Cap K 2011 2012

The affirmative. Pretending that we can influence the government takes our attention away from the kinds of activism that could really cause change- a fight against capitalism. Herod 2001 (James, A Stake, Not a Mistake: On Not Seeing the Enemy, October,
http://www.jamesherod.info/index.php?sec=paper&id=9 Accessed 6/27/10 GAL)

although it is important to try to shatter this illusion, it is ultimately not enough, and of very limited effectiveness, simply to list all the atrocities committed by our rulers, carefully expose all their double standards, accuse them of being the real terrorists, morally condemn what they are doing, or call for peace. All these arguments are useful of course in the battle for the hearts and minds of average people, if average people ever heard them, which they do not, for the most part. And if they do hear them,
So it's like they (most of them) are tuning in to madness, they're so brainwashed. It takes a lot more than mere

arguments to break through the mind set of a thoroughly indoctrinated people. Of all the dozens of

comments that I read on the government's response to the attacks of September Eleven, precious few raised the key question: How do we stop them (the government, from attacking Afghanistan)? For the most part, progressive commentators don't even raise questions of strategy.[9] They are too busy analyzing ruling class ideology, in order to highlight its hypocrisies. Proving that the ruling class

is hypocritical doesn't get us very far. It's useful

of course. Doing this work is an important task. Noam Chomsky, for example, devotes himself almost exclusively to this task, and we should be thankful that we have his research. He usually does mention also, somewhere in almost every speech, article, or interview, that 'it doesn't have to be this way', that this situation we are in is not inevitable, and that we can change it. But when asked "How?", he replies, "Organize, agitate, educate." Well, sure. But the Christian Coalition organizes, agitates, and educates. So did the Nazis and the Klu Klux Klan. The Taliban organizes, agitates, and educates. So does the ruling class, and it does so in a massive and highly successful way, which results in overwhelming hegemony for its point of view. In spite of more than three decades of blistering exposs of US foreign policy, and in spite of the fact that he is an anarchist, and is thus supposedly against all government, at least in the long run, Chomsky still regularly uses the 'universal we'. Much of the time Chomsky says "The US government does this, or does that," but some of the time he says "We do this, or we do that," thus including himself, and us, as agents in the formation and execution of US foreign policy. This is an instance of what I call the 'universal we'. It presumes a democracy that does not exist. The average American has no say whatsoever in the formation

and execution of US foreign policy. Nor do we even have any influence in picking the people who

are making it, since we have no say over who gets to run for office or what they do after they are elected. So to say something like "we shouldn't be bombing Afghanistan", as so many progressives

do, is highly misleading, and expresses a misperception and misdiagnosis of the situation we are in. In
the question period following Chomsky's major address on "The New War Against Terror" (delivered at MIT on October 18) [10], Chomsky was challenged by a man in the audience who accused Chomsky of blaming America for the tragedy of September 11. Chomsky correctly said that the term America is an abstraction and cannot do anything. But then he said that he blamed himself, and his questioner, and others present, for this event (implying that 'we' are responsible for what 'our' government does). This is a half-truth at best. The blame for September Eleven rests squarely on those who did it. Next, to the extent that a connection can be proved between their actions and US foreign policy, the US government is to blame, and the ruling class that controls the government. Average Americans are to blame for what the US government does only in the sense that they have not managed to change or block its policies, either because they haven't tried or because they have tried but have failed. Of course, the category of Average American is an abstraction as well. Many average Americans vigorously support US foreign policy. Others oppose it, but have failed to change it. Those of us who want a real democracy, and want to put an end to Empire, have so far failed to do so, and only in this sense are we in anyway responsible for September Eleven. But even this failure must be judged in light of the relative strengths that the parties bring to the fight. We cannot fault ourselves for being defeated by an opponent with overwhelmingly superior forces, as long as we fought as bravely and as hard as we could. Our task is to find ways to enhance our strengths and weaken theirs . To fail to make a distinction

between the ruling class and the rest of us hinders this task, causes us to presume a democracy that does not exist, to misunderstand exactly what we are up against, and to misidentify the enemy. It thus prevents us from devising a successful strategy for defeating this enemy.

And, modern capitalism has caused mass genocides. If we dont do anything to fight it, capitalism this terrible pattern will continue Internationalist Perspective 2000 Capitalism and Genocide, http://www.geocities.com/wageslavex/capandgen.html
Mass death, and genocide, the deliberate and systematic extermination of whole groups of human beings, have become an integral part of the social landscape of capitalism in its phase of decadence. Auschwitz, Kolyma, and Hiroshima are not merely the names of discrete sites where human beings have been subjected to forms of industrialized mass death, but synecdoches for the death-world that is a component of the capitalist mode of production in this epoch. In that sense, I want to argue that the

Holocaust, for example, was not a Jewish catastrophe, nor an atavistic reversion to the barbarism of a past epoch, but rather an event produced by the unfolding of the logic of capitalism itself. Moreover, Auschwitz, Kolyma, and Hiroshima are not "past", but rather futural events, objective-real possibilities
on the Front of history, to use concepts first articulated by the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch. The ethnic cleansing which has been unleashed in Bosnia and Kosovo, the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, the mass death to which Chechnya has been subjected, the prospect for a nuclear war on the Indian sub-continent, are so many examples of the future which awaits the human species as the capitalist mode of production enters a new millenium. Indeed, it is just such a death-world that constitutes the meaning of one pole of the historic alternative which Rosa Luxemburg first posed in the midst of the slaughter inflicted on masses of conscripts during World War I: socialism or barbarism!

Thus, the alternative Reject the affirmative to refuse the violent logic of capitalism. Finally, Rejecting capitalism is the only way to open up the possibility of a new, better world. Only complete refusal, not piece-by-peice reform, can prevent extinction. Herod 04 (James, http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/GetFre/4thEd/4-index.htm, Getting Free, 4th Edition) It is time to try to describe, at first abstractly and later concretely, a strategy for destroying capitalism. This
strategy, at its most basic, calls for pulling time, energy, and resources out of capitalist civilization and putting them into building a new civilization. The image then is one of emptying out capitalist structures, hollowing them out, by draining wealth, power, and meaning out of them until there is nothing left but shells. This is definitely an aggressive strategy. It requires great militancy, and constitutes an attack on the existing order. The strategy clearly recognizes that capitalism is the enemy and must be destroyed, but it is not a

frontal attack aimed at overthrowing the system, but an inside attack aimed at gutting it, while simultaneously replacing it with something better, something we want. Thus capitalist structures
(corporations, governments, banks, schools, etc.) are not seized so much as simply abandoned. Capitalist

relations are not fought so much as they are simply rejected. We stop participating in activities that support (finance, condone) the capitalist world and start participating in activities that build a new world while simultaneously undermining the old. We create a new pattern of social relations alongside capitalist
relations and then we continually build and strengthen our new pattern while doing every thing we can to weaken capitalist relations. In this way our new democratic, non-hierarchical, non-commodified relations can eventually overwhelm the capitalist relations and force them out of existence. This is how it has to be done. This is a plausible, realistic strategy. To think that we could create a whole new world of decent social arrangements overnight, in the midst of a crisis, during a so-called revolution, or during the collapse of capitalism, is

foolhardy. Our new social world must grow within the old, and in opposition to it, until it is strong enough to dismantle and abolish capitalist relations. Such a revolution will never happen automatically, blindly, determinably, because of the inexorable, materialist laws of history. It will happen, and only happen, because we want it to, and because we know what were doing and know how we want to live, and know what
obstacles have to be overcome before we can live that way, and know how to distinguish between our social patterns and theirs. But we must not think that the capitalist world can simply be ignored, in a live and let live attitude, while we try to build new lives elsewhere. (There is no elsewhere.) There is at least one thing, wage-slavery, that we cant simply stop participating in (but even here there are ways we can chip away at it). Capitalism must be explicitly refused and replaced by something else. This constitutes War, but it is not a war in the traditional sense of armies and tanks, but a war fought on a daily basis, on the level of everyday life, by millions of people. It is a war nevertheless because the accumulators of capital will use coercion, brutality, and murder, as they have always done in the past, to try to block any rejection of the system. They have always had to force compliance; they will not hesitate to continue doing so. Nevertheless, there are many concrete ways that individuals, groups, and neighborhoods can gut capitalism, which I will enumerate shortly. We must always keep in mind how we became slaves; then we can see more clearly how we can cease being slaves. We were forced into wage-slavery because the ruling class slowly, systematically, and brutally destroyed our ability to live autonomously. By driving us off the land, changing the property laws, destroying community rights, destroying our tools, imposing taxes, destroying our local markets, and so forth, we were forced onto the labor market in order to survive, our only remaining option being to sell, for a wage, our ability to work. Its quite clear then how we can overthrow slavery. We must reverse this process. We must begin to reacquire the ability to live without working for a wage or buying the products made by wage-slaves (that is, we must get free from the labor market and the way of living based on it), and embed ourselves instead in cooperative labor and cooperatively produced goods. Another clarification is needed. This strategy does not call for reforming capitalism, for changing capitalism into something else. It calls for replacing capitalism, totally, with a new civilization. This is an important distinction, because capitalism

has proved impervious to reforms, as a system. We can sometimes in some places win certain concessions from it (usually only temporary ones) and win some (usually short-lived) improvements in our lives as its victims, but we cannot reform it piecemeal, as a system.

Link Hegemony
The emphasis on hegemony is an effort to boost economic competitiveness and form a global police force to put down anyone who challenges the internationalization of capital the US Marine becomes the foot soldier in the aggression of global capital Sakellaropoulos 08 (Spyros, Assistant Professor in the Social Policy Department of the Panteion University, specializing in the subject
State and Political Theory, American Foreign Policy as Modern Imperialism: From Armed Humanitarianism to Preemptive War, http://web.ebscohost.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=2&hid=12&sid=2a83c715-08ec-4e2a-a643-194b21de665e %40sessionmgr11)

This definition of hegemony also helps us better understand the contradictions of U. S. foreign policy. These cannot be described as simple problems of domination, in the form of insubordination of the other capitalist countries. They arise whenever the power blocs in the other capitalist countries think that the United States is not offering a collective solution in the collective capitalist interest, for example in the form of their fear that American
aggression may have short- or long-term destabilizing results. But this also works the other way around: It is rather simplistic to describe post9/11 American policy as just a unilateralist policy for world domination for the sake of American capitalism alone. It also has a certain quality of a new hegemonic project, which would combine Clintons vision of globalization as the spread of free markets and

western-style democracy all over the globe with greater emphasis on disciplinary practices, both economicfinancial and political, as a way to counter rising labor and social unrest after 1995 and to cope with the possibility of a
major depression. And contrary to an equally simplistic image of Europe as the expression of a different global strategy, one should see that right from the beginning the new U. S. strategy had great appeal. The so called New Europe of neoliberal economics, extremely low wages, flat taxes, zero tolerance policing, anti-immigrant measures, harsh anti-terrorist laws and neo Atlantic foreign policy saw in G. W. Bushs declarations a much better way to crack down on popular demands and rising social militancy and to boost economic competitiveness than vague social democratic notions of sharing the benefits of the New Economy and globalization. In view of the above, current American foreign policy can be described as hegemonic in two ways: First, it offers a possible arrangement of international affairs and problems based on the use of force, military export of the market economy and Western democratic institutions, and the crackdown on any movement that challenges the internationalization of capital and international police interventions on a global scale. Second, it also offers a domestic hegemonic project that combines even greater market and trade liberalization with authoritarian statism, police repression and social conservatism. In a way these two aspects coincide: Aggressive military interventionism serves not only as a foreign policy tool, but also as a powerful ideological representation of capitals power the U. S. Marine as an allegory for the

aggression of global capital.

Impact Genocide
The Holocaust was an inevitable result of surplus labor the capitalist system justifies nearly infinite atrocities International Perspective 07 (Internationalist Perspective, Collection of essays by an International
Team of Contributors, http://internationalist-perspective.org/IP/ip-archive/ip_49_holocaust.html)
While each stage of capitalist development entails demographic displacements, what typically occurs is a shift of labour-power from one sector to another, from agriculture, to industry, to tertiary sectors. While such shifts continue to occur as the transition from the formal to the real domination of capital takes place, a new

and unprecedented development also makes its appearance when capitalism, as Marx shows, `calls to life all the powers of science and nature, as of social combination and of social intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour time employed on it.' (46) The result is the tendential ejection of ever-larger masses of labour from the productive

process; the creation of a population that from the point of view of capital is superfluous, no longer even potentially necessary to the creation of value, and indeed having become an insuperable burden for capital, a dead weight that it must bear, even at the expense of its profitability. The existence

of such a surplus population -- at the level of the total capital of a national entity can create the conditions for mass murder, inserting the extermination of whole groups of people into the very `logic' of capital, and through the complex interaction of multiple causal chains emerge as the policy of a capitalist state. In the specific case of Nazi Germany, Gtz Aly and Susanne Heim have argued that the extermination of the Jews was the first stage of a far-reaching demographic project in the service of economic modernisation. Germany's attempt to confront AngloAmerican domination of the world market entailed the creation of a vast economic space (Grossraumwirtschaft), continental autarky for Europe, under German hegemony. But such a project was not simply based on geographical expansion; it also necessitated vast demographic changes, especially in Eastern Europe. There, the German planners, demographers, and economists, whose projects Aly and Heim have investigated, confronted a problem of economic backwardness linked to overpopulation. (47) A vast agricultural population, with small landholdings and extremely low productivity, was a formidable obstacle both to German hopes for autarky in food production for the European continent, and for industrial development, economic modernisation, in the East, so as to make the German economic space competitive with Anglo-American capital. The Jews in Eastern Europe, both as a largely urban population, and as the owners of small, unproductive, businesses, constituted a particular obstacle to the migration of Slavs from the overpopulated countryside to the cities, such that their elimination was seen as a prerequisite for economic development. Moreover, for these planners, such processes of economic transformation could not be left to `market forces,' which in England, the US, and in Western Europe, had taken generations, but, given the exigencies of imperialist competition and war, had to be undertaken by the state on the quick. The General plan Ost, within which the extermination of the Jews was the first stage, envisaged the elimination, by `resettlement' (beyond the Urals), death by starvation and slave labour, or mass murder, of a surplus population of perhaps fifty million human beings. (48) While emphasising the economic `utilitarianism' and rationality of this project of mass murder, and ignoring the sadism and brutality of so much of the killing, Aly and Heim have nonetheless attempted to incorporate the role of biological racism into their analysis of the Holocaust: `[s]election according to racist criteria was not inconsistent with economic calculations; instead it was an integral element. Just as contemporary anthropologists, physicians

and biologists considered ostracizing and exterminating supposedly inferior people according to racist and achievement-related criteria to be a scientific method of improving humanity and improving the health of the body of the Volk, economists, agrarian experts, and environmental planners believed they had to work on improving the health of the social structure in the underdeveloped regions of Europe.' (49) What seems to me to be missing in the work of Aly and Heim, is the link between racism and science constituted by their common source in a logos of technics based on the absolute control of nature and humans, right down to the most elementary biological level of existence. And that logos, as I have argued, is the product of the spread of the capitalist law of value into the sphere of reason itself; the transformation of reason, which once included critical reason, into a purely instrumental reason, means-end rationality, the veritable basis of modern science and technology. However, Aly and Heims' research, particularly if it is linked to the operation of the capitalist law of value, and treats the demographic problems that German planners confronted in Eastern Europe as a manifestation of the specific tendency of decadent capitalism to create a surplus population, the extermination of which can become an imperative, can help us to grasp one of the causal chains that led to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Link Asteroid Mining

The plan creates jobs, which fuel capitalism. Herod 04 (James, http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/GetFre/4thEd/4-index.htm, Getting Free, 4th Edition AB)
Another big obstacle we face is the labor market itself. We have to go to where the jobs are. This means that many of us are moving
all the time. Many of our current neighbors will be gone in a couple of years (or we will be gone ourselves). Even if we managed to set up neighborhood assemblies, their members would be constantly turning over. Nevertheless, in every neighborhood, there are also many who manage to stay put and who could provide the needed continuity and stability. Having to follow the jobs also results in a huge disjunction between where people live and where they

work. The vast majority of people who live in urban or suburban areas, throughout the world, do not work in the neighborhoods where they live. They commute to jobs somewhere else. Even if this job is only half a mile away it most likely takes them out of the Home Assembly district (depending on population density of course). That is, even if a neighborhood succeeded in establishing a Home Assembly and even if workers in a neighborhood seized the factories and offices there, we would still be dealing with two sets of people. And many suburban neighborhoods do not even have factories and offices; thus suburbia itself is an obstacle, and will have to be dismantled or rebuilt. So
how could a neighborhood-based Home Assembly become a decision-making unit governing the projects in that area? It would take decades, even if capitalism were destroyed, for people to get relocated into projects nearer home. This must of necessity be a gradual process. In order to avoid total chaos and disintegration, most people must go on working at the jobs they have and know. Otherwise we would all die. There would be no food, no transportation, no medical care, no electricity, no heat, no clothing. So it is quite clear that at least initially there cannot be an integrated neighborhood decision-making unit comprised of a gathering of Peer Circles from Projects and Households into a Home Assembly. But this is not the whole story. There are still compelling reasons for sticking with the strategy. For one thing, even in a thoroughly reconstructed social world, there will be many inter-neighborhood projects which will be governed by pacts struck by several Home Assemblies rather than being controlled solely by a single Home Assembly. So some people will always be working away from the neighborhoods where they live. That is, some persons will attend their Home Assemblies as individuals who are members of Peer Circles from outside their neighborhood. Secondly, it is only by

reconstituting ourselves into neighborhood, workplace, and household associations, despite the obstacles, that we can destroy capitalism and thus slowly start to undo the absurd work/home spatial patterns thrown up by this idiotic system.

Epistemology
Their authors are epistemologically flawed they buy into the capitalist medias depiction of the world. Herod 04 (James, http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/GetFre/4thEd/4-index.htm, Getting Free, 4th Edition AB)
Once we have in mind a clear notion of how we might want to live we can begin to see ways to bring this new world into being, and to see what obstacles have to be overcome. Perhaps the greatest obstacle we face is the enormous capacity capitalists have acquired to shape

and control what people think and how they see the world and events taking place in it. Radio, television, and movies are the greatest weapons ever to fall into the hands of any ruling class. Add to this all the other instruments of mass communication books, newspapers, magazines, newsletters, advertising, videos, computers; then add years and years of schooling, ruling class control of all major institutions, propaganda at work, the homogenization of culture, and the destruction of families, neighborhoods, and communities. Given all this it is hard to see how an autonomous,
opposition consciousness could ever emerge, or survive the systems attacks if it did emerge. Nevertheless, capitalist control of consciousness and culture is not total. Opposition movements continue to be born even now. There are cracks in the empire through which the irrepressible creative subjectivity of human beings can find outlets. This is our main hope. The rapid creation of a worldwide Indymedia, in just a few years (dating from November 1999), is a spectacular manifestation of this hope. I'm sure there are many other ways that we can break the hold of ruling class thought, prove that we have not been totally brainwashed by the doublespeak of their media, and assert our own values and perceptions.