Anti Cap Neg

8/8/2019 Anti Cap Neg

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/anti-cap-neg 1/16

NECESSITY POLITICS LINKS

The visibility your aff gives to anti-capitalist labor is the politics of necessity

Beltrán, associate professor of political science at Haverford College, 09(Cristina, Political Theory , Going Public Hannah Arendt, Immigrant Action, and the Space of AppearanceVolume 37 Number 5 October 2009 595-622)

Yet this dynamic— whereby efforts to honor the contributions of noncitizens lead to the conflation of who they are with what they do—is the double bind of immigrant action. In making labor visible, immigrantsand their allies seek to invest it with political significance. Yet such visibility runs the risk of simultaneously mobilizing the more problematic accounts of labor, those that emphasize necessityover freedom. Such are the contradictions of all publics—including the immigrant counterpublic . As Warnerreminds us, because they are formed by their conflict with the dominant public, counterpublics are “damagedforms of publicness, just as gender and sexuality are, in this culture, damaged forms of privacy.”95 Despitetheir capacity for transformation and reevaluation, counterpublics are also always embedded in the largerpublic. This reality means that we must not simply reject or celebrate labor— instead, this discourseneeds to be questioned, resisted, and renegotiated. Claiming rights by invoking labor clearly has acertain logic. In the United States, for example, the discourse of labor is often mobilized for nationalist ends.Judith Shklar, for example, reminds us that labor and the right to earn function as a central foundation of American citizenship. According to Shklar, part of America’s exceptionalism has involved the right to earnand the right to vote.96 Citing the Jacksonian belief in the dignity of work, Shklar argues that earning and

the value of labor are constitutive of American citizenship. In contrast to ancient associations between leisureand citizenship, Americans have often expressed a wariness of the idle rich, emphasizing the link betweendemocracy and work. Given this history of conferring civic standing through a focus on suffrage andemployment, it is unsurprising that proimmigration advocates would seize on the idea of the undocumentedas hard-working economic contributors. However, as Shklar’s discussion of America also notes, the questionof race remains a “core dilemma” in America’s political history. The existence of chattel slavery bothcomplicated and racialized the model of the independent citizen-earner: while wage labor conferredindependence and autonomy, slavery “did more than any other institution to bring labor into contempt.”97This sometimes led white workers to detest slavery “but hate the slave as well.”98



NO SOLVO

Seeing migrant mobility as a tool against capitalism is too easy. It simply inverts power relations

Bojadžijev AND Karakayalı 10(Manuela, Professor at the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt University of Berlin; Serhat,teaches at the University of Halle, e- flux 06/10)

It is too simplistic to merely turn the power relations on their head , as has sometimes happened incontributions from the field of research on transnationalism. Perceiving migrant practices as a subversiveOther to nation-states, or even to capitalism , is not the answer. Rather than conceptualize every form of migration that is not regulated by the state (especially undocumented migration) as a form of counter-powerto national state practices of territorialization, we are concerned with exploring migratory lines of flight as asocial movement in the intermediate zones, where migration slips out of the hands of regulative, codifying,and stratifying policies. With lines of flight, here, we address that which literally seeks to escape capitalism:migration as escape routes, migration as living labor. In contrast, the super-exploitation of migrant labor isthe opposite of this line of flight; it is its recuperation. The political option lies where this contradiction comesinto play.

ISM FOCUS. The left’s focus on ISM politics is draining its intellectual stockpile. And the fear of nationalpolitics is another link

GITLIN, Prof of Journalism @ U Columbia, 06 (Todd, The Intellectuals and the Flag)

The antigovernment dogma of deregulation, privatization, and tax cuts exacerbates economic and socialtroubles. A culture war against modernity—against secularism, feminism, and racial justice—flies in the face of the West’s distinctive contribution to the history

of civilization, namely, the rise of individual rights and reason. To elaborate on these claims is the work of other books. The reasons for the right-wing ascendancy are many, among them—as I argued in letter 7 of Letters to a Young Activist (2003)—theorganizational discipline that the right cherishes and the left, at least until recently, tends to abhor. The left’sinstitutions, in particular, unions, are weak. But my focus here is another reason for the right’s ascendancy:the left’s intellectual disarmament. Some of the deficiency is institutional. Despite efforts to come from behind after the 2000

election, there remain decades’ worth of shortfall in the left’s cultural apparatus. In action-minded think tanks, talk radio and cable television, didactic newspapers,

subsidies for writers, and so on, the right has held most of the high cards.1 Left and liberal analyses and proposals do emerge from universities and research

centers, but their circulation is usually choked off for lack of focus, imagination, and steady access to mass media—except in the cheapened forms of punditry and

agitprop. The right’s masterful apparatus for purveying its messages and organizing for power is not the only

reason why the left has suffered defeat after defeat in national politics since the 1960s. The left’s intellectualstockpile has been badly depleted, and new ideas are more heralded than delivered. When the left hasthought big, it has been clearer about isms to oppose—mainly imperialism and racism—than about values and

policies to further. At that, it has often preferred the denunciatory mode to the analytical, mustering full-throated opposition rather than full-brained

exploration. While it is probably true that many more reform ideas are dreamt of than succeed in circulating through the brain-dead media, the liberal-left conveys

little sense of a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. While the right has rather successfully tarred liberals with the brush of “tax-and-spend,” those thus

tarred have often been unsure whether to reply “It’s not so” or “It is so, we’re proud to say.” A fair generalization is that the left’s expertise has beenconstricted in scope, showing little taste for principle and little capacity to imagine a reconstituted nation. It has been conflicted and unsteady about values. It has tended to disdain any design for foreign policy other than “U.S. out,” which is no substitute for

a foreign policy—and inconsistent to boot when you consider that the left wants the United States to intervene, for example, to push Israel to end its occupation of

the West Bank. All this is to say that the left has been imprisoned in the closed world of outsider politics.Instead of a vigorous quest for testable propositions that could actually culminate in reform, the academicleft in particular has nourished what has come to be called “theory”: a body of writing (one can scarcely sayits content consists of propositions) that is, in the main, distracting, vague, self-referential, and wrong-headed. “Theory” is

chiefly about itself: “thought to the second power,” as Fredric Jameson defined dialectical thinking in an early, dazzling American exemplar of the new theoretical

style.2 Even when “theory” tries to reconnect from language and mind to the larger social world, languageremains the preoccupation.



Your aff has it backwards. In the world of neoliberalism, we need the ideas of the nation and state tocounter transnational corporations. Your aff will create the conditions for the state’s withdrawal, leavingdecision-making authority up to corporations

Behdad, Dept Chair – Comparative Lit, University of California, Los Angeles, 05(Ali, Portal Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies Vol. 2, No. 2 July)

What we encounter in the discourses of postnationalism and diaspora today is a similar ideologicalambivalence toward what constitutes national consciousness and belonging. Whether we read Said, Bhabhaor Appadurai, we notice the paired critique of nationalism and celebration of a more cosmopolitan, imaginedcommunity—for Said, it is the calling for a Palestinian nation that haunts his celebration of exile as ametaphor of ideal subjectivity; for Bhabha, it is the ‘scattering of the people that in other times and otherplaces, in the nations of others, becomes a time of gathering’ (Bhabha 1990a, 291); and for Appadurai it isthe delocalized transnation that is celebrated against the white nation. What are we to make of thesecontradictory articulations of the nation form? How are we to go beyond the problematic binary of goodnationalism vs. bad nationalism implied in this critical debate?A starting point to address these questions is to unpack the relation between state and nation and exploretheir roles in the global flow of people, capital, and commodities that characterize our contemporary world.What is striking about critiques of nation and nationalism by cultural and postcolonial theorists is theabsence of any substantial discussion of the state, especially problematic because the nation and state are often linked—that is, in the nation-state—if not fully equated. Often reduced to a repressive

apparatus , the notion of state is considered passé in today’s Western academy, associated with an outdatedMarxist paradigm that limited its function to maintaining class domination. But I want to suggest a return tothis key term and question the extent to which the rhetoric of globalization has obscured the important rolestates and governments play in transnational relations of power . Indeed, state apparatuses continue toretain, if not exclusive, tremendous power over deployment of force as well as the authority to regulate howtransnational corporations invest their resources and engage in business transactions . We should ask,therefore, what functions do states, as agencies of representation, perform in the broader system of international regulation? Do global agencies and transnational corporations really undermine the sovereigntyof national governments? Have states become the local agents of corporate interests? Or, does the fact of their being ultimately answerable to their citizens make them the local shields against global capitalism? Canstates re-create a sense of national identity in response to the political and economic constraints of globalization? Or, do state apparatuses mobilize the idea of the nation to enable economic interests of transnational corporations? I raise these questions both to underscore the problematic tendency amongpostcolonial and cultural critics to overlook the function of states and their apparatuses in how global

networks and transnational relations are formed and to offer new areas of inquiry in unpacking andunderstanding the impact of global interconnectedness. But the overlooking of the roles of nation and statein recent theories of diaspora and postnationalism seems also problematic given the speed with which newnations and nationalism are actually emerging today , the peculiar propensity for and the intensity of borderfortification in spite of the global flow of people and commodities across them, and the forging of newpartnerships between certain states and the global capital market. I want to suggest that while nationalborders may no longer impede most of the international trade and other global economic transactions, theydo nonetheless matter greatly when it comes to human subjects whose movements are carefully regulated. Ihave shown elsewhere that in the past twenty years the principle of governmentality in the United States hasactually been solidified, as demonstrated, for example, by the expansion of the prison industry and theproliferation of the technologies of border control at the US-Mexico border (Behdad 1998). Similarly, theintegration of Europe in the form of a union has also meant tougher restrictions on the movement of peoplefrom the Middle East, Africa, and most of Asia to Europe.Moreover, in spite of the increase in global cultural contacts, nationalist sentiments persist throughout the

world and states continue to exert a great deal of power as to how a national community is globalized . Onthe one hand, as R. Radhakrishnan points out:neither the deracinating multi- or inter-national spread of capitalism nor the Marxist theoretical assimilationof the national question within an internationalist communism has been able to do away with the urgenciesof the imagined communities of nationalism (Radhakrishnan 1992, 83).Nationalism and state apparatuses remain powerful everywhere, in Iran and the United States, in Serbia aswell as France. And, without romanticizing the role of states and nationalism, one may add that in an era of foot-loose capitalism, certain nationalist sentiments or state forms of sovereignty may in fact prove useful incountering the lack of accountability on the part of giant transnational corporations.



Turn – border patrol. MORE FLEXIBLE FORMS OF LABOR CAUSES MORE SUPPORT FOR BORDER PATROL

McNevin, RMIT University, Melbourne, 09(Anne, New Political Science, Volume 31, Number 2, June)

These anxieties reflect a fundamental tension that characterises states in which neoliberal ideology provides

the central rationality of governance. This is a tension between the neoliberal imperative to open borders toglobal market forces, including a transnational labour market, and growing popular pressure for territorialclosure.9 The apparent contradiction in neoliberal policy frameworks (active pursuit of global markets for

“national” benefit on one hand, and declining state protection from market risks on the other) challenges thevery raison d’eˆtre of the state as the institutional safeguard of citizens’ interests. While irregular migrantsfulfil demand for more flexible forms of labour in neoliberal economies, native populations seek reassurance that territorial borders remain meaningful guarantors of their privileged status vis-a`-visnon-citizens. In this context, a commitment to border policing against irregular migrants (regardless of itsactual success) provides explicit recognition of the continued significance of borders and the priority andpossibility of protecting the community of citizens they contain. Border policing clearly contradicts the open-borders approach taken in other policy areas and the rhetoric of inevitability that supports this approach. Itcan thus be interpreted as an overwhelmingly performative practice. The lack of efficacy associated with USborder policing, for example, should be seen not only as a means of supplying cheap labour, but also in thecontext of its parallel function as a performance of territorial sovereignty.10 Likewise, the panic induced over

asylum seekers in the Australian context works to distort the nature of the threat to territorial sovereigntyand, thus, the resolve of the state to address it.11 To prevent a border crossing in either of these settings isto reinvigorate the notion of the border itself as ameaningful dividing point between inside and out.

You can’t solve local and state laws

Kretsedemas, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, 08(Philip, American Quarterly, Volume 60, Number 3, September)

This essay reviews the recent expansion of immigration laws that have been enacted by local and stategovernments to control unauthorized migration. Although these laws evoke a conventional, territorial paradigm of national sovereignty, I demonstrate that

they are actually leading toward a more complex form of sovereignty that tolerates wide variations in the way that immigration laws are enforced in different partsof the United States. I also argue that it is a mistake to view these laws only through the lens of an immigration control agenda. Drawing on the writing of Aiwha

Ong and Georgio Agamben, I observe that these laws have been shaped by neoliberal governing strategies that createexceptions to prior legal precedent as well as fostering a looser connection between territoriality, rights and

legal status. My discussion explains how local enforcement laws have been shaped by these neoliberalpriorities, which are more oriented toward the selective policing of an expanding migrant workforce thantoward mass deportation of "illegals." As a result, immigration scholars and immigrant rights advocates should come to terms with the likelihood

that these priorities will become the dominant, driving force behind future trajectories of local enforcement and other forms of immigration enforcement.

Over the past several years, a growing number of local governments have enacted laws that require police,other government workers, and even private citizens to verify the legal status of local residents.Approximately 300 such laws have been enacted over the past four years and more than 180 of them, spanning forty-three states, were enacted in 2007 alone.1 The primary aim of these laws (often referred toas “illegal immigrant” or local enforcement laws) is to allow local authorities to apprehend unauthorizedmigrants. Broadly described, the laws appeal to a territorial paradigm of national sovereignty thatequates the integrity of the nation with the ability to control its borders. From this perspective, theunauthorized migrant is not just a potential “economic burden” or a “security risk,” but an affront toconventional notions of citizenship, which equate political, social, and civil rights with the criterion of legal

residence. Hence local enforcement laws are often viewed by their supporters as efforts to restore the rightsand privileges of the citizenry by ensuring that unauthorized migrants are unable to vote in local elections,access publicly funded services and resources, or compete for jobs that could be filled by citizens and otherlegal residents.2





IMMIGRANT TALK LINKS

Your harm paints immigrants as mere dupes and victims of capitalism

The Frassanito Network 05 (at the European Social Forum, 4/5,www.noborder.org/files/movements_of_migration.pdf)

The transformation of borders reflects the shift in political strategies towards the management of migration.Nevertheless, it also mirrors the fact that neither physical nor legal barriers can stop people's movement.Migrants are not just the collateral damage of global capitalism; they are active agents of free movement who represent a subverting power in respect to the sovereignty of the nation states as well as thenew regimes of hyper-exploitation on a global level. The depiction of national and supernational borders asinstruments whose function is simply to stop unwanted migrants is misleading because it fails both tounderstand migration as a social movement and to consider the struggles against borders. The main functionof global border regimes and migration control strategies is not only to keep people outside, but rather todirect their actions and behaviour across space,leading to what can be described as a system of selectiveinclusion through the illegalization of the migrants. Borders assign people to differentiated social, politicaland legal spaces which extend inwards and outwards across national and supernational territories. Expulsionsand detention camps reserved to foreigners represent a differentiated system of justice aimed atadministrating the actions of foreigners outside of the guarantees of civil rights and general legal principles.In the same way, legal mechanisms which limit the free circulation of people define a de facto differentiated

regime for migrant workers aimed at expropriating the inner value of peoples' mobility. In contrast to thisworld's partition, migration itself is a contestation of the distribution of rights and privileges according to thehierarchical allocation of social and political space. While the globalization of border regimes is a symptom of the increasing difficulty with which to contain the violence of the commodification process of labour withinthe framework of national borders, the everyday challenge to the borders by migrants at the same timeshows the weakness of this globalizing process. The demolishing of borders is not a political utopia. It is astruggle that migrants fight every day when they conquer the "European fortress" - or any other regime builtupon the institution of borders - and when they fight for their social, political and civil rights.

The portrayal of weak subjects neglects the lives of immigrants and it paints them in need of the state tosave them


We therefore need to analyse and start from the conditions and strategies of migrant's mobility and labourand to avoid conceiving them either as abstractions that are to be endowed with rights or as weak subjectsincapable of autonomously taking action. We do not believe that migrants, as in the case of precariousworkers in general, are a priori subjects connoted by a particular political persuasion and by nature destinedto subvert the order of labour. Migrants are a specific presence in the constellation of contemporary labour. And it is from this last point that we

must begin if we want to capture the contradictions and possibilities. Migrant labour means acknowledging that however shackled to labour, migrants anticipate anumber of general conditions that regard contemporary labour as a whole. Migrants are not nomadic subjects which satisfy the image of someone who is more orless permanently present in western societies. They cross borders not to assert some abstract right of movement: in doing so they pay the price for the devaluationof their labour capacity, but at the same time they connect labour conditions and forms of existence which exist in spite of borders and barriers. Migrant labour istherefore directly implicated in contemporary social production. It can represent the possibility of overturning the usual way of thinking about and conducting

political work with migrants, at the same time as allowing us to peruse the general forms which social production is assuming. We believe that consideringmigrants a "a weak" subject, only on the basis of the condition of daily social and work privation, risks neglecting the claim for freedom which is central to the decision to migrate and which also persists ,in spite of all the adverse conditions, on arrival. Moreover, viewing migrants merely as subjects deprived of rights and citizenship means to still think that there is a condition of full enjoyment of those rights

that they must obtai n . This route of integration carries the indelible mark of the national construction of systems of rights, and it also involves the demand to be integrated into the national framework of therecognition of labour. Secondly, it takes for certain that this recognition exists and that it provides a spacewhere labour can politically count. It is obviously a different matter when rights and citizenship act as thearena of political communication between individuals who, in a common search for freedom, place intoquestion, first of all, their differences without ever letting themselves be homologated and enclosed withinlegal and national boundaries.



Migrants are no longer simply victims of economics.


We are here bringing with us the experiences of the struggles of migration all over the world, from themobilization of the sans papiers in Europe to the Freedom Ride of Migrant Workers in the US last year, fromthe "Justice for Janitors" campaign to the upsurge of Woomera, in Australia. In the last years, these

struggles have forged new political languages and practices . The days are gone when it was possible to talk of migrants as mere victims of global economicdevastation. Sure, this kind of political discourse, that was for example hegemonic in the first twomeetings of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, still survives within a left which is unable to overcomethe melancholic plea for a supposed "golden age" of a social State and tamed capitalism. It is possible thatmany of the people attending the European Social Forum in London, even many of those who are criticaltowards the official organization of the forum itself, still share this view. But, on the other hand, we have thereality of the constant mobilization of migrants, of their challenge to the borders of Europe and to otherborders in the world, of their refusal to submit their mobility to the supposed "laws" of the labor market. Wehave the reality of migration as a social movement which is not merely produced by the action of "objective"forces, but which is also driven by a number of subjective needs, desires and behaviors. To say this, even tospeak of an autonomy of migration, doesn't mean to remove from the center of the political debate themechanisms of domination and exploitation which determine the migrants' life. Rather, it suggests a shift in

perspective that allows us to analyze (and to criticize, both theoretically and practically) those mechanismsand to continuously confront them with a set of social practices that contain the possibility for theirovercoming. It is with this shift in perspective that we want to frame our discussion of the topics addressedin this newspaper; namely racism and border regime, citizenship and camps. Our time is a "global" one notonly because of the strategies of neo-liberalism, financial capital, and capitalist corporations. It is global alsobecause the mobility of labor cannot be governed within the framework of national borders anymore. Thegeopolitical architecture of the fordist age has been challenged by transnational migration on a global scale,as the discipline of the fordist factory has been challenged by the refusal of work and the sabotage of theworking class in the "core" countries of capitalism. Detention centers and deportations are as much theanswers to this challenge, as the precariousness of labor and life is. But in the subjective side of labormobility, we can even say in its subjective flexibility, lies the main productive force of our age. There is nopossible subversive cooperation, no possible radical change without this productive force. This is ourstandpoint. But we also add that there is no possible "progressive" reform without taking it into account.



AT: SQ = CAPITALISM

True, the status quo’s exploitation of cheap labor fuels the interests of capital but so does legalization, in adifferent way. The management of illegality is a way for capitalism to create safety valves which keep italive

Barbagallo & Beuret 08(Nicholas and Camille have recently migrated to Europe, live in East London and have worked on migration

and labour issues in Australia and the UK, Mute 2 #7, 2/12, http://www.metamute.org/en/Mute-Vol2-7-Show-Invisibles-migration-data-work)

The amnesty produces ‘the people’ as much as it homogenises the migrant – it sets up a twin moment of re/production, hinging on a notion of tolerance. Little wonder then that its corollary is a crude racism. Theother is made in the same moment as ‘the native’, producing both tolerance and racism (as if they werereally that distinct).

Of course, the racism produced by such moments also has a directly productive role with regards to capital.Race is one of the key differentials in the wage and labour hierarchy. Amnesties generally serve asmomentary corrections to national labour markets, serving the needs of capital in a crude, safety valvekind of way. Of course it is not that illegality does not also serve the needs of capital, but it does so in adifferent fashion. In the economic instance, an amnesty serves to bring into the formal economy (for reasonsof taxation and management) those people working outside of it. To be sure there are markets and

economies that benefit significantly from illegality, but nonetheless this illegality needs to be constantlymanaged and when it is not necessary, the illegal must be brought into the legal. This movement back andforth , between legal and illegal is by no means a smooth space and while illegality benefits the interests of certain sections of capital, it is also worth noting it is not always the view of the state managers of thenational economy that illegality is of benefit.

THE AFF IS JUST A WAY TO RESOLVE CAPITALIST CRISES

Sherman, Metropolis British Columbia – Canadian Metropolis Project, M.A. Queen’s Dept of Geography, 08 (Yolande Pottie, MORAL PANIC OVER MERIT-BASED IMMIGRATION POLICY: TALENT FOR CITIZENSHIP ANDTHE AMERICAN DREAM, June)

If Hall et al. (1978) are correct and elites orchestrate moral panics to cover economic crises, what was the crisis in the capitalist system at the time of the study

period that necessitated panic around destruction of family structure? According to the Marxist perspective, migration cannot be separated fromthe capitalist project. Migrants provide an “industrial reserve army of labor” that depresses wages. It followsthat capitalists are pro-migration but that economic up- and downturns influence immigration quotas andpolicy. What’s more, some argue that “immigrant labor enters the society at the lowest tier of thesocioeconomic ladder, thereby raising the native workers to a higher tier and lessening the intensity of theclass conflict” (Meyers 2000: 1249). Immigration is thus seen as mediating recession and ultimatelyavoiding crises of capitalism (Meyers 2000: 1248).

STATE INCLUSION ALLOWS THE ORGANIZATION OF CAPITAL

Barbagallo & Beuret 08(Nicholas and Camille have recently migrated to Europe, live in East London and have worked on migration

and labour issues in Australia and the UK, Mute 2 #7, 2/12, http://www.metamute.org/en/Mute-Vol2-7-Show-Invisibles-migration-data-work)

The boundaries and borders must be crossed and threatened for the categories to have meaning. This showsthe deeper state-building significance of an amnesty – it is a state-led and managed moment of controlling and organising the tension and threat in a productive way for both the state and capital. Anamnesty might represent a real and substantial gain for migrant communities and a limited number of individuals, but at the cost of the re-inscription of life into the state and the legitimisation of the state's rolein managing the tension between, and circulation across, borders and boundaries.



The focus on immigrant agency has been redeployed to aid the concern for skilled workers

Bojadžijev AND Karakayalı 10(Manuela, Professor at the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt University of Berlin; Serhat,teaches at the University of Halle, e- flux 06/10)

Various effects followed from the deployment —by ourselves and others—of the concept of the autonomy of migration. It unsettled several things that had until then been taken for granted within anti-racism debates;a coherent “politics of autonomy,” however, did not emerge. The autonomy thesis was rebuffed where it wasinterpreted phenomenologically, as an empirical description of processes of migration; as if we had presumedmigrants to be autonomous individuals who “did their thing” regardless of border controls and migrationpolicies. There was fear that the turn away from the misery of migration could prove a flawedstrategy ; that the emphasis on the agency of migrants would play into the hands of those who had alwaysinferred homo economicus and the pursuit of self-interest in migrants . But this quickly becomes a fatal,circular argument that rests on the precondition that migrants may only ever be regarded as the victims of circumstance. The liberals set the precedent, and for the Left there only remains the option to play along orlay the groundwork for the Right. Instead, one must ask how it could be possible to lay the foundation for abroader movement in the concerns of migrants? Beyond basic pity and general human rights, what could bebrought into play as a common terrain?



CREATIVITY / ART / CRITIQUE IS ABSORBED BY CAP

nomad capitalism means critique is easily assimilated to the point of dysfunction – no longer the institutionbut instead the concept of the mobile reigns supreme over popular consumer consciousnessDiken 2 (Bulent, Department of Sociology, Lancaster Univ. “Justification and Immigration in the NetworkSociety – A New Ambivalence?” AMID Working Paper Series April 2002. PDF)

In the contemporary network society real geography is to a large extent cancelled by the deterritorialized

logic of flows.24 Power works according to the principle of mobility: the fast eat the slow.25 Ours is a “nomad capitalism”;26 it justifies itself and advertises its products also with reference to the aestheticregime of inspiration: “Be Inspired”, as Siemens says in its adverts. Meanwhile, capitalists themselves boastin new ways—“I am such a nomad, I am such a tramp”, says Anita Roddick, the owner of Body Shop.27 Anda new capitalist discourse based on metaphors of mobility is emerging in business organizations, promotingthe notion of a “constant adaptive movement” and flexible organizational forms that can “go with theflow”.28 In short, as Bauman nicely formulates it, today “we are witnessing the revenge of nomadism overthe principle of territoriality and settlement”.29 We are today “condemned to nomadism, at the very momentthat we think we can make displacement the most effective means of subversion”.30Aesthetic creativity, which is related to the idea of transgressing oneself, industrialist productivity, and themarket’s grandeur, willingness to take risks, are no longer exclusive worlds. The new “project-regime” is welladjusted to the world of networks precisely because it is a transitory form.31 Those who do not have projectsor do not explore networks are threatened by exclusion. In the new connectionist world, the real threat is notnon-integration but exclusion from networks. In this reticular world, in which a pre-established habitus is not

desirable, one “should be physically and intellectually mobile” and be able to respond to the call of “a movingworld”: the new “grand person is mobile”.32My point is that critique is not a peripheral activity. Rather, it contributes to capitalist innovations that can assimilate critique, which in turn confronts critique with the danger of becoming dysfunctional. Capitalism had received mainly two forms of critique until the 1970s: the social critique, from the Marxistcamp (based on the concept of “exploitation”), and the aesthetic critique, from the French philosophy (basedon the concept of “nomadism”). Yet, since the 1970s, capitalism seems to have found new forms of legitimation in the artist critique, which resulted in a “transfer of competencies from leftist radicalismtoward management”.33 Consequently, the aesthetic critique seems to have dissolved into a post-Fordistnormative regime of justification, while the notion of creativity has been re-coded in terms of flexibility, andwhile difference has been commercialized.

Even if all immigration fantasies disappeared, society would still be fascist

Diken 2 (Bulent, Department of Sociology, Lancaster Univ. “Justification and Immigration in the NetworkSociety – A New Ambivalence?” AMID Working Paper Series April 2002. PDF)

What is served by racism today is an ideological fantasy about a “society” that still exists. Its logic is this: if “society” were not “threatened” or “destroyed” by the mobile immigrant, we would have a consistent, cosy,and non-antagonistic – one is tempted to say “happily fascist” society. Is not this fantasy the kernel of thewhole immigration debate? I wonder what would be left in the immigration debate if this fantasy were takenaway. One is tempted to say: nothing! Though, if this fantasy is taken away, what is left is of coursea series of social problems. Yes, in the network society neither “society” nor the “migrant” exist, butthere exist a lot of social problems. Perhaps, we should “re-invent politics”, as Ulrich Beck says.41 Weshould talk about the “common good”, not in terms of cultural identity but in terms of politics. For “people donot need to be given their cultures, only their political rights”.42 Yet, the existing immigration debate is a-political or, in a sense, “post-political”. The dominant form of politics today is Third Way “postpolitics”, a

disavowal of politics as such. Post-politics does not “repress” politics as such but rather “forecloses” it:ideological conflicts are replaced by the collaboration of technocrats and multi-culturalists; what is foreclosedis thus the political itself, which returns in the form of racism, ethnic violence, and so on.43



FOUCAULT / NECESSITY POLITICS LINKS

Hardt and Negri’s multitude is a recipe for labor oriented fascism

Scott Michaelsen, and Scott Shershow, 05 (Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University,Professor of English at the University of California, Davis),“Why Work on Rights? Citizenship, Welfare andProperty in Empire and Beyond”, Theory & Event, Volume 8 Issue 4

Though Hardt and Negri's formula here is intended to rebalance the global social contract toward what theycall elsewhere the "democratic republic founded on labor" (Labor 55 ff.), they at the same time riskreproducing the tradition outlined by Shklar and Rose in a new way. In other words, they project a citizenoriented toward productive labor and the amassing of capital rather than toward bourgeois identity and itsconstant companion, the work-ethic; but, in either case, judgments will have to made regarding who has metthe threshold of "creation" and therefore who is entitled to the "rewards". They also appear to completelyreaffirm the moral contract (the self-fashioning labor of the citizen in the form of a certain Work), since theirfigure of citizenship involves a "man" who must be "squared," or multiplied with itself, and must be furtherelevated through "love of the community," in order to reach the threshold of liberation. The exclusivity of this formulation should be obvious: what happens to those beings who cannot achieve homohomo, or cannotshoulder the burden of such massively productive, capital-generating labor? And, even more so, what willhappen to those who may refuse to seek such a threshold? (Here, perhaps, one should remember the oldSituationist slogan: "Never work.") Finally, what is to be done with those who, on entirely different grounds,refuse the fusion of the multitude into what Hardt and Negri call its "singularity" in the name of difference orparticularity, however conceived? As Jacques Derrida has noted: "[C]ommunio is a word for militaryformation and is a kissing cousin of the word 'munitions': to have a communio is to be fortified on all sides,to build a 'common' (com) 'defense' (munis), as when a wall is put up around the city to keep the stranger orthe foreigner out. The self-protective closure of 'community,' then, would be just about the opposite of ...preparation for the incoming of the other, 'open' and 'porous' to the other... A 'universal community'excluding no one is a contradiction in terms; communities always have an inside and an outside" (Caputo108). In other words, citizenship -- even an allegedly global or universal citizenship -- will always be anexclusive formulation, open to judgment and determination of who is in and who is out. And Hardt andNegri transparently reveal the hinge for such exclusion, given their dual thresholds of productiveachievement -- one keyed to productive labor, and the other to affective community. As Schuck and Smithnote, Locke, Rousseau, Hobbes, and the like are all aligned in producing a notion of citizenship which has the"potential for discriminatory exclusion" (Schuck and Smith 11; see also 27), and Hardt and Negri merelyrecapitulate and intensify this form, "squaring" it.



ANTI-CAPITALIST RESISTANCE NO SOLVO

COALITIONS AREN’T SUSTAINABLE

DUNN, Institute for Research on World-Systems, UC-Riverside, 05(Christopher Chase, journal of world-systems research, xi, 2, december)

One of the big challenges is how the different kinds of progressive social movements can work together tostruggle against capitalist globalization. The issue of alliances is complicated by the fact that some of thegroups in opposition to capitalist globalization are reactionary rather than progressive. So the enemy of myenemy is not always my friend. And even among the progressives there are major issues. Environmentalistsand labor groups have notorious differences. Core and peripheral workers may have diff erent interestsregarding issues such as global labor standards. And there are obvious contradictions between those whowant to democratize global governance and those who want to abolish it altogether in favor of maximumlocal autonomy.

TRANSITION WARS


Here is an example of this sort of problem. Warren Wagar’s (1992) fi ctional scenario, A Short History of theFuture, tells the story of the next fi fty years under the title “Earth, Incorporated.” It is a story of furtherexpanding domination by huge capitalist corporations, continued technological development, ecologicaldegradation and the emergence of a capitalist proto-world-state, but not yet the dismantling of the militarystructure of the interstate system. U.S. hegemony continues to decline. Immigration, slow economic growth,growing inequalities and the emergence of greater class and racial divides in the U.S. eventually result in theelection of a Mexican-American woman as president. Heartland Republicans start a civil war, but the U.S.army, now staff ed by a large majority of non-white personnel, quickly puts down the opposition. Th e U.S.begins to support semiperipheral states that are resisting the hegemony of the global corporations and so theworld government (under the control of the “megacorps”) decides upon a nuclear first strike to take out theleftist U.S. regime. Th us begins a three-year nuclear war that destroys most of the cities of the NorthernHemisphere. In the aftermath the World Party is able to pull together a global socialist commonwealth. If something like Wagar’s scenario is at all probable, the antisystemic movements need to work to prevent sucha catastrophe. It is ethically unacceptable to simply wait for global capitalism to destroy itself and then pick

up the pieces.

CAPITALISM WILL SURVIVE

Trainer, Senior Lecturer, School of Social Work, U of New South Wales (Australia), 2K [Ted, “Where Are We,Where Do We Want to Be, How Do We Get There?”, Democracy & Nature, Vol. 6, No. 2]

A second line of argument derives from the extremely depressing history of achievement of left causes ingeneral. It could be argued that since the 1970s direct struggle against capitalism has brought little more than catastrophic rout on all fronts, even taking into account the (temporary) blocking of the MAI andthe WTO Seattle conference. Capitalism has never been so triumphant and its drive for ever-greater scopeand power via the globalisation agenda is far from having reached is zenith. It is therefore distressing tocontemplate the continuing devotion of minuscule critical energies to the manifestly futile quest to defeatcapitalism.

EMPIRICALLY, ANTI-CAPITALIST RESISTANCE DRIVES CAPITALISM TO EXPAND


Local and regional protectionism is indeed an important component of the emerging resistance to corporateglobalization and neo-liberal policies (e.g., Amin 1997; Bello 2002). But one lesson we can derive fromearlier eff orts to confront and transform capitalism is that local resistance cannot, by itself, overcomethe strong forces of modern capitalism. What is needed is globalization from below. Global politics hasmainly been the politics of the powerful because they have had the resources to establish long-distance



connections and to structure global institutions. But waves of elite transnational integration have been accompanied by upsurges of transnational linkages, strategies and institutions formed by workers, farmersand popular challenges to the logic of capitalist accumulation. Globalization from below means thetransnationalization of antisystemic movements and the active participation of popular movements in globalpolitics and global citizenship. An analysis of earlier waves of the spiral of domination and resistancedemonstrates that ”socialism in one country” and other strategies of local protection have not been capable of overcoming the negative aspects of capitalist development in the past, and they are even less likely to succeed in the more densely integrated global system of the future. Strategies that mobilize people to

organize themselves locally must be complimented and coordinated with transnational strategies to democratize or replaceexisting global institutions and to create new organizational structures that facilitate collective rationality for all the peoplesof the world. Globalization is producing a backlash much as it did in the nineteenth century and in the 1920s. Capitalistglobalization, especially the kind that has occurred since the 1970s, exposes many individuals to disruptive market forcesand increases inequalities within countries and internationally. Th e gap between the winners and the losers grows, andthe winners use more coercion and less consent in their eff orts to stay on top. Karl Polanyi’s (1944) notion of the doublemovement by which marketization produces defensive reactions and new forms of regulation is conceptually similar to the

notion that expansive capitalism produces efforts to decommodify labor and communities, and that these thendrive capitalism to mobilize on a larger scale in order to overcome the constraints that political resistance produces.

GLOBALIZATION FROM BELOW FAILS

BARLOW 03 (Maude, Labour/Le Travail , Spr'03 pg 265-269)

This is a useful and insightful book, a valuable primer to readers interested in the phenomenon of globalization from below. Yet, one cannot but feel doubt about how their alternative program can berealized. The authors maintain that social movements ''by linking from the nooks and crannies, developing acommon vision and program, and withdrawing their consent from existing institutions,... can impose normson states, classes, armies, and other power actors.'' (25) One can, however, question the viability of thisstrategy. While the proponents of globalization recognize that political activity takes place on many levelsand across borders, no longer a matter of either/or but both/and, they reject the idea of participation inelectoral politics and the capture of state power, trusting that norms can somehow be imposed on the state.While the authors are obviously correct in their assessment that there is no global state to be taken over, itis the nation-state that charters corporations and acts on their behalf , negotiating with representativesfrom other states within those institutions that states multilaterally have created such as the InternationalMonetary Fund, the World Bank, and the WTO. Imposing norms may not be possible or enough and failureto have a strategy to capture state power means abandoning the state to those in powerespousing neo-liberalism or those on the far right who still view the state as useful in combating the ills

and uncertainty of globalization from above as is now occurring in parts of Europe.

CAPITALISM LOVES GLOBALIZATION FROM BELOW

Gindin, Assistant to the President of the CAW, 02(Sam, Canadian Dimension, No. 4, Vol. 36; 7/1, Pg. 18)

The global establishment, in spite of some initial nervousness, has come to understand that this movementfor a social economy, when it does not aim higher, is not a threat. It has consequently been rather accommodating to it, describing it as the newly emerging "global civil society" and as "globalization from below." Corporations, banks, private foundations, governments and regional institutions have been happyand sometimes anxious to provide funding. And, in the absence of a political context, all have been happy to incorporate the abstract language of "empowerment," "community democracy," and "capacities."

It is not just that the elites view this trend as being safe, but that they also see it as being functional toglobalization. With privatization and the erosion of social services, the attempt to provide decentralizedalternatives may -- inadvertently -- legitimate, or at least act to limit opposition to, the regressivechanges. In extreme but not uncommon cases, like the Quebec Solidarity Fund, with its tax breaks to createworker-investors, government partnerships directly integrate social-economy institutions into the state.Again, I want to be careful not to ignore differences within this movement. It is one thing, as in PortoAllegre, where the movement includes many activists tied to a larger, politicized, anti-capitalist project. Butwhere this is not the case, the social-economy movement ironically suffers from the same limits it sees in thesocial-democratic parties for which it has so much contempt. Not oriented to mobilizing against corporatepower, it becomes either peripheral to change or is incorporated into the system. Just as globalization can'tbe changed by a retreat into the past, it can't be changed by a retreat to its margins. What Marx understood



so well when he criticized the Utopians of his time was that if you don't bring your dreams into the belly of the beast, if you try to build around, rather than against, global power, you ultimately offer illusions rather than hope. Globalization and social justice can't be made compatible by leaving globalization intact andconfining social justice to the world outside globalization's walls.



YOUR HARMS NOT TRUE

YOUR “CAP=WAR” IMPACTS DIVERT US FROM THE TRUE CAUSE, NEOCONSERVATISM

Chalmers, Pf Philosophy @ Australian National University, 05 (David, Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol 37, Issue 5, Pages 764-770)

If we consider war profiteering, we observe that the Bush hijo (I had to ask my Spanish daughter-in-lawwhat that meant, Professor McLaren!) White House is keen to make business a partner in the invasion andoccupation of Iraq. There is obvious empirical evidence here: the high-priced reconstruction contracts givento the likes of Halliburton and Bechtel. Corporations such as those are shamelessly opportunistic in seizingbusiness created by US military action; this does not connect war and globalization! If we considerFahrenheit 9/11, Moore's over-reliance on the war-profiteering argument leads to a weak andsimplistic explanation of the causes of war, letting Hillary Clinton, Teddy Kennedy, and all otherDemocrats off the hook. Is there an analogy here? One thing that can be said: the Internet and emails didhelp oust Aznar in Spain. Manuel Castells has a point when he considers the potential for 'electronicpopulism' in today's ecosocialist movements (vol. II—The Information Age). And so do the Zapatistas! Idigress. Yes, war profiteering happens. It is NOT the reason nations go to war. This is a distorted analysis. Ithelps us keep our eyes on the Bush Administration. We forget the routine way corporate America makestrillions off the misnamed Department of Defense—it doesn't matter who is in the White House—a Bush or aClinton. The problem here is that a focus on profiteering diverts us away from the neoconservative rationale: they advocate (permanent) war as a means of reinforcing US hegemony in the Middle East andbeyond, surely slightly more important than short-term kickbacks to corporations? Unfortunately, PeterMcLaren's thesis of a 'military-capitalist' complex meets with my dissent. One other problem with the warprofiteering argument is that it assumes that the interests of businesses like Halliburton and US armscontractors accurately reflect the interests of other multinational companies. This is not true. The WhiteHouse has served the interests of energy companies and arms manufacturers and contractors, but it hasupset the marketplace globally—and this is where US financial companies and consumer-based companies have to compete. The second argument

that McLaren makes to connect the war and globalization is that Bush has used the war on terror to promote a domestic neoliberal agenda, for instance tax cuttingfor the rich, attacking unions in the name of national security, and working to criminalise dissent. There is a wealth of documentation evidencing the Right's attackson both anti-capitalist and globalization protestors as unpatriotic and sympathetic to global terrorists. The problem with this contention is that these actions canalso be seen as opportunism, rather than a product of any systematic relationship between war and globalization. It has to be acknowledged that even Republicanrealists who opposed the invasion of Iraq generally favoured the discriminatory tax cuts and the Patriot Act. Even those former supporters of corporateglobalisation, the members of the Clinton administration, are presumably today opposed, admittedly in a very muted fashion, to Bush's domestic measures. Thereis little reason to believe that war in Iraq was a necessary condition for the advance of Bush's domestic agenda, even though it did provide politically convenientcover. A third key argument for a causal connection between war and globalization is one advocated by Naomi Klein in her classic, No Logo. After the invasion, theUS governing authority restructured Iraq's economy according to strict neoliberal precepts (capitalism with the gloves off!) The Economist called it a 'wish list forforeign investors to dream of'. The forced privatisation of the Iraqi economy indubitably signals a direct link between war and neoliberalism. The question iswhether the invasion represented a new phase of globalization, characterised by 'free' markets being regulated by military power. In my view this is not the case:the Iraqi war will not in any way be a prototype for the building of a new corporate ('democratic') order. At this juncture, I should like to return to the break inglobalization policy referred to earlier. There is empirical evidence to show that much of the global corporate elite would prefer Clinton's multilateral globalization toBush's imperialist actions. After the war effort was underway, corporations were worried. Many factions within global capital were furious at the BushAdministration over its protectionist moves on steel and agricultural subsidies. US bullying has led to the collapse of trade negotiations in the likes of Cancun, Miami

and Seattle. European corporations, always seen as important partners in the expansion of global power, are furious at being shut out of Iraq. The Bushoccupation of Iraq was an act that broke away from the multilateralist model of corporate globalization—seenby many in the world as 'the unacceptable face of capitalism'—who said that?

ANTI-CAPITALIST RESISTANCE IS KNEE-JERK ECONOMISM

STOKES 09 Doug, International Relations Copyright © 2009 SAGE PublicationsLos Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC, Vol 23(1): 85–92

On the fl ip side, however, it is also important that critical scholars do not succumb to a knee-jerk

economism that reduces the current WoT down to the mere economic interests of the American empire. As Ihave argued elsewhere, there has been tendency for more critically aligned scholars, especially the morematerially inclined, to interpret the war on terror as little more than a resource grab for US corporations. Thisinstrumentalism, that essentially views the American state as little more than an instrument in the hands of American business and corporate elites, leaves very little room for the separate and quite distinct political,strategic and discursive aspects of US foreign policy.19 Similarly, terrorism scholars also need to be sensitiveto the local contexts and dynamics of political violence, as well as the quite distinct array of threats that theliberal democracies themselves face.



Immigration is about politics not just capitalism


Purcell and Nevins (2005) examine the history of policy changes concerning the U.S. border, culminating

with “Operation Gatekeeper” in the 1990s, using these to illustrate theories of the state and to argue thatthis history cannot be reduced simply to a manifestation of “capitalist social relations” or capitalistaccumulation. Their analysis of border policy is cognizant of the myriad actors with different positions vis-à-vis the state, looking particularly at “how state actors are motivated by the need to legitimize and reproducepolitical-geographical relationships between the state and its citizenry” (Purcell and Nevins 2005: 216). Inother words, it is about politics too; the “state- citizen and national-local relationships” are “dialectical innature” (221).

Turn - reductionism


State immigration policies are not “reducible” to “capitalist social relations” (Purcell and Nevins 2005).Purcell and Nevins argue that the complex relationships between state actors and groups of citizens have animportant effect on the decisions state actors make, the institutional forms the state takes, and the policies itenacts. In order to maintain political legitimacy and effective authority over its people, the state mustreproduce a politically stable relationship between state and citizen. While these expectations are tied to themaintenance of capitalism in important ways, they are not reducible to that imperative . There aresignificant elements of state-citizen relations that cannot be comprehended by tracing them back toaccumulation and capitalist social relations. (Purcell and Nevins 2005: 213) In other words, actors within thestate must constantly work to “legitimize and reproduce political-geographical relationships between thestate and its citizenry” (Purcell and Nevins 2005: 216) particularly within the context of the “thinning out of places” linked to globalization. National immigration policy making must be seen within this realm of competing influences at multiple scales; the failure of the U.S. Senate to pass the 2007 Immigration ReformBill is fundamentally related to these relationships and interests and cannot be reduced to simply themanifestation of capitalist relations. In particular, “state-citizen and national-local relationships” are

“dialectical in nature” and the state must always work to buttress its legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens.Thus, the actions of states can be attributed to this pressure to reproduce this relationship between “rulerand ruled” and the “need to demonstrate to citizens that state actors are working to secure perceived citizeninterests” (Purcell and Nevins 2005: 216). Citizens often “expect the state to ensure territorial security,provide a certain level of public services, protect their political rights, or preserve the cultural character of the nation” (Purcell and Nevins 2005: 217). In this way, citizens’ political support is therefore conditioned bya contingent, differentiated and changing set of expectations; the state must meet some combination of those expectations sufficiently in order to maintain the overall political support of citizens. (Purcell andNevins, 2005: 217) Furthermore, “state actors also operate entrepreneurially by cultivating citizenexpectations and desires to more closely match those actors’ particular agendas” (Purcell and Nevins 2005:217). As an example, the authors point to the Republican party’s attempt to encourage apprehension aboutincreased crime rates because the party is known for being tough on crime and “stronger on law and order” (217). Where U.S. immigration reform is concerned, the picture is complex.

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