Cap
The instability in Middle East and North Africa can only be understood as expressions of inherent contradictions of interest between authoritarian regimes guarding Western-imposed economic paradigms and the people who bear the weight of these economic systems. Through the omission of class struggle from its analysis, academic accounts of the Arab Spring remain complicit with the forms of assistance whose inner workings will only delay the inevitable crises of neoliberalism.
Petras, 2011
(James, Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ Binghamton University, “Roots of the Arab Revolts and Premature Celebrations,” March, Online: http://www.intifada-palestine.com/2011/03/james-petras-roots-of-the-arab-revolts-and-premature-celebrations/)
Most accounts of the Arab revolts from Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Morocco, Yemen, Jordan, Bahrain, Iraq and elsewhere have focused on the most immediate causes: political dictatorships, unemployment, repression and the wounding and killing of protestors. They have given most attention to the “middle class”, young, educated activists, their communication via the internet, (Los Angeles Times, Feb. 16, 2011) and, in the case of Israel and its Zionists conspiracy theorists, “the hidden hand” of Islamic extremists (Daily Alert Feb. 25, 2011). What is lacking is any attempt to provide a framework for the revolt which takes account of the large scale, long and medium term socio-economic structures as well as the immediate ‘detonators’ of political action. The scope and depth of the popular uprisings, as well as the diverse political and social forces which have entered into the conflicts, preclude any explanations which look at one dimension of the struggles. The best approach involves a ‘funnel framework’ in which, at the wide end (the long-term, large-scale structures), stands the nature of the economic, class and political system; the middle-term is defined by the dynamic cumulative effects of these structures on changes in political, social and economic relations; the short-term causes, which precipitate the socio-political-psychological responses, or social consciousness leading to political action. The Nature of the Arab Economies With the exception of Jordan, most of the Arab economies where the revolts are taking place are based on ‘rents’ from oil, gas, minerals and tourism, which provide most of the export earnings and state revenues(Financial Times, Feb. 22, 2011, p. 14). These economic sectors are, in effect, export enclaves employing a tiny fraction of the labor force and define a highly specialized economy (World Bank Annual Report 2009). These export sectors do not have links to a diversified productive domestic economy: oil is exported and finished manufactured goods as well as financial and high tech services are all imported and controlled by foreign multi-nationals and ex-pats linked to the ruling class (Economic and Political Weekly, Feb. 12, 2011, p. 11). Tourism reinforces ‘rental’ income, as the sector, which provides ‘foreign exchange’ and tax revenues to the class – clan state. The latter relies on state-subsidized foreign capital and local politically connected ‘real estate’ developers for investment and imported foreign construction laborers. Rent-based income may generate great wealth, especially as energy prices soar, but the funds accrue to a class of “rentiers” who have no vocation or inclination for deepening and extending the process of economic development and innovation. The rentiers “specialize” in financial speculation, overseas investments via private equity firms, extravagant consumption of high-end luxury goods and billion-dollar and billion-euro secret private accounts in overseas banks. The rentier economy provides few jobs in modern productive activity; the high end is controlled by extended family-clan members and foreign financial corporations via ex-pat experts; technical and low-end employment is taken up by contract foreign labor, at income levels and working conditions below what the skilled local labor force is willing to accept. The enclave rentier economy results in a clan-based ruling class which ‘confounds’ public and private ownership: what’s ‘state’ is actually absolutist monarchs and their extended families at the top and their client tribal leader, political entourage and technocrats in the middle. These are “closed ruling classes”. Entry is confined to select members of the clan or family dynasties and a small number of “entrepreneurial” individuals who might accumulate wealth servicing the ruling clan-class. The ‘inner circle’ lives off of rental income, secures payoffs from partnerships in real estate where they provide no skills, but only official permits, land grants, import licenses and tax holidays. Beyond pillaging the public treasury, the ruling clan-class promotes ‘free trade’, i.e. importing cheap finished products, thus undermining any indigenous domestic start-ups in the ‘productive’ manufacturing, agricultural or technical sector. As a result there is no entrepreneurial national capitalist or ‘middle class’. What passes for a middle class are largely public sector employees (teachers, health professionals, functionaries, firemen, police officials, military officers) who depend on their salaries, which, in turn, depend on their subservience to absolutist power. They have no chance of advancing to the higher echelons or of opening economic opportunities for their educated offspring. The concentration of economic, social and political power in a closed clan-class controlled system leads to an enormous concentration of wealth. Given the social distance between rulers and ruled, the wealth generated by high commodity prices produces a highly distorted image of per-capital “wealth”; adding billionaires and millionaires on top of a mass of low-income and underemployed youth provides a deceptively high average income (Washington Blog, 2/24/11). Rentier Rule: By Arms and Handouts To compensate for these great disparities in society and to protect the position of theparasitical rentier ruling class, the latter pursues alliances with, multi-billion dollar arms corporations, and military protection from the dominant (USA) imperial power. The rulers engage in “neo-colonization by invitation”, offering land for military bases and airfields, ports for naval operations, collusion in financing proxy mercenaries against anti-imperial adversaries and submission to Zionist hegemony in the region (despite occasional inconsequential criticisms). In the middle term, rule by force is complemented by paternalistic handouts to the rural poor and tribal clans; food subsidies for the urban poor; and dead-end make-work employment for the educated unemployed (Financial Times, 2/25/11, p. 1). Both costly arms purchases and paternalistic subsidies reflect the lack of any capacity for productive investments. Billions are spent on arms rather than diversifying the economy. Hundreds of millions are spent on one-shot paternalistic handouts, rather than long-term investments generating productive employment. The ‘glue’ holding this system together is the combination of modern pillage of public wealth and natural energy resources and the use of traditional clan and neo-colonial recruits and mercenary contractors to control and repress the population. US modern armaments are at the service of anachronistic absolutist monarchies and dictatorships, based on the principles of 18th century dynastic rule. The introduction and extension of the most up-to-date communication systems and ultra-modern architecture shopping centers cater to an elite strata of luxury consumers and provides a stark contrast to the vast majority of unemployed educated youth, excluded from the top and pressured from below by low-paid overseas contract workers. Neo-Liberal Destabilization The rentier class-clans are pressured by the international financial institutions and local bankers to ‘reform’ their economies: ‘open’ the domestic market and public enterprises to foreign investors and reduce deficits resulting from the global crises by introducing neo-liberal reforms (Economic and Political Weekly, 2/12/11, p. 11). As a result of “economic reforms” food subsidies for the poor have been lowered or eliminated and state employment has been reduced, closing off one of the few opportunities for educated youth. Taxes on consumers and salaried/wage workers are increased while the real estate developers, financial speculators and importers receive tax exonerations. De-regulation has exacerbated massive corruption, not only among the rentier ruling class-clan, but also by their immediate business entourage. The paternalistic ‘bonds’ tying the lower and middle class to the ruling class have been eroded by foreign-induced neo-liberal “reforms”, which combine ‘modern’ foreign exploitationwith the existing “traditional” forms of domestic private pillage. The class-clan regimes no longer can rely on the clan, tribal, clerical and clientelistic loyalties to isolate urban trade unions, student, small business and low paid public sector movements. The Street against the Palace The ‘immediate causes’ of the Arab revolts are centered in the huge demographic-class contradictions of the clan-class ruled rentier economy. The ruling oligarchy rules over amass of unemployed and underemployed young workers; the latter involves between 50% to 65% of the population under 25 years of age (Washington Blog, 2/24/11). The dynamic “modern” rentier economy does not incorporate the street as venders, transport and contract workers and in personal services. The ultra- modern oil, gas, real estate, tourism and shopping-mall sectors are dependent on the political the newly educated young into modern employment; it relegates them into the low-paid unprotected “informal economy” of and military support of backward traditional clerical, tribal and clan leaders, who are subsidized but never ‘incorporated’ into the sphere of modern production. The modern urban industrial working class with small, independent trade unions is banned. Middle class civic associations are either under state control or confined to petitioning the absolutist state. The ‘underdevelopment’ of social organizations, linked to social classes engaged in modern productive activity, means that the pivot of social and political action is the street. Unemployed and underemployed part-time youth engaged in the informal sector are found in the plazas, at kiosks, cafes, street corner society, and markets, moving around and about and outside the centers of absolutist administrative power. The urban mass does not occupy strategic positions in the economic system; but it is available for mass mobilizations capable of paralyzing the streets and plazas through which goods and services are transported out and profits are realized. Equally important, mass movements launched by the unemployed youth provide an opportunity for oppressed professionals, public sector employees, small business people and the self-employed to engage in protests without being subject to reprisals at their place of employment – dispelling the “fear factor” of losing one’s job. The political and social confrontation revolves around the opposite poles: clientelistic oligarchies and de clasé masses (the Arab Street). The former depends directly on the state (military/police apparatus) and the latter on amorphous local, informal, face-to-face improvised organizations. The exception is the minority of university students who move via the internet. Organized industrial trade unions come into the struggle late and largely focus on sectoral economic demands, with some exceptions – especially in public enterprises, controlled by cronies of the oligarchs, where workers demand changes in management. As a result of the social particularities of the rentier states, the uprisings do not take the form of class struggles between wage labor and industrial capitalists. They emerge as mass political revolts against the oligarchical state. Street-based social movements demonstrate their capacity to delegitimize state authority, paralyze the economy, and can lead up to the ousting of the ruling autocrats. But it is the nature of mass street movements to fill the squares with relative ease, but also to be dispersed when the symbols of oppression are ousted. Street-based movements lack the organization and leadership to project, let alone impose a new political or social order. Their power is found in their ability to pressure existing elites and institutions, not to replace the state and economy. Hence the surprising ease with which the US, Israeli and EU backed Egyptian military were able to seize power and protect the entire rentier state and economic structure while sustaining their ties with their imperial mentors.
Academic elites actively contribute to the co-option of revolutionary energy by calling for shallow reforms like the 1AC - these changes are only considered by policymakers insofar as they have the potential to expand market influence in the region.
Dixon, 2011
(Marion, doctoral candidate in Dept. of Development Sociology @ Cornell, “An Arab Spring,” Review of African Political Economy, 32:128, pg. 309-316)
The ‘imperial reach’ represents a real threat to the popular opposition movements exploding throughout the Middle East and North Africa. The dangers exist not just in the ongoing military interventions via a United Nations-authorised turned NATO enforced No-Fly Zone in Libya, with Western powers taking an active role, but in internationally legitimated knowledge production and funding that fuel and make invisible the neoliberal agenda. The imperial reach extends throughout the region and attempts to monopolise ‘at home’, in an effort to maintain geopolitical relations of power. For this essay I define this effort in three broad ways: Western governments and observers defining the ‘Arab Spring’ on their own terms, especially in naming responsibility for the social uprisings in one way or another that comes back to the West (or as preferences may be, the ‘Euro-Atlantic axis’), and maintaining a ‘monopoly of expertise’ (Mitchell 2002). This effort of claiming and co-opting is funnelled squarely to prop up the neoliberal agenda that has brought to the region much of what the movements have risen to reject – a revolving door between wealthy businessmen and ruling party members, monopolistic and oligopolistic economies, rising food and housing prices, slashed wages/prices and protections for workers and farmers, dropping standards of living with weakened public welfare programmes, heightened restriction of rights and liberties (‘reign of terror’) – to name a few resulting societal ills. And the ‘assistance’ announced thus far by Western governments for democratic transitions in the region is more of the same of what has been ‘offered’ for the last three decades – pre-packaged, trickledown prescriptions of private-sector growth. This indeed seems like an opportune ‘time of shock’ for the further implementation of neoliberal reforms, just as such prescriptions have been more widely questioned as a result of the ongoing triple crisis (financial–climate change–food). I argue that these dangers signal a need for a collective effort among writers/commentators to ward off or resist the imperial reach of the tremendous momentum that has generated in the region for popular democracy rooted in social and economic justice. Western governments have reacted to the uprisings, revolts and revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa according to what appears to be a prescribed protocol, reserved for public responses to widespread social upheaval in the Global South, in countries with Western-backed unpopular and repressive governments. The protocol goes something like this: With the US at the helm, high-level government officials urge ‘restraint on both sides’. When the revolts appear to be not so easily thwarted, they then call for reform. Tensions escalate and international media attention grows, the call for reform turns to an acknowledgement of the need for a new government. In the case of the Barack Obama administration’s public response to the 25 January Revolution in Egypt, at this point the administration goes on the defensive, claiming to have a strong record in Egypt of defending human rights and promoting civil society. The call for a new government is not immediate; after all, publicly announcing a wish for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to step down just days after standing by him as a close friend and ally would be obviously disingenuous. The Obama administration instead urges Mubarak not to seek re-election, a redundancy after Mubarak had already announced that he would not run in the 2011 elections and all indications were that he was priming his son Gamal Mubarak to take his place as president. Only when there is continued, mass support for the popular resistance do the United States and European governments begin to prepare proposals for a new government, or in the case of Libya, declare their active support of a United Nationssanctioned No-Fly Zone. In the case of a successful uprising, when the popular opposition overthrows the ruler, Western governments cheer loudly and declare that the will of the people has been heard! This protocol fails to veil the hypocrisy of the ‘West’s relationship with the Rest’, although not entirely. The image of Western governments as defenders and promoters of democracy and development fractures before a fumbling, reticent reaction to mass democratic movements confronting authoritarian rule. The script – from restraint to reform to a new government to ‘yeah for democracy!’ – demonstrates much more than hypocrisy on the part of the West. Western hypocrisy is a non-starter by itself, having long been established in a post-colonial era of consistent support for tyranny overseas. Rather, it may be understood as a significant character of Western imperialism, opening a window for the observer into the workings of twenty-firstcentury imperial forms, especially those more subtle and less visible. On 11 February 2011, the day that newly appointed Egyptian Vice-President Omar Suleiman publicly announces that President Mubarak has ‘stepped down’, hours later Obama’s ‘address to the Egyptian people’ is broadcast on state television, before the celebrating crowds in Tahrir Square. Obama does not just declare a joint celebration, the American people and their government celebrating alongside Egyptians, who have just kicked out their ruler who had long been embraced as a close American friend. Obama gives a lecture on democracy, teaching Egyptians what it will take to build democracy, warning them of the long road ahead. As David Africa (2011) eloquently argues in an opinion piece in Al Jazeera English, the Egyptian people who are leading a popular revolution know what democracy is and how to practise it, thank you very much. Much of the commentary on Obama’s speech in the Western media focused on its eloquence, however, arguing that it was one of Obama’s better speeches. And, according to the National Broadcasting Company’s (NBC) correspondent Richard Engel, after hearing the live speech from Obama a crowd of Egyptians around him in Tahrir began to cheer for Obama and chant ‘We love America’ (The Guardian 2011). When former Tunisian President Ben Ali and Egyptian President Mubarak addressed the nation in the midst of uprisings in January and February, respectively, some were comforted by the rulers’ posturing as their father, protector and guarantor, while others were infuriated by the rulers’ patronising tone. One patronising address after another made people’s anger grow, quickly forcing out the rulers and their immediate families. Evidently, the day that the American emperor’s address to teach about democracy and the rule of law is overwhelmingly felt as patronising worldwide has not yet arrived. It is precisely because it has not that 11 February, the day of joint celebration of Western powers with the Egyptian people, marked the beginning of the ‘expropriation of the Egyptian revolution by the Euro-Atlantic axis’ (Africa 2011). Claims of expertise – and the vast funding apparatus to support them – come with meddling and posturing to ensure that changes in the region keep in line with a vision of the world order promulgated by the Washington Consensus. It may be argued that the West’s public declarations of support of popular revolts in the region at least helped break the pervasive Middle East exceptionalism thesis.
Corruption reform in Egypt masks the neoliberal roots of mass poverty – it depoliticizes the functioning of markets by portraying exploitation as an isolated incident
Armbrust, 2011
(Walter, Lecturer in the Faculty of Oriental Studies & Fellow of Modern Middle Eastern Studies @ Oxford, “The Revolution Against Neoliberalism,” February, Online: http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/contributors/10682)
The hunt for regime cronies’ billions may be a natural inclination of the post-Mubarak era, but it could also lead efforts to reconstitute the political system astray. The generals who now rule Egypt are obviously happy to let the politicians take the heat. Their names were not included in the lists of the most egregiously corrupt individuals of the Mubarak era, though in fact the upper echelons of the military have long been beneficiaries of a system similar to (and sometimes overlapping with) the one that that enriched civilian figures much more prominent in the public eye such as Ahmad ‘Izz and Habib al-‘Adly. To describe blatant exploitation of the political system for personal gain as corruption misses the forest for the trees. Such exploitation is surely an outrage against Egyptian citizens, but calling it corruption suggests that the problem amounts to aberrant behavior from a system that would otherwise function smoothly. If this were the case then the crimes of the Mubarak regime could be attributed simply to bad character: change the people and the problems go away. But the real problem with the regime was not necessarily that high-ranking members of the government were thieves in an ordinary sense. They did not necessarily steal directly from the treasury. Rather they were enriched through a conflation of politics and business under the guise of privatization. This was less a violation of the system than business as usual. Mubarak’s Egypt, in a nutshell, was a quintessential neoliberal state. Although neoliberalism is now a commonly used term, it is still worth pausing a moment and think about what it means. In his Brief History of Neoliberalism[1] social geographer David Harvey outlined “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.” Neoliberal states guarantee, by force if necessary, the “proper functioning” of markets; where markets do not exist (for example, in the use of land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution), then the state should create them. Guaranteeing the sanctity of markets is supposed to be the limit of legitimate state functions, and state interventions should always be subordinate to markets. All human behavior, and not just the production of goods and services, can be reduced to market transactions. The market becomes an end in an of itself, and since the only legitimate function of states is to defend markets and expand them into new spheres, democracy is a potential problem insofar as people might vote for political and economic choices that impede the unfettered operation of markets, or that reserve spheres of human endeavor (education, for example, or health care) from the logic of markets. Hence a pure neoliberal state would philosophically be empowered to defend markets even from its own citizens. As an ideology neoliberalism is as utopian as communism. The application of utopian neoliberalism in the real world leads to deformed societies as surely as the application of utopian communism did.
We’ll isolate three impacts:
US and other Western governments play a central role in creating and maintaining social and economic deprivation. What corporations want is markets and raw natural resources, no matter the socioeconomic consequences. Corporate-driven globalization and modern neoliberalism are the ultimate perversion of democracy- it’s a project of sacrificial genocide that silences dissent and mandates docility- we must reject the kill to save mentality in order to challenge the death drive which makes all atrocities inevitable.
Santos, 2003
(Boaventura de Sousa, Professor of Sociology at the School of Economics, University of Coimbra (Portugal), Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School and Global Legal Scholar at the University of Warwick, and Director of the Center for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra, “Collective Suicide?,” March 28, Online: http://www.ces.fe.uc.pt/opiniao/bss/072en.php)
According to Franz Hinkelammert, the West has repeatedly been under the illusion that it should try to save humanity by destroying part of it. This is a salvific and sacrificial destruction, committed in the name of the need to radically materialize all the possibilities opened up by a given social and political reality over which it is supposed to have total power. This is how it was in colonialism, with the genocide of indigenous peoples, and the African slaves. This is how it was in the period of imperialist struggles, which caused millions of deaths in two world wars and many other colonial wars. This is how it was in Stalinism, with the Gulag and in Nazism, with the holocaust. And now today, this is how it is in neoliberalism, with the collective sacrifice of the periphery and even the semiperiphery of the world system. With the war against Iraq, it is fitting to ask whether what is in progress is a new genocidal and sacrificial illusion, and what its scope might be. It is above all appropriate to ask if the new illusion will not herald the radicalization and the ultimate perversion of the western illusion: destroying all of humanity in the illusion of saving it. Sacrificial genocide arises from a totalitarian illusion that is manifested in the belief that there are no alternatives to the present-day reality and that the problems and difficulties confronting it arise from failing to take its logic of development to its ultimate consequences. If there is unemployment, hunger and death in the Third World, this is not the result of market failures; instead, it is the outcome of the market laws not having been fully applied. If there is terrorism, this is not due to the violence of the conditions that generate it; it is due, rather, to the fact that total violence has not been employed to physically eradicate all terrorists and potential terrorists. This political logic is based on the supposition of total power and knowledge, and on the radical rejection of alternatives; it is ultra-conservative in that it aims to infinitely reproduce the status quo. Inherent to it is the notion of the end of history. During the last hundred years, the West has experienced three versions of this logic, and, therefore, seen three versions of the end of history: Stalinism, with its logic of insuperable efficiency of the plan; Nazism, with its logic of racial superiority; and neoliberalism, with its logic of insuperable efficiency of the market. The first two periods involved the destruction of democracy. The last one trivializes democracy, disarming it in the face of social actors sufficiently powerful to be able to privatize the State and international institutions in their favour. I have described this situation as a combination of political democracy and social fascism. One current manifestation of this combination resides in the fact that intensely strong public opinion, worldwide, against the war is found to be incapable of halting the war machine set in motion by supposedly democratic rulers. At all these moments, a death drive, a catastrophic heroism, predominates, the idea of a looming collective suicide, only preventable by the massive destruction of the other. Paradoxically, the broader the definition of the other and the efficacy of its destruction, the more likely collective suicide becomes. In its sacrificial genocide version, neoliberalism is a mixture of market radicalization, neoconservatism and Christian fundamentalism. Its death drive takes a number of forms, from the idea of "discardable populations", referring to citizens of the Third World not capable of being exploited as workers and consumers, to the concept of "collateral damage", to refer to the deaths, as a result of war, of thousands of innocent civilians. The last, catastrophic heroism, is quite clear on two facts: according to reliable calculations by the Non-Governmental Organization MEDACT, in London, between 48 and 260 thousand civilians will die during the war and in the three months after (this is without there being civil war or a nuclear attack); the war will cost 100 billion dollars, enough to pay the health costs of the world's poorest countries for four years. Is it possible to fight this death drive? We must bear in mind that, historically, sacrificial destruction has always been linked to the economic pillage of natural resources and the labor force, to the imperial design of radically changing the terms of economic, social, political and cultural exchanges in the face of falling efficiency rates postulated by the maximalist logic of the totalitarian illusion in operation. It is as though hegemonic powers, both when they are on the rise and when they are in decline, repeatedly go through times of primitive accumulation, legitimizing the most shameful violence in the name of futures where, by definition, there is no room for what must be destroyed. In today's version, the period of primitive accumulation consists of combining neoliberal economic globalization with the globalization of war. The machine of democracy and liberty turns into a machine of horror and destruction. / In opposition to this, there is the ongoing movement of globalization from below, the global struggle for social justice, led by social movements and NGOs, of which the World Social Forum (WSF) has been an eloquent manifestation. The WSF has been a remarkable affirmation of life, in its widest and most inclusive sense, embracing human beings and nature. What challenges does it face before the increasingly intimate interpenetration of the globalization of the economy and that of war? I am convinced that this new situation forces the globalization from below to re-think itself, and to reshape its priorities. It is well-known that the WSF, at its second meeting, in 2002, identified the relationship between economic neoliberalism and imperial warmongering, which is why it organized the World Peace Forum, the second edition of which took place in 2003. But this is not enough. I believe that a strategic shift is required. Social movements, no matter what their spheres of struggle, must give priority to the fight for peace, as a necessary condition for the success of all the other struggles. This means that they must be in the frontline of the fight for peace, and not simply leave this space to be occupied solely by peace movements. All the movements against neoliberal globalization are, from now on, peace movements. We are now in the midst of the fourth world war (the third being the Cold War) and the spiral of war will go on and on. The principle of non-violence that is contained in the WSF Charter of Principles must no longer be a demand made on the movements; now it must be a global demand made by the movements. This emphasis is necessary so that, in current circumstances, the celebration of life can be set against this vertiginous collective suicide. The peace to be fought for is not a mere absence of war or of terrorism. It is rather a peace based upon the elimination of the conditions that foster war and terrorism: global injustice, social exclusion, cultural and political discrimination and oppression and imperialist greed. A new, cosmopolitan humanism can be built above and beyond western illuminist abstractions, a humanism of real people based on the concrete resistance to the actual human suffering imposed by the real axis of evil: neoliberalism plus war.
Neoliberal quick fixes make ecological extinction inevitable – prioritization of profit over environment destroys the planet
Kovel, Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies at Bard College, awarded Fellowship at the John Guggenheim Foundation, 2002
(Joel, The Enemy of Nature, pages 131-132)
Science, technology and industry, therefore, are all bundled together and, under the aegis of capital, come to express its powers of splitting. In capital's early phase, the inner connection to the gendered bifurcation of nature were strikingly revealed, in the blood shed in the great witch crazes of early modern Europe, and through ideologues of science such as Francis Bacon. As the system matured, its latent powers of ecodestruction would come to the fore under the aegis of industrialization.24 Industrialization is not an independent force, then, but the hammer with which nature is smashed for the sake of capital. Industrial logging destroys forests; industrial fishing destroys fisheries; industrial chemistry makes Frankenfood; industrial use of fossil fuels creates the greenhouse effect, and so forth – all for the sake of value-expansion. Most important, the technically driven production of the industrial order demands an expanded energy supply, for the purpose of which fuels such as coal, natural gas and petroleum are by far the most likely candidates. Such fuel represents past ecological activity: numberless residues of chemical bonds developed by living creatures in interaction with sunlight over hundreds of millions of years, now turned to heat energy to propel the instruments of industrial society. Each drive to the mall to buy wasteful plastic junk made from fossil fuel degrades aeons of ecological order into heat and noxious fumes. I have read somewhere that in a single day the industrial world consumes the equivalent of ten thousand years of bio-ecological activity, a ratio, roughly, of 3-4,000,000 to one. With this squandering, and the associated tossing about of materials of every sort, the entropic potentials inherent in social production reach levels of eco-destabilization on an expanding scale. The staggering pace of entropic decay has become noticeable only recently because the earth is sizeable enough to have buffered its effects until the past thirty years or so, since when we have had a clogging of the 'sinks' along with an ever rising level of production. The phenomenon of separation expresses the core gesture of eco¬disintegration, for separation in the physical and social sense corresponds to splitting in the ontological sense. Splitting extends the separation of elements of ecosystems past the point where they interact to create new Wholes – or, from another angle, to the point where the dialectic that constitutes eco¬systems breaks down. It follows that the ecological crisis is not simply a manifestation of the macro-economic effects of capital, but also reveals the extension of capitalist alienation into the ecosphere. And as this alienation, and the whole structure of the system, is grounded in the relation between capital and labour, it also follows that the ecological crisis and capital's exploitation of labour are two aspects of the same phenomenon. The historical matrix for this occurred when persons of the nascent ruling class subjugated labour into the system of exchange-value, turning their power to transform nature into a commodity on sale for a wage. The wage relation, in which one's capacity to work is given a money equivalent and sold on the market, is much older than capitalism itself, nor was it the only form of labour within emerging capitalist markets," nor, needless to say, is it a necessary evil in each and every instance where it appears. But its generalization into the means by which capital itself is produced perman¬ently alters the landscape of human being in an anti-ecological direction.
We have an ethical obligation to reject this glossing over of structural violence – it renders the loss of millions of lives incalculable
Slavoj Zizek and Glyn Daly, Senior Lecturer in Politics in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at University College, Northampton, 2004, Conversations With Zizek, p. 14-16)
For Zizek it is imperative that we cut through this Gord¬ian knot of postmodern protocol and recognize that our ethico-political responsibility is to confront the constitutive violence of today’s global capitalism and its obscene naturalization/anonymization of the millions who are subju¬gated by it throughout the world. Against the standardized positions of postmodern culture — with all its pieties con¬cerning ‘multiculturalist’ etiquette — Zizek is arguing for a politics that might be called ‘radically incorrect’ in the sense that it breaks with these types of positions and focuses instead on the very organizing principles of today’s social reality: the principles of global liberal capitalism. This requires some care and subtlety. For far too long, Marxism has been bedevilled by an almost fetishistic economism that has tended towards political mor¬bidity. With the likes of Hilferding and Gramsci, and more recently Laclau and Mouffe, crucial theoretical advances have been made that enable the transcendence of all forms of economism. In this new context, however, Zizek argues that the problem that now presents itself is almost that of the opposite fetish. That is to say, the prohibitive anxieties surrounding the taboo of economism can function as a way of not engaging with economic reality and as a way of im¬plicitly accepting the latter as a basic horizon of existence. In an ironic Freudian-Lacanian twist, the fear of economism can end up reinforcing a de facto economic necessity in respect of contemporary capitalism (i.e. the initial prohibi¬tion conjures up the very thing it fears). This is not to endorse any kind of retrograde return to economism. Zizek’s point is rather that in rejecting economism we should not lose sight of the systemic power of capital in shaping the lives and destinies of humanity and our very sense of the possible. In particular we should not overlook Marx’s central insight that in order to create a uni¬versal global system the forces of capitalism seek to conceal the politico-discursive violence of its construction through a kind of gentrification of that system. What is persistently denied by neo-liberals such as Rorty (1989) and Fukuyama (1992) is that the gentrification of global liberal capitalism is one whose ‘universalism’ fundamentally reproduces and depends upon a disavowed violence that excludes vast sectors of the world’s population. In this way, neo-liberal ideology attempts to naturalize capitalism by presenting its out¬comes of winning and losing as if they were simply a matter of chance and sound judgement in a neutral marketplace. Capitalism does indeed create a space for a certain diver¬sity, at least for the central capitalist regions, but it is neither neutral nor ideal and its price in terms of social exclusion is exorbitant. That is to say, the human cost in terms of inherent global poverty and degraded ‘life-chances’ cannot be calculated within the existing economic rationale and, in consequence, social exclusion remains mystified and name¬less (viz, the patronizing reference to the ‘developing world’. And Zizek’s point is that this mystification is mag¬nified through capitalism’s profound capacity to ingest its own excesses and negativity: to redirect (or misdirect) social antagonisms and to absorb them within a culture of differ¬ential affirmation. Instead of Bolshevism, the tendency today is towards a kind of political boutiquism that is readily sus¬tained by postmodern forms of consumerism and lifestyle. Against this Zizek argues for a new universalism whose primary ethical directive is to confront the fact that our forms of social existence are founded on exclusion on a global scale. While it is perfectly true that universalism can never become Universal (it will always require a hegemonic-par¬ticular embodiment in order to have any meaning), what is novel about Zizek’s universalism is that it would not attempt to conceal this fact or to reduce the status of the abject Other to that of a ‘glitch’ in an otherwise sound matrix.
The alternative is: vote negative to resist the compulsion to act that insulates capitalism from radical ideological resistance. Capitalism ensures shallow political reform by using the threat of totalitarianism and constant crisis to prohibit ideological questioning. Thus, the first step to eradicate capitalism is to break out of the ideological prison in which activism has previously been confined by denying thoughtless action in the face of crisis. This inaction opens space for a radical break from capitalist ideology.
Johnston, asst. prof. of philosophy, 2007
(Adrian, International Journal of Zizek Studies, p. 21-3, http:zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/8/24)
<The height of Zizek's philosophical traditionalism, his fidelity to certain lasting truths too precious to cast away in a postmodern frenzy, is his conviction that no worthwhile praxis can emerge prior to the careful and deliberate formulation of a correct conceptual framework. His references to the hybrid Lacanian-Badiouian notion of the act-event (qua agent-less occurrence not brought about by a subject) are especially strange in light of the fact that he seemingly endorses the view that theory must precede practice, namely, that deliberative reflection is, in a way, primary. Furthermore, the political aims of Zizek's own theoretical endeavor are obviously not of an orthodox communist nature. He doesn't urge the simple reenactment of the sort of revolution embarked upon by Lenin. Nor is he, as some have alleged, merely interested in being an anti-capitalist and nothing more (an accusation alluding to his abandonment of the positive Marxist project).116 For Zizek, the foremost concrete task to be accomplished today isn't some kind of rebellious acting out, which would, in the end, amount to a series of impotent, incoherent outbursts.117 Instead, given the contemporary closure of the socio-political imagination under the hegemony of liberal-democratic capitalism, he sees the liberation of thinking itself from its present ideological constraints as the first crucial step that must be taken if anything is to be changed for the better. In a lecture given in Vienna in 2001, Zizek suggests that Marx's call to break out of the sterile closure of abstract intellectual ruminations through direct, concrete action (thesis eleven on Feuerbach—"The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it") must be inverted given the new prevailing conditions of late-capitalism. Nowadays, one must resist succumbing to the temptation to short-circuit thinking in favor of acting, since all such rushes to action are doomed; they either fail to disrupt capitalism or are co-opted by it. Zizek argues that a genuine materialist embraces the taking of risks with no guarantee whatsoever of a subsequent good result—"True materialism... consists precisely in accepting the chanciness without the implication of the horizon of hidden meaning—the name of this chance is contingency."118 And, reiterating a thesis argued for by Badiou in his 1985 text Peut-on penser la politique?,119 he claims that the liberal-democratic belief system of free-market capitalism uses the bogeyman of "totalitarianism"—people often insist that the danger of recreating nightmarish Stalinist or fascist dictatorships justifies the avoidance of any radical measures deviating from accepted mainstream political wisdom in the West— to de-legitimize just this sort of "materialism." In other words, the specter of totalitarianism is invoked so as to silence demands for taking chances by intellectually entertaining possibilities pronounced impermissible by capitalist democracy—"the notion of 'totalitarianism,' far from being an effective theoretical concept, is a kind of stopgap: instead of enabling us to think... it relieves us of the duty to think, or even actively prevents us from thinking."120 Zizek continues, noting that, "Today, reference to the 'totalitarian' threat sustains a kind of unwritten Denkverbot (prohibition against thinking)."121 Hence, the phrase "repeating Lenin" doesn't refer to the ridiculously anachronistic and ineffective posturing that would be involved in another attempt at launching a communist revolution. For Zizek, it broadly signifies a disruptive break that makes it possible to imagine, once again, viable alternatives to liberal-democratic capitalism by removing the various obstacles to thinking seriously about options forcefully foreclosed by today's reigning ideologies—"'Lenin' stands for the compelling FREEDOM to suspend the stale existing [post]ideological coordinates, the debilitating Denkverbot in which we live—it simply means that we are allowed to think again."122 Zizek links liberal democracy's employment of the threat of totalitarianism to a more fundamental rejection of the act itself qua intervention whose consequences cannot safely be anticipated. In Zizek's view, contemporary democracy legitimates itself through a pathetic posture in which the avoidance of risk (i.e., of extreme measures not covered by preexisting democratic consensuses, measures with no guarantee of status-quo-affirming success) is elevated to the status of the highest political good123—"what the reference to democracy involves is the rejection of radical attempts to 'step outside,' to risk a radical break."124 The refusal to risk a gesture of disruption because it might not turn out exactly the way one envisions it should is the surest bulwark against change: The standard critique concerns the Act's allegedly 'absolute' character of a radical break, which renders impossible any clear distinction between a properly 'ethical' act and, say, a Nazi monstrosity: is it not that an Act is always embedded in a specific socio-symbolic context? The answer to this reproach is clear: of course—an Act is always a specific intervention within a socio-symbolic context; the same gesture can be an Act or a ridiculous empty posture, depending on the context. In what, then, resides the misunderstanding? Why this critique? There is something else which disturbs the critics of the Lacanian notion of Act: true, an Act is always situated in a concrete context —this, however, does not mean that it is fully determined by its context. An Act always involves a radical risk. It is a step into the open, with no guarantee about the final outcome— why? Because an Act retroactively changes the very co-ordinates onto which it intervenes. This lack of guarantee is what the critics cannot tolerate; they want an Act without risk—not without empirical risks, but without the much more radical 'transcendental risk' that the Act will not only simply fail, but radically misfire. Those who oppose he 'absolute Act' effectively oppose the Act as such, they want an Act without the Act.125
Case
No risk of extinction due to biodiversity loss or cornerstone species. Extinction proves.
Moore. 1998. Thomas Gale Moore. “Climate of Fear: Why We Shouldn't Worry About Global Warming”. 1998. CATO Institute. Washington D.C. ISBN 1-882577-64-7. Pg. 98-9. - M.E.
Nevertheless, the loss of a class of living beings does not typically threaten other species. Most animals and plants can derive their nutrients or receive the other benefits provided by a particular species from more than a single source. If it were true that the extinction of a single species would produce a cascade of losses, then the massive extinctions of the past should have wiped out all life. Evolution forces various life forms to adjust to change. A few may not make the adaptation but others will mutate to meet the new conditions. Although a particular chain of DNA may be eliminated through the loss of a species, other animals or plants adapting to the same environment often produce similar genetic solutions with like proteins. It is almost impossible to imagine a single species that, if eliminated, would threaten us humans. Perhaps if the E. coli that are necessary for digestion became extinct, we could no longer exist. But those bacteria live in a symbiotic relationship with man and, as long as humans survive, so will they. Thus any animal that hosts a symbiotic species need not fear the loss of its partner. As long as the host remains, so will parasites and symbiotic species.
Biodiversity doesn't matter. Their evidence is mistaken. They only lead to bad policies and needless expense.
Moore. 1998. Thomas Gale Moore. “Climate of Fear: Why We Shouldn't Worry About Global Warming”. 1998. CATO Institute. Washington D.C. ISBN 1-882577-64-7. Pg. 102. - M.E.
These economists translate their findings into an estimate of the value of protecting a marginal piece of land. That estimate depends on the species diversity of the area. For the richest territory with the greatest diversity (western Ecuador), they estimate that the benefit of the marginal hectare is only $8.00 per acre. Other less species-intense areas are worth less, with California Floristic province* reckoned at 20 cents. The authors assert that these are upper estimates of the value.
Although people do like the concept of a globe inhabited by many different types of animals and plants, the value of any one or even many is not large in benefits provided to mankind. The Greek chorus of doomsayers grossly overstates the value of biodiversity. Their exaggerated veneration of each and every species leads to mistaken policy and needless expense.
Biodiversity loss is happening now. Multiple causes. Attempts to stop it in the past have always become marred in local and national politics. Globalization will continue the process.
Mbow, Smith and Leadley. 2010. Cheikh Mbow, Mark Stafford Smith and Paul Leadley. “Biodiversity Scenarios: Projections of 21st Century Change in Biodiversity and Associated Ecosystem Services: A Technical Report for the Global Biodiversity Outlook 3”. CBD Technical Series Number 50. Appendix IV: West Africa: The Sahara, Sahel and Guinean Region. 2010. ISBN 92-9225-219-4. Pg 76 – M.E.
Coupled human-environment interactions in West Africa, extending from the southern Sahara downthrough the Sahel and into the Guinean Forest, are highly vulnerable to climate, land use and landmanagement changes that can cause ecosystems to shift to alternate states with high impacts on biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being. Poverty, lack of governance, conflict and resulting human migrations leave this region with little margin for adaptive responses.
Tipping-points in West Africa are complex due to the multiplicity of drivers and their interactions. We
focused on four interacting tipping-points that influence this region:
Climate regime shifts: Future climate regime shifts are highly uncertain, especially for precipitation for which projections range from a persistent increase, to increased variability, to long-term reductions in rainfall.
Overuse of marginal resources: Marginal resources coupled with overuse result in a downward spiral of productivity, poverty and biodiversity impoverishment. Accompanying land degradation makes it difficult to restore biodiversity and ecosystem services even when socio-economic and climatic conditions improve.
Globalisation and overexploitation: Agricultural development and market globalization drive exploitation in areas of more abundant natural resources, with forest clearing having the most serious impact. Improvements in access and increasing local wealth in these areas of the region drive improved access and further increases in exploitation.
Instability and limited resources: Ineffectual governance caused by instability and conflict permitsunregulated use of natural resources including those in protected areas. This also drives refugee movements to other regions, increasing stress on natural resources in those areas and triggering further social and political disruption.
Combinations of drought, overuse of natural capital and political instability have led to widespread biodiversity loss, land degradation and famine in the recent past, clearly illustrating the region’s high potential vulnerability to future global changes. Current trends in biodiversity responses indicate a strong decline in bird and mammal populations and range shifts due to land use and climate change. At the other
extreme, the Sahara/Sahel has been much “greener” during wetter climate regimes over the last several thousand years and the Sahel is currently “greening”.
Global biodiversity projections suggest that this region will be one of the most highly impacted regions of the world in terms of destruction of natural habitat, decreasing species abundance and species extinctions. Models of habitats and birds suggest that land use will be the dominant driver of biodiversity change in the 21st century. Climate change is often projected to be a positive factor for biodiversity due to regime shifts to a wetter climate and rising CO2 concentrations, but these projections have typically overlooked the importance of climate variability and uncertainty in their analyses.
Ecosystems in this region are a major source of environmental capital for ecosystem goods and services used by local populations, but globalization and marketing of these resources is projected to continue tolead to a degradation of services provided by natural and semi-natural ecosystems.
Keystone species don't exist.
Cristancho and Vinig. 2004. Sergio Cristancho and Joanne Vining. “Culturally Defined Keystone Species”. Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences. Research in Human Ecology. Volume 11. Number 2. 2004. Pg 161. Accessed from: www.udea.edu.co/.../2004_Culturally%20Defined%20Keystone%20Species_11(2)%20Human%20Eco.pdf – M.E.
Traditionally, natural sciences have focused their efforts on maintaining keystone species alive and functioning well within the ecosystem in which they are embedded. Now we may examine the human ecosystem in a similar way and suggest that natural and social scientists work together to determine cultural keystone species as well as natural ecological keystone species. The study of CKS could be a convergence point for interdisciplinary collaboration. We should note, however, that there are differences in philosophy or inquiry between disciplines that may hinder such collaboration. Culturally defined keystone species do not exist in nature — they are constructed by humans. There is a perception among many in the natural and physical sciences that ecological keystone species are real, that they are in no sense constructed by a human psyche. Many, if not most, social scientists would argue that a keystone species is a human construction, whether biologically or culturally defined. Nonetheless, the notion that an ecologically defined keystone species is somehow more real than a culturally defined species could hinder interactions among disciplines on this important topic. As we stated earlier, we borrowed a concept from the natural sciences as a model to explain social and cultural phenomena because we believe in the usefulness of such conceptual analogies for the purposes of clarity.
Biodiversity loss in Africa is inevitable. 40% will be degraded by 2025. Multiple causes.
Mbow, Smith and Leadley. 2010. Cheikh Mbow, Mark Stafford Smith and Paul Leadley. “Biodiversity Scenarios: Projections of 21st Century Change in Biodiversity and Associated Ecosystem Services: A Technical Report for the Global Biodiversity Outlook 3”. CBD Technical Series Number 50. Appendix IV: West Africa: The Sahara, Sahel and Guinean Region. 2010. ISBN 92-9225-219-4. Pg 81 – M.E.
Future loss and shifts in biomes and habitats – A relatively broad range of global models have been used to project changes in biomes or habitats in West Africa. However, these models account, at best, for only one or two of the tipping point mechanisms outlined above. None of these models has been run for a wide range of climate scenarios. Because of these shortcomings and the high uncertainty in both climate projections and socio-economic scenarios for this region, we feel that the future of biodiversity in this region is considerably more uncertain than one of these analyses taken alone would suggest. The majority of global vegetation models project an increase in primary productivity in natural and semi-natural ecosystems in this region due to climate change because of increasedrainfall and/or rising CO2 concentrations (e.g., MA 2005, Sitch et al. 2008). This is accompanied by a greening of the southern Sahara in some cases and an increase in woody vegetation in the Sahel in most cases.
Land use scenarios for this region indicate very large to extremely large rates of land use conversion in this region, with particularly heavy impacts on Guinean forests (and forests of the Congo basin) driven by population increase, globalization and increased access (Millennium Assessment MA 2005, African Environmental Outlook-2 AEO2 2006, Global Environmental Outlook GEO4 2007, Alkemade 2009). These analyses agree that, of all regions of the globe, the sub-Saharan region will experience among the highest projected rates of natural and semi-natural habitat destruction over the next several decades. Land use scenarios suggest that the worst prospects for West Africa involve development pathways that focus either on market-driven globalization, or on continued regional patterns of rapid population growth, increasing social inequity, weak governance and continued conflict. Globalization scenarios foresee extensive land degradation, with more than 40% of currently cultivated land modeled as degraded by 2025 (AEO2 2006), and massive deforestation across Guinean forests by mid- to late-century (MA 2005, GEO4 2007, although not in AEO2 2006). Scenarios of high population growth and increasing inequity also lead to very high rates of land degradation and deforestation. At the opposite extreme, a scenario of “great transitions” that includes declining population growth rates, aggressive poverty reduction and greatly improved governance suggests that less than 10% of cropped land might be degraded by 2025 and that forest area could actually increase due to improved land management (AEO2 2006). These strong contrasts in scenarios highlight the overwhelming importance of development pathways in determiningthe fate of biodiversity in this region.
