Will Malson AT: ______ [CAP] Page 1 of 7

AT: ______ [Capitalism K] -- Index

AT: ______ [Capitalism K] -- Index .................................................................................1

AT: Capitalism helps the environment...............................................................................1
Noooo. No. no no no no no. haha no. The environment needs protection from capitalism. ................................1
AT: Improved Standard of Living .....................................................................................2
Arguments that capitalism can improve living standards are blind to the environmental catastrophe the system is
generating. Uncompromising criticism is key. .....................................................................................................2
AT: Poor Benefit................................................................................................................3
Capitalism natural “redistributes wealth” from the poor to the rich ..................................................................3
AT: Capitalism is Human Nature.......................................................................................4
Nothing about capitalism is ingrained in human nature–the system is maintained our continual participation in it, the
alternative solves by rejecting this very notion of inevitability.............................................................................4
AT: Aff already has mindset..............................................................................................7
It is all too common that people think they have the right mindset but actually don’t .........................................7

AT: Capitalism helps the environment

Noooo. No. no no no no no. haha no. The environment needs protection from capitalism.
"The Free Market and the Environment" Richard L. Stroup [Ph.D., professor of economics, Montana
State University, and senior associate, Political Economy Research Center, From 1982 to 1984, he was
the director, Office of Policy Analysis, US. Department of Interior. Dr. Stroup received his Ph.D. from
the University of Washington. He is co-author of Economics: Private and Public Choice (with James
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Gwartney) and Natural Resources: Myths and Management (with John Baden). He has published more
than 20 journal articles and has contributed to American Economic Review, Journal of Law and
Economics, and Economic Inquiry] & Jane S. Shaw [senior associate at the Political Economy
Research Center in Bozeman, Montana. From 1981 to 1984 she was an associate economics editor,
Business Week. She received her B.A. from Wellesley College in 1965. Shaw is the author of several
hundred articles published in magazines and newspapers including Business Week, The Wall Street
Journal, and Policy Review. She is a senior editor with Liberty, and a member of the Editorial Advisory
Board of Regulation], Page 266 of "Rational Readings on Environmental Concerns" by Jay H. Lehr
(Editor), Published by Wiley; 1 edition, May 15, 1992, ISBN-10: 0471284858, ISBN-13: 978-
0471284857 (HEG)
Conventional economic wisdom, in a theory first propounded by Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson, holds
that the unregulated market can-not be expected to protect the environment. In this theory, clean air and
water are "public goods" whose value is not well reflected by market processes. Potential polluters do
not consider the social costs of their action, but only the costs to themselves; in addition, since efforts to
maintain a clean environment benefit even those who do not help fund them, each individual faces a
strong temptation to avoid footing the bill. Similarly, when markets cannot immediately reflect the
benefits of preserving biotic diversity or of saving individual species, private landowners may not be
willing to pay for socially beneficial preserva-tion. In the absence of government intervention, the
argument goes, the environment will therefore be insufficiently protected.

AT: Improved Standard of Living

Arguments that capitalism can improve living standards are blind to the environmental
catastrophe the system is generating. Uncompromising criticism is key.
John Bellamy [Professor of Sociology at University of Oregon and Dennis, researcher with the
Neoliberal Globalism and Its Challengers Project at the University of Alberta, where he also teaches
part-time in the sociology department, Ecology, capitalism, and the socialization of nature], “Ecology
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Against Capitalism”, Published and © copyright 2001 by Monthly Review, Volume 53, Number 5,
October 2001 (HEG)
The Gods of Profit vs. the Environment “The modern world,” Rachel Carson observed in 1963,
“worships the gods of speed and quantity, and of the quick and easy profit, and out of this idolatry
monstrous evils have arisen.” The reduction of nature to factory–like forms of organization in the
interest of rapid economic returns, she argued, lies behind our worst ecological problems (Lost Woods,
pp. 194–95). Such realities are, however, denied by the vested interests who continue to argue that it is
possible to continue as before only on a larger scale, with economics (narrowly conceived) rather than
ecology having the last word on the environment in which we live. The depth of the ecological and
social crisis of contemporary civilization, the need for a radical reorganization of production in order to
create a more sustainable and just world, is invariably downplayed by the ruling elements of society,
who regularly portray those convinced of the necessity of meaningful ecological and social change as so
many “Cassandras” who are blind to the real improvements in the quality of life that everywhere
surround us. Industry too fosters such an attitude of complacency, while at the same time assiduously
advertising itself as socially responsible and environmentally benign. Science, which all too often is prey
to corporate influence, is frequently turned against its own precepts and used to defend the indefensible
—for example, through risk management analysis. It was in defiance of such distortions within the
reigning ideology, reaching down into science itself, that Rachel Carson felt compelled to ask, in her
1962 Women’s National Press Club speech: Is industry becoming a screen through which facts must be
filtered, so that the hard, uncomfortable truths are kept back and only the harmless morsels allowed to
filter through? I know that many thoughtful scientists are deeply disturbed that their organizations are
becoming fronts for industry. More than one scientist has raised a disturbing question—whether a spirit
of lysenkoism may be developing in America today—the philosophy that perverted and destroyed the
science of genetics in Russia and even infiltrated all of that nation’s agricultural sciences. But here the
tailoring, the screening of basic truth, is done, not to suit a party line, but to accommodate to the short–
term gain, to serve the gods of profit and production (Lost Woods, p. 210). We are constantly invited by
those dutifully serving “the gods of profit and production” to turn our attention elsewhere, to downgrade
our concerns, and to view the very economic system that has caused the present global degradation of
the environment as the solution to the problems it has generated. Hence, to write realistically about the
conflict between ecology and capitalism requires, at the present time, a form of intellectual resistance—a
ruthless critique of the existing mode of production and the ideology used to support its environmental
depredations. We are faced with a stark choice: either reject “the gods of profit” as holding out the
solution to our ecological problems, and look instead to a more harmonious coevolution of nature and
human society, as an essential element in building a more just and egalitarian social order—or face the
natural consequences, an ecological and social crisis that will rapidly spin out of control, with
irreversible and devastating consequences for human beings and for those numerous other species with
which we are linked.
AT: Poor Benefit

Capitalism natural “redistributes wealth” from the poor to the rich

Ted Trainer [professor at the School of Social Work, University of Wales], “The conserver society:
alternatives for sustainability”, Page 5, Publisher: Zed Books, ISBN-10: 1856492753, ISBN-13: 978-
1856492751, September 15, 1995 (HEG)
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AT: Capitalism is Human Nature

Nothing about capitalism is ingrained in human nature–the system is maintained our continual
participation in it, the alternative solves by rejecting this very notion of inevitability
Joel Kovel [Education: B.S., Summa cum Laude, Yale University, M.D., Columbia University College of
Physicians and Surgeons, Graduate, Psychoanalytic Institute, Downstate Medical Center, Brooklyn, New York; Career:
Director of Residency Training, Department of Psychiatry, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Professor of
Will Malson AT: ______ [CAP] Page 5 of 7

Psychiatry, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Adjunct Professor of Anthropology, Graduate Faculty, New
School for Social Research, Visiting Professor of Political Science and Communications, University of California, San
Diego, Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies, Bard College, Annandale, since 2003, Distinguished Professor
of Social StudiesSpring, Visiting Professor of Communication, University of California, San DiegoProfessor, Saybrook
Institute, San Francisco, CA], “The enemy of nature: the end of capitalism or the end of the world?” Pages 120-121,
Publisher: Zed Books; 2 edition, ISBN-10: 1842778714, ISBN-13: 978-1842778715, December 9, 2007 (HEG)
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AT: Aff already has mindset

It is all too common that people think they have the right mindset but actually don’t
Adrian Johnston [Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Major
areas of research interest: Nineteenth and twentieth-century European philosophy (particularly German idealism and post-war French
thought) and psychoanalysis (especially Freud and Lacan). His publications include: The forthcoming Žižek's Ontology: A Transcendental
Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Northwestern University Press (2007). And Time Driven Northwestern University Press (2005)], “The
Cynic’s Fetish: Slavoj Žižek and the Dynamics of Belief”, International Journal of Žižek Studies, Pages 93-94, February 4, 2007, ISSN
1751-8229 (HEG)
On the basis of Lacanian theory, one could argue that an act is something whose occurrence can only be determined retroactively (as per
Freud’s Nachträglichkeit and Lacan’s après-coup). It isn’t until after a whole series of concrete actions have already been engaged in, and
whose effects have temporally unfurled to a sufficient extent, that one is able to assess whether an act actually did happen. One always
recognizes an act as such after-the-fact (Zizek himself acknowledges this too126). Thus, as Lacan insists, acts aren’t events brought about
in the present by self-conscious volitional agents because, within the immediacy of the here-and-now, individuals aren’t able to determine
or decide whether their actions will eventually qualify, through the verdict of subsequent history, as genuine acts strictly speaking.
Individuals must first immerse themselves in action, since, without these particular interventions, there would be nothing to grasp later
through hindsight as an act. Although an act is indeed not an action (and although far from every action can or does become an act), there
is, nonetheless, no act without an action. A politics of the pure act, one that eschews engaging in any specifications
concerning actions to be performed, is an empty “politics without politics.” The risk that this position
refuses isn’t the risk of the “absolute Act” and its always-possible failure—it risks refusing the active
specification and performance of actions that might not end up becoming acts. The activity of thinking that Zizek
hopes to facilitate again by toppling certain implicit ideological prohibitions must not allow itself to neglect grappling with the tangible
details of, for instance, social and political policymaking. Is the passivity of awaiting the messianic future arrival of the undefined act-
miracle the sole viable replacement for Marx’s abandoned political project of communism? At some point soon, Zizek needs to explain
what fills the vacuum remaining after he severs the positive prescriptive agenda of Marxism from its diagnostic-descriptive dimension.
Perhaps the absence of a detailed practical roadmap in Zizek’s political writings isn’t a major shortcoming. Maybe, at least for the time
being, the most important task is simply the negativity of the critical struggle, the effort to cure an intellectual constipation resulting from
capitalist ideology and thereby truly to open up the space for imagining authentic alternatives to the prevailing state of the situation.
Another definition of materialism offered by Zizek is that it amounts to accepting the internal inherence of what fantasmatically appears as
an external deadlock or hindrance127 (with fantasy itself being defined as the false externalization of something within the subject, namely,
the illusory projection of an inner obstacle128). From this perspective, seeing through ideological fantasies by learning how to think again
outside the confines of current restrictions has, in and of itself, the potential to operate as a form of real revolutionary practice (rather than
remaining just an instance of negative/critical intellectual reflection). Why is this the case? Recalling the earlier analysis of commodity
fetishism, the social efficacy of money as the universal medium of exchange (and the entire political economy grounded upon it) ultimately
relies upon nothing 93more than a kind of “magic,” that is, the belief in money’s social efficacy by those using it in the processes of
exchange. Since the value of currency is, at bottom, reducible to the belief that it has the value attributed to it (and that everyone believes
that everyone else believes this as well), derailing capitalism by destroying its essential financial substance is, in a certain respect, as easy
as dissolving the mere belief in this substance’s powers. The “external” obstacle of the capitalist system exists
exclusively on the condition that subjects, whether consciously or unconsciously, “internally” believe in
it—capitalism’s life-blood, money, is simply a fetishistic crystallization of a belief in others’ belief in the socio- performative force
emanating from this same material. And yet, this point of capitalism’s frail vulnerability is simultaneously the
source of its enormous strength: Its vampiric symbiosis with individual human desire, and the fact that the
late-capitalist cynic’s fetishism enables the disavowal of his/her de facto belief in capitalism, makes it highly unlikely that
people can be persuaded to stop believing and start thinking (especially since, as Zizek claims, many of
these people are convinced that they already have ceased believing). Or, the more disquieting possibility to entertain
is that some people today, even if one succeeds in exposing them to the underlying logic of their position,
might respond in a manner resembling that of the Judas-like character Cypher in the film The Matrix (Cypher opts to embrace
enslavement by illusion rather than cope with the discomfort of dwelling in the “desert of the real”):
Faced with the choice between living the capitalist lie or grappling with certain unpleasant truths, many
individuals might very well deliberately decide to accept what they know full well to be a false pseudo-
reality, a deceptively comforting fiction (“Capitalist commodity fetishism or the truth? I choose fetishism.”).