20From%20Barbed.pdf, ctc

The maquiladora industry is profoundly sexist. Women who eventually quit or were fired understood this well as
they looked back on their experiences with both nostalgia and bitterness. Sometimes they understood it from the perspective of failed efforts to challenge management, like Alma, who remembered quitting because she was "fed up and exhausted." [FN215] Alma felt that "No

woman in the maquiladora stands up for her rights, neither here nor on the other side of the

border. That's why the owners prefer to hire women." [FN216] Other times a female worker's gender awareness stemmed from a reflection on the way she was socialized to be a woman in her culture, a perspective that can produce as many truisms as stereotyped views about Latina women's traits and abilities. For example, Amelia felt that: women are less problematic than men. We're more responsible. It's a real hardship if we lose our jobs. By contrast, men don't worry about it. If a man wakes up with a hangover some morning, just like that he blows off his job. We women tend not to have so many bad habits, and those women who do are less likely to blow it off. [FN217] -- Amelia, a maquiladora worker. Alma expressed similar internalized gender attitudes as Amelia, but as a "retired" maquiladora worker she viewed them through the lenses of age and experience: [T]hey

hire women because men created more problems for them. We women are more easily managed. The bosses
just have to express their concerns about production and we women, fools that we are, work even harder to protect their profits while we ourselves are dying of hunger. . . . [A] male worker wouldn't stand for it--he's more aggressive. Men organize themselves, and if they don't get what they want, they walk off the job, . . . That's why they

pull in any young girl to work. They train them and pay them the minimum *777 wage if they can. The owners well understand this; they don't hire men
because the maquildoras would not be as productive. [FN218] -- Angela, a maquiladora worker. a. Mexican Patriarchy, American Racism and Labor Division in the Maquiladoras The

Mexican culture is well known for its idealized visions of the masculine and feminine gender roles. "Machismo," or "male chauvinism," has traditionally called for men to be sexually assertive, independent and emotionally restrained, the wage-earner, and the ultimate patriarchal authority over wife, children, and servants, if any, in the household. I
remember learning from a young age that, embedded in the affectionate reference to a man as mi rey (my king), was a message of respect for male authority not to be questioned by the women in the home. The gender role for women, in contrast, has been described as Marianismo, a role modeling based upon the legendary image of the La Virgen Maria, the mother of Jesus Christ. Given the prominence of Catholicism in Mexico, Marianismo has influenced generations of women to be dependent on their fathers, husbands, or elder male relatives. The women are responsible for the domestic chores and completely selfless and devoted to her family and children. [FN219] Given these traditional values, Mexican women have had little access to the experience of earning wages. Of course, similar to the history of women's labor in this country, that statement mostly pertains to the experiences of middle-class women. Like the United States, Mexico has its own longer history of peasant women working alongside their husbands in the fields, or of working-class mestizas earning a pittance of wages in the industrializing textile and tobacco factories in the nineteenth century. [FN220] There is also a long history and tradition of poor peasant families sending their young daughters to work as "help" or domestics in the homes of the wealthier classes, sometimes only for room and board and sometimes for small wages. [FN221] In the context of maquiladora work,

the traditional gender roles that dictate domesticity and submissiveness in a woman are replicated *778 and shaped by race and class attitudes about the poor Mexicana in the gender relations between women workers and male plant managers: "You
know, we are doing real good for Mexico. My girls, well, they have no skills at all coming into these factories. What they have is a respect for authority and an ability to work long and hard at the same thing, over and over again." [FN222] Plant who truly believe

managers they are doing "good for Mexico" would apparently deny the charge of female exploitation since the Mexicana worker has been socially constructed into someone who is ignorant, has no skills, and can barely take orders without complaining. The belief system produces further sexualized racist attitudes about her, a young Mexican woman who, if not "saved" by maquiladora work, would choose more debasing work: I mean, these girls don't have a lot of
other options: stay at home, sell trinkets or candies on the street, work at a sewing factory, or, worst of all, prostitution. . .. . The way I figure, these plants are good for Mexico because they. . . offer the young women a chance to be something better. At ElectroFixtures we have a slogan: "Working hard for EF is working hard for self-improvement." [FN223] -- Unnamed Ciudad Juarez plant manager. Choices about whom to employ and how to treat them are infused with gendered attitudes in the maquiladoras.

Gender ideology is premised upon the division between male and female bodies and a culture's perceived differences in women's and men's talents and abilities based on these physical aspects. [FN224] Researchers of the industry who have interrogated the workers and their employers note how young women are
preferred for tasks that are delicate and monotonous, work assignments that draw directly upon the blatant stereotypes of a woman's physical form and her natural talents or her perceived demeanor--as docile, submissive, patient, and reserved. [FN225] An

image of the ideal maquiladora worker is created by a confluence of the historical fact of her dependency, cultural gender roles, and the sexually racist beliefs that these women are best suited for repetitive, tedious, and mindless work, while men should do the work requiring action, reason, endurance, and leadership. Gender attitudes further influence the manager's view of whether or not women can be promoted into positions of authority: *779 It's just too much trouble. I can move women up a notch or two--you know, from operator to group chief and maybe even quality-control inspection. But, if I was to promote women into higher supervisory levels, well, the men, the Mexican males, would be terribly upset. I'm not against the idea of women doing that type of work, but my first duty is to maintain order in the
plant. The attitude of the men here, let me just say that it does not give me a lot of room to move in. [FN226] -- Unnamed Ciudad Juarez plant manager. In fact, the few women who are promoted into typically male jobs, like mechanics, [FN227] describe the work as not only better paid but "anything but boring." But the rarity of a woman doing such a job, noted Gabriela, who was promoted into the job of mechanic, also earns her the "envy of a lot of people." [FN228: The females are much less tolerant of mistakes, poor quality, whatever. They are fantastic leaders of males. The difficult thing is making the females believe they are managers.

If they want a job like a man they have to work like a man. [FN229] -- Unnamed Ciudad Juarez plant manager b. Sexism, Racism, and Ageism in the Maquiladoras The driven pace of work in the maquiladoras could not be accomplished without the paternalism and/or machismo of the plant managers who must constantly seek ways, while upholding harsh production quotas and machinery speed to maintain the loyalty of his workers. The plant manager who previously stated that "you must hit them with pride," [FN230] alluded to an essential
aspect of the success of the maquiladoras in socially controlling its workers with a range of strategies aimed at eliciting that sense of employee pride and joy. Throughout the industry, management uses informal sources of regulation such as *780 rewarding workers. [FN231] For example, the maquiladoras have long been known to put on "beauty pageants" for the title of "La Flor Mas Bella de la Maquiladora," [FN232] or "Miss Maquiladora," [FN233] or "decorate the [assembly] line contests." [FN234] These strategies obviously supplement the task of managers and supervisors controlling the workers by walking around checking production quotas, changing machinery speed, and reprimanding anyone who is chatting or doing anything to slow down the production schedule. The

workplace dynamic of the maquiladora conjures up an image of the paternal master/dumb servant. Given the owner's power to expect so much for so little in return, it is hardly surprising to see the
array of inconsistent attitudes, some quite racist, expressed by plant managers about the Mexican worker. Either she or he is filled with pride, hopelessly "without skills," [FN235] "too dumb or ignorant to know better," or someone whom, if not watched, will "sit in a corner and let someone else do the work." [FN236] Whatever they are, too much or too little, they are not to be allowed to think too much on the job, although obviously some do just that. Those who have learned to struggle against the speedup [FN237] or who have asked for a raise in protest against an arbitrary production quota, [FN238] or who ask for a raise to compensate for a creative solution, [FN239] must come to know and understand well that the little contests, bonuses, and rewards are just meant to keep them competing with each other and to prevent them from unionizing. [FN240] The fact that maquiladora workers are typically female and very young, some even children of ages eleven to fourteen, [FN241] is an asset to the manager's efforts at controlling them. Ana Rosa Rodriguez, who was thirty- seven when she applied to work at a Panasonic factory, was told that the company had a policy of not hiring women who were *781 over thirty. [FN242] The young ones can be distracted from their harsh working conditions by having them look forward to rewards for their hard labor with company-paid fiestas or trips to resort towns, small prizes of pens or blazers with the company's logo, or a free vacation every few months to the shop's best workers. [FN243] It is an effective system for avoiding the request for more pay or for a promotion. [FN244] Not surprisingly, the

tactics often include psychological ploys that encourage a young female worker to utilize her sexuality: The
supervisor takes to flirting with me, saying, "You're the best worker, and that's why you're my favorite." Soon all the women are jealous because he treats me better than them, and they all stop talking to me. After several days he says the same thing to another, and all the women get jealous again. We are always competing to be the best and become the favorite. [FN245] -- Marta, a maquiladora worker. Managers also encourage young women to take classes about the work they are doing, or to attend "personal hygiene classes" offered by government social service agencies. [FN246] Some of the workers in fact attended school in addition to working in a maquiladora and described the company managers' paternalistic attitudes: All of us who work in these factories are quite young, and the supervisors worry about us as if they were our parents. They're always hurrying us up so we don't get to class late, because the majority of us who work there also go to school." [FN247] --Marta, a maquiladora worker The combination of fiestas, free food, small gifts, bonuses, vacations, and training creates the image of the company truly caring for its workers, even as

it manifests the patronizing racist attitude that the benevolent maquiladora owner is "doing good for Mexico." Against the backdrop of the exceedingly low wages, the unsafe or unhealthy working conditions, and the

constant harassing by supervisors to work faster to produce more, the

conduct evokes the historic analogue of the nineteenth century plantation owners who sought to maintain their slaves' loyalty with big holiday parties and special foods or clothing. This gives the illusion of the Master's kindness and sincere
gratitude*782 for their free labor. [FN248] Photographs I recently took of the maquiladoras of Ciudad Acuna, Coahuila confirm my impression of the companies' grounds, with their ten-foot high chain-linked fences, picnic areas and basketball courts, akin to the institutional settings of a prison or a reform school where discipline is maintained with strict rules and reward systems for obtaining social control.

Only an experiment in economics is able to deconstruct capitalist hegemony and create a feminist economy
Jenny CAMERON, School of Environmental Planning @ Griffith University, AND JK GIBSON-GRAHAM, Department of Human Geography, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies @ Australian National University, 2003, Feminizing the economy: metaphors, strategies, politics, Gender, Place, and Politics, ctc//rainy Hazel Hendersons

promotion of an alternative economics that might enable a saner, more equitable, gender-balanced, ecologically-conscious future (1995, p.9) comes closest to the kind of project that interests usof imagining and enacting alternative or noncapitalist economies. Both Henderson
and Brandt offer examples that open up the economy to difference. Consistent with her interest in renewable energy sources

Henderson uses the environment as an axis of differentiation within the monetized economy to distinguish between green and brown capitalist enterprises. For example, she distinguishes between traditional businesses that have no interest in environmental values, and the contrarians: mostly smaller, younger, innovative enterprises, investment funds, venture capitalists and investors already positioned in the cleaner greener social markets of the 21st century. (1998, p. 8). Brandt on the other hand identifies what she calls empowering businessesthose enterprises that empower people as an integral part of their economic activities. As she points out these businesses may be small or large, privately or cooperatively owned, profit-making or not-for-profit, organized by private individuals, community groups, religious organizations, government agencies or a combination of any of these (1995, p. 113). Through her interest in community activism and empowerment, Brandt opens up the economy to multiple axes of differentiation that include a variety of styles of decisionmaking, forms of ownership and organization, and emphases on profit or other core values. In so doing she provides a picture of a diverse economic landscape made up of all sorts of capitalist and noncapitalist enterprises. In all these moves a rigid and oppositional dichotomy is dissolved. It is possible to see greater diversity within the layers of the economic cake and, importantly, we think, connections across what were previously thought of as separate and opposed layers. The multiple axes of differentiation that Brandt identifies suggests that economic practices and enterprises can be conceived as having multiple identities, rather than a singular and essential identity that places them on one or the other side of the ledger.ix The work of Henderson and Brandt provides an example of deconstructing the economy, as well as adding to it. They take characteristics more readily associated with the non-monetized part of the economy, mother nature and social cooperation, and find these within the monetized part of the economy. In so doing they provide insights into the variety of ways goods and services might be produced in the market sector outside of mainstream capitalist firmsthrough nonprofit initiatives, cooperatives, alternative capitalist enterprises that operate according to a social or environmental ethic. This strategy resonates with our own efforts to represent a diverse economy in which multiple and unfixed economic identities can be conceived (see Figure 2). [figure 2 omitted] In our representation, the economy is emptied of any essential identity, logic, organizing principle or determinant. In place of the view that the economy is a whole comprised of a pre-established number of parts

or sectors, we

see the economy as an open-ended discursive construct made up of multiple constituents. Our first stab at conceptualizing the radical diversity of economic relations has been in terms of the coexistence of different kinds of transaction with their multiple calculations of
commensurability different ways of performing and remunerating labour different modes of economic organization or enterprise with their multiple ways of producing, appropriating and distributing surplus labour In

the diverse economy we cannot easily read off credits and debits but are forced to inquire into the specific conditions of any economic activity before we can advocate or oppose it. While this renders the project of political transformation more complex, it does not preclude proposing interventions inspired by feminism. To illustrate this point
consider the many ways and contexts in which the caring labour of childcare is practiced in the diverse economy. Figure 3 describes a range of possible situations in which the work of childcare is done.x Many of these locations outside

of the traditional household where mothers care for children (unpaid, unregulated and traditionally undervalued) have arisen as a result of feminist struggles. Certainly in Australia the community cooperative
childcare movement, successful agitation for government-funded childcare and community trade networks and baby-sitting clubs are directly attributable to a variety of different kinds of feminist politics. That the corporate sector has responded with capitalist childcare and domestic service agencies is likewise a by-product of the feminization of the paid workforce. The diversity of economic relations that currently characterize child care-giving reflects the unparalleled success of a [figure 3 omitted] transformative feminist economic project which has multiplied the options for how women and men raise children in our society as well as achieving other

Within this diverse economy on both sides of the market/non-market, paid/unpaid, are opportunities for economically exploitative and emotionally oppressive conditions as well as fair and emotionally creative ones. It seems to us that a feminist economic politics would champion the latter in all locations of the diverse economy in which childcare is performed. To take this point one step further we join with Henderson, Brandt and Matthaei (2001) in suggesting that a transformative feminist economic politics might advocate the proliferation of diverse economic forms that promote in all sectors of goods and services provision what Brandt calls the positive social values and self-directed structure of the invisible economy (1995, p.55). In all economic activities across the board we could promote the valuing and strengthening of traditionally coded feminine qualities such as nurture, cooperation, sharing, giving, concern for the other, attentiveness to nature, and so on, as well as traditionally coded masculine qualities such as independence, experimentation, leadership and adventurousness. We are particularly committed to strengthening the viability of non-capitalist activities in which social surplus is communally produced and distributed on the basis of ethical principles to collectively decided upon ends.xii Our interest is in fostering an economy in which the interdependence of all who produce, appropriate, distribute and consume in society is acknowledged and built upon. There can be no doubt that feminists have produced a truly inspirational figure/ground shift in how we see the economy. Our emerging feminist economic politics takes sustenance from the incredible insights of feminist interventions that have, in so many different ways, forced a recognition of the creativity, productivity, resilience and solidarity of that half of the economy that has traditionally not been seen or accounted for. Feminizing the economy via the deconstructive
interests and objectives.xi capitalist/non-capitalist divides there

move extends this powerful representational politics in a different direction, opening up a myriad of ethical debates in all nooks and crannies of the diverse economy about the kinds of worlds we as feminists would like to build.

This experimentation is the HRC, or hybrid research collective. We inventory different economic forms and allow the local economy to decide what invisible form best suits them. JK GIBSON-GRAHAM, A feminist project of belonging for the Anthropocene, 2010, //rainy //ctc

We are suggesting experiments in regional development. But who or what is it that experiments? Who or what learns and transforms? How is the becoming world initiated in an intentional, responsive, responsible way? Elsewhere we have nominated for this role something Callon calls a hybrid research collective, an assemblage that, through research, increases possibilities for (being in) the world (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2009, 11; Callon and Rabeharisoa 2003; Roelvink 2008, 2009). Research is a site where new publics are marshaled around matters of concern, and university based research is where experimentation is supported. So why not conceive of university based action research as a potential catalyst for going on in a different mode of humanity, starting where we are, in our own regions? What have we got to lose? If we accept our belonging to a planet made up of complex matter that cuts across personhood, animality and objecthood, what kind of regional development might emerge? Again, we have no concrete idea. But we are interested in outlining some steps toward answering that question by enrolling activities we have employed in regional action research and recalibrating them with sensitivity to the more than human. Our community partnering research has usually begun starting where we are by inviting participants to inventory the range of economic practices and assets that are often overlooked as potential contributors to regional development. Lets think about starting with this intervention and extending our regional inventory to encompass the more than human. First, there would be the task of compiling a regional profile. Usually this includes marshaling official statistics about demographic characteristics and trends, housing stock, community services, transport, infrastructure, local government and, most importantly, mainstream economic structure, including capitalist and self-employed business activity, paid employment and income levels. Our project would build on this regional profile by including elements of the diverse economy (see Figure 4). Such an expanded vision of economy is not easily available as there are few official statistics on many activities in the lower cells of any of the diverse economy columns. The process of generating a diverse economy regional profile would involve enrolling people to collect indicative data about the economic activities they care about. There might be little chance of conducting a comprehensive survey of diverse economic activities, but this may not matter. In the process of compiling and mapping, teams of hybrid researchers would form collective learning assemblages that would potentially become open to belonging in new ways.

This experimentation is crucial to breaking down the masculine/feminine dichotomy by destroying the singular economy into smaller shards, we also problematize what it means to be female and male.
JK GIBSON-GRAHAM, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): a feminist critique of political economy, 1996, pg 13-15, ctc//rainy

In the writings of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985, for example) we find the identity of "the social" rethought and decentered. Society

resists being thought as a natural unity (like an organism or body) or as one that is closed by a structure, like patriarchy or capitalism, around a central antagonism or fundamental relation. Rather society can be seen as transiently and partially unified by temporary fixings of meaning. These are achieved in part through political struggles that change the relationship of social elements one to another. Often though not always, the elements of society are articulated, "sutured" as moments in a "hegemonic" relational structure. But this articulation is always ever incomplete and temporary, susceptible to subversion by the "surplus of meaning" of its moments (each of which has various "identities" in the sense of being differentiated within alternative relational systems). Thus the term "woman" has a different meaning when it is articulated with "private life" and "marriage" than

when it is set in the context of "feminism" and "lesbian," and the latter contextualization is
destabilizing to concepts of male prerogative associated with the former.22 Identity, whether of the subject or of society, cannot therefore be seen as the property of a bounded and centered being that reveals itself in history. Instead identity is open, incomplete, multiple, shifting. In the words of Mouffe (1995) and other poststructuralist theorists, identity

is hybridized and nomadic. Perhaps we may pursue this further, into a region that is somewhat less traveled, to consider what this might mean for the economy, to ask what a hybridized and nomadic "economic identity" might be. If Mouffe and Laclau have rethought the "social," translating what was formerly closed and singular to openness and multiplicity, what implications might such a rethinking have for the "economic"? It might suggest, at the very least, that the economy did not have to be thought as a bounded and unified space with a fixed capitalist identity. Perhaps the totality of the economic could be seen as a site of multiple forms of economy whose relations to each other are only ever partially fixed and always under subversion . It would be possible, then, to see contemporary discourses of capitalist hegemony as enacting a violence upon other forms of economy, requiring their subordination as a condition of capitalist dominance.23 In the frame of such a discursivist and pluralist vision, emerging feminist discourses of the noncapitalist household economy can be seen as potentially destabilizing to capitalism's hegemony.24 By placing the term "capitalism" in a new relation to noncapitalist "household production," they make visible the discursive violence involved in theorizing household economic practices as "capitalist reproduction." The feminist intervention problematizes unitary or homogeneous notions of a capitalist economy. It
opens the question of the origins of economic monism and pushes us to consider what it might mean to call an economy "capitalist" when more hours of labor (over the life course of individuals) are spent in noncapitalist activity.25 It is possible, then, that such

an intervention could mark the inception of a new "hegemonic discourse" of economic difference and plurality.26 At the moment, however, the conditions of possibility of such a discourse are decidedly
unpropitious. For both as a constituent and as an effect of capitalist hegemony, we encounter the general suppression and negation of economic difference; and in

representations of noncapitalist forms of economy, we have found a set of subordinated and devalued states of being. What is generally visible in these
representations is the insufficiency of noncapitalism with respect to capitalism rather than the positive role of noncapitalist economic practices in constituting a complex economy and determining capitalism's specific forms of existence.27 In encountering the subordination of noncapitalism, we

confront a similar problem to that encountered by feminists attempting to reconceptualize binary gender. It is difficult if not impossible to posit binary difference that is not potentially subsumable to hierarchies of presence/absence, sufficiency/insufficiency, male/female, positivity/negation. Thus rather than constituting a diverse realm of heterogeneity and difference, representations of noncapitalism frequently become subsumed to the discourse of capitalist hegemony. To the extent that capitalism exists as a monolith and noncapitalism as an insufficiency or absence, the economy is not a plural space, a place of difference and struggle (for example, among capitalist and noncapitalist class identities). The question then presents itself, how do we get out of this capitalist place? Here we may fruitfully turn to the work of those feminists who have attempted to (re)theorize sexual difference, to escape - however temporarily and partially - from the terms of a binary hierarchy in which one term is deprived of positive being. For woman to be a set of specificities rather than the opposite, or complement, to Man, man must become a set of specificities as well. If Man is singular, if he is a self-identical and definite figure, then non-man becomes his negative, or functions as an indefinite and homogeneous ground against which Man's definite outlines may be seen. But if man himself is different from himself, then woman cannot be singularly defined as non-man. If there is no singular figure, there can be no singular other.
The other becomes potentially specific, variously definite, an array of positivities rather than a negation or an amorphous ground. Thus the plural specificity of "men" is a condition of the positive existences and specificities of "women."28 By analogy here,

the specificity of capitalism - its plural identity, if you like - becomes a condition of the existence of a discourse of noncapitalism as a set of positive and differentiated economic forms. Feudalisms,

slaveries, independent forms of commodity production, nonmarket household economic relations and other types

of economy may be seen as coexisting in a plural economic space - articulated with and overdetermining various capitalisms rather than necessarily subordinated or subsumed to a dominant self-identical being. But in order for this to occur, capitalism must relate to itself as a difference rather than as a sameness or a replication. For if capitalism's identity is even partially immobile or fixed, if its inside is not fully constituted by its outside, if it is the site of an inevitability like the logics of profitability or accumulation, then it will necessarily be seen to operate as a constraint or a limit.29
It becomes that to which other more mutable entities must adapt. (We see this today in both mainstream and left discussions of social and economic policy, where we are told that we may have democracy, or a pared-down welfare state, or prosperity, but only in the context of the [global capitalist] economy and what it will permit.) It is here that anti-essentialist

strategies can begin to do their work. If there is no underlying commonality among capitalist instances, no essence of capitalism like expansionism or property ownership or power or profitability or capital accumulation,30 then capitalism must adapt to (be constituted by) other forms of economy just as they must adapt to (be constituted by) it. Theorizing capitalism itself as different from itself31 - as having, in other words, no essential or coherent identity - multiplies (infinitely) the possibilities of alterity. At the same time, recontextualizing capitalism in a discourse of economic plurality destabilizes its presumptive hegemony. Hegemony becomes a feature not of capitalism itself but of a social articulation that is only temporarily fixed and always under subversion; and alternative economic discourses become the sites and instruments of struggles that may subvert capitalism's provisional and unstable dominance (if indeed such dominance is
understood to exist).

The feminine/masculine dichotomy makes extinction inevitable Karen WARREN is the chair of the philosophy department at Macalester College AND Duane CADY is a professor of
philosophy at Hamline University, , Feminism and Peace: Seeing Connections http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3810167.pdf To say that patriarchy is a dysfunctional system is to say that the

1994

fundamental beliefs, values, attitudes and assumptions (conceptual framework) of patriar- chy give rise to impaired thinking, behaviors, and institutions which are unhealthy for humans, especially women, and the planet. The following diagram represents the features of patriarchy as a dysfunctional social system: [figure 1 omitted] Patriarchy, as an Up-Down system of power-over relationships of domina- tion of women by men, is conceptually grounded in a faulty patriarchal belief and value system, (a), according to which (some) men are rational and women are not rational, or at least not rational in the more highly valued way (some) men are rational; reason and mind are more important than emotion and body; that humans are justified in using female nature simply to satisfy human consumptive needs. The discussion above of patriarchal conceptual frame- works describes the
characteristics of this faulty belief system. Patriarchal conceptual frameworks sanction, maintain, and perpetuate impaired thinking, (b): For example, that men can control

women's inner lives, that it is men's role to determine women's choices, that human superiority over nature justifies human exploitation of nature, that women are closer to nature than men because they are less rational, more emotional, and respond in more instinctual ways than (dominant) men . The discussions above
at (4) and (5), are examples of the linguistic and psychological forms such impaired thinking can take. Operationalized, the evidence of patriarchy as a dysfunctional system is found in the behaviors to which it gives rise, (c), and the unmanageability, (d), which results. For example,

in the United States, current estimates are that one out of every three or four women will be raped by someone she knows; globally, rape, sexual harassment,

spouse-beating, and sado-masochistic pornography are examples of behaviors practiced, sanctioned, or tolerated within patriarchy. In the realm of environmentally destructive behaviors, strip-mining, factory farming, and pollution of the air, water, and soil are instances of behaviors maintained and sanctioned within patriarchy. They, too, rest on the faulty beliefs that it is okay to "rape the earth," that it is "man's God-given right" to have dominion (that is, domination) over the earth , that nature has only instrumental value, that
environmental destruction is the acceptable price we pay for "progress."And the presumption of warism, that war is a natural, righteous, and ordinary way to impose dominion on a people or nation, goes hand in hand with patriarchy and leads to dysfunctional behaviors of nations and ultimately to international unmanageability. Much

of the current" unmanageability" of contemporary life in patriarchal societies, (d), is then viewed as a consequence of a patriarchal preoccupation with activities, events, and experiences that reflect historically male-gender identified beliefs, values, attitudes, and assumptions. Included among these real-life consequences are precisely those concerns with nuclear proliferation, war, environmental destruction, and violence toward women, which many feminists see as the logical outgrowth of patriarchal thinking. In fact, it is often only through observing these dysfunctional behaviors-the symptoms of dysfunctionality that one
can truly see that and how patriarchy serves to maintain and perpetuate them. When patriarchy is understood as a dysfunctional system, this "unmanageability" can be seen for what it is-as a predictable and thus logical consequence of patriarchy.'1 The theme that global environmental crises, war, and violence generally are predictable and logical consequences of sexism and patriarchal culture is pervasive in ecofeminist literature (see Russell 1989, 2). Ecofeminist Charlene Spretnak, for instance, argues that "militarism

and warfare are continual features of a patriarchal society because they reflect and instill patriarchal values and fulfill needs of such a system . Acknowledging the
context of patriarchal conceptualizations that feed militarism is a first step toward reducing their impact and preserving life on Earth" (Spretnak 1989, 54). Stated in terms of the foregoing model of patriarchy as a dysfunctional social system, the claims by Spretnak and other feminists take on a clearer meaning:

Patriarchal conceptual frameworks legitimate impaired thinking (about women, national and regional conflict, the environment) which is manifested in behaviors which, if continued, will make life on earth difficult, if not impossible. It is a stark message, but it is plausible. Its plausibility lies in understanding the conceptual roots of
various woman-nature-peace connections in regional, national, and global contexts.

This local instance of deconstruction spills over to a global destruction of patriarchal power
JK GIBSON-GRAHAM, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): a feminist critique of political economy, 1996, xxvi-xxviii, ctc//rainy Closely related questions about the power and efficacy of our interventions are posed in the language of scale. How can these small and local efforts make a difference? Aren't they ultimately subsumed within the global order of neoliberal capitalism? We have devoted considerable time and developed some theoretical muscle wrestling with this daunting vision, drawing on our experience and understanding of second-wave feminism (Gibson-Graham 2002, 2005c). Most

theories of scale are dominated by a vertical ontology (Marston 2000) that presumes a hierarchy of scales from global to local, mapped onto a hierarchy of power in which macro forces operate to constrain everyday practices. Change that does not address the top of the hierarchy is ultimately contained. This worldview demands that local initiatives "scale up" before they can be seen as transformative. In response to this
limiting requirement, thinkers who are interested in expanding political possibility have proffered flat ontologies that do not presume nested scales and hierarchies of power. We are no exception.

Our alternative "flat" spatial imaginary is an aspect of the feminist political imaginary that informs what we refer to above as "place-based globalism" (Osterweil 2004). Second-wave feminism transformed and continues to transform lives and livelihoods around the world to different degrees and in different ways, rendering the life experiences of many women literally unrecognizable in the terms of a generation ago.19 Yet the politics of feminism bears little resemblance to revolutionary politics as it is traditionally practiced. Feminism linked

feminists emotionally and semiotically, rather than primarily through organizational ties. It did not rely on (yet did not eschew) coordinated actions and alliances. The globalization of a feminist politics did not involve organization at the global scale to challenge global structures of patriarchal power.20 The movement achieved global coverage without having to create global institutions, though some of these did indeed come into being. Ubiquity rather than unity was the ground of its globalization. We are intrigued at the way the loosely interrelated struggles and happenings of the feminist movement were capable of mobilizing social transformation at such an unprecedented scale, without many of the "necessaries" we have come to associate with political organization. The complex intermixing of alternative discourses, shared language, embodied practices, self-cultivation, emplaced actions, and global transformation associated with second-wave feminism has nourished our thinking about a politics of economic possibilityimpressing us with the simple ontological contours of a feminist imaginary: if women are everywhere, a woman is always somewhere, and those places of women are transformed as women transform themselves. The vision of feminist politics as grounded in persons yet (therefore) potentially ubiquitous has been extended in our thinking to include another ontological substrate: a vast set of disarticulated "places"households,
neighborhoods, localities, ecosystems, workplaces, civic organizations, public arenas, urban spaces, diasporas, regions, government agencies, occupationsrelated

analogically rather than organizationally and connected through webs of signification. A feminist spatiality embraces not only a politics of ubiquity (its global manifestation) but a politics of place (its localization in places created, strengthened, defended, or transformed). This powerful imaginary gives us
the perhaps unwarranted confidence that a place-based economic politics has the potential to be globally transformative. Our (mis)placed confidence stems from other sources as well, especially theoretical work to uncouple size and power (placing us in a position to study their interactions) and to develop ontologies of unpredictability. We have taken as inspiration the truisms that big things start small, and that path dependency and uncertainty (including uncertainty about the scale of effects) mark the trajectory of any initiative or experiment. We

have refused to treat the local as a container/limit, preferring to treat it as the (only possible) starting place. We have drawn encouragement from scholars like Bruno Latour and Michel Gallon,
who argue that "reversals of balances of power can come from anywhere. . . . [T]hey can propagate via the transporting and transposition of solutions conceived of in one place" (Callon 2005a, 16).

1ac plan
Thus, ____ and I ask you to imagine that the United States federal government substantially increases its economic engagement towards Jurez, Mexico through hybrid research collective programs.

1ac 2
Through this debate, we have taught you about the HRC and a future outside of capitalism. But to be honest, youve been in the hybrid research collective this whole time. Debate is the HRC. We bring you new ideas of labor, property, enterprise, finance, transactions and more and we have mapped the possibility of new forms of becoming within economics. Only through discursive resistance within every space of thought what well call the politics of ubiquity can we begin to resist economic hegemony here and now
Miller 13 *Ethan Miller University of Western Sydney Community Economy: Ontology, Ethics, and Politics for RadicallyDemocratic Economic Organizing http://www.communityeconomies.org/site/assets/media/Ethan_Miller/Miller_CommunityEconomy.pdf]//BMitch Thus far I have sidestepped an important dimension in Gibson-Graham's concept of community economy. In one sense, the term is mobilized in the three ways that I have described above. In another, the

term stands as a tentative proposal for an alternative fixing of economic identity around a new nodal point (Gibson-Graham 2006a, 78). This is to say that the community economy could itself become a political project to unify *the+ discursive terrain of multiple diverse economies, challenging the hegemony of capitalocentric social formations: Articulating the multiple, heterogeneous sites of struggle, such a discourse could resignify all economic transactions and relations, capitalist and noncapitalist, in terms of their sociality and interdependence, and their ethical participation in being-incommon as part of a 'community economy'. (Gibson-Graham 2006a, 97) Here we see an aspiration to collapse the meta-ethical moment of CE2 into CE3's moment of politics and to pose a political articulation around the question of the exposure and negotiation of social interdependence. Such a move would politicizeand thus make explicit the potential antagonisms withinthe Nancian distinction between socially imploded generality and socially exposed particularity. A community economy would be built by those who seek to sustain and struggle for spaces in which interdependence is visible and collectively negotiated, opposing processes of uncommoning or enclosure in all their forms. What does this look like as an organizing project? One might be tempted to imagine the formation of a coalition identified with ethical exposure, oriented around a commitment only to the question of ethics itself. Indeed, GibsonGraham's aspiration is toward some kind of substantive linking, asking how do we multiply, amplify, and connect these different activities? (2006a, 80). Yet her counterhegemonic articulation of community economy is not meant to suggest the construction of anything resembling an organizationally-coherent movement. Her preferred theory of change is based, rather, on a feminist political imaginary inspired by the complex intermixing of alternative discourses, shared language, embodied practices, self-cultivation, emplaced actions, and global transformation associated with second-wave feminism (2006b, xxvii). Transformation occurs, in this view, through ubiquity rather than unity (2006a, xxiv), in a vast set of disarticulated 'places'...related analogically rather than organizationally and connected through webs of signification (2006b, xxvii). Community economy as a counterhegemonic

discourse might thus link diverse projects of ethical exposure and negotiation emotionally and semiotically rather than primarily through organizational ties (2006b, xxiii). Is this not how capitalocentric hegemony was, in fact, established? While institutional articulation has clearly been essential for the rise of such a force, haven't the emotional and semiotic dimensions of capitalist discourse also been crucial in rendering noncapitalist practices, and potential spaces of collective creation and resistance, effectively invisible? Perhaps. Yet capitalist hegemonic articulations have been robustly positive in their
content, never shying away from the common-being that CE1 demands we unwork, or from closing the ethical spaces that CE2 demands we open. Can the near-emptiness of a community economy meta-ethic generate the kind of identificatory power that a strong nodal point requires? Is there enough family resemblance (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, 179) between various instances of community economy (CE2) to enable politically effective connections to emerge across vast difference? These are questions to which a solidarity economy approach might answer no.

Traditional forms of political discussion are melancholic and nostalgic conceptions of political certainty make us slaves to institutions and destroy our agency
Gibson-Graham 06 [J. K. Gibson-Graham, University of Minnesota A Post-Capitalist Politics p. 5//BMitch

Nostalgia for old forms of political organization (like international movements of worker solidarity or unions that had teeth) and attachment to the political victories of yesteryear (such as the nationalization of industry or protection for key sectors) blinds us to the political opportunities at hand.
We come to love our left passions and reasons, our left analyses and convictions, more than we love the existing world that we presumably seek to alter (W. Brown *1999, 21+ paraphrasing Benjamin). Melancholia

conserves and preserves, turning its hatred toward the new and blaming thoseincluding poststructuralists and practitioners of identity politics (22)who betray the old ideals. It is from this stance that place-based activism of the kind we advocate is seen as accommodationist and divisive. As a departure from the politics of the past, place-based movements are suspect and likely to be seen as already incorporated into the capitalist world order. Here we have not only the melancholic attachment to the traditional paranoid style of theorizing, but the melancholic impulse to separate from and punish those who stray and innovate. Again there is work to be done to melt the frozen heart of the
putative leftist, where the conservative, backward-looking attachment to feelings, analyses, and relationships blocks any move toward present possibility and connection (W. Brown 1999, 22). To be a leftist is historically to be identied with the radical potential of the exploited and oppressed working class. Excluded

from power yet xated on the powerful, the radical subject is caught in the familiar ressentiment of the slave against the master. Feelings of hatred and revenge toward the powerful sit side by side with the moral superiority of the lowly (and therefore good) over the high and mighty (and therefore bad) (Newman [2000, 2] paraphrasing Nietzsche). Moralism provides an emotional shoring up of the reactive stance of the weak, who dene themselves in opposition to the strong (3).11 With the dissolution in recent times of positive projects of socialist construction, left moralism has been energized by increasing investments in injury, failure, and victimhood (W. Brown 1995). When power is identied with what is ruthless and dominating, it becomes something the left must distance itself from, lest it be co-opted or compromised (Newman 2000). Fearing implication with those in power, we become attached to guarding and demonstrating our purity rather than mucking around in everyday politics. Those who engage in such work may nd themselves accused of betraying their values, sleeping with the enemy, bargaining with the devilall manner of transgressions and betrayals. A moralistic stance fuels doubts about whether local economic experimentation can do anything but shore up a repressive state apparatus, or whether

action research reproduces the power of the manipulative academic over the passive community. Focused

on the glass half empty rather than half full, this angry and skeptical political sensibility is seldom if ever satised. Successful political innovation seems perpetually blocked or postponed because it requires an entirely new relation to power. It will need to escape power, go beyond it, obliterate it, transform it, making the radical shift from a controlling, dominating power to an enabling, liberating one (Newman 2000). But since distance from power is the marker of authentic radicalism and desire is bound up in the purity of powerlessness, the move to reinhabit power is deferred. If we are to make the shift from victimhood to potency, from judgment to enactment, from protest to positive projects, we also need to work on the moralistic stance that clings to a singular conception of power and blocks experimentation with power in its many forms. Widely present if not fully manifest in any person or pronouncement, this culture of thinking and feeling creates a political sensibility that is paradoxically depoliticized. The theoretical closure of paranoia, the backwardlooking political certainty of melancholia and the moralistic skepticism toward power render the world eectively uncontestable . The accompanying aects of despair, separation, and resentment are negative and repudiating, inhospitable to adventure and innovation, at best cautious and lacking in temerity. From our perspective, these stances are what must be worked against if we are to pursue a new economic politics . Thankfully those same theorists who have helped to identify the barely conscious contours of a habit of thinking that blocks possibility have also led us to potential strategies for loosening its hold over us .
The practices of what Nietzsche called self-artistry or self-overcoming (Connolly 2002, 77; Newman 2000, 20) and Foucault called

self-cultivation or care of the self are an important entry point for eecting changes in thinking and being in the world.12 If our goal as thinkers is the proliferation of dierent economies, what we most need is an open and hospitable orientation toward the objects of our thought. We need to foster a love of the world, as Arendt says, rather than masterful knowing, or melancholy or moralistic detachment. To do this, perhaps we need to draw on the pleasures of friendliness, trust, conviviality, and companionable connection. Our repertory of tactics might include seducing, cajoling, enrolling, enticing, inviting. There could be a greater role in our thinking for invention and playfulness, enchantment and exuberance. And we could start to develop an interest in unpredictability, contingency, experimentation, or even an attachment to the limits of understanding and the possibilities of escape. Shifting Stances How do we disinvest in what we are, what we habitually feel and do, and turn ourselves to a project of becoming? How do we work against mastery, melancholia, and moralism and cultivate capacities that can energize and support the creation of o ther economies? If we want other worlds and other economies, how do we make ourselves a condition of possibility for their emergence? Clearly there are powerful pressures that keep us thinking and feeling in the same old ways. But as Connolly points out, there are also countervailing pressures and possibilities . . . at
work in the layered corporeality of cultural beings. Thinking bounces in magical bumps and charges across zones marked by dierences of speed, capacity, and intensity. It is above all in the dicey relations between the zones that the seeds of creativity are planted. For

thinking, again, is not harnessed by the tasks of representation and knowledge. Through its layered intra- and intercorporeality new ideas, theories, and identities are sometimes propelled into being. These new ideas, concepts, sensibilities, and identities later become objects of knowledge. Thinking is thus creative as well as representative, and its creativity is aided by the fact that the process of thinking is not entirely controlled by the agents of thought. (2002, 6566) There are, he suggests, experimental practices that we can employ to reeducate

ourselves, to convince our bodies to adopt fundamentally dierent attitudes that we intellectually entertain as a belief, thereby producing new aective relations with the world (78). We can work in the conscious realm to devise practices that produce the kind of embodied, aect-imbued pre-thoughts that we want to foster. And in the daily rehearsal of these practices we can hope that they will become part of our
makeup, part of a cell memory that will increasingly assert itself without resort to conscious calling.13 Practicing Weak Theory, Adopting Reparative Motives, and Producing Positive Affect What if we believed, as Sedgwick suggests, that the goal of theory were not only to extend and deepen knowledge by conrming what we already knowthat the world is full of cruelty, misery, and loss, a place of domination and systemic oppression? What if we asked theory to do something elseto help us see openings, to help us to nd happiness, to provide a space of freedom and possibility? As

a means of getting theory to yield something new, Sedgwick suggests reducing its reach, localizing its purview, practicing a weak form of theory that cannot encompass the present and shut down the future (2003, 134). Little more than description, weak theory couldnt know that social experiments are already coopted and thus doomed to fail or to reinforce dominance; it couldnt tell us that the world economy will be transformed by an international revolutionary movement rather than through the disorganized proliferation of local projects. Zen master Shunryu Suzuki reminds us that *i+n the beginners mind there are many possibilities, in the experts mind there are few (1970, 1). The practice of doing weak theory requires acting as a beginner, refusing to know too much, allowing success to inspire and failure to educate , refusing to extend diagnoses too widely or deeply.14 Weak theory can be undertaken with a reparative motive that welcomes surprise, entertains hope, makes connection, tolerates coexistence and oers care for the new. As the impulse to judge or discredit other theoretical agendas arises, one can practice making room for others, imagining a terrain on which the success of one project need not come at the expense of another. Producing such spaciousness is particularly useful for a project of rethinking economy, where the problem is the scarcity rather than the inconsistency of economic concepts.15 Reparative theorizing can
be called on to open our assessments of repudiated movements and practices, fostering anities and even aliations. We can choose to cultivate appreciation, taking heart, for example, from the ways that identity politics has opened doors to class politics, or the ways in which a politics of recognition is already also a politics of redistribution.16 We

can practice relinquishing melancholic attachment to the past with its established narratives and entrenched blame. With a commitment to coexistence, we can work toward a way of thinking that might place us alongside our political others, mutually recognizable as oriented in the same direction even if pursuing dierent paths.17 Practicing weak theory allows us to deexoticize power, accepting it as our mundane, pervasive, uneven milieu. We can observe how we produce our own powerlessness with respect to the economy, for example, by theorizing unfolding logics and structural formations that close o the contestable arrangements we associate with politics. As we teach ourselves to come back with a beginners mind to possibilities, we can begin to explore the multiple forms of power, their spatialities and temporalities, their modes of transmission, reach and (in)eectivity. A dierentiated landscape of force, constraint, freedom, and opportunity emerges and we can open to the surge of positive energy that suddenly becomes available for mobilization. In the last part of this chapter we present a reading of two lms, showing how one, The Full Monty, portrays
movements that sidestep the paranoia, melancholia, and moralism of traditional left thinking as exemplied in the other, Brassed O.18 Our aim is to illustrate the stance that we feel needs to be cultivated for the task of imagining and enacting a postcapitalist politics. What follows, then, is an experiment in reading that might nudge us toward a dierent aective relationship to the world and its possibilities.

Without the plan, debate is dominated by consultants, not policymakers: irresponsibly crafting marketing strategies, incapable of advocating social change. Only the affirmative can create responsible methodology which is an independent reason to vote affirmative.
MASON 13 (Arthur, Assistant Professor, Justice and Social Inquiry, School of Social Transformation, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences @ Arizona State U., Cartel Consciousness and Horizontal Integration in Energy Industry Cultures of Energy: Power, Practices, Technologies, 2013, pp. 126-129)

The culture of power surrounding large-scale energy systems over the past century can best be described as forms of collusion whose decision-making authority relies on structural positions of bureaucratic- and capitalist-led industry organization. In this chapter, I depart from this model by drawing attention to the increasing role played in energy policy decision-making by one group of experts, intermediaries (consultants) whose authority is based not on their structural position but instead on their theoretical knowledge and independent stance within the energy sector. In the past, energy systems were highly regulated by a national political community in which expertise was embedded as part of the originary political organizational form. Wrestling civilian control of nuclear power from the military, for example, resulted in the establishment of a core set of experts embedded within U.S. congressional politics. Atomic scientists and expectations of nuclear power as too cheap to meter were present in the popular imagination. However, the transparency of expertise was not autonomous from government nor did experts view themselves as independent of any sector of the industry. This is
the case even after the 1970s, when expansion in the scope of conflict and interested publics led to bureaucratic fragmentation and reorganization of nuclear power. In fact, one need only draw attention to popular catchphrases of collusion and government capture throughout the twentieth century to realize that prior

to restructuring of energy markets in the 1980s, the culture of power and political decision-making was based upon structural position in industrial organization. The notion of iron triangles or subgovernments, for example, draws attention to the closedcircle partnerships of industry leaders, congressional member, and technocratic elites involved in promoting nuclear power from the postwar years to the 1970s (Temples 1980). Managerial consensus reflects the backroom arrangements of public utility officials and industry leaders that results in expansion of electricity transmission from the Depression era to the restructuring of the 1980s (Hirsh 2001). Natural monopoly and negotiated settlements refer to growth of the natural gas industry to, in the case of the former, a government selection process, and in the latter, pre-agreements that forestall litigation among pipeline builders, natural gas producers, and distributors (Doucet and Littlechild 2006; Tussing and Tippee 1995). The

government-sponsored project, as in the Manhattan Project that exemplifies an alliance of military and managerial expertise, was not limited to the advent of the nuclear era but inclusive of other federally sanctioned megaprojects (Rochlin 1994). Interest group may be included here, especially the forms of claims-making across civil and govermentental spheres to remediate environmental insult (Tugwell 1980; Wapner 1995). All such phrases call attention to a crucial feature of twentieth-century styles of collusion: the forces that influence and indeed authorize political and economic arrangements are based on decision-making authority in which possessors of theoretical knowledge are the dominated faction of the dominating group. Curiously, the most pervasive arrangement of collusion in which the dissembedding of expertise becomes transparent is the cartel. A cartel refers to a group of sellers whose intent is to fix prices and production outputs in concert to maximize wealth, usually by strategy of trial and error. The cartel arrangement is associated with oligopolistic industries in which the presence of few sellers facilitates coordination. Oligopoly means few sellers in the marketplace, often with strategic interaction among rival firms. While each
firm may independently decide its strategy, its actions anticipate the reaction of rival firms. Among students of cartel theory,

anticipation and reaction represents a "consciousness of interdependence" (Dibadj 2010:595). That is, even

without intent to agree on specific conditions, oligopolies are marked by coordinated conduct across industries where prices are suspiciously similar or change in rapidly parallel ways (gasoline, airline tickets, cell phone rates, credit-card fees, movie tickets). This coordinated conduct has given rise to the phrase conscious parallelism, to describe a tacitly collusive conduct in which firms engage in parallel behavior in order to gain collusive profits but where a cartel is not set up explicitly. The absence of explicit agreement is consequential in antitrust law, where the cartel fulfills a "contract,"
"combination," or "conspiracy" requirement (section 1 of the Sherman Act). In the legal profession, conscious parallelism is restricted to "probable reactions of competitors" in setting their prices (Turner 1962). "Although it is hard to find a precise definition," conscious parallelism refers to "tacit collusion in which each firm in an oligopoly realizes that it is within the interests of the entire group of firms to maintain a high price or to avoid vigorous price competition, and the firms act in accordance with this realization" (Hylton 200373, emphases added). In this chapter, I energy policy

highlight the role of independent experts in decision-making by focusing on the forms they employ for realizing interdependence among energy companies. I draw attention to representational strategies used by consultants (workshops, commodified forms of knowledge, expert advice) for translating information into knowledge that becomes the collective property of energy industry elites. I argue that the advisory services of firms such as Wood Mackenzie, Cambridge Energy, and others structure the location and content of high-level conversations within the newly privatized and globalized energy markets. Through mastery of skill gained through experience, competency in education and employment, the discrimination they perform as it pertains to judgment between knowledge claims based on one's involvement in certain social networks, consultants reduce the complexity of facts into the kinds of simplicity that can form the basis of decisionmaking. In so doing, experts disentangle themselves from political and economic rights in techno-economic decision-making by addressing, at least on the surface of things, reasons for adopting their advice in virtue of the things that they do and know rather than as members of institutions. To characterize their role, I begin by outlining the ascendency of energy consultants and then identify media representations, such as brochures and advertisements produced by consultant firms, through which clients become witness to a detailed interplay of images about global modernity. These images establish a relation between consultants' intended audience (energy executives), those defined as outside this audience (energy consumers), and the future. Because of its resonance with risk, the future is open to contestation. Contestation is the norm in the energy decision-making arena where a cartel alliance and cartel-like consciousness are reconstructed continuously. The temporary stabilization of an alliance relies upon a sustained perception of the credibility of a given future. To be sustained, it is incumbent to replicate an image of the future that is both believable and authoritative.

Our imagination approach to the plan doesnt mean we shouldnt care about Juarez - we still think that a HRC project should occur there, and we ask you to imagine that it does. If you think about the first time fiat was explained to you, youll realize that fiat is always mere imagination. Well still answer disads about our thought project, we just think that the discursive act of imagining is more important. Ethics through fixed models and policy solutions are doomed to remaining in current dogma only imaginative experimentation is able to resist commodification
Gibson-Graham 06 [J. K. Gibson-Graham, University of Minnesota A Post-Capitalist Politics p. 87]//BMitch

We are proposing that a discourse of the community economy has the capacity to politicize the economic in new ways by resignifying economy as a site of decision, of ethical praxis, instead of as the ultimate reality/ container/constraint; and all economic practices as inherently social and always connected in their concrete particularities to the commerce of being-together. (Nancy 2000, 74) Resocializing (and repoliticizing) the economy involves making explicit the sociality that is always present , and thus constituting the various forms and practices of interdependence as matters for reection, discussion, negotiation, and action. But where might we look for strategies for negotiating plurality and interdependence, the
ethics of connection that make up the fabric of economy? How might we redress the positioning of community as an afterthought to the given of the individual in thinking about economic matters? And what might a nonfantastical, nonsingular vision of the community economy be? Here we

are seeking the ethical coordinates for a political practice, not a model or a plan, nor elements of a xed ideology, a dogma that we have to subscribe to (De Angelis 2003, 4). Nancy reminds us that Marx and Freud were two of the few thinkers who have attempted
to redress the relegation of the plural, social or communitarian dimension to the status of an addition to that of a primitive individual given (2000, 44). Marxs

project of exposing the social nature of capitalist economic relations, especially the way in which exchange masked the social origins of surplus value, is central to our understanding of economic relations and thus to the task of resocializing the economy.10 His theory of surplus labor and Resnick and Wols anti-essentialist Marxian analysis of the class process oer
some conceptual tools for practically approaching economic being-in-common. A class process involves the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus labor (in labor, product, or value form) and is but one way of representing and accounting for ows of labor in a society (Gibson-Graham, Resnick, and Wol 2000a, 2001).11 Whether or not we acknowledge it, our own existence at every level can be seen as the eect of the labor of others. For our purposes, then, labor has an inessential commonalitya solidarity that in no way contains an essence (Agamben 1993, 19)that might give us some purchase on economic being-in-common. If we

wish to emphasize the becoming of new and as yet unthought ways of economic being, we might focus on the multiple possibilities that emerge from the inessential commonality of negotiating our own implication in the existence of others. An ethical praxis of being-in-common could involve cultivating an awareness of what is necessary to personal and social survival; how social surplus is appropriated and distributed; whether and how social surplus is to be produced and consumed; and how a commons is produced and sustained. Negotiations around these key coordinates and the interactions between them could inform an ethics and politics of the community economy.12

other 1ACs

mini-tournament 1AC

1ac 1
We begin in Jurez, Mexico. The system of maquiladoras, or female industrial labor exploitation, is representative of the system of capitalism in Mexico today. The people of Jurez are trapped in a cycle of poverty where there seems to be no alternative.
Vogel 04 (Richard D. Vogela political reporter who monitors the effects of globalization on working people and their communities. He has published articles in WorkingUSA, Monthly Review, Canadian Dimension, and is the contributor of "Marxist Theories of Migration" to the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration. Stolen Birthright: The US Conquest and Exploitation to the Mexican People 2004 http://www.houstonculture.org/hispanic/conquest6.html)//rainy

In Ciudad Jurez, as everywhere, economic power translates into political power. In this city where half the population lives in homes without sewer service, municipal administrators have made accommodating foreign-owned factories their top priority. The official 2010 development plan for the city focuses on paving projects and the development of roads between the maquiladoras and the border crossings, while ignoring the social services that impact the quality of everyday life for Mexican citizens. Family life, the foundation of every community, has deteriorated under the influence of the maquiladoras. About half of the families that reside in the two and three room adobe houses in the working-class neighborhoods of Jurez are headed by single mothers, many of whom toil long hours in the maquiladoras for subsistence wages. The resulting stress on families has lead to chronic problems of poor health, family violence, and child labor exploitation. Children suffer the most. Because of the lack of child-care programs, kids are often left home alone all day and fall prey to the worst aspects of street culture, such as substance abuse and gang violence. Ciudad Jurez, by any measure of social progress, is moving backward rather than forward under the influence of the maquiladora industry.

Maquiladora employers punch womyn in the stomach each month to damage any possible unborn child and secure their work force. After all, what could be more important than cheap labor?
Pantaleo 06 (Katie Pantaleo-- graduate from California University of Pennsylvania-- president of Sociology Club @ UPenn.
Masters in Social Policy from Duquesne University. Gendered Violence: Murder in the Maquiladoras p. 13 http://www.pasocsociety.org/article2.pdf //rainy)

One of the problems that many Mexican women face while working in maquiladoras has less to do with discrimination in hiring and more to do with discriminating practices in the workplace. While there is no discrimination against women working in maquiladoras, there is pregnancy discrimination in the workplace. Women who are pregnant are turned away immediately, while those who are hired can be subject to established practices designed to discourage and prevent pregnancy. These practices are as follows: pregnancy testing, proof of menstruation, and physical harm. First of all, women can be forced to undergo pregnancy testing throughout their work term (Abell 1999). This occurs randomly and
without notice and usually consists of a urine test. A second practice is more painful for the women, psychologically and emotionally. Each

month, women may be mandated to demonstrate proof of their menstruation by showing sanitary napkins to managers. Also a series of intrusive questions are asked to each female employee, such as the date of her last period, what kind of contraception she uses, and when the last time was she had sex (Koerner 1999). The third practice adds physical harm to the existing emotional and psychological stress. Women may be deliberately punched in the stomach and abdomen by managers to make sure that they are not pregnant or to damage any unborn child. Because of these practices, female maquiladora workers suffer numerous consequences. In relation to reproduction in general, maquiladora workers are likely to
have irregular menstruation, miscarriages, fertility problems, and to bear children with birth defects such as premature births or low birth weight (Abell 1999). The

maquiladora management justify these practices because they fear

that pregnant women will disrupt the flow of work within the maquiladoras especially in the later stages in pregnancy when the women will leave work to return home to care for their child. By turning away women who are already pregnant and controlling the pregnancy status of current employees, maquiladora owners are preventing future disruptions within the workplace. Also, a law exists in
Mexico that insists on paid maternity leave, which employers find to be expensive (Abell 1999). According to Koerner (1999), the management of the maquiladoras or the Mexican Institute of Social Security is responsible for paying maternity benefits, depending on the length of employment of the women. If she has made social security payments for at least thirty weeks during the preceding twelve months prior to receiving benefits, the Mexican Institute of Social Security pays for maternity leave.

maquiladora employers rationalize these demeaning practices by arguing that they do not want to pay the legally granted maternity leave to workers not only because it is expensive but also because it would mean possibly losing full-time employees.
Otherwise, the maquiladora management must pay the benefits. Therefore,

Penetrated by U.S super-capitalism, Juarez is proof that Mexico has accepted the idea that the Mexicans are the subordinate object to economics
Vogel 04 (Richard D. Vogela political reporter who monitors the effects of globalization on working people and their communities. He has published articles in WorkingUSA, Monthly Review, Canadian Dimension, and is the contributor of "Marxist Theories of Migration" to the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration. Stolen Birthright: The US Conquest and Exploitation to the Mexican People 2004 http://www.houstonculture.org/hispanic/conquest6.html rainy) The situation in Ciudad Jurez is not exceptional. The millions of jobs that have been created along the border since 1965 have sparked a mass migration to the North, but the lives of Mexican workers have not improved under the reign of the maquiladoras. Since the 1982 economic crisis in Mexico, wages have declined and working conditions have deteriorated in the maquiladora sector, mirroring the stagnation of the economy at large. The U. S. was quick to exploit the crisis. During

the oil boom of the 1970s, finance capitalists from the North had extended easy credit to the Mexican bourgeoisie who went on an unbridled spending spree that mortgaged the future of the country. The economic bust in the early 1980s offered U.S. and other creditors a golden opportunity. Through the World
Bank and World Trade Organization (WTO), they insisted on the devaluation of the peso and the imposition of financial austerity programs on the country in order to repay the outstanding loans and, at the same time, tighten their control over the Mexican economy. The

domestic austerity programs imposed on Mexico were promoted under the slogan "short-term pain for long-term gain". The Mexican government, afraid of losing credit from the North and
unwilling to reform the economy to benefit working class Mexicans, agreed to the following austerity programs that freed up money for debt repayment and opened

Mexico to further U.S. penetration and exploitation:

- To cut social spending. The Mexican government increased fees for medical services, resulting in less treatment, widespread suffering, and needless deaths among the poorer segments of the Mexican population. The government also increased public school fees, a move that forced many poor parents to pull their children, especially girls, out of school. This austerity program also required a reduction of pension payments, shifting the burden of debt to the disabled and elderly. -

To shrink government. Because the government was the largest employer in Mexico in the early 1980s, this change resulted in massive
lay-offs and increased nationwide unemployment. The poor, hit hardest by this program, became desperate to work at any wage. -

To increase interest rates. This economic policy cut off loans to small farmers and businessmen, crippling the domestic economy and increasing unemployment across the country. This policy shift dramatically expanded the ranks of the poor. - To eliminate regulations on the foreign ownership of resources and businesses. This change allowed U.S. capitalists to gain control of key industries such as mining and allowed them to penetrate deeper into the heart of Mexico. To attract more investment from the U.S. and other rich nations, the Mexican government secretly pledged not to enforce labor and environmental laws against foreign businesses. - To eliminate tariffs. This reform undermined Mexican-owned industries and opened the markets of Mexico to U.S. and Canada. Unable to compete against advanced and, in many cases, government subsidized North
American producers, many domestic industries had to shut down and lay off their workforce. This policy hit Mexican agriculture especially hard -- well over a million small farmers were wiped out. - To privatize government-owned enterprises. This economic policy transferred many assets owned by the Mexican people to private, often U.S., ownership. The transportation, communication, and mining industries were hit the hardest. State enterprises were sold at a fraction of their actual worth, and their transfer to private ownership resulted in higher prices and reduced services across the nation. - To

reduce government

subsidies for bread, petroleum, fertilizer, etc. This change increased the cost of living in Mexico beyond the resources of average citizens and exacerbated the distress of the poor. - To reorient the Mexican economy away from domestic production and toward export production through tax incentives. This move threatened food security,
increased the exploitation of natural resources by foreign interests, and increased Mexican dependence on expensive imported food and manufactured goods. The

"short-term pain for long-term gain" slogan used to justify the U.S.imposed austerity programs has proven in practice to be long-term pain for Mexican workers and long-term gain for U.S. capitalism. One major result of the programs has been a mass migration of desperate
Mexican workers to the maquiladora cities on the U.S.-Mexico border. Between 1980 and 2000, the populations of Tijuana, Ciudad Jurez, Ciudad Acua, Reynosa, and Matamoros more than doubled. The population booms at Mexicali, Nogales, Piedras Negras, and Nuevo Laredo were not far behind. The advantage to U.S. capitalism was swift and substantial -- by 1983 two thirds of the foreign investment in Mexico was concentrated in the maquiladoras and, in one year (between 1982 and 1983), wages were cut in half (from $1.38 to $.67 per hour). The

superprofits realized by America firms helped pull the U.S. out of its own economic crisis and attracted even more American capital to Mexico.
Between 1982 and 1987, the number of maquiladoras and the maquiladora workforce nearly doubled. During the same period, because of the skyrocketing populations, and because the maquiladoras paid such low wages and so few taxes, social conditions continued to deteriorated in the boomtowns along the border. The

maquiladora system has proven so advantageous to U.S. capitalism that every American president of the last four decades has actively sought to expand the program and push it ever deeper into Mexico. A major milestone in the U.S. quest to further exploit Mexico and her people was the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) of 1994.

Transition to a more sustainable economic system is impossible absent an exploration of different economic practices that capitalism renders invisible. This exploration of economics is our project the Hybrid Research Collective, or HRC. Any attempt to destroy capitalism will fail absent the affirmatives breaking down of the idea that capitalism is hegemonic in the first place. George DEMARTINO - Professor of international economics @ U of Denver, 2013, Work in Progress posted, Ethical
Economic Engagement in a World Beyond Control, Rethinking Marxism)//rainy //ctc
The J.K. Gibson-Graham project is, in a word, saturated with ethical content. Present from the start of their collaboration as J.K. Gibson Graham, the ethical content has become more explicit and intentional as the project has evolved. In their forthcoming book with Jenny Cameron and Stephen Healy, begun before Julies death, the

ethical content is front and center. They write, For us, taking back the economy through ethical action means surviving together well and equitably, distributing surplus to enrich social and environmental health, encountering others in ways that supports their wellbeing as well as ours, consuming sustainably, maintaining, replenishing and growing our natural and cultural commons, investing our wealth so the at future generations can live well. An economy in which these ethical actions take place or are being worked toward is what we call a community economya space of decision where we recognize and negotiate our interdependence with other humans, other species and our environment. In the process of recognizing and negotiating, we become a community (Gibson-Graham, Cameron
and Healy forthcoming). The community or diverse economy project took root in recognition that much of the Marxian scholarship on the nature of capitalism that flourished in the latter part of the 20th century presumed an ontology that unwittingly effaced the political efficacy of capitalisms critics. In the End of Capitalism (as we knew it), Gibson- Graham faulted Marxian thought for contributing to the capitalist hegemony that Marxists sought to displace. In Gibson-Grahams view, Marxism erred in theorizing capitalism as having essential properties that insulated it from all but the most heroic political resistancea kind of resistance, in fact, that was hardly possible and, in any event, largely undesirable. The forms of Marxism that Gibson-Graham targeted forced the conclusion that capitalism was effectively beyond challenge in fact if not in principle. In the traditional Marxian account,

capitalism was marked by the ontological properties of unity, singularity and totality (Gibson-Graham 1996,

ch. 11). Gibson Graham argued that capitalism was theorized as self-generative and re-generative, protean adaptable almost without limit so that any prosaic or achievable challenge or alternative to it could and would be assimilated to its needs.

Capitalism was also seen to infuse all aspects of the social formation that sustained itthere was no authentically non-capitalist space (geographical, political, economic, ideational or cultural) that was immune to capitalist
penetration. Non-capitalist sites and practices were rendered epiphenomenalas vestigial and, so, not yet capitalism; as functional to capitalism; or otherwise subordinate to capitalism. The presumption of this ontological binary, in which capitalism

and only capitalism occupies

a privileged, essential position, renders resistance futile, as the Borgs would say. Not in principle, of course. Indeed, in
the traditional Marxian account capitalism is understood to be fraught with contradictions that open up the theoretical possibility for a mass movement or workers (and their class allies) with the power and objective interest in overthrowing it. But in practice, the vision of capitalism as ontologically privileged makes a mockery of any actual, practical resistance. Trade union struggles for higher wages or worker rights? Community campaigns to protect the environment, or to assert control over local capitalist corporations? These piecemeal

efforts can only ever displace but never resolve the contradictions they target (OConnor 1988). In the end, capitalism emerges from these skirmishes ever stronger and refined. Indeed, the challenges are absorbed and exploited by capital to increase surplus
production and extraction. We now have fair trade commodities and green products, for instance, which command a higher pr ice on the market and secure a higher rate of return for capital. Gibson-Graham found in poststructuralist, feminist, queer, and anti-essentialist Marxian accounts a basis for displacing the traditional Marxian ontology and its associated political imaginary. What if, they asked, the capitalism we confront achieves hegemony not largely as a consequence of its deep structural attributes but in part as a consequence of the knowledges of it that its Marxian critics and others generate and sustain? What if we collaborate in capitalisms construction as a unity, singularity and totality by the very way that we theorize it (JK Gibson-Graham 1996)? What

if we recognize the imagined, narrative basis of the purportedly scientific Marxian accounts that project onto capitalism the properties that they believe themselves to simply discover? If this is so then perhaps alternative narratives of capitalism, alternative imaginaries, might be available to us that would effectively deny capitalism these properties. Alternative visions of capitalism might recognize that it is ever incomplete, porous, and even fragile. These counter- narratives might then open up the terrain for the production of non-capitalist economies
right here, right now. In this imaginary, an imaginary that simply refuses the ontological privilege with which w eve invested capitalism, a largely negative project of resistance to what cant be resisted is displaced by a largely positive project of invention and construc tion. No

longer is it required of us that we engineer a grand oppositional, mass movement that can take on all of capitalism from the US to China all at once; indeed, no longer is there a Capitalism that needs to be uprooted and displaced so that non-capitalisms can proliferate. Instead, the alternative narrative beckons us to recognize that social formations comprise capitalist practices alongside all sorts of other economic practices that, together, populate a dense, diverse economic landscape. This vision calls on us to recognize that instead of inhabiting a capitalist universe, a barren economic monoculture, we are situated always in an economic pluriverse that is teeming with diverse economic creatures and creations that share and shape the landscape. This kind of landscape may afford us ample space for economic experimentation that can yield and nurture all sorts of non-capitalist economic practices. Indeed, we may realize that weve been constructing these projects all along, in our families, with our friends and
neighbors, in our community organizations and even in many of our formal economic institutions, without recognizing the import of the achievement. And not just us. It

may be that our most ardent defenders of Capitalism are closeted class revolutionaries in the privacy of their own homes, and also in their churches and country clubs, where they engage unwittingly in non- capitalist, non-exploitative and perhaps even communist practices.

The HRC project constitutes bringing researchers and activists to local populations in order to educate them and instruct them to differentiate the economy JK GIBSON-GRAHAM, A feminist project of belonging for the Anthropocene, 2010, //rainy //ctc
We are suggesting experiments in regional development. But who or what is it that experiments? Who or what learns and transforms? How is the becoming world initiated in an intentional, responsive, responsible way? Elsewhere we have nominated for this role something Callon calls a hybrid research collective, an assemblage that, through research, increases possibilities for (being in) the world (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2009, 11; Callon and Rabeharisoa 2003; Roelvink 2008, 2009). Research is a site where new publics are marshaled around matters of concern, and university based research is where experimentation is supported. So why not conceive of university based action research as a potential catalyst for going on in a different mode of humanity, starting where we are, in our own regions? What have we got to lose? If we accept our belonging to a planet made up of complex matter that cuts across personhood, animality and

objecthood, what

kind of regional development might emerge? Again, we have no concrete idea. But we are interested in outlining some steps toward answering that question by enrolling activities we have employed in regional action research and recalibrating them with sensitivity to the more than human. Our community partnering research has usually begun starting where we are by inviting participants to inventory the range of economic practices and assets that are often overlooked as potential contributors to regional development. Lets think about starting with this intervention and extending our regional inventory to encompass the more than human. First, there would be the task of compiling a regional profile. Usually this includes marshaling official statistics about demographic characteristics and trends, housing stock, community services, transport, infrastructure, local government and, most importantly, mainstream economic structure, including capitalist and self-employed business activity, paid employment and income levels. Our project would build on this regional profile by including elements of the diverse economy (see Figure 4). Such an expanded vision of economy is not easily available as there are few official statistics on many activities in the lower cells of any of the diverse economy columns. The process of generating a diverse economy regional profile would involve enrolling people to collect indicative data about the economic activities they care about. There might be little chance of conducting a comprehensive survey of diverse economic activities, but this may not matter. In the process of compiling and mapping, teams of hybrid researchers would form collective learning assemblages that would potentially become open to belonging in new ways.

Hegemonic economic thought makes ethics impossible the idea of a normalized economy is violence through economic colonization that makes extinction inevitable
Ethan Lloyd MILLER @ University of Massachusetts, May 2011, RETHINKING ECONOMY FOR REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT: ONTOLOGY, PERFORMATIVITY AND ENABLING FRAMEWORKS FOR PARTICIPATORY VISION AND ACTION, ctc - Conventional RED = conventional regional economic development - the trinity/triple-bottom-line is the categorization of everything into economics, society, and nature - positions held by conventional RED are in italics

Ecological and social relationships are also subsumed within conventional RED by a notion of "amenities," collectively defined as "cultural, historic, natural or built environmental resources that increasingly contribute to our notion of quality of life" (Shaffer, Deller, and Marcouiller 2004, 7). 19 In this conception, the beings and relationships constituting society and nature are positioned not as resource inputs for production, but rather as supporting background contexts within which economic development plays out. As amenities, these constitutive interrelationships appear as pleasant sources of attraction that might add value to a given process of economic growth (or, in their absence, might hinder such a process) (Green 2001); that might increase the competitiveness of a region by providing a more appealing stage upon which economic drama can unfold (Rogerson 1999; Wojan and McGranahan 2007); that may "reduce transaction costs" and thus enhance economic activity (Stimson, Stough, and Roberts 2006, 321); or may even be transformable into resources (sustainably,
of course) for commodity production.20 The notion of a "regional milieu," found extensively throughout recent work on the role of innovation and "knowledge spillovers" in enhancing regional economic competitiveness, is often a more nuanced and robust--but ultimately similar-- version of the amenity approach to social and ecological relations (Amin 1999). In all of these conceptualizations,

the economic is foregrounded as the active, productive force against a background of passive objects or instrumentalized relationships. Despite the occasional invocation of a "triple-bottom-line," Stimson, Stough and Roberts build their core discourse and analysis around only the economic node of this trinity. It is one thing to invoke a valuation of the economic, social and natural; it is quite another to enact this in analytical models of regional development. When the substantive questions are asked and the numbers are gathered and stacked in columns, it is the "economic"--specifically constituted by measurements of wages, jobs, productivity and aggregate regional growth--that stands at the

center of the picture. "Some constraint on the pursuit of economic values, particularly the quest for high economic growth, may be necessary in the short term," write Stimson, Stough and Roberts,"but it is unreasonable and unrealistic for societies to lower long-term economic aspirations" (2006, 218). The discourse of the triple bottom line only serves, then, to obscure the fact that in a contest between the three domains, the economic stands most likely to prevail. Ecological imperatives are acceptable so long as they can generate increased revenues for economic processes: hence the strong emphasis in recent regional
development literature on what Pike, Rodrguez-Pose, and Tomaney call "ecological modernisation," including "the promotion of more efficient economic growth that uses fewer natural resources, regulated markets and using environmental practices as an economic driver" (2006, 115). Social imperatives are important--as in Shaffer, Deller and Marcouiller's acknowledgement of society as "a subtle background force that defines the norms, values and ethics that determine right from wrong, good from bad" (2004, 7)--but

they are also constituted as soft and subjective (or "political") in contrast to the objective (measurable, calculable, predictable) necessities of the economic. It is, in the end, economic imperatives that rise to the top: "the overall purpose of community economic development policy is to reduce or abolish the barriers (economic, cultural, and/or 35 political) in product and factor markets that prevent the positive culmination of economic development processes" (Shaffer, Deller, and Marcouiller 2006, 70). There are at least two distinct critical responses that can be generated in
relation to the tripartite ontological structure presented by conventional RED. The first approach might view the distinction itself as constructed but essentially innocent, placing critical emphasis on the ways in which the relation between the three realms has become imbalanced in contemporary economic development practice. Even if the ontological structure itself is revealed as a historical production (which, to be clear, it is not in Stimson, Stough and Roberts), the problem is seen in the domain of the relations among elements of the trinity. Stimson, Stough and Roberts allude to such a perspective in suggesting that the "primary objective of sustainable regional development will be to restore the equilibrium" between the economic, social and ecological realms (2006, 218). Such an

approach, however, does not sufficiently examine the politics of the ontological distinctions themselves. A second to accept the innocence of economy, nature and society as categories. Far from being neutral tools for understanding differences in the world, these distinctions make slices through actual bodies and interrelationships in ways that enable and sustain the particular dominance of the economic as well as its associated forms of violence, exploitation and colonization.21 "The economy," in enclosing its space of operation, externalizes all of the relationships, behaviors, rationalities and ethical dynamics that it wishes to ignore, undermine or exploit to "society." Society, in a similar but broader move, builds its membrane by externalizing all people, species, relationships and dynamics that it wishes to exclude from ethical consideration and political deliberation to "nature." Nature, as the ultimate externality, serves a simultaneous role as the final ontological dump and the final ontological ground, both resource and recourse--on one hand, the place to which all excluded are banished to become resources or ghosts; on the other hand, the source of "objective" legitimation for any operation in the economic or social domains which someone seeks to render uncontestable by (of course) an operation of "naturalizing" (Yanagisako and Delaney 1995). 22 We can see two emergent effects of these separations. First, the separation of economy as a sphere distinct from society and nature makes possible--and even plausible--the assertion that "value judgments concerning social welfare should remain in the realm of politics, not economics" (Shaffer, Deller,
approach--one which I adopt--refuses and Marcouiller 2004, 9). This is a common notion throughout mainstream economic literature, reflected in the distinction between "positive" and "normative" economics and a frequent injunction toward the former (Friedman 1970). In this way, categories

that are inevitably linked with value practices (McMurtry 1998; De Angelis 2007) are able to generate knowledges of the world that render these practices effectively invisible behind a veil of apparent objectivity. Asserting the necessity of a particular form of economic development to improve well-being becomes simply a description of what is and what must be rather than a normative attempt to intervene in the world. This is particularly insidious since the "economic" effectively maintains an exclusive right to activities understood as crucial for the reproduction of contemporary life (i.e., jobs and money) and can therefore draw on the power of this claim while also presenting its process of knowledge production and intervention as "objective." A second

move enabled by the separation of an economic domain from all others is the erasure of a wide variety of fundamental life processes from view as legitimate and integral elements of human livelihoods. We have, on one side, economy--the domain where people "make a living"; while on the other side
lies society (where people gain meaning, participate in culture, have relationships, make ethical judgments, etc.) and nature (from which we draw resources or gain benefits). The

social and biophysical relationships--the constitutive

interrelationships-- that make life itself possible and form the primary basis for all activities that might be construed as economic are separated from the very domain that purports to examine how humans meet needs, satisfy wants and create well-being (i.e.,
"economics"). In this ontology,

slicing across and through interconnections between and among

humans and nonhumans, both nature and society are rendered variously --as we have seen
in conventional RED-- into

collections of resources or sets of background "amenities" to be

utilized. The ontology of economy, society and nature that undergirds conventional RED (as
well as much of the broader culture from which it emerges) effectively experientially--from

severs us-- conceptually, materially, and the responsibilities that our interrelationships as members of a community of

life demand. When interrelationships become invisible , or when culturally-constructed dynamics are
conceived as ontological 38 facts, then all need) is

ethics becomes impossible . It is because the "economy" (which we

that we call "jobs." It is because

seen as different from society that we can justify the violence done to our

bodies and minds and hearts by the regime of coercive labor

the "economy" is seen as fundamentally different from nature that we can justify treating all other beings as resources (or ignoring them altogether) (Plumwood 2002) and end up with a system of livelihood that undermines our own conditions of existence and secures the ongoing

violence of colonization

(Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 1998). 23

We are exposing the grisly violence of capitalism in Juarez you have an ethical obligation to oppose the poverty, rape, gang violence, and exploitation there
Charles BOWDEN, American non-fiction author and journalist, Harpers Magazine, WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING, December

1996, ctc
I am here because of a seventeen-year-old girl named Adriana Avila Gress. The whole thing started very simply. I was drinking black coffee and reading a Juarez newspaper, and there, tucked away in the back pages, where the small crimes of the city bleed for a few inches, I saw her face. She was smiling at me and wore a strapless gown riding on breasts powered by an uplift bra, and a pair of fancy gloves reached above her elbows almost to her armpits. The story said she'd disappeared, all 1.6 meters of her. I turned to a friend I was having breakfast with and said, "What's this about?" He replied matter-of-factly, "Oh, they

disappear all the time. Guys kidnap them, rape them, and kill them." Them? Oh, he continued, you know, the young girls who work in the maquiladoras, the foreign-owned factories, the ones who have to leave for work when it is still dark. Of course, I knew that violence is normal weather in Juarez. As a local fruit vendor told an American daily, "Even the devil is scared of living here." That's when it started for me.
The photographers, like Jaime showing me his slides, are the next logical step to understanding the world in which beaming seventeen-year-old girls suddenly vanish. The

cities of Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, Texas, constitute the largest border community on earth, but hardly anyone seems to admit that the Mexican side exists. Within this forgotten urban maze stalk some of the boldest photographers still roaming the streets with 35-mm cameras. Over the past two years I have become a student of their work, because I think they are capturing something:

the look of the future. This future is based on the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, and industrial growth producing poverty faster than it distributes wealth. We have these models in our heads about growth, development, infrastructure. Juarez doesn't look like any of these images, and so our ability to see this city comes and goes, mainly goes. A nation that has never hosted a jury trial, that has been dominated by one party for most of this century, that is carpeted with corruption and poverty and pockmarked with billionaires is perceived as an emerging democracy marching toward First World standing. The snippets of fact that once in a great while percolate up through the Mexican press are ignored by the U.S. government and its citizens. Mexico may be the
last great drug experience for the American people, one in which reality gives way to pretty colors. These photographs literally give people a picture of an economic world they cannot comprehend. Juarez

is not a backwater but the new City on the Hill,

beckoning us all to a grisly state of things. I've got my feet propped up on a coffee table, a glass of wine in my hand,
and as far as the half-dozen photographers present for the slide show are concerned this is my first day of school and they're not sure if I've got what it takes to be a good student. After all, no one comes here if he has a choice, and absolutely no one comes to view their work. The

photographers of Juarez once put on an exhibition. No one in El Paso, separated interested in hanging their work, so they found a small room in Juarez and hung big prints they could not really afford to make. They called their show Nada Que Ver "Nothing to See."
from Mexico by thirty feet of river, was Beginning in the early 1980s, photographers began to show up with university degrees and tattered copies of the work of New York's famous street shooter, Weegee (Arthur Fellig). A tradition of gritty, unsentimental, and loving street shooting that has all but perished in the United States was reborn in Juarez, in part because the papers offered a market but mostly because the streets could not be denied. The street shooters of Juarez are mainly young and almost always broke. Pay at the half-dozen newspapers runs from fifty to eighty dollars a week, and they must provide their own cameras. Film is rationed by their employers. "We

are like firemen," Jaime Bailleres explains, "only here we fight fires with our bare hands." The slide presentation clicks away. A child of seven is pinned under a massive beam. He and his father were tearing apart a building for its old bricks when the ceiling collapsed. Jaime says that the child is whimpering and saying he is afraid of death. He lasted a few minutes more. Alfredo Carrillo stares intently at the images as Jaime gives him tips on how to frame different scenes. A hand reaches out from under a blanket-a cop cut down by AK-47s in front of a mansion owned by Amado Carrillo Fuentes. Carrillo is a local businessman. U.S. authorities calculate that he moves more than 100 tons of cocaine a year across the Rio Grande and into El Paso. He is estimated to be grossing $200 million a week, and to the joy of economists, this business is hard currency and cash-and-carry. To my untrained eye the dimensions of the dope business are simple: without it the Mexican economy
would totally collapse." (1) A gold ring gleams on the cop's dead hand; for Bailleres it is a study in the ways of power. Alfredo says, "All

these young kids dream of being Amado Carrillo." The competition is rough. Yesterday, Juan Manuel twenty-three, got into a dispute with a drug dealer. Juan belonged to Los Harpys. Today at 4:30 P.M. he was buried in the municipal cemetery by his fellow gang members . The campo santo was crowded with people, the afterflow of the Day of the Dead observance. Carloads of guys from Barrio Chico, rivals of Los Harpys, opened fire on the procession. No one is certain how many people were wounded. The gangs of Juarez, los pandillas, kill at least 200 people a year. Accepting such realities is possible; thinking about them is not. Survival in Juarez is based on alcohol, friendships, and laughter, much laughter. But this happens in private. The streets are full of people wearing masks.
Bueno Duenas,

Some economic forms the HRC would promote are: alternative paid, reciprocal labor, fair trade, alternative currencies, cooperative banks, micro-finance, volunteer, and worker cooperatives. Our recognition of different economic forms allows us to see our interdependence with the environment and approach daily life ethically.
Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 09 [J. K. Gibson-Graham; Department of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts, Gerda
Roelvink Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy, University of Western Sydney, An Economic Ethics for the Anthropocene"]//BMitch

Taking off from this characterization, we

could perhaps say that through our own ( h ybrid) r esearch

c ollective s we have been attempting to produce a new econo-sociality. Over the past two decades
we have worked with community researchers drawn from all walks of life as well as NGOs, government agencies, small businesses, academic researchers and students in a variety of locations in the USA, Australia and the Philippines (Gibson-Graham 2006). Our

action research around the world has attempted to reclaim the economy as a site of ethical decision-making and practice. In all our research conversations the economy, rather than being seen as out there in the stock markets and corporate headquarters of global cities, has been domesticated, brought down to size and made visible as a site of everyday activities and familiar institutions. A powerful image that has emerged from these conversations is that of an iceberg with formal market transactions, wage labor and capitalist enterprise at the tip, underpinned by a myriad of submerged but sustaining alternative and non-market transactions, alternatively paid and unpaid labor, alternative capitalist and non-capitalist enterprises (see www.communityeconomies.org). We have used this image and the diverse economy diagram in which it is encoded (GibsonGraham 2006:71) as an inventory kitnot unlike the perfume industrys odor kitto produce economic actors attuned to their multiple economic roles. This kit locates everyone as contributing to (and part of) the economy in different and multiple ways: the grandmother who gifts her caring labor to mind a grandchild so that the parents can join the paid work force, the corporate executive who volunteers several hours a week at a local food bank, the trash-picker who recycles the rubbish of a city in the majority world, the poor farmer who harvests his neighbors rice as part of a time-honored reciprocal labor relationship and the policeman who turns a blind eye to the movement of illegal drugs within a neighborhood in return for kick-backs. The heightened economic sensibility that arises from using this kit has spun off discussions about the ethical choices that confront people in daily life, as they participate in a diverse economy of interdependent being-in-common. Retrospectively, we can understand our research experience as involving a hybrid research collective learning to be affected by economic diversity. Such learning provokes a questioning of all the inherited givens that see, for example, the unemployed as economically inactive, the household as a dependent site of consumption, minimally capitalized self-employed businesses as unviable, cooperatives as backward-looking, capitalist corporations as unable to care for the environment, and unionized workers as defending collective wellbeing. The diverse economy catapults multiplicity and economic differentiation to the fore and helps us to counter the ingrained belief that capitalist economic relations are the only driving economic force. Once this oneway street toward development becomes just one among a number of avenues, economic innovation proliferates. New possibilities for enterprise development emerge from discussions around
the inventory kit; as these possibilities are pursued, new enterprise forms are created, which lead to greater differentiation of the inventory kit and the possibility of developing new types of enterprises in different locations. In our action research people and agencies have been transformatively affected and new body-worlds (or body-economies) have been created, ones that are dynamic and differentiating rather than stuck and singular. Localities

that were defined in terms of deficiency and need have been re-experienced as sites of surplus possibility where alternative pathways to shaping economies are continually opening up. Taken together, these processes of co-constitution are producing a new econo-sociality (what we have called a community economy) at the core of which is the negotiation of interdependence. The diverse economy inventory kit assists with clarifying the ethical choices involved. Will a local government continue to grant free access to a closed pre-school building so that a group of volunteers can keep their Santas workshop open? The kit helps local officials to locate all the economic activities (barter with the corporate sector, volunteer training labor, work-forthe dole, gold coin donations for
access to materials, gifts of paints and timber, recycling of waste paint, production for use by local residents, sale of surplus product)

that flow through and around the workshop and contribute to the integration and resilience of the local community (Cameron and Gibson 2005). Will a farming community continue to value and engage in the
longstanding practice of reciprocal labor exchange? The diverse economy kit helps community researchers recognize this form of labor as a key contributor to livelihoods in the agricultural sector, and to propose that it be drawn upon as a resource for the fledgling phase of social enterprise development (Community Economies Collective and Gibson 2009). While these examples suggest

how close we have come to practicing an economic ethics of human interdependence, they also indicate how distant we still are from an ethics for the Anthropocene. In small and local ways, the human being-in-common of our action research has changed the world, including ourselves and our research collectives; and in more extensive ways, it has changed (that is, contributed to) the world of possibility. But we are just beginning to be affected by the coming of the Anthropocene, and have barely glimpsed the world of economic possibility it carries with it. In the next section we attempt to extend our thinking to the ethics of more-thanhuman interdependence, seeking out already existing projects that are learning/acting/being with a more-than-human world.

1ac Advocacy
Thus, ____ and I ask you to imagine that hybrid research collective programs are implemented in Jurez, Mexico.

1ac 2
Contention Two is Debate. Through this debate, we are teaching you about the HRC and a future outside of capitalism. But to be honest, youve been in the hybrid research collective this whole time. Debate is the HRC. We bring you new ideas of labor, property, enterprise, finance, transactions and more and we have mapped the possibility of new forms of becoming within economics. Our performative discourse of the 1AC produces new knowledge and breaks down capitalism
Miller 11 (Ethan Lloyd Miller-- masters of science @ University of Massachusetts Amherst RETHINKING ECONOMY FOR
REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT: ONTOLOGY, PERFORMATIVITY AND ENABLING FRAMEWORKS FOR PARTICIPATORY VISION AND ACTION http://www.communityeconomies.org/site/assets/media/Ethan_Miller/Miller_RethinkingEconomy_MSThesis-2011.pdf May 2011//rainy) A realist approach to epistemology asserts the existence of a world "out there," independent of any accounts made of that world (Law 2007a). In this way, stories or theories describe the world--they can be more or less accurate representations of an objective reality. A performative approach to discourse breaks with such a conception. While able to remain agnostic (or to hold, even, contradictory opinions) about ontology (the question of the "reality" of an "external world"),

theorists who embrace performativity recognize that meaning-making processes organize our experiences of the world and, in so doing, influence our ways of feeling, thinking and acting. It is impossible to demarcate the lines that separate "the world" from these processes through which we encounter it and with which we then act to intervene in it. Our concepts of the world emerge from the world, but they also contribute to making it. The production of knowledge, the creation of representations of our world(s)--economies being no exception--is an exercise of performative power in which we participate in the process of mobilizing actors and constructing real relationships. Referring specifically to the stories told by academic researchers, Law and Urry write that "social inquiry and its methods are productive: they (help to) make social realities and social worlds. They do not simply describe the world as it is, but also enact it" (2004, 391). Put differently, "research methods...are performative...they have effects, they make differences, they enact realities; and they can help to being into being what they also discover" (Law and Urry 2004, 392).

Our advocacy provides a framework for engagement, not a specific policy ethics through fixed policy solutions are doomed to remaining in current dogma. Only imaginative experimentation is able to resist commodification
Gibson-Graham 06 [J. K. Gibson-Graham, University of Minnesota A Post-Capitalist Politics p. 87]//BMitch We are proposing that a discourse of the community economy has the capacity to politicize the economic in new ways by resignifying economy as a site of decision, of ethical praxis, instead of as the ultimate reality/ container/constraint; and all economic practices as inherently social and always connected in their concrete particularities to the commerce of beingtogether. (Nancy 2000, 74) Resocializing (and repoliticizing) the economy involves making explicit the

sociality that is always present, and thus constituting the various forms and practices of interdependence as matters for reection, discussion, negotiation, and action. But where might we
look for strategies for negotiating plurality and interdependence, the ethics of connection that make up the fabric of economy? How might we redress the positioning of community as an afterthought to the given of the individual in thinking about economic matters? And what might a nonfantastical, nonsingular vision of the community economy be? Here we

are seeking the ethical coordinates for a political practice, not a model or a plan, nor elements of a xed ideology, a dogma that we have to subscribe to (De Angelis 2003, 4). Nancy reminds us that Marx and Freud
were two of the few thinkers who have attempted to redress the relegation of the plural, social or communitarian dimension to the status of an addition to that of a primitive individual given (2000, 44). Marxs

project of exposing the social

nature of capitalist economic relations, especially the way in which exchange masked the social origins of surplus value, is central to our understanding of economic relations and thus to the task of resocializing the economy.10 His theory of surplus labor and Resnick and Wols anti-essentialist Marxian analysis of the class process oer
some conceptual tools for practically approaching economic being-in-common. A class process involves the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus labor (in labor, product, or value form) and is but one way of representing and accounting for ows of labor in a society (Gibson-Graham, Resnick, and Wol 2000a, 2001).11 Whether or not we acknowledge it, our own existence at every level can be seen as the eect of the labor of others. For our purposes, then, labor has an inessential commonalitya solidarity that in no way contains an essence (Agamben 1993, 19)that might give us some purchase on economic being-in-common. If we wish

to emphasize the becoming of new and as yet unthought ways of economic being, we might focus on the multiple possibilities that emerge from the inessential commonality of negotiating our own implication in the existence of others. An ethical praxis of being-in-common could involve cultivating an awareness of what is necessary to personal and social survival; how social surplus is appropriated and distribute d; whether and how social surplus is to be produced and consumed; and how a commons is produced and sustained. Negotiations around these key coordinates and the interactions between them could inform an ethics and politics of the community economy.12

Traditional forms of political discussion are melancholic and nostalgic conceptions of political certainty destroy political change and agency
Gibson-Graham 06 [J. K. Gibson-Graham, University of Minnesota A Post-Capitalist Politics p. 5//BMitch Nostalgia for old forms of political organization (like international movements of worker solidarity or unions that had teeth) and attachment to the political victories of yesteryear (such as the nationalization of industry or protection for key sectors) blinds us to the political opportunities at hand. We come to love our left passions
and reasons, our left analyses and convictions, more than we love the existing world that we presumably seek to alter (W. Brown [1999, 21] paraphrasing Benjamin). Melancholia conserves

and preserves, turning its hatred toward the new and blaming thoseincluding poststructuralists and practitioners of identity politics (22)who betray the old ideals. It is from this stance that place-based activism of the kind we advocate is seen as accommodationist and divisive. As a departure from the politics of the past, place-based movements are suspect and likely to be seen as already incorporated into the capitalist world order. Here we have not only the melancholic attachment to the traditional paranoid style of theorizing, but the melancholic impulse to separate from and punish those who stray and innovate. Again there is work
to be done to melt the frozen heart of the putative leftist, where the conservative, backward-looking attachment to feelings, analyses, and relationships blocks any move toward present possibility and connection (W. Brown 1999, 22). To be a leftist is historically to be identied with the radical potential of the exploited and oppressed working class.

Excluded from power

yet xated on the powerful, the radical subject is caught in the familiar ressentiment of the slave against the master. Feelings of hatred and revenge toward the powerful sit side by side with the moral superiority of the lowly (and therefore good) over the high and mighty (and therefore bad) (Newman [2000, 2] paraphrasing Nietzsche). Moralism provides an emotional shoring up of the reactive stance of the weak, who dene themselves in opposition to the strong (3).11 With the dissolution in recent times of

positive projects of socialist construction, left

moralism has been energized by increasing investments in injury, failure, and victimhood (W. Brown 1995). When power is identied with what is ruthless and dominating, it becomes something the left must distance itself from, lest it be co-opted or compromised (Newman 2000). Fearing implication with those in power, we become attached to guarding and demonstrating our purity rather than mucking around in everyday politics. Those who engage in such work may nd themselves accused of betraying their values, sleeping with the enemy, bargaining with the devilall manner of transgressions and betrayals. A moralistic stance fuels doubts about whether local economic experimentation can do anything but shore up a repressive state apparatus, or whether action research reproduces the power of the manipulative academic over the passive community. Focused on the glass half empty rather than half full, this angry and skeptical political sensibility is seldom if ever satised. Successful political innovation seems perpetually blocked or postponed because it requires an entirely new relation to power. It will need to escape power, go beyond it, obliterate it, transform it, making the radical shift from a controlling, dominating power to an enabling, liberating one (Newman 2000). But since distance from power is the marker of authentic radicalism and desire is bound up in the purity of powerlessness, the move to reinhabit power is deferred. If we are to make the shift from victimhood to potency, from judgment to enactment, from protest to positive projects, we also need to work on the moralistic stance that clings to a singular conception of power and blocks experimentation with power in its many forms. Widely present if not fully manifest in any person or pronouncement, this culture of thinking and feeling creates a political sensibility that is paradoxically depoliticized. The theoretical closure of paranoia, the backward-looking political certainty of melancholia and the moralistic skepticism toward power render the world eectively uncontestable . The
accompanying aects of despair, separation, and resentment are negative and repudiating
Thankfully , inhospitable to adventure a nd innovation, at be st cautious and la cking in temerity. From our perspe ctive,

these stances are what must be worked against if we are to pursue a new economic politics .
. The practices of w hat Nietzsche calle d sel f-artistry or self-over coming

those same theorists who have helped to identify the barely conscious contours of a habit of thinking that blocks possibility have also led us to potential strategies for loosening its hold over us self-cultivation or care of the self are an important entry point for eecting changes in thinking and being in the world. If our goal as thinkers is the proliferation of dierent economies, what we most need is an open and hospitable orientation toward the objects of our thought. We need to foster a love of the world, rather than masterful knowing, perhaps we need to draw on the pleasures of friendliness, trust, conviviality, and companionable connection. Our repertory of tactics might include seducing, cajoling, enrolling, enticing, inviting. There could be a greater role in our thinking for invention and playfulness, enchantment and exuberance. And we could start to develop an interest in unpredictability, contingency, experimentation, or even an attachment to the limits of understanding and the possibilities of escape. How do we work against mastery, melancholia, and moralism and cultivate capacities that can energize and support the creation of other economies? there are powerful pressures that keep us thinking and feeling in the same old ways. there are countervailing possibilities For thinking is not harnessed by the tasks of representation and knowledge. Through its layered intra- and intercorporeality new ideas, theories, and identities are propelled into being Thinking is creative as well as representative its creativity is aided by the fact that the process of thinking is not entirely controlled by the agents of thought. There are, practices we can employ to reeducate ourselves, producing new aective relations with the world We can work in the conscious realm to devise practices that produce pre-thoughts that we want to foster. As a means of getting theory to yield something new, Sedgwick suggests reducing its reach, localizing its purview, practicing a weak form of theory that cannot encompass the pr esent weak theory couldnt know that social experiments are already coopted and thus doomed to fail or to reinforce dominance; it couldnt tell us that the world economy will be transformed by an international revolutionary movement rather than through the disorganized proliferation of local projects. *i+n the beginners mind there are many possibilities, in the experts mind there are few The practice of doing weak theory requires acting as a beginner, allowing success to inspire and failure to educate refusing to extend diagnoses widely Weak theory can be undertaken with a reparative motive that welcomes surprise, entertains hope, makes connection, tolerates coexistence and oers care As the impulse to judge or discredit other theoretical agendas arises, one can practice making room for others imagining a terrain on which the success of one project need not come at the expense of another. Producing spaciousness is useful for a project of rethinking economy, where the problem is the scarcity rather than the inconsistency of economic concepts. We can practice relinquishing melancholic attachment to the past with its established narratives and entrenched blame. we can work
(Connolly 2002, 77 ; New man 200 0, 20 ) and Fouca ult called 12 as Arendt says, or melancholy or moralistic detachment. T o do thi s, Shifting Stances How do we disi nvest in what we are, what we habit ually feel and do, and turn ourselves to a pr oject of be coming? If we want other worlds a nd ot her economies, how do we make ourselves a condition of possibility for their emerge nce? Clearly But as Connolly points out, also pressures and . . . at work in the layered corpor eality of cultural beings. Thinki ng bounces in magical bumps and charges a cros s zones marked by di ere nces of s pee d, capa city, and inte nsity. It is above all in the di cey relations betwee n the zones that the se eds of creativity are planted. , again, someti mes identities later become obje cts of knowledg e. thus , and (2002, 65 66) he suggests, experi mental that to convince our bodies to adopt funda mentally dierent attitudes that we intellect ually entertain as a belief, there by (78). the kind of e mbodied, ae ct-i mbued And in the daily rehearsal of these practice s we can hope that they will become part of our makeu p, part of a cell me mory that will increasingly assert itself without resort to conscious calling .13 Pra ct icing Weak T heory, Adopting Reparative Motives, and Producing Positive Affe ct What if we believed, as Sedgwi ck suggests, that the g oal of the ory were not only to exten d and deepe n knowle dge by conr ming what we already knowthat the worl d is full of cruelty, misery, and los s, a place of domi nation and syste mic oppres sion? What if we asked t heory to do something els e to help us see opening s, to help us to nd ha ppiness, to pr ovide a spa ce of free dom and pos sibility? and shut down the future (200 3, 134 ). Little more than descri ption, Zen master Shunryu Suz uki reminds us t hat (1970, 1). refusing to know too much, , too or deeply.14 for the new. , such particularly on to open our asses sme nts of repudiated move ments and practi ces, fostering a nities and even aliations. We can choose to cultivate appreciation, taking heart, for e xa mple, from the ways that identity politics has opene d doors to clas s politics, or the ways in whi ch a politics of recognition i s already also a politics of redistribution. 16 With a commit ment to coe xisten ce,

. These new ideas, concepts, se nsibilities, and

15 Reparative theorizing can be calle d

Practicing weak theory allows us to deexoticize power, accepting it as our mundane, pervasive, uneven milieu. We can observe how we produce our own powerlessness with respect to the economy, for example, by theorizing unfolding logics and structural formations that close o the contestable arrangements we associate with politics. As we teach ourselves to come back with a beginners mind to possibilities, we can begin to explore the multiple forms of power, their spatialities and temporalities, their modes of transmission, reach and (in)eectivity. A dierentiated landscape of force, constraint, freedom, and opportunity emerges and we can open to the surge of positive energy that suddenly becomes available for mobilization. In the last part of this chapter we present a reading
toward a way of thinking that might place us alongside our political others, mutually recognizable as oriented in the same direction even if pursuing dierent paths
.17

of two lms, showing how one, The Full Monty, portrays movements that sidestep the paranoia, melancholia, and moralism of traditional left thinking as exemplied in the other, Brassed O.18 Our aim is to illustrate the stance that we feel needs to be cultivated for the task of imagining and enacting a postcapitalist politics. What follows, then, is an experiment in reading that might nudge us toward a dierent aective relationship to the world and its possibilities.

Without the aff, debate is dominated by consultants, not policymakers: irresponsibly crafting marketing strategies, incapable of advocating social change. Only the affirmative can create responsible methodology which is an independent reason to vote affirmative.
MASON 13 (Arthur, Assistant Professor, Justice and Social Inquiry, School of Social Transformation, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences @ Arizona State U., Cartel Consciousness and Horizontal Integration in Energy Industry Cultures of Energy: Power, Practices, Technologies, 2013, pp. 126-129) In this chapter, I highlight the role of independent experts in energy policy decision-making by focusing on the forms they employ for realizing interdependence among energy companies. I draw attention to representational strategies used by consultants (workshops, commodified forms of knowledge, expert advice) for translating information into knowledge that becomes the collective property of energy industry elites. I argue that the advisory services of firms such as Wood Mackenzie, Cambridge Energy, and others structure the location and content of high-level conversations within the newly privatized and globalized energy markets. Through mastery of skill gained through experience, competency in education and employment, the discrimination they perform as it pertains to judgment between knowledge claims based on one's involvement in certain social networks, consultants reduce the complexity of facts into the kinds of simplicity that can form the basis of decisionmaking. In so doing, experts disentangle themselves from political and economic rights in techno-economic decision-making by addressing, at least on the surface of things, reasons for adopting their advice in virtue of the things that they do and know rather than as members of institutions. To characterize their role, I begin by outlining the ascendency of energy consultants and then identify media representations, such as brochures and advertisements produced by consultant firms, through which clients become witness to a detailed interplay of images about global modernity. These images establish a relation between consultants' intended audience (energy executives), those defined as outside this audience (energy consumers), and the future. Because of its resonance with risk, the future is open to contestation. Contestation is the norm in the energy decision-making arena where a cartel alliance and cartel-like consciousness are reconstructed continuously. The temporary stabilization of an alliance relies upon a sustained perception of the credibility of a given future. To be sustained, it is incumbent to replicate an image of the future that is both believable and authoritative.

Their demand for us to read policy arguments incorporates us into neoliberalism space for critical theory is crucial to decision-making and democracy
WOLFE 11 (Cary, Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Prof. of English @ Rice U., THEORY AS A RESEARCH PROGRAMME THE VERY IDEA Theory After Theory, pp. 45-48) In this light, the task of theory is made doubly formidable when the corporate ethos of the university is wedded to the intellectual traditionalism that furthers it, you might say, by other means. It is precisely for these reasons that the humanities must, in Derrida's view, dedicate themselves to the principle of unconditional discussion, unconditional freedom of thought (Derrida 2002: 202, 203), even though this unconditionality is never entirely possible. For Derrida, if that unconditional freedom is the raison
d'etre of the university (versus, say, technical training and the development of applied knowledge), the humanities are its 'originary and privileged place of presentation, of manifestation, of safekeeping' (ibid.: 207). In the context of the humanities so understood, then, theory

serves as a place of irredentist resistance or even, analogically, as a sort of principle of civil disobedience, even of dissidence in the name of a superior law and a justice of thought (ibid.: 208). This

last passage helps underscore the fact that what

might seem 'apolitical' or 'uncommitted' to some in Derrida's approach to such questions is, in fact, a product of his taking quite seriously his responsibility to the humanities and to the university as a philosopher or, if you like, a themist (leaving aside for the moment how we might want to precisely conjugate those terms). In fact, as he points out in ' The Principle of Reason', many ostensibly more 'committed' forms of 'political thought' in the contemporary university are quite easily recontained as part of its standard operating machinery of dissensus a shopping mall pluralism, if you like, serving a fundamentally neoliberal project of incorporation. Here, we would do well to remember
Rajan's contextualization of the changing role of cultural studies not in terms of the ostensibly political projects it announces and embraces for itself, but in terms of the hegemonic norms of the contemporary university and its disciplinary protocols: a situation in which 'the social is now the unquestioned ground of the humanities' , and the humanities refuse to 'claim a way of thinking the social from the outside' (Rajan 2001: 74). Regarding 'sociology

or politology' , Derrida writes that 'I would be the last to question scientific normativity, beginning with the value of objectivity or objectification, which governs and authorizes their discourse . . . These sociologies of the institution remain in this sense internal to the university, intra-institutional, controlled by the deepseated standards, even the programs, of the space that they claim to analyze. (Derrida 1983: 149) In this light, to model knowledge in the humanities on the sciences is to remain 'homogeneous with the discourse that dominates the university in the last analysis'. And to use such a project to create an 'objective' basis for politics, no matter how 'revolutionary', as Derrida puts it, is therefore to leave unquestioned 'the most conservative forces of the university' (ibid.: 149). This is not to say that such work is a waste of time; it is simply to say that it is situated in multiple ways conceptually, institutionally and ideologically. And here, it seems to me, theory finds a crucial role at the present moment in asserting itself against the representationalism (to use Rorty's term) that links what at first might look like strange bedfellows: a cultural studies that thinks the social 'as the unquestioned ground of the humanities' (Raj an 2001: 74) and a 'scientific' orientation that grounds the humanities on a 'methodologico-ontological' basis. Moreover, to remember that Derrida pens his critique in the early 1980s, at the dawn of the Reagan era, is to recall those pressures of corporatization and federal divestment (well glossed by Lambert, among others) that will in the years that follow exert increasing pressure on the humanities to justify themselves in terms of a 'relevance' whose ground lay elsewhere, in society or nature. And it
want to disqualify them. But whatever conceptual apparatus they may have', he continues, they never is here that we may bring into sharper focus, an additional context for the political work of 'professing' theory that I mentioned earlier: the context of globalization (or 'mondialisation', to use the French term Derrida prefers). If

the effect of current cultural studies in this context is, according to Rajan, to simulate the preservation of civil society after the permutation of the classical public sphere' into an essentially market and consumerist logic of 'representation' (ibid.: 69-70), then the attempt to meet that shortcoming by deploying 'scientific' or ontological models of theory (which would, precisely, not depend on the continuation of identity politics by other means) runs aground on a different set of problems. In Derrida's view, globalization is driven by (indeed would be impossible without) the kind of 'calculation' of reason that anchors the production-centred ethos of the corporate university: namely, the standardization and commodification of knowledge via information technologies (Derrida 1983: 14). So if (to put it very schematically) in the corporate university, theory-qua-cultural studies serves globalization by helping along the neoliberal project of ideological incorporation, then theory-qua-scientificresearch-programme serves globalization not so much by its direct subordination to utility, but rather by extending a picture of what counts as 'real' knowledge 'realist', 'scientific', 'materialist', 'empiricist' and 'hard' that underwrites a production-centred ethos. Over and against both, theory as 'unconditional' thought may feel 'soft', frivolous or even risky, but 'to claim to eliminate that risk, Derrida writes, 'by an institutional program is quite simply to erect a barricade against a future' not the future, crucially, but a future (Derrida 1983: 18-19). It is to duck theory's challenge to 'define new
responsibilities in the face of the university's total subjection to the technologies of informatization' (Derrida 1983: 14). And it is on this point that we may most clearly distinguish Derrida's view from Rorty's. For Derrida, theory

is indeed crucial to

democratic society, and to the place of institutions of higher learning within it. But he does not
exactly subordinate theory to politics (as in Rorty's declaration of 'the priority of democracy to philosophy'), much less to any specific politics (such as Rorty's liberalism) (Rorty 1991: 17 5). For Derrida, the

commitment to theory as unconditional thought means that 'the university should thus also be the place in which nothing is beyond question, not even the current and determined figure of democracy, not even the traditional idea of critique' (Derrida 2002: 20 5). But neither does Derrida's view subordinate politics
to theory, since theory is always situated within a historical, ideological and institutional conjuncture of the sort we have been tracing here, the sort that en frames the corporate university and its hegemonic forms of disciplinarity. Or - to put it in a shorthand that sharpens his distance from Rorty's liberal pragmatism for

Derrida, it is not possible to talk about the unconditional duty of theory without also talking about the conditional contexts of capitalism, globalization and the corporate university that over-determine theory's role at this present moment. And in that light - at that nexus of institutional power, economic pressure and disciplinary hegemony a final irony of the idea of theory as a research programme is that one might well wonder why the 'science' that it aspires to would ever take it seriously.

State-centric approaches water down any attempt to revolutionize and change politics
GODDARD 2006 The Encounter between Guattari and Berandi and the Post Modern Era Felix and Alice in Wonderland
http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpbifo1.htm What this type of radio achieved most of all was the short-circuiting of representation in both the aesthetic sense of representing the social realities they dealt with and in the political sense of the delegate or the authorised spokesperson, in favour of generating a space of direct communication in which, as Guattari put it, it is as if, in

some immense, permanent meeting placegiven the size of the potential audienceanyone, even the most hesitant, even those with the weakest voices, suddenly have the possibility of expressing themselves whenever they wanted. In these conditions, one can expect certain truths to find a new matter of expression. In this
sense, Radio Alice was also an intervention into the language of media; the transformation from what Guattari calls the police languages of the managerial milieu and the University to a direct language of desire: direct speech, living speech, full of confidence, but also hesitation, contradiction, indeed even absurdity, is charged with desire. And it

is always this aspect of desire that spokespeople, commentators and beaureaucrats of every stamp tend to reduce, to filter. [...] Languages of desire invent new means and tend to lead straight to action; they begin by touching, by provoking laughter, by moving people, and then they make people want to move out, towards those who speak and toward those stakes of concern to them. It is this activating dimension of popular free radio that most distinguishes it from the usual pacifying operations of the mass media and that also posed the greatest threat to the authorities; if people were just sitting at home
listening to strange political broadcasts, or being urged to participate in conventional, organised political actions such as demonstrations that would be tolerable but once

you start mobilising a massive and unpredictable political affectivity and subjectivation that is autonomous, self-referential and self-reinforcing, then this is a cause for panic on the part of the forces of social order, as was amply demonstrated in Bologna in 1977.
Finally, in the much more poetic and manifesto-like preface with which Guattari introduces the translation of texts and documents form Radio Alice, he comes to a conclusion which can perhaps stand as an embryonic formula for the emergence of the post-media era as anticipated by Radio Alice and the Autonomia movement more generally: In Bologna and Rome,

the thresholds of a revolution without any relation to the ones that have overturned history up until today have been illuminated, a revolution that will throw out not only capitalist regimes but also the bastions of beaureaucratic socialism [...] , a revolution, the fronts of which will perhaps embrace entire continents but which will also be concentrated sometimes on a specific neighbourhood, a factory, a school. Its wagers concern just as much the great economic and technological choices as attitudes, relations to the world and singularities of desire. Bosses, police officers, politicians, beuareaucrats, professors and psycho-analysts will in vain conjugate their efforts to stop it, channel it, recuperate it, they will

in vain sophisticate, diversify and miniaturise their weapons to the infinite, they will no longer succede in gathering up the immense movement of flight and the multitude of molecular mutations of desire that it has already unleashed. The police have liquidated Aliceits animators are hunted,
condemned, imprisoned, their sites are pillagedbut its work of revolutionary deterritorialisation is pursued ineluctably right up to the nervous fibres of its persecutors. This is because the revolution unleashed by Alice was not reducible to a political or media form but was rather an explosion of mutant desire capable of infecting the entire social field because of its slippery ungraspability and irreducibility to existing sociopolitical categories. It

leaves the forces of order scratching their heads because they dont know where the crack-up is coming from since it doesnt rely on pre-existing identities or even express a future programme but rather only expresses immanently its own movement of autoreferential self-constitution, the proliferation of desires capable of resonating even with the forces of order themselves which now have to police not only these dangerous outsiders but also their own desires.

This shift from fixed political subjectivities and a specified programme is the key to the transformation to a post-political politics and indeed to a post-media era in that politics becomes an unpredictable, immanent process of becoming rather than the fulfilment of a transcendental narrative. In todays political language one could say that what counts is the pure potential that another world is possible and the
movement towards it rather than speculation as to how that world will be organised. As Guattari concludes: The point of view of the Alicians on this question is the following: they consider that the movement that arrives at destroying the gigantic capitalistbeaureaucratic machine will be, a fortiori, completely capable of constructing an other worldthe stage to outline projections of societal change.

collective competence in the matter will come to it in the course of the journey, without it being necessary, at the present

framework

2ac framework

2ac definitions
Should indicates desirability, OED 11

(http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/should?region=us) Resolved is to reduce by mental analysis, Random House 11

(http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/resolve)

The United States federal government is the people

Howard, 2005 (Adam, Jeffersonian Democracy: Of the People, By the People, For the
People, http://www.byzantinecommunications.com/adamhoward/homework/highschool/jeffersonian.h tml, 5/27)
Ideally, then, under Jeffersonian Democracy, the Therefore, if

government is the people, and people is the government. a particular government ceases to work for the good of the people, the people may and ought to change that government or replace it. Governments are established to protect the people's rights using the power they get from the people. Substantially is : being largely but not wholly that which is specified <a substantial lie> Merriam

Webster 11

2ac predictability/limits
Political ambiguity makes limits impossible
Christian

DE COCK, Professor of Organizational behaviour, change management, creative problem solving, Of Philip K. Dick,
2001

reflexivity and shifting realities Organizing (writing) in our post-industrial society, Science Fiction and Organization,

'As Marx might have said more generally, 'all that is built or all that is "natural" melts into image' in the contemporary global economies of signs and space' (Lash and Urry, 1994, p. 326). The

opinion seems to be broadly shared among both academics and practitioners that traditional conceptions of effective organizing and decision-making are no longer viable because we live in a time of
irredeemable turbulence and ambiguity (Gergen, 1995). The emerging digital or 'new' economy seems to be a
technologically driven vision of new forms of organizing, relying heavily on notions of flexibility as a response this turbulence. Corporate dinosaurs must be replaced with smart networks that add value. Words such as 'cyberspace' 3 and 'cyborganization' drip easily from tongues (e.g. Parker and Cooper, 1998) and 'the

organization' becomes more difficult to conceptualize as it 'dissipates into cyberspace' and 'permeates its own boundaries' (Hardy and
Clegg 1997: S6). Organizations are losing important elements of permanence as two central features of the modern organization, namely the assumption of self-contained units and its structural solidity, are undermined (March, 1995). Even the concept of place becomes increasingly phantasmagoric as locales get thoroughly penetrated by social influences quite distant from them (Giddens, 1990). In this new

organizational world 'reality' seems to have become only a contract, the fabrication of a consensus that can be modified or can break down at any time (Kallinikos, 1997) and
the witnessing point - the natural datum or physical reference point - seems to be in danger of being scrapped (Brown, 1997). This notion that reality

is dissolving from the inside cannot but be related with feelings of disorientation and anxiety. Casey (1995, pp. 70-1), for example, provides a vivid description of the position of 'the self'
within these new organizational realities. This

is a world where everyone has lost a sense of everyday competence and is dependent upon experts, where people become dependent
on corporate bureaucracy and mass culture to know what to do. The solidity (or absence of it) of reality
has of course been debated at great length in the fields of philosophy and social theory, but it remains an interesting fact that organizational scholars have become preoccupied with this issue in recent years. Hassard

and Holliday (1998), for

example, talk about the theoretical imperative to explore the linkages between fact/fiction and illusion/reality. It is as if some fundamental metaphysical questions have finally descended into the metaphorical organizational street. Over the past decade or so, many academics who label themselves critical management theorists and/or postmodernists (for once, let's not name any names) have taken issue with traditional modes of organizing (and ways of theorizing about this organizing) by highlighting many irrationalities and hidden power issues. These academics have taken on board the idea that language has a role in the constitution of reality and their work is marked by a questioning of the nature of reality, of our conception of knowledge, cognition, perception and observation (e.g. Chia, 1996a; Cooper and Law, 1995; Czarniawska, 1997).
Notwithstanding the importance of their contributions, these authors face the problem that in order to condemn a mode of organizing or theorizing they need to occupy an elevated position, a sort of God's eye view of the world; a position which they persuasively challenge when they deconstruct the claims of orthodox/modern organizational analyses (Parker, 2000; Weiskopf and Willmott, 1997). Chia, for example, writes

about the radically untidy, ill-adjusted character of the fields of actual experience - 'It is only by giving ourselves over to the powers of "chaos", ambiguity, and confusion that new and deeper insights and understanding can be attained' (Chia, 1996b, p. 423) - using arguments which could not be more tidy, analytical and precise. This of course raises the issue of reflexivity: if reality can never be stabilized and the research/theorizing process 'is always necessarily precarious, incomplete and fragmented'
(Chia, 1996a, p. 54), then Chia's writing clearly sits rather uncomfortably with his ontological and epistemological beliefs. In this he is, of course, not alone (see, e.g., Gephart et al.., 1996; Cooper and Law, 1995). This

schizophrenia is evidence of rather peculiar discursive rules where certain ontological and epistemological

statements are allowed and even encouraged, but the reciprocate communicational practices are disallowed. Even the people who are most adventurous in their ideas or
statements (such as Chia) are still caught within rather confined communicational practices. To
use Vickers' (1995) terminology: there is a disjunction between the ways in which organization theorists are ready to see and value the organizational world (their appreciative setting) and the ways in which they are ready to respond to it (their instrumental system). When we write about reflexivity, paradox and postmodernism in organizational analysis, it is expected that we do this unambiguously. 4 And yet,

the notion that 'if not consistency, then chaos' is not admitted even by all logicians, and is rejected by many at the frontiers of natural science research - 'a contradiction causes only some hell to break loose' (McCloskey, 1994, p. 166). contradiction causes only some hell to break loose' (McCloskey, 1994, p. 166).

2ac fairness
The negs appeals to fairness and predictability is a conservative strategy in order to maintain status quo power relations which destroys students abilities to think critically Richard DELGADO, Charles Inglis Thomson Professor of Law, University of Colorado. J.D, University of California at Berkeley, 1992 ESSAY SHADOWBOXING: AN ESSAY ON POWER, 77 Cornell L. Rev. 813, Lexis) It is important to know when we are being gulled, manipulated, and duped. n1 It is even more important to know when we are unwittingly doing this to ourselves -- when we are using shopworn legal scripts and counterscripts, going around endlessly in circles, getting nowhere. n2 Understanding how we use predictable arguments to rebut other predictable arguments in a predictable sequence -- "The plaintiff should have the freedom to do X," "No -- the defendant should have the
security not to have X done to her"; "The law should be flexible, permitting us to do justice in particular cases," "No -- the law must be determinate; only bright-line rules are administrable and safe" n3 -- frees us to focus on real-world questions that do matter. We

can begin to see how the actions we take as lawyers, law students, and legal scholars advance or retard principles we hold dear. n4 We can see where the scripts come from and, perhaps, how to write new and better ones. <Continues> Underlying these stylized debates about subjective versus objective standards is a wellhidden issue of cultural power, one neatly concealed by elaborate arguments that predictably invoke predictable "principle." n25 These arguments invite us to take sides for or against abstract values that lie on either side of a well-worn analytical divide, having remarkably little to do with what is at stake. The arguments mystify and sidetrack, rendering us helpless in the face of powerful repeat players like corporations, human experimenters,
action-loving surgeons, and sexually aggressive men. n26 How does this happen? Notice that in many cases it is the

stronger party -- the tobacco company, surgeon, or male date -- that wants to apply an objective standard to a key event. n27 The doctor wants the law to require
disclosure only of the risks and benefits the average patient would find material. n28 The male partygoer wants the law to ignore the woman's subjective thoughts in favor of her outward manifestations. n29 The tobacco company wants the warning on the package to be a stopper. Generally, the law complies. What explains the stronger party's preference for an objective approach, and the other's demand for a more personalized one? It is not that one approach is more principled, more just, or even more [*818] likely to produce a certain result than the other. Rather, in my opinion, the

answer lies in issues of power and culture. It is now almost a commonplace that we construct the social world. n30 We do this through stories, narratives , myths, and symbols -- by using tools that create images, categories, and pictures. n31 Over time, through repetition, the dominant stories seem to become true and natural, and are accepted as "the way things are." n32 Recently, outsider jurisprudence n33 has been developing means, principally " counterstorytelling ," to displace or overturn these comfortable majoritarian myths and narratives . n34 A well-told counterstory can jar or displace the
dominant account. n35

The debate on objective and subjective standards touches on these issues of worldmaking and the social construction of reality. Powerful actors, such as tobacco companies and male dates, want objective standards applied to them simply because these standards always, and already, reflect them and their culture. These actors have been in power; their subjectivity long ago was deemed "objective" and imposed on the world. n36 Now their ideas about meaning, action, and fairness are built into our culture, into our view of
malefemale, doctor-patient, and manufacturer-consumer relations. n37 <continues>

I began by observing that law-talk can lull and gull us, tricking us into thinking that categories like objective and subjective, and the stylized debates that swirl about them, really count when in fact they either collapse or appear trivial when viewed from the perspective of cultural power. If we allow ourselves to believe that these categories do matter, we can easily expend too much energy replicating predictable, scripted arguments -- and in this way, the law turns once-progressive people into harmless technocrats. n70

2ac education
The assumption that education is neutral is the crux of failed progressive politics only breaking away from instrumentalism allows us to counter neoliberal politics

GIROUX 11 (Henry A. Giroux, Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, 8 November
2011, Beyond the Limits of Neoliberal Higher Education: Global Youth Resistance and the American/British Divide, http://www.truth-out.org/beyond-limits-neoliberal-higher-education-global-youth-resistance-and-americanbritish-divide/1320688)

The corporatization of schooling and the commodification of knowledge over the last few decades has done more than make universities into adjuncts of corporate power. It has produced a culture of critical illiteracy and further undermined the conditions necessary to enable students to become truly engaged, political agents. The value of knowledge is now linked to a crude instrumentalism, and the only mode of
education that seems to matter is that which enthusiastically endorses learning marketable skills, embracing a survival-of-the-fittest ethic, and defining the good life solely through accumulation and disposal of the latest consumer goods. Academic

knowledge has been stripped of its value as a social good. To be relevant, and therefore adequately funded, knowledge has to justify itself in market terms, or simply perish. Enforced privatization, the closing down of critical public spheres, and the endless commodification of all aspects of social life have

created a generation of students who are increasingly being reared in a society in which politics is viewed as irrelevant, while the struggle for democracy is being erased from social memory. This is not to suggest that Americans have abandoned the notion that ideas have power or that
ideologies can move people. Progressives pose an earnest challenge to right-wing ideologies and policies, but they seem less inclined to acknowledge the diverse ways in which the pedagogical force of the wider culture functions in the production, distribution, and regulation of both power and meaning. By contrast, the conservative willingness to use the educational force of the culture explains in part both the rapid rise of the Tea Party movement and the fact that it seemed to have no counterpart among progressives in the United States, especially young people, though this is now changing given the arrogant and right-wing attacks being waged on unions, public sector workers, and public school educators in Wisconsin, Florida, Ohio, New Jersey, and other states where Tea Party candidates have come to power.[38] Progressives,

largely unwilling to engage in a serious manner the

educational force of the larger culture as part of their political strategy, have failed to theorize how conservatives successfully seize upon this element of politics in ways that far
outstrip its use by the left and other progressive forces. Missing

from their critical analyses is any understanding of how public pedagogy has become a central element of politics itself. Public
pedagogy in this sense refers to the array of different sites and technologies of image-based media and screen culture that are reconfiguring the very nature of politics, cultural production, knowledge, and social relations. Market-driven

modes of public pedagogy now dominate major cultural apparatuses such as mainstream electronic and print media
and other elements of screen culture, whose one-sided activities, permeated by corporate values, proceed more often than not unchallenged. Left to their own devices by progressive movements who for decades have largely refused to take public pedagogy seriously as part of their political strategy, the new and old media with their depoliticized pedagogies of consumption may finally be encountering some resistance from the rising student protests around the globe. Higher Education and the Erasure of Critical Formative Cultures In

a social order dominated by the relentless privatizing and commodification of everyday life and the elimination of critical public spheres, young people find themselves in a society in which the formative cultures necessary for a democracy to exist have been more or

less eliminated, or reduced to spectacles of consumerism made palatable through a daily diet of game
shows, reality TV, and celebrity culture. What

is particularly troubling in American society is the absence of vital formative cultures necessary to construct questioning persons who are capable of seeing through the consumer come-ons, who can dissent and act collectively in an increasingly imperiled democracy. Sheldon Wolin is instructive in his insistence that the creation of a democratic formative culture is fundamental to
enabling both political agency and a critical understanding of what it means to sustain a viable democracy. According to Wolin, democracy is about the conditions that make it possible for ordinary people to better their lives by becoming political beings and by making power responsive to their hopes and needs. What is at stake in democratic politics is whether ordinary men and women can recognize that their concerns are best protected and cultivated under a regime whose actions are governed by principles of commonality, equality, and fairness, a regime in which taking part in politics becomes a way of staking out and sharing in a common

life and its forms of self-fulfillment. Democracy is not about bowling together but about managing together those powers that immediately and significantly affect the lives and circumstances of others and ones self. *39+ Instead

of public spheres that promote dialogue, debate, and arguments with supporting evidence, American society offers young people a conservatizing, consumer-driven culture through entertainment spheres that infantilize almost everything they touch, while legitimating opinions that utterly disregard evidence, reason, truth, and civility. The delete button has replaced the critical knowledge and the modes of education needed for long-term
commitments and the search for the good society. Intimate and committed social attachments are short-lived, and the pleasure of instant gratification cancels out the coupling of freedom, reason, and responsibility. As a long-term social investment, young

people are now viewed in market terms as a liability, if not a pathology. No longer a symbol of hope and the future, they are viewed as a drain on the economy, and if they do not assume the role of functioning consumers, they are considered disposable. Within the last thirty years, the United States under the reign of market fundamentalism has been transformed into a society that is more about forgetting than learning, more about consuming than producing, more about asserting private interests
than democratic rights. In a society obsessed with customer satisfaction and the rapid disposability of both consumer goods and long-term attachments, American

youth are not encouraged to participate in politics. Nor are they offered the help, guidance, and modes of education that cultivate the capacities for critical thinking and engaged citizenship. As Zygmunt Bauman points out, in a consumerist society, the tyranny of the
moment makes it difficult to live in the present, never mind understand society within a range of larger totalities.*40+ Under such circumstances, according to Theodor Adorno, thinking loses its

ability to point beyond itself and is reduced to mimicking existing certainties and modes of common sense. Thought cannot sustain itself and becomes short-lived, fickle, and ephemeral. If young people do not display a strong commitment to democratic politics and collective struggle, then, it is because they have lived through thirty years of what I have elsewhere called a debilitating and humiliating disinvestment in their future, especially if
they are marginalized by class, ethnicity, and race.[41]

2ac boggs
Boggs votes aff BOGGS 11 (Carl Boggs, Professor and Ph.D. Political Science, National University, Los Angeles, Phantom Democracy: Corporate
Interests and Political Power in America, pp. 249-254)

The very expanse of American power todayglobal, military, corporate, bureaucraticought to pose the question of a potential fascist equivalent in the modern setting. Despite economic
crisis, this

behemoth exhibits no signs of retreating. While Mann is correct to emphasize the firm grounding

of liberal- democracy in the

United States, he forgets that this is also a system marked by such high levels of institutionalization and ideological consensus that electoral politics has diminished impact within a power structure even more concentrated and oligarchic than the one described by Mills. A fascist
equivalent would necessarily be less totalitarian than interwar fascist states that, in any event, always depended on tradi tional pillars of support (church, monarchy, aristocracy) enjoying some degree of social and political autonomy. Elements of liberalism and right- wing authoritarian can easily coexist, as they have historically, in countries like Japan, Mexico, Russia, and South Korea. The very notion of a classical fascist revolution, forcing a total break with the past, turns out to be yet another of the time- honored myths. That Mann believes fascism will never come to the United States is hardly surprising given a restrictive definition tied to the historical moment when fascism is the pursuit of transcendent and cleansing nation- statism through paramilitarism. 37 Fixation on paramilitary action linked to rampaging local militias as in the famous but largely fictional march on Rome was overdrawn even for best- case Italy. In fact powerful elite coalitions dictated the nature of fascist ascendancy, and most paramilitaries were either weak or absent; mass political activity occurred within a transmission belt that worked from top to bottom. As Laqueur points out, True, the masses were mobilized, not in order to participate actively in politics, not to fight in the streets, but to march in occasional mass demonstrations and parades, to listen from time to time to lectures, and to attend similar functions. 38 For Japanese fascism, Barrington Moore arrived at the same conclusion: the regime was based on an alliance of big business and traditional interests, where elites rallied the masses around nationalism and militarism as they orchestrated everything from above. 39 The Japanese model, though rarely discussed, was closer to the general norm than was Nazi Germany. It follows that a

depoliticized public sphere would pose no great obstacle to fascist prospects in the United States, where corporate and imperial power seeks maximum freedom of movement, surely
preferring something along lines of Wolins managed democracy. For modern authoritarian rule, popular insurgency no doubt ends up more disruptive than system- sustaining. Predictions of a fully developed fascist order in the United States now seem entirely premature, even crazy, especially where the definition of fascism clings to the classical experience. Whether

Constitutional and other liberal modalities are today durable enough to prevent such an outcome in the face of ongoing corporate, imperial, and military expansion, however, seems increasingly doubtful. Counterforces do, of course exist, including social movements and grassroots activism that have pervaded U.S. history. Explosive demotic momentsstrong but momentary expressions of citizen engagement or protestthat Wolin discusses at some length could

be decisive at future critical junctures. The twentieth century witnessed a steady expansion of popular suffrage
along with a spirited defense of civil and legal rights, even as the

political system itself became more closed and less participatory under the weight of corporate power, the war economy, bureaucratization, media concentration, and bipartisan ideological conformity. Indicators of citizen involvementvoter turnout, issue knowledge and awareness, sense of efficacy, etc.have declined sharply in recent decades, only to be slightly (and no doubt temporarily) revived during Obamas run to the presidency. 40 Leftist and progressive movements capable of posing effective alternatives to an increasingly bankrupt political order scarcely exist. Democratic upsurges cited by Wolin have been most visible at times of social crisis, as during the 1930s and 1960s, but elections as such have rarely produced far- reaching change. In Wolins view,
demotic moments can effectively pose short- term challenges to the arts of management, but their episodic character means their capacity to effectively challenge power or class relations under present circumstances will be limited. Thus, while an Obama presidency offered the American public much- needed imagery of hope and change, it should be remembered that Democrats

are beholden to the same corporate and military interestsand subscribe to the same broad political outlookas Republicans. And these voracious interests exhibit no readiness to abandon their vast network of privilege and power, nor relinquish the grand illusions vital

to perpetuating their hegemony. Conclusion If the preceding chapters paint an excessively dark picture of American
politics, the objective has been to frame the contemporary predicament in its starkest reality, devoid of its celebratory fictions and myths against the backdrop of a long history. At present democracy constitutes more legitimating

symbol than operating mechanism of a system dominated by globalized corporate, state, and military power. The overwhelming evidence reveals a social order that is increasingly oligarchic and inegalitarian, best understood as a complex ensemble of political and economic, institutional and ideological, domestic and global forces at work. The contribution this system has made to the mounting global crisis simultaneously economic, military, and ecological in its dimensionsmakes it central to the unfolding historical drama. Equally central to the American experience is the paucity of democratic politics, placing severe limits on the capacity of human beings to face the challenge and reverse the outof- control trajectory leading toward planetary catastrophe. The future prospects of democratization, in the United States as elsewhere, will require a thoroughgoing process of countersystemic change in the long- established patterns of corporate predation, unfettered economic growth, privatized consumption, and harsh social relations that shape the entire terrain of public life, meaning full scale renewal of a political culture historically imbued with habits of passivity and deference to hierarchical authority. Sheldon Wolin writes: Put starkly, the crucial
political issue or our times concerns the incompatibility between the culture of everyday reality to which political democracy should be attuned and the culture of virtual reality on which corporate capitalism thrives. 1 In other words, fundamental

change, including democratization, cannot succeed without a conscious reorientation of the ideological consensus underlying the institutional framework of the public sphere .
Wolin adds: The persisting conflict between democratic egalitarianism and an economic system that has rapidly evolved into another inegalitarian regime is a reminder that capitalism is not solely a matter of production, exchange, and reward. It is a regime in which culture, politics, and economy tend toward a seamless whole, a totality. 2 This essentially Gramscian sensibilitythe

idea that radical change is unthinkable without reshaping mass beliefs and attitudesis at the core of any future democratic renewal. Far removed from the liberal ethos of business- asusual, such a process will have to depart from deeply ingrained norms and rules, opening space for a more insurgent politics: disruptive protests, dynamic popular movements, a vibrant community life, deep citizenship that empowers the great mass of people.

2ac mason
The only portable skill debate gives us is investing desire in politics. They render the activity unsustainable, converting debate into an elite consultants summit which enforces cartel consciousness between companies
MASON 13 (Arthur, Assistant Professor, Justice and Social Inquiry, School of Social Transformation, College of Liberal Arts and
Sciences @ Arizona State U., Cartel Consciousness and Horizontal Integration in Energy Industry Cultures of Energy: Power, Practices, Technologies, 2013, pp. 136)

Consulting firms, buoyed by venture capital, operate like transnational entities in which their power relies on the strength of their networks. Consequently, emphasis in energy development increasingly is placed on global financial markets, instead of structural positions within national political systems. For the elative isolation and elitism of these deciders who think big thoughts, squirreled away in jaw-droppingly expensive conferences, located in elite resorts, the perfomativity of knowledge creation suggests knowledge artifacts seem to materialize out of thin air. The use of images of strategy and transparency to ensure control over information is complete, suggesting knowledge is occluded and manipulable by the companies themselves. Thus, cartel consciousness is the reproduction of oligopoly through horizontal integration, a type of "clubbiness" that is strategically beneficial to participants and impenetrable to nonparticipants, who remain vulnerable and at risk in the new world of energy insecurity.

2ac epistemology
Policy solutions are trapped within an epistemic issue capitalisms monopoly on knowledge forecloses positive economic education George DEMARTINO - Professor of international economics @ U of Denver, 2013, Work in Progress posted, Ethical
Economic Engagement in a World Beyond Control, Rethinking Marxism)//ctc

Science streamlines its categories in hopes of achieving exceptionless, predictive, quantitative laws. Narrative has quite different ends in view, being concerned with the particular, the exceptional, the unique. So schemes suited to narrative enterprises exhibit different features from those suited to science. Scientific vicesambiguity, imprecision, immeasurability, and indeterminacyare often narrative virtues. -- Catherine Z. Elgin (1989; 87) We have found that we need
technologies for a more reticent yet also more ebullient practice of theorizing, one that tolerates not knowing and allows for contingent connection and the

hiddenness of unfolding: one that at the same time foregrounds specificity, divergence, incoherence, surplus possibility, and the requisite condition of a less predictable and more productive politicsWhat is bizarre about this theorizing (from the standpoint of common theoretical practice) is that it does not collapse what it aggregates into fewer categories, but spreads everything out to the limits of our tolerance for dimensionality and detail.
--J.K. Gibson-Graham (2006; xxxi) Political projects of all sorts are grounded in and take direction from theoretical analyses that present themselves as largely adequate to the world they hope to transform. Neoclassical

economic theory in particular is widely taken to provide the uniquely correct science of the organization of society, and to unveil the uniquely appropriate policy interventions that will make for a better world. This view motivates, sustains and legitimizes the social engineering to which leading neoclassical economists have been prone, especially but not only in the Global South. The consequences are often extraordinarily damaging. Not least, the hubris
associated with the neoclassical project played a significant role in the failure of the US government to regulate the new financial assets that proliferated during the 1990s and early 2000s, with the effect of producing

one of the most serious financial crises of the past 100 years (DeMartino 2011). On the left, Marxian political economy has often been taken to be a dependable and even adequate theory upon which to build an appropriate transformative politics. Marxism is seen to provide a deep scientific account of the trajectory of and imminent contradictions within capitalist economiesone that pierces the veil of appearances and illuminates the ontological substratum of social organization. The allure of
this sort of Marxian theory derives not just from the direction it provides to those who seek to overcome oppression. It also derives from the confidence it engenders; from the imprimatur of science and certainty with which it stamps the political projects that take root in its theoretical soil. In this regard Marxism has often been treated as if it were an objective analysis of society that can and, in the hands of sufficiently skilled theoreticians, actually does illuminate the key ontological levers by which fundamental transformations can be engineered. But

for the extraordinary hopes that have been placed on Marxian theory to serve these functions, the intensity of the theoretical and political controversies that arose over the course of the 20th century within Marxism and between Marxists and non- Marxist progressives would be hard to comprehend. But what if neither Marxian theory nor any other account does or even can provide the kind of knowledge that many have sought in it? What if the confidence it induces is misplaced? What if the insights it enables and the strategies it motivates are always terribly incomplete? What if fundamental contradiction is not just a feature of capitalist and other class-based social formations, but also a feature of any comprehensive knowledge of society and any transformative strategies that that

knowledge motivates? What if our theoretical accounts can never be, in fact, adequate to the purposes to which we put them? How are we to engage a world we cant ever know in the sense that we have hoped? These questions open the way to an engagement with anotherone that has not received the attention it deserves. What kind of discourse is appropriate for grounding projects of resistance to exploitation and injustice in its myriad forms? In particular, what kind of discourse is appropriate for projects that seek to confront economic powerlessness and economic injustice, and exploitation? The predominant answer to this question within the Marxian tradition is a discourse that
reveals the underlying exceptionless, predictive, quantitative laws that govern the metabolism of capitalist economy and society. The predominant Marxian view throughout the 20th century and since has been to view Marxian theory as a (if not the) science of capitalism that is appropriate to the task of emancipation. Owing

to its deep insights into the underlying, fundamental tendencies and contradictions of capitalism, Marxian science can identify efficacious forms of political engagement. One key function Marxian science performs in this regard is to
discriminate between those oppositional strategies that target and exploit the fundamental contradictions of the system and those that merely ameliorate some of its harmful consequences. On this view, in short, Marxian science must come first. It

would be reckless to embark on emancipatory political projects without a prior specification of the laws of capitalist accumulation, since those laws determine where political interventions can in fact have their intended effects. The intuitive appeal of politics grounded in science is undeniable, of course. How can we begin to challenge practices and structures that we do not even understand? But what if scientific discourse, as philosopher of science Catherine Elgin defines it in the epigraph
to this essay, is not the only or best kind of discourse to found strategies and campaigns for economic empowerment, or economic justice? What if, instead, what

Elgin calls narrative discoursesthose that are concerned with the particular, the exceptional, the uniqueprovide a more fecund grounding for projects seeking economic justice? Could it be that the scientific vices/narrative virtues of ambiguity, imprecision, immeasurability, and indeterminacy are more potent instigators of radical economic projects than a social science from which adherents are to deduce a corresponding science of politics? Much is lost in the refusal to accept Marxian theory as a scientific grounding for political strategies, of course. Clarity, focus, certainty, and direction evaporate. In their place, though, a narrative-based politics just might promote room to move and a kind of creativity and inventiveness that explicitly science-based politics lack. In this view, ineradicable epistemic limitations are viewed as opportunities to pursue politics that are, theoretically speaking, off the grid. That, at least, is the hope of those who refuse to presume that science is in
chargethat it does or should have the last word on what kinds of interventions have the capacity to catalyze fundamentally new arrangements that yield a better world. At

stake here is not just a serious knowledge problemthe problem of epistemic inadequacy that derives from any particular knowledgegenerating project. What is also at stake is a control problem. If the theoretical enterprise does not and cannot generate adequate knowledge of the world, where
adequate in this context must mean the knowledge that would be available to us were we to sit with Platos souls at the rim of heaven, then

it cant yield the epistemic privilege that would be sufficient to allow for control over that world (Nussbaum, 1994, 18). Control entails mastery, after all; nothing less will do. If mastery is lacking, then we are left to occupy a terribly dangerous position a position in which as transformative agents we exert influence without control. If we take the view that epistemic insufficiency is an ineradicable feature of any social theoretic enterpriseif mastery in regards to the social world is unavailablethen we confront an urgent and difficult ethical question. How are those who know they lack mastery, in fact and even in principle, to engage a world they cannot hope to control?

A daunting questionbut one, fortunately, that some researchers and activists have begun to confront in their scholarship and other transformative practices.

case

capitalism

economic heg impact

Our deconstruction of the economy breaks down the subject/object dichotomy that is driving the world towards extinction absent the plan, ecological destruction is inevitable because nature is merely a receptacle for us to consume JK GIBSON-GRAHAM, A feminist project of belonging for the Anthropocene, 2010, //ctc
We hope that our familiar methods will still serve us herefor

years we have undertaken projects of deconstructing existing local economies to reveal a landscape of radical heterogeneity, populated by an array of capitalist and noncapitalist enterprises; market, alternative market and nonmarket transactions; paid, unpaid and alternatively compensated labor; and various forms of finance and propertya diverse economy in place (GibsonGraham 2006; 2008). In this diverse multiplicity we find glimmers of the future, existing economic forms and practices that can be enrolled in constructing a new economy here and now, one that is more focused on social wellbeing and less on growth and profitability.
This kind of exploratory, place-based method still seems like a useful way to proceed. Our methods may feel right, but the way we use our core theoretical categoriessubjects, communities, placesbetrays our alignment with Plumwoods old mode of humanity. No matter that we treat these categories as empty of prior meaning, as potentialities, as openings for a politics of possibility and becoming, they are

still fully human-centered. Each time we invoke them we perform the human/nonhuman binary alongside that of subject/object, constituting a world made up of conscious and acting humans and unconscious or passive others. Feminists and others have seen such binary thinking as deeply implicated in the crisis of life that now engulfs our planet. In Plumwoods view, the binary habit of thought creates hyper-separation (2002, 49); Bruno Latour sees it as producing hyper-incommensurability (2001, 61). According to Jessica Weir, thinking hyper-separation places humans in a relation of mastery with respect to earth others and limits their capacity to respond to ecological devastation (2009, 3). Humankind loses the ability to empathise and see the non -human sphere in ethical terms; we gain an illusory sense of autonomy (Plumwood 2002, 9 quoted in Weir 2009, 3). Nature remains our dominion, our servant, our resource and receptacle. Deconstruction identifies and breaks down binary hierarchies, opening up a field of radical heterogeneity . Useful though this technique has been to us, we feel that what is required at the moment for our feminist project of belonging is not something deconstruction can provide. What critics of separateness and separation thinking are asking us to do is to think connection rather than separation, interdependence rather than autonomy. In this way we may imbue our categories and practices with a different mode of humanity. Thinking connection involves sensory and intellectual receptivity and suggests to us a number of ethical projects: (1) The project of actively connecting with the more than human, rather than simply seeing connection. Interestingly, this ethical act is
not just the prerogative of human beings. In a wonderful article called watching whales watching us, we read of the gray whales of Baja initiating a connection with humans, who are receptive and responsive. Whale scientists note that this is relatively new behaviorthe whales seem to have learned that people in that part of the Pacific no longer intend to harm them. A mother gray approaches the whale-watching boat and checks out the passengers, turns away briefly and returns with her newborn calf who raises its head above water and looks the author in the eye. At precisely the time (calving) when youd expect them to be most defensive, theyre incredibly social, says Toni Frohoff, a marine mammal behavioralist. Theyll come right up to boats, let people

touch their faces, give them massages, rub their mouths and tongues. (Seibert 2009, 2). To our whale-watching receptivity, whales respond with an overt act of connecting. The

connection here is not just in the act but in the parity, the mutuality, the reciprocity between the species. As Seibert writes, Id never felt so beheld in my life (p. 3). What is this encounter but a moment of recognized kinship? As Nikolas Kompridis puts it The worldmy kin, my twin (2009,, 259). To acknowledge the world as ones kin and twin is to see that a change in ones condition is coextensive with a change in the condition of the world (2009,, 259) Or as
Fransisco Varela puts it, to change ourselves is to change the world (1999). Our whale-watching receptivity, so different from our former murderous mastery, is a world-changing stance, coextensive with whales reaching out in connection.

The hegemony of capitalism makes violence inevitable and ethics impossible

Ethan Lloyd MILLER @ University of Massachusetts, May 2011, RETHINKING ECONOMY FOR REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT: ONTOLOGY, PERFORMATIVITY AND ENABLING FRAMEWORKS FOR PARTICIPATORY VISION AND ACTION, ctc The basic premise of this thesis is that the

stories we tell about the world make a difference. Rather than simply being descriptive accounts of an objective "reality," our concepts and theories play an active role in shaping the worlds that we live in. Ideas do not determine our worlds; nor do they fabricate them
from nothing (it is not all a "language game"), but they can and do sometimes play a profound role in helping to bring them into being. What

we think the world is made of, and how we think it all works, influences what we imagine, what we desire, and what we decide to make and do. Our concepts of "economy" and "economic development" are no exception. The current dynamics and institutions that constitute our economic lives are not written into the laws of nature; they are, rather, produced by specific historical processes in which our ideas about "the economy" have played a crucial role. This implies that the construction of different--more equitable, cooperative, democratic and ecologically-sound--economic relationships cannot simply be a matter of finding ways to cope differently with the overwhelming and demanding presence that we call "the economy." It must involve an interrogation of the very nature of this thing, our assumptions about what it is and how it works, and about the ways that these assumptions shape our sense of agency and possibility. As Gibson-Graham writes provocatively, "it is the way capitalism has been 'thought' that has made it so difficult for people to imagine its supersession" (2006a, 4). Theories of regional economic
development, as I will argue in Chapter 1, have contributed to constructing a widely-shared set of assumptions about economic ontology (what "the economy" is and how it works)1 that channel energy and imagination into a constricted set of options for communities to pursue. Facing

an apparently omnipresent, ever-demanding, weather-like (often "global") economy, people in regions around the world often feel forced to take actions in the name of necessary growth and competition that otherwise undermine their fundamental values: to create jobs, to increase income, to attract capital, to "win" in the "global marketplace," regions clearcut their forests, tear apart their mountains, drain their rivers, sell off public lands and resources, slash social programs and public-interest laws, lower minimum wages, or outsource all of these forms of violence to other regions in order to maintain an attractive, competitive "quality of life" for wealthy consumer-citizens. The seeming necessity of these dynamics--the sense of their inevitability--is produced, in significant part, by the way that economy has been "thought," by the ways in which discourses of regional economic development have constructed and successfully promoted a concept of economy and development that make such ethical trade-offs appear as part of the fabric of nature itself .
This thesis will challenge such a conception of economy and development and explore other pathways for thinking that might open up space for politics. Indeed, this is a thoroughly political project, grounded in my commitment to the work of imagining and building more equitable, democratic, ecologically-sound, and loving ways of living together. Another regional development is possible, I believe, and I hope to contribute to its creation and institution. My points of intervention in this project are quite specific:

recognizing the power of economic ontologies to shape and channel our imagination and action, I seek to interrogate conventional accounts of economy, to understand more fully what it means to

"perform" other economies into being, and to explore some alternative ontologies that might be useful in facilitating participatory inquiry into other economic possibilities.

ethics framing
Ethics is a prerequisite to ontology and is the condition of life itself
Ethan Lloyd MILLER @ University of Massachusetts, May 2011, RETHINKING ECONOMY FOR REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT: ONTOLOGY, PERFORMATIVITY AND ENABLING FRAMEWORKS FOR PARTICIPATORY VISION AND ACTION, ctc

Our strategies regarding the performance of various ontologies (economic or otherwise) must be informed by at least three dimensions. First, the ethical: we must ask, when engaging or formulating economic representations, "what are the effects we are seeking?" (Mol 1998, 86). Ontology here is not posed as something upon which we ground our action or strategy, but rather as an experimental stance that arises from an ethical impulse, from collective ethical negotiation; ethics , in this sense, precedes ontology . Human engagements with the processes of worldmaking are always constituted within/as what De Angelis (2007, 24; following McMurtry 1998) calls "value systems"--articulated webs of value practices through which we engage in making the social, in constructing some forms of relationship (and some forms of ontology) and not others.56 As De Angelis describes, "the articulation between individuals and whole, parts and totality, implies that is is by pursuing value that we reproduce wholes, that is webs of co-production. Therefore, different types of value pursuits reproduce different types of wholes, of different self-organizing systems, of 'societies' (2007, 25). For GibsonGraham, this world-making process of ethical negotiation is expressed through the notion of being-in-common (drawn from Jean-Luc Nancy), in which being-together is understood as the very condition of life itself. The process of making worlds together calls for us to view economy (and, presumably society and nature) as "an ethical space of becoming in which interdependence is acknowledged and enlarged" (2008c, 156). As I have discussed in Chapter 1, the ontologies performed by conventional RED emerge from and call forth a constellation of value practices that shrink, rather than enlarge, spaces for the acknowledgement and expansion of ethical interdependence. Separating a domain of human livelihood ("the economy") from the social, political and ecological; constituting this domain as a coherent system; delineating its elements in such a way as to exclude vast realms of work and provision; pitting one region against the others in a compulsion toward quantitative growth--these are ontological claims and effects that emerge from and confirm a particular value system. Our work of challenging conventional RED and of developing other pathways for regional development must be-- first and foremost--the work of experimenting with ontologies, relationships and practices that articulate other values and that work to create a world hospitable to and affirming of such values.

mason extension
The only portable skill debate gives us is investing desire in politics. They render the activity unsustainable, converting debate into an elite consultants summit which enforces cartel consciousness between companies
Mason 13 (Arthur, Assistant Professor, Justice and Social Inquiry, School of Social Transformation, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences @ Arizona State U., Cartel Consciousness and Horizontal Integration in Energy Industry Cultures of Energy: Power, Practices, Technologies, 2013, pp. 136) Consulting firms, buoyed by venture capital, operate like transnational entities in which their power relies on the strength of their networks. Consequently, emphasis in energy development increasingly is placed on global financial markets, instead of structural positions within national political systems. For the elative isolation and elitism of these deciders who think big thoughts, squirreled away in jaw-droppingly expensive conferences, located in elite resorts, the perfomativity of knowledge creation suggests knowledge artifacts seem to materialize out of thin air. The use of images of strategy and transparency to ensure control over information is complete, suggesting knowledge is occluded and manipulable by the companies themselves. Thus, cartel consciousness is the reproduction of oligopoly through horizontal integration, a type of "clubbiness" that is strategically beneficial to participants and impenetrable to nonparticipants, who remain vulnerable and at risk in the new world of energy insecurity.

consumption solvency
Our economic revealing is crucial to an ethics of conduct ethical decisionmaking combats the unchecked consumption of both the environment and workers themselves
Gibson-Graham et al 13 [J.K. Gibson-Graham, Department of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts, Esra Erdem,
received her Ph.D. in Economics in 2008 at the University of Massachusetts, Ceren zseluk is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University. Thinking with Marx For a Feminist Postcapitalist Politics http://www.communityeconomies.org/site/assets/media/Esra_Erdem/GibsonGraham_Erdem_Ozselcuk-.pdf]//BMitch Having laid out the diverse economies framework, we would like to proceed by pinpointing some 9of the ways in which this framework has been related to a postcapitalist politics by researchers and activists associated with the Community Economies Research Collective.1 A caveat is in place here. The

diverse economies perspective broadens our conception of economic value and widens our policy choices. It is not meant as a way of arriving at a more complete economy by adding in formerly invisible and marginalized economic practices. Nor does it claim that all economic practices and transactions should be valued indiscriminately, or that they might contribute to alternative economic niches. Rather, the diverse economies framework embodies a shift from a moral position involving an a priori judgment about whether a practice is valued as good or bad (Gibson-Graham 2006, 98) to an ethics of conduct. This stance involves starting here and now, i.e. to regard each individual economic transaction and practice as a possible site of struggle and ethical decision-making, as the (problematic) starting place for a project of transformation or becoming. Through its refusal to posit an a priori judgment about the value of any transaction and practice, the diverse economies framework forces us to inquire into the specific conditions of any economic activity and subject it to a process of democratic decision-making about its potential merits and drawbacks. Such conscious reflection constitutes the basis for a process of building and performing a new value, a being-in-common at the economic level. Postcapitalist politics leads us on towards an engagement with the economic field from a perspective of ethical decision making, bringing together the realms of community and economy by articulating a shared concern about economic and ecological interdependence. Key concerns of a community economy
include how to produce and share a social surplus in order to meet our needs, how to generate and sustain commons, as well as how to invest in an ecologically and socially sustainable future (Gibson-Graham, Cameron and Healy 2013). Given the fact that all

class formations feature institutionalized mechanisms that attempt to configure the necessary/surplus division and the social content of needs, the central impulse of postcapitalist politics is to foreground the inherent sociality of decisions made indefining necessity, and the various forms of interdependence that are enacted when such decisions are made (Gibson-Graham 2006, 90). In other words, prior to enacting a particular institutional configuration, postcapitalist politics aims to open up the tightly woven sutures of already existing discourses and institutions that determine what is necessary and what is surplus. By way of a conclusion, let us reiterate that postcapitalist politics does not refer to a blueprint around which to organize diverse economic transactions. It does not prescribe a certain scale whether it be local or global for transformation. It is both a naming and a process; it is the nodal point of an investment that sets off a process of negotiating relations of interdependency among the different economic practices of diverse

economies. While postcapitalist politics reveals a preference for democratic negotiation, its democratic deliberation and participatory politics is grounded in the premise of an affective surplus, i.e. that there is an irreducible antagonism in the social that refuses the ultimate reconciliation of community through communicative reasoning la Habermas. The ethical dimension of postcapitalist politics thus refers to a shift of subjectivity that chooses not to cover over inherent antagonisms by positing ideals of economic harmony. In this sense, the ethics of postcapitalist politics refers to a commitment to a continual process of becoming in common through refusing the homogenization of identities and harmonization of community.

The plan promotes an economy focused on interdependence rather than growth that results in sustainability within the environment
Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 09 [J. K. Gibson-Graham; Department of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts, Gerda
Roelvink Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy, University of Western Sydney, An Economic Ethics for the Anthropocene"]//BMitch Necessity What

do humans, other species and ecosystems need in order to survive with some kind of dignity? This (anthropomorphic?) question increasingly intrudes upon what were formerly purely economic deliberations. The needs of animals, plants, soils and water sources, for example, have become a matter of concern that is reorganizing the food production industry. Reorganization has
been moved along by rogue infectious agents such as the prions that cause mad cow disease (Whatmore 2002) and the algae that grow in stagnant water holes but also by the environmental and animal liberation movements. The need for chickens to scratch the earth, move about, take dust baths, nest at night and lay eggs in comfort is acknowledged and accommodated in the growing organic free range poultry industry. While the price of the eggs and poultry meat from this sector cannot compete with that of mainstream producers, the presence of this niche has put pressure on the mainstream to improve the living conditions of its birds. Gerardo Ramos of Holyoke, Massachusetts has initiated a small business around more-than-human needs, responding to the plight of dying coral reefs by focusing his education and livelihood on them. Though he never completed high school, Ramos has taught himself to read the English-language textbooks and articles that have made him an expert on coral reef habitats. His business, Marine Reef Habitat, supplies institutions, individuals and businesses with fresh and saltwater tanks, fish and corals. Eventually, with the stock of corals generated through coral farming, and his savings supplemented by donations, Ramos intends to restore the coral reefs of his native Puerto Rico, where he used to swim and fish as a child before the reefs were decimated by pollution. Surplus Traditionally, Marxists and labor

advocates have been militantly concerned about the exploitative capitalist class process in which surplus (value) is appropriated by nonproducers from the workers who produce it. What if we added to our concern about the exploitative
interdependence between producers and non-producers a concern for the unaccounted-for exploitation of the non-human world? Because the

contribution of the more than human is not taken into account, in practice it ends up in the residual we identify as surplus. This is true for exploitative and nonexploitative enterprises alikecapitalist firms, worker cooperatives, independent producers, etc. To recognize and account for the needs of the non-human world would be to raise the social allocation to necessity and reduce the social surplus generated and finally appropriated.3 It would mean the growth of activities focused on regeneration and maintenance of the environmental commons and the dignity of animal life as an integral part of production. It would mean a fundamental change in the nature of business thinking and practice. Indeed, with a smaller surplus available for investment, the whole economics of growth might be called into question, and an opening created for a new economics focused on sustenance and interdependence. Such a shift seems impossible when posed in macro terms, but the beginnings of a change are clearly visible at the firm and industry levels . A New Hampshire
electronics firm, for example, was at first resistant to regulation by the US Environmental Protection Agency and only reluctantly

allocated a distribution of surplus to comply with clean air and water regulations. Ten years later the picture had entirely changed: the department that was initially assigned the task of compliance had become the center of innovation and cost-saving in the firm, and also the area where employees were most desirous of working. New people with environmentalist values had joined the company and older personnel had left or been influenced to change (James Hamm, personal communication). While the impact on surplus was probably positive, the example reminds us that new distributions of surplus are always taking place (if often toward executive compensation) and such distributions are increasingly targeted to meeting the needs of the more than human (see, for example, Gibson-Graham and ONeill 2001). Reflections The

community economy coordinates focus attention on ethical practices that produce economic connection and change. Distinct but interrelated, the coordinates prompt us, for example, to trace the ways that attending to the needs of the more than human reallocates surplus, shifts patterns of consumption, and replenishes a commons(or not). They constitute rudimentary elements of an economic theorycategories that separate out points of analytical interest (these could be called entry points) while at the same time enabling us to map and differentiate the ethical space of an economy . They help to distance us from the structural dynamics that have plagued economic theorizing, allowing us to represent an economy as a space of negotiated interdependence rather than a functional (or dysfunctional) growth machine. They also offer a tool for discerning an emerging
economic order and participating in its performative consolidation (Callon 2007).4 We have collated and displayed here just a few among the multitude of ethical projects that are arguably and even demonstrably bringing a more-than-simply-human economy into being. At the same time, in this essay and elsewhere, weve

been engaged in a number of related activities, including bringing an experimental (learning) rather than critical (judging) stance to ethical projects; amplifying and integrating small projects and disparate processes (via the community economy concept, for example); coming up with schematics and categorizations (like the coordinates and the inventory kit) that can orient research and proliferate economic possibilities; interpreting and disseminating key ideas and innovations; translating and making connections between different knowledge systems and communities; developing a pedagogy and protocols for listening to what was previously inarticulate; extending the collective to students, colleagues and other communities; transforming the collectives concerns into tangible and transportable objects of public policy; fostering credibility and working against inevitable attempts to discount the viability and significance of collective achievements (Santos 2004). We see these activities as an academic contribution to hybrid research collectives that are building community economies. In what follows we track several such collectives that are engaged in co-creating a
community economy for the Anthropocene.

experimentation spillover
The plan not only teaches us to learn to be experimental with economics, but to approach everything experimentally JK GIBSON-GRAHAM, A feminist project of belonging for the Anthropocene, 2010, //ctc
Fortunately, there are great precedents for proceeding in the face of not knowing how to proceed. Eco-philosopher Freya

Mathews points to the Chinese sage who proceeds by cultivating a sensitivity to the field of influencesin which he is immersed (2009, 351). She calls his practice conformational; he inhabits a jigsaw world, everything shaped by and shaping everything else (p. 12) Mathews jigsaw puzzle metaphor conveys an up close, piecing-it-together, participatory approach to understanding (or performing) the world rather than a big-picture, spectator approach that captures and reduces everything via universal laws. Mathews calls it strategy as distinct from theory. The piecing-ittogether approach is a way of being in the world; its improvisational and experimental. From our perspective, to adopt an experimental orientation is simply to approach the world with the question What can we learn from things that are happening on the ground? This is very different from the question of what is good or bad about these things that informs so many investigations. The experimental orientation is another way of making (transformative) connections; it is a willingness to take in the world in the act of learning, to be receptive in a way that is constitutive of a new learner-world, just as
Latours concept of learning to be affected describes the formation of new body-worlds (2004; Gibson-Graham and Roelvink, 2010). In

experimentation theres no active transformative subject learning about a separate inert object, but a subject-object that is a becoming world. The Anthropocene calls to us to recognize that we are all participants in the becoming world, where everything is interconnected and learning happens in a stumbling, trial and error sort of way. In the spirit of this participation, many offer the experiment as the only way forward: the only way to approach such a period in which uncertainty is high and one cannot predict what the future holds, is not to predict, but to experiment and act inventively and exuberantly via diverse adventures in living.
(Dumanoski 2009, 213 quoting C.S. Holling.) This resolute and confident statement brings us to what we tentatively hope to do in this paperwhich is to outline an experiment, a set of adventures

in living, that could potentially proliferate in the form of diverse pathways of becoming in different places and regions. In A Postcapitalist Politics
we introduced a feminist political imaginary. We identified three simple but powerful ingredients of a world shaping political movement: 1) the decentralized attempts by women to change themselves, 2) the ubiquity of women, and 3) the global compass of a new discourse woman. In a similar vein we

posit parallel ingredients of a new world shaping movement: 1) assemblages that are experimenting with new practices of living and being together, 2) the ubiquity of these assemblages, and 3) the potential global compass of a new discourse of belonging linked to a more-than-human regional development imaginary. Our working definition of regional development is: how we (that is, all the human/non-human participants in the becoming world) organize our lives (or how life organizes us) to thrive in porously bounded spaces in which there is some degree of inter-connection, a distinctively diverse economy and ecologies, multiple path-dependent trajectories of transformation and inherited forms of rule. Not much to
go on, but not much is needed. Just enough to bring us down to earth and put us in place. Adventures in living Since we are at a loss when it comes to thinking about the big picture of more than human regional development for the Anthropocene, we take up the strategic piecing-it-together approach as a way to begin. Well

start with a few jigsaw pieces and see where we go from there. Our first adventure is an experiment in regional development led by individuals and institutions that are motivated in part by an ethic of caring for place and environment.

AT: cant solve juarez

Empirics prove local community economy movements counter capitalism
Wise and Waters 01 (Tim Wise is Deputy Director of the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts
University. Eliza Waters is a Research Assistant at the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University. Community Control in a Global Economy: Lessons from Mexicos Economic Integration Process http://ase.tufts.edu/gdae/policy_research/CommControl.PDF // rainy)

Communities, civil society organizations, and some local governments in Mexico have developed effective strategies in the effort to manage their relationship to the world economy, some predating NAFTAs taking effect in 1994. Many such strategies seek to gain collective control of both natural and financial capital while pressuring government institutions to provide adequate support and, if necessary, continued protection. Some tell the story of successful adaptation to new economic conditions and suggest the possibility that grassroots organizations can seek out new market niches or opportunities in which to develop independent initiatives. Others reflect a collective effort to change market-driven sink-orswim public policies that threaten the source of peoples livelihoods. The vast majority, however,
combine both tactics: as social organizations adapt to a more open economy they resist those aspects that threaten their standards of living and put their cultural survival at risk. Such examples of community-based efforts to manage the economic integration process are widespread. They include community-based sustainable forestry; the efforts of small coffee farmers to secure their own niche in the world market; basic grains producers trying to sustain their markets under the flood of corn imports. They

span the country, touching virtually every vulnerable sector of Mexican society. They often integrate environmental concerns within a larger socioeconomic agenda.

imagination solvency
Imagining the plan allows ourselves to realize alternative modes of being capitalism effaces the invisible economic systems in order to maintain thought hegemony. George DEMARTINO - Professor of international economics @ U of Denver, 2013, Work in Progress posted, Ethical
Economic Engagement in a World Beyond Control, Rethinking Marxism)//ctc

What would it mean, they ask, to view thinking and writing as productive ontological interventions? (Gibson-Graham 2008, 2) Indeed, Gibson-Graham simply announce without apology their presumption that the world is not driven by deep structures that render small, achievable economic projects of emancipation unviable. This is a discursive strategy that is chosen for its productivity. They adopted an anti-essentialist approach, theorizing the contingency of social outcomes rather than the unfolding of structural logics. This gave us (and the world) more room to move, enlarging the space of the ethical and political (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985) (Gibson-Graham 2008, 3).
Gibson-Grahams is a form of thinking in which unyielding power is evacuated by decree from the localities where economic subjects live their lives and make their economic worlds. They

ask of us to imagine with them that our world is unsutured, uncentered, at odds with itself, and hence always hospitable to alternative ways of being and living (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Lets get busy finding out what we can do with the aperture that this ontology
presents. Speaking of theoretical advances over the past decade by their growing band of merry poststructuralist revolutionaries, they claim that their

most notable contribution is to have loosened the hold of structural visions that channel transformative change into narrow openings and scarce opportunities (GibsonGraham and Roelvink, 335?). These advances have helped to distance us from the structural dynamics that have plagued economic theorizing, allowing us to represent an economy as a space of negotiated interdependence rather than a functional (or dysfunctional) growth machine. They also offer a tool for discerning an emerging economic order and participating in its performative consolidation (Callon 2007) (Gibson- Graham and Roelvink 2009, 335). Put in these terms, the project appears large and
imposing. Bereft of the sort of roadmap that structural accounts of Capitalism provide, how do we discern the avenues forwardor even distinguish forward from backward? But in fact the

project features strategies that are prosaic, manageable and almost embarrassingly small. In the first instance creating economic diversity requires little more than taking an inventory of the types of economic practices that already exist in any particular locale. Gibson-Graham present the image of an iceberg to convey the fact that traditional conceptions of political economy recognize Capitalism and only Capitalism when surveying contemporary economies.
This, though, is an illusion, an artifact of theory that finds the Capitalism its looking for. What if, instead, we presume that

capitalist practices are just the tip of the iceberg? What if, below the surface of our recognition, modern economies are internally diverse, comprising all sorts of capitalist and non-capitalist economic practices and forms? In this case the practice of seeing differently, recognizing economic diversity, becomes an incendiary theoretical act that threatens to call into question the supposed supremacy of capitalist practices over non-capitalist alternatives. In their words, We
have used this image [of the iceberg] and the diverse economy diagram in which it is encoded (Gibson-Graham 2006:71) as an inventory kit ... to produce economic actors attuned to their multiple economic roles. This kit locates everyone as contributing to (and part of) the economy in different and multiple ways The

heightened economic sensibility that arises from using this kit has spun off discussions about the ethical choices that confront people in daily life, as they participate in a diverse economy of interdependent being-in-common
(Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2009, 329).

policy bad
Discourse is key incorporation of policy destroys the movement
Gibson-Graham 06 [J. K. Gibson-Graham, University of Minnesota A Post-Capitalist Politics p. 87]//BMitch From the earliest days of this political exploration, we recognized the special challenges of economic politicsthe obduracy of the economic object as it had been discursively framed and practically constructed; the poverty of economic subjectivity, with its few identity positions and contracting (if also intensifying) desires; and the persistent conviction that large-scale, coordinated action was required for the task of economic transformation. In the search for successful political projects and practices to encourage and inspire us, we have turned primarily to second-wave feminism.14 We never fail to be amazed at how the feminist movement has
transformed and continues to transform households, lives, and livelihoods around the world to dierent degrees and in dierent ways, rendering the life experiences of many women literally unrecognizable in the terms of a generation ago.15 Here we are thinking of everything from the increased participation of women in public life, to the social recognition of and responsibility for domestic violence, to the proliferation of options of gendered embodiment. This

is not to deny that these achievements are partial and embattled, but rather to arm that they are recognizable and widespread.16 The crucial role of alternative discourses of woman and gender in this process of transformation cannot be overestimated. But second-wave feminism also oered new practices of the self and of intersubjective relation that enabled these new discourses to be inhabited in everyday life. The decentralized, uncoordinated, and place-based consciousness-raising groups that became the movements signature intervention (at least in the English-speaking world) acted as the foundational site for a politics of becoming (Connolly 1999, 57), unleashing myriad practices and performances of woman. The slogan
the personal is political authorized women to speak of their intimate concerns in legitimate tones, enabling them to connect the private and public, the domestic and national, shattering forever the rigid boundaries of established political discourse. The

practice of feminism as organizational horizontalism fostered alternative ways of being (powerful), including direct and equitable participation, non-monopoly of the spoken word or of information, the rotation of occasional tasks and responsibilities, the non-specialization of functions, the non-delegation of power (Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar 1998, 97). Feminism linked feminists emotionally and semiotically rather than primarily through organizational ties. Without rejecting the familiar politics of organizing and networking within groups and across space, individual women and collectivities pursued local paths and strategies that were based on avowedly feminist visions and values, but were not otherwise connected. The upscaling or globalization of a feminist politics did not involve formal organization at the global scale to challenge global structures of patriarchal power.17 It did not rely on (though it did not eschew) coordinated actions and alliances. The movement achieved global coverage without having to create global institutions, though some of these did indeed come into being. Ubiquity rather than unity was the ground of its globalization. We are intrigued at the way the
loosely interrelated struggles and happenings of the feminist movement were capable of mobilizing social transformation at such an unprecedented scale, without resort to a vanguard party or any of the other necessities we have come to associate with poli tical organization. The

complex intermixing of alternative discourses, shared language, embodied practices, self-cultivation, emplaced actions, and global transformation associated with second-wave feminism has nourished our thinking about a politics of economic possibilityimpressing us with the
strikingly simple ontological contours of a feminist imaginary: if women are everywhere, a woman is always somewhere, and those places of women are transformed as women transform themselves. The

vision of feminist politics as grounded in persons yet (therefore) potentially ubiquitous has been extended in our thinking to include another ontological substrate: a vast set of disarticulated placeshouseholds, communities, ecosystems,
workplaces, civic organizations, bodies, public arenas, urban spaces, diasporas, regions, government agencies, occupations related

analogically rather than organizationally and connected through webs of signication. A feminist spatiality embraces not only a politics of ubiquity (its global manifestation), but a politics of place (its localization in places created, strengthened, defended, augmented, and transformed by women). In this admittedly stylized rendering, feminism is not about the category woman or identity per se, but about subjects and places. It is a politics

of becoming in place.18 The achievements of second-wave feminism provide, for us, the impetus for theorizing a new global form of economic politics. Its remapping of political space and possibility suggests the ever-present opportunity for local transformation that does not require (though it does not preclude and indeed promotes) transformation at larger scales. Its focus on the subject prompts us to think about ways of cultivating economic subjects with dierent desires and capacities and greater openness to change and uncertainty. Its practice of seeing and speaking dierently encourages us to make visible the hidden and alternative economic activities that everywhere abound, and to connect them through a language of economic dierence. If we can begin to see noncapitalist activities as prevalent and viable, we may be encouraged here and now to actively build on them to transform our local economies.

discourse cards
Discourse shapes the process of world making
Miller 11 (Ethan Lloyd Miller-- masters of science @ University of Massachusetts Amherst RETHINKING CONOMY FOR REGIONAL
DEVELOPMENT: ONTOLOGY, PERFORMATIVITY AND ENABLING FRAMEWORKS FOR PARTICIPATORY VISION AND ACTION http://www.communityeconomies.org/site/assets/media/Ethan_Miller/Miller_RethinkingEconomy_MSThesis-2011.pdf May 2011//rainy) Chapter 2 takes a step back from this claim to ask, in some detail, what

it means to propose that "the economy" is socially-produced and that ontologies can be "performative." Before engaging with a robust exploration of alternative economic representations, in other words, we must understand more clearly what we expect these discourses to do in the world. Is it enough to simply "change the story"? Is there more at work in the process of making worlds? How do we account for this and how might our understanding of the performativity of discourse (and more) help us to be strategic about our ontological choices? I explore these questions
through theoretical engagement with the work of Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Bruno Latour and others.

The world, I suggest, is enacted--continuously--through complex relationships among human and nonhuman actants. Conceptual discourse cannot be elevated above materiality nor separated from it, and the relationship between words and world will always remain indeterminate. Yet our ideas might very well become important agents in world-making if we use them to organize strategically and to enlist enough allies. Processes of worldmaking provide many opportunities for swerves, departures from old patterns and openings into new possibilities.

Projects and discourse are the best ways to make our economy a reality
Miller 11 (Ethan Lloyd Miller-- masters of science @ University of Massachusetts Amherst RETHINKING ECONOMY FOR REGIONAL
DEVELOPMENT: ONTOLOGY, PERFORMATIVITY AND ENABLING FRAMEWORKS FOR PARTICIPATORY VISION AND ACTION http://www.communityeconomies.org/site/assets/media/Ethan_Miller/Miller_RethinkingEconomy_MSThesis-2011.pdf May 2011//rainy) The first two forms of performativity identified by MacKenzie--generic and effective--do not particularly concern me. That a theory is used says very little; that it does something (anything) says little more. The second two forms, however--Barnesian and

counter- performativity--offer starting points for further exploration of what it means to take the world-making power of discourse seriously in the domain of economy. Barnesian performativity suggests, in line with aspects of with the work of Callon, Mitchell and others, that discourses about the economy significantly participate in making economic reality. As Mitchell writes, "the projects that form the economy involve economics; economics is not outside, representing the economy from some other place. It is caught up in these projects. The success of economics, like all science, is measured in the extent to which it helps make of the wider world places where its facts can survive" (2008,
1119).

Construction of an economy cannot distance itself from discourse

Miller 11 (Ethan Lloyd Miller-- masters of science @ University of Massachusetts Amherst RETHINKING ECONOMY FOR REGIONAL
DEVELOPMENT: ONTOLOGY, PERFORMATIVITY AND ENABLING FRAMEWORKS FOR PARTICIPATORY VISION AND ACTION http://www.communityeconomies.org/site/assets/media/Ethan_Miller/Miller_RethinkingEconomy_MSThesis-2011.pdf May 2011//rainy) This sense of performativity--which we might add to Mackenzie's scheme as a fifth form, that of ontological

performativity--allows us to speak about the construction of an ontological domain of "the economy" without either reducing this account to "merely a 42 Gibson-Graham make a similar point, perhaps more clearly, in

their observation that "This is not to say that things, beings, processes, and places have no influence on how we think about them, but that they do not generally speak clearly and conceptually for themselves. Theory, then, has an independent and even an adventurous role to play" (Gibson-Graham 2006a, xx). story" (as if there were no materiality to such an economy) or conceding a non-discursive reality to such an economy that somehow lies beyond the reach of any concept or articulatory process. We can say, then, paraphrasing Butler that "there

is no reference to a real economy which is not at the same time a further formation of that economy." Mitchell's claim that the economy as an object of analysis and intervention "is itself constituted as a discursive process, a phenomenon of values, representations, communications, meanings, goals and uses, none of which can be separated from or said to pre-exist their representation in economic discourse" (Mitchell 1998, 91), can be seen in this light not as a claim that the economy is nothing but a language game, but that its assemblage must always be understood and engaged in the context of the discourses in which it is inextricably bound.

feminism

cap = cause

Gender inequality towards womyn that results in torture, rape, and murder is unique in maquiladoras- especially in Juarez
Pantaleo 06 (Katie Pantaleo-- graduate from California University of Pennsylvania-- president of Sociology Club @ UPenn.
Masters in Social Policy from Duquesne University. Gendered Violence: Murder in the Maquiladoras p. 13 http://www.pasocsociety.org/article2.pdf //rainy)

Inequality in gender and work exists all over the world (Charles and Grusky 2004), but it is not always accompanied by violence both inside and outside the workplace. Yet, the women who work in the maquiladoras along the U nited S tates Mexico border have been victims of both. Along the border, especially in Ciudad Juarez, close to four hundred women have suffered from torture, rape, and then murder. These murders began around 1993, and continue to the present day. They may be closely related to the maquiladora industry. This paper discusses the sexual harassment associated with working in the maquiladoras and the violence which often leads to murder. An understanding of the dynamics of intersectionality theory, based on the intersection of patriarchy and capitalism, helps to explain why and how this violence occurs both inside and outside the maquiladoras.

The type of capitalism used in maquiladoras is the reason womyn are treated terribly
Pantaleo 06 (Katie Pantaleo-- graduate from California University of Pennsylvania-- president of Sociology Club @ UPenn.
Masters in Social Policy from Duquesne University. Gendered Violence: Murder in the Maquiladoras p. 13 http://www.pasocsociety.org/article2.pdf //rainy) Therefore, capitalist enterprises seek sources of less expensive labor, which explains the placement of the maquiladoras in an area where a supply of unskilled, uneducated workers reside. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has

a capitalist approach to the maquiladoras. Sweatshops are not a recent development in the world; the idea of cheap labor has been used many times by sweatshops. The maquiladoras in Mexico began around 1965, but it was the result of globalization, which created the free trade agreement on imports and exports between the U nited S tates and Mexico, that fueled the growth of the maquiladoras. The low wages and poor working conditions of the maquiladoras are the consequence of capitalism because it is the major transnational corporations who ultimately control the maquiladora industry and the wages that women receive (Quintero-Ramirez 2002).

at: reform
Even the most radical attempts at reform fail without the plan
Jenny CAMERON, School of Environmental Planning @ Griffith University, AND JK GIBSON-GRAHAM, Department of Human Geography, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies @ Australian National University, 2003, Feminizing the economy: metaphors, strategies, politics, Gender, Place, and Politics, ctc//rainy

Feminism has produced a representation that aligns the feminine with domestic production/the sphere of reproduction/the gift economy/the economy of care, but that separates this and opposes it in some way to the market or the sphere of production that is aligned with the masculine. Each part of the whole tends to be seen as distinct and arranged in opposition to the other. The strategy of completing the economy has implications for emancipatory and transformative projects like feminism and left politics. For those who adopt a conservative feminist politics, the feminized economic domain is understood as equal to the masculinized domain. The task is to explain the dynamics of the hitherto unrecognized economic sphere and bring about a shift in policies to eliminate the disadvantages that women face because of their association with one particular sphere of economy.vii12 For those who adopt a liberal or leftist stance the association of the feminine with the domestic realm has been seen as a key source of womens oppression that might be overcome by ensuring that women have the same access as men to the market sphere or sphere of production. From this political vantage it is difficult to imagine that domesticity might contain emancipatory potential, for womens liberation is to be secured largely by renouncing that part of the economy associated with the feminine. The growing divisions between women who work in well-paid jobs outside the
home and women (who in the US are frequently illegal migrants) employed as their domestic workers can be seen as one unintended side-effect of feminisms focus on getting women out of the home (Mattingly 1998, 1999). For others more attracted to a radical feminist reversal of masculinist valuations the invisible layer, the feminine realm, or the gift paradigm is seen as holding the key to salvation, while the visible layer, the masculine realm, the exchange paradigm, contains the seeds of societal devastation. In the layer cake model, for example, the icing and top layer are seen as masculinized, money-making and exploitative, while the bottom two layers are seen as feminized, governed by need and non-exploitative relationships. This

compartmentalizing of the economy makes it difficult to imagine that market-based production might contain any features of worth, and that the social cooperation sector might, for example, produce inequitable relationships. In these dualist models of economy one side of the binary is privileged as the source of emancipation while the other side is renounced. If you like, one of the legacies of the
double-entry bookkeeping system is the desire to account for the world in terms of a ledger with credits on one side, debits on the other.13 Underlying

all these stances is the view that a more complete representation of the economy will inform a political transformation. In the epilogue to her book, Marilyn Waring takes it further
asserting that the system could not stand the pressure *of fully enumerating womens economic contribution+ and would be transformed by the additions (p. 256). She suspects that the strategy of counting in will bring about the sort of economic revolution advocated by radical feminists; in Audre Lordes terms, Waring hopes to use the tools of the master to dismantle the masters house. But can the feminist political project be this simple? We are concerned with some of the consequences of the realist project of analytical completion and empirical measurement that characterizes much feminizing of the economy. And we

are wary of expecting that by producing a more complete understanding of what is included in the economy a transformative feminist politics will be enacted. In our view a representational politics is not necessarily strengthened by recourse to an empiricist argument about inclusion and accuracy. Indeed the attempts by mainstream economics to redress the invisibility of womens work through, for example, Gary Beckers new home economics,viii or the World Banks advocacy of social capital, point to entirely acceptable and depoliticized (in feminist terms) efforts to enlarge the scope of the economy. It seems that the strategies of adding on and counting in might fall short of generating a feminist politics of transformation. They add to the picture of what contributes to the production of goods and services but they do not necessarily help us think differently about the economy. Furthermore, by staying within a binary framing of economic activities (masculinized/market and feminized/household, etc) the added in sectors, though recognized and counted, remain locked in the subordinate, under/devalued position vis a vis the core economy. It is hard

to extrapolate from this vision a positive politics of transformation that really shakes up what we think of as economy and helps us to enact economy according to feminist economic ethics (whatever they might be).

offcase

at: Haass
We meet- Hybrid Research Collectives are economic engagement the program is an incentive for pursuing alternative economic practices George DEMARTINO - Professor of international economics @ U of Denver, 2013, Work in Progress posted, Ethical
Economic Engagement in a World Beyond Control, Rethinking Marxism)//ctc In A Postcapitalist Politics, An Ethics of the Local (2003) and other work Gibson-Graham explore the power of language and theory, but also interpersonal encounter and collaboration, in confronting and overcoming these obstacles. What they would later come to call hybrid

research collectives came to serve as the chief practical vehicle for pursuing projects of economic emancipation. The collective joins university and community-based researchers with other community members in joint projects to inventory already existing alternative economic practices and indigenous resources and capacities, and to imagine and pursue economic practices and build economic institutions that defy traditional conceptions of just what economic forms are and are not achievable and sustainable. A central goal is to proliferate economic formsto generate a vibrant economic ecosystem populated by all sorts of economic species rather than
to pursue a

pre-defined

set of models of

economic engagement . Implicit in the project is the need to

inquire into economic alternatives without judgment; to silence the reflexive skepticism that haunts the academic mind so as to allow for the frothy spawn (Gibson-Graham 1996) of new and as-of-yet unimagined progeny. Of equal importance is the task of promoting safe spaces within which economic

agents who are marginalized and emptied of aspiration regenerate themselves as vibrant economic subjects who recognize the potency of their agency in making the world anew.

Counter interpretation - Targeting non-state actors is economic engagement Haass 00 Richard N. Haass, Vice President and Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the
Brookings Institution, and Meghan L. OSullivan, Fellow with the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution, Engaging Problem Countries, Brookings Policy Brief, No. 61, June, http://dspace.cigilibrary.org/jspui/bitstream/123456789/18245/1/Engaging%20Problem%20Co untries.pdf?1 The provision of economic incentives to the private sector can also be an effective mode of unconditional engagement , particularly when the economy of the target country is not entirely statecontrolled. In these more open climates, economic actors nourished by exchanges will often be agents for change and natural allies in some Western causes. To the extent that economic engagement builds the private sector and other nonstate elements within the target country, it is likely to widen the base of support for engagement with America specifically and the promotion of international norms more generally. Certainly, U.S. engagement with
China has nurtured constituencies which are sympathetic, if not to American ideals per se, then at least to trade and open markets and the maintenance of good relations to secure them.

Prefer it 1. Functional limits prevent topic explosion substantial and PICs constrain aff choice. 2. Reasonability important when defining engagement avoids an impossible definitional maze.

Drifte 3 Reinhard Drifte, Professor and Chair of Japanese Studies and Director at the
Newcastle East Asia Center at the University of Newcastle, 2003 (Introduction, Japan's Security Relations with China Since 1989: From Balancing to Bandwagoning?, Published by Routledge, ISBN 1134406673, p. 5-6) The complex nature of engagement policy The misunderstanding of the policy of engagement gives rise to considerable confusion because it obfuscates the Realist elements of engagement, i.e. the role of force to effect balancing and hedging. In order to propose remedies to perceived deficiencies of engagement, qualifying adjectives to 'engagement', or even the coinage of new words , have been proposed which make an appropriate understanding of engagement policy even more difficult . Definitions range from unconditional engagement, conditional engagement, comprehensive or constructive engagement, robust engagement, congagement, coercive engagement, to constrainment.8 The resulting definatory maze cannot fail to make the pursuit of engagement difficult at a national level, let alone in tandem with another country. In fact engagement relies as much on Realist foundations, with their deterrence and balance-ofpower elements, as on Liberal foundations, which stress the positive forces of increasing international economic interdependence and integration, the spreading of international norms, the establishment of rules and institutions to regulate and enable peaceful cooperation between nations. The power-balancing and deterrence elements in engagement policy follow the Realist teaching that war can be avoided if there is a stable power balance, but that the shift of power relations (which China drives forward through its economic and military strengthening) is particularly dangerous for the maintenance of peace. The systemic issues for hegemonic stability are how to maintain such stability and how to accommodate change. Realists will point out that multipolar systems like those in Asia are less stable than unipolar systems. The situation in Asia has been depicted as a five-power balance-of-power system, as 'ripe for rivalry', and as heading for instability.9 The following definition of engagement by Alastair Iain Johnston and Robert S. Ross probably describes best the dualistic character of this policy: 'The use of non-coercive methods to ameliorate the non-status-quo elements of a rising power's behaviour. The goal is to ensure that this growing power is used in ways that are consistent with peaceful change in regional and global order'. The authors explicitly state that amelioration of the rising power's behaviour does not seek to limit, constrain or delay the newcomer's power, nor to prevent the development of influence commensurate with its greater power.10 They attach four conditions that will make a policy of engagement effective: 1. the new rising power has only limited revisionist aims and there are no irreconcilable conflicts of interest with the established powers; 2. the established powers are strong enough to mix concessions with credible threats, i.e. a sticks and carrots policy; 3. engagement is a complement and not an alternative to balancing; 4. the established powers must live by the same principles they demand of the new rising power11 When we look carefully at this statement it becomes clear that, for the rising power, 'coercive means' must still be considered in its calculation of the [end page 5] established powers despite their goal of the non-use of 'coercive methods'. Not only is this related to the established powers' Realist objectives (i.e. balancing and hedging) vis-a-vis conceivable intentions of a rising

power, but it is also, in the first instance, due to the simple fact that all the established powers, including Japan, maintain considerable military forces and are involved in military alliances to cater for a whole range of challenges to their security. The crucial issue for a correct understanding of Japan's engagement policy (and this would apply to the engagement policy of any other country) is to clarify the emphasis and the robustness with which some rather than other goals associated with engagement are pursued, as well as the mix of policy tools used ; one needs to consider issues such as no unilateral use of offensive military force, peaceful resolution of territorial disputes, respect for national sovereignty, transparency of military forces, cooperative solutions for transnational problems or respect for basic human rights.12 3. Good is good enough Race to the bottom- Competing interpretations means the neg can always move the goal posts to find the most limiting topic Substance Crowd out- focusing on trivial distinctions like whether or not the engagement needs to exist in the status quo distracts from actual topic specific education

at: Celik
We meet- The plan increases economic contacts we redefine the idea of an economic actor George DEMARTINO - Professor of international economics @ U of Denver, 2013, Work in Progress posted, Ethical
Economic Engagement in a World Beyond Control, Rethinking Marxism)//rainy //ctc Soon after the completion of The End of Capitalism, Gibson-Graham began to broaden their scholarship to encompass actionoriented research. Working

in what they would later come to identify as h ybrid r esearch c ommunities, Gibson-Graham undertook to engage their colleagues, students and communities beyond the academy in joint projects of economic discovery and invention. These projects have embraced all the features of the diverse economies project that weve examined so far. Emphasis is placed on the practice of seeing differently with an eye toward reframing the economy as a diverse and lively place; and, thereby, reframing economic actors as living densely diverse economic lives and facing meaningful economic choices. From the start the project has sought to awaken and invigorate aspirations for noncapitalist economic alternatives of all sorts; and step by step, to institute and sustain diverse economic practices and institutions. The strategy is disarmingly simple: we can understand our research experience as involving a h ybrid r esearch c ollective learning to be affected by economic diversity. The diverse economy catapults multiplicity and economic differentiation to the fore and helps us to counter the ingrained belief that capitalist economic relations are the only driving economic force. Once this one-way street toward development becomes just one among a number of avenues, economic innovation proliferates (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2009, 329-330). The h ybrid r esearch c ommunity involves important ethical commitments that can be described as an ethics of engagement . These commitments comprise notknowing too much; genuine collaboration with those whom progressive academics have generally thought themselves to represent; and shared risk taking in projects of self-and community discovery. Mundane duties follow: to show up; to be dependable and be depended upon; to exhibit genuine respect to all of the research communitys members; to exhibit patience; to learn to listen; and to provide a relatively safe space in which participants can reinvent themselves. Also

relevant is the duty to manage what philosopher John Hardwig calls the epistemic inequality that always attends relations between professionals and laypersons, and that yields rational deference of the lay person to the professional. This deference lies at the heart of the particular form of power that an expert has and is also the center of the particular form of vulnerability that each of us, as a layperson, is in (Hardwig 1994, 86). In the hybrid research community the researcher must take steps to reduce this inequality in order to empower her collaborators, in part by foregrounding and cultivating their knowledge and skills, and in part
by emphasizing the limitations to her own expertise and capacities. Gibson-Graham reveal careful attention to these duties in their writing on their work in the hybrid research communities. In their recent work on ethical engagement in the Anthropocene epoch, for instance, they write:

In these collectives academic researchers are learning to listen to [nature] and to non-academic researchers and being called to translate, inventory, codify, formalize, formulate policy, communicate to ever wider publics, extend the boundaries of collectives, and make connections between them (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2009, 341; emphasis added).

Counter interpretation - Targeting non-state actors is economic engagement Haass 00 Richard N. Haass, Vice President and Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the
Brookings Institution, and Meghan L. OSullivan, Fellow with the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution, Engaging Problem Countries, Brookings Policy Brief, No. 61, June, http://dspace.cigilibrary.org/jspui/bitstream/123456789/18245/1/Engaging%20Problem%20Co untries.pdf?1

The provision of economic incentives to the private sector can also be an effective mode of unconditional engagement , particularly when the economy of the target country is not entirely statecontrolled. In these more open climates, economic actors nourished by exchanges will often be agents for change and natural allies in some Western causes. To the extent that economic engagement builds the private sector and other nonstate elements within the target country, it is likely to widen the base of support for engagement with America specifically and the promotion of international norms more generally. Certainly, U.S. engagement with
China has nurtured constituencies which are sympathetic, if not to American ideals per se, then at least to trade and open markets and the maintenance of good relations to secure them.

Prefer it
1. Functional limits prevent topic explosion substantial and PICs constrain aff choice. 2. Reasonability important when defining engagement avoids an impossible definitional maze. Drifte 3 Reinhard Drifte, Professor and Chair of Japanese Studies and Director at the Newcastle East Asia Center at the University of Newcastle, 2003 (Introduction, Japan's Security Relations with China Since 1989: From Balancing to Bandwagoning?, Published by Routledge, ISBN 1134406673, p. 5-6) The complex nature of engagement policy The misunderstanding of the policy of engagement gives rise to considerable confusion because it obfuscates the Realist elements of engagement, i.e. the role of force to effect balancing and hedging. In order to propose remedies to perceived deficiencies of engagement, qualifying adjectives to 'engagement', or even the coinage of new words , have been proposed which make an appropriate understanding of engagement policy even more difficult . Definitions range from unconditional engagement, conditional engagement, comprehensive or constructive engagement, robust engagement, congagement, coercive engagement, to constrainment.8 The resulting definatory maze cannot fail to make the pursuit of engagement difficult at a national level, let alone in tandem with another country. In fact engagement relies as much on Realist foundations, with their deterrence and balance-ofpower elements, as on Liberal foundations, which stress the positive forces of increasing international economic interdependence and integration, the spreading of international norms, the establishment of rules and institutions to regulate and enable peaceful cooperation between nations. The power-balancing and deterrence elements in engagement policy follow the Realist teaching that war can be avoided if there is a stable power balance, but that the shift of power relations (which China drives forward through its economic and military strengthening) is particularly dangerous for the maintenance of peace. The systemic issues for hegemonic stability are how to maintain such stability and how to accommodate change. Realists will point out that multipolar systems like those in Asia are less stable than unipolar systems. The situation in Asia has been depicted as a five-power balance-of-power system, as 'ripe for rivalry', and as heading for instability.9 The following definition of engagement by Alastair Iain Johnston and Robert S. Ross probably describes best the dualistic character of this policy: 'The use of non-coercive methods to ameliorate the non-status-quo elements of a rising power's behaviour. The goal is to ensure that

this growing power is used in ways that are consistent with peaceful change in regional and global order'. The authors explicitly state that amelioration of the rising power's behaviour does not seek to limit, constrain or delay the newcomer's power, nor to prevent the development of influence commensurate with its greater power.10 They attach four conditions that will make a policy of engagement effective: 1. the new rising power has only limited revisionist aims and there are no irreconcilable conflicts of interest with the established powers; 2. the established powers are strong enough to mix concessions with credible threats, i.e. a sticks and carrots policy; 3. engagement is a complement and not an alternative to balancing; 4. the established powers must live by the same principles they demand of the new rising power11 When we look carefully at this statement it becomes clear that, for the rising power, 'coercive means' must still be considered in its calculation of the [end page 5] established powers despite their goal of the non-use of 'coercive methods'. Not only is this related to the established powers' Realist objectives (i.e. balancing and hedging) vis-a-vis conceivable intentions of a rising power, but it is also, in the first instance, due to the simple fact that all the established powers, including Japan, maintain considerable military forces and are involved in military alliances to cater for a whole range of challenges to their security. The crucial issue for a correct understanding of Japan's engagement policy (and this would apply to the engagement policy of any other country) is to clarify the emphasis and the robustness with which some rather than other goals associated with engagement are pursued, as well as the mix of policy tools used ; one needs to consider issues such as no unilateral use of offensive military force, peaceful resolution of territorial disputes, respect for national sovereignty, transparency of military forces, cooperative solutions for transnational problems or respect for basic human rights.12 3. Good is good enough Race to the bottom- Competing interpretations means the neg can always move the goal posts to find the most limiting topic Substance Crowd out- focusing on trivial distinctions like whether or not the engagement needs to exist in the status quo distracts from actual topic specific education

at: T- increase = pre-existing

We meet The economic systems that would be introduced to Juarez exist now- its just a question of making them visible- thats Demartino counterinterp increase means to make something greater
Reinhardt, 05 U.S. Judge for the UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT (Stephen, JASON RAY
REYNOLDS; MATTHEW RAUSCH, Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. HARTFORD FINANCIAL SERVICES GROUP, INC.; HARTFORD FIRE INSURANCE COMPANY, Defendants-Appellees., lexis) Specifically, we must decide whether charging a higher price for initial insurance than the insured would otherwise have been charged because of information in a consumer credit report constitutes an "increase in any charge" within the meaning of FCRA. First, we examine the definitions of "increase" and "charge." Hartford Fire contends that, limited to their ordinary definitions, these words apply only when a consumer has previously been charged for insurance and that charge has thereafter been increased by the insurer. The phrase, "has previously been charged," as used by Hartford, refers not only to a rate that the consumer has previously paid for insurance but also to a rate that the consumer has previously been quoted, even if that rate was increased [**23] before the consumer made any payment. Reynolds disagrees, asserting that, under [*1091]

the ordinary definition of the term, an increase in a charge also occurs whenever an insurer charges a higher rate than it would otherwise have charged because of any factor--such as adverse credit information, age, or driving record 8 --regardless of whether the customer was previously charged some other rate. According to
Reynolds, he was charged an increased rate because of his credit rating when he was compelled to pay a rate higher than the premium rate because he failed to obtain a high insurance score. Thus, he argues, the definitions of "increase" and "charge" encompass the insurance companies' practice. Reynolds is correct. Increase" means to make something greater. See, e.g., OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY (2d ed. 1989) ("The action, process, or fact of becoming or making greater; augmentation, growth, enlargement, extension."); WEBSTER'S NEW WORLD DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN ENGLISH (3d college ed. 1988) (defining "increase" as "growth, enlargement, etc[.]"). "Charge" means the price demanded for goods or services. See, e.g., OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY (2d ed. 1989) ("The price required or demanded for service rendered, or (less usually) for goods supplied."); WEBSTER'S NEW WORLD DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN ENGLISH (3d college ed. 1988) ("The cost or price of an article, service, etc."). Nothing

in the definition of these words implies that the term "increase in any charge for" should be limited to cases in which a company raises the rate that an individual has previously been charged.

Increase doesnt require preexistence

Words and Phrases 8 (Words and Phrases Permanent Edition, Increase, Volume 20B, p. 263267 March 2008, Thomson West) Wahs. 1942. The granting of compensation to any officer after he has commenced to serve the term for which he has been chosen, when no compensation was provided by law before he assumed the duties of his office, is an increase in salary or compensation within the constitutional provision prohibiting an increase of the compensation of a
public officer during his term of office. Const. art, 2, 25; art. 11, 8. State ex rel. Jaspers v. West 125 P.2d 694, 13 Wash.2d 514. Offic 100(1).

Prefer it1. Aff ground- their interpretation limits out all quality affs on the topic including all of Cuba, oil ventures, terror list, etc. 2. Functional limits checks limits explosion 3. Literature checks abuse- Its impossible to conceive of a new aff that doesnt exist in the lit

4. Good is good enough Race to the bottom- Competing interpretations means the neg can always move the goal posts to find the most limiting topic Substance Crowd out- focusing on trivial distinctions like whether or not the engagement needs to exist in the status quo distracts from actual topic specific education

at: T- capital
We meet- Im just going to make this argument so you spend time on it.
Targeting non-state actors is economic engagement Haass 00 Richard N. Haass, Vice President and Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the
Brookings Institution, and Meghan L. OSullivan, Fellow with the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution, Engaging Problem Countries, Brookings Policy Brief, No. 61, June, http://dspace.cigilibrary.org/jspui/bitstream/123456789/18245/1/Engaging%20Problem%20Co untries.pdf?1 The provision of economic incentives to the private sector can also be an effective mode of unconditional engagement , particularly when the economy of the target country is not entirely statecontrolled. In these more open climates, economic actors nourished by exchanges will often be agents for change and natural allies in some Western causes. To the extent that economic engagement builds the private sector and other nonstate elements within the target country, it is likely to widen the base of support for engagement with America specifically and the promotion of international norms more generally. Certainly, U.S. engagement with
China has nurtured constituencies which are sympathetic, if not to American ideals per se, then at least to trade and open markets and the maintenance of good relations to secure them.

Motive is irrelevant --- the form of engagement is key Singh 1 Swaran Singh, Research Fellow at the Institute for Defence Studies & Analyses,
China-India: Expanding Economic Engagement, 1-3, http://www.idsa-india.org/an-jan-301html.html
A fourth route, in the eastern sector has been agreed-in-principle since the last few years but there remain some basic complications. The

problem with this border trade post involves the ticklish issue of India's province of Sikkim that the Chinese continue to regard as an independent state. While the Indian side has been suggesting the route originating in Sikkim,
the Chinese have been deliberating on this issue as it implies a formal recognition of Sikkim's accession to India. China, therefore, has suggested an alternate route from Kalimpong in the Darjeeling district of India's province of West Bengal (passing through Sikkim) to Yatung in Chumbi Valley region. The Chinese have also been indicating that such an agreement on this border trade post may include language implying China's official recognition of Sikkim as part of the Indian Union. New Delhi, however, would like China to recognise Sikkim as part of India as a pre-requisite to any such agreement. This is often explained in terms of India's earlier experiences with such trade pacts. For example, in another trade agreement of April 1954, Prime Minister Nehru had traded off entire Tibet for nothing. To break from this intractable deadlock in their eastern sector, the two sides have since expanded their framework and have been exploring possibilities of opening their border trade as part of sub-regional cooperation amongst India's northeast, China's southwest, Bangladesh and Myanmar. The first formal conference for this purpose was convened in August 1999 at Kunming in China's province of Yunnan and it passed a resolution which is known now as the Kunming Initiative. India is preparing to host the second such conference for sub-regional cooperation amongst these four countries during the first week of December 2000 at Delhi. All

this clearly shows how despite continuous improvement in their mutual trade and commerce, their economic decisions still continue to be guided by their non-economic motives .

Prefer it1. their ev is epistemologically flawed- the entire 1AC is an indict of the idea that neoliberalism and capitalism are the only legitimate forms of economics- their authors fall prey to the hegemony of capitalism in western knowledge production

2. No bright line- the T argument is based off of the justifications for doing the aff- that means there is a topical version of each aff the research burden isnt any smaller under their interpretation 3. No ground loss- the only things they lose are the neolib K and Cap K impact turn it on the neg 4. If they win a topical version of the aff, vote aff- T shouldnt be about the justifications for the aff, but rather the plan text in a vacuum Good is good enough 1. Race to the bottom- competing interpretations allows them to move the goal posts to find the most limiting definition of the topic 2. Substance crowd out- well probably go for this- Neolib good isnt a procedural - theyve turned an impact turn into a T argument because they didnt want to engage the aff- if neoliberalism is so sweet, impact turn the aff

at: T- USFG (its)

Policy solutions are trapped within an epistemic issue capitalisms monopoly on knowledge forecloses positive economic education George DEMARTINO - Professor of international economics @ U of Denver, 2013, Work in Progress posted, Ethical
Economic Engagement in a World Beyond Control, Rethinking Marxism)//ctc

Science streamlines its categories in hopes of achieving exceptionless, predictive, quantitative laws. Narrative has quite different ends in view, being concerned with the particular, the exceptional, the unique. So schemes suited to narrative enterprises exhibit different features from those suited to science. Scientific vicesambiguity, imprecision, immeasurability, and indeterminacyare often narrative virtues. -- Catherine Z. Elgin (1989; 87) We have found that we need
technologies for a more reticent yet also more ebullient practice of theorizing, one that tolerates not knowing and allows for contingent connection and the

hiddenness of unfolding: one that at the same time foregrounds specificity, divergence, incoherence, surplus possibility, and the requisite condition of a less predictable and more productive politicsWhat is bizarre about this theorizing (from the standpoint of common theoretical practice) is that it does not collapse what it aggregates into fewer categories, but spreads everything out to the limits of our tolerance for dimensionality and detail.
--J.K. Gibson-Graham (2006; xxxi) Political projects of all sorts are grounded in and take direction from theoretical analyses that present themselves as largely adequate to the world they hope to transform. Neoclassical

economic theory in particular is widely taken to provide the uniquely correct science of the organization of society, and to unveil the uniquely appropriate policy interventions that will make for a better world. This view motivates, sustains and legitimizes the social engineering to which leading neoclassical economists have been prone, especially but not only in the Global South. The consequences are often extraordinarily damaging. Not least, the hubris
associated with the neoclassical project played a significant role in the failure of the US government to regulate the new financial assets that proliferated during the 1990s and early 2000s, with the effect of producing

one of the most serious financial crises of the past 100 years (DeMartino 2011). On the left, Marxian political economy has often been taken to be a dependable and even adequate theory upon which to build an appropriate transformative politics. Marxism is seen to provide a deep scientific account of the trajectory of and imminent contradictions within capitalist economiesone that pierces the veil of appearances and illuminates the ontological substratum of social organization. The allure of
this sort of Marxian theory derives not just from the direction it provides to those who seek to overcome oppression. It also derives from the confidence it engenders; from the imprimatur of science and certainty with which it stamps the political projects that take root in its theoretical soil. In this regard Marxism has often been treated as if it were an objective analysis of society that can and, in the hands of sufficiently skilled theoreticians, actually does illuminate the key ontological levers by which fundamental transformations can be engineered. But

for the extraordinary hopes that have been placed on Marxian theory to serve these functions, the intensity of the theoretical and political controversies that arose over the course of the 20th century within Marxism and between Marxists and non- Marxist progressives would be hard to comprehend. But what if neither Marxian theory nor any other account does or even can provide the kind of knowledge that many have sought in it? What if the confidence it induces is misplaced? What if the insights it enables and the strategies it motivates are always

terribly incomplete? What if fundamental contradiction is not just a feature of capitalist and other class-based social formations, but also a feature of any comprehensive knowledge of society and any transformative strategies that that knowledge motivates? What if our theoretical accounts can never be, in fact, adequate to the purposes to which we put them? How are we to engage a world we cant ever know in the sense that we have hoped? These questions open the way to an engagement with anotherone that has not received the attention it deserves. What kind of discourse is appropriate for grounding projects of resistance to exploitation and injustice in its myriad forms? In particular, what kind of discourse is appropriate for projects that seek to confront economic powerlessness and economic injustice, and exploitation? The predominant answer to this question within the Marxian tradition is a discourse that
reveals the underlying exceptionless, predictive, quantitative laws that govern the metabolism of capitalist economy and society. The predominant Marxian view throughout the 20th century and since has been to view Marxian theory as a (if not the) science of capitalism that is appropriate to the task of emancipation. Owing

to its deep insights into the underlying, fundamental tendencies and contradictions of capitalism, Marxian science can identify efficacious forms of political engagement. One key function Marxian science performs in this regard is to
discriminate between those oppositional strategies that target and exploit the fundamental contradictions of the system and those that merely ameliorate some of its harmful consequences. On this view, in short, Marxian science must come first. It

would be reckless to embark on emancipatory political projects without a prior specification of the laws of capitalist accumulation, since those laws determine where political interventions can in fact have their intended effects. The intuitive appeal of politics grounded in science is undeniable, of course. How can we begin to challenge practices and structures that we do not even understand? But what if scientific discourse, as philosopher of science Catherine Elgin defines it in the epigraph
to this essay, is not the only or best kind of discourse to found strategies and campaigns for economic empowerment, or economic justice? What if, instead, what

Elgin calls narrative discoursesthose that are concerned with the particular, the exceptional, the uniqueprovide a more fecund grounding for projects seeking economic justice? Could it be that the scientific vices/narrative virtues of ambiguity, imprecision, immeasurability, and indeterminacy are more potent instigators of radical economic projects than a social science from which adherents are to deduce a corresponding science of politics? Much is lost in the refusal to accept Marxian theory as a scientific grounding for political strategies, of course. Clarity, focus, certainty, and direction evaporate. In their place, though, a narrative-based politics just might promote room to move and a kind of creativity and inventiveness that explicitly science-based politics lack. In this view, ineradicable epistemic limitations are viewed as opportunities to pursue politics that are, theoretically speaking, off the grid. That, at least, is the hope of those who refuse to presume that science is in
chargethat it does or should have the last word on what kinds of interventions have the capacity to catalyze fundamentally new arrangements that yield a better world. At

stake here is not just a serious knowledge problemthe problem of epistemic inadequacy that derives from any particular knowledgegenerating project. What is also at stake is a control problem. If the theoretical enterprise does not and cannot generate adequate knowledge of the world , where
adequate in this context must mean the knowledge that would be available to us were we to sit with Platos souls at the rim of heaven, then

it cant yield the epistemic privilege that would be sufficient to allow for control over that world (Nussbaum, 1994, 18). Control entails mastery, after all; nothing less will do. If mastery is lacking, then we are left to occupy a terribly dangerous position a position in which as transformative agents we exert influence without control. If we take the view that epistemic insufficiency is an ineradicable feature of any social

theoretic enterpriseif mastery in regards to the social world is unavailablethen we confront an urgent and difficult ethical question. How are those who know they lack mastery, in fact and even in principle, to engage a world they cannot hope to control?
A daunting questionbut one, fortunately, that some researchers and activists have begun to confront in their scholarship and other transformative practices.

The hopeful thought experiment of a post-capitalist future leads to that future the discourse we choose to utilize determines our ontology, not the other way around George DEMARTINO - Professor of international economics @ U of Denver, 2013, Work in Progress posted, Ethical
Economic Engagement in a World Beyond Control, Rethinking Marxism)//ctc Perhaps the most consistent theme in Gibson-Grahams work, from The End of Capitalism up to the present, is its emphasis on the complicity of theory and theorists in constructing the world that they purport to describe. They urge

us to

recognize our role in bringing new realities into being (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2009, 320). Weve taken note already of what is, for Gibson-Graham, a particularly damaging instance of this phenomenonthose Marxian and other left analyses of Capitalism that invest it with powers it would not otherwise enjoy. Unity, singularity and totality these features of capitalist hegemony do not derive from capitalisms ontological properties. To the degree that capitalism achieves hegemony, it secures this privilege discursively, in part from the manner in which it comes to be known. Knowing, here, is generative and constitutivenever merely descriptive. Important ethical consequences follow. For Gibson-Graham, the language that scholars mobilize and the narratives they produce to describe the objects of their analysis are always chosen; they are never simply imposed by the nature of the object itself . Even the most resolutely scientific narratives have a fictional quality in the sense that they invent and construct as a necessary correlate of generating knowledge. The choices scholars make matter hugelynot because they yield theory that is either a true or false representation of the world, but because they alter that world in ways that either illuminate and enable or obscure and disable strategies of transformation. This sort of epistemological stance attributes to the knowing subject powers that she is not understood to enjoy under more traditional epistemologies. This theorist wields the power to bend reality, to make it otherwise. It seems like magic: Now we see Capitalism, now we dont! But it also implies that the researcher bears the ethical duties of humility and care. Increasing degrees of freedom imply far greater complexity than we are able to manage, and the associated proliferation of space for interventions require of us that we acknowledge the ubiquity of unintended consequences that mock our efforts at control. A world in which the separation of the subject from the object is effacedwhere the subject is in the object as much as the object is in the subject this kind of world is a world both of radical potentialities and severe risk. Philosopher Nelson Goodman captures both aspects of the matter succinctly, as follows: rather than the facts determining how we take them, how we take them determines the factsbut we had better be careful how we take
them (Goodman 1989, 85; emphasis added). Gibson-Graham exploits the creative space yielded by a generative view of theory. From this perspective, radical

scholars face a duty to produce theoretical accounts that reveal opportunities and not just constraints. In their view the appropriate choice is not to try to get it right but to pursue
inventiveness; not to think critically in a debunking mode (describing what something is and should not be) but instead ebulliently (Massumi 2001) (Gibson-Graham 2003, 71). More recently, in their work on ethical engagement in the Anthropocene epoch,3 they

write: 3 The current Anthropocene epoch is one in which humankind is foregrounded as a geological force or agent, the epoch is defined both by the heating trendand by the radical instability expected of future environments (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2009, 320; 321). To put this in the form of a mandate, we

are being called to read the potentially positive futures barely visible in the present order of things, and to imagine how to strengthen and move them along (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2009, 342). In this account the theorist promotes emancipation of all sorts not by mapping the treacherous, difficult and unique path to salvation that generally appears in discourses that presume overarching, oppressive structuresbut by choosing to forgo totalizing narratives that give those structures their oppressive force. Hard- headed systemic thinking is replaced by joyful, experimental theorizing that presumes the existence of, looks for and then finds spaces to innovate and create alternatives that operate beyond the reach of structure. Presuming as an exercise in
choice is central here: Gibson-Graham are obdurate in holding the view that opportunities exist always and everywhere to make change, even class revolution. Yet they purposely offer us no deep ontological grounding to sustain this view. In the face of opposing modernist approaches that reach down to ontology to sustain their visions (say, of Capitalism), they upend the relation between ontology and the world we live. For them, ontology

is a produced effect of discourse, rather than the reverse. lose the comfort and safety of a subordinate relation to reality and can no longer seek to capture accur ately what already exists; interdependence and creativity are thrust upon us as we become implicated in the very existence of the worlds that we research (Gibson-Graham 2008, 8).
When ontology becomes the effect rather than the ground of knowledge, we

Their demand for us to read policy arguments is destructive pseudomaterialism and erodes democracy
WOLFE 11 (Cary, Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Prof. of English @ Rice U., THEORY AS A RESEARCH PROGRAMME THE VERY IDEA Theory After Theory, pp. 45-48)
In this light, the

task of theory is made doubly formidable when the corporate ethos of the university is wedded to the intellectual traditionalism that furthers it, you might say, by other means. It is precisely for these reasons that the humanities must, in Derrida's view, dedicate themselves to the principle of unconditional discussion, unconditional freedom of thought (Derrida 2002: 202, 203), even though this unconditionality is never entirely possible. For Derrida, if that
unconditional freedom is the raison d'etre of the university (versus, say, technical training and the development of applied knowledge), the humanities are its 'originary and privileged place of presentation, of manifestation, of safekeeping' (ibid.: 207). In the context of the humanities so understood, then, theory

serves as a place of irredentist resistance or even, analogically, as a sort of principle of civil disobedience, even of dissidence in the name of a superior law and a justice of thought (ibid.: 208). This last passage helps underscore the fact that what might seem 'apolitical' or 'uncommitted' to some in Derrida's approach to such questions is, in fact, a product of his taking quite seriously his responsibility to the humanities and to the university as a philosopher or, if you like, a themist (leaving aside for the moment how we might want to precisely conjugate those terms). In fact, as he points out in ' The Principle of Reason', many ostensibly more 'committed' forms of 'political thought' in the contemporary university are quite easily recontained as part of its standard operating machinery of dissensus a shopping mall pluralism, if you like, serving a fundamentally neoliberal project of incorporation. Here, we would do well to remember Rajan's
contextualization of the changing role of cultural studies not in terms of the ostensibly political projects it announces and embraces for itself, but in terms of the hegemonic norms of the contemporary university and its disciplinary protocols: a situation in which 'the social is now the unquestioned ground of the humanities' , and the humanities refuse to 'claim a way of thinking the social from the outside' (Rajan 2001: 74). Regarding 'sociology

or politology' , Derrida writes that 'I would be the last to want to

disqualify them. But whatever conceptual apparatus they may have', he continues, they never

question scientific normativity, beginning with the value of objectivity or objectification, which governs and authorizes their discourse . . . These sociologies of the institution remain in this sense internal to the university, intra-institutional, controlled by the deepseated standards, even the programs, of the space that they claim to analyze. (Derrida 1983: 149) In this light, to model knowledge in the humanities on the sciences is to remain 'homogeneous with the discourse that dominates the university in the last analysis'. And to use such a project to create an 'objective' basis for politics, no matter how 'revolutionary', as Derrida puts it, is therefore to leave unquestioned 'the most conservative forces of the university' (ibid.:
149). This is not to say that such work is a waste of time; it is simply to say that it is situated in multiple ways conceptually, institutionally and ideologically. And here, it seems to me, theory

finds a crucial role at the present moment in asserting itself against the representationalism (to use Rorty's term) that links what at first might look like strange bedfellows: a cultural studies that thinks the social 'as the unquestioned ground of the humanities' (Raj an 2001: 74) and a 'scientific' orientation that grounds the humanities on a 'methodologico-ontological' basis. Moreover, to remember that Derrida pens his critique in the early 1980s, at the dawn of the Reagan era, is to recall those pressures of corporatization and federal divestment (well glossed by Lambert, among others) that will in the years that follow exert increasing pressure on the humanities to justify themselves in terms of a 'relevance' whose ground lay elsewhere, in society or nature. And it is here that we may bring into sharper focus, an additional context for
the political work of 'professing' theory that I mentioned earlier: the context of globalization (or 'mondialisation', to use the French term Derrida prefers). If

the effect of current cultural studies in this context is, according to Rajan, to simulate the preservation of civil society after the permutation of the classical public sphere' into an essentially market and consumerist logic of 'representation' (ibid.: 69-70), then the attempt to meet that shortcoming by deploying 'scientific' or ontological models of theory (which would, precisely, not depend on the continuation of identity politics by other means) runs aground on a different set of problems. In Derrida's view, globalization is driven by (indeed would be impossible without) the kind of 'calculation' of reason that anchors the production-centred ethos of the corporate university: namely, the standardization and commodification of knowledge via information technologies (Derrida 1983: 14). So if (to put it very schematically) in the corporate university, theory-qua-cultural studies serves globalization by helping along the neoliberal project of ideological incorporation, then theory-qua-scientificresearch-programme serves globalization not so much by its direct subordination to utility, but rather by extending a picture of what counts as 'real' knowledge 'realist', 'scientific', 'materialist', 'empiricist' and 'hard' that underwrites a productioncentred ethos. Over and against both, theory as 'unconditional' thought may feel 'soft', frivolous or even risky, but 'to claim to eliminate that risk, Derrida writes, 'by an institutional program is quite simply to erect a barricade against a future' not the future, crucially, but a future (Derrida 1983: 1819). It is to duck theory's challenge to 'define new responsibilities in the face of the university's total subjection to the technologies of informatization' (Derrida 1983: 14). And it is on this point that we may most clearly distinguish Derrida's view from Rorty's. For Derrida, theory

is indeed crucial to democratic society, and to the place of institutions of higher learning within it. But he does not exactly subordinate theory to politics (as in Rorty's declaration of 'the priority of democracy to philosophy'), much less to any specific politics (such as Rorty's liberalism) (Rorty 1991: 17 5). For Derrida, the commitment to theory as unconditional thought means that 'the university should thus also be the place in which nothing is beyond question, not even the current and

determined figure of democracy, not even the traditional idea of critique' (Derrida 2002: 20 5). But neither does Derrida's view subordinate politics to theory, since theory is always situated within a historical,
ideological and institutional conjuncture of the sort we have been tracing here, the sort that en frames the corporate university and its hegemonic forms of disciplinarity. Or - to put it in a shorthand that sharpens his distance from Rorty's liberal pragmatism for

Derrida, it is not possible to talk about the unconditional duty of theory without also talking about the conditional contexts of capitalism, globalization and the corporate university that over-determine theory's role at this present moment. And in that light - at that nexus of institutional power, economic pressure and disciplinary hegemony a final irony of the idea of theory as a research programme is that one might well wonder why the 'science' that it aspires to would ever take it seriously.

at: colonialism

2ac colonialism Giroux alt

We control uniqueness for this argument 1AC Vogel indicates that the US has near infinite control over Mexico only the plan is able to reverse economic colonialism Permutation do both imaginative resistance to neoliberalism and the use of local movements is the only way to realize the alternative
Escobar 02 [Arturo , Department of Anthropology University of North Carolina, and Instituto Colombiano de Antropologa e
Historia, Bogot. Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise:1 The Latin American modernity/coloniality Research Program+//BMitch

Rethinking the economy, in the concrete. The combined processes of modernity and coloniality can be seen as projects for the radical reconversion of human and biophysical ecologies world wide. One may speak about a systematic project of cultural, ecological, and economic reconversion along eurocentric lines. Conversely, one

may consider the need to build on practices of cultural, ecological, and economic difference for concrete projects of world transformation for worlds and knowledges otherwise. This helps give flesh and blood to the colonial difference and global coloniality. While these processes have to be advanced at the same time, there seems to be a pressing need to come up with new economic imaginaries, imaginaries that enable effective and practical resistance to the seemingly overpowering imaginary of the market sanctified by neo-liberal globalization (Hinkelamerts age of the total market). Ethnographically, we can follow in the wake of ecological anthropologists documenting practices of ecological difference, which, coupled with the political-intellectual strategies of social movements, could feed into concrete projects of alternative eco-cultural designs and world construction. Theoretically, we are ill equipped for the task. Part of
the answer lies in the fact that political economy analyses have made invisible practices of economic difference, given the totalizing and capitalocentric tendencies of their discourses; these analyses have, in short, tended to reduce all economic forms to the terms of the Same, namely, capital itself (Gibson-Graham 1996). That ecology and the body are ineluctably attached to place (even if not place-bound) seems easy to accept. Less clear is that thinking

about economic difference and alternative economic imaginaries should also have a place-based dimension. Let us see why, in a way that enables us to introduce a place-based dimension to the coloniality of power and the colonial difference. Place, after all, is the site of the subaltern par excellence, the excluded dimension of modernitys concern with space, universality, movement, and the like. It would then make sense to emplace the MC project in more than a metaphorical way. This point is driven home by a project on Women and the Politics of Place that brings
together gender, ecology and economy into one theoretical-political framework.2 In writing about this project, Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson introduce the notion of economic difference and the idea of emplacement, building on the decentered and disorganized (but globally emplaced) political imaginary of second wave feminism, in the following way: Women

and the Politics of Place builds on that ground [of feminist politics], extending the idea of a politics of ubiquity by emphasizing its ontological substrate: a vast set of disarticulated places
households, social communities, ecosystems, workplaces, organizations, bodies, public arenas, urban spaces, diasporas, regions, occupationsrelated

analogically rather than organically and connected through webs of signification. If women are everywhere, a woman is always somewhere, and those somewheres are what the project is
interested in: places being created, strengthened, defended, augmented, transformed by women. It is as though the identity category, woman, were to be addressed through contextualization or emplacement, and the feminist question had become What might a politics of the emplacement be? Not a politics of the category, or of identity per se, but a politics of the product ion of

subjects and places. A politics of becoming in place. (J.K. Gibson-Graham 2003). From an MC perspective,

it can be said that place here serves as an epistemic perspective that can be occupied by many subjects. The Women and the Politics of Place project indeed aims at asserting a logic of difference and possibility against the homogenizing tendencies of globalization and political economy; it seeks to make visible a landscape of cultural, ecological and economic differences; to this extent, there is certain convergence here between the projects of feminism, ecology, and alternative economies and this convergence is articulated around the politics of place. I am not
arguing that this is the only space of convergence for projects of feminist, economic, and ecological futures. I am arguing for a dialogue between the MC project and projects such as those reviewed in this section. The (although, again, not place-bound) practices of

notion of place-based identity, nature, and economy allows us to go beyond a view of subaltern places as just subsumed in a global logic or as a site in a global network, unable to ground any significant resistance, let alone an alternative construction. At the level of the economy, one may realize that places are never fully capitalist, but are inhabited by economic difference, with the potential for becoming something other, an other economy. It is about rethinking difference from the perspective of the economy, and the economy from the perspective of difference. By emplacing the MC project, one might thus be able to link global coloniality to projects that have potential for concrete, real transformations . These may take place in conjunction with social movements. This revaluing of local politics might be one of most important contributions we can make at present, in a moment when nobody seems to give any credence to local actions. Conclusion In his retrospective look at critical discourses on identity in Latin American philosophy and social sciences
since the end of the nineteenth century to the present, Crtica de la Razn Latinoamericana, Santiago Castro-Gmez (1996) concludes that all

such discourses of identity from Alberdi to Mart and Rod and to Zea and Roig-- have been complicit with a modernist logic of alterization, and have thus amounted to countermodernist proposals in the best of cases. In other words, most accounts of identity in liberation discourses in philosophy and other fields have relied on postulating a foundational alterity and a transcendental subject that would constitute a radical alternative in relation to an equally
homogenized modern/European/North American Other. Whether appealing to Latin American indigenous, mestizo, catholic, primordialist, anti-imperialist, or vitalist identities in contradistinction to white, protestant, instrumental, disenchanted, individualist, patriarchal, etc. Euro/American identitythis analysis, are

strategies of alterization, in Castro-Gmez archaeological doomed to failure. To acknowledge the partial, historical, and heterogeneous character of all identities is to begin to correct this flaw, and to begin the journey towards views of identity that emerge from an episteme posilustrada, or post-Enlightment episteme. To the counter-modernist logic of alterization, Castro-Gmez opposes a logic of the historical production of difference. It remains to be seen whether the MC project will fully bypass the modernist logic of alterization insightfully
analyzed by Castro-Gmez. Conceived as an epistemic decolonization, this project would certainly seem to go beyond a politics of representation based on identifying an exclusive space of enunciation of ones own that is blind to its own constructedness; it would also avoid comprehensive allegations of inclusion under a single umbrella (all Latin Americans), and would resist the idea that those included would be fully outside the colonialist totality. Such dreams are in the process of being abandoned. The notion of border thinking (or critical border positioning, as Catherine Walsh has recently called it, 2003) seems to provide, by itself, some insurance against the older logic. As we have seen, engaging with gender, environment and economy

might afford further guarantees that the important insights of this group will not run into the traps described by Castro-Gmez. No longer an absolute other in relation to modernity, and so no longer condemned to the perpetual solitude of which Octavio Paz and Garca Mrquez were so enamored, the Latin America that emerges from the project so sketchily reviewed here would however continue to enact a politics of difference, precisely because it has become newly aware of the constitutive difference that inhabits it and the history that has produced it. Perhaps it is indeed the case that an other Latin America(s) is possible.

Our experimental lens supercharges the ability for the HRC to morph and address any colonialist underpinnings of the plan George DEMARTINO - Professor of international economics @ U of Denver, 2013, Work in Progress posted, Ethical
Economic Engagement in a World Beyond Control, Rethinking Marxism)//ctc

Meeting the Gibson-Graham challenge to see the world differently, without recourse to ontologies that discipline, direct and constrain, requires of the academic a difficult adjustment in affect that many cannot countenance. It calls on us, after all, to challenge the supposed academic virtues of detachment, discernment and critique that allow researchers to penetrate the veil of common understanding and expose the root causes and bottom lines that govern the phenomenal world (ibid, 6). This academic stance means that most theorizing is tinged with skepticism and negativity, not a particularly nurturing environment for hopeful, inchoate experiments (ibid, 6). In the place of skepticism and negativity we are asked to quiet the critical voices that clamor for our attention and observe without the reflexive pre-judgment that renders certain strategies and projects as vestigial, inadequate or otherwise wrong- headed. In this connection Gibson-Graham explore Sedgwicks notion of the paranoid motive that colors much social theorizing, where Everything comes to mean the same thing, usually something large and threatening (like neoliberalism, or globalization, or capitalism, or empire) (ibid, 6). Following Sedgwick, they challenge our predilection for strong theory which is marked by an embracing reach and a reductive field of meaning (Sedgwick 2003) (ibid, 6). This kind of theory discounts and marginalizes even as it flatters; here, academic vanity trumps emancipation. In contrast, Sedgwick and Gibson-Graham ask of us to produce weak theory, theory with substantially reduced pretensions and with entirely different goals: What if we asked theory instead to help us see openings, to provide a space of freedom and possibility? The practice of weak theorizing involves refusing to extend explanation too widely or deeply, refusing to know too much. Weak theory could not know that social experiments are doomed to fail or destined to reinforce dominance; it could not tell us that the world economy will never be transformed by the disorganized proliferation of local projects (ibid, 6-7, emphasis added). In Gibson-Grahams hands the aspiration to learning without judging yields an approach to research that entails experimentation of a particular sort. To treat something as a social experiment is to open to what it has to teach us, very different from the critical task of assessing the ways in which it is good or bad, strong or weak, mainstream or alternative (ibid, 16). Experimentation in this context involves the academic researcher in the social innovations she investigates. Unlike positivist experimentation in which the researcher is to hold back from any affective connection with the community under study, the diverse economies project features deep and sustained engagement between academics and others and explicitly engages all parties to the experiment as researchers and objects of research. While the academic in these projects has certain contributions to make (owing to her academic skill set and
resources) she does not adopt the stance of the detached, objective observer who is uniquely situated to glean the truth that the experiment reveals. In the experiment she pursues

her own transformation while she seeks strategies to enable the transformation of her academic and non-academic collaborators. Here there is no active transformative subject learning about a separate inert object, but a subject- object that is a becoming world
knowledge but in (Gibson-Graham 2011, 4). This

is Not learning in the sense of increasing a store of

the sense of becoming other, creating connections and encountering

possibilities that render us newly constituted beings in a newly constituted world . Latour along with others has called this learning to be affected (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2009, 322). As subjects and objects of experimentation, Gibson-Grahams researchers face a duty to engage in processes of self-reconstruction. The challenge is to reconstruct themselves as conditions of possibility of the diverse economy, rather than as detached, skeptical observers who know already the limitations of the projects

unfolding around them. But how to achieve this? Here we have turned to what Nietzsche called self-artistry, and Foucault called selfcultivation, addressing them to our own thinking. The

co- implicated processes of changing ourselves/changing our thinking/ changing the world are what we identify as an ethical practice. If politics involves taking transformative decisions in an undecideable terrain, ethics is the continual exercising of a choice to be/act/or think in certain ways (Varela, 1992) (Gibson-Graham 2008, 5, 6). Where
and how can these processes of self-cultivation take place? Gibson-Graham find an answer in the hybrid research community.

No link we reduce subjugation of Latin Americans because capitalist economic engagement might be negative, but the plan reduces objectivization by realizing our interdependence with others thats Gibson Graham Links in the context of the USFG arent applicable we separate ourselves from larger institutions and act as academics George DEMARTINO - Professor of international economics @ U of Denver, 2013, Work in Progress posted, Ethical
Economic Engagement in a World Beyond Control, Rethinking Marxism)//ctc

Ethical action is as much a practice of adopting new habits as anything else-- habits of reflecting on our interconnections with others, approaching the new with an inquiring mind and an appreciative stance, trusting others as we jointly encounter a future of unknowns and uncertainties, and learning to allay our fears and conjure creativity. There are no easy solutions to the problems that confront us and there are no guaranteed outcomes, but by thinking ethically we can expand our capacity to act. -- Gibson-Graham, Cameron and Healy (Forthcoming) If what is to be done? is not answered for us by
reference to a disciplinary ontology of social organization that adjudicates political interventions, if non- scientific narrative in (Elgins sense of the term) rather than science provides all the grounding we have and should want, then we inhabit a political landscape in which the choices we make are explicitly and acutely fraught.1 Stripping away ontological 1 Or, I should say, are fraught in ways that those operating on a terrain of certainty do not face. Certainty brings with it its own set of ethical difficulties, such as what normative principles should guide political and other interventions that affect the lives of others. But where

certainty and control are lacking, additional ethical issues come into play (DeMartino 2011). 2 As with most of what they advocate, Gibson-Graham (2011, 12) defend academic intervention in pragmatic terms, without claiming that it matters more than other warrant for their projects, Gibson-Graham confront the immense ethical import of decisions researchers make in three critical areas: 1) the language and
theories they adopt, and the affect they cultivate in themselves as scholars making sense of the world; this entails inter alia the posture they adopt toward themselves and others as projects of becoming; 2) the

relationships they forge with other community members they encounter in campaigns for economic emancipation; and, 3) the way in which they position themselves in relation to research and activism in a world they cannot control. Implicit in the care that Gibson-Graham give to these questions is an understanding of the privilege academics enjoy and the opportunities they face to alter the course of human affairs. As university-based scholars, we are well positioned to mobilize the resources to support the co-creation of knowledges, create the networks necessary to spread these knowledges, work with activists and academics of the future, and foster an environment where new facts can survive (Gibson- Graham 2008, 17). In this vision, academics enjoy leverage not just through large, official projects that entail aggressive social engineeringof the sort too often pursued by institutions like the World Bank . Instead, they argue that We have a broader notion of (political) agency, no longer restricted to a mass collective subject and potentially involving variously sized collectives of human and non-human actants . Small actions and networks can be seen

to have sweeping global effects, and rapid large-scale change can emerge from diffuse local transformations (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2009, 342). Here and elsewhere Gibson-Graham present the scholar as uniquely positioned to cultivate and nurture economic diversity, or to starve new initiatives through judgmental scientific accounts that render them invisible or, where visible, unviable. Academics have access to international networks that take the form of personal relationships, conferences, journals, reports and the like. Academic networks construct epistemic communities that can expedite the spread of new insights and understandings from place to place and the replication of experiments in living from locality to locality or the very same
networks can block transmission altogether (Gibson-Graham 2008). And for Gibson-Graham, the practice of replication, experimentation and innovation in specific localities is all there is when it comes to constructing economic difference (GibsonGraham 2003).2 political practices: Research is a site where new publics are marshaled around matters of concern, and university-based research is where experimentation is supported. So why not conceive of university-based action research as a potential catalyst for going on in a different mode of humanity, starting where we are, in our own regions? What have we got to lose?

The only way for humanitarianism to be coopted by Westernism is the project being undertaken in the name of capital the aff solves
Marina

GRINID, Lecture for Knowledge Smuggling!, 12 January 2009, FROM BIOPOLITICS TO NECROPOLITICS, ctc

Immediately I would like to as well think on the difference in between coloniality and colonialism. Coloniality that is different from the historical colonialism is

the hidden logic of contemporary capital and makes possible here and now the imperial transformation and colonial management of the World in the name of fake but for capital constitutive parameters: progress, civilization, development, and democracy . This process of coloniality is grounded in the Western rhetoric of modernization and salvation, through which global capitalism attempts to disgustingly snobbish and when is not possible with pure violence and death of millions to reorganize what it calls human capital. In the capitalist apocalyptic scenario, technology gets out of control; it seeks only progress and development, and in this fake progress the only scientists, or artists, who can be involved are those from the First capitalist World. You will be hard pressed to find any trace of a position that originates anywhere outside of the Western (First World) neo-liberal capitalism. This differentiation as well makes a cut within postcolonial theory. I quote Achille Mbembe, listen carefully: There is no doubt that postcolonial theory, under its many guises, has importantly contributed to the unmasking of Western hegemony in the field of the humanities and in other disciplines. But at the same time the postcolonial theory has revealed the violence of Western epistemologies and their dehumanizing impulses. This process is far from over. It has intensified in the situation when the imperial sovereignty
dictates who may live and who must die. When sovereign power has taken control over mortality and has defined life as the very site of the manifestation of absolute power, we need to start asking different questions. One such question is who has the right to kill? What does the implementation of such a right tell us? How can we account for the contemporary ways in which the political, under the guise of war, of resistance or of the fight against terror, makes the murder of the enemy its primary and absolute objective? The other challenge to postcolonial theory is what is referred to as globalization. What is clear is that it opens

awareness beyond the postcolonial theory of the 80s and the 90s.

The alternatives abolition of privilege is impossible rather, the plan realizes there is no privileged location for activism because the academy/community binary is always already blurred. Only the plan utilizes power positively.
JK Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): a feminist critique of political economy, 1996, xxvi-xxviii, ctc

Gabriela Delgadillo, one of the academic researchers who had been a Lacanian analyst in her native Bolivia, understood

this in terms of the relationship between analyst and analysand. The goal of the analyst is not to become the analysand's equal, but to move the analysand away from the project of shoring up his or her fantasies and into the difficult process of analysisproducing "truth," in other words, a different, more distanced relation to fantasy. To get the analysand interested in this process, the analyst must come to inhabit the space of desire, which is what we were inadvertently doing in our project. Our refusal to define the economy or capitalism had the effect of making our knowledge desirable. Under Gabriela's tutelage, we began to see the "inequality" between academic and community researchers as constitutive of our work, rather than as a hindrance or detraction. The relationship between academic and community member is eroticized by inequality, by the way "they" invest our peculiar status and formal knowledge with power, and that is in part what made our conversations work. A seductive form of
power (Allen 2003) drew them to us and our project, even as it prompted them to mock, berate, and belittle the university and those working within it. We realized that,

far from attempting to achieve a pristine interaction untainted

by power, we needed to mobilize and direct power, and to make sure that it was used to foster rather than kill what we hoped to elicit passionate participation in our project. Thinking more generally about the role of academics and academic work in a politics of collective action, the injunction to "start where you are" reminds us that there is no privileged social location from which to embark on building a community economy. For us this means that our academic location is no more or less suitable as a starting place than our other social locations as women, citizens, middle-aged adults, yoginis, local residents, workers, and bearers of racial privilege. The extended and complex collectivities engaged in building community economies cannot be recognized in simple relational oppositions like academy/community. While the capabilities we bring to bear may be shaped by our academic training, and some of the networks we are embedded in may be constituted through our academic activities, these particularities distinguish us within but do not separate us from the communities we are working with. Instead they enable us to connect in particular ways. As social scientists we may want, for example, to treat social projects and innovations
(or indeed any social site) as "experiments," to use Callon's term (2005a; Callon and Caliskan 2005). What this means minimally is that we

treat them as instances to learn from, rather than things to be "put in their place" through moral judgment or incorporation into a theoretical macronarrative as case or countercase. Characterizing the U.S. health-care system as an "immense uncontrolled experiment, housing a vast collection of different, potentially informative ways of working" (2004, 286), Donald Berwick attests that "every process produces information on the basis of which it can be improved."21 We often ignore this information because it is not what we are looking for. But as social researchers interested in economic alternatives, this is just the kind of knowledge we are seeking to produce. By processing and purveying such information for an organization
or project, by formalizing and making transportable its experience and strategies (Callon 2005c), the researcher can enable selfreflection among participants, foster a productive redirection of energies, and legitimize the organization in a wider social context. All of these contribute to its strength and viability, to the expanded performation of the model and practices it embodies. Rather than working on the organization or project, the social scientist works alongside it, collaborating wittingly or unwittingly with the other members of a "hybrid research collective": researchers from various disciplines, funders, activists, clients, implicated bystanders, whoever is involved in the project and producing knowledge about it (Callon 2005b). The

social scientist so engaged is always already an activist, part of a collective agency, without needing to change hats or stray outside the walls of the academy.

The plan breaks down the commodity fetishism that allows capital to hollow and objectify the oppressed
Edward A. AVILA, Ph. D @ UC San Diego - Conditions of (Im)possibility : necropolitics, neoliberalism, and the cultural politics of death in contemporary Chicana/o film and literature 2012, ctc *the card is in the context of a documentary named Maquilapolis that is about the Maquilas in Juarez. In this section, I argue that the documentary film Maquilapolis

critiques the erasure of subjectivity through carefully constructed representations of social reification, particularly in relation to the production of commodified objects or things vis--vis sensuous, living beings. Semantic variations
of the term sensuousness capture the multiple dimensions of fetishism represented in the film. The term sensuous contains several important meanings that offer a way of discussing feminicide and anti-female terror in relation to commodity fetishism and, by extension, social reification. Sensuous denotes, among other things, (i) that which pertains to the senses or sense-perception, (ii) that which affects the senses, and (iii) forms of devotion to the gratification and pleasure of the senses (OED). In

conceptualizing the relationship between social reification and fetishism, we turn to two distinct, but related, formscommodity fetishism and sexual fetishism. An analysis of commodity fetishism allows for an interpretive explication of the erasure of sensuous, living forms of labor and social relations. Meanwhile, critical attention to representations of hyper-sexualized, objectified women reveals the extent to which sexual fetishism emerges as an important social and cultural force in tandem with social reification toward the reproduction of the conditions of possibility for social and political abandonment. Both forms draw our attention to the ways in which women, as feeling, thinking, and acting social subjects are reconfigured (and re-presented) as abstracted, dehumanized objects. The essence of capitals power lies in its ability to function as a normative, universal organizing principle. If we take fetishism to characterize the totality of capitalist social processes, then we must ask to what extent the film configures commodified social relations through images of subjectified commodities and objectified living beings. Describing the
social economy of (late) capitalism in terms of recurring processes of fetishism, William Pietz observes, The very legal and financial categories that establish capitals social reality bring about the fetishized consciousness appropriate to it through what Ma rx describes as three-level chiasmus between people and things. The most superficial level is that of personified things and reified people Marx refers to this whole structure as the Trinity Formula: land, labor, and capital (the things that appear to have the personlike power to produce value); landlord, wageworker, capitalist (the reified identities that personify the factors composing capitalist production); and lastly, rent, wages, and profits (the forms of money-capital that mediate among them). This level of fetishized objects and individuals is really an expression of the more fundamental level of fetishized relations. . . People

are reified in their relations insofar as their negotiations and other interactions must be expressed through the objectivity of the commodity price system (that is, in the markets for labor, consumer goods, and
capital). (emphases added, 148) I want to address two important points raised by Pietz. Firstly, Marxs rhetorical schema (i.e., chiasmus) reveals the object-mediation logic of fetishized social relations represented in the Trinity Formula. Reified identities (social

subjects) confront things possessing person-like power mediated by money-capital as the materiality of value or the social substance that appears in material form (130).32 In this respect, commodity fetishism addresses (i) relations between capital and labor and (ii) relations among workers differentiated and essentialized by various levels of productive labor (assembly
workers, supervisors, floor managers, etc.). Additionally, commodity fetishism reaches beyond the shop floor and into the marketplace of sellers and buyers/consumers of commodities, whether through exchange of money for labor or for pleasure. The

materiality of value under late-capitalism potentially has the effect of inscribing upon the body a monetary price or exchange value and, in doing so, transfiguring the dynamic and sensuous living being (social subject) into a reified object of exchange. This is most evident in the sex-industry where prostitution emerges as a form of labor linked to Necessity insofar as it constitutes a form of socio-economic constraint in which the exchange of money for pleasure, from the perspective of
the seller, is an exchange of pleasure for survival in the context of social exclusion and political abandonment. It is worth noting that in the act of survival, the

selling of ones body for money reproduces the notion of the body as an object of consumption. This is not to deny the act of survival as a form of agency or form of resistance against violent
inequality, but rather to signal how in the act of survival and resistance reification nonetheless rears its ugly presence. Secondly, Pietzs notion of fetishized objects and people as the expression of a more fundamental level of fetishized social relations points us

in the direction of social reification. If

social negotiations and interactions are expressed through the objectivity of the commodity-price system, then the reduction of women as sexualized objects or as the abstract producers of commodities rest on a reified conception of human subjectivity in which the specific, concrete and complex identities and personal histories of potential and actual victims evaporate (or melt) into thin air. The sensuous, not as sexualized
objectification but in terms of Marxs theory of the sensuous that manifests in a plurality of ways (thinking, feeling, wanting, creating, acting, loving, and, yes, hurting, for example)

gets emptied out, erased, leaving behind a socially

vacated body, both symbolically and literally , bearing the inscription of commodity value, whether in the form of abstracted labor or an object of consumption. As I will discuss in greater detail later in this chapter when analyzing Seorita Extraviada, the concept of commodity fetishism registers the ways in which violence against women remain obscured or elided behind the equality of market exchange (Kennedy, 108). In interrogating the social character of commodity fetishism and the apparent magical qualities of the commodity, Marx illustrates how the hands and heads of laborers are severed as the products of labor are intimately connected to money as the universal exchange in the marketplace. As the value of commodities increasingly inheres in the object through the erasure of real labor expended to produce the object, the logic of the market-place bleeds into what Wendy Brown describes in the neoliberal context as the construction and interpellation of individuals as entrepreneurial actors in every sphere of social life (42-43). During the next few pages, I want to pick up on
what Marx describes as the finished form of the world of commoditieswhich conceals the social character of private labour and the social relations between the individual workers (168-69).

Neoliberalism is the future of colonialism only the plan addresses the root cause
Mabel Moraa

et al - Professor of Spanish and International and Area Studies @ Washington University in Saint Louis, PhD

from University of Minnesota, Enrique Dussel, Carlos Juregui, 2008 Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate pg 10-12, ctc In other words, from

Canudos to the Mexican Revolution to the guerilla wars of the 1960-1980s, Latin American history is also the history of its many replicants and its multiple forms of systemic and nonsystemic resistance against colonialism and the rule of capital. Likewise, the social movements that appeared in the Latin American scenario during the last decades of the 20th century (Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, in Argentina, Movimento dos Trabajadores Rurais Sem Terra, in Brazil, the Zapatista Movement, in Mexico, indigenous mobilizations in the Andean and Central American regions, to name just some of the most notorious expressions of popular struggles) are evidence of the peoples determination to resist economic inequality, political repression, and social injustice, which are functions of the surviving apparatus
of neocolonial domination (what the Peruvian thinker Jos Carlos Maritegui called colonialismo suprstite *surviving colonialism+) in contemporary times. But the

resilient practices mentioned above, as well as the numerous manifestations of collective sentiments of discontent and rebellion often expressed through the symbolic practices of everyday life and popular culture, are only possible because they are rooted in solid cultural and epistemological foundations. In fact, the history of Latin Americas resistance to colonialism is constituted by the interweaving of multiple narratives that include testimonies of dominated cultures which have survived the devastating impacts of homogenization, repression, and censorship, managing to maintain their alternative and challenging quality throughout the different stages of Latin American history. For this reason, any study of social and political
resistance in the contexts we focus on in this book, necessarily implies an analysis of marginalized imaginaries and alternative epistemologies, surviving and emerging subjectivities, and modes of representation which exist in colonial and neocolonial societies under and in spite of specific conditions of production, reception, and dissemination of knowledge. It could be said, that by

exposing the perpetuation and metamorphic strategies utilized over the centuries by colonial and neocolonial domination, Latin American history challenges the concept of postcoloniality from within. This is particularly true when the prefix is used to connote the cancellation or overcoming of political, cultural and
ideological conditions imposed by foreign powers in societies that existed under colonial rule. Although a periodization of Latin American coloniality is not only possible but necessary in studying regional developments, the idea of a stage in which colonial domination had been economically, politically and culturally erased and/or transcended (as suggested, in some interpretations, by the prefix post) seems more the product of a depoliticized evaluation of contemporary history or even an expression of hope and desire than the result of a thorough examination of Latin Americas past and present. This book offers a thorough examination of the contributions and the downsides of the concept of post-coloniality in the region, and authors differ, on many occasions, about the merits and applicability of the term for our field of study. It is precisely this plurality of critical approaches and ideological positions that makes this book a challenging contribution to the debate. In any case, it

is obvious that for Latin America both globalization and neoliberalism stand as new incarnations of neocolonialism, and capitalism continues to be the structuring principle which, by ruling all aspects of national and international relations, not only allows for but requires the perpetuation of coloniality. The consolidation of a new world order in which the concentration of power and the redefinition and strengthening of hegemony is taking place at a formidable pace, also calls for a thorough examination of peripheral societies where most of the struggles for economic, political, and epistemological liberation are being fought, with variable results. It is within this
framework of theoretical problems and political realities that this book has been structured.

2ac colonialism transmodernity alt

We control uniqueness for this argument 1AC Vogel indicates that the US has near infinite control over Mexico only the plan is able to reverse economic colonialism Permutation do both imaginative resistance to neoliberalism and the use of local movements is the only way to realize the alternative
Escobar 02 [Arturo , Department of Anthropology University of North Carolina, and Instituto Colombiano de Antropologa e
Historia, Bogot. Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise:3 The Latin American modernity/coloniality Research Program+//BMitch

Rethinking the economy, in the concrete. The combined processes of modernity and coloniality can be seen as projects for the radical reconversion of human and biophysical ecologies world wide. One may speak about a systematic project of cultural, ecological, and economic reconversion along eurocentric lines. Conversely, one

may consider the need to build on practices of cultural, ecological, and economic difference for concrete projects of world transformation for worlds and knowledges otherwise. This helps give flesh and blood to the colonial difference and global coloniality. While these processes have to be advanced at the same time, there seems to be a pressing need to come up with new economic imaginaries, imaginaries that enable effective and practical resistance to the seemingly overpowering imaginary of the market sanctified by neo-liberal globalization (Hinkelamerts age of the total market). Ethnographically, we can follow in the wake of ecological anthropologists documenting practices of ecological difference, which, coupled with the political-intellectual strategies of social movements, could feed into concrete projects of alternative eco-cultural designs and world construction. Theoretically, we are ill equipped for the task. Part of
the answer lies in the fact that political economy analyses have made invisible practices of economic difference, given the totalizing and capitalocentric tendencies of their discourses; these analyses have, in short, tended to reduce all economic forms to the terms of the Same, namely, capital itself (Gibson-Graham 1996). That ecology and the body are ineluctably attached to place (even if not place-bound) seems easy to accept. Less clear is that thinking

about economic difference and alternative economic imaginaries should also have a place-based dimension. Let us see why, in a way that enables us to introduce a place-based dimension to the coloniality of power and the colonial difference. Place, after all, is the site of the subaltern par excellence, the excluded dimension of modernitys concern with space, universality, movement, and the like. It would then make sense to emplace the MC project in more than a metaphorical way. This point is driven home by a project on Women and the Politics of Place that brings
together gender, ecology and economy into one theoretical-political framework.4 In writing about this project, Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson introduce the notion of economic difference and the idea of emplacement, building on the decentered and disorganized (but globally emplaced) political imaginary of second wave feminism, in the following way: Women

and the Politics of Place builds on that ground [of feminist politics], extending the idea of a politics of ubiquity by emphasizing its ontological substrate: a vast set of disarticulated places
households, social communities, ecosystems, workplaces, organizations, bodies, public arenas, urban spaces, diasporas, regions, occupationsrelated

analogically rather than organically and connected through webs of signification. If women are everywhere, a woman is always somewhere, and those somewheres are what the project is
interested in: places being created, strengthened, defended, augmented, transformed by women. It is as though the identity category, woman, were to be addressed through contextualization or emplacement, and the feminist question had become What

might a politics of the emplacement be? Not a politics of the category, or of identity per se, but a politics of the production of subjects and places. A politics of becoming in place. (J.K. Gibson-Graham 2003). From an MC perspective,

it can be said that place here serves as an epistemic perspective that can be occupied by many subjects. The Women and the Politics of Place project indeed aims at asserting a logic of difference and possibility against the homogenizing tendencies of globalization and political economy; it seeks to make visible a landscape of cultural, ecological and economic differences; to this extent, there is certain convergence here between the projects of feminism, ecology, and alternative economies and this convergence is articulated around the politics of place. I am not
arguing that this is the only space of convergence for projects of feminist, economic, and ecological futures. I am arguing for a dialogue between the MC project and projects such as those reviewed in this section. The

notion of place-based (although, again, not place-bound) practices of identity, nature, and economy allows us to go beyond a view of subaltern places as just subsumed in a global logic or as a site in a global network, unable to ground any significant resistance, let alone an alternative construction. At the level of the economy, one may realize that places are never fully capitalist, but are inhabited by economic difference, with the potential for becoming something other, an other economy. It is about rethinking difference from the perspective of the economy, and the economy from the perspective of difference. By emplacing the MC project, one might thus be able to link global coloniality to projects that have potential for concrete, real transformations . These may take place in conjunction with social movements. This revaluing of local politics might be one of most important contributions we can make at present, in a moment when nobody seems to give any credence to local actions. Conclusion In his retrospective look at critical discourses on identity in Latin American philosophy and social sciences
since the end of the nineteenth century to the present, Crtica de la Razn Latinoamericana, Santiago Castro-Gmez (1996) concludes that all

such discourses of identity from Alberdi to Mart and Rod and to Zea and Roig-- have been complicit with a modernist logic of alterization, and have thus amounted to countermodernist proposals in the best of cases. In other words, most accounts of identity in liberation discourses in philosophy and other fields have relied on postulating a foundational alterity and a transcendental subject that would constitute a radical alternative in relation to an equally
homogenized modern/European/North American Other. Whether appealing to Latin American indigenous, mestizo, catholic, primordialist, anti-imperialist, or vitalist identities in contradistinction to white, protestant, instrumental, disenchanted, individualist, patriarchal, etc. Euro/American identitythis analysis, are

strategies of alterization, in Castro-Gmez archaeological doomed to failure. To acknowledge the partial, historical, and heterogeneous character of all identities is to begin to correct this flaw, and to begin the journey towards views of identity that emerge from an episteme posilustrada, or post-Enlightment episteme. To the counter-modernist logic of alterization, Castro-Gmez opposes a logic of the historical production of difference. It remains to be seen whether the MC project will fully bypass the modernist logic of alterization insightfully
analyzed by Castro-Gmez. Conceived as an epistemic decolonization, this project would certainly seem to go beyond a politics of representation based on identifying an exclusive space of enunciation of ones own that is blind to its own constructedness; it would also avoid comprehensive allegations of inclusion under a single umbrella (all Latin Americans), and would resist the idea that those included would be fully outside the colonialist totality. Such dreams are in the process of being abandoned. The notion of border thinking (or critical border positioning, as Catherine Walsh has recently called it, 2003) seems to provide, by itself, some insurance against the older logic. As we have seen, engaging with gender, environment and economy

might afford further guarantees that the important insights of this group will not run into the traps described by Castro-Gmez. No longer an absolute other in relation to modernity, and so no longer condemned to the perpetual solitude of which Octavio Paz and Garca Mrquez were so enamored, the Latin America that emerges from the project so sketchily reviewed here would however continue to enact a politics of difference, precisely because it has become newly aware of the constitutive difference that inhabits it and the history that has produced it. Perhaps it is indeed the case that an other Latin America(s) is possible.

Our experimental lens supercharges the ability for the HRC to morph and address any colonialist underpinnings of the plan George DEMARTINO - Professor of international economics @ U of Denver, 2013, Work in Progress posted, Ethical
Economic Engagement in a World Beyond Control, Rethinking Marxism)//ctc

Meeting the Gibson-Graham challenge to see the world differently, without recourse to ontologies that discipline, direct and constrain, requires of the academic a difficult adjustment in affect that many cannot countenance. It calls on us, after all, to challenge the supposed academic virtues of detachment, discernment and critique that allow researchers to penetrate the veil of common understanding and expose the root causes and bottom lines that govern the phenomenal world (ibid, 6). This academic stance means that most theorizing is tinged with skepticism and negativity, not a particularly nurturing environment for hopeful, inchoate experiments (ibid, 6). In the place of skepticism and negativity we are asked to quiet the critical voices that clamor for our attention and observe without the reflexive pre-judgment that renders certain strategies and projects as vestigial, inadequate or otherwise wrong- headed. In this connection Gibson-Graham explore Sedgwicks notion of the paranoid motive that colors much social theorizing, where Everything comes to mean the same thing, usually something large and threatening (like neoliberalism, or globalization, or capitalism, or empire) (ibid, 6). Following Sedgwick, they challenge our predilection for strong theory which is marked by an embracing reach and a reductive field of meaning (Sedgwick 2003) (ibid, 6). This kind of theory discounts and marginalizes even as it flatters; here, academic vanity trumps emancipation. In contrast, Sedgwick and Gibson-Graham ask of us to produce weak theory, theory with substantially reduced pretensions and with entirely different goals: What if we asked theory instead to help us see openings, to provide a space of freedom and possibility? The practice of weak theorizing involves refusing to extend explanation too widely or deeply, refusing to know too much. Weak theory could not know that social experiments are doomed to fail or destined to reinforce dominance; it could not tell us that the world economy will never be transformed by the disorganized proliferation of local projects (ibid, 6-7, emphasis added). In Gibson-Grahams hands the aspiration to learning without judging yields an approach to research that entails experimentation of a particular sort. To treat something as a social experiment is to open to what it has to teach us, very different from the critical task of assessing the ways in which it is good or bad, strong or weak, mainstream or alternative (ibid, 16). Experimentation in this context involves the academic researcher in the social innovations she investigates. Unlike positivist experimentation in which the researcher is to hold back from any affective connection with the community under study, the diverse economies project features deep and sustained engagement between academics and others and explicitly engages all parties to the experiment as researchers and objects of research. While the academic in these projects has certain contributions to make (owing to her academic skill set and
resources) she does not adopt the stance of the detached, objective observer who is uniquely situated to glean the truth that the experiment reveals. In the experiment she pursues

her own transformation while she seeks strategies to enable the transformation of her academic and non-academic collaborators. Here there is no active transformative subject learning about a separate inert object, but a subject- object that is a becoming world
knowledge but in (Gibson-Graham 2011, 4). This

is Not learning in the sense of increasing a store of

the sense of becoming other, creating connections and encountering

possibilities that render us newly constituted beings in a newly constituted world . Latour along with others has called this learning to be affected (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2009, 322). As subjects and objects of experimentation, Gibson-Grahams researchers face a duty to engage in processes of self-reconstruction. The challenge is to reconstruct themselves as conditions of possibility of the diverse economy, rather than as detached, skeptical observers who know already the limitations of the projects

unfolding around them. But how to achieve this? Here we have turned to what Nietzsche called self-artistry, and Foucault called selfcultivation, addressing them to our own thinking. The

co- implicated processes of changing ourselves/changing our thinking/ changing the world are what we identify as an ethical practice. If politics involves taking transformative decisions in an undecideable terrain, ethics is the continual exercising of a choice to be/act/or think in certain ways (Varela, 1992) (Gibson-Graham 2008, 5, 6). Where
and how can these processes of self-cultivation take place? Gibson-Graham find an answer in the hybrid research community.

The alternative is transmodernist thats an ethical system that refuses binaries which means they arent able to utilize the binary of desirable/undesirable vote aff because you cant make a normative statement about the alt Links in the context of the USFG arent applicable we separate ourselves from larger institutions and act as academics George DEMARTINO - Professor of international economics @ U of Denver, 2013, Work in Progress posted, Ethical
Economic Engagement in a World Beyond Control, Rethinking Marxism)//ctc

Ethical action is as much a practice of adopting new habits as anything else-- habits of reflecting on our interconnections with others, approaching the new with an inquiring mind and an appreciative stance, trusting others as we jointly encounter a future of unknowns and uncertainties, and learning to allay our fears and conjure creativity. There are no easy solutions to the problems that confront us and there are no guaranteed outcomes, but by thinking ethically we can expand our capacity to act. -- Gibson-Graham, Cameron and Healy (Forthcoming) If what is to be done? is not answered for us by
reference to a disciplinary ontology of social organization that adjudicates political interventions, if non- scientific narrative in (Elgins sense of the term) rather than science provides all the grounding we have and should want, then we inhabit a political landscape in which the choices we make are explicitly and acutely fraught.1 Stripping away ontological 1 Or, I should say, are fraught in ways that those operating on a terrain of certainty do not face. Certainty brings with it its own set of ethical difficulties, such as what normative principles should guide political and other interventions that affect the lives of others. But where

certainty and control are lacking, additional ethical issues come into play (DeMartino 2011). 2 As with most of what they advocate, Gibson-Graham (2011, 12) defend academic intervention in pragmatic terms, without claiming that it matters more than other warrant for their projects, Gibson-Graham confront the immense ethical import of decisions researchers make in three critical areas: 1) the language and
theories they adopt, and the affect they cultivate in themselves as scholars making sense of the world; this entails inter alia the posture they adopt toward themselves and others as projects of becoming; 2) the

relationships they forge with other community members they encounter in campaigns for economic emancipation; and, 3) the way in which they position themselves in relation to research and activism in a world they cannot control. Implicit in the care that Gibson-Graham give to these questions is an understanding of the privilege academics enjoy and the opportunities they face to alter the course of human affairs. As university-based scholars, we are well positioned to mobilize the resources to support the co-creation of knowledges, create the networks necessary to spread these knowledges, work with activists and academics of the future, and foster an environment where new facts can survive (Gibson- Graham 2008, 17). In this vision, academics enjoy leverage not just through large, official projects that entail aggressive social engineeringof the sort too often pursued by institutions like the World Bank . Instead, they argue that We have a broader notion of (political) agency, no longer restricted to a mass collective subject and potentially involving variously

sized collectives of human and non-human actants . Small actions and networks can be seen to have sweeping global effects, and rapid large-scale change can emerge from diffuse local transformations (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2009, 342). Here and elsewhere Gibson-Graham present the scholar as uniquely positioned to cultivate and nurture economic diversity, or to starve new initiatives through judgmental scientific accounts that render them invisible or, where visible, unviable. Academics have access to international networks that take the form of personal relationships, conferences, journals, reports and the like. Academic networks construct epistemic communities that can expedite the spread of new insights and understandings from place to place and the replication of experiments in living from locality to locality or the very same
networks can block transmission altogether (Gibson-Graham 2008). And for Gibson-Graham, the practice of replication, experimentation and innovation in specific localities is all there is when it comes to constructing economic difference (GibsonGraham 2003).2 political practices: Research is a site where new publics are marshaled around matters of concern, and university-based research is where experimentation is supported. So why not conceive of university-based action research as a potential catalyst for going on in a different mode of humanity, starting where we are, in our own regions? What have we got to lose?

The only way for humanitarianism to be coopted by Westernism is the project being undertaken in the name of capital the aff solves
Marina

GRINID, Lecture for Knowledge Smuggling!, 12 January 2009, FROM BIOPOLITICS TO NECROPOLITICS, ctc

Immediately I would like to as well think on the difference in between coloniality and colonialism. Coloniality that is different from the historical colonialism is

the hidden logic of contemporary capital and makes possible here and now the imperial transformation and colonial management of the World in the name of fake but for capital constitutive parameters: progress, civilization, development, and democracy . This process of coloniality is grounded in the Western rhetoric of modernization and salvation, through which global capitalism attempts to disgustingly snobbish and when is not possible with pure violence and death of millions to reorganize what it calls human capital. In the capitalist apocalyptic scenario, technology gets out of control; it seeks only progress and development, and in this fake progress the only scientists, or artists, who can be involved are those from the First capitalist World. You will be hard pressed to find any trace of a position that originates anywhere outside of the Western (First World) neo-liberal capitalism. This differentiation as well makes a cut within postcolonial theory. I quote Achille Mbembe, listen carefully: There is no doubt that postcolonial theory, under its many guises, has importantly contributed to the unmasking of Western hegemony in the field of the humanities and in other disciplines. But at the same time the postcolonial theory has revealed the violence of Western epistemologies and their dehumanizing impulses. This process is far from over. It has intensified in the situation when the imperial sovereignty
dictates who may live and who must die. When sovereign power has taken control over mortality and has defined life as the very site of the manifestation of absolute power, we need to start asking different questions. One such question is who has the right to kill? What does the implementation of such a right tell us? How can we account for the contemporary ways in which the political, under the guise of war, of resistance or of the fight against terror, makes the murder of the enemy its primary and absolute objective? The other challenge to postcolonial theory is what is referred to as globalization. What is clear is that it opens

awareness beyond the postcolonial theory of the 80s and the 90s.

Perm do the alternative Gibson Graham indicate we break down the use of the subject/object binary thats the crux of all dichotomist issues

No link to essentializing gender and race issues we just believe that struggles against neoliberalism intersects with struggles versus sexism and racism thats Miller Plan is a prerequisite to breaking down rationality of the State - only an experimental approach to economics can escape the fascism of control George DEMARTINO - Professor of international economics @ U of Denver, 2013, Work in Progress posted, Ethical
Economic Engagement in a World Beyond Control, Rethinking Marxism)//ctc Given all that we have encountered in Gibson-Graham, it ought come as no surprise that the

project emphasizes the ethical virtue of humility that stems from recognition that the world is something we struggle to make but do not ever control. The same grounding that provides hopethe anti-essentialist presumptions that undermine any ontologically-imposed order or simplicityalso undermines any aspiration to social mastery or social engineering. Epistemic insufficiency is the universal here. Contingency, chance, discontinuity, serendipity, the particular (and the peculiar), emergence, becomingthese are the watchwords that at once sustain a political project of invention and place off limits any claims it can make to certainty or control. Ignorance is what were up against, Gibson-Graham
suggest, but its also what we have going for us as we seek to become other than we are and live otherwise than we do. But how do we undertake transformative projects, then, when we know that we know so little about their efficacy, or their intended or unintended effects? Gibson- Grahams choice of stance as experimental researchers and recognition

of the experimental nature of their interventions represent part of the answer to this question. But this is experimentation with a twist: oriented not so much toward the excavation and assessment of what has already occurred, but toward opening to what can be learned from what is happening on the ground; where participants place emphasis on reading the potentially positive futures
barely visible in the present order of things, and to imagine how to strengthen and move them along (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2009, 342). In recent years, as

Gibson-Graham have begun to wrestle with ecological issues in the context of recognition of the ethical entailments of the Anthropocene epoch, uncertainty has come to play a larger role in their thinking. If the dynamics of an economy are beyond cognitive mapping, those of the natural world (of which humans are a part) are all the more daunting and befuddling. Gibson-Graham are able to find among scholars of the Anthropocene verification of their tentative, experimental approach to economic construction: the only way to approach such a period in which uncertainty is high and one cannot predict what the future holds, is not to predict, but to experiment and act inventively and exuberantly via diverse adventures in living . (Dumanoski 2009,
213 quoting C.S. Holling) (Gibson-Graham 2011, 4) Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson have given careful thought to responsible thinking and action in a world marked irrevocably by epistemic insufficiency. Berry chronicles the harms that have attended the aspiration to and hubris associated with the production and application of scientific knowledge. Science

draws our attention to its power to know and to the content of what it takes as known and to what is, if not yet known, in principle knowable. It mesmerizes with its capacities, and in the process we lose sight of its limitations. In this way it seduces us into believing we know more than we do know or even can ever know. It reassures us that it promises (right now or in some future near future) adequate understanding of and solutions to the problems we confront. But hubris of this sort spurs us to projects we have no warrant to pursueprojects whose grand scale and intensive and extensive effects far outpace our understanding and control. As antidote to our scientific pretensions Berry advocates what he calls the
way of ignorance.4 There is by now an urgent need for us to embrace the fact that our knowledge is small, puny even, relative to our ignorance; and that we had better attend to our cognitive limitations as we go about designing our technologies, industries, institutions, policies, and practices. The way of ignorance is to be careful, to know the limits and the efficacy of our knowledge (Berry 2005, ixx). Awareness of the limits of our knowledge directs us to consider carefully the scale on which we ought to work: 4 Some of the following draws on DeMartino (2011). By propriety of scale we limit the possible damages of the risks we take. If we cannot control scale so as to limit the effects, then we should not take the risk. From this, it is clear that some risks simply should not

be taken. Some experiments should not be made (ibid, 66). In a similar vein, environmentalists Bill Vitek and Wes Jackson (2008, 1) argue that humanity

will always be billions of times more ignorant than knowledgeable about the world we inhabit. Jackson advocates for the adoption of an ignorance- based worldview in which we give constant attention to what we do not and cannot know. He captures the unknowable
with the concept of mystery, and argues that if we are up against mystery, then knowledge is relatively small, and the ancient program is the right one: Act on the basis of ignorance. Acting on the basis of ignorance, paradoxically, requires one to know things, remember things for instance, that failure is possible, that error is possible, that second chances are desirable (so dont risk everything on the first chance), and so on (Jackson 2005, 15). Taking these warnings seriously would require fairly substantial revisions in how scholars across the disciplines understand their role vis-a-vis technological and social innovation. Surveying neoclassical economics David Colander has drawn attention to the fact that economists

continue to presume a simple system of economy, which leads them far too easily to an economics of control approach to policy. Simple system theory presumes what Colander (2003; 2005) calls the holy trinity of rationality, greed, and equilibrium that allows the economist to deduce agents behavior and the outcome of their interactions from first principles. The approach generates parsimonious and elegant theoretical models by collapsing, in Gibson-Grahams terms, what it aggregates into fewer categories (see epigraph). The severe reductionism of the approach seduces economists into believing that they have at their disposal sufficient knowledge to exert control in the world. The economics of control approach to policy
presents the economist as efficacious as a social engineer that can turn this dial or pull that lever in order to ensure good economic outcomes. In contrast, Colander

proposes an alternative view of the economy as an irreducibly complex system. The complexity view understands the economy to encompass emergent properties, path dependencies, discontinuities, multiple equilibriums, and the like. In this view, one does not presume and then bet everything on the stability of well-behaved economic relationships; nor does one seek to generate a full economic mapping that can yield definitive conclusions about optimal policy interventions. In place of the illusion of control, the complex
system view yields a muddling through policy approach in which the economist works as an inductive social mechanic trying this, then trying that, always watching, evaluating and adjusting, and always attentive to surprise and anomalies. These arguments find resonance within various heterodox traditions within economics. Feminist Julie Nelson problematizes conceptions that rely on

the metaphor of the economy as a machine. She argues that this metaphor is based on a seventeenthcentury Newtonian understanding of a clocklike world that privileges observability, predictability and control (2004, 394; 384) and that hives off ethical considerations as irrelevant to the scientific enterprise. But this conception has by now been abandoned in the natural sciences. In contemporary physics,
for example, we find attention to quantum theory, the theory of relativity, and most recently the study of chaos and complexity [that] reveals that the universe has non-mechanical, unpredictable, non-linear, seemingly incommensurable, surprising and even spooky behaviors. More generally,

disequilibrium, effects of the observer on the observed, impossibility of prediction and control, jumpy or chaotic processes, emergence and systems that are more than just the sum of their parts demand non-mechanistic and non-reductionist approaches (ibid, 394). For Nelson, the application of these lessons to economics implies a need for context- sensitive analysis that probes the specifics of particular cases, and that understands that the insights the analysis yields are necessarily partial and contingent. Austrian-inspired
economist Deirdre McCloskey is particularly scathing in her critique of an economic profession that believes itself to operate at the command center of economic affairs. In her view, many

economists have fallen under the modernist spell, articulated, for example, by Wesley Clair Mitchell in 1924: In economics as in other sciences we desire knowledge mainly as an instrument of control. Control means the alluring possibility of shaping the evolution of economic life to fit the developing purposes of the human race. More than any other economist, our Hayek was out of step with such erotic fascism of prediction and control (McCloskey 2000, 3536).

2ac colonialism Wilderson alt

We control uniqueness for this argument 1AC Valencia indicates that the US has near infinite control over Latin America only the plan is able to reverse economic colonialism

Perm do both - opposition to neoliberalism synthesizes afro-pessimistic movements and serve as a starting point for resistance
Eduardo RESTRAPO, PhD in Philosophy from U of North Carolina, EVENTALIZING BLACKNESS IN COLOMBIA 2008, ctc This transformation in meaning, position and reference of black *+ was one of the ways in which those new subjects were constituted. The people the concrete individuals had always been there. But as subjects-in-struggle for a new epoch in history, they appeared for the first time. Stuart Hall (1985: 112). For those who have witnessed the multiple movements of indigenous and black communities in many parts of Latin America, the

concept of ethnicity is closely associated with processes of empowerment for the segments of the population that have been denied rights, experienced social discrimination, and been the target of multiple modalities of exploitation. The FZLN (Front Zapatista of National Liberation) in the southern Mexico or the CONAIE (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuador) in Ecuador are examples of different organizational apparatuses in which ethnicity and cultural difference have occupied a central place. With a base in this type of mobilization and organizational apparatuses, many scholars that consider ethnicity and cultural difference as an openly counter-hegemonic factor. Arguments about ethnicity, community, culture, identity, ancestrality, autonomy and tradition advanced by indigenous and afrodescendant populations that appear in this discourse are located in opposition to policies of structural adjustment, neoliberalism, modernity and 37 globalization associated with national or transnational economic and political elites. Interculturality from below against neoliberalism and globalototalitarism from above it seems to synthesize this understanding of the place of the dissimilar ethnic movements in the age of globalization . Some activists involved in one of the most outstanding sectors of the contemporary black movement in Colombia, known as the Process of Black Communities (PCN), seem to understand this discourse in that way. This
sector of the black movement, embodying some political culture (Escobar, lvarez and Dagnino 1998) articulated around notions of territory, autonomy, ancestrality and cultural identity of black communities, finds its most paradigmatic expression in the Colombian Pacific1 . This modality

of articulation of cultural politics is not limited to this sector of the black movement, but they have consolidated in the last decade to become one of the most powerful academic and political images of black ethnicity
in Colombia (NgWeno 2007). They either

constitute the starting point that is assumed by some or, on the contrary, the referent of the disputes or differences deployed by others. The multiple differences and nuances that are perceived in the contemporary black movement (and in their interpretations) are transversed by the ethnicization process, in which the political subject and the subject of rights lays in the notion of an ethnic group with its own culture and
different from those of Colombian society.

Our experimental lens supercharges the ability for the HRC to morph and address any colonialist or anti-black underpinnings of the plan George DEMARTINO - Professor of international economics @ U of Denver, 2013, Work in Progress posted, Ethical
Economic Engagement in a World Beyond Control, Rethinking Marxism)//ctc

Meeting the Gibson-Graham challenge to see the world differently, without recourse to ontologies that discipline, direct and constrain, requires of the academic a difficult adjustment in affect that many cannot countenance. It calls on us, after all, to challenge the supposed academic virtues of detachment, discernment and critique that allow researchers to penetrate the veil of common understanding and expose the root causes and bottom lines that govern the phenomenal world (ibid, 6). This academic stance means that most theorizing is tinged with skepticism and negativity, not a particularly nurturing environment for hopeful, inchoate experiments (ibid, 6). In the place of skepticism and negativity we are asked to quiet the critical voices that clamor for our attention and observe without the reflexive pre-judgment that renders certain strategies and projects as vestigial, inadequate or otherwise wrong- headed. In this connection Gibson-Graham explore Sedgwicks notion of the paranoid motive that colors much social theorizing, where Everything comes to mean the same thing, usually something large and threatening (like neoliberalism, or globalization, or capitalism, or empire) (ibid, 6). Following Sedgwick, they challenge our predilection for strong theory which is marked by an embracing reach and a reductive field of meaning (Sedgwick 2003) (ibid, 6). This kind of theory discounts and marginalizes even as it flatters; here, academic vanity trumps emancipation. In contrast, Sedgwick and Gibson-Graham ask of us to produce weak theory, theory with substantially reduced pretensions and with entirely different goals: What if we asked theory instead to help us see openings, to provide a space of freedom and possibility? The practice of weak theorizing involves refusing to extend explanation too widely or deeply, refusing to know too much. Weak theory could not know that social experiments are doomed to fail or destined to reinforce dominance; it could not tell us that the world economy will never be transformed by the disorganized proliferation of local projects (ibid, 6-7, emphasis added). In Gibson-Grahams hands the aspiration to learning without judging yields an approach to research that entails experimentation of a particular sort. To treat something as a social experiment is to open to what it has to teach us, very different from the critical task of assessing the ways in which it is good or bad, strong or weak, mainstream or alternative (ibid, 16). Experimentation in this context involves the academic researcher in the social innovations she investigates. Unlike positivist experimentation in which the researcher is to hold back from any affective connection with the community under study, the diverse economies project features deep and sustained engagement between academics and others and explicitly engages all parties to the experiment as researchers and objects of research. While the academic in these projects has certain contributions to make (owing to her academic skill set and
resources) she does not adopt the stance of the detached, objective observer who is uniquely situated to glean the truth that the experiment reveals. In the experiment she pursues

her own transformation while she seeks strategies to enable the transformation of her academic and non-academic collaborators. Here there is no active transformative subject learning about a separate inert object, but a subject- object that is a becoming world
knowledge but in (Gibson-Graham 2011, 4). This

is Not learning in the sense of increasing a store of

the sense of becoming other, creating connections and encountering

possibilities that render us newly constituted beings in a newly constituted world . Latour along with others has called this learning to be affected (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2009, 322). As subjects and objects of experimentation, Gibson-Grahams researchers face a duty to engage in processes of self-reconstruction. The challenge is to reconstruct themselves as conditions of possibility of the diverse economy, rather than as detached, skeptical observers who know already the limitations of the projects

unfolding around them. But how to achieve this? Here we have turned to what Nietzsche called self-artistry, and Foucault called selfcultivation, addressing them to our own thinking. The

co- implicated processes of changing ourselves/changing our thinking/ changing the world are what we identify as an ethical practice. If politics involves taking transformative decisions in an undecideable terrain, ethics is the continual exercising of a choice to be/act/or think in certain ways (Varela, 1992) (Gibson-Graham 2008, 5, 6). Where
and how can these processes of self-cultivation take place? Gibson-Graham find an answer in the hybrid research community.

Alt fails presuming ontological whiteness obscures the shared cultural practices of power structures and reinscribes oppression Welcome 2004 completing his PhD at the sociology department of the City University of
New York's Graduate Center (H. Alexander, "White Is Right": The Utilization of an Improper Ontological Perspective in Analyses of Black Experiences, Journal of African American Studies, Summer-Fall 2004, Vol. 8, No. 1 & 2, pp. 59-73) When addressing or investigating oppositional identity, roadblocks develop. Oppositional identity within the black community is said to be a rejection of all things "white," in terms of behavior and attitudes toward the "white" perspective. This formulation creates a dichotomous structure of behaviors and attitudes--some things are "white" and some things are "black." More specifically, whatever is "white" is not and cannot be "black." In this situation, the question becomes "who determines what is white?" One really does not need to ask the question of "who determines what is black" because in this argument black identity simply reflects the passively determined inverse of white identity. While the preceding analysis suggests that there are problems with Fordham and Ogbu's (1986) conceptualization of the genesis of black identity, other problems also occur with their presentation of what black identity reflects. In the sociological study of identity, and black identity in particular, personal identity has often been conflated with reference group orientation (Cross, 1991). Personal identity reflects "variables, traits, or dynamics that appear in evidence in all human beings, regardless of social class, gender, race, or culture; in this sense [personal identity] studies examine the so-called universal components of behavior" (Cross, 1991, p. 43). Reference group orientation seeks to discover "those aspects of the 'self' that are culture, class, and gender specific .... It seeks to discover differences in values, perspectives, group identifies, lifestyles and worldviews" (Cross, 1991, p. 45). Arguably, what Fordham and Ogbu label "identity" is actually reference group orientation. This paradox in the "acting white" version of oppositional culture is the result of the use of whiteness as an ontological frame. A theory of behavior wherein the agency of actors is limited is not necessarily unsound. However, the inconsistency of the "acting white" version of oppositional culture is its obfuscation of how the nature of identity does not change from group to group, presenting a narrative about the black self that is theoretically untenable. Also, by locating the origin of black identity in the mostly passive inversion of white identity, the individual agency of blacks is obscured, creating a situation wherein white actors possess a freedom to determine and construct their identity that is denied black actors

We dont call upon a higher power to implement policies we separate ourselves from institutions and become activists which proves we havent flinched George DEMARTINO - Professor of international economics @ U of Denver, 2013, Work in Progress posted, Ethical
Economic Engagement in a World Beyond Control, Rethinking Marxism)//ctc

Ethical action is as much a practice of adopting new habits as anything else-- habits of reflecting on our interconnections with others, approaching the new with an inquiring mind and an appreciative stance, trusting others as we jointly encounter a future of unknowns and uncertainties, and learning to allay our fears and conjure creativity. There are no easy solutions to the problems that confront us and there are no guaranteed outcomes, but by thinking ethically we can expand our capacity to act. -- Gibson-Graham, Cameron and Healy (Forthcoming) If what is to be done? is not answered for us by
reference to a disciplinary ontology of social organization that adjudicates political interventions, if non- scientific narrative in (Elgins sense of the term) rather than science provides all the grounding we have and should want, then we inhabit a political landscape in which the choices we make are explicitly and acutely fraught.1 Stripping away ontological 1 Or, I should say, are fraught in ways that those operating on a terrain of certainty do not face. Certainty brings with it its own set of ethical difficulties, such as what normative principles should guide political and other interventions that affect the lives of others. But where

certainty and control are lacking, additional ethical issues come into play (DeMartino 2011). 2 As with most of what they advocate, Gibson-Graham (2011, 12) defend academic intervention in pragmatic terms, without claiming that it matters more than other warrant for their projects, Gibson-Graham confront the immense ethical import of decisions researchers make in three critical areas: 1) the language and
theories they adopt, and the affect they cultivate in themselves as scholars making sense of the world; this entails inter alia the posture they adopt toward themselves and others as projects of becoming; 2) the

relationships they forge with other community members they encounter in campaigns for economic emancipation; and, 3) the way in which they position themselves in relation to research and activism in a world they cannot control. Implicit in the care that Gibson-Graham give to these questions is an understanding of the privilege academics enjoy and the opportunities they face to alter the course of human affairs. As university-based scholars, we are well positioned to mobilize the resources to support the co-creation of knowledges, create the networks necessary to spread these knowledges, work with activists and academics of the future, and foster an environment where new facts can survive (Gibson- Graham 2008, 17). In this vision, academics enjoy leverage not just through large, official projects that entail aggressive social engineeringof the sort too often pursued by institutions like the World Bank . Instead, they argue that We have a broader notion of (political) agency, no longer restricted to a mass collective subject and potentially involving variously sized collectives of human and non-human actants . Small actions and networks can be seen to have sweeping global effects, and rapid large-scale change can emerge from diffuse local transformations (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2009, 342). Here and elsewhere Gibson-Graham present the scholar as uniquely positioned to cultivate and nurture economic diversity, or to starve new initiatives through judgmental scientific accounts that render them invisible or, where visible, unviable. Academics have access to international networks that take the form of personal relationships, conferences, journals, reports and the like. Academic networks construct epistemic communities that can expedite the spread of new insights and understandings from place to place and the replication of experiments in living from locality to localityor the very same
networks can block transmission altogether (Gibson-Graham 2008). And for Gibson-Graham, the practice of replication, experimentation and innovation in specific localities is all there is when it comes to constructing economic difference (GibsonGraham 2003).2 political practices: Research is a site where new publics are marshaled around matters of concern, and university-based research is where experimentation is supported. So why not conceive of university-based action research as a potential catalyst for going on in a different mode of humanity, starting where we are, in our own regions? What have we got to lose?

Analyzing neoliberalism is an indispensable starting point for analyzing the domination of Africans
Jon SOSKE, professor of modern African history @ McGill University, THE DISSIMULATION OF RACE: "AFRO-PESSIMISM" AND THE PROBLEM OF DEVELOPMENT Qui Parle, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 2004), pp. 15-56, ctc

Tribal society was therefore not an anachronistic relic, but the product of nineteenth-century economic changes and colonial domination that independent African states inherited and incorporated, in one way or another, into their new system of political power. This eventuality is the indispensable starting point in analyzing the ideological content, the historical impact, and the apparent failure of development economics in Africa. Modernization and tribalism, in their
functioning as ideological doctrines, political projects, and objective social phenomena, did not ultimately constitute opposed historical forces. They were

two complementary and mutually determining elements in a system of economic and political rule based on limited foreign investment, the increasing bureaucratic hypertrophy of the single-party state, and the strengthening of traditional institutions to secure and maintain social order. More broadly, many facets of African culture that anthropology once considered atavistic remnants of untouched, tribal societies are now seen as complex responses to colonial and post-colonial modernity.
Recent studies have analyzed the efflorescence of African witchcraft under colonialism and afterwards: "Far from merely being a homeostatic feature of precolonial societies ... the

signs and practices of witchcraft are integral to the experience of the contemporary world. They are called on to counter the magic of modernity. And to
act upon the elusive effects of transnational forces - especially as they come to be embodied in the all-too physical forms of their local beneficiaries/'49 These and modernization, in fact represent

rituals and belief systems, widely thought to embody the failure of economic development the impact of a very modern, post-colonial capitalism on African

societies. Rosiland Shaw has described how, for the Temne of Sierra Leone, the city of witches exists in a metropolitan reality
parallel to our own where diamonds pave the streets, sorcerers buy human flesh from street vendors and fly in magic jets, and witches wear designer garments that transform them into animals. Those

witches who appear impoverished in this world actually possess great wealth and power in the other - a displacement that frequently results in the persecution of the most vulnerable for the crimes of the country's untouchable "big men/'50 It is not only a question of Africans and African culture adapting to new historical circumstances, although that they did should never be far from our minds. Development economics, in uncritically recycling the anthropological stereotypes of pre-industrial society, fundamentally misunderstood and misrepresented institutions and beliefs that are in fact the product of a long contested relationship between Africans and foreign dominance. In an important respect, however, both tribalism and development were separate but interrelated responses to the same historical process: the birth of the colonial working class. Bill Freund writes: "the heart of the economic task of the colonial state is the problem of labour. To open Africa to effective capital penetration, the most central issue which underlay all others, and which to some extent, explains the need for the conquest itself, was to pry open the labour resources of the continent, to re-direct them functionally, socially and geographically in order to create a surplus from which capital will benefit."51 Even modest economic activity directly posed the problem of the creation, reproduction, and domination of an indigenous African proletariat.
Given the chronic scarcity of labor, the colonial powers increasingly either turned to existing African elites to help recruit workers or installed tribal chiefs to act as their agents. Especially in South Africa, the

"native reserves" or tribal system served a crucial role in conjoining the rising capitalist mode of production with African agriculture by disciplining migrant labor. Yet as the colonial working class grew, labor resistance began to feed and inspire anti-colonial movements, threatening both the existing order and - in some ways more directly - its indigenous agents. Recent books by Frederick Cooper and O. Nigel Bolland (anticipated in part by Walter Rodney's A History of the Guyanese Working People) have powerfully demonstrated the centrality of the organized labor movement in the decolonization of both Africa and the Caribbean. Breaking from an older romantic narrative of national liberation, these historians have given greater attention to the
explosive role played by class contradictions within colonial society both during the struggle for independence and in the ensuing political order. The

first articulations of development represented a nationalist response to this radical working class threat, as well as the recognition of a potential political base, indeed the only possible mass political
base in much of Africa and the Caribbean. The universal language of development allowed Africans to pose demands on and against the colonial system. In his groundbreaking Decolonization and African Society, Frederick Cooper shows that a direct connection exists between post-war development theory and arguments about the future of colonial rule, which began in response to working

class revolts that swept parts of the British Empire from the mid-1930s. Before this period, concepts

of labor, industrialization, and the wageworker were simply not used by the colonial powers to describe African society. The African was a peasant who was considered more or less incapable of rigorous industrial work.
In South Africa, where African migrant labor was indispensable for the rise of industry following the discovery of the Rand gold field,

the African became a target worker, only temporarily alienated from his "natural" environment. Further, the colonial powers frequently represented the colonies themselves as lacking the necessary natural resources for industrialization and too impoverished, both environmentally and in the intelligence of their inhabitants, for the existence of a modern working class. However, the abrupt and unexpected eruption of militant workers' struggles in the 1930s shattered this pristine
and deceptive image. Set against the background of the spectacular of uprisings in the West Indies, the 1935 Copper Belt strike announced to the British that labor struggle was an empire-wide problem. In 1939 the

Mombassa general strike (Kenya), the Dares Salaam dock workers strike (Tanzania), and the Gold Coast rail strike (Ghana) made it brutally clear that none of these events represented an isolated occurrence, but each arose from profound structural conditions, rooted ultimately in colonial oppression, that threatened much broader
instability.

No impact to normative ethics and isnt applicable to the aff we simply thing that predictable economic engagement is good in order to foster actual debates on their merit thats key to decisionmaking which is the only portable skill debate teaches us The only way for humanitarianism to be coopted by Westernism is the project being undertaken in the name of capital the aff solves
Marina

GRINID, Lecture for Knowledge Smuggling!, 12 January 2009, FROM BIOPOLITICS TO NECROPOLITICS, ctc

Immediately I would like to as well think on the difference in between coloniality and colonialism. Coloniality that is different from the historical colonialism is

the hidden logic of contemporary capital and makes possible here and now the imperial transformation and colonial management of the World in the name of fake but for capital constitutive parameters: progress, civilization, development, and democracy . This process of coloniality is grounded in the Western rhetoric of modernization and salvation, through which global capitalism attempts to disgustingly snobbish and when is not possible with pure violence and death of millions to reorganize what it calls human capital. In the capitalist apocalyptic scenario, technology gets out of control; it seeks only progress and development, and in this fake progress the only scientists, or artists, who can be involved are those from the First capitalist World. You will be hard pressed to find any trace of a position that originates anywhere outside of the Western (First World) neo-liberal capitalism. This differentiation as well makes a cut within postcolonial theory. I quote Achille Mbembe, listen carefully: There is no doubt that postcolonial theory, under its many guises, has importantly contributed to the unmasking of Western hegemony in the field of the humanities and in other disciplines. But at the same time the postcolonial theory has revealed the violence of Western epistemologies and their dehumanizing impulses. This process is far from over. It has intensified in the situation when the imperial sovereignty
dictates who may live and who must die. When sovereign power has taken control over mortality and has defined life as the very site of the manifestation of absolute power, we need to start asking different questions. One such question is who has the right to kill? What does the implementation of such a right tell us? How can we account for the contemporary ways in which the political, under the guise of war, of resistance or of the fight against terror, makes the murder of the enemy its primary and absolute objective? The other challenge to postcolonial theory is what is referred to as globalization. What is clear is that it opens

awareness beyond the postcolonial theory of the 80s and the 90s.

No academy link - the plan realizes there is no privileged location for activism because the academy/community binary is always already blurred. Only the plan utilizes power positively.
JK Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): a feminist critique of political economy, 1996, xxvi-xxviii, ctc Gabriela Delgadillo, one of the academic researchers who had been a Lacanian analyst in her native Bolivia, understood

this in terms of the relationship between analyst and analysand. The goal of the analyst is not to become the analysand's equal, but to move the analysand away from the project of shoring up his or her fantasies and into the difficult process of analysisproducing "truth," in other words, a different, more distanced relation to fantasy. To get the analysand interested in this process, the analyst must come to inhabit the space of desire, which is what we were inadvertently doing in our project. Our refusal to define the economy or capitalism had the effect of making our knowledge desirable. Under Gabriela's tutelage, we began to see the "inequality" between academic and community researchers as constitutive of our work, rather than as a hindrance or detraction. The relationship between academic and community member is eroticized by inequality, by the way "they" invest our peculiar status and formal knowledge with power, and that is in part what made our conversations work. A seductive form of
power (Allen 2003) drew them to us and our project, even as it prompted them to mock, berate, and belittle the university and those working within it. We realized that,

far from attempting to achieve a pristine interaction untainted

by power, we needed to mobilize and direct power, and to make sure that it was used to foster rather than kill what we hoped to elicit passionate participation in our project. Thinking more generally about the role of academics and academic work in a politics of collective action, the injunction to "start where you are" reminds us that there is no privileged social location from which to embark on building a community economy. For us this means that our academic location is no more or less suitable as a starting place than our other social locations as women, citizens, middle-aged adults, yoginis, local residents, workers, and bearers of racial privilege. The extended and complex collectivities engaged in building community economies cannot be recognized in simple relational oppositions like academy/community. While the capabilities we bring to bear may be shaped by our academic training, and some of the networks we are embedded in may be constituted through our academic activities, these particularities distinguish us within but do not separate us from the communities we are working with. Instead they enable us to connect in particular ways. As social scientists we may want, for example, to treat social projects and innovations
(or indeed any social site) as "experiments," to use Callon's term (2005a; Callon and Caliskan 2005). What this means minimally is that we

treat them as instances to learn from, rather than things to be "put in their place" through moral judgment or incorporation into a theoretical macronarrative as case or countercase. Characterizing the U.S. health-care system as an "immense uncontrolled experiment, housing a vast collection of different, potentially informative ways of working" (2004, 286), Donald Berwick attests that "every process produces information on the basis of which it can be improved."21 We often ignore this information because it is not what we are looking for. But as social researchers interested in economic alternatives, this is just the kind of knowledge we are seeking to produce. By processing and purveying such information for an organization
or project, by formalizing and making transportable its experience and strategies (Callon 2005c), the researcher can enable selfreflection among participants, foster a productive redirection of energies, and legitimize the organization in a wider social context. All of these contribute to its strength and viability, to the expanded performation of the model and practices it embodies. Rather than working on the organization or project, the social scientist works alongside it, collaborating wittingly or unwittingly with the other members of a "hybrid research collective": researchers from various disciplines, funders, activists, clients, implicated bystanders, whoever is involved in the project and producing knowledge about it (Callon 2005b). The

social scientist so

engaged is always already an activist, part of a collective agency, without needing to change hats or stray outside the walls of the academy.

Analyzing neoliberalism is an indispensable starting point for analyzing the domination of Africans
Jon SOSKE, professor of modern African history @ McGill University, THE DISSIMULATION OF RACE: "AFRO-PESSIMISM" AND THE PROBLEM OF DEVELOPMENT Qui Parle, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 2004), pp. 15-56, ctc

Tribal society was therefore not an anachronistic relic, but the product of nineteenth-century economic changes and colonial domination that independent African states inherited and incorporated, in one way or another, into their new system of political power. This eventuality is the indispensable starting point in analyzing the ideological content, the historical impact, and the apparent failure of development economics in Africa. Modernization and tribalism, in their
functioning as ideological doctrines, political projects, and objective social phenomena, did not ultimately constitute opposed historical forces. They were

two complementary and mutually determining elements in a system of economic and political rule based on limited foreign investment, the increasing bureaucratic hypertrophy of the single-party state, and the strengthening of traditional institutions to secure and maintain social order. More broadly, many facets of African culture that anthropology once considered atavistic remnants of untouched, tribal societies are now seen as complex responses to colonial and post-colonial modernity.
Recent studies have analyzed the efflorescence of African witchcraft under colonialism and afterwards: "Far from merely being a homeostatic feature of precolonial societies ... the

signs and practices of witchcraft are integral to the experience of the contemporary world. They are called on to counter the magic of modernity. And to
act upon the elusive effects of transnational forces - especially as they come to be embodied in the all-too physical forms of their local beneficiaries/'49 These and modernization, in fact represent

rituals and belief systems, widely thought to embody the failure of economic development the impact of a very modern, post-colonial capitalism on African

societies. Rosiland Shaw has described how, for the Temne of Sierra Leone, the city of witches exists in a metropolitan reality
parallel to our own where diamonds pave the streets, sorcerers buy human flesh from street vendors and fly in magic jets, and witches wear designer garments that transform them into animals. Those

witches who appear impoverished in this world actually possess great wealth and power in the other - a displacement that frequently results in the persecution of the most vulnerable for the crimes of the country's untouchable "big men/'50 It is not only a question of Africans and African culture adapting to new historical circumstances, although that they did should never be far from our minds. Development economics, in uncritically recycling the anthropological stereotypes of pre-industrial society, fundamentally misunderstood and misrepresented institutions and beliefs that are in fact the product of a long contested relationship between Africans and foreign dominance. In an important respect, however, both tribalism and development were separate but interrelated responses to the same historical process: the birth of the colonial working class. Bill Freund writes: "the heart of the economic task of the colonial state is the problem of labour. To open Africa to effective capital penetration, the most central issue which underlay all others, and which to some extent, explains the need for the conquest itself, was to pry open the labour resources of the continent, to re-direct them functionally, socially and geographically in order to create a surplus from which capital will benefit."51 Even modest economic activity directly posed the problem of the creation, reproduction, and domination of an indigenous African proletariat.
Given the chronic scarcity of labor, the colonial powers increasingly either turned to existing African elites to help recruit workers or installed tribal chiefs to act as their agents. Especially in South Africa, the

"native reserves" or tribal system served a crucial role in conjoining the rising capitalist mode of production with African agriculture by disciplining migrant labor. Yet as the colonial working class grew, labor resistance began to feed and

inspire anti-colonial movements, threatening both the existing order and - in some ways more directly - its indigenous agents. Recent books by Frederick Cooper and O. Nigel Bolland (anticipated in part by Walter Rodney's A History of the Guyanese Working People) have powerfully demonstrated the centrality of the organized labor movement in the decolonization of both Africa and the Caribbean. Breaking from an older romantic narrative of national liberation, these historians have given greater attention to the
explosive role played by class contradictions within colonial society both during the struggle for independence and in the ensuing political order. The

first articulations of development represented a nationalist response to this radical working class threat, as well as the recognition of a potential political base, indeed the only possible mass political
base in much of Africa and the Caribbean. The universal language of development allowed Africans to pose demands on and against the colonial system. In his groundbreaking Decolonization and African Society, Frederick Cooper shows that a direct connection exists between post-war development theory and arguments about the future of colonial rule, which began in response to working class revolts that swept parts of the British Empire from the mid-1930s. Before this period, concepts

of labor, industrialization, and the wageworker were simply not used by the colonial powers to describe African society. The African was a peasant who was considered more or less incapable of rigorous industrial work.
In South Africa, where African migrant labor was indispensable for the rise of industry following the discovery of the Rand gold field,

the African became a target worker, only temporarily alienated from his "natural" environment. Further, the colonial powers frequently represented the colonies themselves as lacking the necessary natural resources for industrialization and too impoverished, both environmentally and in the intelligence of their inhabitants, for the existence of a modern working class. However, the abrupt and unexpected eruption of militant workers' struggles in the 1930s shattered this pristine
and deceptive image. Set against the background of the spectacular of uprisings in the West Indies, the 1935 Copper Belt strike announced to the British that labor struggle was an empire-wide problem. In 1939 the

Mombassa general strike (Kenya), the Dares Salaam dock workers strike (Tanzania), and the Gold Coast rail strike (Ghana) made it brutally clear that none of these events represented an isolated occurrence, but each arose from profound structural conditions, rooted ultimately in colonial oppression, that threatened much broader
instability.

Afro-pessimism is only true within neoliberalism we instill ethics into policymaking

Jon SOSKE, professor of modern African history @ McGill University, THE DISSIMULATION OF RACE: "AFRO-PESSIMISM" AND THE PROBLEM OF DEVELOPMENT Qui Parle, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 2004), pp. 15-56, ctc

Western NGOs and humanitarian agencies reinforce this process by defining their interventions in essentially apolitical terms. Bracketing the geopolitical context of humanitarian crises, the U nited N ations High Commission on Refugees treats refugees as an undifferentiated mass of human suffering, a passive object of humanitarian intervention and administration, without voice, consciousness, history, or often a future.13 Any political motivations or actions on refugees' parts are not
only ignored, but are virtually precluded by international refugee law since these represent a potential challenge to the programs and their host countries.

In 1996 this posture exploded in the aid community's face when it became clear that foreign relief efforts had unintentionally helped Hutu interhamwe militias regroup and rearm in eastern Congo refugee camps after the Rwandan genocide. The UN and the U.S. government, as Johan Pottier has shown, then later accepted and indirectly perpetuated the essentially racist argument that all of the remaining Hutu refugees in the eastern Congo were implicated in the genocide, setting the stage for retaliatory massacres costing tens of thousands of lives.14 The administrative construction of conflict and poverty, central to both aid and development projects, creates a "structural trusteeship" over aid recipients closely related to colonial paternalism and evangelical philanthropy. Simultaneously, this disavowal of politics and history allows institutions like the World Bank, IMF, and UN to displace responsibility for repeated, disastrous interventions onto

their African collaborators. But it is also necessary to underline the dangerous ambiguity of this word. Since the mid1990s, and particularly following the rise of the so-called New Pan-Africanism, the accusation of Afro pessimism has become the principal ballast for an international campaign directed, almost always implicitly, against radical critics of Western financial institutions and their local African representatives.15 Generally, these voices argue that the current emphasis on an African crisis underestimates positive examples of economic growth and capital investment (e.g., Botswana), willingly ignores evidence of growing
political stability, and in fact damages the continent by purveying an inherently sensationalistic image - in other words, by detrimentally effecting the investment climate. Redefining

Afro-pessimism as disbelief in Africa's capacity to thrive in the neoliberal vice of unregulated trade, this counter-critique often implicitly contains a nationalist accusation of racial pessimism. Those who oppose the deleterious impact of IMF/World Bank suzerainty are transmogrified into advocates of a quasi-racist denial that Africans can compete in the international market and build stable democratic societies. The governments of Yoweri Musenvi in Uganda and Thabo Mbeki's African National Congress in South Africa have both employed variants of this construction in attempting to silence domestic protest and dissent.16 Neoliberal ism's emphasis on the fundamental role played by the market, as opposed to earlier state-centered theories, represents a profoundly anti-humanistic denial that political struggle can shape economic and social realities. There is also no question that the structural adjustment programs of the 1980s and 1990s radically compounded Africa's economic problems by deliberately decimating the wages of urban workers and, more inadvertently, undermining state clientage networks that served as an informal (but highly institutionalized) distribution mechanism of wealth to the countryside.17 Many
feel anger and despair at the consequences, not least those who have suffered them directly. But it would be misdirected to simply equate the "crisis of development" and neoliberalism. In 1988, after drawing the pitiful balance sheet of twenty years of African development programs, Aidan Southall concluded that every word of the

World Bank's slogans of "Redistribution with Growth," "Integrated Rural Development," and "Eradication of Poverty" was either deception or a lie. All use admirable goals of development did not come to pass, he argues, precisely because they were never the real objective:
If we take the World Bank as the standard bearer of development organizations and look at its original official aims, they are quite honest. According to the first article of its chapter,

one of the principle objectives was the promotion and encouragement of private investment for productive purposes. The founders wished (Mason, 1973) to encourage an adequate volume of international flow, and to give those who invested abroad reason able assurance of the safety of their funds.... In these aims the Bank and other major development
agencies have been reasonably successful.18 In the context of the Cold War, World Bank loans heavily subsidized American export markets and supplied critical aid to American foreign allies. For every $1.00 the U.S. provided to an ally in bilateral aid, the World Bank matched $5.50 (AD, 3). Inversely, the counterweight created by the existence of the Soviet Union gave many African states a significant measure of economic and political autonomy, at least compared to the situation today. As James Ferguson writes: "'Development' was laid on top of already-existing geopolitical hierarchies; it neither created north south inequality nor undid it but instead provided a powerful set of conceptual and organizational devices for managing it, legitimating it, and sometimes contesting and negotiating its terms."19 Neoliberalism

represented the adoption of a different set of theories and mechanisms - employed by the same institutions - for organizing global capitalism. The pernicious
effects of this new regime, which has always claimed to be working towards economic viability, later intersected the end of the Cold War and the dramatic "redlining" of the continent by U.S. military and economic interests (although some now advocate a more interventionist policy on the basis that impoverishment and conflict have provided "a breeding ground for global terrorism"). Not only did their strategic utility disappear, the plausibility of the World Bank's grandiose slogans had also evaporated. The

frank recognition that development, in the sense of rising to First World levels of production and consumption, has never been posed for the greater part of the continent is less Afropessimism than a brutally realistic appraisal of Africa's prospects within the current world order.

Social death thesis is false blacks have agency and progressive change is possible. Robinson 4 Prof Law @ Howard University, Reginald, CRITICAL RACE THEORY: HISTORY,
EVOLUTION, AND NEW FRONTIERS: ARTICLE: HUMAN AGENCY, NEGATED SUBJECTIVITY, AND WHITE STRUCTURAL OPPRESSION: AN ANALYSIS OF CRITICAL RACE PRACTICE/PRAXIS, 53 Am. U.L. Rev. 1361 Choosing to fight and die, slaves showed us their power to act purposefully. The power to act is human agency, and these actions can support or transform society. Through social and cultural influences, society can constrain or empower ordinary people n9 to act by giving them relatively equal access to the rules, resources, and language. By supporting or transforming a society, we express a latent, inexorable power that rejects the thought that white structural oppression negates ordinary people's subjectivity, thus making them subtextual victims. n10 Within a broad structuralist framework, white structural oppression refers to practices like racism that constitute an objective, external power that robs people of their natural right to be free human beings. Subtextual victims refer to ordinary people like blacks who believe that America will always treat them badly, preventing them from attaining social and economic success. For these ordinary people, experiences like subtextual victimization and practices like white structural oppression belie human agency (e.g., right action). n11 [*1364] Although ordinary people like blacks
exercised human agency within the crucible of slavery, Critical Race Theory ("CRT") builds its methodology on the idea that law, race, and power oppress ordinary people, denying them the right to live free and to act purposefully. n12 Race Crits have developed deconstructive approaches to unearth how law and race form powerful, objective relations of whites over blacks, men over women, natives over foreigners. Relying on this methodology and these approaches, Race Crits, especially in early writings, analyzed unconscious white racism. n13 Given CRT's early development, these writings were perforce theoretical. Recently, some Race Crits have sought practical, serviceable tools to assist lawyers and activists. n14 Practical writings cope better with struggles against white racism. Practical writings talk to community activists. n15 They enable political lawyers to examine and transform legal conflicts into practical solutions or legal remedies. These writings encourage left scholars to leave the ivory tower, so that they can work with the ordinary people for whom Race Crits purport to write and on whom their scholarly existence depends. n16 Under this view, Race Crits can redress white structural oppression and engage in antisubordination struggles, so that ordinary people can use their human agency. [*1365] In this regard, Robert A. Williams advocates for Critical Race Practice (Practice). n17 Eric K. Yamamoto sues for Critical Race Praxis (Praxis). n18 For Williams, traditional legal scholarship, especially ethereal writings, cannot alter ordinary people's lives. n19 Exploiting people of color's personal and social circumstances for institutional gains like tenure, n20 Williams asserts that these Race Crits become little more than vampires, n21 feeding on a people's misery, caring selfishly for themselves, and giving nothing back. n22 By not using their writings to redress day-to-day issues, these Race Crits ignore ordinary people's oppression. n23 To overcome this gap, Practice requires left scholars to teach law students, especially through clinical legal education, how to empower Native people and their perspectives. n24 [*1366] Under Praxis, Yamamoto argues that left scholars must serve ordinary people's practical needs. n25 Right now, these scholars do not relate to political lawyers and community activists. By existing in separate worlds, neither group has helped to co-create n26 "racial justice." As such, theoretical writings and traditional civil rights strategies move institutions not toward racial justice, but toward liberal solutions. n27 So long as this gap continues, law will retreat from racial justice. In surmounting this gap, Yamamoto requires scholars, lawyers, and activists to work together (e.g., consortium). Under Practice or Praxis, Williams and Yamamoto intend to pursue a justice concept, in which antisubordination becomes the singular end. n28 This end promises to give to ordinary people, especially those engaged in interracial conflict, the human agency (or empowerment) that they lack. For example, Yamamoto advocates for a "racial group agency," one oddly standing on racial identity and personal responsibility. n29 Unfortunately,

Practice and Praxis cannot achieve this end. Relying on classical CRT methodology, Williams and Yamamoto assume that ordinary people like blacks lack human agency and personal responsibility. They presume that white structural oppression buries ordinary people alive under the weight of liberal legalisms like Equal Protection, rendering them subtextual victims. n30 I disagree. Pure consciousness is always prior, and all sentient beings have agency. Despite the sheer weight of the legal violence, slaves never forgot their innate right to be free; they retained a pure consciousness that never itself [*1367] was enslaved. n31 Moreover, slaves acted purposefully when they picked cotton and when they fought to be free. Slaves planned revolts, killed masters, overseers, and each other, ran away, picked cotton, and betrayed other co-conspirators; all examples of human agency. Today, despite danger and violence, ordinary people co-create lives of joy, peace, and happiness. Antebellum slaves co-created spaces in which they knew joy, peace, and happiness. In the modern era, ordinary people like blacks have pure consciousness and human agency too. Despite daily examples of human agency, Williams and Yamamoto posit that ordinary people lack real, practical control over their lives. n32 By taking this
position, they reproduce a major premise in CRT: slavery, Jim Crow, racism, and racial discrimination have subordinated the lives of ordinary people. n33 Put

succinctly, white structural oppression (e.g., supremacy) impacts the micropractices of

ordinary people. By implication, it negates their racial identity, social values, and personal responsibility. If so, then criminal courts mock ordinary people like blacks when the state punishes them for committing crimes. n34 If so, the
New York Times unfairly punished Jayson Blair, and he was correct to fault it for encouraging plagiarism and for rewarding his unprofessional behavior. n35 Failing to address these implications, Williams and Yamamoto direct us to white structural oppression and divert us from the real, practical control that ordinary people exercise when they go to work or commit a crime. In this [*1368] way, Williams

and Yamamoto can only empower ordinary people if they eradicate white racism, for only then will ordinary people have human agency. Practice and Praxis fail because they ignore how ordinary people use mind constructs. A mind construct means any artificial, causal, or interdependent arrangement of facts, factors, elements, or ideas that flows
from our inner awareness. n36 Representing core beliefs, n37 a mind construct allows us to make sense of our personal experiences and social reality.

A mind construct is not reality, but ordinary people believe that it is. n38 Practice and Praxis also fail because they refuse to deconstruct mind constructs of ordinary people. Intending to adhere to CRT's methodology, Williams and Yamamoto believe that these mind constructs cannot co-create experiences, and thus white structural oppression must be an external, objective reality. By refusing to interrogate these mind constructs, they tell us that the proper locus of white structural oppression must be white mindsets. By and large, while white mindsets co-create racial oppression, other mind constructs cannot. Whites have power; others do not. Whites victimize blacks; ordinary people cannot co-create their own oppression experience. n39 Working
within CRT methodology, Williams and Yamamoto cannot re-imagine ordinary people as bearers of human agency, the power to act purposefully that includes how we use our mind constructs to co-create and to understand experiences and realities. By failing to see ordinary people as powerful agents, Williams and Yamamoto have tied personal liberty not only to liberal legalism and white appreciation, but also to CRT's liberal agenda. n40 [*1369] Ordinary people have always had human agency. But Race Crits cannot imagine this power. They must alter our core beliefs to sustain their theories. A core belief flows from feelings and imaginations, and ordinary people reinforce this belief through words and deeds.

From this core belief, ordinary people co-create their experiences and realities. Core beliefs, experiences, and realities are concentric circles, overlapping and indistinguishable. For example, race consciousness (a core belief) denies ordinary people full experiences, and at the same, it co-creates what they seek to avoid. Yet, race consciousness is simply a mind construct. In this Article, race consciousness constitutes a belief (or a mind construct) that encourages ordinary people to point accusatory fingers at white racism, an emotional balm for that which naturally flows from their feelings, imaginations, and actions. Part I lays out the framework of Practice and Praxis, illustrating how these
frameworks link themselves to a central feature of CRT -structural determinism. Part II critiques CRT's mindset doctrine and "naming our own reality," n41 arguing that they are corollaries of structural determinism. Part III presents an incomplete model for a pure consciousness theory of human agency, an approach that conjoins pure consciousness, conscious mind (inner and outer ego), and co-creative principles as powerful elements in the cocreation of a range of personal experiences and social realities. These

elements suggest a new model for agency, bypassing the liberal notion of a negated subject and, by implication, the victim's theory of ordinary people who suffer apparent external, objective structural forces. In this tentative model, nothing exists outside of the individual self or collective selves. CRT embraces a liberal idea of human subjectivity, and so Race Crits cannot liberate anyone from so-called oppressive experiences. Nevertheless, I should point out that ordinary people, relying on a pure consciousness theory of agency, can choose what personal experiences and social realities they would like to co-create, thus reminding them that they are human gods who simply play the role of victims.

Capital obfuscates ongoing slavery and makes alternative solvency impossible

Jon SOSKE, professor of modern African history @ McGill University, THE DISSIMULATION OF RACE: "AFRO-PESSIMISM" AND THE PROBLEM OF DEVELOPMENT Qui Parle, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 2004), pp. 15-56, ctc

It is almost too easy to ridicule the self-flattering hypocrisy of the Promethean civilizing mission, or the passage's ethnocentric discussion of the "ideals of modernization," atomized into quasi-transcendental categories bereft of any actual content (more precisely, their content is meant to be so obvious, so intuitive, as to preclude explication). The purported great march of progress and rationalization, once exclusively the domain of the West, will now be exported with the

invaluable assistance of foreign aid and university generated, social scientific expertise. But, rather than the concepts of social and economic progress in and of themselves, the problem lies in treating progress as a self propelling mechanism independent of the ongoing social struggles both within African societies and internationally. This false eschatology locates the "undesirable conditions in the social system that have perpetuated the state of underdevelopment" completely with in the refractory practices of traditional or undeveloped society. The result is a simplistic conflation of increasing economic productivity, the amelioration of social and economic inequality, and the idealized norms of social scientific rationality. Narrow and technocratic in its outlook, development economics focused on macroeconomic strategies designed to promote growth in the context of the Bretton Woods financial regime.25 Nevertheless, its
paramount concepts have proven quite tenacious, and continue to dominate both popular representations of Africa and contemporary writing on Third World economies.26 Such virulence owes a great deal to two historical presuppositions. First,

development economics espoused a generalized conception of the less developed country that derived in large part from colonial anthropology. This model did not merely efface local and regional "particularities/' although it certainly did allow so-called experts to ignore much that deviated from their Platonic image of a static agricultural society. It denied the very fact that the
former colonial countries have a long, complex history. African societies have been shaped not only by hundreds of years of exchange with Islamic cultures, pre-colonial trade with the Mediterranean and India, slavery, colonialism, and interactions with the world economy, but also through millennia of indigenous political, social, technological, and economic innovation. In bracketing these formative processes, development

economics reiterated a vigorous tenant of colonial racism, sanitized under the frail coverings of positivist methodology: Africa has no significant past, at least not one that centrally involves the actions and ideas of black Africans. Furthermore, this schematic allowed development economics to avoid interrogating the origin of political and economic inequities between the so called First and Third Worlds. Or, it claimed that the originating
factors of the great divergence were intrinsic to the given societies and reflected cultural differences. As writers like Andre Gunder Frank and Walter Rodney began to argue in the 1970s, this approach willfully

obscured slavery and colonialism's role in manipulating the evolution of African economies and forcibly subordinated the continent to a marginal role within the world capitalist system.27

The plan breaks down the commodity fetishism that allows capital to hollow and objectify the oppressed
Edward A. AVILA, Ph. D @ UC San Diego - Conditions of (Im)possibility : necropolitics, neoliberalism, and the cultural politics of death in contemporary Chicana/o film and literature 2012, ctc *the card is in the context of a documentary named Maquilapolis that is about the Maquilas in Juarez. In this section, I argue that the documentary film Maquilapolis

critiques the erasure of subjectivity through carefully constructed representations of social reification, particularly in relation to the production of commodified objects or things vis--vis sensuous, living beings. Semantic variations
of the term sensuousness capture the multiple dimensions of fetishism represented in the film. The term sensuous contains several important meanings that offer a way of discussing feminicide and anti-female terror in relation to commodity fetishism and, by extension, social reification. Sensuous denotes, among other things, (i) that which pertains to the senses or sense-perception, (ii) that which affects the senses, and (iii) forms of devotion to the gratification and pleasure of the senses (OED). In

conceptualizing the relationship between social reification and fetishism, we turn to two distinct, but related, formscommodity fetishism and sexual fetishism. An analysis of commodity fetishism allows for an interpretive explication of the erasure of sensuous, living forms of labor and social relations. Meanwhile, critical attention to representations of hyper-sexualized, objectified women reveals the extent to which sexual fetishism emerges as an important social and cultural force in tandem with social reification toward the reproduction of the conditions of possibility for social and political abandonment. Both forms draw our attention to the ways in which women, as feeling, thinking, and acting social subjects are reconfigured (and re-presented) as abstracted, de-

humanized objects. The essence of capitals power lies in its ability to function as a normative, universal organizing principle. If we take fetishism to characterize the totality of capitalist social processes, then we must ask to what extent the film configures commodified social relations through images of subjectified commodities and objectified living beings. Describing the
social economy of (late) capitalism in terms of recurring processes of fetishism, William Pietz observes, The very legal and financial categories that establish capitals social reality bring about the fetishized consciousness appropriate to it through what Marx describes as three-level chiasmus between people and things. The most superficial level is that of personified things and reified people Marx refers to this whole structure as the Trinity Formula: land, labor, and capital (the things that appear to have the personlike power to produce value); landlord, wageworker, capitalist (the reified identities that personify the factors composing capitalist production); and lastly, rent, wages, and profits (the forms of money-capital that mediate among them). This level of fetishized objects and individuals is really an expression of the more fundamental level of fetishized relations. . . People

are reified in their relations insofar as their negotiations and other interactions must be expressed through the objectivity of the commodity price system (that is, in the markets for labor, consumer goods, and
capital). (emphases added, 148) I want to address two important points raised by Pietz. Firstly, Marxs rhetorical schema (i.e., chiasmus) reveals the object-mediation logic of fetishized social relations represented in the Trinity Formula. Reified identities (social

subjects) confront things possessing person-like power mediated by money-capital as the materiality of value or the social substance that appears in material form (130).32 In this respect, commodity fetishism addresses (i) relations between capital and labor and (ii) relations among workers differentiated and essentialized by various levels of productive labor (assembly
workers, supervisors, floor managers, etc.). Additionally, commodity fetishism reaches beyond the shop floor and into the marketplace of sellers and buyers/consumers of commodities, whether through exchange of money for labor or for pleasure. The

materiality of value under late-capitalism potentially has the effect of inscribing upon the body a monetary price or exchange value and, in doing so, transfiguring the dynamic and sensuous living being (social subject) into a reified object of exchange. This is most evident in the sex-industry where prostitution emerges as a form of labor linked to Necessity insofar as it constitutes a form of socio-economic constraint in which the exchange of money for pleasure, from the perspective of
the seller, is an exchange of pleasure for survival in the context of social exclusion and political abandonment. It is worth noting that in the act of survival, the

selling of ones body for money reproduces the notion of the body as an object of consumption. This is not to deny the act of survival as a form of agency or form of resistance against violent
inequality, but rather to signal how in the act of survival and resistance reification nonetheless rears its ugly presence. Secondly, Pietzs notion of fetishized objects and people as the expression of a more fundamental level of fetishized social relations points us in the direction of social reification. If

social negotiations and interactions are expressed through the objectivity of the commodity-price system, then the reduction of women as sexualized objects or as the abstract producers of commodities rest on a reified conception of human subjectivity in which the specific, concrete and complex identities and personal histories of potential and actual victims evaporate (or melt) into thin air. The sensuous, not as sexualized
objectification but in terms of Marxs theory of the sensuous that manifests in a plurality of ways (thinking, feeling, wanting, creating, acting, loving, and, yes, hurting, for example)

gets emptied out, erased, leaving behind a socially

vacated body, both symbolically and literally , bearing the inscription of commodity value, whether in the form of abstracted labor or an object of consumption. As I will discuss in greater detail later in this chapter when analyzing Seorita Extraviada, the concept of commodity fetishism registers the ways in which violence against women remain obscured or elided behind the equality of market exchange (Kennedy, 108). In interrogating the social character of commodity fetishism and the apparent magical qualities of the commodity, Marx illustrates how the hands and heads of laborers are severed as the products of labor are intimately connected to money as the universal exchange in the marketplace. As the value of commodities increasingly inheres in the object through the erasure of real labor expended to produce the object, the logic of the market-place bleeds into what Wendy Brown describes in the neoliberal context as the construction and interpellation of individuals as entrepreneurial actors in every sphere of social life (42-43). During the next few pages, I want to pick up on
what Marx describes as the finished form of the world of commoditieswhich conceals the social character of private labour and the social relations between the individual workers (168-69).

extra K cards
Capitals exploitative and oppressive nature is a function of biopower that makes subjectivization inevitable
Marina

GRINID, Lecture for Knowledge Smuggling!, 12 January 2009, FROM BIOPOLITICS TO NECROPOLITICS, ctc the events in the

2. To differentiate in- between biopolitics and necropolitics In principle it is possible to state that all

World today are brought back to a single event. This event I will name in reference to Santiago Lpez Petit as the impossibility of capital to restrain from exploitation and expropriation. This unrestrainment of capital is the accomplishment of co-property between capital and power. This was clearly seen in the way how the financial crisis that involved banks and their deficit was solved in September 2008, with a bill issued with one single move in order to save the capitalists and their banks savings. It presented the unification of power (political representatives) and capital (and note that nothing similar was proposed regarding for example New Orleans and the poorest working class that
lost everything in the aftermath of the hurricane Katrina). French philosopher Michel Foucault characterizes biopolitics as biopower, as a power that aims for the production and reproduction of life itself. Biopolitics

thus practices sovereignty that can, today, also be connected to the processes of subjectivization, which does not mean only a production and reproduction of subjects, but above all the regulation and understanding what the process of subjectivization means in itself. Biopower is based on strategies of control that transcend those institutional frameworks which were important for societies at a time when domination was founded on punishment and discipline; biopolitics /biopower is based on control. Biopower is a matter of a direct instrumentalization of life enabled through contemporary new media technologies. Control is, thus, composed of surveillance systems (surveillance cameras following us everywhere); increasingly more detailed digitalized databases of personal information available to the state; as well as, it is composed of public opinion (market) researches and other forms of acquiring more and more precise personal data. In the genealogy of the connections between institutions, money, and power that Foucault defines as one of the more important procedural processes of biopolitics, economy plays a very significant role. The politics of economy shows how finances are distributed in such a way that
the government supports only those organizations, administrations, discourses, theories, and populisms that are vital only to that particular government and its commands, practices and governance of the social body. Achille Mbembe in his book On the Postcolony: On Private Indirect Government (2001) stated, regarding

the proposed accomplishment of coproperty between capital and power in the time of globalization, and taking into account specific conditions of environmental exploitation and warfare in Africa, that while war tactics in Africa are quite rudimentary, they still result in human catastrophes. This is because, via Mbembe, military pressure sometimes targets the straightforward destruction, if not of the civilian population, at least of the very means of its survival, such as food reserves, cattle, and agricultural implements. In some cases, these wars have enabled gang leaders to exercise more or less continuous control over territory. Such control gives them access not only to those living in the territories but also to the natural resources and the goods produced there for instance, to extraction of precious stones, exploitation of natural resources. The financing of these wars is very complex. In addition to the financial contribution provided by Diasporas and
assignment of men and women to forced labor, there is resort to loans, appeal to private financiers, and special forms of taxation. He argued that these new

forms of more or less total control not only blur the supposed relationship between citizenship and democracy, or, I will add biopolitical forms of life, but rather and more deadly incapacitate whole sections of the population politically, economically and structurally. Therefore it is possible to state that what is becoming evident with reference to Mbembe (and in relation to Africa where we see the intensification of many exploitation processes established and empowered through colonialism) is the emergence of a new form of relation in-

between capital and power named private indirect government. It presents new configurations of power, the privatization of violence (myriad of militias and private armies) that works hand in hand with economy that is as well put through the process of privatization and therefore is completely informalized. In an interview given by Mbembe, on the occasion of the publication of his book
On Post-Colony, he stated firmly that democracy as a form of government and as a culture of public life does not have a future in Africa or for that matter, elsewhere in the world if it is not rethought precisely from the crucible of necropower. By

necropower Mbembe refers to a sovereign power that is set up for maximum destruction of persons and the creation of deathscapes that are unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead. Today these deathscapes if we only think about what has been going on in Gaza from December 2008 to January 2009
are not, as is pointed out by Mbembe, a peculiar African reality, but something that is becoming more and more of a normal landscape in all the territories outside of the First capitalist world (just think about Palestine, Chechnya etc.). Even

though

such deathscapes were once reserved only for the third and second worlds (Balkans Srebrenica was such a clear deathscape) with the present recession deathscapes they are now becoming slowly normalized within the First capitalist world as well (thousands of jobs will be lost, low middle class will be
transformed in a new class of poorscape and therefore a deathscape reality, etc).

at: state PIC

2ac
Perm do both if the counterplan can change status quo state structures it should be able to overcome the plan the aff isnt incompatible with the counterplan the 1AC doesnt support the state No link - we solely recognize that government exists but dont conflate our agency with the governments we recognize that we should be the ones doing the imagining. This is the entire second contention of the 1AC we are the HRC, our discourse matters, and only our movement creates change We link turn agency - imagination allows us to foster micropolitical movements to affect macropolitical ones
JK Gibson-Graham, An Ethics of the Local, Rethinking Marxism, May 2001, //ctc
The two research

projects provide a social context for Foucaults second moment of morality cultivating the ethical subjectwhich involves working on our local/regional selves to become something other than what the global economy wants us to be. But what actual processes or techniques of self (and other) invention do we have at our disposal? Foucault is not forthcoming here, at the
microlevel of actual practices. And when we embarked on these projects we did not imagine how difficult the process of resubjectivation would be. In both the U.S. and Australia, for example, we have come up against the patent lack of desire for economic difference in the regions where we are working. We

have encountered instead the fixation of desires upon capitalismindividuals want employment as wage workers, policymakers want conventional economic development. It was only after months of resistance, setbacks, and surprising successes that we could see the deeply etched contours of existing subjectivities and the complexity of the task of resubjecting we were attempting to engage in. Invaluable in helping us to conceptualize and negotiate this complexity was the work of William Connolly. Whereas we had stumbled through the process of cultivating alternative economic subjects, Connollys work on self-artistry and micropolitics allowed us retrospectively to see steps and stages, techniques and strategies. Connolly is concerned with the subject as a being that is already shaped and as one that is always (and sometimes deliberately) becoming. In his view active selftransformation
working on oneself in the way that Foucault has described

functions as a micropolitical process that makes

macropolitical settlements possible . If we are to succeed in promoting a diverse economy and producing new subjects and practices of economic development, there must be selves who are receptive to such an economy and to transforming themselves within it. How do we nurture the micropolitical receptivity of subjects to new becomings, both of themselves and of their economies? Micropolitics can be understood as an assemblage of techniques and disciplines that impinge on the lower registers of sensibility and judgment without necessarily or immediately engaging the conscious intellect (Connolly 2001, 33). One object of such a politics is what Connolly calls the visceral domain where thoughtimbued intensities below the reach of feeling (1999, 148) dispose the individual in particular ways, with a seldom acknowledged impact on macropolitical interactions. In a discussion of the public
sphere, where he argues that the visceral register cannot be excluded from public discourse and the process of coming to public consensus,

Connolly (1999, 35-36) puts forward a set of norms for discourse across differences. Instead of attempting to tame or exclude the body, reducing public discourse to rational argument, he advocates developing an appreciation of positive possibilities in

the visceral register of thinking and discourse as a way of beginning to creatively produce and respond to the emergence of new identities. This appreciation of positive possibilities in the body, he suggests, might be supplemented by an ethic of cultivation that works against the bodily feelings of panic experienced when naturalized identities are called into question. And rather than expecting people to transcend their differences in order to be or behave like a community, he suggests the possibility of a generous ethos of engagement between constituencies in which differences are honored and bonds are forged around and upon them. All these attitudes and practices could make possible ethically sensitive, negotiated settlements between potentially antagonistic groups and individuals in the construction of communities. We are drawn to Connollys italicized arsenal of stances and
strategies because they take into account the stubborn, unspoken bodily resistances that stand in the way of individual becoming and social possibility; and at the same time they acknowledge the visceral register of discourse as a positive resource for social creativity. For us, retrospectively, they

offer a cultivators manual for the ethical practice of cultivating different local economic subjectssubjects of capacity rather than debility, subjects whose range of economic identifications exceeds the capitalist order. Though Connolly did not intend them this way, for us they have become a way of
organizing our narrative of local resubjectivation in the Latrobe and Pioneer Valleys.

Reject PICs in this instance our interpretation is that they get PICs with evidence in the context of the plan which is key to predictable literature and aff ground a state K solves their offense without stealing the 1AC Our discursive focus in the 1AC proves that we empower agency and mobilize micropolitical forces
Miller 11 (Ethan Lloyd Miller-- masters of science @ University of Massachusetts Amherst RETHINKING ECONOMY FOR
REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT: ONTOLOGY, PERFORMATIVITY AND ENABLING FRAMEWORKS FORPARTICIPATORY VISION AND ACTION http://www.communityeconomies.org/site/assets/media/Ethan_Miller/Miller_RethinkingEconomy_MSThesis-2011.pdf May 2011//rainy) In this chapter, I will outline a general theoretical approach to engaging with questions of economic ontology and alternative economic representation in the service of participatory regional development. Taking up in more detail some of the theoretical approaches suggested in Chapter 1, I will contend that the

term "economy" does not refer to a real thing in the world that exists apart from our discursive construction of it. "Economy," rather, should be understood as a particularly powerful discursive tool that mobilizes forces and articulates disparate elements (human and nonhuman) into particular webs of meaning and action, all of
which are socially and historically contingent (Callon 2007; Gibson-Graham 2006a; Mitchell 1998; 2008). Such a conception should make clear that there are no "economic laws" apart from those that are made by specific, historical processes of institutionalization, habit- and desire-formation and cultural expectation. There

is nothing necessary about economic dynamics: we make economy, therefore we can make it differently. Yet this does not imply that everything is possible. Human agents live, relate and make worlds in the context of myriad others whose world-making activity "pushes back" at our attempts to craft imagined futures. The limits of possibility cannot, however, be known beforehand, and the work of challenging and developing alternatives to what Unger (2004) calls "necessitarian social theory" can open the way to processes of exploration and experimentation at (and perhaps, therefore, beyond) the margins of the possible. Such work may be enabled, I will argue, by an understanding of the performativity of theory--an awareness of the ways in which the stories we tell about the world participate in its very construction. To weave a new discourse of economic ontology is thus to engage in a process of articulating new ways of feeling, thinking and enacting that are potentially generative of the the very economy that is proposed to exist. As Judith Butler writes, "recognition is not conferred on a subject, but forms that subject" (1993, 226). This implies that our ontologies are political acts and political choices, and that a process of developing new forms of livelihood and interrelationship must also be a process of proposing--

thoughtfully, strategically, and provisionally--economic ontologies to support such relations. What kinds of experimental economic ontologies, we can ask, might enable us to remember our individual and collective power, help us to cultivate our creativity, allow us to see new possibilities for connection and creation, and facilitate our awareness of and responsibility toward the ethical interrelationships (human and morethan-human) of which we are a part?

Our 1AC performance of the HRC acknowledges our agency and political power as debaters
Miller 11 (Ethan Lloyd Miller-- masters of science @ University of Massachusetts Amherst RETHINKING ECONOMY FOR REGIONAL
DEVELOPMENT: ONTOLOGY, PERFORMATIVITY AND ENABLING FRAMEWORKS FOR PARTICIPATORY VISION AND ACTION http://www.communityeconomies.org/site/assets/media/Ethan_Miller/Miller_RethinkingEconomy_MSThesis-2011.pdf May 2011//rainy) Despite this clarification, crucial questions of power remain. Does the ontological performativity of the economy imply that "the economy" can be transformed by a change in the discourses we generate and mobilize about it? Gibson-Graham, in advocating that capitalism

"is strengthened, its dominance performed, as an effect of its representations " (2008a, 3) has sometimes been accused of a certain kind of narrative voluntarism--as if to suggest that telling a different story about capitalism and economics is sufficient to generate a liberated, noncapitalist world
(e.g., Scott 2004). Such accusations do not, however, pay adequate attention to the robust theorizations of the co-implications of materiality, discourse and power that have been offered by Butler (1993; 1996), Laclau and Mouffe (2001; 1998) and others (including Gibson-Graham, who draw on these authors). Performativity, for Butler, is inseparable from questions of power and analysis of the differential possibilities for the discursive transformation of a particular identity or process. It is, in fact, "a specific modality of power as discourse" (Butler 1993, 187, italics mine). 43 Butler is explicit not only that performativity is about power, but also that this power does not simply lie in the performative utterance itself but rather in the entire field of power relations--the "chains of iteration"--of which a given performative is a part and which provide its very intelligibility. "For

discourse to materialise a set of effects, 'discourse' itself must be understood as complex and convergent chains in which 'effects' are vectors of power.

Failure to imagine an ethical State economic policy makes violence inevitable

Tahmasebi 10 Victoria, assistant professor in women's studies/humanities at the University of Toronto Scarborough, Does
Levinas justify or transcend liberalism? Levinas on human Liberation, Philosophy Social Criticism June 2010 vol. 36 no. 5 If the subject should not be judged exclusively in terms of formal justice, the third then entails two intimately related notions of justice. It is crucial to analytically distinguish these two notions, and to explore their interrelation. I will focus on these two orders of justice as signified in Levinas thought, and draw out some of the implications for a politics that is irreducible to liberalism. In Levinas, justice

is sometimes the recognition of the other as my master: justice is the recognition of his privilege work becomes the uprightness of the facetoface, signifying the establishment of the ethical relation, as Levinas suggests in the following quote: The establishing of this primacy of the ethical, that is, of the relationship of man to man signification, teaching, and justice a primacy of an irreducible structure upon which all the other structures rest.92 When speaking of justice in the above
qua Other and his mastery.91 Its sense, Levinas usually uses terms such as ethical justice, or, in more religious language, divine or celestial justice.93 Sometimes he simply uses the term justice (as in the above quotes), making the distinction between the two orders difficult, and perhaps indicating his reluctance to separate the two. The

third, as I have already argued, brings the necessity of justice as thematization, equality, comparison, the state, hierarchy, and even violence. This meaning is especially
apparent in Levinas later work, Otherwise than Being, but also appears in some of his early works such as The Ego and the Totality.94 In Otherwise than Being, discussing saying and the said, he argues: Justice is necessary, that is, comparison,

coexistence, contemporaneousness, assembling, order, thematization.95 This quote and others have prompted many
Levinasian scholars to argue that by the time of Otherwise than Being, Levinas had abandoned his former notion of justice the notion of ethical justice having recognized the limitation that the third brings into the anarchical responsibility of one-for-theother. For example, both Simon Critchley and Robert J. S. Manning96 put forward such an exposition and argue along the same line. Manning argues that in Totality and Infinity, justice is within the face-to-face relation, but by the time of Otherwise than Being

Levinas has abandoned his original notion of justice and introduced a different justice which occurs only when the third party arrives,97 that is, justice as thematization, comparison, law and the state. Yet even within this second order of justice, these commentators reduce Levinas notion of justice to formal equality
without seriously exploring his assertion that formal justice starts with economic justice, a point Levinas never hesitates to emphasize: equality among persons means

nothing of itself; it has an economic meaning and presupposes money, and already rests on justice which, when well-ordered, begins with the Other.98 Although the demand for justice comes from outside of economic relations, justice, in Levinas words, can have no other object than economic equality.99 Mannings reading not only presents a reductive interpretation of
Levinas understanding of justice, creating a dichotomy between justice and compassion and between formal and economic justice, but it also leaves unexplored the significance of Levinas conception of ethical justice for a radical conception of the poli tical. Let me first emphasize that in

Levinas ethical relation, justice does not arise to restore t he reciprocity between the I and the other, or the stability of rational peace; it arises from the fact of the third being another other to me.100 Yet just because we are more than two, my responsibility towards the third does not get diluted among the others others, among us. Instead, I am the one who is responsible for the other and for all the others others no one else, and no institution, can take this responsibility. So the third makes my infinite responsibility a finite practice, and raises the necessity of calculating, thematizing and prioritizing. But the social, the political and the state are to emerge from this finite practice of the one-for-the-other, and not from the limitation of violence. Levinas insistence on my infinite responsibility for the other, therefore, does not merely imply the impossibility of meeting my responsibility. Rather, infinite responsibility functions as a measure of legitimacy for every social, economic and political arrangement, for every state. Accepting ethics as the first politics means that one-forthe-other should ground the constitution of the state. Levinas makes this distinction as follows: those who seek to have a State in order to have justice and those who seek justice in order to ensure the survival of the State.101Though the third and its call to justice works within history, the state does not rely exclusively on the logic of formal justice. While most of Levinas commentators start with the ethical and end with the state, Levinas, I argue, envelops formal justice within his conception of ethical justice. As such, he radically disturbs and transcends a conception of the political and the state whose legitimacy is derived from a reductive, liberal and modern notion of justice, which according to Levinas neutralizes the face into a totalized concept called equity. 102 Therefore, Levinas ethical relation contains both formal equality and formal justice, and transcends them at the same time. The liberal
achievement of formal equality (equality of rights and freedoms) is welcomed, and a Marxian struggle for formal justice (economic equality) is demanded. And yet, both are seen as insufficient to establish a different kinship based on ethical asymmetry between me and the other.103 Levinas therefore does writes as though he has. Rather, in

not abandon his earlier notion of justice, even if he sometimes his later works the third becomes a link between, and an embodiment of, the two orders of justice formal and ethical. Levinas argues: In reality, justice does not
include me in the equilibrium of its universality; justice summons me to go beyond the straight line of justice.104 But how does Levinas notion of ethical justice both encompass and transcend formal justice? In what follows, I will discuss two aspects of Levinas conception of ethical justice. At times, Levinas becomes very specific about his conception of ethical justice, and suggests that the third signifies two important and interrelated exigencies for ethical justice. The first aspect is the irreducible responsibility for the other, the non-indifference to the suffering and death of the other.105 The second is ethical justice as tikkun olam, which means literally to repair the world.106 In the first aspect of Levinas conception of ethical justice and herein lies my quibble with other readers of his before limiting my responsibility, before compelling me to compare and thematize, the third calls me to demand justice for the other man.107 It is the third who awakens the subject to another aspect of the ethical relation, one that goes beyond the subjects private hospitality and goodness to the other. The existence, from the beginning, of the third marks the face-to-face encounter as both an ethical and a political event, forever linking the meaning of the political to the circumstance of the other, and not to a liberal notion of the political, which is preoccupied with the maintenance of ones own rights and freedoms, or to a system of rights and duties, or to public charity. It exposes the ethico-political subject as an instant that appears in the political as a struggle against injustice done to the other. This is the meaning of Levinas claim to responsibility for the other, to the point of d ying for the other. In Levinas language, the

humanity of the human is awakened through the call for justice: Morality comes to birth not in equality, but in the fact that infinite exigencies, that of serving the poor, the stranger, the widow, and the orphan, converge at one point of the universe.108Reducing this responsibility to acts of private or public charity, as suggested by liberal readings of Levinas, will not do. The second aspect of Levinas articulation of ethical justice demands that the

subject repairs the world. This

demand cannot be reduced to an individual fight of good against evil, as it always is in western individualist culture. Rather, to view justice as immediately repairing the world opens Levinas ethics to a radical and collective political praxis whose aim is to demand justice for others. Levinas clearly states that rebellion against an unjust society expresses the spirit of our age. That spirit is expressed by rebellion against an unjust society.109 In an endnote to this quote, Levinas points out that our age sometimes caricatures this rebellion, alluding to many revolutions of the 20th century which ended up as dominant and dictatorial as the ones they rebelled against. However, he immediately adds: But the caricature is itself a revelation from which a meaning must be extracted; a meaning that requires correction, but which cannot be ignored or disregarded with impunity.110 If the third brings into the scene of human sociality the demand of justice for the other, then the subject is responsible to fight against injustice done to the other while fearing the death of the other more than his or her own death. With the entry of the third, both of these ethical commands acquire added urgency, and the commitment to both becomes the yardstick for the degree of ethical fulfillment, or of the
betrayal in the political. Levinas ethical relation takes us beyond the concern for the formal (un)freedom of the individual against/for which the modern liberal subject is called to fight, and beyond the class bondage against which the Marxian subject is summoned to unite. Ethical

justice in Levinas summons the ethico-political subject to fight for the rights and freedoms of another human, against the suffering of the excluded and forgotten. That is to say, the primordial call to fight against injustice is not about the ethico-political subjects regaining her or his natural freedom, but rather it is for the subject to justify his or her freedom to indict my arbitrary and partial freedom.111 Levinas not only surpasses the formal justice
established by and through the liberal modern state, but shows the displaced origin of the call for justice in Marx. In this sense, Levinas not only expands the notion of justice to include both formal and economic equality, but shows that the origin of this human quest comes from the poverty of the face of another human being, who calls the subject to respond.

Acknowledging the State through attempts to influence macrolevel policy is essential to stopping mass murder
Simmons 1999 (William Paul, current Associate Professor of Political Science at ASU, formerly at Bethany College in the
Department of History and Political Science, The Third: Levinas' theoretical move from an-archical ethics to the realm of justice and politics, Philosophy & Social Criticism November 1, 1999 vol. 25 no. 6) We should also say that all those who attack us with such venom have no right to do so . . . along with this feeling of unbounded responsibility, there is certainly a place for defence, for it is not always a question of me but of those close to me, who are also my neighbors. Id call such a defence a politics, but a politics thats ethically necessary. Alongside

ethics, there is a place for politics. 55 Levinas argues for a place for both ethics and politics, or, to employ his metaphor, a place for both the Jewish
tradition of ethics and responsibility and, along with it, the Greek tradition of language, justice and politics. This section will analyze the mutual necessity of both ethics and politics. According to Levinas, ethics and

politics can both be needed only if there is separation, that is, if each has its own justication. Neither ethics nor politics should be taken to their extremes; each must be moderated by the other. I think theres a direct contradiction between ethics and politics, if both these demands are taken to the extreme.56 Ethics must temper the political because politics unbounded leads to tyranny, absolute power of the strongest. Politics ignores the individuality of each citizen, treating each as a cipher, a member of a species. Further, without a norm outside of the scope of the said, there is no standard to judge political regimes. The call for a standard by which to judge regimes is what Levinas means by a return to Platonism. Plato, in the Republic, had used the good beyond
being as his standard. A return to Platonism would be necessary to restore the independence of ethics in relation to history and trace a limit to the comprehension of the real by history.57 Levinas nds a standard in the ethical relationship with the Other. The norm that must continue to inspire and direct the moral order is the ethical norm of the interhuman. If

the moral-political order totally relinquishes its ethical foundation, it must accept all forms of society, including the fascist or totalitarian, for it can no longer evaluate or discriminate between them. The state is usually better than anarchy but not always. In some instances, fascism or totalitarianism, for example the political order of the state may have to be challenged in the name of our ethical responsibility to the other. This is why ethical philosophy must remain the rst philosophy.58 At the same time, ethics

needs politics. To reach those others who are far away, ethics must be transxed into language, justice and politics. As prima philosophia, ethics cannot itself legislate for society or produce rules of conduct whereby society might be revolutionized or transformed.59 Although this universalization distances the ego from the Other, it must be done to reach the others. We must,
out of respect for the categorical imperative or the others right as expressed by his face, un-face human beings, sternly reducing each ones uniqueness to his individuality in the unity of the genre, and let universality rule. Thus we courts of law, institutions

need laws, and yes and the state to render justice.60 Further, politics is necessary because there are those who will refuse to heed the new law, Thou shall not kill. Levinas is well aware that this
commandment is not an ontological impossibility. Many will take Cains position and shun the responsibility for the Other. Thus,

politics is necessary to prohibit murder, in all its forms . A place had to be foreseen and kept warm for all eternity for Hitler and his followers.61 Both ethics and politics have their own justication. The justication for ethics is found in the face-to-face relationship with the Other. The justication for politics is to restrain those who follow Cains position and ignore the responsibility for the Other. Politics does not subsume ethics, but rather it serves ethics. Politics is necessary but it must be continually checked by ethics. Levinas calls for a state that is as ethical as possible, one which is perpetually becoming more just. Levinas
calls for the liberal state.

at: Latin America DA/K/PIK

2ac
They shouldnt be exempt from this argument-- their own authors use Latin America. Cross-ex checks that saying Latin America within evidence AT ALL is what links us to their argument. Reject our use of Latin America, not the whole aff our use of Latin America isnt crucial to our advocacy No spillover a single rejection without a political alternative fails proven by their authors inability to stop the use of the word Turn- neoliberalism is the root cause of imperialist democracies
Brown 03 (Wendy Brown-- political theory professor at University of California Berkeley Neo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal
Democracy http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v007/7.1brown.html)//rainy An assault on liberal democratic values and institutions has been plenty evident in particular recent events: civil liberties

undermined by the USA Patriot Acts and Total Information Awareness (later renamed Total Terror Awareness)
scheme, Oakland police shooting wood and rubber bullets at peaceful anti-war protesters, a proposed Oregon law to punish all civil disobedience as terrorism (replete with 25 year jail terms), and McCarthyite deployments of patriotism

to suppress

ordinary dissent and its iconography. It is evident as well in the staging of aggressive imperial wars and ensuing occupations along with the continued dismantling of the welfare state and progressive taxation schemes already stripped by the Reagan, Bush Sr. and Clinton administrations. It has been more subtly apparent in "softer" events: the de-funding of public education that led 84 Oregon school districts to
sheer almost a month off of the school year in spring 2003 and delivered provisional pink slips to thousands of California teachers at the end of the 2002-03 academic year.14 Or the debate about whether anti-war protests constituted unacceptable costs for a

many critics of current U.S. foreign policy expressed anger at peaceful civil disobedients for the expense and disruption they caused, implying that the value of public opinion and protest should be measured against its dollar cost.15 Together these phenomena suggest a transformation of American liberal democracy into a political and social form for which we do not yet have a name, a form organized by a combination of neo-liberal governmentality and imperial world politics, contoured in the short run by conditions of global
financially strapped cities -- even economic and global security crises.

They indicate a form in which the contemporary imperial agenda is

able to take hold precisely because the domestic soil has been loosened for it by neo-liberal rationality . This form is not fascism or totalitarian as we have known them historically nor are these appellations likely to be

this is a political condition in which the substance of many of the significant features of constitutional and representative democracy have been gutted, jettisoned, or end-run, even as
most helpful identifying or criticizing it.16 Rather,

they continue to be promulgated ideologically, serving as a foil and shield for their undoing and for the doing of death elsewhere. These features include civil liberties equally distributed and protected; a press and other journalistic media minimally free from corporate ownership on one side and state control on the other; uncorrupted and unbought elections; quality public education oriented, inter alia, to producing the literacies relevant to informed and active citizenship; government openness, honesty and accountability; a judiciary modestly insulated from political and commercial influence; separation of church and state; and a foreign policy guided at least in part by the rationale of protecting these domestic values. None of these constitutive elements of liberal democracy was ever fully realized in its short history -- they have always been compromised by a variety of economic and social powers from white supremacy to capitalism. And

liberal democracies in the First World have always

required other peoples to pay

-- politically, socially, and economically -- for what these societies have enjoyed, that is

there has always been a colonially and imperially inflected gap between what has been valued in the core and what has been required from the periphery. So it is important to be precise here. Ours is not the first time in which elections have been
bought, manipulated and even engineered by the courts, the first time the press has been slavish to state and corporate power, the first time the U.S. has launched an aggressive assault on a sovereign nation or threatened the entire world with its own weapons of mass destruction. What is unprecedented about this time is the extent to which basic principles and institutions of democracy are becoming anything other than ideological shells for their opposite as well as the extent to which these principles and institutions are being abandoned even as values by large parts of the American population. This includes the development of the most secretive government in 50 years (the gutting of the Freedom of Information Act was one of the quiet early accomplishments of the current Administration, the "classified" status of its more than 1000 contracts with Halliburton one of its more recent); the plumping of corporate wealth combined with the elimination of social spending reducing the economic vulnerability of the poor and middle classes; a bought, consolidated, and muffled press that willingly cooperates in its servitude (emblematic in this regard is the Judith Miller (non)scandal, in which the star New York Times journalist wittingly reported Pentagon propaganda about Iraqi WMDs as journalistically discovered fact); and intensified policing in every corner of American life -- airports, university admissions offices, mosques, libraries, workplaces -- a policing undertaken both by official agents of the state and by an interpellated citizenry. A potentially permanent "state of emergency" combined with an infinitely expandable rhetoric of patriotism overtly legitimates undercutting the Bill of Rights and legitimates as well abrogation of conventional democratic principles in setting foreign policy, principles that include respect for nation state sovereignty and reasoned justifications for war. But behind these rhetorics there is another layer of discourse facilitating the dismantling of liberal democratic institutions and practices,

a govermentality of neo-liberalism that eviscerates non-market morality and thus erodes the root of democracy in principle at the same time that it raises the status of profit and expediency as the criteria for policy making.

Their Escobar evidence utilizes the term Native American which is a form of white guilt that glosses over the horrors of the past
Kathryn WALBERT holds a PhD in US History from the University of North Carolina @ Chapel Hill. American Indian vs. Native American: A note on terminology, January 2009, http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nc-american-indians/5526, ctc Some American Indians prefer the term American Indian over Native American for specific reasons. Lakota activist Russell Means has noted that the

American Indian is the only ethnic group in the United States with the American before our ethnicity and prefers to use that term because he knows its origins.6 Others argue that the term Native American is inaccurate because anyone who is born in the western hemisphere is native to the Americas and could be considered a native American. Still others believe that the term Native American serves only to assuage white guilt over the treatment of American Indians. As Christina Berry notes, Native Americans did not suffer through countless trails of tears, disease, wars, and cultural annihilation Indians did. The Native people today are Native Americans not Indians, therefore we do not need to feel guilty for the horrors of the past.7 In this view, the term American Indian is used because it is the term that has been used most consistently and because it makes the connection to the past treatment of people who have been called Indians in ways that make it difficult to gloss over the history of racism and discrimination in our country.

Reject the negs unconscious use of Native American - in order to be aware of the governments violence and cultural annihilation versus American Indians, the rhetoric we use is uniquely key. Rejection of Latin America fails failure to advocate a political alternative reinforces coloniality
Christopher SHAW, University of California, Los Angeles, 2006 Mignolo's Idea of Latin America: Race, Place, and the Pluriverse: MIGNOLO, WALTER D. The Idea of Latin America. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. 198 pp., Mester, ctc But even

if we can establish through some empirical means that the "real" Latin America does not correspond to the idea of it propagated by the West, that does not change the reality that the West's idea of Latin America was so wildly successful because of, rather than despite, the fact that it was a political project masking itself as an ontological reality. Indeed, pointing out the idea of Latin America as an ontological fallacy does nothing to defuse its representational powera fact corroborated by Mignolo's focus on political (rather than sociological or empirical) projects designed to combat the idea of Latin America. To bring us back to Mignolo's question as to whether his endorsement of say AfroCaribbean political projects were "pure and simple essentialism," the answer must be "yes, in practice," simply because they call on and inhabit the essentialist, racialized categories set by occidentalist discourse. After all, if

we are to understand essentialism as confusing the ontological with the political, is that in practice any different from confusing the political with the ontological, which Mignolo attributes to the idea of Latin America? Certainly Mignolo is at pains to demonstrate that the political projects he espouses are merely strategic and thus anti-essentialist; but for as much as they question the content and reductive make-up of racial categories, they nonetheless leave the categories in place . Thus it is not clear how that will prevent an occidentalist/capitalist, essentialist co-optation of those projects as they reinforce the racial and racializing categories of modernity and coloniality. The more pressing problem seems to be
occidentalism's power of representation itself, its power to overwrite any and all political projects. What do we do about that?

The plans breakdown of capitalism excavates the idea of Latin America solvency only goes one way MIGNOLO 5 Walter D. Mignolo, William H. Wanamaker Professor and Director of Global Studies and the Humanities at
the John Hope Franklin Center for International and Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University, 2005 (Preface: Uncoupling the Name and the Reference, The Idea of Latin America, Published by Wiley, ISBN p. Kindle 43-55)//ctc

To excavate coloniality, then, one must always include and analyze the project of modernity, although the reverse is not true, because coloniality points to the absences that the narrative of modernity produces. Thus, I choose to describe the modern world order that has emerged in the five hundred years since the discovery of America" as the modern/colonial world, to indicate that coloniality is constitutive of modernity and cannot exist without it. Indeed, the "idea" of Latin America cannot be dealt with in isolation without
producing turmoil in the world system. It cannot be separated from the "ideas" of Europe and of the US as America that dominate even today. The

Americas are the consequence of early European commercial expansion and the motor of capitalism, as we know it today. The "discovery" of America and the genocide of Indians and African slaves are the very foundation of "modernity" more so than the French or Industrial Revolutions. Better yet, they constitute the darker and hidden face of modernity, "coloniality." Thus, t0 excavate the "idea of
Latin America" is, really, to understand how the West was born and how the modern world order was founded. The following discussion is, thus, written within the frame 0f what Arturo Escobar has called the modernity/coloniality research project. Some of the premises are the following: 1 There is no modernity without coloniality, because coloniality is constitutive of modernity. 2 The modern/colonial world (and the colonial matrix of power) originates in the sixteenth century, and the discovery/invention of

America is the colonial component of modernity whose visible face is the European Renaissance. 3 The Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution are derivative historical moments consisting in the transformation of the colonial matrix of power. 4 Modernity is the name for the historical process in which Europe began its progress toward world hegemony. It carries a darker side, coloniality. 5 Capitalism

as we know it today, is of the essence for both the conception of modernity and its darker side, coloniality. 6 Capitalism and modernity/coloniality had a second historical moment of transformation after World War II when the US look the imperial leadership previously
enjoyed at times by both Spain and England.